Parade's End (Wordsworth Classics) by Ford Ford Madox

Author:Ford, Ford Madox [Ford, Ford Madox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
Published: 2012-11-30T17:00:00+00:00

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 pillowslip 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 . . .

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