Parade's End

FORD MADOX FORD
PARADE’S END

Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer in England in 1873. In 1919 he changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in honor of his grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written. Ford was well-known for both his fiction and his criticism. He founded two influential journals, The English Review in 1908 and The Transatlantic Review in 1924, in which he championed many of the leading modernist writers of the day. His most famous novels include the tetralogy Parade’s End and The Good Soldier, which are still ranked among the greatest literary works of the twentieth century. Ford died in 1939, at age sixty-five, in France.

Also by Ford Madox Ford
Available in Vintage Classics

 

The Good Soldier

 

The Fifth Queen

 

FIRST VINTAGE CLASSICS EDITION, JANUARY 2012

Copyright © 1950, copyright renewed 1978 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1950.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Classics and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The four works which comprise this tetralogy were originally published separately as Some Do Not … (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up— (1926), and The Last Post (1928).

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ford, Ford Madox, 1873–1939.
Parade’s end / Ford Madox Ford.
p. cm. (Everyman’s library)
I. Title.
PR6011.053P35 1992
823′.912—dc20
92-52922

eISBN: 978-0-307-74421-0

Cover design by Megan Wilson

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Some Do Not …

Part One

Part Two

No More Parades

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

A Man Could Stand Up—

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

The Last Post

Part One

Part Two

SOME DO NOT …

 

PART ONE

THE two young men – they were of the English public official class – sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable varnish; the train ran as smoothly – Tietjens remembered thinking – as British gilt-edged securities. It travelled fast; yet had it swayed or jolted over the rail joints, except at the curve before Tonbridge or over the points at Ashford where these eccentricities are expected and allowed for, Macmaster, Tietjens felt certain, would have written to the company. Perhaps he would even have written to The Times.

Their class administered the world, not merely the newly created Imperial Department of Statistics under Sir Reginald Ingleby. If they saw policemen misbehave, railway porters lack civility, an insufficiency of street lamps, defects in public services or in foreign countries, they saw to it, either with nonchalant Balliol voices, or with letters to The Times, asking in regretful indignation: ‘Has the British This or That come to this!’ Or they wrote, in the serious reviews of which so many still survived, articles taking under their care, manners, the Arts, diplomacy, inter-Imperial trade, or the personal reputations of deceased statesmen and men of letters.

Macmaster, that is to say, would do all that: of himself Tietjens was not so certain. There sat Macmaster; smallish; Whig; with a trimmed, pointed black beard, such as a smallish man might wear to enhance his already germinated distinction; black hair of a stubborn fibre, drilled down with hard metal brushes; a sharp nose; strong, level teeth; a white, butterfly collar of the smoothness of porcelain; a tie confined by a gold ring, steel-blue speckled with black – to match his eyes, as Tietjens knew.

Tietjens, on the other hand, could not remember what coloured tie he had on. He had taken a cab from the office to their rooms, had got himself into a loose, tailored coat and trousers, and a soft shirt, had packed quickly, but still methodically, a great number of things in an immense two-handled kit-bag, which you could throw into a guard’s van if need be. He disliked letting that ‘man’ touch his things; he had disliked letting his wife’s maid pack for him. He even disliked letting porters carry his kit-bag. He was a Tory – and as he disliked changing his clothes, there he sat, on the journey, already in large, brown, hugely welted and nailed golf boots, leaning forward on the edge of the cushion, his legs apart, on each knee an immense white hand – and thinking vaguely.

Macmaster, on the other hand, was leaning back, reading some small, unbound printed sheets, rather stiff, frowning a little. Tietjens knew that this was, for Macmaster, an impressive moment. He was correcting the proofs of his first book.

To this affair, as Tietjens knew, there attached themselves many fine shades. If, for instance, you had asked Macmaster whether he were a writer, he would have replied with the merest suggestion of a deprecatory shrug.

‘No, dear lady!’ for of course no man would ask the question of anyone so obviously a man of the world. And he would continue with a smile: ‘Nothing so fine! A mere trifler at odd moments. A critic, perhaps. Yes! A little of a critic.’

Nevertheless Macmaster moved in drawing-rooms that, with long curtains, blue china plates, large-patterned wallpapers and large, quiet mirrors, sheltered the longhaired of the Arts. And, as near as possible to the dear ladies who gave the At Homes, Macmaster could keep up the talk – a little magisterially.