Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (158 page)

PART IV. THE BANKRUPT JEWELLER
.

CHAPTER I
.

SHE had been watching for his return from her window. She wanted to see if he looked worried; it might tell her whether he really were ruined. He came walking with his fine stride; beside him a porter was wheeling his portmanteau on a hand-truck. He was interested in something the man was saying. He nodded.

“I suppose Griffin is begging of him,” Clara said bitterly to herself. George looked in at the window; he saw her, and waved a hand gently. He smiled brilliantly. She had not seen him for two days, and it seemed to her that she had never seen anyone so noble, so good and so kind; her heart was filled with an immense thankfulness, and she wanted to cry because he had come back.

“He can’t be ruined,” she said. “He
can’t
be going away.”

It came to her as a luminous conviction that, had there been any danger, he would have told them. He would owe that to them. She could no longer believe that he was not at least friendly to her, and interested in her. And, even if he weren’t, he would owe it to her father to tell him. They were his most intimate friends. And she knew George so well. He couldn’t be so cruel as not to have told them.

During the next few days she observed him with the meticulous earnestness of a woman in love. He wasn’t in the least melancholy; he wasn’t even preoccupied. Once or twice she observed him frown and wince. It was always when Carew was speaking. A rather rigid look would come into his eyes and spread, as if it were communicating itself, to the back of his head and to his spine. It suggested to her a wild thought that she dared not entertain. Carew came and went with the fine irresponsibility and the easy swing of a great bird round an accustomed crag. A younger son, he genially
“
didn’t get on with” the elder brother who lived in his paternal house, or with the sister who was married in ‘Yorkshire. She thought him too boisterous. He made himself quite frankly at home with the Bredes. Clara found him amusing because he reminded her of an immense Newfoundland dog. As children, they had climbed oaks together, and, hidden among the leaves, had dropped acorns upon the heads of passers by. He wanted her to accept a pony from him, and tried to make her take up riding again. He said she used to have a regular cowboy’s seat when she was a child, and the nerve of three men, by Jove, only her hands were a little heavy on the reins. Women’s always were. He might cure her of that, though. Clara laughed, and said that she had her father to see to. He asked if old Moffat wasn’t enough for the governor? She didn’t answer.

They were walking towards the sea a fortnight after George’s return. Looking back upon that time afterwards, it seemed that they had all the time been doing nothing else in the tremendous blaze of the summer weather. Great rollers of white cloud piled up into the immense crystalline and shimmering vault of the sky. The level fields blazed vivid green; yellowing rushes filled the dykes. A dancing haze made tremulous the outlines of low, purple hills on the horizon. Mr. Brede, at George’s side, laid down the law ponderously. The shining, dark red cattle watched their passage as they walked four abreast across the smooth turf.

This occasion seared itself into her mind; it was never forgotten; it never merged itself into the other seasonal “walks to the sea.” The cattle raised their noses, snuffing the wind. Then, with a sudden accord, they went galloping, a serried wedge of red-brown, round and round, thundering on the green meadow, appearing and suddenly disappearing on the slopes of the dyke mounds. In all the fields around, among the shaggy pollard willows, there were tails flashing up at the flanks of galloping beasts.

Carew stopped and laughed with a wholehearted gaiety. “Ah, they smell the thunder” — it growled heavily below the horizon—” but you should see my stock. You should come and see them.” He raised his arms, as if he were urging the cattle on in their gallop.

George caught Clara’s gentle and frank smile. It gave him a moment’s intense pleasure merely to see it. Then it struck him as an injury intensely and personally to be resented, that that smile was one he had regarded as reserved for him.

“My dear sir!” he said sharply to Mr. Brede, who was more than half way through a sketch of a letter inciting resident gentry to provide bathrooms for their tenantry. “What, in the end,
is
the good of all this? You can’t keep the peasant in the village. You’d have to alter the moon to arrest a falling tide.”

The actual purport of the outburst did not penetrate to the engrossed mind of Mr. Brede. Clara’s eyes seemed to be always upon the ground; but she felt the sudden chill that George spread around him. It made her admire him the more. He
could
be cold; he could strike and wound. She wondered that one of them wasn’t actually blighted, and it pleased her. It made him seem so much more of a man.

