Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (370 page)

“Brandetski,” one of the foremost children exclaimed, “is the saviour of his country. A lion-hearted revolutionist.”

“It should be the joy of our lives,” the other child said, “to unlace his boots when he is weary, mother says.

Only he wears top-boots. Mr Brandetski is the salt of the earth. With one revolver he has rid the world of a hundred Cossacks.”

“But not with one shot, my little dear,” Mr Creedy said. “I haven’t a doubt that he’s a most estimable gentleman and deserving of all your praise.”

“Brandetski’s going to be the co-respondent,” the front left-hand child announced decisively.

Again Mr Creedy said, “Ssh! ssh!” And he added, “So it isn’t Gubb?”

“Father says,” the front right-hand child continued, “that Brandetski looted a Church near Odessa and bolted to get away from his wife who’s twenty years older than him. Father’s sending for his wife.”

“Father’s going to make it hot for him,” the other child added.

“And quite right, too,” Mr Creedy commented. “Quite
right,
too. The sanctity of our homes must be maintained against these foreign interlopers.”

The hinder pair of children, growing restive under this censure, made in turn an attack.

“All nations are brothers,” one of them said, and then the other added, “The Russian Revolutionists are the noblest sons of God.”

Mr Creedy said, “Mind, I’m not saying they’re not.”

“Father,” the left-hand child said, “is a disgusting money-lender.”

“Mother,” the other child corroborated her, “says that when Quakers take to usury they’re more disgusting than Jews.”

“A money-lender?” Mr Creedy said. “Now what may his registered name and address be?”

“Henry Augustus Pierpoint,” the left-hand hindermost child exclaimed and the other added, “37 Sackville Street, W.”

Mr Creedy’s jaw fell suddenly. “My God!” he exclaimed. “My little dears, what a coincidence!” His perturbation increased. “Well,” he said, “well! well!” And then he made almost the solitary joke of his life. “If your dear father,” he said ruefully, “doesn’t like the Simple Life he revels in Compound Interest. And his notepaper’s so superior looking. ‘Money advanced to any amount on note of hand alone.’” He looked at the children with a face almost of awe. “Not but what,” he said, “your dear father won’t have taught me the lesson of my life, if ever I
do
get out of his clutches. But two hundred and forty per cent, is cruel.” He reflected for a moment. “Cruel!” he added.

The children appeared to be neither interested nor touched by this discourse. And suddenly bringing himself out of his personal woes Mr Creedy returned to his earlier text.

“Well, my little dears,” he said, “we all have our troubles and trials. And though I might draw morals it is not for me to point the finger of scorn at your dear father or your loving mother, but let me beg you to remember one thing. Never peach against your mother to your father. And never peach against your father to your mother. Fathers is fathers and has their little ways. And mothers is sometimes better than they should be and sometimes not so good. But I’ve always said as the perfect servant should be all eyes and ears and no tongue, and that’s a very good rule for children, for though they ain’t exactly servants, they has to keep in the background if not exactly in the sculleries and pantries, out of sight of Company, like governesses and secretaries, to whom a shut head is as precious as much gold.”

The child on the right-hand back seat yawned with an extreme loudness.
“
Isn’t it time for the fight?” she said.

“I’m ready,” her ally answered.

“We’re always ready,” the other two exclaimed.

They appeared to scramble out of the governess-cart, so that Mr Creedy’s eyes became confused and blurred.

“Now we may kick and bite,” he heard the largest exclaim. For when they were all upon the ground, though their costumes were exactly similar so that they appeared to him like four little black devils, they exhibited obvious differences of height. “We may kick and bite but we mus’n’t punch noses so that the blood’ll show, and we may only scratch hands and legs.”

“That,” the youngest explained to Mr Creedy, “is because we can explain that the marks were made by brambles.”

Mr Creedy raised both his hands to about the level of his ears. “What little devils! What little devils!” he exclaimed. “Lying and pretending and tale-bearing and not fighting fair.”

