Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [139]
And in certain moods during the past week she had accepted this suspicion; in certain other moods she had put it from her. Towards the Thursday it had no longer seemed to matter. Her lover was going from her; the long pull of the war was on; the hard necessities of life stretched out; what could an infidelity more or less matter in the long, hard thing that life is? And on the Thursday two minor, or major, worries came to disturb her level. Her brother announced himself as coming home for several days' leave, and she had the trouble of thinking that she would have forced upon her a companionship and a point of view that would be coarsely and uproariously opposed to anything that Tietjens stood for--or for which he was ready to sacrifice himself. Moreover she would have to accompany her brother to a number of riotous festivities whilst all the time she would have to think of Tietjens as getting hour by hour nearer to the horrible circumstances of troops in contact with enemy forces. In addition her mother had received an enviably paid for commission from one of the more excitable Sunday papers to write a series of articles on extravagant matters connected with the hostilities. They had wanted the money so dreadfully--more particularly as Edward was corning home--that Valentine Wannop had conquered her natural aversion from the waste of time of her mother...It would have meant very little waste of time, and the £60 that it would have brought in would have made all the difference to them for months and months.
But Tietjens, whom Mrs Wannop had come to rely on as her right-hand man in these matters, had, it appeared, shown an unexpected recalcitrancy. He had, Mrs Wannop said, hardly seemed himself and had gibed at the two first subjects proposed--that of 'war babies' and the fact that the Germans were reduced to eating their own corpses--as being below the treatment of any decent pen. The illegitimacy rate, he had said, had shown very little increase; the French-derived German word 'Kadaver' meant bodies of horses or cattle; Leichnam being the German for the word 'corpse.' He had practically refused to have anything to do with the affair.
As to the Kadaver business, Valentine agreed with him, as to the 'war babies' she kept a more open mind. If there weren't any war babies it couldn't, as far as she could see, matter whether one wrote about them; it couldn't certainly matter as much as to write about them, supposing the poor little things to exist. She was aware that this was immoral, but her mother needed the money desperately and her mother came first.
There was nothing for it, therefore, but to plead with Tietjens; for Valentine knew that without so much of moral support from him as would be implied by a good-natured or an enforced sanction of the article, Mrs Wannop would drop the matter and so would lose her connection with the excitable paper which paid well. It happened that on the Friday morning Mrs Wannop received a request that she would write for a Swiss review a propaganda article about some historical matter connected with the peace after Waterloo. The pay would be practically nothing, but the employment was at least relatively dignified, and Mrs Wannop--which was quite in the ordinary course of things!--told Valentine to ring Tietjens up and ask him for some details about the Congress of Vienna at which, before and after Waterloo, the peace terms had been wrangled out.
Valentine rang up--as she had done hundreds of times; it was to her a great satisfaction that she was going to hear Tietjens speak once more at least. The telephone was answered from the other end, and Valentine gave her two messages, the one as to the Congress of Vienna, the other as to war babies. The appalling speech came back:
'Young woman! You'd better keep off the grass. Mrs Duchemin is already my husband's mistress. You keep off.' There was about the voice no human quality; it was as if from an immense darkness the immense machine had spoken words that dealt blows. She answered; and it was as if a substratum of her mind of which she knew nothing must have been prepared for that very speech; so that it was not her own 'she' that answered levelly and coolly: