Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (453 page)

“Oh, you can go on,” Lady Aldington comforted him. “Only do rehearse your woes in a language that I can understand one word in three of.”

“Dear lady—” Macdonald said; and he remained for a moment lost in thought. Then he began:

“I was born in the month of April of the year
1872, in
my ancestral domain of Potsdamskaia, in the government of Kieff. My distinguished ancestor, General Count Macdonald, was able to persuade the Empress Catherine of blessed memory that he was the legitimate king of Scotland. And that fact is inscribed upon our Charter of Nobility.” Macdonald broke off to gaze at Lady Aldington. “I hope this biographic style is clear enough. Well... my first education was undertaken by tutors and tutoresses of various nationalities. I can remember most distinctly an English governess who was called Miss Pett.... In the year 1886...” Lady Aldington suddenly interrupted him with the words, “That reminds me that I meant to ask you who were your friends the Petts.”

Macdonald held up his hand authoritatively. “Lady Aldington,” he exclaimed, “you are about to listen to one of the most singular biographies ever related by a child of his age. And you interrupt me in order to ask who a person called Pett may be!”

“I don’t really care about Pett,” Lady Aldington said. “What I want to know is, who is the man’s wife?”

“That,” Macdonald said, “would have come out in the ordinary course of my story. Mr. Pett is the thinker who has most profoundly influenced my career.”

“But—” Lady Aldington said, —

“Oh, I know,” Macdonald said. “He called you Lady Haldington. But that does not affect the quality of his thoughts. You have to adjust yourself to a new world. Rome, in fact, is burning. It has burnt off the initial ‘h’s’ and the final ‘g’s’ of your language. The very distinguished Mr. Pett, the product of your Education Act of 1870, is a school-master abroad. He is also a journalist, and he will probably be Conservative Prime Minister of your country — or, if not Pett, then someone like Pett. Pett’s wife is Pett’s cousin, a school-mistress and journalist, and to the two of them my excellent Miss Pett, who taught me the Lord’s Prayer in English and the virtues of your late Queen Victoria — to these two the excellent Miss Pett stood in the relation of aunt. But the train is proceeding at the rate of twelve miles an hour towards our destination, and, if I am to finish my biography, I must now proceed with it.... In the year 1886 I proceeded to the University of Smolensk....”

Slowly and smoothly the train rolled on beside high hills, covered with dark woods upon which the sun shone down. At a wayside station it appeared to wait for three- quarters of an hour for no particular reason. Then they were dragged slowly past a broad-spreading castle which was decorated with a great number of flags hanging from the peaked roofs. A number of maid-servants in caps and aprons were leaning over the green slopes of the glacis, conversing with a number of black brass-bound soldiers in the road below.

“My august sovereign,” Macdonald said, “is visiting his august relatives in that castle. That is why the train was delayed three-quarters of an hour.”

A man looking like a waiter, with narrow eyes and a foxy moustache, peered in at them from the corridor.

“That,” Macdonald said, “is the chief of the Russian detective police. The train was kept waiting to suit his convenience. He could have gone to Nauheim in ten minutes, in a motor-car. He’s spying on us now.”

Lady Aldington shuddered slightly.

“Disgusting?” Macdonald asked her. “Yes, of course it’s disgusting. It’s disgusting that an express train should be kept waiting for a detective, just as it’s disgusting that you’ll find yourself shadowed by dirty-looking Russians wherever you go in Nauheim till they find out who you are. That’s because you’re talking to a subject of my august sovereign. And that is why Rome is burning to the tune of those
mouchards.”

Then Macdonald continued the story of his life. Leaning forward, animated and giving the impression that he was not in the least in earnest, Macdonald was extremely fair, and his clothes, as Lady Aldington had already remarked, were just too well cut to let him be really English, of good tradition. His suit of blue serge had the frontal creases of the trousers so exceedingly stiffly marked that they appeared to be kept out by a whale-bone spring. His hands were large and long; they had the aspect of being cool and firm, and from time to time he used them to emphasize what he was saying. Lady Aldington was astonished that she did not find this disagreeable. His face would have been as bland as it was blonde if it had not been for the shape of his eyelids. His eyes were of a Scotch blue, but the lids, slightly narrow and running slightly upwards, gave Lady Aldington to understand that in this man there would be upon occasion a touch of a devil. It was a faint suggestion of black Scotch pride, of dark Tartar passion and cruelty, as well as the romantic self-containment of which both these races are capable. Lady Aldington could not exactly have put it into words. But once he broke off the account of the immigration of his soul amongst Russian revolutionists in London to say, gazing at her fingers:

“You English women have such beautiful hands!” And there was in the undertones of his voice such a quaver of longing that Lady Aldington felt as if he were devoting to her long fingers a passion that he could not respectfully address to her whole person. She leant back, all in white, surveying him through her eyelashes, and she listened. Only the curve of her long neck showed her pride not only of place but in every other thing. And that was involuntary....

“I can’t,” Madame Sassonoff said, “I can’t tell you whether he’s’ quite,’ unless you tell me, dear Lady Aldington, what ‘quite’ means.”

“Well,” Lady Aldington said, “I’ve been walking about with him all the morning and, as he’s either enterprising or astonishingly simple, it looks as if we should be walking about together for the rest of the day. At least, he has announced his intention of calling for me at my aunt’s hotel exactly at four o’clock, when my aunt goes to bed.”

“Well, he is discreet, is Sergius Mihailovitch,’’ Madame Sassonoff said.” You can rely upon him to be that.”

“I don’t know that I care,” Emily said, “whether he is that or not. But I should like to know the other.”

