Ford Madox Ford - The Parade's End Tetralogy - Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up & Last Post

Tietjens opened his eyes, the girl was standing over him, having approached from the table. She was holding out a slip of paper on which she had transcribed the message. She appeared all out of drawing and the letters of the message ran together. The message was:

Righto. But arrange for certain Hullo Central travels with you. Sylvia Hopside Germany.’

Tietjens leaned back for a long time looking at the words; they seemed meaningless. The girl placed the paper on his knee, and went back to the table. He imagined the girl wrestling with these incomprehensibilities on the telephone.

‘Of course if I’d had any sense,’ the girl said, ‘I should have known it couldn’t have been mother’s leader note; she never gets one on a Saturday.’

Tietjens heard himself announce clearly, loudly and with between each word a pause:

‘It means I go to my wife on Tuesday and take her maid with me.’

‘Lucky you!’ the girl said, ‘I wish I was you. I’ve never been in the Fatherland of Goethe and Rosa Luxemburg.’ She went off with her great tray load, the table-cloth over her forearm. He was dimly aware that she had before then removed the crumbs with a crumb-brush. It was extraordinary with what swiftness she worked, talking all the time. That was what domestic service had done for her; an ordinary young lady would have taken twice the time, and would certainly have dropped half her words if she had tried to talk. Efficiency! He had only just realized that he was going back to Sylvia, and of course to Hell! Certainly it was Hell. If a malignant and skilful devil . . . though the devil of course is stupid and uses toys like fireworks and sulphur; it is probably only God who can, very properly, devise the long ailings of mental oppressions . . . if God then desired (and one couldn’t object but one hoped He would not!) to devise for him, Christopher Tietjens, a cavernous eternity of weary hopelessness . . . But He had done it; no doubt as retribution. What for? Who knows what sins of his own are heavily punishable in the eyes of God, for God is just? . . . Perhaps God then, after all, visits thus heavily sexual offences.

There came back into his mind, burnt in, the image of their breakfast-room, with all the brass, electrical fixings, poachers, toasters, grillers, kettle-heaters, that he detested for their imbecile inefficiency; with gross piles of hothouse flowers—that he detested for their exotic waxennesses—with white enamelled panels that he disliked and framed, weak prints—quite genuine of course, my dear, guaranteed so by Sotheby—pinkish women in sham Gainsborough hats, selling mackerel or brooms. A wedding present that he despised. And Mrs Satterthwaite, in negligé, but with an immense hat; reading The Times with an eternal rustle of leaves because she never could settle down to any one page; and Sylvia walking up and down because she could not sit still, with a piece of toast in her fingers or her hands behind her back. Very tall; fair; as graceful, as full of blood and as cruel as the usual degenerate Derby winner. Inbred for generations for one purpose: to madden men of one type . . . Pacing backwards and forwards, exclaiming: ‘I’m bored I Bored!’; sometimes even breaking the breakfast plates . . . And talking! For ever talking; usually, cleverly, with imbecility; with maddening inaccuracy; with wicked penetration, and clamouring to be contradicted; a gentleman has to answer his wife’s questions . . . And in his forehead the continual pressure; the determination to sit put; the decor of the room seeming to burn into his mind. It was there, shadowy before him now. And the pressure upon his forehead . . .

Mrs Wannop was talking to him now, he did not know what she said; he never knew afterwards what he had answered.

‘God!’ he said within himself, ‘if it’s sexual sins God punishes, He indeed is just and inscrutable!’ . . . Because he had had physical contact with this woman before he married her! In a railway carriage; coming down from the Dukeries. An extravagantly beautiful girl!

Where was the physical attraction of her gone to now? Irresistible; reclining back as the shires rushed past . . . His mind said that she had lured him on. His intellect put the idea from him. No gentleman thinks such things of his wife.

No gentleman thinks . . . By God; she must have been with child by another man . . . He had been fighting the conviction down all the last four months . . . He knew now that he had been fighting the conviction all the last four months, whilst, anaesthetized, he had bathed in figures and wave-theories . . . Her last words had been: her very last words: late: all in white she had gone up to her dressing-room, and he had never seen her again; her last words had been about the child . . . ‘Supposing,’ she had begun . . . He didn’t remember the rest. But he remembered her eyes. And her gesture as she peeled off her long white gloves . . .

He was looking at Mrs Wannop’s ingle; he thought it a mistake in taste, really, to leave logs in an ingle during the summer. But then what are you to do with an ingle in summer? In Yorkshire cottages they shut the ingles up with painted doors. But that is stuffy, too!

He said to himself:

‘By God! I’ve had a stroke!’ and he got out of his chair to test his legs . . . But he hadn’t had a stroke. It must then, he thought, be that the pain of his last consideration must be too great for his mind to register as certain great physical pains go unperceived. Nerves, like weighing machines, can’t register more than a certain amount, then they go out of action. A tramp who had had his leg cut off by a train had told him that he had tried to get up, feeling nothing at The pain comes back though . . .

He said to Mrs Wannop, who was still talking:

‘I beg your pardon. I really missed what you said.’

Mrs Wannop said:

‘I was saying that that’s the best thing I can do for you.’ He said:

‘I’m really very sorry: it was that that I missed. I’m a little in trouble, you know.’

She said:

‘I know: I know. The mind wanders; but I wish you’d listen. I’ve got to go to work, so have you, I said: after tea you and Valentine will walk into Rye to fetch your luggage.’

Straining his intelligence, for, in his mind, he felt a sudden strong pleasure; sunlight on pyramidal red roof in the distance: themselves descending in a long diagonal, a green hill: God, yes, he wanted open air. Tietjens said:

‘I see. You take us both under your protection. You’ll bluff it out.’

Mrs Wannop said rather coolly:

‘I don’t know about you both. It’s you I’m taking under my protection (it’s your phrase!). As for Valentine: she’s made her bed; she must lie on it. I’ve told you all that already. I can’t go over it again.’

She paused, then made another effort:

‘It’s disagreeable,’ she said, ‘to be cut off the Mountby visiting list. They give amusing parties. But I’m too old to care and they’ll miss my conversation more than I do theirs. Of course, I back my daughter against the cats and monkeys. Of course, I back Valentine through thick and thin. I’d back her if she lived with a married man or had illegitimate children. But I don’t approve, I don’t approve of the suffragettes: I despise their aims: I detest their methods. I don’t think young girls ought to talk to strange men. Valentine spoke to you, and look at the worry it has caused you. I disapprove. I’m a woman: but I’ve made my own way: other women could do it if they liked or had the energy. I disapprove! But don’t believe that I will ever go back on any suffragette, individual, in gangs; my Valentine or any other. Don’t believe that I will ever say a word against them that’s to be repeated— you won’t repeat them. Or that I will ever write a word against them. No, I’m a woman and I stand by my sex!’