Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (222 page)

For was not he going to the United States to strike a deathblow at what his father represented? Was he not going to cripple all his father’s enterprises? Was not he going to — as far as he could — set up a different standard? And would not that standard be the standard of Eleanor?

CHAPTER II
.

THE sun that night went down leaving a pink and golden splendour that put new heart into Mrs Sargent. There lay Mrs Greville, with Eleanor by her side, green and brown rugs wrapped almost up to their noses, their feet tendered glorious by the light from the low sky, which gave to all outlines a soft, luminous enhancing. A never-ceasing procession, silhouetted against the light — of lean men’s figures, stout women, children whose little pigtails cut diagonally the lines of the cordage — passed before their faces, the notes of a harmonium, the clashing of pail-handles to simulate cymbals, laughs and endless, monotonous songs from the emigrants, invisible below their feet, went up to mingle in the brilliant heavens with the rush of the water. It seemed, the darkness down there, to enshroud and to accentuate the jaunty indifference, the squalor, the ferocity or the mere listless, Eastern dejection with which, through the day, the fore-part of the ship, with its kerchiefed, Orientally-draped crowd, seemed to confront the serene castle of luxury that rose, white and embattled, half way between stem and stern.

The sky was a flat, impenetrable pink, and from just to the right of the bows a single backbone of gilt, feathery cloud glowed and slanted, like a vast spruce tree about to fall transversely, up into the pale blue peak of the heavens. It had, the sky, something of a garish splendour, to which the slatey-blue, unchangeable sea seemed to offer a saturnine comment, and from time to time Mrs Sargent led to their feet, for presentation to these extraordinary Europeans who were travelling to the other side “for pleasure,” small bands of what they had come to call “Them.” They made in this way the acquaintance of a Scottish Presbyterian minister from an aristocratic suburb of Philadelphia, who told them that there was no coal smoke in New York; of a lady whose husband owned a button factory in Froudeville, Connecticut; of a judge from Decatur, Illinois; of the son of a distinguished family called Callum of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and of a Mr Houston of Brooklyn, who told them, in gentle and despondent tones, that whatever they did they were to avoid the — Hotel in a street whose number he could not just remember. And each of these people cordially endorsed the remark with which, successively, Mrs Sargent introduced them — that they were going to the land to see sunsets. The lady from Froudeville added the rider that they’d find New York very strange but that they’d like it immensely when they got used to it. To which the judge’s son added that they were not to think that N’York was America, it was just a sink. It appeared afterwards that by this image he had meant to imply nothing opprobrious, but merely that New York, in its cosmopolitan character, was merely the channel — or, as you might say, the funnel into which the wealth of the Transatlantic continent forced itself in its way eastward. But all these silhouettes with querulous voices waved their arms towards the invisible sun and the western skies. The sunset, indeed, they assured her was but a first note of what, hospitably and charmingly, they were going to do for them. And Eleanor’s protest, wrung from her at the fifth repetition, that they were not thirty-six hours out from Europe so that the sunset might as well be called the last taste of what Europe could do for
them
— Eleanor’s protest, for which she felt a certain contrition, was summarily quashed by her Aunt Emmeline. She was inclined to put the sunset down to the sturdy Protestantism and the energy of the Transatlantic race.

They went, she explained, together: skies and energy being synonymous, for was not it a scientific fact that climate had a vast influence upon character? And inviting the gentle Mr Houston and Mrs Sargent to take the dark, vacant chairs next her own, she sent Augustus, who happened at the moment to pass at Don’s side, down to her maid’s cabin to inquire for a volume of his father’s sermons, in which, by a coincidence, that idea of Transatlantic vigour and the occidental skies was rhetorically foreshadowed. And Don, being roundly accused by Aunt Emmeline of unsociability, was constrained amiably to hook one of his long arms round an iron stay and to hoist himself into a sitting posture upon the hard rail; where, silhouetted, too, against the paling sky — the gigantic gilt spruce tree had become a roisterous old man’s head — he listened to Mrs Sargent’s upbraiding of Mr Houston, who, in the light of the electric lamp that glowed by now from the ceiling above the chairs, had revealed himself as a small, old, tired-looking gentleman in a Homburg hat and with a short goat’s beard. He repeated that he had not been able to sleep in the hotel in 29th Street, and to Mrs Sargent’s reprimand that it was unpatriotic and altogether un-American to let an Englishman imagine that the worst American hotel could be worse than the very best English hotel, he repeated once more that he supposed, under correction, it was not the best way to give English visitors a good impression of the States to direct them to an hotel under which they were blasting a tunnel. And whilst Mrs Sargent was demonstrating that to sleep over a tunnel in preparation would be just the thing to give English visitors an idea of the overflowing industry and energy of New York (“So that you get them again both ways!” Don could not help interjecting) Mrs Greville had turned the topic into that of the social organisations attached to American churches.

