Parade's End Series: Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up & Last Post (Complete Edition). Madox Ford
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on the edge of a cliff in Yorkshire where the moors come above the sea, during one of the tiresome shoots that are there the fashion, a man had bidden her observe the demeanour of the herring gulls below. They were dashing from rock to rock on the cliff face, screaming, with none of the dignity of gulls. Some of them even let fall the herrings that they had caught and she saw the pieces of silver dropping into the blue motion. The man told her to look up; high, circling and continuing for a long time to circle; illuminated by the sunlight below, like a pale flame against the sky was a bird. The man told her that that was some sort of fish-eagle or hawk. Its normal habit was to chase the gulls which, in their terror, would drop their booty of herrings, whereupon the eagle would catch the fish before it struck the water. At the moment the eagle was not on duty, but the gulls were just as terrified as if it had been.
Sylvia stayed for a long time watching the convolutions of the eagle. It pleased her to see that, though nothing threatened the gulls, they yet screamed and dropped their herrings . . . The whole affair reminded her of herself in her relationship to the ordinary women of the barnyard . . . Not that there was the breath of a scandal against herself; that she very well knew, and it was her preoccupation just as turning down nice men—the ‘really nice men’ of commerce—was her hobby.
She practised every kind of ‘turning down’ on these creatures: the really nice ones, with the Kitchener moustaches, the seal’s brown eyes, the honest, thrilling voices, the clipped words, the straight backs and the admirable records—as long as you didn’t enquire too closely. Once, in the early days of the Great Struggle, a young man—she had smiled at him in mistake for someone more trustable—had followed in a taxi, hard on her motor, and flushed with wine, glory and the firm conviction that all women in that lurid carnival had become common property, had burst into her door from the public stairs . . . She had overtopped him by the forehead and before a few minutes were up she seemed to him to have become ten foot high with a gift of words that scorched his backbone and the voice of a frozen marble statue: a chaudfroid effect. He had come in like a stallion, red-eyed, and all his legs off the ground: he went down the stairs like a half-drowned rat, with dim eyes and really looking wet, for some reason or other.
Yet she hadn’t really told him more than the way one should behave to the wives of one’s brother officers then actually in the line, a point of view that, with her intimates, she daily agreed was pure bosh. But it must have seemed to him like the voice of his mother—when his mother had been much younger, of course—speaking from paradise, and his conscience had contrived the rest of his general wetness. This, however, had been melodrama and war stuff at that: it hadn’t, therefore, interested her. She preferred to inflict deeper and more quiet pains.
She could, she flattered herself, tell the amount of empressement which a man could develop about herself at the first glance—the amount and the quality too. And from not vouchsafing a look at all, or a look of the barest and most incurious to some poor devil who even on introduction couldn’t conceal his desires, to letting, after dinner, a measured glance travel from the right foot of a late dinner partner, diagonally up the ironed fold of the right trouser to the watch pocket, diagonally still, across the shirt front, pausing at the stud and so, rather more quickly, away over the left shoulder, while the poor fellow stood appalled, with his dinner going wrong—from the milder note to the more pronounced she ran the whole gamut of ‘turnings down.’ The poor fellows next day would change their bootmakers, their sock merchants, their tailors, the designers of their dress-studs and shirts: they would sigh even to change the cut of their faces, communing seriously with their after-breakfast mirrors. But they knew in their hearts that calamity came from the fact that she hadn’t deigned to look into their eyes . . . Perhaps hadn’t dared was the right word!
Sylvia, herself, would have cordially acknowledged that it might have been. She knew that, like her intimates—all the Elizabeths, Alixs, and Lady Moiras of the smooth-papered, be-photographed weekly journals—she was man-mad. It was the condition, indeed, of their intimacy as of their eligibilities for reproduction on hot-pressed paper. They went about in bands with, as it were, a cornfield of feather boas floating above them, though to be sure no one wore feather boas; they shortened their hairs and their skirts and flattened, as far as possible, their chest developments, which does give, oh, you know . . . a certain . . . They adopted demeanours as like as possible—and yet how unlike—to those of waitresses in tea-shops frequented by city men. And one reads in police court reports of raids what those are! Probably they were, in action, as respectable as any body of women; more respectable, probably, than the great middle class of before the war, and certainly spotless by comparison with their own upper servants whose morals, merely as recorded in the divorce court statistics—that she had from Tietjens—would put to shame even those of Welsh or lowland Scotch villages. Her mother was accustomed to say that she was sure her butler would get to heaven, simply because the Recording Angel, being an angel—and, as such, delicately minded—wouldn’t have the face to put down, much less read out, the least venial of Morgan’s offences . . .
And, sceptical as she was by nature, Sylvia Tietjens didn’t really even believe in the capacity for immoralities of her friends. She didn’t believe that any one of them was seriously what the French would call the maîtresse en titre of any particular man. Passion wasn’t, at least, their strong suit; they left that to more—or to less—august circles. The Duke of A . . . and all the little A’s . . . might be the children of the morose and passion-stricken Duke of B . . . instead of the still more morose but less passionate late Duke of A . . . Mr C, the Tory statesman and late Foreign Minister, might equally be the father of all the children of the Tory Lord Chancellor E . . . The Whig front benches, the gloomy and disagreeable Russells and Cavendishes trading off these—again French—collages sérieux against the matrimonial divagations of their own Lord F and Mr G . . . But those armours of heavily titled and born front benchers were rather of august politics. The hot-pressed weekly journals never got hold of them: the parties to them didn’t, for one thing, photograph well, being old, uglyish and terribly badly dressed. They were matter rather for the memoirs of the indiscreet, already written, but not to see the light for fifty years . . .
The affairs of her own set, female front benchers of one side or other as they were, were more tenuous. If they ever came to heads, their affairs, they had rather the nature of promiscuity and took place at the country houses where bells rang at five in the morning. Sylvia had heard of such country houses, but she did not know of any. She imagined that they might be the baronial halls of such barons of the crown as had patronymics ending in schen . . . stein . . . and baum. There were getting to be a good many of these, but Sylvia did not visit them. She had in her that much of the papist.
Certain of her more brilliant girl friends certainly made very sudden marriages; but the averages of those were not markedly higher than in the case of the daughters of doctors, solicitors, the clergy, the lord mayors and common council-men. They were the product usually of the more informal type of dance, of inexperience and champagne—of champagne of unaccustomed strength or of champagne taken in unusual circumstances—fasting as often as not. They were, these hasty marriages, hardly ever the result of either passion or temperamental lewdness.
In her own case—years ago now—she had certainly been taken advantage of, after champagne, by a married man called Drake. A bit of a brute she acknowledged him now to be. But after the event passion had developed: intense on her side and quite intense enough on his. When, in a scare that had been as much her mother’s as her own, she had led Tietjens on and married him in Paris to be out of the way—though it was fortunate that the English Catholic church in the Avenue Hoche had been the scene of her mother’s marriage also, thus establishing a precedent and an ostensible reason!—there had been dreadful scenes right up to the very night of the marriage. She had hardly to close her eyes in order to see the Paris hotel bedroom, the distorted face of Drake, who was mad with grief and jealousy, against a background of white things, flowers and the like, sent in overnight for the wedding. She knew that she had been very near death. She had wanted death.
And even now she had only to see the name of Drake in the paper—her mother’s influence with the pompous front bencher of the Upper House, her cousin, had put Drake in the way of colonial promotions that were recorded in gazettes—nay, she had only