Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (367 page)

Everard had remained a widower for seven years. Towards the end of the seventh, however, he had proposed to Polly Smith. He would have liked, indeed, to marry Evangeline, but she had been married to Mr Luscombe before Mrs Everard had been dead a twelvemonth. At this date, however, Mr Everard had found himself wanting to get married. He needed some domesticity for when he felt fagged and he had a desire to do a little modest entertaining. He knew, of course, how to give half-a-dozen different sorts of banquets in half-a-dozen different restaurants, but he wanted to have something quieter within his power. It was, indeed, one of his ambitions to sit upon the Borough Council of Marylebone and become a churchwarden. And Miss Smith was the most lady-like person that he knew, for he certainly did not intend to marry into the profession.

Miss Smith, on the other hand, was nothing loth to marry Mr Everard. He was fabulously wealthy, he was exceedingly generous, and he appeared to have no vices at all. The engagement, however, which had lasted six months, had been accompanied by almost as many outbreaks of temper on Miss Smith’s part as there had been days in that space of time. She made scenes at him because he used occasionally North-country idioms, because it rained, or if the hooks of her blouses came undone. If she had told him overnight to take tickets for the day to Folkestone, she would upbraid him violently next morning because he had not made it the 10.50 Pulman to Brighton. And when he bought her a diamond tiara she refused to speak to him for twenty-four hours because it had not been a Buhl cabinet that he did not know she had always wanted in her dressing-room. Mr Everard did not pay very much attention to these sallies. He thought they were the common property of womankind. Mrs Everard, he knew, had been an exception, and he had always heard that women were contrary. Nevertheless, he was not even as mediocrely happy as he had expected to be, for Miss Smith would pass whole afternoons in a sulky silence and violently resented having her hair disarranged if he attempted a modest embrace.

“You know,” Gerald Luscombe continued, “that Ophelia Bransdon is a married woman.”

“Oh, the devil!” Mr Everard ejaculated. “Married what? Married whom? Where’s her husband? I’ve never heard of him.”

“It’s rather secret,” Gerald Luscombe said. “I only know of it by accident.”

Mr Everard said, “Hum!” and then, “What’s the story? They ought not to let death traps like that run around.”

“I thought it would be just as well to tell you,” Gerald said.

“Well, but she didn’t at all seem to object to being kissed,” Everard expostulated.

“She wouldn’t,” Luscombe said. “I daresay she wouldn’t. But you never know where you might be landed. Theoretically, I suppose her husband wouldn’t object, but then again, you never know how much travelling mayn’t have changed him.”

“Well, but hang it all, what’s the story?” Everard asked. “One ought to be told.”

“I don’t see exactly why you ought to be told,” Luscombe said. “It’s no more your affair than it is mine.

And nobody’s told me anything except that Ophelia Bransdon has a husband who is the son of Gubb.”

“Oh, that man,” Mr Everard said lightly. “He’s a smart business man but he makes me feel sick just the same. What does Ophelia’s husband do, anyhow?”

“They were separated at the church door,” Gerald Luscombe said. “At least, they were separated in the next room. Since then young Gubb’s travelled. I believe he’s studying Bacteriology in Heidelberg — somewhere in Germany at any rate. He was adopted by an old maid on the wedding-day.”

“But, hang it all,” Mr Everard exclaimed, “old maids can’t go adopting other people’s husbands on their wedding-day.”

“
He doesn’t like it,” Gerald Luscombe said.

“Shouldn’t think he would,” Mr Everard ejaculated. “I mean he doesn’t like studying Bacteriology,” Luscombe answered. “He doesn’t like anything in the world. He wants to be back here with the Simple Life.”

“I should think he would, too,” Mr Everard said, “A man’s proper place is with his wife.”

“Well, I don’t know.” Gerald Luscombe tried to let the subject drop. “There seemed to be some motive for separating them — in the mind of Gubb.”

“Oh, Gubb,” Mr Everard exclaimed. He continued after a pause, “Bransdon’s rather a jolly old boy. I’m going to take him for a run in my motor to-morrow.”

“A jolly old boy,” Gerald Luscombe exclaimed. “That’s the last thing I should have thought of calling Bransdon.”

“
Oh, he’s quite convivial,” Everard said. “Says he’ll write me a play about South Africa. I don’t know that I particularly want it, but he’s set on having a shy.”

“Bransdon?” Luscombe asked with a slight incredulity.

“
Are you quite sure you haven’t got hold of any of the others?”

“The others,” Mr Everard sniffed. “You couldn’t call any of them convivial. They’re more like chewed string, all of them.”

Luscombe’s eyebrows went up high into his forehead. “You can’t be talking of Bransdon!” he said.

“But I tell you I am,” Mr Everard answered with even a little irritation. “Simon Bransdon, author of ‘Clotted Vapours,’ a chap weighing about sixteen stone, with a beard like a dirty waterfall. Got a thing in his cottage like a monkey cage that he calls a loom, and he’s been in Africa.”

“Oh, you’ve been in the cottage,” Luscombe said.

“Bight there, sir,” Everard answered. “Ophelia Bransdon took me in after the Countess had driven away, and there was the old chap. Seemed mighty contented with himself, prattling away like a parakeet. Well, I’ve met some celebrities in my time — Lord Tennyson and Mark Twain and the President of the United States and Mr George R. Sims. I don’t want to say that Mr Bransdon was the most larky of them all, but I’ve known some of them that had a great deal more side and, as far as I know, a great deal less in them.”

“Did he recite to you?” Gerald Luscombe asked.

“No, sir,” Mr Everard answered. “We got talking about Teddy Montague’s grog-shop in Cape Town where I was just before the war broke out, with that company that I took to Jo’burg, and I got such a thirst on me that I commandeered a bottle of whisky and some split sodas from the little pub next door but one, and there we sat and smoked and clacked away about odd people we’d met till just before dinner when Ophelia wanted to show me her printing works.”

“But Bransdon doesn’t smoke,” Luscombe said.

“
He cottoned on to my Flor de Coronas like winking, then,” Mr Everard answered. “I think I’ll put on his old play if he writes it. I’ll try it in Manchester. He wants to call it ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and have a cast with twenty-two niggers in it. It might do. You never can tell. Sometimes I think the public might swallow Serious Literary Drama. It will never pay like Musical Comedy, of course, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t have a shy.”

“He’ll never write a play,” Gerald Luscombe said. “He’s too sleepy. I don’t know what’s come to him if what you say is true. Perhaps it’s the air! But I wouldn’t mind betting a fiver he doesn’t ever keep awake long enough to write a play.”

Mr Everard leaned forward in his chair. “You’ll bet a fiver?” he said.

“Two, if you like,” Gerald Luscombe laughed.

Mr Everard rose genially from his chair. “Done with you!” he said. “Now I’ll bet ten to one, a hundred quid to your two five-pound-notes that I shake him into writing a play before two years are out. And I’ll back myself to put it on at Manchester and run it for a fortnight at the shortest. Come now.”

Luscombe sat looking up at him amiably. “I haven’t anything against taking it,” he said. “But you’ll lose a lot of money if you win the bet.”

“Well, I can afford to lose it, can’t I?” Mr Everard said. “‘The Girls of Girton’ is going to run five hundred nights if I’m any judge. So I don’t see why I shouldn’t drop a little on the poor old legitimate and Literature. Even if it’s only to put those National Theatre chaps’ noses out of joint.” He leaned back on his heels, looking at Luscombe and a glimmer came suddenly into his eyes.

“
By God!” he said. “I’ll take a London Theatre and put the thing on for a month’s run. I’ll work it for all I’m worth. I don’t believe I shall lose money on it. I believe I can work it so as to make a profit.”

Luscombe contemplated him seriously. “Is that the way you do business?” he said. “Are you really in earnest?”

“Of course, that’s the way I do business,” Mr Everard said. “And of course I’m in earnest. You see, I’ve got a feeling about things. I feel I can do this. I’ve noticed this is my life, that my failures, such as they have been, have always come when I’ve sat down and thought a thing out. When I’ve made a success it’s always been by a sort of accident and I’ve always had this sort of feeling. I suppose, really, it lies in me. If I start something along what the newspapers call the cold lines of reason I work at it of course and work hard, too, but it’s not quite the same thing as when I’ve got a feeling that a thing would be a lark and worth shoving for the fun of it, and would make people gasp because they never believed I could carry it off. And by Jove! I’ll do this and carry it off, too. You see!”

