Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (451 page)

CHAPTER I
I

GEORGE FAWKENHURST, third baron Aldington, was one of those unfortunate persons whom everybody called a brute. Everybody without exception. There was not even one of the fourteen or fifteen maid-servants at Leicester House or at Aldington Towers who had a single good word to say for their master. Heavy, hairy, and untidy, he carried himself with a slouch, and he had enormous hands. At Harrow he hadn’t made a friend; from Oxford he had been sent down for ill- treatment to a cat. This animal he had put into a barrel, setting half a dozen young terriers upon it in order to train them to face the badger. He just escaped imprisonment. From the Guards he was requested to resign after he had been with his regiment in the perfunctory service that was at that time demanded of this arm of H.M.’s service. He caused so many cases of insubordination that even that regiment could find no use for him. It was just that he was a brute.

It was in the blood, it was in the tradition. For centuries in the Vale of York, where they have been small landowners, his family had been known as the False Fawkenhursts. This was not so much because they did not keep their word as because no one would ever have thought of extracting a promise from any member of the family. Then, about sixty years before, George Fawkenhurst’s grandfather James had married a lady who brought him a considerable amount of land in the Cleveland district.

Within a year of this marriage, iron in great quantity had been discovered upon this land. From that the peerage had come, James, first baron, having purchased it by contributing something over £30,000 to the party funds. Thus was established the great Whig house of Aldington. James Fawkenhurst had lived to a great age. In habits and behaviour he had been a little better than one of his own farm-servants. But, having been a man of a violent humour, he had beaten and shouted at his son and heir, the second baron, until William Fawkenhurst, George’s father, had been nothing but a sad and disagreeable shadow. William had married Julia Saxwyndholm, who brought with her the estate of Aldington Towers, and it was from this estate that old James Fawkenhurst chose to take his title, which did not come to him until his son William had been married a year or so. Aldington Towers was an estate of about four thousand acres in East Sussex, perhaps six miles north of Battle. George’s father had faded disagreeably out of existence — he died of dropsy, without ever having had the fun of drinking hard, when George himself had been, perhaps, thirteen, and was away at Harrow. When George was eighteen, the iron upon the Cleveland land had given out, utterly and suddenly. And none of the Fawkenhursts had been a saver. They had lived to the tune of £40,000 a year for fifty years, and had got precious little to show for their money. George Fawkenhurst found himself thus, when he came of age, forced to depend upon the rents from the Aldington Towers estate, from the original Fawkenhurst land in the Vale of York, and the useless lands of his grandmother in the Cleveland district. Thus he was at liberty to consider himself dismally poor, since his mother, who still lived, had a jointure to be paid her that had been calculated in the days when the Fawkenhursts were still drawing their
£
40,000 a year from iron.

Why Emily Dummy should have fallen in love with Lord Aldington was simply one of the mysteries of sex attraction. She fell in love with him when she was twenty; she married him when she was twenty-one, and with a cruel cynicism her husband had destroyed all her illusions by the time she was aged twenty-one years and one week. And within six months Emily was ready to acknowledge that when everyone in the world had besought her not to make this match, everyone in the world had been perfectly right. By the time she was twenty-three she had resolutely cut down the allowance that she made her husband to a very few thousands a year. Emily Duminy had been the richest woman in England, and she still was. The granddaughter and only surviving descendant of James, eleventh Duke of Kintyre, Dijon, and Batalha, her mother Lady Mary Buchanan had married a lieutenant in the French navy. The Duke had detested his only child for this marriage, and, Lieutenant Duminy turning out a very bad hat indeed, the Duke had left the daughter to starve on £500 a year in a villa at Twickenham. But upon the death of Lady Mary the Duke had taken his grand-daughter away from the High School, where she was getting her education. He had done his very best to spoil her. He detested his heir almost more than he detested the rest of mankind, and he was not a very amiable character. Thus, impoverishing the entailed estates as much as he could, the Duke had done his best to build up an immense fortune for his grand-daughter. No one knew exactly how large this fortune was. The Lady Aldington had paid succession duty on something under a million. That the newspapers, of course, reported. But, in addition, he was known to have settled a hundred thousand upon her at her marriage. At that date he had not been pleased with her, and he had declared that he was going to see how the marriage turned out before he made over any more of his “brass” to Emily. To his delight, the marriage turned out thoroughly badly. And by the time she had been twenty-five Emily had been able to make her grandfather certain that she was quite able to keep all her money out of her husband’s clutches. It was at that date that her grandfather, in order to avoid the death duties, had made over to her what rumour estimated as one-fifth of the city of Glasgow, half of a Scotch county, or the whole of three London slum districts. By the time she was twenty-seven Emily had been able to assure her grandfather that she would never have any children by her husband. And in his delight at the thought that none of his money would ever go into the pockets of a descendant of Aldington’s, the Duke made over to her the whole of the lands of she Duchy of Batalha. This was an enormous stretch of rather barren territory in the north of the republic of Galizia. It contained, however, several very valuable mines of tin, silver, and cobalt. This, the third of His Grace’s duchies, was not a matter of tail male, but would pass along with the title itself to Emily.

No doubt the hard discipline of fate prevented the Lady Aldington from becoming finally spoiled. In insisting on marrying Aldington she had behaved like a spoiled child; but by disillusioning her so suddenly and completely — within a week of their marriage — Aldington had done her character all the good in the world. With a perfectly callous frankness, Aldington at that date had asked her for a business interview. It had been at Taormina. He had said that he kept several establishments; that he had married Emily only to obtain money to keep these going, and he wanted to know what arrangements she was ready to make to that end. He had made the announcement without preface, and he left it without apology, standing with his heavy slouch. The shadows of the vines on the broad pergola had fallen all over him; the sky had been a hard and dazzling blue, the sea a blue deeper, darker and more dazzling, beside and below them. She had had to get used to it.

