Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (586 page)

“Damn it! So I will it and will have it.... Look at me! What should I have been without... If I had been able to defend myself in a house that was alive, not a mausoleum!”

He sank down suddenly into his chair, and remained for as long as Miss Jeaffreson was in the room, looking at the dead fire, without speaking.

CHAPTER V

I GO back, then, to my own story.

But I defy anybody to render, in words and on the scale that I have hitherto devoted to it, the rest of that day of mine.

The least important part — my speech before the serried rows of the Ladies’ Club gathering — remains clearest in my mind.

I got back in time for it. I got back, indeed, to hear all but the first sentence or two of my opponent.

It must have been about 4.20 by then; the police court business being over about 4.0. I am not going to say much about that. For one thing, I did not get into the Court itself; for the other, the actual proceedings were of no dramatic importance. Mr. Podd swore to his case, and George Heimann was sent down, to be released when his bail arrived. That I heard when I got to the Police Station. I was marched along white-tiled — I think they were white-tiled, but they may have been merely stucco — passages by Lady Ada Pugh Gomme and a really extraordinary solicitor-brother of Miss Jeaffreson. I hardly got, at that time, any sense of Lady Ada, except that she was tall, dressed in black, low-voiced, and very persuasive. There was also an extremely tall German with a dark, fiery aspect and a deep voice, who appeared to be bewildered —

Anyhow, there was quite a crowd in those white corridors with the green doors.

They wanted me to go bail — the second bail, of course — for that boy, and I was quite ready, as long as they got me through it quickly. And they did. They secured me in a room where there were people of another type — police, I suppose — behind desks. I signed my name at a sort of pulpit.

I must be absolved from the suspicion of having been weak. I was not at all. I was quite ready to trust George Heimann for bail to any amount — on his face. Besides, Lady Ada Pugh Gomme was the other bail. But I was in a hurry.

I daresay I should have got through it all like a flash if it had not been for all those people who wanted to talk to me. And that extraordinary solicitor fellow — he was small, blonde, had pince-nez that would not keep on, and exactly resembled a cod-fish — gripped my arm all the time with his left hand. At the top of his voice, but with his right hand to his mouth and his mouth close to my ear, he was telling me rather damaging anecdotes about other clients of his. I suppose he imagined that the action of putting his hand between his mouth and my ear converted his high-pitched shouting into a whisper. It was a very disagreeable sound. On the other side, Lady Ada Pugh Gomme began sentences that that noise drowned. He also asked me if I had made my will, and I had to confess, before such witnesses as were present in the Bail Office, that I hadn’t.

Anyhow, Lady Ada detached me, and we reached the taxi-cab, after a little conversation with that tall German fellow. I was squeezed so close to him in the corridor that I had no particular impression of him at the moment except that he was certainly the Professor-Poet Curtius, and that he had an extremely powerful hand grip — a giant; but not disagreeable.

His accent off the telephone was much less German. He said:

“So you are the second pail after all. Good.
Gemuethlich
!” He was going on to say something about my “pudiful book,” but someone or other interrupted him. His ceremonial sentences took too long to get under way. I had a glimpse of George Heimann, pale, but quite composed, leaning back in the street, with Miss Jeaffreson and his sister clawing all over him. They ought to have left him alone to recover from the painful emotions of the police court. But leaving him alone was the last thing those women would ever do.

All the others were getting themselves cabs. They said they wanted to hear me speak; but what they really wanted was to talk to me clamorously about George’s case. So we went in a racing trail down Constitution Hill.

In my conveyance — it was a rather atrocious specimen — Lady Ada was being thrown against me and was uttering a string of kindly hints that I could not quite catch about George Heimann and his sister. I think she wanted to reassure me as to the bail I had gone for George. But it was difficult to hear her, and altogether it was not a very good preparation for my lecture.

She was a very kind and beautiful woman — statuesque, as if she really did exercises every morning after her cold bath. She had a great deal of uniformly grey hair, from which looked out her youngish, very dark face with black horseshoe eyebrows and singular prune-black eyes. She was dressed in close-fitting black, so that she had the air of wearing a riding-habit. The wife of an
extremely
high — and, I believe, an extremely disagreeable! — British Imperial official “ from Balliol,” Lady Ada Pugh Gomme spoke in hints because, I suppose, she had lived most of her life amongst State secrets in a society of intimates who could easily take half-hidden meanings. But she had an unusually fine smile. It was astonishingly like George Heimann’s — quick to come, but a little deprecating.

I fancy she wanted me to gather that even she did not know everything about the young people and their ancestry. But she certainly conveyed to me the impression that auspicious if indefinite Fates might be considered as attendant on those two young things, and that I need not have the least alarm as to the safeness of my bail. She even let me know that she did not prohibit her own young people from, as it were, playing with the little Heimanns. The backing that they had had from their mysterious “uncle” had warranted her, she hinted, in that. And I gathered that Lady Ada herself desired me to take an interest in the young people. It would, she said, so please her connection, Mr. Heimann, whom she wanted to please above almost anyone else in the world.

At any rate, long before I reached the Ladies’ Club, I could see that those two young people were not merely unbefriended waifs. Indeed, I began to think that that young man had almost too many people to take passionate interests in him. At the Bail Office of the police court there had seemed to be a crowd of them. And none of them had appeared to be very wise.

That boy certainly did have a good deal to contend with. My impression was in no way wrong! For it was certainly an ironic jest of Fortune that made him deliver, on that 13th of July before a gathering of the Ladies’ Club, of all unfortunate places in the world, a semi-jocular oration in praise of Germany. Yet that was inevitable.

It came about in this way:

My opponent for the afternoon, an Irish poet, a charming fellow, made a speech in favour of the Muse of Eirinn.

I myself made a silly, facetious speech that no one was meant to take seriously.

But the feeling of being at last alone upon that platform where no one could touch me, and no one above all could speak to me, was merely blissful. I had to oppose a personally charming Irish poet. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to oppose anybody. I daresay I did it all the better because of that.

I had before me three or four hundred attentive ladies and six or seven men. Immediately under my nose, in the first row, were the two women in electric blue, who had come to sneer at me — and Professor Doctor Wirklicher Geheimrath Curtius. Somewhere in the dimmer part of the horseshoe of audience were all those others, from Lady Ada Pugh Gomme to that queer solicitor fellow. They had followed me with the avowed purpose of further discussing that boy’s case; and I recognised with a sinking of the heart that, when I ended, the charmed circle around me would dissolve. So I finished by saying that even my distinguished opponent, the Irish poet, had had to come to England to find amongst the despised, Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon race, a profitable, an appreciative, and even an adoring audience. I had a sense of him, leaning at a table, behind me, smiling, a little like Shakespeare. I concluded by quoting from memory one of his poems about the Dark Rosaleen.

Almost before the sound of my purposedly chanting voice had died away, and certainly before what applause there was had ended, the athletic Professor Doctor was on his feet. The extremely capable Miss Scott had asked him, as soon as he entered the Club, to follow me in the tale of speakers.

He was an immense, thin, large-boned man, with very sunken, intent, dark eyes and high cheek-bones; a Silesian Slav, I should imagine, rather than a Teutonic-German; with a very deep, vibrating chest voice. And he was in a state of emotion. There were, even then, too many war rumours in the air for him to be perfectly calm. He was, moreover, a Romantic: a good fellow!

A gentleman of this country who wrote modern epics, built castles in facsimile for himself and his unsympathetic wife, exclaimed that he felt the laurels fade on his brow when the binding of his book fell to pieces, and lived, though I believe quite platonically, with a Muse called Clara — such a gentleman in England would appear either imbecile or else improbable. But the Germany of those days was not only the land of innumerable allegories in stone, in orations, on paper or canvas; it was a land of great sales for epics. So that Curtius was immensely wealthy, and could spoil himself when he had a mind to.

Obviously no English poet would erect a Gothic castle in stone for his divorced wife; but then, no English poet could. Nor do our own bards bother much about their print or bindings; they are only too glad, poor devils, if they get printed on sugar paper and bound in flour-sacking. And I do not believe that any English poet would live with a Muse called Clara — platonically.

But in Germany, if the Professor Doctor Wirklicher Geheimrath dropped his fountain pen, the All-Highest of Germany hastened to pick it up. He was killed quite early in the war, near a place called Béthune, and my own regiment must have killed him. I wish they hadn’t.

In peaceful July such things seemed impossible, but the tall, thin, very large-boned youngish Professor was used to a good deal of room, even in a speech at a Ladies’ Club. That afternoon he took it. He talked of a great many things — of poetry in the abstract, and of the incredibly great sales in Germany and Austria, of my opponent, the Irish poet. That fellow beside me must have been a perfect Croesus!

He went on to eulogise great, tranquil, orderly London and threw laurel wreaths over the imaginary figure of a London policeman. But, naturally, he was only delaying to come to the inevitable note. And how painful it seems in memory! For suddenly he filled his great lungs to say that the heart of every individual in Germany was filled with intense and never-ending admiration for this wonderful nation with its phlegm, its practical virtues, its admirable system of Justice, its unspotted tradition of Freedom. And if — his eyes flamed and his forehead was contracted — there existed any hell-born villains who desired to sow the seeds of discord....

A good many people felt like that in those days, and no German, speaking in London, in public, could have avoided, whatever his topic, some such peroration. But at last he lowered his voice to friendly and almost caressing tones. The Fates were surely, with irony on their faces, drawing in on poor George. For: Well, then, the Professor concluded, if there were any doubters in that audience let him beg the Fræulein Praesidentin, the Miss Presidentess, to call on his beloved friend and translator, George Heimann, better known as James Pearson, his translator’s modest pseudonym, to address the meeting. He, a loyal Englishman, was also a dear friend, a true lover — of Germany! He would assure them of the real state of affairs in the Fatherland.

The Professor sat down after paying a short tribute to me as his, he permitted himself to say, dear new friend and esteemed colleague. A true friend, too, of George Heimann, otherwise James Pearson! That was the ruin of George!

For the two hags in electric blue dresses at the poet’s right hand set up a titter and looked round through their tortoise-shell lorgnettes on long sticks. They were versatile journalists of the less reputable press. Even at that date they hated Germany almost as much as they hated me: and they hated me with the hate of Hell. I can think of no better phrase. In addition they loved Mr. Podd. They would!

As for why they hated me I have barely a notion. It may have been predestined so as to drive that boy to suicide. They were two cousins, red-haired, mature, and wearing whole birds of paradise in their electric blue feather hats. That is why I called them hags. I will call any woman a hag who wears the plumage of inedible birds. Except for that, they may have been good souls enough. I know nothing else against them.

But it is a queer world! Those two women hated and pursued me relentlessly — and I can give no reason. My nose may have been too long, or my voice too soft. Or, perhaps....

Twelve or thirteen years before, my father — formerly a celebrity as an engineer — had died, and been slow in dying. My mother, thinking him dead, had cried out half-an-hour before his death, and a stupid Irish servant had run all over the house, pulling down the blinds. Immediately there came thunderous knockings on the front door, and pealings at the door bell. I was called down from the death-chamber, and there, in the hall, their reporters’ notebooks out, were the two cousins. They were younger, and, poor creatures, had their feet just on the first rung of journalistic life and its rope ladder.