Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (143 page)

She looked him very straight in the eyes. In the light of the moon that had just unveiled, her face was pale, strongly defined, full of emotions. It was as if he were looking at it through deep water that quivered slightly.

“You are such a good man,” she said.

“Oh, I will make it all right,” George repeated. He was thinking of the intense sadness of her position. He must, of course, make it all right. He must, and he felt that he could, by sheer force of words, bring Mr. Brede back to reason.

Going back through the moonlight, walking quite slowly and looking at his shadow, George wondered vaguely whether he really were “such a good man, and why he did it all.” He reached no solution. At the corner of the churchyard there was a black knot of lounging villagers. When he had passed them a boy’s hoarse voice called:

“There goes old ‘
That’s what you want.”
It was George’s nickname in the village, conferred upon him in return for an infinite amount of material assistance, and an almost more boundless quantity of advice. “A dozen of port,” or “a few books to read,” or “a larger window in the bedroom, that’s what you want,” distinguished so many of his chats with the villagers.

The harsh “Old
That’s what you want,”
and the soft, bitter “No one ever thanks you,” vibrated in his ears together as he went the rest of his way.

In the drawing room Hailes was relating to Mrs. Moffat and Mrs. Henwick some engrossing anecdotes of Lady Carrie Jones. Thwaite and Dora Brede, with their heads close together, were talking beside the great fire-place. Gregory, his hands beneath his coat tails, was poking his spectacles up against the glass of one of Grigson-Turner’s pictures of lamp flames. He was beamingly making the tour of the room. It was said that he had once discovered an authentic Wilkie under the daubings of a later student by recognising a hair that, having come out of one of the peculiar brushes Wilkie used, had showed through the later coat of paint. That is probably untrue.

But it is indubitable that no one had missed George.

CHAPTER IV
.

NEXT morning they all flew away as quickly and completely as a puff of sparrows from a roadway. The recalcitrant
chauffeur
was supposed to have maliciously “deranged the entrails” of the imposing automobile, but its repair was only a matter of a few minutes to Hailes. The car, like an immense phenomenal black-beetle, spat and gurgled spasmodically in front of George’s high stone steps, surrounded by a small horseshoe of children in pink pinafores, hoops, and with fingers in their mouths. Hailes, who had an engrossed air, ran round it with spanners, and even disappeared under it. Mrs. Moffat sat opulently on the front seat, the bright wind stirring the black cock’s feathers of her great drooping hat. Her husband and Mrs. Henwick had strolled forward along the western road.

After final jerks of misgiving, the motive power settled to its sustained buzz. Hailes reappeared, admirably calm, with no perceptible flush on his pallid, slightly Japanese face, and no visible elation. He jerked his head back to its rigid erectness, brushed some dust off the knees of his navy blue trousers, adjusted his cap, and began to put the spanners back into their box. He hadn’t even soiled his hands, which were like pallid alabaster fins. George came down the steps and said to him:

“I’ve been thinking over those passages in your chapter four. Mind you, I think they want keying down — bringing in tone.” He was talking of the novel he had for so long been helping Hailes to write. “Because it seems to me that if you get the opening chapters so strong — as they undoubtedly are — you won’t have anything left for the end.. in the way of effect.”

Hailes was tired of his novel, and still more tired of George’s ceaseless incitements to all sorts of technical excellencies. He answered: “Yes,” with the air of one engrossed with more important things. He slammed the lid of the spanner box, cast a watchful eye along the side of the car, and then made for his seat. “I’ll think about it,” he added, climbing in beside Mrs, Moffat. “Good-bye.”

The particular noise of the motor changed to another equally particular; it started spasmodically; turned in short compass, whizzed violently, and went off. George had expected some sort of farewell moment. Mrs. Moffat had waved a plump, gloved hand; her light-coloured eyes, brilliantly relieved, and her brilliantly relieved, high-coloured cheeks had flashed for a moment at George. Her high voice had pealed out: “Good-bye, George, don’t fall in love with...” The rest was lost in the clatter, dust and east wind.

Hailes’ rigid head had been devoted to his steering wheel. The ostler was grinning as he began to lout back towards the inn.

