Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (454 page)

Lady Aldington smiled a little. “If some of the gentlemen who come to my receptions were to hear that,” she said, “they would move in the House for a detachment of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals people to be sent to the district of Kurshk.”

“My dear,” Madame Sassonoff replied, “God also is sometimes such a trainer of nightingales. After many years He will let one loose in the garden of a prince or of a lover. And not even the British Constitution can send Prevention of Cruelty People to God.”

“I don’t think you quite understand,” Emily said, “how we live in England. I don’t want to be pharisaic, of course; but we don’t give way in this sort of thing as foreigners do. I don’t say we’re any better for it, but our training is different.”

“Oh, come,” the Baroness said, “we are not the high contracting powers of England and Russia; there is no need for you to utter these official falsehoods to me. Let me tell you a little anecdote. If you cling so much to your British chastity, let me give you a little warning. Once Aldington was in my salon in the hotel at Cairo. He was all alone, waiting for me. But when I came in he did not hear me, for he was looking out of the window. And he had on his face such an extraordinary expression, he was looking so intently, that I too went to look and see what it was he was looking at. You were on that marble terrace where they had the geraniums in tubs. And you were talking to the Graham boy. And you were laughing — laughing! My dear, I never saw you so animated.”

“The poor Graham boy!” Lady Aldington said. “He was killed at Adis Abeba.”

“And your husband was looking at you and muttering. He had had a little too much wine for lunch.”

“Well, you needn’t tell me what he said,’’ Lady Aldington interrupted.

“I wasn’t going to,” the Baroness said. “But I thought I would warn you.”

“He said as much to my face,” Lady Aldington uttered; and then she suddenly really did break out. “Tell me what I ought to have done. I don’t know. Three years ago — just about that time — Aldington was very unhappy. Yes, I mean unhappy, not merely disagreeable. I didn’t like to see him suffer, and I said in exactly these words:

‘Look here, Aldington, if I divorced you and gave you a couple of hundred thousand, would you marry that woman?’ And he looked at me and swore. ‘Marry her?’ he said. ‘Good God, no! She was a barmaid.’”

“It’s still the same woman?” Madame Sassonoff asked. “It’s still the same,” Emily answered. “I don’t know what she’s like. I know she was a barmaid. And I think I’ve gathered to-day that she has a cockney voice, and drops her h’s. And her extravagance must be extraordinary. I know in one way and another Aldington gets fifteen thousand a year out of me. Why, she has a house in Curzon Street....” And Lady Aldington’s eyes filled with unmistakable tears. “My dear,” she said, “what is the attraction of these creatures? Why is it that we women have to suffer? They appear to be nothing, these women. They are vulgar, they daub themselves with paint. And the men howl over them and suffer the pains of the damned. And if one offers to set them free to marry, they say, ‘My God, no!’ What does it mean? Isn’t it the most abominable insult one can have offered to one? What
does
it mean?”

Madame Sassonoff shook her head almost sadly. “Ah! if one only knew that!”

After a time she added, “My dear, no, it’s not an insult. Men are made like that. They are all the same.” And then she added again, “Sometimes I think it is a compliment — to our delicacy. Men are coarse creatures. They need a touch of coarseness in their companions. It’s necessary for them. It’s what keeps them going. We’re too delicate.”

“But,” Lady Aldington said plaintively, “we — that is, you have your lovers.”

“Perhaps,” Madame Sassonoff reflected, “that’s only a matter of reaction too. Sergius Mihailovitch has a terrible wife. A terrible woman. She was the daughter of a London tailor.”

Suddenly, as if she thought she had unbent more than sufficiently, Lady Aldington drew herself up into an attitude of British calm, which was symbolised by her taking from her pocket her little green card-case. And she began to ask questions about the Woronzow-Dashkoffs, and Prince Peshkoff, and the Lacour-Chantelleries, and other people who had been at Cairo three years before. Madame Sassonoff returned the appropriate answers. And very shortly Lady Aldington rose and achieved the feat of laying one of her own cards and two of her husband’s on the comer of a marble console table that was much occupied by many vases of flowers. She made her adieux, and Madame Sassonoff’s man had already opened the door, when the Baroness said:

“Of course, Sergius Mihailovitch is perfectly trustworthy as to money, if that’s what you mean by ‘quite’ ... He has given all his money away, you know.” Lady Aldington halted in her path towards the door. “I should have thought,” she said, “that that would have made him exceedingly untrustworthy in money matters.”

“Oh, come!” the Baroness said. “Don’t be so extravagantly English! Sergius Mihailovitch was an extremely wealthy man. Not, of course, wealthy as people like you go; but still decidedly well off. Well off, even for England. And he gave it all away. Don’t you see that that makes him absolutely unlikely to try to get at your money?”

“Oh, I can look after my money well enough,” Lady Aldington said. “Whom did he give his money to?”

“I thought he’d related his whole biography to you,” the Baroness commented. “He gave the money, of course, to that London Russian anarchist club. Wasn’t it fine?”

Lady Aldington said: “Oh dear!” rather helplessly; and then she added, “But didn’t it help those wretches to go on throwing bombs?”

The Baroness said: “My dear! How extraordinarily obtuse you are as soon as we get on to the subject of Sergius Mihailovitch. Of course the money broke up that anarchist club altogether. As soon as there was a large sum of money to be divided, those anarchists divided it. Then of course they became capitalists. Sergius Mihailovitch is accustomed to say that half the cheap restaurants, gambling clubs, and sweating tailors’ businesses in one quarter of London, whose name I forget — half of them were set up by his first fortune...

