No More Parades, Ford Madox Ford [best ereader for pdf TXT] 📗
- Author: Ford Madox Ford
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She found an early opportunity to carry on her investigations. For, at dinner that night, she found herself, Tietjens having gone to the telephone with a lance-corporal, opposite what she took to be a small tradesman, with fresh-coloured cheeks, and a great, grey, forward-sprouting moustache, in a uniform so creased that the creases resembled the veins of a leaf … A very trustworthy small tradesman: the grocer from round the corner whom, sometimes, you allow to supply you with paraffin … He was saying to her:
“If, ma’am, you multiply two-thousand nine hundred and something by ten you arrive at twenty-nine thousand odd …”
And she had exclaimed:
“You really mean that my husband, Captain Tietjens, spent yesterday afternoon in examining twenty-nine thousand toenails … And two thousand nine hundred toothbrushes …”
“I told him,” her interlocutor answered with deep seriousness, “that these being Colonial troops it was not so necessary to examine their toothbrushes … Imperial troops will use the brush they clean their buttons with for their teeth so as to have a clean toothbrush to show the medical officer …”
“It sounds,” she said with a little shudder, “as if you were all schoolboys playing a game … And you say my husband really occupies his mind with such things …”
Second-Lieutenant Cowley, dreadfully conscious that the shoulder-strap of his Sam Browne belt, purchased that afternoon at the Ordnance, and therefore brand-new, did not match the abdominal part of the belt that he had had for nearly ten years—a splendid bit of leather, that!—answered nevertheless stoutly:
“Madam! If the brains of an army aren’t, the life of an army is … in its feet … And nowadays, the medical officers say, in its teeth … Your husband, ma’am, is an admirable officer … He says that no draft he turns out shall …”
She said:
“He spent three hours in … You say, foot and kit inspection …”
Second-Lieutenant Cowley said:
“Of course he had other officers to help him with the kit … but he looked at every foot himself …”
She said:
“That took him from two till five … Then he had tea, I suppose … And went to … What is it? … The papers of the draft …”
Second-Lieutenant Cowley said, muffled through his moustache:
“If the captain is a little remiss in writing letters … I have heard … You might, madam … I’m a married man myself … with a daughter … And the army is not very good at writing letters … You might say, in that respect, that thank God we have got a navy, ma’am …”
She let him stagger on for a sentence or two, imagining that, in his confusion, she might come upon traces of Miss Wannop in Rouen. Then she said handsomely:
“Of course you have explained everything, Mr. Cowley, and I am very much obliged … Of course my husband would not have time to write very full letters … He is not like the giddy young subalterns who run after …”
He exclaimed in a great roar of laughter:
“The captain run after skirts … Why, I can number on my hands the times he’s been out of my sight since he’s had the battalion!”
A deep wave of depression went over Sylvia.
“Why,” Lieutenant Cowley laughed on, “if we had a laugh against him it was that he mothered the lot of us as if he was a hen sitting on addled eggs … For it’s only a ragtime army, as the saying is, when you’ve said the best for it that you can … And look at the other commanding officers we’ve had before we had him … There was Major Brooks … Never up before noon, if then, and out of camp by two-thirty. Get your returns ready for signing before then or never get ’em signed … And Colonel Potter … Bless my soul … ’e wouldn’t sign any blessed papers at all … He lived down here in this hotel, and we never saw him up at the camp at all … But the captain … We always say that … if ’e was a Chelsea adjutant getting off a draft of the Second Coldstreams …”
With her indolent and gracious beauty—Sylvia knew that she was displaying indolent and gracious beauty—Sylvia leaned over the tablecloth listening for items in the terrible indictment that, presently, she was going to bring against Tietjens … For the morality of these matters is this: … If you have an incomparably beautiful woman on your hands you must occupy yourself solely with her … Nature exacts that of you … until you are unfaithful to her with a snubnosed girl with freckles: that, of course, being a reaction, is still in a way occupying yourself with your woman! … But to betray her with a battalion … That is against decency, against Nature … And for him, Christopher Tietjens, to come down to the level of the men you met here! …
Tietjens, mooning down the room between tables, had more than his usually aloof air since he had just come out of a telephone box. He slipped, a weary mass, into the polished chair between her and the lieutenant. He said:
“I’ve got the washing arranged for …” and Sylvia gave to herself a little hiss between the teeth, of vindictive pleasure! This was indeed betrayal to a battalion. He added: “I shall have to be up in camp before four-thirty tomorrow morning …”
Sylvia could not resist saying:
“Isn’t there a poem … ‘Ah me, the dawn, the dawn, it comes too soon!’ … said of course by lovers in bed? … Who was the poet?”
Cowley went visibly red to the roots of his hair and evidently beyond. Tietjens finished his speech to Cowley, who had remonstrated against his going up to the camp so early by saying that he had not been able to get hold of an officer to march the draft. He then said in his leisurely way:
“There were a great many poems with that refrain in the Middle Ages … You are probably thinking of an albade by
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