Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (463 page)

“No, I can’t do it,” she said. “I would have given my life to dine at the Ritz and to have spoken to Miss Flossie Coward. I have seen her face on a hundred thousand postcards, and she rides about in a motor car with a real king.”

“Oh, well,” Macdonald said, “you needn’t bother if you aren’t strictly respectable. No one is, you know; and you won’t be asked any questions at the door.”

Her lips quivered — large and red, they really quivered. “But I can’t go home to-night,” she said, “without taking
£2.
They will turn me into the streets if I don’t.”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you,” Macdonald asked, “that I might possibly give you
£2
?”

“No,” she answered. “I don’t think you would have thought of it. You are too respectful. Respectful gentlemen never think of giving one money.”

“Well, there is something in that;” and he lifted his finger to stop a taxi-cab.

“Come along,” he said, “get in;” and reluctantly she yielded to the temptation.

In the dark recesses of the cab, with its slight odour of petrol, she said with an accent of fear:

“But you haven’t promised to give me anything.”

“Oh, that’s understood,” Macdonald answered. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you throw the peach at the head waiter I’ll give you a five-pound note, and if you pour the champagne over the King’s head artistically I’ll give you another five-pound note. And if the whole row is really brilliant, you shall have a third.”

Suddenly she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him.

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’’ she exclaimed.” With three hundred marks I shall be able to get back to Hamburg again. Oh, I want to get back to Hamburg!”

Her kisses were fresh and agreeable, but Macdonald pushed her gently off him.

“My dear child,” he said, “you really shouldn’t disarrange one’s hair. A man doesn’t like having his hair disarranged before dinner, and as I’ve got to be a corrupter of kingly youth and innocence I had taken a great deal of trouble to make my hair smooth to-night. If you don’t do it again I’ll promise you this. Make this evening a real success of scandal, and I’ll pack you off to Hamburg and give you a nice little sum to go on with when you get there.”

“I’ll scream like seven tigresses if you want it,” she said; and then she added: “But if you’re always so generous to me, perhaps I shan’t want to go back to Hamburg at all.”

“That is as it chances,” Macdonald said. “I dare say I can find a use for you. But we
shall
be a queer crowd of adventurers,” he added.

CHAPTER
V

THE young King was playing spillikins with such industry and attention that he did not notice when Macdonald and the young lady were brought up to his table through the crowd of diners. In the brilliant diffused light of the great hall he sat bending forward over the large pile of wooden toothpicks that he had emptied on to the tablecloth — a rather dark, sulky- looking boy of eighteen, with no back to his head, a high nose, and an immense lower jaw. Miss Flossie Coward, a brunette with an oval face and small white teeth, which she showed all the time in a fixed and rather painful smile — Miss Coward had taught the King this game to keep him in a good temper whilst they waited for Macdonald. She had also lent him a hairpin, with which he was engaged in removing the toothpicks one from above the other. The King’s head was bent very much on one side and his jaw hung down, his tongue following the motions of the point of his hairpin. Miss Coward thought he was the most thoroughly disagreeable boy she had ever come across, and he exceedingly disliked Miss Coward, for she had no conversation and could do nothing in the world but smile. From other tables they were being regarded by the Duchess of Richmond and Mr. Williams of Waterbury, Va.; by the president of the Royal Academy, who had with him the French Minister of Fine Arts and a party; and by the reporter of the
Daily Herald,
to whom Macdonald had contrived to have it conveyed that something piquant was certain to happen in the Long Room that evening. Miss Coward said to the King:

“This must be Count Macdonald and his friend.”

But the King only frowned and bent his head lower down over the toothpicks, and when the lady touched his shoulder he nudged her energetically with his elbow and grunted violently.

Macdonald sat down opposite this royal personage and placed his companion in face of Miss Coward. The King, looking up, said sharply to the head waiter:

“Don’t you put anything on the table until I’ve finished my game.”

The two young ladies began immediately to talk as if they had known each other all their lives. It appeared that Miss Elsa di Pradella had been an actress in Hamburg. There did not appear to be any light part that she had not played, though her age was seventeen. She had played soubrettes, principal boys; she had danced in a
pas de quatre;
she could even, she declared in broken English, do the splits. This Miss Coward found it difficult to believe, for Miss Coward had never done anything but skip about languidly in what is known as musical comedy. Miss di Pradella, however, explained how you were taught to do the splits. You stood upon two chairs, and they were gradually drawn apart... The King continued engrossed with his toothpicks. Behind him stood the head waiter bearing a tray. The shaded lights shone down, the conversation went up in a steady humming buzz from all the many tables. In the distance a soft band was playing somewhere, and, seeing that his three young people were all enjoying themselves, Macdonald permitted himself to slip into a reverie.

