Parade's End (61 page)

Perowne said:

‘Yssingueux-les-Pervenches, such a pretty name,’ reproachfully.

‘It’s no good,’ Sylvia answered, ‘your trying to awaken sentimental memories in me. You will have to make me forget what you were like if you want to carry on with me… . I’m stopping here and listening to your corncrake of a voice because I want to wait until Christopher goes out of the hotel … Then I am going to my room to tidy up for Lady Sachse’s party and you will sit here and wait for me.’

‘
I’m not
,’ Perowne said, ‘going to Lady Sachse’s. Why,
he
is going to be one of the principal witnesses to sign the marriage contract. And Old Campion and all the rest of the staff are going to be there… . You don’t catch
me
… . An unexpected prior engagement is my line. No fear.’

‘You’ll come with me, my little man,’ Sylvia said, ‘if you ever want to bask in my smile again… . I’m not going to Lady Sachse’s alone, looking as if I couldn’t catch a man to escort me, under the eyes of half the French house of peers… . If they’ve got a house of peers! … You don’t catch
me
… . No fear!’ she mimicked his creaky voice. ‘You can go away as soon as you’ve shown yourself as my escort… .’

‘But, good God!’ Perowne cried out, ‘that’s just what I mustn’t do. Campion said that if he heard any more of my being seen about with you he would have me sent back to my beastly regiment. And my beastly regiment is in the trenches… . You don’t see
me
in the trenches, do you?’

‘I’d rather see you there than in my own room,’ Sylvia said. ‘Any day!’

‘Ah, there you are!’ Perowne exclaimed with animation. ‘What guarantee have I that if I do what you want I shall bask in your smile as you call it? I’ve got myself into a most awful hole, bringing you here without any papers. You never told me you hadn’t any papers. General O’Hara, the P.M., has raised a most awful strafe about it. And what have I got for it? … Not the ghost of a smile… .
And
you should see old O’Hara’s purple face! … Someone woke him from his afternoon nap to report to him about your heinous case and he hasn’t recovered from the indigestion yet… . Besides, he hates Tietjens … Tietjens is always chipping away at his military police … O’Hara’s lambs… .’

Sylvia was not listening, but she was smiling a slow smile at an inward thought. It maddened him.

‘What’s your game?’ he exclaimed. ‘Hell and hounds, what’s your game? … You can’t have come here to see …
him
. You don’t come here to see me, as far as I can see. Well then …’

Sylvia looked round at him with all her eyes, wide open as if she had just awakened from a deep sleep.

‘I didn’t know I was coming,’ she said. ‘It came into my head to come suddenly. Ten minutes before I started. And I came. I didn’t know papers were wanted. I suppose I could have got them if I had wanted them… . You never asked me if I had any papers. You just froze on to me and had me into your special carriage… . I didn’t know you were coming.’

That seemed to Perowne the last insult. He exclaimed:

‘Oh, damn it, Sylvia! you
must
have known… . You were at the Quirks’ squash on Wednesday evening. And
they
knew. My best friends.’

‘Since you ask for it,’ she said, ‘I didn’t know… . And I would not have come by that train if I had known you would be going by it. You force me to say rude things to you.’ She added: ‘Why can’t you be more conciliatory?’ to keep him quiet for a little. His jaw dropped down.

She was wondering where Christopher had got the money to pay for a bed at the hotel. Only a very short time before she had drawn all the balance of his banking account, except for a shilling. It was the middle of the month and he could not have drawn any more pay… . That, of course, was a try on her part. He might be forced into remonstrating. In the same way she had tried on the accusation that he had carried off her sheets. It was sheer wilfulness, and when she looked again at his motionless features she knew that she had been rather stupid… . But she was at the end of her tether: she had before now tried making accusations against her husband, but she had never tried inconveniencing him… . Now she suddenly
realised
the full stupidity of which she had been guilty. He would know perfectly well that those petty frightfulnesses of hers were not in the least in her note; so he would know, too, that each of them was just a try-on. He would say: ‘She is trying to make me squeal. I’m damned if I will!’

She would have to adopt much more formidable methods. She said: ‘He shall … he shall … he
shall
come to heel.’

