Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (236 page)

“Oh, that,” he said, “is so much in his character that I don’t think even
he
could see the other side of it!” And he added, after a pause: “The whole thing amounts to this: Don is, as you’ve said often enough, a poet. But he’s like me in being hopelessly out of date with his time. You’re exactly right when you say that he’s more in touch with Aesthetic Settlements than he could ever be with Coney Island....” Eleanor realised that her father was really going to make a very long speech: she realised that he was defending Don with a sort of wholeheartedness that she had never heard him use before, and that he was actually pleading with her in the darkness. He was pleading with her to elucify her sense of right and wrong: he was trying to make her see that she mustn’t mix up the wrongness of an individual with wrong views of the necessities of a nation. She felt intuitively that he was really saying: “Don’s in this matter perfectly right to abdicate. He’s right to see that his brain isn’t fit to face these problems that he couldn’t get hold of. It isn’t, in this case, a weakness. It’s a strength.” Actually he was saying: “Don is acting precisely as I’ve acted all my life. He hates modern circumstances. I don’t say that he wants what
I
want. He doesn’t. He isn’t for the Tory Party right or wrong. But he
is
for Aestheticism right or wrong. He
does,
really, want the American people to go in for certain European virtues — for Poetry and the Higher Thought and Rational Dress. Well, they can’t! How can they? America is made up of men who’ve fled from him just as much as they’ve fled from me. It’s made up of people who left Europe because they could not stand Tory restraints or Poetic restraints. How in the world could he impose himself on this steamboat? These people wouldn’t like a fourteenth-century air played on a virginal. They want a tune called ‘On the Shady Side of Broadway’ played on something that makes a braying noise. I’ll admit that it’s poetic from one point of view. I’ll admit that you’ve given an admirable exposition of the point of view. But to Don and me it will always remain beastly!”

“But,” Eleanor said, “New York isn’t America. The West’s America. Miss Dubosc has told me! Don hasn’t seen the West.”

“My dear child,” Mr Greville said, “how can you be so disingenuous? You don’t pretend to imagine that you think cowboys and miners aren’t even newer than New York. Do you think that Don is going to be able to convert
them
to mediaeval gowns or a love for Fra Angelico?”

He didn’t wait for any answer to that knockdown blow and Eleanor, whilst Don was explaining to her how exactly her father had
really
“sized him up,” brought out towards his retreating figure:

“Aren’t you really merely trying to set Don against this country because you hate this country?” Mr Greville came slowly back to say:

“Aren’t you trying to make Don love this country because, out of affection for him, you’ve hypnotised yourself into loving things that normally you couldn’t stand?”

He stood right before her again, back upon his heels.

“This steamer isn’t really more orderly than a Greenwich steamer. Coney Island is not, really, more delightful than Earl’s Court. New York isn’t really more beautiful than London. You like it because you’ve got yourself in the mood to like it. But that’s not the point. The point is that Don isn’t, really, any more the proper person to regenerate New York than I’m the person to regenerate London. I’ve got the sense not to try it for London: you ought to have the sense to be glad that he isn’t going to try it for New York.”

He was silent for a minute and then he said:

“My dear, you haven’t begun to think because you’re so anxious to see Don act. How could he ever understand America? How could any one ever understand America or the future of America? You can’t tell anything about it. You can’t tell that in a hundred years it won’t be populated entirely by Latins and Sclavs. Do you understand that at present that seems to be its probable fate? Well, then, what would be the good of Don’s trying to form the future of a mixed race of Latins and Sclavs — and negroes? How could he? He doesn’t understand them: he never could. And the best thing he could do — the most heroic action — is to have the self-restraint to abstain from muddling.” He turned upon his heel and in the light from the hatchway they saw him pick up the tired man’s child that had once more fallen from the rickety stool.

Eleanor remained for a long time silent: it was Don who did the talking.

“At bottom he’s exactly right,” he said, “though he doesn’t explain my actual feelings. My actual feelings are simply bewilderment — and horror.” And he went on to describe his bewilderment and his horror. He had been simply appalled at New York — at its squalid back streets, at its hard voices, at its hideous language, at its physical recklessness, and at the fact that he hadn’t discovered, anywhere, a trace of desire for anything morally better. They only wanted, all these people, plush instead of cotton, six-course dinners instead of one meal of canned meat, a chance of a million dollars instead of a daily wage of one dollar twenty-five cents. “Of course,” he said, “I don’t say they won’t develop ideals. But they can’t ever be my ideals. I can’t understand things. I’m bewildered: I’m frightened, and oh — I’m dreadfully tired.”