There were all these pleasant sights, there were all these pleasant sounds, the light was pleasanter than the light of the sun itself; and Sergius Mihailovitch’s idea of heaven was of a place where there was light, and always more light, diffused and warm. It was a scene of innumerable delicate contacts, of innumerable and delicate sympathies. He couldn’t accuse himself of any longing for mere comfort. What he was after was more than anything a sort of asceticism — an asceticism of sheer efficiency. There were places where you could eat more and possibly eat better; there were places where you could find better wines, talk louder, lounge with more abandon, or unbutton to any extent. But that certainly was not what he was looking for.

He was forced to regard himself — if he was to regard himself as anything at all — as something of a crusader in life. After all, he was trying to key things up — to key up the whole world. He was setting out upon a desperate adventure. He was trying not so much to put back the hands of the clock as to retain for the world something that the world already possessed. It wasn’t the mere setting up again in a ridiculous little republic of a ridiculous little monarchy; it was a question of proving to the world that certain things were good, and that there was enough to go round.

For himself, he knew perfectly well that it was a question of his own private predilections; but behind him he had Mr. Pett, who was the prophet of a democracy that would build itself up and not pull other persons down. Mr. Pett said that this was economically possible, and Sergius Mihailovitch was ready to take Mr. Pett on trust for the economic side of things.

Mr. Pett, as the basis of his political economy, held to the fact that this was the age of machines. All previous democratic theorists had taken, as it were, for the basis of their republics the figure of the single-hand worker. All states in the past were supposed to be run for the benefit of some hypothetic man wielding some quite definite implement — a spade, a hoe, or the pickaxe. This individual was, as it were, the unit of coinage of all the former state currencies.

But Mr. Pett pointed out that, in the age in which we lived, such an individual could no longer be regarded as a proper unit. It was and it would remain a machine age. The man who still worked with an implement was either an incapable survival or a man so skilled above the common as to be an artist. To all intents and purposes the spade was as much an artist’s tool nowadays as was the brush. You would no longer dig a field; nowhere, save in the most backward of agricultural communities, would you even use a horse-plough to a field. No, you used an immense machine that could turn over a hundred acres in the day. The spade, then, remained the tool of the most difficult feats of the gardener, or of the market gardener. But the cultivation of the earth in its broadness was given over to the skilled mechanic — to the man who could drive, tend, repair, and understand these immense machines. So it was with hoeing, with weaving, with mining, with the making of bricks, the baking of bread, the milking of cows. And the odd thing was, according to Mr. Pett, that though everyone knew that these things were so, there was no one who had yet taken into account how immensely these things had altered the aspect of the social problem.

It was as antiquated to legislate for the single sweated worker as it would be to estimate your naval expenditure upon the lines of the three-deckers of Nelson’s date. No, what we had to do was to go in for a social policy that disregarded expenditure altogether, and disregarded altogether the vicissitudes of the individual. It wasn’t any longer the statesman’s business to take into account a picturesque and idealised blacksmith with his brawny arms, his sleeves rolled up, resting an immense hammer upon a small anvil. The blacksmith had altogether disappeared by now. You couldn’t tell with certainty where to go to find him lingering. What, then, was the use of considering him, even in your most Utopian dreams? It was like trying to make the ichthyosaurus happy. What you had to do, according to Mr. Pett, was to solidify the happiness of those who were already happy, and little by little to bring all the rest into line. As Sergius Mihailovitch and as Mr. Pett could remember, in their boyhoods the mere possession of a watch by a boy, even of the wealthiest classes, was sufficient to mark him off from, to let him appear amongst all his brother schoolboys, as an exception — as an aristocrat. Now there was no schoolboy who did not possess a watch. And that was the work of machines. And again and again Mr. Pett had returned to the charge. It wasn’t our business to pull down, but to level up.

