Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (488 page)

“That’s as it may be,” he answered. “But I couldn’t possibly do it if you were still the wife of Macdonald. That’s the way he looks at it. I can’t even come and philander with you as I have been doing.”

“That’s the way he looks at it,” she mocked him with what she would have called a fine scorn.

“That’s the way he looks at it,” the Duke said seriously. “I didn’t look at it in that way until just now. But I see he’s perfectly right. He can’t have me philandering with his wife. I did it in order to help him. But I see that it was a sort of suspect — an unpleasant position.”

“You admire Sergius Mihailovitch as much as that?” she asked.

“I admire him as much as you can possibly think,” he answered. “And I may as well add, because you’ll understand that much better, that he also carries a heavy financial backing from me. I don’t want to lose my money.”

“Oh, you think I shall understand that better than the other?” she said. “But I don’t. You’re a bad hat, but you’re such a sentimental fool that when you come into contact with a man as honourable as Sergius Mihailovitch is, you simply go a silly mucker over him.”

“Well, you can put it like that,” the Duke answered. “I don’t care how you put it. I didn’t want to marry you. I never promised to marry you. What I promised to do was to give you exactly what you wanted.”

“What’s that but marrying me?” she said.

“Oh, there are much better things than marrying me,” he answered. “If you married me you could only monkey with my life and make me miserable. And I’m a pretty tough customer You wouldn’t really like that in the end. The job you want is that of torturing a whole lot of miserable weak things that can’t hit back. You ought to manage an orphan school. That’s the job you want, and that’s the job I shall probably find for you one of these days. You want to torture easily on a wholesale plan. So there you have it. If you’ll divorce Sergius Mihailovitch I’ll marry you.”

“I shall never do that,” she answered.

“Then you’re an entirely ruined creature,” he said gravely. “You’re done. You’re gone out. One of these days you’ll come crawling to me, and you’ll ask me to give you what you want.”

The Countess laughed. You’re like a stage prophet,” she said. “I’ve got the whole lot of you.”

“Oh no, you haven’t!” he answered. “Your goose is cooked. I tried to give you your chance. But you have lost it.”

“I shall leave for Flores to-morrow morning,” the Countess said.

“Well, that will be quite pleasant,” the Duke answered. “The press telegrams are entirely suppressed, so we shan’t be troubled with you for at least a month. That’ll be a relief, for you are an extremely agitating person.”

She stood still and let him look at her. She would have called it exercising her full power of fascination.

“I wish you’d divorce Macdonald and let me marry you,” he said slowly.

She only laughed.

“Take the chance,” he urged.

She laughed once more.

“You’re doing it awfully well,” he said. “Mucking up your life and my life and all the other lives. But is it really worth it? Absolutely all you’ll get out of it will be that you will be able to go to poor Miss Dexter and tell her all about it with extreme detail, and then say, ‘Didn’t I do that well?’ Don’t muck up everything for the sake of this silly little bit of play-acting.”

“You’ve had your answer,” the Countess said.

The Duke slowly shrugged his shoulders up to his ears in his habitual attitude, which expressed deep dejection.

“You understand,” he said, “that if you don’t divorce Sergius Mihailovitch he will divorce you. You seem to forget that all this time he is a Russian subject.”

The Countess only laughed. “There isn’t any divorce in Russia,” she said.

“Oh, but there is,” he answered. “Don’t you understand that the Czar can dissolve any marriage by a ukase?”

“Sergius Mihailovitch would never do it,” she answered contemptuously.

“Oh, but he would,” the Duke said. “You’ve lor- gotten Emily Aldington. You’ve played the game too long. You trusted too much in his sense of responsibility to you. Now he’s got a responsibility to Emily Aldington. He’ll do everything that he can for her — as much as he ever tried to do for you. You forced him into her arms. You let it go too long.”

“He’ll never do it,” she said stubbornly.

“Then if he won’t do it,” Kintyre answered, “it will be done for him. By a week from to-morrow you’ll be an unmarried woman.”

“He’ll never do it,” she repeated.

“My dear Margaret,” he answered, “do believe there are interests more powerful even than Sergius Mihailo- vitch’s will, and they’re all at work here. The American financial interests want it. I want it. The Grand Duke wants it. The Grand Duke has only got to write the ukase, or to dictate it to a secretary along with orders for Court balls, and the Emperor will sign it as if it were a receipt for a pound of fish Don’t you understand that it’s all over with you? All those people want to be rid of you. You haven’t a friend in the world except for me. I shouldn’t have
let
you divorce Sergius Mihailovitch if I hadn’t wanted to make it as easy for you as possible. The Grand Duke would have written that ukase months ago if Sergius Mihailovitch hadn’t begged him not to, and if I hadn’t supported Sergius Mihailovitch. I’ve offered you a sporting chance, because you’re a sporting woman. You’ve refused it, but I will make you the offer again. Divorce Sergius Mihailovitch and I’ll marry you.”