She put, in the darkness, her arm round his neck and pulled his head down to her shoulder.

“Dear,” she whispered, “I’m a brute, and you’re right. You aren’t the man to do these things, and oh, my own thing, if you’re just going to be my man and nothing else, oughtn’t I to welcome it!”

But he couldn’t rest there: he raised his head and then stood on his feet before her.

“I know,” he said, “that you’ll despise me. I’m not the sort of brave knight that a woman wants.”

“Oh, dear,” she said tenderly, “a woman wants a lover. I don’t believe that, even when there were knights, women didn’t love the men that stayed at home — if they were fated to love them — more than they loved the Lancelots.”

“But you,” he said, “you would have loved a Lancelot.”

“Oh, dear,” she answered again, “I only want a lover who’ll know what he wants.”

But even at that he couldn’t say more than:

“Let’s walk up and down!” And if she remembered another blackness upon another steamer, and another lover, she made for him the quick excuse that he was, poor dear, after all his runnings about in foul air and squalid surroundings, in a state of nervous, quivering exhaustion.

And all the same, when they stood in the bows and saw, majestic and overwhelming, the great man-made cliffs, the twinkling lights that seemed like those of cottages on a mountain — when she saw that unforgettable sight that Don still pished at, she couldn’t help thinking that her father
had
been unjust to her. It was, in the blackness, above the waters, with its mysteries of a harbour and the feeling that it gave her of men striving to climb to heaven, this great conglomeration of human efforts was, to her, supremely beautiful and unforgettable. She couldn’t help feeling regret at the thought that this was probably the last time in her life that she should ever see this hill that seemed with all its lit windows to be a mass of gnomes’ fires; she couldn’t help believing that she’d have been moved by it in any case. And she couldn’t help thinking that it was ironical that if she had — and with her woman’s desire for submission she tried to believe it — if she had forced herself to admire these things for Don’s sake, that very admiration, arising out of her love, should have brought her so near to her first sense of disunion with him.

“I shall have,” Don said, “to give a certain amount of time to studying factory conditions now,” and he added: “but if it weren’t the fact that I’m the master of my father’s enterprises I’d leave this beastly country to-morrow.”

And something panic-stricken and almost cruel in his tone made her say:

“I wish, dear, that we could!”

She was really afraid that he was going to be ill.

CHAPTER V
.

THE power to put their wish into effect came that evening.

They were going to sup, for the fresh air of the boat had given them all appetites that there was no dissembling, when there came to Don a message that he was wanted at the special telephone line he had had held for him between their rooms and Mrs Kelleg’s house in Boston. And whilst Don went Eleanor sat herself down in her hat and coat — she was too tired to do any dressing — in the dim, dusty lounge at the side of the entrance door. It seemed to her that, upon the whole, this was the quietest place in New York, and though it wasn’t rational to want quiet in New York she did certainly need it. The ottomans had a soiled splendour, the light fell bluely from Oriental mosque-lamps that, oddly enough, were of red glass; there were settees draped with Persian carpets, little black stools that might have been of walnut wood, a slightly misty, slightly smoky tinge in the air, and a general feeling of desertion. She lay back in a stuffy armchair and made ready to rest for ten minutes. There didn’t seem anything left for her to do; there didn’t seem anything left for her to say. If she wasn’t any longer to try to make Don like his own country there was no need for her to try to do anything.

From the far corner of the room came the monotonous, restless, querulous, high sound of an American woman’s voice: it was the sort of sound that you couldn’t possibly much want to listen to — but it wasn’t at all troublesome. If it wasn’t quite as soft as the cooing of doves it wasn’t as nervously exasperating as the cackle of poultry. She made out in the dim light, and gradually, a dark, feeble-looking, French-looking, endlessly-talking girl, who showed in her profile dark eyelashes that softened her eyes and a large, weak nose. And, as gradually as she made her out, Eleanor made out from her monotonous words that she had just got back from Europe and was talking, languidly but determinedly, about the Carlyle House. “Of course we visited those sacred precincts every day we were in the British metropolis! No, he wasn’t — What a hero! — My! How can you say so?” (Her companion’s voice was inaudible just as her companion was hidden.) “He
isn’t
their property. He’s ours! We’ve a thousand times more men of his kind than ever
they
had.
He
was an American at heart if ever there were one. Hadn’t he got just all our virtues?”

