0,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 0,00 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 0,00 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In Ford Madox Ford's historical novel, 'Some Do Not,' the readers are transported to the tumultuous years leading up to World War I. The book follows a group of characters as they navigate love, betrayal, and the changing social landscape of pre-war Europe. Ford's fragmented narrative style, with shifting perspectives and unreliable narrators, adds depth to the story and reflects the uncertainty of the time. The novel is a masterpiece of modernist literature, blending experimental techniques with a gripping and emotional storyline. The historical context of the novel provides insight into the political and cultural tensions that ultimately led to the outbreak of the Great War. Ford Madox Ford, a prominent figure in early 20th-century literature, drew on his own experiences as a writer and editor to craft 'Some Do Not.' His intimate knowledge of the literary world and his keen observations of human nature shine through in the novel. Ford's innovative approach to storytelling has cemented his reputation as a pioneer of modernist fiction. I highly recommend 'Some Do Not' to readers interested in exploring the complexities of pre-war Europe and the modernist literary movement. Ford Madox Ford's insightful examination of societal norms and personal relationships makes this novel a captivating and thought-provoking read. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Ähnliche
Some Do Not (Historical Novel)
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
In an age hurtling toward catastrophe, a man who insists on keeping faith with his own code becomes both anchor and anomaly.
Some Do Not is the first volume of Ford Madox Ford’s monumental sequence Parade’s End, first published in 1924. Set in the waning glow of Edwardian England and the shadow of the approaching war, the novel centers on Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant civil servant and unyielding Tory, whose private and public worlds collide. Around him move Sylvia, his formidable and unpredictable wife, and Valentine Wannop, a gifted young suffragette whose principles and presence unsettle his certainties. Without announcing conclusions, Ford stages a study of conscience under pressure: what it means to keep faith with one’s values when the era itself is changing shape.
Readers and critics have long regarded Some Do Not as a classic because it marries historical sweep to modernist innovation. Rather than proceeding in tidy chronology, the book advances through shifting perspectives, abrupt transitions, and the currents of interior thought. The result is a narrative that feels lived rather than arranged, a mosaic assembled from memory, rumor, and partial knowledge. This approach reflects the dislocations its characters endure and helped define the novel’s possibilities after the First World War. Ford’s prose, exact and oblique by turns, invites attention to nuance, the glance and half-said phrase that reveal a society’s inner weather.
Ford Madox Ford came to this subject with rare authority. A seasoned novelist by the time of the war, he had already written The Good Soldier and had served during the conflict that reshaped Europe. In the early 1920s he turned decisively to the material of that upheaval. As an editor before and after the war—of The English Review in London and later the transatlantic review in Paris—he championed an array of writers who would define modernism. The sensibility honed in those pages—attentive to experiment, skeptical of cant—suffuses Some Do Not, lending it both stylistic daring and a reporter’s eye for social truth.
Set largely in drawing rooms, offices, and clubs rather than on battlefields, this opening novel maps the fault lines of a class system about to be tested. Tietjens’s professional world of statistics and policy embodies the twentieth century’s new faith in systems, even as the society funding those systems still runs on patronage and whispered reputation. Ford shows how small slanders can do public damage, and how official forms can conceal private suffering. The novel’s historical detail is understated yet exact: the oscillation between country and city, the pressure of gossip, the shifting etiquette that measures who belongs and who does not.
Time in Some Do Not moves like weather across a landscape, illuminating and obscuring by turns. Memories surface not as neat flashbacks but as sensations: a street’s chill, a scrap of talk, the aftertaste of an argument. Ford uses such moments to explore how the mind organizes experience under stress. The war’s imminence warps schedules and morals, while official deadlines and train timetables insist on precision that life refuses to honor. This layered temporality, at once uncertain and meticulously observed, anticipates techniques that would later be widespread and gives the book its haunting rhythm of interruption, return, and unresolved expectancy.
Christopher Tietjens anchors the sequence not as a flawless hero but as a man committed to anachronistic standards—truthfulness, restraint, the keeping of promises—even when they harm his prospects. Sylvia Tietjens resists any simple reading, by turns devout, reckless, and strategic, a woman whose intelligence refuses to be contained by prescribed roles. Valentine Wannop embodies urgency and candor, her work and political commitments framing a different kind of fidelity. Ford refuses caricature: each figure arrives with a history of sensation and belief, and the collisions among them generate moral problems rather than melodramas. Their conversations bristle with consequences felt long after words fade.
The novel also tracks the wider currents of early twentieth-century Britain—suffrage agitation, changing sexual mores, the expansion of education, and the fragility of inherited privilege. Ford understands how public arguments enter private rooms and alter marriages, careers, and friendships. The language of duty and service, so often invoked by institutions, is tested against the realities of desire, fatigue, and fear. In this way Some Do Not becomes a social document as well as a work of imagination: it records the texture of a society negotiating new forms of authority and belonging, while treating its characters’ conflicts with the gravity of lived ethical debate.
As the first movement of Parade’s End, Some Do Not has exerted a quiet but durable influence. Its blend of historical reconstruction with psychological modernism offered a model for later novelists seeking to write about public crisis without abandoning interiority. The book’s method—braiding bureaucracy, love, and national myth—anticipates countless twentieth-century narratives that treat paperwork and rumor as engines of fate. Ford’s achievement helped secure a place for the modernist historical novel alongside more documentary accounts of the period. Subsequent reassessments have continually returned to his example when asking how fiction might represent a society’s breakdown without surrendering its complexity.
Published in 1924, Some Do Not was followed by No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up—, and Last Post, completing the tetralogy across the decade. Each volume enlarges the canvas, yet this opening novel establishes the moral and social problems that echo through the sequence. It can be read on its own as a study of principle confronted by contingency, of love tested by rumor and role. Ford’s design, meticulously patterned but open-ended, asks readers to inhabit uncertainty rather than resolve it too quickly. The emphasis falls on consequence and character, setting the stage without revealing what choices will finally be made.
Reading Some Do Not is an immersion in texture: the friction of syntax, the precision of a gesture, the weight placed on a misdelivered message. Ford’s sentences, modulated and rhythmic, reward attention to cadence as much as to plot. He trusts readers to assemble the story from overlapping impressions, and the effort pays dividends. Scenes return with altered meanings as new information surfaces, proving the book’s architecture sound beneath its apparent spontaneity. The effect is not puzzle-solving but recognition: a sense that moral life, like history, takes shape through accumulation—of acts, of misreadings, of responsibilities accepted or evaded, seldom neatly.
