No More Parades: A novel

by Ford Madox Ford

"I have to look after Christopher now and then." He remained hanging over her with a schoolboy grin for a minute, then he drifted away as an object sinks into deep water. . . . Father Consett again hovered near her. She exclaimed:

"But the real point is, father. . . . Is it sporting? . . . Sporting or whatever it is?" And Father Consett breathed: "Ah! . . ." with his terrible power of arousing doubts. . . . She said:

"When I saw Christopher . . . Last night? . . . Yes, it was last night . . . Turning back to go up that hill. . . . And I had been talking about him to a lot of grinning private soldiers. . . . To madden him. . . . You mustn't make scenes before the servants. . . . A heavy man, tired . . . come down the hill and lumbering up again. . . . There was a searchlight turned on him just as he turned. . . . I remembered the white bulldog I thrashed on the night before it died. . . . A tired, silent beast . . . with a fat white behind. . . . Tired out. . . . You couldn't see its tail because it was turned down, the stump. . . . A great, silent beast. . . . The vet said it had been poisoned with red lead by burglars. . . . It's beastly to die of red lead. ... It eats up the liver. . . . And you think you're getting better for a fortnight. And you're always cold . . . freezing in the blood-vessels. . . . And the poor beast had left its kennel to try and be let into the fire. . . . And I found it at the door when I came in from a dance without Christopher. . . . And got the rhinoceros whip and lashed into it. . . . There's a pleasure in lashing into a naked white beast. . . . Obese and silent . . . Like Christopher. . . . I thought Christopher might. . . . That night. . . . It went through my head. . . . It hung down its head. . . . A great head, room for a whole British encyclopædia of misinformation, as Christopher used to put it. . . . It said: 'What a hope!' ... As I hope to be saved, though I never shall be, the dog said: 'What a hope!' . . . Snow-white in quite black bushes. . . . And it went under a bush. . . . They found it dead there in the morning. . . . You can't imagine what it looked like, with its head over its shoulder, as it looked back and said: What a hope! to me. . . . Under a dark bush. An eu . . . eu . . . euonymus, isn't it? . . . In thirty degrees of frost with all the blood-vessels exposed on the naked surface of the skin. . . . It's the seventh circle of hell, isn't it? the frozen one . . . The last stud-white bulldog of that breed. . . . As Christopher is the last stud-white hope of the Groby Tory breed. . . . Modelling himself on our Lord. . . . But our Lord was never married. He never touched on topics of sex. Good for Him. . . ."

She said: "The ten minutes is up, father . . ." and looked at the round, starred surface between the diamonds of her wrist watch. She said: "Good God! . . . Only one minute. . . . I've thought all that in only one minute. . . . I understand how hell can be an eternity. . . ."

Christopher, very weary, and ex-Sergeant-Major Cowley, very talkative by now, loomed down between palms. Cowley was saying: "It's infamous! . . . It's past bearing. . . . To re-order the draft at eleven. . . ." They sank into chairs. . . . Sylvia extended towards Tietjens a small packet of letters. She said: "You had better look at these. . . . I had your letters sent to me from the flat as there was so much uncertainty about your movements. . . ." She found that she did not dare, under Father Consett's eyes, to look at Tietjens as she said that. She said to Cowley: "We might be quiet for a minute or two while the captain reads his letters. . . . Have another liqueur? . . ."

She then observed that Tietjens just bent open the top of the letter from Mrs. Wannop and then opened that from his brother Mark:

"Curse it," she said, "I've given him what he wants! . . . He knows. . . . He's seen the address . . . that they're still in Bedford Park. . . . He can think of the Wannop girl as there. . . . He has not been able to know, till now, where she is. . . . He'll be imagining himself in bed with her there. . . ."

Father Consett, his broad, unmodelled dark face full of intelligence and with the blissful unction of the saint and martyr, was leaning over Tietjens' shoulder. . . . He must be breathing down Christopher's back as, her mother said, he always did when she held a hand at auction and he could not play because it was between midnight and his celebrating the holy mass. . . .

She said:

"No, I am not going mad. . . . This is an effect of fatigue on the optic nerves. . . . Christopher has explained that to me . . . He says that when his eyes have been very tired with making one of his senior wrangler's calculations he has often seen a woman in a eighteenth-century dress looking into a drawer in his bureau. . . . Thank God, I've had Christopher to explain things to me. . . . I'll never let him go. . . . Never, never, let him go. . . ."