Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [143]
'Certainly not. I imagined you knew me better'--brushing her aside as if she had been a midge. And, thank God, he had hardly listened to her!
She was Valentine Wannop again; in the sunlight the chaffinches said 'Pink! pink!' The seed-heads of the tall grasses were brushing against her skirt. She was clean-limbed, clear-headed...It was just a problem whether Sylvia Tietjens was good to him...Good for him was, perhaps, the more exact way of putting it. Her mind cleared, like water that goes off the boil...'Waters stilled at even.' Nonsense. It was sunlight, and he had an adorable brother! He could save his brother...Transport! There was another meaning to the word. A warm feeling settled down upon her; this was her brother; the next to the best ever! It was as if you had matched a piece of stuff so nearly with another piece of stuff as to make no odds. Yet just not the real stuff! She must be grateful to this relative for all he did for her; yet, ah, never so grateful as to the other--who had done nothing!
Providence is kind in great batches! She heard mounting the steps the blessed word Transport! 'They,' so Mark said: he and she--the family feeling again--were going to get Christopher into the Transport...By the kindness of God the First Line Transport was the only branch of the Services of which Valentine knew anything. Their charwoman, who could not read and write, had a son, a sergeant in a line regiment. 'Hooray!' he had written to his mother, 'I've been off my feed; recommended for the D.C.M. too. So they're putting me senior N.C.O. of First Line Transport for a rest; the safest soft job of the whole bally front line caboodle!' Valentine had had to read this letter in the scullery amongst black-beetles. Aloud! She had hated reading it as she had hated reading anything that gave details of the front line. But charity begins surely with the char! She had had to. Now she could thank God. The sergeant, in direct, perfectly sincere language, to comfort his mother, had described his daily work, detailing horses and G.S. limber wagons for jobs and superintending the horse-standings. 'Why,' one sentence ran, 'our O.C. Transport is one of those fishing lunatics. Wherever we go he has a space of grass cleared out and pegged and b----y hell to the man who walks across it!' There the O.C. practised casting with trout and salmon rods by the hour together. 'That'll show you what a soft job it is!' the sergeant had finished triumphantly...
So that there she, Valentine Wannop, sat on a hard bench against a wall; downright, healthy middle-class--or perhaps upper middle-class--for the Wannops were, if impoverished, yet of ancient family! Over her sensible, moccasined shoes the tide of humanity flowed before her hard bench. There were two commissionaires, the one always benevolent, the other perpetually querulous, in a pulpit on one side of her; on the other, a brown-visaged sort of brother-in-law with bulging eyes, who in his shy efforts to conciliate her was continually trying to thrust into his mouth the crook of his umbrella. As if it had been a knob. She could not, at the moment, imagine why he should want to conciliate her; but she knew she would know in a minute.
For just then she was occupied with a curious pattern; almost mathematically symmetrical. Now she was an English middle-class girl--whose mother had a sufficient income--in blue cloth, a wideawake hat, a black silk tie; without a thought in her head that she shouldn't have. And with a man who loved her: of crystal purity. Not ten, not five minutes ago, she had been...She could not even remember what she had been! And he had been, he had assuredly appeared a town...No, she could not think the words...A raging stallion then! If now he should approach her, by the mere movement of a hand along the sable, she would retreat.
It was a godsend; yet it was absurd. Like the weather machine of the old man and the old woman on opposite ends of the stick...When the old man came out the old woman went in and it would rain; when the old woman came out...It was exactly like that! She hadn't time to work out the analogy. But it was like that...In rainy weather the whole world altered. Darkened!...The cat-gut that turned them slackened...slackened...But, always, they remained at opposite ends of the stick!