Macdonald himself was contentedly aware that his own views were less extended than this. What he saw was the pleasantnesses, and these he desired to maintain. He desired to maintain them simply because they were pleasant to him to contemplate, just as the paintings of Rembrandt were pleasant or the music of Delibes. It wasn’t that he desired great possessions, but that it was comfortable to him to be in a world where great possessions existed here and there. It wasn’t that he had any personal ambitions, but that he liked to think that greatness was a possibility. It wasn’t that he desired the society of the fine, the noble or the cultivated, for of his own will he was setting out upon a long venture in the close society of an egregious American, an obvious prostitute, a disagreeable and foolish king, a foolish chauffeur, an unwashed Galizian, and a semi-imbecile actress. They were an odd band to stand for any ideal or for any high adventure. But Macdonald knew enough of the world, of history, and of the fate of kings and peoples to know that they were about on a level with the figures of most idealistic movements. They were probably not a bit the better or a bit the worse than the supporters of Joan of Arc, of Robespierre, of Washington, of Garibaldi, of Napoleon III. or of Bismarck, just as they were not a bit worse than the supporters of Orsini the conspirator, or Cauchon who burnt the Maid of Orleans, of Benedict Arnold the traitor, of Walker the filibuster, or of all the innumerable spies, unknown traitors, or forgotten idealists whose one crime was their unsuccess. He didn’t want more capable associates, he did not ask for larger resources, he considered that fate would undo him if he had all the battle-ships of an empire at his back. Fate could undo him by some little thing — by something as little as the malignancy of his wife or the breaking of a piston-rod. In the end, the only thing was the fineness of the adventure, the spirit in which the task was undertaken.

He was aware that Miss di Pradella, who had been laughing with Miss Coward, had risen from his side. She had leaned her parasol against the table; it had fallen to the ground, and true to her prophecy, a waiter had sprung to retrieve it. She was standing in the space between the tables, looking rather flower-like in her pink dress, and laughing without any self-consciousness at all, at Miss Coward. Sergius Mihailovitch had not the least idea of what was going on. Suddenly she lifted her skirts just above her ankles and slowly she subsided until she appeared to have sunk into the red velvet of the carpet.

There was a buzz of laughter, of applause, of reprehension. Miss di Pradella looked up at Miss Coward’s face with an expression of laughter and of childish triumph. She was “doing the splits,” victoriously and with a splendid unconsciousness of the place she was in.

Half a dozen men stood up in their places to look at her, the head waiter had an uncertain air. One of her feet had pushed against the table-leg, utterly upsetting the King’s pile of toothpicks. He swore with a sudden passion, and then, looking down at the smiling girl, exclaimed animatedly: “I say! How perfectly ripping! How does she manage to do it?”

And immediately he became quite animated.

The head waiter gingerly assisted the girl to rise, and she came back laughing and smiling to Macdonald’s side. “I hope I have done you credit,” she said.

“You couldn’t have done anything better,” Macdonald answered. “You’re worth your weight in gold. I think I can let you off throwing the peach at the waiter and pouring the champagne over the King’s head. You’ve been infinitely more artistic.”

“Oh, but you’ll give me the fifteen pounds?” Miss di Pradella said, with a sudden dismay.

“I should rather like her to pour the champagne over my head,” the King exclaimed, “I should think it would be jolly ripping.”

“Oh, you can all do exactly as you like,” Macdonald said. “And you can all have as much money as you want. The evening is quite a success.”

For Macdonald had observed that the reporter of the
Daily Herald
had snapshotted Miss di Pradella upon the ground and the King with his toothpicks.

But if it never came to throwing peaches, the King and the young lady were throwing pieces of bread at each other across the table, and even Miss Coward was so moved by the gaiety of the occasion that she imitated, in her best musical comedy manner, the crowing of a cock. This was her only accomplishment.

They finished up the evening in a box at the Empire, where there were already Mr. Edward U. Dexter and the Marquis da Pinta. Macdonald was a little tired with his long journey, and the American annoyed him intensely. Moreover, Da Pinta, if he hadn’t anything at all to say, annoyed him almost as much. The Galizian was too extravagantly dirty, and an old diplomatic uniform that he had put on because he was going to be in attendance upon the King was altogether too shabby to be bearable. It gave Da Pinta the air of being a forlornly dilapidated waiter at a German railway restaurant. It was, however, Mr. Dexter who was really trying. He was normally a loquacious man, but his first contact with a real king turned him into a positive geyser of moral conversation. He was a tall, fresh-coloured man, with silver-grey hair, and an exceedingly healthy complexion. He was, of course, an Anglo-maniac, and because he was going to be in attendance upon a king, he had put on a Windsor uniform. And because he desired to be as English as possible he had grown slight, grey side-whiskers, like those of a barrister. Thus, with his blue swallow-tailed coat, his white waistcoat, from which there depended an enormous fob chain with many seals, Mr. Dexter presented in a singular degree the aspect of a John Bull, so that Sergius Mihailovitch could not have said whether he resembled a music-hall singer or a walking advertisement for somebody’s coaching tours. His voice had not so much the American accent as the American quality of highness, persistence, and monotony. It went on and on and on, and at every fifth word Mr. Dexter said: “Your Majesty.”