Parade's End

the hips, and gave an effect of length and swing — yet it did not descend as low as the ankles. It was, no doubt, the amount of material that did that, like the Highlander’s kilt that takes twelve yards to make. And from the silence Valentine could tell that every woman and most of the men — if they didn’t know that this was Mrs. Christopher Tietjens — knew that this was a personage of Illustrated Weekly, as who should say of county family, rank. Little Mrs. Swan, lately married, actually got up, crossed the room and sat down beside her bridegroom. It was a movement with which Valentine could sympathise.

And Sylvia, having just faintly greeted Mrs. Duchemin, and completely ignored the celebrity in the arm-chair — in spite of the fact that Mrs. Duchemin had tried half-heartedly to effect an introduction — stood still, looking round her. She gave the effect of a lady in a nurseryman’s hothouse considering what flower should interest her, collectedly ignoring the nurserymen who bowed round her. She had just dropped her eyelashes, twice, in recognition of two staff officers with a good deal of scarlet streak about them who were tentatively rising from their chairs. The staff officers who came to the Macmasters were not of the first vintages; still they had the labels and passed as such.

Valentine was by that time beside her mother, who had been standing all alone between two windows. She had dispossessed, in hot indignation, a stout musical critic of his chair and had sat her mother in it. And, just as Mrs. Duchemin’s deep voice sounded, yet a little waveringly:

“Valentine… a cup of tea for…” Valentine was carrying a cup of tea to her mother.

Her indignation had conquered her despairing jealousy, if you could call it jealousy. For what was the good of living or loving when Tietjens had beside him, for ever, the radiant, kind, and gracious perfection. On the other hand, of her two deep passions, the second was for her mother.

Rightly or wrongly, Valentine regarded Mrs. Wannop as a great, an august figure: a great brain, a high and generous intelligence. She had written, at least, one great book, and if the rest of her time had been frittered away in the desperate struggle to live that had taken both their lives, that could not detract from that one achievement that should last and for ever take her mother’s name down time. That this greatness should not weigh with, the Macmasters had hitherto neither astonished nor irritated Valentine. The Macmasters had their game to play and, for the matter of that, they had their predilections. Their game kept them amongst the officially influential, the semi- official and the officially accredited. They moved with such C.B.s, knights, presidents, and the rest as dabbled in writing or the arts: they went upwards with such reviewers, art critics, musical writers and archaeologists as had posts in, if possible, first-class public offices or permanent positions on the more august periodicals. If an imaginative author seemed assured of position and lasting popularity Macmaster would send out feelers towards him, would make himself humbly useful, and sooner or later either Mrs. Duchemin would be carrying on with him one of her high-souled correspondences — or she wouldn’t.

Mrs. Wannop they had formerly accepted as permanent leader writer and chief critic of a great organ, but the great organ having dwindled and now disappeared the Macmasters no longer wanted her at their parties. That was the game — and Valentine accepted it. But that it should have been done with such insolence, so obviously meant to be noted — for in twice breaking up Mrs. Wannop’s little circle Mrs. Duchemin had not even once so much as said: “How d’ye do?” to the elder lady! — that was almost more than Valentine could, for the moment, bear, and she would have taken her mother away at once and would never have re-entered the house, but for the compensations.

Her mother had lately written and even found a publisher for a book — and the book had showed no signs of failing powers. On the contrary, having been perforce stopped off the perpetual journalism that had dissipated her energies, Mrs. Wannop had turned out something that Valentine knew was sound, sane, and well done. Abstractions caused by failing attention to the outside world are not necessarily in a writer signs of failing, as a writer. It may mean merely that she is giving so much thought to her work that her other contacts suffer. If that is the case her work will gain. That this might be the case with her mother was Valentine’s great and secret hope. Her mother was barely sixty: many great works have been written by writers aged between sixty and seventy….

