Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (238 page)

But it is equally true that as, gravely and gradually, they swung out from the little black wharf into the shining stream torn up with its innumerable shuttles she couldn’t quite realise that they were leaving New York for good. She certainly couldn’t realise it without regret. The flag-waving group — it was tiny indeed by comparison with the thousands that had greeted their arrival — disappeared. From further out she could see alike the immense name of the Pattern King and the smaller, but still vast, black and white announcement of Kelleg’s name. ‘It was very clear this time: they could see right up the Palisades and up the Hudson. The tall chimneys sent forth no black smoke, but from the cliffs that grouped themselves above the little green Battery there went up against the grey sky little plumes of white vapour. Tall, vast, grouped together, she couldn’t help still regarding them — all those grey, immense buildings — as a fine expression of a humanity that reaches towards the heavens. And then they “raised” Brooklyn Bridge — high, thin, like a spider’s web: and then the little island with its grim suggestion of railway sheds: and then the clumsy figure in a nightgown, with its torch like a policeman’s stave held in the middle...

“But isn’t it,” she said to herself, “all tranquil and peaceful and blessed?...” And then she noticed that on the white staff at the stem they carried the British flag.

“Oh, well,” she said — and the echo of a phrase came to her lips: “Little old New York is good enough for me.” And in a sense she really meant it.

Don didn’t want to see his city, he was below in his berth: Mr Greville was forward choosing deck chairs. The ship, in the clearness and silence beyond the final spit of sand, stayed a little to drop the pilot, curtseying in the rolling water. Then, engrossed and formidable, it made its way towards the nothingness of the horizon. Before them, a little to the right, a large Italian liner — British owned — was high out of the water, pouring away over its shoulder a great fillet of grey smoke; behind them another, British too, was overhauling them fast, gay and red and white in the sunlight that waited for them just beyond the Hook. Then the long, grey, whale-like piece of land that had greeted her arrival appeared in the distance and dropped astern. Then she was free.

And Eleanor too was free to pass through the stages and frames of mind that one has to — when one is an Englishwoman — in coming back to England. She had to do it for Don’s sake: it was, it seemed to her, her woman’s duty. It was a part of the “backing him up” in his actions; it was a part of her loyalty to him. She hadn’t, after all, the duty of forming conceptions: she had, as she saw it, only that of making the best of what he gave her.

It is true that her task was rendered singularly easy for her by Don’s compatriots: for she couldn’t be told that New York trolleys were faster than London trams (she knew they weren’t); that American women had the finest complexions in the world (she thought it was a matter of taste); that the American language was the language of Shakespeare; she couldn’t be overwhelmed — as she had to be — by the terrific blaze and bang of assertions of people who had never seen land to the eastward of them; she couldn’t be out-shouted, out-talked and reduced to a placid silence on these matters for ten days without gently taking up the cudgels. And she took them up, not so much for England as for Europe. She seemed to feel an extraordinary solidarity, a thing that she hadn’t ever before known, with Frenchmen, with Italians — even with the Scots.

When the slow vessel was finally surging mud in the Thames she didn’t remember to compare the gentle swiftness of the Customs men; she didn’t even remember to say that the silent departure in a little steamer from the great boat’s side was touching, dignified and gentlemanly compared with the moaning savage sound that had greeted their arrival in New York.

Nothing, indeed, marked any definite stage of her psychology until they were, all three together, walking up the crowded, dirty High Street that in Gravesend leads from a squalid pier to an incredibly dismal railway station. By that time, in the face of the vastness of the ocean, New York had assumed in her mind an air of littleness — of cleanness, of whiteness, of climbing towards the skies — but above all of tininess. And with its irresponsibility, its crowding, its noises — which did not any more seem to matter much now that she was separated from them by several thousand tranquil minds — it had taken to itself too an air of something pathetic and touching. She wasn’t any more, she supposed, ever going to see it again — and it became like a person that one has known well, a frail, small, chattering, fluttering, bright person that has died and that one regrets.

But the High Street of Gravesend, with its steepness, its unpresentable shops, its sooty roofs and its sauntering crowds — and perhaps above all the sight of a yellow, varnished canvas sou’-wester that, hanging outside a shop door in the foreground, seemed to give the note to the whole little picture, drew from her irresistibly the words:

“How picturesque!”

