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Ford Madox

Parade’s End

Ford Madox Ford

with an Introduction by

Robert Hampson &

Andrew Purssell

Parade’s End first publishedby Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2013

Published as an ePublication 2013

ISBN 978 1 84870 087 1

Introduction and Notes © Robert Hampson and Andrew Purssell 2013

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General Introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free Introductions and to provide Notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

Keith Carabine

General Adviser

Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury

Introduction

Ford Madox Ford was born on 17 December 1873 in Merton, Surrey, and died on 26 June 1939 at Deauville, France. In between, he became an exemplary literary figure in the community of letters in England, France and North America – the three countries in which he spent his life. In 1908, he founded The English Review, a monthly magazine which published, among many now famous writers, the early work of D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. As his biographer Max Saunders notes, Ford’s editing of The English Review immediately put him ‘at the centre of literary London’. [1] In retrospect, Ford can be seen as an important promoter of literary modernism in pre-First World War Britain. Reflecting this role, Pound described Ford’s editing of the review as ‘the EVENT of 1909–10’ (Kenner, p. 308). Ford moved to Paris in 1922, where he set up another modernist magazine the transatlantic review, which published fiction by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, e. e. cummings and Ernest Hemingway (among others). [2] In that same year, Ford also began Some Do Not . . . , the first in the series of novels that would later be known collectively as Parade’s End.

The rest of Ford’s life was divided between Paris, the South of France and, latterly, the United States, where his reputation and influence during his lifetime were much greater than in Britain. He first visited New York in 1906, and was there almost every year from 1924 to 1930. He also made extended visits to the United States in 1937 and 1938. Although he is now best known as a novelist, he was then also well-known as a poet, and a number of major American poets – including Ezra Pound, Allen Tate and Robert Lowell – have acknowledged a debt to his work. [3] The rediscovery of Ford’s work after the Second World War began in the United States, with a symposium in the Princeton University Library Chronicle in 1948. Parade’s End – which together with The Good Soldier (1915) figured centrally in the late-twentieth-century re-evaluation of Ford’s works – was first published as a single volume there in 1950 (Davenport and Hampson, p. 1).

At home, however, Ford was for a long time one of the most under-rated British novelists of the twentieth century. This neglect was partly because of the amount of work he published – some eighty-one books and over four hundred articles; partly because of a critical tendency to foreground his roles in The English Review and the transatlantic review and view him as an enabler of other authors’ careers rather than as an author in his own right; and partly because of disapproval surrounding his personal life. In 1894 he eloped with his childhood friend, Elsie Martindale, whom he married against her family’s wishes. Initially, they lived together in Kent, but, after some years of marriage, they settled into a pattern of spending time apart. During 1903 Ford seems to have been having an affair with his wife’s older sister, Mary Martindale. In 1909 he left his wife for the novelist Violet Hunt, and a stormy relationship ensued. Ford’s private life had begun to affect his professional one, and the relationship with Hunt (on whom Ford would later partly model the vindictive Sylvia Tietjens in Parade’s End) created a scandal in Britain that would affect his literary reputation there for years to come. [4] During the course of this relationship, Ford also became involved, first, with the unhappily married Brigit Patmore and then, at the end of the war, with a young Australian studying art in London, Stella Bowen (who would later design the dust jackets of several of Ford’s works, including the first English edition of the first part of Parade’s End, Some Do Not . . .). In 1919 he moved into a cottage in Sussex with Stella, and three years later they both moved to France, where they lived as part of an expatriate bohemian set. It was here that Ford began a relationship with the promising but unknown author Ella Williams – whom Ford persuaded to change her name to Jean Rhys. Ford encouraged her writing, with ‘Vienne’, her first published story, appearing in the transatlantic review, and wrote an enthusiastic introduction to The Left Bank (1927), a collection of her stories. (Ford also seems to have dictated the third part of Parade’s End, A Man Could Stand Up –, to her.) Rhys’s debut novel Quartet (1928), based on her love-affair with Ford, presents a thinly-veiled, unflattering portrait of him in the figure of H. J. Heidler. Both The Good Soldier and Parade’s End grew out of and reflect this lived experience of unhappy marriages and fraught love-affairs.

1. War and its Aftermath

Not only is Parade’s End one of the best books about the First World War (this is a particularly crowded field: according to one estimate there were by 1930 already some 690 books about the war), but it is also perhaps the great British war novel. It was published as three linked novels, Some Do Not . . . (1924), No More Parades (1925) and A Man Could Stand Up – (1926); Ford then wrote a fourth volume, The Last Post (1928), which moves into the post-war period and gathers together all of the loose ends as part of a narrative of post-war reconstruction. The central character in the series, Christopher Tietjens, is a composite figure based partly on Ford’s late friend Arthur Marwood, a Yorkshire Tory who had helped him found The English Review; and partly on Ford himself, whose physical appearance and war service strongly echo Tietjens’s own. Ford spent the early part of the war writing propaganda for the British government. In this role he published Between St Dennis and St George (1915) and When Blood is Their Argument (1915). He had left his wife for Violet Hunt in 1909, but, by 1915, it had become clear that his relationship with Hunt was also coming to an end. He enlisted in July 1915, a few months after the publication of The Good Soldier, and got a commission in the Welch Regiment (Special Reserve) in August. In June 1916, he prepared to leave for France and arrived in Rouen in July.

This was, however (and unfortunately for Ford), also the beginning of the Battle of the Somme. Sent to the Ninth Battalion near Bécourt Wood, Ford was blown up by a near miss and, as a result of this experience, lost his memory for almost thirty-six hours. He clearly suffered from ‘shell-shock’ afterwards, and was sent to Menton in the South of France to recover (an experience that is given fictional shape in Some Do Not . . . when Tietjens – fresh from the Front, his memory obliterated by an exploding shell – is suspected by his wife of ‘acting the hypochondriac or merely lying to obtain sympathy or extended sick leave’). By early 1917 he was back in Rouen running a Canadian labour battalion and then sent on to Abbeville to command prisoners of war (an experience echoed in Tietjens’s final command in A Man Could Stand Up – ). In mid-March he was invalided home and given light duties as a captain attached to the 23rd King’s Liverpool Regiment. He changed his name from Hueffer to Ford in June 1919, having gone through his war-service with an obviously German surname (Some Do Not . . . makes telling reference to those ‘with foreign names, accents or antecedents’).

Parade’s End powerfully represents not only the psychological damage wrought by the war upon the combatants, but also its terrible physical effects. There is, for example, the account of the death of O Nine Morgan in No More Parades: ‘The face below him grinned at the roof – the half face! The nose was there, half the mouth with the teeth showing in the firelight . . . It was extraordinary how defined the peaked nose and the serrated teeth were in that mess’. At the same time, in setting its glimpses of life in London against the seemingly endless parade of explosions, gassings and collapsed trenches at the Front, the novel reflects a gap between how the war was imagined at ‘home’ and its reality on the ground, a gap that Parade’s End – with its by turns impressionistic, by turns graphic representation of the effects of war on the bodies of the men and women fighting it – sets out to close. This process is emblematised in Tietjens’s first-hand experience of the death of O Nine Morgan and in his memory of the dead nurse, Beatrice Carmichael, in Some Do Not . . . : ‘Then a lot of people carried pieces of a nurse down the hut; the Germans’ bombs had done that of course . . . Her name was Beatrice Carmichael’. The connection of a name to a body (or what little of it remains) here contrasts pointedly with Valentine’s abstract ‘patterned deaths’, when, in Some Do Not . . . , she is pictured at the War Office ‘looking at the lists of casualties that hung beneath a cheaply green-stained deal shelter against the wall’. The horrendous physical effects of weaponry, the traumas and human cost of the war are reduced in this bureaucratic tabulation of losses into ‘sheets of paper . . . laterally striped with little serrated lines’. The novel’s representations of devastating physical damage, however, though graphic, are not gratuitous; one of Ford’s stated aims for Parade’s End, after all, was that it ‘should have for its purpose the obviating of all future wars’ (Meixner, p. 213).

This scene at the War Office is reversed in No More Parades, where the emphasis is not on civilians such as Valentine wondering about what is happening at the Front, but on the soldiers wondering about what is happening at home. One of the most striking characteristics of Ford’s novel is its presentation of a dual or multiple consciousness, by which the characters can be involved in their day-to-day duties at the Front and simultaneously engaged in the complexities of their private lives at home. The intolerable burden of these multiple strains, however, forces more than one character to the edge of madness. (This is suggested, for example, by the voice of the German miner which Tietjens hears, or – as one of the first signs of ‘shell-shock’ – perhaps only imagines hearing – below his trench during a night-time bombardment.) At the same time, as in other accounts of the war (such as Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That [1929] and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer [1930]), there is an additional turn of the screw for these serving soldiers from a sense of the incompetence and indifference of the politicians and senior officers. Tietjens reflects on how ‘All these men’ are ‘given into the hands of the most cynically carefree intriguers’, and how ‘all these agonies’ are ‘mere occasions for picturesque phrases to be put into politicians’ speeches without heart or even intelligence’. This produces the sense of a war conducted not only on an unprecedented industrial scale, but impersonally, and at a distance. More than that, however, it contrasts the suffering and sacrifice of the soldiers fighting the war with the carelessness and irresponsibility of those running it.

2. From Pre-Raphaelitism to Impressionism

Ford began life as Ford Hermann Hueffer. His parents were the German music journalist Franz Hueffer and Catherine Madox Brown, the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Ford Madox Brown. Christina Rossetti, the poet, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the founders (and for many the figurehead) of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, were his aunt and uncle. Although his attitude towards it shifted throughout his life, Ford’s ‘Pre-Raphaelite childhood’ would have a lasting impact on his sense of himself and on the value he placed on art. It certainly encouraged his early engagement in writing. He published his first book when he was eighteen, a children’s story called The Brown Owl, which came out in 1891 with illustrations by his grandfather Ford Madox Brown. He published his first novel, The Shifting of the Fire, in 1892. Ford’s early poetry, including The Questions at the Well (1893) and Poems for Pictures (1900), was also indebted to Pre-Raphaelitism. Following on from his father Franz, who earlier had written an introduction for the German edition of Rossetti’s poems, Ford became, over the turn of the twentieth century, one of the chief reviewers of Pre-Raphaelitism. He wrote a biography of Ford Madox Brown (1896), a critical study of the Brotherhood (1907) and, like Macmaster in Some Do Not . . . , a monograph on Rossetti (1902).

Parade’s End contains other clues to Ford’s Pre-Raphaelite heritage and influences. For example, in her physical characteristics and sexual behaviour Sylvia Tietjens bears a striking resemblance to Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1868–73), the flame-haired seductress of Judaic myth, whom Ford described as the ‘witch-wife of Adam’ (Rossetti, p. 140), while Edith Ethel, in her dark-blue dress and her necklace of polished amber, appears to Macmaster as the ‘incarnation of Pre-Raphaelite womanhood’ (Bickley, p. 70). Sylvia is the culmination of Ford’s interest in Rossetti’s destructive femme fatale, but this pre-Raphaelite world is far removed from the outspoken Valentine Wannop and the struggle for women’s suffrage which provides the social and political backdrop in Some Do Not . . . Meanwhile Tietjens’s ‘gentlemanly’ views on extra-marital love, from which the title of that first volume derives – ‘We’re the sort that . . . do not!’ – are contrasted with the self-gratification and sensuality of Rossetti, ‘that obese, oily man’. [5] Conversely, Tietjens’s chivalric code derives from the same idealised, mythic English past as that which the Brotherhood – with its emphasis on medieval revivalism – was exploring in its art. As all of this suggests, Ford had a complicated relationship with Pre-Raphaelitism. On the one hand, he was conscious of being the heir to the Pre-Raphaelites. Violet Hunt, for her part, was the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Alfred Hunt. Yet on the other, as the editor of The English Review, which had done much to promote the new literary avant-garde, he was keen to push away from the Victorianism that the Pre-Raphaelites represented and associate more with the modernism of Henry James, Ezra Pound and, above all, Joseph Conrad. As Ford later put it: ‘But for him [Conrad] I should have been a continuation of DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI’ (Letters, p. 127).

Ford met Conrad in September 1898. Conrad, then almost forty-one, was a critically acclaimed but, in popular terms, unsuccessful novelist. He had published Almayer’s Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Tales of Unrest (1897) and The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897; published in the United States as The Children of the Sea) – and was struggling with The Rescue, the third of his trilogy of novels about Tom Lingard. Ford was working on a novel of Kentish smugglers and Caribbean pirates – at that point called ‘Seraphina’ – which he seems to have read to Conrad at Conrad’s home in Kent, shortly after they met. Conrad’s criticisms of the novel led to the decision to work together on rewriting it, and ‘Seraphina’ was rewritten and published as Romance: A Novel in 1903. For much of the next decade, Conrad and Ford were in close (and often daily) contact. They collaborated on two further novels, The Inheritors (1901) and The Nature of a Crime (1909). The Inheritors, which was largely Ford’s work, was his version of ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899), then being serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine. Conrad’s powerful narrative based on his experiences in the Belgian Congo was rewritten by Ford as an odd hybrid of roman à clef, political satire and Wellsian science fiction. Both Ford and Conrad knew H. G. Wells, who was a neighbour in Kent, and were familiar with his popular ‘scientific romances’. The plot of The Inheritors, which centres on the taking over of the British government by people from the Fourth Dimension, carries obvious echoes of Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). Through this transparent allegory, it attacked the materialistic spirit of the new age, satirised individual contemporary politicians and authors, and criticised European imperialism in Africa. The Nature of a Crime, which was almost entirely Ford’s work, is a short first-person narrative in the form of a series of letters, written by a man to the married woman whom he has silently loved, and whose defrauding of his ward of his fortune is about to be discovered. Romance, their only genuine collaboration, is also generally regarded as the most interesting of the three works they published jointly.