Major Perowne had now closed his jaw. He was reflecting. Once he mumbled: ‘More
conciliatory
! Holy smoke!’

She was feeling suddenly in spirits; it was the sight of Christopher had done it, the perfect assurance that they were going to live under the same roof again. She would have betted all she possessed and her immortal soul on the chance that he would not take up with the Wannop girl. And it would have been betting on a certainty! … But she had had no idea what their relations were to be, after the war. At first she had thought that they had parted for good when she had gone off from their flat at four o’clock in the morning. It had seemed logical. But, gradually, in retreat at Birkenhead, in the still, white, nun’s room, doubt had come upon her. It was one of the disadvantages of living as they did that they seldom spoke their thoughts. But that was also at times an advantage. She had certainly meant their parting to be for good. She had certainly raised her voice in giving the name of her station to the taxi-man with the pretty firm conviction that he would hear her; and she had been pretty well certain that he would take it as a sign that the breath had gone out of their union… . Pretty certain. But not quite! …

She would have died rather than write to him; she would die, now, rather than give any inkling that she wanted them to live under the same roof again… . She said to herself:

‘Is he writing to that girl?’ And then: ‘No! … I’m certain that he isn’t.’ She had had all his letters stopped at the flat, except for a few circulars that she let dribble through to him, so that he might imagine that all his correspondence was coming through. From the letters to him that she did read she was pretty sure that he had given no other address than the flat in Gray’s Inn… . But
there
had been no letters from Valentine Wannop… . Two from Mrs. Wannop, two from his brother Mark, one from Port Scatho, one or two from brother officers and some officials’ chits… . She said to herself that, if there
had
been any letters from that girl, she would have let all his letters go through, including the girl’s… . Now she was not so certain that she would have.

In the glass she saw Christopher marching woodenly out of the hotel, along the path that led from door to door behind her. It came to her with extraordinary gladness – the absolute conviction that he was not corresponding with Miss Wannop. The absolute conviction… . If he had come alive enough to do that he would have looked different. She did not know how he would have looked. But different … alive! Perhaps self-conscious; perhaps … satisfied …

For some time the major had been grumbling about his wrongs. He said that he followed her about all day, like a lap-dog, and got nothing for it. Now she wanted him to be conciliatory. She said she wanted to have a man on show as escort. Well then, an escort got something… . At just this moment he was beginning again with:

‘Look here … will you let me come to your room tonight or will you not?’

She burst into high, loud laughter. He said:

‘Damn it all, it isn’t any laughing matter! … Look here! You don’t know what I risk… . There are A.P.M.s and P.M.s and deputy sub-acting A.P.M.s walking about the corridors of all the hotels in this town, all night long… . It’s as much as my job is worth… .’

She put her handkerchief to her lips to hide a smile that she knew would be too cruel for him not to notice. And even when she took it away, he said:

‘Hang it all, what a cruel-looking fiend you are! … Why the devil do I hang around you? … There’s a picture that my mother’s got, by Burne-Jones … A cruel-looking woman with a distant smile … some vampire … La belle Dame sans Merci. That’s what you’re like.’

She looked at him suddenly with considerable seriousness… .

‘See here, Potty …’ she began. He groaned:

‘I believe you’d like me to be sent to the beastly trenches… . Yet a big, distinguished-looking chap like me
wouldn’t
have a chance… . At the first volley the Germans fired, they’d pick me off… .’

‘Oh, Potty,’ she exclaimed, ‘try to be serious for a minute… . I tell you I’m a woman who’s trying … who’s desperately wanting … to be reconciled to her husband! I would not tell that to another soul… . I would not tell it to myself… . But one owes something … a parting scene, if nothing else… . Well, something … to a man one’s been in bed with… . I didn’t give you a parting scene at … ah, Yssingueux-les-Pervenches … so I give you this tip instead… .’

He said:

‘Will you leave your bedroom door unlocked, or won’t you?’

