Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (220 page)
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Authors: Ford Madox Ford
“But what’s going to be
done?
” Eleanor asked, and for a moment she wished that her lover might at times dispense with his tremendous flow of words. “You forget that whilst you’ve been settling it with dad we’ve been sitting here.”
Don’s eloquent bronzed face expressed a sudden contrition and concern.
“It all seems so simple, now that your father’s arranged it,” he said, “that I’ve sort of got the impression it’s so obviously the one thing to do — so obviously, that of course you’d know it for yourselves!”
“I’m to go with you?” she asked. “Next Wednesday?” And whilst her mind quickly ran to preparations, he was answering:
“Oh, it’s principally
you
that go. But there’ll also be I and your father, and Augustus here as
my
chaperon, and your Aunt Emmeline as yours, and your father’s man to valet Augustus and him, and your aunt’s maid for her and you. Supposing of course that there’s accommodation on the boat.”
He added reflectively:
“Though, as the boats all practically belong to me, there doesn’t seem to be much difficulty. For your father says — I don’t know how he knows it — that
my
father always kept a sort of prior claim for himself on a suite of state-rooms for every boat of his lines...”
“It’ll cost a tremendous lot of money,” Eleanor said.
“Oh, money!” Don said vaguely. “It doesn’t exist any more. There’s nothing left for me but action.”
And whilst she was wondering whether she could altogether like a state of things, a physical condition, in which, as it were, the force of gravity was left out and you just floated, he said himself:
“It’s a most extraordinary feeling! It’s as if you could fly and did not want to,” so that Eleanor had a quick feeling of delight at their thoughts being so much in unison, as if, by mental telepathy, she had sent him that very image...
Augustus said:
“But surely Uncle Greville isn’t going to let
you
pay for himself and Eleanor. Or has he too....”
For he could not think of his uncle as affected by such a cataclysm, though he felt its effects upon his own self. He knew, in his bones, that he too was going to fly — but his uncle was such a determined pedestrian.
“Oh,” Don answered, “at the rate your uncle can come to resolutions we’ve had time to settle that too.
He
pays for Eleanor and himself and your mother and the servants. He’ll do it because, with Eleanor so well ‘settled,’ from that point of view he can afford to sacrifice his economies of some years to his desire to see for himself what the place is like....”
Augustus said: “Ah!” His uncle certainly
was
a pedestrian. He disliked motor-cars: he would not bicycle: he did not keep a trap: he would not even sit down save when it was necessary — so you certainly could not think of him as flying with another man’s wings in the face of the Tory proprieties.
“I guess,” Don was going on, “that he would not approve of letting the fact that Eleanor was to be well settled help him to make an excursion if it wasn’t that he thought I needed someone to give me backbone. What he takes from me in the one obligation he’ll restore several hundredfold by saving me from making, as he thinks, an irrevocable ass of myself. I do not mean that he wants to keep me from making reparations...”
“Don dear,” Eleanor interrupted him, “did dad say that you were to take Augustus?”
The fact that the conversation had, under Augustus’s auspices, taken a monetary turn, shocked her sense of the proprieties — though she herself had provoked it. Money, in her scale of things, was a thing you
did not
talk about. You might say: “It would be too expensive!” But, once you had received the opinion that it would not, you did not, in well-arranged circles, proceed to discuss the shares of the expenditure. That settled itself because the people engaged were decent people; and she was so touched with coldness at Augustus’s contribution to the discussion — he ought to have
known
her father would do the right thing! — that she was anxious even to indicate to Don that Augustus was not the person to take with them, though she saw what a tremendously “good thing” it would be for him if Don took him up.... She could not, moreover, conceive of her father as recommending his nephew as a solicitor or as a travelling companion for himself. Don, however, could not conceive of anybody else.
“Oh!” he answered her question. “Your father said that I must take a lawyer with me — not that the law of the United States is the same as ours — yours — but simply because I needed a trained intelligence.... No, he did not tell me to take Augustus: he told me to take my solicitor. And” — he put his hand upon Augustus’s shoulder, a gesture that Eleanor felt to be wholly “American”—” Augustus
is
my solicitor.”