It slipped suddenly into her mind: “He must be jealous!’ and she found that she was laughing excitedly, and breathing very fast.

It wasn’t possible. And yet—” That doesn’t mean that he loves me,” flashed through her excited mind. Men are like that. They will be jealous whether they want a woman or not. She had seen the same thing in robins on the lawn.

But her cousin must be paying her attentions — that was what had made George so angry. She had never thought of it before. It became a pleasing certainty. She hadn’t any doubt of it. It was very soothing. Now she was
living.
All of a sudden she was going to be able to watch, as if through half closed eyes, these two men concerned with her, agitated about her, swayed by her. She smiled, and the bright fields grew more bright; the sky itself seemed friendly. Her breathing grew more free. She felt as if she could fly if she wanted to, as if she could do anything that she tried without any effort. This was life at last. She could not bring herself to believe that George loved her; it would be too like a fairy tale. On the other hand, he wasn’t despicable, like robins or like other men. He wouldn’t be jealous for mere love of conquest. So he must care for her. But she could not believe it.

She wanted very much to test him. She thought of showing Carew some small favours to see if George frowned again. But she could not think of what to do. Supposing she put her hand on her cousin’s arm, or said that she wished she could go to La Plata. But she might do too much, and then George would despise her.

It struck her rather comfortingly that she was now a “mere coquette.” She had always despised such women. She had fallen very low. She understood them now. It was a woman’s right. She understood vividly that the fight between man and woman is according to no code of honour. Besides, she imagined that George himself admired a spice of coquetry in a woman. He had bantered her about her continual “scruples.” She became more reserved towards Carew. She couldn’t bring herself to flirt with him; it wasn’t in her. He became more attentive, and she grew distressed. She was afraid of hurting George if he really did care for her. She could not bear to think of that. It was like a pain to think that he should suffer.

But there were going to be these long days full of light, and pleasant thoughts to take to bed with one. She almost forgot the burden that her father was. Her unceasing and jealous watch over him was hardly any more a strain. She could sit beside him and think of these other things. And when at night she listened outside his door to make sure from his breathing that he was asleep, she knew that in her bed when she returned to it she would find warm and pleasant half-dreams.

CHAPTER II
.

GEORGE was sitting with her father one evening in Mr. Brede’s tiny work-room. It was obscure and gloomy, encumbered with dark furniture, and lit by a solitary reading candle in a metal hood. In the shadow, Mr. Brede’s funereal coats and hats on pegs looked like dim men who had hung themselves. It seemed to him by now more familiar and more homelike than his own fine study.

The intrigues of the ladies of the Society for Promoting Rural Pleasures had become more harassing than ever. Mr. Brede displayed their letters and telegrams, that had cost formidable amounts, docketed and bound by broad india-rubber bands.

“Look here, this is what I have to put up with.” He knotted his brows above a letter; with a faint idea of courtesy he fumbled with his reading candle to give George a better light.
“
This kind of unbearable thing. Listen.” He began to read with a sort of frenzied indignation.

George caught faintly through the thin walls of the tiny room the thrilling jar of Carew’s voice, followed by a long pause, then a fainter suggestion of Clara Brede’s clear, conscientiously halting tones. They were in the drawing-room just across the narrow passage.

“Of course, that’s the confounded Countess,” Mr. Brede commented. He pushed foolscap sheets irritably to right and to left, and grasped a telegram on several, pages.

George’s nerves were on the stretch. In the next room there was a long silence. Mr. Brede went on reading slowly and ponderously the virulent sentences of an American lady of title who wanted to be on his committee. George was wondering whether Clara was succumbing to the large attractions and stock-whip mannerisms of Carew. He tried to fix his mind on the affairs of the Society. He knew them all by heart. Carew’s voice uttered one inaudible, sharp word. Clara, after an interval, a soft, long speech. Then Carew laughed.

“Feel imperative to press view on you to-morrow for committee meeting,” Mr. Brede read heavily from his telegram. Suddenly he flung it passionately on to the desk. George knew that he would say: “It’s no good.” He raised a huge hand to his great creased forehead.

“I shall be off to La Plata,” he said.

George felt the weight of an immense and expected catastrophe. It was all over, then!

