Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (228 page)

“You can’t tell how we all — my mother and I — adore Don, and you’ll find out,” he added, “that whenever Don does act — if it’s not very often — he invariably does do the right thing. He does more than the right thing. He’s princely: he’s sublime.”

“Oh, come!” Eleanor said with delight.

“It’s perfectly true,” Canzano answered. “He gives blank cheques. You haven’t yet learned what a gallant thing the American spirit is at its best!”

“I’m only wanting to learn,” she answered him. But he had dropped his enthusiasm, and along with it his figures of speech.

“I don’t know,” he said, and he lowered his voice, “if Don exactly knows how he’ll stand — I mean financially —
vis-à-vis
of my mother and me.”

“Do you think you ought to tell me,” she asked, “if he doesn’t know?”

“I don’t know that I
know
myself,” he said. “I think we may discuss it because we both love him. I leave it to you to break it to him or to leave it to my mother. But I’m pretty certain that his father won’t have left him much chance to smash up his — his nefarious affairs.”

Eleanor opened her eyes.

“You mean,” she said, “that we shan’t be so fabulously rich.”

“Oh,” he answered, “you’ll be fabulously rich. But I fancy Don won’t be able to throw his bombs into the House that Jack Built.”

Eleanor heaved a deep sigh. “Poor Don!” she said, and then: “But I daresay we shall be able to find out a way!”

It was his turn to open his eyes.

“You sympathise with his ideas?” he asked.

And Eleanor answered, with a perfect candour:

“I don’t know what his ideas are. I don’t know that he knows himself. But I want him to be able to do what he wants to do — when he finds out what it is.”

Canzano heaved a rather ludicrous sigh.

“How like a woman!” he said. “I don’t believe
they
differ whether they’re American, or English, or Italian!”

CHAPTER V
.

IT was upon that same life-raft in the moonlight, six hours later, that Eleanor suddenly felt herself clasped violently in a man’s arms and kissed on the forehead, the cheeks, the lips, on the very eyes. She didn’t need, considering the tense feel of the arms, the hungry violence of the lips, to be told that it wasn’t Don. Instead, his face bluish and shadowed in the moonlight, the whites of his eyes glistening, his moustache ends drawn back like an angry cat’s, she saw Augustus. He said, with a harsh, jaunty misery:

“I don’t care.”

She felt the seat on which she was sitting as if to be quite certain that her senses didn’t deceive her. And then she uttered, without recoiling or moving, simply the words:

“Ah, something will have to be done to settle you in your place too.” And she wasn’t, after the first instant, particularly perturbed. It didn’t seem that the violence really concerned her.

“I don’t care!” he said again. “I don’t care what any one can do. I’m at the end of my tether.”

“You haven’t been drinking?” she asked.

“No,” he answered harshly, “I’ve been listening to mother!”

Eleanor said:

“Oh, if it’s that..”

“She’s been telling me that you said I was odious and contemptible and that no woman would ever look at me. So that I don’t care any longer.”

Eleanor nerved herself to put into order a strand of hair that she felt was loose upon her neck.

“Hadn’t you got the sense to see that she was simply trying to drive you mad?” she said hardly. “You
are
an idiot.”

Augustus had an air of settling down on his heels and folding his arms.

“You didn’t say those things?” he almost grunted. “I didn’t say them because I don’t think them,” she answered. “I think she has bullied you till you’re no better than a baby. I told her that I was trying to stand up for you, not to run you down. I
do
think her jealousy has ruined your life.”

He took an odd little step forward.

“Ellie!” he said.

“Well, of course I was standing up for you,” she said. “Do you think I’d run you down except to your face?”

He made an extraordinary expiration of his breath. “You are such a
silly
sort of fool, Oggie,” she said regretfully. “Of course, I’m not going to take you and this seriously.”

He understood her well enough to grunt out:

“You think it would be flattering me?”

“It would be flattering you,” she repeated simply. “Besides, I won’t have scenes and situations and things. I don’t like them and I won’t have them.” He looked at the moon that washed all the white wood with a tranquil splendour. It left, beneath the swinging boats, great gouts of black shadow, and left the ocean all around them a heaving black shadow itself. And it was referring to their solitude, to his violent passion and the moonlight, that he said sardonically:

“Don’t you call
this
‘a scene or a situation or a thing’ ?”

