Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (221 page)

“You were not, you know,” she said, “so exceedingly in earnest the Wednesday before last.” He rubbed his hand up his brow.

“Perhaps I was not,” he said slowly. “But it
does
come back to me — the national feeling. I do not know where it comes from. Perhaps from the days when I played with the bell-boys in the hall of the hotel. I do not know where else. But...” He paused, and a look of positive appalment in his face overwhelmed her.

“My dear thing!” he brought out, “I’ve been dreadfully unfair to you. If you did not expect.... It’s shameful,” he said; “of course you could not expect that I’d drag you into such an affair.”

To calm him she put her hand upon his where it rested on the rail, as she was in the habit of doing for her father in church when the sermon irritated him beyond bearing. But the contact did not calm Don. He looked up at the canvas screen of the bridge where, silhouetted against the pale sky, a man, bearded and blonde, with a gilt line round his cap, was holding at the moment a glass to his eye. His own, mechanically, followed its direction.

“There’s a ship!” he uttered, and then: “Of course I can’t turn the boat round — or I might perhaps, only it would be hard on the passengers. But the very minute we get to New York, if you wish it...”

“Dear!” she said, “don’t you
understand?
”

He brought out, almost hysterically, it was so swift, a “Yes, but....”

“When I accepted you as my responsibility,” she said, with an attempt at a smile to calm him, “I took you with all
your
responsibilities. I shan’t funk the slums of New York when I come to them. Only...”

“Heavens,” he interrupted, “it need not come to that!”

“Only” — she was determined to finish her speech—” I do not want you to assume more responsibilities than you’ve got to do for your peace of mind.”

“My peace of mind is irrevocably bound up with yours and your comfort,” he said. And she accepted the obvious sincerity of his speech in lieu of the kiss that she felt she had deserved.

“And mine’s so entirely bound up in yours,” she said, “that if I thought there was a single thing you felt you really ought to do, and if you did not do it for my sake, I should be irrevocably miserable.”

The shrill notes of the second bugle made him move backwards from the rail.

“Only,” she repeated, as they squeezed close together to enter the companion door at the stem end of the deck, “I
do
want you to make up your mind what
will
satisfy you.”

“And you’ll stand the racket?” he asked, supporting himself above her with a hand on the panelling as the slow pitch of the creaking vessel elevated him right above her coiled hair. “You are a brick.” And she looked back and up at him with an ingenuous pleasure upon her fresh cheeks, so that they remained at gaze until, in revenge, the dropping stemwards of the ship made the stairway almost horizontal and brought her face up to his level. He did not kiss her even then because he was lost in the consideration of whether he
ought
to accept the sacrifice.

This problem occupied him during the greater part of dinner, inordinate though — the second dinner of the voyage being one upon which the resources of the kitchen were strained to show what, as against the competing lines, the ship could do — inordinate though the dinner proved in length to be. The problem of whether he ought really to take her with him any further accompanied him through the indifferent soup, the excellent oysters, the
hors d’œuvres;
it spoilt his appreciation of the
mousse
of Westphalian ham; it made him so inattentive to the needs of Aunt Emmeline that it was positively Augustus who had to reach across the table to fill her glass with Apollinaris. It cast such a blight, this problem, upon him that he would almost gladly have taken refuge in the belief that it was the motion of the vessel affecting his spirits. But he was too excellent a sailor, and in spite of his dejection his appetite was too good to let him have that solace. And almost he came to the conclusion, since the matter so much affected him, that that alone was proof that he ought not to bring Eleanor into contact, however willing, with his Responsibility.

He contrived to be dragged out of his brooding by hearing the lady at his elbow exclaim, in tones too triumphant for the most preoccupied to miss:

“Now,
there’s
a great man.”

The remark was addressed to Mr Greville, who raised his thin, aquiline face and piercing eyes immediately opposite to her across the table. And Don, in spite of his preoccupation, was subconsciously aware that the subject of her eulogy was his own father.

Mr Greville’s politeness, asking as if for information of an extreme ignorance, came across to her.

“In what significance do you use the word ‘great’ ?”

“Consider,” the lady cried out — she had massive, striking red hair and a massive and very striking pale face of a mealy whiteness—” all the money he’s made.”

Mr Greville uttered: “Ah!”

“And consider,” she went on, “his charities.”

“Now what proportion,” Mr Greville asked, “do you consider that his charities bear to his income?”

“Ah,” the lady said, “I know you’re sneering at us. But tell me how many members of your corrupt aristocracy have founded a university?”

Aunt Emmeline leaned across Don to almost groan:

“Ah, too true!”

She had found herself in singular accord with the red-haired lady. She had not ever anywhere met people who so intimately agreed with her views of life as she discovered most of the people on board did. She leaned, however, still further across Don, so that the aigrette in her hair discommoded him, to remark that Mrs Sargent was not to take it for granted that
all
their upper classes were unmindful of their responsibilities; though too few, altogether, recognised what — for instance in their relations to the Church — their duties were; and Mr Greville in turn begged Mrs Sargent to realise that he was not sneering at her. He was travelling for the sole purpose of informing his mind.

“So that you’re
really
coming for pleasure?” And the lady, in her agreeable surprise, pulled still further back the glove that dangled from her white and very plump forearm. “Now that is
real
nice. You’re coming to see us as we really are? So few British do.”

Aunt Emmeline said that it was indeed lamentable that the better class of
her
island had so little curiosity: it was one of the symptoms, it was probably one of the causes, of British national decay.

