Parade's End (82 page)

She had, of course, been, not in suspension, but in suspense. Because, if he made a sign – ‘I understand,’ Edith Ethel had said, ‘that you have not been in correspondence’ … or had it been ‘in communication’ that she had said? … Well, they hadn’t been either… .

Anyhow, if that grey Problem, that ravelled ball of grey knitting worsted, had made a sign she would have known that she had not been insulted. Or was there any sense in that?

Was it really true that if a male and female of the same species were alone in a room together and the male didn’t … then it was an insult? That was an idea that did not exist in a girl’s head without someone to put it there, but once it had been put there it became a luminous veracity! It had been put into her, Valentine Wannop’s head, naturally by Edith Ethel, who equally naturally said that she did not believe it, but that it was a tenet of … oh, the man’s wife! Of the idle, surpassing-the-Lily-and-Solomon-too, surprisingly svelte, tall, clean-run creature who for ever on the shining paper of illustrated journals advanced towards you with improbable strides along the railings of the Row, laughing, in company with the Honourable Somebody, second son of Lord Someone-or-other… . Edith Ethel was more refined. She had a title, whereas the other hadn’t, but she was pensive. She showed you that she had read Walter Savage
Landor,
and had only very lately given up wearing opaque amber beads, as affected by the later pre-Raphaelites. She was practically never in the illustrated papers, but she held more refined views. She held that there were some men who were not like that – and those, all of them, were the men to whom Edith Ethel accorded the
entrée
to her Afternoons. She was their Egeria! A refining influence!

The Husband of the Wife, then? Once he had been allowed in Edith Ethel’s drawing-room: now he wasn’t! … Must have deteriorated!

She said to herself sharply, in her ‘No nonsense, there’ mood:

‘Chuck it. You’re in love with a married man who’s a Society wife and you’re upset because the Titled Lady has put into your head the idea that you might “come together again”. After ten years!’

But immediately she protested:

‘No.
NO
. No! It isn’t that. It’s all right the habit of putting things incisively, but it’s misleading to put things too crudely.’

What was the coming together that was offered her? Nothing, on the face of it, but being dragged again into that man’s intolerable worries as unfortunate machinists are dragged into wheels by belts – and all the flesh torn off their bones! Upon her word that had been her first thought. She was afraid, afraid, afraid! She suddenly appreciated the advantages of nunlike seclusion. Besides she wanted to be bashing policemen with bladders in celebration of Eleven Eleven!

That fellow – he had no furniture; he did not appear to recognise the hall porter… . Dotty. Dotty and too morally deteriorated to be admitted to drawing-room of titled lady, the frequenters of which could be trusted not to make love to you on insufficient provocation, if left alone with you… .

Her generous mind reacted painfully.

‘Oh, that’s not
fair
!’ she said.

There were all sorts of sides to the unfairness. Before this War, and, of course, before he had lent all his money to Vincent Macmaster that – that grey grizzly had been perfectly fit for the country-parsonage drawing-room of Edith Ethel Duchemin: he had been welcomed
there
with effusion! … After the War and when his money was – presumably – exhausted, and his mind exhausted, for he had no furniture and did not know the porter … After the War, then, and when his money was exhausted he was not fit for the Salon of Lady Macmaster – the only Lady to have a Salon in London.

It was what you called kicking down your ladder!

Obviously it had to be done. There were such a lot of these bothering War heroes that if you let them all into your Salon it would cease to be a Salon, particularly if you were under obligations to them! … That was already a pressing national problem; it was going to become an overwhelming one now – in twenty minutes’ time; after those maroons. The impoverished War Heroes would all be coming back. Innumerable. You would have to tell your parlourmaid that you weren’t at home to … about seven million!

But wait a minute… . Where did they just stand?

He … But she could not go on calling him just ‘he’ like a school-girl of eighteen, thinking of her favourite actor … in the purity of her young thoughts. What was she to call him? She had never – even when they had known each other – called him anything other than Mr. So and So… . She could not bring herself to let her mental lips frame his name… . She had never used anything but his surname to this grey thing, familiar object of her mother’s study, seen frequently at tea-parties… . Once she had been out with it for a whole night in a dog-cart! Think of that! … And they had spouted Tibullus one to another in moon-lit mist. And she had certainly wanted it to kiss her – in the moon-lit mists a practically, a really completely strange bear!