Augustus was his solicitor: he had written, for Don, two solicitor’s letters to two magazines owned by the same gentleman. The two magazines had calmly appropriated two landscape illustrations that Don had exhibited at a Black and White exhibition. Don would not have worried about it if it had not been that the things had been so vilely reproduced. The proprietor of the magazines had replied that the mere advertisement of appearing in the
P
— and the
W
— ought to be payment enough for a person like Don. But Augustus’s threat that his client would apply for an order to suppress the issues of the magazines had brought tumbling in two cheques for fifteen pounds — which Don really had not known what to do with — and a commission for further illustrations from the proprietor, who, if he did not like to be bested, conceived a tremendous respect for an artist who would care to stand up to
him.
A success so considerable — it was all the more considerable in Don’s eyes in that the proprietor had given an assurance that
all
Don’s subsequent work should be reproduced just exactly as Don desired — had filled poor Don with an immense respect for Augustus’s powers. It
wasn’t
everybody who could make a magazine proprietor careful as to reproductions.
This would not, perhaps, have mattered to Don so much if Don had not been a lonely soul and if Augustus had not been Eleanor’s cousin. One might even go so far as to say that Don had invented the occasion of the lawyer’s letters — he would not normally have bothered even about the bad reproduction — especially that he might come in contact with Eleanor’s relation. He wanted relations: he wanted, with all his affections, a family feeling. And if it was not that, in the least, that had made him fall in love with Eleanor — he had met her as a solitary figure when she had been living in lodgings in Paris to attend the L ——
— School of Design, so that she did not seem to have any relations at all — it was part of an added charm to find that she had so splendid and so typical — so comfortable — an atmosphere of belonging to a family. He had not himself, since his mother was dead and he had quarrelled with his father, the ghost of a person to feel affectionate towards: but on Eleanor’s side he discovered he would be able to sink, as it were, luxuriously and warmly, into all sorts of connectionships. It did not matter that, as he gradually discovered, Eleanor had not very much opportunity to see the members of her father’s and mother’s family. She did not, indeed, seem ever very much inclined to make at all strenuous efforts to keep up these connections. She need not, as he put it, because she had such a tremendous wealth of them that as she had never known the lack — the feeling of being alone in the world — she could not be blamed for not feeling how precious the possession was. But there they were, hundreds and hundreds of aunts and cousins and uncles: and blood
is
thicker than water. He felt himself at last about to slip into place somewhere on the edge of a ring. He would not any more be without some sort of circle.
He would, in fact, have called Augustus “his solicitor” even if he had been the veriest of muffs. He had so much need of something that was “his” that he would have proclaimed Augustus one of the most remarkable practitioners in England though Augustus had had nothing but a lack of opportunity. As it was it was splendid, because Augustus was solicitor to the Woman’s T.U.F. and to the Diocese of — ; and he had so efficiently conducted Don’s own affairs. So that, with his general excitement, with the feeling that he had that it was necessary to act — then and there, under the very nose of Mr Greville, and actually under the eyes of Eleanor, Don irrevocably engaged Augustus to be his man of affairs.
THE waves beneath their eyes swayed out from the vessel’s side; the sea was dark and metallic, like slate with white furrings. It was astonishing because the sky was an unbroken pale blue, and in the swept arch of the heavens the sun, hidden somewhere by the smoke stacks, had a sway unhindered by any cloud. It affected the girl hostilely, this hard surface, in spite of the pure white paint of the boat, in spite of the fresh feel of the air on her face, in spite of the
bouillon
in handleless cups, the neat dresses that filled all the nooks of the pleasant decks, in spite of the accent that made you laugh, because, faint as it mostly was, it was, undoubtedly, as all-pervading as the faint smell of tar that exhaled from every cranny of the immense boat.
The first bugle was sounded for dinner: the two blessed little intervals of their day had commenced; for though you never observed any noticeable change in their attire, and though they could not possibly have been any cleaner than they always were, they, all of them, except a pallid lady who was said to be “very ill,” disappeared into their cabins to do, in half an hour, what Eleanor — it was, she was aware, inconsiderate to the stewards — contrived with deft swiftness to get done in five minutes after the second bugle “had gone.” Don apparently did not “do” anything at all, for he was always discreetly in his chair opposite hers by the time that, swaying just a little to what was undoubtedly the inconsiderate motion of such an hotel, she made her way between the filled chairs.