In our own unsettled century, the questions Some Do Not raises feel freshly urgent: how to act with integrity inside institutions, how to separate truth from rumor, how private commitments survive public storms. Ford’s characters grapple with systemic change, media-fueled reputations, and the strains of service—pressures that remain familiar. The novel endures because it refuses to simplify either love or politics, and because its technique still feels bracingly contemporary. To open it is to encounter a mind working at full stretch to register a society at a turning point, and to discover, in that registration, a lasting measure of human steadiness.
Synopsis
Some Do Not, published in 1924, is the opening volume of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End sequence, a modernist historical novel set in late Edwardian Britain on the brink of the First World War. It follows the social and moral dislocations of a class-bound society entering modernity, viewing upheaval through the experience of a gifted, conservative civil servant. Ford’s non-linear method and close attention to consciousness place private conflicts against public change without announcing a single thesis. Instead, the book arranges scenes and recollections that accumulate into a portrait of a world under strain, where codes of conduct are tested by gossip, bureaucracy, and the gathering threat of war.
Christopher Tietjens, the central figure, is a brilliant government statistician in Whitehall from a Yorkshire gentry family. His formidable memory and stubborn sense of duty define him: he prefers accuracy to comfort and principle to advantage. Yet these qualities make him vulnerable in a milieu where discretion and social calculation often matter more than truth. He is paired with his colleague and friend Vincent Macmaster, a talented and ambitious man whose literary ambitions and social tact contrast with Tietjens’s rigid rectitude. Their conversations, offices, and club rooms frame a study in divergent strategies for navigating a shifting society.
Tietjens’s marriage to Sylvia, a beautiful and capricious socialite, becomes the crucible for his ideals. Having left him amid rumors of infidelity, she returns unexpectedly, setting a pattern of provocation, contrition, and renewed hostility. Tietjens refuses to seek a divorce, both from personal conviction and because the social disgrace would harm others around him. Their union, which includes a child, is sustained less by mutual affection than by convention, pride, and calculated manipulations. The domestic drama turns public as gossip intensifies, positioning Tietjens as a man who will absorb injury rather than expose a woman’s reputation or compromise the decorum he believes he must uphold.
A chance encounter propels Tietjens into contact with Valentine Wannop, a young teacher and committed supporter of women’s suffrage. During a protest that spills onto a golf course, he helps her evade arrest with a mixture of gallantry and reserve. Valentine’s background—rooted in an intellectually serious but financially constrained household—aligns with Tietjens’s love of exactness and learning. Their meeting initiates a relationship marked by candor and restraint. They share an affinity of mind more than a declaration of feeling, and Tietjens treats the bond as another site where principle must govern impulse, even as the emotional stakes quietly rise.
Consequences unfold in professional and social spheres as rumors misinterpret Tietjens’s actions and motives. He refuses to defend himself publicly, believing explanation would compromise others. In the office and beyond, he takes on responsibility for mistakes not wholly his own, and his career prospects suffer. Meanwhile, Macmaster leverages his gifts and connections within literary and cultured circles, demonstrating a nimbleness that Tietjens cannot—or will not—match. Drawing rooms, editorial lunches, and politely fraught visits sketch an environment where taste, patronage, and tact determine advancement, and where the price of moral stubbornness can be isolation.
International tensions sharpen the stakes. As Britain moves toward war, the machinery of government expands and reshuffles; duty acquires a literal, military dimension. Tietjens, insisting on an old-fashioned understanding of service, faces choices that could upend his position and safety. Domestic pressures intensify as Sylvia alternates between fascination with and hostility toward her husband’s inflexibility. Valentine adapts her energies to a new public mood in which activism and national service converge. The novel keeps their situations morally unsettled: feelings strengthen, yet formal boundaries remain, and the costs of crossing them are measured against obligations to family, class, and conscience.
Ford’s narrative moves back and forth in time, filtering action through interior monologues and partial recollections. Scenes recur from different vantage points—on trains, in London offices, across country houses and sporting grounds—to reveal how memory and opinion shape reality. The structure emphasizes the fragility of certainty: what appears as scandal or virtue depends on the teller and the moment. Against the backdrop of suffrage debates, clubland rituals, and bureaucratic exactitude, the book probes class expectations and gendered double standards, setting Tietjens’s stoicism beside the lively intelligence of Valentine and the volatile strategies of Sylvia.
With war underway, separations, transfers, and hurried decisions alter the terrain without resolving the personal dilemmas. Careers are remade or compromised; friendships tilt under the weight of new loyalties; reputations are recalibrated in a society that rewards adaptability. Tietjens’s determination to live by exact truth leaves him exposed to misunderstanding, while Valentine’s quiet steadfastness offers a counterpoint to the surrounding opportunism. Macmaster consolidates position through social finesse, underscoring a contrast between inner constancy and outward success. The title’s implication—that some keep faith and some do not—echoes through these changes, attaching to private vows as much as to public commitments.
Some Do Not closes without tidy resolution, instead presenting an anatomy of honor faced with the ambiguities of modern life. It asks whether integrity can endure when institutions, marriages, and hierarchies wobble, and whether clear moral action is possible amid partial information and competing claims. As the first movement of a larger historical composition, the novel frames questions that deepen in subsequent volumes while standing on its own as an exacting study of conscience under pressure. Its enduring significance lies in showing how a world’s collapse can be registered most tellingly in the disciplined, conflicted minds of those who try to do right.
Historical Context
Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not is set chiefly in late Edwardian and wartime Britain, moving between London and the English provinces during roughly the 1910s. The narrative unfolds under the dominance of institutions that ordered upper- and middle-class life: the Church of England, the gentlemanly public-school and Oxbridge pipeline, the hereditary landed estate, exclusive London clubs, and the expanding civil service. These frameworks had long sustained a hierarchical society confident in tradition and deference. The novel situates its characters inside this apparatus just as it begins to strain: industrial urbanity, mass politics, and administrative modernity press upon a caste conditioned by honor, discretion, and inherited duty.
Politically, the prewar years were marked by a struggle between Conservative (Tory) defense of established privilege and Liberal reform. The 1906 Liberal landslide was followed by welfare legislation and a constitutional crisis over the 1909 “People’s Budget,” culminating in the Parliament Act of 1911, which curtailed the House of Lords’ veto. These contests framed debates over authority, entitlement, and obligation. Some Do Not echoes this moment by placing a traditionalist gentleman amid a Britain in which parliamentary power, party realignment, and the growth of the administrative state were redrawing the boundaries of class and governance.
The landed gentry confronted financial and social erosion. Agricultural depression since the late nineteenth century, mounting death duties from the 1890s, and new taxation after 1909 forced many estates to sell land or timber or to retrench domestic staffs. Rail travel and motorcars drew wealth and attention toward cities. The old rural order—its tenancies, ritualized hospitality, and employment of large servant bodies—felt precarious. Ford’s novel registers these pressures not through economic treatise but through atmosphere: anxious conversations about money, property, and lineage, and the uneasy coexistence of inherited status with the accounting habits of a modern, cash-based society.
