Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (391 page)

TO V. H.

My dear: such as it is, take this story — for it is yours. I have worked at it harder, I think, than at any story I ever wrote, because it was to please you. And in proportion to the hardness of the work so I have the sense of its failure. But this I can say — and this you know to be true — that where it is yours by suggestion, it might scrape past, where it is mine, in the two-stranded idea of it, it is a futility. But if it goes out with the letters of your name upon its forehead it will give me at least as ‘much pleasure as, in these days and years, I can get from the writing of books.

 
— F. M. H.

PART I.

CHAPTER I.

MR. SORRELL stepped out into the swaying corridor from the carriage into which he had gallantly accompanied Mrs. Lee-Egerton. He wanted to smoke a cigar and, now that he was off the boat, he wanted in cold blood to reflect as to whether he had not made a fool of himself. The carriage was swaying tremendously, the train travelling at an unheard-of speed, and this speed pleased Mr. Sorrell. He felt, if he were not responsible for it, he was at least a friend of its author, Mr. Makover, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Indeed, he himself had gone with the Pennsylvanian to interview the driver. The millionaire had promised the mechanic a ten-pound note if he would get them up to town in time to dress, dine, and go to the Empire before the ballet began. And in the speed at which they travelled Mr. Sorrell took a personal pride. You cannot, as a rule, do much with trains, but he himself had had a hand in this acceleration.

His left shoulder struck with violence the outer window; his right pained him considerably when it hit a brass hand-rail of the inner one.

“Oh, steady!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed.

‘He was bending down to peer into the carriages in order to discover one in which he could smoke, when his eyes hit upon the broad expanse of spotless white of a nun’s large head-dress, and at the same moment he was once more thrown so violently against the glass of the outer window that, for a moment, he experienced a feeling of panic at the thought that he had just missed breaking it and going clean through.

“Oh, I say!” he exclaimed. “This won’t do.”

He set his feet hard against the outer wall of the corridor and his shoulders against the inner. Decidedly he was going to smoke, and equally decidedly he was not going any farther. He got out a cigar, pierced the end of it with a patent American stiletto, set it in his clean-shaven mouth, lit it, and began to smoke. Then he took another peep at the nun.

She excited in him an almost unholy curiosity. He could not remember ever to have seen a nun before; at any rate he had never before been so near to one. He had not, indeed, really been certain that nuns any more existed. And it seemed to him absolutely odd that one should be seated in a railway train. It was still more odd that she should be coming back from America. He supposed that there might be nuns in England still — survivals, perhaps, of monasteries that had been forgotten at the Reformation — but he was quite certain that the up-to-date United States, with its salutary laws against undesirable emigrants, would not permit one of them to enter its territories. But on second thoughts Mr. Sorrell considered that his first must have been too rash. There must, after all, be some Roman Catholics left somewhere in the world! And, of course, when he came to think of it, he remembered that in his youth there had been a Home Rule Agitation in Ireland and that one of the main objections to giving Parnell what he wanted had been that Home Rule would have spelt Rome Rule. Then Mr. Sorrell remembered that there was still a Pope. Indeed, when Mr. Sorrell had still been the proprietor of
The Fourpenny Magazine
, he remembered that they had published an article with illustrations on a day’s work in the life of the Vatican. And he remembered, even, that he had commissioned the editor to try to get for the magazine an article written by the Pope, even if it cost him a hundred pounds.

“How extraordinary of me!” Mr. Sorrell said to himself. And he meant that it was just as extraordinary for him to have forgotten that Roman Catholics existed as it was that he should ever have wanted such truck as an article by the Pope, and been ready to pay a hundred pounds for it. Of course, it was the extraordinary rush of modern life. To-day a subject seemed of enormous importance. In a month you would not touch it as any kind of publishing matter. And Mr. Sorrell had a moment of misgiving when he remembered the sum he had paid to the Theat Publishing Company of New York for the account of the travels of Mr. Car K. Claflin, the intrepid explorer. It was perfectly true that Mr. Claflin had gone completely round the earth, never deviating by as much as half a mile from the equatorial line. But on the other hand he was paying Mr. Theat as much as
£1
0,000 for the English publishing rights of the intrepid explorations. Mr. Sorrell repeated these words rather frequently in his mind, because all the way over from New York he had been occupied with writing a sixteen-page pamphlet about Mr. Claflin’s book. In this production the word
intrepid
occurred thirty-four times and the words
explorer
and
exploration
twenty and fourteen times respectively. These lapses from literary style would afterwards be corrected by Mr. Sorrell’s typewriter. The main thing was to get the pamphlet, the book, the illustrations, the preliminary puffs, and the advertisements out as quickly as possible. Mr. Sorrell reckoned that he could do it in a fortnight. The American printed sheets of the book were in the hold of the S.S.
Eurytonka.
They would be in London that night and delivered at the binders’ next morning, giving the press seven preliminary days in which to write their reviews, and his travellers the same seven days in which to get orders from the libraries and booksellers, and devoting himself and the whole of his staff with a furious energy to the task of obtaining publicity from the halfpenny papers, which are easy to manage as long as you give them plenty of advertisements. With that pulling together of the whole crew, with that devotion to the team of his whole staff which is the cricket of publishing, Mr. Sorrell imagined that he would score another immense success. And it would have been done in record time. It was only eleven days at that moment since the day when, in London, he had received from Theat and Company, of New York, the cable announcing that they had secured the full rights of Mr. Claflin’s book, Mr. Claflin having arrived the day before in New York with his memoirs in his hand-grip. Yes, it was a pretty smart piece of work.

And, bending down to peep again at the nun, Mr. Sorrell felt a rush of satisfaction at the fact that he lived in the present day. For it was the day of rushes. There was no saying how many deals you could not get through in all sorts of fragments of time. He was even proud that he felt exceedingly tired. Except for the few hours that he had spent in the society of Mrs. Lee-Egerton, he did not think that he had really had any leisure whatever in the five days that the journey from New York to Southampton had cost him. He was proud too of his profession, which was that of a publisher. There were not any effeminate frills about the business any more. In the old days a publisher had to consider what was Literature. It was something impracticable, it was something fanciful, and you went through it in a kid-glove sort of way, trying to establish friendly relations with authors and nonsense of that sort. Now it was just a business. You found out what the public had to have. For what Mr. Sorrell supplied was just that. He gave them encyclopaedias that every clerk in the Fulham Road and every commuter from Brooklyn to Manhattan Beach could not hold up his head without having.
Commuter
is the American for season-ticket holder, and Mr. Sorrell held up his head with pride at the thought that it was he, more than anybody else, who supplied the sort of printed stuff that the suburban season-ticket holder must indispensably have. In his day Mr. Sorrell had done to this end many extraordinary things. Yet he had started out in life as a mining engineer. He had not begun with the least idea of publishing. He had rather remarkable mechanical talents and a still more singular gift of tongues. He used to say that he could pick up any South American dialect in ten minutes and drop it completely twenty minutes after he had no more use for it. In his career as mining engineer this had been to him of extraordinary use, because he could be sent off at any minute to inspect any mine, whether in South Africa, in Galicia, or on the Klondyke. And without having to rely on the representations of the Anglo-Saxons or Semites who might be trying to sell a mine, he had been able to pick up nearly always quite tidy little bits of information from native miners and the hangers-on at bars. So that, of course, he had not limited himself to his mechanical and mineralogical efforts. He had had a finger in a pie or two of his own.

