Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (480 page)

“Oh, he’s a silly fool!” the Countess conceded.’ I’ll admit that he’s a fool whenever being a fool can do mischief, but it’s his fate to work mischief one way or the other.”

But at last Miss Dexter got the Countess down to a sort of a wager. She staked her intelligence upon the point that, if the legal aspect of the case could be put to Sergius Mihailovitch, Sergius Mihailovitch would perfectly readily agree to let the Countess have her divorce. And that really started in the Countess a new train of thought. It made her, moreover, exceedingly eager to get the matter settled that very night. For if that could be done before morning she would be able to tell Mr. Buss that she had settled the matter without his aid. She wanted to be able to snap her fingers in Mr. Buss’s face.

“It’s very odd to me,” Miss Dexter said, “that you don’t seem to hate Mr. Buss. He was real rude to you. Real, downright rude! And you don’t seem to mind it a bit.”

“No, I don’t mind it a bit,” the Countess answered. “That’s how I like a man to treat me; if he’s right he is right, or if I can dish him, as he called it, I’ll dish him. But there aren’t any maudlin frills about him. He speaks to me as if I were a man, and I speak to him back as if I were a man, and that’s what I want.”

“Then there’s no wonder,” Miss Dexter sighed, “that you can’t get on with any one as perfectly lovely as Sergius Mihailovitch.”

“No, I’ve no use for that sort of fool,” the Countess answered.

And having got her mind set upon it, she whirled Miss Dexter right up to the door of Macdonald’s lodgings in the mews. She made Miss Dexter knock, and then withdrew into the shadows of the passage.

“But ain’t you coming with me?” Mamie exclaimed helplessly.

“Certainly not,” the Countess answered. “Do you suppose that I would soil myself by entering those polluted doors?”

“But shan’t I be soiled too?” Miss Dexter answered.

“You!” the receding Countess called, contemptuously. “Do you suppose that any man would be suspected of so much as looking at you?”

It was in this way that Macdonald had both Miss Dexter and Miss di Pradella on his hands in the garage at Little Walden Street. But Miss di Pradella did not occupy his time all along. He had to take her out into Regent Street and find her a cab. When he came back he found that Miss Dexter had retired into his room downstairs.

“Couldn’t you,” he asked, “have stopped in the garage? It would have been much more respectable.”

“No, I couldn’t,” she answered. She shivered. “I couldn’t stand all those automobiles in that dim light. They seemed to be watching me like dragons — like wet monsters.”

Macdonald sighed. “Well, what’s it all about?” he said.

“It’s just this,” she answered. “The Countess thinks that you aren’t going to let her divorce you.”

“Now, see here,” Macdonald said. “This isn’t at all the proper sort of talk for a girl like you. How old are you? Nineteen.... I never like to talk about Her Excellency, and I never like to blame her, but I think it’s the most outrageous and disgusting thing that I’ve ever heard of a woman doing for a young girl in her charge.”

“Oh, what’s the use of talking like that?” Miss Dexter wailed. “Are you going to let the Countess divorce you or aren’t you?”

“Of course I am,” Macdonald said. “I’ve told those fools that I’ll let them do anything they want. All this is infamous! It’s execrable!”

A profound misery had indeed descended upon Macdonald — a blackness of despair such as had been familiar to him in the days of unbridled repression after the failure of the Russian revolution. He didn’t feel able to think; he didn’t feel able to move. He just sat in a chair with his hands hanging beside him.

“In the name of God,” he said, “what have I done to get mixed up in this sort of loathsome business?”

Miss Dexter was sitting on the bed facing him. “Oh, don’t!” she exclaimed. “I believe you’re going to cry.”

Macdonald looked desolately at her. “I wish I could,” he said. And then he added, “I see you’ve got your glasses. Do they do you any good?”

“Oh, it’s heaven!” Miss Dexter exclaimed. “It’s just heaven! I haven’t had one of my headaches since the day I put them on. And if ever I bless you for anything, it is for making me go to that old oculist.”

“Well, you certainly look much better,” Macdonald said absently. “You’re putting on flesh... But be off now; you can’t keep the Countess waiting.”

