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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She said:
“My dear, it couldn’t have lasted forever … But you’re a good man. And very clever. … You will get through. …”
Not ten yards ahead Tietjens saw a tea-tray, the underneath of a black-lacquered tea-tray, gliding towards them: mathematically straight, just rising from the mist. He shouted: mad: the blood in his head. His shout was drowned by the scream of the horse: he had swung it to the left. The cart turned up: the horse emerged from the mist: head and shoulders: pawing. A stone seahorse from the fountain of Versailles! Exactly that! Hanging in air for an eternity: the girl looking at it, leaning slightly forward.
The horse didn’t come over backwards: he had loosened the reins. It wasn’t there any more. The damndest thing that could happen! He had known it would happen. He said:
“We’re all right now!” There was a crash and scraping: like twenty tea-trays: a prolonged sound. They must be scraping along the mudguard of the invisible car. He had the pressure of the horse’s mouth: the horse was away: going hell for leather. He increased the pressure. The girl said:
“I know I’m all right with you.”
They were suddenly in bright sunlight: cart: horse: commonplace hedgerows. They were going uphill: a steep brae. He wasn’t certain she hadn’t said: “Dear!” or “My dear!” Was it possible after so short … ? But it had been a long night. He was, no doubt, saving her life too. He increased his pressure on the horse’s mouth gently: up to all his twelve stone: all his strength. The hill told too. Steep, white road between shaven grass banks!
Stop; damn you! Poor beast … The girl fell out of the cart. No! jumped clear! Out to the animal’s head. It threw its head up. Nearly off her feet: she was holding the bit. … She couldn’t! Tender mouth … afraid of horses. … He said:
“Horse cut!” Her face like a little white blancmange!
“Come quick,” she said.
“I must hold a minute,” he said, “might go off if I let go to get down. Badly cut?”
“Blood running down solid! Like an apron,” she said.
He was at last at her side. It was true. But not so much like an apron. More like a red, varnished stocking. He said:
“You’ve a white petticoat on. Get over the hedge; jump it, and take it off …”
“Tear it into strips?” she asked. “Yes!”
He called to her; she was suspended halfway up the bank.
“Tear one half off first. The rest into strips.”
She said: “All right!” She didn’t go over the quickset as neatly as he had expected. No take off. But she was over. …
The horse, trembling, was looking down, its nostrils distended, at the blood pooling from its near foot. The cut was just on the shoulder. He put his left arm right over the horse’s eyes. The horse stood it, almost with a sigh of relief. … A wonderful magnetism with horses. Perhaps with women too? God knew. He was almost certain she had said “Dear.”
She said: “Here.” He caught a round ball of whitish stuff. He undid it. Thank God: what sense. A long, strong, white band. … What the devil was the hissing. … A small, closed car with crumpled mudguards: noiseless nearly: gleaming black … God curse it: it passed them: stopped ten yards down … the horse rearing back: mad! Clean mad … something like a scarlet and white cockatoo, fluttering out of the small car door … a general. In full tog. White feathers! Ninety medals! Scarlet coat! Black trousers with red stripe. Spurs too, by God!
Tietjens said:
“God damn you, you bloody swine. Go away!”
The apparition, past the horse’s blinkers, said:
“I can, at least, hold the horse for you. I went past to get you out of Claudine’s sight.”
“Damn good-natured for you,” Tietjens said as rudely as he could. “You’ll have to pay for the horse.”
The General exclaimed:
“Damn it all! Why should I? You were driving your beastly camel right into my drive.”
“You never sounded your horn,” Tietjens said.
“I was on private ground,” the General shouted. “Besides I did.” An enraged, scarlet scarecrow, very thin, he was holding the horse’s bridle. Tietjens was extending the half petticoat, with a measuring eye, before the horse’s chest. The General said:
“Look here! I’ve got to take the escort for the Royal party at St. Peter-in-Manor, Dover. They’re laying the Buff’s colours on the altar or something.”
“You never sounded your horn,” Tietjens said. “Why didn’t you bring your chauffeur? He’s a capable man. … You talk very big about the widow and child. But when it comes to robbing them of fifty quid by slaughtering their horse …”
The General said:
“What the devil were you doing coming into our drive at five in the morning?”
Tietjens, who had applied the half petticoat to the horse’s chest, exclaimed:
“Pick up that thing and give it me.” A thin roll of linen was at his feet: it had rolled down from the hedge.
“Can I leave the horse?” the General asked.
“Of course you can,” Tietjens said. “If I can’t quiet a horse better than you can run a car …”
He bound the new linen strips over the petticoat: the horse dropped its head, smelling his hand. The General, behind Tietjens, stood back on his heels, grasping his gold-mounted sword. Tietjens went on twisting and twisting the bandage.
“Look here,” the General suddenly bent forward to whisper into Tietjens’ ears, “what am I to tell Claudine? I believe she saw the girl.”
“Oh, tell her we came to ask what time you cast off your beastly otter hounds,” Tietjens said; “that’s a matutinal job. …”
The General’s voice had a really pathetic intonation:
“On a Sunday!” he exclaimed. Then in a tone of relief he added: “I shall tell her you were going to early communion in Duchemin’s church at Pett.”
“If you want to add blasphemy to horse-slaughtering as a profession, do,” Tietjens said. “But you’ll have to pay for the
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