Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (157 page)

“The beast; oh, the beast!”

Mrs. Henwick really had shown her proofs to George, producing them bashfully under the beaming glances of Gregory. She had been reading and re-reading them, fretting delicately up and down the secluded paths of the walled garden. Then George had appeared in the wake of his brother. I am not sure that Mrs. Henwick’s attack hadn’t been the best thing in the world for George himself.

He had mastered his desire for flight. There had not seemed to be any reason for it; he instinctively distrusted his emotions. He wasn’t, after the inevitable had happened, going to yelp at his time of life. He mastered the desire and assented to Gregory’s fervent pressure to stop the night.

“You haven’t seen the house; you haven’t seen the gardens,” Gregory uttered in a flustered, outraged voice.

George found himself suddenly let out of a little door into a blaze of sunlight and fruit trees. They worried him more than a little. Gregory began pointing out the strawberry beds.

Gregory, in the words of Mrs. Moffat, worshipped George. In common with his wife — whom Gregory considered still one of the most brilliant persons in the world — George stood for all that was most able, fine and illustrious — for the undoubted hope of the family. Gregory would have wanted to conceal, to make up deficiencies out of his own pocket, to drop a mortgage here, an odd figure or two there. But under George’s keen eyes this wasn’t possible — and Gregory had had to face putting the matter as coldly and as clearly as he could. It agitated him a great deal — far beyond the point of realising that strawberry beds in July couldn’t much interest a man who suddenly found himself penniless.

To him, too, Mrs. Henwick’s gliding approach had come as a relief; it gave him time to think how he was going to say things to George — to make offers without giving offence. It was, after all, comedy — those three in the blazing garden, with their smiles concealing emotions intense enough. For Mrs. Henwick, more diffident and less a master of words than even Gregory himself, the plunge — the definite request to a person of George’s calibre — had been almost incredible. She was as flustered as a wild bird in your hand.

A minute or so later they were seated on a white bench in the shadow of a tallpear-espalier.

Gregory, his clumsy and unpresentable thumbs sticking out from his jacket pockets, a white hat tilted forward above his spectacles, and a length of scorched, red neck dominating the back of his crumpled and baggy fawn-coloured coat, moved clumsily, at a little distance, still intent on the strawberry leaves that, here and there, were already changing colour.

CHAPTER VIII
.

GEORGE was in love with Clara Brede. He had to face that fact, too, very late, in a great bed, in a panelled room. It stood straight up against him and filled him with an embarrassed and intense dislike for the frailty of his own nature.

He, at his age, with his experience, with his maturity, with all the things that made anything like such a feeling disastrous, was simply in love with a young girl to whom he stood, as it were, in a position of trust. It was a calamity — a calamity that made everything else unimportant, that paled the other ruin, since it meant that he could not any more be sure of himself. It was more than a calamity; it was a humiliation. But he was undoubtedly in love with her. He had to face the fact, and to face it he must give it a name. The words
“
in love” said nothing, or said too much; covered a space too wide, and left undefined the exact nature of the thing. And, having, as it were, uttered and faced them, he dropped them once and for all.

What did he want? What did he desire? He, too, did not know. He only wanted to be back there. It was as if he could only get a clear view of the situation with her beneath his eyes. In that case he might get at something — if there was anything to be got at. Where he lay, staring at the darkness, there seemed to be nothing but a physical unrest, with the vague phantoms of thoughts, dark and flitting before a dim radiance as vaguely suggesting her face. Vaguely suggesting! He could not even remember — could not call to mind — her features. It was as if something external told him that she was fair; that she had blue eyes — as if he had made a note of it and remembered the note, not the face. That, too, added to his perplexity.

He wanted to be back, to see just what she
was
like. He could remember exactly the emotions her face had caused him — tenderness, compassion, an intense desire to comfort, an overwhelming pity. Thinking of her, he felt all these. But he wanted to see her to be sure.

He would never deserve to be sure again — never sure of himself. He had behaved like a fool; he had been a fool. Why hadn’t he got out of the way? The feelings, the emotions that he could remember, ought to have warned him at the time he felt them. If he had thought! If he had taken himself in hand; if only he hadn’t fatally drifted. He remembered now very clearly sudden, intense twinges of impatience — when her father had talked of travelling. He understood why he hadn’t been able to stand that La Platan. Why hadn’t he at the time taken his feelings in hand, analysed them, got to the bottom of them? He realised that it was because he had been too contented; too tranquilly happy. And it was the being with Clara Brede that had made him happy.

