Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (371 page)

Mr Parmont was immediately ready to agree that an admiration for literature was purely conventional, and he added that for a generation he had been preaching to young writers that they should study Life — that they should precisely render the lives of the workers in forges, in laboratories, in the Colonies and the jungles, in all the countries and in all conditions where Life was really lived. The young Russian, who did not in the least understand what Mr Parmont said and who was beginning to regard himself as talking to an elderly person with grotesquely old-fashioned ideas — the young Russian said, “Precisely! Precisely!”

Determined, in his conscientious manner, to get sidelights upon all the information he had with regard to anything Russian, Mr Parmont began next to run over the names of all these Revolutionaries whom he had come across in London — gentlemen of mysterious disappearances and reappearances, who resided mostly between Bedford Park and Shepherd’s Bush. Mr Parmont had known a great many of them, and in that there was nothing surprising, for it had been absolutely impossible during the twenty years or so in which Mr Parmont had been connected with advanced movements and unconventional ideas — it had been absolutely impossible to avoid being roped in at some time or other as a friend of Russian Freedom. And, indeed, Russia had played during all Mr Parmont’s life since he had left school the part of a tremendous ground bass, rising occasionally to an uproar that drowned the noise of all the other advanced movements in Europe. Thus Mr Parmont had subscribed to keep one illustrious exile out of the workhouse; had signed memorials to the Czar at the instance of another refugee to keep yet a third illustrious revolutionary leader from the gallows. He had lectured on Russian literature at a sort of benefit performance in aid of the widow of Sergius Grobovitch, and he had provided an asylum for Vassili Kunin after the Russian Secret Police in London had made three determined attempts to sandbag him in the Brook Green Road. Thus he might, he thought, claim to know the Revolution
au fond.

The young Russian listened with polite deference to Parmont’s recital of names, but he hardly recognised more than one or two, and even with those whose names he knew he was not personally acquainted. He said that he himself came from Moscow whereas most of Mr Parmont’s friends were from Petersburg; As a matter of fact, most of poor Mr Parmont’s friends, though they might have been good revolutionary leaders and thrown good bombs in their day, were by that time quite out of date and forgotten. For in revolutions, even more than in the other things of this world, one must be the man of the moment or how very quickly one becomes merely the shadow of a name! And then Mr Parmont asked, “Do you know the name of Brandetski?” in his barbarous and halting French.

The young Russian pushed his hat back from off his forehead, thumped his fist on the tea-table, and burst into a loud laugh.

“Brandetski!” he exclaimed. “Si je connais ce nom là!” He added that there were a good many of them that would give a good deal to get their hands on that fellow.

“Why?” Mr Parmont asked. “Why should anyone be irritated with Simon Bransdon? He hadn’t been anywhere near Russia since he was of the age of three.”

Then it wasn’t the same man, Count Lboff said. The Brandetski he meant had been one of the most dangerous of the Agents Provocateurs that the Czar’s government had ever employed.

Mr Parmont replied that Mr Simon Bransdon, whose real name was Simeon Brandetski, was the apostle of the Simple Life.

If he plays such tricks with the Simple Life, Count Lboff said, as the other Brandetski had played with the revolution, there would very soon be some plentiful complications. The Brandetski that he was talking about was a most extraordinary scoundrel — a scoundrel of the most complicated order. There was not really any crime that he had not committed, from political murder to robbing a church. Both these crimes were, of course, praiseworthy, regarded from a revolutionary standpoint, but it was significant that the authorities had let Brandetski escape. He had been regarded as one of the most useful men amongst the conspirators of southern Russia. He had planned the assassination of General Count Popovitch — an assassination which failed, and after which three hundred and twenty arrests of revolutionaries had been made. He had planned, also, the riot of the 15th of January in Odessa Market when so many hundreds of poor people were shot by the military. After that, too, innumerable domiciliary visits had followed and innumerable arrests and wholesale executions. Brandetski had, in fact, been “in” every council of the revolutionaries for the last five years. He had appeared to be, so Count Lboff heard, a lively, light-hearted fellow, and one of a most astonishing daring. This last was not so astonishing, Lboff said, when you considered that he was hand in glove with the police. Not a single enterprise that the revolutionaries had, in short, succeeded, with the exception of the murder of Count Schulzen, whom Brandetski had shot with his own hand, escaping in a way that could only be considered miraculous, from under the noses of half a dozen gendarmes. This was not so much to be wondered at, Count Lboff said, when they came to consider that Schulzen, who was Public Prosecutor of the Court of Odessa, was personally obnoxious to the league of Russian men, the bad reactionaries who had the Czar for their President. The Government wanted Schulzen out of the way, because, though he was vigorous enough in all conscience from the Revolutionary point of view, the Civil Authorities desired to see him replaced by someone more vigorous still. They had permitted Brandetski, therefore, to murder this official in order that he might the more efficiently gain the confidence of the revolutionaries. This they had only discovered later, but it must be admitted to be a stroke of genius on the part of the Chief of Police in Odessa, or on the part of Brandetski himself, to whichever of them was due the credit of the ingenious invention. Brandetski had married for her money the widow of a prominent Jewish usurer and he had very soon dissipated all that he could lay hands on. At about the same time rumours of his untrustworthiness had begun to spread amongst the revolutionaries, and perhaps with the connivance of the police, perhaps without, Brandetski had robbed the Church of St Vasali. He had carried off the Communion Plate and several silver ikons together with enough gold lace to fill half a dozen portmanteaux. It was generally understood that this was to he considered as a slight warning from the police to the archbishop of the diocese, who was considered to have shown signs of elementary Liberalism. From that time Brandetski had completely disappeared. He was said to have been seen in London, but for his part Count Lboff did not believe this. He believed that Brandetski was one of the personal bodyguard of the Czar.

