Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 549
Mrs Wannop sat opposite him in the other grandfather’s chair; an admirable hostess, an admirable lady. Full of spirit in dashes; but tired. As an old horse is tired that, taking three men to harness it in the stable yard, starts out like a stallion, but soon drops to a jog-trot. The face tired, really; scarlet-cheeked with the good air, but seamed downward. She could sit there at ease, the plump hands covered with a black lace shawl, and descending on each side of her lap, as much at ease as any other Victorian great lady. But at lunch she had let drop that she had written for eight hours every day for the last four years — till that day — without missing a day. To-day being Saturday, she had no leader to write:
‘And, my darling boy,’ she had said to him. ‘I’m giving it to you. I’d give it to no other soul but your father’s son. Not even to...’ And she had named the name that she most respected. ‘And that’s the truth,’ she had added. Nevertheless, even over lunch, she had fallen into abstractions, heavily and deeply, and made fantastic misstatements, mostly about public affairs...It all meant a tremendous record...
And there he sat, his coffee and port on a little table beside him; the house belonging to him...
She said:
‘My dearest boy...you’ve so much to do. Do you think you ought really to drive the girls to Plimsoll tonight? They’re young and inconsiderate, work comes first.’
Tietjens said:
‘It isn’t the distance...’
‘You’ll find that it is,’ she answered humorously. ‘It’s twenty miles beyond Tenterden. If you don’t start till ten when the moon sets, you won’t be back till five, even if you’ve no accidents...The horse is all right, though...’
Tietjens said:
‘Mrs Wannop, I ought to tell you that your daughter and I are being talked about. Uglily!’
She turned her head to him; rather stiffly. But she was only coming out of an abstraction.
‘Eh?’ she said, and then; ‘Oh! About the golf-links episode...It must have looked suspicious. I daresay you made a fuss, too, with the police, to head them off her.’ She remained pondering for a moment, heavily, like an old pope:
‘Oh, you’ll live it down,’ she said.
‘I ought to tell you,’ he persisted, ‘that it’s more serious than you think. I fancy I ought not to be here.’
‘Not here!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why, where else in the world should you be? You don’t get on with your wife; I know. She’s a regular wrong ‘un. Who else could look after you as well as Valentine and I.’
In the acuteness of that pang, for, after all, Tietjens cared more for his wife’s reputation than for any other factor in a complicated world, Tietjens asked rather sharply why Mrs Wannop had called Sylvia a wrong ‘un. She said in rather a protesting, sleepy way:
‘My dear boy, nothing! I’ve guessed that there are differences between you; give me credit for some perception. Then, as you’re perfectly obviously a right ‘un, she must be a wrong ‘un. That’s all, I assure you.’
In his relief Tietjens’ obstinacy revived. He liked this house; he liked this atmosphere; he liked the frugality, the choice of furniture, the way the light fell from window to window; the weariness after hard work, the affection of mother and daughter; the affection, indeed, that they both had for himself, and he was determined, if he could help it, not to damage the reputation of the daughter of the house.
Decent men, he held, don’t do such things, and he recounted with some care the heads of the conversation he had had with General Campion in the dressing-room. He seemed to see the cracked wash-bowls in their scrubbed oak settings. Mrs Wannop’s face seemed to grow greyer, more aquiline; a little resentful! She nodded from time to time, either to denote attention or else in sheer drowsiness:
‘My dear boy,’ she said at last, ‘it’s pretty damnable to have such things said about you. I can see that. But I seem to have lived in a bath of scandal all my life. Every woman who has reached my age has that feeling...Now it doesn’t seem to matter...’ She really nodded nearly off: then she started. ‘I don’t see...I really don’t see how I can help you as to your reputation. I’d do it if I could: believe me...But I’ve other things to think of...I’ve this house to keep going and the children to keep fed and at school. I can’t give all the thought I ought to to other people’s troubles...
She started into wakefulness and right out of her chair.
‘But what a beast I am!’ she said, with a sudden intonation that was exactly that of her daughter; and, drifting with a Victorian majesty of shawl and long skirt behind Tietjens’ high-backed chair, she leaned over it and stroked the hair on his right temple:
‘My dear boy,’ she said. ‘Life’s a bitter thing. I’m an old novelist and know it. There you are working yourself to death to save the nation with a wilderness of cats and monkeys howling and squalling your personal reputation away...It was Dizzy himself said these words to me at one of our receptions. “Here I am, Mrs Wannop,” he said...And...’ She drifted for a moment. But she made another effort: ‘My dear boy,’ she whispered, bending down her head to get it near his ear: ‘My dear boy; it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t really matter. You’ll live it down. The only thing that matters it to do good work. Believe an old woman who has lived very hard; “Hard lying money” as they call it in the navy. It sounds like cant, but it’s the only real truth. You’ll find consolation in that. And you’ll live it down. Or perhaps you won’t; that’s for God in His mercy to settle. But it won’t matter; believe me, as thy days so shall thy strength be.’ She drifted into other thoughts; she was much perturbed over the plot of a new novel and much wanted to get back to the consideration of it. She stood gazing at the photograph, very faded, of her husband in side-whiskers and an immense shirt-front, but she continued to stroke Tietjens’ temple with a sublime tenderness.
This kept Tietjens sitting there. He was quite aware that he had tears in his eyes; this was almost too much tenderness to bear, and, at bottom his was a perfectly direct, simple and sentimental soul. He always had bedewed eyes at the theatre, after tender love scenes, and so avoided the theatre. He asked himself twice whether he should or shouldn’t make another effort, though it was almost beyond him. He wanted to sit still.
The stroking stopped; he scrambled on to his feet.
‘Mrs Wannop,’ he said, facing her, ‘it’s perfectly true. I oughtn’t to care what these swine say about me, but I do. I’ll reflect about what you say till I get it into my system...
She said:
‘Yes, yes! my dear,’ and continued to gaze at the photograph.
‘But,’ Tietjens said; he took her mittened hand and led her back to her chair: ‘What I’m concerned for at the moment is not my reputation, but your daughter Valentine’s.’
She sank down into the high chair, balloon-like, and came to rest:
‘Val’s reputation!’ she said, ‘Oh! you mean they’ll be striking her off their visiting lists. It hadn’t struck me. So they will!’ She remained lost in reflection for a long time.
Valentine was in the room, laughing a little. She had been giving the handy-man his dinner, and was still amused at his commendations of Tietjens.
‘You’ve got one admirer,’ she said to Tietjens. ‘“Punched that rotten strap,” he goes on saying, “like a gret of yaffle punchin’ a ‘ollow log!” He’s had a pint of beer and said it between each gasp.’ She continued to narrate the quaintness of Joel which appealed to her; informed Tietjens that ‘yaffle’ was Kentish for great green woodpecker; and then said:
‘You haven’t got any friends in Germany, have you?’ She was beginning to clear the table.
Tietjens said:
‘Yes; my wife’s in Germany; at a place called Lobscheid.’
She placed a pile of plates on a black japanned tray.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, without an expression of any deep regret. ‘It’s the ingenious clever stupidities of the telephone. I’ve got a telegraph message for you then. I thought it was the subject for mother’s leader. It always comes through with the initials of the paper which are not unlike Tietjens, and the girl who always sends it is called Hopside. It seemed rather inscrutable, but I took it to have to do with German politics and I thought mother would understand it...You’re not both asleep, are you?’
Tietjens opened his eyes, the girl was standing over him, having approached from the table. She was holding out a slip of paper on which she had transcribed the message. She appeared all out of drawing and the letters of the message ran together. The message was:
Righto. But arrange for certain Hullo Central travels with you. Sylvia Hopside Germany.’
Tietjens leaned back for a long time looking at the words; they seemed meaningless. The girl placed the paper on his knee, and went back to the table. He imagined the girl wrestling with these incomprehensibilities on the telephone.
‘Of course if I’d had any sense,’ the girl said, ‘I should have known it couldn’t have been mother’s leader note; she never gets one on a Saturday.’
Tietjens heard himself announce clearly, loudly and with between each word a pause:
‘It means I go to my wife on Tuesday and take her maid with me.’
