Parade's End (14 page)

‘Ah, but mother isn’t a Wannop,’ the girl said, ‘only by marriage. The real Wannops … they’ve been executed, and attaindered, and falsely accused and killed in carriage accidents and married adventurers or died penniless like father. Ever since the dawn of history. And then, mother’s got her mascot …’

‘Oh, what’s that?’ Mrs. Duchemin asked, almost with animation, ‘a relic… .’

‘Don’t you know mother’s mascot?’ the girl asked. ‘She tells everybody… . Don’t you know the story of the man with the champagne? How mother was sitting contemplating suicide in her bed-sitting room and there came in a man with a name like Tea-tray; she always calls him the mascot and asks us to remember him as such in our prayers… . He was a man who’d been at a German university with father years before and loved him very dearly, but not kept touch with him. And he’d been out of England for nine months when father died and found out about it. And he said: “Now Mrs. Wannop, what’s this?” And she told him. And he said, “What you want is champagne!” And he sent the slavey out with a sovereign for a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. And he broke the neck of the bottle off against the mantelpiece because they were slow in bringing an opener. And he stood over her while she drank half the bottle out of her tooth-glass. And he took her out to lunch … oh … oh … oh, it’s cold! … And lectured her … And got her a job to write leaders on a paper he had shares in …’

Mrs. Duchemin said:

‘You’re shivering!’

‘I know I am,’ the girl said. She went on very fast. ‘And of course, mother always
wrote
father’s articles for him. He found the ideas, but couldn’t write, and she’s a splendid style… . And, since then, he – the mascot – Tea-tray – has always turned up when she’s been in tight places. When the paper blew her up and threatened to dismiss her for inaccuracies! She’s frightfully inaccurate. And he wrote her out a table of things every leader writer must know, such as that “A. Ebor” is the Archbishop of York, and that the Government is Liberal. And one day he turned up and said: “Why don’t you write a novel on that story you told me?” And he lent her the money to buy the cottage we’re in now to be quiet and write in … Oh, I can’t go on!’

Miss Wannop burst into tears.

‘It’s thinking of those beastly days,’ she said. ‘And that beastly,
beastly
yesterday!’ She ran the knuckles of both her hands fiercely into her eyes, and determinedly eluded Mrs. Duchemin’s handkerchief and embraces. She said almost contemptuously:

‘A nice, considerate person I am. And you with this ordeal hanging over you! Do you suppose I don’t appreciate all your silent heroism of the home, while we’re marching about with flags and shouting? But it’s just to stop women like you being tortured, body and soul, week in, week out, that we… .’

Mrs. Duchemin had sat down on a chair near one of the windows; she had her handkerchief hiding her face.

‘Why women in your position don’t take lovers …’ the girl said, hotly. ‘Or that women in your position
do
take lovers… .’

Mrs. Duchemin looked up; in spite of its tears her white face had an air of serious dignity:

‘Oh,
no
, Valentine,’ she said, using her deeper tones. ‘There’s something beautiful, there’s something
thrilling
about chastity. I’m not narrow-minded. Censorious! I don’t
condemn
! But to preserve in word, thought and action a lifelong fidelity… . It’s no mean achievement… .’

‘You mean like an egg and spoon race,’ Miss Wannop said.

‘It isn’t,’ Mrs. Duchemin replied gently, ‘the way I should have put it. Isn’t the real symbol Atalanta, running fast and not turning aside for the golden apple? That always seemed to me the real truth hidden in the beautiful old legend… .’

‘I don’t know,’ Miss Wannop said, ‘when I read what Ruskin says about it in the
Crown of Wild Olive
. Or no! It’s the
Queen of the Air
. That’s his Greek rubbish, isn’t it? I always think it seems like an egg-race in which the young woman didn’t keep her eyes in the boat. But I suppose it comes to the same thing.’

Mrs. Duchemin said:

‘My
dear
! Not a word against John Ruskin in
this
house.’

Miss Wannop screamed.

An immense voice had shouted:

‘This way! This way! … The ladies will be here!’

Of Mr. Duchemin’s curates – he had three of them, for he had three marshland parishes almost without stipend, so that no one but a very rich clergyman could have held them – it was observed that they were all very large men with the physiques rather of prize-fighters than of clergy. So that when by any chance at dusk, Mr. Duchemin, who
himself
was of exceptional stature, and his three assistants went together along a road the hearts of any malefactors whom in the mist they chanced to encounter went pit-a-pat.

Mr. Horsley – the number two – had in addition an enormous voice. He shouted four or five words, interjected ‘tee-hee’, shouted four or five words more and again interjected ‘tee-hee’. He had enormous wrist-bones that protruded from his clerical cuffs, an enormous Adam’s apple, a large, thin, close-cropped, colourless face like a skull, with very sunken eyes, and when he was once started speaking it was impossible to stop him, because his own voice in his ears drowned every possible form of interruption.

This morning, as an inmate of the house, introducing to the breakfast-room Messrs. Tietjens and Macmaster, who had driven up to the steps just as he was mounting them, he had a story to tell. The introduction was, therefore, not, as such, a success… .

‘A
S
TATE OF
S
IEGE
,
L
ADIES
! Tee-hee!’ he alternately roared and giggled. ‘We’re living in a regular state of siege… . What with …’ It appeared that the night before, after dinner, Mr. Sandbach and rather more than half-a-dozen of the young bloods who had dined at Mountby, had gone scouring the country lanes, mounted on motor bicycles and armed with loaded canes … for Suffragettes! Every woman they had come across in the darkness they had stopped, abused, threatened with their loaded canes and subjected to cross-examination. The countryside was up in arms.

As a story this took, with the appropriate reflections and repetitions, a long time in telling, and afforded Tietjens and Miss Wannop the opportunity of gazing at each other. Miss Wannop was frankly afraid that this large, clumsy, unusual-looking man, now that he had found her again, might hand her over to the police whom she imagined to be searching for herself and her friend Gertie, Miss Wilson, at that moment in bed, under the care, as she also imagined, of Mrs. Wannop. On the links he had seemed to her natural and in place; here, with his loosely hung clothes and immense hands, the white patch on the side of his rather cropped head and his masked, rather shapeless features, he affected her queerly as being both
in
and out of place. He seemed to go with the ham, the meat-pie, the galantine and even at a pinch with the roses; but the Turner pictures, the æsthetic curtain and Mrs. Duchemin’s flowing robes, amber and rose in the hair did not go with him at all. Even the Chippendale chairs hardly did. And she felt herself thinking oddly, beneath her perturbations of a criminal and the voice of the Rev. Horsley that
his
Harris tweeds went all right with her skirt, and she was glad that she had on a clean, cream-coloured silk blouse, not a striped pink cotton.

She was right as to that.

In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection. Yet first impressions have always a bias in their favour, and even quiet reflection has often a job to efface them.

The night before, Tietjens had given several thoughts to this young woman. General Campion had assigned her to him as
maîtresse en titre
. He was said to have ruined himself, broken up his home and spent his wife’s money on her. Those were lies. On the other hand they were not inherent impossibilities. Upon occasion and given the right woman, quite sound men have done such things. He might, heaven knows, himself be so caught. But that he should have ruined himself over an unnoticeable young female who had announced herself as having been a domestic servant, and wore a pink cotton blouse … that had seemed to go beyond the bounds of even the unreason of club gossip!

That was the strong, first impression! It was all very well for his surface mind to say that the girl was not by birth a tweeny maid; she was the daughter of Professor Wannop and she could jump! For Tietjens held very strongly the theory that what finally separated the classes was that the upper could lift its feet from the ground whilst common people couldn’t… . But the strong impression remained. Miss Wannop was a tweeny maid. Say a lady’s help, by nature. She was of good family, for the Wannops were first heard of at Birdlip in Gloucestershire in the year 1417 – no doubt enriched after Agincourt. But even brilliant men of good family will now and then throw daughters who are lady helps by nature. That was one of the
queernesses
of heredity… . And, though Tietjens had even got as far as to realise that Miss Wannop must be a heroine who had sacrificed her young years to her mother’s gifts, and no doubt to a brother at school – for he had guessed as far as that – even then Tietjens couldn’t make her out as more than a lady help. Heroines are all very well, admirable, they may even be saints; but if they let themselves get careworn in face and go shabby… . Well, they must wait for the gold that shall be amply stored for them in heaven. On this earth you could hardly accept them as wives for men of your own set. Certainly you wouldn’t spend your own wife’s money on them. That was what it really came to.

