Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (455 page)

“I don’t believe I ever did,” Lady Aldington answered. “Well, study her well when you meet her,” Madame Sassonoff said. “I understand that Countess Macdonald is a typical member of that class.”

“I don’t suppose,” Lady Aldington said, “that I ever shall meet her.”

“Oh yes, you will,” the Baroness answered. “I think you will find that Sergius Mihailovitch is going to England to-morrow.”

Lady Aldington laughed from the doorway.

Her visit to her aunt, Mrs. Crewkeme, was as trying as she could have expected. Mrs. Crewkeme had been a Mademoiselle Duminy, the sister of Lady Aldington’s father, the French Lieutenant de Vaisseau. Mademoiselle Duminy had married an English west-country parson, who had hoped for preferment from the fact of his wife’s distant connection with a duke. The preferment had never come, and Mrs. Crewkeme had vegetated in a small isolated rectory until she had become as typically and disagreeably an English clergyman’s wife as if she had been born in a cathedral close. Upon the death of her husband, Mrs. Crewkerne had been left entirely destitute. Lady Aldington had not only supported her since then, she had also treated the disagreeable old woman as if she were a dowager of the house of Aldington or Kintyre. When they went to Egypt, Mrs. Crewkeme went with them; and she would have lived with them in London but for the fact that her health required a country life. Lady Aldington, indeed, treated her with a formal deference and a patient respect that came to her with her French blood. The only reward that she got for this was that Mrs. Crewkeme had conceived an immense and whole-hearted admiration for Lord Aldington. She was indeed his sole admirer in the whole world, so that the great part of her conversation was devoted to telling her niece that she treated Aldington badly. She said that Emily ought to pay more attention to the poor man’s comfort, and, during the whole of that afternoon, she embroidered unceasingly upon this theme. She instructed her niece as to how, by seeing that he never went out without a liver-protector when there was the least touch of east wind, she had managed to keep the Rev. Mr. Crewkeme in a good humour. She had given him linseed tea every Saturday night of their married life. She had seen on every single night that his sleeping-socks were aired and warmed. And she enjoined upon Emily all these stratagems for recovering the affections of her husband.

Once Lady Aldington said: “But, aunt, he has twenty- four servants to wait upon him in my house, and seven in another.”

But her aunt paid no attention to this speech, and that was almost the only time that Emily opened her lips during the two hours and a half of her visit.

Mrs. Crewkerne managed to make even the gilded room of the best hotel of Nauheim give Lady Aldington the feeling that she was sitting in the small stuffy chamber of a country parsonage, on a long Saturday afternoon, whilst the vicar was preparing his sermon. And that is exactly what, with one of her rare smiles, Lady Aldington said to Sergius Mihailovitch Macdonald, when she found him waiting for her in the hall of the hotel.

“Ah,” he said, “you feel like a schoolgirl released. And so do I. I am going to England to-morrow.”

CHAPTER
V

MACDONALD found his wife standing in the drawing-room of the Grand Duke’s suite in the Hotel des Anglais. The room was officially furnished with chairs and tables, and even pictures which had formerly been the property of Marie Antoinette. The proprietor of the hotel had purchased these articles under the impression that they would afford comfortable associations to such royal guests as deigned to visit him. The rooms had been used, amongst other people, by Napoleon III, the Emperor don Pedro of Brazil, and, the year before, by the dethroned King of Galizia; so that the Grand Duke, who possessed a sense of humour, was accustomed to call this apartment the Memento Mori room, and to wish that his imperial nephew might pay him a visit there. Indeed, with the view to this possibility, the Grand Duke had ordered from Paris full-length portraits of each of those dethroned sovereigns. Thus, in place of “Fêtes Galantes” by Watteau or Lancret, these lugubrious personages looked down from the walls. To make the joke more complete, the Grand Duke had ordered a large and particularly ugly copy of “Les Enfants d’Edouard,” and this monstrosity the Grand Duke had caused to be placed upon an easel immediately in front of the principal door by which, when the Emperor visited the Grand Duke, he must necessarily enter. Indeed, every time that Macdonald passed through the room, the immense and lugubrious picture of the murdered princes of the Tower gave him a disagreeable shock. He had, indeed, ventured to remonstrate with his imperial master. He said that the picture was in the very worst of tastes. But the Grand Duke, with the sinister jocularity that distinguished him from other princes, answered Sergius Mihailovitch with the words:

“And why not? That
crétin
is persuaded that I desire to play Richard of Gloucester to his children. Let him understand that I know he suspects me of that imbecile design.”

And Sergius Mihailovitch had left it at that.

