Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (155 page)

CHAPTER V
.

CAREW, the South American cousin, was a younger son who had gone out and returned an ingenuous, public-school, University of Cambridge young man. He more than a little disturbed George, who, in the goodness of his heart and the’ largeness of his house, was “putting him up.”

In the unharassing Pampas he had preserved his ingenuousness and his youth even more notably than Clara Brede had done. He took an immense and, as it were, filial liking to his distinguished host. He called George “Sir,” and, extending his great legs and genially waving a cigar on the evening after the wedding, candidly unfolded to George his simple ideas. They depended guilelessly and entirely upon a wife. He wanted a wife.

And, apparently, like Mr. Beale, he considered ‘that he was born to get what he wanted; it showed in all his gestures, and almost in the very curl of his cigar-smoke. He explained that it was a good life “out there that the right sort of woman would be good for it — And it would be good for her, by Jove.... Now, what do you think?”

George said that undoubtedly Mr. Carew himself must be the best judge.

“But I want to know what you think, Sir,” Carew iterated. “Wouldn’t it be good for a girl — the right sort of girl?”

George said: “Really—” and Carew explained himself in a burst of rugged eloquence. His hacienda was really pretty; there were passion-flowers all over the verandah, and an excellent water supply. And he himself — well, he wasn’t an angel, but he thought he was a gentleman.

“And mind you, Sir, I’m not the sort of blackguard to take a girl out to the back of beyond without a reasonably filled purse and a promise of good living.”

He asked George his opinion of Clara Brede. Wasn’t she a rattling good sort? He explained that he hadn’t got a father living; George was the only elderly man — George winced — that he had ever been able to get on terms with, or ask advice of.

George considered the matter rather earnestly, digging the point of his paper-knife into the hard wood of his desk.

“I mean,” Carew began again, “that I like Clara, though there’s no need for a broken heart if I don’t let myself go. And women, as a rule, like me,” he added. His quick eye caught a rather heavy frown settling on George’s rather noticeable forehead.

“Oh, I’m not talking loosely,” he hastened to explain. “I mean just that, and no more.” George had the painful conviction that his interlocutor regarded him as old-maidish. And the disappearance of Clara Brede into the
“
back of beyond” would be a calamity in the face of the eternal fitnesses.

“My dear fellow,” he began suddenly, with a sort of indignation. He felt as if the man had, with a surpassing and blind coolness, asked for the Venus of Milo to use as the doorstep of his stables. “No, I don’t know of any objection,” he said coldly.

Carew went on to dilate, with a modesty that was quite touching and young, on his own eligibility. “She’s only got her father to think of now. And he can come with us.” It would be the making of Mr. Brede. He could ride about all day and take services. He was sound of wind and limb, and only wanted the megrims bumped out of him.

For the very first time in his life George found himself full of a personal envy. Even at school he had hardly been able to bowl out the captain of his team — from sheer dislike for spoiling an innings.

That was what, most of all, he had always suffered from. Seeing always, clearly enough, the ends and aims of others; never having had any very conscious goal of his own, he had always been content to step out of the way, and to supply the immense incentive of applause. It was as if, recognising very fully the futility of human strivings, he were content himself to strive not at all, and had attempted to be, in a small, practical way, a tutelary of good fortune.

He had tried to supply at odd moments those little bits of unexpected luck that will change a man’s moods and the tide of a man’s affairs. He very certainly desired this man’s failure.

It alarmed him a little; he took refuge in a simple refusal of counsel. Perhaps that, too, was for the first time in his life.

“I simply don’t know,” he said twice.
“
I couldn’t judge in such a matter.”

“But you don’t say no?” Carew asked.

George felt a sudden and intense impatience. What was this person to him? Let him be quiet. Let him learn manners.

“And if you don’t say no, Sir,” the other went on — his tone implied an enthusiastic homage paid to a man of immensely superior knowledge of the world — and of immense seniority—” if you don’t say no, there can’t be much wrong.”

Afterwards George had to listen to a long and very detailed account of Carew’s properties in South America.

“Well, I’ve got thirty thousand acres there, with a pretty good head of cattle, but not so many as at the other place I was telling you of, and the droughts are worse.”

Next morning George walked with Clara Brede along the sand. Carew had ridden off for a two days’ tour among the neighbouring cathedrals, which it “was his duty as an Englishman” to “do.”

“Ah, yes, beyond the horizon,” George said musingly, with his eyes on the juncture of sky and sand and sea. “My dear young lady, the question is — and it’s the same for every one of us — what we should find there.” It was, after all, George’s manner rather than his matter that was so eminently soothing.

He let loose the platitudes that lie so inevitably close to the hand of every habitual consoler; he proved to her how very identically her case — with the inevitable
mutatis mutandis
— was that of everyone else.
“
I, you know, have come across so many. And it’s striking how exactly the same all the cases are. It’s only in the very exterior symptoms that the differences make any kind of a show.” He was speaking slowly, and with a great deal of
bonhomie.
He made little soothing and emphatic gestures.

“All our stories are the same. One wants to be something — something that what identically one can’t by any possibility be. Or one wants to have something that one either doesn’t get, or that one doesn’t care for when one gets it.” He spoke his platitudes with an absent enough air, and then added more brilliantly:

“You, of course, don’t want any poor ministrations of mine. You’re temperamentally too brave; you bear things in silence. That, after all, is the highest of human qualities. Not to yelp. Not to disturb the neighbours.”

“But I
have
been yelping,” Clara smiled at him.

He made an airy gesture with his stick.

“Oh — for a yelp,” he said. “It wasn’t that. It was, if you like, a curse wrung out,
that’s
the point. When one’s put out one ought to show it.” He raised his eyebrows humorously.
“
Don’t you see, too, the immense advantages of your — your confidences?”

Clara, laughing rather brilliantly, confessed that she didn’t.

“You save me from a danger of complete misapprehension. How otherwise was I to know that you weren’t a goddess; not to be tired; not to be ruffled by all the squabblings of all the relations in the world? How? Isn’t it a pleasure to know that you’re human if — as I’m sure I hope will be the case — I’m to go on seeing a good deal of you.”

Clara remonstrated:

“One would have to be stone not to be afraid that you had been disgusted by our humiliating squabbles,” but any shade of bitterness had gone out of her voice.

“One might, you know,” George said humorously, “be a Venus of Milo. If you’ll go to the Louvre you’ll see her surrounded by people excellently more trivial than your amiable relatives. Obviously, she hears their comments. But think how much more desirable she would be if—”

Clara, with her conscientious humour, said: “Oh, please don’t make me think of a Venus with a
crise de nerfs.”

“The obvious retort would be,” George flashed amiably back at her, “then why do you make me?”

Mr. Brede, remotely suggesting a shortness of breath, obtruded suddenly between them.

“I wish, Moffat,” he said, with some show of vexation,
“
you would not let Clara tire you with her nonsense.”

He had seen George hardly at all for the last three days; he wanted to have the cream of George’s mind for himself. “Those confounded women are still squabbling. They’re all women on my Committee now.”

George said: “Oh, my mind’s alert enough for all the squabbles in the world.” He smiled rather hilariously at the immense clergyman. Clara, too, smiled softly. She listened with an expression of engrossed contentment. He
had
talked to her. She wondered — she wondered how much he really meant. Did he find her charming? Oh, if only he sometimes spoke more seriously. But she didn’t want him in the least altered. She wondered if it could be true that he was ruined. He
couldn’t
talk so gaily if he were. But then, he was so wonderful; he never “yelped.” George was saying that for the moment he couldn’t give Mr. Brede more than that one day. He had to consult his brother upon business. Gregory, in fact, had begged him urgently to come.

Clara thought, agitatedly, “What does he mean? What is it? Is he ruined now? He can’t be. It doesn’t seem possible.”

