Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (482 page)

“By English law this agreement for separation renders any subsequent divorce impossible. That is why Mr. Buss does not want you to sign this deed of separation.”

“Then why did they ask me to sign it?” Macdonald said.

Again Mr. Lumsden smiled. “Why,” he said, “that was simply because Messrs. Buss wanted to get more out of you than they supposed you to be willing to give.”

“But they must have known!” Macdonald exclaimed hotly. “The Countess must have known that I would give her anything she asked.”

Mr. Lumsden waved his hand. “Either the Countess didn’t know it or else she represented it otherwise to Messrs. Buss. She represented, in fact, to Messrs. Buss that you were determined to leave her to starve and to marry some other lady. So to fight this, Messrs. Buss put forward a deed which would make it impossible for you to marry anyone else, in order to make you behave handsomely to the Countess if she consented to divorce you. I hope I make myself plain, for that is all that this document was meant to do. So, of course, when Messrs. Buss learnt that you were ready to sign it, they were naturally thrown off their legs, for it certainly appears that their client is anxious to remarry, whilst you aren’t. That gives us the absolute whip hand over them. Your Excellency can dictate any terms that you like.”

“I don’t want to dictate any terms at all,” Macdonald said wearily. “I want you to arrange it so that Her Excellency gets everything that is provided for in this deed, together with whatever facilities she wants for divorcing me. Of course, I don’t wish to be made to appear too much of a villain. But if that is what your law insists on, your law can have that too. You understand.”

They left it on that basis, though of course Mr. Lumsden made it plain that he would have to fight all the points in order to concede them gracefully afterwards. To Macdonald that seemed an imbecile proceeding, but Mr. Lumsden said it couldn’t be done otherwise, as a vague functionary called the King’s Proctor would be always on the watch to smell out any trace of agreement between the parties, as he called them. He warned Macdonald that he would have to receive from the Countess a pitiful letter asking him to return to the domestic hearth that he had so heartlessly abandoned. But as this letter would be dictated by the Countess’s solicitors in order to make certain that there was nothing in it that would give a handle to the King’s Proctor, Macdonald was to take no notice of it.

Personal poverty hadn’t affected Macdonald in the least, but this obscure fumbling in the unpleasant background of what appeared to him unholy indiscretions affected him quite horribly. It was like playing a game of make- believe in which every one of the details was obscene. And for a great many days he went about in a state of deep and lasting depression. His Countess had indeed broken out in a new place. He couldn’t believe that she believed that he was ready to leave her to starve. On the other hand, she had certainly said just that to her legal advisers. If she had said it without believing it it was revolting, but if she believed it it was revolting almost beyond belief. She couldn’t believe it. Yet the uncertainty weighed upon him. He wanted to write to her to point out that she must know that such a course of conduct would have been impossible to him. But Messrs. Lumsden absolutely forbade him to write. They said that the King’s Proctor could call for all the documents in the case, and that this letter alone would be sufficient to prevent a divorce. So that, in a Russian phrase, all his soul shivered on the brink of uncertainty. It had to continue to shiver.

Mr. Pett might by now, as far as the affair of Galizian revolutions was concerned, be regarded as Macdonald’s political enemy. And Macdonald imagined that, this being the case, Mr. Pett would avoid any personal contact with him. But this was not the case.

They had, of course, to meet in a social manner, here and there, and they had to behave themselves, which Macdonald was quite capable of doing. But on the occasion of one of Lady Aldington’s shoots they were all stopping at Aldington Towers together — Kintyre, Macdonald, the Petts, the Dexters, the Galizian royal family with Da Pinta in attendance, and twenty or thirty gentlemen and ladies of Whig opinions who did not much count, though they provided an agreeable background at dinner and in the smoking-room, where they told anecdotes until far into the night.