But Don, apparently, never had any need to “do” anything. He was always astonishingly neat: in England, she remembered, he had always stood out, in this way, from all the other men she had known. Here, among what she could not help calling to herself his compatriots — though his mother had actually made him naturalise himself — he did not stand out at all. It was something that, there in the shadow of a slung boat in the sea air, puzzled her a little. It puzzled her even while Don talked, as he always was talking, in pleasant undertones, about things that she never very well remembered. Or rather, yes, when she brought her mind back to it, he was talking about what it would feel like to drown just where they were. The night before they had desultorily made out in the great gilt-bound volume of charts that was in the great gilt-and-white lady’s drawing-room, that the sea there was 1400 fathoms deep — or
But what really occupied her mind was the riddle of his odd identity with all these other young men here. For here, somehow, he did not stand out — as Augustus certainly did. There were here perhaps seventy young Americans out of the 400 of their centre of the ship — seventy young men, all gentle, low-voiced, extremely well washed — you would not somehow call it well-groomed — and with uncreased coats rather long in the back. It was not that the coats were not made in Regent Street — they all were. But they had, precisely, an uncreased look; you could not tell why. It was not that they were extravagantly new; it was rather as if they had been built — built was precisely the word — for people who would never put them to any physical uses out of doors. And yet it was not that the young men never went out of doors or never indulged in violent exercise; for ten of those young men were returning — a college team — from competing with a Cambridge band of athletes; and two others, at least, had, as war correspondents, done quite astonishing things with rough-riders in some war. Nevertheless, Augustus, who could not tell one end of an oar from the other, who had never been on a horse, who hated cricket, never walked a yard if he could help it, and regarded footballers as “muddied oafs” who infinitely contributed to our national decay — Augustus gave the idea that he could punch all their heads by sheer force of passion. Don did not; yet Don had, she knew, pulled a very creditable oar in his college eight and, tucked away somewhere amongst his other accomplishments, had the gift of shooting out all the pips of a five of spades at twenty feet with an army revolver — and Don stood over six foot in his stockings. Yet you never noticed him, unless you were in love with him, when, after breakfast and before dinner, he joined in the frenzied swift rush round the promenade deck.
The problem, not the fact, worried her a great deal: for, approaching as she did those new shores with a singular curiosity, she was anxious to discover what
were
the differences. She was not inclined to believe — at first she had not been — that she was going to trouble her head in the least about the differences. There were not, she had been ready to advance, any differences. The people would prove just Englishmen who rushed a little faster perhaps but who wanted much the same things.
But, in spite of herself, she was, she was aware, wondering all the time what made
her
feel different from anything she had ever felt before. She realised, of course, that she was, really, trying to make discoveries about her lover: she tried to think that he was not an American. But she felt, in spite of herself, that he certainly was what those people called an un-American American. He was voyaging, indeed, under the pseudonym of “Greville” and passed vaguely for her father’s nephew. It was not Don that was in question. But the lady who sat at her elbow at meals — a dark person with an odd variety of German accent who spent all her summers in “Yurup” — had told her that another American, who passed most of his years in Liverpool, was un-American. It was, apparently, undemocratic, if it was not absolutely unpatriotic, to have any ties at all with any of the several old countries that they all, now they were hastening towards Sandy Hook, affected contentedly to despise.
Don, therefore, was undemocratic and un-American. She felt, in her loyalty to him, that she would not have minded if he had been both. And yet he fitted in so well with all the others. And she felt so differently among them. She had been but two days on board and she tried to assure herself that it was the unfamiliarity of her surroundings — the private sitting-room with the vast-blossomed flowers, the yellow velvet with gold-work on it, the green marble wash-hand basin in her berth with its silver fittings, or the nickel handles of all kinds and shapes that her Aunt Emmeline in the next berth was perpetually straining her wrists to manipulate for improbable purposes. Her Aunt Emmeline had days of fads when she would not allow herself to be “waited on.” Or it might have been the fact of eating with 400 other people at once that made her feel strange...
But though she tried to assure herself that it was this, she was aware that it
was not.
What at bottom was strange was to be among 400 people and not to attract from any man any of the unsanctioned attention
— œillades
or mere droppings of the eyes — that anywhere else would have made her comfortably uncomfortable. Augustus, of course, was always eyeing her, but that did not count, and she had, as it were, a definite prospect of a sort of loneliness that stretched out before her eyes. It
was
a loneliness, for somehow the women.... They were not.... They were...
