Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (148 page)

She squared her shoulders involuntarily: “Taller, more graceful, imposing — but this glass always flattered me” — the under bodice was cut low beneath the lace; she wondered if it were not too low. She couldn’t tell. She had never had anything like it before. A London dressmaker wouldn’t have sent her anything immodest.
“
And for evening wear....”

George said behind her:

“I want to speak to you about Thwaite.”

Her heart beat wildly. What was going to happen? Did he know? Did he guess why she had refused Dora her money? But he couldn’t. Was he angry?

She faced him. He was smiling. He said: “Oh, what a pretty dress.” He sat down comfortably beside the piano, and rested one arm on the end of the keys. His dark eyes seemed to see right through her, and she felt unreasonably tremulous. She said:

“I can’t talk about Thwaite.” She had acted once more!

She felt a profound feeling of thankfulness. Then, suddenly, she thought that she had been horribly rude to him, and cold, and brutal. He asked:

“You think I’m presumptuous because I interfere.” —

She answered:
“
Oh,
no.”

And he said:
“
I take an interest in you all. But, of course, I
am
meddling.”

He thought how calm she was and how very reasonable. He
hadn’t
any right to speak to her.

“I can’t talk about the matter,” she said. Her voice was trembling. “I believe I’m acting rightly.” She couldn’t trust herself to say any more. She had wanted so much to talk to him, just once. Now he was offering to talk to her about the one thing she could not talk about. She leaned against the mantelpiece. It relieved her to have even a material support. She became more nervous. Supposing she should think out loud. She might say: “It’s because I want the money for you.” She shivered. She remembered her dress. Oh, supposing those words came out. Suddenly she found herself wishing that she dared say them. If only she could say them and have done with it —

He flicked his cap gently on his knee.

“Well, I suppose that settles it,” he said. He had never been treated like that before. It was as if she had told him to mind his own business, and it pleased him. It made him feel like a lion confronted by a sparrow defending its nest. She was most refreshing; he certainly hadn’t a right to meddle, and she told him so.

She thought:
“
Now I have made him hate me. He is smiling to hide his anger.” Then she thought, proudly: “But I’m doing the right thing.”

He said:

“I suppose I shall find your father in the study.”

He was on his feet, and she was thinking desperately of something to say to keep him a moment longer. She had wanted so much to speak to him. Now he was going. She said: “I was only trying this dress on.”

He smiled and answered:

“Well, it’s very charming,” and she wondered how in the world she could have said such a thing. She must have been trying to excuse the splendour of it.

He paused at the door and added:

“I thought it might have been that old matter — Thwaite’s lack of scruples. That’s unfounded, I assure you.” It occurred to him oddly that he had been pleading his own cause. If he had to support Dora it meant selling his furniture.

“I ventured because poor Thwaite is a good deal worried just now.” The door closed upon him.

To her it was like a knell. She had offended him mortally. He would never speak to her again. Suddenly she thought, with a mutinous rage:

“He thinks about Thwaite’s worries. He never imagines I have any.” Her head fell upon her chest. “I never let him!” She had prevented his talking.

But he had noticed her dress.

CHAPTER II
.

GEORGE took up his parable of the poetic point of view some nights later. The thing was running in his head. It simply meant his salvation, he said, and he felt, he went on, a desperate desire to
be
saved. He didn’t know why. “At my age it seems childish. But there it is.”

Thwaite was still correcting proofs. He nodded.

“Dora has been prodding me on to write great works. It’s in the Brede family,” he said, “
to
prod you on. In me you might call it love.”

“I’ve always felt so hopelessly dull, so commonplace,” George said. But it had come as a revelation to him that his commonplaces might be the poetry of A, B and C. “So that if I accept myself on those lines I may do something yet.” He stopped, and then repeated: “Something yet.”

“I’ve always been too honest, or too contemptuous to ‘write poetic.’” It had always seemed to him that consequently he hadn’t anything worth saying. “But you fellows insist that I (I’m a wealth of boredom to myself) am really somebody, a personality, a poet—”

Thwaite made an energetic forward movement. George said hastily that he didn’t deny it. It was a thing they couldn’t discuss—” I have it or I haven’t it — this personal magnetism, this power of hypnotising crowds.” But it was his duty to be natural, not to pose, not to cast about for a poetic point of view. That was it, wasn’t it? Thwaite said that he wasn’t any good at Socratic argument.

That day, to avoid a troublesome draught of some years’ standing, George had had his desk moved some yards further from the window. A mirror above the fireplace threw the reflection of his own face in profile, warmly lit up by the glow of light on the papers in front of him, into a large glass on the opposite wall.

