Parade's End (121 page)

‘Eh, no mon. You’re a fine soldier now, raping half the girls in Flanders an’ Ealing and asking us to regard you as heroes. Fine heroes. And now you’re safe… . A hundred pounds is a price to a Christian that is faithful to his lovely wife. Five pounds is as much as I’ll give you for the model and be thankful it is five, not one, for old sake’s sake!’

That was what Sir John Robertson had said to Christopher; that was what the world was like to serving soldiers in that day. You don’t have to wonder that Christopher was bitter – even to his own brother with the sweat making his underlinen icy. He had said:

‘My good chap. I won’t lend you a penny on that idiotic jigamaree. But I’ll write you a cheque for a thousand
pounds
this minute. Give me my cheque book from the table… .’

Marie Léonie had come into the room on hearing Christopher’s voice. She liked to hear the news from Christopher. And she liked Christopher and Mark to have heated discussions. She had observed that they did Mark good: on the day when Christopher had first come there, three weeks before, when they certainly had heatedly discussed, she had observed that Mark’s temperature had fallen from ninety-nine point six to ninety-eight point two. In two hours… . After all, if a Yorkshireman can quarrel he can live. They were like that, those others, she said.

Christopher had turned on her and said:

‘Ma belle amie m’attend à ma maison; nous voulons célébrer avec mes camarades de régiment. Je n’ai pas le soue. Prêtez moi quarante livres, je vous en prie, madame!’ He had added that he would leave his cabinet as a pledge. He was as stiff as a sentry outside Buckingham Palace. She had looked at Mark with some astonishment. After all, she might well be astonished. He himself had made no sign and suddenly Christopher had exclaimed:

‘Prêtez les moi, prêtez les moi, pour l’amour de Dieu!’

Marie Léonie had gone a little white, but she had turned up her skirt and turned down her stocking and took out the notes.

‘Pour le dieu d’amour, monsieur, je veux bien,’ she had said… . You never knew what a Frenchwoman would not say. That was out of an old song.

But the sweat burst out all over his face at the recollection: great drops of sweat.

VII

MARIE LÉONIE, A
strong taste of apples in her mouth, strong odours of apples on the air, wasps around her and as if a snow-drift of down descending about her feet, was frowning seriously over Burgundy bottles into which ran cider from a glass tube that she held to their necks. She frowned because the task was serious and engrossing, because the wasps annoyed her and because she was resisting an impulse inside herself. It told her that something ailed Mark and urged her to go and look at him.

It annoyed her because as a rule she felt presages of something ailing Mark only at night. Only at night. During the day usually she felt in her
for intérieur
that Mark was like what he was only because he wanted so to be. His glance was too virile and dominant to let you think otherwise – the dark, liquid, direct glance! But at nightfall – or at any rate shortly after supper when she had retired to her room terrible premonitions of disaster to Mark visited her. He was dying where he lay; he was beset by the spectral being of the countryside; robbers, even, had crept upon him, though that was unreasonable. For all the countryside knew that Mark was paralysed and unable to store wealth in his mattress… . Still, nefarious strangers might see him and imagine that he kept his gold repeater watch beneath his pillow… . So she would rise a hundred times in a night and, going to the low, diamond-casement window, would lean out and listen. But there would be no sound: the wind in the leaves; the cry of water-birds overhead. The dim light would be in the hut, seen unmoving through the apple boughs.

Now, however, in broad daylight, towards the hour of tea, with the little maid on a stool beside her plucking the boiling-hens that were to go to market next day, with the boxes of eggs on their shelves, each egg wired to the bottom of its box waiting till she had time to date-stamp it – in the open potting-shed in the quiet, broad light of a summer day she was visited by a presage of something ailing Mark. She resented it, but she was not the woman to resist it.

There was, however, nothing to warrant it. From the corners of the house, to which she proceeded, she could see quite well the greater part of Mark’s solitary figure. Gunning, being talked to by the English lord, held a spare horse by the bridle and was looking at Mark over the hedge, too. He exhibited no emotions. A young man was walking along the inside of the hedge between it and the raspberries. That was no affair of hers: Gunning was not protesting. The head and shoulders of a young woman – or it might be another young man – were proceeding along the outside of the hedge nearly level with the first one. That was equally no affair of hers. Probably they were looking at the bird’s nest. There was some sort of bird’s nest she had heard, in that thick hedge. There was no end
to
the folly of the English in the country as in the town: they would waste time over everything. This bird was a bottle … bottle something and Christopher and Valentine and the parson and the doctor and the artist who lived down the hill were crazy about it. They walked on tip-toe when they were within twenty yards. Gunning was allowed to trim the hedge, but apparently the birds knew Gunning… . For Marie Léonie all birds were
moineaux
, as who should say ‘sparrers’ as in London they called them – just as all flowers were
giroflées
– as you might say wall-flowers… . No wonder this nation was going to rack and ruin when it wasted its time over preserving the nests of sparrers and naming innumerable wall-flowers! The country was well enough – a sort of suburb of Caen: but the people! … No wonder William, of Falaise, in Normandy subjugated them with such ease.

Now she had wasted five minutes, for the glass tubes, hinged on rubber, that formed her siphon from barrel to bottle had had perforce to be taken out of the spile-hole, the air had entered into it, and she would have to put it back and suck once more at the tube until the first trickle of cider entered her mouth. She disliked having to do that; it wasted the cider and she disliked the flavour in the afternoon when one had lunched. The little maid also would say: ‘A – oh, meladyship, Ah
du
call thet queer!’ … Nothing would cure that child of saying that though she was otherwise
sage et docile
. Even Gunning scratched his head at the sight of those tubes.

Could these savages never understand that if you want to have
cidre mousseux
– foaming – you must have as little sediment as possible? And that in the bottom of casks, even if they had not been moved for a long time, there will always be sediment – particularly if you set up a flow in the liquids by running it from a tap near the bottom. So you siphon off the top of the great casks for bottling
mousseux
and bottle the rest of the cask and run the thickest into little thin-wood kegs with many hopes for freezing in the winter… . To make
calvados
, where you cannot have alembics because of the excise … In this unhappy country you may not have alembics for the distilling of apple-jack, plum-brandy or other
fines
– because of the excise!
Quel pays! Quels gens!

They lacked industry, frugality – and above all, spirit! Look at that poor Valentine, hiding in her room upstairs because there were people about whom she suspected of being people from the English lord’s house… . By rights that poor Valentine should be helping her with the bottling and ready to sell that lugubrious old furniture to visitors whilst her lord was away buying more old rubbish… . And she was distracted because she could not find some prints. They represented – Marie Léonie was well aware because she had heard the facts several times – street criers of ambulant wares in London years ago. There were only eight of these to be found. Where were the other four? The customer, a lady of title, was anxious for them. For presents for an immediate wedding! Monsieur my brother-in-law had come upon the four that were to make up the set at a sale two days before. He had recounted with satisfaction how he had found them on the grass… . It was supposed that he had brought them home; but they were not in the warehouse at Cramp the carpenter’s, they were not to be found, left in the cart. They were in no drawer or press… . What was to prove that
mon beau-frère
had brought them home from the sale. He was not there: he was gone for a day and a half. Naturally he would be gone for a day and a half when he was most needed… . And where was he gone, leaving his young wife in that nervous condition? For a day and a half! He had never before been gone for a day and a half… . There was then something brewing; it was in the air; it was in her bones… . It was like that dreadful day of the Armistice when this miserable land betrayed the beautiful
pays de France
! … When monsieur had borrowed forty pounds of her… . In the name of heaven why did not he borrow another forty – or eighty – or a hundred, rather than be distracted and distract Mark and his unhappy girl? …

She was not unsympathetic, that girl. She had civilisation. She could talk of Philémon and Baucis. She had made her
bachot
, she was what you would call
fille de famille
… . But without
chic
… Without … Without … Well, she neither displayed enough erudition to be a
bas bleu
– though she had enough erudition! – nor enough
chic
to be a
femme légère
– a
poule
who would
faire la noce
with her gallant. Monsieur the brother-in-law was no gay spark. But
you
never know with a man… . The cut of a skirt; a twist of the hair … Though to-day there was no hair to twist; but there is the equivalent.

And it was a fact that you never knew a man. Look at the case of Eleanor Dupont who lived for ten years with Duchamp of the Sorbonne… . Eleanor would never attend scrupulously to her attire because her man wore blue spectacles and was a
savant
… . But what happened… . There came along a little piece with a hat as large as a cartwheel covered with greenstuff and sleeves up above her ears – as the mode was then… .

That had been a lesson to her, Marie Léonie, who had been a girl at the time. She had determined that if she achieved a
collage sérieux
with a monsieur of eighty and as blind as a bat she would study the modes of the day right down to the latest perfume. These messieurs did not know it, but they moved among
femmes du monde
and the fashionable cocottes and however much she at home might be the little brown bird of the domestic hearth, the lines of her dresses, her hair, her personal odour, must conform. Mark did not imagine; she did not suppose he had ever seen a fashionable journal in her apartments that were open to him or had ever suspected that she walked in the Row on a Sunday when he was away… . But she had studied these things like another. And more. For it is difficult to keep with the fashion and at the same time appear as if you were a serious
petite bourgeoise
. But she had done it: and observe the results… .

But that poor Valentine… . Her man was attached enough, and well he should be considering the affair in which he had landed her. But always there comes the
pic des tempêtes
, the Cape Horn, round which you must go. It is the day when your man looks at you and says: ‘H’m, h’m’, and considers if the candle is not more valuable than the game! Ah then … There are wise folk who put that at the seventh year; other wise ones, at the second; others again at the eleventh… . But in fact you may put it at any day on any year – to the hundredth… . And that poor Valentine with four spots of oil on her only skirt but two. And that so badly hung, though the stuff no doubt was once good. One must concede that! They make admirable tweeds in this country: better certainly than in Roubaix. But is that enough to save a country – or a
woman
dependent on a man who has introduced her into a bad affair?

A voice behind her said:

‘I see you have plenty of eggs!’ – an unusual voice of a sort of breathless nervousness. Marie Léonie continued to hold the mouth of her tube into the neck of a burgundy bottle; into this she had already introduced a small screw of sifted sugar and an extremely minute portion of a powder that she got from a pharmacist of Rouen. This, she understood, made the cider of a rich brownness. She did not see why cider should be brown but it was considered to be less fortifying if it were light golden. She continued also to think about Valentine who would be twittering with nerves at the window whose iron-leaded casement was open above their heads. She would have put down her Latin book and have crept to the window to listen.

The little girl beside Marie Léonie had risen from the three-legged stool and held a dead, white fowl with a nearly naked breast by its neck. She said hoarsely:

‘These ’ere be ’Er Ladyship’s settins of prize Reds.’ She was blonde, red-faced and wore on her dull fair hair a rather large cap, on her thin body a check blue cotton gown. ‘’Arf a crownd a piece the heggs be or twenty-four shillings a dozen if you take a gross.’

Marie Léonie heard the hoarse voice with some satisfaction. This girl whom they had only had for a fortnight seemed to be satisfactory mentally; it was not her business to sell the eggs but Gunning’s; nevertheless she knew the details. Marie Léonie did not turn round: it was not
her
business to talk to anyone who wanted to buy eggs and she had no curiosity as to customers. She had too much else to think about. The voice said:

‘Half a crown seems a great deal for an egg. What is that in dollars? This must be that tyranny over edibles by the producer of which one has heard so much.’

‘Tiddn nothin’ in dollars,’ the girl said. ‘’Arf a dollar is two bob. ’Arf a crown is two ’n six.’

The conversation continued, but it grew dim in Marie Léonie’s thoughts. The child and the voice disputed as to what a dollar was – or so it appeared, for Marie Léonie was not familiar with either of the accents of the disputants. The child was a combative child. She drove both
Gunning
and the cabinet-maker Camp with an organ of brass. Of tin perhaps, like a penny whistle. When she was not grubbily working, she read books with avidity – books about Blood if she could get them. She had an exaggerated respect for the Family but none for any other soul in the world… .