Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (460 page)

The train had almost stopped; the blue-shaven face and the black eyebrows of Lady Aldington’s footman appeared in the doorway of the compartment.

“
We’re running into Rudesheim, my lord,” he said.

“If you think,” the Countess said in her clear level tones, “that I intend to force my society on you when you are hankering after another woman, you are entirely mistaken. There was a time when I used to think you were a fine man and had a noble character. Sometimes I think now that you only boast of these debaucheries and talk of these women in order to impress me. But if you think that you are entirely mistaken. All they make me do is to wish to have done with you for good.”

The footman repeated expressionlessly that they were running into Rudesheim. Macdonald was sitting huddled up in his seat. He had no colour at all in his lips. The footman stood with his face like a wooden mask, as if he were correctly waiting at a table where private matters were being discussed. Upon Macdonald himself his wife’s tongue, her mannerisms, the flow of her voice, acted with an enervating physical effect. It seemed at the same time to stop his heart, to set an immense weight upon his skull as if for many nights he had been deprived of sleep, and to render his limbs numb and heavy. At the moment he could not have trusted himself to raise a hand.

“You think,” his wife’s voice droned on, “that you have deceived me about this woman. Do you suppose that I have not any eyes in my head? Do you suppose that if it had not been for her you would ever have had the courage to tell me that you wanted to separate? Do you suppose that I do not know the shilly-shallying creature that you are? Do you suppose that I did not see your eyes fall upon her just now? Do you suppose that I did not know at once? What do you men suppose we women are made of? You will tell me that you have only seen her three times, and that you have told me how you travelled with her in the train? You will say that you have been strictly truthful, and that I ought to have been deceived? I dare say you will tell me that you never so much as wanted to kiss the doll of a creature that it is. And I dare say it is true enough. That is the sort of effeminate creature that you are, and you will call it chivalry or honour. But you cannot take me in: you want to get rid of me because of that woman. That is what has given you courage. You would call it strength...
 
Yes, I can see that this servant hears. And why not? Sooner or later you have to let corrupt creatures like that into your secrets. They have to do the fetching and carrying of your mean lives. So why not sooner instead of later?”

The train had come to a standstill.

“This is Rudesheim, my lord,” the footman said. “Lunch will be served in five minutes.”

The Countess rose, rigid and precise.

“Tell your mistress we are coming immediately,” she said; and as the footman disappeared she turned again upon her husband. “I am going to see what sort of a creature has supplanted me,” she said. “Did you think I had not the courage? And as you have said you wanted it, so let it be. We will take separate cabs at Charing Cross, I never want to see your imbecile face again. I never want to hear your imbecile voice speaking to me again. You can write me a formal letter to make business arrangements again, and that will be the end.” She trailed between the seats towards the door. Then she stopped to say: “You need not be in that state of idiotic fear. I am not going to make that woman a scene. I can remember that I am a lady. Besides, I have done with you. You are free. But I reserve to myself the right of curiosity. I want to understand what sort of painted fool it is that has taken a useless creature like you to her heart. Or perhaps she has not even taken you to her heart? I don’t ask.”

She turned once more, and then once again seemed to hang over Macdonald, and her eyes were full of large tears; “What does it all mean?” she asked pitifully. “Why have these creatures such power? They use all sorts of aids to beauty that any eye can see through. They are idle; they are frivolous; they have not an idea in their heads. What are they compared to a woman like me? What do you see in them? How do they attract you? It’s a mystery; it’s all a mystery.” She twisted her black- gloved hands painfully, and then suddenly she added: “But if you think I want to keep you, you are mightily mistaken. We have spoken our last word. I have done with you, for I despise you. You have broken my faith in man. You have broken my heart. This is my last word.” And with her head erect, her silhouette marched down the corridor of the train in the direction that the footman had taken.

CHAPTER II
I

THE train being very late, it was a quarter-past six before they all reached Charing Cross. There was a great crowd and many cries, but Macdonald saw his wife into one cab and promised to send her things after her by another, as soon as they were through the Customs. She did not speak a word to him; she didn’t even look at him; but gloomily and rather angularly she seemed to fall back into the hansom and to be wheeled out of sight.

Macdonald felt in all his limbs an impression of lightness. The weight of years seemed for the minute to fall away from him; but he had too many things to attend to. He saw Lady Aldington going away up the platform; Mr. Pett was shouting in his ear; a porter was asking him for his keys, and appeared to be beseeching him with a quite disproportionate anxiety not to go away from the barrier. And even when Macdonald was in his cab it was difficult to find Little Walden Street, all he knew of it being that it was a cul-de-sac approximately behind the Post Office in Regent Street. So that, really, he had not thought at all by the time they drew up in a stony place with square buildings of liver-coloured brick encasing grimly an ugly court. Upon the asphalt were from three to four motor cars standing, like monsters of the slime age, before the open and silent doors of the ugly garages.

A man in a peaked cap, with rubber overalls, approached Sergius Mihailovitch in the fading light. He had a quiet and grating voice, so that Macdonald considered that they could not be heard by the cabman on his high box.

“I’d almost given your lordship up,” he said. “I’m His Majesty’s..

“Oh, say Mr. Spenlow’s chauffeur.”

The chauffeur said: “How, my lord?”

“Well, help me in with my things,” Macdonald said.

“In here?” the chauffeur asked incredulously.

“If it’s the office of the Resiliens Company,” Macdonald answered.

The chauffeur got Macdonald’s two portmanteaux down from the hansom, and with an expert air dragged them over the pavement and into the dim doorway of the show-room. Macdonald looked round him in a pause of reflection. The show-room was dusky in the waning light, for no reflections of afterglow came from the brown, tall buildings outside, and in this dusk a double procession of motor cars seemed to mount backwards into the positive darkness of the rear, two and two with a sort of aisle between, in the middle of which stood Macdonald and his companion with the baggage at their feet.

“Now, what hotel shall I drive your lordship to?” the chauffeur asked. “You’ve not overmuch time to dress in. His Majesty expects us at eight.”

“I can’t be there till nine,” Macdonald replied. “You had better telephone to him. What’s your name?”

“My name’s Salt,” the chauffeur answered.

“Oh, you’re the man he can’t get on without?”

“If your lordship means that His Majesty has told me what the plan is, I am,” the man answered. He was small, lean, querulous, and rather dark in aspect.

“And don’t you think His Majesty is a damned fool?” Macdonald asked.

“For telling me?” the man asked in turn. He reflected for a moment. “Yes, I do,” he said. “He isn’t going to lose by it, as it happens. But he might. He’s a fool for that.”

“It’s satisfactory to learn that he isn’t going to lose by it,” Macdonald answered.

“Of course, I’m not going to say that I would lay down my life for the King,” the chauffeur began again. “But I’ve recognised that politically as well as practically what I stand for is the same as what he stands for.”

“Well, that’s satisfactory, too,” Macdonald commented. “You aren’t asked to lay down your life. You aren’t asked to do any more than your duty, and to hold your tongue about it when it’s done.”

“Of course, I’m always ready to oblige as between man and man as long as it’s not anything below my place that I’m asked to do. Not that I ever do get asked to do anything that’s below.”

“You wouldn’t be,” Macdonald answered. “We’re all of us afraid of our chauffeurs. You’re a priestly caste. You observed that I did not ask you to take my things out of the cab, but to help me with them. You pulled the portmanteaux, and I carried my kitbags and the wraps.”

“I did not particularly notice it,” Mr. Salt said. “It’s so much the usual thing.”

Macdonald sat down on the step of one of the cars. “Let us settle one or two things,” he said. “I suppose if all goes well we shall see a good deal of each other just because the King has told you things.”

He added, “I wish he had not, but he has.”

“You won’t lose by it,” Mr. Salt reassured him.

“I don’t suppose that we shall,” Macdonald replied. “But it makes you more difficult to keep in your place. All you are asked to do is to drive cars.”

“A first-rate mechanic has not any place, you know,” Mr. Salt reminded him. “He’s always just where he stands. By birth I’m as good as Nelson. His father was a clergyman; mine’s a Methodist minister. At present I’m the King of Galizia’s tutor.”

“In fact, you’re just the sort of chap it’s the most difficult to keep in his place,” Macdonald said. “The sort of metallic man that Cromwell turned into an Ironside.”

“Ah,” Mr. Salt answered. “But reading the works of Mr. Pett and hearing him talk has made me see that I stand by the King. The skilled mechanic — and you said we were a caste yourself — he has not any place in a levelled- down democracy. It’s taken hundreds of centuries to develop us, and we should be sacrificed to unskilled labour if modem tendencies went on. But we run the world. You can’t get away from the fact that we run the world. And we aren’t going to be levelled down. We’re a privileged class, and it’s the duty of the privileged classes to stand together. That’s what Mr. Shaw does not see.”

“Mr. Who?” Macdonald asked.

“Shaw,” the chauffeur repeated; “G.B.S., him who used to write the musical criticisms for the
Star,
and now writes smartish plays. I’m not saying anything against his plays, but about his power of thinking. Take ‘Enery Straker! I don’t mind admitting that I’ve modelled myself on ‘Enery Straker. Such as you see me, he has had a great influence on my manners. But not on my career or my political ideas. Oh no! I’m not one of your flannel- nightgowned woolly Fabians. Money’s been spent on me by way of training. I’m a vested interest as I stand here. Just as much as you are, I am. That’s what Mr. Shaw didn’t foresee. You may try to set up a democracy by education, but the moment you make a trained class you make a privileged one that’s interested in maintaining Society as it is. Take doctors, take priests, take attorneys — they all rise from the same class as myself; but you can’t find a more Conservative or reactionary lot if you look for them with a ninety-Diogenes power headlight from now till Michaelmas.”

