No More Parades - Ford Madox Ford (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📗

minister’s included, to agree with Mrs. Tietjens of Groby that they had altogether too much of it⁠ ⁠…

But here!⁠ ⁠… She seemed to be in the very belly of the ugly affair⁠ ⁠… It moved and moved, under your eyes dissolving, yet always there. As if you should try to follow one diamond of pattern in the coil of an immense snake that was in irrevocable motion⁠ ⁠… It gave her a sense of despair: the engrossment of Tietjens, in common with the engrossment of this disreputable toper. She had never seen Tietjens put his head together with any soul before: he was the lonely buffalo⁠ ⁠… Now! Anyone: any fatuous staff-officer, whom at home he would never so much as have spoken to: any trustworthy beer-sodden sergeant, any street urchin dressed up as orderly⁠ ⁠… They had only to appear and all his mind went into a close-headed conference over some ignoble point in the child’s game: the laundry, the chiropody, the religions, the bastards⁠ ⁠… of millions of the indistinguishable⁠ ⁠… Or their deaths as well! But, in heaven’s name what hypocrisy, or what inconceivable chicken-heartedness was this? They promoted this beanfeast of carnage for their own ends: they caused the deaths of men in inconceivable holocausts of pain and terror. Then they had crises of agony over the death of one single man. For it was plain to her that Tietjens was in the middle of a full nervous breakdown. Over one man’s death! She had never seen him so suffer; she had never seen him so appeal for sympathy: him, a cold fiend of reticence! Yet he was now in an agony! Now!⁠ ⁠… And she began to have a sense of the infinitely spreading welter of pain, going away to an eternal horizon of night⁠ ⁠… ’Ell for the Other Ranks! Apparently it was hell for the officers as well.

The real compassion in the voice of that snuffling, half-drunken old man had given her a sense of that enormous wickedness⁠ ⁠… These horrors, these infinities of pain, this atrocious condition of the world had been brought about in order that men should indulge themselves in orgies of promiscuity⁠ ⁠… That in the end was at the bottom of male honour, of male virtue, observance of treaties, upholding of the flag⁠ ⁠… An immense warlock’s carnival of appetites, lusts, ebrieties⁠ ⁠… And once set in motion there was no stopping it⁠ ⁠… This state of things would never cease⁠ ⁠… Because once they had tasted of the joy⁠—the blood⁠—of this game, who would let it end?⁠ ⁠… These men talked of these things that occupied them there with the lust of men telling dirty stories in smoking-rooms⁠ ⁠… That was the only parallel!

There was no stopping it, any more than there was any stopping the by now all but intoxicated ex-sergeant major. He was off! With, as might be expected, advice to a young couple with differences of opinion! The wine had made him bold!

In the depth of her pictures of these horrors, snatches of his wisdom penetrated to her intelligence⁠ ⁠… Queer snatches⁠ ⁠… She was getting it certainly in the neck!⁠ ⁠… Someone, to add to the noise, had started some mechanical musical instrument in an adjacent hall.

“Corn an’ lasses
Served by Ras’us!”

a throaty voice proclaimed,

“I’d be tickled to death to know that I could go
And stay right there⁠ ⁠…”

The ex-sergeant-major was adding to her knowledge the odd detail that when he, Sergeant-Major Cowley, went to the wars⁠—seven of them⁠—his missus, Mrs. Cowley, spent the first three days and nights unpicking and re-hemstitching every sheet and pillow-slip in the ’ouse. To keep ’erself f’m thinking⁠ ⁠… This was apparently meant as a reproof or an exhortation to her, Sylvia Tietjens⁠ ⁠… Well, he was all right! Of the same class as Father Consett, and with the same sort of wisdom.

The gramophone howled: a new note of rumbling added itself to the exterior tumult and continued through six mitigated thumps of the gun in the garden⁠ ⁠… In the next interval, Cowley was in the midst of a valedictory address to her. He was asking her to remember that the captain had had a sleepless night the night before.

There occurred to her irreverent mind a sentence of one of the Duchess of Marlborough’s letters to Queen Anne. The duchess had visited the general during one of his campaigns in Flanders. “My Lord,” she wrote, “did me the honour three times in his boots!”⁠ ⁠… The sort of thing she would remember⁠ ⁠… She would⁠—she would⁠—have tried it on the sergeant-major, just to see Tietjens’ face, for the sergeant-major would not have understood⁠ ⁠… And who cared if he did!⁠ ⁠… He was bibulously skirting round the same idea⁠ ⁠…

But the tumult increased to an incredible volume: even the thrillings of the nearby gramophone of two hundred horsepower, or whatever it was, became mere shimmerings of a gold thread in a drab fabric of sound. She screamed blasphemies that she was hardly aware of knowing. She had to scream against the noise: she was no more responsible for the blasphemy than if she had lost her identity under an anaesthetic. She had lost her identity⁠ ⁠… She was one of this crowd!

The general woke in his chair and gazed malevolently at their group as if they alone were responsible for the noise. It dropped. Dead! You only knew it, because you caught the tail end of a belated woman’s scream from the hall and the general shouting: “For God’s sake don’t start that damned gramophone again!” In the blessed silence, after preliminary wheezes and guitar noises, an astonishing voice burst out:

“Less than the dust⁠ ⁠…
Before thy char⁠ ⁠…”

And then, stopping after a murmur of voices, began:

“Pale hands I loved⁠ ⁠…”

The general sprang from his chair and rushed to the hall⁠ ⁠… He came back crestfallenly.

“It’s some damned civilian bigwig⁠ ⁠… A novelist, they say⁠ ⁠… I can’t stop him⁠ ⁠…” He added with disgust: “The hall’s full of young beasts and harlots⁠ ⁠… Dancing!”⁠ ⁠… The melody had indeed, after a buzz, changed to a languorous and interrupted variation of a waltz. “Dancing in the dark!” the general said with enhanced disgust⁠ ⁠… “And