A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [73]
'I shall find it difficult enough to get a job after the War!' Not only to seduce the young woman, but to invite her to live a remarkably precarious life with him. It isn't done! The Lance-Corporal said:
'Oh, sir; no, sir!...You're Mr Tietjens, of Groby!'
He had often been to Groby of a Sunday afternoon. His mother was a Middlesbrough woman. Southbank, rather. He had been to the Grammar School and was going to Durham University when...Supplies stopped. On the eight nine fourteen...
They oughtn't to put North Riding, Yorkshire, boys in Welsh-traditioned units. It was wrong. But for that he would not have run against this boy of disagreeable reminiscences.
'They say,' the boy said, 'that the well at Groby is three hundred and twenty feet deep, and the cedar at the corner of the house a hundred and sixty. The depth of the well twice the height of the tree!' He had often dropped stones down the well and listened: they made an astonishingly loud noise. Long: like echoes gone mad! His mother knew the cook at Groby. Mrs Harmsworth. He had often seen...he rubbed his ankles more furiously, in a paroxysm...Mr Tietjens, the father, and him, and Mr Mark and Mr John and Miss Eleanor. He once handed Miss Eleanor her riding crop when she dropped it...
Tietjens was never going to live at Groby. No more feudal atmosphere! He was going to live, he figured, in a four-room attic-flat, on the top of one of the Inns of Court. With Valentine Wannop. Because of Valentine Wannop!
He said to the boy:
'Those German shells seem to be coming back. Go and request Captain Gibbs as soon as they get near to take his fatigues under cover until they have passed.'
He wanted to be alone with Heaven...He drank his last cup of warm, sweetened coffee, laced with rum...He drew a deep breath. Fancy drawing a deep breath of satisfaction after a deep draught of warm coffee, sweetened with condensed milk and laced with rum!...Reprehensible! Gastronomically reprehensible!...What would they say at the Club?...Well, he was never going to be at the Club! The Club claret was to be regretted! Admirable claret! And the cold sideboard!
But, for the matter of that, fancy drawing deep breaths of satisfaction over the mere fact of lying--in command of a battalion!--on a slope, in the clear air, with twenty thousand--two myriad!--corks making noises overhead and the German guns directing their projectiles so that they were slowly approaching! Fancy!
They were, presumably, trying out their new Austrian gun. Methodically, with an infinite thoroughness. If, that is to say, there really was a new Austrian gun. Perhaps there wasn't. Division had been in a great state of excitement over such a weapon. It stood in Orders that every one was to try to obtain every kind of information about it, and it was said to throw a projectile of a remarkable, High Explosive efficiency. So Gibbs had jumped to the conclusion that the thing that had knocked to pieces his projected machine-gun emplacement, had been the new gun. In that case they were trying it out very thoroughly.
The actual report of the gun or guns--they fired every three minutes, so that might mean that there was only one and that it took about three minutes to re-load--was very loud and rather high in tone. He had not yet heard the actual noise made by the projectile, but the reports from a distance had been singularly dulled. When, presumably, the projectile had effected its landing, it bored extraordinarily into the ground and then exploded with a time-fuse. Very likely it would not be very dangerous to life, but, if they had enough of the guns and the H.E. to plaster the things all along the Line, and if the projectiles worked as efficiently as they had done on poor Gibbs' trench,