Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (362 page)

Mr Gubb had begun to address Ophelia in soft and persuasive tones.

“This seems to us,” he said, “to be the right moment when you should travel — when you should enlarge your mind.”

“We had arrived at precisely the same conclusion ourselves,” Ophelia was interrupting when Mr Gubb cut in again:

“Your foolish proceeding of this morning we have decided altogether to ignore. The reasons against your marrying we have already rehearsed.” Mr Gubb looked over his shoulder and said “eh, my dear Bransdon?” Bransdon turned swiftly round like a guilty schoolboy and exclaimed hurriedly:

“Certainly my dear Gubb. Marriage is a most inconvenient thing. We have decided against marriage.”

“But you’ve all along said,” Ophelia maintained, “that you claimed no parental authority. You always said, both of you, that parental authority was an accursed thing for fathers and children. We acknowledge no authority of any kind.”

“We acknowledge nothing. We acknowledge nobody,” Hamnet Gubb exclaimed spiritedly. “The thing is over and done with. Leave us in peace to develop our minds.” And with a little gesture of his hand he appeared to brush his father out of his meditations.

“You’ve got to be separated somehow,” Miss Stobhall said. “Even if the police have to be called in to you for making a false declaration of your ages before the registrar.”

“But to be separated is just what we particularly don’t want,” Hamnet said. “There’s no nonsense of love or passion about it, but we want to pursue certain common investigations. We have a mission.”

“The time,” Mr Gubb said, “has become very critical for our community. You are perhaps not aware that we have this morning sold our present abode, and that we are in search of another. Now if at this critical moment anything so contrary to the principles of the Simple Life as a marriage should take place, the effects on the community as a whole must be disastrous in the extreme. We have always decried marriage. With what sort of a confidence, then, could we face our comrades and ask them to seek with us a new resort? You must see for yourselves that it is your duty to sacrifice your individual wishes to the good of the whole community.”

“Oh, you’ve sold the cottages!” Ophelia exclaimed. “You’re going to move!”

Miss Stobhall was overcome by irritation at so much talk and she appealed to Mr Bransdon with such suddenness that Mr Bransdon let fall the vase he was fingering.

“Tell them,” she said, “that they’ve
got
to separate. Be a man for once in your life!”

The vase, having had only an inch or so to fall on to the cover of the book, did not break. Nevertheless an intense nervous irritation jarred Mr Bransdon to the very centre of his soul. He turned upon Ophelia; he squared his shoulders, his eyes gleamed and he shook his hairy fist towards the girl’s face.

“Separate!” he roared suddenly reacquiring his voice that he had used to his teams of niggers. “You separate, by God, or I’ll cut the sold out of your body! I’ve had enough of this thing.”

Ophelia regarded him with a sort of sleepy insolence.

“We haven’t consulted upon this matter,” she said. “But for my part I’ve not the least inclination to separate or to go away in any crucial position of affairs. I’ll remain and see that things are done to my liking.”

Ophelia was thinking that if things were going to be done she was certainly not going to go away and leave to Mrs Lee a controlling voice in their movements. She was going, herself, to be the life and soul of it.

“I shall certainly remain here,” she concluded.

She looked over her shoulder at Hamnet with a sort of regal indifference. Very tall and very much trussed up by her dress she had quite extraordinarily the aspect of a lady of the extremest fashion talking to a parcel of boys. A sort of hopelessness came over the features of Mr Gubb and he looked at Miss Stobhall to intimate that he had told her so. He knew Ophelia Bransdon so remarkably well.

“Then I shall take
you”
Miss Stobhall announced to Hamnet. “I’d rather have you than her, but I thought it right to give her the first chance. I shall take you,” she said, “to Florence and then to Odessa. That will knock some of the nonsense out of you.”

“Yes, she shall take you, by God!” Mr Bransdon exclaimed, but a great deal of the spirit had oozed out of him already. He was itching to turn again to his tableful of bibelots. He wanted to be left alone and he was getting hungry for he was accustomed to have his evening meal at seven o’clock and the unaccustomed fresh air had whetted his appetite. Hamnet extended his feet still more widely.

“You know, Ophelia,” he said, and he agitated his pince-nez judicially towards her, “you know we have agreed to go out into the world for three months.”

“Well, I’m certainly not going,” Ophelia answered. “Not now. I’m going to see what’s being done. You can please yourself.”

“The position,” the young man continued, “is in one sense complicated and in another not complicated at all. I think,” he addressed Mr Gubb, “your arguments have a considerable weight, and though I should dislike to imagine that Ophelia and myself have ever acted precipitately or without due consideration. I can well believe that the fact of our marriage at such a juncture might be prejudicial to the interests of the community as a whole.

