Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (215 page)

“Shan’t we go to my sitting-room?”

But he answered:

“No: your father’s got to be faced and enlightened and rendered hostile — and the sooner it’s done the better.” And then, resuming his pleading: “Only, till then’ — and his eyes sought the decorous clock—” we’ve got ten minutes. Let’s be desultory. We shall have to be businesslike enough. You’ll have it all and to spare. But till then let’s just talk. You’ve got to hear — and I can’t tell it you often enough — that you’re the most beautiful thing in the world.” — , She leant back now against her end of the long couch, and she had an air of complacent resignation: he was so tall, so brown, so gentle and so fluent, that even eating muffins by a good fire in November, after coming in from the rain, was not more pleasant than being told in his endless digressions that he loved her.

“You see,” he began his flow of words that was to last for ten minutes, “when you’re at leisure you taste life — and it’s just because this life here is the fine flower of leisure that it’s the most perfect thing in the world. It’s brought up to its highest pitch. Now you...”

CHAPTER III
.

IT was not only a forecast of his plans that the young man had to offer to Mr Greville, it was also a detailed biography. Mr Greville was of an extreme height and meagreness: he wore always a black frock coat — he had never explained why — he was clean shaven, and, because his beard grew with extravagant thickness and speed, he shaved always twice a day — before breakfast and before dinner, which he took at nine. The apparent keenness of his black eyes — though he was actually extremely shortsighted — the forward tilt of his head and a habit of listening to every speech with his lips parted and his head a little averted, gave to his whole bearing an air of deaf obstinacy. He had had no history: a younger son of a huge family it gave one the idea that his people must have been of a fabulous richness, that he had never done anything to add to his patrimony: he had married a woman of no particular dowry, he had always eaten the best things in the world, bought the best printed and the best bound books, and had the best servants. He sought in life for an extreme accuracy of mind, and having, whilst at college, contracted a habit of reviewing books for a magazine started in his day by the undergraduates, he had continued to review books until that day — consecrating his labours to the service of a journal chiefly distinguished for its staff of reviewers, who were unequalled in discovering minute errors in works of encyclopaedic length. He discovered errors in books on every conceivable subject, and because this sedentary occupation was unnatural to one of his physical robustness he had cultivated the habit of standing at most times when other people sat down. Thus, he stood all through such church services as he attended; it was his custom to take his breakfast standing, and at dinner he remained upon his legs until he had finished his soup. It was, nevertheless, characteristic of the society in which he lived that although he did everything that was possible differently from everybody else, and although he differed in his views from almost every soul that he met, no one seriously considered that he was at all extraordinary, and his opinions were sought for with anxiety by the higher clergy of the diocese when they were troubled in matters of ritual, or by the Conservative candidates of the county when they were preparing electioneering speeches.

It was part of his routine of studied politeness to Kelleg that every time the young man dined with them he should deem it his duty to pass exactly fifty minutes in the society of the young couple. It was his habit on those occasions to ask the young man what story he was illustrating for the magazines, and, having heard the plot, he would analyse the idea, state what stories it resembled, and carry back the analogy to Grecian, Indian or prehistoric originals.

On this occasion, having shaken the young man’s hand beside the sofa, he retreated to the other side of the dining-table, and so far departed from precedent as to say that he trusted the young man had received less disquieting reports as to the state of his father’s health from across the Atlantic. He then turned his face to one side and, resting his knuckles upon the table, prepared to listen. His daughter’s suitor replied by passing the cable across the table.

“It will save time, sir,” he said, “if you read this. It will make, you will see, a great deal of difference to everything.”

Mr Greville, with a slightly distasteful expression, fumbled for his pince-nez. He disliked being seen to wear glasses anywhere: he particularly disliked to have to put them on outside his study. Nevertheless, holding the tortoiseshell rims a little over to one side, he read down the paper. His first words were: “I trust you will present my condolences to any surviving relatives of your father’s.”

The young man laughed friendlily. The dislike of his
fiancée’s
father couldn’t inspire his indefatigable optimism with the belief that they wouldn’t one day hit it off together. Besides, Mr Greville’s presence acted to such an extent as a tonic upon his mental faculties that he felt always a pleasant hardening of his own backbone when they were together.

“My father hadn’t a relative in the world,” he said. “He was born in the workhouse at Rydale in Yorkshire — not a quarter of a mile from where I’ve heard you say
you
were born.”

Mr Greville gazed straight in front of him.

“That explains his extraordinary name,” he said.

“I recollect that two of the guardians of the poor in our parish in the year 1840 were called, the one Collar and the other Kelleg.”

The young man laughed again.

“I guess,” he said, “that most of the extraordinary American names have some such European beginning. And most of the extraordinary American customs too!”

Mr Greville stored the remark in his memory that he might, at a later moment, demonstrate its inaccuracy. Immediately he asked:

“And your own name? It is not an American perversion of John?”

“Oh, I’m called Don,” the young man answered, “because my mother was lady’s-maid in the family of ‘the something Don’ — an Irish family, you know. My mother had a great feeling of gratitude to her employers. They treated her very kindly.”

Mr Greville supplied the name of the Irish family in question and added a slight — and a slightly favourable—”Hum!” It distinctly pleased him that Don’s mother should, in spite of the fact that she became an American, have retained so proper a sentiment of respect for the ancient European family in whose service she had been.

The young Don was so fortified by this sign and so stimulated by his future father-in-law’s presence that he could come straight to the mark.

“If you don’t object,” he said, “I’m going to tell you all about myself. It hasn’t seemed necessary till now to trouble you, beyond assuring you, as I’ve tried to do by the sight of me, that I’m a decent sort of citizen and properly devoted to Eleanor. Now it’s different, and if you don’t mind I’ll take up so much of your time.”

Mr Greville assented, as much by moving his clenched fist an inch or two further along the edge of the tablecloth as by any other sign that he gave. Eleanor settled herself more comfortably in the cushions at the end of the lounge. She was complacently aware that her lover was about to utter an immense flow of words, and if she was afraid that he might, in the course of them, irritate her father by inaccuracies in his generalisations, she knew her father well enough to beware that this would not increase his personal dislike of her lover. He was so nice, so pleasant, and so ingenuous, and he had made that much of a good impression on her father as to make him take in the fact that, although Don’s father had been born in a workhouse and his mother had been a lady’s-maid, you could not really call either of them Americans. Mr Greville had never listened to her upon the subject. He had accepted, in grim silence, the fact that she had engaged herself to “an American” : he had been marvellously polite to her lover because he owed that to the future husband of his daughter. But he had not once brought himself to talk the matter over. She had accepted this as she had accepted his obstinacy of drinking his soup standing. It was not a thing you could argue about. In the same way she accepted her lover’s decree that he was going to talk, and she let her mind wander away upon the point of what sort of mourning she must wear for his father whilst she kept an attentive ear for any new fact that might appear in a biography that she had already heard more than once. For decidedly she
must
wear some sort of mourning as soon as the fact of the death should become officially known.

Don began his story with the succinct statement that he had been born exactly thirty-one years before, to a day, in the then uncharted territory of Idaho. Mr Greville received this exact statement with satisfaction, but the young man could not remain in a rigour of precision. He had at once to introduce his impressions and his memories. Of his first three years he had not any memories at all, but his mother had told him that they had borne hardships, and his father had since told him that his mother had borne these hardships with a courage that was admirable in a woman who had been brought up as she had.

“And indeed,” Don hazarded the digression, “it’s one of the wonderful things about America that you’ll find there literally multitudes of such women, putting up with a heat, squalor and hard work that they would not stand here for the promise of any riches.”

“I suppose you lived in waggons?” Mr Greville pursued his search for the definite.

Eleanor, for her part, had arrived at the conclusion that she approved of mourning for the relatives of a girl’s
fiancé.
It was a formality: a definite and clear assertion of recognition. And after next Monday there would not be any getting out of having the relationship with the late Collar Kelleg forced upon them. She had been able to avoid the subject when fencing with her less intimate friends before. Now Mr Kelleg, by the nature of his death, would create such a splutter that they could not possibly avoid the notoriety. It would
have
to be faced...

“Oh, I don’t know that it ran even to a waggon,” Don was answering her father. “I know my people arrived after three years in the State of Montana. Copper was the actual attraction, I think — or it may have been gold...”

“No: copper was the cause of the growth of the State of Montana,” Mr Greville said.

“I daresay,” Don replied easily. “My father’s energies have been so multifarious since then that I’m certainly a little vague.”

“You may take it that it
was
copper,” Mr Greville repeated.

“No doubt!” Don replied, and Eleanor shivered a little. This indifference to fact was precisely the thing to irritate her father: and indeed Mr Greville, standing sideways at the table, pursed his lips and moved his hand upon the cloth. “Anyhow,” Don continued, “my father’s actual beginnings were not in copper. He used to say that they lived for the first year upon the price for his vote — paid by both parties and for a vote he had not got, because he was not yet on the register.”

“That must have been an exaggeration,” Mr Greville said, “for it is given in evidence that the
highest
average amount paid even for the votes at the Senatorial elections in Montana was sixty-eight dollars per head of the population of the State.

Now, if your father had received sixty-eight dollars from each side the total amount would not have been more than twenty-seven pounds — so that they could not have lived for a year on the proceeds.”

“He might have received more than the average,” Don answered blandly. “It would have been like my father. Anyhow,” he added, “I was only trying to give you an idea of the sort of thing that went on round my cradle. But I guess, as you seem to know ten times as much about the State of Montana’s history as I do, I may as well drop that part of it.”

He considered for a moment, whilst Mr Greville was saying that the facts connected with the Montana elections had come under his notice because he had reviewed for the journal he aided the report of the United States Government inquiry into the contest.

“And the facts,” he said, “were sufficiently singular to remain in one’s memory.”

This conclusion gave the young man his opening. “Yes,” he said, “you take the total bribery as so much per head of the population. But you do not take into account the fact that
all
the population did not receive bribes.... Oh, I know” — he was quick to countersigns of protest in Mr Greville—”a pretty large proportion did. I’m not trying to whitewash the State of Montana. The returns are there, certified by our Government. But” — and he grew more earnest—” my father was not the man to lie much, even when he was boasting of a — a successful misdemeanour. No doubt my father was speaking figuratively when he said that he lived for a
whole
year on the bribes. He meant he got a pretty good whack — above the average, and a pretty good lot of what’s to be accounted for by the citizens who would not be bribed.”

“Your father,” Mr Greville said, “received 362 dollars from one side and 379 from the other.”

“Father,” Eleanor said, “how
could
you remember that?”

“It was the most notorious instance cited by the Commission in their report,” her father answered.

“There you are!” Don closured the matter triumphantly. “I
told
you my father would be the most notorious case. He always was.”

The discussion at that point was so distinctly “up to” her father that Eleanor awaited his next attack. But Mr Greville remained silent and she recognised that he was not fighting an argumentative battle; he was trying to pin his young interlocutor down to definite statements. Thus, so far, they both triumphed, and Eleanor was not certain to which to accord the more, or the more affectionate applause.