It was on the sixth and last night of his stay that Mr. Pett heard that Macdonald, Kintyre, and a Lady Vulliamy, who was a distant connection of Lady Aldington, were going to stop on at Aldington Towers for the week-end after the crowd of them had left. Mr. Pett heard this by accident at dinner, because Kintyre said across the table to Macdonald that if the morning was at all decent they would ride over and see the otter hounds at work in the neighbourhood of Northiam. Mr. Pett had already been informed by the butler that his train to town left at ten- fifteen. The otter hounds would not be at work until about eleven of the following day. Therefore Macdonald must be going to outstay Mr. Pett. He turned indeed straight upon Sergius Mihailovitch and said:

“You’re stopping on then, I understand.”

Macdonald said: “Yes, I’m stopping on until Tuesday.” And Mr. Pett grunted: “What about Furness and Furness? About the ammunition? You were to have seen them to-morrow.”

Macdonald answered: “But unfortunately Lord Surbiton has just wired to me that he has got the influenza, and can’t see me until Tuesday afternoon.”

Mr. Pett choked in his throat. He couldn’t eat any more dinner, and he couldn’t think of anything, because his emotions were too strong for him; for after that he imagined that there could not be any doubt that Macdonald had more influence with Lady Aldington than he with all his genius. And this appeared to him to be a positive sin against God, for whenever Mr. Pett had deigned to talk to Emily she had listened to him with a deference that seemed quite proper. So that at the end of the meal, when the ladies were leaving the gentlemen, Mr. Pett got up from his chair, approached her, quivering with excitement, and said that he must positively have some words with her before they went to bed, as he wouldn’t see her on the following morning, and she was stopping at Aldington Towers for a fortnight.

Lady Aldington said that it was a fine night, and that she would meet him on the south gallery of the terrace in about ten minutes, or as soon as she had seen that the ladies had had their coffee in comfort. It had rained hard all day, but now it had stopped, and she said they would both probably be better for a breath of fresh air.

In his public utterances Mr. Pett would have declared that it was the duty of Lady Aldington to admire — even to adore him for his eminence and wisdom. She ought to hang upon his lips waiting for the words that should show her how to conduct her public duties. Indeed, had Mr. Pett known what was the male equivalent for an Egeria, or even what exactly an Egeria was, he would have declared that he ought to be her ladyship’s Egeria. In private he had the feeling that his physical charm and the brilliant bitterness of his wit ought by now to have forced her to become his mistress. He wanted more than anything to be able to boast to a small but admiring circle that Lady Aldington was his mistress, and indeed he had already hinted as much to this small group amongst whom he felt really at home. These were the disbanded members of the Putney Fabian Society, who had followed Mr. Pett when he had gone over to Toryism; they regarded Mr. Pett as the greatest influence of his day, and no doubt he was, for at that date this writer set the whole tone of life for an almost uncountable multitude of younger men and women.

He was used to being taken as a poetic philosopher; he was used to being looked up to by adoring eyes, to be listened to with the parted lips of absolute attention. His “conquests” among women and female disciples of the middle and lower middle classes had been so numerous and so extremely facile that in his moments of unbending he was accustomed to say that the Englishwoman was extraordinarily immoral — though, of course, he had never recorded this opinion in print — and he regarded himself really as the sultan of the world.

It is true that according to his own standards Mr. Pett had been very badly treated by her ladyship. Emily Aldington had regarded the little cockney as a friend of Sergius Mihailovitch, and any friend of his she considered to be worthy of attention. Thus she had listened to Mr. Pett’s quite brilliant conversation with a serious attention, though she had always disliked shaking hands with him. But, with Mr. Pett, to listen to him with serious attention was, for a woman, a sign that she was ready to be seduced by him when he chose to throw down his handkerchief.

At that date — in late November — he had already been told by Mrs. Pett that Lady Aldington was wrapped up in Macdonald, but though the announcement had at first put him into a fever of rage, as the weeks had passed and he had seen absolutely no sign of any understanding between Sergius Mihailovitch and Emily, he had gradually come to take it for an accepted fact that that story was only a manifestation of Mrs. Pett’s jealousy. For the only manifestation of jealousy that Mrs. Pett allowed herself over all her husband’s numerous infidelities was at times, with a faint malice, to disparage the lady who for the time being occupied the time in her husband’s attention that she considered ought to be devoted to his work. And that Mrs. Pett should say that Lady Aldington preferred to the attentions of Mr. Pett those of Sergius Mihailovitch, Mr. Pett considered was a serious libel. It belittled the intelligence of Emily Aldington; it was as if she were accused of preferring the man to the master.

For there is no denying that Mr. Pett considered Sergius Mihailovitch to be immensely his inferior. It must be remembered that Mr. Pett, being a writer, regarded himself as immensely the superior of any man who did not write books. This is an attitude very common amongst politico- economic writers. Mr. Pett indeed regarded himself as a sort of priest. He would not have said this in public, but it was what he felt in his heart. And since he regarded himself as the finest serious writer in the world of his day, so he regarded himself as the high priest of the world. He had no respect for any other man unless that man happened to possess a title — and a British title at that. Thus he regarded Sergius Mihailovitch with a contempt that can hardly be measured. For Sergius Mihailovitch had never done anything He had never written a book or a newspaper article; he hadn’t even so much as written a poem. He seldom showed any gifts of argument, and he practically never talked about Sociology, Hygienics, or the New Toryism. He was therefore just nothing, though from time to time in the moments of warm generosity that he undoubtedly had Mr. Pett remembered that it was by taking Macdonald’s money that he had been able to make a start as a writer. For Mr. Pett had commenced his career of public usefulness as booking-office clerk at a suburban station, and it had been at a Fabian meeting that he had impressed Sergius Mihailovitch with the sense of his enormous gifts.

The sky above the terrace of Aldington Towers was of a jet black with many stars powdered all over its face, and some of them hanging twinkling between the black boughs of the large elms that fringed the terraces. The night was exceedingly still and exceedingly cold. The black buildings rose up behind the terraces in a rigid mass that in the darkness presented an air of venerability. Aldington Towers was unfortunately a modern edifice of the very worst type of Victorian architecture. The original building had been destroyed by fire in the year 1873, and the present house, which was supposed exactly to reproduce it, contained three hundred and sixty-five windows, each one being a slab of solid plate glass four feet by three in dimensions. But all of its newness the night hid. From four of the plate-glass windows a warm light poured outwards, and up and down along stone, balustraded terrace Mr. Pett marched in a fur coat, in the bitter cold. He had a little champagne in him, and he was upon the point of being screaming mad with rage before he perceived Lady Aldington opening one of the French windows, which was so brightly lit, and coming out upon the terrace.

Mr. Pett plunged straight upon her. “Look here, Lady A,” he exclaimed, “this battleship business has got to be stopped! Do you understand? It’s just got to be stopped.”

“No, I don’t understand,” Lady Aldington said.

She walked straight across the terrace and leant upon the balustrade, looking out upon the darkness to the southward. A very long way away on the shore of the sea a lighthouse whirled round intermittently, and by its light Mr. Pett had two momentary glimpses of her face.

When she stood looking out like that, and it was a characteristic habit of hers, it always seemed to him as if she were superintending the landscape itself. That was it. It was as if she looked at that great expanse of country not for the pleasure of looking, but just in order to see whether it still remained pleasing to her, and whether she would not have some of it altered. And in the two glimpses that he had, Mr. Pett perceived that her face, even in the darkness, preserved still that aspect of cold power. Mr. Pett knew this lady had bought the whole town of Berkhampstead-on-Sea so that square blocks of lodging- houses should not spoil the perfection of her view to the south. And when Mr. Pett considered that this cold woman of great power was bowing her head not before him, but before a man whom he considered to be the dirt under his feet, Mr. Pett so nearly screamed with rage that his voice had a high and piercing note.