A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [56]
It occurred to him suddenly that he had committed a military misdemeanour in leaving Lance-Corporal Duckett with Aranjuez. An officer should not walk along a stretch of lonely trench without escort. Some Hun offering might hit him and there would be loss of property to His Majesty. No one to fetch a doctor or stretcher-bearers while you bled to death. That was the Army...
Well, he had left Duckett with Aranjuez to comfort him. That minute subaltern was suffering. God knew what little agonies ran about in his little mind, like mice! He was as brave as a lion when strafes were on: when they weren't, his little, blackamoor, nobbly face quivered as the thoughts visited him...
He had really left Valentine Wannop with Aranjuez! That, he realized, was what he had done. The boy Duckett was Valentine Wannop. Clean, blonde, small: with the ordinary face, the courageous eyes, the obstinately, slightly peaked nose...It was just as if, Valentine Wannop being in his possession, they had been walking along a road and seen someone in distress. And he, Tietjens, had said:
'I've got to get along. You stop and see what you can do!'
And, amazingly, he was walking along a country road beside Valentine Wannop, silent, with the quiet intimacy that comes with possession. She belonged to him...Not a mountain road: not Yorkshire. Not a valley road: not Bemerton. A country parsonage was not for him. So he wouldn't take orders!
A down-land road, with some old thorn trees. They only grew really in Kent. And the sky coming down on all sides. The flat top of a down!
Amazing! He had not thought of that girl for over a fortnight now, except in moments of great strafes, when he had hoped she would not be too worried if she knew where he was. Because he had the sense that, all the time, she knew where he was.
He had thought of her less and less. At longer intervals...As with his nightmare of the mining Germans who desired that a candle should be brought to the Captain. At first, every night, three or four times every night, it had visited him...Now it came only once every night...
The physical semblance of that boy had brought the girl back to his mind. That was accidental, so it was not part of any psychological rhythm. It did not show him, that is to say, whether, in the natural course of events and without accidents, she was ceasing to obsess him.
She was certainly now obsessing him! Beyond bearing or belief. His whole being was overwhelmed by her...by her mentality really. For of course the physical resemblance of the Lance-Corporal was mere subterfuge. Lance-Corporals do not resemble young ladies...And, as a matter of fact, he did not remember exactly what Valentine Wannop looked like. Not vividly. He had not that sort of mind. It was words that his mind found that let him know that she was fair, snub-nosed, rather broad-faced and square on her feet. As if he had made a note of it and referred to it when he wanted to think of her. His mind didn't make any mental picture: it brought up a sort of blur of sunlight.
It was the mentality that obsessed him: the exact mind, the impatience of solecisms and facile generalizations!...A queer catalogue of the charms of one's lady love!...But he wanted to hear her say: 'Oh, chuck it, Edith Ethel!' when Edith Ethel Duchemin, now of course Lady Mac-master, quoted some of the opinions expressed in Mac-master's critical monograph about the late Mr Rossetti...How very late now!
It would rest him to hear that. She was, in effect, the only person in the world that he wanted to hear speak. Certainly the only person in the world that he wanted to talk to. The only clear intelligence!...The repose that his mind needed from the crackling