Macdonald nodded absent-mindedly, uttering with a sort of mechanical politeness the words: “That’s good; that’s good.”

The chauffeur went on to say that the world had been run a great deal too long for the benefit of the weak and the unfit. That was the wrong reading of democracy. A man had to make his place, and his place was where he made it; and he was not — when he was the produce of the development of thousands of years — to be levelled out of it because of the divine right of some incapable members of the lower classes, the powerless classes, who hadn’t any more right than that of having been born to incompetent fathers by incapable mothers. It wasn’t, in Mr. Salt’s opinion, because you just happened to have come into the world whining and by keeping up the whining that you acquired any rights except to a lethal chamber. We all whined when we came into the world, and the privilege was the property of the man who stopped whining, not of the one who went on till his miserable dying day. That was how he looked at it, thanks very largely to the writing of Mr. Pett in the
Daily Herald.
They had been hoodwinked too long by people who made themselves powerful by exploiting the whines of the useless in a picturesque way. But they had had to come down to solid facts, and as far as he was concerned anything that even looked like reaction was going to have his sympathy and his support as long as it did not interfere with the rights of skilled mechanics.

Macdonald, who had been listening vaguely, pulled himself together to say:

“Oh, you see for yourself how little chance there is of anyone’s being able to do that.” And then he asked: “There are two rooms here? I suppose there is not such a thing as a bed in them?”

Mr. Salt shook his head.

“There’s a table and some office furniture in one,” he said. “That’s above ground. The other’s in the basement on the level of the mews behind. But there’s nothing in it but some straw.”

“Well, let’s look at the room with the straw,” Macdonald said. “I rather think that is going to be the theatre of my dreams to-night. That’s a Russian way of saying that it’s where I shall sleep.”

“Your lordship likes your joke,” the chauffeur said. “No, I’m an idealist,” Macdonald said. “That is going to be a symbol. We begin the regeneration of the world from some straw in a room on the level of the mews.”

“If your lordship is going to have time to get to your hotel!...” the chauffeur exclaimed.

“I can’t afford hotels,” Macdonald answered, “or, if I can to-day, the dark forest of the future alone knows whether I shall be able to the day after to-morrow.”

“I don’t understand your lordship,” Mr. Salt said.

“Of course you don’t,” Macdonald answered. “If you did you would be leading this movement, not I. You’ve got one gift. You’re the best chauffeur in Europe, so they say. But, you know, I can drive a car almost as well as you can. And I can say things that you cannot understand. That’s why I am the leader.”

“I could say things you couldn’t understand,” the chauffeur muttered.

Macdonald stood up. “Oh no, you couldn’t,” he answered. “Try.”

The chauffeur stood puzzled for a moment.

“I could if the things would come into my head,” he ejaculated.

“But they never do and they never will,” Macdonald laughed at him. “You’re an aristocrat with only one gift. I’m an idealist with fifty.” He picked up his kitbags and said: “Come along.”

The shadows of the back of the show-room swallowed them up.

There were no shadows about the room in the basement on a level with the mews behind. A single drop of electric light at the end of a wire lit it up. The walls were the bare plaster; on the boards were a few straws from departed packing cases.

“Your lordship can’t sleep here,” the chauffeur said in a tone between triumph and shockedness. Macdonald dropped his kitbags on to the ground. He stood smiling round upon the room and soothing Mr. Salt with little motions of his hands.

“Don’t interrupt a general in his meditations on the battlefield,” he said. “I shall have to fight with devils here.”

“It’s not my idea of comfort,” the chauffeur grumbled between his teeth.

“It wouldn’t be,” Macdonald answered gaily.

“It’s not fitting; it’s not proper,” Mr. Salt protested; “it’s not even sanitary. There’s sure to be a smell from the mews.”

“Now,” Macdonald said, “can you get me a bed? Buy one at a shop and bring it here on your car?”

“The shops are all shut at this time of night,” the chauffeur still grumbled.

“Now, my good chap,” Macdonald said, “if you think you are going to make me do what you think is fitting and proper by being disobliging, I shall kick you through the door and there’s an end of you. And, as you are dying of curiosity, that isn’t what I want to do.”

“How do you know I’m dying of curiosity?” the chauffeur grumbled.

“It’s my business to know men,” Macdonald said.

“And when you speak to me, call me Your Excellency. That’s my title. And when you speak of the King, call him Mr. Spenlow. Now oblige me by going into the mews and asking for two bundles of straw — to make my bed.”