Parade's End

TIET JENS lit a pipe beside the stile, having first meticulously cleaned out the bowl and the stem with a surgical needle, in his experience the best of all pipe-cleaners, since, made of German silver, it is flexible, won’t corrode and is indestructible. He wiped off methodically with a great dock-leaf, the glutinous brown products of burnt tobacco, the young woman, as he was aware, watching him from behind his back. As soon as he had restored the surgical needle to the notebook in which it lived, and had put the notebook into its bulky pocket, Miss Wannop moved off down the path: it was only suited for Indian file, and had on the left hand a ten-foot, untrimmed quicken hedge, the hawthorn blossoms just beginning to blacken at the edges and small green haws to show. On the right the grass was above knee high and bowed to those that passed. The sun was exactly vertical; the chaffinchs said: “Pink! pink!” The young woman had an agreeable back.

This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous; he of good birth; she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest. Each come just from an admirably appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people, their promenade sanctioned, as it were, by the Church — two clergy — the State, two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids.

Each knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch, greenfinch, yellow-ammer (not, my dear, hammer! ammer from the Middle High German for “finch”), garden warbler, Dart-ford warbler, pied-wagtail, known as “dishwasher.” (These charming local dialect names.) Marguerites over the grass, stretching in an infinite white blaze; grasses purple in a haze to the far distant hedgerow; coltsfoot, wild white clover, sainfoin, Italian rye grass (all technical names that the best people must know: the best grass mixture for permanent pasture on the Wealden loam). In the hedge: Our Lady’s bedstraw, dead-nettle, bachelor’s button (but in Sussex they call it ragged robin, my dear), so interesting! Cowslip (paigle, you know, from old French pasque, meaning Easter); burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, but not burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers, of course, over; black briony; wild clematis: later it’s old man’s beard; purple loose-strife. (That our young maids long purples call and literal shepherds give a grosser name. So racy of the soil!)… Walk, then, through the field, gallant youth and fair maid, minds cluttered up with all these useless anodynes for thought, quotation, imbecile epithets! Dead silent, unable to talk, from too good breakfast to probably extremely bad lunch. The young woman, so the young man is duly warned, to prepare it: pink india-rubber half-cooked cold beef, no doubt; tepid potatoes, water in the bottom of willow-pattern dish. (No! Not genuine willow-pattern, of course, Mr. Tietjens.) Overgrown lettuce with wood-vinegar to make the mouth scream with pain; pickles, also preserved in wood- vinegar; two bottles of public-house beer that, on opening, squirts to the wall. A glass of invalid port… for the gentleman!… and the jaws hardly able to open after the too enormous breakfast at 10.15. Midday now!

“God’s England!” Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour. “‘Land of Hope and Glory!’ — F natural descending to tonic, C major: chord of 6–4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C major…. All absolutely correct! Double basses, ’cellos, all violins, all woodwind, all brass. Full grand organ, all stops, special vox humana and key-bugle effect…. Across the counties came the sound of bugles that his father knew…. Pipe exactly right. It must be: pipe of Englishman of good birth; ditto tobacco. Attractive young woman’s back. English midday midsummer. Best climate in the world! No day on which man may not go abroad!” Tietjens paused and aimed with his hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe lemon-coloured flower. The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman killed among crinolines!

“Now I’m a bloody murderer!” Tietjens said. “Not gory! Green stained with vital fluid of innocent plant… And by God! Not a woman in the country who won’t let you rape her after an hour’s acquaintance!” He slew two more mulleins and a sow-thistle! A shadow, but not from the sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass bloom and marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass!

