Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (224 page)

It was then that Mr Greville delivered himself of his apothegm, after Don had delivered himself of a tranquillised version of his searchings of the soul — a version that in relation to his former vividness of feelings was as the packing-case on which he stood was to the depths from which he had looked up.

“What you ought to do,” Mr Greville said, “is to find yourself.”

He hadn’t got to bother about trains of thought, but about what he wanted. And Mr Greville hazarded the further speech:

“If a man is determined to inflict himself on his time it is his duty first to consider what
he is!
For what is criminal is to wobble once you have begun. A man has to define what his ideal is and then to make for it.”

“Ah,” Don said, “that is what people have been telling me all my life...”

“Study, if you’ve got the brain” — Mr Greville cut him short—” or if you haven’t, and have the temperance, let things alone. You’ll do less harm if you let things alone. But you’ll do infinitely more if, once you’ve begun to meddle, you change your mind!” He spoke without any passion. It wasn’t, assuredly, any business of his to meddle with other people.

It was Eleanor who imparted the personal note.

“Whatever you do is so certain to be kind that....”

“That I’m rather to strain after effects that seem cruel?” Don asked her. “I’m to strain for such effects as drowning new-born puppies if they’re likely to prove mongrels.”

She didn’t quite follow his image, and, under cover of her pause for reflection, he got away into the reminiscence he was determined upon.

“When I was in Paris,” he said, “I worked in an
atelier
where Whistler used to visit. He made me his monitor. I had to call silence for him and turn round canvases on easels. I thought I was rather fine. But when the
atelier
broke up, principally because he wouldn’t visit it regularly, he told me to come and see him. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘you think I made you monitor because I thought you were promising. You aren’t. You’re a hopeless duffer. But you’re pleasant. That’s why I chose you!’ And when Don, crushed but valiant, had asked the master what he meant, the master had turned, wasplike, upon a sketch of his own. ‘Look there,’ he said, ‘that’s painted. That’s a masterpiece. Look at that spade! But you’ll never paint. You never will see. You’re a poet. Go and write little verses. Go and moon about.’ And when he was still further pressed he had brought out: ‘You can’t paint a spade because you can’t see the thing that the light plays on; you see the hunger in the entrails of the peasant who’s going to dig with it! You can’t paint hunger!’”

And whilst Eleanor brought out: “What a rude bear he always was!” Mr Greville formulated:

“Did you ever reflect on those words?”

He cut, however, Don’s flow of protest that he never thought about anything else short with the words that whilst he always saw so many aspects of everything he couldn’t ever expect to do anything. It was a form of laziness.

“And I don’t see,” he finished, “why you can’t be content to go on being lazy.”

And whilst Don was protesting that the thought of people who talked like Mrs Sargent goaded him to desperation, Mr Greville again cut him short.

“If all you’re going to do in throwing your money away is to attempt to change Mrs Sargent and her people, it is sheer waste of effort; she’ll be an odious fool whatever you give her for example. You won’t change their hearts or give them intellects. That class of intellect is the same in England or America. They’ll always be the same whether you gather the wealth of your country into two hands or distribute it to the eighty million.”

And having delivered this staggerer he unlinked his arm from Eleanor’s and announced that he was going to fetch his book. He had already erected a custom to suit his new environment, that of sitting in a deck chair in the evenings and studying a United States Baedeker for an hour before turning in. He was intent on getting for himself the lie of the streets in several American towns, so that he would never have to ask the way supposing that — which he doubted — the inscriptions on American street comers were to be found or trusted.

At the mere mention of this desire Don had sprung forward to the deck door and was fetching the Baedeker. And Eleanor, up in the darkness with her father, fenced the question that she really wanted to ask by asking another.

“Father,” it came, “why don’t you ever like to ask your way?”

He surveyed her with what, in his affectionate gaze, was almost surprise, as if she ought to have understood.

“I’m sure,” she continued, “you’re always asking people other questions.”

“My dear,” he said, “if you’ll observe you’ll see that I never ask for information as to facts.”

“You only collect foolish points of view?” she said, thinking of the red-haired lady.

“I collect points of view,” he answered, avoiding her adjective. “If I want information — facts upon which I’m going to act myself — I find out for myself. I should advise you to pursue the same course.”

She buttoned the golf cape more closely under her chin as a gust of wind from out of the gleaming and black void took the two of them, whirling her white skirts about his legs.

“Of course it makes one tremendously sure,” she said musingly. “But it leaves one a frightfully narrow field.”

He was looking at the invisible windward of the ship. “What does one want to do a lot of things for?” he asked, and descending from his impossible generalities to his affection and politeness he asked once more: “Don and you know the Yorkshire saying:

‘A little farm well tilled, A little wife well willed, A little purse well filled’ ? — that’s all you want!”

