Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (150 page)

“You think he’ll insert
you!”
Mrs. Moffat asked, with a shade of irony.

“He’ll have to,” Hailes answered. “We’ll throw him out if he doesn’t.”

Mrs. Moffat raised her eyebrows.

“You
can
, can’t you?” Hailes asked, “Any one but a fool could edit so as to make money out of it. It’s a good salary, too.”

“Better than the Spanish idea?” Mrs. Moffat asked, a little anxiously.

“Oh, no, we’ll work that too,” Hailes answered with his air of cheerful competence. “We’ll work everything. You shall see.”

She dropped him outside the small gallery at the top of Bond Street. It was for the time tenanted by an Oriental-German called Kleinkampf. Hailes intended to convert it into his Peninsular Gallery. In imagination he already saw his sandwichmen with the name scrawled across their backs, and elevated above their uniform caps. “We’ll do the thing in style,” he said to himself. He disappeared into the swing-doors. Mrs. Moffat caught a glimpse of the venerable, grey-bearded proprietor who was lying in wait. At the same moment, Gregory himself, jostled in the crowd, recognised his equipage and hopped in beside his wife. She wondered uneasily if he had seen Hailes going in; if he suspected anything, and what he would do if he did. “I was just coming to you,” she vouchsafed. He beamed sideways at a large, gilt sign across an upper window. He said nothing, but friendlily patted her hand. It was a habit of his, and it intensely disgusted her. A minute afterwards he handed her out, fumblingly, in front of the Gallery. He ambled away before her towards a carter’s arch that was some distance from the gilt and marble of the facing. Mrs. Moffat intensely disliked her husband’s side entrance. She followed some yards behind his awry figure; in the intense draught of the arch, her immense hat was uncomfortably lifted, nearly from her head. Her face had an expression of disgust.

She rejoined him at the tail of a black-hooded van that, by the agency of men in green aprons, was discharging immense flat packing-cases into an opening that had glass doors painted white. A man with one arm was superintending the unloading. He was normally a commissionaire of considerable presence, now in his shirt-sleeves and a sackcloth apron, a four days’ grizzled beard and a screw-driver stuck across his mouth. He removed a dirty cloth cap and bowed to Mrs. Moffat, then went on to talk to Gregory.

They were getting ready for an interim exhibition before the full-dress Spring show. Mrs. Moffat, ignoring their existence, swept into the opening that for the moment was free of men and cases. She went swiftly past a series of rectangular, ill-lit stone cellars, and emerged, ill-temperedly, in a subterranean board room. It had iron bars before windows looking on nothing, and an immense red baise table, surrounded by cane chairs, and dotted with ink pots and blotting pads.

A man with a particularly nice waistcoat and a genial, incompetent air came suddenly out of a side door up to Gregory.

“That immense big Rubens,” he said, smoothing the hair that was plastered across his forehead—” Good morning, Mrs. Moffat — has got an immense big nail hole through the cheek of one of the Sabine women — Yes, of course it’s a loan, sir.” He referred to a printed invoice.
“
An immense big hole.”

He fingered his watch chain, and looked at Gregory, who smiled amiably, and said nothing.

“Of course I ballyragged the carriers. The owner’s that Jeaffreson, of Birmingham; he’s as crusty as the devil. He’ll bring all the lawsuits in the world. An unpleasant business.” Gregory appeared to reflect upon the state of the inkpots. “Who’s the forwarding agent?” he asked.

The secretary referred again to the invoice. “Wyllie, of King Street, sir,” he answered, “Oh, let them re-back it, and fill up the hole,” Gregory decided.

The secretary said: “Certainly, sir. And not tell the owner anything at all?’

“Why certainly not. An unpleasant business, very,” he explained to Mrs. Moffat, who was not listening. “It makes other owners so chary of lending. Charming weather.”

He disappeared.

Gregory already had his head in the safe that stood between the barred windows. He produced a cheque book, and looked at his wife interrogatively. She sank voluminously into a chair, and faced him across the red table. She was a little nervous; she never
had
sounded Gregory.

“What can you make it?” she asked. “I’m pretty deep. Deeply hit, I mean.”

Gregory dipped a pen into ink and laid the cheque book on a blotting pad. His face questioned her again.

“After all, you’ve nothing to grumble at,” his wife protested. “I’m not as bad as a thousand women in our set.”

“There aren’t so many,” Gregory chuckled suddenly; “there aren’t a thousand.”

She looked down meditatively at a gold bangle on her tight wrist of her black glove.

“I’ve dropped a pot of money on Barberton Reefs. I suppose you’d mean me to face the music.”

Gregory said, “Oh.”

“A couple of thousand will set me quite straight,” she said. The sudden thought of Hailes had advanced her hopes and her demands. “You can make me a present of
that,
I should think. I haven’t asked you for anything for myself for two years.”

“It makes a thousand a year,” Gregory chuckled. His pen was already at work on a cheque. “Pin money? Eh?”

Mrs. Moffat thought with intense disgust: “While I was at it I might have asked him for the double. But you never know with a man. You’d almost think he was
fond
of me.”

She said: “Well, you can’t grumble. I’m not extravagant.”

Gregory paused in the middle of his signature. “I wish,” he said, without displaying any emotion at all, “you would get rid of that Hailes. I don’t like him.”

Sheer astonishment deprived Mrs. Moffat of speech.

“You,” she said. And then, with sharp haughtiness: “What absurdity. I must have a private secretary. If you didn’t like him, why didn’t you speak before? I’ve engaged him for a year.” She added sharply: “With a year’s notice.”

It was quite untrue, an after-thought. Gregory completed his cheque.

“I shall have you interfering with the housemaids next,” Mrs. Moffat snorted with the indignation of virtue.

“You can give wages in lieu of notice, you know,” Gregory said with benevolent reasonableness.

Mrs. Moffat rose and caught up the cheque.

“And you complain of my extravagance? Wages in lieu of notice! How would you conduct business on such lines?”

“I
didn’t
complain, you know,” Gregory answered amiably.

She swept towards the further door. Gregory, roused from his absent-mindedness to a sort of impressed politeness, hurried to open it.

As they met at the top of the table Mrs. Moffat apostrophised him with expansive gestures:

“No, you don’t complain, of course. You never do. That’s just what
I
complain of. How do I know what you’re thinking of? How can I tell? It’s like living with — with — as her eyes roamed round the room her husband regarded her with amused admiration and affection—”with a blotting pad,” she completed. “You never tell me what you think.”

“I tell you I don’t like Hailes,” Gregory beamed amiably.

“And I tell you I don’t care whether you like him or not.” She swept out of the room. “I do.”

Gregory closed the door noiselessly behind her.

CHAPTER V
.

IN the dim, broad, marble-balustered staircase that led up from the Board Room to the Gallery itself, she paused in front of an immense mirror to shake her ruffled plumes into their proper storminess. She was still quivering with the extraordinariness of it.

“She had never...”

That was precisely it. She never had. There was something unprecedented about the whole affair. She had never before had to ask her husband for such a sum, and he had never before spoken — had never dared to speak — in such a manner. He had never so much as mentioned her companions; she had gone about with Hoey for years. And all her other friends. He must know that he himself, with his obfusque, blind silence, wasn’t a proper companion for her. He had always seemed to realise that, even if he didn’t hear any of the sharp truths that she lashed him with. She moved nearer to the great glass — it ran from floor to ceiling of the tall, square landing — to arrange the cock’s hackle boa beneath her determined chin.

The dim, unfriendly light fell through ground glass windows from high above behind her head. She was filled with sudden misgiving. Was it possible she looked like that — so coarse, so heavy? How could she keep a hold on people? on anybody, let alone Hailes — an immense, tawny-maned woman with a great drooping hat. It wasn’t possible unless she had a personal attraction, a magnetism, something behind and above the qualities of skin, eyes and hair. She was accustomed to think of herself as striking; the hair shining, the eyes flashing. And, on top of the flush that what she felt to be Gregory’s inscrutable outrage had brought to her cheeks, two round marks of the other flush seemed, as it were, to float, accentuated and betrayed.

She squared her shoulders and looked things in the face. If she could not hold Hailes by personal charm, she would have to the other way. Her fingers crumpled more nervously Gregory’s cheque. And, with a rapid motion, she drew a powder puff from her reticule and dabbed it impatiently over her face; she pulled down a veil that had floated, negligently draped, among the feathers of her hat.

Her reflections flashed an immense distance back into the past and out again, like a diving bird in deep water. She paused for her face to resume composure.

