Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (427 page)

“I wish she had been,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said sweetly. “I most particularly want to talk to her.”

“More than you want to talk to me?” the major asked.

“Oh, of course, I shall have to have an explanation with you before the day is out,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said grimly. “I certainly intend to have one. But I want a regular — what you might call — heart talk with Miss Delamare before she gets down to your uncle.”

“About” — the major rather gasped—”about
things!
”

“Of course, about things,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said; “about the most important things in the world. I want to point out to Miss Delamare that you can’t reform the theatre without reforming the conventional idea about marriage. I want a play I’ve written to be the very first that she puts on at the Reformed Theatre. This is not self-seeking on my part — it’s the most important thing in the world, the reform of conventional marriage.”

“Oh, I see,” the major said amiably, “you want to nobble her before she makes any business arrangements with my uncle.” He paused and remained lost in thought. But Sir Arthur Johnson was anxious to explain his position.

“I am anxious to explain my position,” he said, “so that there may not be any mistake about it.”

“I am sure it will be extremely interesting,” the major said politely.

“I am not in the habit,” the president of the Quietist Church continued, “of entering into conversation with strangers in a railway carriage. I never lose my temper — that is the great lesson that Quietism teaches us. No, I never lose my temper. But when you stamped very hard upon my toes, that, I must confess, induced in me what we are accustomed to call a marked quickening of ideas. That, you see, is quite different from losing one’s temper. From the fact that you have dragged me into this carriage, stamped upon my toes, mentioned that you have changed a discreditable name and had, what I took to be, an engagement in a place frequented by grooms, horsey people, and the criminal classes generally — from all these facts together I imagined that you yourself were either a groom or a member of a horsey and criminal class. I imagined that, knowing that I was the head of an advanced and wealthy body, you imagined that I carried about with me in my hand-baggage, which you had observed to be very heavy, the funds of the Church of which I am the head.”

“So that there we all, in a manner of speaking, are,” the major astonishingly remarked.

“I don’t take you,” Sir Arthur said frostily.

“Oh, that’s a way I’ve got,” the major said, “from studying the works of Henry James. His characters are perpetually remarking ‘so that there, in a manner of speaking, we are.’ And, of course, as you can never make out where they are, it’s extraordinarily strengthening to the brain to work it out. That’s why I’m the youngest major in the British Army.”

“I don’t see what all that has to do with me,” Sir Arthur said frostily. “What I have to do is to make my position quite plain to you. When I considered that you and your female companion were dangerous criminals intent on stealing from me the contents of my very heavy luggage, I at once matured a plan. That is one of the great benefits of Quietism that, instead of letting your thoughts waste themselves on useless anger, they are quickened. I immediately matured a plan. I said to myself, these are dangerous robbers, intent on securing, the contents of my luggage. What I have to do is, before they come to any actual deed of violence, to let them understand that the contents of my bags consist in nothing but works of reference — every kind of work of reference, but nothing else.”

“Now that’s extraordinarily interesting,” the major said. “I suppose you toughen your brain on works of reference, just as I do mine on the works of the author to whom I can never be sufficiently grateful. Now I wonder,” he continued, “if your sort of literature has the same effect on your mind as mine has on mine? I mean that I can’t possibly read any book in which the characters aren’t always saying ‘so there, in a manner of speaking, we are.’ It’s like a craze — a sort of infection. Nothing else seems really to amuse me. And I daresay it’s the same with you. I mean, I suppose you can’t read anything that doesn’t look like, ‘Denmark, pop. 8,000,742. King constitutional. Cap. Cit. Copenhagen....’ That’s the sort of thing that you get in works of reference, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know about that,” Sir Arthur said haughtily; “but I certainly cannot read the cryptic, morbid, and unpleasant stuff that in the present day passes for literature.”

“Well, of course,” the major said, “here in a manner of speaking — I mean, that accounts for it all. It’s been an extraordinary privilege and pleasure, getting to know you. The moment I saw you, I knew you to be someone commanding. There couldn’t be the least mistake about that. I thought you were Vice-Admiral Sir Arthur Bowles....”

