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

had felt the horse quivering at the end of the reins. The horse, too, was used to her by now. It had hardly stirred⁠ ⁠… He wondered when he had left off singing “John Peel.”⁠ ⁠… He said:

“Come along, then: have you found anything?”

The answer came:

“Something⁠ ⁠… But you can’t talk in this stuff⁠ ⁠… I’ll just⁠ ⁠…”

The voice died away as if a door had shut. He waited: consciously waiting: as an occupation! Contritely and to make a noise he rattled the whip-stock in its bucket. The horse started and he had to check in quickly: a damn fool he was. Of course a horse would start if you rattled a whip-stock. He called out:

“Are you all right?” The cart might have knocked her down. He had, however, broken the convention. Her voice came from a great distance:

“I’m all right. Trying the other side⁠ ⁠…”

His last thought came back to him. He had broken their convention: he had exhibited concern: like any other man.⁠ ⁠… He said to himself:

“By God! Why not take a holiday: why not break all conventions?”

They erected themselves intangibly and irrefragably. He had not known this young woman twenty-four hours: not to speak to: and already the convention existed between them that he must play stiff and cold, she warm and clinging.⁠ ⁠… Yet she was obviously as cool a hand as himself: cooler, no doubt, for at bottom he was certainly a sentimentalist.

A convention of the most imbecile type.⁠ ⁠… Then break all conventions: with the young woman: with himself above all. For forty-eight hours⁠ ⁠… almost exactly forty-eight hours till he started for Dover.⁠ ⁠…

“And I must to the greenwood go,
Alone: a banished man!”

Border ballad! Written not seven miles from Groby!

By the descending moon: it being then just after cockcrow of midsummer night⁠—what sentimentality!⁠—it must be half-past four on Sunday. He had worked out that to catch the morning Ostend boat at Dover he must leave the Wannops’ at 5:15 on Tuesday morning, in a motor for the junction.⁠ ⁠… What incredible cross-country train connections! Five hours for not forty miles.

He had then forty-eight and three-quarter hours! Let them be a holiday! A holiday from himself above all: a holiday from his standards: from his convention with himself. From clear observation: from exact thought: from knocking over all the skittles of the exactitudes of others: from the suppression of emotions.⁠ ⁠… From all the weariness that made him intolerable to himself.⁠ ⁠… He felt his limbs lengthen, as if they too had relaxed.

Well, already he had had six and a half hours of it. They had started at 10 and, like any other man, he had enjoyed the drive, though it had been difficult to keep the beastly cart balanced, the girl had had to sit behind with her arm round the other girl who screamed at every oak tree.⁠ ⁠…

But he had⁠—if he put himself to the question⁠—mooned along under the absurd moon that had accompanied them down the heaven: to the scent of hay: to the sound of nightingales, hoarse by now, of course⁠—in June he changes his tune; of corncrakes, of bats, of a heron twice, overhead. They had passed the blue-black shadows of corn stacks, of heavy, rounded oaks, of hop oasts that are half church tower, half finger-post. And the road silver grey, and the night warm.⁠ ⁠… It was midsummer night that had done that to him.⁠ ⁠…

Hat mir’s angethan.
Das war ein schwiegsame Reiten.⁠ ⁠…

Not absolutely silent of course: but silentish! Coming back from the parson’s, where they had dropped the little London sewer rat, they had talked very little.⁠ ⁠… Not unpleasant people the parson’s: an uncle of the girl’s: three girl cousins, not unpleasant, like the girl but without the individuality⁠ ⁠… A remarkably good bite of beef: a truly meritorious Stilton and a drop of whisky that proved the parson to be a man. All in candlelight. A motherly mother of the family to take the rat up some stairs⁠ ⁠… a great deal of laughter of girls⁠ ⁠… then a restart an hour later than had been scheduled.⁠ ⁠… Well, it hadn’t mattered: they had the whole of eternity before them: the good horse⁠—really it was a good horse!⁠—putting its shoulders into the work.⁠ ⁠…

They had talked a little at first; about the safeness of the London girl from the police now; about the brickishness of the parson in taking her in. She certainly would never have reached Charing Cross by train.⁠ ⁠…

There had fallen long periods of silences. A bat had whirled very near their off-lamp.

“What a large bat!” she had said. “Noctilux major.⁠ ⁠…”

He said:

“Where do you get your absurd Latin nomenclature from? Isn’t it phalœna⁠ ⁠…” She had answered:

“From White⁠ ⁠… The Natural History of Selborne is the only natural history I ever read.⁠ ⁠…”

“He’s the last English writer that could write,” said Tietjens.

“He calls the downs ‘those majestic and amusing mountains,’ ” she said. “Where do you get your dreadful Latin pronunciation from? Phal⁠ ⁠… i⁠ ⁠… i⁠ ⁠… na! To rhyme with Dinah!”

“It’s ‘sublime and amusing mountains,’ not ‘majestic and amusing,’ ” Tietjens said. “I got my Latin pronunciation, like all public schoolboys of today, from the German.”

She answered:

“You would! Father used to say it made him sick.”

“Caesar equals Kaiser,” Tietjens said.⁠ ⁠…

“Bother your Germans,” she said, “they’re no ethnologists; they’re rotten at philology!” She added: “Father used to say so,” to take away from an appearance of pedantry.

A silence then! She had right over her head a rug that her aunt had lent her; a silhouette beside him, with a cocky nose turned up straight out of the descending black mass. But for the square toque she would have had the silhouette of a Manchester cotton-hand: the toque gave it a different line; like the fillet of Diana. It was piquant and agreeable to ride beside a quite silent lady in the darkness of the thick Weald that let next to no moonlight through. The horse’s hoofs went clock, clock: a good horse. The near lamp illuminated the russet figure of a man with a sack on his back, pressed into the