“By Jove, how young I look!” he exclaimed. He felt a sudden warmth of joy, of thankfulness, as it were. He saw a head that appealed to him very much; that was sympathetic, massive, full of energy and expressive.

“Didn’t you know?” Thwaite laughed.
“
You’re a child. The youngest of us all.”

George paused for a long time. If he were as young as that — if he still had that life, that power of taking an interest in life, which is more than life itself, he had still a chance.

He might still — What? What was it that he wanted? The minutest examination of the mirror didn’t reveal a wrinkle. His eyes shone.

“I don’t know what in the world has come over me,” he said vehemently. “I seem to have been talking of myself for hours. I’m beginning a stage. What stage? What is it? Senile decay? A final flicker of the candle before it drops into the socket?” He was speaking in his large, bantering manner. He looked down at his work. “I shall have something to show you in a minute.”

“I’m so extremely glad,” Thwaite said with a gush of pleasure. “We shall all be.”

“It’s three-quarters finished,” George said. “But wait a minute.” He vigorously erased three lines of manuscript. Then his eyebrows contracted, and he interlined little words.

“One minute,” he repeated abstractedly.

Thwaite looked intently and affectionately at George’s engrossed face.
“
If only he
could
really take an interest in himself,” he thought. He felt immense pleasure. He had been waiting for the announcement so very long. George hadn’t had “anything to show” anybody for a period that had melted from months into years.

If only he would pull himself together, and deliver one blow to clench all the staves of the barrel. He ran over in his mind the desultory output of George’s life. “There are volumes enough, and it’s all good stuff; it’s got charm; it’s got his own individuality.” It hadn’t failed of its success of esteem; but in the light of George’s personality the success did not seem good enough.

George, with an abstracted expression, held his pen poised over a missing word.

“No, there isn’t any reason,” Thwaite thought. “He should make pots of money if there
isn’t
any budding publisher he wants to give a lift to. He may do the trick this very time.”

His mind went rapidly over the engineering of the trick. He saw himself running about from reviewer to reviewer. There were the hundreds of fellows George had helped. Thwaite would force them, for shame, to give George a shove. That was how these things are worked. He saw advertisements in enormous letters. He would bully George into letting him fill the
Salon
with them.

“It all turns on what he’s writing now,” he thought, excitedly. And then, “No, it doesn’t matter a straw what he’s writing; it’s a sure thing.”

The pen of the unconscious George began to scratch swiftly over the paper.

“Yes, if only he’d succeed now,” Thwaite thought. He thought of the immense sums that George ought to make. His mind lost itself in details of publishers’ agreements. Thwaite was fond of money, and he had a settled idea — George let himself be victimised by these people. It irritated him horribly. There ought to be a definite clause in the next agreement; the publishers must spend a stipulated sum on advertisements. He grew impatient. “Why can’t he show me the back pages, and let me catch him up?”

The pen slackened its pace, and George looked meditatively up the page. “It’s coming now.”

The tramp of heavy feet sounded on the cobbles outside the window; it was followed by the sound of a clumsy hand on the portentous iron fastenings of the front door. The noise penetrated even to the absent mind of George. He threw down his pen with a gesture of impatience.

“Our excellent friend,” he said.

Mr. Brede loomed darkly into the room.

“You’re busy?” he asked, with a shade of apology in his tone. “I couldn’t do without some company. I’ll listen to your talk.” He dropped his great bulk into a low chair.

“We’d been discussing,” George said with his suave collectedness,
“
the reason for the degeneracy of us modern poets.”

“Ah, give me the poets of my young days,” said Mr. Brede. “And the classics, of course.”

Thwaite moved across the room in his desultory manner. He sloped a long arm and caught at the manuscript before George.

“Let me look,” he said.

“There’s dry rot everywhere,” Mr. Brede boomed.
“
Only money matters.”

“There were some points I wanted to make clear,” George said a little regretfully to Thwaite. He had very much wished for a quiet talk with Thwaite.

“Look all round you,” Mr. Brede boomed cheerfully.

Thwaite carried the pile of manuscript to the sofa at the far end of the room, and Mr. Brede continued his philippic. It meant that it was quite one of his best days, for on his bad ones he hadn’t a thought to bestow outside his own condition. George felt that it was a little more than hard to have him when he was well, since he was ready enough to give his time when Mr. Brede needed cheerful society. He caught sight of his own reflection again. Thwaite, suddenly absorbed in the manuscript, lay on the sofa beneath his reading-lamp. George saw his own friendly smile at Mr. Brede. “It’s such a very relative matter,” he was saying.

