Complete works of ford m.., p.516
Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 516
The solicitor moved stealthily into her vacant seat, just opposite me. He kept on stretching his fingers half across the table. I talked with great animation to Lady Ada Pugh Gomme. But I could not keep it up for ever. I had to look at that man. Immediately his slip was in my fingers. It read:
“Miss Heimann begs you to be cautious in talking to lady on your right. She is probably his aunt. Complications!”
A voice said in my ear:
“She blesses you and thanks you. On bended knee. She has the offer of a perfect engagement.”
It showed that she was a good girl that she should think of thanking me, like that, right away. George Heimann’s hair was tickling my ears. His dark eyes were reading the note from his solicitor to me. He could not help it: it lay unrolled on the tablecloth just beneath his aquiline nose.
A murderous frown contracted his dark brows. He ran round the table; seemed to He for a second on the cloth beside the miserable solicitor. His fist struck the table violently; he was whispering into the wretched man’s pink, ugly ear. With her fan Lady Ada patted his outstretched hand on the cloth. She pointed at the grey, enormous Someone, who was two places down from her. In a second, admirably, George had his sister on one arm and Miss Honeywill on the other. They stood before the great man as calm and smiling as the figures of wax in a costumier’s windows. Marie Elizabeth was at least as well bred as her brother when it came to keeping her countenance.
The Cabinet Minister embraced Marie Elizabeth, and they went revolving away, a grey elephant with a very agile cat; George threw Miss Honeywill into the arms of the young Pugh Gomme — and they went off. He stood laughing at them, and suddenly fell upon Lady Ada. They, too, revolved away....
And then, suddenly, at a table just behind us, I saw Mr. Podd, who was entertaining the two witch sisters. They were writing in reporters’ notebooks, the hats with birds of paradise aquiver. It was a nasty feeling. And then, just behind them, frigid and beautiful, I saw a face that would not recognise me. I poured half a tumbler of brandy into a long glass of heavy Rhine wine. What else in the world was I to do?
It was then half-past one; and the place was dreadful; the thin air tight in the lungs; the lights too bright; the dreadful white pillars leering. I danced a great many dances with Miss Jeaffreson, who was an admirable person to hold, and whose step went exactly with mine. I had an interminable argument with Mrs. Epstein and the fellow whose face was like a brown egg — about all the operas that had been performed at Covent Garden during the season that was now dying. The Professor Doctor Geheimrath turned up suddenly with another German professor. We had a long talk about Ibsen and the Scandinavian influence on literature. They both thanked me profusely and in formal terms for something or other. I danced with Marie Elizabeth; she did not dance well; she was too stiff....
At four-thirty, in cool, steely daylight, I was giving an arm to Madame in front of a taxicab outside that cellar. A figure was beside me. It kissed me, swiftly, like something brushing my ear. It said:
“You good, dear man; thank you for ever and ever!”
George Heimann was standing, holding open the door of another cab. He caught that figure round the waist and threw it into the dark interior; he laughed at me. The cab went off and he beside it, waving his hat and shouting, as far as the end of the little street.
“It’s she, then,” Madame said, “not Marie Elizabeth,.... That name was Marsden.... He was Postmaster-General.... He hated to meet the English.... He left suddenly whenever English came and recognised him. He had been disgraced... by your Mr. Gladstone! So he took the name of Hijmann.”
Mr. Revendikoff, in the grey dawn, was suddenly beside the door of the cab. His face was like that of one of the Notre Dame gargoyles and his hands were, of course, upstretched to the pale stars. Madame said to the cabman:
“Claridge’s!” — and was gone.
The Russian said:
“Now: some pickled gherkin sandwiches and a little vodka, and I will sine you all the tenor partition of Coq d’Or!”
But I went home to bed. Towards five George Heimann came in to tell me that Miss Honeywill was an admirable creature and very grateful to me.
PART II
CHAPTER I
FROGHOLE SUMMIT — though my brother preferred to call it The Ridge, Froghole, as a name with “less fuss about it” — was one of those bachelor establishments which boast a great view. And that was the only thing that my brother ever boasted about. He was a good fellow — he’s dead now — and he had such natural abilities that he might have boasted about other things. He never did; it was as if, supposing occasion had arisen, he would have exhausted every one of the evil qualities that were in him over that prospect that, so he declared, embraced twelve counties. If he had not possessed that place, I mean, he might have employed in its acquisition all the seven deadly sins. He might have lied, murdered, perjured himself to obtain possession of it. But he owned it by quite commonplace purchase, and no occasion for sinning arose. For myself I could never count more than seven counties to please him, and I did not believe in more than four or at most five. So he lied, probably, about his view.
But, having thus exhausted his vices, in all other matters he was a saint — of the English variety. Large-limbed, slow, with an irregular nose, a spurting brown moustache and small, straight, ruminating blue eyes that never lost their aspect of gazing at something three counties off, he never that I heard uttered an unkind word about a soul — except such unfortunate souls as talked in his presence about such things as the View from the Seven Hills. And even then he would say little more than that they were stupid fellows or had no sense of proportion.
He had purchased that chicken farm and added to it the woods along that small, flat, rather high ridge, so that that view had become really his property. It could be seen from some miles to the north and from some miles to the south; but from that particular angle no human soul could gaze at it without his permission; though he never turned anyone off his property.
And it was as if, having acquired that, he had exhausted not only all his capacity for sin but all legitimate ambitions. Walking all day over his fields that sloped downwards and were thick with chickens in wire enclosures, he leaned frequently on the long thistle-spud that he carried, and led the contemplative life. I never saw him use the thistle-spud, for there had been no thistle on the lands of Froghole Ridge for ten years.
He might well have been an extra-mural member of one of the great monastic orders; for perpetually, in a slow way, he reflected on the rights and wrongs of things and wished well to all the world. And I daresay his well-wishing did as much good as the prayers of some of the monks who pray for ever for the good of all the world; and his simple thoughts were as clear and direct and came as near to discerning the nature of the Godhead. He was a good man.
But he formed no intimacies, as he seemed to have no really material interests. I never heard of his talking to a woman, though Clarice Honeywill told me that she had seen the view from his terrace one afternoon by permission of his bailiff when Fred himself had been out. He farmed about thirty acres, all of them given up to poultry as far as I know; and he had another ten or so of woodland along the ridge. There, there were some of the largest beech trees I have ever seen, the eel-skin barks furrowed out with the carved hearts and initials and dates of the lovers of a hundred years. My brother, who had been in Germany a good deal, used to say that his level road running along the hillside beneath these grey, emotional giants — for I can never get away from the idea that huge beech trees possess human souls! — my brother used to say that that road was an exact reproduction of the Philosophen Allées that you find outside every German university town: avenues where professors walk bareheaded and discuss or think out their systems of philosophy. I daresay he was right, for when, several years later, George Heimann attempted unsuccessfully to hang himself from one of my brother’s trees, he was undoubtedly thinking of the Philosophen Allée just outside the city of Zell — or Celle.
My brother’s house was very peaceful. It was run by a cousin of our mother’s — a large, quite negligible lady in black satin and white curls, with a huge cameo. She had her own rooms, and sometimes did not come near us for a week, even for meals. When she did, she talked away about the household of my grandfather, a Crimean general, my mother having been of much better family than my father. Neither of us listened with great attention, but neither of us ever interrupted her, and indeed we were very fond of her.
So the quiet surfaces of the mahogany tables reflected the hues of the wide skies; the silver rose-bowls, the pattern of the tablecloths on which they were fragrantly placed; you slipped on rugs which lay on the parquet flooring because the parquet floor was like ice. I suppose there were thousands of such bachelor houses in England of that date: I wonder if you will find any at all now. Talking of the men that used to inhabit them, you just say: “He’s dead!”
Well, the sheets of the bed in which I slept smelt so strong of lavender that you saw, at odd moments, the green-grey plants beneath the sun. The mahogany pillars that supported the flowered chintz tester were thin and beautiful; the mirror over the fireplace showed, in leaf-gilt, Cupids flying to Graces. And through the open French windows you saw — well, twelve counties. The little hedges, like shadows, thin, indefinite, ran over the million fields; the grey, the straw-coloured, or the purple hills mounted towards the horizon or fell away. A favourite hen with twelve balls of yellow fluff walked across the door-sill, clucked tranquilly and showed the chickens how to scratch in a grey-haired rug with scalloped, scarlet flannel borderings.
The shadows of four persons passing in front of the view flickered on the ceiling one morning as I lay there, the windows wide open. I was reading a pleasant book from my brother’s small library. I daresay it was a hunting novel; those I always read with pleasure.
I wasn’t well: not ill, but feeling just enervated and weak in all my joints. I had, out of curiosity rather, called in Clarice Honeywill’s father. As I have said, Dr. Robins’ practice embraced my brother’s small territory; and indeed he attended the farm servants. My brother himself was never ill. He was a rough tweed sort of fellow, rising fifty, greyish, and with disturbing eyes — the sort of eyes that seem always to be screwed up in order to look into a gale of wind.
He ordered me to stay in bed when I did not want to get up, and to drink from time to time a decoction of cat’s valerian. I did not want to get up at all. Sometimes I had lunch with my brother, and afterwards sat in a chaiselong on his terrace, which was arched over with pink rambler roses. More often I did not get up till dinner time, when I dined with Fred and my aunt. In those days we dressed for dinner every night: to think of it! — and there would be wax candles and silver dishes.
I had had to go up to Town twice for that confounded trial. Dr. Robins had allowed for that. My brother motored me right up to the police court and back again. On two successive days it was — the twentieth and the twenty-first of July. I am not going to give you the trial. I do not remember it very well; there were wigs in the court, and anxious faces, and undercurrents of elation and depression as the talking went on. Too much has passed since then to make it of much importance. Besides, it was only a formality. The police magistrate apparently had no option but to send a charge of that nature to the higher court. But, as far as he could, George Heimann scored hands down. Nothing was said about his origins; apparently, when it came to the point, Mr. Podd’s counsel funked the issue; and the magistrate reduced the bail to George’s own recognizances in the sum of ten pounds — if that is the right way to put it. At any rate, it was regarded as his way of showing that he considered the case against George as being of little weight, and he himself unlikely to bolt. Mr. Jeaffreson told me to look at the face of Mr. Podd whilst that was being said. I did not; I didn’t want to see the fellow more often than I had to.
In the action — if it is called that — against the Evening Paper, George’s party did not fare so well. The Court simply took the view that I had held: the appearance of those two paragraphs simultaneously had been sheer accident. The one had been written by the two cousins with the bird of paradise hats: I cannot imagine why it took two of them to write it; the other had been sent in by the paper’s usual police-court reporter. The judges simply dismissed the case—” refused the order” is, I believe the correct term; and they were rather rude to George for wasting the time of the Court.
I never read newspapers in the country — or very seldom — and I should not myself have heard of the case if George had not come over to me to apologise. He took the view that in letting Marie Elizabeth and the Jeaffresons act against my advice he had been rude to me. He seemed rather haggard and, not feeling very well, I was inclined to be impatient with him.
But it was pretty obvious that I had done him about the worst turn that had ever been done to him by anyone yet.
In talking to that solicitor at the Night Club about George’s possibly standing for Parliament, I had naturally taken it that Mr. Jeaffreson would respect my confidences. I don’t know why I had expected that: solicitors never do respect confidences. I ought to have been wiser. But I suppose one will go on doing it until one dies.
George said I could not imagine how hard his sister had taken that news when she had heard it from the miserable solicitor — or the extravagances she proposed to commit. She had taken it into her head — or the idea had been put there by Miss Jeaffreson — that George was in a conspiracy with his uncle: George was to accept his election expenses as a bribe for stopping all investigations into their birth-rights.
He had had at last to consent to the action against the Evening Paper. It was an irrational concession, but it had brought him a little peace from the two women. He said to me anxiously:
“You must not take me as meaning that my sister is a virago. She isn’t. Nor even vulgar. It’s with her a kind of religion. She sees nothing else. But it is painful! She sees nothing but wrongs done to illegitimate children: wrongs that must be righted!” It appeared that Marie Elizabeth had threatened to have visiting cards printed with the title and name that she had taken into her head were hers by right — and to leave them on all the friends she had made through Lady Ada Pugh Gomme.
I asked him whether he had any idea what that title was. He answered, looking straight at me:
“I have. I have long known; but I prefer not to talk about it. Not at present!” He imagined that the Jeaffresons had ferreted out something, too. Anyone could do it at the expense of a little trouble. It was no great conjuring trick. But, since the evening of the Night Club, the Jeaffresons had been reticent with him, and he did not know what they knew or did not know.
This conversation took place, by-the-bye, on the fifteenth of July, two days after the evening of the Night Club. I had been at my brother’s just twenty-four hours: they had applied for the order against the Evening Paper at pretty well the hour when I had been getting into the train to come down to Froghole. I said negligently:
“I don’t see why you do not let your sister have her visiting cards. There is no law against assuming a title that belongs to no one else.”
He answered — and his face had an almost unbalanced expression of apprehension and repugnance:
“I should not be surprised if she did. But, by Heaven, I believe too that I shall hang myself if she does.”
I said (I was feeling tired):
“Oh, nonsense! That’s no reason for making away with oneself. Go and have a good time at the Laubenheimers’.” I felt depressed, too. There could be no doubt that I had let him down by telling that solicitor of his political prospects. He must have been having a pretty bad, jawing sort of time with those two young women. And he had been in court two days running — not a very healthful way of passing the time for a young man who had publicity-phobia, a nervous dread of seeing his name in the papers. He bore the marks of those two days already.
After that, as far as I was concerned, things became quiet for seventeen or eighteen days. I believe that my brother, under the orders of Dr. Robins, just kept people away from me. At any rate, except for the two excursions to the police courts, which were soon over, and during which I was not even called to give evidence, and which became merely quiet luncheon parties with my brother and the young people and, once, Lady Ada Pugh Gomme — except for them, nothing at all seemed to remain of the hatefulnesses of that hateful end of a season. The young Heimanns went duly to Lady Laubenheimers’, a dozen miles away. Miss Jeaffreson was not with them. I think Marie Elizabeth had quarrelled with her: or there was a coldness. I believe that at the Night Club, where I had not of course observed everything, Marie Elizabeth had come upon Miss Jeaffreson, Mr. Podd, and the bird of paradise cousins conversing earnestly in a corner. At any rate, Mr. Podd’s solicitors had indulged in the imbecile sharpness of subpœnaing that young woman for the prosecution. They really believed that disreputable facts about George Heimann’s past could be elicited from her. They did not call her in the end: but Marie Elizabeth gathered that her Eleanor had talked a great deal too freely. Indeed, it came out that, much as I had guessed in Shaftesbury Avenue, that young woman had lunched with the publisher somewhere in a private room, that being in those days the fashion for advanced young women.
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.
