Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (614 page)

I was not well, of course. I had just come out of hospital, I think. I looked round. I expected to see that invalid N.C.O. waiting to shepherd me to the train. I saw Clarice.

It was February, in the Lines of Communication. There was a good deal of snow round about, outside the station. Her round face was a rather pale blur; she was bulked out with a great deal of fur — brown, not very long. I could not think who she was. She said:

“You dear man! You never write! I’ve just finished singing here. George is somewhere in the neighbourhood. On Lord Something’s staff...”

I was moving slowly among market women who had not sold geese, along the shadowy platform. We were level with the exhausted French sentry with the too large rifle and the zigzag bayonet. I imagined her active figure going out beyond that weary Cerberus, who should stop me with an irrevocable gesture of his fantastic weapon.

She said:

“He was born in Jersey! Think of that! They were both born in Jersey! His father had thought of that. If he had been born in France he might have had to serve as a French Tommie. But Lord Marsden had thought it out. Jersey is a British island. They were born there!

I daresay she told me more than that; that is what comes back to me. The train was moving as I got to it; someone of my own battalion hauled me in. I was not very active.

She stepped on to the footboard of the moving carriage; it was unglazed and her face was just below mine. I was shivering beneath my British warm. The train hardly moved: at a mere snail’s pace out of that vault of shadow. The scent of her furs was in my nostrils. She said:

“There was not in the end any difficulty about it, really!”

Someone in the black and drowsy interior said:

“By God! Old man Jessop appears to have got off with Clarice Honeywill!”

A very young voice cried:

“That’s Countess Marsden. It said so on the programme.”

Suddenly, just below my face, Clarice said:

“Ernest! Dear Ernest! Let George get you a staff job. He can. He will!”

No one had called me by my Christian name — for a thousand years. I had forgotten what it was; there was no one to call me by it. She said:

“You’re not fit! You can’t go on. Do you suppose I have not followed your history?” She whispered: “I implore you!”

I said:

“By God! I would rather be dead!”

She must have put her right foot down on the invisible ballast, and there was nothing but inky darkness beneath my face.

I saw some Annamite platelayers of the French railway breakdown service, with blue silk hoods, blue silk shirts, and high, soft boots all bordered with lambswool. They had kindly, flat, Oriental faces. But I suppose that must have been next morning. It was very cold; there was no glass in the carriage windows, and we remained there, of course, a hundred yards outside the station, till next day at nine. It is in that way that reinforcements are hurried to the front.

At some time in the black hours there had been a great crash. A
great
crash. Someone in the outside blackness said that the Germans had dropped a highly successful bomb on our engine and our first six carriages. Our’s was about the eighth. I daresay that was what it was: we could hear their planes overhead, but no one from our compartment got out to see. I have nothing personal to record, and indeed I was not, after that, much good until, in 1921, I saw on a sort of dais of the splendid Hotel Geneva, Lord Marsden holding a large white ten pound note over the head of a kneeling waiter.

But I hear — indeed I know — that some of our splendid
Intelligentsia
are doing what they can to trepan this country into another war. I pray that God will force them to gain their glories and fortunes in other ways. Wars are very terrible things. It is not merely that people die and suffer: people must die and people must suffer, if not here, then there. But what is dreadful is that the world goes on and people go on being stupidly cruel — in the old ways and all the time. I used to think that, once out there, we should be surrounded by a magic and invisible tent that would keep from us all temporal cares. But we are not so surrounded, and it is not like that. The one nail does not knock out the other. There is that never ceasing waiting about; and the cold; and the long depressions. Now and then there is terrible noise — wearing, lasting for days. And some pain. All that is bearable. But what is desolating, what is beyond everything hateful, is that, round your transparent tent, the old evils, the old heartbreaks and the old cruelties are unceasingly at work. And that is what you have to go back to. I think that if our splendid
Intelligentsia
knew how mournful, how terrible, and how long a strain on the mind war really was, they would not seek with light hearts to drive poor fellows again into such pain in the mind. There are other fields in which they may gain glory. I permit myself to say so much....

The rest of this is hearsay. After that, with the idea of being killed, or at least not bothered any more, I just cut all the communications that I could. For impracticable love is very wearying.

Before then I had often wondered why George had never re-enlisted. Very much later I learned that he did have a try at re-enlistment, and was actually for forty-eight hours in barracks in some Western seaport — Cardiff, I think. That accounted for his three days of disappearance, before Clarice found him walking down High Holborn. But how could that poor devil hope to be accepted, at that moment, in any battalion of H.M. Army? His photograph was in every journal in the kingdom that could be expected to go into any officers’ or sergeants’ mess. Besides, the mere fact that he had been in the Guards was enough to be his undoing.

It is a thing that I defy anyone to disguise. I understand that George tried to shamble like a recruit during those two days, and found he could do it all right by thinking very hard so long as it was merely a matter of crossing the parade ground. But the minute he got a command of Right or Left turn whilst marching with his squad of rookies he just jumped to it with that terrific Guardee’s kick. It was impossible not to.

As soon as he was spotted as an ex-Guardsman his company sergeant-major cross-examined him and then took him before his company officer. The company officer was reading an illustrated daily sheet that reproduced a half life-size photograph with, under it, the inscription:

“
Coroner Censures Alien ex-Guardsman,”
or something like it.