“You said Rear-Admiral just now,” Sir Arthur said.

“Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Bowles,” the major continued, undisturbed, “because, of course, an Admiral in his own fleet is a sort of pope. And the moment I saw your, if you will pardon my saying so, noble head, I knew you were a sort of pope. And you are. You are the head of a Church. I was perfectly right in wanting your company. It will, in a manner of speaking, purify the whole day, and be a memory to retain till the end of one’s life.”

Sir Arthur Johnson appeared visibly flattered. He stroked his white beard, touched with his gloved hands his blue-black moustache, and his blue-black and formidable eyebrows assumed a mollified turn.

“Then let that be the end of it,” he said. “I was about to address some further remarks to you. But they would probably strike you unpleasantly. Of course I have not the least objection to being unpleasant if it would be for your good, but at the end of this journey we shall part, and you are probably hardened in what I am bound to call your evil courses.”

“Well, you speak straight, and no mistake,” the major said.

“I do,” Sir Arthur answered, “and if you would kindly remove yourself to the other end of the carriage, opposite your companion, I may be able to resume the studies that you have interrupted.”

The major humbly got up and humbly sat down opposite Mrs. Kerr Howe. The train continued on its way; the old gentleman arose and, a fierce and martial figure in his fur cloak, he began to take a great quantity of red and blue and green books out of a large leather kit-bag. These he laid upon the seat in front of him, where the major had vacated it.

“Extraordinary sort of day this,” the major remarked to Mrs. Kerr Howe.

Mrs. Kerr Howe said nothing, and for a moment there was a tranquillity that even Major Brent Foster — though he loved a scrap — considered blessed. Mrs. Kerr Howe was looking out of the window, and he considered her carefully. If he was going to spend at his uncle’s several days, weeks, or months in the society of Mrs. Howe, of Flossie Delamare and of his fiancée, Miss Peabody, who was not in her first youth — being six months older than the major — and in consequence was not too certain of her charms, well, he would certainly need to know how the land lay.

It was an extraordinary muddle. There was Mrs. Kerr Howe; there could not be the least doubt about
her
charms. Olympia certainly would not doubt them — and the major sighed, because, of course, from duty and inclination, he had to consider Olympia first.

Mrs. Kerr Howe was little and dimpled to a degree that the major hardly believed credible. It struck him as a sort of false pretences. She ought to be fluffy-minded, clinging and affectionate; so at least he had imagined her to be in the first days at Simla, where she had come in the train — as a sort of guest — of the Viceroy’s wife. In those days he had been lonely, rottenly poor, four years younger, and twenty-four years gayer and more irresponsible than he was even then. And Mrs. Kerr Howe had trotted about with him, little and dimples and all. She had even read her novels to him — sloppy novels that she turned out at the rate of one a fortnight, each one containing a lady like Mrs. Kerr Howe — a sentimental lady who went extraordinarily “wrong.” At that date she had not been able to find a publisher for any one of them, though she had paid to publish two.

And little by little he had discovered, even at Simla, that in that little dimpled body there dwelt the spirit of a six-foot grenadier. She knew what she wanted, and she was extraordinarily set on getting it. And one of the things that she wanted, it had appeared, was Captain Edward Brent. There was not a doubt about that.

He really had not done much. He might have taken her for a drive half a dozen times; he had listened to four or five of her novels — it was true that when she had come to the gurgly love passages she had always gazed into his eyes, but that was not his fault. He had taken her to the Swanston pony races, and almost beggared himself over it, since he hadn’t a pice but his captain’s pay. He had certainly commiserated with her over the singularly brutal letters that her husband had written her. Her husband had been a disagreeable invalid, and she had come to India strongly against his will whilst he remained at home. He had sat with her half a dozen times looking at the sunset from Dawson’s Tea Gardens through the deodars — a remote spot that was pretty solitary, because few of the Simla people knew of its existence. But up to the quite fatal day, he could not recall a single thing that he had “done” — not so much as squeezing her hand. And then, suddenly — it had happened to be at that damned Dawson’s and a sunset under the deodars — she had said:

“When we are married, we will always live in a sunset land.” And immediately afterwards she had looked steadily at him and remarked, “My husband cannot live more than three years.”

