Lines I Wished I’d Written: Sylvia Contemplates Revenge, from Parade’s End

I am nearing the end of my four or five year journey through Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy.  The fourth novel of the series is titled The Last Post.  Perhaps the overly deliberate pace I’ve been reading has caused to make me lose sight of the novel’s themes, but it’s still a wonderfully written work.  In technique and skill, this is one of the highest achievements of modernist literature.  But for now let me just highlight another wonderful passage.

Here we have Sylvia Tietjens again.  Her husband Christopher has finally left her because of her infidelity.  Christopher had come back from the war (WWI) and taken up with a young lady, Valentine Wannop, having fallen in love with before he went to the war, but in which he did not consummate the relationship.  He was honorable and had intended to stay with his wife before the war, but the war seemed to have changed everything. 

In order to grasp the context of this passage, you have to understand a few things.  Sylivia is Catholic, and despite her many sinful actions, she is a believer.  Christopher is High Anglican, and he too is a believer.  Christopher, unlike the other upper class British in the novel, is chivalrous to the point of being saintly.  Sylvia actually calls him a saint in this passage.  Father Consett is a priest who had known Sylvia for most of her life and had died sometime during the war. 

Sylvia in this passage is bitter that Christopher has left her, and she contemplates some sort of revenge.  Gunning is a yeoman farmer on their estate and he makes the suggestion to Sylvia that she could induce a miscarriage to Christopher and Valentine’s baby that Valentine is carrying.  It took some contemplation before Sylvia realized what exactly Gunning was suggesting.

We also see in this passage the modernist technique of narration that Ford uses.  It’s in third person narration but in free indirect discourse style.  That means the author speaks in a third person point of view but shifts in and out of a character’s mind using the character’s interior thoughts to move the narration.  It’s almost like a stream of conscious narration but controlled by the author’s third person view.  I marvel at how Ford executes it with such skill throughout the novel.  So much of what passes through Sylvia’s mind resonates with events her life that Ford has built a detailed mind filled with psychological depth.  Here Ford starts with Sylvia thinking about religion and morality and ends with her horror struck when she realizes what Gunning has actually suggested.

Anyhow the case had been a fiasco and for the first time in her life Sylvia had felt mortification; in addition she had felt a great deal of religious fear.  It had come into her mind in Court—and it came with additional vividness there above the house, that, years ago in her mother’s sitting-room in a place called Lobscheid, Father Consett had predicted that if Christopher fell in love with another woman, she, Sylvia, would perpetrate acts of vulgarity.  And there she had been, not only toying with the temporal courts in a matter of marriage, which is a sacrament, but led undoubtedly into a position that she had to acknowledge she was vulgar.  She had precipitately left the Court when Mr. Hatt had for the second time appealed for pity for her—but she had not been able to stop him.…Pity!  She appeal for pity!  She had regarded herself as—she had certainly desired to be regarded as—the sword of the Lord smiting the craven and the traitor to Beauty!  And was it to be supported that she was to be regarded as such a fool as to be decoyed into an empty house!  Or as to let herself be thrown downstairs!...But qui facit per alium is herself responsible and there she had been in a position as mortifying as would have been that of any city clerk’s wife.  The florid periods of Mr. Hatt had made her shiver all over and she had never spoken to him again.

And her position had been broadcast all over England—and now, here in the mouth of his gross henchman it had recurred.  At the most inconvenient moment.  For the thought suddenly recurred, sweeping over with immense force: God had changed sides at the cutting down of Groby Great Tree,

The first intimation she had had that God might change sides had occurred in that hateful court and had as it were, been prophesied by Father Consett.  That dark saint and martyr was in Heaven, having died for the Faith, and undoubtedly had the ear of God.  He had prophesied that she would toy with the temporal courts.  Immediately she had felt herself degraded, as if strength had gone out of her.

Strength had undoubtedly gone out of her.  Never before in her life had her mind not sprung to an emergency.  It was all very well to say that she could not move physically either backwards or forwards for fear of causing a stampede amongst all the horses and that, therefore, her mental uncertainty might be excused.  But it was the finger of God—or of Father Consett, who as saint and martyr, was the agent of God…Or, perhaps, God, Himself, was here really taking a hand for the protection of His Christopher, who was undoubtedly an Anglican saint….The Almighty might well be dissatisfied with the relatively amiable Catholic saint’s conduct of the case in which the saint with the other persuasion was involved.  For surely Father Consett might be expected to have a soft spot for her whereas you could not expect the Almighty to be unfair even to Anglicans….At any rate, up over the landscape, the hills, the sky, she felt the shadow of Father Consett, the arms extended as if in a gigantic cruciform—and then above and behind that an…an August Will!

Gunning, his bloodshot eyes fixed on her, moved his lips vindictively.  She had, in face of those grossly manifestations across hills and sky, a moment of real panic.  Such as she had felt when they had been shelling near the hotel in France when she had sat amidst palms with Christopher under a glass roof….A mad desire to run—or as if your soul ran about inside you like a parcel of rats in a pit an unseen terrier.

