Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (144 page)

He went to see how the Reverend Mr. Brede had passed the night. He felt convinced it must have been one of extreme anguish.

One of the local flies was driving away from the gate of the Brede’s cottage. He could see in it the hats of Mr. Brede and of both daughters. It rattled vigorously on the stony road, the driver limply swished his whip, and the whole swept round a corner in the direction of the station. George felt discontented and nipped by the east wind. It was one of those radiant, cold autumn days when brilliant trails of scarlet creeper shook on grey walls all over the town; all the shadows were very blue, and small whirlwinds of dust arose at the street corners.

There simply was not a conversable resident left in the town if the Bredes had gone for any space of time. Thwaite was at his office. There remained only several old maids and a widow, who were not on terms one with another. They united, however, in regarding George as “so sarcastic.”

George pulled his cap on more, and walked briskly in the teeth of the wind to the little watchhouse, a tarred shelter of planks on a stone platform. It hung over the brow of the steep hill. Formerly, there had been ramparts there. Far below was a great expanse of green marshland threaded by dykes. In the distance there was the brilliant blue sea, and some small white houses on the shingle of the beach. He sat down discontentedly on a plank seat in its lea.

In front of him, an extravagantly tall young man and a young girl were leaning against the low brick parapet, and looking over the flats. They talked animatedly in a language that George did not understand, and pointed over the great expanse, speaking very fast and with much enthusiasm. George regarded them with tacit disfavour.

They had a singularly exotic air, tempered by a kind of misery of the wind that swept every visible object as dry, bare, and cold as a clean-picked bone. The young man was an immensely tall, cadaverous figure of plaintiveness. His mobile eyebrows quivered, his hands shivered and hesitated on the hook of his stick. It had a large horn for handle, and was extravagantly gold-mounted. His buff waistcoat boasted a portentous crossing of gold eyeglass and watch-chains. His long, trembling fingers had many rings upon them.

He pointed his noticeable stick at the little group of huts on the edge of the distant, slaty sea, and said something. The young girl was fair, florid, and unformed; had large, prominent, nervous eyes, and had very evidently only lately
“
put her hair up” in some foreign style. She seemed to contradict him; they fell into an excited argument. The young man, fumbling very uncertainly in his pocket, produced a map that he unfolded tremulously. It blew into a fluttering sheet of green and pink and blue. He spread his fingers across it, and peered between them at the names. George still regarded them with disfavour.

The young man turned his head, which was bent over the map, and scanned George with the furtive glance of a beast that has been much hunted. He looked; then looked again straight into George’s eyes — rather authoritatively. He drew himself very straight, and marched towards George with a military salute that suggested the greeting of a royal personage to defiling troops.

“Do I see,” he said quickly, with a soft, guttural accent, “do I see the great poét, the great mastéhr?”

He began addressing his sister very animatedly, ignoring George’s slight motion of deprecation. “We, my people, owe a great debt to you, sir, we Moldauers to you, sir. I come to Paris to fetch my sister after our revolution.”

His sister began animatedly:

“
Monsieur mon frère veut dire, monsieur
...” The brother recommenced: “Your great song, your famôse poém. I have let him be translated. I give one hundred thousand copies to sing roun’ the camp fire with music of the balalaika.. in the great mountains all through our revolution just ended.”

“You are quite aware of my identity?” George hazarded stiffly.

“We have seen so many, many portraits,” the young man said enthusiastically, “and your house, this little town where in old days great fighting was too, is it not?”

“My name is—” George began again.

“Precisely — Georg Mo-fat, Mister Georg Mo-fat. You did write the great, the heroic song...” He recited some sonorous lines in an ungraspable language; there was great fire and much charm in his voice. Then he translated: “
When upon our mountains the foot-tread of the conquering
! We are now free, we Moldavians.” There was a fiery pride in his voice. The mistrust did not leave George. As a matter of fact he had suffered before from inroads of refugees from the Balkans. At one time they had settled round him in great swarms and caused some lamentable inconveniences in the little town. He said:

“I think you are mistaken. I cannot recall the lines at all.”

The young man consulted with his sister, and she flashed shyly upon George:

“
Mais non, mais non. Il n’y a pas d’erreur, Monsieur, me se souvient il pas?
 
‘Et quand sur nos montagnes vont les pas du conquérant
’...”

They both looked at him with parted lips, a great expectation. George shook his head. He could not remember ever having written lines answerable. He maintained his new pose of unsociability, the unaccustomed suspicion which in his genial romanticism he exaggerated.

“I really cannot take the credit,” he closured the matter stonily.

The young girl said eagerly:
“Mais si, mais si, monsieur.”

Her brother laid his trembling hand upon her arm with an air of tender and darkling restraint.

“You have forgotten, sir,” he said; “you wrote the great song perhaps years agone. You wrote him for another people struggling for liberty as we have struggled many years. We took it, we made it for our own.” He had drawn himself up to an immense height and leaned diagonally across his stick like a great ladder. “I came to fetch my sister from Paris where she haf made her studies.” They had come to Wickham principally to thank George. “We have seen, we do make thanks. The great mastéhr has forgotten his great poem; we — we will never forget, we Moldavians.” He removed his hat with a rather grand air.

