Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (603 page)

George was in the room, behind me. I was not looking at him, but I had a sense that he was brilliant, alive, and absolutely competent for the job he had taken on. It was that that filled me with sombre rage. I exclaimed:

“You damn well ought to be. You damn well have. To please that Tomfool girl, I suppose!”

Behind me, George said:

“I’m here, now, you know; perhaps your strafing wants to be private?”

The apologetic voice on the telephone was mumbling something wretched about the unreasonableness of George’s sister whilst George was speaking. When George’s voice stopped I could hear the other positively asking me whether I thought there was anything they could do! I just hung up the earpiece; and for a quarter of an hour afterwards the Foreign Office made my rooms unbearable by ringing up to ask whether I was going to breakfast with Mr. Carstones next morning at a quarter to ten. I answered “Yes “ at least four times. I expect Mr. Carstones was really feeling fairly wretched about the mess he knew they had got that unfortunate boy into, so he got hold of all the messengers he could to make sure of me. It was a pretty damnable mess. An hour or so later Mr. Carstones must have got hold of Sir Arthur himself, for someone unknown to me but with a Governing Class voice rang me up to tell me that Sir Arthur personally was taking “that case” up. In the meantime George was telling me his story.

He had settled himself down in a low armchair; his legs were very long and his knees came near his chin. He stretched his arms right away back, over the top of the chair, in an air of satisfaction. He said:

“It’s a long time since I sat in a London parlour. I see Clarice only at the restaurant and the theatre. Sundays we run down to see her people. In the old bus. We’re to be married just before I go out, so as to have my last leave for the honeymoon. In seven weeks I’m due to go. I bet I do, too — Now I’m going to tell you all about Hun-land — the Land of the Huns!”

All the while he was telling me I sat in a sombre rage. I suppose, just because I was in my own rooms, that looked rather faded and felt very uninhabited, I had resumed a good deal of my old attitude of rather depressed irritation — at the stupidity of life and the irrational muddlesomeness of humanity. We needed then, men, above all things. And there was a man. So we were certainly going to scrap him. I did not know what exactly was happening, but I knew that. There he sat: the magnificent young animal, singularly in repose, with the repose of the perfectly healthy body in equilibrium, and of the quite good, generous, commonplace mind; quite at ease, talking with great animation and admirable lung power. And, mind you, in those days, one looked with respect — yes, really with respect — at the shining men of H.M. Foot Guards. A sort of aura hung around them, if only because they had been selected and hammered as hard as good steel. If you could have seen the pigeon-chested, knock-kneed dwarfs with whom I had to deal! But the Guards were the steel point of the wedge!

And to-morrow this fellow was no longer going to be the point of the wedge! That was one of the queerest feelings I have ever known. There he sat. For that afternoon and an hour or so he would continue to be one of the proudest and most splendid of human beings and one of the most accomplished for his allotted work! Then, next morning, he would be one of the most disgraced; his magnificent limbs obscured by the slouching clothes of the civilian, the brightness of his glance dulled to the consciousness of obloquy that haunted all the non-serving English. I can’t help it: that was how I felt it! As an unimaginable catastrophe: something that ought not to be able to happen to a man!

And I had not the courage to break it to him! He went on talking of the future. Who was I to tell him that he had no future!

His story was this:

He and Curtius had left Froghole at about two in the afternoon of the third day of August of the year before. They had caught the boat and had got through all right except for delays for Customs examinations at Rotterdam and on the German frontier. That was on account of the car: it had had to be weighed, measured, re-measured, numbered, sealed with leaden seals, passported and repassported at each Douane.
 
Peace — and there was still peace — had its locusts too.

So they reached Zell not till eleven at night of the fourth of August. There George had been arrested on the hotel steps and put for three days and nights into the town gaol, in a clean enough cell. His father had hanged himself that afternoon from one of the immense beeches of an avenue outside the town, called the
Philosophen Wald
: the Philosopher’s Wood. There is one of these, I believe, outside every German town, so that philosophers may feel at home. I think I have mentioned that, above my brother’s house at Froghole, there was just such another avenue of enormous beech-trees, so that George, who came in the end to mind my brother’s chickens, was kept well in mind of his father’s fate by the constant sight of those enormous boles.

He said that pigs must have gone rooting beneath his father where he hung in the twilight; at any rate, the body was discovered by the City Swineherd, a State official. And he cannot have found it very easy to hang himself, for, as a rule, beeches do not send out horizontal branches before they have reached some height. However, on very old trees of the kind there are sometimes great swellings, bosses, projections that will let some of them be like staircases. Perhaps, really, Mr. Heimann found one like that. George, however, persisted obstinately in thinking of height. That really saved him in the end.

Of course Mr. Heimann had to hang himself; he had experienced the breakdown of a moral ideal. He had staked his life, his son’s immediate prospects, and all that could be said to remain to himself of a just possible return to a career, on the peacefulness, serenity, and correctitude of the people amongst whom he dwelt. And certainly he had staked and lost his honour too. For that people had proved itself at least not “correct,” almost certainly not peaceful, and quite demonstrably not serene.

At any rate, Lord Marsden never waited for this country to declare war. He was sitting at lunch on the fourth of August, in a pergola attached to his hotel. The colonel of one of the regiments in the neighbourhood was engaged to eat that meal with him, and came in rather late. I daresay he had been busy. He was by no means a blusterous or violent fellow: George said he was lean, rather scrawny, fiftyish, ennobled and of a rather worrying disposition. Stiff, of course, in a blue uniform; but quite sympathetic and of a very old house.

