Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [68]
Tietjens said:
'Excogitabo!'
'That's purely canine!' she said with contempt.
'Besides,' Tietjens said, longum is much better than vastum. I hate cant adjectives like "vast."...'
'It's like your modesty to correct Ovid,' she exclaimed. 'Yet you say Ovid and Catullus were the only two Roman poets to be poets. That's because they were sentimental and used adjectives like vastum...What's "Sad tears mixed with kisses" but the sheerest sentimentality?'
'It ought, you know,' Tietjens said with soft dangerousness, 'to be "Kisses mingled with sad tears"..."Tristibus et lacrimis oscula mixta dabis."'
'I'm hanged if ever I could,' she exclaimed explosively. 'A man like you could die in a ditch and I'd never come near. You're desiccated even for a man who has learned his Latin from the Germans.'
'Oh, well, I'm a mathematician,' Tietjens said. 'Classics is not my line!'
'It isn't,' she answered tartly.
A long time afterwards from her black figure came the words:
'You used "mingled" instead of "mixed" to translate mixta. I shouldn't think you took English at Cambridge, either! Though they're as rotten at that as at everything else, father used to say.'
'Your father was Balliol, of course,' Tietjens said with the snuffy contempt of a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. But having lived most of her life amongst Balliol people she took this as a compliment and an olive branch.
Some time afterwards Tietjens, observing that her silhouette was still between him and the moon, remarked:
'I don't know if you know that for some minutes we've been running nearly due west. We ought to be going southeast by a bit south. I suppose you do know this road...'
'Every inch of it,' she said. 'I've been on it over and over again on my motor-bicycle with mother in the side-car. The next cross road is called Grandfather's Wantways. We've got eleven miles and a quarter to do. The road turns back here because of the old Sussex iron pits; it goes in and out amongst them; hundreds of them. You know the exports of the town of Rye in the eighteenth century were hops, cannon, kettles, and chimney backs. The railings round St Paul's are made of Sussex iron.'
'I knew that, of course,' Tietjens said: 'I come of an iron county myself...Why didn't you let me run the girl over in the side-car, it would have been quicker?'
'Because,' she said, 'three weeks ago I smashed up the side-car on the milestone at Hog's Corner: doing forty.'
'It must have been a pretty tidy smash!' Tietjens said. 'Your mother wasn't aboard?'
'No,' the girl said, 'suffragette literature. The side-car was full. It was a pretty tidy smash. Hadn't you observed I still limp a little?'
A few minutes later she said:
'I haven't the least notion where we really are. I clean forgot to notice the road. And I don't care...Here's a signpost though; pull in to it...
The lamps would not, however, shine on the arms of the post; they were burning dim and showing low. A good deal of fog was in the air. Tietjens gave the reins to the girl and got down. He took out the near light and, going back a yard or two to the signpost, examined its bewildering ghostlinesses...
The girl gave a little squeak that went to his backbone; the hoofs clattered unusually; the cart went on. Tietjens went after it; it was astonishing; it had completely disappeared. Then he ran into it: ghostly, reddish and befogged. It must have got much thicker suddenly. The fog swirled all round the near lamp as he replaced it in its socket.
Did you do that on purpose?' he asked the girl. 'Or can't you hold a horse?'
'I can't drive a horse,' the girl said; 'I'm afraid of them. I can't drive a motor-bike either. I made that up because I knew you'd say you'd rather have taken Gertie over in the side-car than driven with me.'
'Then do you mind,' Tietjens said, 'telling me if you know this road at all?'
'Not a bit!' she answered cheerfully. 'I never drove over it in my life. I looked it up on the map before we started because I'm sick to death of the road we went by. There's a one-horse bus from Rye to Tenterden, and I've walked from Tenterden to my uncle's over and over again...'