Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [65]
There came back into his mind, burnt in, the image of their breakfast-room, with all the brass, electrical fixings, poachers, toasters, grillers, kettle-heaters, that he detested for their imbecile inefficiency; with gross piles of hothouse flowers--that he detested for their exotic waxennesses--with white enamelled panels that he disliked and framed, weak prints--quite genuine of course, my dear, guaranteed so by Sotheby--pinkish women in sham Gainsborough hats, selling mackerel or brooms. A wedding present that he despised. And Mrs Satterthwaite, in negligé, but with an immense hat; reading The Times with an eternal rustle of leaves because she never could settle down to any one page; and Sylvia walking up and down because she could not sit still, with a piece of toast in her fingers or her hands behind her back. Very tall; fair; as graceful, as full of blood and as cruel as the usual degenerate Derby winner. Inbred for generations for one purpose: to madden men of one type...Pacing backwards and forwards, exclaiming: 'I'm bored I Bored!'; sometimes even breaking the breakfast plates...And talking! For ever talking; usually, cleverly, with imbecility; with maddening inaccuracy; with wicked penetration, and clamouring to be contradicted; a gentleman has to answer his wife's questions...And in his forehead the continual pressure; the determination to sit put; the decor of the room seeming to burn into his mind. It was there, shadowy before him now. And the pressure upon his forehead...
Mrs Wannop was talking to him now, he did not know what she said; he never knew afterwards what he had answered.
'God!' he said within himself, 'if it's sexual sins God punishes, He indeed is just and inscrutable!'...Because he had had physical contact with this woman before he married her! In a railway carriage; coming down from the Dukeries. An extravagantly beautiful girl!
Where was the physical attraction of her gone to now? Irresistible; reclining back as the shires rushed past...His mind said that she had lured him on. His intellect put the idea from him. No gentleman thinks such things of his wife.
No gentleman thinks...By God; she must have been with child by another man...He had been fighting the conviction down all the last four months...He knew now that he had been fighting the conviction all the last four months, whilst, anaesthetized, he had bathed in figures and wave-theories...Her last words had been: her very last words: late: all in white she had gone up to her dressing-room, and he had never seen her again; her last words had been about the child...'Supposing,' she had begun...He didn't remember the rest. But he remembered her eyes. And her gesture as she peeled off her long white gloves...
He was looking at Mrs Wannop's ingle; he thought it a mistake in taste, really, to leave logs in an ingle during the summer. But then what are you to do with an ingle in summer? In Yorkshire cottages they shut the ingles up with painted doors. But that is stuffy, too!
He said to himself:
'By God! I've had a stroke!' and he got out of his chair to test his legs...But he hadn't had a stroke. It must then, he thought, be that the pain of his last consideration must be too great for his mind to register as certain great physical pains go unperceived. Nerves, like weighing machines, can't register more than a certain amount, then they go out of action. A tramp who had had his leg cut off by a train had told him that he had tried to get up, feeling nothing at The pain comes back though...
He said to Mrs Wannop, who was still talking:
'I beg your pardon. I really