Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [54]
'God's England!' Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour. 'Land of Hope and Glory!--F natural descending to tonic C major: chord of 6-4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C major...All absolutely correct! Double basses, cellos, all violins: all wood wind: all brass. Full grand organ: all stops: special vox humana and key-bugle effect...Across the counties came the sound of bugles that his father knew...Pipe exactly right. It must be: pipe of Englishman of good birth: ditto tobacco. Attractive young woman's back. English midday mid-summer. Best climate in the world! No day on which man may not go abroad!' Tietjens paused and aimed with his hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe lemon-coloured flowers. The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman killed among crinolines!
'Now I'm a bloody murderer!' Tietjens said. 'Not gory! Green-stained with vital fluid of innocent plant...And by God! Not a woman in the country who won't let you rape her after an hour's acquaintance!' He slew two more mulleins and a sow-thistle! A shadow, but not from the sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass bloom and marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass!
'By God,' he said, 'Church! State! Army! H.M. Ministry: H.M. Opposition: H.M. City Man...All the governing class! All rotten! Thank God we've got a navy!...But perhaps that's rotten too! Who knows! Britannia needs no bulwarks...Then thank God for the upright young man and the virtuous maiden in the summer fields: he Tory of the Tories as he should be: she suffragette of the militants: militant here on earth...as she should be! As she should be! In the early decades of the twentieth century however else can a woman keep clean and wholesome! Ranting from platforms, splendid for the lungs: bashing in policemen's helmets...No! It's I do that: my part, I think, miss!...Carrying heavy banners in twenty-mile processions through streets of Sodom. All splendid! I bet she's virtuous. But you can tell it in the eye. Nice eyes! Attractive back. Virginal cockiness...Yes, better occupation for mothers or empire than attending on lewd husbands year in year out till you're as hysterical as a female cat on heat...You could see it in her: that woman: you can see it in most of 'em! Thank God then for the Tory, upright young married man and the suffragette kid...Backbone of England!...'
He killed another flower.
'But by God! we're both under a cloud! Both!...That kid and I! And General Lord Edward Campion, Lady Claudine Sandbach, and the Hon. Paul, M.P. (suspended) to spread the tale...And forty toothless fogies in the club to spread it: and no end visiting books yawning to have your names cut out of them, my boy!...My dear boy: I so regret: your father's oldest friend...By Jove, the pistachio nut of that galantine! Repeating! Breakfast gone wrong: gloomy reflections! Thought I could stand anything: digestion of an ostrich...But no! Gloomy reflections: I'm hysterical: like that large-eyed whore! For same reason! Wrong diet and wrong life: diet meant for partridge shooters over the turnips consumed by the sedentary. England the land of pills...Das Pillen-Land, the Germans call us. Very properly...And, damn it: outdoor diet: boiled mutton, turnips: sedentary life...and forced up against the filthiness of the world: your nose in it all day long!...Why, hang it, I'm as badly off as she. Sylvia's as bad as Duchemin!...I'd never have thought that...No wonder meat's turned to prussic acid...prime cause of neurasthenia...What a beastly muddle! Poor Macmaster! He's finished. Poor devil: he'd better have ogled this kid. He could have sung: "Highland Mary" a better tune than "This is the end of every man's desire"...You can cut it on his tombstone, you can write it on his card that a young man tacked on to a paulo-post Pre-Raphaelite prostitute...'
He stopped suddenly in his walk. It had occurred to him that he ought not to be walking with this girl!
'But damn it all,' he said to himself, 'she makes a good screen for Sylvia...who cares! She must chance it. She's probably struck off all their beastly visiting lists already...as a suffragette!'