Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (225 page)

She answered his final, “It’s been on my mind for years, ever since I knew you, that I ought to have told you,” with a tenderness such as she would have vouchsafed to a too-sensitive child.

“Dear,” she said, “it makes me ever so proud that you should have
wanted
to tell me. But it’s a great deal more than I ever desired or ever
should
desire.” And she added at his shake of the head:

“After all, what sort of relationship between man and woman would call for his bringing his father’s dirty linen for her to see.”

“Ah,” he said, “but it would have explained so much if I had told you.”

“I think, dear,” she countered him, “that you’re a little mad on explaining. What could it have told me about you that I didn’t know?”

He put his hands on both her shoulders and stood swaying her a little on her feet and gazing half humorously, half with suspense, into her kindly and liquid orbs.

“It might have prepared you for what my father’s done.”

“Your father’s only done what every father would have,” she answered. “And at this moment we don’t even know quite what he
has
done. But you couldn’t have explained to me more clearly — if I hadn’t been a fool — that your father couldn’t have disliked you enough to cut you off with a shilling. No one in the world could have done that — to
you.
And I ought to have known — and I ought to have realised — that you’d one day be the richest citizen in the world.”

She laughed, as nearly gaily as she could, and patted his cheek to imply that it was time that any emotional tension other than that of tenderness should be dropped for the night. He dropped it obediently and with an air of comfort. But still holding her and scrutinising her, he added, still half humorously:

“Perhaps, after all, the most dreadful revelation that I ought to have made to you concerns myself. It is simply that I’m much more American than I ever pretended to be. At bottom I am: I feel it. And it was that visit to Boston that did it.”

“You mean,” she was beginning to ask. But his tremendous flow of eloquence had returned to him.

“At bottom,” he said, “I’m tremendously American. If I dislike many of their ways it’s only because I feel so intensely that at bottom they’re fit for such much better things. And if I’ve loafed about in Europe it hasn’t been from lack of interest in my own country. It’s simply been because I haven’t seen my way to do better. I’ve always wanted to do something. Tremendously!”

“I don’t see why I should object to that,” she said, “if all you want is to make them less odious.”

“But don’t you see,” he said, still holding her strongly, “how much more American than you thought me this interest in America makes me? That’s what I’m afraid you’ll hate.”

“Oh, you dear boy,” she laughed. “That’s what I love. I should rather hate it if you didn’t take an interest in your own people. Because it would be a little mean. And if you only want to make them like us...” She paused, and then her affection for him gave her what she considered to be one of her flashes of inspiration. “After all one talks of Americans, but they aren’t a nation. They aren’t a — a race!” She faltered for a minute. “They’re just eighty million individuals on a map. You’re one of them. Some of them are odious, you’re just a dear. You aren’t an American, there aren’t any Americans. They’re just people, mixed up anyhow like the passengers on this boat. And that,” she had another flash, “is just what the Americans are. Passengers. And it’s absurd: you wouldn’t talk about the passengers on this boat being ‘Kelleg liners’ because they are on it, or because they’ve been on it for a certain time, or even because they’d been born on it. They’re some of them thieves, and some of them fools, and some of them shopkeepers, and some of them counts — and there’s one who’s just nothing else but a dear.”

It is probable that he would have applauded this philosophy by at last kissing her, but at that moment, brilliant beneath the light, with his broad bands of gold braid and his bright red face, the captain stepped out of the near doorway and stretched his chest in the night air. Catching sight of Don he remarked pleasantly that it was time to put out the lights on the decks, but if Don desired it they could be left burning a little longer. For that was one of the details of the commissariat: the owner could bear the charge of it if he wished. It wasn’t like the nautical rules that no one could change.

Eleanor, however, had vanished into the doorway, and there wasn’t anything left for the captain but to say that he hoped he hadn’t been indiscreet in talking of owners before Miss Greville, when Don set out on his journey to the smoking-room.

He found Canzano in an evening-dress that one could call faultless, and with a foreign air of being most carefully “got up,” that was as distinct from the English well-groomedness as it was from the American well-washed appearance. It expressed itself, perhaps more than anything, in the singularly iron-trimmed appearance of his glossy black hair, in the polish of his nails that, as they rested on the table, reflected, positively, the brownish tinge of the fumed oak, and the massive ring, a signet of lapis-lazuli, upon his little finger. It had been presented to one of his grandmothers by Pius IX. for services to the Papal troops and he wore it always — he wouldn’t naturally have worn a ring — as a minute but continued protest against the House of Savoy.

If he didn’t stand out from the crowd of men, half Americans interested in the pool and half Germans playing an intricate card game, or from the women — all Germans — who looked on, it was perhaps as much because, in such an environment of smoke, lager-beer glasses, heavy oak galleries and pink sandwiches, it seemed impossible for any man to shine as because he had taken a very retired seat in the angle of the great oak chimneypiece and kept his face down over a journal devoted to the sport of automobiling. It added perhaps a little to Don’s sense of bewilderment and discouragement that this young man who occupied a very definite place in his own mind didn’t, in this place that belonged to him, stand out at all. For, for Don, Canzano represented very exactly and very shiningly the Latin temperament: he was so polished, so unconcerned, so gay, so resigned, so very definitely clear and “all there.” Yet here, somehow, he seemed to sink into the general ragbag of humanity, to become merely one of them, and the train of thought led Don to notice that the Germans weren’t any longer Germans any more than the Anglo-Saxons were any longer distinctive. You seemed there to forget distinctions, so that if, by fixing your eyes very carefully upon a rather haggard man with a heavy moustache, you might say: “He’s probably from Philadelphia,” or if, looking carefully at another, fat, exaggeratedly distinguished, iron-grey, and with a mouth apparently as large as a frog’s, standing with his hands very much in his pockets near the red-faced man in a yachting cap, who was shouting out sums in dollars, you said: “Why, he’s obviously Dash, the actor, or his double!” the effort to keep your mind upon these individuals seemed to become very soon hardly worth the trouble. You were simply in a crowd in the largest, the most undistinguished and the most commonplace smoking-saloon in the world. And the trouble was that though you were in a crowd you didn’t — and no one in it — seemed to belong to the crowd. It hadn’t any common interest... Canzano looked up from his paper and uttered:

“It really looks as if this man’s claim to have discovered a new form of differential was justified. But you never can tell!”

Don slid himself into the polished leather seat beside his friend.

“Is it such a very engrossing topic?” he asked. Canzano raised his eyebrows politely.

“It’s like the new cure for cancer that the papers discover every week,” he said. “It’s the most important thing in the world. Think of being able to go round
any
corner without the least slackening of speed!” And his eyelids closed almost ecstatically. As suddenly, however, he raised them and regarded Don quizzically.

“Is it possible,” he asked, “that my dear and excellent Don isn’t interested in automobiling? Or is interested in the fate of the miserable
canaglia
— the pedestrians? Then what in the world is the most important thing in the world in
his
philosophy?”

And at Don’s pause for evasion he permitted himself to continue rhapsodising, a departure from self-containment that he would never have allowed himself before any other mortal save his mother.

“Confound it,” he said ironically and lightly. “By Bacchus! it’s still some point of conscience with this good gentleman. Then tell me what it is that equals in real importance a new differential? How are you going to add to the sum of human sensation in any other way? Think of being able to ‘speed’ — as your compatriots say — down the most fearful hill in the world without the least fear of the worst corner in the world at the bottom of it. I’ve taken most comers in the world fairly fast. But to do them without a check!....”

“Then you’re interested in motors?” Don asked, carefully using the British word.

“My dear chap!” Canzano remonstrated, “I’m just the same as I always was.” And at Don’s smile he added: “I’m still interested in killing time! An automobile is a clumsy, evilly-smelling, odious contrivance. But so are most human contrivances and nearly all the beasts that you sit on or guide — horses and women and Constituent Assemblies.

They’re all a bother at one time or another, and if they go wrong you have to think yourself a fool for not having managed them better. It’s so with horses: it’s so with women: it’s so with the pictures you used to want to paint. It’s particularly so with votes and voters. Whereas an automobile....”

He paused and then added:

“I’ll bet my hat you’re interested in politics — and women. Or let’s say a woman. I saw it coming in Boston — six years ago.” He went off again at a tangent: “I say, I’m awfully sorry if I’ve given you a bad quarter of an hour.” And still, before Don could get any sort of a say, he continued: “It’s fellows like you who mislead the psychologist. On the face of it it wasn’t any
manque de tact
to refer to your visit to Boston. After all, you can’t have any considerable peccadillo to conceal in that voyage. I know it: I’ll vouch for it to the lady. Heavens! Did not I meet you on the quay at New York? Didn’t I take you to your father? Didn’t I lead you about Boston? Didn’t I accompany you to the quay and on the very voyage back? I repeat I’ll go to the lady and swear to your utter innocence.”

“My dear Carlo,” Don said, “it’s me you’ve got to come to and convince.”

Canzano raised his eyes in a sort of blank bewilderment, and then swiftly catching at the key of this enigma uttered the words:

“Oh, if it’s a question of your conscience and not her jealousy I don’t volunteer.” He looked at Don with incredulity, half mixed with sardonic pity.

“And you mean to say that you still possess it? You can’t even yet dispense with that luxury?”

“A conscience?” Don asked, and Canzano shrugged his shoulders.

“
Oh pour cat
” he ejaculated, “we all possess that, I hope. We’ve all — all the benighted of the Old World got things that we don’t do. No, no. It’s not a conscience that you’ve got: it’s.... What’s the phrase? A New England Conscience? Moral nervous dyspepsia.
Chi lo sa?
No: hypochondria! The finger for ever on the pulse of your ethics!”

He resumed:

“And so the lady? An
amourette?
But no: one does not take such as that to the graveside of one’s father. At least I shouldn’t. But there’s no knowing what will be done by moral enigmas like you.”

It was at this point that the electric lights, hidden in pink globes in the roof, began to play the bewildering tricks that at sea one accepts as equivalent to the “closing time, guests, please,” of the terrestrial smoking-room. Don, however, called to him a steward, and into the incredulous ear of a semi-insolent man whispered the quite peremptory command that he desired the captain informed that he desired the chief steward to inform the bar-keeper that the lights were to be kept burning till it suited him to finish his conversation.

Canzano, leaning upon one white hand, regarded him with a little smile of sardonic impertinence.

“So you have come into your kingdom?” he asked.

“Well, it’s the first exercise I’ve made of my power,” Don said.

“And how symbolical an exercise,” Carlo said.
“
He deranges that most perfect of all things — the routine of a ship!
Ça sent bon, hein?
”