Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (359 page)

Mr Parmont had brought with him a jovial young man called Hangbird who had lately returned from an unsuccessful attempt to make a fortune in the Klondyke. Mr Parmont, who liked young Hangbird because he was, as he expressed it, so “vital,” had brought the young man that he might learn how to rub off from himself the last shade of conventional ideas that a Colonial existence had left to him. Unfortunately, Mr Hangbird, who had a bull neck, a round head, pugnacious jaws and twinkling, prominent eyes, did nothing but grin all the time. He tad flatly refused to put on the convict’s suit — it was he, indeed, who first called the clothes by this name — the Simple Life garment that Mr Parmont kept for his friends to wear when he took any of them to visit Frog’s Cottages. Sandals, also, he refused to don. But having heard that an unconventionality of appearance was demanded of him, he was wearing white tennis shoes, his cricketing flannels and his college blazer. He had come under the shelter of an umbrella but nevertheless his legs and feet being exceedingly wet, he had no sooner entered Mr Bransdon’s apartment, than he demanded a whisky and soda.

This caused Mr Parmont to wince. Whisky and soda was a combination of the most conventional kind. It was supposed by Mr Parmont to be consumed almost exclusively by stockbrokers and journalists, and it grieved him exceedingly that anyone he introduced should have asked for anything so entirely un-ideal. For the returned Colonial, on the other hand, whisky and soda was the ordinary hearty basis of every-day life. You never, in his view of things, went into another fellow’s diggings without automatically getting it. And Mr Parmont could not be quite certain whether he was most pleased or distressed to observe Mr Bransdon make a tentative and as it were inarticulate gesture towards his mead-horn which hung above the mantelpiece. And Mr Gubb, who understood exactly the workings of his leader’s mind, reached down the horn immediately and offered young Mr Hangbird some mead and hot water.

“I don’t care a damn what it is,” Mr Hangbird exclaimed, “as long as it’s warming. I’m beastly cold.”

Mr Gubb, in his gentle and yet didactic tones, whilst he filled the horn with a little mead and a good deal of hot water from the paraffin stove, explained that alcohol did not really make you warm; it only, by its effects upon the pores of the skin, induced a feeling of heat. Actually it lowered the temperature.

“Oh, hell!” Mr Hangbird exclaimed. “If I feel warm, I am warm. What’s warmth but a feeling of warmth?”

Mr Gubb continued his gentle flow of good doctrine. He tried, gathering at once that Mr Hangbird’s was a factual mind, to stick severely to the concrete. He said that warmth was a state, the heightening or lowering of which was proved by the thermometer. Moreover, the fact that alcohol made you cold was proved, not only by the thermometer but because, after an interval depending on the amount you had imbibed, you experienced with certainty a sensation of cold. He made this concluding remark with a gentle sensation of triumph.

“But damn it all,” young Hangbird exclaimed, “then you take some more. You keep your spirits up by pouring spirits down, the poet says. It’s like a fire. You don’t keep that up by giving it nothing to burn.”

At this point Mr Parmont uttered a slow but still agonised “Ssh!” His young friend, he knew, was only crude because he was so “vital,” but he could not expect the people there to be aware that Mr Hangbird had this engaging quality. He would appear to the Lifers to be merely vulgar. For these people, though they fronted the outside world in the most combative manner possible, yet addressed each other, in order to keep up the exalted tone of communal love, always in accents and with expressions of extreme deference. One would ask the other: “In your opinion, would the imposition of a tax upon a commodity of necessity increase the cost of that commodity to the consumer?” And the other, after gazing fixedly in front of him in a manner learned from Mr Bransdon, would reply in tones, as if he spoke from an exalted distance: “After mature consideration and allowing for any objections which you may have to offer, in my view the almost certain effect....” — And after this preamble, which gave to all their debates and deliberations an air of extreme suavity, the speaker would utter his tentative views. Perhaps, also, it was due to these methods of deliberation that the Colony had not as yet settled its views upon the first principles of more than twenty-one aspects of life — though these views, set up in type by Ophelia and entitled
Simple Life Tracts,
could be had to that number at the price of one penny apiece.

It was at this point that Mr Parmont had asked Mr Bransdon whether it was true that he had sold Frog’s Cottages to old Mr Rossiter. Mr Parmont desired to avoid any more possibly painful topics. Mr Bransdon gazed solemnly at Mr Parmont, and as solemnly, with extreme slowness, three times nodded his head. He gave the idea that his thoughts were at an immense distance.

“It seems, doesn’t it,” Mr Parmont exclaimed deferentially, “a pity? I mean that I shall regret it if you go very far away.”