That was it: that was what New York hadn’t got: that was what she imagined there wasn’t to be found in all the Western continent. It was squalid, all this, it was crowded — it was, rationally considered, all as evil as you pleased. But in its huddling together of roofs beneath a grey, moist, fresh and gleaming atmosphere — an atmosphere that fused, that didn’t reveal details nakedly but shrouded them as beneath a gentle cloak — in all this there was a tenderness, a sort of humility. And when, in the evening, above dirty coal paths, above gleaming lines of rails, at Maidstone, they walked from one junction to another and she saw, above the indistinct mass of blackness, against a liquid, pale rift in the clouds that were folding in for night and rest, the square, black tower, the four attenuated little turrets at the angles, in the intense quiet that the hoot of engines didn’t even disturb, she suddenly felt — and it reassured all her misgivings — that this really was her home!

It reassured her in all her misgivings. For she couldn’t disguise from herself the fact that she had rather dreaded the home-coming. Suppose, she had said to herself, that she had acquired a “taste” for the clearness, the excitement, the contagious bustle of that other land! Suppose that really that was at bottom what appealed to her! Suppose that it should prove that she simply wasn’t able to accompany Don back into the atmosphere of Cathedral closes that, as he saw it, was the best that Europe had to offer! But she could! She could! And that night, as she knelt beside her bed, with all the old emotions coming back to her — with an immense awakening of satisfaction at the fact that she could be interested in the restful gossip that their old, fat, irritating cook had to tell her in a kitchen that gleamed with tin utensils and shone with its white tables and dressers — it was tears of thankfulness that really filled her eyes. She was going to be able to keep Don!

CHAPTER II
.

THEY happened to be in the Tottenham Court Road two months later, because they were purchasing furniture for the servants’ bedrooms at Cuddiford House. They wouldn’t have wanted to furnish the servants’ rooms from Tottenham Court Road: they would have liked, both, to give the maids the sort of good, old, really substantial furniture that they had managed to assemble for the rest of the house. But it had taken, they had found, such an extraordinarily long time to fill their own rooms! They had been at it for days and days. They didn’t want anything too new or too battered; they didn’t want anything that had been restored by furniture-dealers, or anything, on the other hand, that was too expensive. And they had been at it, day in, day out, ever since they had landed. So that if they had had to continue the same search on behalf of the upper rooms they might have had to put off their wedding till Heaven knew when.

They had fixed it between them that they weren’t to spend in any one year more than a couple or three thousand pounds. It would be making a sort of game of life — but what more could they do? Don simply hadn’t got the imagination of an Aladdin. He not only hadn’t the least desire to buy up castles or build marble palaces: he couldn’t even begin to think of how he could throw himself into the frame of mind. And Eleanor, with her shrinking from noticeability, accepted his lack of imagination with a very thankful heart. They simply weren’t going, ever, to mention his money. It was left to the stewardship of Augustus — and Augustus was to remain in Boston. His mother, it appeared, was to remain with him.

And everything ran so smoothly. Eleanor didn’t even, to her friends, do more than say that she’d liked America pretty well; she didn’t want to open sores in front of Don, and Don was always with her. And it is to be said that her task was a very easy one — for no one in Canterbury appeared to her to take the least interest in America. Their absolute, tranquil, immutable want of curiosity even astonished her — for in the United States the United States had seemed to her to be of importance. But there, in the Cathedral city, not a sound of it reached her ears: her father never mentioned it — and Don appeared at last to breathe again. It really seemed, more and more, as if they had only made his excursion into the basement to find a hammer that hadn’t been there.

They had come up to town in the last quiet month of the year. She was staying with an aunt in one of the quietest of the London squares. They had bought neat, white, light furniture and neat, white, brass-bound beds, and in the bright, mist-diffused light of the arc lamps they had climbed to the top of a motor ‘bus.

“Oh, isn’t it,” she had said to him as she snuggled herself against him on the seat, “isn’t it heaven to be in Tottenham Court Road again?”

The crowds wandered past on the narrow pavements; the low, yellow, painted house fronts — her eyes had been accustomed to looking so much higher! — seemed wonderfully low and cottage-like. The traffic seemed so quiet: there was no sound of metal, no clash; but they jolted and bumped serenely in the yellow keen air.

“Isn’t it heaven?” she repeated. And all the early days of their association came back to her.

The ‘bus jolted, bumped, and came to a stop, sideways across the road. The passengers behind them descended; cabs drove out of the way to pass them. They didn’t descend: they hadn’t any hurry at all. It was even like the old days because, since she was staying with her aunt, when she got home to the square a discreet, heavy hall door would close upon her and Don would have to go away.

Suddenly he struck his fist upon the back of the seat before them.

“I can’t do it!’ ‘he said.” I
can’t
do it!”

And she, in the midst of her happiness, was so ready for disaster that she hadn’t any need to ask him what he meant.

“I must go back to America!” he muttered huskily. “I
can’t
funk it. I must go back. Even if I can’t do what I wanted there are other abuses to remedy.”

At the very back of the empty ‘bus top the conductor’s figure appeared in the mist. He told them that if they wanted to go on another ‘bus was coming. But as they didn’t move he once more disappeared.

And the interruption had given Eleanor time to see what she had to do. She had thought it all out before: she had thought it all out on the evening when they had come back from Coney Island. She had seen it coming: she had known it must come. She stood up, moved past him, and then remained looking at him in the passage way.

“Then you know it means good-bye?” she said.

He didn’t move: his head was sunken beneath his shoulders: through the misty air from above a lamp shed scintillating rays upon him. She waited for a moment to see if he would speak.

And then the next image that she had of him she had from the pavement. Above the high rail of the ‘bus that slewed across the road, with the silhouetted figures of two men in uniform crouched solitarily in the mist above the bonnet, his hat and shoulders, silhouetted too, were black and perfectly motionless. She turned down the side street; she found herself in a square with a circular patch of trees that disappeared, black and silent, into the invisible sky. She walked once round the railings, sobbing aloud, but at the sight of a gentleman who crossed the road, evidently attracted by her solitude, she stayed her tears and walked away southwards.

And positively the only comment she had to suffer from came from Canzano in a letter of astonishing eloquence that she never brought herself to answer. As for her father, he never spoke; he didn’t even look at her when she made the announcement to him. She had somehow a sense that he was saddened; but she couldn’t be certain whether he approved of her decision for its promptness or whether he condemned her. He might condemn her for having taken up an enterprise and for having dropped it. But she simply couldn’t tell. Augustus remained in Boston, his mother remained with him. They never, either of them, wrote, and she attributed to the silence of one of them a black and malicious glee, and to the other a black and malicious hatred. But there wasn’t any doubt about Canzano’s disapproval.

“Why. did you do it?” he wrote. “Why did you do it? I can imagine two reasons: the one that your ideal is merely to enjoy life: the other that Don — oh, poor Don! — isn’t the sort of man to fit in with your scheme of life as it should be lived. You will wish me to dismiss the first reason at once, without a word of comment. You will say that your ideal is not merely to enjoy life. But think about it for a moment. Question your conscience. I admit at once that my poor half-brother is not the sort of man with whom at one’s side it would be possible to enjoy life. I will admit that he would have worn you out.... But there! Think about this reason for a little while. Perhaps I will return to it.

“Let us then consider the other reason. You think that Don — poor Don! — is not the sort of man to fit in with your scheme of life as it should be lived! You think it was your duty — to your sex, to your class, to your country, to your tradition — that it was your duty to cast him out. I know you very well: how typically English, how typically cold, how typically good, you are. You consider, you women of your class and race and type, that the first thing in life is to form a standard, a rule of conduct, and then to live up to it. Anything else is a weakness, and you could not face the responsibility of introducing into your family — into your
gens
— a weak man.

“You have thought — I
know
that you have thought — that Don would wear you out — that he would ‘get on your nerves.’ But no! The phrase is not ‘get on your nerves’ — for he
has
gotten on them several times and you have pardoned it. But what you feared was that, all your life, as you would have lived with him, he would have been constantly changing, he would have been constantly making up his mind and then reacting to the very opposite conclusion. And you feared that that would have been too much for you — that you would have ‘developed nerves.’ (That is the right phrase.) You feared that then you might have indulged in recriminations, that then yours wouldn’t have been one of those English families that live always in a sabbatical calm, that run by clockwork everywhere among your fat, green, tranquil hills and valleys. Isn’t that it? You were afraid that you wouldn’t, with Don, be able to keep up to your high standard of life.

