Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (498 page)

On that afternoon she was wearing her cheap black dress. It had been made by a French Jewess at Clapham, Miss Macphail having bought the black mohair material at an auction sale at the top of Bedford Street for five and sevenpence and the dressmaker having made it up from a drawing by Wilhelmina of a model from Poiret — the making costing eleven and six, including braid and sundries. And she wore the dress with an air of being fitted into it as an umbrella-case fits an umbrella, and of having nothing whatever beneath it. She had a black hat of chip straw, about the size of an ordinary pudding basin, that could not conceal all her soft, blonde hair. And that was all there was to her, except a pair of
glacé
shoes and black and scarlet, very open-work stockings.

She stood with her legs as wide apart as her skirt would let her and, with her hands behind her back, her soft, lisping accent, and her hard glance, she dressed Mr. Mitchell down.

“You’re an incorrigibly idle, useless waster,” she began. “You can’t write for nuts.”

“Oh, I say!” Mr. Mitchell said; “everyone knows that I’m a stylist.”

“You can’t write short, snappy paragraphs for nuts,” Miss Macphail repeated. “You may write elegies, or reviews, or that sort of stuff all right. I don’t know anything about that.” She told him that he had to earn his living and he didn’t. His notes about furniture shops were no goot — no goot at all. His social paragraphs would not excite a suburban policeman. His Paris notes were copied from the
Daily Telegraph
three weeks late and would not take in an A.B.C. girl. His “Round the Shops” did not bring in a guinea a week. The advertisers did not like him. How could they? They could not understand half the things he said. “You’re utterly no use to me,” she concluded. “You’re no use to the paper. You’re no use at all, and I pay you £3 a week. You’ve just got to quit.”

Mr. Macpherson said plaintively from behind the screen:

“I wish one of yon would come and see if I’m properly shaved and if my ties go with my socks. Since Charles used the looking-glass for pounding sugar on, one can’t in the least see what one looks like.”

The younger Miss Macphail, who had never spoken yet, went round the corner of the screen, and they could hear her whispering kindly to Cluny.

Mr. Mitchell sat down upon the lacquered umbrella-stand and gazed in front of him into vacancy.

“I suppose you realise that it’s black ingratitude, Augusta,” he said half ironically.

“It’s business,” she answered briefly. “Don’t you be an ass, Charlie. I’ve got to get on and the paper’s got to pay. You’ve had three pounds a week for twenty-seven weeks, and that’s been good enough for an incapable like you.”

Mr. Mitchell accepted the inevitable in a half jesting spirit. He teased Augusta, who had no sense of humour whatever, by begging her, with an imitated pathos, to let him write her a column called: “Men’s Fashions for Married Women.” He said it was the one essential for a woman’s paper. Women ought to know when their husbands were well dressed, because it helped them in their careers. He cited instances from among his own relatives. There was his brother-in-law, the Hon. Hugh Ives. He was separated from his wife because she told him he was too fat to wear white boot-tops and check waistcoats when every man in town just had to wear white boot-tops and check waistcoats. Of course they had not actually separated over that. But that was how the quarrel had begun. There was also his cousin, Trevor —

Miss Macphail interrupted him to ask what he was trying to get at.

“Just you let me,” Mr. Mitchell answered, “write my column of men’s fashions, and I may be able to get a pair of evening trousers by puffing some tailor.” He said that all his trousers were too old. If he got a quite new pair he might be able to fascinate some heiress. He was going to eleven balls in the best houses during the next fortnight.

Miss Macphail looked at him with a glance in which were mingled contempt for his powers of attraction and contempt for his humour which she did not understand.

“You are talking rod!” she remarked.

But Mr. Mitchell continued to say that if he could engage in male journalism instead of woman’s, it might give him a certain commanding air that would appeal more to the opposite sex than had been the case hitherto.

The boards trembled beneath Miss Macphail’s feet, and there was a sound of drumming from below.

“That’s Blood,” Mr. Mitchell said. “He’s calling us down to tea. Come along Cluny; come along girls.”

On the floor below, Mr. Blood was just accepting the unquestioning submission of Mr. Fleight, when the quiet of the room was invaded by the voice of Cluny Macpherson. He had run down in advance of the others in order to explain:

“I say you fellows, I’ve finished a most splendid sonnet. I had better read it to you at once, because I’ve got to go on to the Princess’s at 6.15.”

He pulled the large sheet of blue foolscap out of his pocket, unfolded it, and began at once:

“Kwang Su, intent on virginal assaults—”

His voice went on and on in a very high key. F. — D

“It’s no use,” Miss Macphail continued with Mr. Mitchell the wrangle that had accompanied them down the staircase. “You must take a week’s notice. I can’t bother about your trousers.”

Mr. Blood introduced the younger Miss Macphail — Miss Wilhelmina — to Mr. Fleight. When he spoke of her his voice had a kind intonation, but he was aloof enough to all the others.

“The two young men,” he was beginning, but the voice of Mr. Macpherson became so high with excitement when he reached the words:

“Inveighs him to his green ancestral vaults—”

that Mr. Blood had to begin again:

“The two young men you may look upon as excellent representatives of literary and dilettante London of the present day. Mr. Macpherson, as you can hear, is a poet; Mr. Mitchell is a prose stylist. You can take it from me that he is quite excellent. Isn’t he, Miss Wilhelmina?”

“Admirable!” Miss Wilhelmina exclaimed.

