Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (233 page)

Mrs Greville was so worried to take Don into a corner and ask him for a further draft to cable to her brokers — Kelleg shares were still rising, and it was astonishing how Mrs Greville had mastered the details of conducting her gamble across the Atlantic wastes — that she couldn’t do more than utter:

“Oh, it
is
terrible. But I can’t believe it.”

“It’s true,” Don said; “you won’t find here what you find all over England — the fine, unruffled, calm, family spirit. And that...”

The entrance simultaneously from three separate doors of Mr Greville, of Canzano and of Augustus — staggering a little under an enormous rug that his mother had told him to carry for her, because although the heat was actually tropical, in October, sometimes the nights, she understood, had touches of frost — these three entrances moved her to drag Don into a corner and proffer her request for a loan sufficient to help her to make a really large fortune.

CHAPTER IV
.

THE parting, without doubt, was hardest upon Augustus. He had to carry along with him not only a heavy assortment of his mother’s “things,” but a heart that was full of an extraordinary bitterness. He hadn’t, in fact, the least doubt that his cousin, by not treating him worse had treated him extraordinarily badly. He couldn’t make up his mind to acknowledge that she hadn’t
some
feeling for him: he wasn’t going to acknowledge that she hadn’t flirted with him. She
had,
he maintained. She had, simply because she hadn’t turned him out, neck and crop, from her lover’s employment.

And then.... She didn’t even come to say good-bye to him. He lingered in the large, bluish, dirty, empty drawing-room for so long after the others had gone down in the elevator that at last a bell-boy came to summon him — a bell-boy in a bluish uniform, who told him that it was a hot day and didn’t offer to carry the rug, the jewel-case, the dressing-bag or the half-dozen newspapers that his mother had decided to take with them because they were so characteristic. He staggered under the weight of these things — and under the weight of his passion. He couldn’t even clench his fist at Eleanor’s door with its panelling of shepherds, and he couldn’t believe, all the way down in the elevator, in the crowds in the immense, quadrangular, marble and mahogany hall that they called an office — he couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t come to say good-bye; he couldn’t believe it in the New York streets, he couldn’t believe it in the ferry that took them, fixed in between its repulsive boards, in their carriage, across the water. It all appeared unrealisably unreal — so unreal that he half believed that Mr Greville, who sat silently beside him in the roomy carriage, might have some word of comfort and encouragement from Eleanor to deliver to him.

There wasn’t, in the enormous, vaulted, grim depôt, a porter to carry the dressing-case, the jewel-case, the rug or the half-dozen papers that, in his misery, he was continually dropping from under his arm. But even that seemed hardly real — even the extraordinary appointments of the Kelleg private car — the English footman, the Italian maid, the tape machine or the black porter; the velvet and silver, the lace curtains over the leaded windows; the Chippendale chairs and the saddlebag lounges, the French paintings on the ceiling, or the way in which everybody talked in the dim light — it all seemed unreal to him. There were undoubtedly voices: he
was
in a long railway car. But a place where she wasn’t, wasn’t thinkable — and she wasn’t there! He had thrown down the things that troubled him, and he stood on the step of the car scanning the faces that passed. He couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t be
somewhere,
looking over some shoulder, to get a last glimpse of him. She
must
be somewhere; near a French-looking woman with a high figure; near an obviously German man with a blue hat, or amongst the long drove of Italian immigrants that, impeded with bags and broken parcels, with necks craning and anxious or confident eyes streamed slowly down the platform.

The train moved imperceptibly whilst he still stood upon the step; Don waved his hand; Mr Greville, in his long frock coat and with his high-crowned, soft felt hat, glared after them; the Italian immigrants stared dully at the roof and glided backwards. His mother was asking for her lavender salts; the English footman bent over her, silent and attentive; the bell on the locomotive tolled out. They were moving along with a wonderful smoothness: they were out of the station shed and its dim light. It all seemed extraordinarily unfinished...