Imperial identity and the ethos of the gentleman-soldier still framed elite self-understanding. Public schools and Oxbridge promoted a code of stoicism, athleticism, and service, channeling graduates toward the civil service, the City, or commissioned rank. The Boer War (1899–1902) had exposed military shortcomings and prompted reforms, but it also reinforced expectations that leadership and sacrifice would come from the upper classes. In Some Do Not, the pull of duty—social as much as patriotic—runs alongside implicit critique, as inherited codes collide with bureaucratic realities and the sheer scale of industrialized war.
The Haldane reforms (1906–1912) reorganized the Army, establishing a small professional Expeditionary Force and a Territorial Force for home defense. On the outbreak of war in August 1914, the British Expeditionary Force deployed to France, while recruiting drives created “Kitchener’s Army” of volunteers. The novel reflects this context: the abrupt translation of civilian expertise into war work, the jargon and paperwork of a modern army, and the sense that previous standards of gentlemanly competence were insufficient amid logistical mobilization measured in timetables, tonnage, and statistical reports.
As casualties mounted, voluntary enlistment gave way to conscription. The Military Service Acts of 1916 introduced compulsory service for single men and later for married men, with local tribunals adjudicating exemptions and conscientious objections. Social pressure—symbolized by white feathers given to men not in uniform—intensified the climate of judgment. Some Do Not captures the moral complexity of this moment: loyalty, conscience, and pragmatism tangled in conversations, gossip, and official decisions that could brand or redeem reputations in an instant.
The Western Front’s industrialized slaughter—artillery barrages, machine guns, barbed wire, and, from 1915, poison gas—transformed warfare and shattered prewar illusions. Trench rotations, undermanned units, and the heavy attrition of junior officers were the norm by 1916. The term “shell shock,” first used publicly in 1915, entered military and medical discourse, with contested treatments and persistent stigma. In Ford’s novel the psychological aftershocks of war are rendered obliquely but unmistakably: disorientation, memory gaps, and strained self-command signal a society struggling to name and accommodate invisible wounds.
The wartime state expanded rapidly under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) from 1914, tightening censorship, regulating alcohol and lighting, controlling railways, and restricting speech deemed injurious to morale or security. Press barons shaped public perception through mass-circulation newspapers, while rumors and misreporting multiplied under constraints. Some Do Not shows how reputations could be made or unmade in this environment: dossiers, anonymous letters, and strategic leaks intertwine with officialdom, suggesting that personal honor and bureaucratic power were frequently—and dangerously—interdependent.
Anti-German sentiment surged after 1914, affecting naturalized citizens and British families with German names. Enemy aliens were interned; businesses faced boycotts; the royal family rebranded as “Windsor” in 1917. Ford himself, born Ford Hermann Hueffer, adopted the name Ford Madox Ford in 1919, reflecting this climate. The novel registers the era’s anxieties about identity and loyalty—how surnames, accents, and acquaintances could trigger suspicion—and examines how a culture that prized discretion and lineage also indulged xenophobic panic and social scapegoating.
Women’s political activism formed a prominent prewar backdrop. The Women’s Social and Political Union (founded 1903) pursued militant tactics from about 1908, confronting arrests, hunger strikes, and the 1913 “Cat and Mouse Act.” When war began, many suffrage leaders suspended militancy; women entered munitions, transport, and nursing at unprecedented scale. The 1918 Representation of the People Act enfranchised women over 30 meeting property or marital qualifications; the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act opened many professions. Some Do Not engages these transitions through figures whose education, work, and self-possession reflect the era’s redefinition of female agency.
Marriage law and sexual mores framed the stakes of reputation. Before the Matrimonial Causes Act 1923, women faced stricter grounds for divorce than men, and social stigma weighed heavily on wives accused of infidelity. Libel and slander suits could become weapons in personal and political struggles. Religious differences—Anglican norms, Catholic strictures, and nonconformist attitudes—complicated questions of separation and reconciliation. Ford’s novel scrutinizes the double standards that policed women’s behavior and protected male privilege, suggesting that the machinery of respectability was both a shield and a cudgel in upper- and middle-class life.
Urban modernity reshaped everyday rhythms. London’s clubs, restaurants, and hotels formed semi-public stages for business and gossip. The spread of telephones, telegrams, and increasingly punctual rail services made timekeeping and information management a social art and a bureaucratic necessity. Motorcars jostled with horse-drawn cabs; taxicabs threaded the city’s arteries. Ford’s emphasis on timetables, ledgers, and precise memory echoes the period’s technocratic confidence—and its fragility when systems falter, rumors outrun facts, or individuals refuse to fit within administrative categories.
War transformed the economy. The Ministry of Munitions (established 1915) coordinated factories, standardized production, and drew hundreds of thousands of women into industrial labor. Inflation accelerated; from 1918 rationing reached staples such as sugar and meat. Demobilization after 1918 produced unemployment spikes and strikes; a severe slump in 1920–1921 destabilized households and businesses. While Some Do Not is not an economic novel, its background hum is fiscal precarity: salaries, allowances, and obligations debated with new urgency as old securities vanish and the authority of accounts replaces the authority of pedigree.
The Irish Question shadowed domestic politics. The Third Home Rule Bill (introduced 1912) triggered the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the 1914 Curragh incident, revealing deep divisions within the Army and political class. War postponed Home Rule’s implementation; the 1916 Easter Rising and subsequent repression radicalized opinion, leading toward partition by 1921. Although Ford’s narrative stays within English circles, its sense of a polity fraying at the edges—and of elites distracted, defensive, and uncertain—resonates with the constitutional and military crises that Home Rule laid bare.
Culturally, Some Do Not belongs to European modernism. Published in 1924, it appears alongside postwar works that questioned linear narrative and stable identity—T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) being salient examples. Ford’s impressionist method—shifts in perspective, recursive time, interior monologue—mirrors the era’s intellectual dislocation. The form itself is historical evidence: the breakdown of Victorian omniscience into facets and fragments paralleled a society where mass death, bureaucratic abstraction, and contested truth undermined inherited narrative of progress and moral clarity.
Ford Madox Ford’s biography sharpens the novel’s historical veracity. Born in 1873, he edited the English Review from 1908, championing writers who would define modernism. He enlisted during the First World War and served as an officer on the Western Front, experiences that left him with lasting health and psychological effects. In 1919 he adopted the name Ford Madox Ford. These facts illuminate the novel’s insider knowledge of staff work, the texture of trenches and billets, and the delicate boundary between memory and trauma, even as the book refrains from documentary enumeration in favor of suggestive, lived detail.