She remained silent for quite a long time. Her nostrils were working up and down. And then she said slowly:

“You’re the most sentimental ass that I’ve ever come across. You pretend to be a bad hat. But I don’t believe you ever had the spirit to commit a crime, or so much as to leave a woman in the lurch until she was sick of you. You don’t want to leave me in the lurch. But you can. I am sick of you.”

“Oh no, you’re not,” he said. “You’re only acting.”

“That’ll do,” she answered. “You seem to forget that I — have principles. You seem to forget that all my life I have stood for Socialism and trust in the people. Do you think it is I that will join in this atrocious plan for erecting a reactionary government — and making money out of it? Do you think it is I that will take reactionary money?”

“You’re taking money from the Russian Government now,” the Duke said.

“That’s only plundering the Egyptians,” she answered. “I am going to hand all the money I have got to the Galizian Republic to buy powder for the troops. I shall ruin Macdonald’s vile scheme in that way. I am not done with. Don’t think it. I was bom a friend of progress.”

“No, it was Sergius Mihailovitch who made you one,” Kintyre answered.

“And whoever may fall away, that is what I shall remain.”

“Well, you’re an extraordinary figure!” the Duke said. “You speak about Socialism. But did you ever reflect that that amiable party, however stupid it may be, however detrimental it may be, yet contains a few honest people — people with principles? You don’t want to identify yourself with people who have principles They’re not your sort.
Can’t
you drop this play-acting and be a human being? Can’t you let your heart act at all?”

“No,” she said. “Not ever. I shall never change.”

“But can’t you,” he said, “consider that I love you passionately, and, for the matter of that, that you love me? Isn’t there any way out of it?”

“No, none,” she answered. “I am absolutely firm.”

“Torture!” the Duke said. “Well, you may torture a few people, but you’ll never torture anybody as you torture yourself. And for the sake of acting! But you haven’t got a solitary soul left in the world to act to — no one except yourself. You’ll go on acting to little Miss Dexter for a little while. And then I shall marry little Miss Dexter because I want some money, and then — you’ll have no one in the world to act to but yourself. Not a single solitary soul! It’s rather pitiful, isn’t it?”

She held her head erect and looked into his eyes. “No one will ever be able to say—” she began.

“No one will ever say anything,” Kintyre exclaimed “No one will ever think of you. We shall go on our way — all sorts of ways, and you’ll be entirely forgotten. Who’s going to think of you? There won’t be anybody to do it. You’re nothing. You’re nobody. And yet you might be rather a lot. Why don’t you chuck it and come over to us?”

“So that no one will ever be able to say,” she answered, “that I did it.”

PART
V

CHAPTER
I

THE steam yacht
Esmeralda
got up its anchors in the harbour of Batalha at a quarter to one in the morning. Macdonald and Emily Aldington remained upon the captain’s bridge. There were besides them upon the ship Mr. and Mrs. Pett, Mr. and Miss Dexter, the King of Galizia and the Queen-Mother, who, however, was so incapacitated by sea-sickness as to amount to nothing at all, and the chauffeur, Mr. Salt, as well as the King’s most powerful car. There was, more over, a pope who was to marry Lady Aldington to Macdonald as soon as they could touch any kind of Russian territory. The pope was a fine, fat man, with very long hair and very fine curled beard; but he was so usually drunk that it was very difficult to do anything with him.

Indeed, it was very largely this pope who was responsible for the delay they had had in getting off.

Kintyre had spoken quite correctly when he had told the Countess Macdonald that Macdonald, as soon as the way out was pointed out to him, would act entirely in the interest of Emily Aldington. But he had even underestimated the vigour with which Macdonald would act, for no sooner did the idea of the ukase really formulate itself in Macdonald’s head than, within half an hour, he had sent at least four telegrams, the one to the Grand Duke, another to the Czar himself, a third to the Russian Minister of Cults, and a fourth to the Metropolitan of Moscow. And within six hours he had received a telegram from the Grand Duke assuring him that the ukase would be granted by ten o’clock of the following morning, and that it would reach the Russian Embassy in London within the week. That was in the beginning of March. And indeed the imperial ukase, dissolving
ab initio
the marriage between the Count and Countess Macdonald, did reach London within the seven days, and three days before Lady Aldington’s decree against her husband was made absolute. There appeared therefore to be no obstacle. But there was. For upon going to the Embassy Macdonald found that he couldn’t have the necessary copy of the ukase without paying down fees to the amount of eight hundred and ninety-seven pounds, two shillings.

He hadn’t at the moment really any money at all. He had exhausted the last of his own cash on the telegrams to Russia, which, because they had had to be very long and very explicit, had cost him a great deal of money. And he really couldn’t for the life of him see how he was going to raise anything like eight hundred and ninety-seven pounds, two shillings. He was reaching that period of the quarter when he began to visit Messrs. Zimmermann with his dressing-cases and more portable valuables.

It is impossible to represent Sergius Mihailovitch as being in any way rational or coherent in his idealism. All that can be said is that he was consistently an idealist. He had been unreasonably generous in his treatment of his wife up to this point. Now it was as if he had simply switched on to a current of idealism entirety different in quality. Until then it was as if he had tried to drift along the lines of the highest principles. But the revelations of Mr. Pett had extraordinarily hardened and extraordinarily embittered him. It does not very much matter what crisis of psychology or of depression he went through immediately after Mr. Pett’s attempt at blackmail. The psychological bitternesses of men of a sensitive nature arc most often experiences similar — as Macdonald had said — to those which take place in a fever. They are shapes horribly vivid for the time; then they go out.

For many hours, for many days after Mr. Pett’s revelations, Sergius Mihailovitch remained in such a fever. The odd thing was — so horrible is the approach of any kind of blackmailer — that Sergius Mihailovitch for the time being really felt that he was the type of man that Mr. Pett had accused him of being. He couldn’t get away from the feeling that if the whole world considered that he was a
souteneur,
that he had taken money from Kintyre and from Lady Aldington, that he had left his wife to starve — that if the whole world said these things of him they must be true. So for several days he felt that he couldn’t lift up his head, that he couldn’t look anyone in the face. To transact any kind of business, whether the affairs of the Resiliens Company or those of ordering ammunition for the Galizian counter-revolution, became extraordinarily painful for him. He imagined, too, that all to whom he spoke were despising him; he imagined even that Mr. Salt, the King’s chauffeur, despised him, and that so did the King himself.

It was, indeed, from that rather absurd boy that the light really came in the end. The consolations of Lady Aldington did really very little for him, because he felt that she was too much interested in him for her moral upholding to have much value. She said that he was in the right in everything; but that was what she would say.

But one day he told the young King that he thought it would be better if he gave in his resignation as director of the counter-revolution, and this produced an extraordinary storm of feeling on the part of that loyal boy. For whilst he had been under Macdonald’s tutelage, Pedro II — had become as it were very much younger, very much more naïve, and very much more awkwardly gracious.

Dom Pedro, in realising that he was really a king, had become very much more afraid of making mistakes, for he took his responsibilities with great seriousness.

Thus at the very first hint of Macdonald’s resignation he burst out with a sort of incredulous rage:

“Show me the man who has dared to breathe a word against you, and with my own hands I will kill him! For how shall I be fitted to reign without your guidance? And how shall I be able to do my duty to my people if I attempt to reign without it? There is nothing whatever that any man dare say against you. I say that, Dom Pedro. In all these particular matters I have the right to say that, for if I do not yet stand upon Galizian soil, nevertheless in this particular matter by the grace of God I am the head. And it is certain that God, who desires my restoration, would not have given me a guide who was a man of dishonour. I know all these circumstances from the first to the last, and by my race, my tradition, and my ancestry I am very well fitted to judge in these things. And when it comes to my heart, my heart tells me... my heart tells me...” And at that point the boy began to blubber.

They were in the long drawing-room of the house in Portman Square, and the Queen-Mother at the other end of it was knitting and talking as usual to two French duchesses and two English priests.

“Don’t you understand?” the King said passionately. “I want to be a king again, and I can’t without you. I don’t feel I should have the right without you. Now then, isn’t that enough for you? It’s your duty. I tell you. Now then; you’ve got to do it! You hear?”

The King had always struck Sergius Mihailovitch as being extraordinarily pure — as stupid as you like, but wonderfully pure in heart. And that speech could not but wake him out of his lethargy. Indeed, the whole atmosphere of that lazy Galizian Court in the London drawing-room was, for him, singularly sustaining. They trusted him so entirely. The Queen would knit away and ask for news, and go on knitting as if it were none of her business, because she was entirely in his hands. The English priests would look at him with the round eyes of admiration which they reserved for the saviour of the Church, though oddly enough he was by upbringing an Old Believer. The French duchesses would hardly notice his existence, which was the greatest compliment they could have paid him, since it showed him that they considered him to be one of their men. So that Sergius Mihailovitch suddenly squared his shoulders and said:

“Very well.”

Then he had had to become a man of action, he had had to regard himself as one of that corporate body of them all. He had to do his best for the lot of them.

And he even felt a certain pleasure in brutally holding the pistol of the ukase at his wife’s head. To a rather astonished Mr. Buss he said simply:

“You’ve put me at the end of my tether. I’m not going to let the Countess divorce me; I’ve divorced her. She can have the money that I agreed to let her have, but that’s all. You have got to draw up an agreement that will satisfy my solicitors. If you don’t, there won’t be any agreement. The Countess’s money is safe. That’s an end of it.”

