Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (149 page)

“They’re such a debased, dissolute lot,” Mr. Brede said gloomily; “not more interesting than animals.”

“It’s desperately wanted, your organising power,” George said, as if guilelessly.
“
Village life is dying out for want of it.”

“Well, no one knows that better than
I.”
Brede began to talk of the Society for Promoting Rural Pleasures. He had forced it into notoriety throughout the country. He had collected statistics; he had whipped up local gentry and members of both houses. “But goodness only knows what sort of a muddle they’ll have got into. There are too many women in it; they were always quarrelling. The Rural Dean here has asked me to read a paper on my experiences.”

George had roused some of the old fire in him.

Mr. Brede looked at him with a slightly awakened air of nibbling at a bait. “You think it would do me good to mix in these things again?”

In the far corner of the room, Thwaite sighed over the manuscript.

George looked at him absently. “It will save your reason,” he said.

Mr. Brede rose suddenly, and his shadowy form towered over George.

“Come home with me for a moment,” he said. “I’ve something I want to show you.”

George looked hesitatingly at Thwaite, who was getting to the end of his reading. He wanted to hear Thwaite’s verdict.

“I won’t keep you a minute.” Mr. Brede said. His voice was shaking with eagerness, and his eyes rolled.

CHAPTER III
.

“YES, I’m going mad,” he thundered, He caught violently at George’s coat-lapel; they were in his tiny room.

“I’m going mad. You’ve said the word.”

He kept George for two hours in the dim light of a solitary candle, It was past one. On the flap of the bureau lay the facsimile of the papyrus, beside it one of Clara’s gloves. Cheering him, distracting his mind and soothing his nerves, seemed an endless task. The little black hands of the strident clock crept round the dial.

George noticed the glove beside the yellow paper. He twisted it round his fingers and flicked the buttoned end absently at Mr. Brede, emphasising his remarks. Once the click of a door lock sounded above them; footsteps creaked on the stairs; a skirt brushed against the wall. George wondered if Clara Brede would come in. The sounds retreated after a moment. He felt some disappointment. He realised with conviction that she had become alarmed. Her nerves must be always on the stretch. She was trying to hear if her father were talking to himself in a sudden paroxysm. She listened just long enough to satisfy herself that he was not alone. He seemed to know her so very well.

Mr. Brede read him his notes for a sermon on the evilness of the age. He dragged them, panting, out of ill-fitting drawers of the bureau, and talked of them with animation. His eyes sparkled.

“You’re the only person that does me any good,” he asseverated. “I feel better already. That specialist said my brain couldn’t stand any kind of strain.”

George twisted Clara’s glove more tightly round his middle finger. “You ought to see him again,” he said.

“No, no,” the clergyman snorted. “Never! He frightened me out of my wits. That’s what’s the matter with me.”

George reflected. He didn’t like the responsibility. The specialist ought to be consulted.

“What you want,” he said at last, “is precisely not to let these things be a strain. Only work at them enough to keep your mind employed. It’s your duty — if you have any kind of message for the times — to deliver that message. But you ought to see the specialist.” Mr. Brede eluded the injunction. The specialist had frightened him.

“The point is: Am I fit? Have I the right, morally, after—”

“Oh, I’ll help you,” George said cheerfully. “I’m an essential idler.”

Clara Brede had heard in her sleep the deep boom of her father’s voice. She had found herself running out of her door and creeping down the stairs. She hardly knew whether she was frightened; she was breathlessly anxious that there should be no outcry. He was such a large man. One day he would be more violent than she could control, and then she would have to call for help.

That was her constant dread — a public disclosure of the fact that her father was mad. She had no personal fears, but that kept her awake many nights. She heard George’s voice, and suddenly she felt quite safe. It was very cold. She crept back to her room, found in the darkness her blue cloak, and, covering herself with it, she leaned over the banisters at the stair-head and listened to the voices. They seemed to soothe her; it was pleasant to think they were so near. The rest of the house was very quiet and it was quite dark, with the heavy, soundless blackness of a mid-winter midnight, when all the world is as if frozen and dead. She had nothing to think of; she remained perfectly motionless.

