Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (218 page)

And his father and mother had quarrelled incessantly. At least his mother had upbraided his father all day long: his father had always seemed to sit still with a twinkling smile and to catch his mother out in passionately-inaccurate statements.

“It was unbearable!” Don said. “At least I could not stand it. Our storey of the hotel was furnished with no stuff that had not belonged to Marie Antoinette! And those continual rows going on all the time!”

There had, at that time apparently, been another woman in the case — a Countess Canzano. Her husband did work for his father. But he remembered the Countess — a kind, delightful woman who could sit on the Marie Antoinette chairs and look comfortable and in place! He liked her very much.... And finally his mother had become pettish with him too.

There had come a day when he simply
could not
stand it any longer.

“I could not: I
could not!
” he said, full of emotion. He had had but one idea, to get back to Bournemouth.

His mother would not come away. She had said that it was her duty to defend
his
interests against the Countess. So he had run off. “There wasn’t any heroism in it,” he said, “it was simply running away from something intolerable to something that could not possibly be worse.” He had stowed himself away on board a cattle-liner — with one of the liftboys, who had wanted to run away too and who had showed him how to do it.

“It was not a bad time that,” Don said. “Some of the cattle hands belted us: some were quite decent and showed us how to catch the birds that live in the holds on the steers’ backs. Little chaps with dabs of yellow on their heads, like fire.” He added the inconsequential detail that he still remembered the
Minnehaha
whenever he smelt a stable, and that he seemed to smell a stable whenever he saw a golden-crested wren.

But he had arrived at Bournemouth: the proprietors of the private school there had taken him in with a kindness that he had considered to be romantic — until, as years went on, he had argued out the fact that they, too, must have known that he was the son of one of the richest men on earth.

“There is not, I suppose, anything romantic in the world,” Don commenced to speculate. “It is odd. On the face of it my running away on a cattle-ship was romantic. Actually it was not. It was just necessity...”

“Your mother eventually rejoined you in Bournemouth?” The sharp tones of Mr Greville cut into his rather dreamy drawl.

Don drew himself together and, unwillingly enough, resumed his dutifully direct narration.

His mother
had
rejoined him at Bournemouth. She had given up the struggle with the Countess — she had, in fact, divorced her husband, but she had not done so very well out of it. Mr Kelleg had had to make her an allowance, not absolutely princely. She had wanted to do things in the style of an English lady because she wanted her son to have the upbringing of an English gentleman. She had kept rather a good house — she knew how, because she had been a lady’s-maid in rather a good house — and she wanted him to be able to bring home his young friends from Harrow and Oxford.

“I suppose it was not much good to try to make me
exactly
that sort,” Don said. “
I
wanted to be an artist — there were aesthetic chaps at New College in my day.
She
wanted me to go into Parliament. She would, of course. I probably should have,” he continued. “I should have been some nice, friendly chap’s nice, friendly private secretary at this moment, I daresay, if she’d lived.”

He sighed for a moment, regretting perhaps that he had not been forced into those disciplined and ordered paths. For the father of Oxley, who had been his special chum at Harrow, was now Postmaster-General, and who knows.... However, he had been set on being an artist. It was, after all, the visual side of things that always appealed to him — or rather, he corrected himself, it was the psychological, the poetic atmosphere suggested by anything that he saw.

“For instance,” he said, pointing at Mr Greville, “when I look at you it almost invariably suggests to my mind—” But he drew himself together suddenly and closed the digression with: “I wish you’d let me make a study of your head. It’s so tremendously characteristic!”

Mr Greville rigidified the muscles of his neck as if he hardly knew what to do with that compliment, and Eleanor stroked his hand to give him patience.

“Yes,” he said grimly, “I suppose that has always been your trouble — the fact that you cannot stick to the point.”

“It does seem as if I never
shall
settle what I’m going to
do”
Don uttered plaintively. “And yet, Heaven knows, time presses. My boat
— a
boat — leaves on the 16th and that’s only six days from now.”

“I shall finish my book to-night,” Mr Greville said, as if he were announcing that his tailor would be sending him home a suit, and whilst Eleanor, with a little gasp of compunction, was actually saying:

“Oh,
how
I’ve neglected you lately! I thought you were
months
off the end of it!” he brought out in the same monotonous tones:

“I-don’t see why we can’t get our packing done in the five days that will leave us.”

CHAPTER IV
.

IT was into the flurry of thought caused by this tremendous announcement that Mr Augustus Greville’s dark, small, delicately-made and querulous figure was suddenly introduced. Because he disliked ceremony of any kind he greeted no one with more than a nod, although he had just made the journey down from town, and had not seen either his uncle or Don Kelleg for quite a number of months. He walked determinedly to the fireplace, turned smartly on his little polished heels, and, his hands encumbered by his bowler hat, brown gloves and thin, silver-mounted cane, said with an aggrieved air that no girls, nowadays, seemed to
want
to get married.

Mr Greville rose stiffly to his feet.

“I gather, Augustus,” he uttered, and he carefully averted his face from the young man, “that some of your female clients have proved insusceptible to your charms.”

