No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [72]
Some man drifted near her and said:
'How do you do, Mrs Tietjens? Who would have thought of seeing you here?'
She answered:
'I have to look after Christopher now and then.' He remained hanging over her with a schoolboy grin for a minute, then he drifted away as an object sinks into deep water...Father Consett again hovered near her. She exclaimed:
'But the real point is, father...Is it sporting?...Sporting or whatever it is?' And Father Consett breathed: 'Ah!...' with his terrible power of arousing doubts...She said:
'When I saw Christopher...Last night?...Yes, it was last night...Turning back to go up that hill...And I had been talking about him to a lot of grinning private soldiers...To madden him...You mustn't make scenes before the servants...A heavy man, tired...come down the hill and lumbering up again...There was a searchlight turned on him just as he turned...I remembered the white bulldog I thrashed on the night before it died...A tired, silent beast...with a fat white behind...Tired out...You couldn't see its tail because it was turned down, the stump...A great, silent beast...The vet said it had been poisoned with red lead by burglars...It's beastly to die of red lead...It eats up the liver...And you think you're getting better for a fortnight. And you're always cold...freezing in the blood-vessels...And the poor beast had left its kennel to try and be let in to the fire...And I found it at the door when I came in from a dance without Christopher...And got the rhinoceros whip and lashed into it...There's a pleasure in lashing into a naked white beast...Obese and silent...Like Christopher...I thought Christopher might...That night...It went through my head...It hung down its head...A great head, room for a whole British encyclopaedia of mis-information, as Christopher used to put it...It said: "What a hope!"...As I hope to be saved, though I never shall be, the dog said: "What a hope!"...Snow-white in quite black bushes...And it went under a bush...They found it dead there in the morning...You can't imagine what it looked like, with its head over its shoulder, as it looked back and said: What a hope to me...Under a dark bush. An eu...eu...euonymus, isn't it?...In thirty degrees of frost with all the blood-vessels exposed on the naked surface of the skin...It's the seventh circle of hell, isn't it? the frozen one...The last stud-white bulldog of that breed...As Christopher is the last stud-white hope of the Groby Tory breed...Modelling himself on our Lord...But our Lord was never married. He never touched on topics of sex. Good for Him...
She said: 'The ten minutes is up, father...' and looked at the round, starred surface between the diamonds of her wrist watch. She said: 'Good God!...Only one minute...I've thought all that in only one minute...I understand how hell can be an eternity...'
Christopher, very weary, and ex-Sergeant-Major Cowley, very talkative by now, loomed down between palms. Cowley was saying: 'It's infamous!...It's past bearing...To re-order the draft at eleven...' They sank into chairs...Sylvia extended towards Tietjens a small packet of letters. She said: 'You had better look at these...I had your letters sent to me from the flat as there was so much uncertainty about your movements...' She found that she did not dare, under Father Consett's eyes, to look at Tietjens as she said that. She said to Cowley: 'We might be quiet for a minute or two while the captain reads his letters...Have another liqueur?...'