Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [39]
The General laughed:
'You are an incorrigible fellow...If ever there's any known, certain fact...'
'But go and look at the beastly things,' Tietjens said. 'You'll see they've got just a facing of Caen stone that the tide floated here, and the fillings-up are just rubble, any rubbish...Look here! It's a known certain fact, isn't it, that your eighteen-pounders are better than the French seventy-fives. They tell us so in the House, on the hustings, in the papers: the public believes it...But would you put one of your tiny pet things firing--what is it?--four shells a minute?--with the little bent pins in their tails to stop the recoil--against their seventy-fives with the compressed-air cylinders...'
The General sat stiffly upon his cushion:
'That's different,' he said. 'How the devil do you get to know these things?'
'It isn't different,' Tietjens said, 'it's the same muddleheaded frame of mind that sees good building in Henry VIII as lets us into wars with hopelessly antiquated field guns and rottenly inferior ammunition. You'd fire any fellow on your staff who said we could stand up for a minute against the French.'
'Well, anyhow,' the General said, 'I thank heaven you're not on my staff, for you'd talk my hind leg off in a week. It's perfectly true that the public...'
But Tietjens was not listening. He was considering that it was natural for an unborn fellow like Sandbach to betray the solidarity that should exist between men. And it was natural for a childless woman like Lady Claudine Sandbach, with a notoriously, a flagrantly unfaithful husband, to believe in the unfaithfulness of the husbands of other women!
The General was saying:
'Who did you hear that stuff from about the French field gun?'
Tietjens said:
'From you. Three weeks ago!'
And all the other society women with unfaithful husbands...They must do their best to down and out a man. They would cut him off their visiting lists! Let them. The barren harlots mated to faithless eunuchs...Suddenly he thought that he didn't know for certain that he was the father of his child and he groaned.
'Well, what have I said wrong now?' the General asked. 'Surely you don't maintain that pheasants do eat man-golds...'
Tietjen proved his reputation for sanity with:
'No! I was just groaning at the thought of the Chancellor! That's sound enough for you, isn't it?' But it gave him a nasty turn. He hadn't been able to pigeon-hole and padlock his disagreeable reflections. He had been as good as talking to himself...
In the bow-window of another hostelry than his own he caught the eye of Mr Waterhouse, who was looking at the view over the marshes. The great man beckoned to him and he went in. Mr Waterhouse was aware that Tietjenswhom he assumed to be a man of sense--should get any pursuit of the two girls stopped off. He couldn't move in the matter himself, but a five pound note and possibly a police promotion or so might be handed round if no advertisement were given to the mad women on account of their raid of that afternoon.
It was not a very difficult matter: for where the great man was to be found in the club lounge, there, in the bar, the major, the town clerk, the local head of the police, the doctors and solicitors would be found drinking together. And after it was arranged the great man himself came into the bar, had a drink and pleased them all immensely by his affability...
Tietjens himself, dining alone with the Minister to whom he wanted to talk about his Labour Finance Act, didn't find him a disagreeable fellow: not really foolish, not sly except in his humour, tired obviously, but livening up after a couple of whiskys, and certainly not as yet plutocratic; with tastes for apple-pie and cream of a fourteen-year-old boy. And, even as regards his famous Act, which was then shaking the country to its political foundations, once you accepted its fundamental unsuitedness to the temperament and needs of the English working-class, you could see that Mr Waterhouse didn't want to be dishonest. He accepted with gratitude several of Tietjens' emendations in the actuarial schedules...And over their port they agreed on two fundamental legislative ideals: every working man to have a minimum of four hundred a year and every beastly manufacturer who wanted to pay less to be hung. That, it appeared, was the High Toryism of Tietjens as it was the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left...