No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [63]
It had begun with the general's exclaiming to her:
'You know your man's the most unaccountable fellow...He wears the damn-shabbiest uniform of any officer I ever have to talk to. He's said to be unholily hard up...I even heard he had a cheque sent back to the club...Then he goes and makes a princely gift like that--just to get Levin out of ten minutes' awkwardness...I wish to goodness I could understand the fellow...He's got a positive genius for getting all sorts of things out of the most beastly muddles...Why, he's even been useful to me...And then he's got a positive genius for getting into the most disgusting messes...You're too young to have heard of Dreyfus...But I always say that Christopher is a regular Dreyfus...I shouldn't be astonished if he didn't end by being drummed out of the army...which heaven forfend!'
It had been then that Sylvia had said:
'Hasn't it ever occurred to you that Christopher was a Socialist?'
For the first time in her life Sylvia saw her husband's godfather look grotesque...His jaw dropped down, his white hair became disarrayed, and he dropped his pretty cap with all the gold oakleaves and the scarlet. When he rose from picking it up his thin old face was purple and distorted. She wished she hadn't said it: she wished she hadn't said it. He exclaimed:
'Christopher!...A So...' He gasped as if he could not pronounce the word. He said: 'Damn it all!...I've loved that boy...He's my only godson...His father was my best friend...I've watched over him...I'd have married his mother if she would have had me...Damn it all, he's down in my will as residuary legatee after a few small things left to my sister and my collection of horns to the regiment I commanded...'
Sylvia--they were sitting on the sofa the duchess had left--patted him on the forearm and said:
'But general...godfather...'
'It explains everything,' he said with a mortification that was painful. His white moustache drooped and trembled. 'And what makes it all the worse--he's never had the courage to tell me his opinions.' He stopped, snorted and exclaimed: 'By God, I will have him drummed out of the service...By God, I will. I can do that much...'
His grief so shut him in on himself that she could say nothing to him...
'You tell me he seduced the little Wannop girl...The last person in the world he should have seduced...Ain't there millions of other women?...He got you sold up, didn't he?...Along with keeping a girl in a tobacco-shop...By jove, I almost lent him...offered to lend him money on that occasion...You can forgive a young man for going wrong with women...We all do...We've all set up girls in tobacco-shops in our time...But, damn it all, if the fellow's a Socialist it puts a different complexion...I could forgive him even for the little Wannop girl, if he wasn't...But...Good God, isn't it just the thing that a dirty-minded Socialist would do?...To seduce the daughter of his father's oldest friend, next to me...Or perhaps Wannop was an older friend than me...'
He had calmed himself a little--and he was not such a fool. He looked at her now with a certain keenness in his blue eyes that showed no sign of age. He said:
'See here, Sylvia...You aren't on terms with Christopher for all the good game you put up here this afternoon...I shall have to go into this. It's a serious charge to bring against one of His Majesty's officers...Women do say things against their husbands when they are not on good terms with them...' He went on to say that he did not say she wasn't justified. If Christopher had seduced the little Wannop girl it was enough to make her wish to harm him. Had always found her the soul of honour, straight as a die, straight as she rode to hounds. And if she wished to nag against her husband, even if in little things it wasn't quite the truth, she was perhaps within her rights as a woman. She had said, for instance, that Tietjens had taken two pairs of her best sheets. Well, his own sister, her friend, raised Cain if he took anything out of the house they lived in. She had made an atrocious row because he had taken his own shaving-glass out of his own bedroom at Mounts-by. Women liked to have sets of things. Perhaps she, Sylvia, had sets of pairs of sheets. His sister had linen sheets with the date of the battle of Waterloo on them...Naturally you would not want a set spoiled...But this was another matter. He ended up very seriously: