Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (379 page)

For a moment Mr Gubb recovered a little heart.

“I don’t see,” he said, “that I ought to be compared with a station-master or even with a doctor. They’re people who work for hire.”

“Oh, well,” Gerald said, “make it the honorary secretary of the fire brigade. He doesn’t make anything out of it.”

For some unknown reason this remark stung Mr Gubb as if it had been the flick of a whip. He had been growing placable. Now suddenly his wrath flamed up and shook all his limbs.

“This is the end, is it?” he said. “This is the end.”

“Oh, I don’t see why it should be the end!” Gerald exclaimed. “Why don’t you get some other fellow to find the money? Why don’t you — there is an idea for you! — amalgamate with the East Croydon Garden City? Why don’t you move the whole show over there? I should be very glad if you would. And I may as well add,” he continued in the most definite manner possible, “that even if you found the money I should not be disposed to let you have any more land for building an extension here. I don’t, to be perfectly honest with you, like your methods. I don’t like what the Colony’s turned out to be. I suppose I misunderstood you at the start just as you obviously misunderstood me. I don’t want to do anything to incommode you. But what would really please me best would be if you would just surrender your leases and move right off to the other show. It would give you a very nice nucleus to start out from.”

Mr Gubb’s mouth was twitching in an extraordinary manner.

“If you have exhausted all your insults,” he said so shakily that his voice resembled for a moment the bleating of a sheep, “perhaps you will let me utter one observation? I took you for a straightforward and noble man. I find you just as spotted with the commercial greed of the age as all your fellows. I take the blame entirely to myself. I looked amongst hucksters for a man with the public spirit of the repentant publican who is mentioned in the Gospels. But you have great possessions. That is it, you have great possessions. I have sinned grievously because I tried to make myself friends with a man of unrighteousness. Once a landowner, always a landowner, deaf to all vivifying ideas, blind to all that is generous and noble, giving a penny and expecting a pound back—”

“Oh, come,” Gerald said, “you’ve had £5000, you know.”

“There you are!” Mr Gubb exclaimed. “Boasting for ever of that beggarly sum: £5000, when you might have saved five thousand souls: £5000, when you might have set a work going that would have lasted five hundred thousand years! But you have a mean, blind, ignoble soul. Not more mean, blind, ignoble than that of your fellows, but just exactly the same. I have toiled and moiled, dark and obscure: for years I have slaved in penury and poverty. I have eaten husks and crusts like the prodigal son.”

“Ob, come,” Gerald said, “you’re a vegetarian anyhow.”

Mr Gubb’s bps twitched so excessively that they seemed to work right from one side of his face to the other. His eyes rolled, his glance passing agonisedly from Gerald’s slightly concerned face to Mrs Luscombe’s, which was full of anger. Suddenly he crushed his hat down over his brows and rushed from the room shaking as he went his clenched fist at the ceiling.

“Did you see!” Mrs Luscombe exclaimed in tones of outraged horror. “He put his hat on!”

Leaning back in his chair Gerald Luscombe lifted up one finger. From the reverberating stone hall, through the door, there came a hissing, hollow choked sound.

“He’s crying!” Mrs Luscombe exclaimed, incredulously.

“Poor devil!” Luscombe answered. “I wonder if I hadn’t better go and give him a drink?”

“Oh, don’t you do anything of the sort,” Mrs Luscombe answered. “A man who would put his hat on in a room...”

“Oh, come,” Gerald answered. “If you’d just had such a facer you could have been pardoned for throwing your hat on the ground and stamping on it.”

“But you’ve just proved,” Mrs Luscombe said, “that’s he’s been making a huge sum out of you and expects to go on making it.”

“Ah!” Gerald answered. “Don’t you see, he’s been expecting for such a long time to be making three or four times as much!”

They sat listening again, but no sound came from the hall. “Poor beggar!” Gerald said. “I spoke to him like a beastly cad.”

“Oh, Gerald!” his wife said with a touch of pain in her voice. “Don’t spoil it now. I never thought you could have done it.”

“Well, I didn’t display exactly good form,” Gerald protested amiably. “It isn’t good form, you know, to talk so much about money. I felt so like a beastly company promoter that I knew I must be vulgar. But it was the only possible way.”

Mrs Luscombe, who numbered amongst her connections no less than four company promoters and a great many more of what are called “keen business men,” could not precisely accept this view of the matter without a mild protest.

“I don’t see,” she said, “that it’s necessarily vulgar to talk about business.”

“It isn’t,” Gerald answered, “if you’re a business man, or if you’re going to do business. I’m perfectly ready to talk about these things with my stockbroker when I’m buying anything, and think myself quite unspotted, as Mr Gubb would say. But if a chap has lost your money it’s obviously vulgar to reckon it all up under his nose.”

“I don’t see that at all,” Mrs Luscombe said. “The man was just a vulgar cheat.”

“Oh no, my dear, he wasn’t,” Luscombe answered. “Not from his point of view. He’s looked upon himself as a philanthropist all the time. He’s probably considered himself so — so seriously that he probably hasn’t noticed he’s been making a profit.”

“Oh, nonsense!” Mrs Luscombe exclaimed, as if her husband had passed the bounds of incredibility. “He’s got a bank-book like you or me.”

“Yes, but don’t you see,” Gerald said, “that would but go to add to the golden glow of virtue in it all. Chaps who haven’t had a sound classical education are always sketchy in their moral senses. And Gubb probably thinks that an undertaking can only be really sound if it really pays. He’d say that was a cursed commercialism if it were uttered by Everard or Lady Croydon or me. But if
he
said it, it would be principle. And mind you,” Gerald continued, “I don’t know that the chap isn’t perfectly right — from his own point of view. After all, Gubb’s just as much right to try to turn the universe into a population of what Everard would call “chewed string” bossed by Mr Gubb — just as much right as Ada Croydon has to desire to see the universe peopled by domestic servants and bossed by Ada Croydon. Gubb only sees the philanthropic side of his labours. For the matter of that I only see the philanthropic side of my laziness. I’m used to thinking myself a very good landlord, and I am a good landlord. I generally forget that rent and the interests on my stocks both come in regularly.”

“I really don’t understand what this is all about, Gerald,” Mrs Luscombe said. “I never heard you talk like this before.”

Gerald laughed. “Oh, I haven’t talked like it,” he said, “because I never thought the sort of talk would interest you. I run on like it often enough in my own mind. That’s one of the disadvantages of having had a sound classical education. That’s why I’ve never done anything. That’s why I haven’t Mr Gubb’s laudable ambition to have illuminated coffee-pots presented to me.”

“Aren’t you talking rather ridiculously, Gerald dear?”

Mrs Luscombe said. “I thought you were splendid just now when you were pitching into that man. But now you seem to me to be talking rather wildly. You couldn’t have an illuminated coffee-pot. You might have an illuminated address or a presentation coffee-pot or both or either. But you couldn’t...” Mrs Luscombe’s eyes suddenly opened wide with a troubled expression. “You don’t mean to say,” she said, “that you’re changing your mind about that man! You aren’t going to let him have more money?”

Gerald said, “Good Lord! Have I wasted all that vulgarity? Don’t you see that I was vulgar to Gubb, just because it seemed the most merciful way? I wanted to put him right bang out of his agony. He’s been thinking all along that I was the sort of fool who couldn’t follow his complicated calculations. I just worked them out in my head in order to let him see that I had been following him all the time. Otherwise he’d have gone on hoping. He’d have thought that his tremendous strength of mind was going to overbear my jellified intelligence. That’s what Gubb would have thought.”

Mr Luscombe concluded and gazed meditatively at the armchair that had lately contained Mr Gubb’s spick and span form.

“
But, by Jove!” he said, “I muffed it. I never told him. He bolted before I could tell him what were my moral objections to his Colony.”

Mrs Luscombe rose from behind the writing-table. She skirted it, and deposited herself sinuously and gracefully upon her husband’s knee.

“Gerald, dear,” she said, and she put her arm round her husband’s neck,
“
what
are
your objections?”

Just at that moment Bill burst into the room.

“Come along, father,” he said. “Grandma’s got the worms and Mr Melville’s got the gentles, and if you and mother will bring the flies I’ll bet I’ll have three trout before lunch.”

Mr Luscombe kissed his wife lazily.

