Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (373 page)

Mr Brandetski said:

“Little pigeon! Lovely little pigeon!” He raised his eyes to Ophelia’s face to see if that word would not achieve the magic spell of arousing love in her bosom. With an absolute lack of expression Ophelia sewed on. The candlelight shone upon the coils of her hair. The red of her cheeks appeared to Mr Brandetski to be of the colour of strawberries, the white of her forehead and neck like new milk. With the same joyous gleam in his eyes, the same air of one seeking a secret spring to touch, Brandetski exclaimed:

“Little artichoke! Lovely little artichoke!”

It bewildered him, it was incredible to him that he could be alone with this divine creature and yet awaken no spark of passion in her. He could not believe in it. He did not really believe that he could be there. In his day he had been a waiter in an Odessa restaurant and he could not, for the life of him, think that these people were not up to some sort of a game. He could not in the least get to the secret of it. He could not even begin any sort of speculation at all. What was it that they wanted? Was it money? He had offered Ophelia jewels, gold, all the products of a boundless, material imagination, he had offered to have her presented at the Czar’s Court. Ophelia had not taken the least notice of him. No one, indeed, seemed to take the least notice of him except to be kind to him. They fed him, they clothed him: some of them even seemed to admire him and Mrs Lee pestered him to the verge of patience with all sorts of attentions to his personal comfort. That afternoon she had brought him a bunch of roses as big as a sheaf of com. He could not make out what they did it for. There seemed to be no money in it, and, for the matter of that, though he had spied with all the skill of a practised revolutionary, he could not discover that they had any immoral objects. There was not in the world any object worth considering save money and immorality. Then what in the world did these people exist for? They must he mad. It was the English spleen that the Continent always talked of. And at the same time Brandetski was on fire to the very tips of his fingers with a violent passion for Ophelia. She let him go about with her, she let him bemoan himself to her to his heart’s content, but he was physically afraid — afraid of her strength, which seemed to him colossal — to go any further than that. This brought on him fits of violent nervous rage, during which he would indifferently call Mrs Lee an old hag or throw himself flat on the Common, biting at the grass round him like a mad wolf. He was possessed of a desire for slaughter, and once, finding a young plover that had strayed from its nest, he bit and tore it into a hundred fragments beneath the wailing circles of its parents in the sky.

He struck three notes on the balalaika. He was about to try yet another term of exotic endearment when there came several voices from outside. The latch of the garden gate clicked, and there was upon the brick path the shuffle of many heavy feet. The door was fumbled at, then it was thrown back and the doorway appeared to be filled with faces.

Ophelia looked tranquilly up from her sewing. A voice from rather far back in the dusk exclaimed:

“We don’t want to hurt ‘ee, but where be old Bransdon?”

Another voice said: “We be a-going to duck he in the pond shed like.”

Brandetski sprang to his feet. Ophelia continued to sit motionless.

“What? What?” Brandetski said.

“We don’t want to hurt no Rooshans,” a high voice said. “We ‘aint nothing against Brandy.”

“Nor yet Whisky,” another said, Ophelia’s eyes were upon the mist of faces in the doorway. “Get out of here,” she said. “Shut that door.”

She appeared to he engrossed, fumbling in the white and rather untidy contents of what appeared to be a strawberry basket in which she kept her sewing.

The men nearest the doorway were in their holiday broadcloth and hung round the doorposts as if they were afraid to cross the threshold. Those that Ophelia could see had thin, wizened faces, narrow eyes, and the expression of weasels blinking in the candlelight.

“You’re the lowest type of degenerate Anglo-Saxons,” Ophelia said;
“
you’ve degenerated because of breeding-in for centuries!”

There was a shuffled stir amongst the men nearest the door and there pushed between them into the room a man in the dove-coloured corduroys of a labourer, a man of very great height, slouching over to one side, with a ragged, curled beard. He lurched over towards Brandetski, extending one enormous discoloured hand.

“You give us Bransdon,” he said. “You bring him out or you’ll see what we’ll do to you!”

Brandetski had been standing rigidly still, his face pallid, his hands trembling. And suddenly he threw away his chair which fell with a crash against the dresser and he fled towards the scullery door screaming for help in Russian. The man in corduroys spat and swore. He leant still further over to one side and extended the same hand towards Ophelia.

“You give us Bransdon,” he said, “or you’ll see what us’ll do to you!”

Ophelia looked him full in the eyes, her bands still searching among her cottons.

“You dirty dog!” she said. “Go home and get washed!”

One of the boys slouched in and touched the man on the arm. “I say, Hurlock!” he exclaimed.

Ophelia drew a little embroidery stiletto from her work-basket. She rose to her height and stood beside the table.

“You tell your Hurlock,” she said clearly, “that he’s going to have one of his eyes stabbed out with this.” And she grasped the small, white handle in her fist so that, almost invisible, it resembled a dagger. And suddenly from the stairs behind them there came a sound as if coals had been overturned from the top step.

Of late days Mr Bransdon had had his hair cut quite short so that most of the greyness had disappeared. His beard, moreover, had been clipped close to his cheeks and, bulking very large in his trousers and white shirt, he had, at his sudden appearance, the air of an enlarged but very sinister Mephistopheles. He looked beneath his enormous eyebrows towards the doorway. His shoulders heaved and jerked convulsively. And suddenly he began to move forward, the point of his beard poked out, with a singular, stealthy approach like that of a cat, his hands clasping and unclasping.