She could not somehow size it up. When they came into the dining-room in crowds they
looked
all right: but when you took them in detail.... Perhaps it was only the voices, the accent. And yet it was not the accent — one had allowed for that. It was rather a sort of intonation — a faint something — a querulousness! That was it. They seemed all, always, to be complaining, not so much in words as in the tones of their voices. It reminded her — with a quite startling vividness — of ladies at home who could not get servants “to stay.” They did not interest her somehow: not any one of them made her feel the possibility that she would ever come to a thrill of intimacy. They had not the complexions: they certainly had not the voices: they had not the look in the eyes.
They could not ever be her rivals!
It was that, to her astonishing discovery — for it came to her in a flash — that made her for many days drop entirely the habit of speculating as to her companions, and they sank for her to the almost permanent condition of moderately well-dressed automata. She did not care how they dressed: for the way they dressed would not certainly interest any man who could interest her: she did not care to hear about their friends, for they certainly would not be her friends; she did not care to hear their views of Europe and its cathedrals. It did not bother her to have to listen: they simply did not excite her curiosity — not any one of them. And by this second of the very long days she had resigned herself, for all of the time that she could not have Don to herself, to a future of lying in the deck chairs and passing remarks about the weather, or the
bouillon,
or about who was ill...
It was from a reverie upon one of these subjects that Don aroused her, whilst they leant, before dinner, over the rail together, by offering her two cents for her thoughts. He dropped immediately into the digression that she’d have to get used to considering — over there — that though two cents was in value the equal of one penny, actually the Americans called a cent “a penny,” just as a good many of them called a quarter “a shilling” — so that she’d have to get used to considering that a shilling consisted of twenty-five pence. She answered that she did not suppose that she’d ever get used to anything of the sort. And why should she? She’d have him and her father, not to mention Augustus and Aunt Emmeline, to look after her. She did not suppose she’d ever have to come into contact with “It.”
He had a little touch of disappointment in his voice — of a deeper disappointment than she cared to have given him — as he said:
“Oh, I hope you’ll take some of the problems seriously when you come to see.”
“But is not,” she said, “what we’re going for, just to give you an opportunity to get rid of your father’s affairs and to pay a good deal of money away to some poor people and then...?”
Their attention was mutually distracted by the silvery, wedge-like form of a dolphin that, reduced by the height they were up to the apparent size of a mackerel, dived, in a swift curve, in the hurry of waters just below their noses...
“And then....” She took up her sentence again.” Then? Why, nothing. We go back and it will be all over.”
With his hands upon the rail, swaying with the sway of the vessel, he considered this proposition for longer than he’d ever considered before any proposition of hers — for a space of time that appeared unnatural to her, considering how short were the precious minutes that were really theirs before the next bugle would blow.
“Isn’t that it?” she asked at last that he might waste no more.
“That’s
it,”
he said at last. “But what you’ve got to consider is that to do the thing — conscientiously! — will be a thing that’ll call for an immense study. It won’t be — I don’t want it to be if I can help it — and, if you approve...” His voice had in it an almost appealing note. “It won’t be just selling a business — as you might sell a shop in the Marylebone High Street. We are not, in fact — you and I and your father and Augustus — going out to see how I may retire from business. We’re going out as reformers.”
“Dearest boy,” she said, and a note of deep tenderness in her tone answered his pleading, “I’m not going to hinder you.”
“I know, I know,” he said gratefully. “But the whole point is — the point that worries me is that you’ll have to take an interest — you’ll have at least to study the circumstances. You can’t go in and out as we did this morning when we paid a visit to the emigrants’ quarters. I’ve got to plunge right into this eighty millions of people as I might plunge into this water here....” He waved his hands downwards. “Right down, to the very bottom almost. And if you
do
come with me, Heaven knows
when
we shall get out again.”
This was, as Don would have called it, a proposition that, in turn, made Eleanor pause for a space during which they might have been carried a mile towards the invisible coasts. She met it seriously enough with:
“I’m ready to do anything that’s really necessary.” She was not, however, even in her most loyal moods, a person to encourage him in exacting boundless promises. “Wouldn’t it be enough,” she asked, “if you just shook the whole thing off? Is it really necessary to accept the responsibility?”
He did not pause at all with his answer.
“I told you at the very first that it wasn’t a power given to me. It’s a duty. I’ve got to do my best with these people...” He stopped to make the confession. “Coming into contact with so many of them has made me tremendously in earnest. I hear so many old phrases: I’ve got to face, at every word that I overhear, something that represents an old hope, an old inspiration. I’ve
got
to do something.”