Parade's End

it,” he had mumbled to a conclusion….

She was sitting forward in her chair still clenching her hand under her chin at the thought that perhaps Christopher had Valentine Wannop in that town. That was perhaps why he elected to remain there. She asked:

“Why does Christopher stay on in this God-forsaken hole?… The inglorious base, they call it….”

“Because he’s jolly well got to….” Major Perowne said. “He’s got to do what he’s told….”

She said: “Christopher!… You mean to say they’d keep a man like Christopher anywhere he didn’t want to be….”

“They’d jolly well knock spots off him if he went away,” Major Perowne exclaimed…. “What the deuce do you think your blessed fellow is?… The King of England?…” He added with a sudden sombre ferocity: “They’d shoot him like anybody else if he bolted…. What do you think?”

She said: “But all that wouldn’t prevent his having a girl in this town?”

“Well, he hasn’t got one,” Perowne said. “He sticks up in that blessed old camp of his like a blessed she- chicken sitting on addled eggs…. That’s what they say of him. I don’t know anything about the fellow….”

Listening vindictively and indolently, she thought she caught in his droning tones a touch of the homicidal lunacy that had used to underlie his voice in the bedroom at Yssingueux. The fellow had undoubtedly about him a touch of the dull, mad murderer of the police-courts. With a sudden animation she thought:

“Suppose he tried to murder Christopher….” And she imagined her husband breaking the fellow’s back across his knee, the idea going across her mind as fire traverses the opal. Then, with a dry throat, she said to herself:

“I’ve got to find out whether he has that girl in Rouen….” Men stuck together. The fellow Perowne might well be protecting Tietjens. It would be unthinkable that any rules of the service could keep Christopher in that place. They could not shut up the upper classes. If Perowne had any sense he would know that to shield Tietjens was the way not to get her…. But he had no sense…. Besides, sexual solidarity was a terribly strong thing. She knew that she herself would not give a woman’s secrets away in order to get her man. Then… how was she to ascertain whether the girl was not in that town? How?… She imagined Tietjens going home every night to her…. But he was going to spend that night with herself…. She knew that…. Under that roof…. Fresh from the other….

She imagined him there, now…. In the parlour of one of the little villas you see from the tram on the top of the town. They were undoubtedly, now, discussing her…. Her whole body writhed, muscle on muscle, in her chair. She must discover…. But how do you discover? Against a universal conspiracy…. This whole war was an agapemone…. You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women. It was what war was for…. All these men, crowded in this narrow space…. She stood up:

“I’m going,” she said, “to put on a little powder for Lady Sachse’s feast…. You needn’t stay if you don’t want to….” She was going to watch every face she saw until it gave up the secret of where in that town Christopher had the Wannop girl hidden…. She imagined her freckled, snubnosed face pressed — squashed was the word — against his cheek…. She was going to investigate….

II

SHE found an early opportunity to carry on her investigations. For, at dinner that night, she found herself, Tietjens having gone to the telephone with a lance-corporal, opposite what she took to be a small tradesman, with fresh-coloured cheeks, and a great, grey, forward-sprouting moustache, in a uniform so creased that the creases resembled the veins of a leaf…. A very trustworthy small tradesman: the grocer from round the corner whom, sometimes, you allow to supply you with paraffin…. He was saying to her:

“If, ma’am, you multiply two-thousand nine hundred and something by ten you arrive at twenty-nine thousand odd….”

And she had exclaimed:

“You really mean that my husband, Captain Tietjens, spent yesterday afternoon in examining twenty-nine thousand toe-nails…. And two thousand nine hundred toothbrushes….”

“I told him,” her interlocutor answered with deep seriousness, “that these being Colonial troops it was not so necessary to examine their toothbrushes…. Imperial troops will use the brush they clean their buttons with for their teeth so as to have a clean toothbrush to show the medical officer….”

“It sounds,” she said with a little shudder, “as if you were all school-boys playing a game…. And you say my husband really occupies his mind with such things….”

Second-Lieutenant Cowley, dreadfully conscious that the shoulder-strap of his Sam Browne belt, purchased that afternoon at the Ordnance, and therefore brand-new, did not match the abdominal part of the belt that he had had for nearly ten years — a splendid bit of leather, that! — answered nevertheless stoutly:

“Madam! If the brains of an army aren’t, the life of an army is… in its feet…. And nowadays, the medical officers say, in its teeth…. Your husband, ma’am, is an admirable officer…. He says that no draft he turns out shall…”

She said:

“He spent three hours in… You say, foot and kit inspection….”

Second-Lieutenant Cowley said:

“Of course he had other officers to help him with the kit… but he looked at every foot himself….”

She said:

“That took him from two till five…. Then he had tea, I suppose…. And went to… What is it?… The papers of the draft….”

Second-Lieutenant Cowley said, muffledly through his moustache:

“If the captain is a little remiss in writing letters… I have heard…. You might, madam… I’m a married man myself… with a daughter…. And the army is not very good at writing letters…. You might say, in that respect, that thank God we have got a navy, ma’am….”

She let him stagger on for a sentence or two, imagining that, in his confusion, she might come upon traces of Miss Wannop in Rouen. Then she said handsomely:

“Of course you have explained everything, Mr. Cowley, and I am very much obliged…. Of course my husband would not have time to write very full letters…. He is not like the giddy young subalterns who run after…”

He exclaimed in a great roar of laughter:

“The captain run after skirts…. Why, I can number on my hands the times he’s been out of my sight since he’s had the battalion!”

A deep wave of depression went over Sylvia.

“Why,” Lieutenant Cowley laughed on, “if we had a laugh against him it was that he mothered the lot of us as if he was a hen sitting on addled eggs…. For it’s only a rag-time army, as the saying is, when you’ve said the best for it that you can…. And look at the other commanding officers we’ve had before we had him…. There was Major Brooks…. Never up before noon, if then, and out of camp by two-thirty. Get your returns ready for signing before then or never get ’em signed…. And Colonel Potter… Bless my soul…’e wouldn’t sign any blessed papers at all…. He lived down here in this hotel, and we never saw him up at the camp at all…. But the captain… We always say that if ’e was a Chelsea adjutant getting off a draft of the Second Coldstreams…”

With her indolent and gracious beauty — Sylvia knew that she was displaying indolent and gracious beauty — Sylvia leaned over the table-cloth listening for items in the terrible indictment that, presently, she was going to bring against Tietjens…. For the morality of these matters is this: If you have an incomparably beautiful woman on your hands you must occupy yourself solely with her…. Nature exacts that of you… until you are unfaithful to her with a snub-nosed girl with freckles; that, of course, being a reaction, is still in a way occupying yourself with your woman!… But to betray her with a battalion… That is against decency, against Nature…. And for him, Christopher Tietjens, to come down to the level of the men you met here!…

Tietjens, mooning down the room between tables, had more than his usually aloof air since he had just come out of a telephone box. He slipped, a weary mass, into the polished chair between her and the lieutenant. He said:

“I’ve got the washing arranged for…” and Sylvia gave to herself a little hiss between the teeth, of vindictive pleasure! This was indeed betrayal to a battalion. He added: “I shall have to be up in camp before four-thirty to- morrow morning….

Sylvia could not resist saying: