Parade's End

Miss Wanostrocht had grown slightly pale:

“I, if…” she stammered slightly, “by ‘experience’ you mean…”

“I don’t,” Valentine exclaimed, “and you have no right to infer that I do on the strength of a conversation you’ve had, but shouldn’t have had, with one of the worst tongues in London…. I mean that my father left us so that I had to earn my and my mother’s living as a servant for some months after his death. That was what his training came to. But I can look after myself…. In consequence…”

Miss Wanostrocht had thrown herself back in her chair.

“But…” she exclaimed; she had grown completely pale — like discoloured wax. “There was a subscription…. We…” she began: “We knew that he hadn’t…”

“You subscribed,” Valentine said, “to purchase his library and presented it to his wife… who had nothing to eat but what my wages as a tweeny maid got for her.” But before the pallor of the other lady she tried to add a touch of generosity: “Of course the subscribers wanted, very naturally, to preserve as much as they could of his personality. A man’s books are very much himself. That was all right.” She added: “All the same I had that training: in a suburban basement. So you cannot teach me a great deal about the shady in life. I was in the family of a Middlesex County Councillor. In Ealing.”

Miss Wanostrocht said faintly:

“This is very dreadful!”

“It isn’t really!” Valentine said. “I wasn’t badly treated as tweeny maids go. It would have been better if the Mistress hadn’t been a constant invalid and the cook constantly drunk…. After that I did a little office work. For the suffragettes. That was after old Mr. Tietjens came back from abroad and gave mother some work on a paper he owned. We scrambled along then, somehow. Old Mr. Tietjens was father’s greatest friend, so father’s side, as you might say, turned up trumps — if you like to think that to console you….”

Miss Wanostrocht was bending her face down over her table, presumably to hide a little of it from Valentine or to avoid the girl’s eyes.

Valentine went on:

“One knows all about the conflict between a man’s private duties and his public achievements. But with a very little less of the flamboyant in his life my father might have left us very much better off. It isn’t what I want — to be a cross between a sergeant in the army and an upper housemaid. Any more than I wanted to be an under one.”

Miss Wanostrotch uttered an “Oh!” of pain. She exclaimed rapidly:

“It was your moral rather than your mere athletic influence that made me so glad to have you here…. It was because I felt that you did not set such a high value on the physical….”

“Well, you aren’t going to have me here much longer,” Valentine said. “Not an instant more than I can in decency help. I’m going to…”

She said to herself:

“What on earth am I going to do?… What do I want?”

She wanted to lie in a hammock beside a blue, tideless sea and think about Tibullus… There was no nonsense about her. She did not want to engage in intellectual pursuits herself. She had not the training. But she intended to enjoy the more luxurious forms of the intellectual products of others…. That appeared to be the moral of the day!

And, looking rather minutely at Miss Wanostrocht’s inclined face, she wondered if, in the history of the world, there had ever been such another day. Had Miss Wanostrocht, for instance, ever known what it was to have a man come back. Ah, but amid the tumult of a million other men coming back! A collective impulse to slacken off! Immense! Softening!

Miss Wanostrocht had apparently loved her father. No doubt in company with fifty damsels. Did they ever get a collective kick out of that affair? It was even possible that she had spoken as she had… pour cause. Warning her, Valentine, against the deleterious effect of being connected with a man whose wife was unsatisfactory…. Because the fifty damsels had all, in duty bound, thought that her mother was an unsatisfactory wife for the brilliant, grey-black-haired Eminence with the figure of a stripling that her father had been…. They had probably thought that, without the untidy figure of Mrs. Wannop as a weight upon him, he might have become… Well, with one of them!… anything! Any sort of figure in the councils of the nation. Why not Prime Minister? For along with his pedagogic theories he had had political occupations. He had certainly had the friendship of Disraeli. He supplied — it was historic! — materials for eternally famous, meretricious speeches. He would have been head-trainer of the Empire’s pro-consuls if the other fellow, at Balliol, had not got in first…. As it was he had had to specialise in the Education of Women. Building up Primrose Dames….

So Miss Wanostrocht warned her against the deleterious effect of neglected wives upon young, attached virgins! It probably was deleterious. Where would she, Valentine Wannop, have been by now if she had thought that Sylvia Tietjens was really a bad one?

Miss Wanostrocht said, as if with sudden anxiety:

“You are going to do what? You propose to do what?”

Valentine said:

“Obviously after your conversation with Edith Ethel you won’t be so glad to have me here. My moral influence has not been brightened in aspect!” A wave of passionate resentment swept over her.

“Look here,” she said, “if you think that I am prepared to…”

She stopped however, “No,” she said, “I am not going to introduce the housemaid note. But you will probably see that this is irritating.” She added: “I would have the case of Pettigul One looked into, if I were you. It might become epidemic in a big school like this. And we’ve no means of knowing where we stand nowadays!”

Part Two

MONTHS AND MONTHS before Christopher Tietjens had stood extremely wishing that his head were level with a particular splash of purposeless whitewash. Something behind his mind forced him to the conviction that, if his head — and of course the rest of his trunk and lower limbs — were suspended by a process of levitation to that distance above the duckboard on which, now, his feet were, he would be in an inviolable sphere. These waves of conviction recurred continually: he was constantly glancing aside and upwards at that splash; it was in the shape of the comb of a healthy rooster; it gleamed, with five serrations, in the just-beginning light that shone along the thin, unroofed channel in the gravel slope. Wet half-light, just flickering; more visible there than in the surrounding desolation because the deep, narrow channel framed a section of just-illuminated rift in the watery eastwards!

Twice he had stood up on a rifleman’s step enforced by a bully-beef case to look over — in the last few minutes. Each time, on stepping down again, he had been struck by that phenomenon: the light seen from the trench seemed if not brighter, then more definite. So, from the bottom of a pit-shaft in broad day you can see the stars. The wind was light, but from the north-west. They had there the weariness of a beaten army, the weariness of having to begin always new days again….

He glanced aside and upwards: that cockscomb of phosphorescence…. He felt waves of some X force propelling his temples towards it. He wondered if perhaps the night before he had not observed that that was a patch of reinforced concrete, therefore more resistant. He might of course have observed that and then forgotten it. He hadn’t! It was therefore irrational.

If you are lying down under fire — flat under pretty smart fire — and you have only a paper bag in front of your head for cover you feel immeasurably safer than you do without it. You have a mind at rest. This must be the same thing.

It remained dark and quiet. It was forty-five minutes. It became forty-four… Forty-three… Forty-two minutes and thirty seconds before a crucial moment and the slate grey cases of miniature metal pineapples had not come from the bothering place…. Who knew if there was anyone in charge there?

Twice that night he had sent runners back. No results yet. That bothering fellow might quite well have forgotten to leave a substitute. That was not likely. A careful man. But a man with a mania might forget. Still it was not likely!…

Thoughts menaced him as clouds threaten the heads of mountains, but for the moment they kept away. It was quiet; the wet cool air was agreeable. They had autumn mornings that felt like that in Yorkshire. The wheels of