Ford played a central role in the modern movement from the 1890s, when he began collaborating with Conrad, to his death in 1939, on the eve of yet another world war. According to Ford, when they met, he and Conrad shared a common interest in Flaubert and Maupassant – and a common critical attitude towards the conventional English novel, which Ford felt was complacently ‘accepted by the whole world – and by the whole world more than by England’ (The English Novel, p. 105). From Flaubert they took over, as James Joyce also did, the idea of impersonal, objective narration, namely ‘the doctrine of the novelist as Creator who should have a Creator’s aloofness, rendering the world as he sees it, uttering no comments, falsifying no issues’ (ibid., p. 123). They also took over from Flaubert a concern with ‘selection’, with the use of concrete particulars, and with ‘le mot juste’. In addition, they added to the basic tenets of Flaubertian realism a more up-to-date awareness of impressionism. The Impressionists in painting sought a manner of representation that more nearly approached the physical process of seeing, and Conrad and Ford (according to Ford’s account) sought a similar manner of representation in fiction, where the focus fell not on the experience but rather on the process of experiencing. In particular, in Ford’s classic modernist novel The Good Soldier or in Conrad’s works using Marlow as narrator (such as ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Lord Jim [1900]), the emphasis falls on the act of narrating and the process of remembering.

3. Writing Parade’s End

Ford’s particular contributions to the modernist novel included the suppression of the omniscient author, the multiplicity of narrative ‘points of view’, what he called ‘progression of effect’, and, above all, dislocations of chronology and time-shift (the latter a striking feature of Conrad’s 1904 novel Nostromo, in which Ford also had a hand). With its array of ‘modern’ fictional devices, Parade’s End is perhaps the supreme (and certainly the most sustained) example of Ford’s modernism. Its modernism, however, derives not just from its deployment of experimental narrative techniques, but also from its overarching concern with the collapse of Western culture (‘This civilisation . . . was doomed!’ [Some Do Not . . . , p. 192]), a common preoccupation of many of the leading experimental writers of the 1920s – including D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Virginia Woolf. In Parade’s End the war is a symptom and the culmination, rather than the cause, of this cultural collapse. Though not as progressive, perhaps, as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Parade’s End is one of the central modernist novels of the 1920s, comparable in scope to Marcel Proust’s voluminous À la recherche du temps perdu (1909–27; Remembrance of Things Past), for which Ford was considered as a translator before Proust’s death in 1922. Certainly, Ford seems to have conceived Parade’s End as a comparable project. In his memoir It was the Nightingale, he later claimed that Proust’s death ‘made it certain that I should again take up a serious pen’ (p. 179).

Ford began work on Some Do Not . . . at Cap Ferrat, France, sometime between 20 December 1922 and April 1923, and finished it (according to the date on the manuscript) on 22 September 1923, in Tarascon, Provence. It was published in April 1924. Whereas Ford’s earlier war novel The Good Soldier had been accused of ‘denigrating the moral fibre of the military’ (it was released in 1915, when hostilities still had three years to run), [6] Some Do Not . . . received generally favourable reviews, and these were used to generate sales of subsequent volumes. Ford went to work on the second novel, No More Parades, in October 1924. Much of it was written at Guermantes, an hour by train from Paris, where he had moved at the suggestion of Gertrude Stein. He completed it sometime between late March and late May 1925, and dedicated it to William Bird, who had published his 1923 novel Women and Men and had provided him with offices in which to edit the transatlantic review. On its publication in late 1925 reviewers favourably compared it to Dostoyevsky, Joyce and Proust. The third volume, A Man Could Stand Up –, was begun in Toulon in January 1926, and (underlining the rate at which Ford often wrote) finished sometime in mid-May. It was published in early October 1926. Like Some Do Not . . . and No More Parades, it was generally well received by critics in both Britain and the United States, though it did not sell as well as the previous two volumes. [7] The Last Post, which he began after his mother’s funeral in June 1927 and finished in September of that year as he crossed the Atlantic to Montreal, was published in 1928 and sold particularly well in America – over 50,000 copies by June of that year (MacShane, p. 202). The sequence was known collectively as the ‘Tietjens Saga’ until, in a letter to his agent Eric Pinker from 17 August 1930, Ford suggested the title ‘Parade’s End’ as an alternative (Letters, p.197). It was first issued as an omnibus in 1950, by the American publishers Knopf.

Graham Greene famously omitted The Last Post from the Bodley Head edition of Ford’s work in 1963, and ever since there has been a critical debate about whether Parade’s End is a tetralogy or a trilogy, with The Last Post a belated sequel; and whether the final volume actually damages the series by tying up too neatly its various loose ends. (Greene even goes so far as to blame The Last Post for ‘delay[ing] a full critical appreciation of Parade’s End’.) [8] Justifying this decision, Greene cites a letter from Ford to his agent, Eric Pinker, about a possible collected edition of his works, in which he expressed a strong ‘wish to omit The Last Post from the edition’: ‘I do not like the book and have never liked it and always intended the series to end with A Man Could Stand Up – .’ Ford’s intentions are, however, nothing if not uncertain; in the dedicatory letter to A Man Could Stand Up – , he announces that novel as ‘the third and penultimate’ book in the series, which seems to indicate that he saw The Last Post as an integral part of the ‘Tietjens Saga’ (Meixner, p. 217). One possible source of disappointment with The Last Post is that it is less about Tietjens (he is off-stage for much of the novel, with his brother Mark, paralysed after a stroke, providing the focal point of the narrative) than about a weighing of death and new life, loss and regeneration, as part of the process of post-war reconstruction – much as Parade’s End as a whole can be seen as taking part in this process of reconstruction as one in a long line of novels (and also of memoirs, poems and plays) to emerge from and reflect upon the war. The Last Post is included in the current edition to allow the reader to make up their own minds.

Each volume of the novel focuses primarily on the events of an amazingly brief period of time. Some Do Not . . . , for example, is divided into two parts: the first part follows the events of a single weekend (from Friday to Sunday) in June 1912; the second part jumps five years to August 1917 and follows the events of an afternoon and evening of a single day in London. No More Parades is even more compressed: the entire narrative covers two days, 15 to 17 January 1918, the action being divided between a base depot on the Western Front and a hotel room in Rouen. A Man Could Stand Up – takes even smaller slices of time: the first two parts cover the events of one and a quarter hours of April 1918; the third part deals with a few hours on the morning of Armistice Day, 11 November 1918; Part 4 deals with a few hours in the evening of the same day. At the same time, although each volume focuses on such a restricted period of time, the events included in each volume actually cover a much larger time-scale. Ford achieves this through the device of the time-shift, which he developed with Conrad. Ford makes particularly brilliant use of this device in Some Do Not . . . . This first volume is more diffuse than the subsequent volumes partly because it has an expositional function: it has to establish various important characters and their relations to each other. Ford does this economically through a dazzling use of flashbacks and individual memory. Thus, although the primary events of the novel cover only three or four days, and though those three or four days are further reduced to a few very elaborate scenes, Ford manages to compress into that short span the significant events of the preceding ten years, to supply a wider context and the various aspects of the affair which is his subject.

Consider, for example, the opening sentence of Some Do Not . . . . The novel begins with two young men, Tietjens and Macmaster, on a train to Rye:

The two young men – they were of the English public official class – sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage.

Hugh Kenner (Gnomen, p. 150) has suggested that this ‘perfectly appointed railway carriage’ represents the Edwardian world that was ‘figuratively wrecked at Sarajevo’ (the war began with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke and heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Ferdinand, on 28 June 1914). We might wish to focus, however, on that other phrase, ‘the English public official class’. Both Tietjens and Macmaster are civil servants, but, almost immediately, the novel starts to differentiate between them. First, Macmaster and Tietjens are distinguished as Whig and Tory respectively. Then their actual class difference is gradually and carefully delineated. Macmaster, the ‘son of a grocer in Cupar or a railway porter in Edinburgh’, comes from an impoverished Scottish background: ‘as he was very properly reticent as to his ancestry . . . you didn’t, even mentally, make enquiries’; Tietjens, meanwhile, is ‘the youngest son of a Yorkshire country gentleman’, and belongs to a class to which ‘things would come . . . as they do in England’. The contrasting careers of these two young men provide the structure for this first volume: Macmaster rises as Tietjens – despite this presumption of class – steadily falls. But their careers are also more subtly interconnected: Macmaster becomes involved in an adulterous relationship with Mrs Duchemin, but both escape social criticism; Tietjens, on the other hand, although completely innocent, is successively suspected of having sexual relationships with a bookmaker’s secretary, with Mrs Duchemin and with Valentine Wannop (with whom he is accused of having a child) – and his reputation is completely ruined. Indeed, Some Do Not . . . is as much a ‘Condition of England’ novel as it is a novel about the war. As well as charting the rise of the ‘New Woman’ and of political movements such as the suffragettes, it also charts through Tietjens the shifts in the English class system, in particular the demise of the upper classes. Tietjens’s inflexible idea of himself as a ‘gentleman’ – the ‘last’ English Tory! – sees him raising a son who may not be his own, and unwilling to divorce the perennially adulterous Sylvia (‘a man who’s a gentleman suffers . . . the consequences’). One of the novel’s many ironies is that, in keeping to his gentlemanly principles – for example by taking Sylvia’s numerous infidelities on as his own – Tietjens actually invites scandal upon himself, and with it, being seen as ‘ungentlemanly’: ‘he preferred it to be thought that he was the rip, not his wife the strumpet. That was normal . . . the preference of the English gentleman!’. Tietjens is, from the start, presented as a social anachronism, unlike the adaptable and upwardly mobile Macmaster.

One of the most striking features in Some Do Not . . . is its handling of time-shifts. From the conversation in the railway carriage between Macmaster and Tietjens, which occupies the first chapter of the novel, Ford develops the narrative through a rapid series of recalled short scenes: Tietjens asking his mother for financial aid for Macmaster; Tietjens talking to his father about his wife’s running off with another man, and so on. In other words, the narrative moves backwards from the present moment in the railway carriage to outline their past history through following the movements of each character’s consciousness – and, in particular, their individual memory. This produces a fragmentation of the narrative as these internal time-shifts, operating through the movements of consciousness of the character, are accompanied by external time-shifts, such as the huge narrative jumps which take place between chapters. For example, Chapter 2 takes us, without explanation, from the railway carriage to a discussion between another group of characters at a spa at Lobscheid, in the ‘pine woods of the Taunus’. Gradually we realise that Mrs Satterthwaite is Tietjens’s mother-in-law and that Tietjens’s wife Sylvia is with her. The third chapter returns us to Tietjens and Macmaster – but considerably later on the Friday evening – and we gradually piece together that Tietjens and Macmaster have been involved in a game of golf, which was interrupted by a group of suffragettes – of which it later becomes clear Valentine was one – demonstrating against a cabinet minister who was also golfing.

Another feature of Ford’s handling of the time-shift (and of time generally) is the way in which he repeatedly places the reader in the middle of a scene (or of a sequence of events) and then obliges us to work to fill out what is missing. We have seen this already with the start of the novel, but a more striking example is this third chapter, where we are faced with incomprehensible references to ‘women’ being brought up in front of a magistrate, to a policeman whom Tietjens has ‘knocked down’, but with no hint as to how these details are connected. Literary critics call this delayed decoding.

A perfect example occurs at the start of No More Parades:

When you came in the space was desultory, rectangular, warm after the drip of the winter night, and transfused with a brown-orange dust that was light. It was shaped like the house a child draws. Three groups of brown limbs spotted with brass took dim highlights from shafts that came from a bucket pierced with holes, filled with incandescent coke, and covered in with a sheet of iron in the shape of a funnel. Two men, as if hierarchically smaller, crouched on the floor beside the brazier; four, two at each end of the hut, drooped over tables in attitudes of extreme indifference. From the eaves above the parallelogram of black that was the doorway fell intermittent drippings of collected moisture, persistent, with glasslike intervals of musical sound. The two men squatting on their heels over the brazier – they had been miners – began to talk in a low sing-song of dialect, hardly audible. It went on and on, monotonously, without animation. It was as if one told the other long, long, stories to which his companion manifested his comprehension or sympathy with animal grunts . . .

There is a certain enigmatic, riddling quality to this: the precisely described shapes and colours are presented to us without any clue as to the nature of what is being described. It is only retrospectively that we realise that what is being described is a scene of soldiers in a dug-out – and that the estrangement practised here can be seen as a device to convey the unnaturalness of the experience described.

This is very different from the opening of another British war novel, Her Privates We (1930), written by Frederic Manning. Manning enlisted at the start of the war, and Her Privates We is fictionalised autobiography (initial copies were published under Manning’s regimental number ‘Private 19022’). It offers a detailed account of the Somme offensive of 1916 through the experiences of its protagonist, Private Bourne. The opening paragraph makes its generic identity clear: what we have is documentary realism and a clearly fictional mode:

The darkness was increasing rapidly, as the whole sky had clouded, and threatened thunder. There was still some desultory shelling. When the relief had taken over from them, they set off to return to their original line as best they could. Bourne, who was beaten to the wide, gradually dropped behind, and in trying to keep the others in sight missed his footing and fell into a shell-hole. By the time he had picked himself up again the rest of the party had vanished; and, uncertain of his direction, he stumbled on alone. He neither hurried nor slackened his pace; he was light-headed, almost exalted, and driven only by the desire to find an end. Somewhere, eventually, he would sleep. He almost fell into the wrecked trench, and after a moment’s hesitation turned left, caring little where it led him. The world seemed extraordinarily empty of men, though he knew the ground was alive with them. He was breathing with difficulty, his mouth and throat seemed to be cracking with dryness, and his water-bottle was empty. Coming to a dug-out, he groped his way down, feeling for the steps with his feet; a piece of Wilson canvas, hung across the passage but twisted aside, rasped his cheek; and a few steps lower his face was enveloped suddenly in the musty folds of a blanket. The dug-out was empty. For the moment he collapsed there, indifferent to everything. Then with shaking hands he felt for his cigarettes, and putting one between his lips struck a match. The light revealed a candle-end stuck by its own grease to the oval lid of a tobacco-tin, and he lit it; it was scarcely thicker than a shilling, but it would last his time. He would finish his cigarette, and then move on to find his company. [Manning, pp. 1–2]

We have an omniscient, third-person narrator, who describes Bourne from outside (‘with shaking hands he felt for his cigarettes’) but also has access to his thoughts, feelings, inner experiences. Indeed, although we have this external narrator, the whole paragraph stays close to Bourne’s mental and physical state: for example, ‘he was light-headed, almost exalted, and driven only by the desire to find an end’. This close attention to Bourne’s interior state is framed by brief descriptions that serve to suggest an external world, which also establishes the time of day: ‘The darkness was increasing rapidly, as the whole sky had clouded, and threatened thunder.’ Through Bourne’s movements, the paragraph traces a landscape of ‘shell-hole’, ‘trench’ and ‘dug-out’, and ends with a brief sketching of the dug-out through references to the ‘steps’ down, the ‘piece of Wilson canvas’, ‘the musty folds of a blanket’ and the ‘candle-end stuck by its own grease to the oval lid of a tobacco-tin’. Although both the darkening sky and the interior of the dug-out are clearly the perceptions of Bourne, they are simply presented as observed facts. There is no engagement with the process of perception; there is no problematising of perceptual data – as we see in Ford. Everything is described in a matter-of-fact way. The references assume the reader’s familiarity with, for example, ‘Wilson canvas’, and, by doing so, serve to naturalise what is being described – and to make it more acceptable.