Miss Dexter said, with a sudden touch of vindictiveness, “I don’t care if I keep the Countess waiting all night or six weeks!” And then suddenly she broke down and began to wail out: “Oh, do say that you’ll let the Countess have her divorce! Do say that you’ll let the Countess have her divorce! I said you would if the divorce law could be explained to you, but I can’t explain it to you. I only know that if you sign that deed she can’t get her divorce, and oh, I pledged my word that you aren’t that sort of man. Don’t give me the go-by. Don’t do a thing like that. I don’t know what it’s all about, and I’m very tired. But if you don’t do what’s wanted she can’t remarry, and then you can’t marry Lady Aldington.”

Macdonald was too tired to pay much attention. “What’s all that?” he said.

“I said you won’t be able to marry Lady Aldington,” the girl answered.

Macdonald suddenly stood up. “Look here,” he said, “that’s the second time that you’ve said that to me. I am quite ready to believe that you’re innocent, but you haven’t the right to say that sort of scandalous nonsense to my face.”

“But Lady Aldington is divorcing her husband so as to be able to marry you,” Miss Dexter wailed.

Macdonald said harshly: “Who told you that nonsense? It is absolute nonsense! It was the Countess who told you that. Don’t you understand that that woman’s mad about that sort of thing? Can’t you understand that?”

Miss Dexter looked at him tremulously and solemnly through her glasses.

“Do you mean it?” she said. “Do you honourably and honestly mean it? Isn’t there anything at all between you and Lady Aldington?”

“My dear child!” Macdonald said. “There’s nothing! Absolutely nothing! I’d as soon think of marrying you as of marrying her.”

Miss Dexter’s lips parted, but no sound came from them.

“Look here,” Macdonald said again, “it’s scandalous to have to talk to you about this sort of thing, but if you’ve got to have this sort of thing talked about, it’s as well that you should understand that it’s a decent world and not the loathsome sort of place that you’ve been made to think it. Listen to me! There’s nothing whatever between me and Emily Aldington. I admire her immensely; I don’t admire anyone else in the world as I admire her. But I never had the least idea of marrying her. I might say that you’ve put the idea into my head, and that would be absolute truth. Of course, if she could divorce her husband — it’s nonsense to talk about it, for she never could and she never will — but if she did, and if the Countess divorced me, I would marry Emily; but it’s the absolute truth that I’d as soon have thought of marrying you as of marrying her. I haven’t thought about these things at all. Don’t you understand that I’m a busy man, with a great deal to do in the world? I haven’t time to think about this sort of thing, I never do; all my thoughts are taken up. If I wanted to analyze my feelings I should say that I felt that it was pleasant to be going along beside Emily Aldington as a stream might flow along the level grass of meadows. That’s a Russian way of putting it; it’s too flowery for England. But I’m a Russian, you know, and I feel a great deal more than I think, and that’s how I feel.”

Miss Dexter looked at him piercingly.

“It’s true that you never thought of marrying her?” she said; “and it’s true that you’d have just as soon have thought of marrying me?”

“Oh, of course I’d have thought about that much sooner,” Macdonald said kindly. “Because of course she’s got a husband and you haven’t.”

“And I’ve put it into your head about marrying her?” the girl said slowly. “And it will never go out of your head again?”

“Well, I don’t suppose it will,” Macdonald said. “Once a concrete idea is born in the head of us Russians, you know, it never dies out, just because concrete ideas are so rare with us. I dare say I shall think about marrying Lady Aldington for the rest of my life. Of course, it will have to be for the rest of my life, because it’s all nonsense about her divorcing her husband. That’s just the Countess’s jealousy. But now, run along. I hope your mind’s at rest.”

“I’ve put it into your head!” Miss Dexter repeated.

“Well, you’ve certainly done that,” Macdonald said cheerfully.

The girl suddenly pitched forward right off the bed, her face striking the floor, which was very hard, because underneath the carpet it was of concrete. Macdonald simply didn’t know what had happened. It was as if one of the windows had fallen out. And then, having in his eyes the disagreeable feeling of the colour of her face as she lay quite still, rather grey and rather blue, he rushed out into the mews, calling at the top of his voice:

“Margaret, Margaret!”

The Countess answered him from the shadows of the passage. She wanted to know with cold disdain what was the matter. He ran at her and gripped her wrist.

“That girl’s fainted,” he said. “How could you do such an infamous thing as to send her to me?”

The Countess pulled her wrist from his grasp. “She’s in love with you,” she said. “She wanted to come.”

“Well, in God’s name,” Macdonald exclaimed, “come and bring her to!”