“But don’t you think,” Mr Greville asked Mrs Sargent, “that if we do not come it’s because we believe — we’re probably very mistaken — that there’s nothing to see?”

“You do not believe anything of the sort,” Mrs Sargent cried triumphantly. “Go down to the Battery any afternoon and you won’t be able to move for the crowds of British rubber-necks with Baedekers looking at the sky-scrapers and the historic monuments. You don’t find them like that at the Tower of London!”

Her triumph — and the incomprehensible word that you had to wait to work out its meaning — caused a momentary silence, into which Augustus was able to introduce the virulent statement:

“So that you get us both ways!” And to Mrs Sargent’s puzzled expression he vouchsafed the contemptuous explanation that she had said, first, that we were such fools that we never came at all; and secondly, that the sights of New York did attract us so much that we abandoned our own to an extent that impeded the native-born American...

Mr Greville turned his head towards his nephew for sufficiently long to say, over the head of Eleanor, who sat between them:

“We did not come here to convict people of inaccuracies. We came to hear their views.”

And Mrs Sargent rolled bread triumphantly between her white fingers and thumbs of both hands, accepting Mr Greville’s championing and reflecting upon an effective retort. It came after a decent interval:

“I guess we Americans get you — both ways
— all
the time!” And Mr Greville gallantly but enigmatically bowed his head. Mrs Sargent said brightly then she guessed they were the very nicest party of English she’d ever come across — and she herself had been born in County Cork, so she might claim to know both sides of the water and speak with authority. Augustus, she said, would learn better before he was three months older: he’d find American women very bright, and she reflected with satisfaction upon her retort, repeating, to lose none of its effect, that Americans did get them both ways all the time. She hoped she’d be able to take them round Springfield, Illinois, and show them something of the prettiest town in the world...

Don from this, to him, rather painful scene — in his amphibious existence he had heard so much of this Yankee-baiting — retired, a little strengthened, to the consideration of the problem of whether he
ought
to take Eleanor any further into these depths.

It occupied him so fully, the problem, that of the rest of the conversation he only caught Mrs Sargent informing the silent Eleanor that she’d find American gurrls vurry
bright,
and that English women did not know how to put their clothes on, a remark to which Eleanor only smiled a little deafly and bowed with an odd likeness to her father. And he caught Eleanor replying in trenchant undertones to a whisper from Augustus:

“Why, there are ridiculous people everywhere.” If he’d been near her chair last night, instead of being in his berth sea-sick, he’d have heard a drunken English country gentleman holding forth to a lot of perfectly silent Yankees about the incorruptibility of English J.P.s and the perfection of the British system. She’d asked herself just the very words that Augustus had just asked her. “Was it possible that people
really
talked like that?” For, as against Mrs Sargent’s “corrupt aristocracy” the Englishman had alleged that you could get a verdict from the United States Supreme Court — as all the world knew — by bribing any one of the judges.

“You do not believe people talk such rot till you hear it,” she finished trenchantly. “But they
do.
And it would be cruel of dad to draw that poor woman out if he had not got a good reason for it.”

The unfortunate Augustus opened his moustache-hidden mouth to retort, but a slow movement that seemed to take the whole place, band, galleries, ferns on the table, and waiters, in one gigantic hand and wave it through the air, made him at first appear to reflect wildly and then to close his mouth. In spite of the fact that he was assured of £10,000 a year for the next five years and sat next to his cousin, so that he could speak to her in undertones, he was not yet having anything like what Mrs Sargent assured him was to be the time of his life.

It was probably the contact with Mrs Sargent that tipped Don’s wavering scale upwards. For he had to face the eternal problem of how much a king owes to his people, how much to his wife: of how much the same king is pledged by promises that he has given before he comes to the throne in face of the sufferings of his tributaries that he discovers after his accession. For he could not disguise from himself the fact that he had pledged himself to let Eleanor lead the orderly, sheltered, almost august life that had seemed to be all that the future promised them.

It was a definite promise that he had made, and, to his scrupulosity, you cannot be relieved from a promise however willing the other party may be. At the same time he could not be certain that he was not bound by a former promise, contracted not by him, but, as it were, by his ancestors — a promise of which Mrs Sargent was, in her vulgar ignorance, a dismal symptom. For undoubtedly his father — and the men of his father’s kidney who had preceded him — were responsible for that poor woman. It was they who were responsible for her candid utterance that Greatness was the power to trick coins out of the breeches pockets of the poor or that having you both ways was the ideal of life. His father distinctly was the great prototype of extraction just as his whole life had been a matter of having everybody not both ways, but in every possible way.

And it seemed to him that it was a duty he had brought with him into the world to re-act against his father. He had, as far as he could, to show that poor woman with the red hair, pasty face, and untidy, flabby, blue cotton shirt waist — who told his Eleanor that she did not know how to put her clothes on and held up to Mr Greville a swindler like his own father as a type of what a corrupt aristocracy should emulate — it was his duty to show that poor woman and the millions that she represented, the millions that his father had taxed, swindled and presented with false ideals, to show them that Greatness was something greater than the habit of accumulation. And perhaps because of the optimistic sensation induced by the immense dinner, by the time the sparkling wine, provided by the Company, and the nickel-silver souvenir pocket-books in which you were to keep a diary of the run (provided also by the Company), had been arrived at, he had momentarily squared the circle of his thoughts. It was the old solution.