So that if Mr Bransdon advises it — for I have the greatest respect for the opinion of Mr Bransdon...

“Oh, see a bit of life, see a bit of life!” Mr Bransdon muttered, still attentive to the table. “There’s the finest American bar in the world at Florence. I wish I had a Manhattan cocktail from it now!”

Hamnet Gubb was used to such pagan declarations from Mr Bransdon who in absent-minded moments was apt to revert to an earlier manner, and to a phraseology entirely foreign to the ears of the Simple Lifers. So that he took Mr Bransdon’s words for a sort of allegorical benediction. He addressed himself, therefore, to Ophelia:

“I still feel,” he said, “a decided inclination to enlarge my mind by travelling in the outside world. For although I am convinced that in matters of abstract thought my horizon is as wide, and indeed very much wider than is necessary for a person of my age — nevertheless in such matters as human vicissitudes and experience I daresay that I am a little lacking. And although, also, it ought to be taken into account that the community is at a crucial point of its existence when my voice and counsels might be of some use, I have so usually found that my father’s opinions and mine so exactly coincide that there is comparatively little need for my assistance at your deliberations.”

“Oh, we can do without you perfectly,” Ophelia said. “If you want to go, go!”

“My young friend,” Miss Stobhall said grimly, “you’ve got to come with me and that’s an end of the matter. You’re going to be my adopted son and we’ll see if I can’t make something like a man out of you. So you come now, at once. I told poor Bessie that I’d let no harm come to you and I’m going to see that it doesn’t. Though she wasn’t your mother she took enough interest in you for that and you’re just as much down-trodden as any refugee I ever helped. So off you come, at once.”

“You had better,” Mr Gubb said, “go.”

Hamnet put his pince-nez on and looked at their faces short-sightedly one after the other.

“I’m not offering any opposition,” he said. “But at the same time Miss Stobhall must understand that not even for the purpose of making travel more easy for her shall I ever at any point in general conversation in the least mitigate or conceal views which form an integral part of my conception of life.”

“Come now,” Miss Stobhall said, “let us be off. Fall upon each other’s necks if you feel that way inclined. I shouldn’t, but it will be a precious long time before you see each other again.”

She determinedly held the door open and pointed in the hall. Hamnet stalked towards her.

“We aren’t in the habit,” he said, “of indulging in leave-takings or in greetings when we meet. They’re pure conventions.”

He disappeared from the room. Miss Stobhall vented a deep sigh of relief. She gazed at Mr Gubb who had gone a little white at the base of his nose. “That’s settled,” she said, “and you may thank your lucky stars that you have had me to settle it for you.”

Mr Gubb opened his mouth to speak, but he found nothing to say and he stood transfixed.

“Your son will be in good hands, if that’s what you mean,” Miss Stobhall said, and she closed the door upon herself as she went out of the hall.

Mr Bransdon continued to stare at the table: Mr Gubb went to look out of the window and Ophelia Bransdon sank once more deep into the saddlebag chair.

As no one else in the house had perceived Miss Stobhall and Hamnet departing, it was a full quarter of an hour before Gerald Luscombe liked to interrupt what he considered to be their earnest deliberations. And it was only when Mrs Luscombe pressed the suggestion upon him and reminded him that dinner was already twenty minutes late and that the grilled herrings would be like timber, it was only then that Mr Luscombe had the gong rung and entered his drawing-room.

PART II

CHAPTER I

MR GEORGE EVERARD stood upon the doorsill of Coombe Luscombe and gazed over the village green. The clumps of evergreens had all been removed and lawn stretched out to the roadside, so that he had an uninterrupted view.

“By Gum!” he said. “They’re at it!”

Against the distant skyline a number of figures were filing out from the cottages, towards a high pole, like a flagstaff, that had a sort of hoop depending from its summit. The figures formed a sort of disorderly band. They began to caper, attenuated, leggy, as Mr Everard would have said, and waving rather lean arms.

“They’re at it, they’re at it!” and he began to hum “Come Lasses and Lads!” He was waiting for Gerald Luscombe to come out: he had driven over with Mrs Luscombe’s sister, Polly Smith, to pay his visit upon his engagement to that young lady. And Luscombe, having shown him half over the colony that morning, was going now, after lunch, to take him through the rest of it. But a rather smart landau, hung high upon leather straps, swayed in at the gate, the horses stepping very high. It pulled up with a gentle jerk before the doorstep just at Mr Everard’s feet; the footman seemed to fall from the box and had opened the semi-circular door of the carriage before Mr Everard had had time to remove the fat cigar from his lips.

Everard was a dark man of maybe forty with black eyes, a white waistcoat and a crisp moustache that in its formal curve exactly resembled the horns of a water buffalo. He had a rather straight, keen glance, an almost humorous twinkle always in his eyes, and he liked, when it was at all appropriate or possible, to stand with his legs rather wide apart and his thumbs in the sleeve holes of his waistcoat. For the moment he was wearing a large white Panama hat for which he had paid the sum of forty-two pounds. He was the manager of the Talavera Theatre and had been engaged to Miss Polly Smith for nearly six months, so that he felt himself to be a member of the families both of Smith and Luscombe. It was he who, several years before, had offered Mrs Luscombe, gratis, a place in the front row in his ballet, for which his usual charge was two hundred and fifty pounds.

A lady in a black straw hat with black feather boa, a grey mannish dress and brown, rather commanding features, not particularly presentable in Mr Everard’s eyes and slightly jerky in her movements, descended from the carriage, leaving behind her a rather anæmic woman with a frosty face and well-worn clothes. She marched up quite close to Mr Everard and said:

“I have come to call.”

Mr Everard said:

“Well, it’s very kind of you, but I’m not Luscombe.”

“I’m Lady Croydon,” she said. “I suppose I had better ring the bell. I hear your... your friend has such interesting works in hand.”

Mr Everard waved his cigar towards the open country.

“If it’s Mrs Luscombe you’ve come to see,” he said, “you had better ring the bell. But the show’s commenced. They’re at it. If you listen you’ll hear the orchestra.” The lady closed her eyes and gazed across the form of her companion, over the village green at the hopping figures.

“They’re dancing round the maypole, you know,” Mr Everard said.

Lady Croydon gave him a rather friendly glance.

“Well, this isn’t the way to pay a call,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll oblige me by ringing the bell.”

Lady Croydon found Mrs Luscombe sufficiently unnoticeable and her sister, whose voice had decidedly high notes, a little bit vulgar, but she devoted most of her conversation to Mr Luscombe. She desired to get some idea of how he was going to make his new enterprise pay. Luscombe tried to make her see that the task he was engaged on was one of public spirit and she said:

“Of course, of course.” After a minute she added:

“But any really valuable public enterprise ought in the end, oughtn’t it, to be worth the while of its organisers?” Mr Everard cut in with:

“I assure you, you’re perfectly right. Any other sort of arrangement isn’t possible. You can’t get the best out of people if they aren’t engaged in a paying concern. That’s the answer I always make to all those fellows who want a National Theatre. Now at the Talavera...

Lady Croydon turned her attention upon the stoutish man who sat leaning forward in the chair that Ophelia Bransdon had once sprawled in. Mrs Luscombe was easy enough, but her sister who was caught out in a golf skirt and a white cotton blouse carried a singularly stiff back.

Gerald Luscombe half sat, half leaned upon the marble top of the long table. He was regarding with attention the flame of the spirit lamp that was boiling the silver kettle on a small, painted, Chinese table.

“You are Mr Everard,” the Countess asked, “of the Talavera Theatre?” and she added: “My nephew says the “Girls of Girton” is very good fun. I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen anything this year.”

Miss Smith exclaimed: “It’s a perfectly ripping show!”

“It’s been deuced bard work!” Mr Everard calmed her. “But I maintain that that’s the sort of thing that the public wants — does it good. Laughter is the salt of life.”

“Ah, but you’ve got to have the bread and beef, too,” Lady Croydon commented.

“I get them both out of it,” Mr Everard said. And the Countess smiled and Miss Smith laughed upon a very high note.

Lady Croydon pulled her card-case of green leather out of her masculine pocket. She seemed to fold her hands in her lap as if they contained a half-concealed tip, and at the same moment rose stiffly from her chair. The kettle had just begun to boil.

“Thanks, I won’t have any tea,” she exclaimed. “But if I may take a glance over your improvements as I go...”

Mr Luscombe expressed a gentle willingness to show her round, and Mr Everard said he would give them his company because that was what he had come for, anyhow. They left Polly Smith shooting a calculating glance at her sister. Miss Smith was regretting that that morning she had expressed the fact that she didn’t take the least interest in the colony, and that nothing in the world would induce her to go over it. She was not minded now to change her mind so obviously for the sake of a countess, but, looking at her sister, she thought she understood what the Luscombes were, as she put it, “up to.” Before then, she had not for the life of her been able to understand.

As they went through the hall Mr Luscombe waved his hand towards the dining-room door.

“The printing works,” he said, “are in there — that is to say, they’re in the billiard room that leads out of there.”

“But what,” Lady Croydon asked, “what is it, as one might say, all about? The land pays us so wretchedly badly, that if you’ve any secrets for getting more out of it than we can, it would be only neighbourly to give Lord Croydon and me what they call, in the stables, a straight tip. You can’t say we haven’t been neighbourly, because you know we’ve had to let our little place for the last seven years, and we’ve been big game shooting exiles all the time.”

Fanner’s Mall, the seat of the Earl and Countess Croydon, had indeed been let for the last seven years to Sir Isaac Hartenstein who, when he was not at Farmer’s Mall, was spoken of as “Of the Band.” But Lord and Lady Croydon, who had really spent their time in various Colonies and the remoter parts of India, had succeeded in marrying their second and unmarried daughter, Daphne, to young Lord Neil Rose, a subaltern in the King’s Royal Rifles, who had joined his camp with theirs when they had gone tiger shooting from Simla. They had also succeeded in getting their only son appointed a director in the Anglo-Indian Petroleum Corporation, having met Sir Gabriel Moss, the chief promoter of that enterprise, on board the mail ship which had carried them from Rangoon to Colombo. They had thus effected such economies that, the Dowager-Countess, having become reconciled to her daughter-in-law and agreeing to live with them at Fanner’s Mall, in lieu of two-thirds of her jointure, it seemed possible that with rigid care and by raising the rents a very little all over that estate — the price of wheat having hardened and it being unlikely ever very materially to fall again — they might possibly be able to live at home. This seemed to Lady Croydon the all-important thing in the world, since poor Croydon suffered so lamentably from home-sickness and could not stand tea made with any other water than their own.

And upon arriving at home she found the County really agog with the proceedings of Gerald Luscombe.

She had weighed in her mind the position of Mr and Mrs Melville, and being accustomed to bother her head very little about any other consideration when Croydon’s nights might be ameliorated — which always happened when he saw a chance of putting his rents up — Lady Croydon had determined to call upon Mr Luscombe with such precipitation that the honour might seem extremely marked. She was determined to get at what there was in it all, and for the matter of that she had always liked Gerald Luscombe as a boy, and he was her second cousin by marriage, the Luscombes having always been in the habit of intermarrying with the Skillingtons of Fanner’s Mall.

“Now do tell me all about it, there’s a good boy, Gerald,” she said as soon as they were well out of hearing of his wife and sister-in-law. For though Lady Croydon was willing to extend to Luscombe the amount of intimacy that the Christian name implied, she was not as yet at all certain in her mind how far she was going to go with his wife. Evangeline Luscombe made upon her the impression of a decently unnoticeable person. But she had not liked the sister, and except for the fact that to know Mr Everard might mean free tickets for his theatre, she wanted to get to know, before she got to know the Luscombes, how far knowing them would mean having to know a crowd of what she called “City people.”

“Yes, that’s what we want to hear.” Mr Everard echoed her last speech. “Tell us what you’re up to and all about it.”

“I don’t know,” the Countess said, “that I want to see the printing business. I don’t think I’m particularly interested in printing. Some other day will do for that.” Mr Luscombe smiled a large, kindly smile.

“You’d learn all about it in ten minutes from one of the pamphlets,” he said. “It will take an immense time to tell.”

They were upon the doorstep by now and the Countess pulled out a half-hunter from a masculine sort of pocket in what resembled a grey waistcoat.

“I can give you an hour and ten minutes,” she said with the determination that was so characteristic of her. She said some words in the ear of the footman, who sprang like a deer to her side, and in the result the carriage, with its shiny, high-stepping horses and its high-slung body containing the apparently frost-bitten companion, moved with a swift smoothness down the drive and whirled in a very proper style out of the gate. The three followed it slowly, the Countess between the two men.

“It isn’t a sort of Socialism, I hope?” Lady Croydon said. And Mr Everard seemed to ally himself at once with her by uttering the words:

“Oh, of course, it’s no rot like that?”

Mr Luscombe still smiled rather abstractedly and with a gentle aloofness.

“Oh, as Mr Gubb says,” he answered them, “if it is a kind of Socialism it’s not a political system but an effort of the will.”

“I don’t understand that a bit,” the Countess said, “Either it’s Socialism or it isn’t Socialism.”

“Well,” Mr Luscombe said — and the smile continued broad upon his face—” they’ve assured me that they’re perfectly ready to vote Tory in a body and go to Church on Sundays.”

The Countess’s step, which had hitherto been rather sauntering, quickened itself, and with somewhat of the air of the General who, upon a certain battlefield, closed up his telescope and ordered the whole line to advance, she said:

“That’s good enough for me. Let’s go and look at your collection.”

Mr Everard, however, not being a county magnate, was not aware that the whole duty of man consisted in going to Church and voting Tory. He asked therefore:

“But
can
a chap be a crank and vote Tory? I thought they all always voted for Keir Hardie and were Christian Scientists?”

“Ah, but the point is,” Gerald said amiably, “how far you
are
a crank. You see you’re a crank because you’re against the established body of opinion. You’re against the Government in fact.”