Mr. Brede repeated dogmatically, “Everything’s falling to pieces. Look at the Dissenters.” He began to laugh ponderously. “I was talking to an old woman this morning. She asked me: ‘Mister, if so be things were as they usedn’t to be—’”

He mimicked rather spiritedly the drawl of a very old woman.

Suddenly he said: “It’s no good.”

There was a harshness in his voice that took George aback.

“What’s no good?” he asked involuntarily.

“I — I — I,” Mr. Brede answered, clenching his enormous fist. “I’m no good.”

He had had a relapse. It was usual with him.

George sighed. With his new preoccupations, with Thwaite absorbed in the new work, with the new desire to talk of his own aims and aspirations, there descended upon him a new weariness in setting to cast off Mr. Brede’s portentous shadows. He felt an intense desire to say: “I can’t be bothered; I’ve my own worries.”

Mr. Brede muttered: “Clara says I’m not to trouble you. I have to wait till she’s in bed before coming round. Did you ever hear of such a thing?” He looked ferociously at George. “You’re the only person that does me any good. What’s the use of Clara? She’s been working with me all day. But she doesn’t understand. She’s no sympathy.”

“Aren’t you a little hard on people?” George asked.

“Hard,” Mr. Brede groaned. “Yes, I know I’m hard; a burden to all the world. And myself!”

A sudden vision of Clara Brede, bent over the facsimile of the mutilated papyrus, appeared to George. It was too bad.

“I didn’t know Clara was helping you,” he said. “The subject’s not very interesting.”

“Most engrossing,” Mr. Brede said, dogmatically. Most en—” He did not finish his word, which, as if it had touched a spring of discontent, ended in a plaintive groan.

“But I can’t take an interest in anything.” He proclaimed triumphantly that it was a bad sign that he was no longer engrossed by a find so remarkable as that of the Fragment of Strasburg.
“
How can I keep my mind on anything?” he thundered. “I am a murderer. The brand of Cain is on my brow. I shall murder someone else. I’m going mad.” George said hastily: “Nothing of the sort,” and Mr. Brede began his long monologue: “There was my wife. I knew, if ever a man knew anything, that the least excitement would kill her—”

Thwaite and his work seemed to disappear together from George’s mind. He felt that he would have to give them up for a long time at least. This was a nervous crisis, as serious as any that had gone before. He would have to devote weeks to the society of Mr. Brede. He wanted to save the man. He was such a fine creature; so real, so vivid — a man who might be so useful to the world.

“But what’s the good of talking to these oafs,” Mr. Brede was wandering on. He had reached the episode of the knife-boy and the boots. His voice had that odd expression of hard contempt that one finds in the country clergy talking of its flocks. “What’s the good of trying to show them how to do things? They’re like animals—” He continued his stereotyped and miserable story.

George saw his way quite clearly. The thing was to divert his mind — to lure him back to his real work, as a clergyman. He mustn’t be allowed to brood any more. It would be a struggle to get him to do it. But that was to be George’s task; he was up to it.

Mr. Brede’s voice rose: “I don’t know what I should have done to the young devil. But I heard a scream. My God, such a scream. She was dead.”

He looked at the floor, then at George again, his eyes suffused with blood, his face suddenly rigid.

“I believe I’m possessed by a devil,” he whispered.

George affected a laugh: “You don’t believe anything of the sort.”

“I don’t know what I believe,” Brede retorted gloomily. “I hear voices. You don’t know what it is.”

“It’s a purely physical delusion,” George answered cheerfully.

“It’s awful,” Brede said, “awful.” There was an expression of stony fatalism in his voice.

“I think you want work,” George said carefully. He would have to give up his own. “Something you can get engrossed in. More vital than the Greek aorists or fragments of papyrus.”

Mr. Brede looked at him attentively.

“I know what you mean,” he said, “but I’m not fit. How can I go to the altar? They’re whispering to me: ‘Had Nimshi peace who slew his master?’ How can I, a man possessed by devils.”

George said: “Oh, now...” and Brede made a sudden motion.

“I didn’t mean to speak of it,” he muttered. “It slipped out.”

“That isn’t the point,” George said. Undoubtedly he meant that in the end Mr. Brede should again take up his priestly functions. If he ever reached that stage he would be cured for good. It would want a great deal of leading up to. Months, perhaps years. “No, it isn’t the point I mean,” he repeated. “Don’t go among your people as a minister of God, but as a man. Get interested in their sorrows; get engrossed in their endeavourings. God knows, human endeavours and sorrows are interesting enough to take a man out of himself.”