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

not look at him, and saw the white road running to right and left with no stile opposite, he said gruffly to her:

“Where’s the next stile? I hate walking on roads!” She pointed with her chin along the opposite hedgerow. “Fifty yards!” she said.

“Come along!” he exclaimed, and set off at a trot almost. It had come into his head that it would be just the beastly sort of thing that would happen if a car with General Campion and Lady Claudine and Paul Sandbach all aboard should come along that blinding stretch of road: or one alone: perhaps the General driving the dogcart he affected. He said to himself:

“By God! If they cut this girl I’d break their backs over my knee!” and he hastened. “Just the beastly thing that would happen.” The road probably led straight in at the front door of Mountby!

Miss Wannop trotted along a little in his rear. She thought him the most extraordinary man: as mad as he was odious. Sane people, if they’re going to hurry⁠—but why hurry!⁠—do it in the shade of field hedgerows, not in the white blaze of county council roads. Well, he could go ahead. In the next field she was going to have it out with him: she didn’t intend to be hot with running: let him be, his hateful, but certainly noticeable eyes, protruding at her like a lobster’s; but she cool and denunciatory in her pretty blouse.

There was a dogcart coming behind them!

Suddenly it came into her head: that fool had been lying when he had said that the police meant to let them alone: lying over the breakfast-table.⁠ ⁠… The dogcart contained the police: after them! She didn’t waste time looking round: she wasn’t a fool like Atalanta in the egg race. She picked up her heels and sprinted. She beat him by a yard and half to the kissing-gate, white in the hedge: panicked; breathing hard. He panted into it, after her: the fool hadn’t the sense to let her through first. They were jammed in together: face to face, panting! An occasion on which sweethearts kiss in Kent: the gate being made in three, the inner flange of the V moving on hinges. It stops cattle getting through: but this great lout of a Yorkshireman didn’t know: trying to push through like a mad bullock! Now they were caught. Three weeks in Wandsworth gaol.⁠ ⁠… Oh hang.⁠ ⁠…

The voice of Mrs. Wannop⁠—of course it was only mother! Twenty feet on high or so behind the kicking mare, with a good, round face like a peony⁠—said:

“Ah, you can jam my Val in a gate and hold her⁠ ⁠… but she gave you seven yards in twenty and beat you to the gate. That was her father’s ambition!” She thought of them as children running races. She beamed down, round-faced and simple, on Tietjens from beside the driver, who had a black, slouch hat and the grey beard of St. Peter.

“My dear boy!” she said, “my dear boy; it’s such a satisfaction to have you under my roof!”

The black horse reared on end, the patriarch sawing at its mouth. Mrs. Wannop said unconcernedly: “Stephen Joel! I haven’t done talking.”

Tietjens was gazing enragedly at the lower part of the horse’s sweat-smeared stomach.

“You soon will have,” he said, “with the girth in that state. Your neck will be broken.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mrs. Wannop said. “Joel only bought the turnout yesterday.”

Tietjens addressed the driver with some ferocity:

“Here; get down, you,” he said. He held, himself, the head of the horse whose nostrils were wide with emotion: it rubbed its forehead almost immediately against his chest. He said: “Yes! yes! There! there!” Its limbs lost their tautness. The aged driver scrambled down from the high seat, trying to come down at first forward and then backwards. Tietjens fired indignant orders at him:

“Lead the horse into the shade of that tree. Don’t touch his bit: his mouth’s sore. Where did you get this job lot? Ashford market: thirty pounds: it’s worth more.⁠ ⁠… But, blast you, don’t you see you’ve got a thirteen hands pony’s harness for a sixteen and a half hands horse. Let the bit out: three holes: it’s cutting the animal’s tongue in half.⁠ ⁠… This animal’s a rig. Do you know what a rig is? If you give it corn for a fortnight it will kick you and the cart and the stable to pieces in five minutes one day.” He led the conveyance, Mrs. Wannop triumphantly complacent and all, into a patch of shade beneath elms.

“Loosen that bit, confound you,” he said to the driver. “Ah! you’re afraid.”

He loosened the bit himself, covering his fingers with greasy harness polish which he hated. Then he said:

“Can you hold his head or are you afraid of that too? You deserve to have him bite your hands off.” He addressed Miss Wannop: “Can you?”

She said:

“No! I’m afraid of horses. I can drive any sort of car; but I’m afraid of horses.”

He said:

“Very proper!” He stood back and looked at the horse: it had dropped its head and lifted its near hind foot, resting the toe on the ground: an attitude of relaxation.

“He’ll stand now!” he said. He undid the girth, bending down uncomfortably, perspiring and greasy: the girth-strap parted in his hand.

“It’s true,” Mrs. Wannop said. “I’d have been dead in three minutes if you hadn’t seen that. The cart would have gone over backwards⁠ ⁠…”

Tietjens took out a large, complicated, horn-handled knife like a schoolboy’s. He selected a punch and pulled it open. He said to the driver:

“Have you got any cobbler’s thread? Any string? Any copper wire? A rabbit wire, now? Come, you’ve got a rabbit wire or you’re not a handy man.”

The driver moved his slouch hat circularly in negation. This seemed to be Quality who summons you for poaching if you own to possessing rabbit wires. Tietjens laid the girth along the shaft and punched into it with his punch.

“Woman’s work!” he said to Mrs. Wannop, “but it’ll take you home and last you six months