What was she to do?  What the devil was she to do?...She felt an itch….She felt the very devil of a desire to confront at least Mark Tietjens…even if it should kill the fellow.  Surely God could not be unfair!  What was she given beauty—the dangerous remains of beauty!—for if not to impress it on the unimpressible!  She ought to be given the chance at least once more to try her irresistible ram against that immovable post…. She was aware….

Gunning was saying something to the effect that if she caused Mrs. Valentine to have a miscarriage or an idiot child ‘Is Lordship would flay all the flesh off ‘er bones with ‘is own ridin’ crop.’  ‘Is Lordship ‘ad fair done it to ‘im, Gunning ‘isself, when ‘e lef ‘is misses then eight and a ‘arf munce gone to live with old Mother Cressy!  The child was bore dead.

The words conveyed little to her….She was aware….She was aware….What was she aware of?  She was aware that God—or perhaps it was Father Consett that so arranged it, more diplomatically, the dear!—desired that she should apply to Rome for the dissolution of her marriage with Christopher and that she should be freed as early as possible, Father Consett suggesting to Him the less stringent course.

A fantastic object was descending at a fly-crawl the hill road that went almost vertically up to the farm amongst the breeches.  She did not care!

Gunning was saying that that wer why ‘Is Lordship giv ‘im the sack.  Took away the cottage an’ ten bob a week that ‘Is Lordship allowed to all as had been in his service thritty yeer.

She said: ‘What!  What’s that?’  Then it came back to her that Gunning had suggested that she might give Valentine a miscarriage….

Her breath made in her throat a little clittering sound like the trituration of barely ears; her gloved hands, reins and all, were over her eyes, smelling of morocco leather; as felt as if within her a shelf dropped away—as the platform drops away from beneath the feet of a convict they are hanging.  She said: ‘Could…’  Then her mind stopped, the clittering sound in her throat continuing.  Louder.  Louder. 

Descending the hill at the fly’s pace was the impossible.  A black basket-work pony phaeton, the pony—you always look at the horse first—four hands too big; as round as a barrel, as shining as a mahogany dining table, pacing for all the world like a haute école circus steed and in a panic bumping its behind into that black vehicle.  It eased her to see…But,…fantastically horrible, behind that grotesque coward of a horse, holding the reins, was a black thing, like a funeral charger; beside it a top hat, a white face, a buff waistecoat, black coat, a thin Jewish beard.  In front of that a bare, blond head, the hair rather long—on the front seat, back to the view.  Trust Edith Ethal to be accompanied by a boy-poet cicisbeo!  Training Mr. Ruggles for his future condition as consort!

She exclaimed to Gunning:

‘By God, if you do not let me pass I will cut your face in half…’

It was justified!  This in effect was too much—on the part of Gunning and god and Father Consett.  All of a heap they had given her perplexity, immobility and a dreadful thought that was gripping her vitals….Dreadful!  Dreadful!

She must get down to the cottage.  She must get down to the cottage.

She said to Gunning:

‘You damn fool….You damn fool….I want to save…’

He moved up—interminably—sweating and hairy from the gate on which he had been leaning, so that he no longer barred her way.  She trotted smartly past him and cantered beautifully down the slope.  It came to her from the bloodshot glance that his eyes gave her that he would like to outrage her with ferocity.  She felt pleasure.

She came off her horse like a circus performer to the sound of ‘Mrs. Tietjens!  Mrs. Tietjens’, in several voices from above.  She let the chestnut go to hell. 

It seemed queer that it did not seem queer.  A shed of long-parings set upright, the gate banging behind her.  Apple branches spreading down; grass up to the middle of her grey breeches.  It was Tom Tiddler’s Grounds; it was near a place called Gemmenich on the Fourth of August 1914…But just quietude: quietude.

Mark regarded her boy’s outline with beady, inquisitive eyes.  She bent her switch into a half loop before her.  She heard herself say:

‘Where are all these fools?  I want to get them out of here!’

He continued to regard her, beadily, his head like mahogany against the pillows.  An apple bough caught in her hair.

She said:

‘Damn it all, I had Groby Great Tree torn down: not that tin Maintenon.  But, as God is my Saviour I would not tear another woman’s child in the womb!’

He said:

‘You poor bitch!  You poor bitch!  The riding has done it!’

She swore to herself afterwards that she had heard him say that, for at the time she had had too many emotions to regard his speaking as unusual.  She took indeed a prolonged turn in the woods before she felt equal to facing the others.  Tietjens had its woods onto which the garden gave directly.

Her main bitterness was that they had this peace.  She was cutting the painter, but they were going on in this peace; her world was waning.  It was the fact that her friend Bobbie’s husband, Sir Gabriel Blantyre—formerly Bosenhair—was cutting down expenses like a lunatic.  In her world there was the writing on the wall.  Here they could afford to call her a poor bitch—and be in the right of it, as like as not!  (p. 873-7)

What I think Ford wants you to see in this passage is Sylvia’s mind integrating her immediate action of riding a horse, her recent bitterness at her husband leaving her, with Gunning’s proposal of a future revenge, and with the morality established in her core as a child.  Perhaps this is not the most exciting passage in terms of events, but it’s one of great skill.