Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (152 page)

George took the untidy bundle from Clara’s arms and handed it to Mr. Beale.

“Take it,” he said, “take it away. Never let me hear of it and its absurdities again.”

A swift wave of pleasure went over Clara’s face. Mr. Beale said:

“Well, I guess you won’t be dissatisfied as to results.”

George began again:

“I tell you I never want to hear of it again. You may have it as a present. I’ll even correct the proofs. But I wouldn’t take a penny profit if it made the biggest boom that ever—”

“
But,”
Clara interrupted with immense concern. Mr. Beale laughed in sheer incomprehension. It struck him as an agreeable kind of lunacy.

“I won’t give it to you on any other terms,” George said.” I will, to oblige Miss Brede and you, commit a sin with my eyes shut, but I couldn’t think of profiting by Bad Art.”

Clara began again: “But Mr. Moffat—”

George waved a benignant hand at her. “I’m sure,” he silenced, “with your scrupulous nature you won’t disapprove.”

Clara, with her naive, distressed air, answered after a pause:

“I think I — I don’t disapprove. But,” she wrestled painfully with embarrassment,—”but have you thought that you may come—”

“Oh, I’ve thought about the wretched book more than it can by any possibility deserve,” George said. “The world’s full of such much pleasanter topics.”

“It
isn’t,”
Clara said with a quaint and shocked intonation. “But you do such wonderfully—”

Mr. Beale had still his air of bright non-comprehension. He said:

“Well, you can rely on me to mail the cheque for the proper sum. You can build a hospital with it if it rattles you. But good heavens—”

“Mr. Beale has had rather a bad experience of authors as such,” George explained to Clara.

“Oh, this hole makes it all square,” Mr. Beale said. He was going to mail the cheque, or it would give his book-keepers dyspepsia.

George laughed. He wasn’t going to engage in a fantastic duel of generosity with an absurd American. The voices of Thwaite and Dora sounded in the hall.

Thwaite had more than a nodding acquaintance with Mr. Beale.

“You’ve emerged victoriously,” he said. He had caught sight of the obvious bundle under Mr. Beale’s arm.

“Oh, I’m a victor,” Mr. Beale said, “but I guess I’m ashamed of my terms.”

Thwaite laughed gently. “We’re all ashamed when we succeed with Mr. Moffat,” he said.

They stood talking, pleasantly enough, all together in the large room. Suddenly Dora uttered an exclamation of ingenuous surprise and delight:

“Why, there’s your glove, Clara.”

She pointed to the glove that George had carried off the night before; it lay on the bureau where George had thrown it. Clara (she had, Dora said, hunted high and low for it) crimsoned to the roots of her hair; George, in his very best manner, explained the appearance. It amused him a good deal.

Thwaite, with a quick awakened air, looked from one to the other, and suddenly George noticed that Clara Brede was extremely charming. It was as if he had just rubbed his eyes. He looked at her more narrowly with his scrutinising, intensely penetrating glance, and she slowly let her eyes fall.

The other three were talking about the beauties of the town; Mr. Beale said something about a “bully Gothic window.” George missed what they were saying.

“Whoever marries this young person will get a great treasure,” he thought; Clara’s blue-cloaked, gentle figure, as if submissively and proudly, seemed to offer itself for his inspection—”This young person—” He paused, vaguely aware that his habitual, playful tone of badinage wasn’t appropriate, wasn’t in place any more. She had suddenly — or perhaps gradually enough — asserted an equality, as if now, for some reason, she mattered; as if she claimed a place in his serious reflections, had due to her a certain respect, a certain deference, even in his thoughts. She had become a woman, all of a sudden, but very completely.

Her candour of eyes, of face, of form, of mind, her candour of words — had ceased gradually enough to be merely the amusing naïveté of a child. It had come to mean very much more. There was not anything precisely like her in the world; she was, as it were, a standard; her opinions, her view of matters, seemed suddenly not risible, but necessary; not only refreshing, but intensely salutary.

And the qualities of her mind seemed to be translated into her gestures — into the folds her dress took, into the lines of her mouth when she smiled, into the very waves of her hair. It was as if something intensely touching in the picture that she made affected him almost tenderly. A certain pathos, mingled with her candour, her grasp on life and on truth; it had the exquisiteness of habitual renunciation, a radiance as if of many tears.

Mr. Beale, who suddenly had somehow lost the intense significance of his share of life and of candour, was asking him to walk to the station, and, on the way, to point out the glories of the little town. He had to catch the
“
N-D-L.” to-morrow; no idling for
him.