“Well, that is an ideal. I know the English very well because I have spent a year at Oxford and because I have had long talks with you who are the most English woman in the world. And your ideal — the ideal of all of your good, Tory, English type — is simply that of a life that runs smoothly, decently, quietly — a life in which every man and woman knows exactly his part and has exactly his ideas.

“Do you know what has always struck me as the difference between your countrymen and women and those of any other nation? What particularly is the difference between the Englishman and the American? It doesn’t lie in the clothes, in the hair, in the features, or even so much in the voices. It lies in the eyes. Look at a gallery of portraits of your countrymen and at another of Don’s. Or, better still, look at a few hundred individuals. What will you see? That the Englishman’s eyes are always tranquil: he has formed his ideas: he has had them formed for him: he
knows:
he is never going to learn any more. Look in at the glass at your own fine, brown and beautiful eyes. You will see that look — and the same thing is expressed in every one of your slow, powerful features. It is the strong, placid, powerful gaze of the bull that looks away over the pastures and reflects.

“But with the people here it is so different: they don’t
know:
they haven’t any standards: they don’t know even why they live or what they live for: but they are always alert to meet circumstances, to form new judgments. They would be ashamed if they weren’t. And that gives to their glance its eagerness, its swift shiftings, its want of gentlemanly repose. You will say that Don isn’t an American, that his father was English, and his mother. But he
is
an American — for Americanism isn’t the product of a race: it’s a product of a frame of mind. The English who succeed in America are the very English who are stifled at home — who can’t stand your atmosphere of accepted ideas. They may have been born in Hampshire but they are born Americans — as American as if the Minute Man’s Stone at Lexington had heard their first wail in the night. And Don is the child of such Americans...

“You will say that it isn’t part of your business in life to marry an American. You will say that that look in the eyes is so much the most precious of the things that Great Britain has evolved that in its interests you have sacrificed even Don. You loved him so much — I know you loved him so much for I have seen how your eyes rested upon him — and you regret: and you are filled with a great sense of loneliness. But you thought it was your duty.... Oh, my dear, it wasn’t your duty! It wasn’t your duty in the great sense. Your duty was to be good, to be kind, to be dear to the noblest and best man you’ve ever seen. For Don is that!

“Can’t you see it!
Can’t
you see it! The children of great men — and his father was a great man — are frequently weak: but generally they have qualities that only need a wise nursing to render them very sweet and very fine. Don was weak, if you will. He mightn’t have fitted very well into your English life. But hadn’t he a strength? Wasn’t his craving to get at the best in life an action — wasn’t it heroic? Wasn’t it now?

“When, by his final reaction, he decided that he must come back here (he is now devoting all his attention to the study of American politics! He thinks that the secret of American regeneration lies in the getting rid of bribery and is going to devote his millions of income to getting rid of the other millions that are spent in graft) — when he decided that he couldn’t ‘funk,’ that he
must
do his duty to the millions of people that his father had wronged — he
knew,
I say, he knew that you would say to him:

‘It means good-bye.’ He knew it, and it has broken his heart, and yet he said his words and took the blow in silence. Wasn’t that really heroic?

“Couldn’t you have made something of such a man? Couldn’t you, if you had been older, if you hadn’t been so — so English? It
wasn’t
necessary for you to come to a determination and to act upon it. It
was not:
it
was not
— and again it
was not!
You, because you are English, you think it is necessary to be cold, to come to some decision in accordance with your character and to act upon it. But again, I say it wasn’t!

“And you have come to — I won’t say a wrong decision, but to one that wasn’t the only one. You’ve got another plane of thought upon which you could have decided. If Don had been blind, if he’d been crippled, if he’d been merely diseased, wouldn’t you have considered it your duty, your privilege, your tender and splendid pleasure to give all your life to nursing him, to waiting upon him? Well then, my dear, Don is a genius. He is a genius, and you who know him better than I do know better than I that that is true. And if you had looked upon his indecision not as part of his character but as a disease, wouldn’t you have considered it your duty — wouldn’t you have steeled yourself, and don’t you know that you would have been strong enough to nurse him?