Thus he had been regarded already as a remarkably warm business man, when his cousin, William Sorrell, had died. His uncle, William Sorrell, senior, of the firm of Sorrell and Sons, the publishers, established in 1814 — his venerable uncle, William, had then offered him a share in the business direction of the ancient and august house. The literary side Old William had intended to maintain in his own hands. And having gone into the matter carefully, considering that his uncle, by methods as antiquated as those of the builders of the Ark of Noah, contrived to extract from the business an income of between six and seven thousand a year, and considering also that, as his uncle’s sole heir, now that his cousin was dead, the business would ultimately fall to him, Mr. Sorrell had accepted his uncle’s offer. It had, indeed, only taken him five minutes to consider it. He had remembered that the business was old and not much supervised. There must be innumerable screws that could be tightened; there must be innumerable economies that could be effected. Half the staff could probably be kicked out. The site of the snuffy old Georgian house that the firm owned could be converted into a veritable goldmine by building modern offices upon it. And “William Sorrell, Son and Nephew” could be floated as a public company. At first, indeed, Mr. Sorrell had imagined that he would practically limit his energies to the floating of this company. Publishing had then struck him still as something connected with Literature and in consequence as something effeminate. But before very long Mr. Sorrell had averaged it out that books, if you got hold of the right sort of book, were something that the city clerk must have. The right sort of book was as indispensable as a season ticket, a clean collar, or a ten-and-sixpenny top-hat. At the same time Mr. Sorrell had been not so obtuse as not to see that it would be difficult to square the old-fashioned publishing traditions of William Sorrell and Sons — they
were
worth between six and seven thousand a year — to make them square with publishing what the city clerk would want. The long-standing reputation of the house was an asset that Mr. Sorrell did not at all want to depreciate. It had cost him a great deal of thought, but at last he had achieved the happy medium. He had begun with encyclopaedias. He had gone on to cheap editions of the classics originally published by Sorrell and Sons. After all, had not they published works of explorers like Speke, Burton, Grant, and Livingstone in solid quarto volumes? So that what, as a development, was there against their publishing gentlemen like Mr. Car K. Claflin? It was all in the very tradition itself. It
was
the tradition. It was perfectly true that you had to print Mr. Claflin upon heavy glazed paper so that his reproductions from photographs should come out well, and you had to publish him in sevenpenny-halfpenny fortnightly parts, so as to appeal to the pockets of season ticket-holders and commuters. But the old flag flew where it used to fly. The Firm was still the Firm, though just every now and then Mr. Sorrell chafed at his traditions and wished that he had been born an American citizen. His old uncle was still actually alive at Reading, where he insisted on perusing all the manuscripts that were sent into the firm and discussing them with his two maiden cousins of incredible ages who kept house for him. But at any rate Mr. Sorrell at the moment was able to think that he had accomplished the smartest bit of publishing that had ever been known since the makers of books began to move their offices from Paternoster Row.

He peeped again at the nun. She sat perfectly tranquil and self-possessed, and, when she moved a little in her seat, he obtained through the small windows a good view of her face. She had very red cheeks, as if she had been much in the open air, blue, rather hard eyes, and large teeth that appeared to impart to her face an air of rustic and rather hoydenish good health. She looked, to Mr. Sorrell’s eyes, like a prosperous market woman, and this disappointed Mr. Sorrell. He had expected, as long as he could not see her face, that she would appear pale and dark and ascetic, and with all the traces of suffering. His cigar drew well, and, propped between wall and wall of the corridor, he felt, upon the whole, comfortable. He had come out to think whether he had not made a fool of himself with Mrs. Lee-Egerton. But having the kind of brain which is able to cut off its thoughts into hermetically divided compartments, he was determined to leave the subject alone until he had come much more nearly to the end of his cigar. And suddenly it came into his head to think what a bully time he might have if with all his present faculties and knowledge he could be thrown right back into the Middle Ages. What would not he be able to do with those ignorant and superstitious people! He would invent for them the railway train, the electric telegraph, the flying machine, the motor-car, and the machine-gun. Above all, the machine-gun. He would be the mightiest man in the world: he would have power, absolute and enormous power. He could take anything: he could do anything. No king could withstand him. The walls of no castle and of no mint could keep him out. And he felt in his physical being a tingling, impatient sensation, an odd emotion of impatience as if just at his right hand there must be suspended an invisible curtain, which, could he but see it, he had only to draw back to enter into the region of impotent slaves over whom he could be lord of wealth as of life.

It was, of course, the sight of the nun that had aroused in him this train of thought. When he once more looked at her she was, with an expression of enjoyment, eating a sandwich out of a paper bag. And Mr. Sorrell laughed. It seemed to him as absurd that a nun should eat sandwiches as that she should travel in a Southampton-to-London express. He did not know how he ought to consider that they should subsist any more than how he should consider that they ought to travel. He rather imagined them consuming myrrh and hyssop, drinking the tears of affliction, and gliding in their stiff black skirts without touching it over the ground, quite close to it, as Mr. Sorrell was accustomed to do in a recurring dream that he had in common with most of the rest of humanity. The nun brushed the crumbs off the wide expanse of linen over her breast, and then, becoming aware of Mr. Sorrell’s eyes she frowned slightly at the thought that he must have seen her eating and moved over to the other corner of the vacant compartment. Mr. Sorrell did not see her again. And as if it were a signal to him to resume thinking upon whether he had made a fool of himself, Mr. Sorrell thrust his right hand into the deep pocket of his long grey ulster and drew out a leather jewel-case that had “L. E.” stamped upon its slightly domed top in gilt letters of a German-Gothic character.