“And now!” Don said.... He grasped Mr Greville’s black elbow upon the platform and turned from watching the departing train. “Now for Twenty-Ninth Street.”

He had at once an odd feeling of going on a holiday with his friend and father-in-law — and an odd fear of his environment, a hostility, a homesickness. Mr Greville, however, had obviously only the holiday feeling. He moved with assurance along that cross-the-water platform, along the staircases and tunnels, and on to the deck of the huge ferry as if he had been in Canterbury South Eastern itself. He kept Don perfectly straight, holding him by the elbow when he wished to ask of a man in blue trousers when the doors would open. He told a lady who sat by the doors on a seat that she was quite right for Twenty-Third Street, and she told him in return that she had come that day from Gloucester and was going on that night to Philadelphia. Having so memorised his plans, his maps and his time-tables that he couldn’t go wrong, he made to Don — as they hung to the outside of a trolley whirling up between the piers of Sixth Avenue — he made to Don the assertion that New York
was
exceedingly practically laid out. And all that poor Don — in the dusk, with the lights glaring out in the squalid shops, with the “L” trains thundering overhead, with the supports of the Elevated brushing his elbow as they rushed past, with the paper, the straw and the dust whirling out at the wind of their moving — all that Don could find to answer was that if New York were practically laid out it hardly seemed worth doing if the best material they could find to work in were Sixth Avenues.

They crossed, slightly perilously, the greasy granite side of the roadway, and passed into the blue and purple tranquillity of the evening air in the cross street. It was naturally Don who stumbled rather heavily over a hollow where a square of paving stone was missing from the sidewalk, and it was Don who groaned. It was Mr Greville who said seriously that if they allowed their city to be governed by Irishmen that was what they must expect. And all his Saxon prejudice against the troublesome Islanders spoke in his voice.

He stopped Don at the mouth of what appeared to be a cave, and said:

“This is No. 19!” And looking down, Don uttered an exclamation.

“It’s he!” he cried: “it’s certainly Kratzenstein!”

The sheeted figure of a man lay back in a red velvet chair; there were cloths about his face, but over him, negligently and assuredly, stood a fat, hook-nosed, grey-whiskered man in gold spectacles.

“It’s certainly Kratzenstein,” Don repeated, and as a hot blast came from the cave and swept across their faces he uttered: “That’s the
very
smell!” They took an instinctive turn further up the street.

“It’s obviously appropriate,” Mr Greville said, “that the first person you should be in a position to make reparation to should be your father’s first victim. You’d better,” he added, “let me do the initial talking to him.”

They were standing beneath the glass portico of an hotel, and through the open door, up the steps, they had a view of three negroes in blue, high-coloured uniforms.

“The point is,” Don said, “what am I to offer him?”

Mr Greville considered the point, and gazing at the lift that inside the hotel came down and disgorged a girl in white feathers and a chocolate-coloured attendant, he uttered:

“The point is, what he’ll be contented with.”

“You’ve a more mathematical mind than I,” Don said. “How does it work out? Say we put it that my father made him a loan of $700,000

when he stole the mine thirty years ago and we allow interest at five per cent.”

Mr Greville, with his eyes upon the girl in white, who was leaning across the office counter, made an absent calculation. But before he could utter anything Don had said:

“But I want to be fair. I’ve got to consider my father’s other victims. And the people Kratzenstein stole the mine from. And I’ve got to consider that but for my father’s genius the mine might never have been proved to be workable, or it might have been discovered by a third party. I want to get at not only the mathematical chances but the moral chances. For supposing Kratzenstein had had his rights thirty years ago, mightn’t he have made infinitely more than the compound interest on $700,000 at five per cent? Mightn’t he be now the richest citizen in the world?”

