Parade's End

“I knew you were working round to that, sir. But I’ve no politics that did not disappear in the eighteenth century. You, sir, prefer the seventeenth!”

“Another shower-bath, I suppose,” the general said.

“Of course,” Tietjens said, “if it’s Sylvia that called me a Socialist, it’s not astonishing. I’m a Tory of such an extinct type that she might take me for anything. The last megatherium. She’s absolutely to be excused….”

The general was not listening. He said:

“What was wrong with the way your father left his money to you?…”

“My father,” Tietjens said — the general saw his jaw stiffen — “committed suicide because a fellow called Ruggles told him that I was… what the French called maquereau… I can’t think of the English word. My father’s suicide was not an act that can be condoned. A gentleman does not commit suicide when he has descendants. It might influence my boy’s life very disastrously….”

The general said:

“I can’t… I can’t get to the bottom of all this…. What in the world did Ruggles want to go and tell your father that for?… What are you going to do for a living after the war? They won’t take you back into your office, will they?”

Tietjens said:

“No, sir. The Department will not take me back. Everyone who has served in this war will be a marked man for a long time after it is over. That’s proper enough. We’re having our fun now.”

The general said:

“You say the wildest things.”

Tietjens answered:

“You generally find the things I say come true, sir. Could we get this over? Ruggles told my father what he did because it is not a good thing to belong to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries in the twentieth. Or really, because it is not good to have taken one’s public school’s ethical system seriously. I am really, sir, the English public schoolboy. That’s an eighteenth-century product. What with the love of truth that — God help me! — they rammed into me at Clifton and the belief Arnold forced upon Rugby that the vilest of sins — the vilest of all sins — is to peach to the head master! That’s me, sir. Other men get over their schooling. I never have. I remain adolescent. These things are obsessions with me. Complexes, sir!”

The general said:

“All this seems to be very wild…. What’s this about peaching to a head master?”

Tietjens said:

“For a swan-song, it’s not wild, sir. You’re asking for a swan-song. I am to go up into the line so that the morals of the troops in your command may not be contaminated by the contemplation of my marital infelicities.”

The general said:

“You don’t want to go back to England, do you?”

Tietjens exclaimed:

“Certainly not! Very certainly not! I can never go home. I have to go underground somewhere. If I went back to England there would be nothing for me but going underground by suicide.”

The general said:

“You see all that? I can give you testimonials….”

Tietjens asked:

“Who couldn’t see that it’s impossible?”

The general said:

“But… suicide! You won’t do that. As you said: think of your son.”

Tietjens said:

“No, sir. I shan’t do that. But you see how bad for one’s descendants suicide is. That is why I do not forgive my father. Before he did it I should never have contemplated the idea. Now I have contemplated it. That’s a weakening of the moral fibre. It’s contemplating a fallacy as a possibility. For suicide is no remedy for a twisted situation of a psychological kind. It is for bankruptcy. Or for military disaster. For the man of action, not for the thinker. Creditors’ meetings wipe the one out. Military operations sweep on. But my problem will remain the same whether I’m here or not. For it’s insoluble. It’s the whole problem of the relations of the sexes.”

The general said:

“Good God!…”

Tietjens said:

“No, sir, I’ve not gone off my chump. That’s my problem!… But I’m a fool to talk so much…. It’s because I don’t know what to say.”

The general sat staring at the tablecloth; his face was suffused with blood. He had the appearance of a man in monstrous ill-humour. He said:

“You had better say what you want to say. What the devil do you mean?… What’s this all about?…”

Tietjens said:

“I’m enormously sorry, sir. It’s difficult to make myself plain.”

The general said:

“Neither of us do. What is language for? What the hell is language for? We go round and round. I suppose I’m an old fool who cannot understand your modern ways… But you’re not modern. I’ll do you that justice…. That beastly little McKechnie is modern…. I shall ram him into your divisional-transport job, so that he won’t incommode you in your battalion…. Do you understand what the little beast did? He got leave to go and get a divorce. And then did not get a divorce. That’s modernism. He said he had scruples. I understand that he and his wife and… some dirty other fellow… slept three in a bed. That’s modern scruples….”

Tietjens said:

“No, sir, it’s not really…. But what is a man to do if his wife is unfaithful to him?”

The general said as if it were an insult:

“Divorce the harlot! Or live with her!…” Only a beast, he went on, would expect a woman to live all her life alone in a cockloft! She’s bound to die. Or go on the streets…. What sort of a fellow wouldn’t see that? Was there any sort of beast who’d expect a woman to live… with a man beside her…. Why, she’d… she’d be bound to…. He’d have to take the consequences of whatever happened. The general repeated: “Whatever happened! If she pulled all the strings of all the shower-baths in the world!”

Tietjens said:

“Still, sir… there are… there used to be… in families of… position… a certain…” He stopped.

The general said:

“Well…”

Tietjens said:

“On the part of the man… a certain… Call it… parade!”

The general said:

“Then there had better be no more parades….” He said: “Damn it!… Beside us, all women are saints…. Think of what child-bearing is. I know the world…. Who would stand that?… You?… I… I’d rather be the last poor devil in Perry’s lines!”

He looked at Tietjens with a sort of injurious cunning:

“Why don’t you divorce?” he asked.

Panic came over Tietjens. He knew it would be his last panic of that interview. No brain could stand more. Fragments of scenes of fighting, voices, names, went before his eyes and ears. Elaborate problems…. The whole map of the embattled world ran out in front of him — as large as a field. An embossed map in greenish papier mache — a ten-acre field of embossed papier mache, with the blood of O Nine Morgan blurring luminously over it. Years before… How many months?… Nineteen, to be exact, he had sat on some tobacco plants on the Mont de Kats…. No, the Montagne Noire. In Belgium…. What had he been doing?… Trying to get the lie of the land…. No…. Waiting to point out positions to some fat home general who had never come. The Belgian proprietor of the tobacco plants had arrived, and had screamed his head off over the damaged plants….