No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [115]
Tietjens said:
'I don't remember, sir.'
The general said:
'What was the secret grief your mother had? In 1912? She died of it. She wrote to me just before her death and said she had great troubles. And begged me to look after you, very specially! Why did she do that?' He paused and meditated. He asked: 'How do you define Anglican sainthood? The other fellows have canonizations, all shipshape like Sandhurst examinations. But us Anglicans...I've heard fifty persons say your mother was a saint. She was. But why?'
Tietjens said:
'It's the quality of harmony, sir. The quality of being in harmony with your own soul. God having given you your own soul you are then in harmony with heaven.'
The general said:
'Ah, that's beyond me...I suppose you will refuse any money I leave you in my will?'
Tietjens said:
'Why, no, sir.'
The general said:
'But you refused your father's money. Because he believed things against you. What's the difference?'
Tietjens said:
'One's friends ought to believe that one is a gentleman. Automatically. That is what makes one and them in harmony. Probably your friends are your friends because they look at situations automatically as you look at them...Mr Ruggles knew that I was hard up. He envisaged the situation. If he were hard up, what would he do? Make a living out of the immoral earnings of women...That translated into the Government circles in which he lives means selling your wife or mistress. Naturally he believed that I was the sort of fellow to sell my wife. So that's what he told my father. The point is, my father should not have believed him.'
'But I...' the general said.
Tietjens said:
'You never believed anything against me, sir.'
The general said:
'I know I've damn well worried myself to death over you...'
Tietjens was sentimental at rest, still with wet eyes. He was walking near Salisbury in a grove, regarding long pastures and ploughlands running to dark, high elms from which, embowered...Embowered was the word!--peeped the spire of George Herbert's church...One ought to be a seventeenth-century parson at the time of the renaissance of Anglican saintliness...who wrote, perhaps poems. No, not poems. Prose. The statelier vehicle!
That was home-sickness!...He himself was never to go home!
The general said:
'Look here...Your father...I'm concerned about your father...Didn't Sylvia perhaps tell him some of the things that distressed him?'
Tietjens said distinctly:
'No, sir. That responsibility cannot be put on to Sylvia. My father chose to believe things that were said against me by a perfect--or a nearly perfect--stranger...' He added: 'As a matter of fact, Sylvia and my father were not on any sort of terms. I don't believe they exchanged two words for the last five years of my father's life.'
The general's eyes were fixed with an extreme hardness on Tietjens'. He watched Tietjens' face, beginning with the edges round the nostrils, go chalk white. He said: 'He knows he's given his wife away!...Good God!' With his face colourless, Tietjens' eyes of porcelain-blue stuck out extraordinarily. The general thought: 'What an ugly fellow! His face is all crooked!' They remained looking at each other.
In the silence the voices of men talking over the game of House came as a murmur to them. A rudimentary card game monstrously in favour of the dealer. When you heard voices going on like that you knew they were playing House...So they had had their dinners.
The general said:
'It isn't Sunday, is it?'
Tietjens said:
'No, sir; Thursday, the seventeenth, I think, of January...'
The general said:
'Stupid of me...'
The men's voices had reminded him of church bells on a Sunday. And of his youth...He was sitting beside Mrs Tietjens' hammock under the great cedar at the corner of the stone