Parade's End (122 page)

Marie Léonie considered that, by now, she might have got down to the depth of the cask where you find sediment. She ran some cider into a clear glass, stopping the tube with her thumb. The cider was clear enough to let her bottle another dozen, she judged; then she would send for Gunning to take the spile-bung out of the next cask. Four sixty-gallon casks she had to attend to; two of them were done. She began to tire: she was not unfatiguable if she was indefatigable. She began at any rate to feel drowsy. She wished Valentine could have helped her. But that girl had not much backbone and she, Marie Léonie, acknowledged that for the sake of the future it was good that she should rest and read books in Latin or Greek. And avoid nervous encounters.

She had tucked her up under an eiderdown on their four-post bed because They would have all the windows open and currents of air must above all be avoided by women… .
Elle
had smiled and said that it had once been her dream to read the works of Æschylus beside the blue Mediterranean. They had kissed each other… .

The maid beside her was saying that orfen ’n orfen she’d ’eared ’er farver ’oo was a dealer wen a lot of ol’ ’ens, say, ’ad gone to three an nine say: ‘Make it two ’arf dollars!’ They didn’ ’ave dollars in thet country but they did ’ave ’arf dollars. ’N Capt’n Kidd th’ pirate: ’e ’ad dollars, ’n pieces of eight ’n moi-dors too!

A wasp annoyed Marie Léonie; it buzzed almost on her nose, retired, returned, made a wide circuit. There were already several wasps struggling in the glass of cider she had just drawn; there were others in circles round spots of cider on the slats of wood on which the barrels were arranged. They drew in their tails and then expanded, ecstatically. Yet only two nights before she and Valentine had gone with Gunning all over the orchard with a lantern, a trowel and a bottle of prussic acid, stopping up holes along the paths and in banks. She had liked the experience; the darkness, the ring of light from the
lantern
on the rough grass; the feeling that she was out, near Mark and that yet Gunning and his lantern kept spiritual visitors away… . What she suffered between the desire to visit her man in the deep nights and the possibility of coming up against
revenants
… Was it reasonable? … What women had to suffer for their men! Even if they were faithful… .

What the unfortunate
Elle
had not suffered! …

Even on what you might call her
nuit de noces
… . At the time it had seemed incomprehensible. She had had no details. It had merely seemed fantastic: possibly even tragic because Mark had taken it so hardly. Truly she believed he had become insane. At two in the morning, beside Mark’s bed. They had – the two brothers – exchanged words of considerable violence whilst the girl shivered; and was determined. That girl had been determined. She would not go back to her mother. At two in the morning… . Well, if you refuse to go back to your mother at two in the morning you kick indeed your slipper over the mill!

The details of that night came back to her, amongst wasps and beneath the conversation of the unseen woman, in the shed where the water ran in the trough. She had set the bottles in the trough because it is a good thing to cool cider before the process of fermentation in the bottles begins. The bottles with their shining necks of green glass were an agreeable spectacle. The lady behind her back was talking of Oklahoma… . The cowboy with the large nose that she had seen on the film at the Piccadilly Cinema had come from Oklahoma. It was no doubt somewhere in America. She had been used to go to the Piccadilly Cinema on a Friday. You do not go to the theatre on a Friday if you are
bien pensant
, but you may regard the cinema as being to the theatre what a
repas maigre
is as against a meal with meat… . The lady speaking behind her came apparently from Oklahoma: she had eaten prairie chickens in her time. On a farm. Now, however, she was very rich. Or so she told the little maid. Her husband could buy half Lord Fittleworth’s estate and not miss the money. She said that if only people here would take example …

On that evening they had come thumping on her door. The bell had failed to wake her after all the noise in the
street
that day… . She had sprung into the middle of the floor and flown to save Mark … from an air-raid. She had forgotten that it was the Armistice… . But the knocking had gone on on the door.