“How I love him,” she whispered, and to herself it seemed like a loud and startling cry. A great peace descended upon her soul; it was as if all the sleeping world were suddenly at one with itself and with her. She put her hands before her face and began to cry silently, as if with the restfulness of it. Her tears fell between her fingers.

No thoughts came to her. There was only the feeling that he was there, quite near her, and that everything was well. He was there, almost within hand touch; she could hear his voice. And she loved him; the world outside her small, dark circle of hopelessness seemed again to have sent a ray towards her. She was no longer alone, and she was at rest; she wanted to sleep, to sink into unconsciousness; then, with the warmth of her hands upon her face —

The door below her feet clicked open, a thin fillet of light ran up the wall; the voices gushed up to her. She caught her father’s: “Have I the right, morally?”

She leaned forward and looked down. She caught sight of George’s shoulder and of the light shining on his hair. She drank in his voice thirstily, the vibrating, comforting, joyous tones, “Oh, I’ll help you.”

What a
good
man he was! He moved slightly; disappeared. He had such a light foot that she could not hear his steps in the hall. The minutest sounds seemed of immense importance. She heard none. A rush of cold air came. She heard her father’s: “Ph — , what a cold night!” then a sort of murmur, a single footstep on the bricked path. The front door clanged to. It struck her as a shame that her father had not waited until George was out of the gate. Everyone treated him so badly! She had been expecting blissful and impossible things to happen. She heard a fumbling with the chains and bolts. It was all over, then! She couldn’t believe it. She slipped noiselessly into her room.

George walked erectly and elatedly home as the church clock drowsily chimed and struck two. In the study the pile of manuscript lay on the sofa; Thwaite had gone home. He stood for some minutes gazing at the fire and still flicking Clara’s glove up and down. He had carried it off absent-mindedly. He threw it on to his desk. He couldn’t give any reason at all for his elation.

He had, next morning, a letter from his brother Gregory. “No,” it said (George had asked whether he had an idea of dismissing Thwaite from the
Salon), “
I haven’t the least. He need not break his back with hack work. I’m not a sweater.” George went hurriedly round the churchyard to Thwaite’s cottage. He had not even breakfasted. The cottage faced the friendly ruins of the great church. A weather-boarded, two-storied shanty, once run up for a yeomanry occupation during a Napoleonic invasion scare, it had, with its little, long and attenuated strip of garden in front, the air of being sandwiched in, an extravagant toy, a heightened doll’s house, between two rather pretentious brick and tile dwellings.

George was swinging the garden gate briskly ajar when a man sprang out of a passing fly, straight at him. He made a sort of flash of brown ulster and red beard cut nattily into a spade shape.

“I guess you’re Mr. Moffat,” he said, holding out a nervous hand. “I’m George P- Beale — the Philadelphia Book Company.”

He had friendly blue eyes that looked amusedly at the world in general and George in particular.

He jerked out, “I heard from Mr. Hailes that you’ve a book on hand. I
want
it.” George faced him squarely and solidly, “I’m not aware that I have.”

“Well, we can’t talk business in the. open air,” Mr. Beale said, cheerfully. “Haven’t breakfasted even. I came straight on from Mr. Hailes’ rooms. Early morning train.”

George sent him home to await his own coming, and offered him a share of his own breakfast.

“I’m going to
have
that book,” the American called, as he jumped back into the fly. “I thought that was your shanty. Queer erection. But there’s no knowing
what
you English Pre-Raphaelites won’t rejoice in.”

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” George called. The fly drove off. He went smiling up the long, narrow garden path. He was used to people who came to him with absurd requests, and Mr. Beale had amused him. He seemed to promise a cheerful hour at breakfast. He could not think what Hailes had meant by sending the man after a book. Hailes had not heard of the new volume before he went, and he hadn’t taken the trouble to write to George since. Standard roses had been newly planted along the paths; round new, circular beds in the grass, new crocuses peeped perfunctory yellow flames at the March wind.

“You’ve been getting the garden into shape for Dora,” George said to Thwaite.

It had been for years an untended tangle of weeds and briars.

