Parade's End

when she laughed at Mrs. de Bray Pape…. How could she be a friend of Mrs. de Bray Pape’s?…

If it hadn’t been sunlight…. If he had come on Mrs. Lowther as he came out of his mother’s boudoir. He would have had courage. At night. Late. He would have said: “If you are really interested in my fate tell me if I ought to spy upon my father and his… companion!” She would not have laughed, late at night. She would have given him her hand. The loveliest hands and the lightest feet. And her eyes would have dimmed…. Lovely, lovely pansies! Pansies are heartsease….

Why did he have these thoughts: these wafts of intolerable… oh, desire! He was his mother’s son…. His mother was… He would kill anyone who said it….

Thank God! Oh thank God! He was down on the crazy paving level with the house. AND there was another path went up to Uncle’s Mark’s shed. The Blessed Virgin — who was like Helen Lowther! — had watched over him. He had not to walk under those little deep, small-paned windows.

His father’s… companion might have been looking out. He would have fainted….

His father was a good sort of man. But he too must be… like Mother. If what they said was true. Ruined by dissolute living. But a good, grey man. The sort of man to be tormented by Mother. Great spatulate fingers. But no one had ever tied flies like Father. Some he had tied years ago were the best he, Mark Tietjens junior of Groby, had yet. And Father loved the wine-coloured moor. How could he stifle under these boughs! A house overhung by trees is unsanitary. They all say that…

But what a lovely glimpse under the trees. Sweet-williams along the path. Light filtered by boughs. Shadow. Gleams in the little window-panes. Wallstones all lichen. That’s England. If he could spend a while here with Father…

Father had been matchless with horses. Women too…. What an inheritance was his, Mark Tietjens, junior’s! If he could spend a while here…. But his Father slept with… If she came out of the door… She must be beautiful…. No they said she was not a patch on Mother. He had overheard that at Fittleworth’s. Or Helen Lowther…. But his father had had his pick!… If he chose then to sleep with…

If she came out of the door he would faint…. Like the Venus of Botti…. A crooked smile… No, Helen Lowther would protect…. He might fall in love with his father’s… What do you know of what will happen to you when you come in contact with the Bad Woman… of advanced views… They said she was of Advanced Views. And a Latinist…. He was a Latinist. Loved it!

Or his father might with Hel… Hot jealousy filled. His father was the sort of man… She might… Why did over-… people like Mother and Father beget children?

He kept his eyes fascinatedly fixed on the stone porch of the cottage whilst he stumbled up the great stone slabs to the path. The path led to Uncle Mark’s wall-less thatched hut…. No form filled the porch. What was to become of him? he had great wealth; terrific temptation would be his. His mother was no guide. His father might have been better…. Well, there was Marxian-Communism. They all looked to that now, in his set at Cambridge. Monty, the Prime Minister’s son with black eyes; Dobles, Campion’s nephew, lean as a rat; Porter, with a pig’s snout, but witty as hell. Fat ass!

IV

MARK TIETJENS thought that a cow or a hog must have got into the orchard there was such a rushing in the grass. He said to himself that that damn Gunning was always boasting about his prowess as a hedger; he might see that his confounded hedges kept out the beasts from the Common. An unusual voice — unusual in its intonation — remarked:

“Oh, Sir Mark Tietjens, this is dreadful!”

It appeared to be dreadful. A lady in a long skirt — an apparently elderly Di Vernon out of Waverley which was one of the few novels Mark had read — was making dreadful havoc with the standing grass. The beautiful, proud heads swayed and went down as she rushed, knee-deep amongst it; stopped, rushed again across his view and then stopped apparently to wring her hands and once more explain that it was dreadful. A tiny rabbit, scared out by her approach, scuttered out under his bed and presumably down into the vegetables. Marie Leonie’s Mistigris would probably get it and, since it was Friday, Marie Leonie would be perturbed.

The lady pushed through the remaining tall grass that stood between them, and had the air of rising up at his bed-foot. She was rather a faint figure — like the hedge-sparrow. In grey, with a grey short coat and a waistcoat with small round buttons and a three-cornered hat. A tired, thin face…. Well, she must be tired, pushing through that long grass with a long skirt. She had a switch of green shagreen. The hen tomtit that lived in the old shoe they had tucked on purpose under his thatch uttered long warning cries. The hen tomtit did not like the aspect of this apparition.

She was devouring his face with her not disagreeable eyes and muttering:

“Dreadful! Dreadful!” An aeroplane was passing close overhead.

She looked up and remarked almost tearfully:

“Hasn’t it struck you that but for the sins of your youth you might be doing stunts round these good-looking hills? Now!”

Mark considered the matter, fixedly returning her glance. For an Englishman the phrase “the sins of your youth” as applied to a gentleman’s physical immobility implies only one thing. It never had occurred to him that that implication might be tacked on to him. But of course it might. It was an implication of a disagreeable, or at least a discrediting, kind because, in his class they had been accustomed to consider that the disease was incurred by consorting with public women of a cheap kind. He had never consorted with any woman in his life but Marie Leonie who was health exaggerated. But if he had had to do with women he would have gone in for the most expensive sort. And taken precautions! A gentleman owes that to his fellows!

The lady was continuing:

“I may as well tell you at once that I am Mrs. Millicent de Bray Pape. And hasn’t it struck you that but for his depravity — unbridled depravity — your brother might to-day be operating in Capel Court instead of peddling old furniture at the end of the world?”

She added disconcertingly:

“It’s nervousness that makes me talk like this. I have always been shy in the presence of notorious libertines. That is my education.”

Her name conveyed to him that this lady was going to occupy Groby. He saw no objection to it. She had indeed written to ask him if he saw any objection to it. It had been a queerly written letter, in hieroglyphs of a straggling and convoluted kind…. “I am the lady who is going to rent your mansion Groby from my friend Mrs. Sylvia.”

It had struck him then — whilst Valentine had been holding the letter up for him to read… pretty piece, Valentine, nowadays; the country air suited her — that this woman must be an intimate friend of his brother’s wife Sylvia. Otherwise she would have said “Mrs. Sylvia Tietjens” at least.

Now he was not so certain. This was not the sort of person to be an intimate friend of that bitch’s. Then she was a catspaw. Sylvia’s intimates — amongst women — were all Bibbies and Jimmies and Marjies. If she spoke to any other woman it was to make use of her — as a lady’s-maid or a tool.

The lady said:

“It must be agony to you” to be reduced to letting your ancestral home. But that does not seem to be a reason for not speaking to me. I meant to ask the Earl’s housekeeper for some eggs for you, but I forgot. I am always forgetting. I am so active. Mr. de Bray Pape says I am the most active woman from here to Santa Fe.”

Mark wondered: why Santa Fe? That was probably because Mr. Pape had olive-tree plantations in that part of the United States. Valentine had told him over the letter that Mr. Pape was the largest olive-oil merchant in the world. He cornered all the olive-oil and all the straw-covered flasks in Provence, Lombardy, California, and informed his country that you were not really refined if you used in your salads oil that did not come out of a Pape Quality flask. He showed ladies and gentlemen in evening dress starting back from expensively laid dinner tables, holding their noses and exclaiming “Have you no Pape’s! Mark wondered where Christopher got his knowledge, for naturally Valentine had the information from him. Probably Christopher had looked at American papers. But why should one look at American papers? Mark himself never had. Wasn’t there the