Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (357 page)

Mr Melville drew himself upon his sofa with a little air of ancient dignity and reserve.

“If I’ve never formed opinions,” he said, “it’s eh....” eh... because I never had time to think till I was too worked-out to do it.”

Hamnet Bransdon exclaimed: “Pah!”

“I had to work too hard as a youngster to have time to waste on ideas,” Mr Melville said. “You don’t have to have ideas in the Diplomatic Service. You have to be obedient and eh... eh... to have gentlemanly manners.”

Hamnet Bransdon slowly shrugged his shoulders up to his ears and slowly let them fall, as much as to say that to argue with such imbecility was as futile as it was wearisome.

“One gets tired,” he said, “of stating first principles and stating first principles and again stating first principles.”

He turned his back upon the pair of them, walked to the window and looked out at the garden, where the rain poured down unceasingly without a pause and as if it had an engrossed determination of its own. He began to whistle below his breath almost inaudibly, scarcely doing more than let the breath go in and out in regular aspirations. Mr Luscombe smiled at his stepfather. Mr Melville suggested a slightly dazed bewilderment. He had the impression of having had behind him a long and exceedingly occupied life. He thought that he had done the State some very good service and he believed that until he had run away with his present wife he had really had no time in which to occupy himself with what he called vaguely and in a spirit of some terror, “opinions.” It is true that from the date of his disappearance from pubic life he had done practically nothing. He spent long periods every day over his dress, over his manicuring, and even over his beard. He caught, as we have seen, caterpillars and green fly in the garden with assiduity and attention. After lunch he read
“
The Times” which only reached them at one o’clock. The hours between tea and dinner he spent with his wife playing games of backgammon or arranging newly arrived parcels of foreign stamps in their collection. After dinner he took a short nap. He woke up to drink a glass of very weak whisky and water and at ten o’clock regularly he retired to bed spending just over half an hour in his preparations for the night. He thought he had worn his brain out in the posts of Attaché at the Court of Siam, of Deputy-resident with the Sultan of Zelooca, of Resident at the Court of the Rajah of Patiala. Thus he sat, thinking that he really never had had time to read Dante and that, taken up as his days then were, he never would have time. And he could not very well understand in any case what young Mr Bransdon’s excitement was all about. He felt vaguely as if he, Mr Henry Melville, C.M.G., had been on the one hand buffeted for never having read the poet and slapped because he acknowledged that to read the poet was the proper thing to do.

Hamnet Bransdon turned suddenly from the window to exclaim:

“Yes, it’s no good going over first principles again. Our Life is Beauty, Religion, Art, Poetry itself, all the Finer Things.”

He turned again to the window and, behind his back Mr Luscombe smiled indulgently towards his stepfather. He liked Hamnet Bransdon.

CHAPTER IV

MRS LUSCOMBE always in her heart congratulated herself on the fire, that in the year 1840 had swept away practically all the traces of the old house at Coombe. She congratulated herself because, upon her honeymoon with Gerald Luscombe — a honeymoon which they had passed in the north of England — she had been taken over an old manor-house in Derbyshire which Gerald Luscombe said was its exact — its startlingly exact replica. Thingham Manor, it was true, was occupied by several families of farm servants and was in consequence more dilapidated than it was likely that Coombe would have been at that date. But none the less, Mrs Luscombe regarded it as a merciful escape that she should not have to play the lady over anything remotely resembling that rabbit-warren of low, dark rooms. Built in 1840, the present Coombe was an almost square erection with straight holes in the sides for windows, with a deep porch decorated by two huge cement pilasters, with a slate roof, the chimneys all in a bunch at the peak of it and the sides covered with Virginia creeper and wisteria. It contained sixteen rooms — a largish square room on the right of the porch, a largish square room on the left. This latter opened on to a billiard room which had been built by Gerald Luscombe’s father in 1872. Behind the room on the left of the passage was the largish square drawing-room in which Mr Hamnet Bransdon lectured Mr Luscombe and Mr Melville. Behind the room on the right of the passage was a square kitchen. The hall itself was large, cold, and flagged with stones. On the first floor there were six bedrooms, two of which were occupied by Mr and Mrs Melville and two by Mr and Mrs Luscombe. The other two were used by the little boy as a bedroom and a playroom. On the floor above there were six bedrooms of the same size as those on the first floor but slightly lower in pitch.

