No More Parades 10 страница

“Oh, it's probably in the air… It's known the Government want to break their claims to the higher command. And anyone who could help them to that would get a knighthood…”

Mrs Duchemin was more calm.

“It's certainly, ” she said, “Burke'd, as you call it, those beastly people. ” She reflected for a moment. “It's probably that, ” she went on. “It's in the air. Anything that can help to influence public opinion against those horrible people is to be welcomed. That's known pretty widely… No! It could hardly be Christopher Tietjens who thought of it and told you. It wouldn't enter his head. He's their friend! He would be…”

“He's certainly, ” Valentine said, “not a friend of his country's enemies. I'm not, myself. ”

Mrs Duchemin exclaimed sharply, her eyes dilated. “What do you mean? What on earth do you dare to mean? I thought you were a pro-German! ”

Valentine said:

“I'm not! I'm not! … I hate men's deaths… I hate any men's deaths… Any men…” She calmed herself by main force. “Mr Tietjens says that the more we hinder our allies the more we drag the war on and the more lives are lost… More lives, do you understand? …”

Mrs Duchemin assumed her most aloof, tender, and high air: “My poor child, ” she said, “what possible concern can the opinions of that broken fellow cause anyone! You can warn him from me that he does himself no good by going on uttering these discredited opinions. He's a marked man. Finished! It's no good Guggums, my husband, trying to stand up for him. ”

“He does stand up for him? ” Valentine asked. “Though I don't see why it's needed. Mr Tietjens is surely able to take care of himself. ”

“My good child, ” Edith Ethel said, “you may as well know the worst. There's not a more discredited man in London than Christopher Tietjens, and my husband does himself infinite harm in standing up for him. It's our one quarrel. ”

She went on again:

“It was all very well whilst that fellow had brains. He was said to have some intellect, though I could never see it. But now that, with his drunkenness and debaucheries, he has got himself into the state he is in; for there's no other way of accounting for his condition! They're striking him, I don't mind telling you, off the roll of his office…”

It was there that, for the first time, the thought went through Valentine Wannop's mind, like a mad inspiration: this woman must at one time have been in love with Tietjens. It was possible, men being what they were, that she had even once been Tietjens' mistress. For it was impossible otherwise to account for this spite, which to Valentine seemed almost meaningless. She had, on the other hand, no impulse to defend Tietjens against accusations that could not have any possible grounds.

Mrs Duchemin was going on with her kind loftiness:

“Of course a fellow like that—in that condition! —could not understand matters of high policy. It is imperative that these fellows should not have the higher command. It would pander to their insane spirit of militarism. They must be hindered. I'm talking, of course, between ourselves, but my husband says that that is the conviction in the very highest circles. To let them have their way, even if it led to earlier success, would be to establish a precedent—so my husband says! —compared with which the loss of a few lives…”

Valentine sprang up, her face distorted.

“For the sake of Christ, ” she cried out, “as you believe that Christ died for you, try to understand that millions of men's lives are at stake…”

Mrs Duchemin smiled.

“My poor child, ” she said, “if you moved in the higher circles you would look at these things with more aloofness…”

Valentine leant on the back of a high chair for support.

“You don't move in the higher circles, ” she said. “For Heaven's sake—for your own—remember that you are a woman, not for ever and for always a snob. You were a good woman once. You stuck to your husband for quite a long time…”

Mrs Duchemin, in her chair, had thrown herself back. “My good girl, ” she said, “have you gone mad? ” Valentine said:

“Yes, very nearly. I've got a brother at sea; I've had a man I loved out there for an infinite time. You can understand that, I suppose, even if you can't understand how one can go mad merely at the thoughts of suffering at all… And I know, Edith Ethel, that you are afraid of my opinion of you, or you wouldn't have put up all the subterfuges and concealments of all these years…”

Mrs Duchemin said quickly:

“Oh, my good girl. —If you've got personal interests at stake you can't be expected to take abstract views of the higher matters. We had better change the subject. ”

Valentine said:

“Yes, do. Get on with your excuses for not asking me and mother to your knighthood party. ”

Mrs Duchemin, too, rose at that. She felt at her amber beads with long fingers that turned very slightly at the tips. She had behind her all her mirrors, the drops of her lustres, shining points of gilt and of the polish of dark woods. Valentine thought that she had never seen anyone so absolutely impersonate kindness, tenderness, and dignity. She said:

“My dear, I was going to suggest that it was the sort of party to which you might not care to come… The people will be stiff and formal and you probably haven't got a frock. ”

Valentine said:

“Oh, I've got a frock all right. But there's a Jacob's ladder in my party stockings and that's the sort of ladder you can't kick down. ” She couldn't help saying that.

Mrs Duchemin stood motionless and very slowly redness mounted into her face. It was most curious to see against that scarlet background the vivid white of the eyes and the dark, straight eyebrows that nearly met. And slowly again her face went perfectly white; then her dark blue eyes became marked. She seemed to wipe her long, white hands one in the other, inserting her right hand into her left and drawing it out again.

“I'm sorry, ” she said in a dead voice. “We had hoped that, if that man went to France—or if other things happened—we might have continued on the old friendly footing. But you yourself must see that, with our official position, we can't be expected to connive…”

Valentine said:

“I don't understand! ”

“Perhaps you'd rather I didn't go on! ” Mrs Duchemin retorted. “I'd much rather not go on. ”

“You'd probably better, ” Valentine answered.

“We had meant, ” the elder woman said, “to have a quiet little dinner—we two and you, before the party—for auld lang syne. But that fellow has forced himself in, and you see for yourself that we can't have you as well. ”

Valentine said:

“I don't see why not. I always like to see Mr Tietjens! ” Mrs Duchemin looked hard at her.

“I don't see the use, ” she said, “of your keeping on that mask. It is surely bad enough that your mother should go about with that man and that terrible scenes like that of the other Friday should occur. Mrs Tietjens was heroic; nothing less than heroic. But you have no right to subject us, your friends, to such ordeals. ”

Valentine said:

“You mean… Mrs Christopher Tietjens…”

Mrs Duchemin went on:

“My husband insists that I should ask you. But I will not. I simply will not. I invented for you the excuse of the frock. Of course we could have given you a frock if that man is so mean or so penniless as not to keep you decent. But I repeat, with our official position we cannot—we cannot; it would be madness—connive at this intrigue. And all the more as the wife appears likely to be friendly with us. She has been once: she may well come again. ” She paused and went on solemnly: “And I warn you, if the split comes—as it must, for what woman could stand it? —it is Mrs Tietjens we shall support. She will always find a home here. ”

An extraordinary picture of Sylvia Tietjens standing beside Edith Ethel and dwarfing her as a giraffe dwarfs an emu, came into Valentine's head. She said:

“Ethel! Have I gone mad? Or is it you? Upon my word I can't understand…”

Mrs Duchemin exclaimed:

“For God's sake hold your tongue, you shameless thing! You've had a child by the man, haven't you? ”

Valentine saw suddenly the tall silver candlesticks, the dark polished panels of the rectory, and Edith Ethel's mad face and mad hair whirling before them.

She said:

“No! I certainly haven't. Can you get that into your head? I certainly haven't. ” She made a further effort over immense fatigue. “I assure you—I beg you to believe if it will give you any ease—that Mr Tietjens has never addressed a word of love to me in his life. Nor have I to him. We have hardly talked to each other in all the time we have known each other. ”

Mrs Duchemin said in a harsh voice:

“Seven people in the last five weeks have told me you have had a child by that beast: he's ruined because he has to keep you and your mother and the child. You won't deny that he has a child somewhere hidden away? …”

Valentine exclaimed suddenly:

“Oh, Ethel, you mustn't… you mustn't be jealous of me! If you only knew you wouldn't be jealous of me… I suppose the child you were going to have was by Christopher? Men are like that… But not of me! You need never, never. I've been the best friend you can ever have had…”

Mrs Duchemin exclaimed harshly, as if she were being strangled:

“A sort of blackmail! I knew it would come to that! It always does with your sort. Then do your damnedest, you harlot. You never set foot in this house again! Go you and rot…” Her face suddenly expressed extreme fear and with great swiftness she ran up the room. Immediately afterwards she was tenderly bending over a great bowl of roses beneath the lustre. The voice of Vincent Macmaster from the door had said:

“Come in, old man. Of course I've got ten minutes. The book's in here somewhere…”

Macmaster was beside her, rubbing his hands, bending with his curious, rather abject manner, and surveying her agonisedly with his eyeglass, which enormously magnified his lashes, his red lower lid and the veins in his cornea.

“Valentine! ” he said, “my dear Valentine… You've heard? We've decided to make it public… Guggums will have invited you to our little feast. And there will be a surprise, I believe…”

Edith Ethel looked, as she bent, lamentably and sharply, over her shoulder at Valentine.

“Yes, ” she said bravely, aiming her voice at Edith Ethel, “Ethel has invited me. I'll try to come…”

“Oh, but you must, ” Macmaster said, “just you and Christopher, who've been so kind to us. For old times' sake. You could not…”

Christopher Tietjens was ballooning slowly from the door, his hand tentatively held out to her. As they practically never shook hands at home, it was easy to avoid his hand. She said to herself: “Oh, how is it possible! How could he have…” And the terrible situation poured itself over her mind: the miserable little husband, the desperately nonchalant lover—and Edith Ethel mad with jealousy! A doomed household. She hoped Edith Ethel had seen her refuse her hand to Christopher.

But Edith Ethel, bent over her rose bowl, was burying her beautiful face in flower after flower. She was accustomed to do this for many minutes on end: she thought that, so, she resembled a picture by the subject of her husband's first little monograph. And so, Valentine thought, she did. She was trying to tell Macmaster that Friday evenings were difficult times for her to get away. But her throat ached too much. That, she knew, was her last sight of Edith Ethel, whom she had loved very much. That also, she hoped, would be her last sight of Christopher Tietjens—whom also she had loved very much… He was browsing along a bookshelf, very big and very clumsy.

Macmaster pursued her into the stony hall with clamorous repetitions of his invitation. She couldn't speak. At the great iron-lined door he held her hand for an eternity, gazing lamentably, his face close up against hers. He exclaimed in accents of great fear:

“Has Guggums? … She hasn't…? ” His face, which when you saw it so closely was a little blotched, distorted itself with anxiety: he glanced aside with panic at the drawing-room door.

Valentine burst a voice through her agonised throat. “Ethel, ” she said, “has told me she's to be Lady Macmaster. I'm so glad. I'm so truly glad for you. You've got what you wanted, haven't you? ”

His relief let him get out distractedly, yet as if he were too tired to be any more agitated:

“Yes! yes! … It's, of course, a secret… I don't want him told till Friday next… so as to be a sort of bonne bouche… He's practically certain to go out again on Saturday… They're sending out a great batch of them… for the big push…” At that she tried to draw her hand from his: she missed what he was saying. It was something to the effect that he would give it all for a happy little party. She caught the rather astonishing words: “Wie im alten schö nen Zeit. ” She couldn't tell whether it was his or her eyes that were full of tears. She said:

“I believe… I believe you're a kind man! ”

In the great stone hall, hung, with long Japanese paintings on silk, the electric light suddenly jumped; it was at best a sad, brown place.

He exclaimed:

“I, too, beg you to believe that I will never abandon…” He glanced again at the inner door and added: “You both… I will never abandon… you both! ” he repeated.

He let go her hand: she was on the stone stairs in the damp air. The great door closed irresistibly behind her, sending a whisper of air downwards.

Mark Tietjens' announcement that his father had after all carried out his long-standing promise to provide for Mrs Wannop in such a way as to allow her to write for the rest of her life only the more lasting kind of work, delivered Valentine Wannop of all her problems except one. That one loomed, naturally and immediately, immensely large.

She had passed a queer, unnatural week, the feeling dominating its numbness having been, oddly, that she would have nothing to do on Friday! The feeling recurred to her whilst she was casting her eyes over a hundred girls all in their cloth jumpers and men's black ties, aligned upon asphalt; whilst she was jumping on trams; whilst she was purchasing the tinned or dried fish that formed the staple diet of herself and her mother; whilst she was washing-up the dinner-things; upbraiding the house agent for the state of the bath, or bending closely over the large but merciless handwriting of the novel of her mother's that she was typing. It came, half as a joy, half mournfully across her familiar businesses; she felt as a man might feel who, luxuriating in the anticipation of leisure, knew that it was obtained by being compulsorily retired from some laborious but engrossing job. There would be nothing to do on Fridays!

It was, too, as if a novel had been snatched out of her hand so that she would never know the end. Of the fairytale she knew the end: the fortunate and adventurous tailor had married his beautiful and be-princessed goose girl, and was well on the way to burial in Westminster Abbey—or at any rate to a memorial service, the squire being actually buried amongst his faithful villagers. But she would never know whether they, in the end, got together all the blue Dutch tiles they wanted to line their bathroom… She would never know. Yet witnessing similar ambitions had made up a great deal of her life.

And, she said to herself, there was another tale ended. On the surface the story of her love for Tietjens had been static enough. It had begun in nothing and in nothing it had ended. But, deep down in her being—ah! it had progressed enough. Through the agency of two women! Before the scene with Mrs Duchemin there could, she thought, have been few young women less preoccupied than she with the sexual substrata, either of passion or of life. Her months as a domestic servant had accounted for that, sex, as she had seen it from a back kitchen, having been a repulsive affair, whilst the knowledge of its manifestations that she had thus attained had robbed it of the mystery which caused most of the young women whom she knew to brood upon these subjects.

Her convictions as to the moral incidence of sex were, she knew, quite opportunist. Brought up amongst rather “advanced” young people, had she been publicly challenged to pronounce her views she would probably, out of loyalty to her comrades, have declared that neither morality nor any ethical aspects were concerned in the matter. Like most of her young friends, influenced by the advanced teachers and tendential novelists of the day, she would have stated herself to advocate an—of course, enlightened! —promiscuity. That, before the revelations of Mrs Duchemin! Actually she had thought very little about the matter.

Nevertheless, even before that date, had her deeper feelings been questioned, she would have reacted with the idea that sexual incontinence was extremely ugly and chastity to be prized in the egg and spoon race that life was. She had been brought up by her father—who, perhaps, was wiser than appeared on the surface—to admire athleticism, and she was aware that proficiency of the body calls for chastity, sobriety, cleanliness and the various qualities that group themselves under the heading of abnegation. She couldn't have lived amongst the Ealing servant-class—the eldest son of the house in which she had been employed had been the defendant in a peculiarly scabrous breach of promise case, and the comments of the drunken cook on this and similar affairs had run the whole gamut from the sentimentally reticent to the extreme of coarseness according to the state of her alcoholic barometer—she couldn't then have lived among the Ealing servant-class and come to any other subliminal conclusion. So that, dividing the world into bright beings on the one hand and, on the other, into the mere stuff to fill graveyards whose actions during life couldn't matter, she had considered that the bright beings must be people whose public advocating of enlightened promiscuity went along with an absolute continence. She was aware that enlightened beings occasionally fell away from these standards in order to become portentous Egerias; but the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Mrs Taylors, and the George Eliots of the last century she had regarded humorously as rather priggish nuisances. Indeed, being very healthy and very hard-worked, she had been in the habit of regarding the whole matter, if not humorously, then at least good-humouredly, as a nuisance.