What concerned him most was whether he would be able to “keep his end up” ; to conceal the fact; to stand the strain, not to make a fool of himself — not to “yelp.” He hadn’t much doubt of that. He was, after all, mature; he
had
himself in hand. He had managed to keep his end up during that rather long, rather dreary, day. He would have to go on doing it.

George had managed to keep going. It had occurred to him, quite early in the midst of his financial perturbation—” Why, I’m in love with Clara Brede.” Probably because, in the dreariness of his other thoughts, that of Clara had been comforting, the idea had seemed to flash by him as an agreeable pleasantry. But it had recurred insistently. It showed him at last that it was Clara Brede that he was determined not to leave; not his house, his associations, his little town, his past life. Without the shock of his ruin, he felt he might have gone on quietly for years, knowing nothing, merely enjoying himself in her society. The thought of having to leave her came up suddenly through all his talks with Mrs. Henwick, with Hailes, with his sister-in-law, and with his perturbed brother.

He had kept his end up, though. Mrs. Henwick’s little effusion had touched him quite genuinely. His own emotional state, as if it reached out, touched the emotions, the loneliness, and recognised the self-abandonment that really underlay Mrs. Henwick’s night writings. He had, at any rate, left very happy a Mrs. Henwick who was quite awake enough to discriminate between George’s praise and Hailes’.

The meeting with Hailes took place without shock of any kind. If, when the door opened beyond the tea-table, anyone felt any tremor, it was certainly Hailes — and perhaps Mrs. Moffat. George’s figure filled the doorway behind Mrs. Henwick. And Hailes very quickly took a grip of the position. George, he observed, greeted him quite naturally and without any reservation, as if he were really interested to hear how Hailes had “got on.” He proceeded to take tea with Mrs. Moffat. Hailes considered him furtively and attentively. He supposed that, after all, George couldn’t have made such a bad thing of it; he must be seeing his way to make it pay. Gregory was such a wonderful man of business with bric-a-brac of that sort. He perhaps had got out of it too soon. He approached George in a corner of the room and airily suggested:

“If the losses over that Renaissance Press are very heavy, perhaps I ought to try to repay something.” He said that he hadn’t any property but his furniture, but he might sell that to recoup George; it might bring twenty pounds. He affected a certain embarrassment. “Of course, I’m in some degree responsible.”

George looked at him as if absently — as if Hailes hardly existed. “Oh —
that.
Don’t think of it,” he said.

He saw through Hailes very well; he didn’t want to think of him; he was thinking that he had to consider Clara Brede.

Later at night, he and his brother lounged in a large dimly lit hall, where, all round the walls, men-at-arms’ visors gaped out from between ladies in powdered wigs and colonels in scarlet. George explained to Gregory: “If you like, it was the confidence trick, and Hailes is a sharper. But I have always sympathised with these gentry.” Gregory hissed between his yellow teeth, and George smiled a little wanly. “Oh, it irritates you. But if you’re travelling on a foreign railway, and a porter or a guide tries to do you out of an extra franc or so, you’ll see his whole face intent on it, his black eyes flashing and exploring yours like a dog’s; it’s his whole life to him; it’s nothing to you; and perhaps he’s really the better man — the more purposeful, or has the more need—” He spoke rather wearily, without his usual buoyancy of words, and he left his sentence unfinished. His preoccupations had out-tired him, even in his altruist’s profession of faith.

“You mean to say you’d let the man swindle you,” Gregory barked.

George raised a hand deprecatingly.

“It’s idiotic, perhaps, or it isn’t.” He roused himself suddenly on his lounge.
“
But in the matter of Hailes — I’m not going to worry about him. Let’s let him alone.”

Gregory compressed his lips. He didn’t say anything.

“It’s no use,” George began — he paused as if forgetfully—”crying about spilt milk — that particular spilt milk.” Along, heavy night silence descended upon the two of them. After a time George said desultorily:

“Don’t get
your
knife into him. He isn’t worth attention.”

