Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (476 page)

“Your cousin did not seem to take much special notice of me,” she said.

“She didn’t take much notice of anybody, Margaret.” The voice of Mrs. Pett suddenly startled them all. “She regarded this as a purely business meeting. You wouldn’t think it to look at her, but she is a most extraordinarily cool-headed person when it comes to business. I have seen that. I wanted to know how a great property was really worked. So she took me one morning to her offices — to one of her offices. There wasn’t a drawer in the place that she hadn’t a rough knowledge of the contents of. And what struck me most was the extraordinary concentration of her manner. She got a sort of grip, a sort of coldness—”

“Well, I experienced some of that,” Mr. Dexter said amiably. “I was never spoken to like that in my life.”

“She says,” Mrs. Pett continued, “that she can afford herself that manner in business things. She says it’s the only way she can get through.”

The Countess said suddenly: “I think I know all I want to know about Lady Aldington, thank you, Anne.” She looked at the Duke with the manner of a cool slaveowner.

“You’d better come along with me,” she said. “I want to speak to you.”

The Duke rolled himself sideways out of the seat of his chair and, standing up, stiffened his shoulders obediently. And whilst the Countess swept out of the room — she had not given a single look at Sergius Mihailovitch, but had kept her face as stiffly towards the door as if it had been resting in a photographer’s neck stall — Miss Dexter suddenly exclaimed from the bedroom door:

“Oh, I hope I haven’t done any harm to Count Macdonald? Oh, I hope I haven’t done any harm to Count Macdonald?”

The Duke looked at her with his enigmatic and gloomy eyes.

“God knows! God knows!” he said.

Then he stalked gloomily out of the room after the Countess. Macdonald stood up lightly on his feet. They were all silent, listening to the sobs of Miss Dexter.

“It’s extraordinary how little talking I’ve had to do this morning,” he said. “I might have been a battlefield that you were all contending over while I just lay there — except, of course, that it didn’t hurt. It’s been delightful to be so lazy, and it’s all gone like greased clockwork. Her Excellency couldn’t have broken the meeting up at a more convenient moment.”

He looked at the King. “Come along, Mr. Spenlow,” he said, “we’ll be down at Brooklands by half-past twelve all right. And I guess if you want to do a kingly action you will ask Miss Dexter and Mrs. Pett to come with us. They haven’t either of them seen an aeroplane.”

The King suddenly started to life.

“In that way,” Macdonald said, “we leave Mr. Pett and Mr. Rosenbaum to explain to Mr. Dexter the terms of the contract Mr. Pett has drawn up. It’s all entirely Mr. Pett’s doing.”

Mr. Pett said: “Oh, rot! The whole thing was your idea.” The King was making towards the door with more animation than he had displayed at any moment of the meeting, but he was delayed in his stride by the fact that Sergius Mihailovitch had gone into Mr. Dexter’s bedroom and found Miss Dexter sitting on the bed and weeping, with her hands hiding her face. He sat down on the bed beside her and patted her shoulder.

“There! there!” he said. “It’s all forgotten; it’s all forgiven. There aren’t any bones broken. You’ll just have to get used to Kintyre’s manners. He’s a tremendously great nobleman, and he regards us all just as the grass he treads on with his patent leather shoes.”

Miss Dexter pulled her hands fiercely down from her face. “You’re every bit as great a nobleman,” she said. “I hate that old Duke! I never want to speak to him again.”

“Now, that’s rather awkward,” Macdonald said, “because it’s perfectly plain that he’s the person you ought to marry.”

She looked at him more fiercely than ever. “Marry him!” she said. “I’d as soon marry a toad.”

“Oh, well, you know,” Macdonald said, “he may have a jewel in his forehead.”

But the allusion meant nothing to Miss Dexter, who was preparing a new invective against Kintyre when Macdonald held up his forefinger:

“Just a minute!” he said.

From the next room they heard the voice of Mr. Dexter, raised high, and saying, more and more jubilantly:

“Hello, hello!... That Paris?... That the Hotel Bristol? — that Hodges P. Mordaunt?... That you, sir?...”

“Doesn’t it awe you,” Macdonald said, “to think that we’re connected at this very moment with the greatest force in the world?”

