Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (388 page)

“I should like to see you lying dead at my feet,” Gubb answered. “Like that!” And he pointed downwards to the corpse.

“It’s queer,” Bransdon said. “The commonplace psychologist would say that because you’d showed spunk at the fire you wouldn’t behave like a shopkeeper after it. If you’d gone through as much of real knocking about as I have in the course of my life you’d see that fires and disasters are blessings in disguise. For they give chaps who go through them together an opportunity to say, ‘let bygones be bygones.’ That’s the most important thing in the world.”

“Is it you to preach?” Gubb said with an icy passion.

“Why, who else?” Bransdon asked cheerfully. “Didn’t you teach me the trick for years. And by Jove!” be said with a sudden alacrity, “I believe every blessed one of all the copies of all my rubbish that was left for sale was burned with your cottage.”

Mr Gubb answered: “And a good riddance, if it was all written by a traitor!”

“Well, let it pass at that,” Bransdon repeated. “I guess when you’ve spent the whole of your life wrestling with respectable shadows it’s hard to have to come out into the open and face things. You see” — he was continuing.

Two loud shrieks tore the air from behind him. They perceived a small body of people approaching them from the red and white labourers’ cottages. Two women were far ahead, Mrs Lee by a long distance and Madame Brandetski some yards behind. And behind her, walking awkwardly and with less haste came the firemen who had gone to summon them, three policemen, the dawn light showing white in the metal of their uniforms, the Russian police official in his funeral black which had been rescued from the inn where he slept, and a couple of doctors with black leather bags. Further behind still came a group of villagers, grey and misshapen.

Mrs Lee coursed between Bransdon and Gubb. She screamed and cast herself on her knees above the body. The little fat Russian woman, her pallid face stained with tears jolted over the uneven turf sobbing at each tread, her eyes rolling with bewilderment and agony. Bransdon moved away with an impulse of delicacy. Gubb remained, saying, “Look here! Look here!”

The Russian official approached, breathing asthmatically. His eyes, too, rolled in their yellow orbits. The policemen stood in awkward, rustic embarrassment. One of the doctors opened his bag out of sheer irresolution.

“Look here, Ophelia,” Mr Bransdon said. “Go and get Mrs Lee away. She isn’t the life and soul of this Colony any longer. Do your best for her.”

Ophelia moved with a swift submissiveness.

“But where do they all come from?” Luscombe said. “What’s it all about? Who belongs to which?” Hamnet pulled his wideawake down over his brows. He gazed with his faint, ironical smile at the firemen and the policemen, the doctors, his father and the wives. In the background the steam rose sluggishly; high over head, a momentarily visible speck, the lark let its all-penetrating song shower down upon their heads.

“That,” Hamnet Gubb exclaimed, and with his hand he indicated the sombre, ugly group of human beings, “that is the Simple Life!”

CHAPTER X

THE Luscombes were giving a garden party of small dimensions for the sake of Mr and Mrs Everard, who bad come down to visit them shortly after the termination of their honeymoon. They had spent it at Monte Carlo, where Ophelia had lost 27,000 francs at Petits Chevaux. Mr Everard, on the other hand, after exceedingly hard work at the tables, using a system of his own which was a development of the Martingale, had returned a winner of 32s. 6d.

He had recovered from the tap on his head with remarkable celerity. His skull was very thick at the back and his leather motor-cap had been well wadded. He was even able to be present at the inquest on Cyril Brandetski as to whom a verdict of
felo de se
was returned, though the coroner was in favour of one of suicide during temporary insanity. But so well had all these things been hushed up that it might be said there was not a single person of the late Colony who would not have been eligible, as far as character went, for presentation at His Majesty’s Drawing Rooms. Mr Phillimore, the poet, however, should be excepted. Having published the volume, the manuscript of which Mr Bransdon had rescued from the flames, this gentleman had retired to Honolulu with Mrs Johnson. But this had not taken place until nine months after the dissolution of the Colony so that no scandal from that source attached to the Simple Life. On the contrary, they seemed all of them to have gained in social standing. Even Mrs Lee’s slight aberration over the corpse of Brandetski, though it had become pretty generally known, was put down to the necessary strain occasioned by seeing the corpse of an acquaintance stretched out on the grass after a night which had included a presentation and a great destruction of property by fire. Moreover, Madame Brandetski, being determined not to be separated from the corpse of her adored husband, had taken a villa not very far from the churchyard in which, in the unconsecrated portion, he reposed, and she had speedily become Mrs Lee’s most intimate friend. For Mrs Lee after all had known Brandetski better than anyone else there and was therefore more ready and able to listen and to add to the tales of heroic endeavour of the gentleman whom they regarded as a high-souled romanticist, enravelled in the meshes of a gloomy and terrible conspiracy.

