Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (361 page)

It was Ophelia Bransdon’s idea to start a periodical that should enshrine the views of the Simple Life. Ophelia Bransdon was then sixteen, and being exceedingly precocious she did not see why Mrs Lee should any longer be the life and soul of the community. She began at first by writing down her adopted father’s sayings in an ornamental hand in copying-ink which she multiplied from a square tablet of gummy matter. The results, however, were faint and disappointing and Ophelia, hearing that Mrs Lee laughed at her efforts as being childish — Ophelia with a grim determination gave Mr Gubb no peace until he purchased for her a printing-press and a set of type. Fortunately, Mr Stanison P. Chote the young Bostonian who started the “Unconventional” which he printed at Cowbridge three miles away — fortunately Mr Chote at this juncture committed suicide. The sale of his effects being attended almost exclusively by cottage people who came to buy jam and pickle jars, and Mr Gubb being an intimate friend of the auctioneer’s whom he had employed very frequently whilst he was still a solicitor — Mr Chote’s hand-printing-press and his founts of ornamental type were knocked down swiftly and quite furtively for £3, 10s., to Mr Gubb.

Ophelia toiled at her new profession with a determination incredible in anyone connected with Mr Bransdon. She sat up nearly all through the night: she laboured all through the day. Her fingers and her fair cheeks were always smudged with printers’ ink, and in ten days she had produced her first perfect postcard. This contained the words of the great Bransdon, quoted by Miss Stobhall, to the effect that whoso eateth of his fellow-creature, though it be but a chicken, wrings the bosom of the angels. This postcard, which Ophelia sold for a penny, was used by the Simple Lifers upon all occasions suitable and unsuitable for the sending of pictorial correspondence to friends and acquaintances. Mrs Lee, even, to be still in the head of the movement, despatched an example to every butcher whose name was to be found in the directory of the County of Kent. Within three months Ophelia Bransdon had turned out the first copy of the periodical called “The Mare’s Tail.” It consisted of sixty pages of the selected sayings of Mr Bransdon and his disciples, the four remaining pages of a sheet of sixty-four being taken up by the two pages of the cover, one page of advertisements of hygienic jam manufactured by Mrs Driver of Crow’s Nest, near Prog’s Cottages, Court Street, Kent, and the other by another advertisement setting forth the virtues and the humanitarianism of vegetable leather sandals as worn by Mrs Lee of The Summit in the same parish and county.

So this Colony had prospered.

CHAPTER VIII

ALONG shaft of sunshine smote through the clouds from the westward when, towards half past six, Mr Gubb climbed the pathway over the brow of the hill and on to Luscombe Green. He pulled off his hat, wiped the small drops of sweat from his shining forehead and surveyed the hamlet of Coombe Luscombe whilst he was recovering his breath. The rain had held up for a quarter of an hour now, yet so sandy was the soil that already the roads looked dry and in the paths across the Green there was no clotted mud at all. Mr Gubb felt himself to be very high in the air, the air itself was very fresh and the wet sunshine sparkled on little wet houses that surrounded the broad Green. A company of six white geese marched out from under the shadow of the inn signboard over the road and on to the grass. The back of a donkey showed over a mass of gorse, and two goats with long chains trailing from their collars were cropping beside a milestone. Mr Gubb looked down the long slope of the road that led towards New End, five miles away: he was searching for the fly and he perceived it at a distance of perhaps half a mile coming laboriously at a foot pace up the long slope. He stood still at first to await it because he did not wish to invade the Luscombes unsupported. Then suddenly he began to walk along the little group of tiled cottages to inspect them and to count them. “The Promised Land!” he exclaimed. “By Jove, the Promised Land!” There were nineteen small cottages and an inn. Each of them was old and well tiled: each had white painted rails and nearly all had comfortable-looking barns and lodges containing small carts or thriving poultry. The cottages had each from four to five rooms and stood in gardens from forty to fifty yards distant from each other, the gardens being at that time mostly a riot of sweet-peas in whose grey, green network they appeared to stand knee high. All the window frames were painted white and several of the gables were completely covered with Virginia creeper, ampélopsis or wisteria. That the cottages numbered nineteen struck Mr Gubb as remarkable, for he had to think of housing exactly nineteen families and there could not be any doubt in his mind that this must be the ideal spot for the Colony that he desired to lead out of the mud of West Kent. Coombe Luscombe was four miles from the nearest station: it stood, except for Crowbury, upon the highest plateau of Surrey or Sussex; it was surrounded on all sides by open moorland, broken up here and there by great and intricate mounds of gorse. The soil, as he saw, dried very quickly. The air, as in all these upland reaches, was very pure and always cool. But as he turned to walk back towards the approaching fly Mr Gubb’s brow clouded. Landlords, it was part of his official creed, were such obstinate, such retrogressive persons. Might not the landlord of this village sulkily refuse to have anything to do with the Simple Lifers? The landlord class were set against advanced ideas and might very well object to turning out a subservient tenantry in order to install a whole colony of Intellectuals.

