No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [5]
Tietjens laughed at this madness. Then, in the dark brownness, an intolerable pang went all through his heavy frame--the intolerable pang of home news to these desperately occupied men, the pain caused by disasters happening in the darkness and at a distance. You could do nothing to mitigate them!...The extraordinary beauty of the wife from whom he was separated--for she was extraordinarily beautiful!--might well have caused scandals about her to have penetrated to the general's headquarters, which was a sort of family party! Hitherto there had, by the grace of God, been no scandals. Sylvia Tietjens had been excruciatingly unfaithful, in the most painful manner. He could not be certain that the child he adored was his own...That was not unusual with extraordinarily beautiful--and cruel!--women. But she had been haughtily circumspect.
Nevertheless, three months ago, they had parted...Or he thought they had parted. Almost complete blankness had descended upon his home life. She appeared before him so extraordinarily bright and clear in the brown darkness that he shuddered: very tall, very fair, extraordinarily fit and clean even. Thoroughbred! In a sheath gown of gold tissue, all illuminated, and her mass of hair, like gold tissue too, coiled round and round in plaits over her ears. The features very clean-cut and thinnish; the teeth white and small; the breasts small; the arms thin, long and at attention at her sides...His eyes, when they were tired, had that trick of reproducing images on their retinas with that extreme clearness, images sometimes of things he thought of, sometimes of things merely at the back of the mind. Well, to-night his eyes were very tired! She was looking straight before her, with a little inimical disturbance of the corners of her lips. She had just thought of a way to hurt terribly his silent personality...The semi-clearness became a luminous blue, like a tiny gothic arch, and passed out of his vision to the right...
He knew nothing of where Sylvia was. He had given up looking at the illustrated papers. She had said she was going into a convent at Birkenhead--but twice he had seen photographs of her. The first showed her merely with Lady Fiona Grant, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Ulleswater--and a Lord Swindon, talked of as next minister for International Finance--a new Business Peer...All three walking straight into the camera in the courtyard of Lord Swindon's castle...all three smiling!...It announced Mrs Christopher Tietjens as, having a husband at the front.
The sting had, however, been in the second picture--in the description of it supplied by the journal! It showed Sylvia standing in front of a bench in the park. On the bench in profile there extended himself in a guffaw of laughter, a young man in a top hat jammed well on to his head, which was thrown back, his prognathous jaw pointing upwards. The description stated that the picture showed Mrs Christopher Tietjens, whose husband was in hospital at the Front, telling a good story to the son and heir of Lord Birgham! Another of these pestilential, crooked newspaper-owning financial peers...
It had struck him for a painful moment whilst looking at the picture in a dilapidated mess anteroom after he had come out of hospital--that, considering the description, the journal had got its knife into Sylvia...But the illustrated papers do not get their knives into society beauties. They are too precious to the photographers...Then Sylvia must have supplied the information; she desired to cause comment by the contrast of her hilarious companions and the statement that her husband was in hospital at the Front...It had occurred to him that she was on the warpath. But he had put it out of his mind...Nevertheless, brilliant mixture as she was, of the perfectly straight, perfectly fearless, perfectly reckless, of the generous, the kind even--and the atrociously cruel, nothing might