Hamnet Gubb mentioned that Ophelia had told him in a letter that someone called Brandetski, a cousin of her father’s, was stopping at Luscombe Green. Mr Parmont, who had not been near the Colony for some months because he did not approve of its flourishing condition, said that of course it was impossible that any connection of Mr Bransdon’s could be a traitor, and Lboff agreed that Brandetski was a name as common in Russia as Smith in England.

The conversation had not particularly pleased Mr Parmont, and, since she could not understand a word of it, Miss Stobhall was not at all sorry to break up the meal. They went off, therefore, across the terrace and down the hill towards the Castle. Hamnet Gubb and Lboff walking ahead and deep in a heated argument in German, as to the significance of a sentence in “Also sprach Zarathustra.” Mr Parmont and Miss Stobhall walked more sedately after them.

“I’m not at all,” Miss Stobhall said when they were well on the downward path through the high woods, “I’m not at all satisfied with poor Hamnet’s condition.”

“He doesn’t look well,” Mr Parmont said. “He’s got such blue marks under his eyes.”

“Oh, it isn’t physical condition, I mean,” Miss Stobhall said. “He can’t expect to be in perfect health when he’s leading a sedentary student’s life, and it’s necessary that he should study something if he’s to earn any sort of a living.”

“But I thought,” Mr Parmont said, “that the poor fellow was overworking himself.”

“Oh, I’m not saying that he doesn’t work hard,” Miss Stobhall said. “I’m not even saying that he won’t take his doctor quite brilliantly. But that isn’t the point at all. The point is, that the spirit in which he does it is all wrong.”

“But you couldn’t,” Mr Parmont exclaimed, “say that he’s wanting in Idealism! For myself, I’ve never met—”

“Oh, you quite misunderstand me,” Miss Stobhall interrupted him. “Quite! Quite! It isn’t the amount of his Idealism, it’s the quality.”

“But there can’t be any question about Idealism,” Mr Parmont said. “Either you are it or you aren’t it. Either you’re conventional and commercial or you aren’t. Either you’re materialists like these disgusting, fat Germans,” — and Mr Parmont waved his thin hand round the courtyard of the Castle, taking in the reddish sandstone walls, the blind galleries and the defaced carvings in one sweep of contempt and disgust—” Now here,” he said, “is an example of the whole nation. This is Germany, heavy, solid, brutal. Where there’s an attempt at Art it’s an imitation of the French. And there are placards stuck about all over the place prohibiting people from doing disgusting things which only disgusting people would want to do.” And shudders of dislike went all over Mr Parmont’s being.

“You don’t mean to say,” Miss Stobhall said, “that one kind of Idealism is as good as another?”

“As long as a man isn’t conventional,” Mr Parmont answered, “I don’t care what it is.”

“But he might be a Tory Idealist!” Miss Stobhall said.

And Mr Parmont answered, “Oh, now, that’s sheer bad faith. Besides, a man can’t be a Reactionary and an Idealist.”

“But that,” Miss Stobhall answered, “is exactly what I’m afraid Hamnet is.”

They came out under an archway upon the great balcony that looks steeply down on to the town, the river, and across to the sheer hills facing them.

Mr Parmont cast a look of dislike upon the whole scene.

“Now this is feudalism,” he said. “Here you have it, the over-lord looking down upon the roofs of serfs below his immense castle. And the Prussians are still in the same state.”

“But we aren’t, you know, in Prussia,” Miss Stobhall said.

“In exactly the same state,” Mr Parmont ignored her objection. “You have the brutal, fat swagger of the official classes, you have the commercial utilitarian greed of the proletariat, there’s the jingle of money all round you. The whole country thinks in terms of factories and by-products.” He extended a long arm that seemed to point down the river, round the corner and beyond the ends of the Rhine to the Dutch frontier. “And you mean to tell me,” he said, “that Hamnet Gubb is this sort of creature.”

Miss Stobhall looked at the landscape with tranquil complacency. In Germany she was quite at home. She liked the language. She liked the people and their spirit, the hard and practical scientific way they went about things. She liked the landscape enormously and she liked very much to be upon historic ground. It pleased her immensely, for instance, to think that the holes in the walls had been made by Napoleon’s cannon.

“If Hamnet had some of the practical German spirit,” she said, “if he had some of their sound common-sense, I — should feel much happier. You don’t understand how near this country is to an immense step forward. They’re the models of the world already in scientific town-planning. The most Socialistic state you could imagine couldn’t have forked it out better.”

“And couldn’t have made more hideous towns,” Mr Parmont sneered at her.

“There you are,” Miss Stobhall said with fierce conviction. “That’s your muddled-headedness. You mix up an economic problem with the question of aesthetics. What they had to solve was the question of the ground. Ground rents. Unearned increment and improvement values. They weren’t, for the moment, considering what was to be put upon them.”

“Then they ought to have been,” Mr Parmont said with some heat.

And aware that he was working himself up into a passion of race hatred he suddenly changed the topic to: “But what’s this to do with Hamnet?”

“It’s this,” Miss Stobhall answered. “When I said that my dear boy was a Reactionary I didn’t mean that he was a Militarist or a Tariff Reformer or that he beat the Imperial drum. There are just as many ways of being a Reactionary as there are of being an Idealist.”

Mr Parmont was still so angry that he spluttered slightly as if he were foaming at the mouth.

“There’s only one ideal, that’s to hate conventions and love beauty: to hate commercialism and live a frugal life: to be sceptical of all pretensions and to seek to harm nobody. And that’s Hamnet Gubb as I understand him.”