The press and literary marketplace also shaped reception. Mass newspapers under proprietors like Lord Northcliffe influenced politics and taste; wartime and postwar censorship, while uneven, circumscribed what could be printed about sex, violence, and official matters. Yet small magazines and sympathetic publishers supported experimental fiction. Ford’s standing as an editor and collaborator (notably with Joseph Conrad earlier in his career) positioned him to synthesize administrative realism with stylistic innovation. Some Do Not emerges as both a participant in and a commentator on a culture negotiating the limits of propriety, candor, and artistic form in the shadow of war and scandalous rumor.
Author Biography
Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) was an English novelist, editor, and critic who bridged the late Victorian world and the rise of literary modernism. Celebrated for The Good Soldier and the Parade’s End tetralogy, he experimented with narrative order, perspective, and tonal nuance, helping to redefine the possibilities of the novel. As a pioneering editor, he championed both established figures and emerging talents, shaping the direction of twentieth-century letters. His work blends psychological acuity with stylistic precision, probing loyalty, identity, memory, and the slipperiness of truth. Ford’s twin roles as innovator and patron make him a central figure in English-language modernism.
Born into an artistic milieu with strong Pre-Raphaelite connections, Ford grew up in a culture that prized craft, painting, and poetry, influences that informed his prose style and aesthetic commitments. Educated in London and on the Continent, he acquired languages and a cosmopolitan outlook that attuned him to European realism and Symbolist technique. Early exposure to music and visual art reinforced an “impressionist” instinct—rendering experience as it is perceived rather than as an objective chronicle. After the First World War he adopted the name Ford Madox Ford, widely understood as both an artistic homage and a pragmatic move in an era of anti-German feeling.
Ford began as a poet and critic before turning decisively to fiction. He gained early notice with The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908), a sequence of historical novels admired for its atmosphere and moral complexity. Around the same time he collaborated with Joseph Conrad on ventures including The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), experiences that refined his sense of narrative structure and voice. In 1908 he founded The English Review, an influential monthly through which he published major and emerging writers, among them Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound. The magazine became a vital forum for modern prose and poetry.
The outbreak of the First World War reshaped Ford’s life and writing. He served in the British Army and saw the realities of the Western Front, experiences that deepened his skepticism about rhetoric and easy heroics. Published during the war, The Good Soldier (1915) exemplifies his mature method: a meticulously controlled, non-chronological narrative voiced by an unreliable narrator. Although its initial reception was mixed, the novel steadily rose in reputation and is now frequently cited among the finest English-language novels of the twentieth century. Its formal daring and moral ambiguity became hallmarks of Ford’s subsequent fiction.
Ford’s postwar peak came with Parade’s End, the four-novel sequence published between 1924 and 1928. It examines the upheavals of war and modernity through shifting viewpoints, braided timelines, and intensely rendered consciousness. The sequence’s ambition—social panorama, philosophical inquiry, and technical experiment—placed Ford in the front rank of modernists. He wrote influential criticism championing “impressionism” in fiction, urging writers to privilege felt experience and the fluidities of time over mechanical plotting. Biographical studies, notably Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), showed his gifts as memoirist and critic, situating his practice within a broader conversation about the evolving novel.
Alongside his novels and criticism, Ford was a transformative editor and mentor. In 1924 he launched the transatlantic review in Paris, a short-lived but pivotal journal that published and encouraged then-emerging writers including Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. He also helped launch the career of Jean Rhys, recognizing her distinctive voice and publishing her early work. Through such ventures he linked British traditions to the cosmopolitan energy of the expatriate scene, advocating clear, economical prose and an international literary conversation. His editorial judgment, as much as his fiction, shaped the tastes and techniques of the modernist generation.
In his later years Ford continued to write, lecture, and reflect on literature’s history and craft. Memoir and criticism occupied increasing space, with Return to Yesterday (1931) offering recollections of the literary world, and The March of Literature (1939) surveying global traditions with generous, idiosyncratic insight. He died in 1939, leaving a body of work whose standing has steadily grown. Renewed scholarship and adaptations have kept his books in circulation, while The Good Soldier and Parade’s End remain staples of modernist study. Ford’s legacy endures in the novel’s flexible architecture of time and perception, and in the editorial generosity that helped modernism find its voice.
Some Do Not (Historical Novel)
Part One
1
The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable varnish; the train ran as smoothly—Tietjens remembered thinking—as British gilt-edged securities[1q]. It travelled fast; yet had it swayed or jolted over the rail joints, except at the curve before Tonbridge or over the points at Ashford where these eccentricities are expected and allowed for, Macmaster, Tietjens felt certain, would have written to the company. Perhaps he would even have written to The Times[1].
Their class administered the world, not merely the newly created Imperial Department of Statistics under Sir Reginald Ingleby. If they saw policemen misbehave, railway porters lack civility, an insufficiency of street lamps, defects in public services or in foreign countries, they saw to it, either with nonchalant Balliol voices[2] or with letters to The Times, asking in regretful indignation: ‘Has the British This or That come to this?’ Or they wrote, in the serious reviews of which so many still survived, articles taking under their care, manners, the Arts, diplomacy, inter-Imperial trade, or the personal reputations of deceased statesmen and men of letters.
Macmaster, that is to say, would do all that: of himself Tietjens was not so certain. There sat Macmaster; smallish; Whig; with a trimmed, pointed black beard, such as a smallish man might wear to enhance his already germinated distinction; black hair of a stubborn fibre, drilled down with hard metal brushes; a sharp nose; strong, level teeth; a white, butterfly collar of the smoothness of porcelain; a tie confined by a gold ring, steel-blue speckled with black—to match his eyes, as Tietjens knew.
Tietjens, on the other hand, could not remember what coloured tie he had on. He had taken a cab from the office to their rooms, had got himself into a loose, tailored coat and trousers, and a soft shirt, had packed, quickly, but still methodically, a great number of things in an immense two-handled kit-bag, which you could throw into a guard’s van if need be. He disliked letting that ‘man’ touch his things; he had disliked letting his wife’s maid pack for him. He even disliked letting porters carry his kit-bag. He was a Tory—and as he disliked changing his clothes, there he sat, on the journey, already in large, brown, hugely welted and nailed golf boots, leaning forward on the edge of the cushion, his legs apart, on each knee an immense white hand—and thinking vaguely.
Macmaster, on the other hand, was leaning back, reading some small, unbound printed sheets, rather stiff, frowning a little. Tietjens knew that this was, for Macmaster, an impressive moment. He was correcting the proofs of his first book.
To this affair, as Tietjens knew, there attached themselves many fine shades. If, for instance, you had asked Macmaster whether he were a writer, he would have replied with the merest suggestion of a deprecatory shrug.
‘No, dear lady!’ for of course no man would ask the question of anyone so obviously a man of the world. And he would continue with a smile: ‘Nothing so fine! A mere trifle at odd moments. A critic, perhaps. Yes! A little of critic.’
