Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (365 page)

Wooden stairs turning rather awkwardly half way up led them to the bed-room floor. The room which was exhibited — the sleeping apartment of Mr and Mrs Johnson — was as severely, as frugally white as the living room down below. Two beds, quite small and of white, soft wood, were covered with blue serge from head to foot. The fireplace, which had apparently been newly put in, had a circular hearth of very bright red bricks and there was a little semicircular mantel-shelf of white deal. The window curtains, here, also, were of red twill and with the exception of two of the white, high backed chairs there was nothing else at all in the room. Mrs Lee explained that Mr and Mrs Johnson washed themselves in the back garden if it was fine or at the scullery sink during rainy weather. Mrs Lee just pushed open for the Countess’ benefit the doors of the two apartments that were occupied by the absent housekeeper and by Mr Brandetski. The housekeeper’s room, from the glimpse they had of it, appeared to be tidy and from it there issued the strident, mechanical notes of an invisible canary. Mr Brandetski’s room presented, on the other hand, a sudden, swift vision of grey flannel garments tossed on the floor, of a pair of boots on an unmade bed and a glimpse, too, that the Countess caught of a sort of plaque — it might have been a buckler or it might have been a salver, of beaten silver. But Mrs Lee closed the door very precipitately, fanning out with it a momentary gust of tepid, stuffy air.

“The poor man,” Mrs Lee said, referring to Mr Brandetski, “has been used to such great luxury! These Russian persecutions are terrible!”

She indicated to Lady Croydon a fixed wooden ladder — it had, indeed, very much incommoded their short stay on that landing. It led, she explained, up to the loft where they stored apples, quinces, nuts and the other simple fruits of the countryside.

“And that,” she maintained to Lady Croydon, “is our idea of the whole needs of man.”

Lady Croydon was somewhat at a loss for a reply. She could not see in what the cottage differed from any of the cottages on her own estate. It had communicated to her a slight shiver because it was so bare and so clean. She hazarded, however, the remark:

“Don’t you think they could do with some more cupboards?”

For, several years before, the King and Queen having visited the London County Council workmen’s dwellings in Tooting, His Majesty, to the astonishment and edification of all the newspapers of the day, had made this very suggestion. And overwhelmed by the sagacity which to her seemed almost more than royal, Lady Croydon had never from that day forward, been able to think of any dwelling-place of the lower classes as anything else but a receptacle for cupboards. In her gardeners’ and grooms’ cottages she had contemplated having them put in under stairs, across the corners of the rooms, beneath the kitchen dressers, and even under the sinks. But Mrs Lee encountered her with the remark:

“Oh, we have so few superfluities!”

The Countess looked at Mrs Lee.

“You live here?” she asked.

Mrs Lee hesitated a little. “Oh, I don’t exactly live here,” she said. “I live at The Summit near French Street. When one has a husband and children one can’t always do exactly what one wants.”

The Countess said: “Ah, no indeed,” sympathetically. “But I’m over here every day practically,” Mrs Lee said. “I superintend. I smooth out difficulties. I have been called — I’ve even been called
‘
the heart and soul of the Movement’”

“Then do you really think,” the Countess said, “that it
is
all quite respectable?”

At this moment Mr Brandetski stumbled up the stairs and the question was unanswered except by Mrs Lee’s eloquent eyes. Brandetski pushed past them and into his room, the door of which he shut with some vigour, It suggested to the two ladies that they should descend the awkward stairs. In the living room they found Mr Luscombe who was looking out of the window and whistling through his teeth, his hands in his pockets.

CHAPTER III

MR GUBB, who was panting very slightly, startled Mr Bransdon by the speed with which he entered his door.

“Countess Croydon is coming,” he said. “Will you weave or will you dictate?”

Mr Bransdon, always very easily startled, was more particularly perturbed by anyone entering his room very hastily.

“I wish you wouldn’t do it,” he said on this occasion. “You know I don’t like it. One of these days I shall have a fit.”

“Oh, no you won’t!” Mr Gubb said. “My dear friend, the healthy conditions under which we live — our almost ideal, hygienic regulations...”

Mr Gubb was clearing from the oaken slab of the table the remains of Mr Bransdon’s dinner. He set the scullery door open that he might with more speed carry out the pewter plates and the horn mug. Mr Bransdon’s living room exactly resembled that of Mr and Mrs Johnson except that the fireplace was upon the right-hand side of the door and the windows upon the left. It contained, moreover, the loom, and as a concession to Mr Bransdon’s habits of luxury, an old-fashioned dresser of dark wood. The dresser had about it a certain sumptuousness of appearance. It displayed a dozen pewter plates, a drinking horn with tripod feet of silver, half a dozen pewter pots and a mustard pot, a pepper caster and a salt cellar, also of pewter, whilst from a nail on one side hung down an old pair of mahogany bellows and, upon the other, a brass warming-pan. In the further end of the room between the scullery door and the wall was Mr Bransdon’s loom. A fire, however, burnt upon the flat brick hearth of the ingle, and before it Mr Bransdon crouched, though it was the commencement of summer, for he was always chilly.