And under the force of his emotion he shuffled rather than walked like quite an old man towards the Duchess’ footman. In the broad gravel space upon which the tranquil sunlight fell beneficently, the children, who had ranged themselves into two twos, the smallest going with the largest and the two middle ones being united — the children were going through a sort of war-dance, a ritual expressive of violent hatred. They turned their backs at each other, bent down and made hideous grimaces through their legs. They faced round and made long noses, hopping on one leg, and they shouted words of hatred, and even poor Mr Creedy could distinguish obscenities.

“There,” Mr Creedy said to the footman, “this is what comes of your New Schools and Tolstois. This is what you’re bringing the country to. I’ve served with the most dissolute nobility: I’ve been half through the House of Lords that you want to abolish, and never did I see the likes of these, though it’s notorious the gentry don’t know how to raise their children.” His voice actually trembled a little. “And pretty little dears they might have been,” he continued, “if only they’d been brought up proper. I always say that not to send a child to Sunday School is to give him a two to one on chance of the Divorce Courts if not the gallows.”

The chauffeur, who had pulled a copy of “L’Aurore” out of his pocket, took no notice of poor Mr Creedy. The footman only said, “Pah!” The children, all four of them screaming, were in a sort of complicated tangle, two of them on their legs pulling each other’s hair and kicking at each other’s stomachs, and the two others upon the ground biting at the legs of the two that stood up and simultaneously smacking at each other’s faces.

“My God!” Mr Creedy groaned. “What is the country coming to?”

The footman suddenly whistled beneath his teeth and fell to the attitude of attention, rigid, like a Life Guard. The chauffeur, with a leisurely motion, crushed the copy of the paper together and thrust it under the rug between his knees. Only Sir Creedy, in his lamentable perturbation, could not attain to any more composure than left him with the air of a respectable churchwarden, caught by his vicar kissing the housemaid on an afternoon call.

The shrieks of the children became deafening. Then the Countess Croydon issued slowly from the arched doorway, and close behind her followed the Lady Mary Brabazon Courtlew. Lady Croydon surveyed the children at first with a little astonishment and then with a new intelligence. They were now locked together in an extraordinary struggling bundle.

“How interesting!” the Countess said.
“
How deeply interesting! My dear,” and she addressed the Lady Mary, “this must be that Japanese wrestling — eh — Ju-Jitsu. I missed seeing it when I was in Japan but it’s an excellent idea to teach it to children. These people are so very practical.”

The Lady Mary stood beside the Countess, her eyes vacant, her jaw hanging open, a figure of mournful imbecility.

The struggle of the children had now become so intense that they were reduced to a silence, interrupted only by grunts. The Duchess was pushing her goodnatured bulk through the arched door, only one side of which was open, and behind her came the clear, high voice of Mrs Lee:

“My dear Duchess,” it chanted. “How benevolent! How truly gracious of you! With you and the dear Countess as Patronesses the success of the testimonial is assured. And your subscription of ten guineas...”

“Oh, of course,” the Duchess turned back to say into the door with a good-humoured and business-like chuckle, “that’s only nominal. I don’t pay that. You quite understand?”

The remarkably practical Lady Croydon turned to say to the Duchess, “My dear Lily, just observe, they even train the donkey to he down while it’s waiting. So restful for the poor brute! Why can’t we be as considerate?”