But, brightened up as he now suddenly saw her, with silk for the pink cotton, shining coiled hair for the white canvas hat, a charming young neck, good shoes beneath neat ankles, a healthy flush taking the place of yesterday’s pallor of fear for her comrade; an obvious equal in the surroundings of quite good people; small, but well-shaped and healthy; immense blue eyes fixed without embarrassment on his own… .

‘By Jove …’ he said to himself: ‘It’s true! What a jolly little mistress she’d make!’

He blamed Campion, Sandbach, and the club gossips for the form the thought had taken. For the cruel, bitter and stupid pressure of the world has yet about it something selective; if it couples male and female in its inexorable rings of talk it will be because there is something harmonious in the union. And there exists then the pressure of suggestion!

He took a look at Mrs. Duchemin and considered her infinitely commonplace and probably a bore. He disliked her large-shouldered, many-yarded style of blue dress and considered that no woman should wear clouded amber, for which the proper function was the provision of cigarette holders for bounders. He looked back at Miss Wannop, and considered that she would make a good wife for Macmaster; Macmaster liked bouncing girls and this girl was quite lady enough.

He heard Miss Wannop shout against the gale to Mrs. Duchemin:

‘Do I sit beside the head of the table and pour out?’

Mrs. Duchemin answered:

‘No! I’ve asked Miss Fox to pour out. She’s nearly stone deaf.’ Miss Fox was the penniless sister of a curate deceased. ‘You’re to amuse Mr. Tietjens.’

Tietjens noticed that Mrs. Duchemin had an agreeable throat-voice; it penetrated the noises of Mr. Horsley as the missel-thrush’s note penetrates a gale. It was rather agreeable. He noticed that Miss Wannop made a little grimace.

Mr. Horsley, like a megaphone addressing a crowd, was turning from side to side, addressing his hearers by rotation. At the moment he was bawling at Macmaster; it would be Tietjens’ turn again in a moment to hear a description of the heart attacks of old Mrs. Haglen at Nobeys. But Tietjens’ turn did not come… .

A high-complexioned, round-cheeked, forty-fiveish lady, with agreeable eyes, dressed rather well in the black of the not-very-lately widowed, entered the room with precipitation. She patted Mr. Horsley on his declamatory right arm and, since he went on talking, she caught him by the hand and shook it. She exclaimed in high, commanding tones:

‘Which is Mr. Macmaster, the critic?’ and then, in the dead lull to Tietjens: ‘Are you Mr. Macmaster, the critic? No! … Then
you
must be.’

Her turning to Macmaster and the extinction of her interest in himself had been one of the rudest things Tietjens had ever experienced, but it was an affair so strictly businesslike that he took it without any offence. She was remarking to Macmaster:

‘Oh, Mr. Macmaster, my new book will be out on Thursday week,’ and she had begun to lead him towards a window at the other end of the room.

Miss Wannop said:

‘What have you done with Gertie?’

‘Gertie!’ Mrs. Wannop exclaimed with the surprise of one coming out of a dream. ‘Oh yes! She’s fast asleep. She’ll sleep till four. I told Hannah to give a look at her now and then.’

Miss Wannop’s hands fell open at her side.

‘Oh,
mother
!’ forced itself from her.

‘Oh, yes,’ Mrs. Wannop said, ‘we’d agreed to tell old Hannah we didn’t want her to-day. So we had!’ She said to Macmaster: ‘Old Hannah is our charwoman,’ wavered
a
little and then went on brightly: ‘Of course it will be of use to you to hear about my new book. To you journalists a little bit of previous explanation …’ and she dragged off Macmaster… .

That had come about because just as she had got into the dog-cart to be driven to the rectory – for she herself could not drive a horse – Miss Wannop had told her mother that there would be two men at breakfast, one whose name she didn’t know; the other, a Mr. Macmaster, a celebrated critic. Mrs. Wannop had called up to her:

‘A critic? Of what?’ her whole sleepy being electrified.

‘I don’t know,’ her daughter had answered. ‘Books, I daresay.’

A second or so after, when the horse, a large black animal that wouldn’t stand, had made twenty yards at several bounds, the handyman who drove had said: