Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (162 page)

“You’re a good fellow, Gregory,” he said. His brother smiled brilliantly, and began to stammer a disclaimer. George unfolded his telegram; it must be about the boat — some alteration in the time, or something about the weather. It occurred to him that if Clara had taken him in hand she would have forced him to become famous. She would have forced him. He would never have a chance now.

On his knee the telegram displayed large copybook text:

“150,000 copies sold day of issue. Cheque mailed. Friendly congratulations. — Beale.”

The staccato phrases suddenly brought the Philadelphian before his eyes, with Clara Brede talking to them both. The words, he knew, meant something eminently fateful to him. It meant new adjustments, new worries. He tossed the limp sheet to his brother.

“Look at what this good creature says about
Wilderspin,”
he commented. “You see what they can do when they ‘boom.’”

CHAPTER VIII
.

AND after that George had to face the creeping fingers of the clock. He had only a few hours; the fragments of a day. The little black minute marks of the dial became infinite tortures; it was as if they had become small thorns clinging to and impending the skirts of the hours. He wanted it over. The aspect of his room changed from minute to minute. The sunlight crept across the brilliant carpet, and shone reflected on the sumptuous binding of his aligned books. It seemed at times to grow all dim and far away, an unimportant mist hiding the reality of George’s memories. They were the only real things left to him now. The voice of Gregory was discussing what seemed to be merely academic and unprofitable things.

“You’ll be rich, you’ll be successful,” he commented on Beale’s telegram. It was like a subtle and jarring irony. George made a lazy motion of his whole body—” I suppose I shall muddle — meander “ — he was seeking the exact word to express his profitless and futile life. He could not find one; it did not seem worth the labour of finding exact words any more—”as I’ve always done,” he added. “What do I want with such a success of the dogs now?”

“It means several thousand pounds,” Gregory argued. “You’ll have a big market for anything you do. A tremendous position.” He brightened into one of his pleasant smiles.

“It won’t touch me,” George said, lazily. “I shall always be essentially the rotten apple I have been. If I ‘succeed’ on the strength of this absurd book, I shall only be a humbug as well.”

Gregory raised his hands with the shocked air of a priest listening to blasphemy. It was an article of faith with him that George was brilliant in his work as in his life.

George looked at the clock; the minute hand was dropping to a half-hour. There was so much to be decided.

“I suppose I couldn’t buy this place back again,” he asked. Then he saw that that would be no solution.

It would mean not a prolonging of the old, slow, charming life. It would be only the commencement of endless false positions. He couldn’t stroll any more with Clara Brede. Something must now occur. He wasn’t the man, she wasn’t the woman, to carry on an intrigue, to deal in sordid concealments. It wasn’t matter for even a passing thought. At the same time, he could not leave the matter to chance. How much did he owe to Clara’s feelings? Was he pledged to take her and afterwards to shield her? But he owed it to her father, to keep sacred in his eyes his own image as disinterested.

Gregory said: “That, of course, would lie with your purchaser. But if I were you, I would stick to the bargain.” He was talking about the re-purchase of the house.

“Oh, I don’t want to stop here,” George added, negligently. “Besides, I haven’t the money.”’

It had been slowly dawning upon him ever since he had opened Beale’s telegram; it flashed disastrously in upon him now! He had enough money to support Clara Brede!

One of his holds had been swept away.

But her father remained. Nothing could clear him out of the way. He couldn’t carry off the daughter. The point was: ought he to see her again?

Gregory was musing pleasantly. He muttered: “It means at least six thousand pounds already, doesn’t it?”

George did not hear him any more. The point was: ought he to risk a farewell? And he knew that he ought not. He dared not risk it. He could not stand the strain. Neither of them could. She would stand in the arched porch; she would walk beside him to the gate; there would be just a shimmer of moonlight and they would be parting for good. He couldn’t risk it! He would say something disastrous. It would come out in spite of himself. And then — He was never to see her again!

A sudden footstep on the road outside made him start violently. He understood that all the time he was expecting her to come, to say something to him, to bring some message from her father, to pass the window once again in her blue cloak. His gardener was coming back from morning service.

George went to the window. He wanted to see her and her father passing down the churchyard homewards. Her father was the only obstacle now. He was a hale man. He would not die; George would not want him to die. There was not any other way. He couldn’t even think of saddening Mr. Brede; of shaking his belief in human nature. It must do that if he, George, abducted his daughter. It would seem like a small, usual intrigue — the petty horror Thwaite had thought him capable of.

In the churchyard the old and bent form of the sexton hobbled goutily over the pebbles of the path. He was swinging the church key round his thumb. The church was empty. She had gone. He could not risk seeing her that evening. He would never see her again.

He turned upon Gregory. “We had better lunch,” he said.

At dusk the solemn and insistent jangle of the church bell took the place of the clock face, which became a pale blur. He had only the length of the church service now. He could not remember how long it lasted. The church windows became suddenly glowing and tall. He would not be able to see her going in. His hall lamp was lit, too; a thin beading of light fell through the crack of the door. His servants hurried down the steps — the old housekeeper after them. It irritated him. He would, if he were going to say good-bye to the Bredes, have to lose precious time in taking leave of the servants. He couldn’t treat them like dogs; they had been good servants to him.

Suddenly it flashed upon him, he couldn’t be guilty of the incredible cruelty of leaving her without a word. He was in the middle of it all again. The voice of Gregory became intolerable. He was talking about his next exhibition, a Spanish one. It was as if they were in a house where someone lay dying, talking to pass the time.

Minutes assumed their preposterous air of being each a separate eternity. The service must long be over. He moved restlessly. The clock ting’d the half-hour. No. Mr. Brede must be in the middle of his sermon. At the hour George would be setting off for the station at last. He would
have
to say good-bye to the Bredes; he would have to be commonly polite. He might even think of something to say to Clara; something that, in a flash of joy, she might understand and treasure until she forgot. He had only an hour now, all told, in which to catch his train. And he had to see his servants, too. An immense quiver, running all through him, told him that nothing was settled. In spite of everything his mind whispered to himself — in spite of his reasoning, of his ideas of right and fitness, he had not mastered his heart. It began to beat solemnly and insistently. If only there were no Mr. Brede —

He would not go. He would have to stop and explain to Clara Brede. They must part openly from each other, they must face it together. She was so brave — and he, he wouldn’t make a fuss. But no — What was he to do?

Heavy footsteps sounded outside. It must be her father. What was going to happen? Mr. Brede must have heard that he was going; he would make a frightful scene. George hadn’t thought of the frightful scene he would make. Gregory cleared his throat.

The outer door was opened. He was coming in. There was a clanking footstep in the hall; a fumbling knock on their door. What was going to happen? The crack widened; George caught a glimpse of scarlet cloth and of shining metal buttons. He got up quickly to face a military uniform. The callow head of the grocer’s son was staring at him above a too tight collar. He remembered that Mr. Brede’s sermon was to have been to the Volunteers. The boy said:

“Please will you come to Mr. Brede?”

Mr. Brede must have heard that he was going. The boy’s eyes stared at him as if the stiff collar choked him. He grew calm himself. Yes, he was coming. The Volunteer disappeared.

George took his cap, and went slowly along the dark street. It occurred to him that Mr. Brede had been asked to preach a course of sermons to Volunteers. He wanted to consult him before consenting. In that case they would meet in the vestry. George might tell him there; there could not, in the nature of the place, be any scene. They would part. As he walked with his head bent down, pondering, across the turf of the graveyard, he pictured the vestry with its deal wainscotting, the surplices hung up, and glaring oil lamp, the strong shadows. He rehearsed a swift parting speech. It was very dark, and he stumbled over a grave. He thought mournfully enough that whatever else had happened, he had cured Mr. Brede. At least, in that he hadn’t bungled. He had forced him to deliver the sermon.

The light, shooting from the open door, lit up a circular crowd of scarlet coats and of black dresses. He caught sight of the clumsy round of the big drum. A voice said: “Here’s Moffat. Get out of the way.” Faces, bent forward, peered straining into the bright doorway. He went in.

Above the high, brown pews, beneath the soaring vault of a column rendered patchy and pallid by the glare of a lamp, the pulpit was rent from panel to panel. Low and stifled voices came from the invisible aisle on the right. One of the sides of the pulpit hung towards the ground; a fixed reading candle drooped, twisted and contorted, above the preacher’s cushion. It passed slowly through George’s mind, paralysingly: “There’s been an accident.” He stood still for a moment, thinking nothing. The great vault of the church soared into gloom above him; on the altar table the brass candle-sticks and vases of artificial flowers gleamed gaily above the white altar-cloth and the diagonal, bright patterns of the frontal.

He walked swiftly round the pews. A knot of men stood stupidly, panting round a tall, canopied, mediaeval tomb. They moved apart, and he saw Clara Brede bending over her father. He was sitting, crouched and with his hands to his face, at the feet of a cross-legged effigy. A fragment of his surplice hung jagged on his black, left shoulder. As George approached, Clara, still leaning over her father, raised her head. Her face was distorted; her eyes had in them great tears, like those he remembered to have seen in some heavily painted picture. He had thought them impossible. They looked at him, intensely, dumbly, with an agony of appeal.

“This is what we have done,” she said. “Oh, George!”

Mr. Brede had gone mad in the middle of his sermon.

CHAPTER IX
.

“THEN, now there is no one between us.”

The thought came suddenly into George’s mind. It was two nights later, and he stood with his foot on the step of a carriage, looking at his watch in the light of the lamps. Behind him a long building wavered out of sight, old, high walled, with a light shining here and there in a window. A yew tree stretched dim and shadowy tiers of feathery needles over him. He stopped reflecting over his watch; it was ten o’clock. He was eight miles from home; then he remembered that he hadn’t any home. For a moment he thought of driving straight to the junction, then he snapped his watch to. As he got into the black recess before him his eyes ran along the face of the old house. It was long, rambling, comfortable in its outlines of an old manor. The lights of his carriage turned in the drive, there wavered palely in the light details of the brickwork, some rose leaves and a grating before a window.

He sank back into his corner. Twenty minutes before there had been before him the presence of Clara Brede’s father. Now he was in the house George was leaving, like a man buried and no more. He was even more than dead, since the dead seem to us to have spirits, and it was impossible to imagine his imprisoned soul watching the things of this earth. His spirit was more clouded than the soul of any dead man; his weary ghost could not walk between his daughter and her lover.

The dreadful two days that had gone before stood, packed with detail, clear in George’s mind. Everything in them was defined and unforgettable. But two things stood out — his love for her, and hers for him. It was plain and manifest: only the spoken words were needed now to make it alive and actual. They had spoken enough in the long hours whilst her father lay silent and breathing heavily in the shadow of his immense bed. That great and shadowy figure had presided at their remorse, at her tears, at her passionate self-reproach — and at his mournful repentance. It had filled the house with a numb quiet; they spoke, but it seemed as if they were whispering.

George and his brother had taken everything into their hands. If it were a brain specialist who had broken to her that her father would never speak consciously again, it was Gregory who had fetched him and it was George who had acted, as best he could, the part of consoler. There was no sharing the responsibility, and there wasn’t any avoiding it. She crept, after the specialist had spoken to her, up to her father’s room, as if she would be able to convey to him, in silence, her misery and her repentance. George was there, looking silently at the great figure, that lay like a deeper blot in the shadows of the funereal bed curtains.

“That man says that we did it,” she said.

Her father was always to be silent now. His head was always to hang on his breast; it would shake a little at times, as if he were puzzled or as if he were shaking away tears. And he would never hear a word again.