‘Lucky you!’ the girl said, ‘I wish I was you. I’ve never been in the Fatherland of Goethe and Rosa Luxemburg.’ She went off with her great tray load, the table-cloth over her forearm. He was dimly aware that she had before then removed the crumbs with a crumb-brush. It was extraordinary with what swiftness she worked, talking all the time. That was what domestic service had done for her; an ordinary young lady would have taken twice the time, and would certainly have dropped half her words if she had tried to talk. Efficiency! He had only just realized that he was going back to Sylvia, and of course to Hell! Certainly it was Hell. If a malignant and skilful devil...though the devil of course is stupid and uses toys like fireworks and sulphur; it is probably only God who can, very properly, devise the long ailings of mental oppressions...if God then desired (and one couldn’t object but one hoped He would not!) to devise for him, Christopher Tietjens, a cavernous eternity of weary hopelessness...But He had done it; no doubt as retribution. What for? Who knows what sins of his own are heavily punishable in the eyes of God, for God is just?...Perhaps God then, after all, visits thus heavily sexual offences.
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 missed what you said.’
Mrs Wannop said:
‘I was saying that that’s the best thing I can do for you.’ He said:
‘I’m really very sorry: it was that that I missed. I’m a little in trouble, you know.’
She said:
‘I know: I know. The mind wanders; but I wish you’d listen. I’ve got to go to work, so have you, I said: after tea you and Valentine will walk into Rye to fetch your luggage.’
Straining his intelligence, for, in his mind, he felt a sudden strong pleasure; sunlight on pyramidal red roof in the distance: themselves descending in a long diagonal, a green hill: God, yes, he wanted open air. Tietjens said:
‘I see. You take us both under your protection. You’ll bluff it out.’
Mrs Wannop said rather coolly:
‘I don’t know about you both. It’s you I’m taking under my protection (it’s your phrase!). As for Valentine: she’s made her bed; she must lie on it. I’ve told you all that already. I can’t go over it again.’
She paused, then made another effort:
‘It’s disagreeable,’ she said, ‘to be cut off the Mountby visiting list. They give amusing parties. But I’m too old to care and they’ll miss my conversation more than I do theirs. Of course, I back my daughter against the cats and monkeys. Of course, I back Valentine through thick and thin. I’d back her if she lived with a married man or had illegitimate children. But I don’t approve, I don’t approve of the suffragettes: I despise their aims: I detest their methods. I don’t think young girls ought to talk to strange men. Valentine spoke to you, and look at the worry it has caused you. I disapprove. I’m a woman: but I’ve made my own way: other women could do it if they liked or had the energy. I disapprove! But don’t believe that I will ever go back on any suffragette, individual, in gangs; my Valentine or any other. Don’t believe that I will ever say a word against them that’s to be repeated — you won’t repeat them. Or that I will ever write a word against them. No, I’m a woman and I stand by my sex!’
She got up energetically:
‘I must go and write my novel,’ she said. ‘I’ve Monday’s instalment to send off by train to-night. You’ll go into my study: Valentine will give you paper; ink; twelve different kinds of nibs. You’ll find Professor Wannop’s books all round the room. You’ll have to put up with Valentine typing in the alcove. I’ve got two serials running, one typed, the other in manuscript.’
Tietjens said:
‘But you!’
‘I,’ she exclaimed, ‘I shall write in my bedroom on my knee. I’m a woman and can. You’re a man and have to have a padded chair and sanctuary...You feel fit to work? Then: you’ve got till five, Valentine will get tea then. At half-past five you’ll set off to Rye. You’ll be back with your luggage and your friend and your friend’s luggage at seven.’
She silenced him imperiously with:
‘Don’t be foolish. Your friend will certainly prefer this house and Valentine’s cooking to the pub and the pub’s cooking. And he’ll save on it...It’s no extra trouble. I suppose your friend won’t inform against that wretched little suffragette girl upstairs.’ She paused and said: ‘You’re sure you can do your work in the time and drive Valentine and her to that place...Why it’s necessary is that the girl daren’t travel by train and we’ve relations there who’ve never been connected with the suffragettes. The girl can live hidden there for a bit...But sooner than you shouldn’t finish your work I’d drive them myself...’
She silenced Tietjens again: this time sharply:
‘I tell you it’s no extra trouble. Valentine and I always make our own beds. We don’t like servants among our intimate things. We can get three times as much help in the neighbourhood as we want. We’re liked here. The extra work you give will be met by extra help. We could have servants if we wanted. But Valentine and I like to be alone in the house together at night. We’re very fond of each other.’
She walked to the door and then drifted back to say:
‘You know, I can’t get out of my head that unfortunate woman and her husband. We must all do what we can for them.’ Then she started and exclaimed: ‘But, good heavens, I’m keeping you from your work...The study’s in there, through that door.’
