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

delicately minded⁠—wouldn’t have the face to put down, much less read out, the least venial of Morgan’s offences.⁠ ⁠…

And, sceptical as she was by nature, Sylvia Tietjens didn’t really even believe in the capacity for immoralities of her friends. She didn’t believe that any one of them was seriously what the French would call the maîtresse en tître of any particular man. Passion wasn’t, at least, their strong suit: they left that to more⁠—or to less⁠—august circles. The Duke of A⁠ ⁠… and all the little A’s⁠ ⁠… might be the children of the morose and passion-stricken Duke of B⁠ ⁠… instead of the still more morose but less passionate late Duke of A⁠ ⁠… Mr. C, the Tory statesman and late Foreign Minister, might equally be the father of all the children of the Tory Lord Chancellor E⁠ ⁠… The Whig front benches, the gloomy and disagreeable Russells and Cavendishes trading off these⁠—again French⁠—collages sérieux against the matrimonial divagations of their own Lord F and Mr. G.⁠ ⁠… But those amorous of heavily titled and born front benchers were rather of august politics. The hot-pressed weekly journals never got hold of them: the parties to them didn’t, for one thing, photograph well, being old, uglyish and terribly, badly dressed. They were matter rather for the memoirs of the indiscreet, already written, but not to see the light for fifty years.⁠ ⁠…

The affairs of her own set, female front benchers of one side or other as they were, were more tenuous. If they ever came to heads, their affairs, they had rather the nature of promiscuity and took place at the country houses where bells rang at five in the morning. Sylvia had heard of such country houses, but she didn’t know of any. She imagined that they might be the baronial halls of such barons of the crown as had patronymics ending in “schen”⁠ ⁠… “stein”⁠ ⁠… and “baum.” There were getting to be a good many of these, but Sylvia did not visit them. She had in her that much of the papist.

Certain of her more brilliant girl friends certainly made very sudden marriages; but the averages of those were not markedly higher than in the case of the daughters of doctors, solicitors, the clergy, the lord mayors and common councilmen. They were the product usually of the more informal type of dance, of inexperience and champagne⁠—of champagne of unaccustomed strength or of champagne taken in unusual circumstances⁠—fasting as often as not. They were, these hasty marriages, hardly ever the result of either passion or temperamental lewdness.

In her own case⁠—years ago now⁠—she had certainly been taken advantage of, after champagne, by a married man called Drake. A bit of a brute she acknowledged him now to be. But after the event passion had developed: intense on her side and quite intense enough on his. When, in a scare that had been as much her mother’s as her own, she had led Tietjens on and married him in Paris to be out of the way⁠—though it was fortunate that the English Catholic church of the Avenue Hoche had been the scene of her mother’s marriage also, thus establishing a precedent and an ostensible reason!⁠—there had been dreadful scenes right up to the very night of the marriage. She had hardly to close her eyes in order to see the Paris hotel bedroom, the distorted face of Drake, who was mad with grief and jealousy, against a background of white things, flowers and the like, sent in overnight for the wedding. She knew that she had been very near death. She had wanted death.

And even now she had only to see the name of Drake in the paper⁠—her mother’s influence with the pompous front bencher of the Upper House, her cousin, had put Drake in the way of colonial promotions that were recorded in gazettes⁠—nay, she had only involuntarily to think of that night and she would stop dead, speaking or walking, drive her nails into her palms and groan slightly.⁠ ⁠… She had to invent a chronic stitch in her heart to account for this groan which ended in a mumble and seemed to herself to degrade her.⁠ ⁠…

The miserable memory would come, ghostlike, at any time, anywhere. She would see Drake’s face, dark against the white things; she would feel the thin nightgown ripping off her shoulder; but most of all she would seem, in darkness that excluded the light of any room in which she might be, to be transfused by the mental agony that there she had felt: the longing for the brute who had mangled her: the dreadful pain of the mind. The odd thing was that the sight of Drake himself, whom she had seen several times since the outbreak of the war, left her completely without emotion. She had no aversion, but no longing for him.⁠ ⁠… She had, nevertheless, longing, but she knew it was longing merely to experience again the dreadful feeling. And not with Drake.⁠ ⁠…

Her “turnings down” then of the really nice men, if it were a sport, was a sport not without a spice of danger. She imagined that, after a success, she must feel much of the exhilaration that men told her they felt after bringing off a clean right and left, and no doubt she felt some of the emotions that the same young men felt when they were out shooting with beginners. Her personal chastity she now cherished much as she cherished her personal cleanliness and persevered in her Swedish exercises after her baths before an open window, her rides afterwards, and her long nights of dancing which she would pursue in any room that was decently ventilated. Indeed, the two sides of life were, in her mind, intimately connected: she kept herself attractive by her skillfully selected exercises and cleanlinesses: and the same fatigues, healthful as they were, kept her in the mood for chastity of life. She had done so ever since her return to her husband; and this not because of any attachment to