It was more than his wife could do. She was a sufficiently startling figure to find amongst the royal furniture and the imperial bibelots. The daughter of a London tailor of renown, Sergius Mihailovitch had met her rather frequently at socialistic meetings in the Putney of the early ‘nineties. It is impossible to know why foreigners of distinction fall desperately in love with English women of the lower classes. Perhaps Macdonald had fallen in love with her hands; with her voice, which was not loud but exceedingly determined; with the precision with which she enunciated socialist doctrines of the Fabian order; or with the aesthetic cut of her trailing garments. But the tragedy of the unfortunate Russian’s fate enacted that, whereas his own views had completely altered, his wife’s had remained exactly the same. She still dressed in clothes of sage green, her sleeves still swept the floor; round her neck was a rope of amber beads, each one as large as a duck’s egg. Her dark hair was elaborately waved with curling irons, and because she passed the greater part of her life in the open air, she had a startlingly high colour. From endless discussions in which she attempted to force Sergius Mihailovitch back into the roads of orthodox socialism, her face had assumed a permanently strained expression, and her voice had grown high and slightly discordant. Sergius Mihailovitch, upon taking up his post in the Grand Duke’s suite, had done his best to impress her with the fact that she must not attempt to convert the Grand Duke himself to the principles of Karl Marx. He had had the utmost difficulty in persuading the lady to promise him that she would not do so. Indeed, he had had to threaten to leave her at home in England before he could feel reasonably safe in the matter. It was no good telling her that to preach socialism to a grand duke — even to a grand duke travelling incognito — would show a serious lack of tactfulness. She said that there are higher things than tact. And she said that truth is great and shall prevail. Macdonald said that she might practise her converting zeal upon the other gentlemen in attendance upon the eminent person, upon their wives, and the pages and servants. This was not at all what Countess Macdonald desired. She wanted to have a grand duke sitting at her feet. So that at last she gave Sergius Mihailovitch the promise that he needed. She was not going to speak to the Imperial Highness directly about municipal trading or the general distribution of wealth. But she was pretty determined to make the Grand Duke see that if socialism could turn out a creature so altogether desirable as herself, it would be a good thing for him if he became her student. And she imagined that she would be able to do this without ever quoting one of the three hundred and twenty-eight Fabian tracts upon which her faith was founded. Thus Sergius Mihailovitch had no actual mortification caused him, beyond the fact that all the attendants upon the Grand Duke considered that his wife was mad. And to this he was pretty well hardened by that date. Moreover, as most of his companions considered that if he had married a tailor’s daughter she must have been a millionairess, they mostly regarded Macdonald himself with envy It was of no use his saying that she had not brought him a penny. They simply would not believe it. No one, they said, would take less than one hundred thousand roubles a year to sit opposite a scarecrow at breakfast every morning. For they regarded the Countess Macdonald as a scarecrow, their own women dressing in clothes that came from Paris.

* * *

Crossing the room, Macdonald said amicably to his wife:
“
Why, Margaret, what are you doing here?”

His wife made a use of her eyes that she would have called scornfully looking him up and down. She strongly disapproved of his having visited, even at the Grand Duke’s orders, Madame Sassonoff. She did not indeed believe that the Grand Duke had ordered her husband to call on that lady, whom she regarded as a dissolute member of the Russian smart set. That, at least, was the phrase she used. Once, when the Duke of Nottingham, who had met Sergius Mihailovitch at the Russian Embassy, had called upon Countess Macdonald at Putney, that lady being at the time without a servant had sent the Duke into her kitchen to fetch the kettle for tea. That, she was accustomed to say, was like her.

Now, having looked twice from Macdonald’s head to his heels, she brought out in a deep angry voice the words:

“I’m trying to do more than you ever did here. I’m trying to do some good.”

The Countess Macdonald had come there with a double object. She had wanted to discover whether the Grand Duke really had sent her husband to Madame Sassonoff, and she was going to read and to explain to him a work by the late William Morris, called “The Roots of the Mountains.” She had lent it to H.I.H. some days before. On the previous evening he had told her that he had not been able to make head or tail of it. Now she was going to explain it.

“Oh, well,” Macdonald said lightly as he passed her, “that’s a good thing, but a jolly hard job.” He was passing on towards a small gilt door at the end of the long room.

“Tell the Duke,” his wife commanded, “not to keep me waiting any longer.”

Macdonald nodded slightly.

