Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [42]
In that way the sudden entrance of Macmaster gave him a really terrible physical shock. He nearly vomited: his brain reeled and the room fell about. He drank a great quantity of whisky in front of Macmaster's goggling eyes; but even at that he couldn't talk, and he dropped into his bed faintly aware of his friend's efforts to loosen his clothes. He had, he knew, carried the suppression of thought in his conscious mind so far that his unconscious self had taken command and had, for the time, paralysed both his body and his mind.
V
'It doesn't seem quite fair, Valentine,' Mrs Duchemin said. She was rearranging in a glass bowl some minute flowers that floated on water. They made there, on the breakfast-table, a patch, as it were, of mosaic amongst silver chafing dishes, silver epergnes piled with peaches in pyramids and great silver rose-bowls filled with roses, that drooped to the damask cloth, a congeries of silver largenesses made as if a fortification for the head of the table; two huge silver urns, a great silver kettle on a tripod, and a couple of silver vases filled with the extremely tall blue spikes of delphiniums that, spreading out, made as if a fan. The eighteenth-century room was very tall and long; panelled in darkish wood. In the centre of each of four of the panels, facing the light, hung pictures, a mellowed orange in tone, representing mists and the cordage of ships in mists at sunrise. On the bottom of each large gold frame was a tablet bearing the ascription: 'J. M. W. Turner.' The chairs, arranged along the long table that was set for eight people, had the delicate, spidery, mahogany backs of Chippendale; on the golden mahogany sideboard that had behind it green silk curtains on a brass-rail were displayed an immense, crumbed ham, more peaches on an epergne, a large meat-pie with a varnished crust, another epergne that supported the large pale globes of grapefruit; a galantine, a cube of inlaid meats, encased in thick jelly.
'Oh, women have to back each other up in these days,' Valentine Wannop said. 'I couldn't let you go through this alone after breakfasting with you every Saturday since I don't know when.'
'I do feel,' Mrs Duchemin said, 'immensely grateful to you for your moral support. I ought not, perhaps, to have risked this morning. But I've told Parry to keep him out till 10.15.'
'It's, at any rate, tremendously sporting of you,' the girl said. 'I think it was worth trying.'
Mrs Duchemin, wavering round the table, slightly changed the position of the delphiniums.
'I think they make a good screen,' Mrs Duchemin said.
'Oh, nobody will be able to see him,' the girl answered reassuringly. She added with a sudden resolution, 'Look here, Edie. Stop worrying about my mind. If you think that anything I hear at your table after nine months as an ash-cat at Ealing, with three men in the house, an invalid wife and a drunken cook, can corrupt my mind, you're simply mistaken. You can let your conscience be at rest, and let's say no more about it.'
Mrs Duchemin said, 'Oh, Valentine! How could your mother let you?'
'She didn't know,' the girl said. 'She was out of her mind for grief. She sat for most of the whole nine months with her hands folded before her in a board and lodging house at twenty-five shillings a week, and it took the five shillings a week that I earned to make up the money.' She added, 'Gilbert had to be kept at school of course. And in the holidays, too.'
'I don't understand!' Mrs Duchemin said. 'I simply don't understand.'
'Of course you wouldn't,'