Mr Gubb rapidly rinsed out the horn at the sink. He perfunctorily wiped the pewter plates and set them beside their companions on the dresser. He picked up from the cokernut matting a red herring’s head that Mr Bransdon had let fall during the course of his meal.

“It’s nothing of the sort,” Mr Bransdon exclaimed. “My conditions are about as unhygienic as they can be. I ought to have exercise. I never have any exercise. That’s why I’m so fat.”

Mr Gubb was used to querulous moods in his leader.

“Of course, if you weave,” he said, “it looks more simple. But I think that if you dictate it’s really more impressive.”

Mr Bransdon raised one of his shaggy eyelids, giving an odd impression that one half of him was piercingly perspicacious and the other half lazily half asleep.

“I wish you’d shut that door,” he exclaimed. And then he added with an imperiousness that was certainly more than Mr Gubb had expected: “Of course you prefer me to dictate. It lets you show off your devotion!”

“My dear friend!” Mr Gubb exclaimed.

“Oh, don’t ‘dear friend’ me,” Mr Bransdon answered. There’s nobody to hear you. I’m not going to weave, and I’m not going to dictate. I’m going to have a walk. Perhaps I’m going to have a game of Bowls. I need exercise, I tell you.”

“If you haven’t got anything fresh in your head to dictate,” Mr Gubb said, “you could do ‘Riders to the Hills’ or ‘The Waste Places of the Sea’ over again. It doesn’t really matter about having anything new. It’s just to show people a typical example of how we live.” Mr Gubb was pressing his head against the window-pane and peering painfully sideways along the road.

“She’s coming out of Johnsons’” he said. “Won’t you sit in the loom-seat? It’s so much more impressive!” A sort of shiver of discontent passed all over Mr Bransdon. He cast a look of savage dislike at Mr Gubb’s back. But, his shoulders shrugged up and his hands hanging before him like an anthropoid ape, he shuffled his trodden-down slippers over the matting and, with an expression of distaste, heaved himself sideways into his loom-seat.

“This is all blame rot!” he exclaimed.

The latch of the garden gate clicked. Mr Gubb, trotting swiftly across the room, caught up his reporter’s tablet and his pencil, and, according to the established custom, so that the chanting voice might be heard through the closed door, Mr Bransdon began to speak from deep in his throat and Mr Gubb became engrossed in his shorthand:

“I will hie me to the waste places of the sea,” Mr Bransdon chanted. “To the weary, waste places of the sea where ever the wind wails weary from the north —

“I will cast my soul to float upon the desolate stretches of the tide, yea, upon the stretches of the tide I will make for my soul a black and bitter bed —

“I will set my fingers in my matted hair, nor in my ears shall sound the cry of the sea-bird’s keening for Ulalune....”

By infinitesimal gentle shakes the latch of the door was lifted. It swung back inaudibly, and upon the threshold appeared Mrs Lee, her finger reverentially upon her lips directing to Lady Croydon a glance that told her imperiously to maintain complete silence. The Countess gazed in at the door with a slightly imperious and a puzzled look, and over their shoulders appeared the face of Gerald Luscombe, slightly amused, slightly expectant. Behind them stretches of the Common were green and bright in the sunlight. Mr Bransdon’s eyes looked downwards so that he had an air of a sort of mystical blindness.

“Oh, Ulalune lost!” he chanted. “Girl of the grey eyes and the milk-white feet: no more beside the lone rath nor upon the lorn hillside shall thy silver hand beckon me to pursuit ——

“Unseen of thee shall all the little foxes play by the Corrighan Ghu: the doves of Eimir shall call unto thee and they shall not hear thee. Nevermore, oh girl of the snowy forehead and shell-like breasts, nevermore shall thy grey gown rival the tender mists of Oysium ——

“Lo, I have begotten me to the waste places of the sea. Black and bitter is my bed. Black and bitter is my companionless bed....”

The door closed once more with a movement of the slowest and the most reverential, and when the catch of the latch was once more securely in the hasp, Mr Bransdon, retaining his high and hollow note of voice, changed his chanting to the syllable:

“Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!”

He maintained this noise until it might be imagined that the listeners were well out of earshot, and then he said with a sudden, intense sharpness:

“Look here, you, I’m not going to put up with this sort of thing any longer.”

Mr Gubb said soothingly: “Well! well!” He was confident enough that when the next batch of visitors came along he would be able to persuade his wayward leader into the old course of action. He rose and was making towards the door.

“It’s all very well,” Mr Bransdon exclaimed. “There you go, dancing attendance on people, picking up all the desirable acquaintances you can, and here I have to sit, acting the fool like a blame sick monkey. Let me tell you I’m as good a man at conversation as you are, and I’m pretty fairly sick of this great Panjamdrum business.”

Mr Bransdon came out of his loom-seat with an activity altogether astonishing. He moved, that is to say, about one-third as slowly as an ordinary man would move. Nevertheless, he came towards Mr Gubb and snatched his grey tweed hat heavily down from the nail behind the door.

“I’m coining with you,” he announced.

Mr Gubb uttered a “But...” and then he relapsed into silence. “After all,” he said, “I don’t see why you shouldn’t. Except,” he added, “that it will look as if your dictation was merely a dramatic display.”

“Well, it was only play-acting, wasn’t it?” Mr Bransdon said.

They started out from the cottage side by side in pursuit of the Countess, Mr Gubb impressing upon his great man the fact that though the dictation had been in the nature of a display, there was nothing really meretricious or deceptive about it. It was the usual sort of life they led. It was the sort of thing to give a new visitor a true idea of the sort of people they were. Mr Bransdon, however, only breathed through his nostrils deeply and with an air of uttering mordant sarcasms. He plodded silently over the grass until his heavy breathing resembled the puffing of a locomotive. Mr Gubb had seen Mr Bransdon in a great many tempers, but he could not remember ever to have seen him exactly like this before.

The Countess and her companions were some little way ahead of them, just at the beginning of the row of new cottages that Luscombe had built to accommodate the original tenantry of Luscombe Green. The cottages had an air, indeed, of an extreme newness, twenty of them being built in blocks of two each along the wavy line of the by-road that led from the Green down into the valley. Being built of slabs of concrete with a rough and rubbly surface, each pair of houses was long, rather low, and of an extreme, a dazzling white. And Mr Major, having fetched his tiles from the brick-works that he affected in East Kent, the roofs were of a redness as extreme and as dazzling, and each had a bright green door. For the moment the sky above them was of a limpid blue, the grass was very green, and the gorse bushes which surrounded them were showered, as if from a liberal pepper box, with golden blossoms. Far down below them and for miles and miles of a bluish grey towards the south stretched Surrey and Sussex. A plantation of high fir trees sheltered their long gardens from the East, and goats and donkies pastured peacefully all round them whilst lines of very white, of very pink, or of very mauve garments, dancing in the fresh breeze and suggesting here and there distended human forms, showed that it was Monday.

“My dear Gerald,” Lady Croydon said, “this place is almost too good for working people. It’s an earthly paradise.”

Luscombe said with his ruefully humorous smile:

“You wait till you hear the tenants tackle me. I only come near the place when I’ve got to.”

An old man in corduroy with a forest of white whiskers and exceedingly hard, blue eyes was, indeed, leaning over the gate of the first cottage that they approached.

He was letting grains of maize dribble one by one between his fingers for the benefit of the cock and four pullets that cackled and exclaimed before the gate. He pulled his pipe from his mouth and touched with the point of its stem the brim of his battered wideawake.

“Aft’noon, Muss Luscombe!” he exclaimed. “Aft’noon, the company!”

Gerald put as bold a face as he could upon his:

“Well how are things, George?”

The old man maintained for a moment a gloating, a diabolical silence, and then replied in a croaking voice that united at once, as it were, mystery, reserve, querulousness and a sense of injury:

“Well, not so be exactly as how you might say first-rate. Not quite that there tiptop as it might be.”

“Well! well! well!” Gerald Luscombe said cheerfully. “What’s the matter now?”

“What I mean to say,” the old man said, “if as how be, you wants a straight answer to a straight question, t’s this here water, sir.”

“Oh, it’s still the water!” Gerald Luscombe said. “Haven’t you tried the stuff for softening it?”

“What I mean to say in the manner of speaking...” the old man began.

“The water’s the best you could possibly have,” Mrs Lee cut in energetically, her breezy voice winding far away over the gorse bushes and bringing to the door of the next cottage a woman and two children.
“
It’s entirely superstition to imagine that it could possibly disagree with you.”

“What I mean to say in the manner of speaking,” the old man recommenced with an extreme patience, “is as how my missus says to me: ‘George, throw the dirty stuff away! Throw the dirty stuff away, George!’”

“
But if you want to drink soft water,” Gerald said, “you must use the water-softener.”

“Measter” — the old man addressed Gerald, hut he waved the stem of his pipe round at the assembled company as if to them he were a judge indicting his landlord before an indignant jury—” in a manner of speaking and what I mean to say is, I was seventy-two come Monday, three weeks back. For seventy-two years I have lived in Luscombe Green, and for seventy-two years I have drunk none but rain water. What I mean to say is, what’s this new water? What is it?” He paused and surveyed with a sort of gloating indignation Mr Bransdon and Mr Gubb, who had arrived within a few feet of Lady Croydon. “For seventy-two years,” he continued, “what I mean to say is, you might have eat your dinner off the bottom of our kettles. Now what’s it like? Fuzz! Fir! What I mean to say is, it’s muck as deep as my finger and marbles ‘aint no good. And as for this here water-softener, why, we’ve a-tried them in a manner of speaking, and it only meakes them wusser and wusser. ‘Tis more like a hog pen than a kettle!”