Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (369 page)

“Father’s a conventional money-grabber without a soul,” one of the rearmost children chanted.

“Mother’s a cat and a prig and no better than she ought to be,” came the challenging answer. “That’s what we’re going to fight about.”

“Well,
but,
my little dears!” Mr Creedy exclaimed. “Well now, come, come!”

“That’s what we’re going to fight about,” the children behind exclaimed.

“Of course,” Mr Creedy deferentially said, “we know things must be like this. Even in the best of families. But it’s just as well not to talk about it. That’s been my rule through life.”

A sound resembling a repeated grunt came from somewhat far down the avenue, and Mr Creedy perceived, speeding very fast and smoothly towards them, a motorcar of enormous proportions. He looked from the recumbent donkey to the door behind which he had a correct impulse to vanish. But it was not his business to be perturbed. If the Countess chose to have people call upon her with donkeys that lay down it was not part of any of the duties that had ever been expected of him to tackle the emergency by any kind of routine. He stepped, however, to the other side of the governess-cart and held up his hand to the approaching automobile very much in the manner of a policeman. The car glided noiselessly to the bend of the drive, stopping with exceedingly beautiful precision within half a yard of Mr Creedy’s erect form. The chauffeur regarded him with a gloomy indifference, the footman scrambled out of his deep seat to the handle of the door. Mr Creedy walked composedly to the footman’s side. He said without emotion and with no signs of a deference at all slavish:

“Her Ladyship is in. Indeed, I believe she’s expecting your Grace.”

He was addressing a very large, dark lady with a brown skin, who wore a black straw hat of enormous size decorated with three disproportionately huge, pea-green ostrich feathers.

“But there’s a little obstacle,” Mr Creedy continued, “which will prevent your Grace’s reaching the front steps.”

“Then I must get out here,” the lady exclaimed cheerfully, but in a heavy, rather foreign voice. “Come along, Brabby.” And pulling behind her by the hand a very thin, tired, pale-looking, fair girl, she seemed to overflow from the motor-car with a sideways motion.

“
Her Ladyship is in the morning room,” Mr Creedy explained as he led the way up the steps.

The Duchess, an enormous figure, in innumerable folds of black silk, looked cheerfully at the governess-cart.

“Um! Children!” she exclaimed. “Whose children are you? What, what?”

The Lady Mary Brabazon Courtlew, whose pale hair was as lifeless as her face, appeared to perceive neither the Duchess nor the children but followed Mr Creedy with eyes apparently unseeing into the octagonal hall. As it was none of Mr Creedy’s business to enlighten the Duchess and as she had not addressed any remarks to him, he had reached the door of the morning room and thrown it open, so that the Lady Mary had entered before the Duchess had given up staring at the children. The children in turn, having resumed their air of wondering puppies, stared back at the Duchess with large eyes. Her Grace then sneezed three times and still fumbling for a pocket that it was hopeless to discover, she scuffled up the steps and entered the morning room, in which Lady Croydon preferred to sit because it was less intolerably sham-Gothic than any other room in the Castle.

Mr Creedy hastened back to the open air.

“Here, come and look at this!” he exclaimed to the footman as soon as he was near the car. The footman had sallow cheeks, dark, indignant eyes, and a flat black cap with a leather shield.

“I can’t say that I take any interest in children,” he exclaimed in a voice rather haughty and nasal. “The country is vastly over-populated as it is.”

“Ah, but these are special,” Mr Creedy said. “They’re some of your Socialist brand, but perhaps I ought not to encourage you in that sort of folly?”

“I know who they are,” the footman continued still contemptuously. “They’re the children of those amateurs. They’re making the whole movement into a laughing-stock. It’s a much more serious thing than you imagine, Mr Creedy. Have you seen the
New Age
this week?”

“No, I haven’t and I don’t think I want to,” Mr Creedy said. “I’ve been a Gladstonian Liberal all my life and a Congregationalist, and I’ve made my sacrifices for my opinions and I should be making them now if employers asked as many questions about going to Church as they used to do. I’ve served in the best Liberal families in the country and I shouldn’t be with Conservatives now if it wasn’t for what the likes of you are leading the Party into.”

“Ah, yes,” the footman said. “It’s you Liberals that are the enemies of all progress. You and the official Socialists.”

He appealed to the chauffeur who, with gloomy and threatening eyes, surveyed nothing at all.

“You tell him, M. Auguste,” he said, “what comrade Georges Sorel says about the General Strike.”

Leaning very far back in his seat, with an air of invalid inability, in black leather clothes and with a black moustache, his left arm cuddling his steering-wheel, M. Auguste spat at nothing, showed the whites of his eyes and raised his right, heavily gloved hand.

“Ah, oui, la Grève Generale!” he exclaimed. “The General Strike! It is a Utopian myth. Ah, yes, a myth, but Utopian that shall give them to think. Trust me, Auguste Pleurlichot, who tell you.”

“Ah, yes, something with bombs in it,” Mr Creedy said composedly.

M. Auguste spat in considerable excitement and wrestled with his language. “But no! certainly not. That is the obsolete, the decadent. It is Anarchist. Stupid!

Old! No, no, this will make to get up the proletariat which now lies down, broken, écrasé, like that donkey. Look me then at that poor beast fallen beneath many blows of its ferocious employers. That is the Proletariat. But it shall rise up finely with that Utopian myth. Hein! Oui-dà, the General Strike! What?”

