Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (435 page)

“Oh, Lord, no,” the major said. “You’re a sweet good brick — a lump of nougat — and the prettiest girl — the prettiest girl — only — I just want to get a chance to think...”

Miss Delamare said “Poor fellow!” again, and the major said:

“Don’t say that, I don’t like it,” again in a really appealing voice; and he added: “Go away as quietly as you can.”

“All right, Teddy,” she answered. “I’m in my stockinged feet and I shan’t ring a fire-bell.

I don’t in the least know whether I can find my way, but I guess I’ll get in somewhere all right.” For the third time the major fell into his armchair, but this time he exclaimed:

“No, I can’t see — even though Flossie doesn’t add anything to the problem at all — I can’t see in any imaginable manner of speaking where we all...”

CHAPTER VI
.

THERE came a knock upon his door — quite a loud knock — and he started forward in his low chair and sat listening, with his right hand almost on the floor.

“That’ll be Olympia! If she’s seen Flossie going...” The knocking was repeated more determinedly, and he called, “Come in,” because he imagined that Olympia would not really care to come into his room. Mrs. Kerr Howe came in.

She was in a purple Japanese kimono with a swallow worked in gold thread over each breast, and a great roll and bow at the back, her maid having learned how to put kimonos on in Tokio. She tripped in — and her smallness gave a certain Japanese air of littleness, resignation, and obedience — and remarked:

“I said we must have an explanation before to-morrow morning. I’ve come for it.” And she sat herself down on the edge of the arm-chair facing the major’s and looked at him. The contrast between her appearance and her mental attitude always surprised the major so much — he was always expecting some sort of soft fluffiness to

come out somewhere — that he simply gave up the situation. He let drop any attempt to understand and to control it with the words:

“I’m simply too flabbergasted to be able to try to explain anything. I couldn’t explain the theory of lateral strains in bridges. And there seem to be ten or a dozen women determined to go after me here. I never knew such a place. It’s like being mad.” And suddenly he really felt a sort of glad madness — he couldn’t imagine that he was not at least going to get some fun out of it. Mrs. Kerr Howe said:

“Well, I’m glad you feel some remorse.”

“Oh, it’s not exactly remorse,” he answered almost gaily. “It’s like having indigestion very badly. So that you can’t eat with ten dishes that you’d like to eat very much just under your poor nose.”

Mrs. Kerr Howe said contemptuously:

“I suppose you think that I am one of the ten or a dozen. It’s like you to regard yourself as the Grand Turk!”

“It’s like you, Juliana,” the major said, “to say polygamous things of that sort. I wish I just felt like that.”

“No doubt you do,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said, with an even deeper note of determination. “But I’m going to have my explanation. There was not time in the train because I wanted to get my play settled about. And from what I’ve seen of Miss Peabody — your aunt introduced me to her as your oldest, best, and most affectionate friend, so she’s prepared for what’s coming — from what I’ve seen of the lady I don’t imagine she will leave us much time together to-morrow. So it has got to be now.”

“But, my dear Juliana,” the major said, “you’ve got really to remember that I’m a reformed character!”

“I don’t in the least understand you,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said; “I haven’t asked you to do anything but your simple duty.”

“It’s really all I can do to understand myself,” the major laughed. “I can only tell you that I vowed to reform the moment I crossed my aunt’s threshold. I’m bound to say that, from what I can make of it, she does not seem anxious that I should. But still, that’s my job — a difficult one, but I’m doing my best.”

Mrs. Kerr Howe pointed to Miss Delamare’s slippers that were in the fender.

“You’ve been having someone to help you,” she said amiably. But the major had noticed her eye on them by the speech before the last.

“Oh, those?” he said; “that’s a little present I brought for poor Olympia. She’s so liable to cold that I was airing them a little. But I do wish you’d go.”

And then Mrs. Kerr Howe remarked: “Poor fellow!”

The major started energetically forward in his chair.

“Look here,” he shouted, “don’t you say that. I can stand anything but that. There’s nothing the matter with me. I don’t want pity.” Mrs. Kerr Howe was looking down into the fender with what she meant to be an expression of meditative cruelty. “Do you always give people second-hand hearts — and presents?” she asked. “These slippers have been worn, I see.”

“Why of course, Juliana,” the major answered, with an engaging air of candour, “I always have presents worn when I bring them from abroad. It saves the customs duty.”

“I see,” she said slowly, as if she were working out a riddle; “you get Flossie Delamare to wear them before you present them to your fiancée. That’s what’s called standing in another woman’s shoes, isn’t it? And to save you the trouble of lying any more — I hid in a doorway as she left this room; I had enough decency not to want to be seen. She did not seem to mind.”

“Mind?” the major asked. “Why should she mind? She’s got a good conscience and a heart of gold.”

“Do you mean to say that I haven’t?” Mrs. Kerr Howe asked.

“I don’t see how you
can
have,” the major said, still with his candid air—”coming to a man’s rooms like this, and trying to steal him from his fiancée.” And then — for as a rule his trouble was that he forgot his past inventions — he had a brilliant stroke of memory, and he added: “You know, my dear Juliana, you are astonishingly off the track here. It won’t wash. It really won’t wash. When I said in the train that little Flossie was a sort of half-sister of mine, you thought I was lying. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t really. It was only what’s called intelligent anticipation. You see, my aunt was in this room a short time ago, saying that she meant to adopt Flossie, because she is a dear little thing. And then she went and talked to Flossie, and so, of course, Flossie was naturally excited about it, and wanted to talk to me. And if you don’t believe that, you’d better go and ask my aunt if it isn’t true. That’s what you ought to have understood when I said a sort of half-sister. It is only the president of a Society like yours that could put an evil construction on the words.”

“Oh, I have no doubt,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said calmly, “you can get your aunt into a tale with you. You’re capable of anything in the persuasion line. And I have no doubt Miss Delamare can look after herself.”

“But what about your reputation?” the major asked—”what about your reputation if you should be discovered here?”

Mrs. Kerr Howe laughed sharply.

“Oh, I knew you’d take that line,” she said; “but look here, my friend, we live in the twentieth century, not the eighteenth, and a woman can perfectly be alone with a man without losing her reputation.”

“Oh, you can tell that to my aunt,” the major said.

“So I have,” Mrs. Kerr Howe asserted, “and she entirely agrees with me that censoriousness is the worst of the vices.”

“Oh, well,” the major said, “you just tell her to-morrow morning that you came to my room at a quarter past twelve at night, and you’ll see the fur fly.
You
aren’t going to be her adopted daughter.”

“Oh, you aren’t going to get out of it in that way,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said calmly. “I’ve come here as one man might to another to ask you what you mean to do.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I jolly well mean to do,” he answered. “I’m engaged to Miss Olympia Peabody, of Boston, Massachusetts, and I mean to be as faithful to her as I can. I used to think that it would be as easy as eating eggs, to be a reformed character under the virtuous roof of my aunt and uncle. But it’s more like the temptation of St. Antony. I couldn’t have imagined that British middle-class families could be this sort of thing. They evidently arc, but I never knew anything like it.”

It was at this point that Mrs. Kerr Howe said softly, with a discreet glance on the ground:

“Aren’t you going to kiss me, Teddy?”

And the major remarked, with the air of one bathed in monotony: “No, I’m shot if I am!”

“Don’t you,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said, “don’t you remember Simla?”

“Oh, you are too late at the fair,” the major said. “I don’t remember Simla. I don’t in the least want to remember Simla. The last time I was there was just after some Abor gentleman had shot a rotten little stone-headed arrow into my thigh, and the silly little stone head came off, and the bone sawyers had no end of a job in getting bits of it out for months after I got back to the residency. No, I don’t in the least want to remember Simla.”

“I ought to have been there to nurse you,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said.

“You ought to have been nursing your husband,” the major said grimly. “I had an R.C. Sister.” And again Mrs. Kerr Howe dropped her voice:

“Don’t you
want
to marry me, Teddy?”

“Well,” the major said levelly, “speaking as man to man, I don’t. I want to marry Olympia.

That is to say, I don’t want to, I’ve got to. I’m bound in honour, and that’s an end of it.”

“But at Simla you said...” Mrs. Kerr Howe was beginning. But the major interrupted her in a business-like voice:

“I never said a single word about marrying you at Simla. I remember every blessed word I did say. How could I have talked about marrying you? You had a husband, and you weren’t a bit more in earnest than I was. You were just flirting with a subaltern to pass the time, and to get conversation to put in your books. Why, you were ten years older than I was then. Of course, you’re younger now. But there is someone else on the scene. I am very sorry — you’re too late. You said I was to talk to you as a man. So there you’ve got it. I don’t want...”

But he was interrupted in his turn by Mrs. Kerr Howe, who exclaimed:

“Why! where did that horrible little dog come from?”

And indeed a very small Pekinese spaniel, like a piece of glossy brown hearthrug, was sitting beside the major’s chair, and gazing up with adoration at one of his hands that hung over the side. The major sprang up sharply, just in time to see the little animal, that knew his habits very well, crawl under the very low bed. He sprang after it, but it had already disappeared, and he was quite unable to move the bed which, with its great carved pillars and heavy walnut canopy, weighed nearly half a ton.

“Great heavens!” the major exclaimed, “we’re lost. I’m lost — you’re lost. I knew it would come. Why in the world did you leave the door open? If I could have caught the little beast, I might have chucked him outside, and thrown boots and things at him till he went back to his mistress. As it is there’s no hope.”

Mrs. Kerr Howe drew herself up with an expression approaching as near as possible to one of severe virtue.

“Do you suppose,” she said, “that I was going to be alone with a man at night with a door shut?”

“Well, it’s usual to shut the door on these occasions,” the major said.

Mrs. Kerr Howe remarked: “I don’t know what sort of women you can be used to.”

But the remark failed considerably of its effect, because the major was upon his stomach trying to get under the bed, which was much too low for him. He leaned upon one elbow and glared fiercely at Mrs. Kerr Howe. Mrs. Kerr Howe laughed.

“I don’t see what it matters,” she said. But the major waved at her the arm that he was not leaning on, and said violently:

“What it matters is that I shall lose Olympia.

She’ll be here in a minute, I’ll bet my head she will. There’s a sort of psychic affinity between her and that little beast under the bed. She says she wakes up in the night and feels cold if it isn’t lying on her doormat. I tell you, I shall lose Olympia.”

“Well, I don’t care,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said.

“And if you’re found here,” the major continued, “they’ll say you’re compromised, and I shall have to marry you.”

“Well, I don’t care,” Mrs. Kerr Howe repeated. “But I tell you this too, Juliana,” the major said seriously, “if you’re compromised, my uncle certainly won’t let Flossie Delamare produce your old play. That’s what it will come to.”

Mrs. Kerr Howe suddenly started to her feet.

“Not produce my play!” she exclaimed. “But that’s infamous!”

“That’s what will happen,” the major repeated. “You ought to have thought of that before you came. My uncle is absolutely devoted to Olympia.”