Mr. Brede maintained a heavy brooding silence. The candle flickered slightly in the gloom and cast a wavering light on to the brown ceiling. They weren’t speaking in the other room.

At last Mr. Brede brought out his heavy knell:
“
It’s all over. It’s no use.”

And George echoed him. It wasn’t any use. He could not engage in a struggle that, win or lose, must be ignoble. He was not going to fight — with a La Platan — for the possession of a woman he could do nothing with.

“Yes,” he said slowly,
“
perhaps it would be the best thing you could do.”

Mr. Brede flashed an angry and overbearing: “What?” from the depths of his black-study.
“
Do what? Write to these infernal women? It’s no use.”

George answered deliberately enough: “I mean, go to La Plata with your nephew.”

Mr. Brede said: “Oh,” contemptuously. He had forgotten already. “That’s pure nonsense.”

George’s ideas whirled. He felt an irresistible desire to know something; to have something settled.

“Hasn’t your nephew asked you?” he blurted out.

“Oh, that fellow,” Mr. Brede answered, contemptuously.
“
He wants to marry Clara. What nonsense.”

George’s heart gave a solitary and sickening leap. Carew had spoken then. And Clara? At that moment Clara might be in his arms.

He sprang to his feet. The reedy, ancient piano began desultorily the
tum-pa-tum
of a Spanish-American banjo melody. “No. She couldn’t be, then. The burr of Carew’s voice, humming the melody between his teeth, succeeded; then the drawing-room door closed. The sounds sank to nothing.

Mr. Brede, speaking thickly and very fast, began a string of confidences that were horrible on account of his voice and his suddenly wild eyes: “I tell you I’m going mad. The very idea terrifies me. You don’t know what it is. I don’t want to worry you. You’re very good to me. I’ve no claim.” He continued a hopeless, listless fatalism of monologue. He was sunk low in his chair; there were deep vibrating tones in his voice that roused in George a vague and helpless alarm. He felt wearily that Mr. Brede was worse than he had ever been. His voice sank to nothing. He sat looking blackly and gloomily, as if at shadows of terror that he saw very plainly a long way away. He ground his teeth; it was the devil who tempted him, who mocked at him, and who was driving him mad.

George raised a fine and insincere laugh. He had a faint glimpse of that sinister survival of the black history of man. This man still believed with a savage and hidden belief that was all the more blighting in that he did so sedulously hide it, that was all the more hopeless in that no human words could conjure it away. George would not accept that view; he wasn’t going to. It wasn’t in him to do so. He said that that sort of thing — the Society and its distractions — was only a means, not an end. Mr. Brede wasn’t to take it seriously, it was only a means for tiding him over dark moments. He must drop it now that it had become a strain.

Mr. Brede muttered silently: “If I went to La Plata, what would you do?”

George, as if suddenly brought down to the earth, was silent.

“Of course, you couldn’t be expected to come too,” Mr. Brede added convincingly.
“
Well, then?” He had an air of heavily convincing an opponent’s futility. He meant that he couldn’t do without George.

Face to face with an opening that would one day have to be entered, George began:

“Eventually, you know, you’ll have to get on without me.”

Mr. Brede paid him no kind of attention.

“Of course, I sha’n’t go,” he said. “I shall face things out here. I’m not going to run away.” George was overcome by a thankfulness that he could not analyse.

“Yes, here,” Mr. Brede said. “If I can’t do that, what’s the good of me.”

He rose heavily, and, at his full height, with a mysterious vindictiveness brought out:

“You think I ought to get back to my work — to my real work as shepherd of my flock. I ought to preach. You
said
so.”

He was going to fight Satan, high in the air, from the shining elevation of the pulpit. He knew that it would kill him. Very well! But it would prove to these fellows — George and the rest — that he wasn’t shamming, that there always had been that horrible “something” the matter with him.

“There’s no doubt about it,” he continued. “Very well, I shall.” He motioned a great hand towards the door. “Let’s hear some of that fellow’s strumming. I shall try to be a man. I’ve shirked it too long.” He held the door open. “I’m going to try to live up to your standard, Moffat.”

George, in his hurry of mind, wondered vaguely which of his many maxims Mr. Brede had got hold of now.

The light of the drawing room was rather dazzling. Carew, with his back to the door, was abstractedly thumbing the yellow keys of the ancient box of a piano. Clara, from the further window seat, rose up eagerly at their entry. She smiled frankly into George’s eyes. Carew, without turning his large back, began to roll out a Spanish Bamboula to the distracted stringy tinkle of the piano’s notes. He had a rather good natural voice and sang with sentiment.

George leaned back in his chair. In a mirror running from floor to ceiling he had an excellent view of Clara Brede on the window-seat behind his back. She sat a little forward, with her hands clasped back to back, the little fingers linked, lying on the lap of her blue dress. Her fair hair was quite smooth; her eyes rested on the floor. She did not seem to be listening to the music of Carew. That gave George a moment’s pleasure.

The song changed to a languorous and rhythmically marked chorus. It was as if, in the mirror, Clara Brede were a portrait of herself, shut in the alcove of the window-curtains that draped the straight, square seat; the whole was framed in the reflection by the gilt bunches of flowers and fruit that set the mirror itself. Carew resumed the body of his song, the piano the inane
tumpa-tumpa.
The brilliant lamp suddenly raised its flame in a draught of open-windowed July. A sense of the heavy night outside conveyed itself by the black small panes of the casement.

She had just refused Carew. It had saddened and had sobered her. He had said: “I thought that you liked me. Is there anyone else?” His voice had shaken and grated; it had upset her. She had wondered if she had used him badly; she could not believe she had. She had been avoiding him ever since the other day. But perhaps she ought to tell him that there was someone else! If only there hadn’t been! She might be going away out of all this, beyond the horizon. Now there was nothing and no one — a long round of days, a dull world. If only she
needn’t
love George! Carew began to thump on the piano. He had a passionate and entirely sensuous love for rhythmical melodies.

She recognised that he was drowning his sorrows in the sound. She liked him for it, and she pitied him. Then George was there, looking at her. Ah, if only he had never come into her life! What was the good of it all? She could never leave her father; she had made this other man miserable. What senselessness! Why did he ever come? He was looking at her in the glass; it paralysed her. It was as if some immense power were keeping her motionless. What right had he to this hold over her? What right had any man to make a woman love him, and not to know, not to care, not to think? He looked at her so that it was as if she should never be able to move again.

She seemed to droop, listening to other voices — to the whispers of other thoughts; the pitiful, tender smile was on her abstracted face. George’s eyes ran over it from chin to forehead, from forehead to chin. The intense folly of his preoccupation made him wish to rub his eyes. He wondered very intensely why he should care; what made him. She was a woman — a girl with certain, clear-cut, delicately enough tinted, softly enough outlined features — and a certain sadness. But just a woman. What, in essence, was her charm? Had she a charm? What was it? Nothing seemed to radiate from her; nothing appeared to hold his eyes. She was rather sad. But —

Carew finished with his Bamboula; he bent again over the keys. He muttered that he had heard a rattling good song in town; he had learned it for the benefits of the fellows “over there.” He struck the first notes of a music-hall ballad.

George wondered what he was doing here. With a touch of the immense pride of the artist, he looked round him. It seemed ludicrous that he —
he
— should be among these little people, listening to that grotesque noise. And moved by this girl with nothing — nothing but a droop — a sadness, a passivity. He could not believe it. These people! These! They were the very people, the very class that one regards as the most hopeless, the most
borné,
the most unappreciative — and the most inappreciable. The “local clergy” ! It was not possible that they could appeal to him. What had become of all the artists with the great hopes he had shared; of all the circle of thinkers more exclusive than Castillians; more contemptuous of outsiders than any military sect? They would have laughed at the idea of being in a parson’s house. Yet there wasn’t one of them within miles of him. He was listening to a jingle-song; he was swayed by the hopes of people whose only purpose on earth was a tomb-stone, decipherable for a year or two. Clara raised her eyes, and in the glass met his fixed and abstracted glance. She had as if a moment of embarrassment, then gently turned her head and looked out into the night behind her. The curve of her neck filled him with sudden, intimate, and very great joy. The pressure of her good-night hand was a thing frank, ingenuous and tender. He knew he had been awaiting it. It was the climax of his whole nights, and of each of his days.