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

‘Because,’ she said, ‘three weeks ago I smashed up the side-car on the milestone at Hog’s Corner: doing forty.’

‘It must have been a pretty tidy smash!’ Tietjens said. ‘Your mother wasn’t aboard?’

‘No,’ the girl said, ‘suffragette literature. The side-car was full. It was a pretty tidy smash. Hadn’t you observed I still limp a little?’

A few minutes later she said:

‘I haven’t the least notion where we really are. I clean forgot to notice the road. And I don’t care . . . Here’s a signpost though; pull in to it . . .

The lamps would not, however, shine on the arms of the post; they were burning dim and showing low. A good deal of fog was in the air. Tietjens gave the reins to the girl and got down. He took out the near light and, going back a yard or two to the signpost, examined its bewildering ghostlinesses . . .

The girl gave a little squeak that went to his backbone; the hoofs clattered unusually; the cart went on. Tietjens went after it; it was astonishing; it had completely disappeared. Then he ran into it: ghostly, reddish and befogged. It must have got much thicker suddenly. The fog swirled all round the near lamp as he replaced it in its socket.

Did you do that on purpose?’ he asked the girl. ‘Or can’t you hold a horse?’

‘I can’t drive a horse,’ the girl said; ‘I’m afraid of them. I can’t drive a motor-bike either. I made that up because I knew you’d say you’d rather have taken Gertie over in the side-car than driven with me.’

‘Then do you mind,’ Tietjens said, ‘telling me if you know this road at all?’

‘Not a bit!’ she answered cheerfully. ‘I never drove over it in my life. I looked it up on the map before we started because I’m sick to death of the road we went by. There’s a one-horse bus from Rye to Tenterden, and I’ve walked from Tenterden to my uncle’s over and over again . . . ’

‘We shall probably be out all night then,’ Tietjens said. ‘Do you mind? The horse may be tired . . .

She said:

‘Oh, the poor horse! . . . I meant us to be out all night . . . But the poor horse . . . What a brute I was not to think of it.’

‘We’re thirteen miles from a place called Brede; eleven and a quarter from a place whose name I couldn’t read; six and three-quarters from somewhere called something like Uddlemere Tietjens said. ‘This is the road to Uddlemere.’

‘Oh, that was Grandfather’s Wantways all right,’ she declared. ‘I know it well. It’s called “Grandfather’s” because an old gentleman used to sit there called Gran’fer Finn. Every Tenterden market day he used to sell fleed cakes from a basket to the carts that went by. Tenterden market was abolished in 1845—the effect of the repeal of the Corn Laws, you know. As a Tory you ought to be interested in that.’

Tietjens said patiently: He could sympathize with her mood; she had now a heavy weight off her chest; and, if long acquaintance with his wife had not made him able to put up with feminine vagaries, nothing ever would.

‘Would you mind,’ he said then, ‘telling me . . .

‘If,’ she interrupted, ‘that was really Gran’fer’s Want-ways: midland English. “Vent” equals four crossroads: high French carrefour . . . Or, perhaps, that isn’t the right word. But it’s the way your mind works . . . ’

‘You have, of course, often walked from your uncle’s to Gran’fer’s Wantways,’ Tietjens said, ‘with your cousins, taking brandy to the invalid in the old toll-gate house. That’s how you know the story of Grandfer. You said you had never driven it; but you have walked it. That’s the way your mind works, isn’t it?’

She said: ’ Oh !’

‘Then,’ Tietjens went on, ‘would you mind telling me—for the sake of the poor horse—whether Uddlemere is or isn’t on our road home. I take it you don’t know just this stretch of road, but you know whether it is the right road.’

‘The touch of pathos,’ the girl said, ‘is a wrong note. It’s you who’re in mental trouble about the road. The horse isn’t . . .

Tietjens let the cart go on another fifty yards; then he said:

‘It is the right road. The Uddlemere turning was the right one. You wouldn’t let the horse go another five steps if it wasn’t. You’re as soppy about horses as as I am.’

‘There’s at least that bond of sympathy between us,’ she said drily. ‘Gran’fer’s Wantways is six and three-quarter miles from Udimore; Udimore is exactly five from us; total, eleven and three-quarters; twelve and a quarter if you add half a mile for Udimore itself. The name is Udimore, not Uddlemere. Local place-name enthusiasts derive this from “O’er the mere.” Absurd! Legend as follows: Church builders desiring to put church with relic of St Rumwold in wrong place, voice wailed: “O’er the mere.” Obviously absurd! . . . Putrid! ” O’er the “ by Grimm’s law impossible as “ Udi “; ” mere “ not a middle low German word at all . . . ’

‘Why,’ Tietjens said, ‘are you giving me all this information?’

‘Because,’ the girl said, ‘it’s the way your mind works . . . It picks up useless facts as silver after you’ve polished it picks up sulphur vapour; and tarnishes! It arranges the useless facts in obsolescent patterns and makes Toryism out of them . . . I’ve never met a Cambridge Tory man before. I thought they were all in museums, and you work them up again out of bones. That’s what father used to say; he was an Oxford Disraelian Conservative Imperialist . . . ’

‘I know, of course,’ Tietjens said.

‘Of course you know,’ the girl said. ‘You know everything . . . And you’ve worked everything into absurd principles. You think father was unsound because he tried to apply tendencies to life. You want to be a Nenglish country gentleman and spin principles out of the newspapers and the gossip of horse-fairs. And let the country go to hell, you’ll never stir a finger except to say I told you so.’

She touched him suddenly on the arm:

‘ Don’t mind me!’ she said. ‘It’s reaction. I’m so happy. I’m so happy.’

He said:

‘That’s all right! That’s all right!’ But for a minute or two it wasn’t really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities—even merely with the velvet. He added: ‘Your mother works you very hard.’

She exclaimed:

‘How you understand . You’re amazing: for a man who tries to be a sea-anemone!’ She said: ‘Yes, this is the first holiday I’ve had for four solid months; six hours a day typing; four hours a day work for the movement; three, housework and gardening; three, mother reading out her day’s work for slips of the pen . . . And on the top of it the raid and the anxiety . . . Dreadful anxiety, you know. Suppose mother had gone to prison . . . Oh, I’d have gone mad . . . Weekdays and Sundays . . . ’ She stopped: ‘I’m apologizing, really,’ she went on. ‘Of course I ought not to have talked to you like that. You a great Panjandrum; saving the country with your statistics and It did make you a rather awful figure, you know . . . and the relief to find you’re . . . oh, a man like oneself with feet of clay . . . I’d dreaded this drive . . . I’d have dreaded it dreadfully if I hadn’t been in such a dread about Gertie and the police. And if I hadn’t let off steam I should have had to jump out and run beside the cart . . . I could still . . . ’