The Grand Duke’s own suite consisted of a great number of little rooms, the one opening out of the other. They were all exceedingly untidy, for the Grand Duke disliked orderliness beyond all things; so that in one little room books, in another clothes, and in another empty champagne bottles lay about on the valuable carpets. Indeed, in one room — that which was decorated by the champagne bottles — all the looking-glasses were broken, and the glass, mingled with bottle glass, lay about on the carpets. The night before the Grand Duke had been exercising himself by throwing bottles at his own reflection in the mirrors. This was not a mere display of senseless waste. It had occurred to H.I.H. that a bottle is a capital weapon in a restaurant, in case you should be approached by an assassin, or by any other troublesome person. And this idea happening to occur to him when he was sitting in the little room which contained a great number of old wall mirrors, it had at once occurred to him that he had better practise this means of self-defence. Indeed, he took great credit to himself that he had only flung one full bottle at a looking-glass. He had sent to the cellar of the hotel for several dozen empty ones. He said that nobody, after that, could call him wasteful. Nevertheless, the old glasses which had reflected the features of Marie Antoinette and of how many other fallen royalties would certainly never The Duke, who was distinguished for the enormous strength of his hands, with a single effort tore the yellow volume in half. H.I.H. was wearing a bathing wrap of pink Chinese silk embroidered all over with great dragons. It came down right to his feet, and added to his tall, stout figure an air of exaggerated voluminousness. The gipsy, who regarded this royal personage as a constant farcical entertainment, had come into the room and was leaning against the door-post, grinning negligently, with her legs crossed.

“That I will do to you, wild cat,” the Grand Duke said; “one of these days I will break you in half like this book.”

One half of the torn volume he threw on to the floor, and the other at the head of the gipsy. She bent down — and indeed she was like a wild cat — and, picking up a handful of the scattered leaves, she flung them back at the Grand Duke so that the white squares fluttered all over his bald head. Then she ran away in the next room, screaming with laughter. A soft odour of aromatic herbs spread slowly into the room from the vapour bath. The Duke yawned enormously.

“I have had a terrible day. I have taken six baths this afternoon. It is the only place where I could think myself safe.”

Sergius Mihailovitch said: “Imperial Highness?” interrogatively.

“Yes, my friend,” the Duke repeated, “safe! I am afraid for my life. All day I’ve been afraid — of your wife.”

Macdonald laughed.

But what a terrible woman!” the Duke exclaimed.

“What an overwhelming woman! She is camped in my drawing-room. She has got a terrible book that she insists on reading to me. It is incomprehensible; it is maddening.

I never knew such books existed! I never knew such women existed! My good friend, Sergius Mihailovitch, you deserve Siberia because you did not strangle that woman on your wedding night.”

Macdonald said gaily: “That book is by a great English poet and moralist. It would immensely improve Imperial Highness’s morals to let Madame la Comtesse expound it to Imperial Highness. Let me tell Imperial Highness something about William Morris, the English poet and moralist who wrote that book which no one was ever able to read — except when they were reading it to someone who was driven mad with terror at the thought of hearing it.” The Grand Duke said: “Seriously, my friend, I do not believe you are safe with that woman. For God’s sake, for my sake, since I do not want to lose your services, have her locked up. I tell you she will bore you to death! I tell you she will bore me to death!... And she makes eyes at me. But eyes! I am frightened out of my life! My good friend, supposing she should transfer her ardent affections from you to me! How horrible that would be! But what a blessing for you! Horrible! Besides, it is hardly creditable to you in the capacity of husband. Get rid of her, Sergius Mihailovitch, my good fellow!” Sergius Mihailovitch drew himself up to his full height and clicked his heels together.

“Imperial Highness will of course expect,” he said, “that after such an insult offered to the lady who shares my name, I shall at once hand in to your Highness my demission.”

The Duke looked at him with a face of incredulous panic. “But Sergius Mihailovitch!” he spluttered, “but my good fellow—”

“I desire,” Macdonald said, “to leave Wiesbaden tomorrow.”

“But that’s impossible, my friend,” the Duke said. “To-morrow,” Sergius Mihailovitch repeated.

“But, you ass,” the Duke expostulated,
“
I have said nothing but the truth about the Countess! Death to my life, do we not all know how you suffer under this infliction? I tell you I am your friend, Sergius Mihailovitch. I will get my nephew to issue a special ukase divorcing you from this creature.”

“Imperial Highness!” Macdonald answered, “it is imperative that I should go to England to-morrow—”

“Now, what woman is this after?” the Grand Duke said.

Sergius Mihailovitch reflected for the fifth of a second that the chief of the Fourth Service had seen him in the train with Lady Aldington.

“I don’t want in the least to deny,” he said, “that a woman has something to do with it. It is Lady Aldington, as I.H. will of course hear to-night from I.H.’s information officers.”

The Grand Duke said: “This Lady Aldington who prevented you from getting gossip of Madame Sassanoff? I have seen her. She is a beautiful woman. I felicitate you, my good friend. But is it necessary that you should leave my service? Reflect a little. You are young and precipitate.”