Mr Gubb looked at Mr Bransdon to see if he had any comments to offer, but Mr Bransdon was gazing fixedly at his warp. Mr Hangbird had his face hidden in the mug of mead; the disciple had, for the moment, abandoned the task of pounding his tobacco and sat behind the stove his hands falling limply at his side. The time seemed ripe enough to Mr Gubb.

“We number,” he said to Mr Parmont in his peculiarly honied tones, “now twenty-eight in all. That is to say that there are twenty-eight of us who rigidly do all things in common. Our adherents all over the world number several thousands. We have for our periodical ‘The Mare’s Tail,’ so called because that plant is the most rudimentary and therefore the most simple form of vegetable life — our periodical has two thousand seven hundred enthusiastic subscribers though it does no advertising and its fame is spread purely by word of mouth. Our
Simple Life Tracts
sell by many thousands, most notably the one called ‘Mother’s Milk,’ which deals with the upbringing of children in their tenderest years upon the most purely ethical lines. This has been reprinted fifteen times, the type having been set up by Miss Ophelia Bransdon and the printing being done by disciples and friends who have worked at times by relays night and day. You will acknowledge, therefore, that we have done no little work towards the humanising of the world.”

Mr Parmont nodded slowly, and Mr Hangbird, who had given a guffaw at the name of the so successful tract, remained in a state of painful attention, his lower jaw hanging down in a continual grin like that of young dogs. Mr Gubb spoke with the practised fluency of an old Parliamentary candidate. It is true that he had never secured election, but in his pre-regenerate days he had stood for no less than six constituencies. He kept his eyes fixed upon the London critic and continued:

“I recite these facts, my dear friend, although many of them are known to you, in case you should consider them worthy of notice in the Literary News which you contribute to the columns of the more advanced journals.”

“Oh, you don’t object to press notices!” Mr Hangbird exclaimed. “Old Parmont’ll put your notice of removal card into
The Speaker
all right. He draws ten hob a time.” Mr Parmont shuddered slightly but Mr Gubb continued: “We court it, my friend, we court the attention of the press, we welcome any way of spreading our doctrines.”

He paused for a moment to reconstruct his train of thought.

“I’ll certainly mention it in two or three papers,” Sir Parmont said. “I’m obliged to yon for refreshing my memory. I hope you got a good price?”

Mr Bransdon exclaimed in deep, hollow tones, enshrining a sort of gloating gratification:

“Forty years’ purchase.”

Mr Hangbird exclaimed: “By Gum!”

Mr Gubb gave his leader a little quick glance of apprehension.

“The place,” he began to speak rather quickly, “is hallowed by associations.”

Mr Hangbird said “Rats!” under his breath but Mr Gubb had recovered his stride.

“We number now twenty-eight,” he recapitulated, “and in the present iniquitous system of land tenure we are scattered far and wide for lack of mere housing all over this neighbourhood. The time has therefore long since arrived when we have felt that we are, if not crippled, at least definitely hindered by our lack of concentration. Our desire, therefore, is to find some spot where we may have our communal weaving-barns, our communal Craftsmen’s shops and... and... room for expansion in fact.”

Mr Parmont asked whether they had settled on a spot. “No,” Mr Gubb answered. “We shall begin to look out at once.”

“The moment,” Mr Bransdon said, “seemed extremely opportune.”

“You mean you wouldn’t get any other chap to pay a quarter as much,” Hangbird put in, and Mr Bransdon slowly nodded his enormous head.

“Mr Rossiter, the purchaser,” Mr Gubb exclaimed, “is almost one of us. It will immensely enhance for him the value of these rooms when he sits in them to think how the great Bransdon’s voice has rolled through them chanting some of his most enthralling prose poems.”

“I hope,” Mr Parmont said deferentially, “that you will choose somewhere a little less damp than this. I daresay that it is a good thing that you are going. Still, I am sorry that you should be cutting off all connection with this place.”

“Of course,” Mr Gubb remarked quickly, “we shall choose a drier spot. We will have in preference a sandy soil upon a hilltop. But you are mistaken in thinking that we have severed all ties with this spot. Mr Bransdon has not parted with the freehold. He has only given a lease.” A minute look of dismay and disapprobation came on to Mr Parmont’s face. It was one of the canons of the
Simple Life Tracts
that leasehold tenure was an abomination.

“Oh,” Mr Gubb said, “Mr Bransdon has not given an ordinary common-place ninety-nine years’ lease. We have reverted to an old medieval custom of the country hereabouts. We have given a three lives’ lease. After, that is to say, Mr Rossiter and his heirs to the number of two have died, the cottages will revert to Mr Bransdon. And Mr Rossiter has undertaken to make no substantial changes in the cottages but only to put them into a state of thorough repair from top to bottom.”