Luscombe smiled at him rather friendlily.

“Well, I wish you luck,” he said. I’m sure I haven’t anything against it.”

“And mind you,” Mr Everard continued, “there’s the cold lines of reason joke about this, too. This is what stands to reason. Now you hear me. If that chap Gubb can run Bransdon so as to make him pay along the lines of any kind of crank and prig, I, yes, this gentleman,” — and Mr Everard tapped the front of his shirt with a large and spatula te finger—” I can make him pay about four hundred times as well. You mark my words. There isn’t a gold mine in the new, realistic, poetic-and-all-that-rot drama. The whole of London isn’t made up of prigs and cranks and snobs. But if this Mr Gubb can get together nineteen households of chewed string, there’s no reason in the world why I shouldn’t get thirty housefuls out of them. The great heart of the nation is sound, thank God! Nothing will ever touch Musical Comedy, or not in my life-time. But the other market hasn’t been worked yet.”

“It has been tried, you know,” Gerald Luscombe said. “I don’t know much about these things.”

“Ah, you mean Shaw and Granville Barker and a chap called Galsworthy?” Mr Everard said. “But that Court-Savoy business wasn’t run on common-sense lines. You can’t do anything in hole-and-corner ways. It hasn’t got a sound commercial principle behind it. Now you listen to me.” Mr Everard stuck both his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat. “Did you ever go,” he asked suddenly, “into the bar between the acts on a first-night?”

“I don’t think I have ever been to a first-night in my life,” Gerald Luscombe said.

“Then you don’t know the London Critic,” Mr Everard continued. “Of all the sodden, venial devils in the world, commend me to the Dramatic Critic. You stodge him up with champagne and dinners and cigars, and you ask him down to your little place in the country, and every now and then you give a part to some girl he recommends, and you keep the best liqueurs and pâté de foie gras for him, and then, why you can just write his notices.” Mr Everard paused to take breath. “Now,” he continued, “the Dramatic Critic doesn’t like high-class authors butting into the Theatre. He doesn’t like it because he’s sodden, and it startles him and his wife’s uncle who got him the job on his paper as a Dramatist, and all the other old regular ring of Dramatists have fed him up and promised his wife chow-dogs and given him rides in motors, which he isn’t likely to get from Literary Authors who don’t know the ropes, and so, naturally, he doesn’t want the old gang interfered with—”

“Haven’t you got a bit of a down on them?” Gerald Luscombe asked.

“Down on them!” Mr Everard answered. “Oh, Lord, not me. They do my work well enough or the advertisement manager of their papers would soon hear of it and they’d lose their shops! Down on them! Oh dear no! But it’s a dirty, rotten job that a decent, straight man like me should have to deal with such swabs.” He paused once more and then continued, “but when I raise my little finger you shall see how they’ll welcome the new, great author. You shall hear them all yelping together. Because it will be done in a thoroughly practical manner. This play’s going to be called “The White Man’s Burden.” Oh, yes, and there shall be niggers walloped to please the “how I love my brother Boer” cranks and there shall be lovely white ladies interceding and a stem, heroic sort of gentleman, sort of Kitchener type, coming down like tons of bricks on the oppressors and there’s going to be a sort of Englishman’s Home business in the Colonies just to daub the beggars in the eye with the rotten, dangerous condition the Empire’s in. My dear chap...” Mr Everard hesitated and then added, “I didn’t mean to say ‘my dear chap.’ I beg your pardon. I was carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment. But what I do mean is, that I talked the whole thing out with old Bransdon and at first it didn’t appeal to me, but now it’s growing. It’s growing. Good Lord! there won’t be a dry eye in the house when just before the curtain goes down the bugles of the British relieving forces are heard and the Englishman’s Home, Colonial version, is saved just as the stern administrator has got his pistol ready to blow out the beautiful lady’s brains to save her from the howling niggers officered by renegade Germans in disguise. Oh, Lord, don’t you see it, don’t you see it? I’ve got a patent cinematograph dodge for having shells burst in the sky in the back-cloth — and then the thin, clear note of the bugle! It isn’t a bugle at all, really. It’s a Sax horn with a muslin pocket-handkerchief stuffed down it to make it sound distant.”