Parade's End (84 page)

‘It was the last thing you would think of him as doing,’ the Head answered with a pale gleam of youth. ‘He was such a thorough man of the world. So awake!’

‘We ought to be a queer lot, my brother and I,’ Valentine said. ‘With such a father … And mother of course!’

Miss Wanostrocht said:

‘Oh … your
mother
…’

And immediately Valentine conjured up the little, adoring female clique of Miss Wanostrocht’s youth, all spying on her father and mother in their walks under the Oxford Sunday trees, the father so jaunty and awake, the mother so trailing, large, generous, unobservant. And all the little clique saying: If only he had
us
to look after him… . She said with a little malice:

‘You don’t read my mother’s novels, I suppose… . It was she who did all my father’s writing for him. He couldn’t write, he was too impatient!’

Miss Wanostrocht exclaimed:

‘Oh, you
shouldn’t
say that!’ with almost the pain of someone defending her own personal reputation.

‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t,’ Valentine said. ‘He was the first person to say it about himself.’

‘He shouldn’t have said it either,’ Miss Wanostrocht answered with a sort of soft unction. ‘He should have taken care more of his own reputation for the sake of his Work!’

Valentine considered this thin, ecstatic spinster with ironic curiosity.

‘Of course, if you’ve sat … if you’re still sitting at father’s feet as much as all that,’ she conceded, ‘it gives you a certain right to be careful about his reputation… . All the same I wish you would tell me what that person said on the phone!’

The bust of Miss Wanostrocht moved with a sudden eagerness further towards the edge of her table.

‘It’s precisely because of that,’ she said, ‘that I want to speak to you first… . That I want you to consider… .’

Valentine said:

‘Because of my father’s reputation… . Look here, did that person – Lady Macmaster! – speak to you as if you were me? Our names are near enough to make it possible.’

‘You’re,’ Miss Wanostrocht said, ‘as one might say, the fine fruit of the product of his views on the education of women. And if you … It’s been such a satisfaction to me to observe in you such a … a sound, instructed head on such a … oh, you know, sane body… . And then … An earning capacity. A commercial value. Your father, of course, never minced words… .’ She added:

‘I’m bound to say that my interview with Lady Macmaster … who surely isn’t a lady of whom you could say that you disapprove. I’ve read her husband’s work. It surely – you’d say, wouldn’t you? – conserves some of the ancient fire.’

‘He,’ Valentine said, ‘hasn’t a word of Latin to his tail. He makes his quotations out, if he uses them, by means of school-cribs… . I know his methods of work, you know.’

It occurred to Valentine to think that if Edith Ethel really
had
at first taken Miss Wanostrocht for herself there might pretty obviously be some cause for Miss Wanostrocht’s concern for her father’s reputation as an intimate trainer of young women. She figured Edith Ethel suddenly bursting into a description of the circumstances of that man who was without furniture and did not appear to recognise the porter. The relations she might have described as having existed between her and him might well worry the Head of a Great Public School for Middle Class Girls. She had no doubt been described as having had a baby. A disagreeable and outraged current invaded her feelings… .

It was suddenly obscured by a recrudescence of the thought that had come to her only incidentally in the hall. It rushed over her with extraordinary vividness now, like a wave of warm liquid… . If it
had
really been that fellow’s wife who had removed his furniture what
was
there to keep them apart? He couldn’t have pawned or sold or burnt his furniture whilst he had been with the British Expeditionary Force in the Low Countries! He couldn’t have without extraordinary difficulty! Then … What
should
keep them apart? … Middle Class Morality? A pretty gory carnival that had been for the last four years! Was this then Lent, pressing hard on the heels of Saturnalia? Not so hard as that, surely! So that if one hurried… . What on earth did she want, unknown to herself?

She heard herself saying, almost with a sob, so that she was evidently in a state of emotion:

‘Look here, I disapprove of this whole thing: of what my father has brought me to! Those people … the brilliant Victorians talked all the time through their hats. They evolved a theory from anywhere and then went brilliantly mad over it. Perfectly recklessly… . Have you
noticed
Pettigul One? … Hasn’t it occurred to you that you
can’t
carry on violent physical jerks and mental work side by side? I ought not to be in this school and I ought not to be what I am!’