The young girl looked at George, her large blue eyes troubled, her large fair cheeks a little depressed. “
Ah, monsieur,”
she said, “
monsieur mon frère vient de si loin
,
exprès.”

Her brother stooped his discouraged height tenderly over her. He thrust his great hand under her arm, and, still holding his hat, drew her away.

“A good day, sir, and take our thanks,” he said. They went slowly up the ascending street.

George looked moodily after them; he had no doubt of having hurt their feelings. One of the young man’s long legs was longer than the other, and he halted rather painfully. He continued to point his portentous stick at the stone-work of the house-fronts.

George had an impulse to go after them, to overwhelm them with atoning hospitalities. But he could not tell, and, for the matter of that, did not wish to tell — that they were not intent upon some Oriental form of the confidence trick. He said as much about twenty minutes afterwards to Clara Brede.

By that time he had impatiently made the tour of the ramparts of the little town. He recovered his circulation, and called at the Bredes’ cottage to make enquiries. He found Miss Brede in the unpleasantly furnished sitting-room — the house was a hired one — very much engrossed with a thin book. She looked up with a gentle, rapt expression, then flushed and laid the book down upon the marble top of a cheffonier. It had a looking-glass with a frame lavishly carved like rose wreaths for a back, and for ornaments a number of large shiny shells, reclining on green and red worsted
“
tidies.”

She said merely:

“Oh!”

Receiving George’s apologies, she explained that she had sent her father away for two or three days.

“It was necessary for himself, and for us all,” she said, with her soft determinedness. She was sitting in a cane lounge, near a fire, and she twined her hands back to back in a minutely-affected attitude, that used to characterise Cambridge students of a decade or so ago.

George, standing looking down on her, began a mild “But?” of surprise. She smiled, and showed even white teeth.

“I have to think for my sister,” she said. “These... manifestations, like that of last night, are so dreadfully bad for her — for a young girl.” She looked, at the moment, intensely young herself. “Dreadfully bad for a young mind,” she repeated slowly. “Because, of course, the sort of thing is in the family, Contact would undoubtedly bring it out in Dora.”

“She has such a happy disposition,” she added, then she sighed very slightly.

“But yourself, my dear young lady?” George said.

She looked up at him gravely.

“You know,” she said, “one Iphigenia in a family doesn’t matter so much; but there sha’n’t be two.”

George pondered the remark for a moment without much fathoming it. He looked at the reflection of part of his waistcoat in the looking-glass at the back of the cheffonier. Then his eye caught the back of the thin book she had been reading. It was one of his own volumes of verse of some years back. She would naturally have a curiosity to read something of his, and would be able to borrow his books from Thwaite. “Does that queer stuff leave any impression at all?” he asked, To him the recollection of the book was like that of leaves gone very dry, and with a faint scent. She looked past him out of the window, and then said:

“I think it was because of that I sent my father away.”

George, standing with his stick in one hand, his hat in the other, jumped very slightly.

“It seemed so — so shameful that you should be taken up with our worries,” she said.

George gently tapped his leg with the crook of his stick. It was equivalent to a yokel hilariously slapping his thigh. He said: “How energetic you are!” She continued, looking calmly at him —

“We are a very selfish family, hopelessly self-centred. It’s a symptom of the other — the neurotic side.”

George looked at her for an explanation.

“My father,” she went on, “would take up your entire time. And the more skilfully you talk to him the more skilful he becomes — in the dialectics of his own misery. I would not permit it any longer.”

George walked slowly to the window seat and sat down.

“You meant to give me time for work?” he asked.

“The change is very good for him, too,” she said. “He has gone back to his parish to look after his
locum tenens
for two days. He’s excellent at parish work.”

George was silent.

“He will come back a great deal better, and afterwards I shall keep him out of your way,” she said, with her soft determinedness.

George said: “Oh, don’t do that. My work doesn’t count. I used to blow little tunes on an oat straw; but it all went years ago.”

For answer she slowly drew out a blue review from her side in the lounge, and held it accusingly at him.

“Oh, that I wrote six months ago,” he said, a little guiltily.

“I am determined the loss shan’t be traceable to
us”
she said sharply.

George said, gaily: “Oh, bother the loss,” and she leant forward, with an impatience that was almost an anger.

“Do you mean to say,” she said, fixing her eyes upon him, “that you don’t know you’re a great poet?”

George said: “Well, I didn’t know anyone followed my work like that,” and then burst into quite joyful laughter. Her quaint anger, her accusing, long white hand; her figure, of which all the lines of her coarse, dull blue dress seemed to lend themselves to her earnestness in this form of academic debate; all these things struck him as quaintly and adorably charming. She looked at him in the same mood for a moment, and then began to laugh too.

“I get,” she said, “these firmnesses from having to manage a family.” She smoothed her fair hair, that drooped in a sort of Flemish band over her small ears. In her half confusion her face had the tint of a shell cameo. “But it
is
irritating,” she affirmed; “because you
are
a great poet.”