He could not even accuse himself of having been weak. He was Irish, and polite enough to be perfectly frank. He had said that he simply was not taking any, and that he wanted to marry someone else; that he did not intend to marry anyone unless he could marry someone else.

And she had answered:

“Oh, I know. A girl called Mary Savylle. That was a silly boy and girl affair! Why, you probably would not recognize her if you saw her again.”

He had sworn under his breath at that — because it just showed him that in the damned gossiping nest that Simla was, there was not a single blessed thing that they did not find out sooner or later — though possibly the only person that would be found to tell it to a man’s face was a brazen woman like Mrs. Kerr Howe. Simla itself was damned gossiping, but damned discreet all the same. That was what made the place so confoundedly snaky and dangerous. Indeed, the very next thing that Mrs. Kerr Howe had said on that occasion had been:

“You know, everybody will expect you to marry me as soon as my husband dies. And why shouldn’t you? You can’t go on starving as a lower grade officer in India all your life.”

He had been perfectly good-humoured; he had said simply that he did not deserve the honour. But she had stuck to it; she was particularly earnest on the point that he would never marry Nancy Savylle, whom he would not know if he met her again.

It had given him what would have been the lesson of his life if he had been able to learn any lessons. He had gone a thousand miles up country, but Mrs. Kerr’s letters pursued him: sometimes they spoke about her blasted reputation; sometimes she spoke about her broken heart; sometimes she wrote about the good time she was having in Ceylon, in Rangoon, in California, in the Sierra Nevada. She took a year to get home, and he supposed that she was trying to make him jealous. Sometimes he answered her; sometimes he did not. He had a lonely life in a hill station; and sometimes he wrote her chaffy pages for the sheer want of something to do, or the sheer want of keeping in contact with someone who was not buried a thousand miles deep.

Then, next season, he had come across Flossie Delamare, who had been, as he had said, a halfstarved sort of little rat at the time — she had been playing French maids in a rotten company that was going round the eastern world, in places like Hong Kong and Tokio — in a rotten company in which everyone had seemed to be a hundred and two except Flossie. He had found Flossie receiving attentions from a doubtful sort of Parsee, and he had just sailed in to yank her out of it, as he said. He was not any great social shakes in Simla; people could get on without him all right, and he was a detrimental even for garrison hacks. But just about then he had a letter from Mrs. Kerr Howe to say, “Your old flame is. marrying a fat old man — the Earl of Cumberland,” so he just sailed in to give Flossie Delamare — who had been a shopgirl from Oxford Street — as decent a sort of time as he could. Nevertheless, he had told her carefully at the start that there was not to be the least idea of his marrying her; but he used to take her to Dawson’s to tea, and when he felt sick about Nancy Savylle he used to kiss her. And he took her to Swanston pony races and made bets for her that turned out remarkably well, so that she had a good time all the way. And he used to help her rehearsing her little parts, and that was about all there was to it. Then one day in the theatre he had seen a fat old man with a fattish, darkish, pleasant-looking woman by his side. He learned from an attaché — quite by the grace of God — that it was the Earl of Cumberland with his new wife, who had been the Dowager Lady Mary Savylle — his own Nancy’s aunt! So that Mrs. Kerr Howe had been lying or very clumsily mistaken. And next day he had packed Flossie back to London with every penny he could scrape up and borrow and a letter to a fat, kind, real actress that he had known before his father broke. She had written to him once or twice to say that she had got “goodish shops,” and then he had gone to Somaliland to watch over a well that deposited alkali at the bottom of the corrugated iron cisterns at the rate of three inches a day. But the well had been all-important for the safety of the Empire in that part of the world, and his readiness in watching over i
t
had caused him to be favourably regarded by his immediate superiors; and in the meantime he had read the extraordinary novels that had, he considered, toughened his brain fibre. But the alkali and the well and the shadelessness and the reading had played the devil with his eyesight, so that when he had passed his really brilliant examination and was really the youngest major in the British Army, the Army doctors just said that he would not be fit for active service any more.