Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (141 page)
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Authors: Ford Madox Ford
He bought the best house in the place. It was old, battered, rat-ridden, and spacious. It had been a fortified dwelling. It had been a manor house, and, when George bought it, it had sunk into the hands of three families of agricultural labourers. It had been plastered and tarred in places, but its old stones were intact, and, under the whitewash and paper of the inside, George discovered the ancient beams and fireplaces as large as small rooms. It was the house in which later the interview with Mrs. Gregory Moffat had taken place. It stood beyond a strip of park, at the end of a gapped and spacious street of cottages. Its buttresses rose to the roof line, and a background of immense elms sheltered it, fan-like, from the west winds.
To Mrs. George, for the first few years, the house was a palace of romance. She was excited at finding the old fireplaces and carved corbels, and to discover primitive and ugly frescoes under coatings of wall-paper seemed the most important thing in life. ‘She was very young; she admired looking up to her husband; she came to it out of a dull northern castle, where turnip fields ran almost up to the drawing-room windows, and where her family had been so considerable that there had been no one she could talk to within fifteen miles of moor roads.
But gradually she became very religious, and the marriage turned out a lamentable mistake. George’s tolerance made her horribly unhappy, and in the conversations of the young men whom he aided she imagined constantly that she detected loose ideas and impiety. She grew at last to consider that, in helping them to write, George was committing a sacrilege. She left him after five years that were miserable to them both.
George’s large and tolerant figure had, in fact, got on her nerves. She could not stand it. She went back to her own people — the people whose scientific farming carried turnips up to their back windows. Charity she could understand, a whole-hearted district visiting, a bestowing to help the deserving poor of a tithe of one’s goods. But it seemed to her that with George it was give, give, give — to the undeserving as to the meritorious, a continual giving of his time, his counsel, his brains, his money, and, above all, of his excuses. He would find pity for an adulteress, she said, and he would give the shirt off his back. He could not give any reason for it, and she could not believe that it did any good.
Her brother approached him on the subject of a separate establishment. George gave her not her jointure alone, but a considerably larger sum. It left him almost poor, but she accepted the sacrifice because she considered that the money would otherwise dwindle into the hands of his parasites. Her family made efforts to reconcile them, and George wrote to her at times, but as the years went on she grew more and more intolerant. One day George’s name headed a petition for the release of a man who had been committed to gaol for militant agnosticism. The petition was successful, and after that she did not answer his letters.
Gregory Moffat, George’s younger brother, was a silent figure. He had no glamour, no physique, and no anecdotes to speak of. His clipped golden whiskers, slightly bald head, and peeringly jocular manner permitted him to attract no attention in his own house. He passed an unobtrusive life between his “business” and his
“
study.” Extraordinarily noisy “meetings,” which, his wife’s voice windily dominated, set the tone of his lofty white and ormolu reception rooms, were echoed in reverberations on the tall white and gilt-brass staircases, and eddied in overflows during the day-time round the empty dining-room tables.
When he came in from business, ambling up to dress, he brushed against groups of ladies still debating on the landings, or effaced himself against the gilt dados as they brushed downwards past him. He beamed upon them through spectacles at the extreme tip of his button nose. Hardly more than two or three of them were even hazily aware of his identity. Half their number would have disputed the assertion that a certain Mr. Frewer Hoey was not Mr. Moffat — was not, in fact,
the
Mr. Moffat, “who, don’t you remember, wrote that delightful....” and then a pause of doubt as to what it was he
had
written.
Mr. Frewer Hoey was seen with her everywhere, a dark person with an extremely rigid spine, acting as her private secretary in her political activities. He was a quite good composer of ballads in his leisure moments. The confusion of identities, inextricable as it was, was excusable.
There was Mr. Gregory Moffat, who was a lay figure; there was
the
Mr. Moffat, who had written something. That was George. There was also
the
Mrs. Moffat. Had she not all but engineered the famous “Lady’s Qualification, &c., Act” through the lower house? And were not her considerable figure, that remotely suggested a gathering of pillows tightly packed, her large hats and gestures, her great mass of golden hair, whose genuineness not even her friends questioned, her brilliant cheeks and pronounced eyebrows, and her high voice familiar to everybody, everywhere that anyone went? It was a pardonable error to mistake the usual companion of Mrs. Moffat for Mr. Moffat, and Mr. Moffat for
the
Mr. Moffat. One had seen Mr. Frewer Hoey carrying her wraps. He collected paper slips when there was any voting; at the meetings he stood like a stiff, dark sentry beside her pulpit; he directed the fourteen gardeners in the West.
