Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (355 page)

CHAPTER III

“OUR name,” the boy said, “is ‘Bransdon,’ and we both have the Celtic temperament. That is what you might expect, for Ophelia’s father is the great Mr Bransdon and mine is his chief disciple, Mr Gubb. We have neither of us tasted flesh meat or alcohol in our lives and we are compiling a book called ‘Health Resides in Sandals.’”

Mr Luscombe said: “Well, now!”

Mr Gubb’s son fetched the bicycles from outside the wall. From the handle-bar of each of them depended a net bag containing a very sodden loaf of bread and a paper bag so melted that raisins dripped from them here and there as the bicycles shook. But the showers of talk continued undamped, as if they were veritable bursts of sunshine beneath the liquid downfall. Nevertheless, when they were about half-way up the carriage drive the great Mr Bransdon’s daughter exclaimed: “Ugh!” and wriggled her shoulders inside her ill-fitting clothes. “The rain has gone through! It’s trickling down my spine!”

She had interrupted a dissertation of her husband who was explaining that though both Mr Bransdon and Mr Gubb objected to bicycling it was never their way to employ a blind subservience towards their distinguished parents. Indeed, their parents had not exacted it. They had never commanded either of their children to do anything. They had simply appealed to their reason. Thus, though the fathers strongly objected to bicycles because they were vulgar, were not employed in medieval times, were machines manufactured by other machines and had never been ridden by either Mr Bransdon or Mr Gubb — in spite of these very weighty reasons the children had decided to inaugurate their common life by a bicycle tour. They did it for the sake of the experience and they did it because, also, they were upon a crusade.

“We want to spread our ideas,” the boy explained. “We want to preach here and there in the hedgerows and by-ways. And so the more quickly we can get from audience to audience the better. Our desire is to do something fine. That, for instance, is why for the first time in our lives we have put on stockings.”

Mr Luscombe said that he did not follow their course of reasoning.

“You see, it’s like this,” the boy continued, “we desire to talk to all sorts of people and we have observed that even round Court Street, where we are comparatively well-known figures, we are sometimes laughed at as we go along the road. Now it cannot be a good opening for a lecture if the lecturer is laughed at. It takes away considerably from your chance of a hearing. Usually I wear a smock frock and Ophelia a single garment of a clinging and flowing design and we have always walked about bare-foot, carrying our sandals in our hands for rough places. But we have decided that if we are to see people as they actually are and if we are to be listened to with attention at a first hearing we must appear as nearly like ordinary people as is possible. With the results that you see. We feel that we are hideous but it is in a good cause. And we can put it to our account that all of our garments have been manufactured by our own hands from fabrics actually woven by our fathers and their disciples.”

He stopped for a moment to look himself down and to survey the figure of his wife. Underneath their misshapen and sodden clothes their figures appeared, as if they were something foreign and disconnected from their attire, to he lithe, rounded and glowing. It was as if antelopes had put on coats and trousers.

“Hideous, but certainly to be excused,” the boy was beginning with complacency but at this point the girl interrupted him with the little scream to the effect that the water was trickling down her back. There was just the slightest suspicion of annoyance in the boy’s voice as he said:

“Well, you won’t take cold: we never take cold. We have been brought up on rational, hygienic principles.”

“But it’s horribly uncomfortable,” the girl said. “Horribly! I’ve never felt anything so cold.”

This gave Mr Luscombe the chance for a word and he suggested that he would lend the young man some of his own clothes and the girl some of his wife’s.

“
I shall wear nothing of the sort,” the young man said.
“
I have always been of the opinion that we should allow our clothes to dry upon us. If animals can do it why should not we?”

The girl hesitated for a moment and then as a fresh little runlet of water reached her skin, she exclaimed:

“I shall go off my head if I don’t get these things off. It’s like being tickled to death with icicles.”

She started forward into the porch and Mr Luscombe followed her. The young man remained to stack the bicycles against one of the large stone pilasters. He took the loaves of bread from the string bags and set them on a carved oak chair in the hall, and the raisins he laid out to dry on the hall table. Then, having shaken the wet out of his wide-awake with a circular sweep of his arm, he was about to follow Mr Luscombe into the drawing-room when the crash of falling bicycles warned him that his work was to do all over again.

Miss Stobhall had come in that morning to bring Mrs Melville a piece of her last year’s damson cheese. And, although she was not afraid of the weather, the rain at ten o’clock had set in so heavily that it had been too much for her to face. She had remained to lunch, though Mrs Luscombe had gone in in the brougham to do a day’s shopping in Dorking and to attend a garden party of the vicar’s wife’s. Atrocities had of late been comparatively scarce in Eastern Europe except in Russia. But Miss Stobhall’s enthusiasms, if they were many, perpetual and varied, were apt gradually to die away and if the strict truth could be told, Miss Stobhall was a little tired of Russia. But, for the whole of that rainy day she had entertained Mr and Mrs Melville with a vivid account of what was happening in Saravejo. She had described that city’s position, its public buildings, the circumstances of its population and the condition of the bandits who occupied the surrounding country. She had talked of these things with a volubility whose very lowest note was to the effect that it was the duty of the British Government to send a squadron of destroyers and a landing party up the Danube.

