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

“I wish you’d make some noise. It’s lonely down here, besides being possibly dangerous. There might be dicks on each side of the road.”

If they were on the marsh there certainly would be dykes⁠—why did they call ditches “dykes,” and why did she pronounce it “dicks”?⁠—on each side of the road. He could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t express concern and he couldn’t do that by the rules of the game. He tried to whistle “John Peel!” But he was no hand at whistling. He sang:

“D’ye ken, John Peel at the break of day⁠ ⁠…” and felt like a fool. But he kept on at it, the only tune that he knew. It was the Yorkshire Light Infantry quickstep: the regiment of his brothers in India. He wished he had been in the army: but his father hadn’t approved of having more than two younger sons in the army. He wondered if he would ever run with John Peel’s hounds again: he had once or twice. Or with any of the trencher-fed foot packs of the Cleveland district, of which there had been still several when he had been a boy. He had been used to think of himself as being like John Peel with his coat so grey⁠ ⁠… Up through the heather, over Wharton’s place; the pack running wild; the heather dripping; the mist rolling up⁠ ⁠… another kind of mist than this south country silver sheet. Silly stuff! Magical! That was the word. A silly word.⁠ ⁠… South country⁠ ⁠… In the north the old grey mists rolled together, revealing black hillsides!

He didn’t suppose he’d have the wind now: this rotten bureaucratic life!⁠ ⁠… If he had been in the army like the two brothers, Ernest and James, next above him⁠ ⁠… But no doubt he would not have liked the army. Discipline!⁠ ⁠… He supposed he would have put up with the discipline: a gentleman had to. Because noblesse oblige: not for fear of consequences⁠ ⁠… But army officers seemed to him pathetic. They spluttered and roared: to make men jump smartly: at the end of apoplectic efforts the men jumped smartly. But there was the end of it.⁠ ⁠…

Actually, this mist was not silver, or was, perhaps, no longer silver: if you looked at it with the eye of the artist⁠ ⁠… With the exact eye! It was smirched with bars of purple; of red; of orange: delicate reflections: dark blue shadows from the upper sky where it formed drifts like snow.⁠ ⁠… The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man’s work. The only work for a man. Why, then, were artists soft: effeminate; not men at all: whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the schoolteacher, was a manly man? Quite a manly man: until he became an old woman!

And the bureaucrat then? Growing fat and soft like himself, or dry and stringy like Macmaster or old Ingleby? They did men’s work: exact observation: return No. 17642 with figures exact. Yet they grew hysterical: they ran about corridors or frantically rang table bells, asking with high voices of querulous eunuchs why form ninety thousand and two wasn’t ready. Nevertheless men like the bureaucratic life: his own brother, Mark, head of the family: heir to Groby.⁠ ⁠… Fifteen years older: a quiet stick: wooden: brown; always in a bowler-hat, as often as not with his racing-glasses hung around him. Attending his first-class office when he liked: too good a man for any administration to lose by putting on the screw.⁠ ⁠… But heir to Groby: what would that stick make of the place?⁠ ⁠… Let it, no doubt, and go on pottering from the Albany to race meetings⁠—where he never betted⁠—to Whitehall, where he was said to be indispensable.⁠ ⁠… Why indispensable? Why in heaven’s name? That stick who had never hunted, never shot: couldn’t tell coulter from plough-handle and lived in his bowler-hat!⁠ ⁠… A “sound” man: the archetype of all sound men. Never in his life had anyone shaken his head at Mark and said:

“You’re brilliant!” Brilliant! That stick! No, he was indispensable!

“Upon my soul!” Tietjens said to himself, “that girl down there is the only intelligent living soul I’ve met for years.”⁠ ⁠… A little pronounced in manner sometimes; faulty in reasoning naturally, but quite intelligent, with a touch of wrong accent now and then. But if she was wanted anywhere, there she’d be! Of good stock, of course: on both sides!⁠ ⁠… But, positively, she and Sylvia were the only two human beings he had met for years whom he could respect: the one for sheer efficiency in killing: the other for having the constructive desire and knowing how to set about it. Kill or cure! The two functions of man. If you wanted something killed you’d go to Sylvia Tietjens in the sure faith that she would kill it: emotion: hope: ideal: kill it quick and sure. If you wanted something kept alive you’d go to Valentine: she’d find something to do for it⁠ ⁠… The two types of mind: remorseless enemy: sure screen: dagger⁠ ⁠… sheath!

Perhaps the future of the world, then, was to women? Why not? He hadn’t in years met a man that he hadn’t to talk down to⁠—as you talk down to a child: as he had talked down to General Campion or to Mr. Waterhouse⁠ ⁠… as he always talked down to Macmaster. All good fellows in their way.⁠ ⁠…

But why was he born to be a sort of lonely buffalo: outside the herd? Not artist: not soldier: not bureaucrat: not certainly indispensable anywhere: apparently not even sound in the eyes of these dim-minded specialists⁠ ⁠… An exact observer.⁠ ⁠…

Hardly even that for the last six and a half hours:

“Die Sommer Nacht hat mirs angethan:
Das war ein schwiegsame Reiten⁠ ⁠…”

he said aloud.

How could you translate that: you couldn’t translate it: no one could translate Heine:

“It was the summer night came over me:
That was silent riding⁠ ⁠…”

A voice cut into his warm, drowsy thought:

“Oh, you do exist. But you’ve spoken too late. I’ve run into the horse.” He must have been speaking aloud. He