But being brought right up against the sexual necessities of a first-class Egeria had been for her a horrible affair. For Mrs Duchemin had revealed the fact that her circumspect, continent and suavely aesthetic personality was doubled by another at least as coarse as, and infinitely more incisive in expression than, that of the drunken cook. The language that she had used about her lover—calling him always “that oaf” or “that beast”! —had seemed literally to pain the girl internally, as if it had caused so many fallings away of internal supports at each two or three words. She had hardly been able to walk home through the darkness from the rectory.

And she had never heard what had become of Mrs Duchemin's baby. Next day Mrs Duchemin had been as suave, as circumspect, and as collected as ever. Never a word more had passed between them on the subject. This left in Valentine Wannop's mind a dark patch—as it were of murder—at which she must never look. And across the darkened world of her sexual tumult there flitted continually the quick suspicion that Tietjens might have been the lover of her friend. It was a matter of the simplest analogy. Mrs Duchemin had appeared a bright being: so had Tietjens. But Mrs Duchemin was a foul whore…

How much more then must Tietjens, who was a man, with the larger sexual necessities of the male… Her mind always refused to complete the thought.

Its suggestion wasn't to be combated by the idea of Vincent Macmaster himself: he was, she felt, the sort of man that it was almost a necessity for either mistress or comrade to betray. He seemed to ask for it. Because, she once put it to herself, how could any woman, given the choice and the opportunity—and God knows there was opportunity enough—choose that shadowy, dried leaf, if there were the splendid masculinity of Tietjens in whose arms to lie. She so regarded these two men. And that shadowy conviction was at once fortified and appeased when, a little later, Mrs Duchemin herself began to apply to Tietjens the epithets of “oaf” and “beast”—the very ones that she had used to designate the father of her putative child!

But then Tietjens must have abandoned Mrs Duchemin; and, if he had abandoned Mrs Duchemin, he must be available for her, Valentine Wannop! The feeling, she considered, made her ignoble; but it came from depths of her being that she could not control and, existing, it soothed her. Then, with the coming of the war, the whole problem died out, and between the opening of hostilities and what she had known to be the inevitable departure of her lover, she had surrendered herself to what she thought to be the pure physical desire for him. Amongst the terrible, crashing anguishes of that time, there had been nothing for it but surrender! With the unceasing—the never ceasing—thought of suffering; with the never ceasing idea that her lover, too, must soon be so suffering, there was in the world no other refuge. No other!

She surrendered. She waited for him to speak the word, or look the look that should unite them. She was finished. Chastity: napoo finny! Like everything else!

Of the physical side of love she had neither image nor conception. In the old days when she had been with him, if he had come into the room in which she was, or if he had merely been known to be coming down to the village, she had hummed all day under her breath and had felt warmer, little currents passing along her skin. She had read somewhere that to take alcohol was to send the blood into the surface vessels of the body, thus engendering a feeling of warmth. She had never taken alcohol, or not enough to produce recognisably that effect; but she imagined that it was thus love worked upon the body—and that it would stop for ever at that!

But, in these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her. It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you are drawn towards it. Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself. The moon so draws the tides.

Once before, for a fraction of a second, after the long, warm night of their drive, she had felt that impulsion. Now, years after, she was to know it all the time, waking or half waking; and it would drive her from her bed. She would stand all night at the open window till the stars paled above a world turned grey. It could convulse her with joy; it could shake her with sobs and cut through her breast like a knife.

The day of her long interview with Tietjens, amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings, she marked in the calendar of her mind as her great love scene. That had been two years ago: he had been going into the army. Now he was going out again. From that she knew what a love scene was. It passed without any mention of the word “love”; it passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin. Yet with every word they had said to each other they had confessed their love: in that way, when you listen to the nightingale you hear the expressed craving of your lover beating upon your heart.

