Parade's End (3 page)

And Macmaster, who would have sentimentalised the plump girl to the tune of
Highland Mary
, would for a day damn Tietjens up and down for a coarse brute. But at the
moment
he thanked God for Tietjens. There he sat, near to thirty, without an entanglement, a blemish on his health, or a worry with regard to any woman.

With deep affection and concern he looked across at his brilliant junior, who hadn’t saved himself. Tietjens had fallen into the most barefaced snare, into the cruellest snare, of the worst woman that could be imagined.

And Macmaster suddenly realised that he wasn’t wallowing, as he had imagined that he would, in the sensuous current of his prose. He had begun spiritedly with the first neat square of paragraph… . Certainly his publishers had done well by him in the matter of print:

‘Whether we consider him as the imaginer of mysterious, sensuous and exact plastic beauty; as the manipulator of sonorous, rolling and full-mouthed lines; of words as full of colour as were his canvases; or whether we regard him as the deep philosopher, elucidating and drawing his illumination from the arcana of a mystic hardly greater than himself, to Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, the subject of this little monograph, must be accorded the name of one who has profoundly influenced the outward aspects, the human contacts, and all those things that go to make up the life of our higher civilisation as we live it to-day… .’

Macmaster realised that he had only got thus far with his prose, and had got thus far without any of the relish that he had expected, and that then he had turned to the middle paragraph of page three – after the end of his exordium. His eyes wandered desultorily along the line:

‘The subject of these pages was born in the western central district of the metropolis in the year …’

The words conveyed nothing to him at all. He understood that that was because he hadn’t got over that morning. He had looked up from his coffee-cup – over the rim – and had taken in a blue-grey sheet of notepaper in Tietjens’ fingers, shaking, inscribed in the large, broad-nibbed writing of that detestable harridan. And Tietjens had been staring – staring with the intentness of a maddened horse – at his, Macmaster’s, face! And grey! Shapeless! The nose like a pallid triangle on a bladder of lard! That was Tietjens’ face… .

He could still feel the blow, physical, in the pit of his stomach! He had thought Tietjens was going mad: that he
was
mad. It had passed. Tietjens had assumed the mask of his indolent, insolent self. At the office, but later, he had delivered an extraordinarily forceful – and quite rude – lecture to Sir Reginald on his reasons for differing from the official figures of population movements in the western territories. Sir Reginald had been much impressed. The figures were wanted for a speech of the Colonial Minister – or an answer to a question – and Sir Reginald had promised to put Tietjens’ views before the great man. That was the sort of thing to do a young fellow good – because it got kudos for the office. They had to work on figures provided by the Colonial Governments, and if they could correct those fellows by sheer brain work – that scored.

But there sat Tietjens, in his grey tweeds, his legs apart, lumpish, clumsy, his tallowy, intelligent-looking hands drooping inert between his legs, his eyes gazing at a coloured photograph of the port of Boulogne beside the mirror beneath the luggage rack. Blond, high-coloured, vacant apparently, you couldn’t tell what in the world he was thinking of. The mathematical theory of waves, very likely, or slips in someone’s article on Arminianism. For, absurd as it seemed, Macmaster knew that he knew next to nothing of his friend’s feelings. As to them, practically no confidences had passed between them. Just two: On the night before his starting for his wedding in Paris Tietjens had said to him:

‘Vinnie, old fellow, it’s a back door way out of it. She’s bitched
me
.’

And once, rather lately, he had said:

‘Damn it! I don’t even know if the child’s my own!’

This last confidence had shocked Macmaster so irremediably – the child had been a seven months’ child, rather ailing, and Tietjens’ clumsy tenderness towards it had been so marked that, even without this nightmare, Macmaster had been affected by the sight of them together – that confidence then had pained Macmaster so frightfully, it was so appalling, that Macmaster had regarded it almost as an insult. It was the sort of confidence a man didn’t make to his equal, but only to solicitors, doctors, or the clergy who are not quite men.
Or,
at any rate, such confidences are not made between men without appeals for sympathy, and Tietjens had made no appeal for sympathy. He had just added sardonically:

‘She gives me the benefit of the agreeable doubt. And she’s as good as said as much to Marchant’ – Marchant had been Tietjens’ old nurse.

Suddenly – and as if in a sort of unconscious losing of his head – Macmaster remarked:

‘You can’t say the man wasn’t a poet!’

