Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [127]
She found him--as subconsciously she knew he was--astonishingly mild. She had too often watched him whilst he listened to her mother's tirades against the Kaiser, not to know that. He did not raise his voice, he showed no emotion. He said at last:
'You and I are like two people...' He paused and began again more quickly: 'Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read "Monkey's Soap"; if you look back when you've passed it's "Needs no Rinsing."...You and I are standing at different angles, and though we both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we stood side by side we should see yet a third...But I hope we respect each other. We're both honest. I, at least, tremendously respect you and I hope you respect me.'
She kept silent. Behind their backs the fire rustled. Mr Jegg, across the room, said: 'The failure to co-ordinate...' and then dropped his voice.
Tietjens looked at her attentively.
'You don't respect me?' he asked. She kept obstinately silent.
'I'd have liked you to have said it,' he repeated.
'Oh,' she cried out, 'how can I respect you when there is all this suffering? So much pain! Such torture...I can't sleep...Never...I haven't slept a whole night since...Think of the immense spaces, stretching out under the night...I believe pain and fear must be worse at night...' She knew she was crying out like that because her dread had come true. When he had said: 'I'd have liked you to have said it,' using the past, he had said his valedictory. Her man, too, was going.
And she knew too: she had always known under her mind and now she confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would say farewell to her: like that, using the inflexion of a verb. As, just occasionally, using the word 'we'--and perhaps without intention--he had let her know that he loved her.
Mr Jegg drifted across from the window: Mrs Haviland was already at the door.
'We'll leave you to have your war talk out,' Mr Jegg said. He added: 'For myself, I believe it's one's sole duty to preserve the beauty of things that's preservable. I can't help saying that.'
She was alone with Tietjens and the quiet day. She said to herself:
'Now he must take me in his arms. He must. He must!' The deepest of her instincts came to the surface, from beneath layers of thought hardly known to her. She could feel his arms round her: she had in her nostrils the peculiar scent of his hair--like the scent of the skin of an apple, but very faint. 'You must! You must!' she said to herself. There came back to her overpoweringly the memory of their drive together and the moment, the overwhelming moment, when, climbing out of the white fog into the blinding air, she had felt the impulse of his whole body towards her and the impulse of her whole body towards him. A sudden lapse: like the momentary dream when you fall...She saw the white disk of the sun over the silver mist and behind them was the long, warm night...
Tietjens sat, huddled rather together, dejectedly, the firelight playing on the silver places of his hair. It had grown nearly dark outside: they had a sense of the large room that, almost week by week, had grown, for its gleams of gilding and hand-polished dark woods, more like the great dining-room at the Duchemins'. He got down from the fire-seat with a weary movement, as if the fire-seat had been very high. He said, with a little bitterness, but as if with