“By God,” he said, “Church! State! Army! H.M. Ministry: H.M. Opposition: H.M. City Man…. All the governing class! All rotten! Thank God we’ve got a navy!… But perhaps that’s rotten too! Who knows! Britannia needs no bulwarks… Then thank God for the upright young man and the virtuous maiden in the summer fields: he Tory of the Tories as he should be: she suffragette of the militants: militant here in earth… as she should be! As she should be! In the early decades of the twentieth century however else can a woman keep clean and wholesome! Ranting from platforms, splendid for the lungs, bashing in policemen’s helmets…. No! It’s I do that: my part, I think, miss!… Carrying heavy banners in twenty-mile processions through streets of Sodom. All splendid! I bet she’s virtuous. But you don’t have to bet. It isn’t done on certainties. You can tell it in the eye. Nice eyes! Attractive back. Virginal cockiness…. Yes, better occupation for mothers of empire than attending on lewd husbands year in year out till you’re as hysterical as a female cat in heat…. You could see it in her, that woman, you can see it in most of ’em! Thank God then for the Tory, upright young married man and the Suffragette kid… Backbone of England!…”

He killed another flower.

“But by God! we’re both under a cloud! Both!… That kid and I! And General Lord Edward Campion, Lady Claudine Sandbach, and the Hon. Paul, M.P. (suspended) to spread the tale…. And forty toothless fogies in the club to spread it; and no end visiting books yawning to have your names cut out of them, my boy!… My dear boy: I so regret: your father’s oldest friend…. By jove, the pistachio nut of that galantine! Repeating! Breakfast gone wrong; gloomy reflections! Thought I could stand anything; digestion of an ostrich…. But no! Gloomy reflections! I’m hysterical like that large-eyed whore! For same reason! Wrong diet and wrong life: diet meant for partridge shooters over the turnips consumed by the sedentary. England the land of pills… Das Pillen- Land, the Germans call us. Very properly… And, damn it, outdoor diet: boiled mutton, turnips, sedentary life… and forced up against the filthiness of the world; your nose in it all day long! Why, hang it, I’m as badly off as she. Sylvia’s as bad as Duchemin!… I’d never have thought that… No wonder meat’s turned to uric acid… prime cause of neurasthenia…. What a beastly muddle! Poor Macmaster! He’s finished. Poor devil: he’d better have ogled this kid. He could have sung: ‘Highland Mary’ a better tune than ‘This is the end of every man’s desire’… You can cut it on his tombstone, you can write it on his card that a young man tacked on to a paulo-post pre-Raphaelite prostitute….”

He stopped suddenly in his walk. It had occurred to him that he ought not to be walking with this girl!

“But damn it all,” he said to himself, “she makes a good screen for Sylvia… who cares! She must chance it. She’s probably struck off all their beastly visiting lists already… as a suffragette!”

Miss Wannop, a cricket pitch or so ahead of him, hopped over a stile; felt foot on the step, right on the top bar, a touch of the left on the other steps, and down on the white, drifted dust of a road they no doubt had to cross. She stood waiting, her back still to him…. Her nimble foot-work, her attractive back, seemed to him, now, infinitely pathetic. To let scandal attach to her was like cutting the wings of a goldfinch: the bright creature, yellow, white, golden and delicate that in the sunlight makes a haze with its wings beside thistle-tops. No; damn it! it was worse; it was worse than putting out, as the bird-fancier does, the eyes of a chaffinch…. Infinitely pathetic!

Above the stile, in an elm, a chaffinch said: “Pink! pink!”

The imbecile sound filled him with rage; he said to the bird:

“Damn your eyes! Have them put out, then!” The beastly bird that made the odious noise, when it had its eyes put out, at least squealed like any other skylark or tom-tit. Damn all birds, field naturalists, botanists! In the same way he addressed the back of Miss Wannop: “Damn your eyes! Have your chastity impugned them? What do you speak to strange men in public for! You know you can’t do it in this country. If it were a decent, straight land like Ireland where people cut each other’s throats for clean issues: Papist versus Prot… well, you could! You could walk through Ireland from east to west and speak to every man you met… ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore…’ To every man you met as long as he wasn’t an Englishman of good birth; that would deflower you!” He was scrambling clumsily over the stile. “Well! be deflowered then: lose your infantile reputation. You’ve spoken to strange pitch: you’re defined… with the benefit of Clergy, Army, Cabinet, Administration, Opposition, mothers and old maids of England…. They’d all tell you you can’t talk to a strange man, in the sunlight, on the links, without becoming a screen for some Sylvia or other…. Then be a screen for Sylvia: get struck off the visiting books! The deeper you’re implicated, the more bloody villain I am! I’d like the whole lot to see us here; that would settle it….”