She was a rather large-boned woman, with a loud voice, handsome brown eyes, a north-country accent and a trick of suddenly stammering and losing hold of her subject when she was in the midst of one of her longest speeches. These sudden digressions were apt to be exceedingly bewildering to Mr and Mrs Melville. Thus before the door opened to admit Ophelia Bransdon and Mr Luscombe, Miss Stobhall had broken off a glowing description of the beauty, modesty and virtue of a Servian Jewess who had been maltreated and imprisoned in Little Russia and was then appealing to the civilised world for subscriptions to pay her fare from Odessa to Buenos Ayres — Miss Stobhall had interrupted this narration in the middle of a sentence, nay, half way through the word American, to exclaim suddenly:

“And then there’s the case of poor Somerville, the Earl of Croydon’s oldest tenant, who has been evicted from his farm because he applied to the County Council for land under the Small Holdings Act. Of all the abominable tyrannies committed by the band of dastards who own the pubic lands of England,” she was saying...

Mr and Mrs Melville sat side by side upon a square sofa. They blinked their eyes beneath the torrent of Miss Stobhall’s words. Very quiet and domesticated old creatures, they rather liked the north-country lady’s interminable harangues. When she was once started it appeared to them as if they were setting out for a long and rather sleepy railway journey. They had no particular sympathy with Miss Stobhall’s views and they had no particular views of their own. But Miss Stobhall’s stories, when Mr and Mrs Melville could understand them, partook always very much of the marvellous, and Miss Stobhall’s world was so entirely made up of black-browed tyrants and virtuous and gifted victims that she certainly gave them something picturesque to listen to in the long, quiet day when so little occurred.

A long solitude in each other’s exclusive society had given to these two old people a singular similarity as if they had been painted in the same colours by the same hand and brush. And when they were apart they had that quaint air of incompleteness that will be seen in the case of a small pair of parakeets. Their most engrossing employment was to follow Gerald Luscombe round the garden whilst he weeded or potted out plants. And whilst he crouched down over the dark soil they would stand behind him hand in hand, the one holding his trowel, the other his weed basket. Or else they would go round the garden cleaning the roses of greenfly and caterpillars and calling to each other with expressions of admiration and triumph when they caught a particularly large snail. Sometimes Mr Melville would talk of his adventures in India as a child of eight during the Mutiny, or of the tigers that he had shot. And sometimes Mrs Melville would allude to the Court Ball and the Opera of the late sixties. But it was as difficult to realise that Mr Melville had ever stood up to anything larger than a caterpillar, as it was to believe that Mrs Melville had ever committed such deeds as to earn for her in an unenviable sense, an immense notoriety. It was upon this trio, settled down as they seemed to be, for a long afternoon that Ophelia Bransdon was introduced. Miss Stobhall immediately sprang up with a little expression of astonishment. The old people seemed to twitter with small pleasurable sounds.

“My dear,” Miss Stobhall said, “I should never have recognised you. Has your father come to his senses at last?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Ophelia answered, “but I know I’m very wet.”

Mr Luscombe, with his smiling and diffident air as if he were afraid of having committed an imprudence, begged his mother to take Ophelia up-stairs and to put her into some of his wife’s clothes. And there ensued a little rustling of coming and going which ended in leaving Miss Stobhall alone with Mr Melville and Mr Luscombe.

“Upon my word,” Miss Stobhall exclaimed, “
can
the great Bransdon have come to his senses?”

She looked enquiringly at Sir Melville and Mr Luscombe who returned mystified glances to her. The young man in the porch had been arranging the bicycles once more but he now stalked into the room holding his wide-awake crumpled up in his hand. He said “Ha!” upon observing Miss Stobhall and nodded perfunctorily to Mr Melville. Then he began to walk slowly up and down the carpet, his hands deep in his pockets and his head hanging upon his chest. He seemed to be aloof from or at least oblivious of his companions. Seen without his hat he appeared even fairer and younger, for his decidedly golden hair had an odd, boyish roughness. He looked, nevertheless, extraordinarily clean — as if he had been washed so often that his features had a semi-transparent quality.

“I’ve just been asked,” Miss Stobhall said to him in her determined voice, appearing ten years older and as much harder by contrast with his frail youth—”I have just been asked — or I was just going to be asked, but they haven’t had time to get it out — what sort of a thing a great Bransdon is. You see, your great man doesn’t bulk much with the outside world. These men have never even heard of him!”

Mr Melville appeared full of consternation: Mr Luscombe uttered unintelligible sounds, meaning to say that of course he had heard the great man’s name, though he couldn’t for the moment recall any of the actions by which he had earned his reputation. The young man simply shrugged his shoulders right up to his ears and let them sink slowly again. He continued to pace up and down as if he were thinking very deeply. He and Miss Stobhall were quite old friends, for her colonies of exiles had kept him prowling perpetually in her neighbourhood. He found them so romantic. They had had an immense number of battles of words, for the lady was of an engaging frankness and took in the young man as nearly a maternal interest as a pronounced old maid can be expected to feel. So that the two had a sort of comradeship of battle and it was without annoyance or shyness that the young man began to speak.

“
Bransdon,” he said, “is the apostle of the Simple Life.”

“Bransdon,” Miss Stobhall interjected, “is a dirty old man, too slack to keep himself tidy.”

“All over the world,” the young man continued with equanimity, “in thousands and thousands, you will find people trying to lead it, but Bransdon began it. He lives it, he talks it, he breathes it, he is it.”

“You must remember,” Miss Stobhall said, “that in this county of Surrey alone there must be fifty or sixty similar cranks, each making the same claim for himself. But I’ll admit that Bransdon is the greatest fraud and the greatest crank of them all.”

“
But,” Mr Luscombe interjected hesitatingly and with some bewilderment, “I don’t know anything at all about these matters, but I’ve always thought you prided yourself, Miss Stobhall, on being something of a crank, too.”