Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (382 page)

“But,” the young man said, “it was agreed with Deirdrè at the start...”

“Oh, I daresay it was,” Mr Everard interrupted him. “It was agreed between you that you were both to be perfectly free. But what she meant was that she was to be free and you weren’t.”

“There isn’t a single man she’s cast eyes on since we were married,” the young man said passionately, “that she hasn’t coquetted with one way or another.”

“No, of course there isn’t,” Mr Everard said. “There wouldn’t be. That’s the agreement.”

“And yet,” the young man continued, “when I told her this afternoon that poor Mrs Johnson was so unhappy that I wanted to console her...”

“Oh, you
damned
ass!” Mr Everard said. “You disgusting fool! You week-kneed idiot!”

“It’s always been my principle,” the young man said, “to be perfectly honourable and straightforward. I’ve been as open with Deirdrè as with my own soul.”

“Of course, of course!” Mr Everard said. “You’ve got to be perfectly honourable and straightforward. That’s perfectly right. I hope we all are. But it isn’t honourable to kiss and tell.”

“I
never
kissed Mrs Johnson,” the young man said.

Mr Everard looked him up and down.

“No, I don’t suppose you have,” he said. “But all this sort of wandering about on the moors that your wife speaks of and squeezing hands...”

“You disgusting man!” the young man exclaimed in a high squeak. “I’ve never so much as once been alone with Mrs Johnson for two minutes. Deirdrè’s always been present. But Mrs Johnson’s husband drinks, and he’s deserted her to all intents and purposes, and she looks so yearning, so mournful...” The tears were welling up into the young man’s eyes. “And so I told Deirdrè this afternoon that my heart was tom with the desire to find words to comfort her.”

“Oh, you beastly weak-kneed tomfool!” Mr Everard exclaimed. “I really think you’re the most disastrous idiot that I’ve ever heard tell of. Didn’t you ever hear the proverb, ‘What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t ache for?’ Didn’t you? What right has an ass Like you to go tearing his wife’s heart to pieces
and
dragging in another lady who probably regards you as a crazy wool-gatherer? It’s idiots like you that do all the mischief in the world. Here you’ve got the makings of a first-class scandal to discredit the whole Colony, made out of nothing at all.”

The young man stretched out a mournful hand to the reproduction of the picture by Rossetti above the mantelpiece.

“When I first met Deirdrè,” he said, “she was just like that. She’d sit by the hour together, with her hands in her lap. Her name was Biddy O’Flanagan and her father was a small farmer in County Galway. She’d sit by the hour together and listen to poems by me and Mr W. B. Yeats, for all she had no letters. She was as meek as the milk that flowed in her pails, and as tender as the young grass on the hills that look over the sea. Why, I wrote a poem to her. It began:

‘Girl of the green-grey lashes—’”

“Oh look here,” Mr Everard said with some alarm, “I can’t stand here and listen to poetry.”

“I didn’t suppose you had the soul to,” the young man said with a sort of feeble disdain. “But that was what she was then, and I brought her over and had her educated at the Communal School when we were at Frog’s Cottages. And then I married her, and what is she now?”

“Well, yon shouldn’t have married her,” Mr Everard said. “I don’t suppose you needed to.”

“She’s as vain as a peacock,” the young man said. “She’s as jealous as a tiger: she’s as loquacious as a sparrow: she’s more vulgar than a jackdaw: she’s as lazy as a sloth. Every morning it’s I that must get up and light the fire and scrub the room out and bring her her morning cup of tea. And as for listening to poetry...”

“
Look here, my young friend,” Mr Everard said, “that’s your affair. You’ve married the lady. I haven’t, and I wouldn’t have done it if you’d given me a ten-foot hop pole to do it with. Besides, it’s not gentlemanly nor kind in any way for a man to complain of his wife to a third party. In a general way I’d never speak again to a man who complained to me about his wife. It’s a man’s duty to make the best of the bargain that he’s got.” Mr Everard paused. “But then,” he went on, “you’re hardly a man, and I don’t suppose you’ve been brought up as a man, or that anyone has ever talked to you like a man. So just you listen to me. I’ve not got the gift of the gab. I wish I had; but I’ve handled more vain women in a year than ever you’ll see in all your little life.”

“Oh, come,” the young man said, “I was considered very marriageable in my day.”

“Oh, get away,” Mr Everard said. “For shame! The pap isn’t dry on your lips. If you want to talk about conquests talk about them openly. Now you listen to me, sonny. I lived with my missus for twenty-two years and I never had a word with her excepting, perhaps, once or twice at nights when I’d come home late and had a little too much in me, and no doubt I richly deserved what I got then. And she was the making of me, and every time her name’s mentioned, when I’ve got my hat on I take it off, and I’ve spent £2000 on a white marble tomb in Kilburn Cemetery, and I wasn’t really ever unfaithful to her in all those years. But how do you suppose she’d have liked it if I’d found it necessary to go and tell her every time I wanted to comfort a ballet-girl because her skirts were cut too long? It isn’t your job to make ducks and drakes of a woman’s life because your conscience plays silly little tricks with you. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t ache about, young man, and your job is to make your missus as happy as, thank God! I was able to make mine, for she died with her hand in mine, and her last words were, ‘George, I’ve had a happy life. See that the headbills at Manchester have Harry Peto’s name starred.’ Those were her last words.” Mr Everard thought for a moment. “Where was I?” he said. And then, “Ah, yes. Now what I’m going to say now, isn’t what I’ve thought out myself. It was what was said at my club only the night before last. There was a leading K.C. and the richest man in the wholesale cheese trade, a director of the Derby Glucose Factory and Canon Everingham, though, of course, he didn’t say much. He couldn’t be expected to. But there was the solid British middle class. If anybody could be expected to speak for the middle classes, we could. There wasn’t a man there worth less than £5,000 a year, nor one that hadn’t been happily married for twenty years.”

“Oh, thanks,” the young man said with a slight growing up of his disdain. “If you’re going to tell me that the middle class man thinks that he’s a right to do what he likes as long as he conceals it from his wife, I don’t want to know it. It makes me feel sick. It’s disgusting.”

“You’re made to feel sick very easily, my young friend.” Mr Everard said. “What’s the good of little creatures like you trying to kick against rules like that?

That’s the -wisdom we learnt from our fathers, for I guess most of them learnt little things about their fathers and their fathers about
their
fathers. Do you think little chaps like you are going to upset the rule of life? Do you think you can do better than the great solid British middle class? I’ve risen from the ranks and proud I am to have done it. For let me tell you, I’ve travelled about a good bit in my time, and there isn’t on the solid earth, not in the Old world or in the New, a class of men so solid, so respectable, with so little nonsense in them, so charitable when it’s proper to be charitable or so God-fearing...”

“So God-fearing!” the young man sneered outrageously. “They may well fear God. I wonder they dare to walk upon the earth. I’ve always heard and I’ve always thought that ‘middle class’ was the term for the most contemptible thing on earth. And when you,
you
come from that disgusting hot-bed of vice and deceit that you describe and talk to us, leading our pure, innocent and simple lives...”

“Oh, I say!” Mr Everard exclaimed. Hold on! Stop a minute! When I’ve just been having to listen to such details about your lives that I simply had to stop your wife talking about them — when you appear to me to be the most immoral nest...”

He was interrupted by Mr Gubb who entered the room with Miss Egmont following him.

“I’ve come to announce a most happy event,” he said. “One which I feel will put the crowning seal upon my labours and the success of the Colony. Miss Egmont and I are to be married next Tuesday.”

The young man’s mouth fell open, but this was more a sign of want of thought than of serious astonishment.

“Well now,” Mr Everard said, “I’m heartily glad to hear it. I’ve always thought,” he added to Miss Egmont,
“
he wanted a woman to look after him, and I’m sure no one more fitted to perform the task could be found.” He added, “Perhaps, madam, you would let me commission you to paint a miniature of Miss Bransdon in your most expensive, I should say, most careful manner, and let me then present it — after I’ve paid for it, of course — to you and Mr Gubb as a little reminder of old associations? Because, although there must be partings, we all, I feel sure, want to entertain towards each other as kindly sentiments as possible.” And Mr Everard shook hands warmly with Miss Egmont and Mr Gubb, and even with the depressed Colonist, and exclaimed to each: “Proud indeed to have been permitted to meet you.”

Immediately afterwards he asked Mr Gubb whether the wife of his young friend there hadn’t called upon him just lately.

“No, she hasn’t,” Mr Gubb said. “Why should she?”

“Horatio and I,” Miss Egmont corroborated him, “have been making the round of the cottages informing each of the Lifers as to our mutual intention.”

“It seemed,” Mr Gubb exclaimed, “to be the friendliest thing we could do. It is so much more human than a mere official announcement stuck on the notice board.”

“Oh, yes, certainly,” Mr Everard said. “But I hope you won’t be late at the meeting? You know I’m in sole charge of the proceedings.”

When Miss Egmont and Mr Gubb had departed Mr Everard turned once more to the Colonist.

“There now,” he said. “That’s what I like to see: bonds growing tighter. Those people must have known each other for years and yet they can trust each other. Now, that’s really splendid. That’s what we want in the world,” he added suddenly, “I say, what’s your wife up to, by the bye? I hope she’s not gone after Mrs Johnson?”

The young man’s bps curled still more contemptuously.

“Cora’s gone to Guildford for the day,” he said. “You’ll probably find Deirdrè flirting with Whittaker and Brayle in No. 5. She was to have had tea with them if she hadn’t had this little outbreak.”

“Oh, well, that’s splendid,” Mr Everard said, and he wrung the young man’s limp hand once more. “Now you just reflect upon what I’ve said. By Jove! I must be off. I must dress.”

And Mr Everard trotted out of the cottage and walked swiftly up the road, heading once more for Coombe Luscombe.

CHAPTER V

HE had not, however, gone twenty yards through the dusk and had reached about level with the milestone upon which Mr Gubb had sat to read his letter, when suddenly he struck his forehead with his gloved hand. “By God! Ophelia!” he exclaimed aloud. It had come into his head that possibly, since Mr Bransdon might be extremely occupied with his Russian relatives, he might have forgotten to forbid Ophelia to hold the meeting outside the school buildings — the meeting of protest that she had threatened. He could not make up his mind whether to go on at once and dress or whether to return, question Mr Bransdon and himself press his views upon the young lady. “Oh, blast Ophelia!” he exclaimed aloud again.

“And what, pray, is the matter with Ophelia?” a voice asked.

With a slight start he perceived that he had omitted to observe in the grey dusk a slight young man in grey, seated upon the milestone.

“Oh, I say, you gave me a turn,” Mr Everard said. “You oughtn’t to sit about like a bogey.” He walked close up to the young man to observe him more distinctly. He perceived a thin, pale, frail figure in a grey wideawake hat, grey cycling suit and coarse grey worsted stockings. Even the shirt was a grey rough fabric, tied at the neck with a knotted cord.

The young man pulled off his gold pince-nez and peered short-sightedly at Mr Everard. “I never asked you, you know,” he said, “to walk along the road.”

“Oh, come,” Mr Everard said. “Roads are meant to he walked along.”

“That has nothing to do,” the young man said, “with my place in the universe. I don’t ask for roads to walk upon, though if you come to that, milestones are made to sit on.”

“They aren’t,” Mr Everard said. “They’re to show you how far it is to where you want to get.”

“They aren’t, if you never want to get anywhere at all,” the young man said.

“But I’ve always got to be getting somewhere,” Mr Everard answered.

“That’s the difference between us,” the young man answered. “I felt an unconquerable desire to get here. Now I’ve got here, it’s entirely distasteful and I’m going.”

“Well, but if you’re going, you must be going somewhere,” Mr Everard said.

The young man waved his hand round upon the mists that were closing in upon them.

“No,” he said, and he struck Mr Everard as being exceedingly tired and dispirited. “Nowhere. Here, there, just anywhere.”

“Oh, I say,” Mr Everard said. “You might just as well say you’re going to stop here all night, sitting on the milestone.”

“And why not?” the young man asked sepulchrally.

For a moment Mr Everard felt a considerable discomfort. He could not help thinking that this must be a madman or at least some poor wandering creature in much need of being looked after. But suddenly his mind cleared.

“Oh, of course, you’re one of the Lifers!” he said. “When I come to think of it you’re extraordinarily like Ophelia Bransdon: almost a family likeness. Yon might be her brother.”

The young man said, “Oh!” languidly and without the slightest show of interest.

“Look here,” Mr Everard said, “do me a good turn, will you? Just go down into the village and find Ophelia, and tell her from me not to make a silly ass of herself.”

“In what particular department of her activities?” the boy asked.

“Oh, about the testimonial,” Mr Everard answered. “But let me tell you, my young man, there’s precious little foolishness about Ophelia. She’s got a wonderfully sharp business head. She’s as hard as nails, and she could drive a motor against any man in the world. It’s only just jealousy of Mrs Lee that’s making her behave foolishly about the testimonial.”

“Every word you tell me increases my distaste,” the young man answered. “There was a time when I loved Ophelia, or at least I respected her.”

“Look here, young man,” Mr Everard said, “nobody that I know wants you to love Ophelia or to respect her either.”

The young man looked at the ground.

“Business abilities,” he said, “that means avarice. A hard mind. A knowledge of how to manipulate machinery, and jealousy! Jealousy of Mrs Lee. This is what I find! I went away to study the world. I found it commercially horrible, distasteful. I returned to this place thinking to find a green coolness and pure minds. I find the world has crept in here, too. Everything is greed! Everything is jealousy! Everything is self-conscious! Everything is a weariness!”

“I say, you know,” Mr Everard said, “don’t you think you want Epsom Salts? I find there’s nothing like them when I’ve really got the hump.”

“No,” the young man answered, “it’s everything else that wants Epsom Salts of one sort or another.”

“Well, you know,” Mr Everard said cheerfully, “you only want a skull and you’d do for Hamlet.”

The young man stood up.

“Oh, wise man after the wisdom of the world!” he said ironically. “‘A blind hen sometimes finds a pea’ as they say in Germany. I am going.”

He moved slowly off into the darkness.

“I say,” Mr Everard called after him, “you seem very tired. If you just go down to the School and tell my chauffeur you’ve come from me, he’ll take you wherever you want to go.” He heard through the darkness and the mist the words:

“He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t ever get there.”

Mr Everard as he hurried along the road towards Coombe Luscombe, was more than a little puzzled. The young man had spoken like a madman — distinctly like a madman, if you considered what he had said. On the other hand his voice had been cold, collected and even contemptuous. And there was no doubt about his being assured. He had not, therefore, gone suddenly off his head or he would have been more excited. On the other hand, Mr Everard could not see what was contemptible about himself. Nevertheless, both the young husband of the lady with red hair and now this young man, had spoken to him as if he had been, intellectually speaking, the dirt beneath their feet. Mr Everard had, however, come across so many people that be was quite aware that it took all sorts to make a world, and he hurried still faster towards the Luscombes’ House.

Gerald Luscombe was standing in the porch in evening dress talking to a lady in severe attire with a strong face, short skirts and a boat-shaped bat.

“You say,” be was saying as Mr Everard reached them, “that he left Heidelberg ten days ago?”

“It’s just ten days,” Miss Stobhall said.

Luscombe perfunctorily introduced to her Mr Everard, who, intent on getting up to his room to dress, was trying to edge past them.

“You don’t happen to have seen Hamnet Gubb about the Settlement?” Mr Luscombe asked.

“Never heard of the gentleman,” Mr Everard said. “Shouldn’t know what he looked like if I had seen him.” And he hurried past them up to his room. He really had not much time. The ceremony of the evening was to begin at half-past eight, and it was at that moment a quarter to the hour. He would have, he saw, to go without his dinner. He flung off his motor coat, his undercoat, his waistcoat, and began to unknot his tie, when suddenly he exclaimed: “Good Lord! Hamnet Gubb!” And with an extraordinary scrambling movement he pushed his tie together again and hoisted on first his waistcoat and then his coat. He buttoned up the latter whilst he ran downstairs exclaiming, “What a day I’m having! Good Lord! What a day I’m having!”

Miss Stobhall was not upon the porch steps, neither, for the matter of that, was Gerald Luscombe in the diningroom, where Mrs Luscombe was engaged in dissecting the second of a pair of fowls.