The remark had been, as it were, torn from him, because he had observed, in the strong light of the compartment, that half of Tietjens’ forelock and a roundish patch behind it was silvery white. That might have been going on for weeks: you live beside a man and notice his changes very little. Yorkshire men of fresh colour, and blondish, often go speckled with white very young; Tietjens had had a white hair or two at the age of fourteen, very noticeable in the sunlight when he had taken his cap off to bowl.

But Macmaster’s mind, taking appalled charge, had felt assured that Tietjens had gone white with the shock of his wife’s letter – in four hours! That meant that terrible things must be going on within him; his thoughts, at all costs, must be distracted. The mental process in Macmaster had been quite subconscious. He would not, advisedly, have introduced the painter-poet as a topic.

Tietjens said:

‘I haven’t said anything at all that I can remember.’

The obstinacy of his hard race awakened in Macmaster:

‘Since,’ he quoted, ‘when we stand side by side

Only hands may meet,

Better half this weary world

Lay between us, sweet!

Better far tho’ hearts may break

Bid farewell for aye!

Lest thy sad eyes, meeting mine,

Tempt my soul away!’

‘You can’t,’ he continued, ‘say that that isn’t poetry! Great poetry.’

‘I can’t say,’ Tietjens answered contemptuously. ‘I don’t read poetry except Byron. But it’s a filthy picture… .’

Macmaster said uncertainly:

‘I don’t know that I know the picture. Is it in Chicago?’

‘It isn’t painted!’ Tietjens said. ‘But it’s there!’

He continued with sudden fury:

‘Damn it. What’s the sense of all these attempts to justify fornication? England’s mad about it. Well, you’ve got your John Stuart Mills and your George Eliots for the high-class thing. Leave the furniture out! Or leave me out, at least I tell you it revolts me to think of that obese, oily man who never took a bath, in a grease-spotted dressing-gown and the underclothes he’s slept in, standing beside a five-shilling model with crimped hair, or some Mrs. W. Three Stars, gazing into a mirror that reflects their fetid selves and gilt sunfish and drop chandeliers and plates sickening with cold bacon fat and gurgling about passion.’

Macmaster had gone chalk white, his short beard bristling:

‘You daren’t … you daren’t talk like that,’ he stuttered.

‘I
dare
!’ Tietjens answered; ‘but I oughtn’t to … to you! I admit that. But you oughtn’t, almost as much, to talk about that stuff to me, either. It’s an insult to my intelligence.’

‘Certainly,’ Macmaster said stiffly, ‘the moment was not opportune.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ Tietjens answered. ‘The moment can never be opportune. Let’s agree that making a career is a dirty business – for me as for you! But decent augurs grin behind their masks. They never preach to each other.’

‘You’re getting esoteric,’ Macmaster said faintly.

‘I’ll underline,’ Tietjens went on. ‘I quite understand that the favour of Mrs. Cressy and Mrs. de Limoux is essential to you! They have the ear of that old don Ingleby.’

Macmaster said:

‘Damn!’

‘I quite agree,’ Tietjens continued, ‘I quite approve. It’s the game as it has always been played. It’s the tradition, so it’s right. It’s been sanctioned since the days of the
Précieuses Ridicules
.’

‘You’ve a way of putting things,’ Macmaster said.

‘I haven’t,’ Tietjens answered. ‘It’s just because I haven’t that what I
do
say sticks out in the minds of fellows
like
you who are always fiddling about after literary expression. But what I do say is this: I stand for monogamy.’

Macmaster uttered a ‘
You!
’ of amazement.

Tietjens answered with a negligent ‘
I!
’ He continued:

‘I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of course if a man who’s a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again, no talking about it. He’d no doubt be in the end better, and better off, if he didn’t. Just as it would probably be better for him if he didn’t have the second glass of whisky and soda… .’

‘You call that monogamy and chastity!’ Macmaster interjected.

‘I do,’ Tietjens answered. ‘And it probably is, at any rate it’s clean. What is loathsome is all your fumbling in placket-holes and polysyllabic Justification by Love. You stand for lachrymose polygamy. That’s all right if you can get your club to change its rules.’

‘You’re out of my depth,’ Macmaster said. ‘And being very disagreeable. You appear to be justifying promiscuity. I don’t like it.’

