Parade's End

were; that, and you weren’t! What was it like? Oh heaven, she knew…. She stood there contemplating parting from… One minute you were; the next… Her breath fluttered in her chest… Perhaps he wouldn’t come…

He was immediately framed by the sordid stones. She ran upon him and said something; with a mad hatred. All these deaths and he and his like responsible!… He had apparently a brother, a responsible one too! Browner complexioned!… But he! He! He! He! Completely calm; with direct eyes…. It wasn’t possible. “Holde Lippen: klaare Augen: heller Sinn….” Oh, a little bit wilted, the clear intellect! And the lips? No doubt too. But he couldn’t look at you so, unless…

She caught him fiercely by the arm; for the moment he belonged — more than to any browner, mere civilian, brother! — to her! She was going to ask him! If he answered: “Yes! I am such a man!” she was going to say: “Then you must take me too! If them, why not me? I must have a child. I too!” She desired a child. She would overwhelm these hateful lodestones with a flood of argument; she imagined — she felt — the words going between her lips…. She imagined her fainting mind; her consenting limbs….

His looks were wandering round the cornice of these stone buildings. Immediately she was Valentine Wannop again; it needed no word from him. Words passed, but words could no more prove an established innocence than words can enhance a love that exists. He might as well have recited the names of railway stations. His eyes, his unconcerned face, his tranquil shoulders; they were what acquitted him. The greatest love speech he had ever and could ever make her was when, harshly and angrily, he said something like:

“Certainly not. I imagined you knew me better” — brushing her aside as if she had been a midge. And, thank God, he had hardly listened to her!

She was Valentine Wannop again; in the sunlight the chaffinches said “Pink! pink!” The seed-heads of the tall grasses were brushing against her skirt. She was clean-limbed, clear-headed…. It was just a problem whether Sylvia Tietjens was good to him…. Good for him was, perhaps, the more exact way of putting it. Her mind cleared, like water that goes off the boil…. “Waters stilled at even.” Nonsense. It was sunlight, and he had an adorable brother! He could save his brother…. Transport! There was another meaning to the word. A warm feeling settled down upon her; this was her brother; the next to the best ever! It was as if you had matched a piece of stuff so nearly with another piece of stuff as to make no odds. Yet just not the real stuff! She must be grateful to this relative for all he did for her; yet, ah, never so grateful as to the other — who had done nothing!

Providence is kind in great batches! She heard, mounting the steps, the blessed word Transport! “They,” so Mark said: he and she — the family feeling again — were going to get Christopher into the Transport…. By the kindness of God the First Line Transport was the only branch of the services of which Valentine knew anything. Their charwoman, who could not read and write, had a son, a sergeant in a line regiment. “Hooray!” he had written to his mother, “I’ve been off my feed; recommended for the D.C.M. too. So they’re putting me senior N.C.O. of First Line Transport for a rest; the safest soft job of the whole bally front line caboodle!” Valentine had had to read this letter in the scullery amongst black-beetles. Aloud! She had hated reading it as she had hated reading anything that gave details of the front line. But charity begins surely with the char. She had had to. Now she could thank God. The sergeant, in direct, perfectly sincere language, to comfort his mother, had described his daily work, detailing horses and G.S. limber wagons for jobs and superintending the horse-standings. “Why,” one sentence ran, “our O.C. Transport is one of those fishing lunatics. Wherever we go he has a space of grass cleared out and pegged and b ——y hell to the man who walks across it!” There the O.C. practised casting with trout and salmon rods by the hour together. “That’ll show you what a soft job it is!” the sergeant had finished triumphantly.

So that there she, Valentine Wannop, sat on a hard bench against a wall; downright, healthy middle-class — or perhaps upper middle-class — for the Wannops were, if impoverished, yet of ancient family! Over her sensible, moccasined shoes the tide of humanity flowed before her hard bench. There were two commissionaires, the one always benevolent, the other perpetually querulous, in a pulpit on one side of her; on the other, a brown-visaged sort of brother-in-law with bulging eyes, who in his shy efforts to conciliate her was continually trying to thrust into his mouth the crook of his umbrella. As if it had been a knob. She could not, at the moment, imagine why he should want to conciliate her; but she knew she would know in a minute.

For just then she was occupied with a curious pattern; almost mathematically symmetrical. Now she was an English middle-class girl — whose mother had a sufficient income — in blue cloth, a wideawake hat, a black silk tie; without a thought in her head that she shouldn’t have. And with a man who loved her: of crystal purity. Not ten, not five minutes ago, she had been… She could not even remember what she had been! And he had been, he had assuredly appeared a town… No, she could not think the words…. A raging stallion then! If now he should approach her, by the mere movement of a hand along the table, she would retreat.

It was a Godsend; yet it was absurd. Like the weather machine of the old man and the old woman on opposite ends of the stick…. When the old man came out the old woman went in and it would rain; when the old woman came out… It was exactly like that! She hadn’t time to work out the analogy. But it was like that…. In rainy weather the whole world altered. Darkened!… The catgut that turned them slackened… slackened…. But, always, they remained at opposite ends of the stick!

Mark was saying, the umbrella crook hindering his utterance:

“We buy then an annuity of five hundred for your mother….”

It was astonishing, though it spread tranquillity through her, how little this astonished her. It was the merely retarded expected. Mr. Tietjens senior, an honourable man, had promised as much years ago. Her mother, an august genius, was to wear herself out putting, Mr. Tietjens alive, his political views in his paper. He was to make it up to her. He was making it up. In no princely fashion, but adequately, as a gentleman.

Mark Tietjens, bending over, held a piece of paper. A bell-boy came up to him and said: “Mr. Riccardo!” Mark Tietjens said: “No! He’s gone!” He continued:

“Your brother…. Shelved for the moment. But enough to buy a practice, a good practice! When he’s a full- fledged sawbones.” He stopped, he directed upon her his atrabilarian eyes, biting his umbrella handle; he was extremely nervous.

“Now you!” he said. “Two or three hundred. A year of course! The capital absolutely your own….” He paused: “But I warn you! Christopher won’t like it. He’s got his knife into me. I wouldn’t grudge you… oh, any sum!” He waved his hand to indicate an amount boundless in its figures. “I know you keep Christopher straight,” he said. “The only person that could!” He added: “Poor devil!”

She said:

“He’s got his knife into you? Why?”

He answered vaguely:

“Oh, there’s been all this talk…. Untrue, of course.”

She said:

“People have been saying things against you? To him? Perhaps because there’s been delay in settling the estate.”

He said:

“Oh, no! The other way round, in fact!”

“Then they have been saying” she exclaimed, “things against… against me. And him!”

He exclaimed in anguish:

“Oh, but I ask you to believe… I beg you to believe that I believe… you! Miss Wannop!” He added grotesquely: “As pure as dew that lies within Aurora’s sun-tipped…” His eyes stuck out like those of a suffocating fish. He said: “I beg you not on that account to hand the giddy mitten to…” He writhed in his tight double collar. “His wife!” he said… “She’s no good to… for him!… She’s soppily in love with him. But no good…” He very nearly sobbed. “You’re the only…” he said, “I know…”

It came into her head that she was losing too much time in this Salle des Pas Perdus! She would have to take the train home! Five-pence! But what did it matter. Her mother had five hundred a year…. Two hundred and forty times five….

Mark said brightly:

“If now we bought your mother an annuity of five hundred…. You say that’s ample to give Christopher his chop…. And settled on her three… four… I like to be exact… hundred a year.

... The capital of it; with remainder to you…” His interrogative face beamed.