But Mr. Frewer Hoey had vanished two months before Mrs. Moffat sat in George’s drawing room. The noise of the final rupture — or at least Mrs. Moffat’s part of it — was said to have penetrated the walls of the adjoining house at Campden Hill. He had been seen carrying the cloak of a tall, swaying, reedy lady, a Mrs. Minver, of Queen’s Gate. What Mrs. Moffat felt when she swept past them in her victoria is not recorded. Neither is what Mr. Moffat said. Apparently he had never said anything that mattered since his marriage, and no one appears to have known him before that union.
He had been educated by Sir Graham as a solicitor, and his name appeared with others of weight on a brass door-plate in Bedford Row. His person accorded with the plate, he looked like a family adviser. But he was known to have some connection with a gallery that had lately blazed into being in Bond Street. He had a manner of closely peering at objects of art and
vertu
whenever he came across them, and this had got him, even among his wife’s friends, the reputation of a connoisseur. It is certain that the enormous aggravation of his income had taken place about the time that “really smart” people discovered the value of Raeburns and Hoppners.
He, however, never discoverably unbosomed himself. He may or may not have engineered the “boom” in those artists. A marquis, an earl, and several honourables directed the affairs of the Bond Street Gallery, and perhaps it was only a coincidence that they also directed the taste of the public that counted in such matters. Gregory Moffat had perhaps inherited the prodigious
flair
that the gallery undoubtedly possessed for the discovery of the decorative bric-a-brac that was going to be the rage. It might be going too far to say that the peers in question admitted into the elect Wyndham Chetwynd set only those new people who paid record prices for works of art exhibited in the gallery. That was said, though. Gregory Moffat’s income certainly became considerable, and he was undoubtedly adviser to the Marquis and the Earl. There was, for instance, the affair of a quite hopelessly unpaying journal called the
Salon.
People knew that it was the property of Mr. Gregory Moffat. It was edited by a queer, hirsute, unpresentable personage, Thwaite, author of the “Love Poems of Sidonia,” which were creating a prodigious and deserved flutter. Thwaite was, however, said to be one of Mrs. Moffat’s young men. He had certainly once made an appearance in Mrs. Moffat’s drawing room.
Thwaite really was one of George’s young men. He had been recommended to Gregory by George when the purchase of the
Salon
had been made by Gregory a year before.
Thwaite, in fact, had been and remained George’s one ewe-lamb. With a delicately sensitive talent he had passed through an extravagantly bad time. When he first came to see George he had looked almost like a tramp. He had been carrying the MS. of the famous “Love Poems,” practically his sole possession, in a rather dirty German knapsack. George had played the good Samaritan, and Thwaite had the singular merit of having been the one person who had never in any way kicked over poor George’s traces. His week remained divided between the office of the
Salon
itself and a tiny slice of weather-boarded cottage in George’s town.
As an editor he had shown no signs of being a success. Under his rule the
Salon
boasted no new
“
features” — not even a prize competition. Its
Salon
chaffed them quite good humouredly. As for Mrs. Moffat’s high-pitched propaganda, it never noticed them at all. What was to be made of such a situation?
When the Marquis, on the velvet carpet of the marble staircase in the Bond Street establishment, laid his small gloved hand on Gregory’s sleeve, and asked, in his high, delicate voice,
“
Moffat,
what
are you up to with that paper of yours?” Gregory, with his spectacles on the end of his nose, beamed on the great man’s Murillo face, fur-lined coat, and darkly gleaming monocle. His myopic smile might have indicated inaudible chuckling over a humorous thought. But he said nothing. He probably would have said no more had he been interrogated on the subject of Mrs. Moffat, Mr. Frewer Hoey, his brother George, Thwaites, or even Mrs. Henwick.
MRS. HENWICK herself, the tiny Pompadour Marquise in a Gainsborough hat, never to all intents and purposes did anything but go about with Mrs. Moffat. She had a house of great size, modelled, as far as decorations went, on Mrs. Moffat’s, and she had a husband, also modelled on Mrs. Moffat’s. He was something professional. No one knew why Mrs. Henwick went about with Mrs. Moffat. She did not speak at the meetings; she did not even vote. She had seemed content to appear as the complement of Mr. Frewer Hoey before the defection of that gentleman.
Since then she had been, as it were, the sole supporter of a florid coat of arms. She sat about as still as a mouse, and pointed her little shoe at the carpet.
Beneath the dark beams, before the great stone hearth, in the pleasant light from the elaborately leaded windows, she sat still, whilst George delivered his overwhelming and only partly comprehensible defence of Mr. Hailes. “He had a real and quite genuine talent; he was at a loose end; George was tiding him over.”
