A Man Could Stand Up - Ford Madox Ford [86]
He said:
'I suppose you would want to go out. If you don't we will have a fire. You can't stop here without a fire.' At the same moment her mother said:
'If that is Christopher I will speak to him.'
She said away from the mouthpiece:
'Yes, let's go out. Oh, oh, oh. Let's go out...Armistice...My mother wants to speak to you.' She felt herself to be suddenly a little Cockney shop-girl. A midinette in an imitation Girl Guide's uniform. 'Afride of the gentleman, my dear.' Surely one could protect oneself against a great carp! She could throw him over her shoulder. She had enough Ju Jitsu for that. Of course a little person trained to Ju Jitsu can't overcome an untrained giant if he expects it. But if he doesn't expect it she can.
His right hand closed over her left wrist. He had swum towards her and had taken the telephone in his left. One of the window panes was so old it was bulging and purplish. There was another. There were several. But the first one was the purplishest. He said:
'Christopher Tietjens speaking!' He could not think of anything more recherché to say than that--the great inarticulate fellow! His hand was cool on her wrist. She was calm but streaming with bliss. There was no other word for it. As if you had come out of a bath of warm nectar and bliss streamed off you. His touch had calmed her and covered her with bliss. <
He let her wrist go very slowly. To show that the grasp was meant for a caress! It was their first caress!
Before she had surrendered the telephone she had said to her mother:
'He doesn't know...Oh, realize that he doesn't know!' She went to the other end of the room and stood watching him.
He heard the telephone from its black depths say:
'How are you, my dear boy? My dear, dear boy; you're safe for good.' It gave him a disagreeable feeling. This was the mother of the young girl he intended to seduce. He intended to. He said:
'I'm pretty well. Weakish. I've just come out of hospital. Four days ago.' He was never going back to that bloody show. He had his application for demobilization in his pocket. The voice said:
'Valentine thinks you are very ill. Very ill, indeed. She came to you because she thinks that.' She hadn't come, then, because...But, of course, she would not have. But she might have wanted them to spend Armistice Day together! She might have! A sense of disappointment went over him. Discouragement. He was very raw. That old devil, Campion! Still, one ought not to be as raw as that. He was saying, deferentially:
'Oh, it was mental rather than physical. Though I had pneumonia all right.' He went on saying that General Campion had put him in command over the escorts of German prisoners all through the Lines of several Armies. That really nearly had driven him mad. He couldn't bear being a beastly gaoler.
Still--Still!--he saw those grey spectral shapes that had surrounded and interpenetrated all his later days. The image came over him with the mood of repulsion at odd moments--at the very oddest; without suggestion there floated before his eyes the image, the landscape of greyish forms. In thousands, seated on upturned buckets, with tins of fat from which they ate at their sides on the ground, holding up newspapers that were not really newspapers; on grey days. They were all round him. And he was their gaoler. He said: 'A filthy job!'
Mrs Wannop's voice said:
'Still, it's kept you alive for us!'
He said:
'I sometimes wish it hadn't!' He was astonished that he had said it; he was astonished at the bitterness of his voice. He added: 'I don't mean that in cold blood of course,' and he was again astonished at the deference in his voice. He was leaning down, positively, as if over a very distinguished,