Some Do Not … by Ford Madox Ford (story read aloud txt) 📕
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Some Do Not … opens at the cusp of World War I. Christopher Tietjens, a government statistician, and his friend Vincent Macmaster, an aspiring literary critic, are visiting the English countryside. Tietjens, preoccupied with his disastrous marriage, meets Valentine Wannop, a suffragette, during a round of golf. As their love story develops, the novel explores the horrors of the war without the narrative ever entering the battlefield.
The characters are complex and nuanced. Tietjens is an old-fashioned man even by the standards of his day; he’s concerned with honor and doing the right thing, but he lives in a society that only pays those values lip service. Yet he himself isn’t free of a thread of hypocrisy: he won’t leave his deeply unhappy marriage because that would be the wrong way to act, but the reader is left wondering if he tolerates his situation simply because he married up in class. He wants to do to the noble and right thing, but does that mean going to war?
The men and women around him each have their individual motivations, and they are often conniving and unlikable in their aspirations even as the propaganda of England at war paints the country as a moral and heroic one. The delicate interplay of each character’s subtleties paints a rich portrait of 1920s English society, as the romantic ideals of right and wrong clash with notions of ambition and practicality.
The prose is unapologetically modernist: unannounced time shifts combine with a stream-of-consciousness style that can often be dense. Yet Ford’s portrayal of shell shock, the politics of women in the 1920s, and the moral greyness of wartime is groundbreaking. The book, and its complete tetralogy—called Parade’s End—has garnered praise from critics and authors alike, with Anthony Burgess calling it “the finest novel about the First World War” and William Carlos Williams stating that the novels “constitute the English prose masterpiece of their time.”
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- Author: Ford Madox Ford
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“No, I’m afraid it can’t be done, Father,” Mrs. Satterthwaite interrupted finally. “I’ve hidden here for four months to cover Sylvia’s tracks. I’ve got Wateman’s to look after. My new land steward’s coming in next week.”
“Still,” the Father urged, with a sort of tremulous eagerness, “if only for a month. … If only for a fortnight. … So many Catholic ladies do it. … Ye might think of it.”
“I see what you’re aiming at,” Sylvia said with sudden anger; “you’re revolted at the idea of my going straight from one man’s arms to another.”
“I’d be better pleased if there could be an interval,” the Father said. “It’s what’s called bad form.”
Sylvia became electrically rigid on her sofa.
“Bad form!” she exclaimed. “You accuse me of bad form.”
The Father slightly bowed his head like a man facing a wind.
“I do,” he said. “It’s disgraceful. It’s unnatural. I’d travel a bit at least.”
She placed her hand on her long throat.
“I know what you mean,” she said, “you want to spare Christopher … the humiliation. The … the nausea. No doubt he’ll feel nauseated. I’ve reckoned on that. It will give me a little of my own back.”
The Father said:
“That’s enough, woman. I’ll hear no more.”
Sylvia said:
“You will then. Listen here. … I’ve always got this to look forward to: I’ll settle down by that man’s side. I’ll be as virtuous as any woman. I’ve made up my mind to it and I’ll be it. And I’ll be bored stiff for the rest of my life. Except for one thing. I can torment that man. And I’ll do it. Do you understand how I’ll do it? There are many ways. But if the worst comes to the worst, I can always drive him silly … by corrupting the child!” She was panting a little, and round her brown eyes the whites showed. “I’ll get even with him. I can. I know how, you see. And with you, through him, for tormenting me. I’ve come all the way from Brittany without stopping. I haven’t slept. … But I can …”
Father Consett put his hand beneath the tail of his coat.
“Sylvia Tietjens,” he said, “in my pistol pocket I’ve a little bottle of holy water which I carry for such occasions. What if I was to throw two drops of it over you and cry: Exorciso te Ashtaroth in nomine? …”
She erected her body above her skirts on the sofa, stiffened like a snake’s neck above its coils. Her face was quite pallid, her eyes staring out.
“You … you daren’t,” she said. “To me … an outrage!” Her feet slid slowly to the floor; she measured the distance to the doorway with her eyes. “You daren’t,” she said again; “I’d denounce you to the Bishop. …”
“It’s little the Bishop would help you with them burning into your skin,” the priest said. “Go away, I bid you, and say a Hail Mary or two. Ye need them. Ye’ll not talk of corrupting a little child before me again.”
“I won’t,” Sylvia said. “I shouldn’t have …”
Her black figure showed in silhouette against the open doorway.
When the door was closed upon them, Mrs. Satterthwaite said:
“Was it necessary to threaten her with that? You know best, of course. It seems rather strong to me.”
“It’s a hair from the dog that’s bit her,” the priest said. “She’s a silly girl. She’s been playing at black masses along with that Mrs. Profumo and the fellow who’s name I can’t remember. You could tell that. They cut the throat of a white kid and splash its blood about. … That was at the back of her mind. … It’s not very serious. A parcel of silly, idle girls. It’s not much more than palmistry or fortune-telling to them if one has to weigh it, for all its ugliness, as a sin. As far as their volition goes, and it’s volition that’s the essence of prayer, black or white. … But it was at the back of her mind, and she won’t forget tonight.”
“Of course, that’s your affair, Father,” Mrs. Satterthwaite said lazily. “You hit her pretty hard. I don’t suppose she’s ever been hit so hard. What was it you wouldn’t tell her?”
“Only,” the priest said, “I wouldn’t tell her because the thought’s best not put in her head. … But her hell on earth will come when her husband goes running, blind, head down, mad after another woman.”
Mrs. Satterthwaite looked at nothing; then she nodded.
“Yes,” she said; “I hadn’t thought of it. … But will he? He is a very sound fellow, isn’t he?”
“What’s to stop it?” the priest asked. “What in the world but the grace of our blessed Lord, which he hasn’t got and doesn’t ask for? And then … He’s a young man, full-blooded, and they won’t be living … maritalement. Not if I know him. And then. … Then she’ll tear the house down. The world will echo with her wrongs.”
“Do you mean to say,” Mrs. Satterthwaite said, “that Sylvia would do anything vulgar?”
“Doesn’t every woman who’s had a man to torture for years when she loses him?” the priest asked. “The more she’s made an occupation of torturing him the less right she thinks she has to lose him.”
Mrs. Satterthwaite looked gloomily into the dusk.
“That poor devil. …” she said. “Will he get any peace anywhere? … What’s the matter, Father?”
The Father said:
“I’ve just remembered she gave me tea and cream and I drank it. Now I can’t take mass for Father Reinhardt. I’ll have to go and knock up his curate, who lives away in the forest.”
At the door, holding the candle, he said:
“I’d have you not get up today nor yet tomorrow, if ye can stand it. Have a headache and let Sylvia nurse you … You’ll have to tell how she nursed you when you get back to London. And I’d rather ye didn’t lie more out and out than ye need, if it’s to please me. … Besides, if ye watch Sylvia nursing you, you might hit on a characteristic touch to make it
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