Parade's End

all the time to cherish that unforgivingness…. Not quite not playing the game, but almost. For hadn’t Mark held out feelers? Hadn’t he made concessions? Hadn’t his very marrying of Marie Leonie been by way of a concession to Christopher? Didn’t Christopher, if the truth was to be known, want Mark to marry Marie Leonie because he, Christopher, wanted to marry Valentine Wannop and hadn’t a hope? If the truth were known… Well, he had made that concession to Christopher, who was a sort of a person anyhow. But ought Christopher to have exacted — to have telepathically willed — that concession if he wasn’t himself going to concede something? Ought he to have forced him, Mark, to accept his mooning, womanly services when the poor devil was already worn out with his military duties of seeing old tins cleaned out day after day, and when he meant to become a beastly old-furniture dealer and refuse Groby? For, upon his soul, till the morning of Armistice Day Mark had accepted Christopher’s story of Mr. Schatzweiler as merely a good-humoured, grim threat… A sort of a feint at a threat….

Well, probably it was playing the game all right: if Christopher thought it was jonnock, jonnock it was!

But… a damn beastly shock…. Why he had been practically convalescent, he had been out of bed in a dressing gown and had told Lord Wolstonemark that he could pile in as many papers as he liked from the office…. And then Christopher, without a hat and in a beastly civilian suit of light mulberry coloured Harris tweed, had burst into the room with a beastly piece of old furniture under his arm…. A sort of inlaid toy writing-desk. A model. For cabinet-makers! A fine thing to bring into a convalescent bedroom, to a man quietly reading Form T. O. LOUWR 1962. E 17 of the 10/11/18 in front of a clean fire…. And chalk-white about the gills the fellow was — with an awful lot of silver in his hair…. What age was he? Forty? Forty-three? God knew!

Forty… He wanted to borrow forty quid on that beastly piece of furniture. To have an Armistice Day Beanfeast and set up house with his gal! Forty quid! My God! Mark felt his bowels turning over within him with disgust…. The gal — that fellow’s half-sister as like as not — was waiting in an empty house for him to go and seduce her. In order to celebrate the salvation of the world by seven million deaths!

If you seduce a girl you don’t do it on forty pounds: you accept Groby and three, seven, ten thousand a year. So he had told Christopher.

And then he had got it. Full in the face. Christopher was not going to accept a penny from him. Never. Not ever!… No doubt about that, either. That fact had gone into Mark as a knife goes into a stag’s throat. It had hurt as much, but it hadn’t killed! Damn it, it might as well have! It might as well have…. Does a fellow do that to his own brother just because his own brother has called him… what is the word? Maquereau!… Probably a maquereau is worse than a pimp…. The difference between a flea and a louse, as Dr. Johnson said.

Eh, but Christopher was bitter!… Apparently he had gone round first to Sir John Robertson’s with that jigamaree. Sir John had promised to buy it for a hundred pounds. It was a special sort of model signed by some duke of a Bath cabinet-maker in 1762…. Wasn’t that the year of the American Rebellion? Well, Christopher had bought it in a junk-shop of sorts for a fiver and Sir John had promised him a hundred quid. He collected cabinet- maker’s models; extraordinarily valuable they were. Christopher had spat out that this was worth a thousand dollars…. Thinking of his old-furniture customers!

When Christopher had used that word — with the blue pebbles sticking out of his white lard head — Mark had felt the sweat break out all over him. He had known it was all up…. Christopher had gone on: you expected him to spit electric sparks, but his voice was wooden. Sir John had said to him:

“Eh, no mon. You’re a fine soldier now, raping half the girls in Flanders an Ealing and asking us to regard you as heroes. Fine heroes. And now you’re safe…. A hundred pounds is a price to a Christian that is faithful to his lovely wife. Five pounds is as much as I’ll give you for the model and be thankful it is five, not one, for old sake’s sake!”