She had consulted his mother, who was still alive, six months later. And the dowager Lady Aldington could only beg her not to let her son have too much money or he would go to the devil, and not to cut him off altogether or he would go to the devil still sooner. She had consulted her grandfather, and he had given her exactly the same advice. So she had taken her line.

As things were, she was understood to have some “hold” over her husband. In the early days he had once or twice behaved outrageously to her in public places. Once he had insisted on introducing an obviously impossible woman to her on the lawn at Ascot. But rather suddenly all that had stopped. About that time Aldington had been seen going about with an unusually shaken appearance, and he had been observed to be drinking rather more whisky than usual at his clubs. Reggie Windus, who had been passing the door of Leicester House on the Saturday after Ascot, had seen a police-sergeant going down the steps, and positively Lady Aldington had been closing the front door upon him.

Leicester House with its immense gardens stands in the little cul-de-sac that turns off Forbes Square, S.W., so that how Reggie Windus could have been passing the house was not very evident to his friends; nor did it seem in the least likely that Lady Aldington, the most coldly correct of women, would ever have been near her front door. But Windus stuck to his story, and there it was. He even said, to account for his having passed the door, that the Pekingese spaniel that he had been taking for a walk to oblige Lady Hilary Cholmely had run down the cul-de-sac and, attracted by some delectable odour on the garden railings of Leicester House, had to be fetched and forcibly carried off by Reggie himself.

But the Aldingtons at all social functions formed one of the extremely model couples of which so many are to be found in London. Except to teas, Lady Aldington never went out alone, and even to many teas her husband accompanied her. He was generally to be found somewhere not very far from her chair, and, if he had not very often anything to say, that also was considered to be agreeable, since what he said whenever he did speak was invariably in the nature of a grumble against somebody or something. It was as if Lord Aldington was the most bitterly oppressed individual of a bitterly oppressed class. The Aldingtons spent from Easter to July in London, from July till October they were at Aldington Towers. In October they moved to Fawkenhurst for the shooting. A fortnight before and a week after Christmas they spent in London again, and then they moved off to Egypt until a week before Easter. This week they spent always in their yacht in the harbour of the city of Batalha, the northernmost of the three cities that the republic of Galizia contained. In the city of Batalha there was no hotel fit for the Aldingtons, and there was always smallpox. It is exceedingly likely that the large estates of Lady Aldington as Duchess de Batalha would have been confiscated when the republic had been proclaimed in 1909. They would certainly have been confiscated had the Galizian Ministry not very much desired recognition by the Government of Great Britain. As it was, the dictator passed a decree that on account of the brilliant services of the Duchess and her ancestors to the economic and political welfare of the republic of Galizia
— (Li servizi insignanti al causa de la libertad y economismo Galiziana
) — the estates of the Duchess and her heirs should be exempted from the penalties that fell upon all monarchical landowners. Indeed, it might well be said that the old Duke of Kintyre had not been a monarchist and had made for Galizia all the wealth that that impoverished country contained. In the whole of it elsewhere there was not to be seen a factory chimney. But, lying in the harbour of Batalha, Lady Aldington from the deck of her yacht could observe no less than nine. And in the remainder of the rocky province there were exactly fourteen more. In Batalha itself there was even an electric tramway, and, for what it was worth, a water supply and a drainage system, so that Galizians were accustomed to speak of the city of Batalha as
le Chicago del Sude
— the Chicago of the South. Nay, in Batalha there was even a hospital with German doctors, and two Protestant churches, the one Scotch Episcopal for the benefit of the superintendants of the mines, and the other Primitive Methodist for the benefit of the Cornish miners, of whom the province of Batalha boasted a population of nearly three thousand, All these things were the property, or were supported by, the Lady Aldington, and they were all under the general superintendence of a Scotchman called Macdonald. This gentleman was known as
le rey de Batalha
— the King of the Province.

With the regularity of the hands of a clock the Aldingtons had pursued this circular itinerary for seven years — London, Aldington Towers, Fawkenhurst, London, Egypt and then Batalha. But three years before Aldington himself had developed stomach troubles. So, at the recommendation of Sir Chrested Joins, they had managed to squeeze three weeks at Wiesbaden into their yearly round. Lady Aldington herself suffered from no troubles of any physical kind.

She was thirty-one. She stood five foot nine in her stockinged feet. She rode ten stone, and she rode it for an hour and a half every morning of the year, wet or fine. She was called a hard woman, and she had few preoccupations in life except that she desired to be able to classify her husband’s attacks of bad temper and insubordination. She put these down as a rule to ill health. Thus she discovered that Aldington never attended a sitting or voted in the House of Lords without on the next day behaving like a sulky wild beast with criminal leanings. She was, therefore, fairly certain that this came from the fact that the Upper Chamber had a particularly bad atmosphere, and that its wine list contained the name of one really good wine — a Pontet Canet of which Aldington was particularly fond. Thus four years before she had got her husband to pair with a Tory peer who had become incapable of putting in an appearance through confirmed and premature senile decay.

It was part of Aldington’s disagreeable eccentricities that he obstinately insisted on remaining a Whig. He did not even follow the Marquis of Hartington into the Unionist fold. Nay, he had once, for a period of two months, held an inferior office in a Liberal Ministry; but two months after the general election he had had to resign. Fourteen cottages on the Fawkenhurst estate had been peremptorily closed by the local sanitary authority, and the Liberal Government being engaged at that time in promoting a bill for the housing of the poor, Lord Aldington’s name, however short the party might be of peers, was held not to decorate the roll of the ministry. Indeed, it was quite as disagreeable to the Liberals to have Lord Aldington for a supporter as it was to the Tories that he should vote against them.