Gregory suddenly erected his head until it had the rigidity of a seal’s peering out of the water. He didn’t say anything. George laughed a little disconsolately. He recognised his brother’s final sign of implacability.

“Oh, let him alone,” he said.
“
I tempt these people. I’m too open to them; it’s not fair to be revenged on them.” He got up like a very tired man.
“
It’s no use talking—”

Gregory, leaning a little forward, let out his voice as if his throat were very dry. It was a sign of intense nervousness.

“You wouldn’t, I suppose, go back — go, that is, to your wife? Or let me—”

He had a more than nervous fear of his brother’s displeasure — a shrinking from any kind of quarrel.

George faced round on him with sudden vigour: “I,” he said. Then he paused. Gregory having, as it were, entered on the road, commenced to shuffle along it:

“But your wife. She needs your advice.”

“My
advice,”
George said.

Gregory, hurried and anxious to make the most of any opening, said: “Your advice is always excellent, George.”

George said: “Oh, for heaven’s sake—”

He made towards the distant stairs and came back.

“You want me, in fact, to live on her. How could I? With what sort of a face?”

Gregory said:
“
Gertrude would be very glad.”

“My dear chap,” George said,
“
my dear chap, I’ve ruined my own life.”

A sort of conviction in his tone made Gregory attempt a sort of stuttered, “Not so bad as that.”

“I’ve mangled and mismanaged everything that I ever touched. I’ve muddled and meddled.” He raised a hand in a large gesture. Then, in spite of the genuineness of his emotions, it struck him that he was overdoing it; that he was, so to speak, harrowing Gregory’s feelings. “I mean,” he finished quickly, “that the respect I have for Gertrude should surely, in all conscience, make me leave her alone.”

Gregory raised his hands and opened his mouth with the gesture of an old woman. It shocked him inexpressibly that the brother that he considered so gifted and so fine should even remotely touch such mortification. “There’s all my money,” he brought out. “All this.” His clumsy thumb indicated the large hall, the house, and its treasures. “If you wanted them, they’d practically all be at your disposal. There’s no one else but you and my wife.”

The words hardly filtered through to the inner George, though he felt as if Gregory had withdrawn a curtain from something affecting.

“Of course, you’ll have to go on working without money troubles,” Gregory said. “You’ve got to keep up the family name and the tradition.”

The speech as much astonished George as if, whilst he was hurrying past it, one of the men-at-arms had muttered from its shadowy and yawning visor.

He went to bed to face his feeling for Clara Brede, but Gregory’s last speech added to his perplexities. It added to them because it seemed to increase his responsibilities. He wasn’t, he discovered, alone. There were his brother, his father’s friends and admirers; his own, too, perhaps — old people now whom he had not seen for years. They counted on him to maintain the tradition of his family, that had done things worthily. He had, as it were, to sacrifice himself to them. They demanded it, all of them, down to his eloquent and brilliant father. To men like George the dead do not die, since their memories are living things in the heart. It was not with him a point of conduct; it was not a thing that affected himself. He had to preserve his image worthily before the world, so that the dead whose name he bore should be unashamed, and so that such of the living as loved him should not be saddened.

To preserve his image unspoiled... He thought about the small piece of his future that he could see, and it was an easy matter to arrange in his mind. He would sell his house without any fuss, secretly, and at the last moment he would walk out and go away. In any case, he would have had to go away. He wasn’t, of course, a man who could not keep himself from making love to a girl nurtured and placed as Clara Brede had been. And, much more, he could not spoil his own image for her father.

He wasn’t, of course, going to make any fuss, even to himself; he wasn’t going to avoid the Bredes. He would stay his month or so at home, and then go. He gave very little thought to the material side of it. He would live in an Italian town, making enough to keep himself with his pen. That was perfectly easy.

Even in her eyes he would go down gallantly. He would not tell them that he was ruined. He did not wish to sadden her, as he knew it would sadden her. He would say nothing, or nothing more than that he was going abroad, and he would disappear, leaving the same gallant and helpful image in her mind. He knew that she respected him, and that would be how she would continue to think of him.

Then it struck him as curiously unphilosophical that he should desire to leave any image in her mind, and then, in the darkness, he smiled at himself for expecting to be superhumanly reasonable. Of course, he would want her to think well of him. And he wanted to be at home.