CHAPTER II

MR PARMONT sat upon the terrace of the little inn that overhangs the top of the cog-wheel railway near the brow of the precipitous hill above Heidelberg. Mr Parmont was in a state of extreme nervous discomfort for everything in Germany disgusted him. He had been making a walking tour with two friends along the Rhine, but unable to put up any longer with the country, the policemen, the professors, the military, the uniforms of the students or even the marks of the milestones along the Rhine, Mr Parmont could stand no more of it and he had fled from Coblenz intending to stop for a day at Munich, in order to see the pictures in the Pinakothek and to go straight on from there to Italy, a country more in tune with his soul. But he had long before promised to spend in Heidelberg a couple of days in the society of Hamnet Gubb and Miss Stobhall and here he was doing it. He was, that is to say, waiting for Hamnet to come out from one of his afternoon classes up to the café where they were to drink tea and from which, afterwards, they were to visit the castle and the great Tun. The terrace was full of people, each of whom seemed to be separately disgusting to Mr Parmont who was, besides, troubled by the attention of a waiter whom he could not make to understand that he wanted to wait for tea till his friends came. Students wandered by, fat and pug-nosed, with coloured ribbons slung across their coats, little pill-box hats sideways over their ears, some of them with huge scars upon their cheeks and foreheads, some with Great Danes following them, the dogs slinking along, their noses close to their masters’ heels. Women, apparently of the peasant class with wrinkled faces and black alpaca clothes, were being treated to tea by sons who had become clerks in offices. Children ran up and down bowling hoops, and a monkey, chained to a flag-post, was devouring lighted cigarette ends which were being thrown to him by two young recruits in the white uniform of the Cuirassiers.

The waiter offered Mr Parmont the menu: he said: “Wine? No. Beer? No. Coffee? No. Ver good pale Ale.”

Mr Parmont shivered with disgust and tried to brush the waiter away with his long, thin hand. The waiter shrugged his shoulders and galloped off to a table at which there sat an under officer in a dark blue uniform with red braid, and his intended in sky-blue satin. For a moment there was a break in the heavy fog that had overhung the whole Rhine district ever since Mr Parmont had reached it. Beneath the great brown veil the plain stretched out, pallid and steel-grey. For a moment the factory chimneys of Mannheim discovered themselves at a great distance. Then the fog swept down again like heavy curtains trailing across the plains.

“Beastly people! Beastly country!” Mr Parmont muttered, his uneven shoulders shrugged right up to his ears.

The waiter approached him once more, holding out the menu and exclaiming: “Tea? No. Coffee? No. Ver good veal chop.”

Mr Parmont sprang to his feet. Seizing the hazel stick that he had cut from a hedge in Kent the year before last he exclaimed: “Damnation!” and rushed from the terrace, catching one of his legs in a child’s hoop and coming very nearly to the ground. The waiter stood gazing after him, his mouth open, his hands hanging despondently at his apron sides. But once outside the gates Mr Parmont perceived approaching him up the steep hill that came from the cog-wheel station, amongst a little desultory crowd of climbing people who appeared to Mr Parmont to be all very fat and all bow-legged, some of them carrying in their hands pocket-handkerchiefs with which to wipe their perspiring brows — Mr Parmont perceived Hamnet Gubb, Miss Stobhall and a young Russian student called Lboff, who was Hamnet Gubb’s most intimate friend in the University town. Miss Stobhall was as brown, as loud-voiced and as energetic as ever, but about Hamnet Gubb there was a certain air of dispiritude. His shoulders drooped, his face was slightly pallid, and the lines at the corners of his mouth were creased and turned downwards. The young Russian had a face like a jolly toad’s: his eyes twinkled, his brown hair was in crisp curls, and he whistled even in climbing the hill. Mr Parmont saluted them by touching the brim of his pork-pie hat with his hazel stick, and very much against Mr Parmont’s will, they turned once more into the little terrace where the disparity of their sizes excited more than usual attention and derision. Mr Parmont would have been six feet three in height had not his stoop diminished this by two inches. Hamnet Gubb was not much more than four feet seven, though the extreme fragility of his appearance gave him the air of being somewhat taller. The young Russian Count, on the other hand, was as round as a butter tub, and Miss Stobhall, with her short skirts, her cropped, iron-grey hair and her massive limbs, could look over the heads of both the younger men. Mr Parmont screwed his head right over his shoulder and veering his body round ejaculated, “Cads!” But eventually they found a table at the back of the restaurant near the empty cage of the cigarette-eating monkey. It smelt slightly. Mr Parmont was uncomfortable all the time that they stayed there. They began to talk all at once about the Peace Conference that was being held at the Hague, and Mr Parmont and the young Lboff found themselves unanimously stigmatising the whole thing as sheer humbug.

