No More Parades_ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [77]
What was incredible was that Christopher should let her go on starving in such a poverty-stricken place when he had something like the wealth of the Indies at his disposal...But the Tietjens were hard people! You could see that in Mark's rooms...and Christopher would lie on the floor as lief as in a goose-feather bed. And probably the girl would not take his money. She was quite right. That was the way to keep him...She herself had no want of comprehension of the stimulation to be got out of parsimonious living...In retreat at her convent she lay as hard and as cold as any anchorite, and rose to the nuns' matins at four.
It was not, in fact, their fittings or food that she objected to--it was that the lay-sisters, and some of the nuns, were altogether too much of the lower classes for her to like to have always about her...That was why it was to the Dames Nobles that she would go, if she had to go into retreat for the rest of her life, according to contract...
A gun manned by exhilarated anti-aircraft fellows, and so close that it must have been in the hotel garden, shook her physically at almost the same moment as an immense maroon popped off on the quay at the bottom of the street in which the hotel was. She was filled with annoyance at these schoolboy exercises. A tall, purple-faced, white-moustached general of the more odious type, appeared in the doorway and said that all the lights but two must be extinguished and, if they took his advice, they would go somewhere else. There were good cellars in the hotel. He loafed about the room extinguishing the lights, couples and groups passing him on the way to the door...Tietjens looked up from his letter--he was now reading one of Mrs Wannop's--but seeing that Sylvia made no motion he remained sunk in his chair...
The old general said:
'Don't get up, Tietjens...Sit down, lieutenant...Mrs Tietjens, I presume...But of course I know you are Mrs Tietjens...There's a portrait of you in this week's...I forget the name...' He sat down on the arm of a great leather chair and told her of all the trouble her escapade to that city had caused him...He had been awakened immediately after a good lunch by some young officer on his staff who was scared to death by her having arrived without papers. His digestion had been deranged ever since...Sylvia said she was very sorry. He should drink hot water and no alcohol with lunch. She had had very important business to discuss with Tietjens, and she had really not understood that they wanted papers of grown-up people. The general began to expatiate on the importance of his office and the number of enemy agents his perspicacity caused to be arrested every day in that city and the lines of communication...
Sylvia was overwhelmed at the ingenuity of Father Consett. She looked at her watch. The ten minutes were up, but there did not appear to be a soul in the dim place...The father had--and no doubt as a Sign that there could be no mistaking!--completely emptied that room. It was like his humour!
To make certain, she stood up. At the far end of the room, in the dimness of the one other reading lamp that the general had not extinguished, two figures were rather indistinguishable. She walked towards them, the general at her side extending civilities all over her. He said that she need not be under any apprehension there. He adopted that device of clearing the room in order to get rid of the beastly young subalterns who would use the place to spoon in when the lights were turned down. She said she was only going to get a timetable from the far end of the room...
The stab of hope that she had that one of the two figures would turn out to be the presentable man died...They were a young mournful subaltern, with an incipient moustache and practically tears in his eyes, and an elderly, violently indignant baldheaded man in evening civilian clothes that must have