But then again Mr Gubb’s brow cleared. He planted his heels more firmly on the ground. He had one tremendous argument. The Simple Life paid. It paid well. It paid very well.

His particular scheme had been moulding itself in his mind for more than a year. His idea was this. He would form himself into a company which should acquire either the freehold or the long leases of a quantity of land or of a sufficient number of dwellings to house all the Colonists near Frog’s Cottages. These dwellings and this land, the Simple Life Limited would let out to its supporters in such parcels as they might desire, charging a sufficient margin of rent to provide work-buildings and various other communal necessities. Mr Gubb had not at this time any idea of making a personal profit. What he desired, though he had never put it in words to himself, was to be the actual organiser, the dictator of a prosperous “going” concern along lines of a sufficient idealism to gain for himself a certain sphere of influence. In his contacts with humanity for the greater part of his life he had always been half conscious of the fact that he was treated with a sort of contemptuous indifference. He had almost always had to adopt the attitude of a sort of toady. He had toadied to the late Mr William Morris: he had toadied to various members of the Fabian Society, he had toadied at first to the great Bransdon himself. And this he did not very much like. He was aware that physically he was not of a sufficient decorative impressiveness ever to be of great importance as a figure. Since he never saw himself he could not tell exactly what was wrong, but his experience in the Scottish constituencies that he had contested had rubbed it very well into him that he could not ever be impressive. He knew that although he could speak fluently he had never yet succeeded in affecting anybody with pathos or inspiring them with enthusiasm. At the same time he knew that he was practical and he knew that he was indefatigable. Thus, though he did not really aspire to wealth except in so far as it supplied tranquillity of mind and a certain measure of power; and although he did not aspire to fame because he knew it was fated that he should never get it, Mr Gubb thought that he might make himself indispensable to some Cause. He had been content enough to remain in the background and let Bransdon become the great Bransdon; he had been content because he knew that he held, if not the strings of power at least all the reliance and trustfulness of the apostle of the Simple Life. As for the Simple Life itself, no one could exactly have said what was Mr Gubb’s attitude towards it. He talked about it all day. He never talked about anything else, and with an indefatigable ardour he had read everything of any authority that had been written on the subject. He had got up the case of the Simple Life as, much earlier, he had trained himself for his legal career. He had read carefully every one of the ninety-eight Fabian tracts that by that date had been published; he had retained in his mind the salient point of all the works of Count Tolstoi, of Mr Edward Carpenter, of Mr H. G. Wells, of Dr Saleeby, of Henry George, of the late Mr William Morris and his school; he had read with attention all the periodical literature of an idealistic nature or of a hygienic materialism ranging from the leaflets of Mr C. B. Fry to
The English Review.
And indeed, you might have said that his own idealism limited itself to a cold and cool-headed determination to be “up” in his subjects, so exactly at his fingers’ ends did he have every statistic that could be desirable or every tract that was published. Indeed, since he suffered much from indigestion, Mr Gubb talked a great deal in his sleep and, again and again, through the thin partition between their bedrooms, Hamnet had heard his father exclaiming, deep into the night, phrases like: “Noble humanitarianism!”