The passage from No More Parades works quite differently. Like the novel it introduces, it approaches its subject obliquely and makes immediate demands on the reader. The first difficulty is that word ‘desultory’. Manning uses it also when he referred to ‘some desultory shelling’ (a phrase which recurs throughout Her Privates We), where the sense of ‘irregular’ or ‘non-methodical’ is easily understood. When applied to ‘space’, it is strangely abstract – it is much easier to grasp ‘rectangular’ and ‘warm’. The warmth is precisely what would be noticed by someone stepping in out of the damp winter night: it thus implies the bodily presence of the observer and licenses the use of the other senses (most particularly hearing) in the paragraph that follows. ‘Rectangular’ is a less obvious word to use than ‘square’: its geometrical precision links up with the word ‘parallelogram’ later, and the two together suggest a painterly process of abstraction being applied to the sense impressions with which the passage is concerned. Indeed, the passage is concerned not just with conveying certain sense impressions but also with conveying those impressions through a self-conscious engagement with the language of the visual arts.

Consider, for example, the references to ‘dim highlights’, which is very much a visual artist’s attention to light and shade, and the comparison with ‘the house a child draws’. We all know exactly what this means, but we might also reflect that the child’s drawing is itself stylised, abstract and non-realistic. The comparison, in other words, alerts us to non-realistic modes of representation. In this context, we might consider the description of the two men ‘as if hierarchically smaller’. Again, the reference is to non-realistic modes of representation, as, for example, in Egyptian art or early Italian painting, where the pictorial space is not the illusionistic space of realist art but is governed by other principles, so that the size of figures is not determined by perspective but rather by their importance in some social or religious hierarchy. Thus, the paragraph presents us with an intensely visual experience, but it also presents that experience in such a way as to engage us in the problematics of the representation of the visual. Where Manning presents empirical data and presents it non-problematically, Ford engages more closely with both the process of perception and the process of representation. As in life, we have the time-lag between receiving the sense-impression and decoding it, and we have an interrogation of the different ways in which sense-data might be represented. This suggests obvious continuities between the modernist fiction of Ford and the concerns of painters like the Impressionists. Modernist art is concerned with perception, and with relations between perception and representation, and Parade’s End, as we have seen, is an exemplary modernist text.

Its modernism and reputation as a war novel aside, Parade’s End is also every bit as compelling as more popular contemporary works such as John Galsworthy’s first four Forsyte novels (1906–21), published as The Forsyte Saga (1922), or even more modern tetralogies such as John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels (1960–90). Ford, like Conrad, wanted his reader to collaborate in the production of the novel’s meaning, and Parade’s End is undoubtedly a ‘difficult’ work; yet it is also a richly rewarding one.

Robert Hampson

Andrew Purssell

Notes

1. Saunders, p. 242. For full details of this and other references turn to the Bibliography at the end of this Introduction. Whenever possible the surname and page number will follow in parentheses after the quotation.

2. Hemingway and Basil Bunting were Ford’s assistants on the transatlantic review. Perhaps in return for these services, Ford gave Hemingway the manuscript of the second volume of Parade’s End, No More Parades.

3. Ford’s Collected Poems were published by Oxford University Press in New York in 1936.

4. In 1910, Ford’s wife, Elsie, rather than agree to a divorce, sued for ‘Restitution of Conjugal Rights’, and the trial was widely publicised. The following year, after the Daily Mail and the magazine The Throne referred to Violet Hunt as ‘Mrs Ford Madox Hueffer’, Elsie sued both periodicals: the Daily Mail apologised; The Throne libel case was a major scandal.

5. However, Tietjens’s statement (‘I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it’) has to be set against his reason for marrying Sylvia (he believes he got her pregnant in a railway-carriage sexual encounter) and his significant qualification: ‘Of course if a man who’s a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again no talking about it.’

6. Saunders (ed.), p. lviii

7. According to Ford’s account in It was the Nightingale, Some Do Not . . . sold ‘like hot cakes’ (p. 326). No More Parades, meanwhile, went through no fewer than five reprints before the end of 1926, when A Man Could Stand Up – was published.

8. Greene, p. 5

Bibliography

Primary Texts

Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work, Longmans Green and Co., London, 1896

Ford Madox Hueffer, Rossetti: A Critical Essay on His Art, Duckworth, London, 1902

Ford Madox Hueffer, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: A Critical Monograph, Duckworth, London, 1907

Ford Madox Ford, The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad, Constable and Co., London, 1930

Ford Madox Ford, It was the Nightingale, Heinemann, London, 1934

Frederic Manning, Her Privates We, Peter Davies, London, 1930

Secondary Texts

Pamela Bickley, ‘Ford and Pre-Raphaelitism’, in Tony Davenport and Robert Hampson (eds), Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, Vol. 1, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2002, pp. 59–78

Tony Davenport and Robert Hampson, Introduction to Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal, International Ford Madox Ford Studies, Vol. 1, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2002, pp. 1–4

Graham Greene, Introduction to Parade’s End, Bodley Head, London, 1963, pp. 5–8

Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, Faber, London, 1951

Hugh Kenner, Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature, McDowell Obolensky, New York, 1958

Richard M. Ludwig (ed.), Letters of Ford Madox Ford, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1965

Frank MacShane, The Life and Work of Ford Madox Ford, Horizon Press, New York, 1965

John A. Meixner, Ford Madox Ford’s Novels: A Critical Study, Minnesota, Minneapolis University Press, 1962

Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996

Max Saunders (ed.), Introduction to Some Do Not . . . , Carcanet, Manchester, 2010, pp. xiii–lxvi

Some Do Not . . .

Part One

Chapter 1

The two young men – they were of the English public official class – sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable varnish; the train ran as smoothly – Tietjens remembered thinking – as British gilt-edged securities. It travelled fast; yet had it swayed or jolted over the rail joints, except at the curve before Tonbridge or over the points at Ashford where these eccentricities are expected and allowed for, Macmaster, Tietjens felt certain, would have written to the company. Perhaps he would even have written to The Times.

Their class administered the world, not merely the newly created Imperial Department of Statistics under Sir Reginald Ingleby. If they saw policemen misbehave, railway porters lack civility, an insufficiency of street lamps, defects in public services or in foreign countries, they saw to it, either with nonchalant Balliol voices or with letters to The Times, asking in regretful indignation: ‘Has the British This or That come to this?’ Or they wrote, in the serious reviews of which so many still survived, articles taking under their care, manners, the Arts, diplomacy, inter-Imperial trade, or the personal reputations of deceased statesmen and men of letters.

Macmaster, that is to say, would do all that: of himself Tietjens was not so certain. There sat Macmaster; smallish; Whig; with a trimmed, pointed black beard, such as a smallish man might wear to enhance his already germinated distinction; black hair of a stubborn fibre, drilled down with hard metal brushes; a sharp nose; strong, level teeth; a white, butterfly collar of the smoothness of porcelain; a tie confined by a gold ring, steel-blue speckled with black – to match his eyes, as Tietjens knew.

Tietjens, on the other hand, could not remember what coloured tie he had on. He had taken a cab from the office to their rooms, had got himself into a loose, tailored coat and trousers, and a soft shirt, had packed, quickly, but still methodically, a great number of things in an immense two-handled kit-bag, which you could throw into a guard’s van if need be. He disliked letting that ‘man’ touch his things; he had disliked letting his wife’s maid pack for him. He even disliked letting porters carry his kit-bag. He was a Tory – and as he disliked changing his clothes, there he sat, on the journey, already in large, brown, hugely welted and nailed golf boots, leaning forward on the edge of the cushion, his legs apart, on each knee an immense white hand – and thinking vaguely.

Macmaster, on the other hand, was leaning back, reading some small, unbound printed sheets, rather stiff, frowning a little. Tietjens knew that this was, for Macmaster, an impressive moment. He was correcting the proofs of his first book.

To this affair, as Tietjens knew, there attached themselves many fine shades. If, for instance, you had asked Macmaster whether he were a writer, he would have replied with the merest suggestion of a deprecatory shrug.

‘No, dear lady!’ for of course no man would ask the question of anyone so obviously a man of the world. And he would continue with a smile: ‘Nothing so fine! A mere trifle at odd moments. A critic, perhaps. Yes! A little of a critic.’

Nevertheless Macmaster moved in drawing-rooms that, with long curtains, blue china plates, large-patterned wallpapers and large, quiet mirrors, sheltered the long-haired of the Arts. And, as near as possible to the dear ladies who gave the At Homes, Macmaster could keep up the talk – a little magisterially. He liked to be listened to with respect when he spoke of Botticelli, Rossetti, and those early Italian artists whom he called ‘The Primitives’. Tietjens had seen him there. And he didn’t disapprove.

For, if they weren’t, these gatherings, Society, they formed a stage on the long and careful road to a career in a first-class Government office. And, utterly careless as Tietjens imagined himself of careers or offices, he was, if sardonically, quite sympathetic towards his friend’s ambitiousnesses. It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.

The youngest son of a Yorkshire country gentleman, Tietjens himself was entitled to the best – the best that first-class public offices and first-class people could afford. He was without ambition, but these things would come to him as they do in England. So he could afford to be negligent of his attire, of the company he kept, of the opinions he uttered. He had a little private income under his mother’s settlement; a little income from the Imperial Department of Statistics; he had married a woman of means, and he was, in the Tory manner, sufficiently a master of flouts and jeers to be listened to when he spoke. He was twenty-six; but, very big, in a fair, untidy, Yorkshire way, he carried more weight than his age warranted. His chief, Sir Reginald Ingleby, when Tietjens chose to talk of public tendencies which influenced statistics, would listen with attention. Sometimes Sir Reginald would say: ‘You’re a perfect encyclopaedia of exact material knowledge, Tietjens,’ and Tietjens thought that that was his due, and he would accept the tribute in silence.

At a word from Sir Reginald, Macmaster, on the other hand, would murmur: ‘You’re very good, Sir Reginald!’ and Tietjens thought that perfectly proper.

Macmaster was a little the senior in the service, as he was probably a little the senior in age. For, as to his roommate’s years, or as to his exact origins, there was a certain blank in Tietjens’ knowledge. Macmaster was obviously Scotch by birth, and you accepted him as what was called a son of the manse. No doubt he was really the son of a grocer in Cupar or a railway porter in Edinburgh. It does not matter with the Scotch, and as he was very properly reticent as to his ancestry, having accepted him, you didn’t, even mentally, make enquiries.

Tietjens always had accepted Macmaster – at Clifton, at Cambridge, in Chancery Lane and in their rooms at Gray’s Inn. So for Macmaster he had a very deep affection – even a gratitude. And Macmaster might be considered as returning these feelings. Certainly he had always done his best to be of service to Tietjens. Already at the Treasury and attached as private secretary to Sir Reginald Ingleby, whilst Tietjens was still at Cambridge, Macmaster had brought to the notice of Sir Reginald Tietjens’ many great natural gifts, and Sir Reginald, being on the look-out for young men for his ewe lamb, his newly founded department, had very readily accepted Tietjens as his third in command. On the other hand, it had been Tietjens’ father who had recommended Macmaster to the notice of Sir Thomas Block at the Treasury itself. And, indeed, the Tietjens family had provided a little money – that was Tietjens’ mother really – to get Macmaster through Cambridge and install him in Town. He had repaid the small sum – paying it partly by finding room in his chambers for Tietjens when in turn he came to Town.

With a Scots young man such a position had been perfectly possible. Tietjens had been able to go to his fair, ample, saintly mother in her morning-room and say: ‘Look here, mother, that fellow Macmaster! He’ll need a little money to get through the University,’ and his mother would answer: ‘Yes, my dear. How much?’

With an English young man of the lower orders that would have left a sense of class obligation. With Macmaster it just didn’t.

During Tietjens’ late trouble – for four months before Tietjens’ wife had left him to go abroad with another man – Macmaster had filled a place that no other man could have filled. For the basis of Christopher Tietjens’ emotional existence was a complete taciturnity – at any rate as to his emotions. As Tietjens saw the world, you didn’t ‘talk’. Perhaps you didn’t even think about how you felt.

And, indeed, his wife’s flight had left him almost completely without emotions that he could realise, and he had not spoken more than twenty words at most about the event. Those had been mostly to his father, who, very tall, very largely built, silver-haired and erect, had drifted, as it were, into Macmaster’s drawing-room in Gray’s Inn, and after five minutes of silence had said: ‘You will divorce?’

Christopher had answered: ‘No! No one but a blackguard would ever submit a woman to the ordeal of divorce.’

Mr Tietjens had suggested that, and after an interval had asked: ‘You will permit her to divorce you?’

He had answered: ‘If she wishes it. There’s the child to be considered.’

Mr Tietjens said: ‘You will get her settlement transferred to the child?’

Christopher answered: ‘If it can be done without friction.’

Mr Tietjens had commented only: ‘Ah!’ Some minutes later he had said: ‘Your mother’s very well.’ Then: ‘That motor plough didn’t answer,’ and then: ‘I shall be dining at the club.’

Christopher said: ‘May I bring Macmaster in, sir? You said you would put him up.’

Mr Tietjens answered: ‘Yes, do. Old General ffolliot will be there. He’ll second him. He’d better make his acquaintance.’ He had gone away.

Tietjens considered that his relationship with his father was an almost perfect one. They were like two men in the club – the only club; thinking so alike that there was no need to talk. His father had spent a great deal of time abroad before succeeding to the estate. When, over the moors, he went into the industrial town that he owned, he drove always in a coach-and-four. Tobacco smoke had never been known inside Groby Hall: Mr Tietjens had twelve pipes filled every morning by his head gardener and placed in rose bushes down the drive. These he smoked during the day. He farmed a good deal of his own land; had sat for Holdernesse from 1876 to 1881, and had not presented himself for election after the redistribution of seats; he was patron of eleven livings; rode to hounds every now and then, and shot fairly regularly. He had three other sons and two daughters, and was now sixty-one.