Nevertheless Macmaster moved in drawing rooms that, with long curtains, blue china plates, large-patterned wallpapers and large, quiet mirrors, sheltered the long-haired of the Arts. And, as near as possible to the dear ladies who gave the At Homes, Macmaster could keep up the talk—a little magisterially. He liked to be listened to with respect when he spoke of Botticelli, Rossetti, and those early Italian artists whom he called ‘The Primitives.’ Tietjens had seen him there. And he didn’t disapprove.
For, if they weren’t, these gatherings, Society, they formed a stage on the long and careful road to a career in a first-class Government office. And, utterly careless as Tietjens imagined himself of careers or offices, he was, if sardonically, quite sympathetic towards his friend’s ambitiousnesses. It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.
The youngest son of a Yorkshire country gentleman, Tietjens himself was entitled to the best—the best that first-class public offices and first-class people could afford. He was without ambition, but these things would come to him as they do in England. So he could afford to be negligent of his attire, of the company he kept, of the opinions he uttered. He had a little private income under his mother’s settlement; a little income from the Imperial Department of Statistics; he had married a woman of means, and he was, in the Tory manner, sufficiently a master of flouts and jeers to be listened to when he spoke. He was twenty-six; but, very big, in a fair, untidy, Yorkshire way, he carried more weight than his age warranted. His chief, Sir Reginald Ingleby, when Tietjens chose to talk of public tendencies which influenced statistics, would listen with attention. Sometimes Sir Reginald would say: ‘You’re a perfect encyclopaedia of exact material knowledge, Tietjens,’ and Tietjens thought that that was his due, and he would accept the tribute in silence.
At a word from Sir Reginald, Macmaster, on the other hand, would murmur: ‘You’re very good, Sir Reginald!’ and Tietjens thought that perfectly proper.
Macmaster was a little the senior in the service, as he was probably a little the senior in age. For, as to his roommate’s years, or as to his exact origins, there was a certain blank in Tietjens’ knowledge. Macmaster was obviously Scotch by birth, and you accepted him as what was called a son of the manse. No doubt he was really the son of a grocer in Cupar or a railway porter in Edinburgh. It does not matter with the Scotch, and as he was very properly reticent as to his ancestry, having accepted him, you didn’t, even mentally, make enquiries.
Tietjens always had accepted Macmaster—at Clifton, at Cambridge, in Chancery Lane and in their rooms at Gray’s Inn[3]. So for Macmaster he had a very deep affection—even a gratitude. And Macmaster might be considered as returning these feelings. Certainly he had always done his best to be of service to Tietjens. Already at the Treasury and attached as private secretary to Sir Reginald Ingleby, whilst Tietjens was still at Cambridge, Macmaster had brought to the notice of Sir Reginald Tietjens’ many great natural gifts, and Sir Reginald, being on the look-out for young men for his ewe lamb, his newly founded department, had very readily accepted Tietjens as his third in command. On the other hand, it had been Tietjens’ father who had recommended Macmaster to the notice of Sir Thomas Block at the Treasury itself. And, indeed, the Tietjens family had provided a little money—that was Tietjens’ mother really—to get Macmaster through Cambridge and install him in Town. He had repaid the small sum—paying it partly by finding room in his chambers for Tietjens when in turn he came to Town.
With a Scots young man such a position had been perfectly possible. Tietjens had been able to go to his fair, ample, saintly mother in her morning-room and say:
‘Look here, mother, that fellow Macmaster! He’ll need a little money to get through the University,’ and his mother would answer:
‘Yes, my dear. How much?’
With an English young man of the lower orders that would have left a sense of class obligation. With Macmaster it just didn’t.
During Tietjens’ late trouble—for four months before Tietjens’ wife had left him to go abroad with another man—Macmaster had filled a place that no other mart could have filled. For the basis of Christopher Tietjens’ emotional existence was a complete taciturnity—at any rate as to his emotions. As Tietjens saw the world, you didn’t ‘talk.’ Perhaps you didn’t even think about how you felt.
And, indeed, his wife’s flight had left him almost completely without emotions that he could realize, and he had not spoken more than twenty words at most about the event. Those had been mostly to his father, who, very tall, very largely built, silver-haired and erect, had drifted, as it were, into Macmaster’s drawing-room in Gray’s Inn, and after five minutes of silence had said:
‘You will divorce?’
Christopher had answered:
‘No! No one but a blackguard would ever submit a woman to the ordeal of divorce.’
Mr Tietjens had suggested that, and after an interval had asked:
‘You will permit her to divorce you?’
He had answered:
‘If she wishes it. There’s the child to be considered.’ Mr Tietjens said:
‘You will get her settlement transferred to the child?’ Christopher answered:
‘If it can be done without friction.’
Mr Tietjens had commented only:
‘Ah!’ Some minutes later he had said:
‘Your mother’s very well.’ Then: ‘That motor-plough didn’t answer,’ and then: ‘I shall be dining at the club.’ Christopher said:
‘May I bring Macmaster in, sir? You said you would put him up.’
Mr Tietjens answered:
‘Yes, do. Old General ffolliot will be there. He’ll second him. He’d better make his acquaintance.’ He had gone away.
Tietjens considered that his relationship with his father was an almost perfect one. They were like two men in the club—the only club; thinking so alike that there was no need to talk. His father had spent a great deal of time abroad before succeeding to the estate. When, over the moors, he went into the industrial town that he owned, he drove always in a coach-and-four. Tobacco smoke had never been known inside Groby Hall: Mr Tietjens had twelve pipes filled every morning by his head gardener and placed in rose bushes down the drive. These he smoked during the day. He farmed a good deal of his own land; had sat for Holdernesse from 1876 to 1881, and had not presented himself for election after the redistribution of seats; he was patron of eleven livings; rode to hounds every now and then, and shot fairly regularly. He had three other sons and two daughters, and was now sixty-one.
To his sister Effie, on the day after his wife’s elopement, Christopher had said over the telephone:
‘Will you take Tommie for an indefinite period? Mar-chant will come with him. She offers to take charge of your two youngest as well, so you’ll save a maid, and I’ll pay their board and a bit over.’
The voice of his sister—from Yorkshire—had answered: ‘Certainly, Christopher.’ She was the wife of a vicar, near Groby, and she had several children.
To Macmaster Tietjens had said:
‘Sylvia has left me with that fellow Perowne.’ Macmaster had answered only: ‘Ah!’
Tietjens had continued:
‘I’m letting the house and warehousing the furniture. Tommie is going to my sister Effie. Marchant is going with him.’
Macmaster had said:
‘Then you’ll be wanting your old rooms.’ Macmaster occupied a very large storey of the Gray’s Inn buildings. After Tietjens had left him on his marriage he had continued to enjoy solitude, except that his man had moved down from the attic to the bedroom formerly occupied by Tietjens.
Tietjens said:
‘I’ll come in to-morrow night if I may. That will give Ferens time to get back into his attic.’
That morning, at breakfast, four months having passed, Tietjens had received a letter from his wife. She asked, without any contrition at all, to be taken back. She was fed-up with Perowne and Brittany.
Tietjens looked up at Macmaster. Macmaster was already half out of his chair, looking at him with enlarged, steel-blue eyes, his beard quivering. By the time Tietjens spoke Macmaster had his hand on the neck of the cut-glass brandy decanter in the brown wood tantalus.
Tietjens said:
‘Sylvia asks me to take her back.’
Macmaster said:
‘Have a little of this!’
Tietjens was about to say: ‘No,’ automatically. He changed that to:
‘Yes. Perhaps. A liqueur glass.’
He noticed that the lip of the decanter agitated, tinkling on the glass. Macmaster must be trembling. Macmaster, with his back still turned, said:
‘Shall you take her back?’
Tietjens answered:
‘I imagine so.’ The brandy warmed his chest in its descent. Macmaster said:
‘Better have another.’
Tietjens answered:
‘Yes. Thanks.’
Macmaster went on with his breakfast and his letters. So did Tietjens. Ferens came in, removed the bacon plates and set on the table a silver water-heated dish that contained poached eggs and haddock. A long time afterwards Tietjens said:
‘Yes, in principle I’m determined to. But I shall take three days to think out the details.’
He seemed to have no feelings about the matter. Certain insolent phrases in Sylvia’s letter hung in his mind. He preferred a letter like that. The brandy made no difference to his mentality, but it seemed to keep him from shivering.
Macmaster said:
‘Suppose we go down to Rye by the 11.40. We could get a round after tea now the days are long. I want to call on a parson near there. He has helped me with my book.’
Tietjens said:
‘Did your poet know parsons? But of course he did_ Duchemin is the name, isn’t it?
Macmaster said:
‘We could call about two-thirty. That will be all right in the country. We stay till four with a cab outside. We can be on the first tee at five. If we like the course we’ll stay next day: then Tuesday at Hythe and Wednesday at Sandwich. Or we could stay at Rye all your three days.’
‘It will probably suit me better to keep moving,’ Tietjens said. ‘There are those British Columbia figures of yours. If we took a cab now I could finish them for you in an hour and twelve minutes. Then British North Africa can go to the printers. It’s only 8.30 now.’
Macmaster said, with some concern:
‘Oh, but you couldn’t: I can make our going all right with Sir Reginald.’
Tietjens said:
‘Oh yes, I can. Ingleby will be pleased if you tell him they’re finished. I’ll have them ready for you to give him when he comes at ten.’
Macmaster said:
‘What an extraordinary fellow you are, Chrissie. Almost a genius!’
‘Oh,’ Tietjens answered: ‘I was looking at your papers yesterday after you’d left and I’ve got most of the totals in my head. I was thinking about them before I went to sleep. I think you make a mistake in over-estimating the pull of Klondyke this year on the population. The passes are open, but relatively no one is going through. I’ll add a note to that effect.’
In the cab he said:
‘I’m sorry to bother you with my beastly affairs. But how will it affect you and the office?’
‘The office,’ Macmaster said, ‘not at all. It is supposed that Sylvia is nursing Mrs Satterthwaite abroad. As for me, I wish ... ’—he closed his small, strong teeth—‘I wish you would drag the woman through the mud. By God I do! Why should she mangle you for the rest of your life? She’s done enough!’
Tietjens gazed out over the flap of the cab.
That explained a question. Some days before, a young man, a friend of his wife’s rather than of his own, had approached him in the club and had said that he hoped Mrs Satterthwaite—his wife’s mother—was better. He said now:
‘I see. Mrs Satterthwaite has probably gone abroad to cover up Sylvia’s retreat. She’s a sensible woman, if a bitch.’
The hansom ran through nearly empty streets, it being very early for the public official quarters. The hoofs of the horse clattered precipitately. Tietjens preferred a hansom, horses being made for gentlefolk. He had known nothing of how his fellows had viewed his affairs. It was breaking up a great, numb inertia to enquire.
During the last few months he had employed himself in tabulating from memory the errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which a new edition had lately appeared. He had even written an article for a dull monthly on the subject. It had been so caustic as to miss its mark, rather. He despised people who used works of reference; but the point of view had been so unfamiliar that his article had galled no one’s withers, except possibly Macmaster’s. Actually it had pleased Sir Reginald Ingleby, who had been glad to think that he had under him a young man with a memory so tenacious and so encyclopaedic a knowledge ... That had been a congenial occupation, like a long drowse. Now he had to make enquiries. He said:
‘And my breaking up the establishment at twenty-nine? How’s that viewed? I’m not going to have a house again.’
‘It’s considered,’ Macmaster answered, ‘that Lowndes Street did not agree with Mrs Satterthwaite. That accounted for her illness. Drains wrong. I may say that Sir Reginald entirely—expressly—approves. He does not think that young married men in Government offices should keep up expensive establishments in the S.W. district.’
Tietjens said:
‘Damn him.’ He added: ‘He’s probably right though.’ He then said: ‘Thanks. That’s all I want to know. A certain discredit has always attached to cuckolds. Very properly. A man ought to be able to keep his wife.’
Macmaster exclaimed anxiously:
‘No! No! Chrissie.’
Tietjens continued:
‘And a first-class public office is very like a public school. It might very well object to having a man whose wife had bolted amongst its members. I remember Clifton hated it when the Governors decided to admit the first Jew and the first nigger.’
Macmaster said:
‘I wish you wouldn’t go on.’
‘There was a fellow,’ Tietjens continued, ‘whose land was next to ours. Conder his name was. His wife was habitually unfaithful to him. She used to retire with some fellow for three months out of every year. Conder never moved a finger. But we felt Groby and the neighbourhood were unsafe. It was awkward introducing him—not to mention her—in your drawing-room. All sorts of awkwardnesses. Everyone knew the younger children weren’t Conder’s . A fellow married the youngest daughter and took over the hounds. And not a soul called on her. It wasn’t rational or just. But that’s why society distrusts the cuckold, really. It never knows when it mayn’t be driven into something irrational and unjust.’
‘But you aren’t,’ Macmaster said with real anguish, ‘going to let Sylvia behave like that.’
‘I don’t know,’ Tietjens said. ‘How am I to stop it? Mind you, I think Conder was quite right. Such calamities are the will of God. A gentleman accepts them. If the woman won’t divorce, he must accept them, and it gets talked about. You seem to have made it all right this time. You and, I suppose, Mrs Satterthwaite between you. But you won’t be always there. Or I might come across another woman.’
