Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [70]
She exclaimed:
'How you understand. You're amazing: for a man who tries to be a sea-anemone!' She said: 'Yes, this is the first holiday I've had for four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her day's work for slips of the pen...And on the top of it the raid and the anxiety...Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose mother had gone to prison...Oh, I'd have gone mad...Weekdays and Sundays...' She stopped: 'I'm apologizing, really,' she went on. 'Of course I ought not to have talked to you like that. You a great Panjandrum; saving the country with your statistics and It did make you a rather awful figure, you know...and the relief to find you're...oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay...I'd dreaded this drive...I'd have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn't been in such a dread about Gertie and the police. And if I hadn't let off steam I should have had to jump out and run beside the cart...I could still...'
'You couldn't,' Tietjens said. 'You couldn't see the cart.'
They had just run into a bank of solid fog that seemed to encounter them with a soft, ubiquitous blow. It was blinding; it was deadening to sounds; it was in a sense mournful; but it was happy, too, in its romantic unusualness. They couldn't see the gleam of the lamps; they could hardly hear the step of the horse; the horse had fallen at once to a walk. They agreed that neither of them could be responsible for losing the way; in the circumstances that was impossible. Fortunately the horse would take them somewhere; it had belonged to a local higgler: a man that used the roads buying poultry for re-sale...They agreed that they had no responsibilities; and after that went on for unmeasured hours in silence; the mist growing, but very, very gradually, more luminous...Once or twice, at a rise in the road, they saw again the stars and the moon, but mistily. On the fourth occasion they had emerged into the silver lake; like mermen rising to the surface of a tropical sea...
Tietjens had said:
'You'd better get down and take the lamp. See if you can find a milestone; I'd get down myself, but you might not be able to hold the horse...' She had plunged in...
And he had sat, feeling, he didn't know why, like a Guy Fawkes; up in the light, thinking by no means disagreeable thoughts--intent, like Miss Wannop herself, on a complete holiday of forty-eight hours; till Tuesday morning! He had to look forward to a long and luxurious day of figures; a rest after dinner; half a night more of figures; a Monday devoted to a horse-deal in the market-town where he happened to know the horse-dealer. The horse-dealer, indeed, was known to every hunting man in England! A luxurious, long argument in the atmosphere of stable-hartshorn and slow wranglings couched in ostler's epigrams. You couldn't have a better day; the beer in the pub probably good, too. Or if not that, the claret...The claret in south-country inns was often quite good; there was no sale for it so it got well kept...
On Tuesday it would close in again, beginning with the meeting of his wife's maid at Dover...
He was to have, above all, a holiday from himself and to take it like other men, free of his conventions, his strait waistcoatings...
The girl said:
'I'm coming up now! I've found out something...' He watched intently the place where she must appear; it would give him pointers about the impenetrability of mist to the eye.
Her otter-skin cap had beads of dew; beads of dew were on her hair beneath: she scrambled up, a little awkwardly: her eyes sparkled with fun: panting a little: her cheeks bright. Her hair was darkened by the wetness of the mist, but she appeared golden in the sudden moonlight.
Before she was quite up, Tietjens almost kissed her. Almost. An all but irresistible impulse! He exclaimed:
'Steady, the Buffs!' in his surprise.
She said:
'Well, you might as well have given me a hand. I found,' she went on, 'a stone that had I.R.D.C. on it, and there the lamp went out. We're not on the marsh because we are between quick hedges. That's all I have found...But I've worked out what makes me so tart with you...