Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [126]
Next day, and sober, he was almost worse. A handsome, dark boy like his father, he had his mother's hooked nose and was always a little unbalanced: not mad, but always over-violent in any views he happened for the moment to hold. At the Summer School he had been under very vitriolic teachers of all sorts of notions. That hadn't hitherto mattered. Her mother had written for a Tory paper: her brother, when he had been at home, had edited some sort of Oxford organ of disruption. But her mother had only chuckled.
The war changed that. Both seemed to be filled with a desire for blood and to torture: neither paid the least attention to the other. It was as if--so for the rest of those years the remembrance of that time lived with her--in one corner of the room her mother, ageing, and on her knees, from which she only with difficulty rose, shouted hoarse prayers to God, to let her, with her own hands, strangle, torture and flay off all his skin, a being called the Kaiser, and as if, in the other corner of the room, her brother, erect, dark, scowling and vitriolic, one hand clenched above his head, called down the curse of heaven on the British soldier, so that in thousands, he might die in agony, the blood spouting from his scalded lungs. It appeared that the Communist leader whom Edward Wannop affected had had ill-success in his attempts to cause disaffection among some units or other of the British army, and had failed rather gallingly, being laughed at or ignored rather than being ducked in a horse-pond, shot, or otherwise martyrized. That made it obvious that the British man in the ranks was responsible for the war. If those ignoble hirelings had refused to fight all the other embattled and terrorized millions would have thrown down their arms!
Across that dreadful phantasmagoria went the figure of Tietjens. He was in doubt. She heard him several times voice his doubts to her mother, who grew every day more vacant. One day Mrs Wannop had said:
'What does your wife think about it?'
Tietjens had answered:
'Oh, Mrs Tietjens is a pro-German...Or no, that isn't exact! She has German prisoner-friends and looks after them. But she spends nearly all her time in retreat in a convent reading novels of before the war. She can't bear the thought of physical suffering. I can't blame her.'
Mrs Wannop was no longer listening: her daughter was.
For Valentine Wannop the war had turned Tietjens into far more of a man and far less of an inclination--the war and Mrs Duchemin between them. He had seemed to grow less infallible. A man with doubts is more of a man, with eyes, hands, the need for food and for buttons to be sewn on. She had actually tightened up a loose glove button for him.
One Friday afternoon at Macmaster's she had had a long talk with him: the first she had had since the drive and the accident.
Ever since Macmaster had instituted his Friday afternoons--and that had been some time before the war--Valentine Wannop had accompanied Mrs Duchemin to town by the morning train and back at night to the rectory. Valentine poured out the tea, Mrs Duchemin drifting about the large book-lined room amongst the geniuses and superior journalists.
On this occasion--a November day of very chilly wet--there had been next to nobody present, the preceding Friday having been unusually full. Macmaster and Mrs Duchemin had taken a Mr Spong, an architect, into the dining-room to inspect an unusually fine set of Piranesi's Views of Rome that Tietjens had picked up somewhere and had given to Macmaster. A Mr Jegg and a Mrs Haviland were sitting close together in the far window-seat. They were talking in low tones. From time to time Mr Jegg used the word 'inhibition.' Tietjens rose from the fire-seat on which he had been sitting and came to her. He ordered her to bring her cup of tea over by the fire and talk to him. She obeyed. They sat side by side on the leather fire-seat that stood on polished brass rails, the fire warming their backs. He said:
'Well, Miss Wannop.