A look of fascination, a look almost of awe overspread the features of Mr Hangbird.

“Forty year’s purchase!” he gasped. “The place isn’t worth fifteen. It’s falling to pieces with rats and the chap’s to repair it from top to bottom! And three lives’ lease! Why, Mr Rossiter’s sixty-four, and his eldest son’s in the last stages of epilepsy and the second is about as far gone in consumption as he can be, and this place is as damp as the bottom of a water-hole!”

He rose to his feet, his mouth wide open, his eyes rolling.
“
Mr Bransdon, sir,” he exclaimed, “you’ve missed your vocation. You ought to have been a horse-dealer in the Klondyke.”

Mr Bransdon, who had been for some time obviously in another world, gave three sharp hisses between his teeth. Mr Gubb sprang to the side of the loom and seized his pencil and his reporter’s note book. Mr Bransdon opened his mouth wide and words began to pour from it, heavy and sonorous.

“My soul exults in the breath of the wind,” he chanted. “I will go get me into the desert places beneath the white light of the stars. Glorious shall flash my silver limbs. In the tendrils of my hair shall be the kiss of the wind and sweet in my nostrils the odour of the young grapes that love me for my comeliness....”

Suddenly the door was flung back. The sound of rain and running waters filled the room. Miss Stobhall’s eyes were hard and her voice harsh as she entered.

“You, Bransdon, and you, Gubb,” she exclaimed, “you must both come over to Luscombe Green at once.”

CHAPTER VI

TWO hours later a fly, which Mr Hangbird had obligingly fetched from Westerham, climbed dismally up the steep bank behind Frog’s Cottages. It contained within its gloom Mr Bransdon and Miss Stobhall, and also Mr Parmont and Mr Hangbird, which latter were to be dropped at New End. At the same time Mr Gubb set out on foot by the valley path for Coombe Luscombe. The high road being extremely precipitous and round-about, he reckoned that he would reach his destination at least as soon as the carriage, and he had no desire to make a journey of an hour or so boxed up with Miss Stobhall after the rather frightful scene she had made them at Frog’s Cottages.

Mr Parmont and Mr Hangbird had been ejected along with the disciple from Mr Bransdon’s loom-room, so that they had no actual knowledge of what had passed. They had come officially to spend the afternoon and evening, so that they waited in the Craftsmen’s shed during the hour or so that was needed for the interview between Miss Stobhall, Mr Bransdon, and Mr Gubb. They had for perhaps half an hour the companionship of the gloomy disciple, but the dark young man remained lugubrious in the extreme. He had, in fact, nothing whatever to say, and he could give them no information as to the purpose of the crucibles, the little saws, the files, the acids in bottles, or as to any single thing that the large shed, crowded with dusty and rusty fragments of white metal and of iron, contained. He didn’t even know the composition of the white metal, fragments of which, apparently cast in a sort of rough filigree work, lay on the long, rough table made of a single plank, that ran from end to end of the building. His most brilliant conversational sally was to say that he thought the Simple Lifers obtained this metal by melting kitchen spoons. Shortly afterwards he faded desultorily away, attaining first to a corner of the work-table and then slinking gradually out of the door.

He was no sooner gone than Mr Hangbird began jocularly to upbraid Parmont as to the financial capabilities of his two friends. He said that Mr Bransdon and Mr Gubb were nothing more than a pair of swindlers who had obtained money from the unfortunate retired tea-merchant, called Rossiter, by undue influence and misrepresentation. Mr Parmont took up the cudgels in defence of his two friends, but he did it with an annoyed desultoriness. The water dripped and gurgled past the open door of the shed: small draughts ran about their wet feet; a rat jumped now and then amongst the heaps of wood-shavings, beneath the further window, and they smoked cigarette after cigarette. Mr Parmont was indeed in some distress at the thought of his friend’s bargain.