“His
first
fortune?” Lady Aldington ejaculated.

“Well, of course he came into a second,” the Baroness said, “on the death of his mother. The second fortune he gave to some Socialist society in the west end of London. Sergius Mihailovitch says that those people were all discontented middle-class failures. Of course, his second fortune broke
them
up.”

“But, dear me,” Lady Aldington said, “did he want to break them up?”

“Goodness, no!” the Baroness said. “But don’t you see these people being about to regenerate society — that is what Sergius Mihailovitch says in his pleasant manner — being about to regenerate society, they naturally wanted to be careful of how they set about it. When they got money, they naturally wanted to print pamphlets. These advanced people always want to print pamphlets. It’s a mania. So that ruined them.”

“But how could pamphlets—” Lady Aldington was beginning to ask.

The Baroness laughed outright. “Oh, dear!” she said, “don’t you understand? They could not agree as to whose pamphlets they were to publish. So they all went to law. They had innumerable lawsuits. There was a little gentleman called Pett — of real genius; but, of course, not of our world..

“What did Mr. Pett do?” Lady Aldington asked. “I met him last night.”

The Baroness said: “Yes, dear Sergius is very fond of taking those people about. He has introduced them to the Grand Duke. He’s brought them here.... Well, Mr. Pett wanted all the pamphlets that that society published, to be by himself. He said that he was the only one of the club that could write English.”

“But he drops his h’s,’’ Lady Aldington protested.

“Of course I do not notice that, being not English,”

Madame Sassonoff said. She motioned with her hand to her man to shut the door and go away. Then she said:

“Dearest — sit down again that I can explain to you what a really beautiful character Sergius Mihailovitch has.” Lady Aldington obediently sat down. “You’re always good fun to listen to,” she said. “But it all sounds a little like madness. Why should Count Macdonald have given his money away, and why should he go about with that terrible little cockney?”

“Ah,” the Baroness said, “Sergius Mihailovitch is the darling baby of us all — of all the court, and of all of us in Russia who are what you would call in English ‘quite good people.’ And if you mean by ‘quite’ does Sergius Mihailovitch come of ‘quite good people,’ of course he does. As to his giving away his money, that is a thing that you cannot well understand. But to us Russians, it is part of our nature. Why, one of these days I shall give all my money away to build some monastery or to improve flying machines, or to convert India — or England, for the matter of that — to the orthodox church. I shall go begging my way along the roads....”

Lady Aldington said: “My dear!” in a tone of real concern.

“Oh yes, I shall,” the Baroness said sagely. “And it will not be madness, it’s in us. It’s in the Russian people, from the highest to the lowest. There was a case I knew in Russia... a poor tailor, the cousin of one of my serfs. This tailor was miserably poor. He lived in a cellar beneath a nobleman’s house, and patched up the uniforms of second-rate officials. One day a drunken idiot came in to his cellar and said to the tailor, ‘Little brother, I’m starving. I can’t work. I have come to live with you.” And, mind you, this drunken idiot was no relative of the tailor, who had never seen him before. So the drunken idiot lived with the tailor. He stole all the tailor’s money for drink; he stole the second-rate officials’ uniforms, and pawned them for drink. At last, in a moment of anger, the tailor locked him out of the cellar, and the drunkard went away. Who knows where? Then on the next morning the tailor hanged himself. You understand that he could not bear to think that he had turned one of God’s poor people away from the door. And we are all like that, we Russians. At any moment any one of us may do such a thing.”

“But it’s horrible,” Lady Aldington said. “One could not trust oneself with any Russian. Of course, there was Count Tolstoi....”

“
Oh, Alexis Alexëivitch,” the Baroness said, with a touch of contempt in her voice. “The newspapers made an enormous fuss about him; but nobody mentioned the poor cousin of my serf, and there are a million Russians like that. Sergius Mihailovitch is one of them.”

“He does not seem to have been very patient with his anarchist and socialist friends,” Lady Aldington said. “He got tired of them in the end.”

“Oh!” the Baroness answered, “must he not have his phases like anyone else who grows older? Even your newspaper-advertised Tolstoi went through his phases. He was a gambling officer, and then a Social reformer, and then a Quietist. Sergius Mihailovitch has gone through his phases in the reverse direction, that is all. At present he is assimilating the ideas of the great Mr. Pett. To those I should say he will adhere to the end of his life. The voices have told me that Mr. Pett will kill Sergius Mihailovitch.”

“Kill him?” Lady Aldington said.

“Yes,” the Baroness answered. “He will murder him. That’s what I mean.”

“But this is being mad,” Lady Aldington said. “If you think Count Macdonald is going to be murdered — what is it about? Will the little man be jealous of his wife?

If you think Count Macdonald is going to be murdered, aren’t you going to do something to prevent it?”

The Baroness shook her head. “We are Orientals, we are Fatalists, we Russians,” she said. “How are you going to prevent it? And, no, it will not be about Mr. Pett’s wife. Sergius Mihailovitch has a wife of his own. As one of your ministers said of one of your prime ministers, ‘The right honourable gentleman was married for many years to a lady of no charm, with little intellect, and of a disagreeable character, to whom, nevertheless, he was singularly faithful.’”

“Well,” Lady Aldington said, “if he’s faithful to his wife he has at least one virtue that an English woman can appreciate.”

And once more she rose to go. Madame Sassonoff looked up at her sagaciously.

“I don’t know,” she said, “that in this case it’s really a virtue. The woman ought to be drowned, or she will kill dear Sergius before Mr. Pett can do it. Did you ever meet an English shopkeeper’s wife?”