‘I’m probably being disagreeable,’ Tietjens said. ‘Jeremiahs usually are. But there ought to be a twenty years’ close time for discussions of sham sexual morality. Your Paolo and Francesca – and Dante’s – went, very properly, to Hell, and no bones about it. You don’t get Dante justifying them. But your fellow whines about creeping into Heaven.’

‘He
doesn’t
,’ Macmaster exclaimed. Tietjens continued with equanimity:

‘Now your novelist who writes a book to justify his every tenth or fifth seduction of a commonplace young woman in the name of the rights of shop boys… .’

‘I’ll admit,’ Macmaster coincided, ‘that Briggs is going too far. I told him only last Thursday at Mrs. Limoux’s …’

‘I’m not talking of anyone in particular,’ Tietjens said. ‘I don’t read novels. I’m supposing a case. And it’s a cleaner case than that of your pre-Raphaelite horrors! No! I don’t read novels, but I follow tendencies. And if a fellow chooses to justify his seductions of uninteresting and viewy young females along the lines of freedom and the rights of man, it’s relatively respectable. It would be
better
just to boast about his conquests in a straightforward and exultant way. But …’

‘You carry joking too far sometimes,’ Macmaster said. ‘I’ve warned you about it.’

‘I’m as solemn as an owl!’ Tietjens rejoined. ‘The lower classes are becoming vocal. Why shouldn’t they? They’re the only people in this country who are sound in wind and limb. They’ll save the country if the country’s to be saved.’

‘And you call yourself a Tory!’ Macmaster said.

‘The lower classes,’ Tietjens continued equably, ‘such of them as get through the secondary schools, want irregular and very transitory unions. During holidays they go together on personally conducted tours to Switzerland and such places. Wet afternoons they pass in their tiled bathrooms, slapping each other hilariously on the backs and splashing white enamel paint about.’

‘You say you don’t read novels,’ Macmaster said, ‘but I recognise the quotation.’

‘I don’t
read
novels,’ Tietjens answered. ‘I know what’s in ’em. There has been nothing worth
reading
written in England since the eighteenth century except by a woman… . But it’s natural for your enamel splashers to want to see themselves in a bright and variegated literature. Why shouldn’t they? It’s a healthy, human desire, and now that printing and paper are cheap they get it satisfied. It’s healthy, I tell you. Infinitely healthier than …’ He paused.

‘Than what?’ Macmaster asked.

‘I’m thinking,’ Tietjens said, ‘thinking how not to be too rude.’

‘You want to be rude,’ Macmaster said bitterly, ‘to people who lead the contemplative … the circumspect life.’

‘It’s precisely that,’ Tietjens said. He quoted:

She walks, the lady of my delight,

A shepherdess of sheep;

She is so circumspect and right:

She has her thoughts to keep.

Macmaster said:

‘Confound you, Chrissie. You know everything.’

‘Well, yes,’ Tietjens said musingly, ‘I think I should want to be rude to her. I don’t say I should be. Certainly
I
shouldn’t if she were good looking. Or if she were your soul’s affinity. You can rely on that.’

Macmaster had a sudden vision of Tietjens’ large and clumsy form walking beside the lady of his, Macmaster’s, delight, when ultimately she was found – walking along the top of a cliff amongst tall grass and poppies and making himself extremely agreeable with talk of Tasso and Cimabue. All the same, Macmaster imagined, the lady wouldn’t like Tietjens. Women didn’t as a rule. His looks and his silences alarmed them. Or they hated him… . Or they liked him very much indeed. And Macmaster said conciliatorily:

‘Yes, I think I could rely on that!’ He added: ‘All the same I don’t wonder that …’

He had been about to say:

‘I don’t wonder that Sylvia calls you immoral.’ For Tietjens’ wife alleged that Tietjens was detestable. He bored her, she said, by his silences; when he did speak she hated him for the immorality of his views… . But he did not finish his sentence, and Tietjens went on:

‘All the same when the war comes it will be these little snobs who will save England, because they’ve the courage to know what they want and to say so.’

Macmaster said loftily:

‘You’re extraordinarily old-fashioned at times, Chrissie. You ought to know as well as I do that a war is impossible – at any rate with this country in it. Simply because …’ He hesitated and then emboldened himself: ‘
We
– the circumspect – yes, the circumspect classes, will pilot the nation through the tight places.’