Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (145 page)

George said: “Oh, you young people.”

She seemed to him, perhaps on account of the
naïveté
of her attack, intensely young still. He felt himself, in proportion, ripely and mellowedly middle-aged.

CHAPTER V
.

THEN George told her the story of the young Moldavians. He related it as an anecdote illustrating the folly of youthful enthusiasms.

“I was rather rude to him,” George said, “or, at least, quite cool. He was distinctly
brusqué.
I don’t know that I don’t regret it.”

“What a pity, oh, what a pity,” Clara Brede said, with an evident and intense concern. It prepared George for a new and pleasant shock of surprise.

“He was an attractive figure,” he said, “but it was stupid of him. The lines certainly aren’t mine—’
Quand, sur nos montagnes sonne Le pas du conquérant.’”

He shook his head. Clara Brede’s eyes were full of an intense concern.

“Don’t you remember?” she asked....

“So, on that day,

When our hills feel a foreign tread,

And our slave-seed shall strive to raise

Their necks from underneath the yoke,

There shall not lack a folk to say:

Their fathers’ deeds inspired our souls

With breath of freedom, and shall they

Cry unto us in vain?”

Her voice was full and rich; she quoted with the certainty of knowing the words infinitely well.

George had the swift, disturbing feeling of remembering the long since forgotten. “Oh, was it
that?”
he said.

Years before, Greece had been making one of its periodical clamours against the Turk. George had written some unbalanced verse, aimed at inducing one of the political parties to unsheath the sword against the oppressor.

“I learned them — we all learned them — when I was at college,” Clara Brede said reproachfully.

“Oh, an unlicked production,” George laughed.

“You mustn’t say it,” she answered rather fiercely.
“
I love these lines.”

“Well, anyhow,” he excused himself,
“
how could
I
tell that Moldavians would adopt something I had written for the Greeks? And how
could
I recognise a free translation into French from the Moldavian?”

“I am so sorry,” she said, pensively, “so sorry.”

George rose. “One must lunch, after all,” he said. He was a little nettled. “I have been a good deal victimised,” he added, as she followed him to the garden gate.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “I know. I should be so very glad if you recognised it more.” Her eyes were exploring the street up and down.

He went again to his study desk. He had undoubtedly the itch to write. The letter of the editor of
“
The Higher Things” confronted him, and the words
“
a great poet” still rang in his ears. He had fallen under his own spell. There was the fervent letter of the editor offering him a gratifying sum for a sonnet; there were the look, the steadfast face of Clara Brede. Her full voice, her exhortatory manner, were those of the whole-souled women who incite to great enthusiasm and to forlorn hopes.

His own attitude towards himself as poet was the inevitable one of backing and filling. It is obvious that he must have been at times obsessed by the jingle of words. But, nine days out of ten he would dismiss his work with a small motion of his hand, that, given his great personal prestige, did really extinguish it altogether. He had tried to do it with Clara Brede. He had in the nature of the case no respect for the intellects of the people for the moment enthusiastic about him. An editor is by nature an ass; a Moldavian can’t be expected to judge English verse. And a young girl is a young girl. You can’t give a reason for her likings. But the three together did something. Applause after all is applause; and for the moment he had that faint touch of hope, like a waft of spring wind; like a glimmer of first love — that sort of half touch of whole faith that we must sometimes have or die — the faith that words matter, that letters survive. He dipped his pen spiritedly in the ink and held it poised above clean paper. With that pen on that paper he might write words that would outlast the stars. It had become, for the moment at least, a potentiality.

He did not, of course. The postman, jerking down from the steps of the house, jogged past. Then came the tall, halting figure of the Moldavian, half hiding his sister, and, on the further side, Clara Brede, her blue dress waving in the wind. They walked slowly, with the averted gaze and self-conscious air of persons who do not wish to look in at a window, and yet wish to look at a house. George lost himself in conjectures. They passed. A letter was brought in to him. It had a French stamp, and a hand-writing that George recognised as that of a great French writer — one of the great names. It was with a certain pleasure that he read the “
Cher Maître”
of the opening. The letter was by way of being one of recommendation of a Prince Nicholas of Moldavia—” A true hero of the grand style. Figure to yourself, he carries in his left leg two bullets of the oppressor. He has for you a true veneration; it is a veritable artist of action, and so young, with a charm so ingenuous....” The writer begged that George would receive the prince favourably. “But why do I talk of a favourable reception to you, who are the fine soul of hospitality?”