“The objections,” he said, “are of the sort that don’t want to be talked of before youth and innocence or beauty and purity for the matter of that. Don’t you ever get any news from Célestine?”

“Certainly not,” Mrs Luscombe said determinedly. “I never think of talking to the servants or of letting them talk to me.”

“Well, that’s a very excellent rule,” Mr Luscombe said as he went towards the door with his hand resting on his wife’s shoulder. “But I have gamekeepers and sheep-watchers, and it’s their duty to report to me, and it’s my duty to look out for things.”

“Oh, is there going to be trouble of that sort?” Mrs Luscombe asked.

“My dear,” Gerald answered, “I think they’re all too anæmic to make trouble, but I should dislike the whole thing if it was all as easy as roasting eggs!”

CHAPTER III

MR EVERARD came in for an uncommonly busy day on the Saturday of the Presentation. It was not exactly any of his business, but Mrs Lee had no one else to help her at all. It would not, she felt, be perfectly appropriate for Mr Gubb to arrange for his own festivity. Mr Bransdon remained obstinately in bed though the doctor said that there was nothing the matter with him. But none of the other Lifers — and in this Mrs Lee perceived the hand of Ophelia Bransdon — would do anything at all to help in the festivity. So Mrs Lee, having come up to town to purchase an evening dress for the occasion, looked in on Mr Everard at his office in the Talavera Theatre to beg him to give her advice. He had so much experience in conducting complicated affairs.

“I don’t see,” Mr Everard had said, “that there will be anything very complicated about this. You’ll want to see that the lamps are lighted in the schoolroom, and you’ll want someone to conduct the people to their places and have the order of things written out in large, plain hand for the chairman to read. The chairman’s Lord Croydon, isn’t it? And then there’ll be the speeches and the presentation. Who’s to be on the platform?”

He read from the list that Mrs Lee offered him: Lord Croydon, Lady Croydon, Lily Duchess of Portarlington, Mr and Mrs Paul Sandwith, the Rt. Hon. Howard Ygon, Simon Bransdon, Esq., Cyril Brandetski, Esq., as well as Mr Montague Everard himself.

“That’ll be rather a squash on the platform, won’t it? But I daresay they’ll all get on. Now you want a table 282 and a decanter of water and a glass for the Chairman, and two, four, six, eight, ten chairs. Now how many have accepted the invitation?”

Mrs Lee said, “One hundred and twenty.”

“By Jove!” Everard said. “There won’t be much room.”

“Oh, they’re all subscribers and their friends,” Mrs Lee said helplessly.

“Well! well! the more the merrier!” Everard said cheerfully.
“
Have you got a hundred and twenty chairs?”

“No, we haven’t,” Mrs Lee said. “I don’t see how they’re to be got. The Lifers refuse to lend any at all. So do the cottage people.”

“Oh, I say!” Mr Everard exclaimed. “That’s mean. Never mind, we’ll fix that.” He spoke into the telephone on his desk. “Oh, Paul,” he said, “look up the number of Hearne and Company, Caterers at Guildford. ‘Phone to them that they are to deliver a hundred chairs at the schoolroom, Luscombe Green, to-morrow by 3.30 sharp. Say it’s for me, Everard, and mind they’re to the minute. See?” He hung up the receiver. “Precious few towns in England,” he said, “where I can’t get someone to do a job for me. Now about getting people into their seats. You’ll have to have one or two ushers. Don’t give them any fixed seats. Let them get sat down as they come in. The other way would lead to confusion.”

“I really don’t know whom I’m to get to do it,” Mrs Lee said. “There’s such a nasty feeling down at Luscombe Green.”

“What, they’re all boycotting you? Oh, well, look here. If you wouldn’t mind going away now, I’m so confoundedly busy, I’ll run down in my car to-morrow afternoon anyhow. I’ll week-end with the Luscombes. I’ll fix things up for you. I daresay I and my chauffeur can show people into their places. Or Merrill, Luscombe’s head gardener, will give a hand. He’s a sharp man and he’s the advantage of knowing the big wigs of that part of the world by sight. That’ll be all right, you’ll see. Goodbye.” And Mr Everard, patting Mrs Lee on the shoulder, conducted her amiably to the door.

When he reached Luscombe Green on the following day he found that although Luscombe and Mrs Luscombe had resolutely refused to sit upon the platform, they were going to make part of the audience, Gerald desiring amiably not to make his abstention too markedly noticeable. Mr Everard discovered, however, that not only was Mr Bransdon himself determined not to go to the meeting at all, but that nothing was known of the whereabouts of Cyril Brandetski. Even Mrs Lee had not put in an appearance. So that nothing whatever had been done. The schoolroom door was locked, and before the building stood a waggon, loaded like an enormous hay cart with varnished chairs. Mr Everard set the head gardener to find the key. He directed his chauffeur minutely as to the disposal of the seats, ten on the platform and a hundred and twenty in the body of the room. He was also to see that the lamps were filled with oil, to put away forms and benches in the outhouse, to borrow a table and the water-bottle and glasses from Mr Luscombe, and to see to it that everything was in order. Then Mr Everard trotted back to Bransdon’s cottage. Mr Bransdon was still in bed. Everard panted up the narrow staircase, jolly and corpulent in his heavy motor-coat.

“Now then, Achilles!” he exclaimed. “Still sulking in your tent?”

Mr Bransdon, propped up in bed, was slowly tearing a pamphlet into very small pieces that he threw upon the floor like a shower of snow all over the room.

“There goes the last of them,” he said. “Do you know what I’ve been doing all this week? I’ve been steadily reading through all this trash. I haven’t missed a word of it. Now, who’ll say I haven’t got nerve?”

“Look here, old boy,” Everard said cheerfully. “You’ve got to get up and come and sit on the platform and make a little bit of a speech.”

“No, I haven’t missed a single word of all that rubbish,” Bransdon said. “I had a sort of superstitious idea that if I’d funked a letter of it, it would act like a nemesis on me for ever after. So I faced it out and I’ve torn up every scrap that I could lay hands on. A nice, soothing occupation for an invalid gentleman. Like making patchwork quilts!”

“Look here, old man,” Mr Everard repeated once more. “I don’t know what you’re talking about now, but you’ve just got to come and sit on that platform. If you don’t like Gubb now, the man was once a very good friend to you. You can’t get away from that, and it would be a shabby, dirty sort of trick not to back him up in public when you’ve got the chance.”

Mr Bransdon said, “I’m ill, I tell you.”

“Well, let me carry you there in your bed,” Mr Everard said. “That’ll make it all the more effective.”

“See here,” Mr Bransdon said starting rather energetically forward. “Who the devil gave you the right to boss me?”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Mr Everard said. “I took it. I’m just pointing out that it would be mean not to back up an old pal when he’s got a Benefit on. Even if you don’t agree with him now, it’s the last chance you’ll have if I’m taking you up to town on Monday.”

Mr Bransdon fingered his sharp nose reflectively. “Well,” he said, “I daresay you’re right.”

“Where’s Ophelia?” Mr Everard asked suddenly.

“Oh, Ophelia,” Mr Bransdon answered, “she’s raising the devil somewhere. She’s organised a counter demonstration of the Colonists to take place outside the hall simultaneously.”

“Oh, the little devil!” Mr Everard said. He sat down, his motor-coat spreading bulkily all over the small chair. “Look here, Bransdon,” he said. “Stop all that sort of thing. I hate it. It’s Gubb’s show to-day. Let him have his show properly. Just you get up out of bed and trot round to some of your chewed string friends and tell them not to back her up. I begged her not to play monkey tricks the other day when we were in the motor. Do that, there’s a good chap.”

“See here, now,” Mr Bransdon said, “I’ll sit on the platform. I’ll even do my best to stop Ophelia, but I’m hanged if I’ll wear an embroidered smock frock.”

Mr Everard opened his eyes very wide.

“Don’t you understand,” Bransdon said, “that’s what Mrs Lee says is the dearest wish of Gubb’s heart. She went as far as to suggest that I shouldn’t be admitted if I came in evening dress.”