It couldn’t be done, of course, but she remembered still how she had shivered… . Ph … Ph … Ph… . Shivering.

She shivered.

Afterwards they had been run into by the car of General Lord Edward Campion, V.C., P.G. Heaven knows what! Godfather of the man’s Society Wife, then taking the waters in Germany… . Or perhaps not
her
Godfather. The man’s rather; but her especial champion, in shining armour. In these days they had worn broad red stripes
down
the outsides of their trousers, Generals. What a change!
How
significant of the times!

That had been in 1912… . Say the first of July; she could not remember exactly. Summer weather, anyhow, before haymaking or just about. The grass had been long in Hogg’s Forty Acre, when they had walked through it, discussing Women’s Suffrage. She had brushed the seed-tops of the heavy grass with her hands as they walked… . Say the 1/7/12.

Now it was Eleven Eleven… . What? Oh, Eighteen, of course!

Six years ago! What changes in the world! What cataclysms! What Revolutions! … She heard all the newspapers, all the halfpenny paper journalists in creation crying in chorus!

But hang it, it was true! If, six years ago she had kissed the … the greyish lacuna of her mind then sitting beside her on the dog-cart seat it would have been the larkish freak of a school-girl; if she did it to-day – as per invitation presumably of Lady Macmaster, bringing them together, for, of course, it could not be performed from a distance or without correspondence – no, communication! … If, then, she did it to-day … to-day … to-day – the Eleven Eleven! Oh, what a day to-day would be… . Not her sentiments those; quotation from Christina, sister of Lady Macmaster’s favourite poet… . Or, perhaps, since she had had a title she would have found poets more … more chic! The poet who was killed at Gallipoli … Gerald Osborne, was it? Couldn’t remember the name!

But for six years then she had been a member of that … triangle. You couldn’t call it
ménage à trois
, even if you didn’t know French. They hadn’t lived together! … They had d—d near died together when the general’s car hit their dog-cart! D—d near! (You
must
not use those War-time idioms.
Do
break yourself of it! Remember the maroons!)

An oafish thing to do! To take a school-girl, just … oh, just past the age of consent, out all night in a dogcart and then get yourself run into by the car of the V. C., P. G., champion-in-red-trouser-stripe of your Legitimate! You’d think any man who
was
a man would have avoided that!

Most men knew enough to know that the Woman Pays … the school-girl too!

But they get it both ways… . Look here: when Edith Ethel Duchemin, then, just – or perhaps not quite, Lady Macmaster! At any rate, her husband was dead and she had just married that miserable little … (Mustn’t use that word!) She, Valentine Wannop, had been the only witness of the marriage – as of the previous, discreet, but so praiseworthy adultery! … When, then, Edith Ethel had … It must have been on the very day of the knighthood, because Edith Ethel made it an excuse not to ask her to the resultant Party… . Edith Ethel had accused her of having had a baby by … oh, Mr. So and So… . And heaven was her, Valentine Wannop’s, witness that, although Mr. So and So was her mother’s constant adviser, she, Valentine Wannop, was still in such a state of acquaintance with him that she still called him by his surname… . When Lady Macmaster, spitting like the South American beast of burden called a llama, had accused her of having had a baby by her mother’s adviser – to her natural astonishment, but, of course, it had been the result of the dog-cart and the motor and the General, and the General’s sister, Lady Pauline Something – or perhaps it was Claudine? Yes, Lady Claudine! – who had been in the car and the Society Wife, who was always striding along the railings of the Row… . When she had been so accused out of the blue, her first thought – and, confound it, her enduring thought! – had not been concern for her own reputation but for
his
… .

