Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (610 page)

She said:

“I believe you have heard of this from Mr. Carstones; but not seen it. It is very bad. It attacks George by name.” It must have been her greatest piece of acting that she had put up that day. She had read that damning attack on George over her lunch. Then she had acted in the matinée; she had dined with us and acted again; and supped, with that for her sauce.

She appeared small rather than large; humble rather than aware of her power; but she had deep lungs, white and shining shoulders, grey violet eyes and long lashes. She was, of course, not so famous then as afterwards she became. A year or so later a poor fellow said to me:

“I could not have stood any more. Too much cold; too much dark. Then I heard Clarice Honeywill sing. It was Hazebrouck, really. But it was like being in a tea-shop: in Blighty. I don’t suppose you know: from the Bible: ‘Yet with angels and archangels.’ It was like that. A turning point. It seemed to give me courage, and that has lasted. Yes, I assure you.... They say she has married some lord. It was on the programme.”

He was a simple soul. He is dead now.

CHAPTER VIII

I DID not for many years speak to George Heimann again with any intimacy. And, as far as I am concerned, that is the end of the book. I might compile a chronicle of a detailed kind and decorate it with descriptions of places I had never seen and with inventions of mental crises for which my insight alone was the warrant. But that is not what I want to do. That pack drove that miserable boy along until he almost came to the same end as his father. I think it is so obvious that that was what he must do in the end that no immensely long psychological analyses of mine will help the hearer’s convictions. It is surely not necessary to trace the poor boy’s brain, gradually dissolving as, once again, the threefold or fourfold strains developed themselves, and the separate minds shouted to him. To write all that would be pathology. It is enough to say that, externally, up till the very end, he remained collected, clean in his clothing and apparently unmoved. But of course he looked ghastly.

However, all that is obvious enough: I am merely going to make now, some personal notes, as to what I myself actually saw.

I breakfasted, then, with Mr. Carstones and his untidyish wife next morning — on the 29th of April — or at any rate it was a Sunday. Over his plate of unattractive cereals he talked perpetually into a telephone — to Sir Arthur, to Scotland Yard, to the Orderly Room at Chelsea, and to Clarice. He displayed a great, almost a manly energy, for he was determined that George should not be arrested by the civil police on the moment of his discharge. That was going to happen! All the while his voluminous, fairhaired wife, in her morning wrapper and over her saucer of cereals, discussed the works of modern poets with me. She had rather a buzzing voice. Every now and then Mr. Carstones, taking a violent sip of tepid coffee and looking at me, would say that he believed he had done it or was about to do it. The wife would continue her placid buzzing sentence to the effect that the continued Orientalisms of Mr. Someone were — something or other. I did not know what she was talking about, but neither did I know what Mr. Carstones was doing.

Suddenly Mr. Carstones, who had done some pretty violent shouting already, began really to howl. He didn’t want Trunks, and Trunks kept on cutting in. Then he said: “Oh, it’s you!” and pushed the telephone over the table to me.
My
Orderly Room from the extreme ends of England wanted me to return. The battalion was ordered abroad. I was to return at once to superintend the entrainment of bicycles. That dim voice was like part of a fairy tale. They had rung me up at my rooms, and the hall porter, exhibiting a magnesian light flash of intelligence for the first time in his life, had put them on to Mr. Carstones.

A gorgeous, vibrating voice from the hall exclaimed that with Mary’s cheeks as scarlet as that Mary certainly could not be in danger of tuberculosis. That was Sir Arthur speaking to the housemaid.

He pervaded that small, booklined, underground breakfast room like a streak of silver sunlight. Mr. Carstones got me a Bradshaw’s Railway Guide. My world was standing on its head. I had expected three weeks more at the Lewis gun course at Hounslow; or it may have been a signaller’s course — upon my word I forget which; one went to so many “courses “in those days. Now... a certain greyness of vistas stretched out in front of me. Going out to France was not just nothing, then.

The minutely columned minute letterings of the Railway Guide danced together. Sir Arthur was saying — I suppose to Mrs. Carstones — that her interesting pallor made him sure that she had written many beautiful stanzas that night. The woman was as full complexioned as a beetroot! The bells of a church just behind that little house filled the room with their overtones. That suggested to me that it was the Sunday trains that I must look up. The minutely columned, minute letterings danced all over again.

Mr. Carstones squeezed my shoulder and said that they were going to Downing Street. He and Sir Arthur went from that booklined room with a reverential air, with top hats aloft, the brims touching their left shoulders. The bells went on; I continued to study the columns of the Bradshaw. I was a very conscientious officer!

Mrs. Carstones was talking to someone else. She used the words:

“Going out!”

A very lean, sallow, and dark young man, with an immense Adam’s apple, was looking at me with a sort of agonised contempt. He said to me:

“Pooh! You’ll never go out! Your friends will find you some safe job!”

He was, I think, a Poet. Or he may have been a Reviewer. I don’t know for certain that Mrs. Carstones was unfaithful to her husband with him. Perhaps she wasn’t. They are not married now, though that says nothing. Carstones was killed in 1917. I took a cab to one terminus or the other. The Railway Transport Officer there told me that a train that would take me to my battalion by four the next morning started in half an hour. I spent a quiet Sabbath day in the draughty corner of a very antiquated railway carriage. That was what the War was like — nine-tenths of it.

And I never heard what happened to George Heimann on that day. I like to think that his Clarice met him at the barrack gates after his discharge and took him to some place where he had five or six hours of comfort. I am pretty sure that he was not arrested. Sir Arthur, I know, defended that boy tooth and nail from all the assaults of the cheap press.

That needed some courage. Or perhaps it did not. Sir Arthur was decorative and rather foolish, but he was a gentleman. So was Carstones; and those two did not feel very happy over having got George his discharge — to please Marie Elizabeth. They had it on their consciences — the feeling that if they got George discharged to please her it might make her behave more reasonably over the Marsden case. It did not make her more reasonable; she was too hot on the track. And it was the ruin of George.

For as long as he remained in the ranks, Scotland Yard — the Civil Police — were quite prepared to let him alone. Not having to answer questions in either House of Parliament they could afford to be relatively unmoved in the face of newspaper clamour. But the moment George became a civilian they were forced to act, automatically, in the case of Podd
versus
Heimann. So, on the Monday, George came up before the magistrates to answer for having broken his bail. The Foreign Office, at the instigation of Sir Arthur, gave him a certificate to the effect that he had been interned in Germany, so he was bailed out again.

That, of course, provided the
Evening Paper
with some startling headlines. George by then was in his Bloomsbury lodgings, and there Marie Elizabeth and the Jeaffresons descended upon him, bringing him all the papers of the next morning, which they forced him to read. After that they did not leave him alone — and Dr. Robins wrote him a letter in which he put him on his honour not to see Clarice until his “affairs were settled.” All these incidents and clamours were not very good for him.

Then they burned down his boarding-house and killed his old landlady, an old German woman, like a grey-white blackbeetle, crawling about in basements. I don’t mean that Marie Elizabeth and the Jeaffresons did this, but the partisans of Mr. Podd, the ladies with the bird of paradise hats resuscitated for a second season, and the
Evening Paper.
The coroner who sat on the body of the old German woman was particularly severe on George, who was called at the inquest. The coroner said that an already suspect personality should have had more prudence than to reside with an alien. He held George to be morally responsible for the old thing’s death. At the police court gentlemen called Oneday, Lilliput, and Absalom, and eleven others, were fined half-a-crown each for assaults. As they had all got away with mirrors, fire-irons, tea services, or portions of George’s attire, dressing cases and toilet articles, they did not do so badly. The
Evening Paper
commented on the whole affair in a large page, headed right across it something like
Tower Hill for Traitors.
It was an article in favour of law and order, suggesting that George and his deceased landlady ought to have been shot on Tower Hill, not left by an incompetent Scotland Yard to the tender mercies of a creditably excited populace. All these things were not very good for George.

I believe that for three days he was completely lost sight of. Then Clarice, from a taxicab, saw him walking down High Holborn. As he had no lodgings she took him to his aunt’s. She was very distressed, and, having to go straight to a performance, she sent for her father to look after the boy. Exactly what the father did I don’t know. I believe he took George to Harley Street, twisted mirrors in front of his eyes, hit his knees with boxwood hammers, prescribed decoctions of cat’s valerian and quiet, put him again on his honour not to see his daughter, and sent the boy to his own house near Froghole, which was in charge of a dipsomaniac
locum tenens.
Dr. Robins did not know that this gentleman was a dipsomaniac, of course.

