Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [74]
On Tuesday it would close in again, beginning with the meeting of his wife's maid at Dover...
He was to have, above all, a holiday from himself and to take it like other men, free of his conventions, his strait waistcoatings...
The girl said:
'I'm coming up now! I've found out something...' He watched intently the place where she must appear; it would give him pointers about the impenetrability of mist to the eye.
Her otter-skin cap had beads of dew; beads of dew were on her hair beneath: she scrambled up, a little awkwardly: her eyes sparkled with fun: panting a little: her cheeks bright. Her hair was darkened by the wetness of the mist, but she appeared golden in the sudden moonlight.
Before she was quite up, Tietjens almost kissed her. Almost. An all but irresistible impulse! He exclaimed:
'Steady, the Buffs!' in his surprise.
She said:
'Well, you might as well have given me a hand. I found,' she went on, 'a stone that had I.R.D.C. on it, and there the lamp went out. We're not on the marsh because we are between quick hedges. That's all I have found...But I've worked out what makes me so tart with you...
He couldn't believe she could be so absolutely calm: the after-wash of that impulse had been so strong in him that it was as if he had tried to catch her to him and had been foiled by her...She ought to be indignant, amused, even pleased...She ought to show some emotion...
She said:
'It was your silencing me with that absurd non-sequitur about the Pimlico clothing factory. It was an insult to my intelligence.'
'You recognized that it was a fallacy!' Tietjens said. He was looking hard at her. He didn't know what had happened to him. She took a long look at him, cool, but with immense eyes. It was as if for a moment destiny, which usually let him creep past somehow, had looked at him. 'Can't,' he argued with destiny, 'a man want to kiss a schoolgirl in a scuffle...' His own voice, a caricature of his own voice, seemed to come to him: 'Gentlemen don't...' He exclaimed:
'Don't gentlemen?...' and then stopped because he realized that he had spoken aloud.
She said:
'Oh, gentlemen do!' she said, 'use fallacies to glide over tight places in arguments. And they browbeat schoolgirls with them. It's that, that underneath, has been exasperating me with you. You regarded me at that date--three-quarters of a day ago--as a schoolgirl.'
Tietjens said:
'I don't now!' He added: 'Heaven knows, I don't now!'
She said: 'No, you don't now!'
He said:
'It didn't need your putting up all that blue-stocking erudition to convince me...'
'Blue-stocking!' she exclaimed contemptuously. 'There's nothing of the blue-stocking about me. I know Latin because father spoke it with us. It Was your pompous blue socks I was pulling.'
Suddenly she began to laugh. Tietjens was feeling sick, physically sick. She went on laughing. He stuttered:
'What is it?'
The sun!' she said, pointing. Above the silver horizon was the sun; not a red sun: shining, burnished.
'I don't see...' Tietjens said.
'What there is to laugh at?' she asked. 'It's the day!...The longest day's begun...and to-morrow's as long...The summer solstice, you know...After to-morrow the days shorten towards winter. But to-morrow's as long...I'm so glad...'
'That we've got through the night?...Tietjens asked.
She looked at him for a long time. 'You're not so dreadfully ugly, really,' she said.
Tietjens said:
'What's that church?'
Rising out of the mist on a fantastically green knoll, a quarter of a mile away, was an unnoticeable place of worship: an oak shingle tower roof that shone grey like lead: an impossibly bright weathercock, brighter than the sun.