That was the
quality
of his entanglements, their very essence. He got into appalling messes, unending and unravellable – no, she meant un-unravellable! – messes and other people suffered for him whilst he mooned on – into more messes! The General charging the dogcart was symbolical of him. He was perfectly on his right side and all, but it was like him to be in a dog-cart when flagitious automobiles carrying Generals were running a-muck! Then … the Woman Paid! … She really did, in this case. It had been her mother’s horse they had been driving and, although they had got damages out of the General, the costs were twice that… . And her, Valentine’s, reputation had suffered from being in a
dog-cart
at dawn, alone with a man… . It made no odds that he had – or was it hadn’t? – ‘insulted’ her in any way all through that – oh, that delicious, delirious night… . She had to be said to have a baby by him, and then she had to be dreadfully worried about
his
poor old reputation… . Of course it
would
have been pretty rotten of him – she so young and innocent, daughter of so preposterously eminent, if so impoverished a man, his father’s best friend and all. ‘He hadn’t oughter’er done it!’ He hadn’t really oughter… . She heard them all saying it, still!

Well, he hadn’t! … But she?

That magic night. It was just before dawn, the mists nearly up to their necks as they drove; the sky going pale in a sort of twilight. And one immense star! She remembered only one immense star, though, historically, there had been also a dilapidated sort of moon. But the star was
her
best boy – what her wagon was hitched on to… . And they had been quoting – quarrelling over, she remembered:

Flebis et arsuro me, Delia, lecto

Tristibus et
…

She exclaimed suddenly:

‘Twilight and evening star

And one clear call for me

And may there be no moaning at the bar

When I …’

She said:

‘Oh, but you
oughtn’t
to, my dear! That’s
Tennyson
!’ Tennyson, with a difference!

She said:

‘All the same, that would have been an inexperienced school-girl’s prank… . But if I let him kiss me now I should be… .’ She would be a what was it … a fornicatress? …
trix
! Fornicatrix is preferable! Very preferable. Then why not adultrix? You couldn’t: you had to be a ‘cold-blooded adultress!’ or morality was not avenged.

Oh, but surely not cold-blooded! … Deliberate, then! … That wasn’t, either, the word for the process. Of osculation! … Comic things, words, as applied to states of feelings!

But if she went now to Lincoln’s Inn and the Problem held out its arms… . That would be ‘deliberate’. It would be asking for it in the fullest sense of the term.

She said to herself quickly:

‘This way madness lies!’ And then:

‘What an imbecile thing to say!’

She had had an Affair with a man, she made her mind say to her, two years ago. That was all right. There could not be a, say, a schoolmistress rising twenty-four or twenty-five, in the world who hadn’t had
some
affair, even if it were no more than a gentleman in a tea-shop who every afternoon for a week had gazed at her disrespectfully over a slice of plum-cake… . And then disappeared … But you had to have had at least a might-have-been or you couldn’t go on being a schoolmistress or a girl in a ministry or a dactylographer of respectability. You packed
that
away in the bottom of your mind and on Sunday mornings before the perfectly insufficient Sunday dinner, you took it out and built castles in Spain in which you were a castanetted heroine turning on wonderful hips, but casting behind you inflaming glances… . Something like that!

Well, she had had an affair with this honest, simple creature! So good! So unspeakably
GOOD
… . Like the late Albert, prince consort! The very, helpless, immobile sort of creature that she ought not to have tempted. It had been like shooting tame pigeons! Because he had had a Society wife always in the illustrated papers whilst he sat at home and evolved Statistics or came to tea with her dear, tremendous, distracted mother, whom he helped to get her articles accurate. So a woman tempted him and he did … No; he didn’t quite eat!

But why? … Because he was
GOOD
?

Very likely.

Or was it … That was the intolerable thought that she shut up within her along with the material for castles in the air! Was it because he had been really indifferent?

They had revolved round each other at tea-parties – or rather he had revolved round her, because at Edith Ethel’s affairs she always sat, a fixed starlet, behind the tea-urn and dispensed cups. But he would moon round the room, looking at the backs of books; occasionally laying down the law to some guest; and always drifting in
the
end to her side where he would say a trifle or two… . And the beautiful – the quite excruciatingly beautiful wife – striding along the Row with the second son of the Earl of Someone at her side… . Asking for it… .