To his sister Effie, on the day after his wife’s elopement, Christopher had said over the telephone: ‘Will you take Tommie for an indefinite period? Marchant will come with him. She offers to take charge of your two youngest as well, so you’ll save a maid, and I’ll pay their board and a bit over.’

The voice of his sister – from Yorkshire – had answered: ‘Certainly, Christopher.’ She was the wife of a vicar, near Groby, and she had several children.

To Macmaster Tietjens had said: ‘Sylvia has left me with that fellow Perowne.’

Macmaster had answered only: ‘Ah!’

Tietjens had continued: ‘I’m letting the house and warehousing the furniture. Tommie is going to my sister Effie. Marchant is going with him.’

Macmaster had said: ‘Then you’ll be wanting your old rooms.’ Macmaster occupied a very large storey of the Gray’s Inn buildings. After Tietjens had left him on his marriage he had continued to enjoy solitude, except that his man had moved down from the attic to the bedroom formerly occupied by Tietjens.

Tietjens said: ‘I’ll come in tomorrow night if I may. That will give Ferens time to get back into his attic.’

That morning, at breakfast, four months having passed, Tietjens had received a letter from his wife. She asked, without any contrition at all, to be taken back. She was fed-up with Perowne and Brittany.

Tietjens looked up at Macmaster. Macmaster was already half out of his chair, looking at him with enlarged, steel-blue eyes, his beard quivering. By the time Tietjens spoke Macmaster had his hand on the neck of the cut-glass brandy decanter in the brown wood tantalus.

Tietjens said: ‘Sylvia asks me to take her back.’

Macmaster said: ‘Have a little of this!’

Tietjens was about to say: ‘No,’ automatically. He changed that to: ‘Yes. Perhaps. A liqueur glass.’

He noticed that the lip of the decanter agitated, tinkling on the glass. Macmaster must be trembling. Macmaster, with his back still turned, said: ‘Shall you take her back?’

Tietjens answered: ‘I imagine so.’ The brandy warmed his chest in its descent. Macmaster said: ‘Better have another.’

Tietjens answered: ‘Yes. Thanks.’

Macmaster went on with his breakfast and his letters. So did Tietjens. Ferens came in, removed the bacon plates and set on the table a silver water-heated dish that contained poached eggs and haddock. A long time afterwards Tietjens said: ‘Yes, in principle I’m determined to. But I shall take three days to think out the details.’

He seemed to have no feelings about the matter. Certain insolent phrases in Sylvia’s letter hung in his mind. He preferred a letter like that. The brandy made no difference to his mentality, but it seemed to keep him from shivering.

Macmaster said: ‘Suppose we go down to Rye by the 11.40. We could get a round after tea now the days are long. I want to call on a parson near there. He has helped me with my book.’

Tietjens said: ‘Did your poet know parsons? But of course he did. Duchemin is the name, isn’t it?’

Macmaster said: ‘We could call about two-thirty. That will be all right in the country. We stay till four with a cab outside. We can be on the first tee at five. If we like the course we’ll stay next day: then Tuesday at Hythe and Wednesday at Sandwich. Or we could stay at Rye all your three days.’

‘It will probably suit me better to keep moving,’ Tietjens said. ‘There are those British Columbia figures of yours. If we took a cab now I could finish them for you in an hour and twelve minutes. Then British North Africa can go to the printers. It’s only 8.30 now.’

Macmaster said, with some concern: ‘Oh, but you couldn’t. I can make our going all right with Sir Reginald.’

Tietjens said: ‘Oh yes, I can. Ingleby will be pleased if you tell him they’re finished. I’ll have them ready for you to give him when he comes at ten.’

Macmaster said: ‘What an extraordinary fellow you are, Chrissie. Almost a genius!’

‘Oh,’ Tietjens answered. ‘I was looking at your papers yesterday after you’d left and I’ve got most of the totals in my head. I was thinking about them before I went to sleep. I think you make a mistake in overestimating the pull of Klondyke this year on the population. The passes are open, but relatively no one is going through. I’ll add a note to that effect.’

In the cab he said: ‘I’m sorry to bother you with my beastly affairs. But how will it affect you and the office?’

‘The office,’ Macmaster said, ‘not at all. It is supposed that Sylvia is nursing Mrs Satterthwaite abroad. As for me, I wish . . . ’ – he closed his small, strong teeth – ‘I wish you would drag the woman through the mud. By God I do! Why should she mangle you for the rest of your life? She’s done enough!’

Tietjens gazed out over the flap of the cab.

That explained a question. Some days before, a young man, a friend of his wife’s rather than of his own, had approached him in the club and had said that he hoped Mrs Satterthwaite – his wife’s mother – was better. He said now: ‘I see. Mrs Satterthwaite has probably gone abroad to cover up Sylvia’s retreat. She’s a sensible woman, if a bitch.’

The hansom ran through nearly empty streets, it being very early for the public official quarters. The hoofs of the horse clattered precipitately. Tietjens preferred a hansom, horses being made for gentlefolk. He had known nothing of how his fellows had viewed his affairs. It was breaking up a great, numb inertia to enquire.

During the last few months he had employed himself in tabulating from memory the errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which a new edition had lately appeared. He had even written an article for a dull monthly on the subject. It had been so caustic as to miss its mark, rather. He despised people who used works of reference; but the point of view had been so unfamiliar that his article had galled no one’s withers, except possibly Macmaster’s. Actually it had pleased Sir Reginald Ingleby, who had been glad to think that he had under him a young man with a memory so tenacious and so encyclopaedic a knowledge . . .

That had been a congenial occupation, like a long drowse. Now he had to make enquiries. He said: ‘And my breaking up the establishment at twenty-nine? How’s that viewed? I’m not going to have a house again.’

‘It’s considered,’ Macmaster answered, ‘that Lowndes Street did not agree with Mrs Satterthwaite. That accounted for her illness. Drains wrong. I may say that Sir Reginald entirely – expressly – approves. He does not think that young married men in Government offices should keep up expensive establishments in the SW district.’

Tietjens said: ‘Damn him.’ He added: ‘He’s probably right though.’ He then said: ‘Thanks. That’s all I want to know. A certain discredit has always attached to cuckolds. Very properly. A man ought to be able to keep his wife.’

Macmaster exclaimed anxiously: ‘No! No! Chrissie.’

Tietjens continued: ‘And a first-class public office is very like a public school. It might very well object to having a man whose wife had bolted amongst its members. I remember Clifton hated it when the Governors decided to admit the first Jew and the first nigger.’

Macmaster said: ‘I wish you wouldn’t go on.’

‘There was a fellow,’ Tietjens continued, ‘whose land was next to ours. Conder his name was. His wife was habitually unfaithful to him. She used to retire with some fellow for three months out of every year. Conder never moved a finger. But we felt Groby and the neighbourhood were unsafe. It was awkward introducing him – not to mention her – in your drawing-room. All sorts of awkwardnesses. Everyone knew the younger children weren’t Conder’s. A fellow married the youngest daughter and took over the hounds. And not a soul called on her. It wasn’t rational or just. But that’s why society distrusts the cuckold, really. It never knows when it mayn’t be driven into something irrational and unjust.’

‘But you aren’t,’ Macmaster said with real anguish, ‘going to let Sylvia behave like that.’

‘I don’t know,’ Tietjens said. ‘How am I to stop it? Mind you, I think Conder was quite right. Such calamities are the will of God. A gentleman accepts them. If the woman won’t divorce, he must accept them, and it gets talked about. You seem to have made it all right this time. You and, I suppose, Mrs Satterthwaite between you. But you won’t be always there. Or I might come across another woman.’

Macmaster said: ‘Ah!’ and after a moment: ‘What then?’

Tietjens said: ‘God knows . . . There’s that poor little beggar to be considered. Marchant says he’s beginning to talk broad Yorkshire already.’

Macmaster said: ‘If it wasn’t for that . . . That would be a solution.’

Tietjens said: ‘Ah!’

When he paid the cabman, in front of a grey cement portal with a gabled arch, reaching up, he said: ‘You’ve been giving the mare less liquorice in her mash. I told you she’d go better.’

The cabman, with a scarlet, varnished face, a shiny hat, a drab box-cloth coat and a gardenia in his buttonhole, said: ‘Ah! Trust you to remember, sir.’

In the train, from beneath his pile of polished dressing and despatch cases – Tietjens had thrown his immense kit-bag with his own hands into the guard’s van – Macmaster looked across at his friend. It was, for him, a great day. Across his face were the proof-sheets of his first, small, delicate-looking volume . . . A small page, the type black and still odorous! He had the agreeable smell of the printer’s ink in his nostrils; the fresh paper was still a little damp. In his white, rather spatulate, always slightly cold fingers was the pressure of the small, flat, gold pencil he had purchased especially for these corrections. He had found none to make.

He had expected a wallowing of pleasure – almost the only sensuous pleasure he had allowed himself for many months. Keeping up the appearances of an English gentleman on an exiguous income was no mean task. But to wallow in your own phrases, to be rejoiced by the savour of your own shrewd pawkiness, to feel your rhythm balanced and yet sober – that is a pleasure beyond most, and an inexpensive one at that. He had had it from mere ‘articles’ – on the philosophies and domestic lives of such great figures as Carlyle and Mill, or on the expansion of inter-colonial trade. This was a book.

He relied upon it to consolidate his position. In the office they were mostly ‘born’, and not vastly sympathetic. There was a sprinkling, too – it was beginning to be a large one – of young men who had obtained their entry by merit or by sheer industry. These watched promotions jealously, discerning nepotic increases of increment and clamouring amongst themselves at favouritisms.

To these he had been able to turn a cold shoulder. His intimacy with Tietjens permitted him to be rather on the ‘born’ side of the institution, his agreeableness – he knew he was agreeable and useful! – to Sir Reginald Ingleby protecting him in the main from unpleasantness. His ‘articles’ had given him a certain right to an austerity of demeanour; his book he trusted to let him adopt an almost judicial attitude. He would then be the Mr Macmaster, the critic, the authority. And the first-class departments are not averse to having distinguished men as ornaments to their company; at any rate the promotions of the distinguished are not objected to. So Macmaster saw – almost physically – Sir Reginald Ingleby perceiving the empressement with which his valued subordinate was treated in the drawing-rooms of Mrs Leamington, Mrs Cressy, the Hon. Mrs de Limoux; Sir Reginald would perceive that, for he was not a reader himself of much else than Government publications, and he would feel fairly safe in making easy the path of his critically gifted and austere young helper. The son of a very poor shipping clerk in an obscure Scotch harbour town, Macmaster had very early decided on the career that he would make. As between the heroes of Mr Smiles, an author enormously popular in Macmaster’s boyhood, and the more distinctly intellectual achievements open to the very poor Scot, Macmaster had had no difficulty in choosing. A pit lad may rise to be a mine owner; a hard, gifted, unsleeping Scots youth, pursuing unobtrusively and unobjectionably a course of study and of public usefulness, will certainly achieve distinction, security, and the quiet admiration of those around him. It was the difference between the may and the will, and Macmaster had had no difficulty in making his choice. He saw himself by now almost certain of a career that should give him at fifty a knighthood, and long before that a competence, a drawing-room of his own and a lady who should contribute to his unobtrusive fame, she moving about, in that room, amongst the best of the intellects of the day, gracious, devoted, a tribute at once to his discernment and his achievements. Without some disaster he was sure of himself. Disasters come to men through drink, bankruptcy, and women. Against the first two he knew himself immune, though his expenses had a tendency to outrun his income, and he was always a little in debt to Tietjens. Tietjens fortunately had means. As to the third, he was not so certain. His life had necessarily been starved of women and, arrived at a stage when the female element might, even with due respect to caution, be considered as a legitimate feature of his life, he had to fear a rashness of choice due to that very starvation. The type of woman he needed he knew to exactitude: tall, graceful, dark, loose-gowned, passionate yet circumspect, oval-featured, deliberate, gracious to everyone around her. He could almost hear the very rustle of her garments.

And yet . . . He had had passages when a sort of blind unreason had attracted him almost to speechlessness towards girls of the most giggling, behind-the-counter order, big-bosomed, scarlet-cheeked. It was only Tietjens who had saved him from the most questionable entanglements.

‘Hang it,’ Tietjens would say, ‘don’t get messing round that trollop. All you could do with her would be to set her up in a tobacco shop, and she would be tearing your beard out inside the quarter. Let alone you can’t afford it.’

And Macmaster, who would have sentimentalised the plump girl to the tune of Highland Mary, would for a day damn Tietjens up and down for a coarse brute. But at the moment he thanked God for Tietjens. There he sat, near to thirty, without an entanglement, a blemish on his health, or a worry with regard to any woman.

With deep affection and concern he looked across at his brilliant junior, who hadn’t saved himself. Tietjens had fallen into the most barefaced snare, into the cruellest snare, of the worst woman that could be imagined.

And Macmaster suddenly realised that he wasn’t wallowing, as he had imagined that he would, in the sensuous current of his prose. He had begun spiritedly with the first neat square of a paragraph . . . Certainly his publishers had done well by him in the matter of print:

‘Whether we consider him as the imaginer of mysterious, sensuous and exact plastic beauty; as the manipulator of sonorous, rolling and full-mouthed lines; of words as full of colour as were his canvases; or whether we regard him as the deep philosopher, elucidating and drawing his illumination from the arcana of a mystic hardly greater than himself, to Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, the subject of this little monograph, must be accorded the name of one who has profoundly influenced the outward aspects, the human contacts, and all those things that go to make up the life of our higher civilisation as we live it today . . . ’

Macmaster realised that he had only got thus far with his prose, and had got thus far without any of the relish that he had expected, and that then he had turned to the middle paragraph of page three – after the end of his exordium. His eyes wandered desultorily along the line:

‘The subject of these pages was born in the western central district of the metropolis in the year . . . ’

The words conveyed nothing to him at all. He understood that that was because he hadn’t got over that morning. He had looked up from his coffee-cup – over the rim – and had taken in a blue-grey sheet of notepaper in Tietjens’ fingers, shaking, inscribed in the large, broad-nibbed writing of that detestable harridan. And Tietjens had been staring – staring with the intentness of a maddened horse – at his, Macmaster’s, face! And grey! Shapeless! The nose like a pallid triangle on a bladder of lard! That was Tietjens’ face . . .

He could still feel the blow, physical, in the pit of his stomach! He had thought Tietjens was going mad; that he was mad. It had passed. Tietjens had assumed the mask of his indolent, insolent self. At the office, but later, he had delivered an extraordinarily forceful – and quite rude – lecture to Sir Reginald on his reasons for differing from the official figures of population movement in the western territories. Sir Reginald had been much impressed. The figures were wanted for a speech of the Colonial Minister – or an answer to a question – and Sir Reginald had promised to put Tietjens’ views before the great man. That was the sort of thing to do a young fellow good – because it got kudos for the office. They had to work on figures provided by the Colonial Government, and if they could correct those fellows by sheer brain work – that scored.

But there sat Tietjens, in his grey tweeds, his legs apart, lumpish, clumsy, his tallowy, intelligent-looking hands drooping inert between his legs, his eyes gazing at a coloured photograph of the port of Boulogne beside the mirror beneath the luggage rack. Blond, high-coloured, vacant apparently, you couldn’t tell what in the world he was thinking of. The mathematical theory of waves, very likely, or slips in someone’s article on Arminianism. For absurd as it seemed, Macmaster knew that he knew next to nothing of his friend’s feelings. As to them, practically no confidences had passed between them. Just two: on the night before his starting for his wedding in Paris Tietjens had said to him: ‘Vinny, old fellow, it’s a back door way out of it. She’s bitched me.’

And once, rather lately, he had said: ‘Damn it! I don’t even know if the child’s my own!’

This last confidence had shocked Macmaster so irremediably – the child had been a seven months’ child, rather ailing, and Tietjens’ clumsy tenderness towards it had been so marked that, even without this nightmare, Macmaster had been affected by the sight of them together – that confidence then had pained Macmaster so frightfully, it was so appalling, that Macmaster had regarded it almost as an insult. It was the sort of confidence a man didn’t make to his equal, but only to solicitors, doctors, or the clergy who are not quite men. Or, at any rate, such confidences are not made between men without appeals for sympathy, and Tietjens had made no appeal for sympathy. He had just added sardonically: ‘She gives me the benefit of the agreeable doubt. And she’s as good as said as much to Marchant’ – Marchant had been Tietjens’ old nurse.

* * *

Suddenly – and as if in a sort of unconscious losing of his head – Macmaster remarked: ‘You can’t say the man wasn’t a poet!’

The remark had been, as it were, torn from him, because he had observed, in the strong light of the compartment, that half of Tietjens’ forelock and a roundish patch behind it was silvery white. That might have been going on for weeks: you live beside a man and notice his changes very little. Yorkshire men of fresh colour and blondish hair often go speckled with white very young; Tietjens had had a white hair or two at the age of fourteen, very noticeable in the sunlight when he had taken his cap off to bowl.

But Macmaster’s mind, taking appalled charge, had felt assured that Tietjens had gone white with the shock of his wife’s letter: in four hours! That meant that terrible things must be going on within him; his thoughts, at all costs, must be distracted. The mental process in Macmaster had been quite unconscious. He would not, advisedly, have introduced the painter-poet as a topic.

Tietjens said: ‘I haven’t said anything at all that I can remember.’ The obstinacy of his hard race awakened in Macmaster:

Since [he quoted], when we stand side by side

Only hands may meet,

Better half this weary world

Lay between us, sweet!

Better far tho’ hearts may break

Bid farewell for aye!

Lest thy sad eyes, meeting mine,

Tempt my soul away!

‘You can’t,’ he continued, ‘say that that isn’t poetry! Great poetry.’

‘I can’t say,’ Tietjens answered contemptuously. ‘I don’t read poetry except Byron. But it’s a filthy picture . . . ’

Macmaster said uncertainly: ‘I don’t know that I know the picture. Is it in Chicago?’

‘It isn’t painted!’ Tietjens said. ‘But it’s there!’ He continued with sudden fury: ‘Damn it. What’s the sense of all these attempts to justify fornication? England’s mad about it. Well, you’ve got your John Stuart Mills and your George Eliots for the high-class thing. Leave the furniture out! Or leave me out at least. I tell you it revolts me to think of that obese, oily man who never took a bath, in a grease-spotted dressing-gown and the underclothes he’s slept in, standing beside a five-shilling model with crimped hair, or some Mrs W. Three Stars, gazing into a mirror that reflects their fetid selves and gilt sunfish and drop chandeliers and plates sickening with cold bacon fat and gurgling about passion.’

Macmaster had gone chalk white, his short beard bristling: ‘You daren’t . . . you daren’t talk like that,’ he stuttered.

‘I dare!’ Tietjens answered; ‘but I oughtn’t to . . . to you! I admit that. But you oughtn’t, almost as much, to talk about that stuff to me, either. It’s an insult to my intelligence.’

‘Certainly,’ Macmaster said stiffly, ‘the moment was not opportune.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ Tietjens answered. ‘The moment can never be opportune. Let’s agree that making a career is a dirty business – for me as for you! But decent augurs grin behind their masks. They never preach to each other.’

‘You’re getting esoteric,’ Macmaster said faintly.

‘I’ll underline,’ Tietjens went on. ‘I quite understand that the favour of Mrs Cressy and Mrs de Limoux is essential to you! They have the ear of that old don Ingleby.’

Macmaster said: ‘Damn!’

‘I quite agree,’ Tietjens continued, ‘I quite approve. It’s the game as it has always been played. It’s the tradition, so it’s right. It’s been sanctioned since the days of the Précieuses Ridicules.’

‘You’ve a way of putting things,’ Macmaster said.

‘I haven’t,’ Tietjens answered. ‘It’s just because I haven’t that what I do say sticks out in the minds of fellows like you who are always fiddling about after literary expression. But what I do say is this: I stand for monogamy.’

Macmaster uttered a ‘You!’ of amazement.

Tietjens answered with a negligent ‘I!’ He continued: ‘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. He’d no doubt be in the end better, and better off, if he didn’t. Just as it would probably be better for him if he didn’t have the second glass of whisky and soda . . . ’

‘You call that monogamy and chastity!’ Macmaster interjected.

‘I do,’ Tietjens answered, ‘and it probably is, at any rate it’s clean. What is loathsome is all your fumbling in placket-holes and polysyllabic Justification by Love. You stand for lachrymose polygamy. That’s all right if you can get your club to change its rules.’

‘You’re out of my depth,’ Macmaster said. ‘And being very disagreeable. You appear to be justifying promiscuity. I don’t like it.’

‘I’m probably being disagreeable,’ Tietjens said. ‘Jeremiahs usually are. But there ought to be a twenty years’ close time for discussions of sham sexual morality. Your Paolo and Francesca – and Dante’s – went, very properly to Hell, and no bones about it. You don’t get Dante justifying them. But your fellow whines about creeping into Heaven.’

‘He doesn’t!’ Macmaster exclaimed. Tietjens continued with equanimity: ‘Now your novelist who writes a book to justify his every tenth or fifth seduction of a commonplace young woman in the name of the rights of shop boys . . . ’

‘I’ll admit,’ Macmaster coincided, ‘that Briggs is going too far. I told him only last Thursday at Mrs Limoux’s . . . ’

‘I’m not talking of anyone in particular,’ Tietjens said. ‘I don’t read novels. I’m supposing a case. And it’s a cleaner case than that of your Pre-Raphaelite horrors! No! I don’t read novels, but I follow tendencies. And if a fellow chooses to justify his seductions of uninteresting and viewy young females along the lines of freedom and the rights of man, it’s relatively respectable. It would be better just to boast about his conquests in a straightforward and exultant way. But . . . ’

‘You carry joking too far sometimes,’ Macmaster said. ‘I’ve warned you about it.’

‘I’m as solemn as an owl!’ Tietjens rejoined. ‘The lower classes are becoming vocal. Why shouldn’t they? They’re the only people in this country who are sound in wind and limb. They’ll save the country if the country’s to be saved.’

‘And you call yourself a Tory!’ Macmaster said.

‘The lower classes,’ Tietjens continued equably, ‘such of them as get through the secondary schools, want irregular and very transitory unions. During holidays they go together on personally conducted tours to Switzerland and such places. Wet afternoons they pass in their tiled bathrooms, slapping each other hilariously on the back and splashing white enamel paint about.’

‘You say you don’t read novels,’ Macmaster said, ‘but I recognise the quotation.’

‘I don’t read novels,’ Tietjens answered. ‘I know what’s in ’em. There has been nothing worth reading written in England since the eighteenth century except by a woman . . . But it’s natural for your enamel splashers to want to see themselves in a bright and variegated literature. Why shouldn’t they? It’s a healthy, human desire, and now that printing and paper are cheap they get it satisfied. It’s healthy, I tell you. Infinitely healthier than . . . ’ He paused.

‘Than what?’ Macmaster asked.

‘I’m thinking,’ Tietjens said, ‘thinking how not to be too rude.’

‘You want to be rude,’ Macmaster said bitterly, ‘to people who lead the contemplative . . . the circumspect life.’

‘It’s precisely that,’ Tietjens said. He quoted.

She walks, the lady of my delight,

A shepherdess of sheep;

She is so circumspect and right:

She has her thoughts to keep.

Macmaster said: ‘Confound you, Chrissie. You know everything.’

‘Well, yes,’ Tietjens said musingly, ‘I think I should want to be rude to her. I don’t say I should be. Certainly I shouldn’t if she were good-looking. Or if she were your soul’s affinity. You can rely on that.’

Macmaster had a sudden vision of Tietjens’ large and clumsy form walking beside the lady of his, Macmaster’s, delight, when ultimately she was found – walking along the top of a cliff amongst tall grass and poppies and making himself extremely agreeable with talk of Tasso and Cimabue. All the same, Macmaster imagined, the lady wouldn’t like Tietjens. Women didn’t, as a rule. His looks and his silences alarmed them. Or they hated him . . . Or they liked him very much indeed. And Macmaster said conciliatorily: ‘Yes, I think I could rely on that!’ He added: ‘All the same I don’t wonder that . . . ’

He had been about to say: ‘I don’t wonder that Sylvia calls you immoral.’ For Tietjens’ wife alleged that Tietjens was detestable. He bored her, she said, by his silences; when he did speak she hated him for the immorality of his views . . . But he did not finish his sentence, and Tietjens went on: ‘All the same, when the war comes it will be these little snobs who will save England, because they’ve the courage to know what they want and to say so.’

Macmaster said loftily: ‘You’re extraordinarily old-fashioned at times, Chrissie. You ought to know as well as I do that a war is impossible – at any rate with this country in it. Simply because . . . ’ He hesitated and then emboldened himself: ‘We – the circumspect – yes, the circumspect classes, will pilot the nation through the tight places.’

‘War, my good fellow,’ Tietjens said – the train was slowing down preparatorily to running into Ashford – ‘is inevitable, and with this country plumb centre in the middle of it. Simply because you fellows are such damn hypocrites. There’s not a country in the world that trusts us. We’re always, as it were, committing adultery – like your fellow! – with the name of Heaven on our lips.’ He was jibing again at the subject of Macmaster’s monograph.

‘He never!’ Macmaster said in almost a stutter. ‘He never whined about Heaven.’

‘He did,’ Tietjens said. ‘The beastly poem you quoted ends:

Better far though hearts may break,

Since we dare not love,

Part till we once more may meet

In a Heaven above.

And Macmaster, who had been dreading that shot – for he never knew how much or how little of any given poem his friend would have by heart – Macmaster collapsed, as it were, into fussily getting down his dressing-cases and clubs from the rack, a task he usually left to a porter. Tietjens who, however much a train might be running into a station he was bound for, sat like a rock until it was dead-still, said: ‘Yes, a war is inevitable. Firstly, there’s you fellows who can’t be trusted. And then there’s the multitude who mean to have bathrooms and white enamel. Millions of them; all over the world. Not merely here. And there aren’t enough bathrooms and white enamel in the world to go round. It’s like you polygamists with women. There aren’t enough women in the world to go round to satisfy your insatiable appetites. And there aren’t enough men in the world to give each woman one. And most women want several. So you have divorce cases. I suppose you won’t say that because you’re so circumspect and right there shall be no more divorce? Well, war is as inevitable as divorce . . . ’

Macmaster had his head out of the carriage window and was calling for a porter.

* * *

On the platform a number of women in lovely sable cloaks, with purple or red jewel cases, with diaphanous silky scarves flying from motor hoods, were drifting towards the branch train for Rye, under the shepherding of erect, burdened footmen. Two of them nodded to Tietjens.

Macmaster considered that he was perfectly right to be tidy in his dress; you never knew whom you mightn’t meet on a railway journey. This confirmed him as against Tietjens, who preferred to look like a navvy.

A tall, white-haired, white-moustached, red-cheeked fellow limped after Tietjens, who was getting his immense bag out of the guard’s van. He clapped the young man on the shoulder and said: ‘Hullo! How’s your mother-in-law? Lady Claude wants to know. She says come up and pick a bone tonight if you’re going to Rye.’ He had extraordinarily blue, innocent eyes.

Tietjens said: ‘Hullo, General,’ and added: ‘I believe she’s much better. Quite restored. This is Macmaster. I think I shall be going over to bring my wife back in a day or two. They’re both at Lobscheid . . . a German spa.’

The General said: ‘Quite right. It isn’t good for a young man to be alone. Kiss Sylvia’s fingertips for me. She’s the real thing, you lucky beggar.’ He added, a little anxiously: ‘What about a foursome tomorrow? Paul Sandbach is down. He’s as crooked as me. We can’t do a full round at singles.’

‘It’s your own fault,’ Tietjens said. ‘You ought to have gone to my bone-setter. Settle it with Macmaster, will you?’ He jumped into the twilight of the guard’s van.

The General looked at Macmaster, a quick penetrating scrutiny: ‘You’re the Macmaster,’ he said. ‘You would be if you’re with Chrissie.’

A high voice called: ‘General! General!’

‘I want a word with you,’ the General said, ‘about the figures in that article you wrote about Pondoland. Figures are all right. But we shall lose the beastly country if . . . But we’ll talk about it after dinner tonight. You’ll come up to Lady Claudine’s . . . ’

* * *

Macmaster congratulated himself again on his appearance. It was all very well for Tietjens to look like a sweep; he was of these people. He, Macmaster, wasn’t. He had, if anything, to be an authority, and authorities wear gold tie-rings and broadcloth. General Lord Edward Campion had a son, a permanent head of the Treasury department that regulated increases of salaries and promotions in all the public offices. Tietjens only caught the Rye train by running alongside it, pitching his enormous kit-bag through the carriage window and swinging on the footboard. Macmaster reflected that if he had done that half the station would have been yelling, ‘Stand away there.’

As it was Tietjens a stationmaster was galloping after him to open the carriage door and grinningly to part: ‘Well caught, sir!’ for it was a cricketing county.

‘Truly,’ Macmaster quoted to himself,

The gods to each ascribe a differing lot:

Some enter at the portal. Some do not!

Chapter 2

Mrs Satterthwaite with her French maid, her priest, and her disreputable young man, Mr Bayliss, were at Lobscheid, an unknown and little-frequented air resort amongst the pine woods of the Taunus. Mrs Satterthwaite was ultra-fashionable and consummately indifferent – she only really lost her temper if at her table and under her nose you consumed her famous Black Hamburg grapes without taking their skin and all. Father Consett was out to have an uproarious good time during his three weeks’ holiday from the slums of Liverpool; Mr Bayliss, thin like a skeleton in tight blue serge, golden haired and pink, was so nearly dead of tuberculosis, was so dead penniless, and of tastes so costly that he was ready to keep stone quiet, drink six pints of milk a day and behave himself. On the face of it, he was there to write the letters of Mrs Satterthwaite, but the lady never let him enter her private rooms for fear of infection. He had to content himself with nursing a growing adoration for Father Consett. This priest, with an enormous mouth, high cheek bones, untidy black hair, a broad face that never looked too clean and waving hands that always looked too dirty, never kept still for a moment, and had a brogue such as is seldom heard outside old-fashioned English novels of Irish life. He had a perpetual laugh, like the noise made by a steam roundabout. He was, in short, a saint, and Mr Bayliss knew it, though he didn’t know how. Ultimately, and with the financial assistance of Mrs Satterthwaite, Mr Bayliss became almoner to Father Consett, adopted the rule of St Vincent de Paul and wrote some very admirable, if decorative, devotional verse.

They proved thus a very happy, innocent party. For Mrs Satterthwaite interested herself – it was the only interest she had – in handsome, thin and horribly disreputable young men. She would wait for them, or send her car to wait for them, at the gaol gates. She would bring their usually admirable wardrobes up to date and give them enough money to have a good time. When contrary to all expectations – but it happened more often than not! – they turned out well, she was lazily pleased. Sometimes she sent them away to a gay spot with a priest who needed a holiday; sometimes she had them down to her place in the west of England.

So they were a pleasant company and all very happy. Lobscheid contained one empty hotel with large verandahs and several square farmhouses, white with grey beams, painted in the gables with bouquets of blue and yellow flowers or with scarlet huntsmen shooting at purple stags. They were like gay cardboard boxes set down in fields of long grass; then the pine woods commenced and ran, solemn, brown and geometric for miles up and down hill. The peasant girls wore black velvet waistcoats, white bodices, innumerable petticoats and absurd parti-coloured headdresses of the shape and size of halfpenny buns. They walked about in rows of four to six abreast; with a slow step, protruding white-stockinged feet in dancing pumps, their headdresses nodding solemnly; young men in blue blouses, knee-breeches and, on Sundays, in three-cornered hats, followed behind singing part-songs.

The French maid – whom Mrs Satterthwaite had borrowed from the Duchesse de Carbon Château-Herault in exchange for her own maid – was at first inclined to find the place maussade. But getting up a tremendous love affair with a fine, tall, blond young fellow, who included a gun, a gold-mounted hunting knife as long as his arm, a light, grey-green uniform, with gilt badges and buttons, she was reconciled to her lot. When the young Förster tried to shoot her – ‘et pour cause’, as she said – she was ravished and Mrs Satterthwaite lazily amused.

They were sitting playing bridge in the large, shadowy dining-hall of the hotel: Mrs Satterthwaite, Father Consett, Mr Bayliss. A young blond sub-lieutenant of great obsequiousness who was there as a last chance for his right lung and his career, and the bearded Kur-doctor cut in. Father Consett, breathing heavily and looking frequently at his watch, played very fast, exclaiming: ‘Hurry up now; it’s nearly twelve. Hurry up wid ye.’ Mr Bayliss being dummy, the Father exclaimed: ‘Three no trumps; I’ve to make. Get me a whisky and soda quick, and don’t drown it as ye did the last.’ He played his hand with extreme rapidity, threw down his last three cards, exclaimed: ‘Ach! Botheranouns an’ all; I’m two down and I’ve revoked on the top av it,’ swallowed down his whisky and soda, looked at his watch and exclaimed: ‘Done it to the minute! Here, doctor, take my hand and finish the rubber.’ He was to take the mass next day for the local priest, and mass must be said fasting from midnight, and without cards played. Bridge was his only passion; a fortnight every year was what, in his worn-out life, he got of it. On his holiday he rose at ten. At eleven it was: ‘A four for the Father.’ From two to four they walked in the forest. At five it was: ‘A four for the Father.’ At nine it was: ‘Father, aren’t you coming to your bridge?’ And Father Consett grinned all over his face and said: ‘It’s good ye are to a poor ould soggart. It will be paid back to you in Heaven.’

The other four played on solemnly. The Father sat himself down behind Mrs Satterthwaite, his chin in the nape of her neck. At excruciating moments he gripped her shoulders, exclaimed: ‘Play the queen, woman!’ and breathed hard down her back. Mrs Satterthwaite would play the two of diamonds, and the Father, throwing himself back, would groan. She said over her shoulder: ‘I want to talk to you tonight, Father,’ took the last trick of the rubber, collected 17 marks 50 from the doctor and 8 marks from the unter-leutnant. The doctor exclaimed: ‘You gan’t dake that immense sum from us and then ko off. Now we shall pe ropped py Herr Payliss at gutt-throat.’

She drifted, all shadowy black silk, across the shadows of the dining-hall, dropping her winnings into her black satin vanity bag and attended by the priest. Outside the door, beneath the antlers of a royal stag, in an atmosphere of paraffin lamps and varnished pitch-pine, she said: ‘Come up to my sitting-room. The prodigal’s returned. Sylvia’s here.’

The Father said: ‘I thought I saw her out of the corner of my eye in the bus after dinner. She’ll be going back to her husband. It’s a poor world.’

‘She’s a wicked devil!’ Mrs Satterthwaite said.

‘I’ve known her myself since she was nine,’ Father Consett said, ‘and it’s little I’ve seen in her to hold up to the commendation of my flock.’ He added: ‘But maybe I’m made unjust by the shock of it.’

They climbed the stairs slowly.

Mrs Satterthwaite sat herself on the edge of a cane chair. She said: ‘Well!’

She wore a black hat like a cartwheel and her dresses appeared always to consist of a great many squares of silk that might have been thrown on to her. Since she considered that her complexion, which was matt white, had gone slightly violet from twenty years of make-up, when she was not made-up – as she never was at Lobscheid – she wore bits of puce-coloured satin ribbon stuck here and there, partly to counteract the violet of her complexion, partly to show she was not in mourning. She was very tall and extremely emaciated; her dark eyes that had beneath them dark brown thumb-marks were very tired or very indifferent by turns.

Father Consett walked backwards and forwards, his hands behind his back, his head bent, over the not too well-polished floor. There were two candles, lit but dim, in imitation pewter nouvel art candlesticks, rather dingy; a sofa of cheap mahogany with red plush cushions and rests, a table covered with a cheap carpet, and an American roll-top desk that had thrown into it a great many papers in scrolls or flat. Mrs Satterthwaite was extremely indifferent to her surroundings, but she insisted on having a piece of furniture for her papers. She liked also to have a profusion of hothouse, not garden, flowers, but as there were none of these at Lobscheid she did without them. She insisted also, as a rule, on a comfortable chaise longue which she rarely, if ever, used; but the German Empire of those days did not contain a comfortable chair, so she did without it, lying down on her bed when she was really tired. The walls of the large room were completely covered with pictures of animals in death agonies: capercaillies giving up the ghost with gouts of scarlet blood on the snow; deer dying with their heads back and eyes glazing, gouts of red blood on their necks; foxes dying with scarlet blood on green grass. These pictures were frame to frame, representing sport, the hotel having been a former Grand Ducal hunting-box, freshened to suit the taste of the day with varnished pitch-pine, bathrooms, verandahs, and excessively modern but noisy lavatory arrangements which had been put in for the delight of possible English guests.

Mrs Satterthwaite sat on the edge of her chair; she had always the air of being just about to go out somewhere or of having just come in and being on the point of going to take her things off. She said: ‘There’s been a telegram waiting for her all the afternoon. I knew she was coming.’

Father Consett said: ‘I saw it in the rack myself. I misdoubted it.’ He added: ‘Oh dear, oh dear! After all we’ve talked about it; now it’s come.’

Mrs Satterthwaite said: ‘I’ve been a wicked woman myself as these things are measured; but . . . ’

Father Consett said: ‘Ye have! It’s no doubt from you she gets it, for your husband was a good man. But one wicked woman is enough for my contemplation at a time. I’m no St Anthony . . . The young man says he will take her back?’

‘On conditions,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said. ‘He is coming here to have an interview.’

The priest said: ‘Heaven knows, Mrs Satterthwaite, there are times when to a poor priest the rule of the Church as regards marriage seems bitter hard and he almost doubts her inscrutable wisdom. He doesn’t mind you. But at times I wish that that young man would take what advantage – it’s all there is! – that he can of being a Protestant and divorce Sylvia. For I tell you, there are bitter things to see amongst my flock over there . . . ’ He made a vague gesture towards the infinite . . . ‘And bitter things I’ve seen, for the heart of man is a wicked place. But never a bitterer than this young man’s lot.’

‘As you say,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said, ‘my husband was a good man. I hated him, but that was as much my fault as his. More! And the only reason I don’t wish Christopher to divorce Sylvia is that it would bring disgrace on my husband’s name. At the same time, Father . . . ’

The priest said: ‘I’ve heard near enough.’

‘There’s this to be said for Sylvia,’ Mrs Satterthwaite went on. ‘There are times when a woman hates a man – as Sylvia hates her husband . . . I tell you I’ve walked behind a man’s back and nearly screamed because of the desire to put my nails into the veins of his neck. It was a fascination. And it’s worse with Sylvia. It’s a natural antipathy.’

‘Woman!’ Father Consett fulminated, ‘I’ve no patience wid ye! If the woman, as the Church directs, would have children by her husband and live decent, she would have no such feelings. It’s unnatural living and unnatural practices that cause these complexes. Don’t think I’m an ignoramus, priest if I am.’

Mrs Satterthwaite said: ‘But Sylvia’s had a child.’

Father Consett swung round like a man that has been shot at.

‘Whose?’ he asked, and he pointed a dirty finger at his interlocutress. ‘It was that blackguard Drake’s, wasn’t it? I’ve long suspected that.’

‘It was probably Drake’s,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said.

‘Then,’ the priest said, ‘in the face of the pains of the hereafter how could you let that decent lad in the hotness of his sin . . . ?’

‘Indeed,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said, ‘I shiver sometimes when I think of it. Don’t believe that I had anything to do with trepanning him. But I couldn’t hinder it. Sylvia’s my daughter, and dog doesn’t eat dog.’

‘There are times when it should,’ Father Consett said contemptuously.

‘You don’t seriously,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said, ‘say that I, a mother, if an indifferent one, with my daughter appearing in trouble, as the kitchenmaids say, by a married man – that I should step in and stop a marriage that was a Godsend . . . ’

‘Don’t,’ the priest said, ‘introduce the sacred name into an affair of Piccadilly bad girls . . . ’ He stopped. ‘Heaven help me,’ he said again, ‘don’t ask me to answer the question of what you should or shouldn’t have done. You know I loved your husband like a brother, and you know I’ve loved you and Sylvia ever since she was tiny. And I thank God that I am not your spiritual adviser, but only your friend in God. For if I had to answer your question I could answer it only in one way.’ He broke off to ask: ‘Where is that woman?’

Mrs Satterthwaite called: ‘Sylvia! Sylvia! Come here!’

A door in the shadows opened and light shone from another room behind a tall figure leaning one hand on the handle of the door. A very deep voice said: ‘I can’t understand, mother, why you live in rooms like a sergeants’ mess.’ And Sylvia Tietjens wavered into the room. She added: ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m bored.’

Father Consett groaned: ‘Heaven help us, she’s like a picture of Our Lady by Fra Angelico.’

Immensely tall, slight and slow in her movements, Sylvia Tietjens wore her reddish, very fair hair in great bandeaux right down over her ears. Her very oval, regular face had an expression of virginal lack of interest such as used to be worn by fashionable Paris courtesans a decade before that time. Sylvia Tietjens considered that, being privileged to go everywhere where one went and to have all men at her feet, she had no need to change her expression or to infuse into it the greater animation that marked the more common beauties of the early twentieth century. She moved slowly from the door and sat languidly on the sofa against the wall.

‘There you are, Father,’ she said. ‘I’ll not ask you to shake hands with me. You probably wouldn’t.’

‘As I am a priest,’ Father Consett answered, ‘I could not refuse. But I’d rather not.’

‘This,’ Sylvia repeated, ‘appears to be a boring place.’

‘You won’t say so tomorrow,’ the priest said. ‘There’s two young fellows . . . And a sort of policeman to trepan away from your mother’s maid!’

‘That,’ Sylvia answered, ‘is meant to be bitter. But it doesn’t hurt. I am done with men.’ She added suddenly: ‘Mother, didn’t you one day, while you were still young, say that you had done with men? Firmly! And mean it?’

Mrs Satterthwaite said: ‘I did.’

‘And did you keep to it?’ Sylvia asked.

Mrs Satterthwaite said: ‘I did.’

‘And shall I, do you imagine?’

Mrs Satterthwaite said: ‘I imagine you will.’

Sylvia said: ‘Oh dear!’

The priest said: ‘I’d be willing to see your husband’s telegram. It makes a difference to see the words on paper.’

Sylvia rose effortlessly.

‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t,’ she said. ‘It will give you no pleasure.’ She drifted towards the door.

‘If it would give me pleasure,’ the priest said, ‘you would not show it me.’

‘I would not,’ she said.

A silhouette in the doorway, she halted, drooping, and looked over her shoulder.

‘Both you and mother,’ she said, ‘sit there scheming to make life bearable for the Ox. I call my husband the Ox. He’s repulsive: like a swollen animal. Well . . . you can’t do it.’ The lighted doorway was vacant. Father Consett sighed.