“Insusceptible!” Augustus met his formidable uncle with saturnine impatience. “I’ve spent the whole morning — the
whole
morning — in a Shoreditch County Court with two nice girls.”

“Two nice, fair, well-brought-up girls!” he repeated, as though indeed the times were out of joint.

“We’ll finish that discussion in my study.” Mr Greville addressed the gently fidgeting Don. “Now, at once.” And with his instinct for courtesy he threw over his shoulder to the ruffled Augustus: “I do not see what more a rising young solicitor can want.” And with his afterthought of kindness he turned round to say to Eleanor, who, in her eagerness, had stretched forth her hands to balance herself for rising from her chair:

“We shan’t settle upon anything you won’t like, my dear.”

“Then I shall go too,” Eleanor informed him pleadingly, as he laid his large, long, scholar’s hand upon Don’s shoulder to conduct him from the room.

“The trouble was,” Augustus Greville threw at the black tails of his uncle’s frock coat, “that they
would not
philander with me.”

“Or with any other man,” he added in a lower voice, for the door had closed, without noise, but peremptorily.

Eleanor made swift reflections whilst her cousin caressed his drooping, silky moustache — he had laid his hat, stick and gloves upon the dining-table. Its long, fine, black hair drooped downwards, like a tuft of maidenhair fern, and, veiling his little mouth, it masked his expression, or added, with its droop, to his air of gloom.

“He’s thinking of going to America!” Eleanor uttered to herself. “But why?” For if Mr Greville was thinking of a thing he was certain to have unanswerable reasons. The things that he did appeared at times incredible. She could not, ten minutes before, more easily have imagined her friend the Canon preaching a sermon against the Thirty-Nine Articles. But now he was going to do it! Then there must be excellent reasons. It might be merely the desire to see the Thing with his own eyes. She remembered that he had once, for a week, gone to stay with a quite incredible Lady Felix, during a shoot, where they played kiss-in-the-ring in the drawing-room at one at night. He had wanted to see, then, with his own eyes, though it had appeared wildly unthinkable before. Or he might merely want to guide Don Kelleg. Don certainly needed a guide. Or he might merely want a change. You could not imagine a change more complete.

So she remained, lost between amazement at her father’s action — between that and a perfect trust in the sanity of his motives — whilst her cousin talked about the two girls in the Shoreditch County Court. They
were
quite nice girls, he kept on in his aggrieved monotone: their people were good people. But what did they do? Look after their homes; marry, or anything of the sort? Not at all. They ran a Woman’s Trade Union Federation in the interests of match-girls. There were about twenty nice girls interested in
that
thing. That was what they were about in Shoreditch — a sweating employer had got a girl as apprentice on iniquitous terms. Well, he’d so arranged the case that the Judge called for a pair of scissors and cut up the deed of apprenticeship. But was
that
the sort of thing for nice girls to be employed on?

Eleanor came out of her reverie about the American voyage for a sufficient interval to keep the conversation decently rolling. Did he, she asked negligently, talk to his clients, the Woman’s T.U.F., in that way?

He gave one of his sudden, surprisingly radiant and sweet smiles that she liked so much in him — a smile that made her think, half wistfully, that if the right woman
had
got hold of him his petulant expression — what they called in the family the scowl that wouldn’t come off — would never have appeared on his face at all. But poor Augustus had been so crushed in his youth by his father, the intolerable ‘Bishop, and so worried in his after youth by his mother, who still, after his father’s death, had kept, as it were, the great verbose spirit of his father as an immense wet blanket for ever before his eyes, that now at thirty-three, whilst he was still a baby he was also a perpetually mutinous old man. He had all the spirit and ideal of extreme youth together with the old man’s — and particularly the old clergyman’s — habit of ineffectually bewailing the disjointedness of his time.

And whilst, still smiling, he told her that it was not of course a solicitor’s duty to express to his clients his views of the Activity of Women and their “proper Fields,” any more than it was his duty to explain to his client, the R.C. Bishop of Chichester, what he thought of “Rome,” because it was his business to get a practice, and his business lay mostly with Federations and Societies and the Trustees of Roman Catholic Dioceses, who, by-the-bye, did want a deuce of a lot of interest on their investments... whilst he was explaining to her, in fact, that he was uncommonly
éveillé
and acute as a solicitor, she was wondering what he would have been like by now if she had accepted him the first time he had proposed to her. He had, indeed, in his negligent, gloomy and aggrieved manner, proposed to her since then innumerable times; practically he had said, “Look here: why don’t you marry me?” every time they had met for the last ten years. She had not ever been very certain of his seriousness: she had not much troubled about it at all. Only from the fact that he had not, latterly, come near them at all, and from the other fact that her Aunt Emmeline occasionally let drop some of her winged shafts against the “inexplicable conceit of poor Eleanor,” had she been able to gather that her refusals really rankled. Aunt Emmeline, of course, had, when they were
quite
young, always kept a watchful eye upon them: she did not, she said, approve of the marriage of cousins, and she had never, after they were seventeen, allowed them to, say, skate alone together. But of course, in those days, Augustus was the son of a real, live — and very roaring — Bishop: since then he had become the son only of a remarkably extinct volcano, with a mother who, having rendered herself impossible to all the inhabitants of their “Close,” had come to living in a villa — if a very big villa — at Reading, from whence it was poor Augustus’s fate to run daily up to town like a blackbird let out at regular intervals to the length of a very short piece of string. But though Aunt Emmeline might really object to the marriage of cousins it was pretty certain that she would object still more to the refusal, by a cousin, of
her
son.

