Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [150]
'A message to me!' Valentine said to herself. 'But which sentence...' She moved, absently, all the cushions to one end of the sofa. Her mother exclaimed:
'He sent his love! His mother was lucky to have such a son!' and turned into her tiny hole of a study.
Valentine ran down over the broken tiles of the garden path, pulling her wideawake firmly on. She had looked at her wrist-watch: it was two and twelve: 14.45. If she was to walk to the War Office by 4.15--16.15--a sensible innovation!--she must step out. Five miles to Whitehall. God knows what, then! Five miles back! Two and a half diagonally, to High Street Station by half-past 19! Twelve and a half miles in five hours or less. And three hours dancing on the top of it. And to dress!...She needed to be fit...And, with violent bitterness, she said:
'Well! I'm fit...' She had an image of the aligned hundreds of girls in blue jumpers and men's ties keeping whom fit had kept her super-fit. She wondered how many of them would be men's mistresses before the year was out. It was August then. But perhaps none! Because she had kept them fit...
'Ah!' she said, 'if I had been a loose woman, with flaccid breasts and a soft body. All perfumed!'...But neither Sylvia Tietjens nor Ethel Duchemin were soft. They might be scented on occasion! But they would not contemplate with equanimity doing a twelve-mile walk to save a few pence and dancing all night on top of it! She could! And perhaps the price she paid was just that; she was in such hard condition she hadn't moved him to...She perhaps exhaled such an aura of sobriety, chastity and abstinence as to suggest to him that...that a decent fellow didn't get his girl into trouble before going to be killed...Yet if he were such a town bull!...She wondered how she knew such phrases...
The sordid and aligned houses seemed to rush past her in the mean August sunshine. That was because if you thought hard time went quicker; or because after you noticed the paper shop at this corner you would be up to the boxes of onions outside the shop of the next corner before you noticed anything else.
She was in Kensington Gardens, on the north side; she had left the poor shops behind...In sham country, with sham lawns, sham avenues, sham streams. Sham people pursuing their ways across the sham grass. Or no! Not sham! in a vacuum! No! 'Pasteurised' was the word! Like dead milk. Robbed of their vitamins...
If she saved a few coppers by walking it would make a large pile to put into the leering--or compassionate--taxicabman's hand after he had helped her support her brother into the dog-kennel door. Edward would be dead drunk. She had fifteen shillings for the taxi...If she gave a few coppers more it seemed generous...What a day to look forward to still! Some days were lifetimes!
She would rather die than let Tietjens pay for the cab!
Why? Once a taximan had refused payment for driving her and Edward all the way to Chiswick, and she hadn't felt insulted. She had paid him; but she hadn't felt insulted! A sentimental fellow; touched at the heart by the pretty sister--or perhaps he didn't really believe it was a sister--and her incapable bluejacket brother! Tietjens was a sentimental fellow too...What was the difference!...And then! The mother a dead, heavy sleeper; the brother dead drunk. One in the morning! He couldn't refuse her! Blackness: cushions! She had arranged the cushions, she remembered. Arranged them subconsciously! Blackness! Heavy sleep; dead drunkenness!...Horrible!...A disgusting affair! An affair of Ealing...It shall make her one with all the stuff to fill graveyards...Well, what else was she, Valentine Wannop: daughter of her father? And of her mother? Yes! But she herself...Just a little nobody!
They were no doubt wirelessing from the Admiralty...But her brother was at home, or getting a little more intoxicated and talking treason. At any rate the flickering intermittences over the bitter seas couldn't for the moment concern him...That bus touched her skirt as she ran for the island...It