Parade's End

well had to keep from showing that you were his superior. Especially intellectually. If you let yourself show a Staff officer that he was a silly ass — you could say it as often as you liked as long as you didn’t prove it! — you could be certain that you would be for it before long. And quite properly. It was not English to be intellectually adroit. Nay, it was positively un-English. And the duty of field officers is to keep messes as English as possible…. So a Staff officer would take it out of such a regimental inferior. In a perfectly creditable way. You would never imagine the hash headquarters warrant officers would make of your returns. Until you were worried and badgered and in the end either you were ejected into, or prayed to be transferred to… any other command in the whole service….

And that was beastly. The process, not the effect. On the whole Tietjens did not care where he was or what he did as long as he kept out of England, the thought of that country, at night, slumbering across the Channel, being sentimentally unbearable to him…. Still, he was fond of old Campion, and would rather be in his command than any other. He had attached to his staff a very decent set of fellows, as decent as you could be in contact with… if you had to be in contact with your kind…. So he just said:

“Look here, Stanley, you are a silly ass,” and left it at that, without demonstrating the truth of the assertion.

The colonel said:

“Why, what have I been doing now?… I wish you would walk the other way….”

Tietjens said:

“No, I can’t afford to go out of camp…. I’ve got to come to witness your fantastic wedding-contract to- morrow afternoon, haven’t I?… I can’t leave camp twice in one week….”

“You’ve got to come down to the camp-guard,” Levin said. “I hate to keep a woman waiting in the cold… though she is in the general’s car….”

Tietjens exclaimed:

“You’ve not been… oh, extraordinary enough, to bring Miss de Bailly out here? To talk to me?”

Colonel Levin mumbled, so low Tietjens almost imagined that he was not meant to hear:

“It isn’t Miss de Bailly!” Then he exclaimed quite aloud: “Damn it all, Tietjens, haven’t you had hints enough?…”

For a lunatic moment it went through Tietjens’ mind that it must be Miss Wannop in the general’s car, at the gate, down the hill beside the camp guard-room. But he knew folly when it presented itself to his mind. He had nevertheless turned and they were going very slowly back along the broad way between the huts. Levin was certainly in no hurry. The broad way would come to an end of the hutments; about two acres of slope would descend blackly before them, white stones to mark a sort of coastguard track glimmering out of sight beneath a moon gone dark with the frost. And, down there in the dark forest, at the end of that track, in a terrific Rolls-Royce, was waiting something of which Levin was certainly deucedly afraid….

For a minute Tietjens’ backbone stiffened. He didn’t intend to interfere between Mlle de Bailly and any married woman Levin had had as a mistress…. Somehow he was convinced that what was in that car was a married woman…. He did not dare to think otherwise. If it was not a married woman it might be Miss Wannop. If it was, it couldn’t be…. An immense waft of calm, sentimental happiness had descended upon him. Merely because he had imagined her! He imagined her little, fair, rather pug-nosed face; under a fur cap, he did not know why. Leaning forward she would be, on the seat of the general’s illuminated car, glazed in, a regular raree show! Peering out, shortsightedly on account of the reflections on the inside of the glass….

He was saying to Levin:

“Look here, Stanley… why I said you are a silly ass is because Miss de Bailly has one chief luxury. It’s exhibiting jealousy. Not feeling it; exhibiting it.”

“Ought you,” Levin asked ironically, “to discuss my fiancee before me? As an English gentleman. Tietjens of Groby and all.”

“Why, of course,” Tietjens said. He continued feeling happy. “As a sort of swollen best man, it’s my duty to instruct you. Mothers tell their daughters things before marriage. Best men do it for the innocent Benedict…. And you’re always consulting me about the young woman….”

“I’m not doing it now,” Levin grumbled direly.

“Then what, in God’s name, are you doing? You’ve got a cast mistress, haven’t you, down there in old Campion’s car?…” They were beside the alley that led down to his orderly room. Knots of men, dim, and desultory, still half filled it, a little way down.

“I haven’t,” Levin exclaimed almost tearfully. “I never had a mistress….”

“And you’re not married?” Tietjens asked. He used on purpose the schoolboy’s ejaculation “Lummy!” to soften the jibe. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I must just go and take a look at my crowd. To see if your orders have come down.”

He found no orders in a hut as full as ever of the dull mists and odours of khaki, but he found in revenge a fine upstanding, blond, Canadian-born lance-corporal of old Colonial lineage, with a moving story as related by Sergeant-Major Cowley:

“This man, sir, of the Canadian Railway lot, ’is mother’s just turned up in the town, come on from Eetarpels. Come all the way from Toronto where she was bedridden.”

Tietjens said:

“Well, what about it? Get a move on.”

The man wanted leave to go to his mother who was waiting in a decent estaminet at the end of the tramline, just outside the camp where the houses of the town began.

Tietjens said: “It’s impossible. It’s absolutely impossible. You know that.”

The man stood erect and expressionless; his blue eyes looked confoundedly honest to Tietjens who was cursing himself. He said to the man:

“You can see for yourself that it’s impossible, can’t you?”

The man said slowly:

“Not knowing the regulations in these circumstances I can’t say, sir. But my mother’s is a very special case…. She’s lost two sons already.”

Tietjens said:

“A great many people have…. Do you understand, if you went absent off my pass I might — I quite possibly might — lose my commission? I’m responsible for you fellows getting up the line.”

The man looked down at his feet. Tietjens said to himself that it was Valentine Wannop doing this to him. He ought to turn the man down at once. He was pervaded by a sense of her being. It was imbecile. Yet it was so. He said to the man:

“You said good-bye to your mother, didn’t you, in Toronto, before you left?”

The man said:

“No, sir.” He had not seen his mother in seven years. He had been up in the Chilkoot when war broke out and had not heard of it for ten months. Then he had at once joined up in British Columbia, and had been sent straight through for railway work, on to Aldershot where the Canadians have a camp in building. He had not known that his brothers were killed till he got there and his mother, being bedridden at the news, had not been able to get down to Toronto when his batch had passed through. She lived about sixty miles from Toronto. Now she had risen from her bed like a miracle and come all the way. A widow, sixty-two years of age. Very feeble.

It occurred to Tietjens as it occurred to him ten times a day that it was idiotic of him to figure Valentine Wannop to himself. He had not the slightest idea where she was: in what circumstances, or even in what house. He did not suppose she and her mother had stayed on in that dog-kennel of a place in Bedford Park. They would be fairly comfortable. His father had left them money. “It is preposterous,” he said to himself, “to persist in figuring a person to yourself when you have no idea of where they are.” He said to the man:

“Wouldn’t it do if you saw your mother at the camp gate, by the guard-room?”

“Not much of a leave-taking, sir,” the man said; “she not allowed in the camp and I not allowed out. Talking under a sentry’s nose very likely.”

Tietjens said to himself:

“What a monstrous absurdity this is of seeing and talking, for a minute or so! You meet and talk…” And next