She said:

‘If that man would throw his handkerchief to me, I would follow him round the world in my shift! Look here … see me shake when I think of it… .’ She held out her hand at the end of her long arm: hand and arm trembled together, minutely, then very much… . ‘Well,’ she finished, ‘if you see that and still want to come to my room … your blood be on your own head… .’ She paused for a breath or two and then said:

‘You can come… . I won’t lock my door. But I don’t say that you’ll get anything … or that you’ll like what you get… . That’s a fair tip… .’ She added suddenly: ‘You
sale fat
… take what you get and be damned to you! …’

Major Perowne had suddenly taken to twirling his moustaches; he said:

‘Oh, I’ll chance the A.P.M.s… .’

She suddenly coiled her legs into her chair.

‘I know now what I came here for,’ she said.

Major Wilfrid Fosbrooke Eddicker Perowne of Perowne, the son of his mother, was one of those individuals who have no history, no strong proclivities, and no, or almost no, characteristics. He had done nothing; his knowledge seemed to be bounded by the contents of his newspaper for the immediate day. At any rate, his conversation never went any farther. He was not bold, he was not shy; he was neither markedly courageous nor markedly cowardly. His mother was immoderately wealthy, owned an immense castle that hung over crags, above a western sea,
much
as a bird-cage hangs from a window of a high tenement building, but she received few or no visitors, her cuisine being indifferent and her wine atrocious. She had strong temperance opinions and, immediately after the death of her husband, she had emptied the contents of his cellar, which were almost as historic as his castle, into the sea, a shudder going through county-family England. But even this was not enough to make Perowne himself notorious.

His mother allowed him – after an eye-opener in early youth – the income of a junior royalty, but he did nothing with it. He lived in a great house in Palace Gardens, Kensington, and he lived all alone with rather a large staff of servants who had been selected by his mother, but they did nothing at all, for he ate all his meals, and even took his bath and dressed for dinner at the Bath Club. He was otherwise parsimonious.

He had, after the fashion of his day, passed a year or two in the army when young. He had been first gazetted to His Majesty’s Forty-second Regiment, but on the Black Watch proceeding to India he had exchanged into the Glamorganshires, at that time commanded by General Campion and recruiting in and around Lincolnshire. The general had been an old friend of Perowne’s mother, and, on being promoted to brigadier, had taken Perowne on to his staff as his galloper, for, although Perowne rode rather indifferently, he had a certain social knowledge and could be counted on to know how correctly to address a regimental invitation to a dowager countess who had married a viscount’s third son… . As a military figure otherwise he had a very indifferent word of command, a very poor drill and next to no control of his men, but he was popular with his batmen, and in a rather stiff way was presentable in the old scarlet uniform or the blue mess jacket. He was exactly six foot, to a hairbreadth, in his stockings, had very dark eyes, and a rather grating voice; the fact that his limbs were a shade too bulky for his trunk, which was not at all corpulent, made him appear a little clumsy. If in a club you asked what sort of a fellow he was your interlocutor would tell you, most probably, that he had or was supposed to have warts on his head, this to account for his hair which all his life he had combed back,
unparted
from his forehead. But as a matter of fact he had no warts on his head.

He had once started out on an expedition to shoot big game in Portuguese East Africa. But on its arrival his expedition was met with the news that the natives of the interior were in revolt, so Perowne had returned to Kensington Palace Gardens. He had had several mild successes with women, but, owing to his habits of economy and fear of imbroglios, until the age of thirty-four, he had limited the field of his amours to young women of the lower social orders… .

His affair with Sylvia Tietjens might have been something to boast about, but he was not boastful, and indeed he had been too hard hit when she had left him even to bear to account lyingly for the employment of the time he had spent with her in Brittany. Fortunately no one took sufficient interest in his movements to wait for his answer to their indifferent questions as to where he had spent the summer. When his mind reverted to her desertion of him moisture would come out of his eyes, undemonstratively, as water leaves the surface of a sponge… .

Sylvia had left him by the simple expedient of stepping without so much as a reticule on to the little French tramway that took you to the main railway line. From there she had written to him in pencil on a closed correspondence card that she had left him because she simply could not bear either his dullness or his craking voice. She said they would probably run up against each other in the course of the autumn season in town and, after purchase of some night things, had made straight for the German spa to which her mother had retreated.