Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (504 page)

CHAPTER VI
I

“GENTLEMEN—”

Mr. Aaron Rothweil was addressing his supporters in the Public Room of the George Inn at Byefleet, in North Kent. For the purposes of his hurried candidature he was stopping with Mr. Blood, at Corbury.

He was perfectly calm, slightly depressed, and so dressed in shiny black clothes that his uncommanding aspect gave him exactly the appearance of any one of the two-hundred shop-keepers whom he was addressing. He had been speaking for about ten minutes. He had given his attention hitherto to the party matters of the day. Now he was to take another line.

He looked down upon Mr. Blood. Mr. Blood was seated in the front row below his feet. Beside him, blonde, large, and more than usually German, was Miss Macphail, who had come down to see how he was getting on, as well as to interview him for the third time for the
Halfpenny Weekly,
whose editorial duties she contrived to combine with the assistant editorship of the new review. That was rapidly coming into existence. Mr. Blood nodded slightly, and Mr. Rothweil gathered from this that Mr. Blood appreciated his performance as far as it had gone.

In the same slightly depressed tones Mr. Rothweil continued:

“It will thus appear that I am absolutely staunch and profess a sound loyalty to the programme of our great party.” He went on to say that it was the historic party as to which every member, being ever so humble, must feel with immense pride, in belonging to it, he formed a part of one of those illustrious bodies which have so enormously influenced the majesty and the tradition of an historic empire.

There was the sound of very great applause in the room. Mr. Blood whispered sarcastically to Miss Macphail:

“Not bad, that! Considering that it is the first speech I have written for fifteen years.”

“Yes, it’s good stuff,” Miss Macphail said; “but I wish he would get a little more animation into his manner.” Mr. Blood answered only: “Listen!”

At the same time, Mr. Rothweil was continuing, whilst bound to his party by that immense spirit of loyalty which, he might be permitted to say, made them all brothers in heart and spirit, he had also his private aspirations. And, since he was now come amongst them for the first time, and, since he had already assured them that he was perfectly sound upon the great questions of Social Reform, Imperial Preference, and all the other planks of their programme, it seemed to be his duty — and was it not for that very purpose that they were gathered there together? — to let them know, “If I may be permitted to use a phrase which is slang, but one which is in common use between simple man and man — to let you know what sort of fellow I am.”

There were many sounds of approval in the hall, and one enthusiastic gentleman, to whom the landlord of the “George” had been unusually generous, exclaimed in a confident voice:

“One of the best!”

Mr. Rothweil continued that he was not going to be unduly modest. It would be utterly ridiculous for him to come there and ask for their support if he couldn’t claim to have pondered more deeply than most people upon the questions of the day. He did not mean to claim any very special gifts; he simply meant to say that he was one of the leisured class. Providence had been good to him, and he had had the time, which many men, better than himself, had simply not had, to devote to thinking about the questions of their day. “That is why I stand before you, and upon that fact I base my claim to your suffrages.”

Mr. Rothweil’s agent, a local solicitor with a rather stupid, blonde face, but full of physical vigour, was seated on the platform next but one to Mr. Rothweil. The chair was taken by the Earl of Barryowen, a fair, sleepy, young man, whose seat, though it was always let, was in the immediate neighbourhood. The gentleman who had exclaimed “One of the best!” now exclaimed “And a damn good claim, too!” And the agent said “Hush!” because Mr. Blood was talking to Miss Macphail in a whisper so loud that it reached their ears upon the platform.

England, Mr. Rothweil was continuing, compared with the showy foreign nations, had always been a little dowdy. It isn’t what you have on your back makes you the man you are; it’s what you have in your stomach; it’s whether your heart is in the right place. That was the secret of England’s greatness. Society was on the wrong track; it was too much led astray by wealth and show. And Mr. Rothweil raised his voice to say:

“I don’t mean to say that there should be no wealthy people. I’m wealthy myself. I’m wearisomely wealthy.”

It was at this point that Gilda Leroy and her mother entered and found seats in the back part of the hall below the dark gallery.

“I’m wearisomely wealthy,” Mr. Rothweil repeated. They probably knew what he got his wealth from. He had eleven thousand employees — a whole town. They were extremely well paid, they were extremely well lodged, they had shares in the business on co-operative lines. He didn’t think that there was a single thing that could be said against him as an employer of labour. If there were anything he would try to have the defect remedied. He had never spent a tenth of his income.

Mr. Rothweil’s voice suddenly became lower: “I am just a man like yourselves,” he said, “with the simplest possible tastes. I don’t really know how to enjoy money. If I had my way — if I had my way — I should like to keep a small shop.”

Mr. Blood said suddenly: “Hullo, that wasn’t in the speech I wrote!”

“I should like to keep a small shop,” Mr. Rothweil repeated. “I should like to sit in peace and quiet behind the counter of an evening and have customers come in and buy things by the ha’porth, and know that every ha’porth that I sold meant a farthing of profit. That’s what I should like to do. That’s what’s really in my blood, because it’s no good making a secret of the fact. And in a small shop in an evening, one would feel so extraordinarily restful. That’s what I should really like, and I tell you this because I daresay you will understand.”

“That’s a silly, rotten thing to have said!” Miss Macphail commented. “He’s let himself down in the eyes of these people.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Blood answered; “he’s got a nice, modest way of speaking, it ought to make us like him.”

Miss Gilda Leroy at the back of the hall said to her mother:

“It’s your shop that he’s talking about. You know how he comes and sits behind the counter of an evening.”

“There can’t be any doubt about it that it’s him, Gilda,” Mrs. Leroy said, “though why he should look as though he was sickening for a gumboil it passes me to understand.”

That was on the Monday.