To Kintyre he had said that he accepted Kintyre’s word, that there was nothing wrong between him and the Countess. And there was an end of it. To Lady Aldington he said that he was going to marry her as soon as he had the ukase in his hands. To Mrs. Pett he wrote that he was ready to forget what her husband had said. He would take it that Pett had been either mad or drunk. For himself he expected Pett to write to him a letter stating that he knew perfectly well that Macdonald had had no money from anybody, that he had not deserted his wife, and that his conduct had been entirely correct in every particular. Mr. Pett came to see Macdonald at the garage. He tried to get out of writing a letter, but Macdonald, who didn’t care twopence about the matter one way or the other, simply held him firmly to it, and at last Mr. Pett wrote it at Macdonald’s dictation. Then Macdonald told him that he could have the run of Lady Aldington’s house just as he had had before.

Lady Aldington had rather objected to this. She considered that little people like Mr. Pett ought to be punished, though she was sorry for Mrs. Pett. But Macdonald said that if they looked over it at all they would have to look over it altogether, if only for the good of the cause. Quarrelling and breaking-offs weren’t nice things in this world. It meant a great deal to Mr. Pett and nothing at all to them. Besides, he had known Mr. Pett twenty years. Mr. Pett received the news with a cross between intellectual patronage and profuse gratitude. He resembled rather a brigadier-general who, being received by the Secretary of State for War after having lost his whole brigade of men in an engagement, received a medal and no mention of the disaster that had befallen him.

It was a grand clearing-up for Sergius Mihailovitch. He even spoke with some firmness to Miss di Pradella. He told her that if she would accept an engagement to dance at St. Petersburg he would continue to look after her financially. If she wouldn’t, he wouldn’t continue to support her and the numerous family of the Austrian waiter with the Polish name beyond that present year. Miss di Pradella signed the contract, but she hadn’t really much idea of carrying it out. She knew she could always got round Sergius Mihailovitch.

So it was all cleared up with the exception of the eight hundred and ninety-seven pounds, two shillings.

Macdonald made various excuses for not producing the ukase, but both Kintyre and Lady Aldington knew perfectly well what was the real reason. Kintyre even approached Macdonald on the subject. He said that it wasn’t reasonable for Sergius Mihailovitch to delay the marriage for a matter of a few pounds. He himself was perfectly ready to lend Macdonald eight hundred and ninety-seven pounds, two shillings, or whatever it was.

But Macdonald peremptorily refused. It was no good telling him that when he married Emily Aldington he would become by automatic process of the law Duke of Batalha and the eleventh richest man in the world. To Macdonald’s crooked and inevitable idealism this wasn’t reason. He was going to raise the money commercially before he married Lady Aldington. Kintyre said that this was mad; but Macdonald said that it didn’t matter. He went to the Jews; but because of his transactions with Messrs. Zimmermann the Jews knew too much and at the same time too little about Sergius Mihailovitch. He offered them five hundred per cent.; he offered them his entire income from the Resiliens Car Company for three years. But the various money-lenders said that they were by no means certain that the Resiliens Car Company would last anything like as long as three years. And they couldn’t see how a gentleman who was accustomed from time to time to pawn a dozen socks for two shillings was going to be in a position ever to repay eight hundred and ninety- seven pounds, two shillings, plus five hundred per cent. They were told that Macdonald had brilliant prospects, but the socks were too much for them. They were acquainted with all sorts of spendthrift lunatics, but Macdonald’s kind was much too rare; they couldn’t get any kind of accountant to average out the risks attendant upon an unusually high sense of personal honour.

A new mental determination of Sergius Mihailovitch’s impeded matters at this point. He got into his head to be extraordinarily careful of Lady Aldington’s reputation. On the second of April they were to sail for Batalha on the yacht
Esmeralda.
But Macdonald declared that he would not sail with her unless they were actually married. He was determined to go by train to Toulon and sail with the Russian battleship, which was to reach Flores on April the fourth. It did not matter to him that this worried Emily very much; he was for the time being a man of action, and he was determined to conduct his actions along what seemed to him to be the most honourable lines. He tried money-lender after money-lender, but he could get nothing; and at last he realised that all these gentry were in communication one with another, as well as Messrs. Zimmermann, who, towards the end of the month, had all his personal property in pawn. On the first of April Macdonald received two hundred pounds, which was his quarter’s salary from the Resiliens Company. Half of that sum was sufficient to get his things from the keeping of Messrs. Zimmermann. But the hundred pounds that remained wasn’t any use to him when it came to obtaining a copy of the ukase. So he had finally broken the news to Emily that he was determined not to sail with her. She didn’t make much fuss about it, but they were both of them hit to the heart.