“Dark Ages of Commercial Greed!” and “We advance a Universal Brotherhood!”

So that Mr Gubb might well be said to be saturated in his subject. He lived for it: he exuded it from every pore of his pink skin. Nevertheless, as he walked back towards the fly that was cresting the rise and lumbering into a trot, Mr Gubb was rehearsing in his mind the inducements that he could hold out to a Tory Landowner. In the first place they could pay — and pay well and regularly. He did not suppose that that was everything — he had had to do himself with the landowning classes in his professional past and he was aware that the large landowners paid some attention to the characters of their tenants. He did not at the moment know who was the owner of Luscombe Green: he imagined that it would prove to be Earl Croydon, and he figured himself as confronting his Lordship. He considered that he would have to be bland — like the family solicitor he had been in the old days. He would smilingly deprecate — as between one man of the world and another — the harmlessness of the prospective tenants. He would point out that their main features were that they were undeniably well-meaning and universally friendly. They were friendly to every sort of idea as long as it was advanced enough. It was perfectly true that they disliked Industrialism — but then so might just as well the country landowner. And Mr Gubb had not the least doubt — so he would be able to inform the Earl — that he would be able to persuade all his tenants to go to Church on Sundays and to vote Tory in a solid block. They had not as yet settled the principle of church-going or of political action. And Mr Gubb knew very well that he could get poetical declarations from Mr Bransdon on both these subjects. And indeed, Mr Gubb in the few minutes that remained to him warmed quite briskly to this idea. He desired to stand well with all men; he would like above all things to stand well with an Earl, a Tory, a Landowner, if it could be done along idealistic lines. And after all, Church-going, particularly on a Sunday evening, was a simple, a picturesque, a medieval revival and communistic, too, for the matter of that. You went into a little, old Church, the organ played simply, you sat amongst the peasantry, you worshipped the Centre of all things as people had done in earlier and simpler days. And Mr Gubb, who always had at the back of his mind the desire to make moving and pathetic speeches, imagined that in this alone, if in nothing else, he would be able to let himself go. And it was not, he argued with himself, wrong to go to Church. It was not in itself wrong so long as you went in no conventional spirit. Similarly it would not be wrong to vote Tory as long as your heart was in the right place. The Simple Lifers welcomed
all
kinds of advanced ideas. Thus they would be perfectly ready to agree that all the Unemployed ought to be drowned, so long as you left the roads open to tramps and gipsies who were picturesque. And Liberalism, of course, is the foe to all advanced ideas; is the Party of timidity, of compromise, of everything that the Lifers hated. The Lifers had no Party except that they were against — yes, certainly they were against — Liberalism, Nonconformity and commercial ideas.

Communing with himself in this way, Mr Gubb perceived that the fly had turned in at a gate beneath two chestnut trees in a sort of wall of tall-growing laurels. To catch it up he had to trot slightly and the motion, shortening his breath, shortened also his flow of ideas. He arrived at the doorstep just as, like a large mass of jelly, Mr Bransdon was groaning and lurching out of the fly. Miss Stobhall had already stridden into the drawing-room at the back of the gloomy hall, and into this room over the flags the two gentlemen were shown by a rather astonished maid. She could not get over the fact — for in her modesty she had kept her eyes on the ground — that both these gentlemen wore cloth sandals and no stockings, and that Mr Gubb’s bare feet, as far as they could be seen, were covered with the sand and mud of the road and field paths.

Gerald Luscombe was alone with Hamnet and Ophelia, for Mrs Luscombe and Mr and Mrs Melville were engaged in dressing for dinner, it being then about a quarter to seven. Mr Luscombe was seated, leaning forward, in his arm-chair. Hamnet was standing with his back to the window, his legs apart and his hands pressing into the small of his back so that his body bent forward in the attitude of an animated orator on the top of a tub. Ophelia lay deep in a saddlebag chair. She was wearing a sort of tea-gown of grape-coloured velvet which fitted very close to her figure and was certainly all of one piece, except that the broad
revers
, which bordered a very considerable
décolletage
, were of Spitalfields silk, worked in pink roses and blue lyres, finished off with a broad and heavy fringe of gold thread. Mrs Luscombe had made Ophelia a present of this dress which she had worn only five times because, when she had got it home she had disliked the colour. Miss Stobhall, who appeared the most energetic of them all, was standing, panting a little, in the centre of the carpet. The two men stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway twisting their pork-pie hats round and round in their hands, for just a moment like two peasants suddenly introduced into a London drawing-room. Miss Stobhall said with determination to Gerald Luscombe:

“Perhaps you’ll let us have the use of the room for three minutes? We sha’n’t need it for more.”

Mr Luscombe rose slowly. “I’ll go and dress,” he said.

“
I suppose you’ll all stop to dinner? We expected Mr Hamnet and Mrs Bransdon, but we’ll knock up something to eat all right.” And he lounged easily past Mr Bransdon and Mr Gubb, saying: “Happy to see you. Hope to have a talk with you after dinner.” He closed the door behind him and then suddenly Miss Stobhall advanced upon the form of Ophelia that lay extended in its chair.

“You put your hat on and come away with me at once,” she said.

Ophelia slowly disengaged herself, moving with some awkwardness because of the tightness of her garment around the knees. She appeared to balance herself with both her hands.

“I shall do nothing of the sort,” she said. “This place is engrossingly interesting.”

Mr Gubb cleared his throat and in turn advanced towards her. Mr Bransdon, with his hat behind his back, wandered desultorily round the large room gazing moodily at the large chocolate-brown portraits of deceased Luscombes, at the views of Venice by Canaletto and the pictures respectively of three cows and two sheep and four sheep and two cows, the one by the late Sidney Cooper and the other by Verboeckhoven. The room possessed an awful fascination for him. He had never in his life conceived anything exactly like it, so pure was it in its early Victorian style — and his life had been passed amongst navvies, amongst South African negroes and in Soho. It reminded him — this room — very faintly of the headmaster’s drawing-room in the school in Epping Forest where he had been accustomed, as he could dimly remember, with awe in his mind and a brown paper path spread over the carpet for his hob-nailed boots to walk upon — he had been accustomed to polish the grate every Saturday morning. He became entirely insensible to the fate of Hamnet and of his adopted daughter in whom he took not the slightest interest. He fingered the cut-glass drops of the lustre candlesticks upon the black marble mantelpiece. He gazed at the reflection of himself in the enormous and gilt-framed looking-glass. And suddenly he combed his bluish-streaked beard with his stubby fingers which had been crushed by a girder fifteen years before in British East Africa. He turned rather quickly and began to examine the contents of the large table that ran down the centre of the room. Made of one slab of pink marble with green veins, with legs of gilded brass showing cherubs’ heads, griffins’ feet and ornaments in the style of foliage, this table supported a sombre mass of heterogeneous objects. The centre of the pile was formed by three great books in stamped and gilded cloth. These supported three vases made of imitation Lapis-lazuli. In between the three vases reclined two brown emu eggs. There was a crystal globe upon a white marble base, a fragment of stone from the Temple at Jerusalem, two silver-gilt pen trays, two Dresden china figures of a shepherdess in pink, and a gallant in green removing a purple hat and, under a glass shade a model of the Taj Mahal executed in pith — a whole museum of objects which possessed for Mr Simon Bransdon an almost unholy attraction. He found himself wishing that he could possess them all, finger them all and live with them all for the rest of his life.