George rather groaned, turning into his empty house. For Hailes’ defection he might have been prepared; for his sister-in-law’s vulgarity, too. Hailes had simply dropped him and the novel along with any associations; deference, even politeness, he might have been expected to show to a distinguished and surely benevolent figure. He had behaved like any servant in changing places. George could see that his own considerable personality must have oppressed Hailes; Hailes had merely submitted to him in order to obtain board and lodging, and, perhaps, “introductions.” Now he had got an introduction. But for the moment he could not see exactly where Hailes expected to get to.

There were undoubtedly loose ends of rope hanging about the triumphal car of the Gregory Moffat’s, and Hailes, having taken hold of one, would probably see to it that he got himself dragged some way along the road.

George, of course, did not sigh, but his gentle, large personality acknowledged, by a general slackening of fibre, the slap in the face.

I suppose he was really always in quest of the perfect disciple. It was not going to be Hailes. Indeed, George, except in his most romantic moments, had hardly expected it to be. But time was getting on, the sands running out, the bank balance, too.

And the quest was incredibly difficult. You have naturally to differentiate between material personality and artistic capacity — I mean, to allow for a man who will rob a bed-ridden mother whilst he is writing a supreme Ode to the Infinite. George allowed for this. Hailes, from his very first appearance with a slip of the Author’s Directory in his hand, had revealed himself as having precisely that
morale
of the domestic servant, that he had so ingenuously displayed at the parting. He had kicked down George’s ladder after climbing into Mrs. Moffat’s motor car. That was the sort of thing George had expected from the first. But George had passed all that over — for the sake of the novel he was going to drill Hailes into writing. As he had put it to Mrs. Moffat: he didn’t care, he hadn’t considered whether Hailes were personally estimable. He had thought he had talent; he knew he “wanted a lift.” Now Hailes had dropped the novel as well; probably for the sake of something Mrs. Moffat had to give.

George turned into his drawing room. In the far, dim corner, his house-keeper, a formidable collection of alpaca, grey curls, and remotely contemptuous nose, was impatiently dusting the books in the portentous book-case. The remaining volumes leaned one against the other in place of standing erect.

“Mr. Hailes, Sir,” she said, pausing in running a purple duster over the gilt top of a book that had leather sides and green ribbon bows, “took four of these big books, and those two water colours from beside the clock.”

George said: “Mr. Hailes?” mildly.

“He said you told him to take them,” the house-keeper said.
“
He packed them in the Venice box from the blue bedroom.”

George said: “Oh.”

“They’re all addressed to go to Shaftesbury Avenue,” Mrs. McNutt added.

George’s face fell a little. It was not the loss of the books, the water - colours and the Venice box, so much as the mention of Shaftesbury Avenue. Undoubtedly he had said about the books and the pictures, “You can have them if you like,” to Hailes at a moment of midnight expansion. And he could picture Hailes, with the hidden dislike that servant has to master, going about the house picking up these perquisites. That, of course, was in the day’s journey.

But he was reminded of another moment — of equal expansion, but more serious in effect.

... A friend of Hailes, a young Mr. Spendle, lately of the Lambeth School of Art, had started along with Hailes a press which was to turn out editions of Renaissance
de luxe
in a new and particularly decorative type, the joint design of Hailes and Spendle. They had intensely and very badly wanted a couple of thousand.

Hailes had brought down Spendle, a young man with very low collars and a vivid red tie. He had wild spectacles that did not much mitigate a cast in his agate blue eyes, and wild pale hair that was not mitigated at all. He had talked with tremendous vivacity, and an obviously honest enthusiasm. It was so honest and infectious that George had ultimately consented to find the couple of thousand.

He didn’t do it without a twinge. But he
wanted
to help them. Spendle appealed to him. Hailes, pulling at his thin black moustache, said:

“Of course, you needn’t find the money at once, Probably not at all.” He eyed George coolly, and with a certain caution. “I know people who will give us all the credit we shall need, if they understand you’re backing us!”

Spendle burst in: “After all, look what jolly capital letters we’ve got.”

George smiled indulgently, as if at a child. He was trying to listen to Hailes.

“In fact,....” Hailes began. He leaned back against the mantel-piece with his air suggestive of “trying it on”—”the way would be to make over the whole concern to you. You would employ Spendle and myself.”

Spendle said: “The ‘G’ alone would make the fortune of any Press.”