Eleanor let her ears cease to attune themselves to the girl’s voice: she began to count the beads on the transparent fringe that fell from the mosque-lamp. But suddenly the girl’s voice rose to a shriek:

“His wife! That silly, vain, little thing! Did you ever hear what he wrote on her tombstone?

‘The glory of my life has departed!’ Wasn’t that enough for her? Wasn’t that enough for any old Englishwoman? He was enough to give you the jimjams! How can you dare to sit there, Mrs Vandoff, and say so! I tell you he was a great and glorious genius. Oughtn’t any silly, vain Englishwoman to be proud of being the slave of such a hero! Why, I tell
you,
Mrs Vandoff, he’s had more effect on us and our thought than any man this side of George Washington. Isn’t that glorious enough for
any
Englishwoman if it
was
a martyrdom to live with him?” And the languid girl in the white blouse positively moved her hands in her excitement.

And Eleanor, with a little sigh, wondered how near it had come to her to be a silly, vain, Englishwoman, martyred to provide an influence for American thought. For decidedly that was what Don, at the outset, had prophesied would be her fate. And, in a sense, there couldn’t be the least doubt that Don was a sort of a genius...

“Nerves!” the dark girl shrieked out. “Of
course
he had nerves. Of
course
she had a bad time. But how
dare
you say it wasn’t her duty to bear it?”

A bell-boy was suddenly asking Eleanor to come to the young chap at the ‘phone. He wanted her pretty bad...

Don had found the little bell of the telephone in the Marie Antoinette cabinet impatiently and incessantly on the buzz. He had had — it had been the sole employment he’d made of wealth that was more like the lamp of Aladdin than anything he could imagine — taken up a special line from his stepmother’s house, where daily Augustus had been conferring with the trustees of the will, with attorneys, with the heads of departments, with the heads of other trusts in association with the Kelleg Combines. The gradual, small details of the huge business had come to him, bit by bit, over the wires in Augustus’s voice. There wasn’t any doubt that the wealth at his disposal would be so unthinkable as to be almost negligible. It figured up gradually, as interest after interest came to be investigated, at four million dollars the year, at seven, at twelve, at eighteen.... And at about that point Don had begged him to stop sending figures. It seemed likely that when they’d taken into account all the rail-lines, all the bakeries, all the factories, all the copper mines, all the everything that his father had dabbled with, it might go to fifty, it might go to a hundred million dollars a year. It had been for Don a sort of worrying, of disturbing, immensity. It had made him feel almost poor simply because he couldn’t map out any sort of scale at which it would be thinkable that he and Eleanor could live. His mind could have gone to about ten thousand a year (English), but he would have been much more able to think of two — and he’d been accustomed to live simply upon four hundred.

He got at it too that although his stepmother had received from his father exactly all she’d asked for — all she’d asked for hadn’t exceeded a few months’ income of what had come to Don. And Canzano, too, who’d got a great deal more than he’d expected, hadn’t come in for more than a week’s or so....

Augustus’s voice came sharp, small and clear to Don’s ear:

“We’ve got it pretty well worked out after a fortnight’s ciphering. The total amounts to...”

Don’s head was aching: his hand that held the black and silver receiver quivered at his ear, he leant forward from Marie Antoinette’s own favourite chair with his elbows on the polished wood of the little yellow cabinet. His mind was filled with rage and impatience: his brown eyebrows came down into a heavy scowl.

“Would you mind remembering,” he called into the mouthpiece, “that I don’t want to hear what it amounts to!” Sometimes he had a curiosity to know: at that moment he had an absolute hatred of the thought of this invisible, this maddening, this mere sound of huge figures. He was about to say: “Write it down: send it in a letter. I’ll read it when I feel inclined,” when he heard, faintly at his ear:

“I can’t go now, mother. I can’t. This is business!” And the words puzzled him a little. Then the voice took up loudly and with confidence:

“Oh, I’m sorry it annoys you. But it wasn’t that I had to say. I have put
that
into a letter.”