“Oh, Dora likes pretty things,” Thwaite answered. “You won’t know this house when we’re done with it.” He was bending over some bacon in a frying-pan that sizzled and sent out a sharp, joyful odour. “It’s going to be like your room. Look at the ceiling.” He pointed a fork backwards over his shoulder.

He read the letter from Gregory, joyfully letting small drops of fat fall from the prongs on to his sackcloth apron. The plaster had been stripped from the ceiling, laying bare the floor joists above; they undoubtedly imitated George’s famous beams. A large, rough oak table that someone had begun to polish had a pile of books for review on it.

“Dora
wants
it to look like your room,” Thwaite commented. He was still intent on the letter. “She’s a tenderly imitative spirit.”

He removed the frying pan from the fire, and placed it among his papers.

“Your brother’s a good sort,” he commented. “I suppose he knows his business.” And what a good sort George was to have come round before breakfast. It took a weight off his mind to know that things were settled — that little room would look really pretty when all the furniture was in it. They had arranged to have a general servant and a knife boy to sleep out.

George laughed.

“One has to arrange these things,” Thwaite admonished him. “It’s a serious business.” He pointed to the frying-pan among the papers. “And I’m certainly acquiring a distaste for that sort of thing.”

George said: “Ah!” and moved towards the door.

“Oh, I know you think I’m deteriorating,” Thwaite jeered at him, “but one can’t always be a tramp. Don’t abandon me, though.”

George lifted the latch. “I’ve got an American publisher descended out of the heavens to breakfast,” he smiled.

“Don’t let him swindle you with your absurd good nature,” Thwaite came to the door to call after him. “I haven’t had time to speak about your work. But it’s going to be a valuable asset.”

George waved a comfortable hand from the gate. He was immensely pleased to think that Thwaite’s post on the
Salon
was safe; it was going to be an ideal little ménage in that cottage.

CHAPTER IV
.

HAILES and Mrs. Moffat had finished breakfast in the large, shining dining room at Campden Hill. The folded
Times
and half a score of letters beside a silver kettle hissing on a tripod awaited Gregory.

Mrs. Moffat was poring, flushed and anxiously, above a sale catalogue of Christie’s, the fine art auctioneers; she made feverish marks with a pencil against several numbers. Hailes stood with his back to the light in one of the three tall white window spaces. His air of unconcern, his noticeable, dark, spick and spanness, and the slight backward ricking of the neck were precisely those that had deserted George four months before.

“I don’t see where anything’s to come from,” he said, “I really don’t.”

Mrs. Moffat looked at him as if with a pang of anguish.

“Oh, as a last resort we can always go to
him.”
She looked disdainfully towards the place of the absent Gregory.

Hailes slightly squared his noticeably squared shoulders.

“If we can carry on till May—”

“That Astley woman ought to be made to pay up,” Mrs. Moffat said angrily.
“
I’ve had her here; Lady Clo’s presented her. What are these people for?”

Hailes swung a window cord knob like an acorn round and round in the air.

“You might as well ask what are we all here for?” he asked sardonically.

Mrs. Moffat looked at him, her eyes full of anger.

“You haven’t any heart,” she said.

Gregory Moffat appeared at the door. He beamed at them through his gold-rimmed spectacles, and sat down to breakfast. Hailes was gazing at the trees that, outside, swung in the fresh breeze. A sparrow flew upwards, carrying a straw. Mrs. Moffat resumed her reading in the catalogue.

Five minutes later she said in her clear, windy voice:
“
Gregory, I must have a cheque.”

Her husband peered, as if with the end of his nose, over a blue letter lying across his plate. He did not move.

“Over and above the household expenses,” Mrs. Moffat explained, as if she were talking to a stupid child.
“
I can’t get along without it. I’ve tried.”

Gregory peered, at first over, then through his glasses.

“A woman must have money,” his wife protested angrily.

Gregory slightly shrugged one of his shoulders, and looked down again at his letter. When he went out of the room he pointed short-sightedly at a large Gainsborough portrait that hung above the imposing sideboard.
“
That’s to go down to the Gallery this morning. There’s a Troyon coming to take its place. You can come down about eleven for the cheque.”

“By Jove, I wish I had his luck,” Hailes said, looking appreciatively at the Gainsborough after Gregory’s noiseless disappearance. “I suppose that’s sold to some fool.” He remained looking moodily at the fire for some minutes. “He cut up rather rusty about the cheque, didn’t he?”

Mrs. Moffat, looking with gloomy abstraction at the table-cloth, muttered: “Oh,
he
—”

Hailes pulled a tiny, gilt-edged note-book from his upper waistcoat pocket.
“
Thirty — no, twenty-eight at a pinch,” he said, beneath his mongolian moustache.

“I’ll do him the justice to say he’s not close with money,” she said scornfully. “He’s never refused me a penny. There’s something else on his mind.”

Hailes put his note-book up.

“I don’t ask for much. And you’ll admit we’ve not been very successful these last few months.”

“It’s the fault of your tip about Barberton Reefs,” Mrs. Moffat said.

Hailes paced abstractedly up and down the border of the enormous Oriental carpet.

“The fact is, you’ve been going on wrong lines,” he said, authoritatively.

From his assured manner and quiet pose of being used to the household it wouldn’t have been guessed that he had been Mrs. Moffat’s private secretary for certainly not half a year.

“I used to keep myself in pocket money very well before,” Mrs. Moffat said, almost plaintively. She was thinking of the Mr. Frewer Hoey who had preceded Mr. Hailes. “And with much less trouble.”

Hailes put his hand to the back bottom rim of his waistcoat, pulled it a little, and jerked his head back.

“That only proves that the game was played out,” he said. “And it’s so niggling at the best of times. I’m almost ashamed to be seen going to these sales and snapping up a thing here and there to sell to wretched parvenus who want to — get into Lady Clo’s set. And Lady Clo wants such a devil of a commission.”

Mrs. Moffat, with instinctive conservatism, said that it was in any case better than Mr. Hailes’ tip about Barberton Reefs.

Mr. Hailes, in no way listening, went on: “Now my Spanish project is a certain thing.”

Mrs. Moffat sighed slightly, and, leaning her arms on the table, prepared to listen to the Spanish project.

The coming of Mr. Hailes had very much changed her life. In the old days — in Mr. Frewer Hoey’s — she had, like so many ladies in her set, dabbled in a branch of the antique furniture business. She went with Mr. Hoey to occasional sales, as a rule in large country mansions, and purchased the more costly lots of bric-a-brac that “went cheaply.” These Mr. Hoey had afterwards, through discreet tradesmen, disposed of to the people Mr. Hailes called “wretched parvenus who wanted to get into the set of Lady Clo, or any other of Mrs. Moffat’s bosom friends.

Mrs. Moffat had hardly considered the money side of the matter. It had comfortably supplemented the income of Mr. Hoey himself. To her it meant more frequent têtes-a-tête with him — in railway carriages to and from the country mansions, pleasant drives in the country, and the pleasing excitement of picking up bargains. The pursuit had had the glamour of romance and sentiment. It had caused, too, only occasional intervals between the once incessant “meetings.”

Mr. Hailes had changed all this. The “meetings” had become the scarce interludes in his almost sinister pursuit of money in large quantities. He had even hinted that politics itself was
vieux jeu.
If Mrs. Moffat really wanted to keep herself in any sort of set at all she might have to face weaning herself from the public life of a sort that she so delighted windily to dominate.

It all caused her a certain amount of disquietude, the precursor of the mental agony of being superannuated, on the shelf, used up and leading nothing. Hailes terrorised her, as it were, by veiled hints, the merest suggestions that if she were undocile he would cut himself adrift. He terrorised her. She most desperately did not want to lose him. Perhaps it was his sinister personal charm; perhaps the mere necessity for close and intimate union with some man, and the feeling that, Hailes once lost, no more in all probability would take his place. I don’t know. She was on that indefinite, wrong side of forty-five, when for a woman everything that is lost is gone for ever. To Mrs. Moffat the measure of rule, of tyranny, that she had enjoyed had meant a very great deal.

Listening to Hailes’ Spanish project she sighed vaguely.

