Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (617 page)

“Look here, Crowther! This is what I like to see. Look here, Crowther; this is what I like to see.”

The guardian of the fortunes of Spain repeated bewilderedly and at intervals:

“Exquisite... what delicacy!... But... What delicacy.... Exquisite!”

I do not know whether he was referring to the Countess or the Earl. For the Earl presented at that moment a striking effect. He had produced from a side-pocket of his dress-jacket a gleaming silver note-case and, having taken from that a ten-pound note that in our world of particoloured, small and dirty currency, produced the dazzling effect of being at once a swan and a poster, was standing, holding this whiteness over the head of the kneeling waiter, who still weeping, was kissing his disengaged hand.

Mr. Crowther exclaiming:

“My! that’s what we ought to do. Help to set him up in his hotel again,” was feeling in some recess of his dress-coat; the Spaniard was looking round as if for help, the whites of his eyes like saucers.

Sir Arthur shook his immense sides and poked the Countess on the bare, white arm.

“We seem to be attracting considerable attention, my dear,” he said. “Hadn’t we better go on to dinner? Are all these our party? Who are they all?

I was trying to exclaim: “No,.... No!” I was trying to go quietly away. In the deep sadness of my world, these happy people in their circle seemed to have no place for me, who had only crossed their courses a long time before. But Mr. Plowright, as if stirred to desperation by this war-cry to men of his nation, burst forward as a charger dashes on to the battlefield, and exclaimed:

“Sir Arthur!”

Sir Arthur said:

“That you, Plowright? Made it up with your relatives, I see. We’ll have a jolly evening. Eh?”

Plowright began again:

“Sir Arthur, allow me to introduce my wife, Lady..

It was as if a frightful convulsion passed over his features. He gave a side glance of agony at the Earl and burst on: “Lady... Lady
Plowright
!... Sir Arthur: Lady Plowright. Lady Plowright: Sir Arthur!”

Sir Arthur said: “But I know her, of course. Remarkably well. No one ever gave me more trouble. No one.”

I was wondering how, in spite of his great Press scoop, she
could
have done it, and modestly and thankfully was half way towards the small door in the wall, when the desperate voice of Mr. Plowright exclaimed:

“Jessop!
Stop
!” And I heard in his ridiculous lower tones the fatal words:

“Sir Arthur, let me introduce my dear friend and battle companion, Arthur Constantine Jessop, the great playwright whose name we all know. He served....” And he poured out a fantastic parody of my war services. He finished with: “Jessop, of course you know Lady Ma — Lady Plowright!”

The Earl gave a sudden snarl, so that that unhappy man really jumped half a pace aside, as if from a venomous animal. The Earl strode away from the still kneeling waiter, and exclaimed harshly:

“For God’s sake, my sister’s name is
Mary
Plowright. For her sins!”

Sir Arthur was patting me on the arm at that moment, in sign of his benevolent delight at my existence. He, too, jumped a little and exclaimed:

“Calm yourself, George.”

But the Earl, with admirable voice, breathing, and lung power, went on:

“These inaccuracies are unbearable. You’d think that fellow would know his own wife’s correct name. You’d think it. But he doesn’t.”

Sir Arthur was patting the arm of the Earl’s sister, who was also Mr. Plowright’s wife, and saying:

“British titles are so very confusing.”

I missed a little of their colloquy at this, because the alarmed Spaniard — I am sure he imagined that he had got into a gallery of maniacs and dreadfully wished that he had gone to dine with his Franco-Belgian-Polish colleagues instead of coming here — the Little, bilious Spaniard had taken hold of my arm, and was saying in French that he had been recommended to read one of my books — in order to acquire the purest English style. I thanked him very civilly, and that seemed to relieve Mm. He smiled brilliantly, which was astonishing in his anxious and sombre countenance: the teeth flashed so.

And, when I again caught on to the other discussion the Earl was saying, with his clear voice and incisive manner, to the British representative:

“Mr. Ernest Augustus Jessop is a novelist, not a playwright. He did not serve in the Royal Regiment — it is not a Brigade — of Artillery. He was in a line battalion, and cannot therefore ever have been a bombardier. A bombardier is an artillery lance-corporal. The Ordre pour le Mérite is a Prussian Order instituted by Frederic the Great. Mr. Jessop did not receive this. The French Government conferred upon him the....—”

He dragged me and the unfortunate Plowright through it all, seeming to tick off the inaccuracies with vindictive pleasure. But at last, since I had not Ms unconcern as to displaying my personality in public, I was driven to say:

“You have followed my career amazingly. But why do you do this now? It’s public! It’s painful!”

It was a fairly extensive speech for a man quivering with nerves — and in that company. But he knocked me clean over by holding out a hand and saying:

“Because we want them all to know!” He looked me straight in the eye — a thing that when I last knew Mm he could never have done, not because he was dishonest, but because he always looked away when he spoke to you — because, I suppose, he was nervous. He added in his deepest tones:

“I do it to show that we’ve all
— all
of us — followed your career. How could we not! And all of us bless to-day and mark it with a red stone!”

There came into his face a strong flush of the personality of the old George Heimann — the courteous and visionary boy who, in the passage of Mr. Podd, had championed his sister; who had loved his father, and suffered with such patience and such courtesy the exactions of his womankind! It was perhaps his French blood that made him not shrink from a touch of rhetoric in his gratitude to me.

But it was practical as well. For all the rest of them — Marie Elizabeth, Mr. Plowright, Sir Arthur and Miss Clarice — with their British awkwardness had hesitated as to how to receive me after all these years. But George’s brave, foreign speech gave them their clues. They ought to have crowded round me. Being English, they hadn’t! But George had put it all right.

We were swept away then. The band began playing, and Sir Arthur, frantic with his newly arrived shrinking from publicity, took us up by armfuls and impelled us down the steps. He was determined, he said, to have a jolly time.

I don’t know how we all came into it, to this day... or not fully. The Earl — George Heimann — and his Countess — Miss Clarice Honeywill — had been simply lounging in Geneva — not, I mean, diplomatically, though Sir Arthur afterwards roped George in on account of his linguistic gifts. The diplomats were there because, of course, they were diplomatists; the Plowrights because he represented the
Chicago Something
and the
London Something-else
; and I, I suppose, because I had been the battle-companion of Julius 0. Plowright. I mean that, if he had not beckoned me across the hall, and, if I had seen all that company from a distance, I should just have gone quietly away — to Aix-les-Bains, I daresay, judging by-gones to be best left as by-gones.

But the dinner really did me good — I know the Countess did, for she took an immense, naive interest in my late maladies, and so restored an intimacy that I hope may be life-long. And, for the matter of that, the Spaniard did me good, too, for though this is not really a story of titled folk — it is that is to say, and it isn’t, as you care to look at it — it does do a newly recovered nerve patient good to find himself amongst people of whom you might say that... well, that their every picture tells a story, and to find that he gets through the evening perfectly well.

They were all such good simple things! Or perhaps Clarice wasn’t. At the time I felt that her tenderness for me was really tenderness for her husband; that if, as she subsequently did, she went for many and long drives and rides with me
pour tout potage,
and if, gradually she most of all revealed to me what I know of that young man’s later vicissitudes, it was to me as a sufferer expert in nerve cures of the old-fashioned kind — not as a man and a poet.

She wanted, really, hints as to what to do if her husband ever had a relapse. Treatment of the newest, auto-suggestion type he had had. The Straightener — the auto-suggestion specialist — had maintained to her that George’s abortive hanging of himself had saved his reason and his life. He said that nothing but that shock could have cleared up all the complexes of George’s worried brain! It might or might not have been that that had cured him. But it had so nearly killed him that Clarice was determined that he would never try it again. It would pretty nearly kill
her.

And I did a real service to her husband’s brother-in-law. For Plowright simply could not write his “stories” for his papers as long as the Earl was in Geneva. That man just petrified him. You are to understand that the nobleman had his whimsical, as well as his calm and flamboyant sides. And at some period he had declared he would never speak to Plowright again unless Plowright could produce one — one only — article which contained no inaccuracy. Any article about any earthly thing. Or in the alternative the poor wretch was to give up his profession and settle down upon his wife’s jointure in the dower-house at Marsden Fell.

I do not say that the Earl was not justified in his cruelties. I think he was, and amply. He deserved revenge, and took it. But the cruelty was atrocious. With the feeling of the Earl’s merciless eyes upon him, Plowright did not dare to write the simplest sentence for fear of split infinitives; he did not dare to say that Bukharest was in Herzegovina or Trieste the capital of Carinthia, or to call the German Emperor the Emperor of Germany. Yet these things are the heart’s blood of journalism.

He had to sit about between towers of atlases, Debretts, Gazetteers, Almanachs de Gotha; you found him miserably ticking off things on his fingers in all sorts of queer places. So I think he would have gone on his knees to me if I had been really obdurate in refusing to write his “stories” for him during that fortnight. But I did write the stuff. And then, would you believe it? — I found that he addressed the cables wrong: as it were to the Chicago
Chronicle
and the London (Eng.)
Tribune
? It cost me a great deal of trouble to put right that symptom of the paralysis caused by his brother-in-law. But it did me good, too, it got me back, a little, into the habit of writing so as to be printed!

I find that I have forgotten to get in the story of that waiter. This was merely that, having seen his hotel at Pustajevo — I think that was the name — sacked by Cossacks, gutted by Servians, burned by Austrians, his wife murdered by I forget whom, and his daughter carried off by Montenegrins, he all the while desperately continuing to cook for the successive conquerors — he had had so frightful a nervous breakdown on the declaration of peace that he had had to abandon even his two remaining frying pans, his corrugated iron shed, his ashes and his graves. His reappearance in the world of ministrants he owed to the simple, sentimental benevolence of M. Chose.

And I like to remember that his disaster with the sauceboat was the beginning of his rehabilitation. For it was inevitable that Sir Arthur should insist on the beautiful Countess going round with a subscription list from table to table of that gorgeous place. So you may figure that once weeping waiter, now magisterially and late at night, presiding over a white-aproned horde, laden with soup, pancakes and caviare, whilst the great trains wait by the dim platforms on their journeys to Tomsk, to Byzantium, to Ostend, to Samarkand. And had that young man not been so self-possessed, so every inch an Earl, that poor little fairy tale would never have found its earthly, so fortunate close.

THE END

The Little House, Winchelsea, Kent - Ford’s home from 1901-07