The Baroness chuckled deep in the throat of her round, dark personality. Her hotel room was filled with masses of bouquets that occupied borrowed vases on every article of furniture. Sergius Mihailovitch Macdonald had just left them to see if he could get for his Grand Duke a certain French novel that the censorship at Wiesbaden had cleared the bookshops of. The Baroness’s plump hands were perpetually moving, and had an air of being extremely accomplished. She had upon each finger at least two large rings. Her income was said to exceed three million roubles, and the Czar himself was one of her trustees. And this imperial backing gave to Madame Sassonoff a recklessness that a great many people found attractive. In spite of her immense wealth, she never entertained in the English sense of the word, because it was too much trouble. She lived in hotels, and yet she was never without a constant stream of pleased visitors. She was capriciously charitable. Once she gave a quarter of a million roubles to a fund for providing Paris coachmen with button-holes on the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin. She was in no way religious, not in the least superstitious, and she had no moral illusions of any kind.

“My dear,” this lady answered Lady Aldington’s last speech, “you never know when you won’t want a man to be discreet, and I wouldn’t, if I were you, be so crudely frank. What you implied just now was that although Sergius Mihailovitch may have been my lover, he would never be yours. But, quite apart from that having been insulting to me, it is a thing you never can tell.”

Lady Aldington said irrelevantly: “My husband put me in his charge. That’s generally considered...”

“My dear,” the Baroness said, “
avec un mari comme le votre
— it would be generally considered a case for
des circonstances extenuantes.
A deucedly suspicious circumstance, in English.”

“My dear,” Emily said, “I don’t think you in the least understand what Aldington wants.”

“But I profess to understand what Aldington
is,”
the Baroness answered. “You don’t suppose we spent that six weeks in that hotel at Cairo together without my discovering what sort of a monster your husband is.... Unless he’s changed in these three years?” she added interrogatively.

“Oh, he hasn’t changed,” Lady Aldington said, and she permitted before this foreigner just a shade of desolation to appear in her tone.

“And you haven’t changed, and the world hasn’t changed, so that nothing has changed!” the Baroness said. “
Quelle misère!
”

“I don’t know that I want anything changed,” Lady Aldington said reflectively. “What should it change to?”

“Ah!” the Baroness said, “that is all very well; but even frozen mutton thaws in the end.”

“I’m not a sheep,” Lady Aldington said.

“No, but you are a lamb,” Madame Sassonoff answered. “I shall be thirty-one next week,” Emily said, “and I can take care of myself.”

“Oh, poor lamb! oh, poor lamb!” the Baroness said. “What is that that I perceive upon your head?”

Emily instinctively raised her hands towards her hat. But then she remembered that Madame Sassonoff in the Russian court was believed to have certain gifts that in Russian were called
sgaravoie
— as who should say, “the voices.” For, every now and then, the Baroness would drop into a sort of trance. She would gaze before her and prophesy. As a rule she did not permit herself these excursions when English women were present in her drawing-room, for it was apt to render them uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the two ladies having lived in some intimacy at Cairo, Emily had once or twice witnessed such a manifestation on her friend’s part — more particularly on one occasion, when a member of the imperial family had been passing through Egypt and had called on the Baroness.

Madame Sassonoff continued to gaze at the buckle of old paste that secured the large feather in her guest’s hat. And in the silence Lady Aldington was vaguely wondering whether this scintillating object just above the Baroness’s line of vision had not produced in her some kind of hypnotic state. And suddenly Madame Sassonoff said:

“Round your smooth golden hair I see a crown of the little white roses of passion. And over your head is a small white cloud, and the voices say: ‘It is very well. Death alone will finish it with a traitor’s shaft in the back of the spine. And the roses round your hair turn all to a jet black. But they do not fade. So whilst lamenting, you will approve the death.’”

Lady Aldington laughed. She could not associate the gorgeous bad taste of the hotel room and the climbing showers of hot-house blooms with any gift of serious prophecy. “What was it you said the
sgaravoie
said?” she asked.

“I could not repeat it,” the Baroness answered. “I do not know; it is gone out of my mind.”

“It was something about being shot in the back by a traitor,” Lady Aldington commented. “I do not see how that could happen to me, or even to Aldington, unless one of the workmen in my mines in Galizia took it into his head to do something of the sort. There are some rough customers in that republic.”

“I do not know,” the Baroness said blankly. “It is gone from my mind.” And then she laughed, with a gentle cooing sound. “My dear Emily,” she said, “you are thirty-one. But you are a little frozen white lamb. When you find the sun, shall you not go frisking in the green grass like all the others? Yes, surely you shall. For do you not understand you have never lived?”

“Never lived!” Lady Aldington said, with a polite bitterness. “Have you an idea what my life has been?”

“No, don’t become un-English over your wrongs,” Madame Sassonoff warned her. “I know that if you scratch an English woman you find a grievance. But just because I know very well what your life has been, I know very well that you have never lived, and in the end life must come. Did you ever hear of the nightingales of Kurshk district?... The nightingales of the Kurshk district are celebrated all through Holy Russia for the sweetness of their voices. Well, those whose occupation it is to catch and to sell these little servants of Heaven and of love,
les attrapent trés jeunes: ils les prennent de leurs nids et puis ils les tiennent pendant deux, pendant trois années dans des caves.
... You understand, they have the belief that the nightingale sings best if it has never sung for several years, or has never sung at all. So when these nightingales have lived to long to sing for all those years, upon a moonlight night they take such a nightingale from the cellar where it has lived in silence. And in the moonlight they hang it in its little cage in the park of a prince or the garden of a lover who has paid them a great deal of money. And so the bird sings all through that moonlight night, and in the morning it dies.”