The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [41]
She ran her hand with a singular clawing motion upwards over her forehead. Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was exactly that of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors there. And then suddenly she stopped. She was, most amazingly, just Mrs Ashburnham again. Her face was perfectly clear, sharp and defined; her hair was glorious in its golden coils. Her nostrils twitched with a sort of contempt. She appeared to look with interest at a gypsy caravan that was coming over a little bridge far below us.
‘Don’t you know,’ she said, in her clear hard voice, ‘don’t you know that I’m an Irish Catholic?’
V
Those words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had in my life. They told me, I think, almost more than I have ever gathered at any one moment – about myself. I don’t think that before that day I had ever wanted anything very much except Florence. I have, of course, had appetites, impatiences… Why, sometimes at a table d’hôte, when there would be, say, caviare handed round, I have been absolutely full of impatience for fear that when the dish came to me there should not be a satisfying portion left over by the other guests. I have been exceedingly impatient at missing trains. The Belgian State Railway has a trick of letting the French trains miss their connections at Brussels. That has always infuriated me. I have written about it letters to The Times that The Times never printed; those that I wrote to the Paris edition of the New York Herald were always printed, but they never seemed to satisfy me when I saw them. Well, that was a sort of frenzy with me.
It was a frenzy that now I can hardly realize. I can understand it intellectually. You see, in those days I was interested in people with ‘hearts’. There was Florence, there was Edward Ashburnham – or, perhaps, it was Leonora that I was more interested in. I don’t mean in the way of love. But, you see, we were both of the same profession – at any rate as I saw it. And the profession was that of keeping heart patients alive.
You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become. Just as the blacksmith says: ‘By hammer and hand all Art doth stand,’ just as the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves around his morning delivery of rolls, as the postmaster-general believes that he alone is the preserver of society – and surely, surely, these delusions are necessary to keep us going – so did I and, as I believed, Leonora, imagine that the whole world ought to be arranged so as to ensure the keeping alive of heart patients. You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become – how imbecile, in view of that engrossment, appear the ways of princes, of republics, of municipalities. A rough bit of road beneath the motor tyres, a couple of succeeding ‘thank’ee-marms’73 with their quick jolts would be enough to set me grumbling to Leonora against the Prince or the Grand Duke or the Free City74 through whose territory we might be passing. I would grumble like a stockbroker whose conversations over the telephone are incommoded by the ringing of bells from a city church. I would talk about medieval survivals, about the taxes being surely high enough. The point, by the way, about the missing of the connections of the Calais boat trains at Brussels was that the shortest possible sea journey is frequently of great importance to sufferers from the heart. Now, on the Continent, there are two special heart cure places, Nauheim and Spa,75 and to reach both of these baths from England if in order to ensure a short sea passage, you come by Calais – you have to make the connection at Brussels. And the Belgian train never waits by so much as the shade of a second for the one coming from Calais or from Paris. And even if the French trains are just on time, you have to run – imagine