He surveyed his father-in-law elect with a mildly humorous glance whilst one of the negroes came down the steps and asked them if they wanted any gentlemen in that hotel. Don said sharply that he didn’t: that it was a free country and that wasn’t the hotel’s sidewalk. The negro said that if they were calculating on seeing any of the actress troupe that were there they wouldn’t, for they’d gone round the town on a Seeing-New-York trip. The lift disappeared and came down again with a fat man with a red tie and a sombrero.

“It’s impossible to know
what
to do,” Don said, “there are millions of considerations.”

Mr Greville seriously considered the man in the sombrero, who was leaning over the office counter beside the girl in white. She was laughing with the clerk: the clerk had grey hair, an English manner, and a pleasant, tired smile.

“I should say,” he said, “that you’d better make the acquaintance of Mr Kratzenstein and then act upon impulse as he affects you.”

“But,” Don said, “I don’t want to act upon impulse. I want to discover what are the moral responsibilities. It sounds ridiculous: but I’m quite in earnest.”

The lift went up again and came down once more with four young men in bowlers and
négligé
shirts. They all went to lean over the office counter and waited patiently whilst the young lady in white chatted with the pleasant clerk.

“That lift’s very worrying to me,” Mr Greville said, and they moved still further up the street till they came to where the sidewalk was entirely torn up before a vacant plot. And here the roar of the trolleys on Broadway made it necessary for Mr Greville to raise his voice.

“If you want my recommendations,” he shouted, “I should suggest that you find out from him what he would consider to be a really comfortable affluence for himself and his children — and give him just that....”

It happened that along the blaze of Broadway there shot an immense ladder, with a wildly clamorous bell, and immediately afterwards the young lady in white, two negroes, a man in shirt sleeves and a very agile, fat Irishman, jostled hastily past them. Mr Greville’s voice came eventually out of the dwindling tumult:

“The first thing to do is to see the man; without that you can’t form any judgment as to whether he’d have made a fortune or whether he’d have used it well or ill.”

“I guess,” Don said discouragingly, “they’ll find it easier to settle that fire they’re off to than I’ll find it to settle what I’m to do.”

“Oh, see your man first,” Mr Greville said.

As they passed the hotel door Mr Greville noted that the fat man in the cowboy hat, and the four young men in bowlers, reinforced now by two more without any hats at all, were still leaning over the office counter asking for their mails. The pleasant-looking clerk was not visible.

“I should suppose,” he said, “that you use a good deal of time over obtaining your correspondence in this country.”

But even Mr Greville was not able to extract very much from Mr Kratzenstein. He desired his evening shave. But the old gentleman, with his profuse white waistcoat, his alpaca coat and his gold pince-nez, was of opinion that Mr Greville’s hair would be much better for a cut. With a slow, benevolent and authoritative manner: “It looks,” he said, “dam foolish like that.”

Mr Greville said that he was in the habit of having his hair cut only by one barber — in the Haymarket.

“Better have your hair cut,” Mr Kratzenstein answered, and having put on another pair of pince-nez with steel rims he added once more, as if he were satisfied with his new inspection, that it looked dam foolish like that.

And whilst, with a fat and benevolent deliberation, he waddled round his subterranean store, fetching bits of cotton wool, face cloths, sponges and essences, he amiably countered Mr Greville’s attempt to speak about Montana with:

“Ah! I guess’d you’d come to talk to Kratzenstein about that. But it’s dam foolishness. What you know about Montana if I talk? — English pipple doand know about Montana. I serve my apprenticeship in the shop you talk about in the Haymarket. I kep’ a shop of my own in Ladbroke Grove, London, before I sell it to go West.
I
ken talk about London, Eng., and about Hamburg, where I come from. But what you know about Montana? Nothing. Better haf your hair cut.”

He continued to mutter that he’d guessed they’d come to Kratzenstein to talk about Montana; whilst tilting Mr Greville and the velvet chair bodily backwards he suddenly became both speechless and motionless.

“Your hair
does
look foolish like that,” he said; and receiving no answer he continued suddenly: “All these journalist fellows is foolish...”