He seems to have begun by telling Lord Marsden that Authority had decided not in any way to inconvenience the Herr Graf. They requested him not to send any more telegrams through the public post office. At nine that morning Lord Marsden had again wired to his son not to come to him. The colonel added that if the Herr Graf — the Earl — desired to send very natural telegrams as to the state of his health to his English relatives, would he be so obliging as to send them through him, the colonel? To avoid complications and to ensure the despatch of the message!

The colonel talked — he so assured George upon his honour — just like one friend to another. “Sogar ohne empressement!” he said, mixing, as all German aristocrats did, two languages in his conversation. He meant that he had tried, by the tones of his voice, to keep the conversation quite calm. He told George all this in prison, where he had come on purpose to break the news to the son of his old friend.

He said that they went on with their lunches, quietly eating away. They were both men whom the clock of the world had rather passed by, and they had been used to converse, before that, very amicably, in faded tones. They had played a great many games of old-fashioned cards — picquet, I suppose — in the local officers’ club, and had discussed the politics of ancient Congresses. Then the Count-Colonel said, quietly:

“We crossed the Belgian frontier at six o’clock this morning.”

He said that Mr. Heimann did not raise his head from above his plate of stewed cherries: cherries, I suppose, grow late in the northern parts of Germany. He just grunted.

That was the last sound he was heard to utter in this world. He got up; moved slowly out of the pergola. The colonel imagined that he had gone to fetch his cigar case, and waited some time for him to come back. No traceable soul ever saw him alive again.

In the prison the colonel swore to George that no harsh word had been spoken to Lord Marsden, nor had any harsh measures been contemplated by Authority. He said that he, George, as a young man of fighting age, must expect a more earnest treatment. That was how he put it. But how exactly George was to be treated had not yet been settled. German law in these matters had not been codified, so that one State differed from another. They were awaiting instructions from Berlin. He was at the moment under the civil arm; the countries were now at war. But Germans were not barbarians. A noble of ancient lineage, like George, need be under no apprehensions of ill-treatment. He was besides watched over by most powerful patronage. He would no doubt be released on parole.

That was how first George knew that our time limit for the ultimatum had expired. He had heard of the likelihood whilst he and the Professor had been motoring through Holland.

The colonel added, by way of consolation, that the young Herr Graf would be glad to know that the old Herr Graf had not, during that last day, suffered at all from his neuritis.

“I, at least,” the colonel said, “should prefer to think that a friend of mine went before his Maker suffering rather from moral despair than because of mere pain. Your father, Lord Marsden, was a man deserving of great respect.”

Nevertheless they did not let George out to see his father’s body or to attend the funeral. Indeed, he only knew of the death itself from the colonel. So that, not having seen the body, he had the terrible and powerful obsession that his father, in his last moments, had swung from a great height, the pigs rooting in the leaves underneath. He carried that obsession with him always. And in the end, by its very wrongness, it saved his life.

The authorities refused also, and absolutely, to let him see his father’s papers, although three days later they ordered him to go and live with the very Rechtsanwalt — the lawyer — to whose safe-keeping his father had confided his statement. The safe which contained them had, however, been visited by the Authority and the papers removed. The Rechtsanwalt professed to know nothing of their contents.

George said that he was certain that even the Town Authorities, who were very much less important than those of the State, had read his father’s “statement.” For, whenever he had to be examined by a Burgomaster or a Military Official, those blue-uniformed and usually bespectacled individuals always addressed him as Herr Graf and, when at last he was moved, the papers authorising that removal described him with minute correctness as “Graf Marsden von Marden Fell i/K. England; Viscount Ranera von Sloanes i /K. Irland; “ s w.” as who should say: “Earl Marsden of Marsden Fell in the Kingdom of England,” and the rest of it. They had therefore, he was certain, been copying from a document comprised amongst his father’s papers.

But in his misery and pride — for naturally he was both miserable and proud! — he had only once asked whether this were the case. Then, the fellow of whom he asked it — a fat, bald, blond creature called an Assessor, smoking an immense cigar and sprawling, all his blue uniform clothes unbuttoned, at a table full of papers, had merely smiled ironically. The boy had been too proud to ask again.

The Rechtsanwalt in whose close, spick-and-span and stuffily upholstered flat he lived called him always “Mr. Heimann,” and other people referred to him as Der Englaender — the Englishman. He made no complaints of ill-treatment; but he said it was all nearly unbearable — the feeling of being near suffocation, which was only in part physical.

One day, in the winter, he was looking down between the lace curtains and yellow velvet hangings of the close flat, into the street. Two men, in a brownish uniform, were slouching along, their hands in their trousers’ pockets — yet with a sort of swagger. They had baskets on their arms; and behind them, without any sort of swagger at all, slouched a very old man in field-grey, with a very long rifle, a very long bayonet. The two men went into a grocer’s. The old man posted himself at the door, blowing on his fingers, his rifle between his knees. The two men came out, jostling each other. Their brass buttons shone. In spite of himself George gave a little exclamation. He had never before seen a British service uniform.

The Rechtsanwalt’s wife had got up from her seat behind him, carrying her knitting. The two fellows in dust-brown had pink, shining faces; their hats all on one side. They crammed cigarettes into the hand of the old man, who transferred them quickly into the pocket of his service overcoat. They pointed down the street. When he shook his head, one of them slapped him on the back and pushed him in the direction they wished to take. They made gestures of drinking.