“But there are great ideas, aren’t there?” she countered him absently — intent on defending Don. “There aren’t — great — facts!” he said slowly. And suddenly she brought out her real question: “What are we going for?”

He went slowly to his deck chair, picked up his dark plaid shawl and draped it round the shoulders of his frock coat. He returned to her, and standing before her, although he strongly disliked answering questions, he gave it her full in the face.

“To look after Don!”

“But, dear,” she said, as she began to digest this statement, “you know I’m provided for whatever he does.”

Her father leaned back against the ship’s rail and extracted one hand from the rug that shrouded his shoulder.

“So that” — she pursued her commentary on his words—” you aren’t looking after my interests. It’s him!” ——

She reflected and then said softly:

“He
is
rather a dear, isn’t he? You
do
like him?” Her father, leaning, draped, back against the rails, still didn’t answer her. But at last he said:

“Probably pickpockets couldn’t strip him fast enough to leave him naked. But tell me what he’s paying Augustus ten thousand a year for?”

This hit Eleanor so closely that she started.

“It’s really great folly,” she said, “all the same, if Augustus appeals to him...”

“Yes!” Her father caught her up. “It’s the things that appeal to him that will play the mischief with everything he attempts. He’ll never do anything. He’s like every manifestation of his country — hysterical.”

She said softly:

“If you like him so much, dear, aren’t you a little hard on him?”

He crooked his large forefinger at her from somewhere near his hips.

“You know I’m not,” he said. “And don’t run away with any false ideas, I’m not in love with Don. But if he’s going to do a certain piece of work I want him to do it cleanly. I shouldn’t have given myself all this trouble and derangement for the sake of what he’d call his
beaux yeux
.” He looked at her solemnly, but with a certain trouble in his eyes. “It amounts to this: He’s bound, in the nature of events, to be brought up against me, with all his troubles, for as long as I’ve got to live. He’ll constantly be depressing you: you’ll constantly be coming to me. I don’t want to meddle with him or his problems. But I shall have to.”

“You mean,” she asked, “that he’ll be losing his money foolishly and asking you, through me, to retrieve it.”

“Child,” he said, “you’re astonishingly naïve still. It isn’t the money he’ll lose that will distress him. He can’t lose money enough. He’ll find his father’s tied it up too well. It’s the silly things he’ll do every time anything appeals to him. He’ll found Institutions and find they breed beastlier chaps than ever. He’ll raise co-operative factories and find the hands will dissipate all their profits in shove halfpenny. I wouldn’t mind wagering that he’ll try to purify the municipal politics of some wretched town, and he’ll find that his money is being used by his reforming, lieutenants to bribe into existence the worst Tammany that’s ever been known. And I shall be forced to pay attention to all these muddles.
That’s
why I’m coming with you.”

“You poor old dad!” Eleanor said softly, “you think that you’ll be able to guide him.”

He stirred uneasily.

“No, you don’t,” she said quickly, “you think that the companionship of a sensible man may harden his backbone a little at the start.”

And she added as swiftly, whilst Don appeared a long way away with the Baedeker in his hand:

“Don’t you think we’re both of us agitating ourselves, possibly for nothing? Isn’t it just as likely as not he’ll see so many aspects of misanthropy that he’ll never make up his mind to do anything at all, ever?”

As Mr Greville drew himself to an erect posture on the deck he uttered, almost with tones of misgiving: “You talk as if you were an old married woman.”

“Well, you made us understand that you wanted a long engagement,” she answered. “I’ve had time to get used to him by now.”

CHAPTER III
.

“I SUPPOSE,” Eleanor whispered in Don’s ear as, linked now together and alone, they disappeared in the darkness of the promenade deck, “that why I really care for you is that you’re a poet!” They had left Mr Greville comfortably tucked in beneath a circular lamp, studying through his large glasses one of the plans of New York, and had, with a feeling, minute but dispirited, of escape at last, gone round the corner of the saloon. “I’m as hard as he is but we’ve both got — though he tries to act as if it weren’t so — a very soft spot for dears like you.”

And no doubt her diagnosis was helped by what she certainly considered to be the weakness of her father for Don. She could see what attracted her father and argued from it what attracted her. And their engagement had been of long standing. It had come about in one of those odd, “most natural manners in the world” that are so common in very individualistic societies. Nothing in fact was so unlikely as that a girl like Eleanor should seriously take up the study of painting. In her particular type of society a girl dabbles in it, producing mild water-colours that, since they cover their parents’ walls, have at least the function of spoiling the market for professional painting, and thus keeping those outsiders in their social places. But it was characteristic of Eleanor that, having once, towards the age of twenty-eight, been filled with a desire to paint, she should desire to get to the bottom of the matter. She wasn’t going to leave it at water-colour sketches. Similarly, if it were odd that she should go to live in Paris to get at the facts, it was the most logical thing in the world that her father should insist that if she insisted on really taking up the study she should go to the place in the world where it can be most studied
au fond.
She had accordingly gone to Paris, and — to go to the very centre of it — she had gone to that very
atélier
in which Don had been indued with the responsibilities of monitor. The master who there gibed at the students’ productions was, in those days, esteemed at least the most workmanlike under whom it was possible to sit. He had gibed at Eleanor’s studies as mercilessly as at any of the others, but it affected her less because she noticed that he didn’t gibe more. And when, upon the break up of the
atélier,
owing to the irregular visits of the master, Don had assured her that the next only man in the world to study under was to be found in a state institution in London, she had very composedly followed Don to her own country.

The companionable, free life that she had led with him and with other girl and men students had proved, she had found, perfectly compatible with a quite composed observance of the decencies. And it wasn’t till she had finally decided — and it was easier to decide it under the more equable rule of the London master — that she hadn’t the least gift for painting that she had discovered that she had grown so used to Don that she couldn’t possibly do without him. It was as if from long looking over portfolios of prints, interchanging remarks on which they had generally agreed, they had suddenly looked into each other’s eyes and said, simultaneously: “You
are
rather a dear!”

Their approach to that point had indeed been so gradual — they had happened to live, both of them, near the northern terminus of a ‘bus route, the School of Art being at its further end, and most of their unconscious courting had taken place on the tops of’ buses as you might say in Tottenham Court Road — that there hadn’t been any point at which she could have warned her father of anything. She had indeed been so unconscious that Don’s “socialism” hadn’t seemed to matter. She hadn’t, in fact, in the least meant to marry him, and if he were a Fabian, or something like a Fabian, tempered with passages that made him at times say things with which she couldn’t altogether agree, about the populations who lived sordid lives round about the Tottenham Court Road, the views had been appropriate enough in the second master of a School of Design. He’d never show any signs of wanting to “do” anything; he’d limited himself very appropriately, considering whose daughter she was, to saying that certain things, in an ideal state of society, would be very much otherwise. He had not even shown any very alarmingly artistic “gifts.” On the contrary, at about the date when she had determined that she hadn’t any gift at all, he had made the discovery that he wasn’t fit to do much more than illustrate stories and songs for the slightly better magazines of two continents...

So that there — if we add the fact that Mr Greville was faced by a situation from which he was actually too disinclined to exertion to attempt to extricate his daughter — there they were!

And on the top of the packing-case in the dark, with the spray of the sea in the air, as on top of the omnibuses, in the misty glare of the arc lights of the Tottenham Court Road, they were still, as lovers will, talking a great deal about themselves and a little about the problems that lurked behind the gilded signs on the house fronts or behind the impenetrable blackness of the night. The sea was beginning to get up; the boat threw them about a little as they walked, and to avoid running constantly into a solitary slim figure that, save for Mr Greville and themselves, was alone on the deck they turned round and walked the reverse way.

Eleanor was explaining to Don that it was just because he was a poet that he did such charming illustrations. They were always, his illustrations, infinitely better than the stories they adorned and that was because he saw precisely the side issues. Eleanor had reached this point of her discourse when the natural consequences of their turning to avoid the stranger who had walked before them took place — they ran against him round the bows of the packing-case. And as the vessel at that moment had lifted its bows, in their run forward they nearly bore him off his feet. In the contact Don’s cap fell off and, with Eleanor on his arm, he stood erect, seeming almost to touch the electric light above. Its rays streamed down on his regular large and friendly features. And the stranger, returning to him the cap that he was free to stoop for, found his gentle apologies cut short by the words, forcing themselves from him:

“You’re Don — Collar — Kelleg!”

A slight feeling of dismay beset Eleanor. It immensely suited her that Don should travel
incognito:
she did not desire that they should journey through the United States heralded with drum and trumpet like the elephants of a travelling circus. And it had suited Don’s book. He imagined that if he went in his tremendous character of the richest citizen on earth he would not ever get to see “conditions” — of labour or of life — as they normally were. It suited Mr Greville very well, for it didn’t trouble him to move about with celebrities on his arm, and if he didn’t believe that he would ever learn anything profitable about the “conditions” of the New World in the course of a four months’ tour, he disliked cordially and with tenacity anything approaching to “fuss.” It suited Augustus very well because, in the circumstances, he would have hated to see Don made much of. And Mr Greville before starting had called the two servants before him and had said that it wasn’t for him to expect that they wouldn’t gossip with other servants about the dispositions and characters of their employers. They might therefore gossip to their hearts’ contents and as their consciences allowed. But they were to understand that they were not to speak of Don as other than Mr Don Greville.

And if the comparatively inconspicuous nature of this tour didn’t so exactly suit Aunt Eleanor — she would have preferred infinitely to travel as the aunt of anyone who was the somethingist something in the world — if her tongue constantly itched to bray forth the fact, along with the fact that she was the Bishopess of — , she had the practical sense to keep silence for the sake of Augustus’s ten thousand a year. For she couldn’t imagine that Don wouldn’t be vindictive if he were vexed; and she had accepted the idea that at least the early part of their tour was to have the aspect of a short preliminary inspection of the ground by Don...

It came therefore as a relief to Eleanor to discover that upon Don’s fine illuminated features there wasn’t much trace of perturbation.

He held out instead a large hand, and with, in his voice, that touch of cordiality that one reserves for people that one has not met for many years, he uttered the words:

“You’re Carlo, of course.”

They moved by unspoken accord to a portion of the deck to which the wind, whipping round the corner, hadn’t so much access.

“I thought,” Don said, “that there was a likeness. But I couldn’t find the name in the passengers’ list.”

The young man laughed pleasantly.

“You’d have found the name of ‘Angeli,’ which was my mother’s before she married, just as I should have found, I daresay, that there wasn’t a ‘Kelleg’ in the boat, though you’re here.”

Don, who in Eleanor’s eyes was plainly reflecting upon something serious, here took a definite step, and she found herself being introduced to a dark, very much muffled young man as the Count Carlo Canzano.

With his odd, peaked and winged, foreign cap, that was obviously an automobilist’s, removed and in his hand, the dark young man revealed olive and aquiline features and a nose that curved down over a military black moustache, blue-black hair and a quite radiant smile. There wasn’t the least accent in his voice when he said to her: What an odd sensation it was to run suddenly up against someone he had known once so well! There wasn’t the least accent, and there wasn’t the least inquisitiveness as to her. And she seemed to gather that in his attitude to her there was implied an almost greater impersonality than would have been appropriate had Canzano been Don’s most intimate friend. He didn’t peer even for a second into what she knew were the deep shadows her lace scarf cast down over her features. He stood instead for a moment staring at his foreign patent shoes. He smiled a little and said then:

“Well, let us get our parts correct: you are Miss Greville,
you
Mr Don Greville, and I am Mr Charles Angeli. It’s settled then....”

He paused for a moment, holding out his hand to Eleanor, but then suddenly he turned upon Don.

“Unless,” he said suddenly, “you don’t intend to recognise me in the future.”

“Heaven forbid!” Don said energetically. “I don’t see that we need scruple about our parents’ misunderstandings.”

“I’m joining my mother, you understand.” Canzano seemed to press the matter further home. And then, recognising from Don’s face that that too didn’t make any great difference, he said gaily:

“After all, we were extraordinarily friendly. Boston, I don’t mind confessing to you, Miss Greville, seemed quite another place when Don was there. I acted as his
cicerone.”
He reflected again and said: “That will be six years ago now, won’t it?”

And Eleanor commented:

“But surely — Don hasn’t been in the United States for much longer than that?”

Canzano stuck to it obstinately.

“It can’t be more, for it’s six years yesterday since I left Boston with him for Italy...” But she noticed that he appeared to catch Don’s eye and suddenly he said good-night and disappeared along the deck.

“Let me see you in the smoking-room for ten minutes,” Don called after him.

She uttered what appeared to her a bright “Then I’d better go,” when the anguish on his face and his muttered “Don’t be
too
angry with me!” made her supplement it with:

“Why in the world should I?”

“Because,” his answer came, “I was in Boston six years ago.”

It was so in her nature to acquiesce in what her menfolk did that she said:

“And why in the world shouldn’t you have been?” It took him aback.

“But,” he said, “I had always concealed it from you.”

She repeated in almost the same tones and in almost the same words, adding:

“If you take a walk now, I don’t ask you to tell me every board you’ve looked at.”

He couldn’t still come out of his concern — for it wasn’t the measure of her resentment that concerned him, but the measure in which, scrupulously speaking, he had sinned against her. He tried to make a clean breast of it now.

“My father asked me to go over and see him after my mother died. But there were certain features of the visit that I couldn’t — that I couldn’t bear, in loyalty to him.... After all, he was my father. And then.... So I concealed the whole affair....”

In his moments of emotion Don’s fine flow of phrases had the trick of deserting him altogether. And, from the jumbled sequence of words of contrition and of extenuation that he now brought out, she could tell how moved he was if she couldn’t tell exactly what it was that moved him.