The Good Soldier (Historical Novel). Ford Madox Ford
had looked out of a hole. No, it was as if my heart had missed a beat. It was as if we were going to run and cry out; all four of us in separate directions, averting our heads. In Ashburnham’s face I know that there was absolute panic. I was horribly frightened and then I discovered that the pain in my left wrist was caused by Leonora’s clutching it:
“I can’t stand this,” she said with a most extraordinary passion; “I must get out of this.” I was horribly frightened. It came to me for a moment, though I hadn’t time to think it, that she must be a madly jealous woman — jealous of Florence and Captain Ashburnham, of all people in the world! And it was a panic in which we fled! We went right down the winding stairs, across the immense Rittersaal to a little terrace that overlooks the Lahn, the broad valley and the immense plain into which it opens out.
“Don’t you see?” she said, “don’t you see what’s going on?” The panic again stopped my heart. I muttered, I stuttered — I don’t know how I got the words out:
“No! What’s the matter? Whatever’s the matter?”
She looked me straight in the eyes; and for a moment I had the feeling that those two blue discs were immense, were overwhelming, were like a wall of blue that shut me off from the rest of the world. I know it sounds absurd; but that is what it did feel like.
“Don’t you see,” she said, with a really horrible bitterness, with a really horrible lamentation in her voice, “Don’t you see that that’s the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world? And of the eternal damnation of you and me and them . . . .”
I don’t remember how she went on; I was too frightened; I was too amazed. I think I was thinking of running to fetch assistance — a doctor, perhaps, or Captain Ashburnham. Or possibly she needed Florence’s tender care, though, of course, it would have been very bad for Florence’s heart. But I know that when I came out of it she was saying: “Oh, where are all the bright, happy, innocent beings in the world? Where’s happiness? One reads of it in books!”
She ran her hand with a singular clawing motion upwards over her forehead. Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was exactly that of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors there. And then suddenly 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?”
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