Parade's End

favours, the domesticity, of that young woman. He hadn’t had a chance of comparison, so that the turning-down need not count. He had treated her barbarously — as social counters go it had been helpful to her — but only at the strong urge of a young woman driven to fury. That could be palliated. It hardly indeed affected her now as a reverse. Looked at reasonably, if a man comes home intending to go to bed with a young woman who has bewitched him for a number of years and finds another woman who tells him that she has cancer and does a very creditable faint from the top of the stairs and then — in spite of practice and being as hard as nails — puts her ankle out of joint, he has got to choose between the one and the other. And the other in this case had been vigorous, determined on her man, even vituperative. Obviously Christopher was not the sort of man who would like seducing a young woman whilst his wife was dying of internal cancer, let alone a sprained ankle. But the young woman had arrived at a stage when she did not care for any delicacies or their dictates.

No; that Sylvia had been able to bear. But if now the same thing happened, in dim, quiet daylight, in a tranquil old room… that she would not be able to face! It is one thing to acknowledge that your man has gone — there is no irrevocability about going. He may come back when the other woman is insignificant, a blue stocking, entirely unnoticeable…. But if he took the step — the responsibility! — of cutting you, that would be to put between you a barrier that no amount of weariness with your rival could overstep.

Impatience grew upon her. The fellow was away in an aeroplane. Gone North. It was the only time she had ever known of him as having gone away. It was her only chance of running down those orange zigzags. And now — it was all Lombard Street to a China apple that Fittleworth intended to disapprove of her running down. And you could not ignore Fittleworth.

II

No, you could not ignore Fittleworth. As a fox-hunting squire he might be an extinct monster — though then again he might not: there was no knowing. But as a wicked, dark, adept with bad women, and come of a race that had been adepts with women good and bad for generations, he was about as dangerous a person as you could find. That gross, slow, earthy, obstinate fellow, Gunning, could stand grouchily up to Fittleworth, answer him back and chance what Fittleworth could do to him. So could any cottager. But then they were his people. She wasn’t… she, Sylvia Tietjens, and she did not believe she could afford to outface him. Nor could half England.

Old Campion wanted India — probably she herself wanted Campion to have India. Groby Great Tree was cut down and if you have not the distinction — if you rid yourself of the distinction, of Groby Great Tree just to wound a man to the heart — you may as well take India. Times were changing but there was no knowing how the circumstances of a man like Fittleworth changed. He sat his horse like a monkey and gazed out over his land as his people had done for generations, bastard or legitimate. And it was all very well to regard him as merely a country squire married to a Trans-Atlantic nobody and so out of it. He hopped up to London — he and his Cammie too — and he passed unnoticeably about the best places and could drop a word or so here and there; and for all the countess’ foreign and unknown origin she had access to ears that could well be dangerous for aspirants to India. Campion might have his war-services and his constituency. But Cammie Fittleworth was popular in high places and Fittleworth had his hounds and, when it came even to constituencies, the tradesmen of a couple of counties. And he was wicked.

It had been obvious to her for a long time that God would one day step in and intervene for the protection of Christopher. After all Christopher was a good man — a rather sickeningly good man. It is, in the end, she reluctantly admitted, the function of God and the invisible Powers to see that a good man shall eventually be permitted to settle down to a stuffy domestic life… even to chaffering over old furniture. It was a comic affair — but it was the sort of affair that you had to admit. God is probably — and very rightly — on the side of the stuffy domesticities. Otherwise the world could not continue — the children would not be healthy. And certainly God desired the production of large crops of healthy children. Mind doctors of to-day said that all cases of nervous breakdown occurred in persons whose parents had not led harmonious lives.

So Fittleworth might well have been selected as the lightning conductor over the house of Tietjens. And the selection was quite a good one on the part of the Unseen Powers. And no doubt predestined! There was no accident about Mark’s being under the aegis — if that was what you called it — of the Earl. Mark had for long been one of the powers of the land, so had Fittleworth. They had moved in the same spheres — the rather mysterious spheres of Good People — who ruled the destinies of the nation in so far as the more decorative and more splendid jobs were concerned. They must have met about, here and there, constantly for years. And Mark had indicated that it was in that neighbourhood that he wanted to end his days simply because he wanted to be near the Fittleworths who could be calculated on to look after his Marie Leonie and the rest of them.

For the matter of that, Fittleworth himself, like God, was on the side of the stuffy domesticities and on the side of women who were in the act-of producing healthy children. Early in life he had had a woman to whom he was said to have been hopelessly attached and whom he had acquired in romantic circumstances — a famous dancer whom he had snapped up under the nose of a very Great Person indeed. And the woman had died in childbirth — or had given birth to an infant child and gone mad and committed suicide after that achievement. At any rate for months and months, Fittleworth’s friends had had to sit up night after night with him so that he might not kill himself.

Later — after he had married Cammie in the search for a domesticity that, except for his hounds he had made really almost stuffy — he had interested himself — and of course his countess — in the cause of providing tranquil conditions for women before childbirth. They had put up a perfectly lovely lying-in almshouse right under their own windows, down there.

So there it was — and, as she took her sideways glance at Fittleworth high up there in the air beside her, she was perfectly aware that she might be in for such a duel with him as had seldom yet fallen to her lot.

He had begun it by saying: “God damn it, Campion, ought Helen Lowther to be down there?” Then he had put it, as upon her, Sylvia’s information, that the cottage was in effect a disorderly house. But he had added: “If what you say is true?”

That of course was distinctly dangerous, for Fittleworth probably knew quite well that it had been at her, Sylvia’s instigation that Helen Lowther was down there. And he was letting her know that if it was at her instigation and if the house was really in her belief a brothel, his countess would be frightfully displeased. Frightfully!

Helen Lowther was of no particular importance, except to the Countess — and, of course, to Michael. She was one of those not unattractive Americans that drift over here and enjoy themselves with frightfully simple things. She liked visiting ruins and chattering about nothing in particular and galloping on the downs and talking to old servants and she liked the adoration of Michael. Probably she would have turned down the adoration of anyone older.

And the Countess liked to preserve the innocence of young American women. The Countess was fiftyish now and of a generation that preserved a certain stiffness along with a certain old-fashioned broadness of mind and outspokenness. She was of a class of American that had once seemed outrageously wealthy and who, if in the present stage of things they did not seem overwhelming, yet retained an aspect of impressive comfort and social authority and she moved in a set most of whose individuals, American, English, or even French, were of much the same class, at least by marriage, as herself. She tolerated — she even liked — Sylvia, but she might well get mad if from under her roof Helen Lowther, who was in her charge, should come into social contact with an irregular couple. You never knew when that point of view might not crop up in women of that date and class.

Sylvia, however, had chanced it. She had to — and in the end it could only be pulling the string of one more showerbath. It was a showerbath formidably charged — but that was her vocation in life and, if Campion had to lose India, she could always pursue her vocation in other countrysides. She was tired, but not as tired as all that!

So Sylvia had chanced saying that she supposed Helen Lowther could look after herself and had added a salacious quip to keep the speech in character. She knew nothing really of Helen Lowther’s husband, who was probably a lean man with some avocation in a rather dim West. But he could not be very impressionne or he would not let his attractive young wife roam for ever over Europe, alone.