Don called: “Well!”

The wire that he had had installed was so perfect that he heard a faint, gleeful chuckle.

“What it’s really necessary that you should know is that I’ve seen to-day a secret agreement between your father and all his other associates.”

Don said: “Well! well!” — and again he was conscious of a low, sibilant chuckle.

“It cuts both ways obviously enough,” the voice said, “though no doubt your father meant it to bind only his associates to
him.
I’ve got the main provisions of it jotted down — it’s all on one sheet of paper. But you’ll remember that your father’s will states that you inherit the income subject to all agreements entered into by him...”

It was at this point that Don — as if he were conscious of a malevolent influence in this colloquy with the invisible — begged him to wait a minute whilst he asked Eleanor to come up to him. He didn’t, positively, like to be alone. The high panels with their tapestried shepherds, the chairs with their lyre-shaped backs against the walls, the lights in clusters upon the imitation wax of the candlesticks — ah these things affected him deeply with a sense of solitude, a sense of smallness, a sense of impotence that he hadn’t felt since he had been a small child. And the repeated mention of his father’s name had brought a tense sense of his father again before him. His father had sat on those very chairs, had looked at those very pictures with his twinkling badger grey eyes of a man used to baffle and outwit. He suddenly felt as if his father were once more saying: “Not this time, sonny!” as occasionally Mr Kelleg had said to him behind his mother’s back when, in one of the endless “ructions” that these panels had witnessed — after, poor things, they had witnessed ructions how different in a France how distant — his father had winked at him and uttered those words that meant that his mother was worsted even in a battle of words.... He was aware that his legs trembled a little as he walked to the hotel telephone to send for Eleanor, but he sat down once more at the little cabinet and, resting his head upon his left hand, applied once more the receiver to his ear.

“It affects your schemes for breaking up the Trusts very materially,” Augustus’s voice came to him: “it amounts to this...” and the words paused: “that you’re absolutely impotent.... Absolutely impotent... absolutely... absolutely... impotent!”

Eleanor didn’t at first want to disturb him: she didn’t, really, notice that his immobility was more than that of engrossed attention, and she stood quite still in the doorway watching him tenderly. But she thought: “How ill he looks, poor dear!” And, “How I wish we
could
go back to England.” And, for the first time, a sudden longing, a sudden homesickness overcame her. She remembered that the streets of Canterbury would be redolent with the smell of hops...

And suddenly she noticed that, beneath the streaming lights, Don’s face was chalk white, with parted, quite silent lips. And then he groaned — and then his lips moved:

“Of course,” his voice was just distinguishable: “of course it
would
be ‘Not this time, sonny!’ again.”

She went quickly to the second earpiece that, for her especial use, so that she too might always hear, he had had attached to the machine, and Augustus’s voice struck her like a blow, clear, hard, hateful.

“The general effect of it is that if you tried to pull out of any engagement without the general consent, the penalties...” — she heard the rustle of paper as Augustus turned over the sheets that he was reading from—” the penalties you would have to pay would be so enormous that in a very few weeks — the penalties being by millions of dollars daily — all your interests would have passed into the hands of your associates. And that, I take it, would leave the things very much worse than if you continued to own them, for your associates are a fine set of sharks. Your father, in short, has simply fooled you. Mrs Kelleg has told me that from conversations he had with you in Boston formerly he thought he’d perfectly sized you up — that you wouldn’t want money, you’d want power — so he’s left you with all the money in the world, and you’re simply absolutely powerless to change a thing. That was his intention and he’s carried it out. You’ve got to have ninety-seven odd millions a year, but you can’t interfere with the works one cent’s worth. It’s there in black and white. It’s absolutely...”

It was at this point that Eleanor noticed Don. His head had fallen forward upon the hard surface of the cabinet, the little black and silver earpiece hung from its cord near the floor.

She called into the mouthpiece:

“You beast! Oh, you beast! He’s fainted.”

And she heard:

“I’ve got in on his self-sufficiency then. I’ve got in — I worked the melodrama....”

“D’you mean it’s not true?” she cried.

“Oh, it’s true,” he said. “He’s a mere gilded coupon. He’s tied hand and foot. But I’ve rubbed it in. He won’t chuckle again for a bit...” Eleanor hung the receiver up.