Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [121]
And she knew too: she had always known under her mind and now she confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would say farewell to her: like that, using the inflexion of a verb. As, just occasionally, using the word 'we'--and perhaps without intention--he had let her know that he loved her.
Mr Jegg drifted across from the window: Mrs Haviland was already at the door.
'We'll leave you to have your war talk out,' Mr Jegg said. He added: 'For myself, I believe it's one's sole duty to preserve the beauty of things that's preservable. I can't help saying that.'
She was alone with Tietjens and the quiet day. She said to herself:
'Now he must take me in his arms. He must. He must!' The deepest of her instincts came to the surface, from beneath layers of thought hardly known to her. She could feel his arms round her: she had in her nostrils the peculiar scent of his hair--like the scent of the skin of an apple, but very faint. 'You must! You must!' she said to herself. There came back to her overpoweringly the memory of their drive together and the moment, the overwhelming moment, when, climbing out of the white fog into the blinding air, she had felt the impulse of his whole body towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him. A sudden lapse: like the momentary dream when you fall...She saw the white disk of the sun over the silver mist and behind them was the long, warm night...
Tietjens sat, huddled rather together, dejectedly, the firelight playing on the silver places of his hair. It had grown nearly dark outside: they had a sense of the large room that, almost week by week, had grown, for its gleams of gilding and hand-polished dark woods, more like the great dining-room at the Duchemins'. He got down from the fire-seat with a weary movement, as if the fire-seat had been very high. He said, with a little bitterness, but as if with more fatigue:
'Well, I've got the business of telling Macmaster that I'm leaving the office. That, too, won't be an agreeable affair! Not that what poor Vinnie thinks matters.' He added: 'It's queer, dear...' In the tumult of her emotions she was almost certain that he had said 'dear.'...'Not three hours ago my wife used to me almost the exact words you have just used. Almost the exact words. She talked of her inability to sleep at night for thinking of immense spaces full of pain that was worse at night...And she, too, said that she could not respect me...'
She sprang up.
'Oh,' she said, 'she didn't meant it. I didn't mean it. Almost every man who is a man must do as you are doing. But don't you see it's a desperate attempt to get you to stay: an attempt on moral lines? How can we leave any stone unturned that could keep us from losing our men?' She added, and it was another stone that she didn't leave unturned: 'Besides, how can you reconcile it with your sense of duty, even from your point of view! You're more useful--you know you're more useful to your country here than...'
He stood over her, stooping a little, somehow suggesting great gentleness and concern.
'I can't reconcile it with my conscience,' he said. 'In this affair there is nothing that any man can reconcile with his conscience. I don't mean that we oughtn't to be in this affair and on the side we're on. We ought. But I'll put to you things I have put to no other soul.'
The simplicity of his revelation seemed to her to put to shame any of the glibnesses she had heard. It appeared to her as if a child were speaking. He described the disillusionment it had cost him personally as soon as this country had come into the war. He even described the sunlit heather landscape of the north, where naïvely he had made his tranquil resolution to join the French Foreign Legion as a common soldier and his conviction that that would give him, as he called it, clean bones again.
That, he said, had been straightforward. Now there was nothing straightforward: for him or for any man. One could have fought with a clean heart for a civilization: if you like for the eighteenth century against the twentieth, since that was what fighting for France against the enemy countries meant. But our coming in had changed the aspect at once. It was one part of the twentieth century using the eighteenth as a cat's-paw to bash the other half of the twentieth. It was true there was nothing else for it. And as long as we did it in a decent spirit it was just bearable. One could keep at one's job--which was faking statistics against the other fellow--until you were sick and tired of faking and your brain reeled. And then some!