She said, without any shadow of emotion:

“Oh, I know what I’m about, Oggie. I’m perfectly able to take care of myself where you’re concerned. It would only be a scene if I weren’t.” He couldn’t, from the position of the moon, see her face other than shadowily, and he brought out:

“You aren’t even angry with me.”

It did not at that moment suit her to say how she felt, and all she vouchsafed was:

“If you like to apologise to me you may. But it isn’t necessary, I suppose, between cousins. You’d lost your temper.”

And she proved to her own satisfaction that she knew pretty well how to handle Augustus when a sort of barrier seemed to be swept away in him.

“Ellie!” he brought out in a deep tone that was astonishing in such a little person, “I’ve not acted badly upon the whole. I haven’t, I haven’t. You can’t say I have.”

“I’m not saying you have,” she answered a little coldly.

“You don’t know what it is,” he said, “you haven’t any means of knowing. You never cared for anyone. Why, I never have a minute’s rest. I’m thinking of you every minute of the day. It’s hell. When I wake up in the morning I’ve two minutes of tranquillity — of not thinking of anything. And then it begins...”

“Oggie dear,” she said softly, “oughtn’t a man — a man of our class — to be less a slave of his passions?”

“Oh, you intolerable woman!” he brought out like a curse: “one is, or one isn’t. Do you suppose I
want
to love you? I’d give my eyesight and my hearing and my taste and my touch not to care for you. Do you suppose I am ‘indulging’ in something? Why, you talk like a temperance reformer telling a sot to abstain from drink. I’m not drinking, am I? I don’t get any pleasure out of it.”

“Well, Oggie dear,” she said, “I’m not blaming you. I asked you a question. I don’t know how men are made. I thought you ought to be able to find distractions.”

“Distractions!” he said, with violent contempt. “What’s to distract me? If the only thing that is interesting is you, what else is to interest me? And how is one to be distracted without being interested?”

“Then I don’t see what’s to be done,” she said. She sat still, rather depressed, looking at the paste buckles on her shoe that, in the moonlight, shot direful rays at her eyes as the boat swayed a little. “I’m sorry for you. But I can’t mend anything.”

“Yes, I know you’re sorry,” he said, “you’ve been very decent to me.”

An odd, draped, white object poked itself from the hatchway beside them, and in the pale stillness had a ghostly semblance of pricking up fantastic ears.

Augustus’s voice hissed out:

“I see you, mother. Come and listen if you want to listen. But, by God, you’re driving me to suicide. It’s as much murder as if you put arsenic in my toast.” He was shaking violently in his dancing slippers, his face grew even bluer in tinge. And accompanied by a deep exasperation from Augustus the figure turned its face towards them and then slowly disappeared below the level of the deck. His mother had gone to find Don.

“No, I haven’t.” Augustus plunged straight back into his speech. “I haven’t behaved badly. Considering what I’ve had to put up with. I’ve kept out of your way a good deal at times. Haven’t I? And think of what it’s been. Think of what I’ve had to bear from those two — your Don and my mother. There’s the one of them chasing me about with remedies for sea-sickness, and the other continually yelping that I’m ruining myself, and you, and her, and all the family.”

“Poor old Oggie!” Eleanor said, and she had the image of her aunt before her eyes.

“Oh, I’m used to mother,” he said. “All my life she’s tried to separate me from everybody that I’ve ever liked. Bad influences she called them. But that other ass....”

“Don’s been unspeakably good to you, Oggie,” she said.

“Sea-sickness!” he snarled out. “Yes, he’s tried to give me bromide and brandy and patent mixtures; when I’ve tried to get away into dark holes — when I’ve almost found a little forgetfulness — he’s come blundering after me. Oh, yes: usually just after even mother has had the decency to leave me alone, he’s come along and begged me to be ‘sociable.’ He’s come along and told me to talk — even to
you!
On the very second night I’d got as far as I could from you, as far as it’s possible on this rat trap — right out by the flag-staff at the stem — and I was counting the revolutions of the thing they’ve got in the patent log and forgetting. And then I feel him tapping at my elbow and telling me to come where the vessel doesn’t move so much — to come where it’s more cheerful!”