‘I told you this was an evil place,’ he said. ‘In the deep forests. She’d not have such evil thoughts in another place.’

Mrs Satterthwaite said: ‘I’d rather you didn’t say that, Father. Sylvia would have evil thoughts in any place.’

‘Sometimes,’ the priest said, ‘at night I think I hear the claws of evil things scratching on the shutters. This was the last place in Europe to be Christianised. Perhaps it wasn’t ever even Christianised and they’re here yet.’

Mrs Satterthwaite said: ‘It’s all very well to talk like that in the daytime. It makes the place seem romantic. But it must be near one at night. And things are bad enough as it is.’

‘They are,’ Father Consett said. ‘The devil’s at work.’

Sylvia drifted back into the room with a telegram of several sheets. Father Consett held it close to one of the candles to read, for he was short-sighted.

‘All men are repulsive,’ Sylvia said; ‘don’t you think so, mother?’

Mrs Satterthwaite said: ‘I do not. Only a heartless woman would say so.’

‘Mrs Vanderdecken,’ Sylvia went on, ‘says all men are repulsive and it’s woman’s disgusting task to live beside them.’

‘You’ve been seeing that foul creature?’ Mrs Satterthwaite said. ‘She’s a Russian agent. And worse!’

‘She was at Gosingeaux all the time we were,’ Sylvia said. ‘You needn’t groan. She won’t split on us. She’s the soul of honour.’

‘It wasn’t because of that I groaned, if I did,’ Mrs Satterthwaite answered.

The priest, from over his telegram, exclaimed: ‘Mrs Vanderdecken! God forbid.’

Sylvia’s face, as she sat on the sofa, expressed languid and incredulous amusement.

‘What do you know of her?’ she asked the Father.

‘I know what you know,’ he answered, ‘and that’s enough.’

‘Father Consett,’ Sylvia said to her mother, ‘has been renewing his social circle.’

‘It’s not,’ Father Consett said, ‘amongst the dregs of the people that you must live if you don’t want to hear of the dregs of society.’

Sylvia stood up. She said: ‘You’ll keep your tongue off my best friends if you want me to stop and be lectured. But for Mrs Vanderdecken I should not be here, returned to the fold!’

Father Consett exclaimed: ‘Don’t say it, child. I’d rather, heaven help me, you had gone on living in open sin.’

Sylvia sat down again, her hands listlessly in her lap. ‘Have it your own way,’ she said, and the Father returned to the fourth sheet of the telegram.

‘What does this mean?’ he asked. He had returned to the first sheet. ‘This here: “Accept resumption yoke”?’ he read, breathlessly.

‘Sylvia,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said, ‘go and light the spirit lamp for some tea. We shall want it.’

‘You’d think I was a district messenger boy,’ Sylvia said as she rose. ‘Why don’t you keep your maid up? . . . It’s a way we had of referring to our . . . union,’ she explained to the Father.

‘There was sympathy enough between you and him then,’ he said, ‘to have bywords for things. It was that I wanted to know. I understood the words.’

‘They were pretty bitter bywords, as you call them,’ Sylvia said. ‘More like curses than kisses.’

‘It was you that used them then,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said. ‘Christopher never said a bitter thing to you.’

An expression like a grin came slowly over Sylvia’s face as she turned back to the priest.

‘That’s mother’s tragedy,’ she said. ‘My husband’s one of her best boys. She adores him. And he can’t bear her.’ She drifted behind the wall of the next room and they heard her tinkling the tea-things as the Father read on again beside the candle. His immense shadow began at the centre and ran along the pitch-pine ceiling, down the wall and across the floor to join his splay feet in their clumsy boots.

‘It’s bad,’ he muttered. He made a sound like ‘Umbleumbleumble . . . Worse than I feared . . . umbleumble . . . “accept resumption yoke but on rigid conditions.” What’s this: “esoecially”; it ought to be a “p”, “especially regards child reduce establishment ridiculous our position remake settlements in child’s sole interests flat not house entertaining minimum am prepared resign office settle Yorkshire but imagine this not suit you child remain sister Effie open visits both wire if this rough outline provisionally acceptable in that case will express draft general position Monday for you and mother reflect upon follow self Tuesday arrive Thursday Lobscheid go Wiesbaden fortnight on social task discussion Thursday limited solely, comma emphasised comma to affairs.” ’

‘That means,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said, ‘that he doesn’t mean to reproach her. Emphasised applies to the word solely . . . ’

‘Why d’you take it . . . ’ Father Consett asked, ‘did he spend an immense lot of money on this telegram? Did he imagine you were in such trepidation . . . ?’ He broke off. Walking slowly, her long arms extended to carry the tea-tray, over which her wonderfully moving face had a rapt expression of indescribable mystery, Sylvia was coming through the door.

‘Oh, child,’ the Father exclaimed, ‘whether it’s St Martha or that Mary that made the bitter choice, not one of them ever looked more virtuous than you. Why aren’t ye born to be a good man’s help-meet?’

A little tinkle sounded from the tea-tray and three pieces of sugar fell on to the floor. Mrs Tietjens hissed with vexation.

‘I knew that damned thing would slide off the teacups,’ she said. She dropped the tray from an inch or so of height on to the carpeted table. ‘I’d made it a matter of luck between myself and myself,’ she said. Then she faced the priest.

‘I’ll tell you,’ she said, ‘why he sent the telegram. It’s because of that dull display of the English gentleman that I detested. He gives himself the solemn airs of the Foreign Minister, but he’s only a youngest son at the best. That is why I loathe him.’

Mrs Satterthwaite said: ‘That isn’t the reason why he sent the telegram.’

Her daughter had a gesture of amused, lazy tolerance.

‘Of course it isn’t,’ she said. ‘He sent it out of consideration: the lordly, full-dress consideration that drives me distracted. As he would say: “He’d imagine I’d find it convenient to have ample time for reflection.” It’s like being addressed as if one were a monument and by a herald according to protocol. And partly because he’s the soul of truth like a stiff Dutch doll. He wouldn’t write a letter because he couldn’t without beginning it “Dear Sylvia” and ending it “Yours sincerely” or “truly” or “affectionately” . . . He’s that sort of precise imbecile. I tell you he’s so formal he can’t do without all the conventions there are and so truthful he can’t use half of them.’

‘Then,’ Father Consett said, ‘if ye know him so well, Sylvia Satterthwaite, how is it ye can’t get on with him better? They say: Tout savoir c’est tout pardonner.’

‘It isn’t,’ Sylvia said. ‘To know everything about a person is to be bored . . . bored . . . bored!’

‘And how are you going to answer this telegram of his?’ the Father asked. ‘Or have ye answered it already?’

‘I shall wait until Monday night to keep him as bothered as I can to know whether he’s to start on Tuesday. He fusses like a hen over his packings and the exact hours of his movements. On Monday I shall telegraph: “Righto” and nothing else.’

‘And why,’ the Father asked, ‘will ye telegraph him a vulgar word that you never use, for your language is the one thing about you that isn’t vulgar?’

Sylvia said: ‘Thanks!’ She curled her legs up under her on the sofa and laid her head back against the wall so that her Gothic arch of a chinbone pointed at the ceiling. She admired her own neck, which was very long and white.

‘I know!’ Father Consett said. ‘You’re a beautiful woman. Some men would say it was a lucky fellow that lived with you. I don’t ignore the fact in my cogitation. He’d imagine all sorts of delights to lurk in the shadow of your beautiful hair. And they wouldn’t.’

Sylvia brought her gaze down from the ceiling and fixed her brown eyes for a moment on the priest, speculatively.

‘It’s a great handicap we suffer from,’ he said.

‘I don’t know why I selected that word,’ Sylvia said, ‘it’s one word, so it costs only fifty pfennigs. I couldn’t hope really to give a jerk to his pompous self-sufficiency.’

‘It’s great handicaps we priests suffer from,’ the Father repeated. ‘However much a priest may be a man of the world – and he has to be to fight the world . . . ’

Mrs Satterthwaite said: ‘Have a cup of tea, Father, while it’s just right. I believe Sylvia is the only person in Germany who knows how to make tea.’

‘There’s always behind him the Roman collar and the silk bib, and you don’t believe in him,’ Father Consett went on, ‘yet he knows ten – a thousand times! – more of human nature than ever you can.’

‘I don’t see,’ Sylvia said placably, ‘how you can learn in your slums anything about the nature of Eunice Vanderdecken, or Elizabeth B. or Queenie James, or any of my set.’ She was on her feet pouring cream into the Father’s tea. ‘I’ll admit for the moment that you aren’t giving me pi-jaw.’

‘I’m glad,’ the priest said, ‘that ye remember enough of yer schooldays to use the old term.’

Sylvia wavered backwards to her sofa and sank down again.

‘There you are,’ she said, ‘you can’t really get away from preachments. Me for the pyore young girl is always at the back of it.’

‘It isn’t,’ the Father said. ‘I’m not one to cry for the moon.’

‘You don’t want me to be a pure young girl,’ Sylvia asked with lazy incredulity.

‘I do not!’ the Father said, ‘but I’d wish that at times ye’d remember you once were.’

‘I don’t believe I ever was,’ Sylvia said, ‘if the nuns had known I’d have been expelled from the Holy Child.’

‘You would not,’ the Father said. ‘Do stop your boasting. The nuns have too much sense . . . Anyhow, it isn’t a pure young girl I’d have you or behaving like a Protestant deaconess for the craven fear of hell. I’d have ye be a physically healthy, decently honest-with-yourself young devil of a married woman. It’s them that are the plague and the salvation of the world.’

‘You admire mother?’ Mrs Tietjens asked suddenly. She added in parenthesis: ‘You see you can’t get away from salvation.’

‘I mean keeping bread and butter in their husbands’ stomachs,’ the priest said. ‘Of course I admire your mother.’

Mrs Satterthwaite moved a hand slightly.

‘You’re at any rate in league with her against me,’ Sylvia said. She asked with more interest: ‘Then would you have me model myself on her and do good works to escape hell fire? She wears a hair shirt in Lent.’

Mrs Satterthwaite started from her doze on the edge of her chair. She had been trusting the Father’s wit to give her daughter’s insolence a run for its money, and she imagined that if the priest hit hard enough he might, at least, make Sylvia think a little about some of her ways.

‘Hang it, no, Sylvia,’ she exclaimed more suddenly. ‘I may not be much, but I’m a sportsman. I’m afraid of hell fire; horribly, I’ll admit. But I don’t bargain with the Almighty. I hope He’ll let me through; but I’d go on trying to pick men out of the dirt – I suppose that’s what you and Father Consett mean – if I were as certain of going to hell as I am of going to bed tonight. So that’s that!’

‘ “And lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!” ’ Sylvia jeered softly. ‘All the same I bet you wouldn’t bother to reclaim men if you could not find the young, good-looking, interestingly vicious sort.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said. ‘If they didn’t interest me, why should I?’

Sylvia looked at Father Consett.

‘If you’re going to trounce me any more,’ she said, ‘get a move on. It’s late, I’ve been travelling for thirty-six hours.’

‘I will,’ Father Consett said. ‘It’s a good maxim that if you swat flies enough some of them stick to the wall. I’m only trying to make a little mark on your common sense. Don’t you see what you’re going to?’

‘What?’ Sylvia said indifferently. ‘Hell?’

‘No,’ the Father said, ‘I’m talking of this life. Your confessor must talk to you about the next. But I’ll not tell you what you’re going to. I’ve changed my mind. I’ll tell your mother after you’re gone.’

‘Tell me,’ Sylvia said.

‘I’ll not,’ Father Consett answered. ‘Go to the fortune-tellers at the Earl’s Court exhibition; they’ll tell ye all about the fair woman you’re to beware of.’

‘There’s some of them said to be rather good,’ Sylvia said. ‘Di Wilson’s told me about one. She said she was going to have a baby . . . You don’t mean that, Father? For I swear I never will . . . ’

‘I dare say not,’ the priest said. ‘But let’s talk about men.’

‘There’s nothing you can tell me I don’t know,’ Sylvia said.

‘I dare say not,’ the priest answered. ‘But let’s rehearse what you do know. Now suppose you could elope with a new man every week and no questions asked? Or how often would you want to?’

Sylvia said: ‘Just a moment, Father,’ and she addressed Mrs Satterthwaite: ‘I suppose I shall have to put myself to bed.’

‘You will,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said. ‘I’ll not have any maid kept up after ten in a holiday resort. What’s she to do in a place like this? Except listen for the bogies it’s full of?’

‘Always considerate!’ Mrs Tietjens gibed. ‘And perhaps it’s just as well. I’d probably beat that Marie of yours’ arms to pieces with a hairbrush if she came near me.’ She added: ‘You were talking about men, Father . . . ’ And then began with sudden animation to her mother: ‘I’ve changed my mind about that telegram. The first thing tomorrow I shall wire: “Agreed entirely but arrange bring Hullo Central with you.” ’

She addressed the priest again.

‘I call my maid Hullo Central because she’s got a tinny voice like a telephone. I say: “Hullo Central” – when she answers “Yes, modd’m,” you’d swear it was the Exchange speaking . . . But you were telling me about men.’

‘I was reminding you!’ the Father said. ‘But I needn’t go on. You’ve caught the drift of my remarks. That is why you are pretending not to listen.’

‘I assure you, no,’ Mrs Tietjens said. ‘It is simply that if a thing comes into my head I have to say it . . . You were saying that if one went away with a different man for every weekend . . . ’

‘You’ve shortened the period already,’ the priest said. ‘I gave a full week to every man.’

‘But, of course, one would have to have a home,’ Sylvia said, ‘an address. One would have to fill one’s midweek engagements. Really it comes to it that one has to have a husband and a place to store one’s maid in. Hullo Central’s been on board-wages all the time. But I don’t believe she likes it . . . Let’s agree that if I had a different man every week I’d be bored with the arrangement. That’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it?’

‘You’d find,’ the priest said, ‘that it whittled down until the only divvy moment was when you stood waiting in the booking-office for the young man to take the tickets . . . And then gradually that wouldn’t be divvy any more . . . And you’d yawn and long to go back to your husband.’

‘Look here,’ Mrs Tietjens said, ‘you’re abusing the secrets of the confessional. That’s exactly what Tottie Charles said. She tried it for three months while Freddie Charles was in Madeira. It’s exactly what she said down to the yawn and the booking-office. And the “divvy”. It’s only Tottie Charles who uses it every two words. Most of us prefer ripping! It is more sensible.’