On the Saturday at nine o’clock, Gilda Leroy had put up the shutters of the tobacco stall that is on the left hand, up-platform of High Street, Kensington, Underground Station. She took all the silver with her in a little wallet, left the coppers in the till, and carefully folded into a bundle, which she carried under her arm, three halfpenny morning papers and two halfpenny evening ones. They had been given to her at her request in return for a damaged packet of cigarettes by the ticket collector. She took the 9.3 train to Victoria and then walked through the shabby streets that shelter between the opposing towers of the Abbey and the Cathedral.

The twilight was still in the dusky skies; the walking took her nearly always over pieces of wrapping paper and banana peels, and the sawdust and detritus that fell from the costermongers’ stalls, lining all the roadways. She was brushed against by wives who were seeking to drag their husbands out of public houses; she brushed against mothers holding several babies for their neighbours, who were inside drinking. Little boys ran against her knees in escaping from the wives of costermongers whom they had insulted, and a continuous cry went up from the meat stalls, fruit stalls, and stalls for the sale of cheap tin ware. The girl, however, in her cheap black dress was, upon the one hand, riding in a barouche with a powdered footman, who would call her “My lady” when he descended from the box; she was in the park, the cynosure of all the eyes of all the idlers that she had ever read of in the penny novelettes in whose almost exclusive society her lonely days were passed. Or, on the other hand, she was walking over Waterloo Bridge just before she threw herself into the river. On an ordinary Saturday evening she was very deft at getting through crowds; as it was, she saw nobody and stumbled against many people.

She went into her mother’s shop, which was a downstairs parlour in a whitewashed blind-alley, the other houses in it being occupied by a chimney sweep, a turncock and a midwife. She placed her wallet upon the counter, and she took her hat off and placed it upon the counter, too. She knew that her mother would be very busy that evening and could not be expected to come into the back parlour. Her mother was just wrapping up three red herrings in a half sheet of the
Morning Post,
and was talking to Mrs. Kerridge, the widow of a bus-conductor, about her rheumatism and her late husband’s rheumatism, and the indigestion of Mrs. Mason, who lived over the fish shop three doors round the corner. Mrs. Edwards, who was a charlady, had also to be served with four pounds of onions, and had to impart the information that her old man, who was the under foreman of a van-yard, always expected to have tripe for his Sunday dinner. Mrs. Leroy said that, for her part, she favoured cow-heel, and they began debating as to the respective merits of these foods, the one being held to be more filling and the other lying less heavily upon the stomach. Mrs. Leroy was an old, square woman, with blue eyes, pendulous jaws and dead white hair, that was parted flatly in the middle of her round head.

Her shop subsisted in its corner by reason of the conservatism of poor neighbourhoods. She sold penny yellow and black tea mugs that came from a pottery down Bristol way — tea mugs of a pattern one hundred and fifty years old. She sold brown moist sugar that was nearly black, and had something the flavour of liquorice, such as none of the new stores sold or would have known where to buy. She sold red herrings from a factory on the east coast that had been established two hundred and fifty years, and that had only three or four customers. She sold medicinal herbs in packets and cooked pig’s-trotters — which she boiled herself — as well as penny broad-sheet ballads that were hung up all over the shop, and onions from Brittany that depended in long ropes all down the window. Her profits from the establishment, except at Christmas and about the fifth of November, when she sold fireworks, were seldom more than seventeen and six, and never less than nine shillings a week. In return she was the dictatress of opinions and the wise woman of Henry Street, James Street, and Charles and Augusta Mews, Westminster.

Gilda Leroy took her wallet, her hat, and the bundle of papers from the counter and went into the little parlour behind the shop. The parlour was so small that, by standing in the middle of it with her arms outstretched, Gilda Leroy could touch the glass rolling-pin over the mantelpiece on one side of the room, and the china cupboard upon the other. Her father, the foreman turncock for that district, a man with grizzly side-whiskers and a Newgate fringe, was sitting inertly in a stuffed armchair. His boots were on a piece of brown paper which Mrs. Leroy had put there to save the carpet; his knees were spread widely apart, and both his palms were upon his knees. When his daughter entered he stood up with something like a grunt of contentment.

“You’re late,” he said. “I’m going to the ‘Three Tuns.’”

Mr. Leroy, though he had worked for upwards of forty years in London, was still a countryman, and he dreaded very much that his daughter would be run over or abducted in returning from her tobacco stall. So that, although he was chairman of the Club of Jovial Guzzlers that met every Saturday night at the “Three Tuns,” he never went to take the chair until he had seen his daughter safe at home.

Miss Leroy went into the little scullery, lit the gas-ring, and placed upon it a tin mug filled with cocoa that her mother had set ready for her. When it was warmed she returned to the parlour, poured the cocoa into a cup, and then, returning to the scullery, she filled the mug with cold water so that it might be easy to wash out. She sat down at the parlour table. It was laid with a blue and red duster upon which her mother had placed a thin piece of cold beef, a jar of extremely yellow pickles and a large cottage loaf. The light that had been in the midsummer sky had almost entirely faded out. Gilda Leroy lit a candle in a tin flat candlestick and began to read a paper, printed with very small print and covered in pink. She buried herself deep in the adventures of a governess who had opalescent eyes and a belted earl. She undid her boots as she was reading and loosened them upon her feet. She identified herself thoroughly and rapturously with the personality of the governess. It was true that the governess was five foot eleven in height, whereas she was not five foot six, and could certainly not fling out showers of diamond notes from a grand piano. Still, she could play “Home Sweet Home” upon the harmonium that stood beneath the window and contained a vox humana stop. And she had just arrived at the point when, the governess’ opalescent eyes having become suffused with a grey light, the belted earl said: