Parade's End

Field?… He was a queer chap, Christopher.

The lady said:

“It isn’t a reason for not speaking to me! It isn’t!”

Her greyish face flushed slowly. Her eyes glittered behind her rimless pince-nez. She exclaimed:

“You are probably too haughtily aristocratic to speak to me, Sir Mark Tietjens. But I have in me the soul of the Maintenon; you are only the fleshly descendant of a line of chartered libertines. That is what Time and the New World have done to redress the balance of the old. It is we who are keeping up the status of the grands seigneurs of old in your so-called ancestral homes.”

He thought she was probably right. Not a bad sort of woman: she would naturally be irritated at his not answering her. It was proper enough.

He never remembered to have spoken to an American or to have thought about America. Except of course during the war. Then he had spoken to Americans in uniform about Transport. He hadn’t liked their collars, but they had known their jobs as far as their jobs went — which had been asking to be provided with a disproportionate amount of transport for too few troops. He had had to wring that transport out of the country.

If he had had his way he wouldn’t have. But he hadn’t had his way because the Governing Classes were no good. Transport is the soul of a war: the spirit of an army had used to be in its feet, Napoleon had said. Something like that. But those fellows had starved the army of transport; then flooded it with so much it couldn’t move; then starved it again. Then they had insisted on his finding enormously too much transport for those other fellows who used it for disposing of smuggled typewriters and sewing machines that came over on transports…. It had broken his back, that and solitude. There had not been a fellow he could talk to in the Government towards the end. Not one who knew the difference between the ancestry of Persimmon and the stud form of Sceptre or Isinglass. Now they were paying for it.

The lady was saying to him that her spiritual affinity was probably a surprise to Sir Mark. There was none the less no mistake about it. In every one of the Maintenon’s houses she felt instantly at home; the sight in any Museum of any knick-knack or jewel that had belonged to the respectable companion of Louis Quatorze startled her as if with an electric shock. Mr. Quarternine, the celebrated upholder of the metempsychosistic school had told her that those phenomena proved beyond doubt that the soul of the Maintenon had returned to earth in her body. What, as against that, were the mere fleshly claims of Old Family?

Mark considered that she was probably right. The old families of his country were a pretty inefficient lot that he was thankful to have done with. Racing was mostly carried on by English nobles from Frankfort-on-the-Main. If this lady could be regarded as speaking allegorically she was probably right. And she had had to get a soul from somewhere.

But she talked too much about it. People ought not to be so tremendously fluent. It was tiring; it failed to hold the attention. She was going on.

He lost himself in speculations as to her reason for being there, trampling on his brother’s grass. It would give Gunning and the extra hands no end of an unnecessary job to cut. The lady was talking about Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette had gone sledging on salt in summer. Trampling down haygrass was really worse. Or no better. If everyone in the country trampled on grass like that it would put up the price of fodder for transport animals to something prohibitive.

Why had she come there? She wanted to take Groby furnished. She might for him. He had never cared about Groby. His father had never had a stud worth talking about. A selling plater or two. He himself had never cared for hunting or shooting. He remembered standing on Groby lawn watching the shooting parties take to the hills on the Twelfth and feeling rather a fool. Christopher, of course, loved Groby. He was younger and hadn’t expected to own it.

A pretty muck Sylvia might have made of the place by now — if her mother had let her. Well, they would know pretty soon. Christopher would be back, if the machine did not break his obstinate neck…. What, then, was this woman doing here? She probably represented a new turn of the screw that that unspeakable woman was administering to Christopher.

His sister-in-law Sylvia represented for him unceasing, unsleeping activities of a fantastic kind. She wanted, he presumed, his brother to go back and sleep with her. So much hatred could have no other motive…. There could be no other motive for sending this American lady here.

The American lady was telling him that she intended to keep up at Groby a semi-regal state — of course with due domestic modesty. Apparently she saw her way to squaring that circle!… Probably there are ways. There must be quite a lot of deucedly rich fellows in that country! How did they reconcile doing themselves well with democracy? Did their valets sit down to meals with them, for instance? That would be bad for discipline. But perhaps they did not care about discipline. There was no knowing.

Mrs. de Bray Pape apparently approved of having footmen in powder and the children of the tenants kneeling down when she drove out in his father’s coach and six. Because she intended to use his father’s coach and six when she drove over the moors to Redcar or Scarboro’. That, Mrs. de Bray Pape had been told by Sylvia, was what his father had done. And it was true enough. That queer old josser, his father, had always had out that monstrosity when he went justicing or to the Assizes. That was to keep up his state. He didn’t see why Mrs. de Bray Pape shouldn’t keep up hers if she wanted to. But he did not see the tenant’s children kneeling to the lady! Imagine old Scot’s children at it or Long Tom o’ th’ Clough’s;… Their grandchildren of course. They had called his father “Tietjens” — some of them even “Auld Mark!” to his face. He himself had always been “Young Mark” to them. Very likely he was still. These things do not change any more than the heather on the moors. He wondered what the tenants would call her. She would have a tough time of it. They weren’t her tenants; they were his and they jolly well knew it. These fellows who took houses and castles furnished thought they jolly well hired descent from the family. There had been before the war a fellow from Frankfort-on-the-Main took Lindisfarne or Holy Island or some such place and hired a bagpiper to play round the table while they ate. And closed his eyes whilst the fellow played reels. As if it had been a holy occasion… Friend of Sylvia’s friends in the Government. To do her credit she would not stop with Jews. The only credit she had to her tail!

Mrs. de Bray Pape was telling him that it was not undemocratic to have your tenants’ children kneel down when you passed.

A boy’s voice said:

“Uncle Mark!” Who the devil could that be? Probably the son of the people he had week-ended with. Bowlby’s maybe; or Teddy Hope’s. He had always liked children and they liked him.

Mrs. de Bray Pape was saying that, yes, it was good for the tenants’ children. The Rev. Dr. Slocombe, the distinguished educationalist, said that these touching old rites should be preserved in the interests of the young. He said that to see the Prince of Wales at the Coronation kneeling before his father and swearing fealty had been most touching. And she had seen pictures of the Maintenon having it done when she walked out. She was now the Maintenon, therefore it must be right. But for Marie Antoinette…

The boy’s voice said:

“I hope you will excuse… I know it isn’t the thing…”

He couldn’t see the boy without turning his head on the pillow and he was not going to turn his head. He had a sense of someone a yard or so away at his off-shoulder. The boy at least had not come through the standing hay.

He did not imagine that the son of anyone he had ever week-ended with would ever walk through standing hay. The young generation were a pretty useless lot, but he could hardly believe they would have come to that yet. Their sons might…. He saw visions of tall dining-rooms lit up, with tall pictures, and dresses, and the sunset through high windows over tall grasses in the parks. He was done with that. If any tenants’ children ever knelt to him it would be when he took his ride in his wooden coat to the little church over the moors…. Where his father had shot himself.

That had been a queer go. He remembered getting the news. He had been dining, at Marie Leonie’s….

The boy’s voice was, precisely, apologising for the fact that that lady had walked through the grass. At the same time Mrs. de Bray Pape was saying things to the discredit of Marie Antoinette whom apparently she disliked. He could not imagine why anyone should dislike Marie Antoinette. Yet very likely she was dislikable. The French who were sensible people had cut her head off, so they presumably disliked her….

He had been dining at Marie Leonie’s, she standing, her hands folded before her, hanging down, watching him eat his mutton chops and boiled potatoes when the porter from his Club had phoned through that there was a wire