Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (596 page)

She was later pardoned and taken back into favour. It would obviously have been too awkward for Marie Elizabeth to be unfriendly to the sister of her solicitor, and Miss Jeaffreson no doubt afforded some explanations of the purity of her motives.

But that holiday Miss Jeaffreson spent with her mother in the palace of Hampton Court, where the old lady had been granted apartments by the Sovereign. And Miss Honeywill, so her father told me, was rehearsing for the idiotic performance whose impresario was the man with the wooden face. It ran its five hundred nights or so, and in its course Clarice was three times promoted — if that is the right word.

So a deep tranquillity seemed to brood over that great view. I lay in bed for the majority of the sleepy hours of ten days, and read novels about hunting. Then those shadows flickered up on to my ceiling.

Two did not arouse my curiosity. I was used to the passing shadows of my brother and his chief poultryman — a cheerful beery old fellow; but at the third, feeling that this must be at least a deputation from the hands asking for a holiday, I looked up.

I saw the long form of Professor Curtius in a motor dust-wrap, passing my window with an engrossed expression. He was followed by my brother, who was expressionless. The other two must have been George Heimann and his sister. Then I knew that there was going to be a war.

It must have been the second of August then, and I had never believed that we could be in a war. I was a Londoner: and still in those days we had London County Councils, Boards of Trade, and a Police Force whose function was to stop things happening. That was the immutable London feeling.

My brother read excitable journals that came to the Ridge a full day late; sometimes I glanced at them — usually I did not. I knew how the papers are prepared. At dinner my brother would say that if something or other happened we should have to “come in.” But that phrase was, then, a very vague one. And when my brother had duly used it my aunt would go on talking about the early days and friends of my mother’s family —

This is not a war novel. Heaven knows I, who saw something of that struggle, would willingly wipe out of my mind every sight that I saw, every sound that I heard, every memory in my brain. But it is impossible, though there are non-participants who demand it, to write the lives of people to-day aged thirty or so, and leave out all mention of the fact that whilst those young people were aged, say, twenty-two to twenty-eight, there existed — Armageddon. For the matter of that, it would be wicked to attempt it, since the eyes, the ears, the brain and the fibres of every soul to-day adult have been profoundly seared by those dreadful wickednesses of embattled humanity.

However.... The sight of the Professor, stalking along, with his intent, barbaric profile, in an immense dust-coat, holding motor goggles in his dusty hands, brought together a great number of bellicose impressions that during the last few weeks had been neglected in my mind. I can put it only in that way. The brain works very fast sometimes. My brother had come into my room that morning after his breakfast and had mentioned that some fellow had been there at seven-thirty to commandeer two of his horses. That had seemed part of a silly, serious game. He had been calm enough.

He was not as calm now.

He came into my room as if he were quite irresolute. He was pretending irresolution so as not to give me too sudden a shock. He let the blind that covered the French windows right down, saying that the light was probably trying for my eyes.

Poor fellow, his job was not too easy. He had an exaggerated idea of my illness — as of my talents. Long after, I found out that he stinted himself a good deal so that my income from my mother might be as large as possible. He thought that genius needed extravagant surroundings, and that, having no desire for “ expression,” though he had a certain gift, it was his duty to make, if possible, a living by his chickens, so as to leave more for me! And he mothered me when he had the opportunity. I only discovered all this long after he was dead.

I lay still, so as not to agitate
him.
He stood beside the window, fingering the knob of the blind-cord. I said:

“What does the Professor want?”

He, too, paused for a long time; then, without looking at me, he said:

“These people! Are they all right?” His voice was level, but miserable. He went on: “There’s hospitality! They’re your guests. What’s to be done? I’ll answer for it that the girl is straight; and the Professor — an open enemy.”

He swung the acorn of the blind-knob round and round. It burst upon me that he considered George Heimann as possibly an enemy agent. To a simple man like my brother that uniform of Bohemia, the beard and the dark features, would naturally be suspicious. Marie Elizabeth I knew he liked. He had talked to her a great deal during the lunches near the police courts. He had called her afterwards “straight” and “sensible.” He went on again:

“Hospitality! Yes! But there’s duty to the country!.... I’m not agitating you?”

He was agitating me, really, a great deal. I said to myself: “That boy
ought
to have some papers to show what he is.” I myself had done all that I could to dissuade him from getting his papers. I said as much to my brother. I added:

“You’re not agitating me more than you must. It has got to be faced. What do you wish to do?

He wanted me to consent to his applying to the authorities for “instructions how to act with regard to the Professor.” By telephone: whilst the Professor was there. It took him a long time to get it out; his eyes watched my features like those of a faithful and imploring spaniel. He said:

“The Professor himself is of opinion that war has broken out. Then he ought not to command this view. There will be movements of troops — plainly visible from here. It’s horrible. I know the idea shocks you.”

I said:

“No. It’s a duty. You may have to detain him. There was something Napoleon did after the breach of the Treaty of Amiens that governs these cases.”

It was like shadow talk — unreal. As if we had been acting to each other, without rehearsal, in an impromptu charade. I said: but that was real enough:

“It’s the boy I’m worried about. He has no papers. I would answer for him with my life. But I’ve got him into a hole.”