“My good man,” she answered clearly, “do you think I would enter your rooms for anything under the sun? Just you manage your love affairs yourself. I’m going back to Putney.” And indeed she was gone before Macdonald could say another word.

He didn’t in the least know what he did. He knew that the girl’s eyebrow was badly cut because one of the glasses was broken into it. He knew that he got a doctor by shouting into the telephone, and that somehow or other the doctor managed to make a nurse arrive at the same moment as himself. And the next thing that he really realised was that towards nearly four o’clock in the morning Miss Dexter, lying on his bed, opened the one of her eyes that wasn’t covered by a bandage, and seeing him and the nurse standing beside her, exclaimed after a moment or two:

“It’s just heaven,” and then began to cry.

In those four hours or so Macdonald really hadn’t been conscious of anything that he would have called concrete, he had been too deep in his own particular dark forest. So that, although his light had burnt with its accustomed and painful brilliancy, it had appeared to him that darkness was all round him.

Then he went to a Turkish bath and spent the remainder of the morning in it.

CHAPTER II
I

IT seemed for some reason or other natural to Macdonald to apply to Kintyre for the name of a firm of solicitors. He had no particular respect for Kintyre’s intellect, though he was prepared to credit him with a rather shallow but yet acute knowledge of the world. He had indeed seen a good deal of Kintyre because of that gentleman’s maritime knowledge; for Kintyre had spent much of his life in yachting, and, indeed, when his prospects of attaining to the title had in his early life seemed obscure, he had passed several years in the Royal Navy. Kintyre, with his maritime knowledge, knew also a great many of the tribe of younger sons and the disinherited with whom Macdonald would have to man the Russian warship. Of the Russian warship, which was indeed a battleship called
Admiral Trogoff II,
there was now no doubt, though it had never come to telegraphing about the lampreys of the Don. The Grand Duke, having occasion to come to London upon a ceremonial visit, had taken occasion also to inspect the various deeds that had passed between Macdonald and his royal and financial associates. Thus H. I. H. had a perfect confidence that he would get his money, and the battleship, which had already broken down off Toulon, was lying, in perfect condition, in that harbour, and was already the property of a shipbreakers’ syndicate. Kintyre himself, taking with him a naval captain, had inspected the
Admiral Trogoff II,
and reported that she was exactly what was wanted. But the getting the crew together was not by any means a matter without its little difficulties.

The navigating crew and the stokers were easy enough. They signed on in Cherbourg, most of them English time- expired seamen, for an indefinite cruise beginning on April 4. But when it came to engaging the fighting men, the gunnery lieutenants, and a possible landing party, various more or less humorous difficulties did arise. They came mostly from Sergius Mihailovitch’s determination to avoid bloodshed and plunder. So that although there was not the least difficulty in getting five or six hundred men all more or less well calculated to handle a rifle or to train thirteen-inch guns of the latest Russian pattern, it needed a great many personal interviews to make certain of the men. Macdonald and Kintyre interviewed them at one club or another. Thus, there was a genial scoundrel called Grant, an ex-gunnery lieutenant of the British Navy, who later had been in the Chilian Republican Service. Grant was everything that was wanted to command the expedition as long as he had a strong hand over him. He was, of course, a ferocious drunkard, but, as the
Admiral Trogoff II
would carry no liquor at all, and all the men would be personally searched on coming aboard, and all the cabins of the officers were by their consent to be searched by three of Kintyre’s gamekeepers, the danger of El Commandante Grant’s getting drunk would be limited. But even if they kept him strictly sober, Grant swore that it was a principle of his never to go upon any filibustering expedition without having at least three shots with a heavy gun at something or other. They couldn’t get him to promise not to do this. There was simply nothing that would make him. In a whimsical sort of way he swore that it wasn’t decent, that no man could hold up his head before his Maker if he had commanded an eighteen-thousand-ton battleship and not fired one single shot with its heavy guns before she went out of commission. He said he wouldn’t do it; he said he couldn’t do it, and three was his minimum. If he could see a flagstaff on an isolated hill he would pot at that; but at something he would pot, laying the gun himself. And they had to leave it at that, because they had to have Mr. Grant. In the odd, ferocious underworld of men that in these interviews came up before the eyes of Macdonald and Kintyre, like creatures of the ooze swimming in the light of day, El Commandante Grant had a position of so much importance that they could not afford to do without him. He was even a man of some substance, possessing a duck-farm of his own at Cholsey-on-Thames. There, whether he was full of liquor or whether he wasn’t, he had, he said, to be dabbling with water, sweet or salt, cold or hot.