“Oh, I couldn’t think of sapping your brains like that,” George said, and Hailes answered, nonchalantly —

“Of course, you can be as liberal as you like with our salaries. It’s a way of giving security.”

The matter had been arranged on that basis, and the Renaissance Press had opened terracotta-faced offices in Shaftesbury Avenue some months before. It had set about producing in black letter one of Scudéry’s romances in nine volumes. Hailes, now business manager without anything to manage, had predicted that the Press would shortly pay a dividend of 215 per cent. Other presses of the sort had done it.

But their more ornamental capitals, that covered both pages of the book, could not be induced to fold properly. George had gently hinted to Hailes that he might spare his promises of dividends. He would be more than contented if he got his money back. His experience made him see well enough the nebulousness of such expected golden comet-tails. Hailes, on the other hand, could not see why George should have lent the money if he didn’t expect a large profit. It seemed too much like the “happy ever afterwards” of a fairy tale. He really could not understand what George was “getting at.” He had gone off on the automobile still puzzled as to the point, and uncertain as to what George really had expected to get out of him.

George was confronted by the weekly household bills that his housekeeper laid before him on the great oak table, and by the fact that in a month or two he wouldn’t know where to go to lay hands for certain on a couple of hundred or so. He very decidedly wished that he had not guaranteed the money. With him it was like drink — and he knew it. He came across men, vivid, real, with strong outlines, with intense hopes, and he entered into their desires and hopes, and made them more than his own. He went casting about, really taking unheard of troubles, and racking his brains. He did not want to do something for them so much as to set them in the position of their ideal as they represented it, or as he figured it.

Once, walking down the broad western avenue, he had come upon a particularly merry tramp seated on the grass, re-bandaging a damaged toe. The man was singing some of the recitative from “Rigoletto.” George discovered that he had been an Irish squireen, particularly good with whiskey punch, Irish epigrams, and that horseflesh which had carried him to sit at the roadside. George set him up in life; he rented a cottage for him, bought him a horse and cart, and launched him as a kind of carrier — a higgler. The Irishman pursued his business for perhaps two months; he paid George back
£2
10s., which he subsequently re-borrowed, and gave many reasons for satisfaction. A carrier of his sort had been much needed in the little town. One dark night he had driven off with his cart and horse, the more moveable of his furniture, and the daughter of the grocer, and the contents of the grocer’s till.

The affair had caused George some unpopularity, because the grocer’s daughter had been much sought after by the youth of the place.

He directed his housekeeper as to the meals for the day. He was dispirited. To use a figure of speech, he was possessed by a graveyard full of tombstones of that kind, glimmering at him in the flashlight of Hailes’ departure. Like all great men, all our great figures, George, in fact, was romantic.

He was that even in his treatment of his housekeeper. She was a worthy and stonily up-upright lady. But George had got it into his head that the upper servants of single gentlemen are exposed to singular temptations — that they almost inevitably rob their masters, in fact. Frequently they drink. He put himself out to make this impossible for Mrs. McNutt by checking her accounts down to the last halfpenny. He acquired considerable knowledge of the prices of such things as butcher’s meat. He took credit to himself for having kept the lady virtuous by dint of never letting her have a chance to be the reverse.

It gave him a great deal of trouble even to affect to cast an eye down her numerous “books,” but he did it, and doubtless with profit. His personal expenses were of the very smallest. He might be regarded as an ascetic of choice — one of your great Cardinals who with a
cordon bleu
in their kitchens at the service of all and sundry, live on dry apples, but like to hear their tables praised. He had not in all this any consideration of saving, except in the most incidental manner; but it had undoubtedly enabled him to keep going for so long.

He considered absent-mindedly a red leather book that had a gilt cow stamped on the cover, and small particles of suet adhering to its edges. Mrs. McNutt gently jingled the keys in her alpaca apron pockets. He was making a resolve. Just as any other man vows to reduce the number of pipes a day, he determined definitely to break off all indulging in assistance to people like Hailes. He had made the same resolve many times before. He went into his study. A letter with a conspicuous heading caught his eye. It came from the editor of a new quarterly to be called “The Higher Things.” George was floridly begged to write a sonnet for the first page of the first number — a sonnet on the higher things. As a matter of fact, George never had written a sonnet in his life. The letter called for a reply. It had lain unanswered for nearly a week.