There was a postscript praising an article of George’s that had appeared some months before. The writer said that it might be taken for the work of a Frenchman.

Five minutes later he was hurrying towards the Bredes’ cottage. Once again the fly was driving away. Clara Brede was standing at the gate waving her hand in farewell to the young girl. The flyman swished his whip. From the back seat the young man was pointing his stick at a gable of the church. Then they disappeared.

Clara Brede, shading her eyes with her hand, turned to go indoors. She caught sight of George and waited.

“I went out to find them,” she said valiantly, as soon as he was within hearing.

George said, “You showed them round?” mildly.

“You must not think it was meddling,” she pleaded. “At least, it was meddling,” she added, conscientiously, “but I mean...”

“It was a kind thought?” he asked.

“I didn’t like it,” she answered, “and I
couldn’t
leave it.”

“You thought it pathetic they should have come so far to meet such a rebuff?” George asked gaily.

She looked down at the ground as if still conscientiously analysing her own motives. “No, I think,” she said, “I didn’t like their carrying away such an impression.”

“Of — of English men of letters?” George asked.

She flushed right over her face and down to where her neck ran into the severe simplicity of her blue dress at just the juncture of the shoulders.

“Of you,” she said.

George said:

“Oh, dear, there’s nothing to be distressed about. I don’t at all resent your coming to my rescue. I
had
behaved like a bear.”

“I told some lies,” she said, as if relief made her suddenly glib.

“You would have to if you wanted me to seem amiable,” George smiled.

“I said you had come there to meditate, and that you had had a bereavement,”

“You might, you know, have said that I had deputed you to make it up. Or that you were, as it were, a buffer between me and a world of intruders.”

“I did think of saying that,” she admitted.

“Now that was too bad,” George said. She looked at him with a sort of alarm. “Think, I mean, of how you missed impressing them with my resources,” he reassured banteringly. “What an idea they might have carried away of a man with a concierge of such charm.” He said the words with a bow and a “leg.”

Her great-grandmother would have curtsied and riposted with a ready turned phrase ending in “Sir.” Clara Brede only said “Oh,” and appeared distressed.

“You know you’ll catch a dreadful cold without a cape,” George ended. “But you shall, if you want to be really kind, come in and make music for me with your sister. I’m a lonely old man.”

That was a “kind thought” of George’s.

George was determined to play the great man, if by that pose he could give pleasure. The two Brede girls came and made music for him; he exerted himself to please. His candles again glowed; there was a great log on the andirons; the magnificent-roofed room was full of warm shadows. And George did justice to his setting. He had precisely that glow, that pleasantness, that a fire has of an early autumn night — what you might call an over-charm. He was the old, great man, exerting himself to be delightful to the young.

They made a mild, folk-ballad music — and then he talked. He was very much at his best. The Brede girls pleased him; they gave him, as it were, a stage and an audience too. And they placed him. He
was
the old great man, a sort of Scott of Abbotsford. They, in their ingenuous, delightful youth, were players to him, too.

Dora, after all, was young, silent, unformed, and, as it were, unawakened, fair, flushed, and as if tumbled after a pleasant warm sleep. But Clara, with her directness, her Puritanic conscientiousness, was a figure of comedy for him. Her pauses before she spoke amused his anticipation; her uttered judgments, her directnesses, were a delight. So were her blushes, her self-consciousness. Once she condemned something George had written in support of one of his young men. But she did it with an air of distress, and at the same time revealed an inherent difficulty of either tempering or shirking the condemnation. It infinitely delighted George.

“I think the man was not worth writing about,” she said.

“But, my dear young lady, he has a certain lisp of a style. And he wanted a friendly lift.”

She hesitated, and said reluctantly:

“But if he was not worth writing about, I think it makes it all the worse that you have written so tremendously well about him. It seems to me like a crime.”

George laughed.

“You know, you will have to be the keeper of my conscience as well as of my door,” he said.

“One wants you to be always at your best,” she maintained, “just because you do so very little.”

“Oh, you mustn’t elevate me to a cult,” he said, “my feet are so obviously clay.” He laughed again hilariously, when he saw Dora cast an involuntary shy glance at his feet.

