Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [120]
'I damn well am!' Mark said. He added: 'I suppose you couldn't do that sort of job in France? Look after transport and horses.'
'I could,' Christopher said, 'but I suppose I shall go back to liaison work.'
'I don't think you will,' Mark said. 'I could put in a word for you with the transport people.'
'I wish you would,' Christopher said. 'I'm not fit to go back into the front line. Besides, I'm no beastly hero! And I'm a rotten infantry officer. No Tietjens was ever a soldier worth talking of.'
They turned the corner of the arch. Like something fitting in, exact and expected, Valentine Wannop stood looking at the lists of casualties that hung beneath a cheaply green-stained deal shelter against the wall, a tribute at once to the weaker art movements of the day and the desire to save the ratepayers' money.
With the same air of finding Christopher Tietjens fit in exactly to an expected landscape she turned on him. Her face was blue-white and distorted. She ran upon him and exclaimed:
'Look at this horror! And you in that foul uniform can support it!'
The sheets of paper beneath the green roof were laterally striped with little serrated lines: each line meant the death of a man, for the day.
Tietjens had fallen back a step off the kerb of the pavement that ran round the quadrangle. He said:
'I support it because I have to. Just as you decry it because you have to. They're two different patterns that we see.' He added: 'This is my brother Mark.'
She turned her head stiffly upon Mark: her face was perfectly waxen. It was as if the head of a shopkeeper's lay-figure had been turned. She said to Mark:
'I didn't know Mr Tietjens had a brother. Or hardly. I've never heard him speak of you.'
Mark grinned feebly, exhibiting to the lady the brilliant lining of his hat.
'I don't suppose anyone has ever heard me speak of him,' he said, 'but he's my brother all right!'
She stepped on to the asphalt carriage-way and caught between her fingers and thumb a fold of Christopher's khaki sleeve.
'I must speak to you,' she said; 'I'm going then.'
She drew Christopher into the centre of the enclosed, hard and ungracious space, holding him still by the stuff of his tunic. She pushed him round until he was facing her. She swallowed hard; it was as if the motion of her throat took an immense time. Christopher looked round the skyline of the buildings of sordid and besmirched stone. He had often wondered what would happen if an air-bomb of some size dropped into the mean, grey stoniness of that cold heart of an embattled world.
The girl was devouring his face with her eyes: to see him flinch. Her voice was hard between her little teeth. She said:
'Were you the father of the child Ethel was going to have? Your wife says you were.'
Christopher considered the dimensions of the quadrangle. He said vaguely:
'Ethel! Who's she?' In pursuance of the habits of the painter-poet Mr and Mrs Macmaster called each other always 'Gug Gums!' Christopher had in all probability never heard Mrs Duchemin's Christian names. Certainly he had never heard them since his disaster had swept all names out of his head.
He came to the conclusion that the quadrangle was not a space sufficiently confined to afford much bursting resistance to a bomb.
The girl said:
'Edith Ethel Duchemin! Mrs Macmaster that is!' She was obviously waiting intensely. Christopher said with vagueness:
'No! Certainly not!...What was said?'
Mark Tietjens was leaning forward over the kerb in front of the green-stained shelter, like a child over a brook-side. He was obviously waiting, quite patient, swinging his umbrella by the hook. He appeared to have no other means of self-expression. The girl was saying that when she had rung up Christopher that morning a voice had said, without any preparation at all: the girl repeated, without any preparation at all:
'You'd better keep off the grass if you're the Wannop girl. Mrs Duchemin is my husband's mistress already.