This fact, had it been necessary, would have added greatly to Mrs Lee’s prestige. But it was not necessary. Her first garden party was held during the week after the day of the Presentation. It was attended by an enormous crowd, and, the appointments having been made by Messrs Canon and Canon of St James’s Street, under the superintendence of Mr Lee himself, no complaints of any kind could be made of the food or the entertainment. The children ran in and out amongst the guests in new but very simple white frocks from Paris. They wore also black silk stockings, patent leather shoes and elaborately frilled sunbonnets hid their lack of hair. It is true that before the end of the afternoon Cordelia Delarobbia and her confederate spoilt the appearance of their sisters by rolling them in a rose bed for the edification of the Dowager Duchess. But the sun shone brilliantly, her large Grace chuckled and everyone voted the scene charming. The children were taken to the nearest High School every morning by their father in his motor-car, and every afternoon he fetched them back. This, with the exception of strolling about among his shorthorns, was Mr Lee’s most strenuous occupation. He had become at one bound a country gentleman.

Yet although he was always there or thereabouts, his modesty of demeanour prevented his ever pushing himself into prominent positions. He became, in fact, just a typical English gentleman of middle age and in comfortable circumstances. He exacted no very great observance of the fashions from his wife, but, taking the advice of Mrs Luscombe, he conducted her, himself, to Paris and from Redfern’s and similar establishments, selected for her a complete wardrobe of dresses that were nearly all tailor-made and dignified. And Mrs Lee, being elected that autumn to the Board of Guardians, became the heart and soul of those particular meetings. It was generally considered quite appropriate for her to be earnest and business-like. She did not find that her dresses stifled her.

On the present occasion Mrs Luscombe’s garden party was not as big as Mrs Lee’s more famous one. Lady Croydon was there and Mr and Mrs Lee, a number of young people who played tennis, Mr Ygon and Mr Bransdon himself, who, singularly impressive in a large, blackframed eyeglass, a very polished top bat, wore a long, lustrous, black cape slightly Spanish in form, in spite of the sun, for he was always of a chilly disposition and declared that the hottest day in England never really had the edge taken off it.
The White Man’s Burden,
having just finished its run for three hundred nights, was being toured by three separate companies in the provinces, and Mr Bransdon was engaged upon a drama dealing romantically with the London Stock Exchange. Upon the marriage of Ophelia to Mr Everard, he bad taken a flat in Jermyn Street, where he was efficiently waited on and valeted by a gentleman with pink cheeks and a bald head, almost exactly resembling Mr Gubb. This, Mr Bransdon said, reminded him of old times. He went out a great deal into Society, where he was much courted and he was exceedingly lazy. This he could well afford, for his play had brought him in a very large sum, and he had received commissions sufficient to enable him to live for the next ten years.

Ophelia had never gone on the Stage. This was because of the mutual declaration of passion which Mr Brandetski had forced from her and Everard, though no doubt it would have come anyhow. And no doubt, although Mr Everard had always declared that he never would have married into the Profession, he would have made an exception in favour of Ophelia Bransdon. But Ophelia, considering that she lacked social experience, was sent to the same finishing school in Paris that had so excellently turned out Mrs Luscombe. She went, moreover, to the same dressmaker. It was intended that she should have stopped for nine months in this establishment, but Mr Everard, finding that because he wasted so much of his time in Paris — where he transported the entire company of
The White Man’s Burden
and gave three performances — finding that he could not get on without Ophelia’s company, any more than she could get on without his, he engaged the Dowager Countess Croydon to act as Ophelia’s chaperone when she returned to London and Mr Bransdon. The Dowager Countess, Lord Croydon’s stepmother, was not very much older than the Earl himself, being forty-nine and of a haughty but vivacious temperament. She was, that is to say, just one year younger than Mr Bransdon, and as she remarked to her friend Lallie Smith, she might do very much worse, for did not the great Dowager Lady Holland marry Addison or Congreve or some such dramatist? At any rate, she was very much upon MT Bransdon’s arm on the occasion of the garden party, wearing a grass-green gown from Stefanie’s, a hat of roses and honeysuckle with a violet motor-veil, auburn hair of extreme brilliance and bright pink cheeks, whilst Mr Bransdon treated her with the greatest empressement. She abandoned him, however, when all those who were interested in him moved off to the number of eight or nine or so through the back garden gate and over the Common to visit Hamnet Gubb whose cottage was about a quarter of a mile away in the firwoods. It was really Countess Croydon’s idea. She had been asking Gerald Luscombe what he really had done to Mr Gubb.

Mr Gubb was now the Director of the East Croydon Garden City Ltd. He had procured his reinstatement as a solicitor, and amongst his other activities drove a thriving trade as conveyancer to the hosts of tenants who were pouring in. As one of the directors, Croydon saw him very frequently, and he was always represented as speaking in tones of a high mysteriousness of Gerald’s base ingratitude.

“Well, you know, Ada,” Gerald answered, “I suppose I did show base ingratitude. He thinks so and who can know better than he?”