CHAPTER II
.

IT had been for Clara like stepping down into an arena. She had delivered her first battle. Mr. Beale was walking beside her, before the others. He turned back; pointed at George’s house; explained that George’s elms were “bully old oaks.” His turf was deliciously soft. Six hundred years old, may be!

She wondered swiftly whether she had said too much.

“I couldn’t
help
what I did say,” she argued with herself.

Mr. Beale said:

“What a fine chap that man is!”

He was talking of George. She assented with a faint smile and her habitual abstracted air.

Where did she stand now? She had brought
Wilderspin
round because she had wanted to see George. She had wanted to
look
at him, to discover, if she could, what had happened to her. Last night she had said to herself that she loved him. And she had passed the night in thinking it; she had fallen asleep smiling about it; it remained a blissful and sublime fact. She felt that now she could wait for ever on her father without a complaint, without a murmur even to herself, Mr. Beale hastened to open George’s gate for her. She bowed her head and smiled — she had awakened smiling. It had been delightful that there was
Wilderspin
to carry back to George. It had made a pretext ready to her hand. It was like a good omen; she had not had to cast about for an excuse. She could act at once. She had acted.

Mr. Beale said:

“Ah, Miss, it’s what one wants, to come to such a quiet place.”

For once in her life she had acted. George’s house had seemed to her more mellow, more grey and more radiant, in among its tall trees. The great buttresses that held it up had seemed like symbols of absolute permanence; the rooks had cawed among the loose sticks of their high, untidy nests, and their mere attitude had suggested ideas of the blue air, as if she herself could fly.

“Don’t you think,” she said to Mr. Beale,
“
that however little one may want, it’s always too infinite for one ever to attain?”

He said, “Well, now?” interrogatively, and began to argue the point. Living in such a place would be good enough for
him.

But what
she
wanted was that George should go on living in that place. That had made her “speak out” so just before. She had found him deliberately throwing away a chance. She had forced him to take it. For a minute she wondered whether she had not said too much. Then she didn’t care. She had made him give
Wilderspin
to this quaint man. Beale would be sure to pay him. She knew that Beale was honest, and the payment for
Wilderspin
would keep George going if he were really poor. With her sure instinct she knew that Beale was not a man to be mistaken.
Wilderspin
would succeed.

She was very happy because George was going to stand out before the world as the author of
Wilderspin.
She had persuaded him to. It would make him illustrious; it would render him beloved by hundreds. She had read the book with avidity. She had cried over the tender passages; noble phrases had elevated her. She had wondered if George could love as tenderly as his hero loved his heroine. She had wondered if that heroine had been his wife.

George was only a few yards behind. She seemed to feel an “influence” coming towards her, and making her vaguely at peace. But just as they were passing her own gate, her father pounced out of it upon George. In his grey study coat he looked like an immense spider dropping out of a lurking place. He said:

“Just come in a minute. I want to consult you.”

George said swiftly: “But, my dear fellow,” and indicated the brilliant, brown figure of the American.

“You said you’d help me,” Mr. Brede grumbled. He opened the wicket for George. “I won’t keep you. You can catch them up.”

George passed helplessly in.

She felt an intense impulse to run back to her father — to upbraid him and to release George. But suddenly she dared not.

Love, which had simplified so many things for Clara Brede, stopped short at that. She was a valiant soul, but she was afraid then. It wasn’t public opinion she feared; it wasn’t even the private reproof of her own people. Her father might know, her sister might know that she loved George helplessly and vigilantly, but
he
must not. She owed that to herself.

She had always thought it ignoble that a woman should prostrate herself before a man. Man had been, for her, the enemy — predatory, accustomed to conquer insolently, and with a hard and odious light in the eyes. She had figured him as twisting a moustache and winking at the universe, whilst a woman hung round his neck or unlaced his boots. It had not enraged her; it had not made her desire to change this for other women. She regarded them as fools; they went under, for the good of the race perhaps. It did not concern her.

George was different — the eternal exception. He had no conquering insolence. He was tender; he was “considerate.” He would be always casting about to spare one humiliation. He was a mental influence that one could feel; a magnetic force, a radiator of joy — something she could not express, but an exception.

Nevertheless, she would not, to his face, save him from her father. She would not let him know that she was concerned for him. That would be a degradation; as if she should cast herself prostrate before him. He must help himself; she would not
“
demoralise” him. But she thought of herself as an invisible providence, keeping off from him these parasites, these thieves of his time, of his goods, of his interests, of his very life. She intended, however, to remain invisible to him.

She was walking beside Mr. Beale, and imparting information with smiles.

“No,” she said,
“
that is not a Renaissance window; it’s Early Perpendicular.” They were outside the end of the church. Dora and Thwaite had forged a little ahead, and were talking intimately, with their heads bent down. She expected every minute to hear George’s footsteps behind her.

“Well, it’s bully,” Mr. Beale said. “Like Brooklyn Evangelical; only better, I expect.” He didn’t know anything about these things, but he
loved
them.

She had his company right down the hill, along the winding road across the levels to the little station. He talked all the time. They ran down Dora and Thwaite at the station, but his last words were addressed to Clara. He said she could rely on his booming
Wilderspin
for all it was worth, because he simply “
loved
” George. Clara tried to think of an apology for George’s absence.

She expected to meet him at every turn of the homeward road. She had to make it alone, because Thwaite and Dora remembered that a mile beyond the line there was a picturesque copse they had not visited together. Thwaite looked at her so gloomily that she did not offer to go with them, and they disappeared into a green field.

She felt vaguely that if George wanted to meet her, there could be no better time. The sight of Thwaite and her sister side by side made her a little melancholy.

“He has never looked at me,” she thought, bitterly. “Never once.”

It was at times in her head that he must care for her, because she cared so much for him. She did not wish for his love; what could she do with it? She had her father to think of. It wasn’t so much a duty; it wasn’t so much affection — it was a piece of work that she had to carry through. There was no one else to do it.

She turned a corner of the road. A quarter of a mile in front of her there was a figure of a man, half hidden by a pollard willow. Her heart began to flutter; she halted irresolutely.

But it was too slight a man, and he did not walk erect enough. She stepped out quickly. Her blue cloak was blown strongly against her in the unsheltered spaces. She wanted to be back to see him. Then she remembered that he might be coming, and, if he came, she would have less far to walk back with him. She slackened her pace.

At the thought that in the end it made no difference, her face grew sad. Then she remembered that he had had her glove, and she smiled. She lingered on the bridge and looked at the small river. It was full with rain, and grey with the reflection of the March skies. She looked at the horizon. The clouds were low, the sails of a ship stood up, dim and sad, above the level of the marsh.

If only, beyond the horizon, there were a land — But she shrugged her shoulders.

This was childish nonsense. Even if there were such a land she couldn’t go to it with him. He had never looked at her, and there was her father. But she imagined a place where the air was always soft, and where one lay back dreamily in long chairs. There would have to be a grey sea there, and a great sky, and perpetual twilight. And one would rest —

The little town was not a hundred yards from her. It stood on a bluff of perpendicular copse. Red roofs peeped over, and hundreds of birds were singing in the brown underwood.

She looked at where the bottom of the road struck the level. He was not at the bend. He was not coming. He had never even looked at her.

She began to walk swiftly. He might be gone back to his house if she did not hurry. She might not see him again for all the rest of that day. She had a sensation of horrible pain because he had not come. Then it struck her that it was ignoble to care so much for a man who altogether ignored her. She turned into the sloping door of a dilapidated stone cottage to order the week’s potatoes. That was her business in life.

In Mr. Brede’s tiny and shabby study George was listening to a “letter needing great tact” — about the affairs of the Society for Promoting Rural Pleasures. Harassing intrigues had sprung up in the Committees during Mr. Brede’s retirement. A Northern countess and a Midland lady had formed two intensely hostile parties. It was a question of policy — were the peasants to pay nominal subscriptions for the books they borrowed from the village libraries whenever the libraries should get themselves established? And which of the two ladies was to be premier lady patroness?

“I shall have to get these women well in hand before beginning anything else,” Mr. Brede said heavily. “Listen—” He began to read his letter. It seemed to George suddenly wearisome that he should be at the beck of anyone for a matter so grotesque and trivial. And Mr. Brede’s implicit and almost childish belief in George’s own good judgment made the matter no better.

But it was, he recognised, his own fault. He had egged Mr. Brede on to divert his mind with these things. Mr. Brede, at least, was alert and bustling. He breathed excitedly through his nostrils. In the midst of these details he was like a horse turned out at last into a luxuriant meadow. His brooding was gone. There was that much gained.

“One of them will have to go into the Committee on Ways and Means,” Mr. Brede said heavily. “I don’t care which. I wish there weren’t any women.”

George, at any rate, in the course of the morning, got a very good insight into the working of Mr. Brede’s Society. The quarrels had been quite extraordinary.