‘Of course I haven’t been abusing the secrets of the confessional,’ Father Consett said mildly.

‘Of course you haven’t,’ Sylvia said with affection. ‘You’re a good old stick and no end of a mimic, and you know us all to the bottom of our hearts.’

‘Not all that much,’ the priest said, ‘there’s probably a good deal of good at the bottom of your hearts.’

Sylvia said: ‘Thanks.’ She asked suddenly: ‘Look here. Was it what you saw of us – the future mothers of England, you know, and all – at Miss Lampeter’s – that made you take to the slums? Out of disgust and despair?’

‘Oh, let’s not make melodrama out of it,’ the priest answered. ‘Let’s say I wanted a change. I couldn’t see that I was doing any good.’

‘You did us all the good there was done,’ Sylvia said. ‘What with Miss Lampeter always drugged to the world, and all the French mistresses as wicked as hell.’

‘I’ve heard you say all this before,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said. ‘But it was supposed to be the best finishing school in England. I know it cost enough!’

‘Well, say it was we who were a rotten lot,’ Sylvia concluded; and then to the Father: ‘We were a lot of rotters, weren’t we?’

The priest answered: ‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose you were – or are – any worse than your mother or grandmother, or the patricianesses of Rome or the worshippers of Ashtaroth. It seems we have to have a governing class and governing classes are subject to special temptations.’

‘Who’s Ashtaroth?’ Sylvia asked. ‘Astarte?’ and then: ‘Now, Father, after your experiences would you say the factory girls of Liverpool, or any other slum, are any better women than us that you used to look after?’

‘Astarte Syriaca,’ the Father said, ‘was a very powerful devil. There’s some that hold she’s not dead yet. I don’t know that I do myself.’

‘Well, I’ve done with her,’ Sylvia said.

The Father nodded: ‘You’ve had dealings with Mrs Profumo?’ he asked. ‘And that loathsome fellow . . . What’s his name?’

‘Does it shock you?’ Sylvia asked. ‘I’ll admit it was a bit thick . . . But I’ve done with it. I prefer to pin my faith to Mrs Vanderdecken. And, of course, Freud.’

The priest nodded his head and said: ‘Of course! Of course . . . ’

But Mrs Satterthwaite exclaimed, with sudden energy: ‘Sylvia Tietjens, I don’t care what you do or what you read, but if you ever speak another word to that woman, you never do to me!’

Sylvia stretched herself on her sofa. She opened her brown eyes wide and let the lids slowly drop again.

‘I’ve said once,’ she said, ‘that I don’t like to hear my friends miscalled. Eunice Vanderdecken is a bitterly misjudged woman. She’s a real good pal.’

‘She’s a Russian spy,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said.

‘Russian grandmother,’ Sylvia answered. ‘And if she is, who cares? She’s welcome for me . . . Listen now, you two. I said to myself when I came in: “I dare say I’ve given them both a rotten time.” I know you’re both more nuts on me than I deserve. And I said I’d sit and listen to all the pi-jaw you wanted to give me if I sat till dawn. And I will. As a return. But I’d rather you let my friends alone.’

Both the elder people were silent. There came from the shuttered windows of the dark room a low, scratching rustle.

‘You hear!’ the priest said to Mrs Satterthwaite.

‘It’s the branches,’ Mrs Satterthwaite answered.

The Father answered: ‘There’s no tree within ten yards! Try bats as an explanation.’

‘I’ve said I wish you wouldn’t, once,’ Mrs Satterthwaite shivered.

Sylvia said: ‘I don’t know what you two are talking about. It sounds like superstition. Mother’s rotten with it.’

‘I don’t say that it’s devils trying to get in,’ the Father said. ‘But it’s just as well to remember that devils are always trying to get in. And there are especial spots. These deep forests are noted among others.’ He suddenly turned his back and pointed at the shadowy wall. ‘Who,’ he asked, ‘but a savage possessed by a devil could have conceived of that as a decoration?’ He was pointing to a life-sized, coarsely daubed picture of a wild boar dying, its throat cut, and gouts of scarlet blood. Other agonies of animals went away into all the shadows.

‘Sport!’ he hissed. ‘It’s devilry!’

‘That’s perhaps true,’ Sylvia said. Mrs Satterthwaite was crossing herself with great rapidity. The silence remained.

Sylvia said: ‘Then if you’re both done talking I’ll say what I have to say. To begin with . . . ’ She stopped and sat rather erect, listening to the rustling from the shutters.

‘To begin with,’ she began again with impetus, ‘you spared me the catalogue of the defects of age; I know them. One grows skinny – my sort – the complexion fades, the teeth stick out. And then there is the boredom. I know it; one is bored . . . bored . . . bored! You can’t tell me anything I don’t know about that. I’m thirty. I know what to expect. You’d like to have told me, Father, only you were afraid of taking away from your famous man of the world effect – you’d like to have told me that one can insure against the boredom and the long, skinny teeth by love of husband and child. The home stunt! I believe it! I do quite believe it. Only I hate my husband . . . and I hate . . . I hate my child.’

She paused, waiting for exclamations of dismay or disapprobation from the priest. These did not come.

‘Think,’ she said, ‘of all the ruin that child has meant for me; the pain in bearing him and the fear of death.’

‘Of course,’ the priest said, ‘child-bearing is for women a very terrible thing.’

‘I can’t say,’ Mrs Tietjens went on, ‘that this has been a very decent conversation. You get a girl . . . fresh from open sin, and make her talk about it. Of course you’re a priest and mother’s mother; we’re en famille. But Sister Mary of the Cross at the convent had a maxim: “Wear velvet gloves in family life.” We seem to be going at it with gloves off.’

Father Consett still didn’t say anything.

‘You’re trying, of course, to draw me,’ Sylvia said. ‘I can see that with half an eye . . . Very well then, you shall . . . ’

She drew a breath.

‘You want to know why I hate my husband. I’ll tell you; it’s because of his simple, sheer immorality. I don’t mean his actions; his views! Every speech he utters about everything makes me – I swear it makes me – in spite of myself, want to stick a knife into him, and I can’t prove he’s wrong, not ever, about the simplest thing. But I can pain him. And I will . . . He sits about in chairs that fit his back, clumsy, like a rock, not moving for hours . . . And I can make him wince. Oh, without showing it . . . He’s what you call loyal . . . oh, loyal . . . There’s an absurd little chit of a fellow . . . oh, Macmaster . . . and his mother . . . whom he persists in a silly mystical way in calling a saint . . . a Protestant saint! . . . And his old nurse, who looks after the child . . . and the child itself . . . I tell you I’ve only got to raise an eyelid . . . yes, cock an eyelid up a little when anyone of them is mentioned . . . and it hurts him dreadfully. His eyes roll in a sort of mute anguish . . . Of course he doesn’t say anything. He’s an English country gentleman.’

Father Consett said: ‘This immorality you talk about in your husband . . . I’ve never noticed it. I saw a good deal of him when I stayed with you for the week before your child was born. I talked with him a great deal. Except in the matter of the two communions – and even in these I don’t know that we differed so much – I found him perfectly sound.’

‘Sound,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said with sudden emphasis; ‘of course he’s sound. It isn’t even the word. He’s the best ever. There was your father, for a good man . . . and him. That’s an end of it.’

‘Ah,’ Sylvia said, ‘you don’t know . . . Look here. Try and be just. Suppose I’m looking at The Times at breakfast and say, not having spoken to him for a week: “It’s wonderful what the doctors are doing. Have you seen the latest?” And at once he’ll be on his high-horse – he knows everything! – and he’ll prove . . . prove . . . that all unhealthy children must be lethal-chambered or the world will go to pieces. And it’s like being hypnotised; you can’t think of what to answer him. Or he’ll reduce you to speechless rage by proving that murderers ought not to be executed. And then I’ll ask, casually, if children ought to be lethal-chambered for being constipated. Because Marchant – that’s the nurse – is always whining that the child’s bowels aren’t regular and the dreadful diseases that leads to. Of course that hurts him. For he’s perfectly soppy about that child, though he half knows it isn’t his own . . . But that’s what I mean by immorality. He’ll profess that murderers ought to be preserved in order to breed from because they’re bold fellows, and innocent little children executed because they’re sick . . . And he’ll almost make you believe it, though you’re on the point of retching at the ideas.’

‘You wouldn’t now,’ Father Consett began, and almost coaxingly, ‘think of going into retreat for a month or two.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ Sylvia said. ‘How could I?’

‘There’s a convent of female Premonstratensians near Birkenhead, many ladies go there,’ the Father went on. ‘They cook very well, and you can have your own furniture and your own maid if ye don’t like nuns to wait on you.’

‘It can’t be done,’ Sylvia said, ‘you can see for yourself. It would make people smell a rat at once. Christopher wouldn’t hear of it . . . ’

‘No, I’m afraid it can’t be done, Father,’ Mrs Satterthwaite interrupted finally. ‘I’ve hidden here for four months to cover Sylvia’s tracks. I’ve got Wateman’s to look after. My new land steward’s coming in next week.’

‘Still,’ the Father urged, with a sort of tremulous eagerness, ‘if only for a month . . . If only for a fortnight . . . So many Catholic ladies do it . . . Ye might think of it.’

‘I see what you’re aiming at,’ Sylvia said with sudden anger; ‘you’re revolted at the idea of my going straight from one man’s arms to another.’

‘I’d be better pleased if there could be an interval,’ the Father said. ‘It’s what’s called bad form.’

Sylvia became electrically rigid on her sofa.

‘Bad form!’ she exclaimed. ‘You accuse me of bad form.’

The Father slightly bowed his head like a man facing a wind.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘It’s disgraceful. It’s unnatural. I’d travel a bit at least.’

She placed her hand on her long throat. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said, ‘you want to spare Christopher . . . the humiliation. The . . . the nausea. No doubt he’ll feel nauseated. I’ve reckoned on that. It will give me a little of my own back.’

The Father said: ‘That’s enough, woman. I’ll hear no more.’

Sylvia said: ‘You will then. Listen here . . . I’ve always got this to look forward to: I’ll settle down by that man’s side. I’ll be as virtuous as any woman. I’ve made up my mind to it and I’ll be it. And I’ll be bored stiff for the rest of my life. Except for one thing. I can torment that man. And I’ll do it. Do you understand how I’ll do it? There are many ways. But if the worst comes to the worst I can always drive him silly . . . by corrupting the child!’ She was panting a little, and round her brown eyes the whites showed. ‘I’ll get even with him. I can. I know how, you see. And with you, through him, for tormenting me. I’ve come all the way from Brittany without stopping. I haven’t slept . . . But I can . . . ’

Father Consett put his hand beneath the tail of his coat.

‘Sylvia Tietjens,’ he said, ‘in my pistol pocket I’ve a little bottle of holy water which I carry for such occasions. What if I was to throw two drops of it over you and cry: Exorcizo to Ashtaroth in nomine? . . . ’

She erected her body above her skirts on the sofa, stiffened like a snake’s neck above its coils. Her face was quite pallid, her eyes staring out.

‘You . . . you daren’t,’ she said. ‘To me . . . an outrage!’ Her feet slid slowly to the floor; she measured the distance to the doorway with her eyes. ‘You daren’t,’ she said again; ‘I’d denounce you to the Bishop . . . ’

‘It’s little the Bishop would help you with them burning into your skin,’ the priest said. ‘Go away, I bid you, and say a Hail Mary or two. Ye need them. Ye’ll not talk of corrupting a little child before me again.’

‘I won’t,’ Sylvia said. ‘I shouldn’t have . . . ’

Her black figure showed in silhouette against the open doorway.

* * *

When the door was closed upon them, Mrs Satterthwaite said: ‘Was it necessary to threaten her with that? You know best, of course. It seems rather strong to me.’

‘It’s a hair from the dog that’s bit her,’ the priest said. ‘She’s a silly girl. She’s been playing at black masses along with that Mrs Profumo and the fellow whose name I can’t remember. You could tell that. They cut the throat of a white kid and splash its blood about . . . That was at the back of her mind . . . It’s not very serious. A parcel of silly, idle girls. It’s not much more than palmistry or fortune-telling to them if one has to weigh it, for all its ugliness, as a sin. As far as their volition goes, and it’s volition that’s the essence of prayer, black or white . . . But it was at the back of her mind, and she won’t forget tonight.’

‘Of course, that’s your affair, Father,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said lazily. ‘You hit her pretty hard. I don’t suppose she’s ever been hit so hard. What was it you wouldn’t tell her?’

‘Only,’ the priest said, ‘I wouldn’t tell her because the thought’s best not put in her head . . . But her hell on earth will come when her husband goes running, blind, head down, mad after another woman.’

Mrs Satterthwaite looked at nothing; then she nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said; ‘I hadn’t thought of it . . . But will he? He is a very sound fellow, isn’t he?’

‘What’s to stop it?’ the priest asked. ‘What in the world but the grace of our blessed Lord, which he hasn’t got and doesn’t ask for? And then . . . He’s a young man, full-blooded, and they won’t be living . . . maritalement. Not if I know him. And then . . . Then she’ll tear the house down. The world will echo with her wrongs.’

‘Do you mean to say,’ Mrs Satterthwaite said, ‘that Sylvia would do anything vulgar?’

‘Doesn’t every woman who’s had a man to torture for years when she loses him?’ the priest asked. ‘The more she’s made an occupation of torturing him, the less right she thinks she has to lose him.’

Mrs Satterthwaite looked gloomily into the dusk.

‘That poor devil . . . ’ she said. ‘Will he get any peace anywhere? . . . What’s the matter, Father?’

The Father said: ‘I’ve just remembered she gave me tea and cream and I drank it. Now I can’t take mass for Father Reinhardt. I’ll have to go and knock up his curate, who lives away in the forest.’

At the door, holding the candle, he said: ‘I’d have you not get up today nor yet tomorrow, if ye can stand it. Have a headache and let Sylvia nurse you . . . You’ll have to tell how she nursed you when you get back to London. And I’d rather ye didn’t lie more out and out than ye need, if it’s to please me . . . Besides, if ye watch Sylvia nursing you, you might hit on a characteristic touch to make it seem more truthful . . . How her sleeves brushed the medicine bottles and irritated you, maybe . . . or – you’ll know! If we can save scandal to the congregation, we may as well.’

He ran downstairs.