At Miss Wanostrocht’s perturbed expression she said to herself:

‘What on earth am I saying all this for? You’d think I was trying to cut loose from this school! Am I?’

Nevertheless her voice was going on:

‘There’s too much oxygenation of the lungs, here. It’s unnatural. It affects the brain, deleteriously. Pettigul One is an example of it. She’s earnest with me and earnest with her books. Now she’s gone dotty. Most of them it only stupefies.’

It was incredible to her that the mere imagination that that fellow’s wife had left him should make her spout out like this – for all the world like her father spouting out one of his ingenious theories! … It had really occurred to her once or twice to think that you could not run a dual physical and mental existence without some risk. The military physical developments of the last four years had been responsible for a real exaggeration of physical values. She was aware that in that Institution, for the last four years, she had been regarded as supplementing if not as actually replacing both the doctor and the priest… . But from that to evolving a complete theory that the Pettigul’s lie was the product of an overoxygenated brain was going pretty far… .

Still, she was prevented from taking part in national rejoicings; pretty certainly Edith Ethel had been talking scandal about her to Miss Wanostrocht. She had the right to take it out in some sort of exaggerated declamation!

‘It appears,’ Miss Wanostrocht said, ‘for we can’t now go into the question of the whole curriculum of the school, though I am inclined to agree with you. What by the by is the matter with Pettigul One? I thought her rather a solid sort of girl. But it appears that the wife of a friend … perhaps it’s only a former friend of yours, is in a nursing home.’

Valentine exclaimed:

‘Oh, he … But that’s too ghastly!’

‘It appears,’ Miss Wanostrocht said, ‘to be rather a mess.’ She added: ‘That appears to be the only expression to use.’

For Valentine, that piece of news threw a blinding light upon herself. She was overwhelmingly appalled because that woman was in a nursing home. Because in that case it would not be sporting to go and see the husband!

Miss Wanostrocht went on:

‘Lady Macmaster was anxious for your advice… . It appears that the only other person that could look after the interests of … of your friend: his brother …’

Valentine missed something out of that sentence. Miss Wanostrocht talked too fluently. If people wanted you to appreciate items of sledge-hammering news they should not use long sentences. They should say:

‘He’s mad and penniless. His brother’s dying, his wife’s just been operated on.’ Like that! Then you could take it in; even if your mind was rioting about like a cat in a barrel.

‘The brother’s … female companion,’ Miss Wanostrocht was wandering on, ‘though it appears that she would have been willing is therefore not available… . The theory is that he – he himself, your friend, has been considerably unhinged by his experiences in the war. Then … Who in your opinion should take the responsibility of looking after his interests?’

Valentine heard herself say:

‘Me!’

She added:

‘Him! Looking after him. I don’t know that he has any … interests!’

He didn’t appear to have any furniture, so how could he have the other things. She wished Miss Wanostrocht would leave off using the word ‘appear’. It was irritating … and infectious. Could the lady not make a direct statement? But then, no one ever made clear statements and this no doubt appeared to that anæmic spinster a singularly tenebrous affair.

As for clear statements … If there had ever been any in precisely this tenebrous mess she, Valentine, would know how she stood with that man’s wife. For it was part of the preposterous way in which she herself and
all
her friends behaved that they never made clear statements – except for Edith Ethel who had the nature of a female costermonger and could not tell the truth, though she could be clear enough. But even Edith Ethel had never hitherto said anything about the way the wife in this case treated the husband. She had given Valentine very clearly to understand that she ‘sided’ with the wife – but she had never gone as far as to say that the wife was a good wife. If she – Valentine – could only know that.

Miss Wanostrocht was asking:

‘When you say “Me”, do you mean that you would propose to look after that man yourself? I trust not.’