Macmaster said:
‘Ah!’ and after a moment:
‘What then?’
Tietjens said:
‘God knows ... There’s that poor little beggar to be considered. Marchant says he’s beginning to talk broad Yorkshire already.’
Macmaster said:
‘If it wasn’t for that ... That would be a solution.’
Tietjens said: ‘Ah!’
When he paid the cabman, in front of a grey cement portal with a gabled arch, reaching up, he said:
‘You’ve been giving the mare less liquorice in her mash. I told you she’d go better.’
The cabman, with a scarlet, varnished face, a shiny hat, a drab box-cloth coat and a gardenia in his buttonhole, said:
‘Ah! Trust you to remember, sir.’
In the train, from beneath his pile of polished dressing and despatch cases—Tietjens had thrown his immense kitbag with his own hands into the guard’s van—Macmaster looked across at his friend. It was, for him, a great day. Across his face were the proof-sheets of his first, small, delicate-looking volume ... A small page, the type black and still odorous! He had the agreeable smell of the printer’s ink in his nostrils; the fresh paper was still a little damp. In his white, rather spatulate, always slightly cold fingers was the pressure of the small, flat, gold pencil he had purchased especially for these corrections. He had found none to make.
He had expected a wallowing of pleasure—almost the only sensuous pleasure he had allowed himself for many months. Keeping up the appearances of an English gentleman on an exiguous income was no mean task. But to wallow in your own phrases, to be rejoiced by the savour of your own shrewd pawkiness, to feel your rhythm balanced and yet sober—that is a pleasure beyond most, and an inexpensive one at that. He had had it from mere ‘articles’—on the philosophies and domestic lives of such great figures as Carlyle and Mill, or on the expansion of inter-colonial trade. This was a book.
He relied upon it to consolidate his position. In the office they were mostly ‘born,’ and not vastly sympathetic. There was a sprinkling, too—it was beginning to be a large one—of young men who had obtained their entry by merit or by sheer industry. These watched promotions jealously, discerning nepotic increases of increment and clamouring amongst themselves at favouritisms.
To these he had been able to turn a cold shoulder. His intimacy with Tietjens permitted him to be rather on the ‘born’ side of the institution, his agreeableness—he knew he was agreeable and useful!—to Sir Reginald Ingleby protecting him in the main from unpleasantness. His ‘articles’ had given him a certain right to an austerity of demeanour; his book he trusted to let him adopt an almost judicial attitude. He would then be the Mr Macmaster, the critic, the authority. And the first-class departments are not averse to having distinguished men as ornaments to their company; at any rate the promotions of the distinguished are not objected to. So Macmaster saw—almost physically—Sir Reginald Ingleby perceiving the empressement with which his valued subordinate was treated in the drawing-rooms of Mrs Leamington, Mrs Cressy, the Hon. Mrs de Limoux; Sir Reginald would perceive that, for he was not a reader himself of much else than Government publications, and he would feel fairly safe in making easy the path of his critically gifted and austere young helper. The son of a very poor shipping clerk in an obscure Scotch harbour town, Macmaster had very early decided on the career that he would make. As between the heroes of Mr Smiles, an author enormously popular in Macmaster’s boyhood, and the more distinctly intellectual achievements open to the very poor Scot, Macmaster had had no difficulty in choosing. A pit lad may rise to be a mine owner; a hard, gifted, unsleeping Scots youth, pursuing unobtrusively and unobjectionably a course of study and of public usefulness, will certainly achieve distinction, security, and the quiet admiration of those around him. It was the difference between the may and the will, and Macmaster had had no difficulty in making his choice. He saw himself by now almost certain of a career that should give him at fifty a knighthood, and long before that a competence, a drawing-room of his own and a lady who should contribute to his unobtrusive fame, she moving about, in that room, amongst the best of the intellects of the day, gracious, devoted, a tribute at once to his discernment and his achievements. Without some disaster he was sure of himself. Disasters come to men through drink, bankruptcy, and women. Against the first two he knew himself immune, though his expenses had a tendency to outrun his income, and he was always a little in debt to Tietj ens. Tietjens fortunately had means. As to the third, he was not so certain. His life had necessarily been starved of women and, arrived at a stage when the female element might, even with due respect to caution, be considered as a legitimate feature of his life, he had to fear a rashness of choice due to that very starvation. The type of woman he needed he knew to exactitude: tall, graceful, dark, loose-gowned, passionate yet circumspect, oval-featured, deliberate, gracious to everyone around her. He could almost hear the very rustle of her garments.
And yet ... He had had passages when a sort of blind unreason had attracted him almost to speechlessness towards girls of the most giggling, behind-the-counter order, big-bosomed, scarlet-cheeked. It was only Tietjens who had saved him from the most questionable entanglements.
‘Hang it,’ Tietjens would say, ‘don’t get messing round that trollop. All you could do with her would be to set her up in a tobacco shop, and she would be tearing your beard out inside the quarter. Let alone you can’t afford it.’
And Macmaster, who would have sentimentalized the plump girl to the tune of Highland Mary, would for a day damn Tietjens up and down for a coarse brute. But at the moment he thanked God for Tietj ens. There he sat, near to thirty, without an entanglement, a blemish on his health, or a worry with regard to any woman.
With deep affection and concern he looked across at his brilliant junior, who hadn’t saved himself. Tietjens had fallen into the most barefaced snare, into the cruellest snare, of the worst woman that could be imagined.
And Macmaster suddenly realized that he wasn’t wallowing, as he had imagined that he would, in the sensuous current of his prose. He had begun spiritedly with the first neat square of a paragraph ... Certainly his publishers had done well by him in the matter of print:
‘Whether we consider him as the imaginer of mysterious, sensuous and exact plastic beauty; as the manipulator of sonorous, rolling and full-mouthed lines; of words as full of colour as were his canvases; or whether we regard him as the deep philosopher, elucidating and drawing his illumination from the arcana of a mystic hardly greater than himself, to Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, the subject of this little monograph, must be accorded the name of one who has profoundly influenced the outward aspects, the human contacts, and all those things that go to make up the life of our higher civilization as we live it to-day ... ’
Macmaster realized that he had only got thus far with his prose, and had got thus far without any of the relish that he had expected, and that then he had turned to the middle paragraph of page three—after the end of his exordium. His eyes wandered desultorily along the line:
‘The subject of these pages was born in the western central district of the metropolis in the year ... ’
The words conveyed nothing to him at all. He understood that that was because he hadn’t got over that morning. He had looked up from his coffee-cup—over the rim—and had taken in a blue-grey sheet of notepaper in Tietjens’ fingers, shaking, inscribed in the large, broad-nibbed writing of that detestable harridan. And Tietjens had been staring—staring with the intentness of a maddened horse—at his, Macmaster’s, face! And grey! Shapeless! The nose like a pallid triangle on a bladder of lard! That was Tietjens’ face ...