Years before, in what Mr Parmont and his friends sighed to recall as the glorious nineties, Mr Parmont had possessed a remarkable power to boom authors into positions of prominence. His word at that date had been accepted avidly by publishers. He had discovered young writers; he had written three, four and even five articles in as many periodicals upon each of their books. And in those days which were becoming dim and forgotten it had been no very difficult matter to “boom” an author. Everything, as Mr Parmont could remember — or almost everything
— had
boomed. You brought out little books in yellow paper covers and the pubic swallowed them by the hundred thousand at eighteen pence apiece. You brought out versions of medieval French poems, printed in black letter upon parchment, and the public oversubscribed them at two guineas before you could get the prospectuses printed. Mr Parmont had lived in the days when first editions of minor poets bound in cardboard went up to prices like forty and fifty pounds a copy. He had been in the Yellow Book wave, he had contributed criticisms to “The Savoy,” he had been an “influence.” He had been asked out to dinner by knights’ wives, he had been interviewed for weekly papers and his private tastes had been discussed in the pubic press. Now he was left rather high and dry at the age of forty-seven. No one any longer took him very seriously; publishers avoided rather than sought for books by the author whom he applauded. He found it difficult sometimes even to get the daily papers to give him books for review. So that his chief source of income for the time being consisted in paragraphs of literary news which, because his acquaintance amongst authors was very considerable, and because he was really liked by them, he had little difficulty in obtaining.

Gifted, however, with tastes of an extreme frugality, his personal vicissitudes troubled him very little, and he got a real gratification from being able to think that the taste of the pubic was at its lowest ebb. No good book, according to him, could possibly pay, and no good anything else. He saw in everything vulgarity, ostentation, meanness and oppression. And these things obsessed him to such an extent that they formed almost the sole topic of his conversation. Thus he parried Mr Hangbird’s attack upon the sale of the cottages by saying — and he perfectly believed it — that no cause could possibly prosper unless somebody made sacrifices for it, and Mr Rossiter’s enthusiasm for Bransdon and his work was so great that the price would be for him a matter of very little importance.

Nevertheless, he felt within himself some small dismay at the thought of a poor old man with two very sickly sons being suddenly planted in that very damp spot, and he felt a dismay still more considerable at the statement that Mr Gubb had so definitely presented to him. It meant that the Simple Life apparently could not be good. For apparently the Simple Life was going to pay its way, and for Mr Parmont nothing that paid could be good.

Parmont, indeed, had himself “discovered” the great Mr Bransdon. During the glorious wave of the nineties he first had taken the great man’s first manuscript to a publisher. And although Bransdon’s first novel had not boomed, nor yet his second, in the course of four or five years, Bransdon had come to be making an income which, but for his temperamental and deep laziness, would have been very considerable. At that point Mr Parmont’s enthusiasm for Bransdon and his work very sensibly cooled off, and he had not seen him for five or six years, when one day, chancing to look him up, he had found Bransdon no longer a comfortable novelist, but at the very beginning of his career as the Prophet of the Simple Life. He was established there in Frog’s Cottages with Mr Gubb, at that time still in practice, week-ending next door to him. That had been five years ago, and although Mr Parmont could not so very enormously appreciate Bransdon’s prose poems about his silver limbs beneath the starlight, there could not be any doubt that they did not pay. This gave them at once a claim to be considered mystically, esoteric, non-commercial, and therefore good. But if now Mr Bransdon’s poems and, above all, his theories, could be considered to be about to pay, Mr Parmont felt vaguely that there must be something wrong about it. It was in his blood to feel this, it was part of his very being. So that he and Mr Hangbird leant against the long table and smoked interminable cigarettes, Mr Hangbird making casual interjections as to the queerness of their absent hosts, and Mr Parmont hardly answering him at all.

Mr Hangbird, in fact, was not by any means having a good time of it. So that when Mr Gubb appeared in the doorway and informed them that be and Mr Bransdon must go at once to Coombe Luscombe, and that he was going to Westerham to fetch a fly, Hangbird with spirit volunteered to run upon that errand. He desired above all things to get to a bar and to have a whisky and soda.

With its four damp occupants in a feeling of steam and depression the fly swayed and jolted at a foot pace towards the Surrey Border. Mr Bransdon had not been outside the boundaries of the cottages and gardens or up the steep bank on to the hard road for more than nine months. He sat hunched together in a gloomy corner, his beard in its longest strands dripping below his belt; he breathed perpetually with a sort of whistle between his teeth, a shrill noise of discomfiture that distracted both Mr Parmont and Miss Stobhall and destroyed their powers of keeping up a connected conversation. By a great ash on the left hand side of the road nearly at the steep top of a hill in the dripping woodlands, the fly came to a lurching halt. With a tremendous rattling of the soaked, swollen window-frames Mr Parmont and Mr Hangbird descended. As they slipped and floundered up the greasy path into the wood, Mr Hangbird ejaculated something to his companion and burst into a demonstrative cackle of laughter. The fly rolled on dispiritedly upwards to the top of the bank, the dripping horse could trot now for perhaps a mile and a half down hill. But the rattle of the window-frames and the grind of the wheels on the sandy road made Miss Stobhall’s voice inaudible when she shouted a remark to her companion.