“And Miss Wilhelmina,” Mr. Blood continued, “is an admirable artist. She draws all the fashion plates, designs all the head and tail pieces, the covers and most of the fancy advertisements of the periodical called the
Halfpenny Weekly.”
He went on to explain that the
Halfpenny Weekly
was a magnificent periodical, a thorough type of the civilization of to-day. It brought in for its proprietors, so he said, rather over fifteen thousand a year, and the editorial expenses were about ten pounds a week. Mr. Mitchell, the stylist, received three pounds ten a week for writing the whole paper. Miss Wilhelmina received one pound ten for acting as art editor, as he had already related. The sub-editor received twenty-five shillings weekly and put in her unoccupied time as an advertisement canvasser, receiving no commission.

Mr. Macpherson, who had ceased for a moment, began again:

“Now, here’s another poem that I am going to read to the Princess and Countess Paramatti:

“The enamelled copper of Ho Pi San’s lawns

Reverberates with tinkles of the lute—”

He continued to read, throwing back his head, halfclosing his eyes and having upon his olive face an expression of ecstatic delight. Miss Macphail, with Mr. Mitchell beside her, was pouring out the tea in a business-like manner.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Charlie,” she said. “If you’ll introduce me to your aunt, the Duchess of Essex, and if she consents to write an article for the paper for nothing, I’ll pay you what I should have paid her — twenty-five shillings.”

“Miss Macphail,’’ Mr. Blood continued,” who has built up that remarkable periodical, guides it, edits it for three pounds fifteen, having, in spite of obvious difficulties with the language, sprung at one bound into a position at the summit of British journalism.”

“But three pounds fifteen a week!” Mr. Fleight said.

“Oh, that’s about current rates for an editor to-day,” Mr. Blood answered. “Of course, someone will be coming along and trying to bribe her away from her present employers. She’ll be able to get eight or nine times as much soon. That’s why I want to secure her at once. She will be offered a position at ten pounds a week this afternoon, and she will stick out for fifteen.”

“How the devil do you know all these things?” Mr. Fleight said; “you’ve never been a journalist.”

“Oh, I know everything,” Mr. Blood answered off-handedly.

“So he does,” Miss Wilhelmina chorussed. “He’s a most diabolical person. I’m positively always afraid of him.”

“As for you,” Mr. Blood looked at her, “you’re not going to be worked to death any more. You’re going to have a nice room with north and top lights, and you’re going to do just exactly what you like in the way of drawing, and you’re going to have your mother over from Germany, and you’re going to keep house for your sister until you make a rich marriage and become a leader of society. That’s how we’re going to arrange your little fairy tale.”

“What heavenly things!” Miss Wilhelmina said in a tone of rapture.

“Oh, I’m not your fairy prince,” Mr. Blood said. “Here he is,” and he touched Mr. Fleight on the shoulder. “This is Mr. Rothweil, the soap-boiler.” Miss Wilhelmina, her eyes enormous with gratitude and wonder, clasped her hands in a position of German sentiment and exclaimed to Mr. Blood:

“Oh, you dear man! Oh, I always knew you would do something for us.” And then she turned quickly upon Mr. Fleight. “Is it really true?” she asked. “Is that what you are really going to do? And are you really the great Mr. Rothweil? I thought he was a much older man?”

“You perceive,” Mr. Blood remarked to Mr. Fleight, “how being Mr. Rothweil places you. It’s better than being a duke because no one in the world knows whether any given duke, except one or two, has twopence to his name. But every one in the world knows Rothweil’s Soap.”

“That’s extraordinarily true,” Miss Wilhelmina exclaimed; and then she asked coaxingly again whether Mr. Fleight was really going to do what Mr. Blood had said.

“I suppose I am,” Mr. Fleight answered. “I almost certainly am. Mr. Blood asked me to do something for some friends, and as you seem to be those friends, that’s what I am going to do. I perceive that he knows so exactly how things are — because I had never looked upon the name of Rothweil as an asset — that if he said I was going to buy all the animals in the Zoo and let them loose on Wimbledon Common, you might take it that that would be exactly what I should be going to do.”

Miss Macphail, coming from the tea-table with Mr. Mitchell behind her, had already provided Mr. Macpherson with a cup of tea. He retained it in his hand whilst he continued to read, and she approached Mr. Fleight with his cup.

“If you take sugar,” she remarked to him, without deigning to look at him, “you will have to go and get it;” and then she said to Mr. Blood: “I’ve given Charlie Mitchell the chug.”

“Oh, well,” Mr. Blood answered, “he’ll be giving you a job this afternoon. It’s all right; his star has risen. But I should advise you, if you want to appear really English, to say not ‘the chug,’ but the ‘giddy mitten.’ It sounds so much more English to be thoroughly American.”

Miss Macphail had listened to the latter part of this speech with irritation. It seemed to her that the great defect of England as a country was that people spoke too much and indulged in a silly facetiousness when they ought to stick to business.

“What’s all this?” she exclaimed in a hard voice.

“What’s this about Charlie Mitchell?” And then she called out: “Come here, Charlie. What have you been keeping up your sleeve?”

“If you could only silence Mr. Macpherson,” Mr. Blood said, “I could tell you all about it.’’

“Oh, shut up!’ Miss Macphail called to Cluny, who was still reading on;” you are an infernal nuisance!”

“I’m just coming to an end,” Mr. Macpherson mumbled. He waved his tea-cup perilously in the air upon its saucer, whilst he held the foolscap close to his eyes. “I can’t read just this word. It looks as if part of it might be ‘perambulator.’ No, that’s it.