“I tell you it’s a certain thing,” he was saying.
“
I know the Duke of Medina’s master of the horse. He would give us all the instructions and introductions we should want. Why, even the figures that I got from the little dealer in Clarges Street mean a profit of four hundred per cent. And properly boomed, as you and your people could do it, there’s a fortune in it. All these old Spanish families part with their old furniture for next to nothing.

There’s a painter in Portugal now — an old master called
Il Gran Vasco.
Why,
he
—”

Hailes, in fact, was merely elaborating the principle of purchasing objects of
vertu
at local sales and disposing of them at enhanced prices in London. His idea was that half the old furniture in Spain — old cloth of gold, ancient tapestries, and gorgeous Portuguese carvings and lace — might be purchased for a few hundred pounds from the country
casas
of the nobles in out of the way places. The nobles would be only too glad of a chance of re-furnishing with Tottenham Court Road and Rue de Rivoli stuff.

“It’s all there waiting,” he said. “Afterwards we open little Kleinkampf’s gallery with the best of the stuff and a few borrowed Goyas and Velasquez. Il Gran Vasco’s pictures — we’ll buy them up at old rag prices — will be
the
discovery of the year. He’s quite unknown. The Bond Street
Peninsular Gallery!
It’s a little fortune if we get the right people interested. And that’s easy.”

“It’s rather like Gregory’s undertakings,” Mrs. Moffat said, negligently.

“Oh, of course, he’s too big a man for us to fly at,” Hailes answered.

“It’s on the same lines, though. The only thing we want is capital.”

He said, after a time: “Get everything you can out of him; every penny. What will he stand — a thousand?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mrs. Moffat answered, a little wearily; “I don’t in the least know. He’s always given me whatever I asked. I daresay he will.”

Mr. Hailes looked as if he envied her. “Well, get the last penny,” he said.

“If we have to go away in April,” Mrs. Moffat hesitated, “I shall miss the Women’s Parliamentary Protection Meetings.” She had always taken the chair unopposed. They were the chief source of her power.

“Of course, you can’t be in Spain and here, too,” Mr. Hailes said, in his reasonable way. “I can go alone, though. Lady Clo and Semples will be in Madrid. We can work it all right.”

“The meetings must go,” Mrs. Moffat said sharply. She did not like the idea of Hailes and Lady Clo in Madrid.

They drove down to Bond Street, through the park, behind the horses that looked as if they had been French-polished.

Mr. Hailes said: “I wish you’d contrive to make that beggar Thwaite and the
Salon
a little more useful. I always thought the paper was
your
property.”

Mrs. Moffat’s large feathered hat waved in the breeze; she had recovered a great deal of her serenity.

“I don’t know; frankly I don’t know,” she said, rather uninterestedly. It had occurred to her that, if she got from her husband the sinews of war that Hailes needed, his allegiance to her must be as rivetted as she could desire. And, lying back among the cushions, she felt that she could torment Hailes as much as she liked. “When Gregory bought the
Salon
I naturally thought it would be an organ for my causes.”

Hailes gnawed at his moustache and meditated. A fat policeman stopped the crosspark traffic for their passage; the boughs above them, brightened by heavy, tight buds, and shot by windy sunlight, shook in the vigour of the spring. Enormous pink and white clouds lumbered high above the clumsy Bayswater houses, across a limpid blue sky.

“It hasn’t been,” she said, negligently.

“I always hated that supercilious ass, Thwaite,” Hailes snarled. “I saw enough of him at George Moffat’s. You must really get rid of him if anything’s to be done.”

Mrs. Moffat looked at the back buttons of the footman’s coat. She smiled faintly. Probably Thwaite
had
irritated Hailes at George’s. She could imagine them together. She said, a little contemptuously:

“Well, the creature has ideas about art. He wouldn’t admit things I wanted put in.”

“It’s a pretty state of affairs,” Hailes sneered. Then he, too, became meditative.

“After all,” he commented, “it’s just as well the
Salon
wasn’t devoted to the shrieking sisterhood. It
has
a sort of tone. That’s what’s wanted.”

“What do
you
want, then?” Mrs. Moffat returned his sneer.

“Oh, I shall have to begin to boom the Spanish project.”