It would not much have surprised her if, at that moment, he had said once more: “Look here: why don’t you marry me?” in his tones which were half masterful and half querulous. Instead his, “Look here!” — for he
did
utter the words — was followed by:

“Is that man dead?”

And it brought her sharply back to the fact that she did not really know whether Mr Collar Kelleg, in his distant and unrealisable city across the water — whether he were actually dead. It was what you would call a moral certainty that he was. But she felt that she would never be actually — as you might say, physically — certain unless she had actually touched his corpse. She answered him, however, with:

“Have
you
been speculating?”

He answered quickly:

“God forbid!” as if the mere suspicion were one more insult.

“Then why,” she asked him, “are you so frightfully anxious to know? You came all the way down from town yesterday to ask: and you’ve come again to-day.”

He replied only:

“It is not at all the sort of thing that I should have to do with.”

She quite realised that the minute shrug attending his words was as much as to say: “You’ve engaged yourself to this man. You cannot expect to have my confidences as you used to.” For she had followed the building up of his practice from the very youngest days, when he had been employed by a great and respectable firm of conveyancers, to the day when, with a small but reputable band of clients of his own, he had launched his own little boat. With each new client he had, as it were, bidden her, imperiously, to rejoice — and, in a gentle way, she had rejoiced. He had always “proposed” when he got a new client too.

She was not, however, going to accept his rebuff. It seemed ridiculous that he should want to shut her out merely because she was going to marry Don — for it would not, that event, in the least affect her accessibility to
him.
There never had been a time when she would not have burst out laughing at the very idea of it. As she put it to herself: one would not marry Oggie any more than one would marry one’s brother or one’s spaniel.

“Not at
all
the sort of thing,” Augustus repeated, referring still to the idea that
he
should speculate in the enterprises of Mr Charles Collar Kelleg.

“Oh, well, Oggie,” she said, “such extraordinary people do seem to have speculated...”

She had in her mind her Aunt Emmeline, and he, who much dreaded that his mother — she kept a flintily hard hand upon her own purse-strings — might be the person she had in mind, asked swiftly:

“Whom d’you mean?”

Her own “No one in particular” — for it was not her business to give away her aunt — had all the effect that she had intended — the effect of making him think that it was ridiculous that there should be secrets between cousins. And she held out to him an olive branch by saying:

“Everyone I know seems to have been dabbling — I dare not go near Canon Dearmer’s, for instance.” He smiled at that confidence, and in a grateful return gave her his own — for it pained him to keep a wall up against her if he could decently throw it down.

“They do it on both sides, then,” he said.

“Ah, it’s your clients you’re concerned for!” She took his meaning. “The Very Reverend ones!” He made a little gesture with his noticeably delicate, pale, dark hands.

“
My
friends,” he said, “think that assuredly Providence will be on their side in the stock market. They think — they really seem to think — that the saints or archangels will contrive to bull their shares.”

“I cannot imagine the poor dear Canon thinking anything but that his gambling is sin,” Eleanor retorted. “He’s probably dreadfully ashamed of doing it.”

“There’s the difference,” Augustus chimed in, “that your Canon does it to enrich himself.
My
clients do it for the furtherance of their Faith.” The communion with Eleanor, upon any terms, thawed him swiftly, and the details of his predicament came out of him now in a rush. She listened so well: she was so receptive and yet she was not, as he put it, any sort of a humbug. It was not, however, what he got out of her, but the manner in which he got things out of himself, that made him think that he never enjoyed anything so much in life as talking to Eleanor.

“It’s like this,” he said: “the late Mr — it does not matter about his name — left a certain sum towards building a church and a mission in a place where there are a number of Irish factory hands. This sum was left to the Bishop and trustees to hold in trust till sufficient money had been raised by subscription to complete the whole thing.” Augustus had been made the solicitor to this Trust, mainly because, although he was the son of an Anglican Bishop — a Bishop particularly hostile to the other persuasion — he had managed to help one of the other Bishop’s trustees to several very profitable investments. “They’d prefer,” Augustus said, “a solicitor of their own persuasion, but it’s one of their maxims, you know, that the godly grow fat at the expense of the unrighteous.” And Sir George — the trustee in question — had persuaded the Monsignor to come to Augustus for advice. The Monsignor — a foreign prelate — had revealed to Augustus a mind of a wholly pleasing
naïveté.
He had said to Augustus that there certainly existed in the world of stocks and shares certain things that would increase any given sum of money tenfold without the motion of a hand. It was true that the original money was sometimes lost; but with Providence on one’s side — and Providence was very good to them — the idea of loss might be negatived. He wanted the Church and Mission money invested in one of these securities.