Parade's End

Obviously it had to be done. There were such a lot of these bothering War heroes that if you let them all into your Salon it would cease to be a Salon, particularly if you were under obligations to them!… That was already a pressing national problem; it was going to become an overwhelming one now — in twenty minutes’ time; after those maroons. The impoverished War Heroes would all be coming back. Innumerable. You would have to tell your parlourmaid that you weren’t at home to… about seven million!

But wait a minute…. Where did they just stand?

He… But she could not go on calling him just “he” like a school-girl of eighteen, thinking of her favourite actor… in the purity of her young thoughts. What was she to call him? She had never — even when they had known each other — called him anything other than Mr. So and So…. She could not bring herself to let her mental lips frame his name…. She had never used anything but his surname to this grey thing, familiar object of her mother’s study, seen frequently at tea-parties…. Once she had been out with it for a whole night in a dog cart! Think of that!… And they had spouted Tibullus one to another in moon-lit mist. And she had certainly wanted it to kiss her — in the moon-lit mists a practically, a really completely strange bear!

It couldn’t be done, of course, but she remembered still how she had shivered…. Ph… Ph… Ph…. Shivering.

She shivered.

Afterwards they had been run into by the car of General Lord Edward Campion, V. C., P. G. Heaven knows what! Godfather of the man’s Society Wife, then taking the waters in Germany…. Or perhaps not her Godfather. The man’s rather; but her especial champion, in shining armour. In these days they had worn broad red stripes down the outsides of their trousers, Generals. What a change! How significant of the times!

That had been in 1912…. Say the first of July; she could not remember exactly. Summer weather, anyhow, before haymaking or just about. The grass had been long in Hogg’s Forty Acre, when they had walked through it, discussing Woman’s Suffrage. She had brushed the seed-tops of the heavy grass with her hands as they walked…. Say the 1/7/12.

Now it was Eleven Eleven…. What? Oh, Eighteen, of course!

Six years ago! What changes in the world! What cataclysms! What Revolutions!… She heard all the newspapers, all the halfpenny paper journalists in creation crying in chorus!

But hang it, it was true! If, six years ago she had kissed the… the greyish lacuna of her mind then sitting beside her on the dog-cart seat it would have been the larkish freak of a school-girl; if she did it to-day — as per invitation presumably of Lady Macmaster, bringing them together, for, of course, it could not be performed from a distance or without correspondence — no, communication!… If, then, she did it to-day… to-day… to-day — the Eleven Eleven! Oh, what a day to-day would be…. Not her sentiments those; quotation from Christina, sister of Lady Macmaster’s favorite poet…. Or, perhaps, since she had had a title she would have found poets more… more chic! The poet who was killed at Gallipoli… Gerald Osborne, was it? Couldn’t remember the name!

But for six years then she had been a member of that… triangle. You couldn’t call it menage a trois, even if you didn’t know French. They hadn’t lived together!… They had d—d near died together when the general’s car hit their dog-cart! D—d near! (You must not use those War-time idioms. Do break yourself of it! Remember the maroons!)

An oafish thing to do! To take a school-girl, just… oh, just past the age of consent, out all night in a dog-cart and then get yourself run into by the car of the V. C., P. G., champion-in-red-trouser-stripe of your Legitimate! You’d think any man who was a man would have avoided that!

Most men knew enough to know that the Woman Pays… the school-girl too!

But they get it both ways…. Look here: when Edith Ethel Duchemin, then, just — or perhaps not quite, Lady Macmaster! At any rate, her husband was dead and she had just married that miserable little… (Mustn’t use that word!) She, Valentine Wannop, had been the only witness of the marriage — as of the previous, discreet, but so praiseworthy adultery!… When, then, Edith Ethel had… It must have been on the very day of the knighthood, because Edith Ethel made it an excuse not to ask her to the resultant Party…. Edith Ethel had accused her of having had a baby by… oh, Mr. So and So…. And heaven was her, Valentine Wannop’s, witness that, although Mr. So and So was her mother’s constant adviser, she, Valentine Wannop, was still in such a state of acquaintance with him that she still called him by his surname…. When Lady Macmaster, spitting like the South American beast of burden called a llama, had accused her of having had a baby by her mother’s adviser — to her natural astonishment, but, of course, it had been the result of the dog-cart and the motor and the General, and the General’s sister, Lady Pauline Something — or perhaps it was Claudine? Yes, Lady Claudine! — who had been in the car and the Society Wife, who was always striding along the railings of the Row…. When she had been so accused out of the blue, her first thought — and, confound it, her enduring thought! — had not been concern for her own reputation but for his….

That was the quality of his entanglements, their very essence. He got into appalling messes, unending and unravellable – no, she meant un-unravellable! – messes and other people suffered for him whilst he mooned on – into more messes! The General charging the dog-cart was symbolical of him. He was perfectly on his right side and all, but it was like him to be in a dog-cart when flagitious automobiles carrying Generals were running a-muck! Then… the Woman Paid!… She really did, in this case. It had been her mother’s horse they had been driving and, although they had got damages out of the General, the costs were twice that…. And her, Valentine’s, reputation had suffered from being in a dog-cart at dawn, alone with a man…. It made no odds that he had – or was it hadn’t? – “insulted” her in any way all through that – oh, that delicious, delirious night…. She had to be said to have a baby by him, and then she had to be dreadfully worried about his poor old reputation…. Of course it would have been pretty rotten of him – she so young and innocent, daughter of so preposterously eminent, if so impoverished a man, his father’s best friend and all. “He hadn’t oughter’er done it!” He hadn’t really oughter…. She heard them all saying it, still!

Well, he hadn’t!… But she?

That magic night. It was just before dawn, the mists nearly up to their necks as they drove; the sky going pale in a sort of twilight. And one immense star! She remembered only one immense star, though, historically, there had been also a dilapidated sort of moon. But the star was her best boy — what her wagon was hitched on to…. And they had been quoting — quarrelling over, she remembered:

Flebis et arsuro me, Delia, lecto

Tristibus et…

She exclaimed suddenly:

“Twilight and evening star

And one clear call for me

And may there be no moaning at the bar

When I…”

She said:

“Oh, but you oughtn’t to, my dear! That’s Tennyson!” Tennyson, with a difference!

She said:

“All the same, that would have been an inexperienced school-girl’s prank…. But if I let him kiss me now I should be….” She would be a what was it… a fornicatress?… trix! Fornicatrix is preferable! Very preferable. Then why not adultrix? You couldn’t: you had to be a “cold-blooded adultress!” or morality was not avenged.

Oh, but surely not cold-blooded!… Deliberate, then!… That wasn’t, either, the word for the process. Of osculation!… Comic things, words, as applied to states of feelings!

But if she went now to Lincoln’s Inn and the Problem held out its arms…. That would be “deliberate.” It would be asking for it in the fullest sense of the term.

She said to herself quickly:

“This way madness lies!” And then:

“What an imbecile thing to say!”

She had had an Affair with a man, she made her mind say to her, two years ago. That was all right. There could not be a, say, a schoolmistress rising twenty-four or twenty-five, in the world who hadn’t had