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

Macmaster said absently:

“Who? Chrissie?⁠ ⁠… Yes! Sometimes I him, sometimes he me.⁠ ⁠… We make engagements. My best friend. The most brilliant man in England, of the best stock too. Tietjens of Groby.⁠ ⁠…” Feeling that she didn’t appreciate his friend he was abstractly piling on commendations: “He’s making calculations now. For the Government that no other man in England could make. But he’s going⁠ ⁠…”

An extreme languor had settled on him, he felt weakened but yet triumphant with the cessation of her grasp. It occurred to him numbly that he would be seeing less of Tietjens. A grief. He heard himself quote:

“ ‘Since when we stand side by side!’ ” His voice trembled.

“Ah yes!” came in her deep tones: “The beautiful lines⁠ ⁠… They’re true. We must part. In this world⁠ ⁠…” They seemed to her lovely and mournful words to say; heavenly to have them to say, vibratingly, arousing all sorts of images. Macmaster, mournfully too, said:

“We must wait.” He added fiercely: “But tonight, at dusk!” He imagined the dusk, under the yew hedge. A shining motor drew up in the sunlight under the window.

“Yes! yes!” she said. “There’s a little white gate from the lane.” She imagined their interview of passion and mournfulness amongst dim objects half seen. That she could allow herself of glamour.

Afterwards he must come to the house to ask after her health and they would walk side by side on the lawn, publicly, in the warm light, talking of indifferent but beautiful poetries, a little wearily, but with what currents electrifying and passing between their flesh.⁠ ⁠… And then: long, circumspect years.⁠ ⁠…

Macmaster went down the tall steps to the car that gleamed in the summer sun. The roses shone over the supremely levelled turf. His heel met the stones with the hard tread of a conqueror. He could have shouted aloud!

Tietjens lit a pipe beside the stile, having first meticulously cleaned out the bowl and the stem with a surgical needle, in his experience the best of all pipe-cleaners, since, made of German silver, it is flexible, won’t corrode and is indestructible. He wiped off methodically, with a great dock-leaf, the glutinous brown products of burnt tobacco, the young woman, as he was aware, watching him from behind his back. As soon as he had restored the surgical needle to the notebook in which it lived, and had put the notebook into its bulky pocket, Miss Wannop moved off down the path: it was only suited for Indian file, and had on the left hand a ten-foot, untrimmed quicken hedge, the hawthorn blossoms just beginning to blacken at the edges and small green haws to show. On the right the grass was above knee high and bowed to those that passed. The sun was exactly vertical; the chaffinchs said: “Pink! pink!”: the young woman had an agreeable back.

This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous: he of good birth; she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest. Each come just from an admirably appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people: their promenade sanctioned, as it were, by the Church⁠—two clergy⁠—the State: two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids.⁠ ⁠… Each knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch, greenfinch, yellow-ammer (not, my dear, hammer; ammer from the Middle High German for “finch”), garden warbler, Dartford warbler, pied-wagtail, known as “dishwasher.” (These charming local dialect names.) Marguerites over the grass, stretching in an infinite white blaze: grasses purple in a haze to the far distant hedgerow: coltsfoot, wild white clover, sainfoin, Italian rye grass (all technical names that the best people must know: the best grass mixture for permanent pasture on the Wealden loam). In the hedge: Our lady’s bedstraw: dead-nettle: bachelor’s button (but in Sussex they call it ragged robin, my dear): So interesting! cowslip (paigle, you know, from old French pasque, meaning Easter): burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, but not burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers of course over; black briony; wild clematis: later it’s old man’s beard; purple loosestrife. (That our young maid’s long purples call and literal shepherds give a grosser name. So racy of the soil!)⁠ ⁠… Walk, then, through the field, gallant youth and fair maid, minds cluttered up with all these useless anodynes for thought, quotations, imbecile epithets! Dead silent: unable to talk: from too good breakfast to probably extremely bad lunch. The young woman, so the young man is duly warned, to prepare it: pink india-rubber half-cooked cold beef, no doubt: tepid potatoes, water in the bottom of willow-pattern dish. (No! Not genuine willow-pattern, of course, Mr. Tietjens.) Overgrown lettuce with wood-vinegar to make the mouth scream with pain; pickles, also preserved in wood-vinegar; two bottles of public-house beer that, on opening, squirts to the wall. A glass of invalid port⁠ ⁠… for the gentleman!⁠ ⁠… and the jaws hardly able to open after the too enormous breakfast at 10:15. Midday now!

“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 midsummer. 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 flower. The structure collapsed,