No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [29]
And as Tietjens, seated on his hams, his knees up, pulled the soft woolliness of his flea-bag under his chin and damned the paraffin heater for letting out a new and singular stink, it seemed to him that this affair was like coming back after two months and trying to get the hang of battalion orders...You come back to the familiar, slightly battered mess ante-room. You tell the mess orderly to bring you the last two months' orders, for it is as much as your life is worth not to know what is or is not in them...There might be an A.C.I. ordering you to wear your helmet back to the front, or a battalion order that Mills bombs must always be worn in the left breast pocket. Or there might be the detail for putting on a new gas helmet!...The orderly hands you a dishevelled mass of faintly typewritten matter, thumbed out of all chance of legibility, with the orders for November 26 fastened inextricably into the middle of those for the 1st of December, and those for the 10th, 25th and 29th missing altogether...And all that you gather is that headquarters has some exceedingly insulting things to say about A Company; that a fellow called Hartopp, whom you don't know, has been deprived of his commission; that at a court of inquiry held to ascertain deficiencies in C Company Captain Wells--poor Wells I--has been assessed at £27 11 4d., which he is requested to pay forthwith to the adjutant...
So, on that black hillside, going and returning, what stuck out for Tietjens was that Levin had been taught by the general to consider that he, Tietjens, was an extraordinarily violent chap who would certainly knock Levin down when he told him that his wife was at the camp gates; that Levin considered himself to be the descendant of an ancient Quaker family...(Tietjens had said Good God! at that); that the mysterious 'rows' to which in his fear Levin had been continually referring had been successive letters from Sylvia to the harried general...and that Sylvia had accused him, Tietjens, of stealing two pairs of her best sheets...There was a great deal more. But having faced what he considered to be the worst of the situation, Tietjens set himself coolly to recapitulate every aspect of his separation from his wife. He had meant to face every aspect, not that merely social one upon which, hitherto, he had automatically imagined their disunion to rest. For, as he saw it, English people of good position consider that the basis of all marital unions or disunions is the maxim: No scenes. Obviously for the sake of the servants--who are the same thing as the public. No scenes, then, for the sake of the public. And indeed, with him, the instinct for privacy--as to his relationships, his passions, or even as to his most unimportant motives--was as strong as the instinct of life itself. He would, literally, rather be dead than an open book.
And, until that afternoon, he had imagined that his wife, too, would rather be dead than have her affairs canvassed by the other ranks...But that assumption had to be gone over. Revised...Of course he might say she had gone mad. But, if he said she had gone mad he would have to revise a great deal of their relationships, so it would be as broad as it was long...
The doctor's batman, from the other end of the hut, said:
Poor--0 Nine Morgan...' in a sing-song, mocking voice...
For though, hours before, Tietjens had appointed this moment of physical ease that usually followed on his splurging heavily down on to his creaking camp-bed in the doctor's lent hut, for the cool consideration of his relations with his wife, it was not turning out a very easy matter. The hut was unreasonably warm: he had invited Mackenzie--whose real name turned out to be McKechnie, James Grant McKechnie--to occupy the other end of it. The other end of it was divided from him by a partition of canvas and a striped Indian curtain. And McKechnie, who was unable to sleep, had elected to carry on a long--an interminable--conversation