Fred asked:

“You have really asked yourself about it? Seriously? He appears to be a selfish sort of fellow. Selfish about his sister’s affairs. She has had the opportunity to tell me.” And I hadn’t thought about it. Suspicions flickered across my mind. What did I know about him, except that he was sympathetic? He had made an oration in favour of the German Empire: he had lived in Germany for a long time. I said:

“I don’t know. I’d trust — I
did
trust him, myself. I went bail for him. Lady Ada Pugh Gomme vouches for him. The magistrate discharged him on his own recognizances for a very small sum. That was a sign of trust. You’ve seen him....”

He said:

“I don’t like the looks of him — much. He has treated his sister selfishly, too. And that sort of man....”

A sudden warm wave of faith in that boy went over me. I said:

“Damn it all! “What are we talking about? We are not policemen — what can we do? Legally?”

He said:

“You don’t
know
anything against him? There are such rumours I’d trust your instinct rather than any sort of papers or Lady Ada’s. You’re a great novelist. You can read character. You might know he was any sort of bad hat, and yet back him against Podd. You would have been perfectly right, too — then! But it’s different now.”

I said:

“The boy is the son — legitimate or illegitimate — of Earl Marsden, who was Postmaster-General in one of Gladstone’s Cabinets. I believe he does not know it himself, or perhaps he does. But
you
know it. You yourself, if you think. What relation is Lady Ada Pugh Gomme, Earl Marsden’s sister, as you may see in any Peerage, to George Heimann? You saw them at lunch together. What did her manner show?”

His face cleared: it was as if more candles had been lit in the room. He said:

“That’s it. I’ve been puzzled. You might have thought she was in love with him! But she’s his aunt of course! An aunt who backs him.”

He went out to send the Professor to me. I daresay he wanted to absolve George Heimann, the brother of his sister, as much as I did.

For three or four minutes I lay there sweating with dismay. It was a pretty affair. For I could not see why — why in the world — I had persuaded George Heimann not to try to get his birth certificate from his “uncle.” Or perhaps “persuaded” is not the word. At any rate I had backed him up silently, with all the influence of an older man and of a man of the world, in his disinclination to worry his uncle. The reasons that there had seemed to be against it — the reasons that had appeared to be as clear and as hard as small marble statuary — had disappeared. I thought and thought, worrying as in a nightmare.

The Professor was in the room. He was perfectly calm, but it was not an English kind of calmness. It was the tranquillity of a man who was quite prepared. We English are never prepared: we accept disaster with phlegm. He said that the day before he had bought an automobile. What was to be done with the young Heimanns? The Laubenheimers could keep them no longer. They were frightened, all the petrol for two hundred miles round having been commandeered. They were, as he put it, too international.

He was blinking hard with both his dark eyes; the rims were red with the dust of motoring. He had been reading Elizabethan texts at the British Museum. He had been rung up at his boarding-house by someone from his Embassy, after midnight. They were warning prominent Germans to clear out. Twenty minutes later he had again been called out of his bed. That had been the Laubenheimers, who had received the same news. Being International, they were not going; but all their guests were leaving them in the morning. Lady Laubenheimer was a kind woman. She wanted to know what was to become of the young Heimanns. She believed they were German Jews.

My brother was in the room. He stalked across it and, with almost the only impatient movement I have ever seen him use, he span up that blind. His voice had the sickly intonation that comes to the Englishman who is talking of the imbecilities of his laws or of his public officials. He said to me:

“It seems that the Professor is free of my view till the day after to-morrow, probably. We are legal friends!”

It was very curious to see the differing simplicities of those two simple creatures. The German rubbed his scalding eyes. With his great frame, his little, firm chin, and the protruding bones of his eyebrows, his face was that of one of those gargoyles that his Gothic ancestors must have conceived in the dim forests of a dim age. And, when it came to action, his mind worked very slowly so that, knowing it, he prepared himself.

My brother was not a stupid man, though he was not an epic poet. But when it came to action his mind jumped to twenty varying courses at once, ten or eleven of them being fantastic.

The Professor said:

“Ach, yes. Your lovely view. Ge-org told me of it. I cannot do it justice. I apologise. My eyes smart so.”

Fred said:

“You must bathe them. I will get you a lotion!”

The Professor stretched out a large arm, rather impressively:

“No. Wait!” he said. “You have used the word ‘Friends.’ Shall we not be friends to all time? And after: when the Archangel Gabriel... what is it: ‘ The trumpet shall blow, and we Dead...’” — he stopped upon a sob.

My brother was in an agony. He said:

“Please let me go and get...

The Professor still stopped him with his great arm held right across the body.

“It is... the dust!” he said. “But ah! what dust shall be ‘When all those legs and arms... some swearing, some crying out...’” He was quoting Henry V. I have forgotten the passage. He was determined to express emotions; my brother was determined to stop him. He kept on bursting in with invitations to the Professor to come and have lunch: to come and see the chickens. The Professor continued in his great voice: He had had so much hospitality; so much heart kindness in this land so beautiful, so quiet beneath the sun, so fertile. And he saw so much better than my brother. He wanted to talk of the dust of innumerable corpses blowing through the thistle-stalks of old battlefields. As we saw them! As we saw them!