After they had gone, he began to rake together fragments of verse from all sorts of drawers full of magazines. He was considering the possibility of a new volume.

CHAPTER VI
.

ONCE a Greek scholar of repute and Fellow of his College, afterwards a clergyman noted for his public spirit and the diligence with which he administered his parish and tried to draw public attention to the wants of the agricultural labourer, Mr. Brede had, until his breakdown, gone about all his work with a fierce energy and a sort of impressive harshness of temper. Now, he walked always rather slowly and with a slight limp. The story of his wife’s death was for ever on his lips. He had an almost stereotyped form of words: —

“There was my wife. The doctors had told me, as plainly as they could tell anybody anything, that in
her
state of health the least excitement would kill her. I knew it, if ever a man knew anything.” There was no stopping him. George must have heard the story at least twenty times on Mr. Brede’s bad days. He would relate it in a sort of frenzy, and detail it in a gloating grief. “It was one day when she had been better than usual. She was sitting in the drawing room window to get the benefit of the sun. I saw that the knife boy hadn’t cleaned my boots properly. He had a habit of blacking over the mud in the welts.” The knife boy had passed across the lawn whistling; Mr. Brede had run out of the French window. The knife boy had “answered” him saucily. “In a rage!” Mr. Brede would foam in telling the tale. “I could have throttled the oaf. I caught hold of him.” He had heard a scream; Mrs. Brede was dead.

He would, in his bad days, talk about it by the hour together. The brain specialist he had consulted had forbidden his working any more. It was a case of complete nervous breakdown; he had been too strenuous; he was, in fact, paying the penalty of doing the work of several men.

His parish had been large. He had attended to it with his angry thoroughness, and he had had many other interests: a crusade against the High Church party in his diocese, and, above all, a society that he had founded for creating social life in rural districts — the Society for Promoting Rural Pleasures. He wanted to keep the peasant on the land by making his life attractive. He had had to give them all up. At his worse moments he would asseverate that he was possessed by devils and unfit to minister before the Most High. He “heard voices.” At his best he was convinced that he had murdered his wife.

Clara Brede had passed from the unceasing tending of her mother to a more harassing attendance upon Mr. Brede. He had an exaggerated desire to talk about his case, and, until at Wickham he had come upon George, he had walked about continuously with her. Then Dora had come back from college.

It added to Clara’s perplexities. Dora must at all costs be kept from the sadness of her own lot, from her father’s depressing influence. Mr. Brede had suddenly recovered a small interest in his classical studies. He bought a number of facimiles of papyri, and spent some hours — it was about the time of the discovery of the
Codex Argentinensis
— in angrily demonstrating that the Strasburg decipherer was entirely in the wrong in his emendations of the missing portions.

“I will,” Clara suddenly offered him on the day of his return from his short visit to the parish, “do all the copying of the Codex for you.” It was in the gloomy and tiny room, like a thin-sided box, that, in the house they had hired at Wickham, served as his study. Heavy and dusty calf-bound books, relics of his fellowship, stood on the small desk that almost filled the room. On its flap lay the yellow facsimile of the papyrus covered with crabbed uncial writing.

“You, you’re no good,” Mr. Brede said gloomily.

Clara looked at him seriously.

“I think I haven’t forgotten everything,” she said. “I can try.”

Mr. Brede looked down at his papers. He had a certain respect for his daughter.

“Well, you can try,” he said. “What would you say now to ‘epidetagmenoi’ here?” He pointed a great finger to where a word had been gnawed by mice out of the papyrus. Clara turned her serious eyes to the place.

“I think the other reading’s quite as good,” she said, after a long pause.

He began to dictate to her: “The Strasburg professor’s contention—” It was the commencement of a quite interminable correspondence about the words missing from the twenty lines of uncials.

Half the morning had passed over the silent movements of her pen when Clara said:

“I think, father, you ought not to take up so much of Mr. Moffat’s time.”

Mr. Brede said, violently: “Oh, nonsense.”

“I’m quite ready,” she went on, unwaveringly, “to give you all mine. Not, of course, as a price or a return. But I think it isn’t right of us to trouble Mr. Moffat.” She continued cogently and conscientiously to put before him just what she had put before George himself.

Mr. Brede grew intensely angry. He said he couldn’t do without George; George was was the only person that understood his case. It made him all the more angry to have to acknowledge that she was in the right.