Up the carriage-drive Mrs Melville always drove with satisfaction though for the moment the windows of her brougham were so steamed and vaporous that she could see nothing more than the dark, blurred masses of holly, laurel and euonymus. The drive was semicircular, enclosing perhaps the equivalent of a quarter of an acre, mostly planted with these evergreens. The shiny surface of their leaves also afforded satisfaction to Mrs Luscombe. They seemed to her to be the most respectable plants in the world, for except for the time that she had spent in being “finished” in Paris, Mrs Luscombe had spent practically the whole of her life in Town, though every summer she had been in the habit of going to some such place as Eastbourne for a month or six weeks. She was, indeed, not even aware that a euonymus was called a euonymus though eight of these trees confronted the Bayswater Road from the window-boxes of her father’s house in Bayswater. Thus to Mrs Luscombe, Coombe Luscombe appeared to be the real glorification of villadom. If it was older than the residences of her numerous brothers-in-law and friends it was also larger: if it was not so spick and span — so redolent of enamel and so shiny as to its furniture, it had nevertheless a pedigree. For the Luscombes had been in Coombe Luscombe ever since the year 1543. This fact meant comparatively little for Mrs Luscombe, who was more acquainted with the merits of a French chansonette than the goodness of a “good” family, who could play the mandoline with an accurate imitation of Gallic lightness and whose little cakes at her “At Homes” were the envy — if they slightly shocked — her visitors. They were sent her from Paris every week and were called
petits fours.

Mrs Luscombe at that date was thirty-two: she was considerably over the middle height but she kept herself so well proportioned with bathing and calisthenics and her dresses fitted her always so exceedingly well — she went twice a year to Paris to procure them at the Maison Raspadocque at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli, where her mannequin was kept and carefully adjusted season by season and where the same saleswoman had waited on her ever since she had been twenty — her dresses fitted so extremely well to her healthy and harmonious limbs that she never presented the slightest suspicion of largeness. She was, indeed, the incarnation of health and of good humour. She had never raised her voice to anyone since she had been married, and she had even an acquired gaiety of manner which did not sit so ill on her because she had acquired, too, such an extreme control over all her muscles. Her face was rather broad, her nose a little turned up at the point; her hair, the colour of straw in the shock, curled naturally with the curve of vine tendrils, her face was of the exact colour and texture of the paler side of a well-ripe peach, and her teeth when she smiled appeared to be exceedingly white, small and even. Her brother-in-law, Jack May, a Chartered Accountant, was of opinion that in marrying Gerald Luscombe she had done exceedingly badly. She ought, he thought, with her figure and “style,” to have figured in the front row of the Talavera Theatre, when she would certainly have married a peer of the realm. Indeed, the enterprising manager of that theatre, who was one of her father’s clients and whom she had met at dinner at Sir Joshua Sebag’s, had actually offered to take her on without charging her his usual premium, which was £250.

Mrs Luscombe had, however, a sense of social values sufficient to let her feel — even if she hadn’t cared exceedingly, as she did, for Gerald Luscombe — to let her feel that she would be, as she would have put it,
plus rangée
as the wife of Gerald Luscombe than united to such peers as made alliances with front rows. She could not see that it mattered very much that she wasn’t going to be and apparently did not seem ever to be going to be “in the County.” She could not value the County any more than, in Paris, she could have valued the legitimist aristocracy. In Paris she would have been satisfied with going anywhere where all Paris went. It would never have occurred to her to get in behind the high walls and the closed windows of the Faubourg St Germain. But as it was she had everything that she could desire, and with the birth of her son even a little bit more.

The son was perfectly healthy and perfectly normal. He struck her as being the cleverest boy in the world for his age and yet as having about him nothing of the extraordinary. If the furniture of Coombe Luscombe was old and substantial and not all of it in the style that she had been taught to value as “Chippendale,” she was perfectly content to live amongst Victorian mahogany until little old Mrs Melville — who was perfectly content with anything that was mahogany and anything that was Victorian as long as it was early enough — until Mrs Melville should gradually fade out of existence. Then with the money that Mrs Melville would leave them — not that they had any need of money but there seemed a certain legal fitness about the arrangement — she was going to make over the whole house. What was early Victorian she would sell, replacing it with light, bright, curly objects of furniture after the fashion of what she had been taught to call “the nouvel art.” From the walls she would have down the heavy, dark, sumptuous wall-papers resembling as they did purple and brown damasks and in their place she would paint, distemper, or enamel, in shades of light blue, white or pink. The few Chippendale objects she would retain but she was going to have them varnished, polished and brought up to a pitch of efficient shininess.

But she was in no hurry to do this. For nothing in the world would she hurt the feelings of Mrs Melville by making any changes before that lady died. For the rest, she had the smartest brougham, the smartest governess-car and the smartest frocks that could be found in any villa for twenty miles round; she had four female servants, a butler, a knife-boy, a gardener, an undergardener, a coachman and a stable-helper. She had upon her calling list Lady Joshua Sebag, Lady Horatio Janus, the wife of Sir Horatio, Alderman of the City of London and Member of Parliament for Fulham, Lady Crested Joins, the wife of the Harley Street Skin Specialist. George Hollands, the Publisher, who had a villa as large as a castle, in the immediate neighbourhood came down on Sundays bringing with him authors and illustrators, slightly strange creatures whose names nevertheless, from time to time, she read of in the newspapers. And if her husband were not actually as rich as either the Sebags, the Januses or the Joins, she had it as a satisfaction that they were not like Sir Crested, living up to the last penny of an income that would vanish as soon as a surgical skill of hand vanished, or like Sir Joshua Sebag, whose enterprises were enormous, but who had once had to file his petition because a malignant creditor had applied to the Courts for a writ of
ne exeat regno
against him.

On its rubber tyres the brougham ran up the drive almost noiselessly and stopped before the pilasters of the porch. Mrs Luscombe descended in a cloud of very light pink. She was wearing in addition a great black hat shaped like a mushroom across the front of which there ran a single white ostrich feather. She had a very light step, and she passed almost soundlessly through the hall with the intention of not being heard by her little boy. With the Londoner’s bewilderment before all phases of weather and forgetful of the green marks that damp lawns will leave on the bottom of skirts, Mrs Luscombe had dressed herself for the Vicar’s wife’s garden party as if she had been going to Goodwood during a period of profoundest drought, and she knew herself that she looked so well that no warnings would prevent her little boy from rushing upon her, springing up and transferring the greater part of the dirt from his blue jersey to her delicate blouse, and from perforating with his heavy boots her skirt which was still more delicate in texture. She wished to get up to her room and to change before she met the little boy. Her son, however, was actually in the stables with Filson, the under-gardener, listening with awe to that gloomy and Conservative politician’s version of the relative strengths of the British and German navies.

A large female form in very tight white was standing before the pier-glass in her bedroom and adjusting by its aid one of those turn-down collars that were then not quite beginning to be worn. Only the day before Mrs Luscombe had received from her dressmaker a costume that she imagined to be just such another. And she had already pictured to herself the thrill of pleasure that it would give her when she appeared white and shining upon Lady Crested Joins’ tennis lawn next Saturday wearing assuredly the first lace frock and the first Peter Pan collar to be seen in that district. On the other hand, the girl appeared so large, so sunny and so voluptuous! Mrs Luscombe couldn’t in the least fix her amongst the number of her friends, but it gave her a distinct feeling of pleasure to see so pagan a figure in her rather grim bedroom, the furniture of which was all of shiny red mahogany and all whose cut looking-glasses had a slightly bluish tinge as if smoke had passed across them. Ophelia Bransdon, indeed, had about her at the moment a touch almost of the sinister. The immoral, Mrs Luscombe would have called it, had not a slight suspicion of immorality of appearance been considered to be in the fashion of that date. The dress which fitted Mrs Luscombe exactly, was slightly tight for Ophelia, so that her ample proportions seemed accentuated in almost more ample curves and the then indispensable corsets thrust her figure forward in an attitude that remotely suggested the predatory.

Ophelia, however, was gazing into the blue-grey glass with a rapt expression. She had such a little catch in her throat at the sight of her white reflection that she could not even speak. The garments she had taken off lay behind her in untidy coils upon the floor, wet, brown, sandy with the sand of the Surrey heaths so that they resembled sea-weed and sacking. Ophelia had seen the Duchess of Portarlington once get out, all in white, from her carriage just beside the large gates at New Hatch. But except for that she had never seen anything like herself, and not even the Duchess, she thought, quite came up to it.

Mrs Melville, a small woman with her black lace cap like a d’oyley, stood just to the right of the mirror holding forward her thin, delicately wrinkled hands in that position that one woman always adopts when she has just “turned out” another woman — mute, contemplative, attentive, but at the same time very much as if she expected her hairpins to fall out. It was as if she were an allegorical figure who had just shoved off a nymph upon a voyage into another world.

“As I was saying,” Ophelia suddenly continued addressing Mrs Melville, “you people who have never done anything and have led sheltered and orderly lives all your days can have very little idea of what it means to be absolutely free. I mean to be free not only now but for ever. You think because I was married yesterday I’m going to acknowledge ties. But nothing of the sort. The marriage was entered into with “reservations” as the Catholics say, in deference to the vulgar opinions of the majority of the State. Outwardly in deference, that is to say, but inwardly in defiance.”

Mrs Melville remained motionless; only her eyelids blinked, and a certain measure of panic appeared in the lines of her face as she regarded Ophelia and her daughter-in-law by turns.

“Oh, she’s taken your new frock!” she gasped, and her hands, from which there descended a small shower of at least a dozen pins, fell helplessly to her sides.

“That!” Mrs Luscombe exclaimed. “Mine!” And though her eyes fell upon the distasteful mass of Ophelia’s damp garments upon the ground, she couldn’t exactly for the moment figure that the white lace gown was her own. She had always considered it as destined to present at a garden party her own thinnish lines that were so long from the breast to the hips — something tight and trim.