“Do you remember,” she asked, suddenly,
“
that night he said I had been very good and patient with him?” The big figure moved a little as if with her voice, a great hand clasped and unclasped itself. “That man says it was the preaching. Oh, poor dear, he thought it was fighting with devils up there...”

She shuddered violently.

George said: “Yes, it was that.” He paused. “You couldn’t reproach me more bitterly than I—”

She put her hand on his arm imperiously to stop him.

“No, I did it,” her voice came.
“
I did it. I knew more than you.”

“You couldn’t have stopped my meddling,” George said, bitterly.

Her eyes dilated, and she spoke breathlessly: “I ought to have sent you away. I had been warned. I had seen him before.” She began to speak in a brooding monotone:
“
Yes, I had been warned. I ought to have known if anyone did, how bad—”

George said, harshly:
“
Don’t say that. Don’t think that. I forbid it.”

She had used the very words, the very tone, that her father had used so often, and George was stung with a terrible dread: the family likeness, the terrible over scrupulousness was there again. He paused, overcome with his sharp fear; he had never been so moved.

“I forbid it,” he repeated, and he felt as if he could make her obey him. “We can’t divide the responsibility. I’ll take it, if you like.” She tried to speak.
“
Or,” he went on gently,
“
I’ll let it rest with him, with his nature, with those who have taught men to dread, with his God..”

But, as if he couldn’t keep back a truth, he said: “No, it was because I cared for him too much. One kills, it seems to me, those one likes too well.”

She said: “Oh, no. Oh,
no.”

He took her hand in both his own. He wanted to soothe her by the sound of his voice:
“
One persuades them to do things that one thinks will make them more happy, or more honourable or more serviceable to their fellows. And then, oh my dearest child, the strain breaks them.”

She shook her head with a dumb vehemence.
“
Don’t. Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t force me to talk, here, now.” Her voice broke in her throat.
“
Look at him!”

Her hand, gripped in his, moved convulsively, like something craving of itself for pity.

“I ought never to have seen him,” George said. “I’ve spoilt too many lives.”

She dragged her hand from his, and pressed her fingers into her ears:

“Oh, don’t; oh, don’t,” she moaned. “It’s like deserting us. He was so fond of you. He never smiled at anyone but you. Wouldn’t you have let him have that little pleasure?” She spoke between the heavings of her breast, her dilated eyes closed and opened, gazing at him, and because she was tottering on her feet, she caught at the curtains of the bed. “And me! And me! What’s to become of me, if you make me think these things about you? I’m so alone. And he — don’t say that he made you do wrong. Oh, you mustn’t desert us. You mustn’t desert us. You must not, you daren’t wrong us, me and him. What else is it, if you say that he made you do wrong.” She fell suddenly on her knees beside the bed, and as if in a passionate appeal to the man that lay there, she felt blindly for his hand. The flame of the candle that had stirred with her motion became a still and solid cone of fire. To George they seemed so terribly alone, all the three of them: alone together with their problems, their responsibilities, their remorseless destinies, and their dead and more remorseless pasts.

“God knows,” he said, “I wouldn’t wrong you or him.”

“You dare not,” she answered: “you dare not.”

To George, outside the gate, holding the fly door handle, the specialist had said: “Get that girl away. Hasn’t she relations or any friends? Well, get her away. How splendidly your creepers do here.”

He shut the door on himself with professional skill, and drove away beside Gregory’s blinking face.

That was George’s last sight of his brother. Gregory was summoned to town; George was to cross the Channel next morning. He would have to start early, practically at dawn, if he wished to avoid seeing the new owner of his house. Gregory on his way up was to arrange for Mr. Brede’s reception at an asylum a few miles further up the line.

But Clara had no relations, and no friends! It was one more fatality; all her people were out of England, and Thwaite, struck down by the shock of his dismissal, was in a brain fever. That also, George thought bitterly, was his handiwork. He had dragged that wretched man into that family. And Dora was tied to his bedside. That sister, too, Clara had lost, as utterly as she had lost her father. And all her friends had dropped away from her, whilst she had been tied first to her mother, then to her father. She was entirely alone: there was no one but himself to think for her.

And then it was all over. George drove to the asylum very late, a black presence sitting alone with him in the intense darkness of a hearselike carriage. The only sights were the swift flitting past of the hedgerow briars, revealed for an instant in the glow of the lamps.

A presence.... The man for whom he had cared so much seemed to him now at minutes only a deeper blot in the gloom, a more intense silence, a void more empty than if there had been no one. Then again, the reflection from a white wall showed dimly, for an instant, features, the outline of a beard, a glimpse of a man. It wasn’t possible that he was shut out from them for ever; it wasn’t thinkable that a time had come when no words ever again could hearten him, make him speak or smile. It was to George as if there must be some secret words, some open sesame, that would touch the springs of his brain. And as the wheels of the carriage crept along, it was as if that word must be at the tip of his tongue. He wanted that drive never to end, so that he should have time to think.

In the narrow street of a market town something blocked their way, and the light from behind a chemist’s carboy shone brilliantly in upon them. The great head turned upon George, the hopeless eyes seemed to unveil. “It’s me, Moffat,” George said, instinctively.

There was no answer; the carriage rolled on again out into the darkness. It was for a time a consolation to George, the feeling that they were doing something together, as if they were on an expedition alone. They had driven that road so often on the way to his parish. George wanted the drive never to end; at corners of rough and narrow lanes it seemed to hang, to pause for a long time. When they went on again it was to George like a disillusionment, because they were nearing the end.

Gradually there settled down upon him, there grew more and more overpowering, the feeling that this was a treachery. He seemed to be there in order to soothe that poor thing until he handed it over to a palpable gaol. He was decoying this man behind gates that would close for ever. It would be better to turn him loose into the darkness, enraged and violent, to let him dash himself to death against the black walls and the black trees, to let him die frenzied and gigantic, but at least free and like a man.

No luminous thought came to him, no philosophy that consoled him; no reasoning could make this thing anything other than lamentable. There was no possibility of leaning back and saying: “Perhaps, after all, it was for the best.” That might have been possible had death come, for rest would have come with it. But this was a continuing misery, a long blackness — and a treachery.

And then all that was over; there was a lighted hall so bright that he could not see at first. A man with an expressionless face motioned him to lead the great black form into a room where no unfamiliar voice could start dreadful fancies in its brain. George felt the pressure on his arm, the weight, the action of a great affection, of a tender solicitude — it was his final guiding and a final treachery.

George left him sitting with his immense hands hanging inert. His heavy eyes gazed unseeingly in front of him, his head was shaking a little. It was not even possible to press his hand in farewell. George tried to remember the last time he had said good-bye, but he could not call it to mind.

A doctor with a comforting professional manner assured him that every care would be taken of his friend. Their system was humane, their living rooms bright and healthy, their employees were men who had been thoroughly tested. He insisted upon showing George over the establishment. Then at last George was outside, looking mechanically at his watch, without a thought, without anything to think of, as if for an instant his brain were marking time.

But as the blackness of the empty carriage enveloped him, there came that immense fact: there was no one now between himself and Clara Brede. For a moment he quailed before the immensity of his satisfaction, as men fear joys that are too great to bear. But the lights shone upon the garden plants, upon the high stone pillars of the old gates, and upon the pallid briars of the hedgerows. He was going to her, and after they met now they would never be parted again. He sighed. Under all the remorse and all the thoughts that fact stood, clear, firm, and tranquil, brought about irresistibly by Fate, that goes to its aim across the graves of men and the wrecks of their hopes, by that ironical and inscrutable destiny that had made all his benefits turn into curses, and that now converted a treachery into a sacred duty and into an intense joy for himself.

Clara was lying back in her long chair in their brightly-lit room. After a few questions and answers as to her father, a silence fell upon them. Then he asked her what plans she had for her future. The question seemed like making believe, because he was going to take her future into his own hands.