Thus this particular side of the venture was shaping itself with Commander Grant for the captain and with Kintyre as a sort of super-cargo. Kintyre, it was understood, would carry upon his person four Browning pistols and would shoot anybody at sight. Macdonald had no need to doubt Kintyre’s coolness or courage. He never showed the least signs of excitement, and from various persons, more particularly from his Russian friends, Macdonald heard that Kintyre was quite as cool as could be wanted. He had, for instance, walked about the fortifications of Vladivostok under the Japanese fire with his hands in his pockets. His Russian friends supposed that this was either showing off or the mere spleen of the Englishman. But in either case it seemed to be good enough for what Macdonald wanted. Moreover, he heard from a man who offered himself for engagement that, in one or two disreputable and tight quarters in Portuguese East Africa, Kintyre had used his Browning pistols with accuracy and dispatch. The man had seen it himself.

It was in this way that Sergius Mihailovitch had seen a great deal of Kintyre. And in one odd way or another, in his manner and in the inflection of his voice, Kintyre had struck Macdonald as cither taking a great, if cool, interest in Macdonald’s affairs, or else as having, in some way that Macdonald did not care to inquire into, some sort of finger in the pie. As a matter of fact, Sergius Mihailovitch was the least inquiring person in the world. A constitutional dislike to talking about his own affairs, and a strong determination to let no other person talk to him about them, rendered him really rather solitary, for no man can be really liked in England who will not talk about himself in a way that most foreigners feel to be as indecent or even more indecent, than appearing without clothing in a public place. Indeed, even Kintyre had only once dared to approach Macdonald in any personal matter. This, to go back, had occurred on the night after Lady Aldington’s reception, when Dr. Farquhar had talked about the Nationalisation of Scottish railways.

On this night, whilst Macdonald was going down the stairs of Leicester House, Kintyre had slipped his hand under his elbow. He had said that he wanted to speak to Macdonald upon an urgent personal matter. Going along Lowndes Square there had been too much noise from the motors that were leaving Lady Aldington’s. But when they came in front of the French Embassy in the dark silent spaces of the park, the Duke, who really knew his man, said suddenly in his cold, level tones:

“Look here! What is your balance at the bank?”

And Macdonald, who understood that Kintyre would not ask for the purpose of mere impertinence, answered simply:

“I’m exactly two pounds thirteen shillings overdrawn.” The Duke took out from his coat pocket an envelope which showed white in the darkness, “Then look here,” he said again, “you’ll oblige me by paying this into your bank by to-night’s post. You will please to put it to a separate account in your own name. You needn’t know the amount of it if you don’t want to; you needn’t draw on it, though of course you can if you wish to. It represents a sum that I and some friends of mine wish to put into your adventure. We pay it into your hands unconditionally; but, of course, you will credit it to us as our share.”

Macdonald remained silent for a moment, and the Duke continued:

“It will also very much oblige me if, in the letter you send to your bank manager with the enclosure, you instruct him to answer fully and unreservedly any questions that may be asked by any person whatever as to your credit at that bank.”

Macdonald still remained silent. Anything like a financial transaction filled him with an extreme dislike. It seemed to him to be as indecent as a personal question: but after reflecting for a moment or two, as they walked, he saw that, as these political transactions must mean the manipulating of immense sums of money, so he must brace himself even to the trouble of keeping accounts, which again appeared to him to be an almost indecent proceeding. It caused him really to feel extremely shy, as shy as if another man had been trying to enter into personal relations with a woman. But as he had to face it, and as Kintyre knew probably what he was about, he answered simply:

“I will do exactly as you ask.”

“You understand,” said Kintyre, “that you’re in a disgusting country where you can’t do anything if your personal credit isn’t safe. I haven’t any comment to make on this. It’s just exactly so. It isn’t necessary for me to say that we exactly trust you, but it’s necessary for us, as we’re interested in your scheme, to put you into such a position that we may rebut any assertions we may hear about you. For I don’t mind saying that several persons, and one person in particular, are trying to wreck this scheme by asserting that you are a penniless adventurer. We know you aren’t, but we’ve got to prove it, or the whole thing will go to pieces on that nonsensical ground. It’s a thing that really doesn’t concern you. It’s nothing to do with your personality.”