Why, something like a fifth of a century (imagine such an age) ago, had she ever married Gregory? Except for the minutest stripplings of time’s colour brush, he had remained precisely the same. In those days she had rather liked him. It even caused her something remotely resembling an
attendrissement;
her mind ran back to the days when Gregory, very young, with practically the same large spectacles and identically the same smile, had persisted in hanging dumbly round her, inscrutably intent on carrying her off, doggedly and silently in love. He hadn’t violated the marriage contract by changing. He might be in love with her still for all she knew; that might account for his many and insufferable tiresomenesses. He was perfectly — and unbearably — what she ought to have expected. The very same.

“And I’m precisely the same myself,” she protested, “except for
that.”
She pointed at her coarse figure in the glass. “I’m exactly what I ought to have expected myself to be. And yet—”

Yes, undoubtedly, she had an
attendrissement de coeur.
She looked back upon herself, young, slim, haughty, with flashing eyes and a great contempt for the created universe; with a steep elastic as that of a race-horse, and fingers that at any motion had curved nervously, as if upon the handle of a riding whip. She had for years, insolently,
“
choked off” in pure irresponsibility all the eligible young men of her own exclusive set — they had been exclusive in those days; she had, as it were, whipped them with scorpions in the face and over the back. Then she had captivated the excellent, mute, obstinate and intent Gregory. And as she looked back to that ever so long ago she suddenly stiffened her back. “Ever so long ago,” she as if snorted; “the absurdity of it. It was yesterday. It’s now. I’m the same. Anyone not a fool could see what’s under that.” It did indeed require only a very little of that imagination that has so small a place in the world to see her — brilliant, flashing, blonde, exhortative; as if flying across the land at the head of the hunt, and contemptuously in at the death.
“
And yet—”

Her mind, alert and hastening, flashed through a list of hitherto despised aids — things one hears recommended, treatments, cures, systems of diet, pink candle shades, all the elixirs of youth. Except for the two red dabs on the cheek-bones, which were, so to speak, flung contemptuously at the eyes of the world, she had ignored all these things. But now... The proprietary Marquis of the Gallery, with a soft brown hat dominating his soft brown fur collar, and an air of leisurely going towards work in an office, strolled down the silencing, red stair-carpets beneath a marble Grace, who seemed about to drop three electric lights on to his head.

He said: “Mrs. Moffat,” as if inscrutably feeling nothing at all.
“
How extremely astonishing.”

He conducted her across the immense rooms of the Gallery itself, looking indulgently at the immense, red-papered, empty walls, the strips of rough matting laid to cover the dancing floor, and the central ottomans draped in dull coloured hollands.

“I’m going to have a gallery for the band put there, up at the top,” he said, pausing and looking with the eye of a connoisseur at the further wall.

“It’s my idea, not Moffat’s this time.”

Mrs. Moffat said: “Oh,” uninterestedly. “Owners have complained,” he said, “that chairs get put against the pictures. You’d think there’d be floor space enough here.”

Mrs. Moffat said contemptuously: “When these Hampstead people want to give a ball they cram in all they can get to come.” She moved on a step or two. “They want full value for their money, trust them.”

“Oh, well, you know,” he surveyed her indulgently through his monocle, “I want it for mine, too.”

He followed her towards the door leading into the next gallery.

“I never looked at it in that way. Now what value do they get? What is the width of the room? Say—” He stopped, and then gravely paced the room from side to side; he faced round and stood considering. His Vandyke beard, swarthy, small face and grave, inherited Castilian expression, gave him an absurd air of being an old master, left unframed, from among the pictures gone from the walls. “Fifty, say by three hundred. Fifteen thousand, isn’t it?” he appealed pleasantly to Mrs. Moffat. “Now, taking into consideration what we charge for the hire of the rooms for a dance and the number of square feet needed per waltzer, and throwing the side galleries in—”

Mrs, Moffat, impatient to be at the real problem of life, wished the amiable
dilettante
very intensely somewhere else.

He abandoned the abstruse calculation with: “And so you see they might get very good value,” as he walked beside her again.

“What! the excellent Hailes?” he said, from the top of the front steps. Hailes was already seated in the victoria. “How do, Hailes?” He waved a tiny hand benignantly, and surveyed Bond Street with musing interest for a minute and a half. The doors of the gallery swung to again behind him.

“If one could only get hold of
him,”
Hailes said, half to himself.

“Oh, he’s no fool,” Mrs. Moffat said, arranging the furs contemptuously round her.

“Henwick’s dead,” Mr. Hailes announced suddenly.

Mrs. Moffat looked at him incredulously, her eyes dilated.

“Henwick?” she asked. “It isn’t possible.”

