The Last Post
By Ford Madox Ford.
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“Oh, Rokehope is a pleasant place
Border Ballad
If the fause thieves would let it be.”
Dedicatory Letter
To Isabel Paterson
Madame et cher Confrère,
I have for some years now had to consider you as being my fairy godmother in the United States—though how one can have a godmother junior to oneself I have yet to figure out. Perhaps godmothers of the kind that can turn pumpkins into glass coaches can achieve miracles in seniority. Or, when I come to think of it, I seem to remember that, for a whole tribe of Incas converted who knows how and simultaneously, in the days of the Conquistadores, an Infanta of Spain went to the font, she being, whatever her age, of necessity junior to the elders at least of the tribe. That, however, is all a trifle—except for my gratitude!—compared with your present responsibility.
For, but for you, this book would only nebularly have existed—in space, in my brain, where you will, so it be not on paper and between boards. Save, that is to say, for your stern, contemptuous and almost virulent insistence on knowing “what became of Tietjens” I never should have conducted this chronicle to the stage it has now reached. The soldier, tired of war’s alarms, it has always seemed to me, might be allowed to rest beneath bowery vines. But you would not have it so.
You—and for once you align yourself with the Great Public—demand an ending: if possible a happy ending. Alas, I cannot provide you with the end of Tietjens for a reason upon which I will later dwell—but I here provide you with a slice of one of Christopher’s later days so that you may know how more or less he at present stands. For in this world of ours though lives may end Affairs do not. Even though Valentine and Tietjens were dead the Affair that they set going would go rolling on down the generations—Mark junior and Mrs. Lowther, the unborn child and the rest will go on beneath the nut-boughs or over the seas—or in the best Clubs. It is not your day nor mine that shall see the end of them.
And think: How many people have we not known intimately and seen daily for years! Then they move into another township, and, bad correspondents as we all are and sit-at-homes as Fate makes most of us, they drop out of our sights. They may—those friends of yours—go and settle in Paris. You may see them for fortnights at decennial intervals, or you may not.
So I would have preferred to let it be with Tietjens, but you would not have it. I have always jeered at authors who sentimentalised over their characters, and after finishing a book exclaim like, say, Thackeray: “Roll up the curtains; put the puppets in their boxes; quench the tallow footlights” … something like that. But I am bound to say that in certain moods in Avignon this year it would less have surprised me to go up to the upper chamber of the mill where I wrote and there to find that friend of mine than to find you. For you are to remember that for me Tietjens is the recreation of a friend I had—a friend so vivid to me that though he died many years ago I cannot feel that he is yet dead. In the dedicatory letter of an earlier instalment of this series of books I said that in these volumes I was trying to project how this world would have appeared to that friend today and how, in it, he would have acted—or you, I believe, would say reacted. And that is the exact truth of the matter.
Do you not find—you yourself, too—that, however it may be with the mass of humanity, in the case of certain dead people you cannot feel that they are indeed gone from this world? You can only know it, you can only believe it. That is, at any rate, the case with me—and in my case the world daily becomes more and more peopled with such revenants and less and less with those who still walk this earth. It is only yesterday that I read of the death of another human being who will for the rest of time have for me that effect. That person died thousands of miles away, and yesterday it would have astonished me if she