“I know it hasn’t,” Macdonald answered. “I dislike the whole thing. But I quite understand it’s a necessity. I know I can’t make romantic omelettes without breaking my own fantastic eggs. Let it go at that. I am much obliged to you, Kintyre, and I’ll do exactly what you ask.”

They reached the colonnades at Hyde Park Comer, and Kintyre got into his motor, which had followed them. Macdonald spent the greater part of the night in walking about the streets, because it was a disagreeable matter to him.

It was on the next morning that, at the meeting, Kintyre had knocked over Mr. Dexter by producing the letter from Macdonald’s bank manager, stating that Sergius Mihailovitch had sixty thousand pounds to his credit; and Macdonald didn’t give any more thought to the matter, because various large sums began to be paid to him for the expenses of the counter-revolution. This was not to say that he did not know the extremity of a personal poverty that quite amused him.

With a rather excessive scrupulousness he had waited on his bank manager to instruct him solemnly that these two accounts were to be kept entirely separate, and that he wasn’t to be allowed to overdraw in his own name one penny more than the bank would have permitted if he hadn’t had any account at all. And the manager amiably listened to his instructions, and said that he perfectly understood. But, nevertheless, it is probable that the second account did remain in the manager’s mind when Macdonald went on to propose certain arrangements that were really only for the benefit of Miss di Pradella. He proposed, that is to say, that the bank should take over the whole of the remainder of his much mortgaged Russian property, and that they should pay the young lady, with this as a security, the sum of ten pounds a week for a year, with the capital sum of two hundred and fifty at the end of that time. And when the manager quite amiably consented to this arrangement, Macdonald really sighed with relief, for it meant that, roughly speaking, Miss di Pradella would be off his hands for at least twelve months, and in the mean time he was having her carefully educated in dancing by the ballet master of the Talavera Theatre, who reported that if she had had the slightest spark of ambition, instead of being quite unreasonably lazy, she might develop into one of the great dancers of the world.

But even this wasn’t to say that Macdonald didn’t know what it was to be from time to time literally without a shilling. He hadn’t, that is to say, the least idea of how to manage money. If he had ten pounds in his bank he certainly spent it the same night in treating some one or other — it might be one of the filibustering scalliwags; it might be Miss di Pradella; it might be Da Pinta, or it might have been Mr. Dexter himself, who was worth just about a million times as much as Macdonald ever had in his possession at that portion of his career.

He really began to know the ways of pawnshops with an extreme intimacy, and the more distinguished brokers treated him with courtesy and attention. When he had pawned all his jewellery and replaced his studs and links with imitations, they obliged him by sending assistance to remove even his personal effects from the little room that gave into the mews. So that, as often as not, Macdonald would possess only the suit that he was walking about in, though the pawnbroker would always oblige him by letting him exchange his morning suit for the evening clothes that were held in pawn in the back of the shop. As a matter of fact, at this stage, the pawnbroker would have let Macdonald do anything he liked, for he regarded him as an eccentric millionaire, and Macdonald had a way of attracting the affection of all Jews, though he personally disliked them. At the same time he insisted that all these business arrangements should be punctiliously observed, so that once, although Messrs. Zimmermann had offered to oblige him with a hundred pound note as a loan, Miss di Pradella, coming to his room to borrow five pounds in order to purchase some linen at a white sale — Miss di Pradella had to sit down on the iron slats of Sergius Mihailovitch’s bedstead, for he had been forced to send his bedclothes into temporary exile.

She had, however, to wait for her five-pound note until two days later, when, providentially, the Resiliens Motor Car Company paid Sergius Mihailovitch his quarter’s salary of two hundred pounds.

This sum would have gone further than it did but for the fact that Miss di Pradella had acquired so large a collection of linen of one kind or another that, her flat being too small to contain it, she was forced to ask Macdonald to take another room for her in the same building. This she did with a great reluctance, because she really disliked asking him for money except when it was a matter of buying linen, and then her moral sense deserted her. The two hundred pounds lasted Macdonald fairly comfortably for about six weeks, and he got through the remainder of the quarter in one way or another. Moreover, as the next quarterly instalment fell two days before his setting sail for Galizia, he was able to do this with all his equipment intact, and even engaged a valet for the time whilst he should be on Lady Aldington’s yacht.