“I think,” she said, “they must have gone into the study. I wish you’d tell Gerald the chickens are getting cold and ask Miss Stobhall to come in and have some dinner. She shouldn’t have called him out just in the middle of it. People are so inconsiderate.”

Mr Everard burst into the study where Gerald Luscombe, still holding his table napkin, was talking in a low tone to Miss Stobhall.

“Look here,” Mr Everard said, “isn’t this Gubb boy — didn’t you tell me he was married to Ophelia? Is he a little chap all falling to pieces like a wisp of hay, with gold eye-glasses?”

“That would be he,” Gerald Luscombe said. “Then you
have
seen him.”

“Why,” Mr Everard answered, “he was sitting on the milestone between here and the Green not three minutes ago. But,” he added, as Miss Stobhall made towards the door, “he just vanished into thin air. He went off over the Common. I don’t know which way and I don’t suppose you could possibly find him amongst the gorse at this time of night. Isn’t he a little bit off his chump?” Gerald Luscombe said, “If he’s in this neighbourhood I daresay I’ve got a clue to where he’s staying.”

But Miss Stobhall was talking to Mr Everard. “Of course he’s mad,” she said. “He’s as mad as a March hare. He’s an Individualist.”

“I don’t quite know what that is,” Mr Everard said. “Is it the same thing as the Peculiar People?”

“Oh, nonsense,” Miss Stobhall said. “An Individualist is everything that’s bad. It’s a person that believes in competition and doesn’t recognise that it’s his duty to consider himself as a part of the State.”

“Ah, that would be him,” Mr Everard said. “He seemed to think that I hadn’t got a right to walk along the road, though he didn’t say anything about competition. I shouldn’t think he’d be much good for that!”

“Did he seem very depressed?” Miss Stobhall asked. “Well,” Mr Everard said, “I don’t know what he’s generally like. He didn’t seem to me to be the sort of person that I should want to sit in the same funeral carriage with.”

“You see,” Miss Stobhall explained, “he took his ‘doctor’ at Heidelberg with distinction, and then as he wouldn’t go and enjoy himself as the other young people do, I took the occasion to talk to him seriously. And then he revealed to me the fact that he hadn’t the least intention of making use of his degree. He had no desire to be of service to society, and he didn’t care at all about earning a living. I spoke to him with a great deal of seriousness. Well, I mean, that I was really very angry. I let him know most of what I thought of him, you understand?”

“Oh, I think I understand,” Mr Everard said.

“I pointed out to him,” Miss Stobhall continued, “what is the duty of a man to Society as it is. I said to him that I had nephews of my own and that he couldn’t expect me to go on keeping him for ever in a state of idleness.”

“And quite right, too, madam,” Mr Everard said.

“He didn’t seem to take much notice,” Miss Stobhall continued, “but next morning he had gone. I thought, of course, he’d perhaps gone for a long walk, but I heard nothing from him that day nor the next nor the next, and then as he hadn’t any money with him and doesn’t know what to do with money if he has it, I began to get very uneasy. I went to the police but they couldn’t find out anything. I don’t suppose they took much trouble over an Englishman. And then about a week later I heard from a friend of Hamnet’s in Heidelberg that he had heard from a common friend of theirs who was a student in Bonn. Hamnet seems to have walked down the Rhine, living, I suppose, like a tramp. His Bonn friend said that he had eaten an enormous breakfast, that he seemed very healthy and cheerful and rather more madly visionary than usual. The friend bought him a ticket on the English steamer for London, and that was the last we’ve heard of him.”

Miss Stobhall paused to take breath.

Luscombe began once more — he had been trying to fit a word in whenever Miss Stobhall paused or whenever Mr Everard interrupted: “I think I can tell you—” when Miss Stobhall started once more.

“Of course I left Heidelberg at once,” she said, “and here I am. It’s absolutely essential that he must be kept away from Ophelia. Don’t you think so?” she addressed Gerald Luscombe. “The marriage ought to be dissolved at once.”

“Oh, I’ll see to that,” Mr Everard said heartily.

“I don’t suppose,” Miss Stobhall said, “that he will offer any objection.”