Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (585 page)

Suddenly it occurred to her as monstrous that that man should sit there, alone with her in the immense room, far into the night and absolutely silent. And, “with all the force of her nature,” she began to will him to speak to her. He was holding a solid book, of the memoir type, on high, rather close to his eyes; his face was hidden. She went on “willing.”

He placed his finger and thumb slowly in the right pocket of his dress waistcoat, drew out a small gold pencil case, made a note on the slip of paper with which he marked his place in the book. He did this very deliberately; when it was done he was looking at Miss Jeaffreson with his overhung eyes. The authority in his deep voice caused Miss Jeaffreson to start so that she dropped her spectacle case.

He had said:

“You have been here three months to-day!”

He was regarding her with composure and speaking in deep chest tones, as if from a height. He went on:

“I notice a great improvement in my niece’s mannerisms, which used to be too foreign. I am much obliged to you!”

She had little doubt that he had once been a man of distinction, but she retained firmly the idea that he had been a criminal; that the children were illegitimate; in all probability he had behaved badly to the mother and he intended to act meanly to the children. Those were her immutable convictions.

She humiliated herself a little by answering something purely conventional, and he continued by saying that the children had been most considerate and affectionate during the whole time of their stay there. He went on to say that he wished to know if Miss Jeaffreson would be content to accompany the children on some small travels in search of recreation and knowledge of the world. Miss Jeaffreson said that she should like nothing better.

He spoke with calmness, precision, and balance; indeed, his sentences might well have come out of one of the books of memoirs that he so constantly read.

He was proposing to give the young people the benefit of a season in London, subject to Miss Jeaffreson’s consenting to undertake their guidance during that period in the British metropolis — say, from the beginning of April until the middle of July.

And having ascertained formally that this programme would be perfectly agreeable to Miss Jeaffreson, he went on:

As long as he lived, he said, the children — or at least the girl — might be expected to go on residing with him in one place or other on the Continent. Still, they were English children, and being of British nationality it put them at a disadvantage never to have visited their country of origin.

The girl he hoped would marry well; the boy he regarded as having great natural parts. And he was destined for public life. In England, if he wished it; if not, in the service of his country. Say in the Foreign Office. That, of course, did not concern Miss Jeaffreson herself at all immediately.

Nevertheless, Mr. Heimann went on, it was the wish of his heart that this young connexion of his should distinguish himself in a certain direction. Isolated as he himself had been for many years, he had not abstained altogether from reflecting on the course of public affairs. And the whole of his mind had been given to cementing what he would call a union of hearts between the two great Teutonic Empires. And it was as an offering to this great ideal that he hoped his young connexion would consider himself. That was the desire of his, Mr. Heimann’s, heart.

Miss Jeaffreson permitted herself to say that no ideal could be more noble than that which had for its aim the close union of England and Germany, and that George Heimann might indeed consider himself fortunate if he could contribute in any way to bringing about that end.

Mr. Heimann went on to give a slight sketch of the educational establishments at which the young people had been brought up, he himself usually contriving to have them with him for the holidays. And at that point he broke off, as if to adopt what Miss Jeaffreson called a more marmoreal tone of voice. At any rate he fixed the young woman with his dark brown eyes and exclaimed — as she represented — hollowly:

“Miss Jeaffreson, whilst I was still in active life I was, I may say, the protagonist of advanced ideas!”

That certainly made Miss Jeaffreson jump!

He went on with extreme seriousness to enumerate the Advanced Causes that he had championed — from Home Rule for Ireland to the Disestablishment of the Church and the Abolition of the House of Peers. He dropped his voice to say:

“So you will acknowledge that I am not the man to exercise pressure on these children in a reactionary direction!”

He went on to make the speech that might be expected as to his having no objection to Socialism — to a sane, well thought out and balanced measure of Socialism that should be brought about by the broadening down of precedent to precedent. But, apparently at the University of Berlin, to which city he had been unable to accompany them, the children had picked up from the less desirable students whom they met there, certain doctrines almost of violence.

He stopped. Suddenly he exclaimed:

“I must acknowledge... I must acknowl...”

He stuttered slightly: went on:

“Parliamentary institutions — not yet perfected — but institutions! Must be studied in their birthplace. I must—” He passed his hand suddenly hard down his face, his fingers pressing on his high forehead, and as if snapping off the bottom of his beard. His eyes glared balefully at the young woman, the dewlaps appearing to drip blood. She started against the back of her chair. The hotel servants had told her that this Milor had only one defect: he was subject to violent, sudden, and incomprehensible fits of rage. She had witnessed no such outbreak, and had regarded this story as being merely one of the stupidities of the foreign domestic class. Mr. Heimann, writhing his square, bulky body, shouted:

“I must acknowledge that, though I have every reason ... every reason in the world.... to hate my own country!”

A panic of nervousness invaded Miss Jeaffreson.

There she sat, alone, very late at night, in a dim, bogey-fied room, immense, with aged furniture and a dying fire — with a man whom she was regarding as bad to the core, burdened with an inscrutable but atrocious past, and apparently on the verge of going beyond control.

He recovered his appearance of equanimity with a sort of violence; as if, Miss Jeaffreson said, he had suddenly tightened upon himself a garment of iron bands. But the singular aspect of his jaws and eyes in the firelight, the grating quaver of his voice when he had said the words: “Every reason to hate my own country! “ — these things, as she put it, continued to make her soul shiver.