He sighed with an utter exasperation.

“Funny, isn’t it?” He used a little Cockney trick of phrase that he had caught from one of his clerks. “That fellow with his ownerships. He owns the ship: I expect he thinks he owns the sea and the sky and the smoke after it’s come out of the funnels. And he owns me too. And he runs along and bleats:
‘Here, don’t be sea-sick, come and be cheerful seeing me own her! It’ll do you good! I’ve got her
...’”

Eleanor said:

“Oh, I know all that part of it, Oggie.”

“Funny,
isn’t
it?” he repeated. “What have I got? —
what
have I got to look forward to? Mother, I suppose. And nothing else in the world. And I’m tied up to that fool, and he can’t even let me be miserable in my own way. I expect that’s what his wretched factory employees will say when he has improved their conditions — that he can’t let
them
be miserable in their own way....” Eleanor interrupted him again with:

“Now, Oggie dear, drop it. What did you come for if you take it like this?”

He snorted at her with astonishing vivacity:

“To see you grow sick of him and to catch you at the rebound. I wasn’t going to let you go away with him right over the world and not be on the spot.” She said:

“You see, you haven’t the least chance. You’d much better do what you’re paid for and behave like a man.”

“Well,” he answered, “I can. I have till this moment. I should have gone on but for mother.” She answered:

“You ought to have been able to see through your mother’s manoeuvres.”

He ran his hand over his eyes.

“How could I tell?” he said. “Of course I ought to have. But you don’t know how it blinds a man. I’ll tell you plainly that when mother told me you’d told her that you despised me — why — I went frantic.... I was going over the side...”

“It was rather silly to want to make me hate you before you did it,” Eleanor said.

Augustus suddenly sprang back. The voice of Don was heard from the hatchway saying that indeed the moon
was
a glorious sight and he ought to be ever so thankful to Mrs Greville for telling him to bring her up there. And their figures loomed in the moonlight just before Eleanor’s face.

Eleanor didn’t move. Mrs Greville was panting a little and there was a victorious smile on her face that the moon hardened.

Eleanor said:

“Don dear, I wish you’d take Aunt Emmeline away for a minute or two. I’m just talking to Oggie.”

Whilst Don obediently turned upon his heel, Mrs Greville brought out, with a high, snickering voice:

“Oh, can’t even
we
share this wonderful secret?” She began indeed to pant a little with the speed she had made in finding Don.

Eleanor said, with a touch of disdain:

“It is not a
wonderful
secret. It’s something I’m arranging with Augustus.”

She moved her hand a little as if she were brushing dust away from her dress. She left it in fact to her aunt to ruin her son if she wanted to. And with an extraordinarily hateful:

“Oh, one would think...” and a sudden gulp for breath, Mrs Greville clutched Don’s arm and they faded away into the distance.

“It’s got to be arranged, Oggie,” Eleanor said, speaking in a swift, low voice. “And I don’t want to have to speak again. I don’t want to have to ruin your prospects — but I shall have to if you’re going to misbehave. You may take it that I shouldn’t abuse you to your mother or to anyone else. I’m far too sorry for you. If you can behave in the future I’ll take what’s past as the sort of ill temper that one’s got to expect from one’s relations — a silly display. But it’s not to happen again. I’m not going to be worried. And I’m not going to have anyone else worried, except Aunt Emmeline, who has only herself to answer to if she’s miserable. Of course I’m fond of you. Of course I want Don’s good fortune to help you if it can. But it ends there, and you’ve got to understand that...”

“Ah, you’ve a talent for arranging things,” Augustus said — and for a moment he felt an extraordinary relief. It was the definite relief of a man whose life had been reprieved — for he had been perfectly resolved, as he had said, “to go over the side.” He would have been there at that moment. And an extraordinary medley of joyous feelings raged in his brain — so that he wanted to sing.