Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (366 page)

“That only means,” Gerald Luscombe said, “that it’s getting rid of the stuff out of the water.”

“That’s agin
all
reason,” the old man said emphatically. “The water do be as clear as crystal. Stands to sense and reason it be that mucky stuff as makes the water mucky. Seventy-two year, in a manner of speaking, I’ve bin a teetotaler. Now I takes beer. If I can’t get rain water or pond water, beer’s my drink.”

At the sight of old George a nervous irritation had overcome Mr Bransdon.

“Pigs!” he said. “These cottagers are all pigs!” The Countess, whom this colloquy between tenant and landlord did not particularly interest, moved a little towards the great author.

“The ingratitude of the lower classes,” she said, “is so proverbial that it’s no use at all, is it, being distressed about it?”

“Distressed!” Mr Bransdon exclaimed. “If I had them in one of my nigger gangs I’d make them feel distressed!” He snorted virulently to right and left of him.

“But I thought,” the Countess said, in a slightly puzzled query, “I thought you — what is it? — held a brief for — ah — these classes?”

“My dear lady,” Mr Bransdon exclaimed, “they’re savages! The lowest type of the Mgonki are Christian gentlemen compared with my neighbours.”

Mr Bransdon, as a matter of fact, was far from popular with the villagers of Luscombe Green. If he took his walks abroad children would pop up from behind gorse bushes, exclaiming: “Blue Beard!” In the evening, hobbledehoys lounging round the base of the ale-house sign-post would call out to him as he passed. A representation of a gallows with himself dangling from it had been chalked on his front door, and on the solitary occasion when he had had his living room window opened upon a very hot night two cats with their tails tied together had been thrown in through the opening. Mr Bransdon, indeed, was not more unpopular than any of the other Colonists, but being of a nervous and autocratic temperament their insults caused him very much more pain. He was, indeed, under the impression that the villagers were actively engaged in praying him to death. But for the moment his peevishness deserted him, and in talking to Lady Croydon he revived some of his early air of gallantry and softness of voice.

“You were at the opening of the Salisbury to Nekmfali?” he asked. “I don’t often see the papers, but I still get cuttings about the old railway. Jove! We had some good times then! Was Mrs Loudon still in Mtele when you passed through?”

The slight bewilderment which these questions occasioned the Countess — for she could not have identified the poet whose chantings had struck her as being so eminently appropriate and fittingly picturesque with anything connected with Africa and its masculine coarsenesses; the remembering that she had actually been with her husband, during their wandering years, the guest of the resident Commissioner at the opening of that section of the Cape to Cairo line; the reminiscences that these facts engendered — all these things caused to arise an animated and mutually satisfactory conversation between the great author and the great lady. The Countess, indeed, had a sort of shyness at the idea of conversation with the Intellectual, and it caused her more than a little satisfaction to discover that she had no difficulty in keeping her end up with the gentleman whom she had been told to regard as one of the supreme mystics of the day....

“Now, here’s a funny thing,” old George was continuing to Gerald Luscombe. They had discussed the question of the water until it had exhausted itself by sheer inanition. The only concrete conclusion that they had arrived at was, that for seventy years old George had drunk nothing but rain or pond water and that now he was going to drink beer. Gerald Luscombe had given the cottagers a laid-on water supply, having brought the fluid at considerable expense by pipes from the spring in the fir-wood a quarter of a mile up the hill. But the grievance had aired itself, and Gerald Luscombe was thinking of passing on when, with a renewed air of mystery, old George had once again begun:

“Now this here’s a very funny thing! And what I mean to say is this. Is it, if so be it is, or isn’t it, if so be as it isn’t, an Englishman’s house is his castle?”

He fixed a vindictive eye upon Mr Gubb who, finding it impossible to secure any share of attention from the Countess, either for himself or for the Simple Life Limited, had drifted desultorily towards Gerald Luscombe and Mrs Lee.

“Well, that being so,” old George continued, “what I mean to ask is this. And saving your permission there’s some of us means to borrow these people’s meeting house” — and he pointed the stem of his pipe at Mr Gubb and Mrs Lee
—”
to hold a meeting for us chaps of ourselves, and what I mean to say is, about this here bath—”

“Oh, Lord!” Gerald ejaculated. “What’s the matter with your bath?”

“What I mean to say is,” the old man droned on, “is we to be stopped from storing injuns in our bath or aren’t us? Some they uses ‘em for potatoes and some for coals and some keeps the pigs’ wash in ‘em, being so handy near the sink. But we, we uses ‘em for injuns. And now up springs this Mr Major and says as how you mustn’t use the bath in that way nor yet in this a-way. And what I mean to say is, is a man to do what he likes with his own or where’s it to end?”

Mrs Lee broke in with:

“But my good man, a bath is meant for bathing in.”

“For seventy-two year — —” old George began once more.

“Oh, you horrid old man!” Mrs Lee ejaculated.

“What I mean to say is,” the old man continued, “saving your presence Mr Luscombe, sir, but not wishing to have no truck nor parcel with other parties, you having been a good master to me, you and your father before you for forty-nine years, I being wood-reeve and my missus being your wet nurse what brought you up, what I mean to say, by hand afterwards, and in a manner of speaking and not putting too fine a point on it, for the benefit of all parties and architexes coming poking their noses in where they’re not wanted which never was the way before in Luscombe Green....” Old George exhausted his breath by this tremendous peroration. He fixed his eye hard on Mrs Lee, and having drawn a deep breath, brought out —

“What I mean to say is, bath or no bath, I’d as soon think of washing my head as my feet.”

Gerald Luscombe began to make a definite move. He laughed, however, and said:

“
Oh, keep anything you please in your bath. Nobody’s going to stop you.”

“What I mean to say is,” the old man asked with a hard sharpness of tone, “is that your permission, nobody else being allowed to do no interloping? Like as how it might be put down on paper?”

“Do anything in the world you please,” Gerald Luscombe said, “as long as you keep your confounded donkey from eating my new beech hedge.... He won’t even do that,” he continued to Mrs Lee as they walked back towards the Green. “The brute is tearing up my new trees all day long.”

“But they’re most unpleasant people, your villagers,” Mrs Lee said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gerald Luscombe answered. “It’s one form of the Simple Life. It depends on how it takes you, you know.”

Mrs Lee looked over her shoulder. She would much have preferred the company of the Countess, but Lady Croydon was following them with slow steps, deep in an intimate conversation with Mr Bransdon.

“They aren’t even decently civil,” Mrs Lee returned to the charge.

“Well, now, why should they be?” Gerald Luscombe asked. “They don’t like being where they are. They don’t like changes. You do what you like; I do what I like; and they don’t see why the deuce they shouldn’t do what they like. Neither do I for the matter of that.”

“I don’t see why they shouldn’t be taught to touch their caps,” Mrs Lee said. “I don’t mean for any absurd social reasons. It’s an old custom and it looks pretty, and after all, you’ve built them those perfectly model cottages, so they might give an indication of gratitude.”

“I never noticed, you know,” Luscombe said, “that they didn’t touch their caps to me.”

“Ah, but to your friends,” Mrs Lee said. “They ought to identify your friends with you.”

Gerald Luscombe stopped for a moment to look squarely at his companion.

“I don’t suppose,” he said, “that they really consider the Colonists in the light of my friends at all. They dislike them exceedingly. They don’t see why the Colonists should have their homes whilst they’ve been transported. And for the matter of that I don’t see why they should either. It strikes me, when I come to think of it, as a ridiculous sort of a mistake.”

Mrs Lee never happened to have had any sort of direct conversation with Gerald Luscombe before. So that when, the Countess’ carriage having been found opposite the inn on the road, the party broke up and Mrs Lee went with Mr Gubb to catch the donkey for her governess cart, she said:

“I don’t think that I find your Mr Luscombe a sympathetic type at all. I think he’s rather like a snob.”

“Ah!” Mr Gubb answered. “When you come to realise that better you’ll understand what some of my difficulties have been.”

“But I thought he was like wax in your hands,” Mrs Lee exclaimed. “I thought you just said, ‘Do this,’ and he did it.”

“Oh, dear no,” Mr Gubb answered. “That’s the iniquity of the landlord system. Once a landlord, always a landlord! But I think I have managed to influence him for good,” he added.

Mr Gubb, having caught the donkey, Mrs Lee extracted from the breast of her white jersey four enormous safety-pins. With these she proceeded to occupy her prominent teeth, afterwards pinning up her already short skirt until it just edged over her knees. This made it more easy for her to stride over the distance that separated her from The Summit, dragging behind her the donkey, the cart and the four children that formed its contents.

“No,” she said when she had emptied her mouth of pins, “I don’t suppose we any of us recognise how much cause we have to be grateful to you. Something ought to be done about it.”

And suddenly Mrs Lee saw a way to put a spoke in the wheel of Ophelia Bransdon.

CHAPTER IV

GERALD LUSCOMBE and Mr Everard sat up very late that night after Mrs Luscombe and her sister had gone up to bed. Luscombe was in the habit of retiring early, but since Mr Everard never by any chance got to sleep before two o’clock they sat in the smoking-room, which was the room giving on to the former billiard-room — they sat and smoked till far into the night. The room was rather agreeably dark, three of the walls, including the one above the fireplace, being given up to books which covered them right up to the ceiling. The fourth, which contained the door leading into the billiard-room, was occupied by a long glass-fronted bookcase containing Luscombe’s guns, his fishing rods, his gardening knives and such seeds as required a very equable temperature. The centre of the room was occupied by a large knee-well writing desk of reddish mahogany with a black leather top. The drawers contained Luscombe’s accounts, his correspondence, Mr Major’s specifications for buildings, string, sealing-wax, red tape, spare pens and the manuscript of a translation that Luscombe was making for his own amusement of the Epistolæ Virorum Obscurorum. The reading lamps, which were illuminated by acetylene gas, wore dark green shades, and the two men sat in deep, pigskin arm-chairs. Between them was a small table bearing a large silver tray upon which were a decanter of whisky, a siphon, a couple of boxes of cigars, and a large pewter tobacco-canister which had been Luscombe’s father’s most cherished possession at Trinity and for the rest of his life.

“I wish—” Gerald Luscombe began suddenly after a fairly easy pause. They had been discussing politics for most of the evening, Mr Everard revealing himself as an ardent patriot, though one who held that the House of Lords should certainly be reformed. Gerald Luscombe, on the other hand, was a quiet Tory with a strong and obstinate objection to any interference with the Upper Chamber.

“I wish,” Mr Luscombe said, “that you would be so good as to abstain in future from kissing Ophelia Bransdon.”

“Oh, you saw that,” said Mr Everard cheerfully, and he jerked his head in reminiscence towards the door of the billiard-room where the incident had taken place. “I always kiss them. It keeps them in order. They do what you tell them twice as well afterwards, and if they won’t stand it they aren’t the sort to be as obedient and workmanlike as they’ve got to be for me.”

“Oh, I daresay it’s all right,” Gerald Luscombe said, “but I’m speaking as Polly Smith’s brother-in-law. If you’re going to marry her I don’t think I want to see you kissing other people in this house.”

“Oh, come,” Mr Everard said, “if she wants to marry me it doesn’t seem to me to make much difference where the event takes place. My first missus didn’t object if it was under her own nose. Business is business and marriage is another matter.”

“But you aren’t, you know,” Gerald said, “going into business with Ophelia Bransdon.”

Mr Everard pulled down the dress-waistcoat that had ridden up over the rotundity of his shirt.

“Well, now, who knows who I mayn’t be going into business with? I never know myself and I don’t believe the young lady would object.”

Mr Everard, indeed, never knew with whom he might not be going into business. He ran the Talavera Theatre, four travelling companies of variety entertainers in England and two in the United States. He had one travelling company, limiting itself to Lancashire and the second-class towns of the North, which acted in heavy drama from Shakespeare, “the Lady of Lyons,” and melodrama written to plots of his own invention by four dramatists whom he kept at a weekly salary in towns like Oldham and Bury. He possessed also two restaurants, one attached to the Talavera Theatre and the other in Piccadilly. He owned a weekly illustrated paper, a patent collar-stud, a millinery establishment in Hanover Square, and a real German delicatessen shop in Manchester. He had begun life as a clog-dancer in the smaller Lancashire music-halls, and when he was quite young he had married a cotton-operative who had kept his accounts for him. For Mr Everard, himself, though he could read, had never had time to learn to write until he was thirty-five, though he managed just to sign his name to cheques. His clog-dancing had got him a knowledge of how Halls were at that day run. He had started by engaging a troupe of contortionists out of the street, next he had written a “sketch” which showed how a hero saved the life and obtained the hand of a beautiful Circassian by marvellous clog-dancing before the Sultan of Trebizond. He had played the hero himself. Then he had bought a small coal-business from his wife’s uncle’s widow, with a cottage and the buildings of a long disused cotton-mill. He had at that time, besides the contortionists and the sketch, a refined conjurer in his employment, two animal trainers and a small troupe of bicycle tramps. He had settled down with his wife, who managed the coal-business, in the cottage attached to it. The disused cotton-mill he used for storing scenery and properties. He had the cottage connected by telephone with the sixteen chief music-halls of Lancashire and the Midlands. He next acquired the small local theatre of the town where the coal-business was situated, and, finding that he could run it most economically as a two-show hall during the winter with his own companies and during the summer as a place for the legitimate drama, he established a small, very low paid stock company of his own. The company produced Shakespeare and melodramas that Mr Everard dictated to his wife. He did not find the least difficulty in writing plays; he had lived amongst them all his life. The cry of “Unhand me, dastard!” the crash of breaking bridges falling with villains on them, or sometimes with heroines, into stony canons with boiling cataracts at the bottom of them; terrific conflagrations in strictly fireproof watermills, with a back-cloth representing a snowy landscape, and the villain’s deserted wife and three deserted children crying vainly for help from the roof as it fell in; honest declarations of manly faith and virtues uttered by heroes with strong North-country accents; ladies with very huge feathered hats whose origins might be obscure and whose feet, though their hearts were extravagantly in the right place, had a tendency to take the wrong turnings; detectives with positively fiendish grins of triumph and rattling handcuffs, who burst from behind curtains, sprang out of practical wardrobes or descended chimneys that, judging from their appearances, must have been remarkably clean — these, with an occasional trained bloodhound, three or four representative race-horses, a real waterfall and a second-hand motor-car, formed Mr Everard’s simple ideas of life as it mirrors itself from the stage.

But with a businesslike modesty Mr Everard hardly ever spoke of his exploits as a dramatist. It seemed to him as easy to concoct these plays as to do anything else, and he had, he said, quite his share of luck. Thus, chancing to assist an individual who selected the parterre of the St Helen’s Empire for a display of delirium tremens — having assisted the attendants to eject him and having good-naturedly taken him home in his car and let his wife treat him — Mr Everard discovered that the man in question was the proprietor of a ham and beef shop in Piccadilly, Manchester. The proprietor, however, appearing to be unlikely ever again to attend to his business, Mr Everard had acquired the property at a very low figure. And it was because he befriended a German clerk out of employment who asked him for aid in the square outside the Town Hall, Manchester, that Mr Everard got into his head the idea of turning the ham and beef shop into a place for the purveying of Strassburg Bratwurst, Italian Salami, Bismarck Herrings, Pumpernickel and Smoked Goose Breasts. He took in later the next door shop and supplied such light refreshments of a Teutonic kind that half business Manchester knocked over the other half in its efforts to get into the establishment at lunch time. He had ended by opening three more exactly similar establishments all within the shadow of the Town Hall, and the Watch Committee passed a vote of thanks to the services that he had rendered to the cause of sobriety. The idea for his patent collar-stud, of which, at that time he had sold thirteen millions — and it was his proud boast that every man in the North of England blessed him when he rose in the morning and when he dressed for dinner — this idea he had won from a New York character-actor, who had formerly been an electrical engineer, over a game of poker during his seventh voyage to the United States. The Illustrated Weekly he had acquired almost by accident, having good-naturedly lent its former proprietor at different times several hundred pounds that he never expected to see again. But having been begged at last to buy the paper, which was in a moribund condition, he set to work to have it rim so as exactly to please himself. Thus it was he who first had the idea of presenting the public with full-page photographs of the leading lights of Musical Comedy by the seaside in fancy bathing costumes. And Mr Everard’s taste, being exactly the tastes of the average healthy man, Mr Everard soon found himself in the possession of one more splendid “Property.” The costumier’s shop he had acquired in order to provide employment for one of his dancers who had had to have her leg amputated after a collision between her cab and a motor-bus when she was going home one night from the theatre. It paid him very well upon the whole, because he had to have his dresses made somewhere.

And then at last Mr Everard had ventured upon the conquest of London itself. Having acquired a lease of the old Frivolity Theatre and rechristened it the Talavera, he produced “The Maids of Madrid,” a light musical comedy with a corps of one hundred and twenty dancers, each of them being blonde with unimpeachable front teeth and over five feet ten in height. That, as Mr Everard told his wife, was how he liked them, and he guessed the public had got to like them too.

“The Maids of Madrid” ran for three hundred and seventy nights, and Mrs Everard died upon the two-hundred-and-twelfth. Mr Everard was not exaggerating when he said that Mrs Everard had been for him wife, sweetheart, mother, amanuensis, secretary, accountant, stage-manager, whenever it was wanted, and even cook when he had indigestion. He got along with her a great deal better than in the later days when he had four business managers, one of them a baronet for matters where presentability was a feature. He had also a singing director, three gymnasium instructors, and four gentlemen whose sole business it was to travel the country, and from the provincial theatres, shops, railway refreshment rooms and even from amongst the servants of hotels and private houses, to find for him his famous figurantes. But it did not all run so well as when Mrs Everard had been alive and it did not pay so well. That was no doubt because she had done more than half these jobs herself for nothing, and, as Mr Everard had said, she had jolly well seen that none of the others rooked him.

For all his complicated business Mr Everard himself never employed a note. It was all done with his head though, of course, he had his secretaries to check him. And this characteristic, with its inevitable tendency to slips of the memory combined with a determination not in the very smallest particular ever to be “done,” this led to a very enviable crop of lawsuits of which some were very big and many quite small. For all this work Mr Everard employed the firm of Smith, Peckover & Jupp. When he had had his first engagement as a clog-dancer Mr Everard had omitted, being illiterate himself, to have any contract for his engagement, which was in a small Midland town. At the end of his week the managers refused to pay him anything at all, alleging that the arrangement was that he was to pay them for the privilege of appearing. He had gone back by train to his native town in such a state of rage and perturbation that his condition had attracted the attention of a gentleman in the railway carriage. This was Mr Smith, the father of Evangeline Luscombe and of Polly, and Mr Smith had been so good-naturedly moved by the state of the poor boy — Everard was at that time only seventeen — that he L had good-naturedly taken the matter up and had succeeded in extracting the boy’s salary. The whole sum, moreover, being only a matter of a few shillings, Mr Smith, himself quite a young man, had refused any payment except an occasional ticket at halls where Everard might be performing. In return Everard had never had any legal business that he had not taken to Mr Smith. And in course of time, the fees now amounting to a very considerable sum annually, Sir Smith had got into the habit of inviting Everard to dinner at Bayswater when he happened to be in London.

Except when he was actually engaged in business — and then he found it convenient occasionally to adopt a gasconnading but truculent or a brutally fierce manner — Mr Everard had a quiet and quite modest appearance. During his day he went through work persistently but without excitement. He seemed to have got to know all the different sorts of ropes he had to pull and the way to pull them, without having gone anywhere where the knowledge could be acquired. Thus, before signing the agreement for the engagement of any young lady he always, quite seriously, did kiss her. It was not that he particularly desired to, but it established the sort of position that he wanted to get at. He had got to be obeyed and he knew he would not be obeyed as sharply as he needed by people who kept him at any kind of distance at all. In a similar spirit he insisted that all his actors, except the principals, should not wear flowers in their buttonholes and should carry handkerchiefs with blue borders. There was not any sense in it, but they’d got to do it. On the other hand, at Mr Smith’s table, Mr Everard established a principle of never speaking until he was spoken to. And as he never slavishly deferred to anyone’s opinion or contradicted anybody in matters that they claimed to understand and as, moreover, he had a great fund of anecdotes about places and people and a shrewd common sense, no one ever seriously objected to meeting Mr Smith’s chief client.