No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [25]
And that was beastly. The process, not the effect. On the whole Tietjens did not care where he was or what he did as long as he kept out of England, the thought of that country, at night, slumbering across the Channel, being sentimentally unbearable to him...Still, he was fond of old Campion, and would rather be in his command than any other. He had attached to his staff a very decent set of fellows, as decent as you could be in contact with...if you had to be in contact with your kind...So he just said:
'Look here, Stanley, you are a silly ass,' and left it at that, without demonstrating the truth of the assertion.
The colonel said:
'Why, what have I been doing now?...I wish you would walk the other way...
Tietjens said:
'No, I can't afford to go out of camp...I've got to come to witness your fantastic wedding-contract to-morrow afternoon, haven't I?...I can't leave camp twice in one week...
'You've got to come down to the camp-guard,' Levin said. 'I hate to keep a woman waiting in the cold...though she is in the general's car...
Tietjens exclaimed:
'You've not been...oh, extraordinarily enough, to bring Miss de Bailly out here? To talk to me?'
Colonel Levin mumbled, so low Tietjens almost imagined that he was not meant to hear:
'It isn't Miss de Bailly!' Then he exclaimed quite aloud: 'Damn it all, Tietjens, haven't you had hints enough?...
For a lunatic moment it went through Tietjens' mind that it must be Miss Wannop in the general's car, at the gate, down the hill beside the camp guard-room. But he knew folly when it presented itself to his mind. He had nevertheless turned and they were going very slowly back along the broad way between the huts. Levin was certainly in no hurry. The broad way would come to an end of the hutments; about two acres of slope would descend blackly before them, white stones to mark a sort of coastguard track glimmering out of sight beneath a moon gone dark with the frost. And, down there in the dark forest, at the end of that track, in a terrific Rolls-Royce, was waiting something of which Levin was certainly deucedly afraid...
For a minute Tietjens' backbone stiffened. He didn't intend to interfere between Mlle de Bailly and any married woman Levin had had as a mistress...Somehow he was convinced that what was in that car was a married woman...He did not dare to think otherwise. If it was not a married woman it might be Miss Wannop. If it was, it couldn't be...An immense waft of calm, sentimental happiness had descended upon him. Merely because he had imagined her! He imagined her little, fair, rather pug-nosed face: under a fur cap, he did not know why. Leaning forward she would be, on the seat of the general's illuminated car: glazed in: a regular raree show! Peering out, shortsightedly on account of the reflections on the inside of the glass...
He was saying to Levin:
'Look here, Stanley...why I said you are a silly ass is because Miss de Bailly has one chief luxury. It's exhibiting jealousy. Not feeling it; exhibiting it.'
'Ought you,' Levin asked ironically, 'to discuss my fiancée before me? As an English gentleman. Tietjens of Groby and all.'
'Why, of course,' Tietjens said. He continued feeling happy. 'As a sort of swollen best man, it's my duty to instruct you. Mothers tell their daughters things before marriage. Best men do it for the innocent Benedict...woman...'
'I'm not doing it now,' Levin grumbled direly.
'Then what, in God's name, are you doing? You've got a cast mistress, haven't you, down there in old Campion's car?...' They were beside the alley that led down to his orderly room. Knots of men, dim and desultory, still half filled it, a little way down.
'I haven't,' Levin exclaimed almost tearfully. 'I never had a mistress...
'And you're not married?' Tietjens asked. He used on purpose the schoolboy's ejaculation