Dora and Thwaite had seen a great deal of each other by a month after that day. They had met at street corners; Thwaite called at the house; they chanced upon each other on George’s steps; the two sisters and Thwaite went walking together. Dora even, in her shy, flushed way, got lessons in book reviewing — for the
Salon.
It was a quite open and quite charming commencement of a courtship.

Then, suddenly, Mr. Brede descended upon them heavily. Dora wasn’t to think of marriage. He forbade it. He was speaking to the two girls alone.

How could Dora after that see Thwaite at all? And how could she explain the avoidance? She avoided him. Clara had argued the matter with her father. He did not give any reasons. He forebade it to her, too.
She
was never to marry. He hadn’t noticed what had been going on; he had not realised that Thwaite was the man. As soon as he had he had spoken.

After a long fortnight of unhappiness Dora met Thwaite. It was on the station road, in the winter dusk. She had tried to pass him; he had detained her very gently and masterfully. She had not the right to treat him in such a way. He wanted to know why she did.

It came out then, and, under the steely glitter of the winter stars, shut in by the gathering shadows, and confronted with the purple bluff of the town’s little hill, which had on one shoulder a single, oblong, orange pane of a lit cottage window, they were gloriously and glowingly warm suddenly — immensely happy and tenderly desolate; bursting into the speech, and dumb with the irrational mournfulness of a newly-avowed and inevitably crossed love.

Eventually Thwaite had gone off to George.

Then George himself confronted Clara in the Brede’s brightly lit and glowing room. She had been crying a little. She had had to listen to her sister’s confession, and it had moved her a good deal. She said:

“Dora is fond of Mr. Thwaite.”

“Oh, I’ll make it all right with your father,” George said.

She looked at him, and asked, with her hesitating and as if painful conscientiousness, “Are you sure? do you think he’s quite scrupulous — Mr. Thwaite, I mean?”

Some days before, Thwaite, with a sort of candour of a tentative suitor, had been making to Dora, and before Clara, little admissions as to his financial prospects. It was as much as to say, “If you don’t think it good enough, we had better not go any farther.” He drew such and such a salary from the
Salon.
He had no debts except that he owed George a good round sum. He had owed it for a great many years. “But, of course,” he added, with his winning smile, “no one ever thinks of repaying
him.”

It had given Clara a shock. She was not used to that sort of gay irresponsibility. She had even argued the matter with him. He had answered: “Oh, it’s rather a large sum. I owed a lot of small things, and he took them all over. I haven’t the least prospect of repaying him. He would not expect it.” He mentioned the sum, and Clara noted that it was just a little more than the dowry she would have to give when Dora was married.

The episode was in her mind when she asked George — it pained her a great deal, even thus veiledly, to question a man George had commended — whether he was sure that Thwaite was quite scrupulous.

George made a large gesture with his hand.

“Oh, my dear young lady,” he said, with his air of ripe knowledge, “ask if he has kind thoughts. Ask — and that’s the essential thing in a journey through life — if he’s sympathetic; a staunch companion, a pleasant and faithful friend. Ask if he’s the imagination that will make him enter into, and be tender to, the desires, the hopes, and above all, the weaknesses of others. That’s the essential quality!” He spoke with a great deal of masterful enthusiasm. He added, amusedly: “But you’ve only got to look at Thwaite’s face to see that he’s the soul of honour.”

Clara Brede, with her rapt air, seemed to signify that he must be right, that he was always right. But her lips closed as if, in spite of that, she had taken a resolve. He set before her a glowing picture of the happiness that must arise from such a marriage as that of Thwaite and Dora. It would make a charming little circle of them all in the tiny town. He certainly succeeded in convincing Clara Brede. It wasn’t so easy a matter with her father. On that night — he, too, had just heard of the coming together of Thwaite and Dora — Mr. Brede abruptly refused even to see George. He wasn’t going to argue the matter; his fiat was irrevocable. George had to confess as much to Thwaite, who was waiting for him.

“But, of course,” George comforted his protégé, “it won’t rest there.”

“The thing’s too senseless, too abominable,” Thwaite said.

His air was rather wild, his eyes fierce, and his hands nervously agitated. “An insensate piece of cruelty; the man’s a brute.” He had a certain vigour of over-riding; a certain almost frenzy that a little disturbed George. He hadn’t seen anything like it in Thwaite before.