And the crowding of youngish men round the old lady had given Valentine a little confirmation of that hope. The book naturally, in the maelstrom flux and reflux of the time, had attracted little attention, and poor Mrs. Wannop had not succeeded in extracting a penny for it from her adamantine publisher; she hadn’t, indeed, made a penny for several months, and they existed almost at starvation point in their little den of a villa — on Valentine’s earnings as athletic teacher…. But that little bit of attention in that semipublic place had seemed, at least, as a confirmation to Valentine: there probably was something sound, sane, and well done in her mother’s work. That was almost all she asked of life.

And, indeed, whilst she stood by her mother’s chair, thinking with a little bitter pathos that if Edith Ethel had left the three or four young men to her mother the three or four might have done her poor mother a little good, with innocent puffs and the like — and heaven knew they needed that little good badly enough! — a very thin and untidy young man did drift back to Mrs. Wannop and asked, precisely, if he might make a note or two for publication as to what Mrs. Wannop was doing. “Her book,” he said, “had attracted so much attention. They hadn’t known that they had still writers among them….”

A singular, triangular drive had begun through the chairs from the fireplace. That was how it had seemed to Valentine! Mrs. Tietjens had looked at them, had asked Christopher a question and, immediately, as if she were coming through waist-high surf, had borne down Macmaster and Mrs. Duchemin, flanking her obsequiously, setting aside chairs and their occupants, Tietjens and the two, rather bashfully following staff officers, broadening out the wedge.

Sylvia, her long arm held out from a yard or so away, was giving her hand to Valentine’s mother. With her clear, high, unembarrassed voice she exclaimed, also from a yard or so away, so as to be heard by every one in the room:

“You’re Mrs. Wannop. The great writer! I’m Christopher Tietjens’ wife.”

The old lady, with her dim eyes, looked up at the younger woman towering above her.

“You’re Christopher’s wife!” she said. “I must kiss you for all the kindness he has shown me.”

Valentine felt her eyes filling with tears. She saw her mother stand up, place both her hands on the other woman’s shoulders. She heard her mother say:

“You’re a most beautiful creature. I’m sure you’re good!”

Sylvia stood, smiling faintly, bending a little to accept the embrace. Behind the Macmasters, Tietjens, and the staff officers, a little crowd of goggle eyes had ranged itself.

Valentine was crying. She slipped back behind the tea-urns, though she could hardly feel the way. Beautiful! The most beautiful woman she had ever seen! And good! Kind! You could see it in the lovely way she had given her cheek to that poor old woman’s lips…. And to live all day, for ever, beside him… she, Valentine, ought to be ready to lay down her life for Sylvia Tietjens….

The voice of Tietjens said, just above her head:

“Your mother seems to be having a regular triumph,” and, with his good-natured cynicism, he added, “it seems to have upset some apple-carts!” They were confronted with the spectacle of Macmaster conducting the young celebrity from her deserted arm-chair across the room to be lost in the horseshoe of crowd that surrounded Mrs, Wannop.

Valentine said:

“You’re quite gay to-day. Your voice is different. I suppose you’re better?” She did not look at him. His voice came:

“Yes! I’m relatively gay!” It went on: “I thought you might like to know. A little of my mathematical brain seems to have come to life again. I’ve worked out two or three silly problems.…”

She said:

“Mrs. Tietjens will be pleased.”

“Oh!” the answer came. “Mathematics don’t interest her any more than cock-fighting.” With immense swiftness, between word and word, Valentine read into that a hope! This splendid creature did not sympathise with her husband’s activities. But he crushed it heavily by saying: “Why should she? She’s so many occupations of her own that she’s unrivalled at!”

He began to tell her, rather minutely, of a calculation he had made only that day at lunch. He had gone into the Department of Statistics and had had rather a row with Lord Ingleby of Lincoln. A pretty title the fellow had taken! They had wanted him to ask to be seconded to his old department for a certain job. But he had said he’d be damned if he would. He detested and despised the work they were doing.