Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [146]
'I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of course if a man who's a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again no talking about it...! His voice--his own voice--came to him as if from the other end of a long-distance telephone. A damn long-distance one! Ten years...
If then a man who's a man wants to have a woman...Damn it, he doesn't! In ten years he had learnt that a Tommie who's a decent fellow...His mind said at one and the same moment, the two lines running one over the other like the two subjects of a fugue:
'Some beguiling virgins with the broken seals of perjury,' and:
'Since when we stand side by side, only hands may meet
He said:
'But damn it; damn it again! The beastly fellow was wrong! Our hands didn't meet...I don't believe I've shaken hands...I don't believe I've touched the girl...in my life...Never once!...Not the hand-shaking sort...A nod!...A meeting and parting!...English, you know...But yes! she put her arm over my shoulders...On the bank!...On such short acquaintance! I said to myself then...Well, we've made up for it since then. Or no! Not made up!...Atoned...As Sylvia so aptly put it; at that moment mother was dying...
He, his conscious self, said:
'But it was probably the drunken brother...You don't beguile virgins with the broken seals of perjury in Kensington High Street at two at night supporting, one on each side, a drunken bluejacket with intermittent legs...'
'Intermittent!' was the word. 'Intermittently functioning!'
At one point the boy had broken from them and run with astonishing velocity along the dull wood paving of an immense empty street. When they had caught him up he had been haranguing under black trees, with an Oxford voice, an immobile policeman:
'You're the fellows!' he'd been exclaiming, 'who make old England what she is! You keep the peace in our homes! You save us from the vile excesses...
Tietjens himself he had always addressed with the voice and accent of a common seaman; with his coarsened surface voice!
He had the two personalities. Two or three times he had said:
'Why don't you kiss the girl? She's a nice girl, isn't she? You're a poor b----y Tommie, ain't cher? Well, the poor b----y Tommies ought to have all the nice girls they want! That's straight, isn't it?...'
And, even at that time they hadn't known what was going to happen...There are certain cruelties...They had got a four-wheel cab at last. The drunken boy had sat beside the driver; he had insisted...Her little, pale, shrunken face had gazed straight before her...It hadn't been possible to speak; the cab, rattling all over the road, had been pulled up with frightful jerks when the boy had grabbed the reins...The old driver hadn't seemed to mind; but they had had to subscribe all the money in their pockets to pay him after they had carried the boy into the black house...
Tietjens' mind said to him:
'Now when they came to her father's house so nimbly she slipped in, and said: "There is a fool without and there is a maid within..."'
He answered dully:
'Perhaps that's what it really amounts to...' He had stood at the hall door, she looking out at him with a pitiful face. Then from the sofa within the brother had begun to snore; enormous, grotesque sounds, like the laughter of unknown races from darkness. He had turned and walked down the path, she following him. He had exclaimed:
'It's perhaps too...untidy...'
She had said:
'Yes Yes...Ugly...Too...oh...private!'
He said, he remembered:
'But...for ever...'
She said, in a great hurry:
'But when you come back...Permanently. And...oh, as if it were in public...I don't know,' she had added. 'Ought we?...I'd be ready...' She added: 'I will be ready for anything you ask.'
He had said at some time: 'But obviously...Not under this roof...' And he had added: 'We're the sort that...do not!'
She had answered, quickly too:
'Yes--that's it. We're that sort!' And then she had asked: 'And Ethel's party? Was it a great success?' It hadn't, she knew, been an inconsequence. He had answered:
'Ah...That's permanent...That's public...There was Rugeley: The Duke...Sylvia brought him. She'll be a great friend!...And the President of the...Local Government Board, I think...And a Belgian...equivalent to Lord Chief Justice...and, of course, Claudine Sandbach...Two hundred and seventy; all of the best, the modestly elated Guggumses said as I left! And Mr Ruggles...Yes!...They're established...No place for me!'