Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (153 page)

CHAPTER III
.

“You may consider that man happy,” George said three months later, “whose months are marked merely seasonally. I mean if his events are — say a bee that’s hanging in a daffodil, or the way the days draw out and shorten. That’s it — phenomena, not events, being set down in his mental journal.”

“Don’t you
think”
Clara Brede asked earnestly (they were conversing along a strip of wet sand, and she paused to step across a little rill that channelled its way down towards unquiet, stretched waves) “that achievements are better than either?”

George laughed.
“
Oh! if it came to achievements,” he said comfortably, “there would be nothing left for us but—” He pointed to a company of gulls floating a long way out beyond the poles of the kettle nets. Clara pondered an exhortative reply.

“You’re a gallant soul,” George said. “What you set out to do you carry through. Not a doubt. But for us — for the rest of the world—”

“I think I have never succeeded in anything in all my life,” Clara said suddenly, with a ring of conviction in her voice.

“Ah, you’re nervous; you’re run down,” George said. “These marriages are enervating. But Dora and Thwaite are off; it’s all over.”

“Oh, it isn’t
that
I mean,” Clara said. “It’s a continual thing. I never can — and so, I suppose I never
shall
— succeed; just really succeed in anything, not anything appreciable, but some grotesquely little thing, like arranging flowers in a vase...” She was speaking fast and nervously. George looked at her in his serious manner.

“You
really
feel like that?” he asked. “You strike one as being so — so tremendously effectual.”

Clara was hindered in the unusual stride of her speech; she looked back at him with her eyes a little wide, and then, as it were, died down.

“You’re only trying to comfort me,” she said. “I know what I
am.”

George felt a sudden and immense tenderness of pity.

“You can’t, you know,” he said, “tell how you appear — comparatively — set against the rest of humanity.”

“Oh, I know I appear harsh and unsympathetic,” Clara said.

“You know you’re extremely young,” George said.

“I’m —
horrible,”
she almost shuddered. “I’ve never been young; I’ve never really enjoyed anything. And I appear—”

A number of distant shouts were carried by the wind from behind them.

“Ah, delightfully young,” George said.
“
I’ve known so many. How do you know — how can you — how you appear? I’ll tell you how you do.”

The shouts were wafted more insistently. A long way behind them, near the two or three bathing tents on the high wall of bright shingle, Mr. Brede, a black figure, quite tiny, agitating arms and hands, was walking swiftly towards them. Clara stepped suddenly forward, and George hastened after her. He wanted to cheer her up; he thought she ought to marry some young man — nicer even than Thwaite. Her environment was altogether too depressing. But there wasn’t anyone good enough. The pleasant wind blew the gulls high into the immense vacancy of the sky before them.

“I think we must have appeared a frightful collection of savages,” she suddenly brought out, “all this time of the wedding. It made me wretched.”

George said, “Good heavens.” There had been the little extraordinary squabbles of all her sisters and all her aunts at Dora’s wedding, but it had never occurred to him that Clara had been in the least degree troubled.

“If it hadn’t been for you—” she began.

George said, quickly, “Oh, please.”

“And some of them were so rude to you. I’m sure my Aunt Hilda — —”

It was as if Clara had suddenly touched the ground.

George laughed. “Of
course,
I got my knuckles rapped. Your aunt naturally didn’t like me. Why should she? And there
will
be quarrels in that sort of gathering — especially among determined types like your amiable relatives. But I hadn’t the least idea you even noticed that sort of thing.”

“Oh, I don’t,” Clara said wearily, “I’m used to it. But when you — when another person comes among it, all the sort of violence and clumsiness, the crudeness, seems to stand out.”

“I know I’m a trifler in your eyes,” George said with a certain levity, “but I wasn’t really crushed by them. I enjoyed it immensely.” Clara said: “I was so miserable. I’m so tired of it all. If I could only get away.”

She half pointed a long, sensitive, white hand towards the sea.

“Beyond the horizon?” George asked sympathetically.

“Beyond — beyond all the horizons,” she assented. She added: “If you only knew.”

“Ah, one can’t get away from one’s own personality,” George said. “It all comes round to that.” He added banteringly: “You couldn’t, you know, even if you were married to the nicest man in the world.”

It was as if her eyes filled with tears.

“I don’t want—” she began with what for her was almost passion, George felt that he had behaved with brutality.

“I only meant,” he said quite seriously, “that you ought to be out of all this.”’

She shook her head.

“I’ve wanted all my life, so intensely,” she said slowly, “not to mind; to be irresponsible; to do things easily and gracefully.”

She looked up at a gull; it swung swiftly across the sky, as if it illustrated what she meant.

“And I’ve seemed always to be doing clumsy things that make one clumsy oneself. Like an agricultural labourer, if you understand what I mean.”

George half shook his head.