In that, too, Mrs Sargent assured her, America was exceedingly “live.” After slightly sketching the relative positions, socially, of the congregations attaching to various churches — it remotely shocked Don, for Aunt Emmeline’s sake, to hear her say that the Protestant Episcopal congregation mostly consisted of kitchenmaids — Mrs Sargent gave instances of this activity: instancing the fact that at Heydon, N.J., the Christian Scientists had, in the vestibule of their new church, a barber’s saloon, so that gentlemen — and ladies too — might appear as seemly as possible at the services: and concluding with the triumphant fact that the Rev. Mr Campbell, the Scottish minister to whom they had been presented and whom they remembered as having told them that there was no coal smoke in New York, had erected in his vestry-house a quick-lunch bar, a tape machine in direct contact with Wall Street, and a telephone, telegraph and messenger-boy service.

“Mr Campbell,” Mrs Sargent said, “has in his congregation some of the wealthiest men in the city, men to whom the delay of a minute might mean the loss of a fortune.”

And whilst Mrs Greville was, approvingly, saying that the only inefficient parallel that her churches had had was the habit of calling doctors out of service if anyone were ill, Mrs Sargent was saying that it proved her own broadmindedness, inasmuch as, whilst she thus eulogised the Rev. Campbell, she herself was a Catholic.

“You won’t find in America,” she said, “any of the narrow intolerance that there is on the other side.” And Mr Houston’s timid “No, indeed!” which resembled more than anything else a clearing of his thin brown throat, was emphasised by a much more audible “No, indeed!” from Aunt Emmeline.

Don lost himself in conjectures as to what exactly could be Mrs Greville’s little game. And as he averaged it out she must imagine herself at last in a
milieu
where her social, ecclesiastical and organising excellences would enable her to shine as they had not — even in the good days of her husband’s episcopacy — enabled her to shine anywhere yet. As she would see it, he mused, she was amongst an infinite number — the representatives of eighty millions — of absolutely middle-class people. Not one of the individuals that she saw around her could be reasonably
“
placed” at all in her mind. So that she had only, whilst paying a purely temporary deference to their odd opinions, to reveal herself as a real Bishop’s wife, to stand forth as an absolute dictator of manners, district-visiting and the disciplining of minor clergy.

And she confirmed him in this speculation — just as Eleanor, by stirring in her chair, exhibited the symptoms that he so much desired, to join him — by suddenly telling him to go and see what had become of Augustus and the volume of her husband’s sermons. For she had remembered — with regard to Mrs Sargent’s claim for a height of tolerance in the United States — a certain sermon of her husband’s preached before a ruri-diaconal conference. In this she had herself forced the bishop to say that if the Roman Catholics would abandon some of their heresies, and the Nonconformists were to abandon some of their stiffneckedness, how exceedingly good it would be for the Church. For, as Don realised, it is extremely difficult to inform a lady who will not listen to you that you are the wife of a Bishop. Whereas a title-page can’t be ignored.

In the course of long wanderings in the deeper stages of the ship, with their slight but persistent odours, their slight but insistent creakings of polished wood and their perspectives that seemed infinite, Don several times lost his way. It is indeed one of the most difficult things in the world, when you have turned a number of corners, gone down and up a number of oscillating staircases, to retain in your mind just where you are or even to realise whether you are going towards the stem or the stem. And having discovered that Aunt Emmeline’s maid was too overcome to begin to consider the problem of finding where in the world Aunt Emmeline’s copy of her husband’s treatises might be (she addressed instead, through the crack of her door, to Don and the stewardess the unanswerable riddle: Why had she ever left Reading?), Don was faced with the problem of discovering what had become of Augustus. He had, the stewardess said, shown, poor gentleman, half an hour before, unmistakable signs of wishing that he had never come to
that
atmosphere. From there he vanished.

Don in his kind-heartedness could not think of taking his valet away from a vastly congenial and just-learned game of poker in the smoking-room, as indeed he would not have thought of leaving poor Augustus to a mere valet. And, his heart filled with concern, and dominated too with a dread that Eleanor might have turned in, Don coursed through what appeared to be miles of passages of shining white paint, shining mahogany and stifled creakings, up to a region where the white paint gave way to fumed oak and painted panels representing cornucopiæ, birds of paradise or nymphs. He coursed out along wind-swept promenade decks, peeped at familiar faces of the prostrate occupiers of deck chairs. He found, in their private saloon with the yellow and gilt velvet, Mr Greville, lean, rigid and attentive, and in the Socratic manner, extracting from the captain, who was a blaze of gilt bindings, red face and golden, harsh hair, facts as to the conditions of service in the United States mercantile marine.

