Parade's End

some affair, even if it were no more than a gentleman in a tea-shop who every afternoon for a week had gazed at her disrespectfully over a slice of plum-cake…. And then disappeared… But you had to have had at least a might-have-been or you couldn’t go on being a schoolmistress or a girl in a ministry or a dactylographer of respectability. You packed that away in the bottom of your mind and on Sunday mornings before the perfectly insufficient Sunday dinner, you took, it out and built castles in Spain in which you were a castanetted heroine turning on wonderful hips, but casting behind you inflaming glances…. Something like that!

Well, she had had an affair with this honest, simple creature! So good! So unspeakably GOOD…. Like the late Albert, prince consort! The very, helpless, immobile sort of creature that she ought not to have tempted. It had been like shooting tame pigeons! Because he had had a Society wife always in the illustrated papers whilst he sat at home and evolved Statistics or came to tea with her dear, tremendous, distracted mother, whom he helped to get her articles accurate. So a woman tempted him and he did… No; he didn’t quite eat!

But why?… Because he was GOOD?

Very likely.

Or was it… That was the intolerable thought that she shut up within her along with the material for castles in the air! Was it because he had been really indifferent?

They had revolved round each other at tea-parties — or rather he had revolved round her, because at Edith Ethel’s affairs she always sat, a fixed starlet, behind the tea-urn and dispensed cups. But he would moon round the room, looking at the backs of books; occasionally laying down the law to some guest; and always drifting in the end to her side where he would say a trifle or two…. And the beautiful — the quite excruciatingly beautiful wife — striding along the Row with the second son of the Earl of Someone at her side…. Asking for it….

So it had been from the 1/7/12, say, to the 4/8/14!

After that, things had become more rubbled — mixed up with alarums. Excursions on his part to unapproved places. And trouble. He was quite damnably in trouble. With his Superiors; with, so unnecessarily, Hun projectiles, wire, mud; over Money; politics; mooning on without a good word from anyone…. Unravellable muddles that never got unravelled but that somehow got you caught up in them….

Because he needed her moral support! When, during the late Hostilities, he hadn’t been out there, he had drifted to the tea-table much earlier of an afternoon and stayed beside it much longer, till after everyone else had gone and they could go and sit on the tall fender side by side, and argue… about the rights and wrongs of the War!

Because she was the only soul in the world with whom he could talk…. They had the same sort of good, bread-and-butter brains; without much of the romantic…. No doubt a touch… in him. Otherwise he would not have always been in these muddles. He gave all he possessed to anyone who asked for it. That was all right. But that those who sponged on him should also involve him in intolerable messes…. That was not proper. One ought to defend oneself against that!

Because… if you do not defend yourself against that, look how you let in your nearest and dearest — those who have to sympathise with you in your confounded troubles whilst you moon on, giving away more and more and getting into more troubles! In this case it was she who was his Nearest and Dearest…. Or had been! At that her nerves suddenly got the better of her and her mind went mad…. Supposing that that fellow, from whom she had not heard for two years, hadn’t now communicated with her…. Like an ass she had taken it for granted that he had asked Lady…. Blast her!… to “bring them together again”! She had imagined that even Edith Ethel would not have had the cheek to ring her up if he hadn’t asked her to!

But she had nothing to go on…. Feeble, oversexed ass that she was, she had let her mind jump at once to the conclusion, the moment the mere mention of him seemed implied — jump to the conclusion that he was asking her again to come and be his mistress…. Or nurse him through his present muddle till he should be fit to…

Mind, she did not say that she would have succumbed. But if she had not jumped at the idea that it was he, really, speaking through Edith Ethel, she would never have permitted her mind to dwell on… on his blasted, complacent perfections!

Because she had taken it for granted that if he had had her rung up he would not have been monkeying with other girls during the two years he hadn’t written to her…. Ah, but hadn’t he?

Look here! Was it reasonable? Here was a fellow who had all but… all BUT… “taken advantage of her” one night just before going out to France, say, two years ago…. And not another word from him after that!… It was all very well to say that he was portentous, looming, luminous, loony: John Peel with his coat so grey, the English Country Gentleman pur sang, and then some; saintly, Godlike, Jesus Christ-like…. He was all that. But you don’t seduce, as near as can be, a young woman and then go off to Hell, leaving her, God knows, in Hell, and not so much as send her, in two years, a picture-postcard with MIZPAH on it. You don’t. You don’t!

Or if you do you have to have your character revised. You have to have it taken for granted that you were only monkeying with her and that you’ve been monkeying ever since with Waacs in Rouen or some other Base….

Of course, if you ring your young woman up when you come back… or have her rung up by a titled lady…. That might restore you in the eyes of the world, or at least in the eyes of the young woman if she was a bit of a softie….

But had he? Had he? It was absurd to think that Edith Ethel hadn’t had the face to do it unasked! To save three thousand, two hundred pounds, not to mention interest — which was what Vincent owed him! — Edith Ethel with the sweetest possible smile would beg the pillows off a whole hospital ward full of dying…. She was quite right. She had to save her man. You go to any depths of ig nominy to save your man.

But that did not help her, Valentine Wannop!

She sprang off the bench; she clenched her nails into her palms; she stamped her thin-soled shoes into the coke-brise floor that was singularly unresilient. She exclaimed:

“Damn it all, he didn’t ask her to ring me up. He didn’t ask her to. He didn’t ask her to!” still stamping about.

She marched straight at the telephone that was by now uttering long, tinny, night-jar’s calls and, with one snap, pulled the receiver right off the twisted, green-blue cord…. Broke it! With incidental satisfaction.

Then she said:

“Steady the Buffs!” not out of repentance for having damaged School Property, but because she was accustomed to call her thoughts The Buffs because of their practical, unromantic character as a rule…. A fine regiment, the Buffs!

Of course, if she had not broken the telephone she could have rung up Edith Ethel and have asked her whether he had or hadn’t asked to… to be brought together again…. It was like her, Valentine Wannop, to smash the only means of resolving a torturing doubt….

It wasn’t, really, in the least like her. She was practical enough; none of the “under the ban of fatality” business about her. She had smashed the telephone because it had been like smashing a connection with Edith Ethel; or because she hated tinny night-jars; or because she had smashed it. For nothing in the world; for nothing, nothing, nothing in the world would she ever ring up Edith Ethel and ask her:

“Did he put you up to ringing me up?”

That would be to let Edith Ethel come between their intimacy.

A subconscious volition was directing her feet towards the great doors at the end of the Hall, varnished, pitch-pine doors of Gothic architecture; economically decorated as if with straps and tin-lids of Brunswick-blacked cast iron.

She said:

“Of course if it’s his wife who has removed his furniture that would be a reason for his wanting to get into communication. They would have split…. But he does not hold with a man divorcing a woman, and she won’t divorce.”

As she went through the sticky postern — all that woodwork seemed sticky on account of its varnish! — beside the great doors she said:

“Who cares!”

The great thing was… but she could not formulate what the great thing was. You had to settle the