Parade's End Read Free Page B

little in debt to Tietjens. Tietjens fortunately had means. As to the third, he was not so certain. His life had necessarily been starved of women, and, arrived at a stage when the female element might, even with due respect to caution, be considered as a legitimate feature of his life, he had to fear a rashness of choice due to that very starvation. The type of woman he needed he knew to exactitude: tall, graceful, dark, loose-gowned, passionate yet circumspect, oval-featured, deliberative, gracious to everyone around her. He could almost hear the very rustle of her garments.
    And yet … He had had passages when a sort of blind unreason had attracted him almost to speechlessness towards girls of the most giggling, behind-the-counter order, big-bosomed, scarlet-cheeked. It was only Tietjens who had saved him from the most questionable entanglements.
    ‘Hang it,’ Tietjens would say, ‘don’t get messing round that trollop. All you could do with her would be to set her up in a tobacco shop, and she would be tearing your beard out inside the quarter. Let alone, you can’t afford it.’
    And Macmaster, who would have sentimentalised the plump girl to the tune of
Highland Mary
, would for a day damn Tietjens up and down for a coarse brute. But at the moment he thanked God for Tietjens. There he sat, near to thirty, without an entanglement, a blemish on his health, or a worry with regard to any woman.
    With deep affection and concern he looked across at his brilliant junior, who hadn’t saved himself. Tietjens had fallen into the most barefaced snare, into the cruellest snare, of the worst woman that could be imagined.
    And Macmaster suddenly realised that he wasn’t wallowing, as he had imagined that he would, in the sensuous current of his prose. He had begun spiritedly with the first neat square of paragraph… . Certainly his publishers had done well by him in the matter of print:
    ‘Whether we consider him as the imaginer of mysterious, sensuous and exact plastic beauty; as the manipulator of sonorous, rolling and full-mouthed lines; of words as full of colour as were his canvases; or whether we regard him as the deep philosopher, elucidating and drawing his illumination from the arcana of a mystic hardly greater than himself, to Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, the subject of this little monograph, must be accorded the name of one who has profoundly influenced the outward aspects, the human contacts, and all those things that go to make up the life of our higher civilisation as we live it to-day… .’
    Macmaster realised that he had only got thus far with his prose, and had got thus far without any of the relish that he had expected, and that then he had turned to the middle paragraph of page three – after the end of his exordium. His eyes wandered desultorily along the line:
    ‘The subject of these pages was born in the western central district of the metropolis in the year …’
    The words conveyed nothing to him at all. He understood that that was because he hadn’t got over that morning. He had looked up from his coffee-cup – over the rim – and had taken in a blue-grey sheet of notepaper in Tietjens’ fingers, shaking, inscribed in the large, broad-nibbed writing of that detestable harridan. And Tietjens had been staring – staring with the intentness of a maddened horse – at his, Macmaster’s, face! And grey! Shapeless! The nose like a pallid triangle on a bladder of lard! That was Tietjens’ face… .
    He could still feel the blow, physical, in the pit of his stomach! He had thought Tietjens was going mad: that he
was
mad. It had passed. Tietjens had assumed the mask of his indolent, insolent self. At the office, but later, he had delivered an extraordinarily forceful – and quite rude – lecture to Sir Reginald on his reasons for differing from the official figures of population movements in the western territories. Sir Reginald had been much impressed. The figures were wanted for a speech of