She was convinced that one day she would be able to prove that this man was a scoundrel — an unpunished criminal. It was her duty to do that: she owed it to womenkind! Men must not escape. And whilst, as she put it, her underself was still shivering, she kept her conscious, physical ears very wide open. She was certain that she would pick up details of the fellow’s past. She imagined by this time that Mr. Heimann must have been a dishonest member of Parliament — or at least a defaulting parliamentary agent!

Mr. Heimann, however, was spinning out generalisations. He would wish the young people, when in London, to witness any great debates in either House of Parliament. That could be arranged for. But he had rather they went slumming than attended lectures on the life and labour of the poor. “Slumming” had been a fashionable-philanthropic pastime in the days of his prime.

It was at this point that Miss Jeaffreson suddenly asked Mr. Heimann if he had made his will. She said that the words sounded like a thunderclap.

I can imagine that they upset her a great deal. Nothing could have been further from her conscious mind than to ask such a question. She said that it was one of the most extraordinary instances of action by a subliminal self that her experience had afforded her. But it should be remembered that her solicitor-brother had asked her to obtain precisely that piece of information, and I am inclined to think that all through this interview, and indeed all through her even casual intercourse with this man, at the bottom of her mind there had always been the passionate desire to know whether Mr. Heimann had made his will!

She heard herself say, baldly, the five words necessary for the question: nothing else, no breaking of the ice And she introduced them into the middle of one of his rounded sentences!

The words did not affect Mr. Heimann as a thunderclap, and the interruption left him perfectly unmoved. He just went on with his sentence. And at that, Miss Jeaffreson said, the half-sense, like a memory, of her mother’s At-homes, twenty years before, became almost overwhelming. She had had it all along; but now it became so strong as to amount almost to a conviction that she was back in her childhood and being talked to interminably by — a Whig statesman.

In those days there had been a Liberal Minister who had come pretty frequently to Lady Jeaffreson’s parties and had overwhelmed those not very festive gatherings with long and resonant harangues on, precisely, the Enlargement of the Franchise or the Abolition of the House of Lords. And once, just as a monotonous sentence was swelling to an intolerable conclusion, Eleanor, then ten or eleven, and beyond herself with sitting on the great man’s benevolent knee whilst he declaimed, had asked the gentleman whether the animals in the Zoological Gardens were happy.

The great man finished his sentence. Then, setting his bearded head on one side, he repeated the child’s question, seriously, deferentially, and word for word. He answered it, dividing his reply into careful and balanced headings, with a summing up.

And she said that Mr. Heimann’s voice and mannerisms were so exactly those of that Liberal peer that, for a moment, she shut her eyes and felt herself to be back, overpoweringly, in the Museum drawing-room, on a November afternoon, with the fog filtering in beside the high window sashes. Of course Mr. Heimann
wasn’t
that peer, who was still alive, though going about usually in a bath-chair.

Mr. Heimann finished his sentence, which had had to do with the life and labour of the poor in London, and contained the words “industry,”

“sobriety,” and “application.” He said:

“Have I made my will? No!” Then he set his head on one side and continued
— exactly
in the voice and traditions and with the mannerisms of Lord — ! — something like:

“Nor — though I appreciate your motives for asking the question! — do I perceive any immediate necessity for doing so. I have no surviving friends to whom I could wish to leave keepsakes or memorials, for I have no wish to be remembered by anybody. Nor do I acknowledge any claims, obligations, or responsibilities to any soul. Not to one! The world has cast me aside, so I have cast it off.

“I have, in the second place, no need to anticipate a speedy dissolution. Except for occasional indispositions, I am sound in health. Should I, in the course of my remaining years, incur obligations — which is very unlikely — I expect to have ample time to make testamentary acknowledgments before my decease. And from my observation of their dispositions I am confident that my heirs would behave handsomely in such circumstances. Thus situated, and after mature consideration, I have arrived at the conclusion that the making of testamentary dispositions, necessitating as it would my entering into painful matters with some solicitor or other, would be entirely supererogatory.”

Those, Miss Jeaffreson said, were nearly his words.

They filled her with such indignation that she could hardly bear herself. For what, she asked, could be plainer than his brutal selfishness? He declared himself ready to risk casting his illegitimate children, her charges, unprovided for upon the world. Merely because he just funked talking to his solicitor about his miserable past. No doubt he meant to provide, during his lifetime, for their futures. But supposing he died before so doing? The children had been brought up to lives of idleness in every circumstance of luxury; they might at any moment be cast penniless upon the world. A fine lot — as she expressed it to herself — his legal heirs could be expected to do for them!

She was about, she said, to make some comment, which would no doubt have been timid enough, when he claimed her attention with a “Miss Jeaffreson!” — so loud that it might have been a clarion call to a political following. He had even risen from his chair.

And, swaying to his feet, apparently apropos of nothing, he let out an extraordinary harangue against inherited privileges. He said they cursed both him that was subject to and him that possessed them. His eyes, she said, were “thunderous,” and he went on for a long time. For his part, he said, he would have a young man come into life without any such hindrance or advantage. Let him, if he might, inherit a competence, or even great wealth or a great name honoured amongst the Humanities. Let his parents train him as best they might; then let him go out on to the broad sea of public life. But with no shackles about his feet! He called out suddenly: