Some Do Not …, Ford Madox Ford [free e novels .txt] 📗

wish I could,” she said. “He doesn’t get anything out of it himself. He’s ascetic to unreasonableness. On Fridays he eats nothing at all. It makes me quite anxious⁠ ⁠… for Saturdays.”

Tietjens said:

“I know.”

She exclaimed⁠—and almost with sharpness:

“You know!”

He continued to gaze straight into her eyes:

“Oh, of course one knows all about Breakfast Duchemin!” he said. “He was one of Ruskin’s road-builders. He was said to be the most Ruskin-like of them all!”

Mrs. Duchemin cried out: “Oh!” Fragments of the worst stories that in his worst moods her husband had told her of his old preceptor went through her mind. She imagined that the shameful parts of her intimate life must be known to this nebulous monster. For Tietjens, turned sideways and facing her, had seemed to grow monstrous, and as if with undefined outlines. He was the male, threatening, clumsily odious and external! She felt herself say to herself: “I will do you an injury, if ever⁠—” For already she had felt herself swaying the preferences, the thoughts and the future of the man on her other side. He was the male, tender, in-fitting; the complement of the harmony, the meat for consumption, like the sweet pulp of figs.⁠ ⁠… It was inevitable; it was essential to the nature of her relationship with her husband that Mrs. Duchemin should have these feelings.⁠ ⁠…

She heard, almost without emotion, so great was her disturbance, from behind her back the dreaded, high, rasping tones:

“Post coitum tristia! Ha! Ha. That’s what it is?” The voice repeated the words and added sardonically: “You know what that means?” But the problem of her husband had become secondary; the real problem was: “What was this monstrous and hateful man going to say of her to his friend, when, for long hours, they were away?”

He was still gazing into her eyes. He said nonchalantly, rather low:

“I wouldn’t look round if I were you. Vincent Macmaster is quite up to dealing with the situation.”

His voice had the familiarity of an elder brother’s. And at once Mrs. Duchemin knew⁠—that he knew that already close ties were developing between herself and Macmaster. He was speaking as a man speaks in emergencies to the mistress of his dearest friend. He was then one of those formidable and to be feared males who possess the gift of right intuitions.⁠ ⁠…

Tietjens said: “You heard!”

To the gloating, cruel tones that had asked:

“You know what that means?” Macmaster had answered clearly, but with the snappy intonation of a reproving Don:

“Of course I know what it means. It’s no discovery!” That was exactly the right note. Tietjens⁠—and Mrs. Duchemin too⁠—could hear Mr. Duchemin, invisible behind his rampart of blue spikes and silver, give the answering snuffle of a reproved schoolboy. A hard-faced, small man, in grey tweed that buttoned, collar-like, tight round his throat, standing behind the invisible chair, gazed straight forward into infinity.

Tietjens said to himself:

“By God! Parry! the Bermondsey light middleweight! He’s there to carry Duchemin off if he becomes violent!”

During the quick look that Tietjens took round the table Mrs. Duchemin gave, sinking lower in her chair, a short gasp of utter relief. Whatever Macmaster was going to think of her, he thought now. He knew the worst! It was settled, for good or ill. In a minute she would look round at him.

Tietjens said:

“It’s all right, Macmaster will be splendid. We had a friend up at Cambridge with your husband’s tendencies, and Macmaster could get him through any social occasion.⁠ ⁠… Besides, we’re all gentlefolk here!”

He had seen the Rev. Horsley and Mrs. Wannop both interested in their plates. Of Miss Wannop he was not so certain. He had caught, bent obviously on himself, from large, blue eyes, a glance that was evidently appealing. He said to himself: “She must be in the secret. She’s appealing to me not to show emotion and upset the applecart! It is a shame that she should be here: a girl!” and into his answering glance he threw the message: “It’s all right as far as this end of the table is concerned.”

But Mrs. Duchemin had felt come into herself a little stiffening of morale. Macmaster by now knew the worst; Duchemin was quoting snuffingly to him the hot licentiousness of the Trimalchion of Petronius; snuffing into Macmaster’s ear. She caught the phrase: Festinans, puer callide.⁠ ⁠… Duchemin, holding her wrist with the painful force of the maniac, had translated it to her over and over again.⁠ ⁠… No doubt that, too, this hateful man beside her would have guessed!

She said: “Of course we should be all gentlefolk here. One naturally arranges that.⁠ ⁠…”

Tietjens began to say:

“Ah! But it isn’t so easy to arrange nowadays. All sorts of bounders get into all sorts of holies of holies!”

Mrs. Duchemin turned her back on him right in the middle of his sentence. She devoured Macmaster’s face with her eyes, in an infinite sense of calm.

Macmaster four minutes before had been the only one to see the entrance, from a small panelled door that had behind it another of green baize, of the Rev. Mr. Duchemin, and following him a man whom Macmaster, too, recognised at once as Parry, the ex-prize fighter. It flashed through his mind at once that this was an extraordinary conjunction. It flashed through his mind, too, that it was extraordinary that anyone so ecstatically handsome as Mrs. Duchemin’s husband should not have earned high preferment in a church always hungry for male beauty. Mr. Duchemin was extremely tall, with a slight stoop of the proper clerical type. His face was of alabaster; his grey hair, parted in the middle, fell brilliantly on his high brows; his glance was quick, penetrating, austere; his nose very hooked and chiselled. He was the exact man to adorn a lofty and gorgeous fane, as Mrs. Duchemin was the exact woman to consecrate an episcopal drawing-room. With his great wealth, scholarship and tradition.⁠ ⁠… “Why then,” went through Macmasters mind in a swift pinprick of suspicion, “isn’t he at least a dean?”

Mr. Duchemin had walked swiftly to his chair which Parry, as swiftly walking behind him, drew