Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [55]
His hands were shaking as if he had been in a jolting cart...
Their lips met in a passion of pity and tears. He removed his mouth to say: 'I must see you this evening...I shall be mad with anxiety about you.' She whispered: 'Yes! yes! In the yew walk.' Her eyes were closed, she pressed her body fiercely into his. 'You are the...first...man...' she breathed.
'I will be the only one for ever,' he said.
He began to see himself; in the tall room, with the long curtains: a round, eagle mirror reflected them gleaming: like a bejewelled picture with great depths: the entwined figures.
They drew apart to gaze at each other: holding hands...The voice of Tietjens said:
'Macmaster! You're to dine at Mrs Wannop's to-night. Don't dress; I shan't.' He was looking at them without any expression, as if he had interrupted a game of cards; large, grey, fresh-featured, the white patch glistening on the side of his grizzling hair.
Macmaster said:
'All right. It's near here, isn't it?...I've got an engagement just after...' Tietjens said that that would be all right: he would be working himself. All night probably. For Waterhouse...
Mrs Duchemin said with swift jealousy:
'You let him order you about...Tietjens was gone. Macmaster said absently:
'Who? Chrissie!...Yes! Sometimes I him, sometimes he me...We make engagements. My best friend. The most brilliant man in England, of the best stock too. Tietjens of Groby...' Feeling that she didn't appreciate his friend he was abstractedly piling on commendations: 'He's making calculations now. For the Government that no other man in England could make. But he's going...'
An extreme languor had settled on him, he felt weakened but yet triumphant with the cessation of her grasp. It occurred to him numbly that he would be seeing less of Tietjens. A grief. He heard himself quote:
"Since when we stand side by side!"' His voice trembled.
'Ah yes!' came in her deep tones: The beautiful lines...They're true. We must part. In this world...' They seemed to her lovely and mournful words to say; heavenly to have them to say, vibratingly, arousing all sorts of images. Macmaster, mournfully too, said:
'We must wait.' He added fiercely: 'But to-night, at dusk!' He imagined the dusk, under the yew hedge. A shining motor drew up in the sunlight under the window.
'Yes! yes!' she said. 'There's a little white gate from the lane.' She imagined their interview of passion and mournfulness amongst dim objects half seen. That she could allow herself of glamour.
Afterwards he must come to the house to ask after her health and they would walk side by side on the lawn, publicly, in the warm light, talking of indifferent but beautiful poetries, a little wearily, but with what currents electrifying and passing between their flesh...And then: long, circumspect years...
Macmaster went down the tall steps to the car that gleamed in the summer sun. The roses shone over the supremely levelled turf. His heel met the stones with the hard tread of a conqueror. He could have shouted aloud!
VI
Tietjens lit a pipe beside the stile, having first meticulously cleaned out the bowl and the stem with a surgical needle, in his experience the best of all pipe-cleaners, since, made of German silver, it is flexible, won't corrode and is indestructible. He wiped off methodically, with a great dock-leaf, the glutinous brown products of burnt tobacco, the young woman, as he was aware, watching him from behind his back. As soon as he had restored the surgical needle to the notebook in which it lived, and had put the notebook into its bulky pocket, Miss Wannop moved off down the path: it was only suited for Indian file, and had on the left hand a ten-foot, untrimmed quicken hedge, the hawthorn blossoms just beginning to blacken at the edges and small green haws to show. On the right the grass was above knee high and bowed to those that passed. The sun was exactly vertical; the chaffinches said 'Pink! Pink!'; the young woman had an agreeable back.