A Man Could Stand Up—, Ford Madox Ford [ebook reader macos .txt] 📗

was not skilful at that: she was thinking about the conversation that dreadfully she felt to be continuing. She must stop the knocking. The knocker had stayed for just long enough for the abstention of an impatient man knocking on a great door. Her mother was too cunning for them. With the cunning that makes the mother wild-duck tumble apparently broken-winged just under your feet to decoy you away from her little things. Storge, Gilbert White calls it! For, of course, she could never have his lips upon hers when she thought of that crafty, beloved, grey Eminence sitting at home and shuddering.⁠ ⁠… But she would!

She found the gadget that opened the door⁠—the third she had tried amongst incomprehensible, painted century-old fixings. The door came open exactly upon a frustrated sound. A man was being propelled towards her by the knocker to which he held.⁠ ⁠… She had saved his thoughts. Without the interruption of the knocker he might be able to see that mother’s device was just cunning. They were cunning, the great Victorians.⁠ ⁠… Oh, poor mother!

A horrible man in uniform looked at her hatefully, with piercing, hollow, black eyes in a fallen away face. He said:

“I must see that fellow Tietjens; you’re not Tietjens!” As if she were defrauding him. “It’s urgent,” he said. “About a sonnet. I was dismissed the Army yesterday. His doing. And Campion’s. His wife’s lover!”

She said fiercely:

“He’s engaged. You can’t see him. If you want to see him you must wait!” She felt horror that Tietjens should ever have had to do with such a brute beast. He was unshaven; black. And filled with hatred. He raised his voice to say:

“I’m Mckechnie. Captain Mckechnie of the Ninth. Vice-Chancellor’s Latin Prizeman! One of the Old Pals!” He added: “Tietjens forced himself in on the Old Pals!”

She felt the contempt of the scholar’s daughter for the Prizeman; she felt that Apollo with Admetus was as nothing for sheer disgust compared with Tietjens buried in a band of such beings.

She said:

“It is not necessary to shout. You can come in and wait.”

At all costs Tietjens must finish his conversation with her mother undisturbed. She led this fellow round the corner of the hall. A sort of wireless emanation seemed to connect her with the upper conversation. She was aware of it going on, through the wall above, diagonally; then through the ceiling in perpendicular waves. It seemed to work inside her head, her end of it, like waves, churning her mind.

She opened the shutters of the empty room round the corner, on the right. She did not wish to be alone in the dark with this hating man. She did not dare to go up and warn Tietjens. At all costs he must not be disturbed. It was not fair to call what her mother was doing, cunning. It was instinct, set in her breast by the Almighty, as the saying is.⁠ ⁠… Still, it was early Victorian instinct! Tremendously cunning in itself.

The hateful man was grumbling:

“He’s been sold up, I see. That’s what comes of selling your wife to Generals. To get promotion. They’re a cunning lot. But he overreached himself. Campion went back on him. But Campion, too, overreached himself.⁠ ⁠…”

She was looking out of the window, across the green square. Light was an agreeable thing. You could breathe more deeply when it was light.⁠ ⁠… Early Victorian instinct!⁠ ⁠… The Mid-Victorians had had to loosen the bonds. Her mother, to be in the van of Mid-Victorian thought, had had to allow virtue to “irregular unions.” As long as they were high-minded. But the high-minded do not consummate irregular unions. So all her books had showed you high-minded creatures contracting irregular unions of the mind or of sympathy; but never carrying them to the necessary conclusion. They would have been ethically at liberty to but they didn’t. They ran with the ethical hare, but hunted with the ecclesiastical hounds.⁠ ⁠… Still, of course, she could not go back on her premises just because it was her own daughter!

She said:

“I beg your pardon!” to that fellow. He had been saying:

“They’re too damn cunning. They overreach themselves!” Her mind spun. She did not know what he had been talking about. Her mind retained his words, but she did not understand what they meant. She had been sunk in the contemplation of Early Victorian Thought. She remembered the long⁠—call it “liaison”⁠—of Edith Ethel Duchemin and little Vincent Macmaster. Edith Ethel, swathed in opaque crêpe, creeping widow-like along the very palings she could see across the square, to her high-minded adulteries, amidst the whispered applause of Mid-Victorian England. So circumspect and right!⁠ ⁠… She had her thoughts to keep, all right. Well under control!⁠ ⁠… Well, she had been patient.

The man said agonisedly:

“My filthy, bloody, swinish uncle, Vincent Macmaster. Sir Vincent Macmaster! And this fellow Tietjens. All in a league against me.⁠ ⁠… Campion too.⁠ ⁠… But he overreached himself. A man got into Tietjen’s wife’s bedroom.⁠ ⁠… At the Base. And Campion sent him to the front. To get him killed. Her other lover, you see?”

She listened. She listened with all her attention straining. She wanted to be able to⁠ ⁠… She did not know what she wanted to be able to do! The man said:

“Major-General Lord Edward Campion, V.C., K.C.M.G., tantivy tum tum, etcetera. Too cunning. Too b⁠⸺⁠y cunning by half. Sent Tietjens to the front too to get him killed. Me too. We all three went up to Division in a boxcar⁠—Tietjens, his wife’s lover, and me. Tietjens confessed that bleedin’ swab. Like a beastly monk. Told him that when you die⁠—in articulo mortis, but you won’t understand what that means!⁠—your faculties are so numbed that you feel neither pain nor fear. He said death was no more than an anaesthetic. And that trembling, whining pup drank it in.⁠ ⁠… I can see them now. In a boxcar. In a cutting.”

She said:

“You’ve had shell-shock? You’ve got shell-shock now!”

He said, like a badger snapping:

“I haven’t. I’ve got a bad wife. Like Tietjens. At