That was what Sir John Robertson had said to Christopher; that was what the world was like to serving soldiers in that day. You don’t have to wonder that Christopher was bitter — even to his own brother with the sweat making his underlinen icy. He had said:

“My good chap. I won’t lend you a penny on that idiotic jigamaree. But I’ll write you a cheque for a thousand pounds this minute. Give me my cheque book from the table….”

Marie Leonie had come into the room on hearing Christopher’s voice. She liked to hear the news from Christopher. And she liked Christopher and Mark to have heated discussions. She had observed that they did Mark good: on the day when Christopher had first come there, three weeks before, when they certainly had heatedly discussed, she had observed that Mark’s temperature had fallen from ninety-nine point six to ninety-eight point two. In two hours…. After all, if a Yorkshire man can quarrel he can live. They were like that, those others, she said.

Christopher had turned on her and said:

“Ma belle amie m’attend a ma maison; nous voulons celebrer avec mes camarades de regiment. Je n’ai pas le soue. Pretez moi quarante livres, je vous en prie, madame!” He had added that he would leave his cabinet as a pledge. He was as stiff as a sentry outside Buckingham Palace. She had looked at Mark with some astonishment. After all, she might well be astonished. He himself had made no sign and suddenly Christopher had exclaimed:

“Pretez les moi, pretez les moi, pour l’amour de Dieu!”

Marie Leonie had gone a little white, but she had turned up her skirt and turned down her stocking and took out the notes.

“Pour le dieu d’amour, monsieur, je veux bien,” she had said…. You never knew what a Frenchwoman would not say. That was out of an old song.

But the sweat burst out all over his face at the recollection: great drops of sweat.

VII

MARIE LEONIE, a strong taste of apples in her mouth, strong odours of apples on the air, wasps around her and as if a snow-drift of down descending about her feet, was frowning seriously over Burgundy bottles into which ran cider from a glass tube that she held to their necks. She frowned because the task was serious and engrossing, because the wasps annoyed her and because she was resisting an impulse inside herself. It told her that something ailed Mark and urged her to go and look at him.

It annoyed her because as a rule she felt presages of something ailing Mark only at night. Only at night. During the day usually she felt in her for interieur that Mark was like what he was only because he wanted so to be. His glance was too virile and dominant to let you think otherwise — the dark, liquid, direct glance! But at nightfall — or at any rate shortly after supper when she had retired to her room terrible premonitions of disaster to Mark visited her. He was dying where he lay; he was beset by the spectral being of the countryside; robbers, even, had crept upon him, though that was unreasonable. For all the countryside knew that Mark was paralysed and unable to store wealth in his mattress…. Still, nefarious strangers might see him and imagine that he kept his gold repeater watch beneath his pillow…. So she would rise a hundred times in a night and, going to the low, diamond-casement window, would lean out and listen. But there would be no sound: the wind in the leaves; the cry of water-birds overhead. The dim light would be in the hut, seen unmoving through the apple boughs.

Now, however, in broad daylight, towards the hour of tea, with the little maid on a stool beside her plucking the boiling-hens that were to go to market next day, with the boxes of eggs on their shelves, each egg wired to the bottom of its box waiting till she had time to date-stamp it — in the open potting-shed in the quiet, broad light of a summer day she was visited by a presage of something ailing Mark. She resented it, but she was not the woman to resist it.

There was, however, nothing to warrant it. From the corners of the house, to which she proceeded, she could see quite well the greater part of Mark’s solitary figure. Gunning, being talked to by the English lord, held a spare horse by the bridle and was looking at Mark over the hedge, too. He exhibited no emotions. A young man was walking along the inside of the hedge between it and the raspberries. That was no affair of hers: Gunning was not protesting. The head and shoulders of a young woman — or it might be another young man — were proceeding along the outside of the hedge nearly level with the first one. That was equally no affair of hers. Probably they were looking at the bird’s nest. There was some sort of bird’s nest she had heard, in that thick hedge. There was no end to the folly of the English in the country as in the town: they would waste time over everything. This bird was a bottle… bottle something and Christopher and Valentine and the parson and the doctor and the artist who lived down the hill were crazy about it. They walked on tip-toe when they were within twenty yards. Gunning was