I believe the company officer was very decent to George — but naturally he had to get back to London. It was, of course, the day after the coroner had sat on the deceased Enemy National Female.

For the matter of that George had another shot at enlisting just after the Podd trial. But he was by then, owing to the ingenious benevolence of Mr. Carstones, accredited with a licence that allowed him to travel no further than five miles from Froghole without reporting to the police, and when he got to Liverpool Street he was stopped by a County Inspector who recognised him — and it cost him twenty pounds in fines. After that he had to report at the local police station every Thursday, and the policeman with the ham face was allotted the task of taking a look at him over a hedge or through a bedroom window every day of his life at Froghole. It was the same man who had reproved George before for switching on his headlights.

Anyhow, the day came when, complacent, stout, in a new coat and trousers and full of good news, Mr. Pflugschmied, so soon to become Plowright, sauntered down hill between the wire-netting runs to find George. It was then, say, September, 1916. I must have been in some quiet excavations, looking across at what remained of Ys-près-Armentières. I was there eight weeks. I might have been spared that particular souvenir: but that is the way Fate works....

Mr. Pflugschmied found George near a hedge, being talked to with screaming vehemence by a thin, red-haired, extremely patriotic scientist. Over the hedge peeped the shining silver-like adornments of the indefatigable police constable’s helmet. That fellow can never either have slumbered or slept in his watch over his suspect. And on this occasion the scientist had requested his presence, saying that he was going to convict this German of a particularly atrocious plot.

And, indeed, had agriculturists been at all active-minded people, it might have been a nasty business, and a great many fields might have been put out of action. My brother’s recipe for improving chicken dung manure — making it, I believe, in some way inoculate the soil — had contained one chemical. For that, in writing about George as an agricultural saviour of Western Europe, Mr. Pflugschmied had substituted another. I know nothing about chemistry: I am merely telling it as the story was told me by Clarice.

You know that fellow Pflugschmied must have had a most amazing mind! Phrases seemed to get hold of — not his imagination. He had none: he had in its stead that amazing factory of inaccuracies. You would think that any sane man who was going to write an article on a chemical formula would have written down the ingredients in a notebook and copied them out with some care. But Mr. Plowright seemed to go exclusively by the sounds of things as they appealed to his ears. Say that he had heard of a sounding-named chemical — as you might say Kakodylate of Soda.

Well, if you told him something about nitrate of soda he would just
have
to print that Kakodylate. “Kakodylate” is more-syllabled, rounded, technical and authoritative in appearance. That is, I suppose, the trick of the great journalistic mind; you
have
to introduce words that look technical and convincing and sound well in the ear. So you may write of monkey-wrenches and jack-spanners whenever you discourse of machinery of any kind, whilst ordinary men say gadgets. And so Mr. Plowright, when I saw him again after five years without at first even knowing that he had married my brother’s widow, found it imperative to talk of the Royal Brigade of Artillery, of Bombardiers as commissioned officers, and of the Prussian Ordre pour le Mérite as a decoration at the disposal of the French Government. Since that day I have observed him pretty closely with Marie Elizabeth. They love each other very dearly; they make comprehensible George Herbert’s poem in which he says that only Married Love is eternal and cannot fade.

But I notice that when Mr. Plowright is elated his tendency is to call Marie Elizabeth “Lady Plowright”; when he is depressed he is more apt to call her “Lady Mary.” I suppose “Lady Plowright” strikes him as sounding more important. Once when he held a hand of nine hearts from the six upwards and three aces at one of our Geneva games of Auction, he addressed Marie Elizabeth afterwards in talking of the play as “Countess.” I believe that for a moment in his great elation over his cards he really thought of his wife as a “Countess in her own right.” It sounds so technical!

Well, let us say that Mr. Pflugschmied had written in his article of Kakodylate, instead of nitrate of soda — Kakodylate being a preparation of arsenic. (I
know
that!) The enraged and patriotic scientist had read the article over his morning coffee. And upon my soul I do not see what he could have done but want to murder George, for if Mr. Pflugschmied’s preparation had been spread on the fields of Western Europe the Central Powers must have won the war in a fortnight. Fortunately the decoction would have cost about ten thousand pounds an acre, and no agriculturist — not even one smallholder! — read the article.

But Mr. Pflugschmied ought to have let George alone!

The effects on the boy were
too
terrible. Even Mr. Plowright could perceive that. For George apologised to that scientist in terms of absolute abjectness! He had not himself seen the article. Marie Elizabeth had read it to him because she thought her brother might like to hear himself described — at the expense of
my
brother! — as the Saviour of Western Europe. But she had left out the chemical formula, which did not interest her.

At that time a Presidential Election or something was going on in the United States; so His Britannic Majesty’s Government had given the influential journalist, Mr. Pflugschmied, the lucrative job of writing anything he liked in a Government-subsidised London daily paper. That was pretty abject; Mr. Pflugschmied might well be proud, like a dictator. But we were very hard pressed in those days! So it had been a London daily paper that had described George as the Saviour of Western Europe.

Anyhow, a portrait of George in a Guardsman’s cap with the badge rubbed off so that he might look like a Staff Officer had appeared at the top of Mr. Pflugschmied’s article in the London
Daily
——
 
— . Clarice used to take that photograph about with her.