Simon Bransdon, whose real name was Simeon Brandetski, was a possibly Polish, possibly Lithuanian, possibly Little Russian Jew. That is to say, he was called a Jew by his enemies. In the days when he had troubled his head about such things he had supposed himself to come from somewhere in the southern and eastern portions of Russia in Europe. Mr Parmont declared that he must be a Pole, since the Poles were, according to Mr Parmont, the most artistic of all the European races, and Simeon Brandetski was, according to the same authority, an artist to his finger-tips. Simeon Brandetski, however, in his unregenerate youth, had cared nothing whatever about these matters. He had been brought to England by someone who was possibly a relative when he was perhaps four or five, his relative — if it were a relative — having performed the function of odd job man and instructor in French at a little nondescript school of the early sixties. His relative was known as Count Boruslaski, though this was certainly not his name. At this school, in return for cleaning the boots and knives, Mr Brandetski had received his first training in the English language, in Literature and in the rudiments of Geometry. Count Boruslaski, however, had died when the young Brandetski was only thirteen, and the proprietor of the school, considering that the boy’s services were not worth his board and education, had turned him immediately loose upon the world. It happened that at that time a branch line was being constructed through Epping Forest by the Great Eastern Railway, and the young Brandetski earned for himself for a time a very precarious living by doing odd jobs for navvies who were laying the line. He carried them their lunches, he bought their food when it needed buying, he heated the water for their tea-cans, he scraped the heavy clay off their corduroys with pieces of rusty iron hoop, and he read the newspapers to them on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. He acquired, too, a very considerable skill in poaching in the forest, for he had a quick eye and ear and an extraordinary knowledge of the habits and homes of wild animals. So that the navvies were accustomed to say that a blooming cock deer would come up and smell young Brandy’s breeches whilst he cut its throat. When he was full grown, the young man became himself a navvy. And as he was very ferocious in character, had an astonishing acquaintance with a vocabulary of oaths, and never scrupled to draw a knife, whereas his companions used only their fists, boots or belts, as implements of attack, Simeon Brandetski very soon became a foreman or a ganger. In this capacity he was fortunate enough to attract the attention of a large railway contractor in whose employment he was at the time, and this contractor, being about to construct a railway line in British East Africa, offered Brandetski the post of superintendent of plate-layers. Brandetski was now a made man. He had beneath him from three to four hundred white overseers and perhaps twice as many thousand native boys. He had ample opportunity for shooting along the railway line as it progressed and ample opportunities for autocracy of the most vigorous description. His pay was very high, for the climate was unhealthy and the life full of danger. It afforded him, too, a great amount of picturesque experience which was of the most vivid use to him in his subsequent career as an author. The line ran through an exceedingly swampy country, over a large undefined river bed and along the banks of a vast lake. Truck-loads of rock from up the country were brought day by day and tilted bodily, truck and all, from the ends of the line into the morasses, forming a causeway along which the line itself proceeded.

It was shortly after Brandetski, then a man of thirty, had been invalided home that he first met Mr Parmont. This occurred at a club dinner of a Liberal shade of opinion where, though Mr Brandetski was of the most pronouncedly Imperialistic views in common with most men who have worked in the Colonies, he had been invited by the war correspondent of a Liberal journal, who was returning from reporting an Indian hill war, on the steamer that had picked up Simeon Brandetski at Cape Town. Mr Parmont came to the same dinner in order to hear the war correspondent recount stories of the iniquitous nature of British rule in India. But Mr Brandetski had monopolised the whole of the conversation with accounts of the iniquities and bestialities of the African nigger-boy. He said that the only thing for them was the whip. It was the only thing the nigger understood: it was the only thing, by God! that he enjoyed. He recounted how, automatically, he had had his pony-boys flogged whenever he discovered that his ponies had been inefficiently rubbed down, or insufficiently fed. And he was, by God! the most popular figure amongst the natives of his section. If he happened to be in want of a boy, hundreds of niggers from half a dozen different races would apply for the post. And he affected the newspaper correspondent to such an extent that that gentleman supplied corroborative evidence, and declared, too, that the only thing for the subordinate races was the whip.

So that Mr Parmont got none of the humanitarian scandal that he had come to seek. On the other hand Mr Brandetski made him prick up his ears. Like most literary men of that date, Mr Parmont had a cant, or perhaps it was a craving for introducing what they called Life into English Literature, and Simeon Brandetski struck him as having come more into contact with Life than anyone he had ever met. He found Mr Brandetski, indeed, infinitely more “vital” even than he afterwards found Mr Hangbird, and he suggested, nay, he even pressed Brandetski to write some of his experiences.