“But what did it all amount to?” the Countess persisted. “The East Croydon is going to pay us remarkably well. We shall be able to do without letting the shooting this year.” Her Ladyship was sitting on a green garden seat in the shade of the high trees at the end of the tennis lawns. On the one side of her sat Mrs Luscombe, on the other Mrs Melville. Mr Melville, trim and precise, sat on a garden seat beside his wife. Mr Everard, with a little more of a white waistcoat than ever, was on another green chair beside Mrs Luscombe, who wore a dress of lavender-coloured muslin, very short in the skirts. Ophelia was coming towards them carrying a tennis racket and walking beside Mrs Lee who, with her high and windy tones, called her “My dear,” and wore a tabor-made costume of brown serge. From the other direction there came slowly the Dowager-Countess and Mr Bransdon who, according to Mr Everard, resembled four James MacNeil Whistlers, with the white lock and all, robed into one.

“What it all amounted to,” Mrs Luscombe said with decision, “was, that the man was an impertinent, underbred little creature, and Gerald gave him the talking-to that he deserved.”

“Oh, no,” Gerald answered, “it amounted to a great deal more than that. It was entirely a matter of misunderstandings of our relative points of view.”

“Oh, come, Gerald dear,” Mrs Luscombe said. “Don’t be irritating and talk wildly. You never have told us what you were driving at, and Ada really wants to know.” She added to the Countess, “You haven’t an idea how teasing Gerald can be at times.”

“I am sure,” Mrs Melville spoke for the first time, “Gerald never teased anybody, in his life. He never even pulled the cat’s tail when he was a boy.”

“Web, you see,” Gerald Luscombe said, “what Mr Gubb was aiming at was, so he said, to turn me into a benefactor of my kind. But what I was aiming at — it was sentimental of me, but there it is! — I was aiming at Hamnet Gubb.”

The Countess said, “What is Hamnet Gubb?” just as Mr Bransdon exclaimed, “Web, you very nearly shot him in the bathing shed.”

“What I mean,” Gerald Luscombe explained patiently, “was that I supposed that the people Mr Gubb was going to bring along would all have the same natures and lead the same sort of life that Hamnet Gubb leads to-day.”

“But who is Hamnet Gubb?” the Countess persisted. “What sort of life
does
he lead?”

“Ah, if you want to know that,” Gerald said, “you’d better go and see him.”

“Oh, let’s go and see him,” Ophelia exclaimed suddenly. “I haven’t set eyes on him since the night in the moonlight when he saved both our lives. You remember,” she addressed her husband, “though we went three times after you were well, we never could find him in the cottage?”

Mr Everard rose indolent and smiling from his tilted chair. At the same moment Countess Croydon got up stiff and erect. “I’ll certainly come with you,” she said, “if we really
are
going to see the Simple Life at last?” She looked down at old Mrs Melville and said, “Won’t you come, too?”

Mrs Luscombe had to remain with her guests and the Dowager-Countess, who did not like to be of any expedition that included the Countess herself, sat down beside her hostess.

“I’ll go and see Hamnet,” Mr Bransdon said. “That boy had some spunk in him.”

They skirted the croquet lawn where Mr Lee was playing a spirited game with the Rt. Hon. Ygon and Bill was marking the hoops.

“Come along, Bill!” Mr Luscombe called out. “We’re all going to see Hamnet Gubb.”

“Oh, hooray!” Bill exclaimed. And running up he caught hold of Ophelia’s shoulder and let her pull him along. “What do you think I saw Hamnet do yesterday? He got a squirrel to come down from a tree and eat sugar out of his hand! And what’s more, when he put it back on the trunk it wouldn’t stop there but came back and burrowed in under his coat! Why, there’s a hen partridge that leads a covey of thirteen chicks over his doorstep when he’s sitting in the doorway!”

“Rather awkward if he took a fancy to your game,” the Countess said to Gerald. “What does he do for a living?”

“Oh, that’s rather sketchy,” Gerald said. “He doctors the farmers’ cows now and then, and he has a potato patch and some cabbages. I believe his father’s offered him some money, but he won’t take it.”

“Oh, you’ve given him some yourself, you know, Gerald,” Mrs Melville said.

“I don’t like that,” the Countess answered. “If he’s healthy and able-bodied he ought to work for his own living and not be a parasite.”

“Well, that’s one way of looking at it,” Gerald Luscombe said. “But I don’t think he much knows or cares, and I don’t much know or care myself.”

“But you don’t want to encourage idleness!” the Countess said.

“I don’t know,” Luscombe answered.
“
I’m idle myself. I’ve been idle all my life. I think I like to encourage Hamnet Gubb to be idle because he does it in a pretty way, just as I like to see Mr Gubb being furiously industrious because it makes me feel so superior.”

“I really don’t know how you can talk like that,” the Countess said. “What is it but idleness that fills all the workhouses and gaols and makes people disconcented with their proper stations in life. That and drink.”