No More Parades, Ford Madox Ford [best ereader for pdf TXT] 📗
- Author: Ford Madox Ford
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Sylvia—they were sitting on the sofa the duchess had left—patted him on the forearm and said:
“But general … godfather …”
“It explains everything,” he said with a mortification that was painful. His white moustache drooped and trembled. “And what makes it all the worse—he’s never had the courage to tell me his opinions.” He stopped, snorted and exclaimed: “By God, I will have him drummed out of the service … By God, I will. I can do that much …”
His grief so shut him in on himself that she could say nothing to him …
“You tell me he seduced the little Wannop girl … The last person in the world he should have seduced … Ain’t there millions of other women? … He got you sold up, didn’t he? … Along with keeping a girl in a tobacco-shop … By jove, I almost lent him … offered to lend him money on that occasion … You can forgive a young man for going wrong with women … We all do … We’ve all set up girls in tobacco-shops in our time … But, damn it all, if the fellow’s a Socialist it puts a different complexion … I could forgive him even for the little Wannop girl, if he wasn’t … But … Good God, isn’t it just the thing that a dirty-minded Socialist would do? … To seduce the daughter of his father’s oldest friend, next to me … Or perhaps Wannop was an older friend than me …”
He had calmed himself a little—and he was not such a fool. He looked at her now with a certain keenness in his blue eyes that showed no sign of age. He said:
“See here, Sylvia … You aren’t on terms with Christopher for all the good game you put up here this afternoon … I shall have to go into this. It’s a serious charge to bring against one of His Majesty’s officers … Women do say things against their husbands when they are not on good terms with them …” He went on to say that he did not say she wasn’t justified. If Christopher had seduced the little Wannop girl it was enough to make her wish to harm him. Had always found her the soul of honour, straight as a die, straight as she rode to hounds. And if she wished to nag against her husband, even if in little things it wasn’t quite the truth, she was perhaps within her rights as a woman. She had said, for instance, that Tietjens had taken two pairs of her best sheets. Well, his own sister, her friend, raised Cain if he took anything out of the house they lived in. She had made an atrocious row because he had taken his own shaving-glass out of his own bedroom at Mountsby. Women liked to have sets of things. Perhaps she, Sylvia, had sets of pairs of sheets. His sister had linen sheets with the date of the battle of Waterloo on them … Naturally you would not want a set spoiled … But this was another matter. He ended up very seriously:
“I have not got time to go into this now … I ought not to be another minute away from my office. These are very serious days …” He broke off to utter against the Prime Minister and the Cabinet at home a series of violent imprecations. He went on:
“But this will have to be gone into … It’s heartbreaking that my time should be taken up by matters like this in my own family … But these fellows aim at sapping the heart of the army … They say they distribute thousands of pamphlets recommending the rank and file to shoot their officers and go over to the Germans … Do you seriously mean that Christopher belongs to an organization? What is it you are going on? What evidence have you? …”
She said:
“Only that he is heir to one of the biggest fortunes in England, for a commoner, and he refuses to touch a penny … His brother Mark tells me Christopher could have … Oh, a fabulous sum a year … But he has made over Groby to me …”
The general nodded his head as if he were ticking off ideas.
“Of course, refusing property is a sign of being one of these fellows. By jove, I must go … But as for his not going to live at Groby: if he is setting up house with Miss Wannop … Well, he could not flaunt her in the face of the country … And, of course, those sheets! … As you put it it looked as if he’d beggared himself with his dissipations … But of course, if he is refusing money from Mark, it’s another matter … Mark would make up a couple of hundred dozen pairs of sheets without turning a hair … Of course there are the extraordinary things Christopher says … I’ve often heard you complain of the immoral way he looks at the serious affairs of life … You said he once talked of lethal-chambering unfit children.”
He exclaimed:
“I must go. There’s Thurston looking at me … But what then is it that Christopher has said? … Hang it all: what is at the bottom of that fellow’s mind? …”
“He desires,” Sylvia said, and she had no idea when she said it, “to model himself upon our Lord …”
The general leant back in the sofa. He said almost indulgently:
“Who’s that … our Lord?”
Sylvia said:
“Upon our Lord Jesus Christ …”
He sprang to his feet as if she had stabbed him with a hatpin.
“Our …” he exclaimed. “Good God! … I always knew he had a screw loose … But …” He said briskly: “Give all his goods to the poor! … But He wasn’t a … Not a Socialist! What was it He said: Render unto Caesar … It wouldn’t be necessary to drum Him out of the Army …” He said: “Good Lord! … Good Lord! … Of course his poor dear mother was a little … But, hang it! … The Wannop girl! …” Extreme discomfort overcame him … Tietjens was halfway across from the inner room, coming towards them.
He
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