Mr. Hailes had very obligingly taken a telegram for Mrs. Moffat, after that lady had decided to stay the night at George’s. She had launched into her warning to George the moment the door had closed behind him. She hadn’t liked Hailes’ looks.
“Oh, I don’t say anything about
that”
George smiled amiably. “I don’t care — I haven’t considered whether he’s personally very estimable. Perhaps he isn’t; but he’s got a talent, and he needs a lift.”
Mr. Hailes re-entered the room, and, with a quiet and efficient air, remarked to Mrs. Moffat —
“Yes, it went for sixpence.” He raised his hand nonchalantly to the thin and stiff black hair on his crown. “One can generally save a fair percentage at the post if one knows the ropes.” He gave the impression of knowing a great many things of all kinds, and of being aware that he could be very, and very quietly, useful to ladies.
He was thirty-five. One noticed most that his very black eyes — he remotely suggested a Japanese — moved continually from one’s own to one’s waistcoat buttons, and back again. He wore a navy blue suit, a dark blue tie with small white spots, and a tall, very shiny collar, open at the throat. There was a striking glitter of white teeth under a black moustache when he spoke, which he did — it was his misfortune — with an air of leaning against something and practising the confidence trick. He was tall, square shouldered, and almost painfully thin.
He sat down and pulled at the knees of his trousers.
George rose and said that, bachelor like, he had “matters to see to.” There was a suggestion of things brewing as he closed the door on Mr. Hailes, Mrs. Moffat, and on Mrs. Henwick, who remained silent.
George took a walk with his brother. There was between the two a subtle resemblance, like that of two carriage horses, which, though radically different apart, become an excellent pair in double harness. Having taken a look at Gregory’s rounded shoulders and short-sighted amble, George, perhaps unconsciously, squared himself, and marched erect and lightly. If a man be as young as he feel, George, who at that moment was distinctly near to fifty, was by many years the younger of the two.
He walked well; he swung his stick; he looked sanguinely and straight at the horizon. The broad brow remained unwrinkled; the nose, passably Grecian; the lips, full and fresh. Where his brother’s face was a matter of bumps and buttons, his own formed one of those combinations of oval curves that, for obscure reasons, please and subtly stir us to happiness in the contemplation. It gave the effect of a landscape of flowing hill-lines, one melting into another.
The house still stood, mellow, grey and buttressed, square and strong, at the end of its hundred yards or so of park-turf, sheltered by its great elms, and looking through the bars of its high gate right down the main street of the tiny bright town. Its owner had the privilege of looking into the very heart of the little old place, suggestively and friendlily, with an interested glance that was not the cold criticism of a squire. That, precisely, was as George would have had it.
The few leaves fallen on the short drive served only to emphasise the crisp whiteness, the evenness of its surface. There wasn’t a sign of decay there, and, assuredly, there was none in George himself. It was his idea to keep things going “just so” — until they stopped dead. There would be no slackening, no slowing down. If, for instance, he kept no trap, it was because brisk walking kept him in his excellent condition.
There wasn’t another “house” in the little town. It had dwindled to the merest village. There were clap board cottages painted white, others with red tiled gables, others with cream-coloured walls, the remains of an immense church in a wide square, the
beaux restes
of a mediaeval, grey stone town hall, a grocer’s shop, a doctor’s, a parsonage. The main road ran through the town above the church square, white and level; the other broad streets had suggestions of blades of grass here and there among the flints.
“You see,” George said, pointing at them, “we can’t keep out these ‘little brothers.’ They’ll get the upper hand one day,” he laughed, gently and gaily.
Taken as he was, walking through the mellowed and gently crumbling buildings of the wide, straight streets, there was not a more hale man in a more charming place. It was the early autumn, towards sun-down.
Whilst they strolled on the high road, down the perspective of a sloping avenue of immense trees they met a young girl and an elder. George’s face became more subtle in line, his step more elastic, his shoulders more square. He paused before them and asked after the health of their father. It was one of his bad days, it appeared. He invited them to dine with himself and the Moffats, refused excuses, and passed on with his brother. Gregory had beamed from a little distance.
“You shall meet Mr. Thwaites at last,” George said over his shoulder to the younger sister. She was a fair, oval-faced slip of a girl, with that loose combing back of fair hair, swing of the shoulders, and slight, rather engrossed manner of moving the chin forward, that denote one newly come from a girl’s college.
She said, “Oh, I should like to, so much,” flushed a little, and passed on with her elder sister.
“A singular set of circumstances about that family,” George said, rejoining his brother.
Gregory said nothing.
“
The father was Vicar of Eastfield, about ten miles to the west. He had to resign. The mother had died about a year before.” Gregory turned his spectacles slightly towards George.