“What’s this?” he barked suddenly. “What the hell’s this?” And then once more in silence he advanced stealthily. Upon the face of the boy was a fascinated fear: on that of the man an imbecile bewilderment. “What’s this?” Bransdon said again sharply and definitely. “You want something of me? Take that as a sample!”

Both the men moved their bodies back a little, and whilst they were in motion there came two distinct grunts, deep and laborious, from Mr Bransdon’s bulk. His right fist went out and caught the boy just beneath the nose, his left with the fifth of a second struck upon the very point of the man’s chin. The man crashed hack upon the dresser, his head knocking down a whole row of pewter plates. The boy covered the lower part of his face with his hand and ran screaming out of the cottage. With a spring Bransdon was over the man, who cowered hack on the dresser. His teeth seemed to be within an inch of Hurlock’s nose, his shoulders worked up and down, his eyes were full of an incredible malignancy.

“You,” — he began, and he followed it up with a string of such incredible obscenities that the man began to whimper feebly and called for help. Suddenly Bransdon caught him by the inside of his collar. He jerked him towards himself so that Hurlock’s long arms flew up helplessly towards the ceiling. The man’s face was perfectly pallid and his eyes shut. Then with another deep grunt Bransdon hurled him with both his hands so that he fell nerveless and with a great crash against the open door. He ricocheted outside and fell in a heap, only his legs remaining inside the threshold.

Footsteps ran shuffling down the pathway outside and away into the invisible road.

“He’s dead!” a boy’s voice screamed.

Mr Bransdon stalked to the doorway.

“Yes, he’s dead!” he exclaimed. “ As dead as you’ll be, by God! if you don’t kneel down and ask my pardon to-morrow morning.” Then contemptuously he kicked Hurlock’s legs over the door-sill and slammed the door to.

But the noise of the slamming door was broken in upon by the loud clatter of the doors in the rear of the cottage opening and slamming. And immediately Cyril Brandetski was upon them. In one hand he held a revolver, in the other an unsheathed hunting-knife, and in his belt was a long and formidable sheathed dagger.

“Come,” he panted, “I have fetched my arms. One for each. Not without a struggle we die!” He cast the hunting-knife on to the table, exclaiming to Ophelia, “For you,” and the sheathed dagger he proffered to Mr Bransdon. Bransdon stood before the table breathing heavily with his exertions.

“You did not think I had desert you?” Brandetski said anxiously. “You did not think I had desert you?”

Ophelia took no notice of him because she was watching Bransdon’s face. Suddenly she thrust her arms out. Her adopted father had wavered on his feet, but she caught him and inclined his fall so that he dropped into his large armchair.

“Ho! he is wounded!” Brandetski exclaimed. “Search the place. Bandage it. I guard the door.” And crossing the room in a state of wild excitement Brandetski levelled the muzzle of his pistol about the height of the latch. Bransdon sat motionless in the chair, his hands hanging inert, his head leaning back, his eyes closed. Ophelia, standing beside him motionless, watchful, tranquil, thought that he appeared all at once wonderfully attractive. He reminded her of reproductions of portraits by Vandyke or of Henry the Fourth of France. And as for the first time she had felt that night her pulses quicken with alarm, so that night, at that moment, she felt the first touch of concern for another human being, of admiration and of affection. It did not find any more efficient expression than in her asking what she could get for him. From the door Brandetski kept up a constant babble of badly translated phrases in a voice growing constantly higher and higher. He swore that he would kill all their foes with the revolver that had slain a hundred police. He offered to rush out into the road and meet them in the open, and perpetually he implored Ophelia to believe that he had not deserted them when he had run to fetch the arms. Ophelia took not the slightest notice of him: she could not understand, indeed, more than one half of his phrases.

Bransdon opened his eyes and then smiled.

“Rottenly out of condition!” he ejaculated. “Just to think of it! Oh, give me a whisky and soda. Stiff!” Ophelia crossed to the dresser and suddenly Brandetski sprang towards her. He threw himself upon his knees, dropped the revolver on the ground and clutched her gown with both hands. His sallow face worked with violent emotions.

“Say you do not believe I desert you!” he exclaimed. “Swear you do not! Swear by God you do not!” Ophelia was trying to squirt soda water into a glass and, since his pawings impeded her, she exclaimed with good-humoured impatience:

“Oh, get away. I don’t know and I don’t care whether you did or you didn’t.”

Brandetski sprang with one bend of his knees to his feet, going so high that the top of his cap almost brushed the low ceiling.

“What do you say?” he screamed, and he caught up the revolver from the floor.

Ophelia passed tranquilly across to her adopted father’s chair, holding the drink in a steady hand.

“I kill myself!” the Russian screamed. “I shoot myself, here, now, if you do not swear!”

Bransdon took a stiff drink from the glass.

“What’s all this rot?” he exclaimed deeply.

“Ophelia,” Brandetski exclaimed, “thinks I run away. Ophelia thinks I desert. I shoot myself dead, I tell you.”

“Oh, drop your silly squirt,” Bransdon said. “You make me tired.”

Suddenly, with a demoniacal distension of his eyelids, Brandetski levelled his revolver full at Bransdon’s forehead.

“I shoot you!” he screamed. “I shoot her! I love Ophelia. I am mad. Like a mad dog, I tell you. Mad! Mad!

Bransdon suddenly leant forward in his chair. His chin heard stuck out, his hair bristled with rage.

“Drop it, you fool,” he shouted from deep in his chest. “Dog! Ass! Pig! Love Ophelia, do you? Then out you go. Do you think my daughter is for scum like you? Go and steal bread from the bakers’ shops in Odessa. I’ll break your back across my knee if I find you in this place to-morrow.”