"The gods to each ascribe a differing lot:
Some enter at the portal. Some do not!"
--MacMaster’s version of a refrain in Ford’s poem,Mr. Bosphorous 

In Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not, the first novel in his tetralogy, Parade’s End, the phrase “Some do not” is repeated like a prose refrain.  It is from at couplet in Ford’s poem, Mr. Bosphorous, which was slightly altered to fit the context of the novel. It is quoted by Macmaster, a hard-working social climber, who has just spent a day in the country successfully networking with General Lord Edward Campion, to whom he was introduced by Christopher Tietjens, his best friend.

MacMaster loves and respects Tietjens; they roomed together at Cambridge. In fact, Tietjens found a job for him at the Imperial Department of Statistics, where he also works.  But the class-conscious MacMaster is glad that he is catching up socially. He cannot forget he went to Cambridge on a scholarship.

Set during World War I, Some Do Not… charts the violence, shell shock, and waste of life in battle. But on this lovely day in the country, MacMaster quotes the couplet softly to himself. Tietjens is late for the train, but confidently runs beside the carriage and throws his enormous kitbag through the window.  MacMaster “reflected that if he had done that half the station would have been yelling, ‘Stand away from there.'” 

“Some enter at the portal. Some do not!” MacMaster knows he has not entered by the portal, but he has found his way.

Meanwhile, generous, honorable Tietjens is on a downward spiral. Most people like him: he is a brilliant statistician with a photographic memory, a Latinist who has memorized reams of Ovid, an expert on antiques, and a fact-checker for his late father’s friend, Mrs. Wannop, who “has written the only good novel since the eighteenth century.”

But his wife, Sylvia, a beautiful, angelic-looking, cruel adulteress slanders him, libels him, and ruins his reputation. She insists that he is the adulterer.

So perhaps the original couplet in Ford’s poem (below) is most suitable for Tietjens’ situation.

The Gods to each ascribe a differing lot!	
Some rest on snowy bosoms!  Some do not!

No snowy bosoms for Tietjens.

I must confess, I was in love with Tietjens at 24. Now I see his flaws, and even understand some of Sylvia’s complaints, but he is an honorable gentleman, an eighteenth-century man, really, and is one of my favorite characters in literature.