“But that’s exactly what you’ve got to do,” Mr Everard said, and he burst into a loud splutter of laughter. “
I’ll
settle Mrs Lee. Gubb can wear his national costume and very fit and proper, too. But you — well, you’ve taken out letters of extradition.” He pulled out his watch, rose and peered out of the window. “Where
is
Mrs Lee?” he said. “Hullo, there’s a fly at the gate. Here you get up, there’s visitors. They look like foreigners.” Mr Everard trotted amiably downstairs. “Hullo!” he exclaimed in the living room. “What do you want?”

In the open doorway there stood an exceedingly pallid lady of perhaps sixty, dressed in what appeared to he a flannel plaid costume that gave her the appearance of being several bolsters cased in squares of violet and emerald green. Behind her towered an enormous gentleman all in a rather lustrous black with black hair, black gloves, a very high black bowler hat and an immense, square, black beard. Behind him, again, peeped out an extraordinarily shabby, elderly man with a grey face and a peaked cap bearing on it the word
“
Interpreter.” The lady gazed at Mr Everard and uttered the one word, “Brandetski.”

“Oh,” Mr Everard said, “Cyril or Simeon?”

“
Nous cherchons
” — the gentleman behind her began, when the lady exclaimed, “
Da! Da! Da! Kyril!
” And she poured out an excited flood of incomprehensible words, bobbing and trotting towards the inner door. The tall gentleman took off his hat and entered, speaking rather slowly in French and the interpreter edged in sideways as if he were shouldering his way between the swing doors of a pubic house.

“Here, I say,” Mr Everard said, “you can’t go up there. He hasn’t got his clothes on. That’s not your man.” And he forcibly closed the door which the lady had already half opened. She continued to talk at the top of her voice. The gentleman also began to talk French rather more quickly, and then the interpreter, as far as Mr Everard could make him out, uttered the words, “His Imperial Majesty’s Government, the gentleman says...”

“Oh, shut up,” Mr Everard suddenly roared in an immense voice. “
Tais toi! Schweigt, Hund!
” He hadn’t very much idea of what these words meant, having heard them only during the run of some French and

German plays that had been produced in his theatre at Manchester, but they caused a sudden and almost deafening silence. The woman looked at him with enormous eyes: the man drew himself up stiff and square...

“Now then,” Mr Everard said to the interpreter, “who the devil are you?”

“I’m the Dover Pier Interpreter, sir,” the man said. “The lady and gentleman picked me up as they came off the boat and I guided them here. A tough job, sir, to makes these cross-country trains fit in.”

“Now hold your tongue till you’re spoken to again,” Mr Everard said. “Who are these two? What do they want?”

“They want to know,” the interpreter said, “if Mr Cyril Brandetski lives here and if he’s at home?”

“Yes, he lives here,” Mr Everard said, “and we expect him home this evening. We shall be in a deuce of a hole if he isn’t.”

The interpreter said some words in French to the gentleman. The gentleman repeated them at once to Madame Brandetski. She at once burst into a babble of tears, laughter and speech. It was some two minutes before Mr Everard could once more hear the interpreter.

“The gent says,” he was saying, “that His Imperial Majesty’s Government will not press for extradition if the gentleman we have named will return to Petersburg. He will have nothing at all to fear....”

“Here, hold hard,” Mr Everard said. “You tell him that I’m Mr George Montague Everard and no particular friend of Mr Brandetski’s. Mr Bransdon will be down as soon as he has dressed himself. I don’t want to hear any of these things. It isn’t in my line.” And Mr Everard, going to the foot of the stairs, shouted up, “Hullo, old boy! There’s some relations of yours downstairs. Hurry, will you?” He did the best be could to get the Russians into chairs and stood fidgeting to be off. He had answered several questions coming to him from the lady by way of the gentleman and the interpreter. He had said that, as far as he knew, Brandetski was in good health, had a good appetite, seemed to be in no need of money, and had led a virtuous life, when his ears were cheered by the sound of Bransdon’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, and he took his departure leaving that distinguished author in the midst of a whirl of sound with a face full of concern and anger. His only impression was that Mr Cyril Brandetski must be in a pretty pickle and that he didn’t envy him his wife.

The chairs were being rapidly got into the schoolroom under the direction of the chaffeur. Mrs Lee, however, was nowhere to be seen, and Everard got into his own car — for it was then nearly five o’clock — and motored over to The Summit, which he reached in less than a quarter of an hour, since he was a rapid and fearless driver.