He couldn’t be. And it didn’t seem possible. She asked so very little of life. Just that he should remain there; that she might walk beside them, thinking, whilst he talked to her father. So very little. Yet, because it gave her so great joy, perhaps it was infinitely too much for her. Her father’s face had fallen lamentably. George said, laughing: “Oh, I sha’n’t be long. I don’t want to leave all this” — he waved his hand, taking in the sea, sky and sand—” in these glorious days.” His eyes happened to be on Clara, and he smiled, friendly and brilliant. It was as if he meant that, in her, he recognised another who felt the infectious glory of these days.

She had one of her swift rushes of pure joy. That was what his smile meant. He regarded her as a kindred spirit; as if he had raised her to his own level and saluted her. Dora had said as much. And he — he too had said it. Her eyes shone; her heart fluttered wildly, and then beat tranquilly and with an assured and sustaining pulsation. She didn’t care. She didn’t believe that he was ruined, that he would have to go. She was not going to believe it. And he had talked to her and he had looked at her.

CHAPTER VI
.

MRS. Moffat’s house in a western county — the house with the legendary fourteen gardeners — dominated the shoulder of a hill at the angle of a bay. Below it the greatest of western watering-places displayed a white and moon-like crescent to the suns of the south. It was only Gregory’s as if innate modesty that made it not one of the show places of the country.

At first, to his acquaintance, it had seemed an appropriate and modest luxury; a little later they said it was an immense folly. Afterwards they agreed that you didn’t know Gregory. It had once been a rather obscure looking, rather large, rather rambling, square mansion, masked and rendered gloomy, on its hill shoulder, by awkwardly disposed timber. It had passed into Gregory’s hands for an old song. A little later, for another old song, he had bought in another part of coastal England, the entire face of a great half timbered house, then in process of demolition. And this entire face, water-borne to the western county, Gregory had had fixed to the front of his obscure mansion. The gloomy surrounding trees had been bodily transplanted into very fine clumps. These dotted sea-marks all over the shoulder of the hill; the glass-houses of the gardeners had sprung up, and an august, walled garden. Outlying, but desirable, parings of the land had become bedecked with pleasant villas. And almost suddenly, at an astonishingly eligible and select distance from the magnificent watering-place, a great, sunny haunt of ancient peace, black and mellow white, stood up and opened out to the soft breezes. One asked as one drove past in one’s fly:
“
What is this? What is
this
?”

It stood in fact revealed that Gregory was possessed of a “property” which the adjectives of an auctioneer could only touch with a crudity to make one blush. Gregory hadn’t turned a hair in the course of the transformation. No one had even realised that he had had anything on hand.

Mr. Hailes sat smooth, cool and precise, in the deep window-seat of a spacious, panelled room; in its bright tallness it appeared quite small and habitable. He wore his air of professional helpfulness, tinged with something masterly and dark; he was pulling his celestial, thin moustache above a long, drooping proof sheet. He played with a blue pencil, and twice made little dabs on the paper. At the other end of the broad seat, deliciously ruffled in her widow’s black, a little and quite unusually perturbed, as if with a touch of naive shyness, Mrs. Henwick was delicately patting the back of her tiny hand against the lozenges of the high, leaded window. Beside them, curtains obscured the tall double doorway of an immensely long and immensely rich room, into which the sunlight fell in glowing patches on a brilliant, soft carpet. The window looked out on to a hopelessly blue sea a long way below.

Mrs. Henwick uttered,
“
Well?” in a birdlike appeal of questioning. The deep frown of a connoisseur did not leave Mr. Hailes’ dead-white, narrow forehead. His eyes travelled slowly down the page. There was a slight clicking noise from the next room; the brilliant, cheerful “pink, pink” of a chaffinch sounded through an open window to the west. Its metallic clearness seemed to belong to another order of world. Mr. Hailes rested the slip on his knee.

“Oh, exquisite. Quite exquisite,” he said.

His voice did not lose its authoritative, connoisseur quality.

“You really think?” Mrs. Henwick appealed, as if hardly believing her ears. Mr. Hailes appeared to come up out of a dream.

“It grips one,” he said. “It undoubtedly grips one.”

Mrs. Henwick said: “Oh!”

Mr. Hailes reversed his pencil, and gently emphasized his words with it: “It’s derivative, of course. But that, in a first effort, is to be expected. Indeed, it’s to be commended.”

Mr. Hailes’ remarkable memory had come to his aid. He was repeating, almost word for word, and to a certain extent the exact mannerisms of the connoisseur who had favourably greeted his own first efforts. “Derivative, but with a certain authentic touch, a delicacy, a — a savour.”

Mrs. Henwick flushed with a quite honest pleasure.

“I was so distractingly afraid of showing it to anyone,” she said. “I thought people might make fun of it.”

It was a storiette written with an intense and quite childish yearning, and destined to face the smudgy portrait of an actress wearing the last opera cloak, in the pages of a lady’s magazine. It dealt with a lady whose starry face (after she had married someone of the plutocracy) beamed out of a lit window on to a terrace where Some One Else (whom she hadn’t married because he was too comparatively penniless) bent his head above his bowed arms, drank in upon his parched face the pure breezes of the night, and swore to be a better man.

She had written the story in the dead of her solitary nights with quite real tears, a quite real catching in the throat, a quite real and indescribable mournfulness. And of its own strength it had got itself placed in the pages of the
Lady’s Magazine.
It filled her with an indescribable tremor of prides, of shamefacedness, of embarrassment. She had not dared to show it to Mrs. Moffat, whom, in her nervous shyness, she worshipped and looked up to. But the sharp eye of Mr. Hailes had caught sight of the familiar blue wrappings of proofs on the breakfast table among Mrs. Henwick’s post. He had proffered his aid, confidentially and with his air of concealed dark reliability, in the hall. Mrs. Henwick, with a new flood of warm emotions, was tremulously trying to tear off the wrapper without injuring the contents. And now Mr. Hailes, with his balanced and surely reliable taste, pronounced her work a master-piece, with only the most venial of flaws observable to the meticulous eye of the hypercritical!

“It’s incredible to me,” he said. “Incredible. Others of us” — he was still quoting George—”work for years at tinkering, at endless patching. You come along, and, if I may use the expression, ‘do the trick’ at the very outset. It makes one doubt the justice of Providence.”

Mrs. Henwick was mute with pleasure. Mr. Hailes, picking up the slip from his knee, moved across the window seat. His shoulder touched hers, and she minutely edged away. He accepted the reservation for the time. “I’ve put in a comma here,” he resumed his mastery, “and deleted this ‘and.’ Of course, in things like these, beginners can be helped, however skilful. And it’s tricks like these make all the difference.”

Mrs. Henwick was profuse in her bird-like thanks.

“Half the battle’s in that,” Hailes said. “I’ve seen some of the great — the high and mighty — writers at work. They talk a great deal about art. But I can assure you — take George Moffat now — it’s nothing more than a juggling of commas to make it look like no other person’s writing, and an occasional change of a word to one no sane person would think of using.”

Mrs. Henwick said:
“
Oh, but George Moffat—”

Hailes shook his head.

“If I didn’t want not to appear outrageously flattering,” he said, coolly, “I should say that this” — he fluttered the slip reverentially—” is worth all that George—”

Mrs. Moffat, entering the further door, brusquely ejaculated:

“Well, but — where’s George?” Her brilliant eyes fell upon Hailes.

“You,” she said. “I thought you were going into the town.”

Hailes explained, nonchalantly, that he had changed his mind.

Mrs. Moffat cast a hard glance right up and down him, then disappeared through the curtain. They heard her high voice exclaim: “George.”

Hailes went swiftly and quite silently out of the room.