Hamnet Gubb was as unhappy as he could be. And he had been unhappy ever since he had started out from Mr Luscombe’s drawing-room at Luscombe Green. He felt like a caged bird, and at the same time like a naked man. He felt himself to be intolerably solitary, and at the same time there did not seem to be a corner in Europe into which he could creep and be alone with himself. Miss Stobhall had taken him to Sienna, to Venice, to Rome and finally to Florence where they had spent six months. Hamnet found that he hated pictures: museums and cathedrals had no attraction for him. And the dilettante mediævalist colony of foreigners who lived around the city of Dante seemed to him to be dismal, effete and affected scandal-mongers. From Florence they had gone to Constantinople where Hamnet had been taken very ill with enteric fever. From Constantinople they had gone to Sebastopol and from there to Moscow. Here their passports had been taken from them and they had been conducted to the German frontier. Miss Stobhall had chosen the large picture gallery of the Kremlin as a fitting place in which to remark in bad French and her high voice that the Russian system of elementary education was a disgrace to even such a semi-civilised country and that she intended, herself, to memorialise the Czar with regard to the treatment meted out to Mlle. Varnka, a teacher in the school for the daughters of the nobility. Mlle. Varnka had been imprisoned for no worse crime than impressing upon her pupils, little girls of eleven and twelve, the fact that the abolition of the Zemstvo was a reactionary step on the part of the authorities. They had been waited on that evening at their hotel by a polite police-officer who demanded their passports, and by eight o’clock next morning they were in charge of two other policemen upon the Moscow-Berlin Express. Miss Stobhall’s boxes and person being searched at the frontier there were found upon her sufficient papers of a compromising nature to send to prison no less than forty revolutionists of Moscow and Sebastopol. It was at this point that Miss Stobhall had persuaded Hamnet that he should turn his attention to the study of medicine, or if not of medicine at least to bacteriology. Her idea was, though she did not want to have any nonsense about it, that some such occupation as that of a public officer of health was the most dignified employment that could be found for a thinking man.

