Ford Madox Ford - The Parade's End Tetralogy - Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up & Last Post

Being near Tietjens she lifted her plate, which contained two cold cutlets in aspic and several leaves of salad: she wavered a little to one side and, with a circular motion of her hand, let the whole contents fly at Tietjens’ head. She placed the plate on the table and drifted slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace.

‘I’m bored,’ she said. ‘Bored! Bored!’

Tietjens had moved slightly as she had thrown: the cutlets and most of the salad leaves had gone over his shoulder. But one, couched, very green leaf was on his shoulder-strap, and the oil and vinegar from the plate—Sylvia knew that she took too much of all condiments—had splashed from the revers of his tunic to his green staff-badges. She was glad that she had hit him as much as that: it meant that her marksmanship had not been quite rotten. She was glad, too, that she had missed him. She was also supremely indifferent. It had occurred to her to do it and she had done it. Of that she was glad!

She looked at herself for some time in the mirror of bluish depths. She pressed her immense bandeaux with both hands on to her ears. She was all right: high-featured: alabaster complexion—but that was mostly the mirror’s doing—beautiful, long, cool hands—what man’s forehead wouldn’t long for them? . . . And that hair! What man wouldn’t think of it unloosed on white shoulders! . . . Well, Tietjens wouldn’t! Or, perhaps, he did . . . she hoped he did, curse him, for he never saw that sight. Obviously sometimes, at night, with a little whisky taken he must want to!

She rang the bell and bade Hullo Central sweep the plateful from the carpet; Hullo Central, tall and dark, looking with wide-open eyes, motionless at nothing.

Sylvia went along the bookshelves, pausing over a book back, ’ Vitare Hominum Notiss . . . ’ in gilt, irregular capitals pressed deep into the old leather. At the first long window she supported herself by the blind-cord. She looked out and back into the room.

‘There’s that veiled woman!’ she said, ‘going into eleven . . . It’s two o’clock, of course . . . ’

She looked at her husband’s back hard, the clumsy khaki back that was getting round-shouldered now. Hard! She wasn’t going to miss a motion or a stiffening.

‘I’ve found out who it is!’ she said, ‘and who she goes to. I got it out of the porter.’ She waited. Then she added:

It’s the woman you travelled down from Bishop Auckland with. On the day war was declared.’

Tietjens turned solidly round in his chair. She knew he would do that out of stiff politeness, so it meant nothing.

His face was whitish in the pale light, but it was always whitish since he had come back from France and passed his day in a tin hut among dust heaps. He said:

‘So you saw me!’ But that, too, was mere politeness.

She said:

‘Of course the whole crowd of us from Claudine’s saw you! It was old Campion who said she was a Mrs . . . I’ve forgotten the name.’

Tietjens said:

‘I imagined he would know her. I saw him looking in from the corridor!’

She said:

‘Is she your mistress, or only Macmaster’s, or the mistress of both of you? It would be like you to have a mistress in common . . . She’s got a mad husband, hasn’t she? A clergyman.’

Tietjens said:

‘She hasn’t!’

Sylvia checked suddenly in her next questions, and Tietjens, who in these discussions never manoeuvred for position, said:

‘She has been Mrs Macmaster over six months.’ Sylvia said:

‘She married him then the day after her husband’s death.’

She drew a long breath and added:

‘I don’t care . . . She has been coming here every Friday for three years . . . I tell you I shall expose her unless that little beast pays you to-morrow the money he owes you . . . God knows you need it!’ She said then hurriedly, for she didn’t know how Tietjens might take that proposition:

‘Mrs Wannop rang up this morning to know who was . . . oh! . . . the evil genius of the Congress of Vienna. Who, by the by, is Mrs Wannop’s secretary? She wants to see you this afternoon. About war babies!’

Tietjens said:

‘Mrs Wannop hasn’t got a secretary. It’s her daughter who does the ringing-up.’

‘The girl,’ Sylvia said, ‘you were so potty about at that horrible afternoon Macmaster gave. Has she had a war baby by you? They all say she’s your mistress.’

Tietj ens said:

‘No, Miss Wannop isn’t my mistress. Her mother has had a commission to write an article about war babies. I told her yesterday there weren’t any war babies to speak of, and she’s upset because she won’t be able to make a sensational article. She wants to try to make me change my mind.’

‘It was Miss Wannop at that beastly affair of your friend’s?’ Sylvia asked. ‘And I suppose the woman who received was Mrs What’s -er-name: your other mistress. An unpleasant show. I don’t think much of your taste. The one where all the horrible geniuses in London were? There was a man like a rabbit talked to me about how to write poetry.’

‘That’s no good as an identification of the party,’ Tietjens said. ‘Macmaster gives a party every Friday, not Saturday. He has for years. Mrs Macmaster goes there every Friday. To act as hostess. She has for years. Miss Wannop goes there every Friday after she has done work for her mother. To support Mrs Macmaster . . . ’

‘She has for years!’ Sylvia mocked him. ‘And you go there every Friday! to croodle over Miss Wannop. Oh, Christopher!’—she adopted a mock pathetic voice—‘I never did have much opinion of your taste . . . but not that! Don’t let it be that. Put her back. She’s too young for you . . . ’

‘All the geniuses in London,’ Tietjens continued equably, ‘go to Macmaster’s every Friday. He has been trusted with the job of giving away Royal Literary Bounty money: that’s why they go. They go: that’s why he was given his C.B.’

‘I should not have thought they counted,’ Sylvia said. ‘Of course they count,’ Tietjens said. ‘They write for the Press. They can get anybody anything . . . except themselves!’

‘Like you!’ Sylvia said; ‘exactly like you! They’re a lot of bribed squits.’

‘Oh, no,’ Tietjens said. ‘It isn’t done obviously or discreditably. Don’t believe that Macmaster distributes forty-pounders yearly of bounty on condition that he gets advancement. He hasn’t, himself, the least idea of how it works, except by his atmosphere.’

‘I never knew a beastlier atmosphere,’ Sylvia said. ‘It reeked of rabbit’s food.’

‘You’re quite mistaken,’ Tietjens said; ‘that is the Russian leather of the backs of the specially bound presentation copies in the large bookcase.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Sylvia said. ‘What are presentation copies? I should have thought you’d had enough of the beastly Russian smells Kiev stunk of.’

Tietjens considered for a moment.