Parade's End (16 page)

‘And your friend? Another medical man! All with stethoscope complete. It takes, of course, two medical men to certify …’

He stopped and with an expression of sudden, distorted rage, pushed aside the arm of Parry, who was sliding a plate of sole-fillets on to the table beneath his nose.

‘Take away,’ he was beginning to exclaim thunderously, ‘these conducements to the filthy lusts of …’ But with another cunning and apprehensive look at Macmaster, he said: ‘Yes! yes! Parry! That’s right. Yes! Sole! A touch of kidney to follow. Another! Yes! Grapefruit! With sherry!’ He had adopted an old Oxford voice, spread his napkin over his knees and hastily placed in his mouth a morsel of fish.

Macmaster with a patient and distinct intonation said that he must be permitted to introduce himself. He was Macmaster, Mr. Duchemin’s correspondent on the subject of his little monograph. Mr. Duchemin looked at him, hard, with an awakened attention that gradually lost suspicion and became gloatingly joyful:

‘Ah, yes, Macmaster!’ he said. ‘Macmaster. A budding critic. A little of a hedonist perhaps? And yes … you wired that you were coming. Two friends! Not medical men! Friends!’ He moved his face closer to Macmaster and said:

‘How tired you look! Worn! Worn!’

Macmaster was about to say that he was rather hard-worked when, in a harsh, high cackle close to his face there came the Latin words. Mrs. Duchemin – and Tietjens! – had heard. Macmaster knew then what he was up against. He took another look at the prize-fighter; moved his head to one side to catch a momentary view of the gigantic Mr. Horsley, whose size took on a new meaning. Then he settled down in his chair and ate a kidney. The physical force present was no doubt enough to suppress Mr. Duchemin should he become violent. And trained! It was one of the curious, minor coincidences of life that, at Cambridge, he had once thought of hiring this very Parry to follow round his dear friend Sim. Sim, the most brilliant of sardonic ironists, sane, decent and ordinarily a little prudish on the surface, had been subject to just such temporary lapses as Mr. Duchemin. On society occasions he would stand up and shout or sit down and whisper the most unthinkable indecencies. Macmaster, who had loved him very much, had run round with Sim as often as he could, and had thus gained skill in dealing with these
manifestations.
… He felt suddenly a certain pleasure! He thought he might gain prestige in the eyes of Mrs. Duchemin if he dealt quietly and efficiently with this situation. It might even lead to an intimacy. He asked nothing better!

He knew that Mrs. Duchemin had turned towards him: he could feel her listening and observing him; it was as if her glance was warm on his cheek. But he did not look round; he had to keep his eyes on the gloating face of her husband. Mr. Duchemin was quoting Petronius, leaning towards his guest. Macmaster consumed kidneys stiffly.

He said:

‘That isn’t the amended version of the iambics. Wilamovitz Möllendorf that we used …’

To interrupt him Mr. Duchemin put his thin hand courteously on Macmaster’s arm. It had a great cornelian seal set in red gold on the third finger. He went on, reciting in ecstasy, his head a little on one side as if he were listening to invisible choristers. Macmaster really disliked the Oxford intonation of Latin. He looked for a short moment at Mrs. Duchemin; her eyes were upon him; large, shadowy, full of gratitude. He saw, too, that they were welling over with wetness.

He looked quickly back at Duchemin. And suddenly it came to him; she was suffering! She was probably suffering intensely. It had not occurred to him that she would suffer – partly because he was without nerves himself, partly because he had conceived of Mrs. Duchemin as firstly feeling admiration for himself. Now it seemed to him abominable that she should suffer.

Mrs. Duchemin was in an agony. Macmaster had looked at her intently and looked away! She read into his glance contempt for her situation, and anger that he should have been placed in such a position. In her pain she stretched out her hand and touched his arm.

Macmaster was aware of her touch; his mind seemed filled with sweetness. But he kept his head obstinately averted. For her sake he did not dare to look away from the maniacal face. A crisis was coming. Mr. Duchemin had arrived at the English translation. He placed his hands on the table-cloth in preparation for rising; he was going to stand on his feet and shout obscenities wildly to the other guests. It was the exact moment.

Macmaster made his voice dry and penetrating to say:

‘“Youth of tepid loves” is a lamentable rendering of
puer calide
! It’s lamentably antiquated …’

Duchemin choked and said:

‘What? What? What’s that?’

‘It’s just like Oxford to use an eighteenth-century crib. I suppose that’s Whiston and Ditton? Something like that …’ He observed Duchemin, brought out of his impulse, to be wavering – as if he were coming awake in a strange place! He added:

‘Anyhow it’s wretched schoolboy smut. Fifth form. Or not even that. Have some galantine. I’m going to. Your sole’s cold.’

Mr. Duchemin looked down at his plate.

‘Yes! Yes!’ he muttered. ‘Yes! With sugar and vinegar sauce!’ The prize-fighter slipped away to the sideboard, an admirable quiet fellow; as unobtrusive as a burying beetle. Macmaster said:

‘You were about to tell me something for my little monograph. What became of Maggie … Maggie Simpson. The Scots girl who was Rossetti’s model for
Alla Finestra del Cielo
?’

Mr. Duchemin looked at Macmaster with sane, muddled, rather exhausted eyes:

‘
Alla Finestra
!’ he exclaimed: ‘Oh yes! I’ve got the water-colour. I saw her sitting for it and bought it on the spot… .’ He looked again at his plate, started at sight of the galantine and began to eat ravenously: ‘A beautiful girl!’ he said: ‘Very long-necked … She wasn’t of course … eh … respectable! She’s living yet, I think. Very old. I saw her two years ago. She had a lot of pictures. Relics of course! … In the Whitechapel Road she lived. She was naturally of that class… .’ He went muttering on, his head above his plate. Macmaster considered that the fit was over. He was irresistibly impelled to turn to Mrs. Duchemin; her face was rigid, stiff. He said swiftly:

‘If he’ll eat a little: get his stomach filled … It calls the blood down from the head… .’

She said:

‘Oh, forgive! It’s dreadful for you! Myself I will never forgive!’

He said:

‘No! No! … Why; it’s what I’m
for
!’

A deep emotion brought her whole white face to life:

‘Oh, you
good
man!’ she said in her profound tones, and they remained gazing at each other.

Suddenly, from behind Macmaster’s back Mr. Duchemin shouted:

‘I say he made a settlement on her,
dum casta et sola
, of course. Whilst she remained chaste and alone!’

Mr. Duchemin, suddenly feeling the absence of the powerful will that had seemed to overweigh his own like a great force in the darkness, was on his feet, panting and delighted:

‘Chaste!’ he shouted. ‘Chaste, you observe! What a world of suggestion in the word …’ He surveyed the opulent broadness of his table-cloth; it spread out before his eyes as if it had been a great expanse of meadow in which he could gallop, relaxing his limbs after long captivity. He shouted three obscene words and went on in his Oxford Movement voice: ‘But chastity …’

Mrs. Wannop suddenly said:

‘Oh!’ and looked at her daughter, whose face grew slowly crimson as she continued to peel a peach. Mrs. Wannop turned to Mr. Horsley beside her and said:

‘You write, too, I believe, Mr. Horsley. No doubt something more learned than my poor readers would care for …’ Mr. Horsley had been preparing, according to his instructions from Mrs. Duchemin, to shout a description of an article he had been writing about the
Mosella
of Ausonius, but as he was slow in starting the lady got in first. She talked on serenely about the tastes of the large public. Tietjens leaned across to Miss Wannop and, holding in his right hand a half-peeled fig, said to her as loudly as he could:

‘I’ve got a message for you from Mr. Waterhouse. He says if you’ll …’

The completely deaf Miss Fox – who had had her training by writing – remarked diagonally to Mrs. Duchemin:

‘I think we shall have thunder to-day. Have you remarked the number of minute insects… .’

‘When my revered preceptor,’ Mr. Duchemin thundered on, ‘drove away in the carriage on his wedding day he said to his bride: “We will live like the blessed angels!” How sublime! I, too, after my nuptials …’

Mrs. Duchemin suddenly screamed:

‘Oh …
no
!’

As if checked for a moment in their stride all the others paused – for a breath. Then they continued talking with polite animation and listening with minute attention. To Tietjens that seemed the highest achievement and justification of English manners!

Parry, the prize-fighter, had twice caught his master by the arm and shouted that breakfast was getting cold. He said now to Macmaster that he and the Rev. Horsley could get Mr. Duchemin away, but there’d be a hell of a fight. Macmaster whispered: ‘Wait!’ and, turning to Mrs. Duchemin he said: ‘I can stop him. Shall I?’ She said:

‘Yes! Yes! Anything!’ He observed tears; isolated upon her cheeks, a thing he had never seen. With caution and with hot rage he whispered into the prize-fighter’s hairy ear that was held down to him:

‘Punch him in the kidney. With your thumb. As
hard
as you can without breaking your thumb …’

Mr. Duchemin had just declaimed:

‘I, too, after my nuptials …’ He began to wave his arms, pausing and looking from unlistening face to unlistening face. Mrs. Duchemin had just screamed.

Mr. Duchemin thought that the arrow of God struck him. He imagined himself an unworthy messenger. In such pain as he had never conceived of he fell into his chair and sat huddled up, a darkness covering his eyes.

‘He won’t get up again,’ Macmaster whispered to the appreciative pugilist. ‘He’ll want to. But he’ll be afraid.’

He said to Mrs. Duchemin:

‘Dearest lady! It’s all over. I assure you of that. It’s a scientific nerve counter-irritant.’

Mr. Duchemin said:

‘Forgive!’ with one deep sob: ‘You can never respect …’ She felt her eyes explore his face as the wretch in a cell explores the face of his executioner for a sign of pardon. Her heart stayed still: her breath suspended itself… .

Then complete heaven began. Upon her left palm she felt cool fingers beneath the cloth. This man knew always the exact right action! Upon the fingers, cool, like spikenard and ambrosia, her fingers closed themselves.

In complete bliss, in a quiet room, his voice went on talking. At first with great neatness of phrase, but with what refinement! He explained that certain excesses being merely nervous cravings, can be combated if not, indeed, cured altogether, by the fear of, by the determination not to endure, sharp physical pain – which of course is a nervous matter, too! …

Parry, at a given moment, had said into his master’s ear:

‘It’s time you prepared your sermon for to-morrow, sir,’ and Mr. Duchemin had gone as quietly as he had arrived, gliding over the thick carpet to the small door.

Then Macmaster said to her:

‘You come from Edinburgh? You’ll know the Fifeshire coast then.’

‘Do I not?’ she said. His hand remained in hers. He began to talk of the whins on the links and the sanderlings along the flats, with such a Scots voice and in phrases so vivid that she saw her childhood again, and had in her eyes a wetness of a happier order. She released his cool hand after a long gentle pressure. But when it was gone it was as if much of her life went. She said: ‘You’ll be knowing Kingussie House, just outside your town. It was there I spent my holidays as a child.’

He answered:

‘Maybe I played round it a barefoot lad and you in your grandeur within.’

She said:

‘Oh, no! Hardly! There would be the difference of our ages! And … And indeed there are other things I will tell you.’

She addressed herself to Tietjens, with all her heroic armour of charm buckled on again:

‘Only think! I find Mr. Macmaster and I almost played together in our youths.’

He looked at her, she knew, with a commiseration that she hated:

‘Then you’re an older friend than I,’ he asked, ‘though I’ve known him since I was fourteen, and I don’t believe you could be a better. He’s a good fellow… .’

She hated him for his condescension towards a better man and for his warning – she
knew
it was a warning – to her to spare his friend.

Mrs. Wannop gave a distinct, but not an alarming scream. Mr. Horsley had been talking to her about an unusual fish that used to inhabit the Moselle in Roman times. The
Mosella
of Ausonius; the subject of the essay he was writing is mostly about fish… .

‘No,’ he shouted, ‘it’s been said to be the roach. But there are no roach in the river now.
Vannulis viridis, oculisque
. No. It’s the other way round:
Red
fins …’

Mrs. Wannop’s scream and her wide gesture: her hand, indeed, was nearly over his mouth and her trailing sleeve across his plate! – were enough to interrupt him.

‘
Tietjens
!’ she again screamed. ‘Is it possible? …’

She pushed her daughter out of her seat and, moving round beside the young man, she overwhelmed him with vociferous love. As Tietjens had turned to speak to Mrs. Duchemin she had recognised his aquiline half-profile as exactly that of his father at her own wedding-breakfast. To the table that knew it by heart – though Tietjens himself didn’t! – she recited the story of how his father had saved her life, and was her mascot. And she offered the son – for to the father she had never been allowed to make any return – her house, her purse, her heart, her time, her all. She was so completely sincere that, as the party broke up, she just nodded to Macmaster and, catching Tietjens forcibly by the arm, said perfunctorily to the critic:

‘Sorry I can’t help you any more with the article. But my dear Chrissie must have the books he wants. At once! This very minute!’