Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (378 page)

And extending the letter which he had that morning received, Mr Gubb proceeded to read aloud the proposals of the directors of the East Croydon Garden City Ltd.

Having finished the perusal he paused to recover his breath and to survey the faces of Mr and Mrs Luscombe. Gerald only said, “A very handsome proposal. I congratulate you. I suppose you’ll accept it?” Mrs Luscombe was looking at her husband.

“Accept it!” Mr Gubb exclaimed with a note of enthusiasm. “Do you think I shall desert you at this critical moment? Do you think that I am the sort of man who, having set his hand to the plough, looks back? No, no. My duty is here and to you. Have no fear of that.”

“Well, I should take a day or two to think of it,” Mr Luscombe said. “Don’t reject the offer precipitately.”

“Now that,” Mr Gubb addressed Mrs Luscombe, “is so exactly like your kind and considerate husband! I may say that it would have been impossible, that it would have been improbable in the highest degree that I could ever have found anyone with whom I could have worked more cordially or whose co-operation could have been more freely given or more delightful to receive. Mr Luscombe, madam, is a man of men. Mr Luscombe has a heart of gold.”

Mrs Luscombe, shuddered slightly and looked at her husband, arching her eyebrows. She could not understand. She could not begin to understand how Gerald could sit in the same room with this little man who positively set her teeth on edge.

Luscombe, however, was only showing two of his white teeth beneath his heavy moustache in a quite comical and good-humoured smile.

“Oh, come, come!” he said.

“But it’s true. It’s all true. It’s absolutely true,” Mr Gubb asseverated to Mrs Luscombe. “When the history of this movement comes to be written — and we are this day lighting in England such a torch as by God’s grace shall never be put out — the name of Luscombe shall be written in gold upon the scroll of glory. For though to life a soul is necessary, yet also is life impossible without a body. This body has been supplied by my friend, Luscombe, for I am sure that by now I may call him my friend. Without the place upon which it could arise there never could have arisen this beautiful, spiritual body whose silver limbs, when all the world sleeps, gleam white in the light of the stars. Our motto is: ‘Onward now, onward ever,’ and splendid against the wind from the dawn-star we shall march.”

At this point the inspiration from Mr Bransdon died down on the lips of Mr Gubb, and after a moment or two of stuttering he said:

“It only remains to settle the preliminary details.” Luscombe was about to speak when Mr Gubb continued:

“I have drawn up a trust-deed. Perhaps you will find it convenient to come down to my office and to discuss some of the minor matters? It would be so pleasant to be able to announce the extension of the Colony at the meeting on Saturday.”

“I’ve got, you know,” Gerald said, “£162 at your disposal.”

“Oh,” Mr Gubb answered cheerfully, “the conveyancing won’t cost anything like as much as that. I’m fully qualified to act as solicitor and I shall do it all as cheaply as possible.”

“I mean,” Gerald said, and he looked Mr Gubb directly in the eyes, “that beyond that sum I sha’n’t have a halfpenny at your disposal.”

“Oh, come, come,” Mr Gubb said. “If you haven’t got the money immediately ready it’s quite easy to get an overdraft at your bank as against shares or title deeds. A willing heart will always find out a way.”

“The trouble is,” Gerald Luscombe said, “that I haven’t got a willing heart. I promised you to spend, and if necessary to lose, £5000, upon this experiment. I’ve spent £4838. You can have the balance but not a penny more. I’m not satisfied with the experiment and I never shall be. It hasn’t acted well and it doesn’t promise to act well. I want to have nothing more to do with it.” Mrs Luscombe heaved an immense sigh of relief.

Mr Gubb’s jaw suddenly dropped. “Not acted well?” he said. “You never said you wanted to make a profit. But even if you do there is money in it. If there wasn’t Mr Sandwith and those others who are hard business men wouldn’t be putting all this money into the East Croydon Garden City Ltd.”

“My dear man,” Gerald Luscombe said, “I’m not a tradesman. They are. That’s the difference.”

“But then—” Mr Gubb ejaculated.

“I don’t want to make money out of it but I don’t want to lose any more. I haven’t got the money to lose, and if I had I consider your scheme so absolutely detrimental that I wouldn’t put a penny into it.”

“Detrimental!” Mr Gubb ejaculated.

“Absolutely detrimental, physically and morally,” Gerald answered.
“
But let us take the things by detachments. Here is your proposition. You ask me to build twenty cottages at a cost of £12,500. You offer me in return a rent of £13 a year apiece or £260 in all. This is at a rate of something more than two per cent, and I have to knock off a considerable further sum for depreciation and rates. I haven’t exactly worked it out but it amounts to about one and a half per cent. My money as it is at present invested brings me in about four and a half per cent. You will see, therefore, if you take the trouble to think of it, that you are asking me to make you a personal present of two-thirds of the capital sum.”

“Me a present!” Mr Gubb gasped. And confronted with Gerald Luscombe’s astonishing insight into the weakness of his plans Mr Gubb felt a deeper and deeper sinking as if physical portions of his interior were being struck with small felt hammers.

“Oh, yes, it’s to you personally,” Luscombe continued. “But we’ll come to that later. You have asked me for £8383 as a present on behalf of the capital amount for building the cottages. You ask me, in addition, to sell you building land worth £6000 for the sum of £200, that is to say, that you ask me for a further present of £5800. Later on you will come to me for the money to build your library and your Cold Storage. This you will pay back to me when the profits of the Simple Life Limited will have exceeded ten per cent, per annum. They will never exceed ten per cent, per annum because you will go on extending the Colony with my money and continuing to keep the profits below ten per cent. The Communal buildings that you now propose to set up will cost me anything between three and five thousand pounds. It is true they will remain my property but they will be absolutely of no value to me. I hope you follow me? You have therefore asked me to make you a present of a sum of between fifteen and eighteen thousand pounds. I am not a millionaire. I am not a lunatic. I am not even a philanthropist, except for the first five thousand pounds that you have already had. I am just a country landowner anxious to do my duty unobtrusively.”

Mrs Luscombe gazed at her husband, her eyes enormous with admiration and astonishment. She had never expected it of him, she had not thought he had it in him, and when it came out her astonishment was only the greater to notice how exactly like himself he seemed. He wasn’t in the least excited. He spoke gently, evenly, amiably, rather like a bland politician explaining to the House of Commons as overwhelmingly as possible the finances of the year. She thought it was only her own father who could so accurately and so surely have taken hold of a very complicated position.

Around the base of Mr Gubb’s nose two plaques of paleness were coming into being and slowly spreading on to his cheeks.

“It isn’t true,” he gasped. “It’s all false, absolutely false. I would have paid you rent for the new Communal buildings. I’ll pay you rent for the old ones.”

“I’m very glad to hear it,” Gerald answered. “You certainly ought to. Now let us consider how the £5000 I’ve already dropped on you has been dropped. I’ve spent on the old cottages, in restoring and redecorating them for your tenants £1800.”

“I put up the rent for you,” Mr Gubb snapped.

“You did,” Gerald Luscombe answered. “My labourers were paying me three and sixpence a week. You pay me five shillings. That means an increase of one and sixpence a week, making £74 a year in all. The interest on £1800 at four per cent, is £72. On the original cottages I gain therefore £2 a year. Let us say £50 in capitalised money. For the original tenants I’ve had to build...”

“You didn’t have to build,” Mr Gubb said harshly. Gerald smiled amiably. “That’s how you see it,” he said. “But some of the families have been our tenants for three hundred years. I couldn’t turn them adrift to find cottages four or five miles off. So I had to build for them. Ten double cottages at £1000 apiece cost me £10,000. The rent per cottage is three and sixpence a week, £8, 14s a year, that is to say, or £174 a year for the lot. I make them a present of the land they stand on and the water-supply that all the cottagers detest. I lose, therefore, on my capital from this source, putting the capital as being worth four per cent., £226 a year. This is already something over £5000. But determining to be generous to you and taking the interest at only two and a half per cent., and estimating that you will some day pay me some rent—” Mr Luscombe broke off to say to his wife, “Just hand me the paper that your right arm’s on.” He continued, “You will see here the exact basis of my calculations, and you will observe that, though I have behaved with great generosity in the Capital Account, there remains over the £162 that I have already spoken of to you.”

Mr Gubb rose rather shakily from his chair.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I hadn’t taken you for the ordinary common-place landowner.”

“Oh, wait a minute,” Gerald Luscombe said amiably, “we’d better thrash the matter out while we’re at it. It’s a pity to leave bad blood and misunderstanding. You objected when I said that you were asking me to make a present to you personally. But you are the Simple Life. The 3500 shares are held as to 3494 by yourself. The remaining six £1 shares are held by dummies. Therefore the profit of something over £250 a year, representing the eight and a half per cent., has gone into your pocket. You draw in addition a salary as manager of £100 a year. You make, that is to say, from three to four hundred a year out of the Simple Life.”

Mr Gubb said, “But it takes up all my time, and I’m an eminent man. I’m the most eminent man in this kind of thing. Look at the letter from the East Croydon people. They offer me fifteen hundred.”

“
I’m not saying anything against you,” Gerald Luscombe said. “I’m only saying that if I hadn’t been mistaken as to the sort of thing your Colony was going to turn out I shouldn’t have spent £5000 to provide you with an income of £400. And I certainly shan’t lose a capital sum of £13,000 further on an extension of the scheme in order to provide you with another income of about £1500. For, of course, as the new cottages were to have each an acre of ground and be better fitted up, you’d charge the tenants something like £50 a year, whilst you pay me only £12.”

Mr Gubb was by now of a deathly pallor.

“I don’t think I shall wait to be insulted any more,” he said.

“Oh, please,” Gerald answered, “don’t regard me as insulting you! I’m incapable of it. I don’t see why you shouldn’t start a land company. Anybody’s got the right to start a land company. Then it’s certainly not an insult to say that he’s done so.”

“It’s a most abominable insult,” Mr Gubb answered, “It’s the most abominable insult that has ever been offered me. You have shaken my faith of years in you. I don’t know how I can believe what my ears have heard. The Simple Life is not a land company. It’s a means for improving the rest of the world. It’s an example showing people how to live wiser and better lives.”

“Mr Gubb,” Gerald said, “I’m sorry if you’ve so misread my character. I am sure that I said nothing to lead to the misunderstanding. From the beginning I’ve said there’d be £5000. I can only imagine that you thought that if I was ass enough to throw away £5000 I should be ass enough for any amount. Isn’t that what it came to?”

“Madam,” Mr Gubb addressed Mrs Luscombe, “I offered your husband the most remarkable chance for distinguishing himself that has been put before any man in this century.”

“But my dear Mr Gubb,” Gerald said amiably, “you forget that I’ve never shown the least desire to distinguish myself.”

“If you would like your name joined with mine in the testimonial—” Mr Gubb was beginning.

“My dear man,” Gerald said, “If I’d been secretary to a fire brigade or a station-master or even a parish doctor — something energetic — I might have deserved it, and I might have taken it. But I haven’t been in the least energetic. I’ve been perfectly lazy. I’ve been lazy all my life. I shall probably be lazy to the hour of my death. But
you,
if you’ll excuse my being personal, are exactly the sort of man for the position. You’re indefatigable. The way you go at things has positively amazed me. Take your testimonial for goodness’ sake. I rejoice exceedingly that you’ve got the opportunity.”