Before it had stood monsieur the brother-in-law and that girl in a dark blue Girl-Guides’ sort of uniform. Both chalk-white and weary to death. As if they leaned one against another… . She had been for bidding them go away, but Mark had come out of the bedroom; in his nightshirt with his legs bare. And hairy! He had bidden them come in, roughly, and had got back into bed… . That had been the last time he had been on his legs! Now, he having been in bed so long, his legs were no longer hairy, but polished. Like thin glazed bones!

She had recalled his last gesture. He had positively used a gesture, like a man raving… . And indeed he was raving. At Christopher. And dripping with sweat. Twice she had wiped his face whilst they shouted at each other.

It had been difficult to understand what they said because they had spoken a sort of
patois
. Naturally they returned to the language they spoke in their childhoods – when they were excited, these unexcitable people! It resembled the
patois
of the Bretons. Harsh …

And, for herself she had been all concerned for the girl. Naturally she had been concerned for the girl. One is a woman… . At first she had taken her for a little piece from the streets… . But even for a little piece from the streets … Then she had noticed that there had been no rouge; no imitation pearl necklace… .

Of course when she had gathered that Mark was pressing money on them she had felt different. Different in two ways. It could not be a little piece. And then her heart contracted at the idea of money being given away. They might be ruined. It might be these people instead of her Paris nephews who would pillage her corpse. But the brother-in-law pushed the thought of money away from him with both hands. If she –
Elle
– wanted to go with him she must share his fortune… . What a country! What people!

There had seemed to be no understanding them then… . It had appeared that Mark insisted that the girl should stop there with her lover; the lover on the contrary insisted that she should go home to her mother. The girl
kept
saying that on no account would she leave Christopher. He could not be left. He would die if he was left… . And indeed that brother-in-law had seemed sick enough. He panted worse than Mark.

She had eventually taken the girl to her own room. A little, agonised, fair creature. She had felt inclined to enfold her in her arms but she had not done so. Because of the money… . She might as well have. It was impossible to get these people to touch money. She would now give no little to lend that girl twenty pounds for a frock and some undergarments.

The girl had sat there without speaking. It had seemed for hours. Then some drunken man on the church steps opposite had begun to play the bugle. Long calls… . Tee … Teee … TEEEE … Ta-heee … To-hee … Continuing for ever… .

The girl had begun to cry. She had said that it was dreadful. But you could not object. It was the Last Post they were playing. For the Dead. You could not object to their playing the Last Post for the Dead that night. Even if it was a drunken man who played and even if it drove you mad. The Dead ought to have all they could get.

If she had not made the necessary allowance that would have seemed to Marie Léonie an exaggerated sentiment. The English bugle notes could do no good to the French dead and the English losses were so negligible in quantity that it hardly seemed worth while to become
emotionnée
when their funeral call was played by a drunken man. The French papers estimated the English losses at a few hundreds; what was that as against the millions of her own people? … But she gathered that this girl had gone through something terrible that night with the wife, and being too proud to show emotion over her personal vicissitudes she pretended to find an outlet because of the sounds of that bugle… . Well, it was mournful enough. She had understood it when Christopher, putting his face in at the crack of the door, had whispered to her that he was going to stop the bugle because its sound was intolerable to Mark.

The girl apparently had been in a reverie for she had not heard him. She, Marie Léonie, had gone to look at Mark and the girl sat there, on the bed. Mark was by then quite quiescent. The bugle had stopped. To cheer him
she
had made a few remarks about the inappropriateness of playing, for a negligible number of dead, a funeral call at three in the morning. If it had been for the French dead – or if her country had not been betrayed. It was betraying her country to have given those assassins an armistice when they were far from their borders. Merely that was treachery on the part of these sham Allies. They should have gone right through those monsters slaying them by the million, defenceless, and then they should have laid waste their country with fire and sword. Let them too know what it was to suffer as France had suffered. It was treachery enough not to have done that and the child unborn would suffer for it.

But there they waited, then, even after that treachery had been done, to know what were the terms of even that treachery. They might even now not intend to be going to Berlin… . What then was Life for?

Mark had groaned. In effect he was a good Frenchman. She had seen to that. The girl had come into the room. She could not bear to be alone… . What a night of movement and cross movement. She had begun to argue with Mark. Hadn’t there, she had asked, been enough of suffering? He agreed that there had been enough of suffering. But there must be more… . Even out of justice to the poor bloody Germans… . He had called them the poor bloody Germans. He had said that it was the worst disservice you could do to your foes not to let them know that remorseless consequences follow determined actions. To interfere in order to show fellows that if they did what they wanted they need not of necessity take what they got for it was in effect to commit a sin against God. If the Germans did not experience that in the sight of the world there was an end of Europe and the world. What was to hinder endless recurrences of what had happened near a place called Gemmenich on the 4th of August, 1914, at six o’clock in the morning? There was nothing to hinder it. Any other state from the smallest to the largest might …

The girl had interrupted to say that the world had changed and Mark, lying back exhausted on his pillows had said with a sort of grim sharpness:

‘It is you who say it… . Then you must run the world… . I know nothing about it… .’ He appeared exhausted.

It was singular the way those two discussed – discussed ‘the situation’ at three-thirty in the morning. Well, nobody wanted to be asleep that night, it seemed. Even in that obscene street mobs went by, shouting and playing concertinas. She had never heard Mark discuss before – and she was never to hear him discuss again. He appeared to regard that girl with a sort of aloof indulgence; as if he were fond of her but regarded her as over-learned, too young, and devoid of all experience. Marie Léonie had watched them and listened with intentness. In twenty years, these three weeks had for the first time showed her her man in contact with his people. The contemplation had engrossed her.

She could nevertheless see that her man was exhausted in his inner being and obviously that girl was tried beyond endurance. Whilst she talked she appeared to listen for distant sounds… . She kept on recurring to the idea that punishment was abhorrent to the modern mind. Mark stuck to his point that to occupy Berlin was not punishment, but that not to occupy Berlin was to commit an intellectual sin. The consequences of invasion is counter-invasion and symbolical occupation, as the consequence of over-pride, is humiliation. For the rest of the world, he knew nothing of it; for his own country that was logic – the logic by which she had lived. To abandon that logic was to abandon clearness of mind: it was mental cowardice. To show the world Berlin occupied, with stands of arms and colours on her public places, was to show that England respected logic. Not to show the world that was to show that England was mentally cowardly. We dare not put the enemy nations to pain because we shrank from the contemplation.

Valentine had said: ‘There has been too much suffering!’

He had said:

‘Yes, you are afraid of suffering… . But England is necessary to the world… . To my world… . Well, make it your world and it may go to rack and ruin how it will. I am done with it. But then … do you accept the responsibility!’

A world with England presenting the spectacles of moral cowardice will be a world on a lower plane… . If you lower the record for the mile you lower the standard of blood-stock. Try to think of that. If Persimmon had not
achieved
what it did the French Grand Prix would be less of an event and the trainers at Maisons Laffite would be less efficient; and the jockeys, and the stable lads, and the sporting writers… . A world profits by the example of a steadfast nation… .

Suddenly Valentine said:

‘Where is Christopher?’ with such intentness that it was like a blow.

Christopher had gone out. She exclaimed:

‘But you must not let him go out… . He is not fit to go out alone… . He has gone out to go back… .’

Mark said:

‘Don’t go… .’ For she had got to the door. ‘He went out to stop the Last Post. But you may play the Last Post, for me. Perhaps he has gone back to the Square. He had presumably better see what has happened to his wife. I should not myself.’

Valentine had said with extraordinary bitterness:

‘He shall not. He shall not.’ She had gone.

It had come through to Marie Léonie partly then and partly subsequently that Christopher’s wife had turned up at Christopher’s empty house that was in the Square only a few yards away. They had gone back late at night probably for purposes of love and had found her there. She had come for the purpose of telling them that she was going to be operated on for cancer so that with their sensitive natures they could hardly contemplate going to bed together at that moment.