Mr. Carstones, in the meantime, persuaded by Marie Elizabeth that she and her brother were on the best of terms again, procured for George a permission to reside, backed by the French Embassy, at Froghole. He also notified the County Police, through the Home Office, that George was to be left in peace at his sister’s residence. County Police are not on as intimate terms with the Central Authorities as are their Metropolitan brothers; they desire independent distinction. They visited my brother’s house at once, and proceeded to scour their county when they found George was not with his sister and that his sister did not know where he was.

After a fortnight they found George with the dipsomaniac
locum tenens
about two miles away from Froghole Summit. The medical practitioner was unable to give any reason for George being there, but he fought a number of constables with great fury. George was requested to attend at the local police station, where he remained for several hours whilst the local police worried the Home Office and the Home Office worried Mr. Carstones. The local police also informed their local papers, which communicated with the London journals. The London journals of the complexion of the
Evening Paper
were at once indefatigably on the scent. Between them, half a dozen journalists interviewed George in the police station before Clarice Honeywill could get down in her car and carry him off to London, where she had engaged rooms for him at a small French hotel. They did not read the English papers there.

In the meantime Mr. Plowright — who was still Mr. Pflugschmied — had got indefatigably to work with the Philadelphia and Chicago papers. Secure in his neutrality, and ready, like Ajax, to defy any lightning, he telegraphed to his journals amazing reports as to the persecution that the heirs to Marsden Moor were enduring at the hands of British Officialdom. He inserted nevertheless tributes to Sir Arthur, whose name he did not give correctly. I fancy our censors let his cables through in pure puzzlement: American journalists were in those days rather privileged persons.

I do not know how far Mr. Pflugschmied’s activities really modified the international situation. He himself was of opinion that not he but his journals — to which he was touchingly loyal — shook the Court of St. James’s pretty considerably. And I believe that a wing of the Foreign Office that did not know Sir Arthur or his activities received copies of Mr. Pflugschmied’s journals. They set Scotland Yard to work on their own account to make enquiries about a fraudulent Lord Marston of Marston Moor, resident at Froghole Summit, for, in giving his brother-in-law’s address, Mr. Pflugschmied for the first time in his life dropped into a disastrous correctness.

So Scotland Yard from two points of view, the local police with faces like hams, and innumerable English and American journalists, descended on George at Froghole Summit. For, of course, as soon as Mr. Pflugschmied had given that address, a great many of his professional brethren from across the water began to take up George’s case, and naturally the news of their activities filtered through to Fleet Street, which is the centre of the British world of journals. That, naturally, had been Mr. Pflugschmied’s kindly intention. He did not know much of life, but he did know enough to be sure that as soon as he gave an address he was going to lose the exclusive nature of his scoop. That he did not mind: he just wanted to do George good.

He didn’t, of course. And when I remember the horror with which poor George had regarded the cuttings from the German press that the professor-poet had forced upon him, I cannot see how these locust swarms of visitors could have been expected to help him much. But the benevolent Mr. Pflugschmied was not to know that.

How was he to? About all his personal matters I am told that George kept his mouth absolutely shut. He would talk courteously to Mr. Pflugschmied about America, to Marie Elizabeth about the chickens, the care of which he eventually took over; to Mr. Jeaffreson, the solicitor, about the case of Podd
versus
Heimann, which was adjourned several times at the instance of Mr. Podd, who did not wish to produce his accounts in Court; and with the same courtesy he would talk to Miss Jeaffreson about psychotherapeutics, auto-suggestion, and the mental penetration of Miss Jeaffreson. He would at any rate be present whilst Marie Elizabeth and Miss Jeaffreson in turns read aloud the comments on himself from the American and British journals. I believe he heard every cutting that came to the Summit, Froghole, and I believe, too, that he never made a single comment on one of them. Once or twice he must have said that, his circumstances being so peculiar, it was natural that he should be regarded with suspicion. But this raised such a clamour from the two women that I believe he gave up even that amount of comment.