… Because, obviously, if she were a good wife, she, Valentine, couldn’t butt in … not generously. As her father’s and still more her mother’s daughter… . On the face of it you would say that a wife who was always striding along the palings of the Row, or the paths of other resorts of the fashionable could not be a good – a domestic – wife of a Statistician. On the other hand he was a pretty smart man, Governing class, county family, and the rest of it – so he might like his wife to figure in Society; he might even exact it. He was quite capable of that. Why, for all she knew, the wife might be a retiring, shy person whom he thrust out into the hard world. It was not likely, but it was as possible as anything else.

Miss Wanostrocht was asking:

‘Aren’t there Institutions … Military Sanatoria … for cases precisely like that of this Captain Tietjens? It appears to be the war that has broken him down, not merely evil living.’

‘It’s precisely,’ Valentine said, ‘because of that that one should want … shouldn’t one … Because it’s because of the War… .’

The sentence would not finish itself.

Miss Wanostrocht said:

‘I thought … It has been represented to me … that you were a Pacifist. Of an extreme type!’

It had given Valentine a turn – like the breaking out of sweat in a case of fever – to hear the name, coldly, ‘Captain Tietjens’, for it was like a release. She had been irrationally determined that hers should not be the first tongue to utter that name.

And apparently from her tone Miss Wanostrocht was prepared to detest that Captain Tietjens. Perhaps she detested him already.

She was beginning to say:

‘If one is an extreme Pacifist because one cannot bear to think of the sufferings of men isn’t that a precise reason why one should wish that a poor devil, all broken up …’

But Miss Wanostrocht had begun one of her own long sentences. Their voices went on together, like trains dragging along ballast – disagreeably. Miss Wanostrocht’s organ, however, won out with the words:

‘… behaved very badly indeed.’

Valentine said hotly:

‘You ought not to believe anything of the sort – on the strength of anything said by a woman like Lady Macmaster.’

Miss Wanostrocht appeared to have been brought to a complete stop: she leaned forward in her chair; her mouth was a little open. And Valentine said: ‘Thank Goodness!’ to herself.

She had to have a moment to herself to digest what had the air of being new evidence of the baseness of Edith Ethel; she felt herself to be infuriated in regions of her own being that she hardly knew. That seemed to her to be a littleness in herself. She had not thought that she had been as little as that. It ought not to matter what people said of you. She was perfectly accustomed to think of Edith Ethel as telling whole crowds of people very bad things about her, Valentine Wannop. But there was about this a recklessness that was hardly believable. To tell an unknown person, encountered by chance on the telephone, derogatory facts about a third party who might be expected to come to the telephone herself in a minute or two – and, not only that – who must in all probability hear what had been said very soon after, from the first listener… . That was surely a recklessness of evil-speaking that almost outpassed sanity… . Or else it betrayed a contempt for her, Valentine Wannop, and what she could do in the way of reprisals that was extremely hard to bear!

She said suddenly to Miss Wanostrocht:

‘Look here! Are you speaking to me as a friend to my father’s daughter or as a Headmistress to a Physical Instructor?’

A certain amount of blood came into the lady’s pinkish features. She had certainly been ruffled when Valentine had permitted her voice to sound so long alongside her own; for, although Valentine knew next to nothing about the Head’s likes or dislikes she had once or twice before seen her evince marked distaste on being interrupted in one of her formal sentences.

Miss Wanostrocht said with a certain coldness:

‘I’m speaking at present … I’m allowing myself the liberty – as a much older woman – in the capacity of a friend of your father. I have been, in short, trying to recall to you all that you owe to yourself as being an example of his training!’

Involuntarily Valentine’s lips formed themselves for a low whistle of incredulity. She said to herself:

‘By Jove! I am in the middle of a nasty affair… . This is a sort of professional cross-examination.’

‘I am in a way glad,’ the lady was now continuing, ‘that you take that line… . I mean of defending Mrs. Tietjens with such heat against Lady Macmaster. Lady Macmaster appears to dislike Mrs. Tietjens, but I am bound to say that she appears to be in the right of it. I mean of her dislike. Lady Macmaster is a serious personality and, even on her public record Mrs. Tietjens appears to be very much the reverse. No doubt you wish to be loyal to your … friends, but …’