M. Auguste gazed ferociously at Mr Creedy. The footman said: “Hear! Hear!”

“But it didn’t, you know,” Mr Creedy said, “fall beneath ferocious blows. It lay down to eat an apple. It’s a little habit it’s got.” And Mr Creedy walked meditatively to the donkey’s nose before which he let fall the remaining half of the apple that he drew once more from his tail pocket where he had placed it upon the arrival of the Duchess and the Lady Mary. “Now my little dears,” he said to the children who had all the while remained silent like observant birds in the nest, “what’s your mother come here for? Not to drop bombs I hope? More likely it’s about Votes for Women.”

The child on the right at the back of the governess-cart exclaimed:

“She’s come to get the Countess to head a testimonial to Mr Gubb.”

The child facing her exclaimed in exactly similar tones:

“Mother is the heart and soul of the Simple Life.”

“Father says old Gubb is a dirty tyke,” the child on the front right seat said.

“Father’s going to divorce mother as soon as he can get evidence,” the child on the front left seat exclaimed.

Mr Creedy’s face expressed horror and alarm. He made little hushing noises between his teeth.

“Oh, my little dears,” he exclaimed, “you mustn’t talk like that! It’s shocking to hear little children talk like that! Where have you learned such things? Don’t you go to school?”

“We go to the New School,” the child on the rear right seat said.

“So I should imagine,” Mr Creedy said dryly. “It almost makes me sorry to have lived into a day when there’s schools so new as to teach little children to talk so of their parents.”

“What
is
then this Simple Life?” M. Auguste demanded of the footman. “This is the number two time to-day that I have heard talk of it.”

“Oh,” the footman exclaimed contemptuously, “it’s another of these bourgeois manifestations of Tolstoyism. You might call them ‘Quietists’ and they sound like what you might call a rum lot, too, by all accounts.”

“Ah, c’est ça,” M. Auguste said.

“And now it seems,” the footman continued, “they’re getting up a testimonial to the Gubb man.
I’ve
been to some of their meetings. Pah!” and his face expressed disgust. “It’s worse than the S.D.F. It’s worse almost than the Fabians. It’s quite true what you say that these are all middle-class devices for keeping power in their own hands. The Social Revolution will never come till all this truck is cleared out of the way.”

“You see, you see,” the Frenchman said, “I have converted you! Ha! ha! and here are testimonials again. Her Grace will be in this, mark you. Her Grace will be a patroness of this. Oh, yes, it is like this with our devotees at home. They do what we call ‘make the noce.’ They do what we call
‘
make the wedding’ all the days of their youth when ginger it is hot in the mouth and then, oh yes, they are patronesses of all charitable undertakings and sew them underlinen for female orphanesses.”

“
It’s very sinister,” the footman said, “this alliance of effete aristocrats with the grasping bourgeoisie. It’s the most sinister symptom of the day. First it was Lady Warwick, now it’s the Duchess. Why, our Lady Mary will be carrying the red flag and squeaking the Carmagnole, if she can keep awake for long enough.”

“But it’s perfectly true,” the front left-hand child was continuing to Mr Creedy. “Father’s got a detective.” Mr Creedy said.
“
Ssh! ssh!” upon an imperative tone. And then, “My dear,” he continued, “you should never, no
never,
talk about them except among yourselves, children in these days, from what it appears to me, being set against their parents.”

“We aren’t against our mother,” the two children on the back seat said at once. “We’re against father.”

“
We’re
against mother,” the other two said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mr Creedy said, “who you’re against or what you’re against. It isn’t fitting for little gentlemen to tell tales out of school. It’s as bad for you to peach to me, though it’s I that says it, as it would be for you to tell tales to your dear parents. Keep your little heads shut and you’ll have your self-respect left when you come to my age.”

“All right, old boy,” the front right-hand child said.
“We
don’t tell tales. But we aren’t little gentlemen. We’re of the female sex.”

“Now I can’t get that into my head,” Mr Creedy said. “Seems as if there must be something wrong when little ladies wear knickerbockers and no skirts over them.”

“That’s what we say!” the child on the front seat exclaimed.

“We entirely disagree,” came from the children behind.

“Now
where
,” Mr Creedy said, “do you learn such language?”

“In the nursery Simple Life Debating Society,” the hindmost right-hand child said.

“We have debates just like the grown-ups. The subject for to-night is: ‘Is it ethical for one child to eat another child’s pudding as well as its own if the other child hasn’t come to supper and it isn’t at all certain that it is coming?’”

“Now I’m not at all certain,” Mr Creedy said, “that I altogether like all this. It
does
seem unnatural.”

“It’s disgusting!” the front right-hand child said. “We’re a disgusting spectacle. That’s what father says. He says he wouldn’t have minded never having a button on his shirt and not being allowed to keep a carriage to take him to the station and not ever having a decent bit of food to put into his mouth, it’s us being turned into such disgusting little prigs that’s made him take this desperate step. And as for Mr Brandetski, father says...”

Mr Creedy raised his finger for silence.

“Not so fast, not so fast,” he said. “I can quite understand that your father has had to suffer, having been a married man myself for twenty-two years till Providence was pleased to release me, so I know what I’m talking about. But I always says that it’s the duty of a man to exhibit patience and forbearance or why is man called the superior animal? But what I should like to know before we go any further is, how does your dear father make his living, if he does make his living and who is Mr Brandywhisky?”