No More Parades, Ford Madox Ford [best ereader for pdf TXT] 📗
- Author: Ford Madox Ford
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Levin said:
“You remembered it just as you saw the handle of your door moving …”
Tietjens said from a sort of a mist:
“Yes. You know how beastly it is when you suddenly remember you have forgotten something in orders. As if the pit of your stomach had …”
Levin said:
“All I ever thought about if I’d forgotten anything was what would be a good excuse to put up to the adjutant … When I was a regimental officer …”
Suddenly Tietjens said insistently:
“How did you know that? … About the door handle? Sylvia couldn’t have seen it …” He added: “And she could not have known what I was thinking … She had her back to the door … And to me … Looking at me in the glass … She was not even aware of what had happened … So she could not have seen the handle move!”
Levin hesitated:
“I …” he said. “Perhaps I ought not to have said that … You’ve told us … That is to say, you’ve told …” He was pale in the sunlight. He said: “Old man … Perhaps you don’t know … Didn’t you perhaps ever, in your childhood?”
Tietjens said:
“Well … What is it?”
“That you talk … when you’re sleeping!” Levin said.
Astonishingly, Tietjens said:
“What of that? … It’s nothing to write home about! With the overwork I’ve had and the sleeplessness …”
Levin said, with a pathetic appeal to Tietjens’ omniscience:
“But doesn’t it mean … We used to say when we were boys … that if you talk in your sleep … you’re … in fact a bit dotty?”
Tietjens said without passion:
“Not necessarily. It means that one has been under mental pressure, but all mental pressure does not drive you over the edge. Not by any means … Besides, what does it matter?”
Levin said:
“You mean you don’t care … Good God!” He remained looking at the view, drooping, in intense dejection. He said: “This beastly war! This beastly war! … Look at all that view …”
Tietjens said:
“It’s an encouraging spectacle, really. The beastliness of human nature is always pretty normal. We lie and betray and are wanting in imagination and deceive ourselves, always, at about the same rate. In peace and in war! But, somewhere in that view there are enormous bodies of men … If you got a still more extended range of view over this whole front you’d have still more enormous bodies of men … Seven to ten million … All moving towards places towards which they desperately don’t want to go. Desperately! Every one of them is desperately afraid. But they go on. An immense blind will forces them in the effort to consummate the one decent action that humanity has to its credit in the whole of recorded history. The one we are engaged in. That effort is the one certain creditable fact in all their lives … But the other lives of all those men are dirty, potty and discreditable little affairs … Like yours … Like mine …”
Levin exclaimed:
“Just heavens! What a pessimist you are!”
Tietjens said: “Can’t you see that that is optimism?”
“But,” Levin said, “we’re being beaten out of the field … You don’t know how desperate things are.”
Tietjens said:
“Oh, I know pretty well. As soon as this weather really breaks we’re probably done.”
“We can’t,” Levin said, “possibly hold them. Not possibly.”
“But success or failure,” Tietjens said, “have nothing to do with the credit of a story. And a consideration of the virtues of humanity does not omit the other side. If we lose they win. If success is necessary to your idea of virtue—virtus—they then provide the success instead of ourselves. But the thing is to be able to stick to the integrity of your character, whatever earthquake sets the house tumbling over your head … That, thank God, we’re doing …”
Levin said:
“I don’t know … If you knew what is going on at home …”
Tietjens said:
“Oh, I know … I know that ground as I know the palm of my hand. I could invent that life if I knew nothing at all about the facts.”
Levin said:
“I believe you could.” He added: “Of course you could … And yet the only use we can make of you is to martyrize you because two drunken brutes break into your wife’s bedroom …”
Tietjens said:
“You betray your non-Anglo-Saxon origin by being so vocal … And by your illuminative exaggerations!”
Levin suddenly exclaimed:
“What the devil were we talking about?”
Tietjens said grimly:
“I am here at the disposal of the competent military authority—You!—that is inquiring into my antecedents. I am ready to go on belching platitudes till you stop me.” Levin answered:
“For goodness’ sake help me. This is horribly painful. He—the general—has given me the job of finding out what happened last night. He won’t face it himself. He’s attached to you both.”
Tietjens said:
“It’s asking too much to ask me to help you … What did I say in my sleep? What has Mrs. Tietjens told the general?”
“The general,” Levin said, “has not seen Mrs. Tietjens. He could not trust himself. He knew she would twist him round her little finger.”
Tietjens said:
“He’s beginning to learn. He was sixty last July, but he’s beginning.”
“So that,” Levin said, “what we do know we learnt in the way I have told you. And from O’Hara of course. The general would not let Pe … , the other fellow, speak a word, while he was shaving. He just said: ‘I won’t hear you. I won’t hear you. You can take your choice of going up the line as soon as there are trains running or being broke on my personal application to the King in Council.’ ”
“I didn’t know,” Tietjens said, “that he could talk as straight as that.”
“He’s dreadfully hard hit,” Levin answered; “if you and Mrs. Tietjens separate—and still more if there’s anything real against either of you—it’s going to shatter all his illusions. And …” He paused: “Do you know Major Thurston? A gunner? Attached to our antiaircraft crowd? … The general is very thick with him …”
Tietjens said:
“He’s one of the Thurston’s of Lobden Moorside … I don’t know him personally …”
Levin said:
“He’s upset the general a good deal … With something he told him …”
Tietjens said:
“Good God!” And then: “He can’t have
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