Every word that he had spoken amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings had been a link in a love-speech. It was not merely that he had confessed to her as he would have to no other soul in the world—“To no other soul in the world, ” he had said! —his doubts, his misgivings and his fears: it was that every word he uttered and that came to her, during the lasting of that magic, had sung of passion. If he had uttered the word “Come” she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the earth; if he had said, “There is no hope, ” she would have known the finality of despair. Having said neither, he said she knew: “This is our condition; so we must continue! ” And she knew, too, that he was telling her that he, like her, was… oh, say on the side of the angels. She was then, she knew, so nicely balanced that, had he said, “Will you to-night be my mistress? ” she would have said “Yes”; for it was as if they had been, really, at the end of the world.

But his abstention not only strengthened her in her predilection for chastity; it restored to her her image of the world as a place of virtues and endeavours. For a time at least she again hummed beneath her breath upon occasion, for it seemed as if her heart sang within her. And there was restored to her her image of her lover as a beautiful spirit. She had been able to look at him across the tea-table of their dog-kennel in Bedford Park, during the last months, almost as she had looked across the more shining table of the cottage near the rectory. The deterioration that she knew Mrs Duchemin to have worked in her mind was assuaged. It could even occur to her that Mrs Duchemin's madness had been no more than a scare to be followed by no necessary crime. Valentine Wannop had re-become her confident self in a world of at least straight problems.

But Mrs Duchemin's outbreak of a week ago had driven the old phantoms across her mind. For Mrs Duchemin she had still had a great respect. She could not regard her Edith Ethel as merely a hypocrite; or, indeed, as a hypocrite at all. There was her great achievement of making something like a man of that miserable little creature—as there had been her other great achievement of keeping her unfortunate husband for so long out of a lunatic asylum. That had been no mean feat; neither feat had been mean. And Valentine knew that Edith Ethel really loved beauty, circumspection, urbanity. It was no hypocrisy that made her advocate the Atalanta race of chastity. But, also, as Valentine Wannop saw it, humanity has these doublings of strong natures; just as the urbane and grave Spanish nation must find its outlet in the shrieking lusts of the bullring or the circumspect, laborious and admirable city typist must find her derivative in the cruder lusts of certain novelists, so Edith Ethel must break down into physical sexualities—and into shrieked coarseness of fishwives. How else, indeed, do we have saints? Surely, alone, by the ultimate victory of the one tendency over the other!

But now after her farewell scene with Edith Ethel a simple rearrangement of the pattern had brought many of the old doubts at least temporarily back. Valentine said to herself that, just because of the very strength of her character, Edith Ethel couldn't have been brought down to uttering her fantastic denunciation of Tietjens, the merely mad charges of debauchery and excesses and finally the sexually lunatic charge against herself, except under the sting of some such passion as jealousy. She, Valentine, couldn't arrive at any other conclusion. And, viewing the matter as she believed she now did, more composedly, she considered with seriousness that, men being what they are, her lover respecting, or despairing of, herself had relieved the grosser necessities of his being—at the expense of Mrs Duchemin, who had, no doubt, been only too ready.

And in certain moods during the past week she had accepted this suspicion; in certain other moods she had put it from her. Towards the Thursday it had no longer seemed to matter. Her lover was going from her; the long pull of the war was on; the hard necessities of life stretched out; what could an infidelity more or less matter in the long, hard thing that life is? And on the Thursday two minor, or major, worries came to disturb her level. Her brother announced himself as coming home for several days' leave, and she had the trouble of thinking that she would have forced upon her a companionship and a point of view that would be coarsely and uproariously opposed to anything that Tietjens stood for—or for which he was ready to sacrifice himself. Moreover she would have to accompany her brother to a number of riotous festivities whilst all the time she would have to think of Tietjens as getting hour by hour nearer to the horrible circumstances of troops in contact with enemy forces. In addition her mother had received an enviably paid for commission from one of the more excitable Sunday papers to write a series of articles on extravagant matters connected with the hostilities. They had wanted the money so dreadfully—more particularly as Edward was corning home—that Valentine Wannop had conquered her natural aversion from the waste of time of her mother… It would have meant very little waste of time, and the £ 60 that it would have brought in would have made all the difference to them for months and months.

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