“
The father,” George continued — (“The name’s Brede, a good name about here”
)—”
got it into his head that he had killed the mother by his impatience. An effect of grief, you know. A magnificent figure of a man, heavy, ponderous, like a sort of Titan. It’s an awful spectacle, one of his fits of depression. The young girl’s in love with Thwaite, your editor of the
Salon.”
Gregory turned his attention to a branch that, prematurely autumned, made a spray of vivid yellow against a mass of green. Afterwards he said:
“I imagine you have been consoling them.” George made a gentle gesture of deprecation.
“She’s had a bad time,” he said.
“
They
all
have.” Somewhat later he added:
“One
has
to give a lift to people like that.” Gregory asked:
“Why in the world?”
“Dora, the younger Miss Brede,” George went on, “you understand, is not in love with Thwaite personally. It’s as author of the ‘Love Poems of Sidonia.’ I’ve never been able to bring them together. I shall to-night, though, if I can catch Thwaite.”
They were both silent for a little while.
“Yes, a very singular family,” George recommenced.
“
Very lovable and essentially conscientious. That’s their note. Extraordinarily conscientious.” He pointed his stick over the palings. “I’ve had some elms cut down there.”
“Essentially — morbidly that, in the father,” he began again, meditatively. “The mother left all her money to Clara, the elder — did you notice her? — with a sort of proviso that she was to apply it as she thought fit, for the benefit of her sisters.”
Gregory uttered an
“
um” of disapprobation. “Why? Is it unusual?” George asked. Gregory said grimly: “That sort of thing’s the fortune of a certain type of legal practitioner.”
“Oh, there hasn’t been any kind of quarrelling,’ George retorted, amusedly,” in the Brede family. And only Dora remains to be provided for.”
Gregory asked if that were the exact wording of the will.
Gregory laughed gaily.
“Oh, it won’t come into any Court. Dora worships her sister, and if Thwaite did marry her, he’d be the last person in the world to cause any sort of trouble.”
Gregory said, “Um.” They went under an old archway into the open country. It fell dusk.
A heavy silence descended upon the brothers. Mrs. Moffat had tired George. In his brother’s society he had the blissful feeling that there was no need for conversation, and because that gave him a great feeling of ease, he was fond of his brother. Suddenly Gregory said:
“I don’t like Hailes.”
George ground his stick violently into the stony road, and then took up the defence of his last protégé.
Hailes, it appeared, had hitherto wasted his great gifts as editor of an Author’s Directory. George drew a moving picture of the man: navy blue suit, spotless, collar, white spotted bow and cuffs protected by sheaths of paper, bent all day over an office desk covered with slips recording dates of birth, of marriage, clubs, and books written during the current year by thousands of authors. These little slips Hailes had cut out and pasted on to sheets with emendations and additions for the printer. It obviously
was
a duty to give him a lift. He was wasting his youth.
“He came to see me,” George said, “incidentally because I had neglected to fill up one of his atrocious slips.” George never had filled up slips. On his first visit Hailes had confidingly, but with a proper shyness, shown George little things of his own, small anecdotes in the style of an author lately deceased. They were written on sheets of grey paper that had a red border-line.
“They were derivative, of course,” George admitted, “but the real man only needed bringing out. Where he did himself justice was in his extraordinary aptness of illustration — of figurative speaking,”
Gregory grunted slightly once more.
“I remember,” George went on, “speaking of—’s books” (he named an author, whose covers were millions of red spots on two continents). “He said the array reminded him of a Saturday night whelk-stall with the kerosene lamps flaring.”
Gregory was in labour with a remark:
“A poor return for a quarter’s board and lodgings,” it came at last.
“Oh, but there were others,” George answered, “in plenty.”
“He’s caught the trick,” Gregory drove home. “It’s like a rather inferior remark of your own.”
George had a moment of discouragement. He really had housed Hailes for the last three months. During that time a brilliant novel was officially supposed to be in the writing. And there was no reason why, in the course of many midnight torrents of words, Hailes should not have caught George’s trick. George disquietedly understood that. Indeed, he was not absolutely certain that Hailes had not caught the whelk-stall simile itself. He had had a hazy notion of having uttered something like it two nights before Hailes had brought it out. But, even to himself, he had credited it loyally to his young friend.
“Anyhow, the man’s a bit of a genius,” he maintained.
“More than a bit of a cur,” Gregory stood it out.
“He
didn’t
do it,” George said, hotly. “It was I who advised him to give the thing up because he was wasting himself.”
The story went that Hailes, with the idea of confirming his position in the firm of Hills, the owner of the Author’s Directory, had more pressingly ingratiated himself with his proprietor’s wife than his proprietor liked.
“
I tell you it was by my advice,” George said. “He resigned of his own accord.”