Parade's End

She saw now the whole situation with perfect plainness. She understood Mrs. Duchemin’s:

“You couldn’t expect us, with our official position… to connive…” Edith Ethel had been perfectly right. She couldn’t be expected…. She had worked too hard to appear circumspect and right! You can’t ask people to lay down their whole lives for their friends!… It was only of Tietjens you could ask that! She said – to Mark:

“It’s as if the whole world had conspired… like a carpenter’s vice — to force us…” she was going to say “together….” But he burst in, astonishingly:

“He must have his buttered toast… and his mutton chop… and Rhum St. James!” He said: “Damn it all…. You were made for him…. You can’t blame people for coupling you…. They’re forced to it…. If you hadn’t existed they’d have had to invent you… Like Dante for… who was it?… Beatrice? There are couples like that.”

She said:

“Like a carpenter’s vice…. Pushed together. Irresistibly. Haven’t we resisted?”

His face became panic-stricken; his bulging eyes pushed away towards the pulpit of the two commissionaires. He whispered:

“You won’t… because of my ox’s hoof… desert….”

She said: — she heard Macmaster whispering it hoarsely.

“I ask you to believe that I will never… abandon…”

It was what Macmaster had said. He must have got it from Mrs. Micawber!

Christopher Tietjens — in his shabby khaki, for his wife had spoilt his best uniform — spoke suddenly from behind her back. He had approached her from beyond the pulpit of the two commissionaires and she had been turned towards Mark on his bench:

“Come along! Let’s get out of this!” He was, she asked herself, getting out of this! Towards what?

Like mutes from a funeral — or as if she had been, between the brothers, a prisoner under escort — they walked down steps, half righted towards the exit arch, one and a half righted to face Whitehall. The brothers grunted inaudible but satisfied sounds over her head. They crossed, by the islands, Whitehall, where the ’bus had brushed her skirt. Under an archway —

In a stony, gravelled majestic space the brothers faced each other. Mark said:

“I suppose you won’t shake hands!”

Christopher said:

“No! Why should I?” She herself had cried out to Christopher:

“Oh, do!” (The wireless squares overhead no longer concerned her. Her brother was, no doubt, getting drunk in a bar in Piccadilly…. A surface coarseness!)

Mark said:

“Hadn’t you better? You might get killed! A fellow just getting killed would not like to think he had refused to shake his brother by the hand!”

Christopher had: “Oh… well!”

During her happiness over this hyperborean sentimentality he had gripped her thin upper arm. He had led her past swans — or possibly huts; she never remembered which — to a seat that had over it, or near it, a weeping willow. He had said, gasping, too, like a fish:

“Will you be my mistress to-night? I am going out to-morrow at 8.30 from Waterloo.”

She had answered:

“Yes! Be at such and such a studio just before twelve…. I have to see my brother home…. He will be drunk….” She meant to say: “Oh, my darling, I have wanted you so much….”

She said instead:

“I have arranged the cushions….”

She said to herself:

“Now whatever made me say that? It’s as if I had said: ‘you’ll find the ham in the larder under a plate…’ No tenderness about it….”

She went away, up a cockle-shelled path, between ankle-high railings, crying bitterly. An old tramp, with red weeping eyes and a thin white beard, regarded her curiously from where he lay on the grass. He imagined himself the monarch of that landscape.

“That’s women!” he said with the apparently imbecile enigmaticality of the old and the hardened. “Some do!” He spat into the grass; said: “Ah!” then added: “Some do not!”

VI

HE let himself in at the heavy door; when he closed it behind him, in the darkness, the heaviness of the door sent long surreptitious whisperings up the great stone stairs. These sounds irritated him. If you shut a heavy door on an enclosed space it will push air in front of it and there will be whisperings; the atmosphere of mystery was absurd. He was just a man, returning after a night out…. Two-thirds, say, of a night out! It must be half-past three. But what the night had lacked in length it had made up in fantastic aspects….

He laid his cane down on the invisible oak chest and, through the tangible and velvety darkness that had always in it the chill of the stone of walls and stairs, he felt for the handle of the breakfast-room door.

Three long parallelograms existed: pale glimmerings above, cut two-thirds of the way down by the serrations of chimney pot and roof-shadows! Nine full paces across the heavy piled carpet; then he ought to reach his round- backed chair, by the left-hand window. He reached his round-backed chair by the left-hand window. He sank into it; it fitted exactly his back. He imagined that no man had ever been so tired and that no man had ever been so alone! A small, alive sound existed at the other end of the room; in front of him existed one and a half pale parallelograms. They were the reflection of the windows of the mirror; the sound was no doubt Calton, the cat. Something alive, at any rate! Possibly Sylvia at the other end of the room, waiting for him, to see what he looked like. Most likely! It didn’t matter!

His mind stopped! Sheer weariness!

When it went on again it was saying:

“Naked shingles and surges drear…” and, “On these debatable borders of the world!” He said sharply: “Nonsense!” The one was either Calais beach or Dover sands of the whiskered man: Arnold…. He would be seeing them both within the twenty-four hours…. But no! He was going from Waterloo. Southampton, Havre, therefore!… The other was by that detestable fellow: “the subject of our little monograph!”… What a long time ago!… He saw a pile of shining despatch cases: the inscription “This rack is reserved for…”; a coloured — pink and blue! — photograph of Boulogne sands and the held up squares, the proofs of “our little…” What a long time ago! He heard his own voice saying in the new railway carriage, proudly, clearly, and with male hardness:

“I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of course if a man who’s a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again no talking about it…” His voice — his own voice — came to him as if from the other end of a long-distance telephone. A damn long-distance one! Ten years…

If then a man who’s a man wants to have a woman…. Damn it, he doesn’t! In ten years he had learnt that a Tommie who’s a decent fellow…. His mind said at one and the same moment, the two lines running one over the other like the two subjects of a fugue:

“Some beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury,” and:

“Since when we stand side by side, only hands may meet!”

He said:

“But damn it; damn it again! The beastly fellow was wrong! Our hands didn’t meet…. I don’t believe I’ve shaken hands…. I don’t believe I’ve touched the girl… in my life…. Never once!… Not the hand-shaking sort…. A nod!… A meeting and parting!… English, you know… But yes, she put her arm over my shoulders…. On the bank!… On such short acquaintance! I said to myself then… Well, we’ve made up for it since then. Or no! Not made up!… Atoned…. As’ Sylvia so aptly put it; at that moment mother was dying….”

He, his conscious self, said:

“But it was probably the drunken brother…. You don’t beguile virgins with the broken seals of perjury in