George was “discovered.” He was seated in a singularly gorgeous, spindle-legged chair, that when he rose displayed on its back cushions the embroidery of a chaste flower-urn. He explained to his sister-in-law how he came to be in that gallery.

“It
is
a gallery, you know,” he said, indicating, with a slight swaying of his supple body, his admiration for the bright, palatial room. “That fire-place!” The fire-place was an enormous structure of shining marbles and alabaster.

“Oh, the things are good enough, I suppose,” Mrs. Moffat said, with an indifferent and wearied swish of her skirts. “I’m sure I don’t know what they all are. Gregory probably does.”

George raised his eyebrows.

“One gets sick to death of living in a showroom,” Mrs. Moffat said.
“I
do. But it’s really nice of you to come, George.”

George bowed his head gallantly and cheerfully. He didn’t know exactly what to make of
that
present; he said he did not deserve praise.

“It’s after all dire necessity that brings me here. Business.”

Mrs. Moffat said: “But you’ll stay? We see so little of you. Gregory will be so pleased.” George surveyed her with ironical, genial hilarity. He was not used to his sister-in-law in this mood. She was undoubtedly ageing.

She seemed, indeed, to be wanting — as august ladies sometimes did — to take George into her confidence to the extent of not defiantly concealing from him that she was unhappy. He laughed a little.

“I’ve brought a bag. I didn’t imagine you’d want to pack me off at once.”

Mrs. Moffat, by voice and manner indicated that George was an immensely honoured guest, and that she was shocked at his not having realised it before.

“Gregory’s in his room,” she said.
“You
may go there; but it’s as much as anyone else’s life is worth.”

She led him, with an air almost of reverence, along a warren of queer, shining passages, flashing through glowing windows immensely bright views of flower-beds and mellowed walls. There were all sorts of odd and precious things in dark corners; a rich brown picture here and there, set against the light.

“By Jove,” George said, “there are those two Constables.” They were descending an obscure, square staircase. “What does Gregory mean by hanging them here?”

Mrs. Moffat made a little hushing, hurried sound.

“Oh, one’s not supposed to know,” she said, with the discreet, unmistakable air that the greatest of ladies assumes when talking of her husband’s “business.”

“There’s not a corner of the house that isn’t full of that sort of thing.

The servants complain that there are no cupboards left for the linen.”

George, with his hands behind his back, peered upwards at the pictures in the dusk.

“Ah, what lovable things,” he said. He turned to face Mrs. Moffat, and swayed gently with his fashion of eternal leisure. “I hadn’t the least idea that Gregory was so like myself,” he said. His genial, deprecatory smile shone out on his clear cut face.

Mrs. Moffat, leaning against the banisters a little below him, questioned him with her clear eyes.

“I mean, he too has just my — my indiscretion in this direction. The taste for anything fine. On a grander scale it’s just my home over again.”

Mrs. Moffat’s large, coarse features drooped a little. She looked nervously at a closed door at the stair-foot.

“All this” — George good-humouredly indicated the pile of buildings that seemed to press on them
—”
all this is so precisely what I should have now if I’d had the resources — if I hadn’t been the fool that I am, and Gregory apparently isn’t.”

Mrs. Moffat shook her head very minutely.

“Apart from the rather excruciating things,” George went on—” that fireplace, for instance — that
do
make me shudder, but that are, I — suppose, extremely valuable, this is more or less exactly my house.”

Mrs. Moffat again shook her head.

“Oh, my dear lady” — George prepared to vanquish her—” don’t you see? The taste’s the same. It’s the family resemblance — the taste for costly, fine things of a certain age, a certain mellowness. Gregory’s taste—”

“Taste!” said Mrs. Moffat, with a sort of scorn of intense denial. “It’s a market instinct with him.” She made it suddenly blaze rather clearly before George that the house wasn’t a house, but a show-room. “You don’t know Gregory” — she quivered—”no one does.” She indicated the doorway. In its darkness and inscrutability it appeared a symbol of his brother’s intense secretiveness.