“Besides,” — Miss Dexter ignored his question and continued her own train of thoughts—”if I married that ugly old Duke you’d never get your divorce, and then you’d never marry Lady Aldington.”

Macdonald’s smile became for a moment rather vague. But he recovered himself immediately, and said:

“Oh, well, if I’ve been impertinent to you for your good, you’ve been impertinent to me in return. So we are quits, and I hope it’ll be for my good too. Come along, we’re all going to Brooklands, and Mr. Spenlow is in a hurry.” Miss Dexter had jumped from the bed to her father’s washstand. She had poured out a basin full of water and had shaken half a bottle of eau de Cologne into it, and had got her face right into the basin before Macdonald was through the door.

In the next room the King was standing forlornly in the middle of the floor. Mrs. Pett was beside him, buttoning up her gloves. Mr. Dexter, the Marquis da Pinta, and Mr. Pett were grouped round the telephone, into which Mr. Pett was reading slowly the terms of the deed that were to limit the powers of the trust in the kingdom of Galizia. Apparently at the other end of the wire Mr. Mordaunt had some difficulty in appreciating the nicenesses of Mr. Pett’s London pronunciation, for one sentence Mr. Pett had to repeat three times over, and once he exclaimed with exasperation:

“Oh, hang it all! Cawn’t you understand Henglish?”

“That,” Macdonald remarked cheerfully to the King, “is how Your Majesty makes history.”

“It seems to be a silly, rotten sort of a way,” was the King’s comment.

PART I
V

CHAPTER
I

THIS was in the beginning of October, but it was nevertheless a full six months before Sergius Mihailovitch and Emily Aldington stood on the deck of the yacht
Esmeralda
looking at the dark outline of the city of Batalha. It was therefore April, and although in north Galizia the spring by that month has as a rule not fully set in, there are at times certain days of great heat and certain nights of a tepid warmth. And this was such a night. The yacht was moored close into the quays, for indeed in that city they have deep waters right to the heart of the bay. There was no moon, but the clusters of bright stars, like swarms of bees, covered the entire dark heavens. Immediately alongside there towered up, black and frowning, the great square masses of warehouses. In front of the warehouses they could make out three enormous steam cranes, like four-legged giants of iron. A little to the left there was an old palace that now housed the Galizian custom service. On its roof against the sky they could see faintly a chariot with three horses and the silhouette of a woman who, standing in the chariot, held out towards them a wreath of laurels. Further along, high standards of electric lights flickered and intermittently sparked and died down for a moment, as if they intended to go out for good; now and then, brightly lit and glowing, an electric tram ran for a brief space along the water front, to be lost behind white houses almost before the rumble of its passing reached their ears coming down the water. Further along still there were some lighted cafés, from which there came faintly the sound of guitars and the metalic bray of a phonograph that continued to repeat the air of “
La ci darem la mano.”
Away to the north there rose up the tall shafts of the factory chimneys that they could count to the number of seven, looming indistinctly in the night, though from one of the factories there came a blinding glare and bright white smoke, sending wavering trails of radiance down the dark water. And all around and behind the town they had the sense of high mountains, looming darkly, and of ragged sea cliffs. There ran, moreover, across the sea front of the bay two promontories of land that seemed to overlap, on each promontory being silhouetted the ragged form of a castle, the one being known as Le Morro, and the other the Castle of the Gracious Endeavour.

“So that,” Sergius Mihailovitch said suddenly, “this is what we can call success. It’s success so overwhelming that if we each of us had a hundred hands and a hundred arms we couldn’t take hold of it, and we couldn’t grasp what it meant.”

The ship seemed all asleep, though somewhere someone watched. A boat was crossing the harbour at a distance and men were singing in it. From the portholes of the upper cabins there was shown here and there a light, bright and yellow, illuminating a little half-circle of the blue darkness. They were on the captain’s bridge, looking down over the whole ship.

“And wouldn’t you think,” Sergius Mihailovitch continued—”Don’t you feel a sense of all these people slumbering beneath our feet? Doesn’t it make the whole ship seem like an immense, softly breathing organism? Don’t you feel little Pett and his wife rather oppressed by the heat where that light is? And don’t you feel the little King on the other side, looking out of his porthole and trying to think historic thoughts, whereas all the while all he can really think about is the new wrench that he and Mr. Salt have been trying to make out of hardened aluminium? And if you really try you can just catch a whiff of the odour of the pope’s cigarettes. His room is somewhere just about under our feet. And the crew is all asleep, and the officers are lying on mattresses right forward there. And the captain is talking to my namesake Macdonald, the King of Batalha. You can just hear their voices. And the cooks, and the stewards, and the stewardesses, and the cabin boys — how many people are there on the ship? A hundred I a hundred and twenty! Haven’t you got a sense of them all, sleeping or watching?”

“No, I haven’t,” Lady Aldington answered. “I am not so sensitized. I only feel a sense... of you.”

“Ah, my dear!” Sergius Mihailovitch said.

And after a silence he continued: “Well, then, don’t you feel,” he asked, “a sense that it’s all more than we deserve? We’ve got everything that we want. There is nothing we can think of that we haven’t got. To-morrow we begin the silly little revolution, and nothing in the world can stop its success. There’s nothing that we have not foreseen, and there isn’t a helping hand for the other side anywhere in the world. And haven’t we just glided along until we are here together — exactly where we want to be, and exactly as we want to be? And we don’t seem to have done anything.”

Again Lady Aldington said: “No, I don’t feel it like that, but I can understand how you feel. They say that’s the difference between a man and a woman — that a man looks forward and a woman remembers. At any rate, that’s the difference between you and me. I can’t forget what you’ve gone through. I can’t forget your ups and downs. I don’t think I am ever going to forget your mortifications. And I don’t suppose I am ever going to feel perfectly safe.”

“It’s as if you didn’t trust me,” he answered happily.

“I don’t know that I do,” she replied. “I don’t mean to say that I don’t trust your motives or your honour or your love for me. That would be nonsense, for you’ve got all the trust I can give. But I don’t think I can trust your... your fate. That’s what I mean.”

“Oh, but just consider,” he answered, “how splendidly we’ve brought it all off! Look what we began from; look what I began from; and look where we are!”

“Ah, that’s your dear optimism,” she said.

“No, no,” he answered. “That’s just what
is.
It isn’t optimism, and pessimism couldn’t change it. It’s fact.” She answered only: “Ah!”

And he continued: “And I still feel that I haven’t done anything for it. There’s the water and the palm- trees and the lights shining all down it, and there’s the blessed warmth, and there’s you!”

“Ah,” she said, “but you forget that we are only here, as you might say, just by the skins of our teeth. It was the day before yesterday at four o’clock that we started, and at a quarter to four you still thought that you couldn’t start at all, or that you’d have to go by another way. And you forget all the miseries you have been through, and all the treacheries, my dear, that you have had to put up with.”

“Oh, but all the treacheries never came to anything,’ he said gaily.” In the end they have quieted down. We’ve brought it off.”

“Well, I’m not wringing my hands,” she answered.

“Oh no!” he exclaimed; “you never wring your hands. Sometimes I have looked at you, and I have wondered if you had any heart at all when that wrangling was going on. But, of course, I know you have a heart. Of course I know it’s only your cold exterior. I know it! I’m simply filled with pity and concern for you. And I suppose really it’s I that haven’t got any heart, for all I think about in the end is just getting forward. And even when I look back and try to be as sympathetic as possible for the worries you have gone through on my account — even then I can’t really worry enough for you. Of course I have my times of depression, but they’re like fevers. That’s the difference. You take these things coolly and you remember them. But they say it doesn’t matter what agonies you have been in if you have got a touch of fever; after they are over you simply don’t remember them. And if I look back on the times we have had, I just remember spots of things here and there. There are interviews with Pett, and interviews with solicitors, and interviews with pawnbrokers, and interviews with filibusters. But I have practically got to make an effort to remember every other interview that wasn’t an interview with you. But when it comes to them I remember every word you ever said. I remember that when we went, for instance, from Wiesbaden to Nauheim you said you couldn’t understand if I talked in figures.”

“Oh, I am beginning to understand you better now,” she answered.

