Parade's End

“I can’t drive a horse,” the girl said; “I’m afraid of them. I can’t drive a motor-bike either. I made that up because I knew you’d say you’d rather have taken Gertie over in the side-car than driven with me.

“Then do you mind,” Tietjens said, “telling me if you know this road at all?”

“Not a bit!” she answered cheerfully. “I never drove it in my life. I looked it up on the map before we started because I’m sick to death of the road we went by. There’s a one-horse ’bus from Rye to Tenterden, and I’ve walked from Tenterden to my uncle’s over and over again…”

“We shall probably be out all night then,” Tietjens said. “Do you mind? The horse may be tired….”

She said:

“Oh, the poor horse!… I meant us to be out all night…. But the poor horse. What a brute I was not to think of it.”

“We’re thirteen miles from a place called Brede; eleven and a quarter from a place whose name I couldn’t read; six and three-quarters from somewhere called something like Uddlemere….” Tietjens said. “This is the road to Uddlemere.”

“Oh, that was Grandfather’s Wantways all right,” she declared. “I know it well. It’s called ‘Grandfather’s’ because an old gentleman used to sit there called Gran’fer Finn. Every Tenterden market day he used to sell fleed cakes from a basket to the carts that went by. Tenterden market was abolished in 1845 — the effect of the repeal of the Corn Laws, you know. As a Tory you ought to be interested in that.”

Tietjens sat patiently. He could sympathise with her mood; she had now a heavy weight off her chest; and, if long acquaintance with his wife had not made him able to put up with feminine vagaries, nothing ever would.

“Would you mind,” he said then, “telling me…”

“If,” she interrupted, “that was really Gran’fer’s Wantways: midland English. ‘Vent’ equals four cross-roads: high French carrefour…. Or, perhaps, that isn’t the right word. But it’s the way your mind works….”

“You have, of course, often walked from your uncle’s to Gran’fer’s Wantways,” Tietjens said, “with your cousins, taking brandy to the invalid in the old toll-gate house. That’s how you know the story of Grandfer. You said you had never driven it; but you have walked it. That’s the way your mind works, isn’t it?”

She said: “Oh!”

“Then,” Tietjens went on, “would you mind telling me — for the sake of the poor horse—whether Uddlemere is or isn’t on our road home. I take it you don’t know just this stretch of road, but you know whether it is the right road.”

“The touch of pathos,” the girl said, “is a wrong note. It’s you who’re in mental trouble about the road. The horse isn’t….”

Tietjens let the cart go on another fifty yards; then he said:

“It is the right road. The Uddlemere turning was the right one. You wouldn’t let the horse go another five steps if it wasn’t. You’re as soppy about horses as… as I am.”

“There’s at least that bond of sympathy between us,” she said drily. “Gran’fer’s Wantways is six and three- quarters miles from Udimore; Udimore is exactly five from us; total, eleven and three-quarters; twelve and a quarter if you add half a mile for Udimore itself. The name is Udimore, not Uddlemere. Local place-name enthusiasts derive this from ‘O’er the mere.’ Absurd! Legend as follows: Church builders desiring to put church with relic of St. Rumwold in wrong place, voice wailed: ‘O’er the mere.’ Obviously absurd!… Putrid! ‘O’er the’ by Grimm’s law impossible as ‘Udi’; ‘mere’ not a middle Low German word at all…”

“Why,” Tietjens said, “are you giving me all this information?”

“Because,” the girl said, “it’s the way your mind works…. It picks up useless facts as silver after you’ve polished it picks up sulphur vapour; and tarnishes! It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent patterns and makes Toryism out of them…. I’ve never met a Cambridge Tory man before. I though they were all in museums and you work them up again out of bones. That’s what father used to say; he was an Oxford Disraelian Conservative Imperialist….”

“I know of course,” Tietjens said.

“Of course you know,” the girl said. “You know everything…. And you’ve worked everything into absurd principles. You think father was unsound because he tried to apply tendencies to life. You want to be an English country gentleman and spin principles out of the newspapers and the gossip of horse-fairs. And let the country go to hell, you’ll never stir a finger except to say I told you so.”

She touched him suddenly on the arm:

“Don’t mind me!” she said. “It’s reaction. I’m so happy. I’m so happy.”

He said:

“That’s all right! That’s all right!” But for a minute or two it wasn’t really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities — even merely with the velvet. He added: “Your mother works you very hard.”

She exclaimed:

“How you understand. You’re amazing: for a man who tries to be a sea-anemone!” She said: “Yes, this is the first holiday I’ve had for four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her day’s work for slips of the pen. And on the top of it the raid and the anxiety…. Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose mother had gone to prison…. Oh, I’d have gone mad…. Week-days and Sundays….” She stopped: “I’m apoligising, really,” she went on. “Of course I ought not to have talked to you like that. You, a great Panjandrum; saving the country with your statistics and all…. It did make you a rather awful figure, you know… and the relief to find you’re… oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay. I’d dreaded this drive. I’d have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn’t been in such a dread about Gertie and the police. And, if I hadn’t let off steam I should have had to jump out and run beside the cart…. I could still…”

“You couldn’t,” Tietjens said. “You couldn’t see the cart.”

They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its romantic unusualness. They couldn’t see the gleam of the lamps; they could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to a walk. They agreed that neither of them could be responsible for losing the way; in the circumstances that was impossible. Fortunately the horse would take them somewhere; it had belonged to a local higgler: a man that used the roads buying poultry for re-sale…. They agreed that they had no responsibilities, and after that went on for unmeasured hours in silence; the mist growing, but very, very gradually, more luminous…. Once or twice, at a rise in the road, they saw again the stars and the moon, but mistily. On the fourth occasion they had emerged into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical sea….

Tietjens had said:

“You’d better get down and take the lamp. See if you can find a milestone; I’d get down myself, but you might not be able to hold the horse….” She had plunged in…

And he had sat, feeling he didn’t know why, like a Guy Fawkes; up in the light, thinking by no means disagreeable thoughts — intent, like Miss Wannop herself, on a complete holiday of forty-eight hours; till Tuesday morning! He had to look forward to a long and luxurious day of figures; a rest after dinner; half a night more of figures; a Monday devoted to a horse-deal in the market-town where he happened to know the horse-dealer. The horse-dealer, indeed, was known to every hunting man in England! A luxurious, long argument in the atmosphere of stable-hartshorn and slow wranglings couched in ostler’s epigrams. You couldn’t have a better day; the beer in the pub probably good, too. Or if not that, the claret…. The claret in south country inns was often quite good; there was no sale for it so it got well kept….

On Tuesday it would close in again, beginning with the meeting of his wife’s maid at Dover….

He was to have, above all, a holiday from himself and to take it like other men; free of his conventions, his strait waistcoatings….

The girl said:

“I’m coming up now! I’ve found out something….” He watched intently the place where she must appear; it