Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (375 page)

“Cordelia! Cordelia!” Mr Gubb uttered in soothing tones.

“A liar!” Miss Egmont repeated. “You say at one moment that Mr Bransdon wanted a doctor sent for and at the next that he has been insensible ever since last night. One of these statements must be an untruth.” She added bitterly, “Probably they both are.”

“If our dear friend should die,” Mr Gubb avoided the subject, “we have to consider public opinion.”

“
We
have to consider public opinion!” Miss Egmont spat out. “Who’s we? You and I? A fine way you’ve taken to consider it.”

“Oh, all of us,” Mr Gubb answered her question. “You, I, — the Colony, everybody. We can’t afford to be discredited in popular opinion now.”

“Pah!” Miss Egmont ejaculated. “Reformers who are afraid of public opinion! What sort of people are they?”

“We can’t afford it,” Mr Gubb said. “Remember what happened when poor Florence died.”

At the mention of the name of Sir Gubb’s late wife Miss Egmont suddenly rose to her feet. She managed to exclaim, “Coward!” and then swallowed painfully in her throat for several seconds. Then she began to speak with a high coldness.

“You don’t imagine, Horatio Gubb,” she said, “that I have forgotten your treatment of me! On the contrary: I have been thinking of it over and over again.”

Mr Gubb said, “Oh, my dear Cordelia, that’s all over and done with.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t,” Miss Egmont answered. “And I shall be glad if you will appoint a time for an interview.”

“Oh, my dear Cordelia!” Mr Gubb tried to carry the matter off brusquely. “You know how busy I am. I can’t afford to waste time on empty discussions.”

“I will await your convenience,” Miss Egmont said. “But I warn you that if you do not see me within three days....”

“I haven’t got a moment to spare,” Mr Gubb answered, “until after the Presentation.”

“
The Presentation?” Miss Egmont asked sharply. “What’s that?”

“A little testimonial is to be presented to me,” Mr Gubb answered with a touch of bashfulness, “on Saturday night.”

“A testimonial!” Miss Egmont exclaimed in tones of the coldest contempt and incredulity. “To you! What for? What have you done? And what has the Simple Life to do with testimonials? It’s contrary to every principle. How has this been done without my hearing of it?
I
should have nipped it in the bud, I can tell you.”

“I didn’t know anything about it myself till ten minutes ago,” Mr Gubb said. “It’s been an extraordinary surprise. Of course, I couldn’t refuse. It’s been got up entirely by outsiders.”

“And you,” Miss Egmont said, “you with the secret shame of your betrayal of me will dare to get up upon a pubic platform in the full light of day...”

“But, Cordelia,” Mr Gubb said, “consider the immense publicity it will give to the Colony. All the London papers will mention it.”

“Ah, the Colony’s going to have publicity enough,” Miss Egmont said. “
I’m
determined to give you that. I’m determined, and nothing whatever in the world will change my intentions, either to write and publish a pamphlet containing an exact account of your treatment of me, together with the whole story of Ophelia, or else I shall bring a breach of promise action against you and let all the details against you be known in that way.”

“Oh, that’s sheer folly,” Mr Gubb exclaimed from rather pale lips.

“You should have thought of that,” Miss Egmont said direfully, “before you deceived a tender, loving and trusting woman, and one who was ready to make a good wife to you.”

“But the whole principle of the Simple Life,” Mr Gubb expostulated, “is against—”

“Then,” Miss Egmont exclaimed and she sat down again, “it can’t hurt the Simple Life if it’s true principles are made known to the public.” She continued in a tone of utter inflexibility, “I’ll give you till Sunday morning to think about it. I’ve nothing more to say. Don’t speak another word. I’m going to study Mr Bransdon’s case and I shall proceed to cure him.” And once more she hooked her heels on to the hand-rail, set her arms upon her knees and intensely scrutinised Mr Bransdon’s face.

Mr Gubb ejaculated once more, “But,
Cordelia!
—”

Miss Egmont only exclaimed, “Hold your tongue if you don’t want to murder your friend as you did your wife.” Her eyes continued to bore into Mr Bransdon’s countenance. Mr Gubb wavered. Expressions of appeal and of despair followed each other across his face. He put out his hand towards the door latch and drew it back, and, finally with a panic-stricken irresoluteness, he wavered from the room.

Alone with Mr Bransdon, Miss Egmont continued to sit entirely motionless. Her eyes were without expression, but about the corners of her lips there were the traces of an acid smile. There was not a sound, and the room seemed to be dominated by the tenseness of her gaze.

“For God’s sake stop that idiotic staring!” Mr Bransdon exclaimed suddenly.

Miss Egmont sprang back so sharply that the back of the chair creaked with vociferous loudness.

“Drop all this nonsense,” Mr Bransdon said. “There’s nothing the matter with me. I’m only sick to the soul with shame. I’m perfectly sensible. I only want to get out of this imbecility as quick as I can.”

Miss Egmont rose from her seat.

“In that case,” she said, “High Potential P. 32 is what is indicated.” And she crossed the room to peer amongst the little collection of phials that resembled the miniature pipes of a tiny organ. Mr Bransdon clutched furiously at the pamphlet lying upon his bed.

“
Look at this,” he said. “This is the sort of infernal childish jargon I’ve been trepanned into writing. Leave your bolusses alone. I won’t take them. I don’t need them; they won’t cure me of having written this stuff.”

He read a passage: “
Healthy, unconfined, bounding
,
the human form shall swing along to the glorious -places of a perfected future. Straight, stark and with swelling limbs they shall gaze into each other’s eyes and be unashamed.”
He shot a piercing glance at Miss Egmont.

“What’s it all mean?” he said. “What is all this rot?”

He passed his hand passionately up his forehead.

“Is it possible a man can have written such stuff and forgotten all about it? Look here, look at it, look at the illustrations.”

Approaching him gingerly Miss Egmont took the pamphlet.

“I don’t see what’s the matter with the illustrations,” she said. “They’re by me, aren’t they?”

“Oh, I daresay yours are all right,” Mr Bransdon said—” though I never could understand why you should find it necessary to make your ideal women so little like yourself, or, for the matter of that, why you should find it so unnecessary to make yourself more like your ideal woman. But it’s the surgical drawings, look at
them!
”

The surgical drawings were rough cuts that appeared to have been borrowed from the advertisements of some patent medicine or other. They represented portions of the human body in distortion or dissection, showing all the organs of the human frame displaced — by the wearing of corsets.

“Just think,” Mr Bransdon continued, “of my signature going out into the world along with those disgusting things! And there are thousands and thousands of copies circulated! And Heaven knows how many million words of this disgusting sickly prose I haven’t written! Look here!” he continued suddenly. “You’re by way of being an artist yourself. Don’t
you
feel disgusted when you think of the things you’ve done for this imbecile movement?”

Miss Egmont reflected hardly and drily for a moment.

“I shall know better what I think about,” she said, “when I know what I’m going to get out of it!”

“Well, I’m not going to get anything out of it at all any way except the everlasting shame of having poured all this flapdoodle out. Heaven knows what harm I mayn’t have done by the corruption of youth! Just fancy me, me, Simon Bransdon, who’ve shot railways across continents and cleared up a tidy portion of the earth,
me,
do you understand, preaching slackness! For that’s what it means, slackness of body, slackness in clothing, slackness in thought, slackness everywhere.”

Miss Egmont said, “You can’t say that I’ve been made slack.”

“Oh,
you,”
Mr Bransdon said. “You’ve worn stays all the time, haven’t you? You weren’t here because you were after the Simple Life, but because you were after something else.”

Miss Egmont’s rather horny skin reddened slightly.

‘The doctrine always seems to me,” she said, “to have its fine points.”

“Oh, yes, the doctrine,” Mr Bransdon answered, “but you never lived the life. You’ve worn black satin and had purple bows in your bonnets. Even down here you’ve bad them; it wasn’t only in London, but — but—”

A sudden fit of rage overwhelmed him once more.

“My God!” he said. “Do you know what all this will amount to? Do you know what they’ll say when they write about me after I’m dead? These blasted beasts, the critics! — they’ll call it my second phase. Do you understand? My second phase!”

His teeth showed enormous in a horrid grin at Miss Egmont.

“Do you suppose I don’t care about my reputation and the name I shall leave behind me? Look at all this horrible rubbish — do you understand I can’t get rid of it? Never, not by any means. They’ll rake it up against me, they’ll go on raking it up against me for ever and ever.”

Miss Egmont looked at him with a cool curiosity. “I don’t know where I stand,” she said, “for I don’t know how I shall be treated. But you know, you’re most extraordinarily different from what you used to be.”

“Ah!” Mr Bransdon said almost hopelessly, “but I feel pretty exactly as I used to do before.” He returned her gaze with a sort of tragic intensity. “There you are! Last night when I knocked that one man out and had the other by the throat all of a sudden I felt that that was what I ought to have been at all the time.”

“What?” Miss Egmont asked with a slightly scandalised tone.

“Oh, I don’t mean to say,” Mr Bransdon continued, “that I ought to have been knocking people about all my life, but that sort of thing is better than this sort of thing. I’ve slipped downhill. I’ve got slacker and slacker. It comes of indulging in toadies and having spaniels to do your fetching and carrying for you. I was a man once. I am a man now. But my God, think of the loathsome sick monkey I’ve been! Now I’m going to draw up my stakes, I can tell you.”

“Well, it’s a revelation to me,” Miss Egmont said. “I always thought you and Horatio were such bosom friends.”

“Oh, Lord!” Mr Bransdon said. “I’m not saying anything
against
Gubb. A flea’s a good flea if it’s an efficient parasite. I’ve nothing really against him, and I suppose according to his lights I ought to be grateful to him, but, by God, anyone else would have let a poor lunatic hide his folly in a lunatic asylum! I was a sick man! But that chap has dragged me like a beastly image of a heathen god, nodding and blinking, half across the world. Don’t talk about it: I don’t want to talk about it any more. And I don’t want to talk to him any more. I suppose I shall have to see him once at least before I pull up my stakes, so as to face the matter out, but by God I am a passionate man! He’ll stand in some sort of danger of his throat while I’m talking to him.”

“Do you mean,” Miss Egmont asked, “that you’ll physically assault him? I wouldn’t hold myself in too much, if I were you. A horsewhipping would be a good thing for him. At least” — and she reflected for a minute—” I’ll let you know what I want done by midday on Sunday.”

Bransdon grinned largely at her.

“Of course,” he said. “You know I heard your conversation just now. You want me to act as your knight-errant?”