Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (497 page)

Mr. Blood nodded his head.

“But when it comes,” Mr. Fleight continued, “to a groom who has lived with you all his life doping horses that have lived with him all his life, and nice horses that you are fond of and are in the competition for their own credit — so as to look fine, and smart, and all the nice things that horses can look — and when that groom gives them, not poison to kill them, but bromides to make them look dull and heavy and stumble, and just does it for a thousand dollars—”

“Go on,” Mr. Blood said.

“A thousand dollars is such a nasty sum, appealing to such a petty imagination. Not enough to set a groom up in an hotel, and too much to get a drink with. He should have taken a five pound note or twelve thousand pounds — nothing between; that would have made it a wantonness or a crime, and you’d have stood it with equanimity. But that this should be an age when a man will betray the nice horses that ought to be like his own children — democracy and education and that sort of sneakiness being the coin of the realm — that was what you could not stand.”

“You phrase it too sentimentally,” Mr. Blood said. “A horse, for instance, is too decent a beast to be called ‘nice’ by any man. But that is, roughly speaking, what I have felt.”

Mr. Fleight nodded his head sagely.

“At the same time,” he said, “I ought, perhaps, to tell you that I find this age a great deal more bearable than you do. I prefer the misdemeanour of doping a horse for two hundred pounds to the crime of pulling for a fiver. It’s less picturesque, but it’s quieter. I’d, in fact, rather live among thieves like company promoters than amongst gentlemen like your ancestor who stole the Crown jewels and was afterwards, I believe, executed for trying to kidnap the Lord Chancellor — something of the sort.”

“Oh, I’ve quite realised that,” Mr. Blood said. “You are a child of the age, if you’re not yet certain to be the father of the age to come.”

There sounded upon the outer door three sharp thumps that must have been made with a stick. Mr. Blood listened, and then remarked:

“Go on with your biography. Those are the people who are coming to tea.”

“The point is,” Mr. Fleight remarked, “that I’m not an illegitimate son at all.”

“Oh, there was a Scotch marriage?” Mr. Blood asked. The knocking was repeated more insistently, but Mr. Blood did not move.

“Isn’t someone going to let them in?” Mr. Fleight asked.

“No,” his host answered, “they’re only some literary people. They’ll go away and come back again.”

“But still,” Mr. Fleight expostulated politely, “don’t let me—”

“Go on,” Mr. Blood said peremptorily. “They live in the rooms above. I’ll send for them when I want them.”

“The real romance,” Mr. Fleight went on, “was not the Scotch marriage. The point about it was that my mother knew that they had got married in the silly, accidental way you can in Scotland. My father didn’t. And she kept it secret from him — so as not to worry him — nearly all the days of her life. And one day, when he was a childless widower of seventy — and a dignified old Hebrew at that — my father sent her a polite note — they had not met for thirty years — to say that he would like to see her. And she had out her terrific old landau and went round in state. And then he made her a formal speech to the effect that he owed the whole of his career to her and that, just as soon as not, he’d marry her. Then she said:

“‘Aaron my boy, you were caught bang up Forty years ago...’

Those were the words of her famous song in the eighties. I, you see, was just the legitimate heir to the soap works and the millions, and Palatial Hall, at Hampstead, where I reign now that my father is gathered to his fathers.”

Mr. Blood took up a long pole. It was used for opening the upper windows as a rule. He remarked: “Oh, well,” and vigorously prodded the ceiling.

“It’s about time,” he said, “that I introduced you to some people that may be useful to you.”

“Then you mean—” Mr. Fleight was beginning.

“I mean,” Mr. Blood was saying, “to try an experiment. I’ve had it in my mind a long time — just the way a man like you
might
climb. I’ve speculated upon it often — you can’t get away from it in these days when the chief characteristic of Society is the multitude of climbers — so that it might amuse me. And at the same time I don’t find you an unamusing companion. You’ve got low tastes but a good intelligence. I don’t promise anything much, but I’ll bear-lead you for a bit. Of course, I want my price. You always get a price for social introductions. And my price is that you should do something pretty considerable for some young people that I am interested in.”

“I’ll do anything in the world,” Mr. Fleight cut in. “That’s good,” Mr. Blood said. “The fact is that I — ought to do it myself, but I’m too lazy. Of course, if you help them, they’ll help you. You’ll help them with quite extraordinary generosity and they’ll ingenuously chant your generosity in just the places where you will need advertisement. That’s the beginning of my scheme for you.”

“Well, I’m entirely in your hands,” Mr. Fleight brought out. “Absolutely.”

