The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford Read Free Book Online Page B

she stopped. She was, most amazingly, just
Mrs Ashburnham again. Her face was perfectly clear, sharp and
defined; her hair was glorious in its golden coils. Her nostrils
twitched with a sort of contempt. She appeared to look with
interest at a gypsy caravan that was coming over a little bridge
far below us.
    "Don't you know," she said, in her clear hard voice, "don't you
know that I'm an Irish Catholic?"
    V THOSE words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had
in my life. They told me, I think, almost more than I have ever
gathered at any one moment—about myself. I don't think that before
that day I had ever wanted anything very much except Florence. I
have, of course, had appetites, impatiences... Why, sometimes at a
table d'hôte, when there would be, say, caviare handed round, I
have been absolutely full of impatience for fear that when the dish
came to me there should not be a satisfying portion left over by
the other guests. I have been exceedingly impatient at missing
trains. The Belgian State Railway has a trick of letting the French
trains miss their connections at Brussels. That has always
infuriated me. I have written about it letters to The Times that
The Times never printed; those that I wrote to the Paris edition of
the New York Herald were always printed, but they never seemed to
satisfy me when I saw them. Well, that was a sort of frenzy with
me.
    It was a frenzy that now I can hardly realize. I can understand
it intellectually. You see, in those days I was interested in
people with "hearts." There was Florence, there was Edward
Ashburnham—or, perhaps, it was Leonora that I was more interested
in. I don't mean in the way of love. But, you see, we were both of
the same profession—at any rate as I saw it. And the profession was
that of keeping heart patients alive.
    You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become.
Just as the blacksmith says: "By hammer and hand all Art doth
stand," just as the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves
around his morning delivery of rolls, as the postmaster-general
believes that he alone is the preserver of society—and surely,
surely, these delusions are necessary to keep us going—so did I
and, as I believed, Leonora, imagine that the whole world ought to
be arranged so as to ensure the keeping alive of heart patients.
You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become—how
imbecile, in view of that engrossment, appear the ways of princes,
of republics, of municipalities. A rough bit of road beneath the
motor tyres, a couple of succeeding "thank'ee-marms" with their
quick jolts would be enough to set me grumbling to Leonora against
the Prince or the Grand Duke or the Free City through whose
territory we might be passing. I would grumble like a stockbroker
whose conversations over the telephone are incommoded by the
ringing of bells from a city church. I would talk about medieval
survivals, about the taxes being surely high enough. The point, by
the way, about the missing of the connections of the Calais boat
trains at Brussels was that the shortest possible sea journey is
frequently of great importance to sufferers from the heart. Now, on
the Continent, there are two special heart cure places, Nauheim and
Spa, and to reach both of these baths from England if in order to
ensure a short sea passage, you come by Calais—you have to make the
connection at Brussels. And the Belgian train never waits by so
much the shade of a second for the one coming from Calais or from
Paris. And even if the French train, are just on time, you have to
run—imagine a heart patient running!—along the unfamiliar ways of
the Brussels station and to scramble up the high steps of the
moving train. Or, if you miss connection, you have to wait five or
six hours.... I used to keep awake whole nights cursing that abuse.
My wife used to run—she never, in whatever else she may have misled
me, tried to give me the impression that she was not a gallant
soul. But,