Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [145]
But being brought right up against the sexual necessities of a first-class Egeria had been for her a horrible affair. For Mrs Duchemin had revealed the fact that her circumspect, continent and suavely aesthetic personality was doubled by another at least as coarse as, and infinitely more incisive in expression than, that of the drunken cook. The language that she had used about her lover--calling him always 'that oaf' or 'that beast'!--had seemed literally to pain the girl internally, as if it had caused so many fallings away of internal supports at each two or three words. She had hardly been able to walk home through the darkness from the rectory.
And she had never heard what had become of Mrs Duchemin's baby. Next day Mrs Duchemin had been as suave, as circumspect, and as collected as ever. Never a word more had passed between them on the subject. This left in Valentine Wannop's mind a dark patch--as it were of murder--at which she must never look. And across the darkened world of her sexual tumult there flitted continually the quick suspicion that Tietjens might have been the lover of her friend. It was a matter of the simplest analogy. Mrs Duchemin had appeared a bright being: so had Tietjens. But Mrs Duchemin was a foul whore...
How much more then must Tietjens, who was a man, with the larger sexual necessities of the male...Her mind always refused to complete the thought.
Its suggestion wasn't to be combated by the idea of Vincent Macmaster himself: he was, she felt, the sort of man that it was almost a necessity for either mistress or comrade to betray. He seemed to ask for it. Because, she once put it to herself, how could any woman, given the choice and the opportunity--and God knows there was opportunity enough--choose that shadowy, dried leaf, if there were the splendid masculinity of Tietjens in whose arms to lie. She so regarded these two men. And that shadowy conviction was at once fortified and appeased when, a little later, Mrs Duchemin herself began to apply to Tietjens the epithets of 'oaf' and 'beast'--the very ones that she had used to designate the father of her putative child!
But then Tietjens must have abandoned Mrs Duchemin; and, if he had abandoned Mrs Duchemin, he must be available for her, Valentine Wannop! The feeling, she considered, made her ignoble; but it came from depths of her being that she could not control and, existing, it soothed her. Then, with the coming of the war, the whole problem died out, and between the opening of hostilities and what she had known to be the inevitable departure of her lover, she had surrendered herself to what she thought to be the pure physical desire for him. Amongst the terrible, crashing anguishes of that time, there had been nothing for it but surrender! With the unceasing--the never ceasing--thought of suffering; with the never ceasing idea that her lover, too, must soon be so suffering, there was in the world no other refuge. No other!
She surrendered. She waited for him to speak the word, or look the look that should unite them. She was finished. Chastity: napoo finny! Like everything else!
Of the physical side of love she had neither image nor conception. In the old days when she had been with him, if he had come into the room in which she was, or if he had merely been known to be coming down to the village, she had hummed all day under her breath and had felt warmer, little currents passing along her skin. She had read somewhere that to take alcohol was to send the blood into the surface vessels of the body,