Parade's End

palms — no mind!

You’d think it must be that from what Edith Ethel had said. He hadn’t recognised the porter; he was reported to have no furniture. Then… She remembered….

She was then — ten minutes before she interviewed Miss Wanostrocht, ten seconds after she had been blown out of the mouth of the telephone — sitting on a varnished pitch-pine bench that had black iron, clamped legs against the plaster wall, nonconformishistically distempered in torpedo-grey; and she had thought all that in ten seconds…. But that had been really how it had been!

The minute Edith Ethel had finished saying the words:

“The sum would be absolutely crushing….” Valentine had realised that she had been talking about a debt owed by her miserable husband to the one human being she, Valentine, could not bear to think about. It had naturally at the same moment flashed upon her that Edith Ethel had been giving her his news: He was in new troubles; broken down, broken up, broke to the wide…. Anything in the world but broken in…. But broken… And alone. And calling for her!

She could not afford — she could not bear! — to recall even his name or to so much as bring up before her mind, into which, nevertheless, they were continually forcing themselves, his grey-blond face, his clumsy, square, reliable feet; his humpish bulk; his calculatedly wooden expression; his perfectly overwhelming, but authentic omniscience…. His masculinity. His… his Frightfulness!

Now, through Edith Ethel — you would have thought that even he would have found someone more appropriate — he was calling to her again to enter into the suffocating web of his imbroglios. Not even Edith Ethel would have dared to speak to her again of him without his having taken the first step….

It was unthinkable; it was intolerable; and it had been as if she had been lifted off her feet and deposited on that bench against the wall by the mere sound of the offer…. What was the offer?

“I thought that you might, if I were the means of bringing you together…” She might… what?

Intercede with that man, that grey mass not to enforce the pecuniary claim that it had against Sir Vincent Macmaster. No doubt she and… the grey mass!…. would then be allowed the Macmaster drawing-room to… to discuss the ethics of the day in! Just like that!

She was still breathless; the telephone continued to quack. She wished it would stop, but she felt too weak to get up and hang the receiver on its hook. She wished it would stop; it gave her the feeling that a strand of Edith Ethel’s hair, say, was penetrating nauseously to her torpedo-grey cloister. Something like that!

The grey mass never would enforce its pecuniary claim…. Those people had sponged mercilessly on him for years and years without ever knowing the kind of object upon which they sponged. It made them the more pitiful. For it was pitiful to clamour to be allowed to become a pimp in order to evade debts that would never be reclaimed….

Now, in the empty rooms at Lincoln’s Inn — for that was probably what it came to! — that man was a grey ball of mist! a grey bear rolling tenebrously about an empty room with closed shutters. A grey problem, calling to her!

A hell of a lot… Beg pardon, she meant a remarkably great deal!… to have thought of in ten minutes! Eleven, by now, probably. Later she realised that that was what thought was. In ten minutes after large, impressive arms had carried you away from a telephone and deposited you on a clamped bench against a wall of the peculiar coldness of torpedo-grey distempered plaster, the sort of thing rejoiced in by Great Public (Girls’) Schools… in those ten minutes you found you thought out more than in two years. Or it was not as long ago as that.

Perhaps that was not astonishing. If you had not thought about, say, washable distemper for two years and then thought about it for ten minutes you could think a hell of a lot about it in those ten minutes. Probably all there was to think. Still, of course, washable distemper was not like the poor — always with you. At least it always was in those cloisters, but not spiritually. On the other hand you always were with yourself.

But perhaps you were not always with yourself spiritually; you went on explaining how to breathe without thinking of how the life you were leading was influencing your… What? Immortal soul? Aura? Personality?… Something!

Well, for two years…. Oh, call it two years, for goodness’ sake, and get it over!… she must have been in… well, call that a “state of suspended animation” and get that over too! A sort of what they called inhibition. She had been inhibiting — prohibiting — herself from thinking about herself. Well, hadn’t she been right? What had a b—y Pro-German to think about in an embattled, engrossed, clamouring nation, especially when she had not much liked her brother-Pro’s! A solitary state, only to be dissolved by… maroons! In suspension!

But… Be conscientious with yourself, my good girl! When that telephone blew you out of its mouth you knew really that for two years you had been avoiding wondering whether you had not been insulted! Avoiding wondering that. And nothing else! No other qualified thing!

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 Some-one-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 entree 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!