“Well, he’s dead, anyhow,” Mr. Hailes answered. “Dropped dead, not ten minutes ago, in that jeweller’s opposite the Gallery. It’s what you might call a coincidence our being so near.”

The dilation in Mrs. Moffat’s eyes did not diminish.

“How
awful”
she said. “And Felicia?”

Felicia, Mrs. Henwick, the little Marquise, was her dearest friend — one of those dearest friends that one has, for no particular reasons, rivetted by a thousand ties of going to the same shops, of lunching in the same restaurants, of leaving cards at the same doors, of hearing and telling the same scandals. And the image of Mr. Henwick — big, clumsy, fair, entirely unpresentable and entirely amiable, suddenly became intensely vivid to her, loomed up and obscured all Bond Street. Her heart seemed suddenly and incredibly compressed. And there wasn’t any reason. She wasn’t aware of taking the least interest in him; his going would not leave the least gap; she would not in the least, she thought, at any moment miss the amiable inanity of his smile as he hung clumsily a cloak round his wife’s shoulders in one or the other of the innumerable crushes they seemed to have been always coming out of together.

Hailes was recounting onwards with the nonchalance of a man intensely bored by sudden deaths, yet interested in the coincidence — that it should have happened just there, so close to them. He had seen a little crowd as he walked down towards the carriage. Mr. Henwick, it seems, had been buying a bracelet for Mrs. Henwick. He had been a little irritated by some detail; it hadn’t been made just as he had ordered it for her. And then.. dead. The heart, of course. Mr. Hailes supposed that Mrs. Henwick would be pretty well off.

“And Felicia?” Mrs. Moffat asked. “Does she know?”

Mr. Hailes didn’t see how she could—”You remember she was going to order a hat at Madame Rene’s just about now.” Mr. Hailes remembered everything. “Yes, I suppose she’ll be pretty well off. Henwick was a warm man, I believe. But it was an extraordinary coincidence, wasn’t it?”

In the depths of his superstitious soul a belief in Luck as the First Cause took the place of every other faith; the coincidence, he thought, might undeniably point to something. He was the first to hear of Mr. Henwick’s death; why shouldn’t that be a supernatural indication that he was to be the first to profit by it?

Mrs. Moffat suddenly stopped the carriage, and then, in the face of the descended footman, dropped into a fit of pondering.

“Madame Rene’s,” she announced at last, and then to Hailes: “We must — we
must
break it to her if we can catch her there.” Hailes said:

“Oh, very well. I thought you hated that sort of thing. That was why I didn’t send into you at the gallery. But of course it will look better, naturally.” After a cheerful pause he added:

“What did he stand?”

Mrs. Moffat was recalled from an immense maze of shaken thoughts to a sharp wearying alertness. She answered:

“Oh... a thousand.”

She instinctively halved what Gregory had “stood,” in the desire to retain, as it were, a reserve force. Hailes’ brow clouded in the slightest degree.

“From what you said,” he pronounced, “I thought you could have made him make it more. We shall have to raise it somehow. The market’s too good to be spoilt by a misfire.”

Mrs. Moffat, with her eyes obsessed by the image of Mr. Henwick grotesquely half alive, half stiff and dead, looked at him with intense repulsion. He didn’t in the least notice it.

“Yes, it was a coincidence,” his mind reverted, “and Mrs. Henwick — she
will
be well off, I suppose?”

“You can’t,” Mrs. Moffat blazed at him, “get at
her
money for your Spanish scheme.” She felt suddenly the fulness of her repulsion. In essentials, her attitude of mind was lofty: she could flagellate well enough such want of imagination as Hailes was displaying.

“No, I suppose the estate couldn’t be arranged in time for that,” he said pensively. Mrs. Moffat’s fingers drummed nervously on the side of the carriage. She did not speak again.

Hailes remained lost in thought. He ran over in his clear mind all the infinite ramification of schemes that, with just the touch of that luck which was surely in store for him, might land him in the “anywhere” of a splendour that he had not even imaged to himself.

Upon the himself of his quite near past he looked with wondering contempt. It did not seem possible that he could ever have looked upon George as a great man, a stepping stone, let alone the wife of a publisher of an author’s Directory. He had come to look upon even Mrs. Moffat as irritatingly wanting in courage or initiative. She hardly seemed to
want
to make the money, of which so large a share, he would take care, should be his. What did she want, anyhow? What had she made him her private secretary for — and herself, as he very well recognised, a little egregious — if not for that?