“Then tell me,” Mr. Blood asked, “exactly what your income is.”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Fleight answered; “not exactly.”

Mr. Blood asked him patiently whether it was nearer £100,000 or £500,000 a year. Mr. Fleight supposed that it was certainly nearer £100,000. He proposed that they should put it at that.

“Then it’s not enough,” Mr. Blood answered. “It’s enough to make a start with, but I should not wonder if I had to send you back into business. I suppose you could extend the soap works or juggle with stock if you wanted to?”

“I suppose I could,” Mr. Fleight said. “I should not object. But what’s all the money wanted for?”

“My dear man,” Mr. Blood said, “if you’re going to go up at all fast as a climber it’s going to cost you £150,000 a year for sheer bribery. You’ll have to take up politics, and the party funds will cost you about £40,000 every two or three years — every time there is a general election, at least. You will have to run a daily paper in order to boom yourself with the general public, and you can’t lose less than £60,000 a year on that. You will have to run a serious monthly or weekly to advertise you to thinking people — another £5,000. You will have to have a constituency with a solid 2,000 majority, and that will cost you about £2 per vote per annum — say £7,000. You will have to have an expensive wife for the social side of things; her establishment charges will run you into at least £12,000 if you do the thing at all decently.”

“I say,” Mr. Fleight ejaculated, “I daresay I could find the money, but I don’t see that I can do with a wife.”

“You’ve got to have her,” Mr. Blood said calmly. “Someone blonde and large and showy. Someone of a decidedly Germano-Christian type to take away from your Hebrew appearance, which would damage you with other Hebrews in Society.”

“I don’t see how it can be done,” Mr. Fleight said. “I really don’t.”

“Of course,” Mr. Blood exclaimed, with a really tyrannous note in his voice, “you’ve got a woman living with you that you’ve got to be faithful to. I know all about it. She’ll cut her throat if you marry. Your sort of chap always does have that sort of thing tacked on to him, and she’s always going to cut her throat. She never does, you know.”

“I don’t know about that,” Mr. Fleight said.

“I know,” Mr. Blood retorted, “you want to be honourable and keep your word. It’s very creditable, and a pretty penny it’s going to cost you as you go through life. This woman’s installed at Palatial Hall, isn’t she?”

Mr. Fleight made affirmatory noises and Mr. Blood went on:

“That’s like a chap like you. Well, you’ll give that place to the lady. It makes you look ridiculous anyhow to have such an exhibition to live in. And you’ll find that Palatial Hall and
£
3,000 a year will do wonders to protect the lady’s throat from the fatal knife. I’ll tell you all about where you’ll live and how, another day. Here are your fellow conspirators.”

CHAPTER I
I

MR. MITCHELL and the Misses Macphail had ascended the broad, dark, steep and turning staircase of Mr. Blood’s house, where Mr. Mitchell lived rent free because Mr. Blood liked him, since he was a gentle stylist and exactly not the sort of person Mr. Blood was supposed to wish to know. Mr. Mitchell had thumped on a door on the third story with his bog-oak stick. They stood in silence. No answer rewarded the second series of thumps.

“Anaemic!” Mr. Mitchell exclaimed.

“Now what do you mean by that?” the younger Miss Macphail asked; she had a strongly noticeable though very slight German accent.

“No Blood there!” Mr. Mitchell explained. “That’s a joke, that is.”

“I call it a rodden choke,” Miss Macphail exclaimed. She was much larger and even more blonde than her sister, and her German accent was heavier and more threatening.

“Well, I’m not a humourist,” Mr. Mitchell answered. He was a fair, plump man of thirty-two and always wore blue serge that, as a rule, was well brushed but shiny at the elbows and the shoulder-blades, because he was generally sprawling in an armchair. “I am a serious novelist of good family, who makes a living by writing paragraphs for the halfpenny papers.”

“And rodden batly you do it!” Miss Macphail exclaimed. “I’ve more than half a mint to chug you.”

Mr. Mitchell winced slightly. Then he affected cheerfulness and exclaimed:

“Oh, well, we can’t discuss earthquakes before the door of Blood. You’d better come up to my rooms and wait till he hits the ceiling. There’s only Cluny there.”

“We ought to haf corn back to the office after lunch,” Miss Macphail replied. “All this is waste of time.” They were all three of them engaged on the staff of a journal called the
Halfpenny Weekly,
which, indeed, Miss Macphail edited with efficiency and determination, and, it being a Friday, when the paper had gone to press, Mr. Mitchell had taken the two young ladies to lunch at a Soho restaurant — which he could not afford to do — and had afterwards persuaded them to come and have tea with Mr. Blood. But during the whole of the modest festival Miss Macphail had grumbled that they ought not to have gone so far away from the office for lunch, and that they ought to go back to the office. She regarded Mr. Mitchell as a fool for paying for their lunches when he could not afford it, and this had made her the more determined to discharge Mr. Mitchell from the
Halfpenny Weekly.

They mounted another weary flight of stairs and arrived at a door that was exactly over Mr. Blood’s, but it was smaller and in a lower and darker corridor. This Mr. Mitchell opened with a latch-key, but he barred the ladies’ entrance whilst he called:

“Hullo, Cluny. I’ve got the Mitchell girls with me.” The answer came to them in a voice strikingly high:

“All right, come in. I’m writing a sonnet. I’m strictly decent, though not attractive.”

They entered a small room. It contained many books, a great deal of blotting paper, Chinese embroidered silks, Japanese kakimonos, bits of sculptured marble, old clocks, tobacco-tins, and innumerable cigarette ends. The room resembled a battle ground, where opposing forces marched the one upon the other; it was difficult to tell where the territory of the books began, or the chinoiseries ended. Indeed, upon one straw chair there lay six large brown volumes and two pieces of Chinese embroidered silk, whilst someone had upset half a tin of yellow tobacco over the chairful.

In a vivid scarlet kimono Mr. Cluny Macpherson, with his slightly bald head, his almond eyes, and his high features, was sitting on a red lacquered umbrella-stand, which he tilted towards an immense sheet of blotting paper in a cleared space on the large round table. He did not look up, but exclaimed in a high voice:

“It’s an awful bore, you people coming in! I was just finishing the sestett.” And, indeed, he was writing in an extremely minute hand upon a large sheet of blue foolscap.

“There’s an awful lot of waste of time goes on in this place,” Miss Macphail said. But no one else spoke, for they were watching the delicate, oriental face of Cluny.

He snatched up, after a moment of time, his sheet of paper and, holding it by one comer at about two feet from his eyes, tilting himself back on his umbrella-stand, he began to read in a high, ecstatic voice, and with a slightly idiotic romance expressed in his long features:

“Ivwang Su, intent on virginal assaults, Goes, paper-lanthorn shaking through the night; The something—”

He interrupted himself to say:

“I haven’t got an adjective for the sky. But it doesn’t matter,” and continued:

“The tum-tum sky, inlaid with opals bright, Inveighs him to his green ancestral vaults.

The crimson dragons and the smelling salts—”

He broke off to say, with a melancholy intonation:

“It’s really awfully fine! It would have beaten ‘The Lament of Hang,’ if you hadn’t interrupted me. Have some lychees. Have some absinthe.” He ran his hand round his chin. “I’ve got to shave. I can’t go to the Countess’s like this. And I’ve got to go to Princess Odintsov’s at 6.15. She’s weaving a crown of laurels for me.”

He trotted behind a Chinese screen at the right-hand comer of the room, and they heard him pouring out water.

“You’d better take me with you to the Countess’s,” Miss Macphail called over the screen. His voice answered: “Oh, dear!” in terms of hopeless lamentation.

“You’d better,” Miss Macphail said grimly.

“But you won’t let me read my poems,” the voice continued pitiably. “You can’t stand my poems.”

“Oh, I can stand half an hour of them,” she replied. “Not more.”

“Then why won’t you ever print them in the
Halfpenny Weekly
?” Macpherson countered her. “This soap won’t lather. I can’t think what Mitchell’s done with the shaving soap.”

“That was an office sample,” Mr. Mitchell said. “It had to be sent back because Augusta wouldn’t let me put in a three line puff about it.”

“They don’t get a three line puff in my paper under thirty-one and six,” Miss Macphail told him. “You shouldn’t have used the sample before you knew they would pay it. It has meant no end of correspondence with the makers. I can’t have the office upset like this. I shall have to give you the chuck, Charlie.”

“You can’t do that, Augusta,” Mr. Mitchell said. “I’ve got a year’s contract.”

“Oh, that was only over the telephone,” Miss Macphail replied. “I never engage anybody any other way. So your contract isn’t worth the twopence it cost you at the public telephone.”

“Oh, that’s rot!” Mr. Mitchell said, but his aspect was one of deep alarm. His livelihood — or at any rate, all the pleasures of it — depended on the caprices of this lady. He had an income of about £75 a year from his father’s trustees, and Mr. Blood let him live rent free, They were, indeed, connected through their common cousin, Countess Cornwall — but that was all he had to live on.

“It isn’t rod!” Miss Macphail said. “And it occurs to me that as I’ve got to give you a cholly coot tressing town, I may as well gif you a cholly coot tressing town at once.”

Miss Macphail was noticeably, was peachily, fair. She was tall and slightly plump, in a German fashion, though, eccentrically enough, her father had been a Scotsman. She had been bom twenty-seven years before in the village of East Dutenhofen, in Southern Prussia. Her father had been one of several unfortunates who had tried to make a living out of Germany by giving lessons in the English language. He had set up a language bureau in that remote province, hoping to proceed in the end to Berlin. But all his life had been taken up in giving English conversation lessons in one or other small German town. He would give three lessons in Schiffenberg on a Monday; five in Amsburg on a Tuesday; eleven in Klosterau, where the University is, on a Wednesday. The number of the lessons varied from year to year, but during the whole of his career they had averaged about six a day, and his average fees had been about one shilling a lesson. And since he had married the daughter of the pastor of Dutenhofen when he was twenty-four, and since he had two daughters very early, and since he had to pay his travelling expenses over a territory of about a hundred miles square that he travelled weekly, he did not do very well, more particularly as he had to keep himself decent. Indeed, the first thing that Augusta could remember was sitting on the doorstep of the Dutenhofen home at sunset, in a small pair of boy’s knickerbockers, with her hair in little golden pigtails, behind the rampart of her father’s dunghill in the street beneath the tall black and white houses — watching the pigs come home, led by a swineherd who blew a wooden horn; and the goats who followed a herd with a bugle; the sheep with a whistle, and the geese following a tall, dirty, blonde girl with amazingly pale hair, who swung a watchman’s rattle to keep them together.

That was Augusta’s earliest reminiscence. Later, she had lugged an old cow by a rope out to the patches of pasture beside the green river Hain. But that is not to say that she had become one of the common people. Her father was a Macphail, her mother a pastor’s daughter, and she spoke German of an extreme correctness. She had also been very well educated.

Her father spoke, of course, Scottish of so barbarous a kind that no English person ever understood more than two words uttered by his pupils or by Augusta herself. Nevertheless, in virtue of her linguistic accomplishments Augusta had been taken as an improver by the great firm of Glogenau, Court Dressmakers, of Frankfort. She had to show off the dresses to English Jewesses visiting their relations in the birthplace of their race.

She had inspired old Mr. Glogenau, the head of the firm, with an unholy and quite immoral passion; nevertheless, she contrived, as she expressed it to her mother, to keep herself virtuous, and she used her leverage to get her younger sister into the business.

Later, she had persuaded Mr. Glogenau to send her to London to keep the business in touch with their English clients, and she had never returned to Germany. She was marvellous in persuading the English clients to buy clothes they did not need — her blondeness and her German accent made all the Jewesses from Bayswater to Park Lane itself as wax in her hands. Besides, they loved to get their clothes from Frankfort, the cradle of their race, where clothes were a little dearer, but how very much more striking than those from Paris!

She had got into touch with the English shops. And then, on one deathless day, she had walked into the office of the
Woman of Fashion,
and had demanded that the proprietors should let her write fashion articles. She took their breaths away. She declared that half the dress and corset makers in the West End had definitely promised to advertise in any paper that employed her. It was, as she said, a striking example of the “bower of the Chew” in our civilisation — the shopkeepers who had made her that promise were thinking of her connection with the ladies of that race.

She had got the job of writing the articles; she had asked for no very great pay, but she had made the fortune of the paper. She brought it in thirteen pages of advertisement a week, and she did not ask for commission.

Nevertheless, she supported in Germany her father, who had gone mad, her mother, who did her best by peasant work to keep expenses down, and her sister, whom she had taken away from Glogenau’s because Wilhelmina was timid and found it difficult to resist the advances of the proprietor. She had even given Wilhelmina the opportunity of an education in drawing at the Frankfort City night schools, which are the best in the world; and at last she had brought her sister over from Germany and took her about with her to draw the models in the shops that she intended to write about. Thus Wilhelmina almost supported herself.

Augusta, in short, was honest, industrious, filial, virtuous, and immensely determined. She led the life of a slave and she flourished because she never refrained from asking for what could be of use to her. When the proprietors of the
Woman of Fashion
determined to start the
Halfpenny Weekly,
Augusta simply demanded the editorship. It was to be written by women for women, and the proprietors, in spite of her German accent, gave her the job. She could write quite good enough English for their clients, they found — her articles were actually written by Mr. Mitchell, whom she had met in a tea-shop in Fleet Street — and the shops just simply loved her. So there, at the moment, she was — still extremely poor, with many demands on her, but valiant and as hard as chilled steel.