Because the captain was stiffly anxious to make the acquaintance of Don, whom he called “Mr Ke-Greville,” Don was forced to stay and admire the aster heads, each as large as a mop, that the captain had done himself the pleasure of sending in for the ladies of the party. There was not, indeed, anything fulsome about the captain, though, upon hearing the cause of Don’s concern, he offered to place at his disposal one of his mates to find Augustus. But it was minutely disagreeable to Don to be called “Mr Ke-Greville.” And he seemed to read into the captain’s hard-bitten, defensive blue eyes the fact that with each word he uttered Captain Mulock was saying really: “Look here, you’re my owner. But you can’t promote me for you’ve nothing* bigger in this line to give. And you can’t, if you’re a decent man, deprive me of the ship, for I’m impeccable.”

“Oh, well” — Don was driven to take the bull by the horns—” I trust you’ll respect my desire for secrecy. I’ve got reasons that I’m sure you’d approve yourself.” And when the captain laid a great red hand upon the evening shirt-front that gave to his gilded broadcloth a final and tremendous finish, and assured him that he’d taken to America two duchesses, a French Ambassador and an English Cabinet Minister without a soul’s even having learnt that they’d been in the States, Don followed his advice and sought for Augustus in the extreme bow and the extreme stem.

“It’s what they all want,” he said. “Darkness and privacy,” and he laughed a cordial and jovial laugh. He’d crossed the Atlantic, he said, man and boy, three hundred times.

The episode aroused in Don a vague disquiet, for it reminded him again that he owned all this... all this! He had not remembered the fact half a dozen times in the course of the two days. Yet to all intents and purposes it was true. He owned it and it was only an infinitesimal part of his possessions that he knew each minute grew and grew. It was worse, the feeling, when he came among the emigrants, with whom the warm, still night had filled the dark chasms of the encumbered decks. They sat on great iron discs, they hung on to steel ropes, they lay on the smoothed boards, half invisible and wholly unrealisable. You could not distinguish them by names any more than you could tell where one class of the ship began and the other ended once you were out of the central castle. And the feeling dominated him when he had found Augustus leaning beside the flagstaff at the stem and had been simply damned for suggesting that there the motion of the vessel was at its worst. And in that darkness, where Augustus appeared nothing but a huddled, disagreeable black mass, lifted up and down against the horizon, it struck Don that he could not even understand Augustus!

In the half way between the stem and the central elevation, where the steerage passengers were massed, some of them had got hold of a storm lamp and had hung it from a bridge that spanned the dark deck. And to the sound of a concertina jerkily wheezing out the air of a Parisian waltz, a pair of Tyrolese — the man in a wide hat with a black cock’s plume, dragging his leg as a barnyard cock does, and with a bearded face and ferociously glistening teeth, the woman in short skirts with white stockings — danced, he intermittently sending out a volley of hand-smackings from his knees, his thighs, his ankles, and even his heels, to the rhythm which was marked by the clapping of a pail handle. In the same ring the sombre-skirted figure of a solitary man, Roumanian, Wallachian or Cypriote, was turning reservedly as if in a very slow Highland Fling, his hands above his head. And in the dusky niche around them faces indistinguishable — Jewish, Oriental, Italian, blonde, red-haired, or eager like those of London street arabs — peered out and muttered. Don asked in German of a shawled figure, half distinguishable near him where she came from and where she was going. She drew the shawl closer over her head and moved an inch or two away. Not one of all these people noticed him — and obviously in this crowd of strange figures nothing could be noticeable. Not even the dusky Roumanian in his skirts. And he would never know where one of them came from or what they came out to seek. What could he — who, after all, had immense power — do for these people? He might make one — he might make them all — rich! But what good would that do? The good that they needed was to be taught that good did not come with riches. Yet in all probability they were flying from the tangible ills of hunger, cold, oppression, rapine and even butchery. They sought, perhaps, some of them, Liberty. Yet most of them probably were attracted by deeds such as those of his father’s, who had been born in a workhouse to die with an infinite power — to do what? To drink wine? buy women? purchase votes? What, in the inscrutable depths of these poor minds, did immense wealth signify? There might be — there probably were — in the thousand or so of them great artists, great thinkers, who went to seek the purely idealistic. How, if he set himself the task — if he interpreted his mission as that of helping those who came first to his hand — how was he to ascertain whose ideals were infinite freedom, whose were infinite opportunities for bestiality, or whose simply the desire for opportunities to live and think? What could he do? — what could he do for any of them?