No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [28]
But, damn it, he, he himself, would make a pact with Destiny, at that moment, willingly, to pass thirty months in the frozen circle of hell, for the chance of thirty seconds in which to tell Valentine Wannop what he had answered back...to Destiny!...What was the fellow in the Inferno who was buried to the neck in ice and begged Dante to clear the icicles out of his eyelids so that he could see out of them? And Dante kicked him in the face because he was a Ghibelline...Always a bit of a swine, Dante...Rather like...like whom?...Oh, Sylvia Tietjens...A good hater!...He imagined hatred coming to him in waves from the convent in which Sylvia had immured herself...Gone into retreat...He imagined she had gone into retreat. She had said she was going. For the rest of the war...For the duration of hostilities or life, whichever were the longer...He imagined Sylvia, coiled up on a convent bed...Hating...Her certainly glorious hair all round her...Hating...Slowly and coldly...Like the head of a snake when you examined it...Eyes motionless: mouth closed tight...Looking away into the distance and hating...She was presumably in Birkenhead...A long way to send your hatred...Across a country and a sea in an icy night...! Over all that black land and water...with the lights out because of air-raids and U-boats... Well, he did not have to think of Sylvia at the moment. She was well out of it...
It was certainly getting no warmer as the night drew on...Even that ass Levin was pacing swiftly up and down in the dusky moon-shadow of the last hutments that looked over the slope and the vanishing trail of white stones...In spite of his boasting about not wearing an overcoat; to catch women's eyes with his pretty Staff gadgets he was carrying on like a leopard at feeding time...
Tietjens said:
'Sorry to keep you waiting, old man...Or rather your lady...But there were some men to see to...And, you know..."The comfort and--what is it?--of the men comes before every--is it 'consideration'?--except the exigencies of actual warfare"...My memory's gone phut these days...And you want me to slide down this hill and wheeze back again...To see a woman!
Levin screeched: 'Damn you, you ass! It's your wife who's waiting for you at the bottom there.'
III
The one thing that stood out sharply in Tietjens' mind when at last, with a stiff glass of rum punch, his, officer's pocket-book complete with pencil because he had to draft before eleven a report as to the desirability of giving his unit special lectures on the causes of the war, and a cheap French novel on a camp chair beside him, he sat in his fleabag with six army blankets over him--the one thing that stood out as sharply as Staff tabs was that that ass Levin was rather pathetic. His unnailed bootsoles very much cramping his action on the frozen hillside, he had alternately hobbled a step or two, and, reduced to inaction, had grabbed at Tietjens' elbow, while he brought out breathlessly puzzled sentences...
There resulted a singular mosaic of extraordinary, bright-coloured and melodramatic statements, for Levin, who first hobbled down the hill with Tietjens and then hobbled back up, clinging to his arm, brought out monstrosities of news about Sylvia's activities, without any sequence, and indeed without any apparent aim except for the great affection he had for Tietjens himself...All sorts or singular things seemed to have been going on round him in the vague zone, outside all this engrossed