He could still feel the blow, physical, in the pit of his stomach! He had thought Tietjens was going mad; that he was mad. It had passed. Tietjens had assumed the mask of his indolent, insolent self. At the office, but later, he had delivered an extraordinarily forceful—and quite rude—lecture to Sir Reginald on his reasons for differing from the official figures of population movement in the western territories. Sir Reginald had been much impressed. The figures were wanted for a speech of the Colonial Minister—or an answer to a question—and Sir Reginald had promised to put Tietjens’ views before the great man. That was the sort of thing to do a young fellow good—because it got kudos for the office. They had to work on figures provided by the Colonial Government, and if they could correct those fellows by sheer brain work—that scored.
But there sat Tietjens, in his grey tweeds, his legs apart, lumpish, clumsy, his tallowy, intelligent-looking hands drooping inert between his legs, his eyes gazing at a coloured photograph of the port of Boulogne beside the mirror beneath the luggage rack. Blond, high-coloured, vacant apparently, you couldn’t tell what in the world he was thinking of. The mathematical theory of waves, very likely, or slips in someone’s article on Arminianism. For absurd as it seemed, Macmaster knew that he knew next to nothing of his friend’s feelings. As to them, practically no confidences had passed between them. Just two:
On the night before his starting for his wedding in Paris Tietjens had said to him:
‘Vinny, old fellow, it’s a back door way out of it. She’s bitched me.’
And once, rather lately, he had said:
‘Damn it I I don’t even know if the child’s my own!’
This last confidence had shocked Macmaster so irremediably—the child had been a seven months’ child, rather ailing, and Tietjens’ clumsy tenderness towards it had been so marked that, even without this nightmare, Macmaster had been affected by the sight of them together—that confidence then had pained Macmaster so frightfully, it was so appalling, that Macmaster had regarded it almost as an insult. It was the sort of confidence a man didn’t make to his equal, but only to solicitors, doctors, or the clergy who are not quite men. Or, at any rate, such confidences are not made between men without appeals for sympathy, and Tietjens had made no appeal for sympathy He had just added sardonically:
‘She gives me the benefit of the agreeable doubt. And she’s as good as said as much to Marchant’—Marchant had been Tietjens’ old nurse.
Suddenly—and as if in a sort of unconscious losing of his head—Macmaster remarked:
‘You can’t say the man wasn’t a poet!’
The remark had been, as it were, torn from him, because he had observed, in the strong light of the compartment, that half of Tietjens’ forelock and a roundish patch behind it was silvery white. That might have been going on for weeks: you live beside a man and notice his changes very little. Yorkshire men of fresh colour and blondish hair often go speckled with white very young; Tietjens had had a white hair or two at the age of fourteen, very noticeable in the sunlight when he had taken his cap off to bowl.
But Macmaster’s mind, taking appalled charge, had felt assured that Tietjens had gone white with the shock of his wife’s letter: in four hours! That meant that terrible things must be going on within him; his thoughts, at all costs, must be distracted. The mental process in Macmaster had been quite unconscious. He would not, advisedly, have introduced the painter-poet as a topic.
Tietjens said:
‘I haven’t said anything at all that I can remember.’ The obstinacy of his hard race awakened in Macmaster:
‘“Since”,’ he quoted,
“when we stand side by side Only hands may meet, Better half this weary world Lay between us, sweet! Better far tho’ hearts may break Bid farewell for aye! Lest thy sad eyes, meeting mine, Tempt my soul away!”
‘You can’t,’ he continued, ‘say that that isn’t poetry Great poetry.’
‘I can’t say,’ Tietjens answered contemptuously. ‘I don’t read poetry except Byron. But it’s a filthy picture ... ’
Macmaster said uncertainly:
‘I don’t know that I know the picture. Is it in Chicago?’ ‘It isn’t painted!’ Tietjens said. ‘But it’s there!’ He continued with sudden fury:
‘Damn it. What’s the sense of all these attempts to justify fornication? England’s mad about it. Well, you’ve got your John Stuart Mills and your George Eliots for the high-class thing. Leave the furniture out! Or leave me out at least. I tell you it revolts me to think of that obese, oily man who never took a bath, in a grease-spotted dressing-gown and the underclothes he’s slept in, standing beside a five-shilling model with crimped hair, or some Mrs. W. Three Stars, gazing into a mirror that reflects their fetid selves and gilt sunfish and drop chandeliers and plates sickening with cold bacon fat and gurgling about passion.’
Macmaster had gone chalk white, his short beard bristling:
‘You daren’t ... you daren’t talk like that,’ he stuttered.
‘I dare!’ Tietjens answered; ‘but I oughtn’t to ... to you! I admit that. But you oughtn’t, almost as much, to talk about that stuff to me, either. It’s an insult to my intelligence.’
‘Certainly,’ Macmaster said stiffly, ‘the moment was not opportune.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ Tietjens answered. The moment can never be opportune. Let’s agree that making a career is a dirty business—for me as for you! But decent augurs grin behind their masks. They never preach to each other.’
‘You’re getting esoteric,’ Macmaster said faintly.
‘I’ll underline,’ Tietjens went on. ‘I quite understand that the favour of Mrs Cressy and Mrs de Limoux is essential to you! They have the ear of that old don Ingleby.’
Macmaster said:
‘Damn!’
‘I quite agree,’ Tietjens continued, ‘I quite approve. It’s the game as it has always been played. It’s the tradition, so it’s right. It’s been sanctioned since the days of the Précieuses Ridicules[4].’
‘You’ve a way of putting things,’ Macmaster said.
‘I haven’t,’ Tietjens answered. ‘It’s just because I haven’t that what I do say sticks out in the minds of fellows like you who are always fiddling about after literary expression. But what I do say is this: I stand for monogamy.’
Macmaster uttered a ’You!’ of amazement.
Tietjens answered with a negligent ’I!’ He continued:
‘I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of course, if a man who’s a man wants to have a woman, he has her. And again, no talking about it. He’d no doubt be in the end better, and better off, if he didn’t. Just as it would probably be better for him if he didn’t have the second glass of whisky and soda ... ’
‘You call that monogamy and chastity!’ Macmaster interjected.
‘I do,’ Tietjens answered, ‘and it probably is, at any rate it’s clean. What is loathsome is all your fumbling in placketholes and polysyllabic Justification by Love. You stand for lachrymose polygamy. That’s all right if you can get your club to change its rules.’
‘You’re out of my depth,’ Macmaster said. ‘And being very disagreeable. You appear to be justifying promiscuity. I don’t like it.’
