Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [45]
Mrs Duchemin had sat down on a chair near one of the windows; she had her handkerchief hiding her face.
'Why women in your position don't take lovers...' the girl said hotly. 'Or that women in your position do take lovers...'
Mrs Duchemin looked up; in spite of its tears her white face had an air of serious dignity:
'Oh, no, Valentine,' she said, using her deeper tones. 'There's something beautiful, there's something thrilling about chastity. I'm not narrow-minded. Censorious! I don't condemn! But to preserve in word, thought and action a lifelong fidelity...It's no mean achievement...'
'You mean like an egg and spoon race,' Miss Wannop said.
'It isn't,' Mrs Duchemin replied gently, 'the way I should have put it. Isn't the real symbol Atalanta, running fast and not turning aside for the golden apple? That always seemed to me the real truth hidden in the beautiful old legend...'
'I don't know,' Miss Wannop said, 'when I read what Ruskin says about it in the Crown of Wild Olive. Or no! It's the Queen of the Air. That's his Greek rubbish, isn't it? I always think it seems like an egg-race in which the young woman didn't keep her eyes in the boat. But I suppose it comes to the same thing.'
Mrs Duchemin said:
'My dear! Not a word against John Ruskin in this house!'
Miss Wannop screamed.
An immense voice had shouted:
'This way! This way...The ladies will be here!'
Of Mr Duchemin's curates--he had three of them, for he had three marshland parishes almost without stipend, so that no one but a very rich clergyman could have held them--it was observed that they were all very large men with the physiques rather of prize-fighters than of clergy. So that when by any chance at dusk, Mr Duchemin, who himself was of exceptional stature, and his three assistants went together along a road the hearts of any malefactors whom in the mist they chanced to encounter went pit-apat.
Mr Horsley--the number two--had in addition an enormous voice. He shouted four or five words, interjected tee-hee, shouted four or five words more and again interjected tee-hee. He had enormous wrist-bones that protruded from his clerical cuffs, an enormous Adam's apple, a large, thin, close-cropped, colourless face like a skull, with very sunken eyes, and when he was once started speaking it was impossible to stop him, because his own voice in his ears drowned every possible form of interruption.
This morning, as an inmate of the house, introducing to the breakfast-room Messrs Tietj ens and Macmaster, who had driven up to the steps just as he was mounting them, he had a story to tell. The introduction was, therefore, not, as such, a success...
'A STATE OF SIEGE, LADIES! Tee-hee!' he alternately roared and giggled. 'We're living in a regular state of siege...What with...' It appeared that the night before, after dinner, Mr Sandbach and rather more than half a dozen of the young bloods who had dined at Mountby, had gone scouring the country lanes, mounted on motor bicycles and armed with loaded canes...for suffragettes! Every woman they had come across in the darkness they had stopped, abused, threatened with their loaded canes and subjected to cross-examination. The countryside was up in arms.
As a story this took, with the appropriate reflections and repetitions, a long time in telling, and afforded Tietjens and Miss Wannop the opportunity of gazing at each other. Miss Wannop was frankly afraid that this large, clumsy, unusual-looking man, now that he had found her again, might hand her over to the police whom she imagined to be searching for herself and her friend Gertie, Miss Wilson, at that moment in bed, under the care, as she also imagined, of Mrs Wannop. On the links he had seemed to her natural and in place; here, with his loosely hung clothes and immense hands, the white patch on the side of his rather cropped head and his masked, rather shapeless features, he affected her queerly as being both in and out of place. He seemed to go with the ham, the meat-pie, the galantine and even at a pinch with the roses; but the Turner pictures,