“Ah!” She looked an immeasurable distance ahead along the sand. “I seem to have been so purposeful always; so dull; so plodding. Why? Why? I plodded at college. I took a degree. I didn’t in the least want to. And I nursed my mother and I kept the home together. I’m still doing it. I don’t know why, either. It may have been a sense of duty. I suppose it was. But that’s not very creditable.”

George said: “It’s a fine thing to have
done.”

“Of course I loved my mother,” she said, “but even that doesn’t make it any more creditable.”

“My dear child,” he interrupted her.

“No, it’s hopeless,” she said decidedly. “I’ve always felt like this; I always shall. But I’d give anything, anything, to get away. Beyond the horizon, as you say.”

“Well, you know,” George said, “you’d lose all self-respect if you did.”

The voice of Mr. Brede calling an intermittent “Hi — hi — hi” passed over their heads unnoticed.

“Because it would be a running away,” George went on. “You were born to face things — and to face them very splendidly and mutely.”

“I’ve been yelping,” she answered bitterly, “like — like a puppy or Werther.”

George laughed.

“You’ve had a trying time,” he commented. “And it’s very charming to hear you. It does me a great deal of good. You’ve always seemed so splendidly assured; so certain. It is charming to find the human touch in you.”

“Oh, I’m human,” she said bitterly; “I’m worrying you with my troubles, like all the rest of them. I swore I never would.”

Mr. Brede hurrying after them had abandoned his calls.

“It’s charming,” George said, “because,
mutatis mutandis,
it’s so very much my own case. We’ve precisely the opposite desires; the opposite quests beyond the horizon. I mean, I feel myself so miserably wanting in the purposefulness you want to get rid of. I’m so desultory.”

“You do everything so well,” Clara accused him.

“Ah, my dear young lady,” George sighed,
“
I don’t
do
anything at all. But the fact remains, we’re each other’s complements.”

She looked away from him out to sea, the corners of her mouth drawn tight.

George’s “You may consider that man happy whose journal is filled with phenomena, not events,” had been the moral drawn from his own life of late. His months had slipped by without external contacts. He had remarked daffodils with bees hanging in them, the sudden sound of the lawn-mowers thrilling in his garden, the immense twilight chorus of birds in April, the lengthening of the days. They were shortening again already; July was beginning. And he had undoubtedly been happy, buoyant, alert and capable of enjoying his leisures. He had seen a great deal of Clara Brede, and nothing had happened.

They had glided into July; the sea — broad, smooth and blue — the warm beach, leisurely hours beneath the sun, had swung again into the round of the year. Mr. Brede was undoubtedly better. He was humanised, and, except for alarming and violent relapses that were characteristic of him, showed the wisdom of George’s treatment. He had even, at odd moments, taken an interest in his daughter’s wedding. And he had been unsparing in his demands on George’s time.

George himself had worked in the intervals, held down to it by an unacknowledged desire to come to the scratch. The last proofs of
Wilderspin
had re-crossed the Atlantic more than a month ago; the lull that precedes publication had set dumbly in. Thwaite had proclaimed that the “new volume” — it was more than three parts finished — really
might
do George’s trick, and George unconsciously rejoiced in the approbation that Clara bestowed alike on his industry and on its fruits. I don’t know that George himself wasn’t pleased with his work.

Thwaite’s marriage had approached with the gentle arriving of all the other phenomena. Preparation had been great fun. The turning of the weather-boarded cottage into a spick and span little dwelling, with a new, red chimney stack, and extremely flourishing standard roses above the tulips of circular beds, had engrossed and amused them all. And Thwaite’s extreme earnestness in the whole matter had agreeably enough diverted George.

“One
has
to consider what Dora has been used to,” he said, in a slightly nettled tone on the night before the wedding. George had a little rallied him on the choice of a Paris hotel.

“I should think that was precisely what one hadn’t to do at this stage,” George said, good humouredly.

“I couldn’t take her to some back street place in the Latin quarter,” Thwaite said.

“
I
should,” George answered.

Thwaite uttered an ejaculation of impatience. “Well, I wish to-morrow was over.” He avoided the question. “That
damned
tailor.”

“Oh, the things will come in the morning,” George said unsympathetically, “otherwise I shouldn’t have recommended him.”

“He’s confoundedly expensive,” said Thwaite. He subsided into an uneasy murmur.

George was surveying him from the calm outer sphere of the sympathetic observer. He was touched by the pleasing pettiness of his preoccupations. One naturally expected Thwaite to rise very superior to the occasion; to soar with the unconcern of a kite right over the church, the ceremony, and the assistants. He didn’t in the least. He was immensely troubled by his own beard. He ran his delicate hands through it, grasped it frantically, and made as if to tear it off.

“Heaven knows what it looks like,” he groaned. “I suppose I shall appear at least fifty.”

“Dora thinks it picturesque,” George said. “It is.”

“I don’t want to look like a tramp.” Thwaite writhed on the sofa.

“You used to, you know,” George said. “That, after all, was what captivated her.” Thwaite sat up and apostrophised George savagely. “Look here; this is a serious matter. You don’t know
how
I feel the responsibility of it.”