And then he said: “I said it was all the dark forest, and you said you couldn’t think what the dark forest meant. And I dare say you can’t. That’s probably the difference between us. When I remember what we have been through, it just seems like a dark forest that I have come out of into this starlight. I don’t see the interviews plainly; I don’t see the people plainly. It’s just a darkness. It’s just tree trunks. But we are out of the wood. Whereas you...”

“Oh, I,” she answered—”I don’t forget anything. And that’s why I wish you’d get rid in some way of Mr. Pett and the Marquis da Pinta.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed, “but I can’t do it! And what in the world can they do to me? I can’t think of it. I can’t begin to think of robbing them of whatever credit there is to be got out of all this funny little affair. You see, they want credit and I don’t. Besides, what can they do to me?”

“Oh, my dear,” she exclaimed, with a touch of deep feeling, “if there’s any credit at all you ought to have it, for you’ve done everything. But I don’t particularly want you to have the credit if you don’t want it. It’s only that if you did want it, if you had a touch of selfishness, I should feel so much safer, because I should know that you’d be able a little to look after yourself. As it is, I dare say you’re all right against Da Pinta, though you can’t expect me to like all this when I know that you’ve got to fight him after all this is over.”

“Oh, but, my dear,” Macdonald answered, “one’s got to fight duels. It’s part of the day’s work.”

“I dare say it is,” she answered. “But you can’t expect me to like it.”

“Oh, I’ll chip a little bit off Da Pinta’s wrist,” Macdonald said. “It’s all right, he hasn’t got a chance with me.”

“I dare say he hasn’t,” Emily answered. “I quite believe he hasn’t, but it’s those two, with their heads always together, whispering and jealous! It worries me. It’s a worry that will go on after this affair is over. You pretend you don’t care what they say. But you do. And I who don’t care what they say — who don’t care in the least, and you know I don’t care, because I have you and I trust you — I have to be worried because you’re worried. That’s what it really comes to.”

Macdonald, of course, was the unconquerable optimist. But that was not to say that he did not have his moments of worry, and it wasn’t to say that in these moments of worry he did not commit himself to actions that were certainly unwise. And the worries of his life had really been considerable, because they were so exceedingly complicated. That was how his absurd trouble with the Marquis da Pinta had arisen. You might have said that for months Da Pinta would have been ready to black Sergius Mihailovitch’s boots. And he really didn’t seem ever to have anything to say. He could talk, of course, about the weather, but he didn’t appear to have any opinions. But one evening, walking home with Sergius Mihailovitch and Mr. Pett from Leicester House, Da Pinta had suddenly begun to talk. And then it appeared that he had an extravagant admiration — which was shared by all his countrymen — for the works of Alexandre Dumas.

For some obscure reason — perhaps because they had no writers of their own — the Galizians had elevated the author of the “Three Musketeers” to the position of a sort of patron saint of the country. And in Galizia, as it came out that evening, the Marquis was celebrated for his immense devotion to the works of this romantic writer. He was even the president of the National Society of Friends of Dumas
— La Sociedad Nationale Dos Amigos De Dumas.
Even at the revolution he had not been deprived of this honour. The republic had said magnanimously that it did not war against poets, so that the president of the republic was actually the vice-president of the Dumas Society, thus being the inferior of the exiled nobleman. Nay, Da Pinta had actually been invited to return to Galizia and to occupy the chair at the great national fête and bull-fight that were to be given on Dumas’ Saint’s Day. Da Pinta was to be amnestied for a week. And he fully intended to take advantage of this invitation, because he was anxious to do honour to the great, the illustrious god of romance. Moreover, he was anxious to get into touch with the President of the Republic so as to gather how much of a fight the ministry might be expected to put up against the counter-revolution. These important facts he told Macdonald as they were walking through the silent emptiness of Cadogan Square towards one in the morning. He added that he fully expected to make excellent use of his visit.

“And thus,” he exclaimed, swelling his chest and making a great gesture with his hand, “thus the restoration to liberty of my unfortunate country will be contributed to by the immortal shade of the great, the illustrious, the god-like poet...”

“
Mais, mon cher,”
Macdonald said pleasantly, “all this is positively absurd,
c’était ce monsieur qui écrivait comme un cocher de fiacre.”

Da Pinta didn’t say another word, and Macdonald forgot all about it, for immediately afterwards Mr. Pett began to talk about a pamphlet that he was writing.