Parade's End

“Oh, Valentine,” she said, “you’re a heroine. And you only twenty-twol… Isn’t that the motor coming?”

But it wasn’t the motor coming and Miss Wannop said:

“Oh, no! I’m not a heroine. When I tried to speak to that Minister yesterday, I just couldn’t. It was Gertie who went for him. As for me, I just hopped from one leg to the other and stuttered: ‘V… V… Votes for W… W… W… omen!’… If I’d been decently brave I shouldn’t have been too shy to speak to a strange man…. For that was what it really came to.”

“But that surely,” Mrs. Duchemin said — she continued to hold both the girl’s hands — “makes you all the braver…. It’s the person who does the thing he’s afraid of who’s the real hero, isn’t it?”

“Oh, we used to argue that old thing over with father when we were ten. You can’t tell. You’ve got to define the term brave. I was just abject…. I could harangue the whole crowd when I got them together. But speak to one man in cold blood I couldn’t…. Of course I did speak to a fat golfing idiot with bulging eyes, to get him to save Gertie. But that was different.”

Mrs. Duchemin moved both the girl’s hands up and down in her own.

“As you know, Valentine,” she said, “I’m an old-fashioned woman. I believe that woman’s true place is at her husband’s side. At the same time…”

Miss Wannop moved away.

“Now, don’t, Edie, don’t!” she said. “If you believe that, you’re an anti. Don’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. It’s your defect really…. I tell you I’m not a heroine. I dread a prison: I hate rows. I’m thankful to goodness that it’s my duty to stop and housemaid-typewrite for mother, so that I can’t really do things…. Look at that miserable, adenoidy little Gertie, hiding upstairs in our garret. She was crying all last night — but that’s just nerves. Yet she’s been in prison five times, stomach-pumped and all. Not a moment of funk about her!… But as for me, a girl as hard as a rock that prison wouldn’t touch…. Why, I’m all of a jump now. That’s why I’m talking nonsense like a pert schoolgirl. I just dread that every sound may be the police coming for me.”

Mrs. Duchemin stroked the girl’s fair hair and tucked a loose strand behind her ear.

“I wish you’d let me show you how to do your hair,” she said. “The right man might come along at any moment.”

“Oh, the right man!” Miss Wannop said. “Thanks for tactfully changing the subject. The right man for me, when he comes along, will be a married man. That’s the Wannop luck!”

Mrs. Duchemin said, with deep concern:

“Don’t talk like that…. Why should you regard yourself as being less lucky than other people? Surely your mother’s done well. She has a position; she makes money….”

“Ah, but mother isn’t a Wannop,” the girl said, “only by marriage. The real Wannops… they’ve been executed, and attain-dered, and falsely accused and killed in carriage accidents and married adventurers or died penniless like father. Ever since the dawn of history. And then, mother’s got her mascot…”

“Oh, what’s that?” Mrs. Duchemin asked, almost with animation, “a relic…”

“Don’t you know mother’s mascot?” the girl asked. “She tells everybody…. Don’t you know the story of the man with the champagne? How mother was sitting contemplating suicide in her bed-sitting room and there came in a man with a name like Tea-tray; she always calls him the mascot and asks us to remember him as such in our prayers…. He was a man who’d been at a German university with father years before and loved him very dearly, but not kept touch with him. And he’d been out of England for nine months when father died and found about it. And he said: ‘Now Mrs. Wannop, what’s this?’ And she told him. And he said, ‘What you want is champagne!’ And he sent the slavey out with a sovereign for a bottle of Veuve Cliquot And he broke the neck of the bottle off against the mantelpiece because they were slow in bringing an opener. And he stood over her while she drank half the bottle out of her tooth-glass. And he took her out to lunch… oh… oh… oh, it’s cold!… And lectured her… And got her a job to write leaders on a paper he had shares in…”

Mrs. Duchemin said:

“You’re shivering!”

“I know I am,” the girl said. She went on very fast. “And of course, mother always wrote father’s articles for him. He found the ideas, but couldn’t write, and she’s a splendid style…. And, since then, he — the mascot — Tea-tray — has always turned up when she’s been in tight places. When the paper blew her up and threatened to dismiss her for inaccuracies! She’s frightfully inaccurate. And he wrote her out a table of things every leader writer must know, such as that ‘A. Ebor’ is the Archbishop of York, and that the Government is Liberal. And one day he turned up and said: ‘Why don’t you write a novel on that story you told me?’ And he lent her the money to buy the cottage we’re in now to be quiet and write in… Oh, I can’t go on!”

Miss Wannop burst into tears.

“It’s thinking of those beastly days,” she said. “And that beastly, beastly yesterday!” She ran the knuckles of both her hands fiercely into her eyes, and determinedly eluded Mrs. Duchemin’s handkerchief and embraces. She said almost contemptuously:

“A nice, considerate person I am. And you with this ordeal hanging over you! Do you suppose I don’t appreciate all your silent heroism of the home, while we’re marching about with flags and shouting? But it’s just to stop women like you being tortured, body and soul, week in, week out, that we…”

Mrs. Duchemin had sat down on a chair near one of the windows; she had her handkerchief hiding her face.

“Why women in your position don’t take lovers…” the girl said, hotly. “Or that women in your position do take lovers…”

Mrs. Duchemin looked up; in spite of its tears her white face had an air of serious dignity:

“Oh, no, Valentine,” she said, using her deeper tones. “There’s something beautiful, there’s something thrilling about chastity. I’m not narrow-minded. Censorius! I don’t condemn! But to preserve in word, thought and action a lifelong fidelity…. It’s no mean achievement….”

“You mean like an egg and spoon race,” Miss Wannop said.

“It isn’t,” Mrs. Duchemin replied gently, “the way I should have put it. Isn’t the real symbol Atalanta, running fast and not turning aside for the golden apple? That always seemed to me the real truth hidden in the beautiful old legend….”

“I don’t know,” Miss Wannop said, “when I read what Ruskin says about it in the Crown of Wild Olive. Or no! It’s the Queen of the Air. That’s his Greek rubbish, isn’t it? I always think it seems like an egg-race in which the young woman didn’t keep her eyes in the boat. But I suppose it comes to the same thing.”

Mrs. Duchemin said:

“My dear! Not a word against John Ruskin in this house.”

Miss Wannop screamed.

An immense voice had shouted:

“This way! This way!… The ladies will be here!”

Of Mr. Duchemin’s curates — he had three of them, for he had three marshland parishes almost without stipend, so that no one but a very rich clergyman could have held them — it was observed that they were all very large men with the physiques rather of prizefighters than of clergy. So that when by any chance at dusk, Mr. Duchemin, who himself was of exceptional stature, and his three assistants went together along a road the hearts of any malefactors whom in the mist they chanced to encounter went pit-a-pat.

Mr. Horsley — the number two — had in addition an enormous voice. He shouted four or five words, interjected “tee-hee,” shouted four or five words more and again interjected “tee-hee.” He had enormous wrist- bones that protruded from his clerical cuffs, an enormous Adam’s apple, a large, thin, close-cropped, colourless face like a skull, with very sunken eyes, and when he was once started speaking it was impossible to stop him, because his own voice in his ears drowned every possible form of interruption.

This morning, as an inmate of the house, introducing to the breakfast-room Messrs. Tietjens and Macmaster, who had driven up to the steps just as he was mounting them, he had a story to tell. The introduction was, therefore, not, as such, a success….