No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [105]
'Love of truth!' the general said. 'Doesn't that include a hatred for white lies? No; I suppose it doesn't, or your servants could not say you were not at home...'
...Pathetic! Tietjens said to himself. Naturally the civilian population wanted soldiers to be made to look like fools: and to be done in. They wanted the war won by men who would at the end be either humiliated or dead. Or both. Except, naturally, their own cousins or fiancées' relatives. That was what it came to. That was what it meant when important gentlemen said that they had rather the war were lost than that cavalry should gain any distinction in it!...But it was partly the simple, pathetic illusion of the day that great things could only be done by new inventions. You extinguished the Horse, invented something very simple and became God! That is the real pathetic fallacy. You fill a flower-pot with gunpowder and chuck it in the other fellow's face, and heigh presto! the war is won. All the soldiers fall down dead! And You: you who forced the idea on the reluctant military, are the Man that Won the War. You deserve all the women in the world. And...you get them! Once the cavalry are out of the way!...
The general was using the words:
'Head master!' It brought Tietjens completely back. He said collectedly:
'Really, sir, why this strafe of yours is so terribly long is that it embraces the whole of life.'
The general said:
'You're not going to drag a red herring across the trail...I say you regarded me as a head master in 1912. Now I am your commanding officer--which is the same thing. You must not peach to me. That's what you call the Arnold of Rugby touch...But who was it said: Magna est veritas et prev...Prev something!'
Tietjens said:
'I don't remember, sir.'
The general said:
'What was the secret grief your mother had? In 1912? She died of it. She wrote to me just before her death and said she had great troubles. And begged me to look after you, very specially! Why did she do that?' He paused and meditated. He asked: 'How do you define Anglican sainthood? The other fellows have canonizations, all shipshape like Sandhurst examinations. But us Anglicans...I've heard fifty persons say your mother was a saint. She was. But why?'
Tietjens said:
'It's the quality of harmony, sir. The quality of being in harmony with your own soul. God having given you your own soul you are then in harmony with heaven.'
The general said:
'Ah, that's beyond me...I suppose you will refuse any money I leave you in my will?'
Tietjens said:
'Why, no, sir.'
The general said:
'But you refused your father's money. Because he believed things against you. What's the difference?'
Tietjens said:
'One's friends ought to believe that one is a gentleman. Automatically. That is what makes one and them in harmony. Probably your friends are your friends because they look at situations automatically as you look at them...Mr Ruggles knew that I was hard up. He envisaged the situation. If he were hard up, what would he do? Make a living out of the immoral earnings of women...That translated into the Government circles in which he lives means selling your wife or mistress. Naturally he believed that I was the sort of fellow to sell my wife. So that's what he told my father. The point is, my father should not have believed him.'
'But I...' the general said.
Tietjens said:
'You never believed anything against me, sir.'
The general said:
'I know I've damn well worried myself to death over you...'
Tietjens was sentimental at rest, still with wet eyes. He was walking near Salisbury in a grove, regarding long pastures and ploughlands running to dark, high elms from which, embowered...Embowered was the word!--peeped the spire of George Herbert's church...One ought to be a seventeenth-century parson at the time of the renaissance of Anglican saintliness...who wrote, perhaps poems. No, not poems. Prose. The statelier vehicle!
That was home-sickness!...He himself was never to go home!
The general said:
'Look here...Your father...I'm concerned about your father...Didn't Sylvia perhaps tell him some of the things that distressed him?'