Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (142 page)

Gregory said, “Um.”

A little, later they met Thwaite, the author of “The Love Poems of Sidonia,” and the editor of Gregory Moffat’s journal, the
Salon.

Gregory suddenly, and to George’s surprise, shot at Thwaite the question:

“Been doing anything original?”

Thwaite answered:

“Why, no; I’m kept too busy.”

“For me?” Gregory asked. “Um.” George pressed Thwaite to come to dinner with them all. Thwaite evaded him — he had work, he would have to be at the office next day by noon. He had no dress clothes. George said that no one had.

Thwaite laughed: “It’s quite impossible,” and George mentioned Dora Brede.

“Oh, dear,” Thwaite said.

George explained hastily:

“The young lady admires your poems. And you know that there is nothing so good for a talent as admiration. Besides, a little human contact of just the right sort would do you all sorts of good.... Isn’t it so, Gregory?” George was anxious that his friend should make a good impression on Gregory, who, after all, was his employer. He waved his stick round the outline of Thwaite, and said, with affectionate banter:

“I seem to see under all this something quite smooth and polished. It’s in his work, it’s in all his thoughts and all his expressions.... delicacy.”

Gregory peered at Thwaite, but did not commit himself. Seen in the half light of the sunken lane at sunset, Thwaite bore out George’s description. He exaggerated it. The knotted stick that he carried was like a club; his boots covered and seemed to crush a quite unnecessary amount of ground. His hair and beard were going grey, and you might have thought the greyness a purposed exaggeration. It was as if he set himself the task of looking like a tramp. His voice and mannerisms were soft.

George turned upon Thwaite:

“You do want a little contact with ordinary people, regular meals, that order of thing. Supposing that you were the best product of your type of life, it wouldn’t harm that to come in contact with the best products of other types of humanity.”

He chuckled. A big man as he walked in the dusk between the two smaller, emphasising his remarks with flourishes of his stick, George had the air of some teacher of classic philosophy strolling between two disciples.

“Don’t you see, my dear fellow,” he apostrophised Thwaite, “you’ve knocked about, you’ve starved; you’ve lived with gipsies, and been a journeyman carpenter; you’ve existed on bread and raisins for six months in Tuscany — He lived for six months on four pounds, Gregory, in peasants’ huts — You’ve done all sorts of out-of-the-way and irresponsible things. Do me a favour now...”

“Oh, there’s no standing against you,’ Thwaite said, good humouredly.” Let me at least post these reviews. But I don’t see, and I can’t see, why you should put yourself out for me.”

“Don’t you see that someone must, as it were, look after the dress clothes of you poets?” George bantered.

He continued, out of earshot, to Gregory:

“Something good must result from bringing nice people in contact.”

“Haven’t you grown out of that pathetic illusion?’ Gregory answered.

CHAPTER III
.

AT the resulting dinner, George wore a white waistcoat and a black velvet coat. Doing the honours, he lived up to his attire; shone upon by wax candles in serpentine silver branches, he radiated light himself.

Nothing pleased him better than to make a number of very ill-assorted people meet and appreciate each other. It was as if he rejoiced in performing a fine conjuring trick.

Mrs. Moffat had certainly reconciled herself to Hailes. They sat side by side; Hailes was enlightening her as to the precise significance of St. Thomas Aquinas, who had somehow turned up in the conversation. Hailes was extravagantly many-sided. He could answer questions upon subjects so unrelated as to be in the nature of conundrums — or he gave that effect.

There was in George’s sister-in-law a great rawness in a sensitive part — a rawness that had persisted unhealed from the date of the defection of Mr. Frewer Hoey. There was also a hatred for that gentleman. It was this hatred which had caused her diatribes against Hailes at the first view. Hailes was physically so like Frewer Hoey that he had given her a shock. There was even in both a singular occasional jerk backwards of the head that resembled nothing so much as the action of a pigeon afflicted with a certain fidgeting complaint. And, in both, there were the darkness, the air of discreetness, the vivid flash of white teeth under a black moustache. All these things were pronounced in Hailes, but Hailes had not Mr. Frewer Hoey’s almost alarmingly distinct spot, like a tonsure, in the jetty black of his cranium. Hoey had been useful; but Hailes, in two minutes, could give a lady the idea that, socially speaking, he was one of those gentlemen who, in great emporiums, glide forward and assure us that they have in stock every article that any self-respecting person could desire. Undoubtedly there is a price to pay.

Vaguely and titillatingly feeling that he was dangerous, the large lady with her tawny mane, her accentuatedly flashing eyes, her accentuatedly brilliant cheeks, succumbed to a craving that Hoey’s departure had left in her. Mrs. Henwick, the silent attendant at so many of the séances, had been silent at one more. She doubtless was by this time aware of what she was” in for.”

Hailes, it had appeared, could drive motor cars of all builds and all forms of propulsion. It was not so much matter for wonder that one small head could carry all he knew, as that he should have contrived to pick up so much whilst ostensibly editing an Author’s Directory. It was one of life’s little puzzles. Mrs. Moffat’s
chauffeur
, a blue-in-the-faced, black spectacled person, like a monkey from cross-channel, had been more than usually, and much more than bearably, insolent during the run from London. With an astonishing swiftness it became arranged that the driver was to be sent, with a flea in his ear, back to town. Mr. Hailes was to take his place and whirl the car the rest of the way to the house with the fourteen gardeners. Thus, whilst Mr. Moffat and George were still strolling, Mrs. Moffat, squired by Mr. Hailes, had walked swiftly across the church square to the Inn where the lady in a grandly negligent manner
had
packed off the driver.

“You’ll have to pay the insolent creature, I suppose,” she sent in her high voice across the dining table to her husband. Gregory jerked his head rather more abruptly than usual in her direction. But he said nothing.

The other feasters — it was a feast — Mrs. Moffat quite naively ignored. There were her husband and Mrs. Henwick; there was George shedding a glamour that
surely
didn’t matter; there was Thwaite, whom she detested — in his capacity of driver of her journal he was quite as insolent a creature as the
chauffeur
she had just dismissed.

There were also the two Brede girls. As far as she was concerned they didn’t exist, and certainly didn’t matter any more than thoroughbred mares, cocker-spaniels, shorthorns, or anything else thoroughbred. They had blue eyes that looked at you; they gave a certain impression of being clean-run, healthy, quite English, and nothing, in particular. They certainly would never set the Thames on fire for any particular set, or fringe of a set.

For George, they undoubtedly existed as much as twin stalks of corn; straight, tall, a pale golden. And, given the right strength of wind, the right sky, the right texture of clod underfoot, stalks of corn may be precious enough. One goes, as he put it, to them for the daily bread one prays for daily, for breakfast, dinner, and tea; they are the products of air, of rain, of sun and the earth — the one thing one cannot dispense with when all the feasting is over and done.

Dora, the younger sister, with her round young face a little flushed and with delighted blue eyes, leaned a little forward listening to Thwaite, who, across the table, was talking about “the Abruzzi” to Mrs. Henwick and Gregory Moffat.

Thwaite, if he had felt any shyness, had lived it down. Dora — it was wonderful to George in what a degree she had the inestimable gift of youth — listened with rapt softness.

The Abruzzi are mountains in the kingdom of Naples, and certainly as Thwaite talked of them they seemed to get an astonishing intimacy with an “atmosphere” of goat-skins, tanned shoulders and faces, vine-garlands and sandal-thongs.

George had a moment’s doubt whether Thwaite were not doing it
too
well. He himself would have called for a little more of a contrast, a little less of the poet. But he reflected that Thwaite’s personal appearance probably gave Dora a sufficiency of shock. It would be the occasion for saying that “when you get accustomed to him,” that, like a little initial check, is the almost necessary opening to a rapid run down-hill into a blessed and inevitable intimacy. He let the matter alone, and devoted himself to the elder sister.

Between Dora and herself ran a quite unrememberable string of Christian names — Harry, who was in Singapore; Willie, who was going out to join him; Marian, in Yorkshire, with two children; and Kate, married to an excellent young man, who was planting oranges in California. There was also a Rose who was dead. Clara Brede had always struck him as being “like her sister.” There were two of them, but, as far as type went, he had noted no more than one. There were features and lines on Clara’s face, where, in her sister’s, there was only a soft roundness. She might have been thirty; she might have been less or more. But she, too, and in her way, had her gift of youth — of not having lived. He knew that, for many years, she had been bound hand and foot attendant on a hopelessly, and very querulously, invalid mother. And he was prepared to read resignation in her face.

But, rather suddenly, it seemed to him that she had been asleep for a long time — as if she must have endlessly waited on her mother in a dream. He began to talk to her very particularly, because, he thought, she must have had great griefs, a sad life. He exerted himself to give her, as far as he could, a happy half-hour of forgetfulness. He had been talking about Thomas Aquinas, having caught the name from Hailes. She said, with conviction:

“Oh, one can’t exist at the bottom of a sandpit all one’s life. Everyone has to
live
sooner or later. I’m convinced of it.”

George asked:

“And Fra Angelico?”

She answered:

“Oh, either they have lived already, your monks. Or, if they are caught quite young, they’ll — I don’t mean kick up their heels; it probably never gets to the surface. But in their minds.”

Her intonation was clear cut, and, in a way, determined. You could tell that she had once sat under professors and held arguments. No doubt she had had aspirations before the sick room had swallowed her. It startled George; it made him wonder in what particular still watches of her invalid’s nights she had thought her thoughts, but it relieved him and released his tongue. He had been holding himself down to platitudes out of deference for what he had imagined to be a good girl wanting in comprehension. After that he let himself go. As she listened, she reminded him of her sister listening to Thwaite. There was the same expression.

He accepted it as a tribute to the excellence of his dinner, and it pleased him. He had all sorts of theories as to dining, and when he took the trouble he drilled his house-keeper with a vigilance that ladies, ranging from the precisest of old maids to Mrs Moffat herself, had envied. It was a matter of the just meat inciting to the just wine, and both to a flow of joyful speech, with flowers here and there.

The door opened, and a tremendous, spectacled head, with a vast black beard, glared suddenly at them all. It was Mr. Brede, the father. His big, jarring voice, said gloomily, but without a touch of embarrassment:

“Oh, I didn’t know.”

“I thought you were too ill to come,” George said; “we’ll make room.”

The big voice answered,
“
No.”

The head withdrew, and George hurried anxiously after it. The Reverend Mr. Brede, in the dim hall, appeared a gigantic figure.

He said suddenly, in his deep voice:

“It’s no good; I shall cut my throat.” He raised his great hands in a gesture of despair, and his shadow flitted away into the recesses of the stone hall, and seemed to run swiftly to vanish in the darkness of the black, carved staircase.

The interview was like a dash of cold water to George. It was a case of aggravated neurotics; maybe it overstepped the bounds of sanity. In blowing up a stable-boy with his tremendous voice, Mr. Brede had seriously alarmed his wife. She had been dying of a nervous complaint. Perhaps he had not accelerated her death; he, on the other hand, was certain that he had.

George had argued the point with him endlessly, in the very early mornings, for hours of the daytime, for almost whole nights. He had wrestled in spirit when Mr. Brede was listlessly hopeless; when he was savagely contemptuous; when, as if hunted by Até, he raved with his immense arms waving over his head.

George went to work again. He had uttered three words when Mr. Brede, violently contorting his black bulk, exclaimed:

“The brand of Cain is upon me.”

Clara Brede came out of the brilliant room and became a dim figure beside them. She said suddenly:

“Father, are we
never
to have a moment’s pleasure?”

Her voice had a great hardness, and Mr. Brede became instantly like a dog that has very often been whipped. The change was almost extravagant.

“Mr. Moffat is
so
good,” she said, “but you…”

Mr. Brede, with the gait of an immense Newfoundland, made off for the front door.

“I shall have to go with him,” she said, grudgingly enough; “don’t come.”

George followed her.

There was, outside, the pearly light of a shrouded moon, and they walked under lighted cottage windows that, with shadows of lattice and flower-pots, looked exactly like a stage set for domestic drama. She said:

“He’ll never do anything. You ought not to fear it.”

Brede, muffling his great voice in his great beard, said bitterly:

“No one understands me; no one cares.” When he reached his cottage he threw the garden gate violently back, and went obscurely crashing into a dark bit of shrubbery.

“What will he do?” George asked.

She answered:

“I think he will go to bed. When he finds he can’t worry you.” She paused. A moment after she said: “What do you do it all for? No one ever thanks you.”

Mr. Brede in the shrubbery was tearing at the twigs like a sinister and gigantic ape. Quite suddenly he loomed out upon them.

“What I wanted to tell you,” his deep and muffled voice boomed at George, “is that Dora can never marry. I forbid it.” He had spoken with passionate fatalism. “Never.” He hastened back to the darkness.

Clara Brede’s head drooped dispiritedly. To George’s “What does he mean?” she answered’:

“I think, because we are
his
children, he thinks we shall inherit madness.”

George, remotely shocked, interrupted her:

“Oh, I will talk him out of that idea.” He felt intensely concerned for her. “You mustn’t let it worry you,” he added, comfortingly. “He will be better soon. I will talk to him.”