Hamnet Gubb had set out to see the world, and although he hated it he was determined to see it through. And it seemed to him that he could see the world just as well by studying minute forms of life at Heidelberg as in any other way. But his travels had not in the least changed him. Nay more, they hardened him. For in all the conventions of the world of whatever kind or wherever he came across them, he perceived nothing that did not appear to him to be imbecile, petty or disgusting. It seemed to him to be as childish to take your hat off when you went into a church as it was repulsive to give tips to a waiter, alms to a beggar, or to pretend conventionally to admire a dirty wall, obscured with splashes of paint, because the splashes of paint were said to have been thrown on it by Piero de la Francesca. It made his blood boil to see soldiers saluting an officer, it filled him with sorrow and disgust to see peasants on their knees before an ikon in the gloomy splendour of a gold-domed Russian church. And the life of a university, with its hundreds of men all devoting themselves to the brain-racking task of delving into minute and useless facts of Scholarship and of Science — all these people struggling against each other for contemptible degrees and for diplomas utterly negligible: this immense organisation, this tyranny of useless, of vain knowledge, seemed to him more terrifying and more tragically depressing than the material tyranny which, with its armed hand, bowed down the hosts of Russia itself. He was seeing it through because he considered it to be his duty to see it through. With a sick heart he toiled over microscopic slides as hard as he knew how to toil. It was going to turn him into a “doctor,” though the idea filled him with horror — simply because he wanted to be able to say that he did not despise these things only because they were unattainable to him. And he longed intensely and intolerably to be back in the green world from which he had set out. He imaged it to himself always as a green world, whereas the Continent, as he had seen it, seemed to be nothing but the arid gilding of hotels and the childish massing together of perishable blocks of marble, crumbling stones, the monuments of forgotten greed and the inanities of political materialism. He wanted perpetually and continuously to be back in the clear air and amongst clean thoughts. And his ascetic mind desired these things not so much because they were agreeable but because they were bare, cold, hard and vigorous. Ophelia had almost vanished out of his mind. It was true they had corresponded lavishly at first, but after a time Ophelia’s letters had disquieted him. They had seemed to become gradually worldly. She spoke even of earning money, of a career that she thought was opening out before her, and of the new developments that were taking place in the Colony. At first he had argued with her and she had argued with him, but gradually he had given up replying though her letters had gone on being as voluminous as ever. She had, indeed, a pen that threw out words as a volcano throws out lava. She wrote of Books, of Music, of Politics and latterly she had begun to talk about the Drama. Once or twice she employed slang phrases and once she sent him a snapshot of herself seated at the driving-wheel of a motor-car beside a fat gentleman, with a white waistcoat and a black moustache, and a hardly recognisable portrait of the great Bransdon himself, huddled up in furs in the seat behind her. Ophelia herself was wearing a large hat tied under her chin by a veil, a white dust-cloak and large gauntleted gloves. Her face had a fixed smile, her lips being drawn wide apart and displaying an even and full row of very white teeth. She appeared to Hamnet to be like one of those portraits of grimacing actresses which Miss Stobhall from time to time received from a nephew of hers who was at Sandhurst. And from that moment all interest in Ophelia died out in him. She wrote that Mr Bransdon was writing a play for a London theatre: that he was displaying enormous activity in its composition: that he had got the first two acts finished in a fortnight: that Mr Gubb being too busy, he had engaged a professional amanuensis: that as soon as the piece was finished it was going to be put into rehearsal: she described the ceremonial at the opening of one Communal building after another, and she described in a comic manner, which struck Hamnet as distinctly vulgar, how at the planting of the memorial oak which was put up to celebrate the completion of the Colony, Mrs Lee had fainted so that the can full of water which had been brought from Stratford-on-Avon to give the tree a start had to be poured over Mrs Lee to bring her to.

But on this immediate occasion, the fact that the young Russian spoke no English, Mr Parmont no German and Miss Stobhall no French, made any general conversation exceedingly embarrassing. They started out on various topic, shut there was always someone left in the cold, and Mr Parmont’s French being of the barbaric sort, uttered with a considerable stutter and an exceedingly broad English accent, and as he was determined to talk to the young Russian who exercised a sort of fascination for him because he was at once romantic, revolutionary and titled, it was Miss Stobhall and Hamnet Gubb who were mostly left out in the cold. Hamnet’s share in the conversation limited itself to correcting Mr Parmont’s French phrases when they were absolutely incomprehensible to the young Mr Lboff. They began by discussing Russian literature, Mr Parmont keeping up his share of the discussion by embroideries upon the theme that Germans were hogs, the English selfish commercialists, and the French too material ever to produce any satisfactory literature. It was only Russians who could write because they hadn’t any conventions, they went straight to life, they went straight to nature. The young Russian, however, belonged to the school of revolutionaries which entirely ignores all the Arts. He listened to Mr Parmont with a polite indifference. He did not in the least care whether Tourgeniev were more artistic than Dostoievsky or that Dostoievsky had travelled deeper into the bye-ways of the soul
— avait traversé plus profondément les petits chemins de l’âme.
He agreed that Gorky expressed more exactly the cry of the wounded beast than did Count Tolstoi. He permitted himself, however, to observe that Herbert Spencer was more valuable to humanity in the cause of progress.

And then he agreed once more that Korolenko has written some charming stories, but that Tchehov immensely surpassed him in gloom and power. He did not, however, know anything at all about the Scandinavian writers to whom Mr Parmont next turned his attention, and then he drew a trail across the discussion by saying that all these books, books, books, were a weariness and that the future of humanity was to be found in the forges and the laboratories of the world. From them would come the salvation and ease of the groaning multitudes.