Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (484 page)

For a moment Mr. Pett thought only that the scene had been extraordinarily unrounded and inartistic. Then it struck him that he would no longer have the run of Leicester House and be able to talk to the ex-members of the Fabian Society of Putney about it. Then he exclaimed to himself:

“By God, I’ll go there all the same! She can’t shut her doors on me, considering what I know about her.” And then suddenly he pulled off his motor coat and ran violently down the terraces on to the rough frozen grass of the park.

It was the full bitterness of things suddenly coming upon him after, for a moment, he had been numbed. He felt a passionate desire to conquer that cold woman; he felt that it was impossible; he felt that he must try it all the same. He wasn’t going to give up. He ran violently in front of him through the black darkness. In the intense cold he became covered with sweat. He pitched right over the back of a cow that lay still and grunted for a moment in the darkness. His hands were cut by the frozen clods. He ran straight onwards for a long way. He didn’t know how long he had been running when he seemed to come to himself; then he remembered his fur-lined motor coat, that had cost thirty-four and a half guineas, and he went grimly back to the terrace to recover it, because he thought that one of the gardeners might steal it in the morning.

This showed that Mr. Pett was recovering his grip on himself. He was not going to give up. He was going to conquer, for he considered himself to be the most wonderful man in the world. He pressed his repeater and heard that it was a quarter-past twelve. The lights were out in the drawing-room, but on the bedroom floor many were still burning in an interrupted row. He slung his motor coat over his shoulder and marched into the house. When he came to his own bedroom he half opened the door, flung the coat in, and went on to Sergius Mihailovitch’s room. He pushed the door open.

Sergius Mihailovitch was sitting sunk in an armchair before the fire. He was wearing an old regimental coat of the Russian Guards, which he put on because he liked it, instead of a dressing-gown, in houses where he considered that his wardrobe would not be minutely observed by the servants. He was sitting looking straight in front of him, and when Mr. Pett burst in he exclaimed lazily:

“Holloa!”

Mr. Pett cried: “Look here, you’d better clear out of this.” Mr. Pett was wet all over with sweat, blood, and hoar-frost; his eyes glared epileptically, his hot hands clenched and unclenched themselves....

“You clear out of this,” he repeated. “I know things about you. You take my tip. Clear out! I want you to.”

Macdonald rose lazily from his chair and went over towards his dressing-table. He was looking for his smelling bottle, because a sniff of very strong salts is an excellent thing for temporarily recovering a friend from a strong attack of liquor.

“I know this,” Mr. Pett said: “You’re Lady Aldington’s paid man. She keeps you. She paid sixty thousand pounds to your account. She’s your mistress. I know all that. I shall make use of it. You quit.”

Macdonald stood extremely still.

“You’re starving your own wife,” Mr. Pett continued; “the Countess has told me so herself. She says you don’t give her any money. You take money from Kintyre when your own wife’s his mistress. Understand? I shall use that too. Do you see? I’ve got you. Quit! Clear out of here. You’re not wanted.”

Macdonald said: “What’s that you said Lady Aldington had paid?... And then my wife!... She said... She said that...?”

“And the money Lady Aldington gives you,” Mr.

Pett continued, “you squander on a woman of the streets.”

Suddenly Mrs. Pett was in the room. She stepped swiftly in front of her husband and kept her face towards Count Macdonald. In her little nightgown she appeared tiny and frail, like a black sparrow with a pink body. She did her best to cover her husband’s body and to push him backwards out of the door. She was too agonised with terror to say anything at all, but her eyes implored Macdonald.

‘‘Yes, get him out,” Sergius Mihailovitch said,’ ‘or he will not live more than a minute.”

“What?” Mr. Pett screamed from behind his wife’s back. “You kill me? You’re not the sort of man to kill me. I’m the sort of man to kill you. That’s what I shall do. I shall kill you. First I shall blast your reputation, and then I’ll have you killed.”

“Oh, I don’t mind threats,” Macdonald said.

Suddenly Mrs. Pett exclaimed: “Don’t be so pale, Sergius Mihailovitch. You’re like chalk!”

And, indeed, in his grey military cloak with the cloth of gold on the shoulders, Macdonald resembled a cloaked statue. Even his hands were chalk-white.

“Get him away,” he exclaimed, without any expression at all. “For God’s sake get him away or I shall kill him. There is a revolver in this drawer.”

And suddenly her tragic dignity deserted Mrs. Pett. She turned upon her husband, wound her fingers in his necktie, and pushed him backwards through the doorway. There was a little red foam between his lips, and Mrs. Pett resembled a dark, enraged coster girl who might have been punishing her bloke. She shut the door quickly behind her.

Macdonald remained standing perfectly still, so that he had the appearance of listening to sounds in the distance.

He took at last, absent-mindedly, a sniff from his smelling- bottle; then he replaced it on the dressing-table and laid himself down once more in his long chair. He remained gazing at the fire. At last he said:

“That’s the real dark forest — the heart of another, because of the wolves that there are in it.”

CHAPTER I
V

THOUGH it was winter, and in the night there had I been a very hard frost, on the next day the sun JL shone very brightly from rising to setting, and in all shadows there was a colour of blue because of the blueness of the sky. Macdonald and Kintyre rode over that crenellated and wrinkled Sussex country where in all the many small copses the oak leaves and the beech leaves were brown and thick beneath the sun. Twice even Kintyre pointed out a primrose flowering on the bank, well sheltered beneath the dead leaves. But it was obvious to Kintyre that Sergius Mihailovitch was not in the mood for talking. It took them an hour and a half to ride to Bodiam, where the otter hounds were, and in all that time Macdonald only put up one snatch of conversation. Just as they were going through Battle he asked suddenly:

“Was that cheque that you paid into my account — a cheque for sixty thousand pounds — signed by you or by Lady Aldington?”

Kintyre looked at him rather apprehensively; his sallow bearded face became even a shade more sallow.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “where the deuce do you think I could get sixty thousand pounds from — at a moment’s notice like that?”

Macdonald only answered “Ah!” And they turned their horses down a steep hill that goes suddenly to the northward. Some time afterwards Sergius Mihailovitch asked:

“And how do you suppose that Pett got hold of that piece of information?”

Kintyre reflected for quite a long time; at last he said: “Has Pett been talking to you? Has he been ragging you about it?”

Macdonald answered: “Of course he has,” in a perfectly lifeless tone.

“Then I can only say,” the Duke brought out cautiously, “that he must have guessed it; he is damnably sharp. Damnably!” He added after a time, “There isn’t any other way. Not any! Of course I shouldn’t talk, and nobody at the bank would talk. It’s just possible that Emily may have told Mrs. Pett because they are great friends, and it’s just possible that Mrs. Pett may have told her husband. It’s just possible, but quite unthinkable.”

“Oh, it’s quite unthinkable,” Macdonald repeated mechanically.

“But, of course, Pett,” Kintyre said, “would be able to deduce it. He’d make a shot at it and take the risk. He knows your financial position pretty well, and he’d guess that I couldn’t raise a huge sum of money like that at a moment’s notice. So you can take my word for it that he just made a shot.”

“Well, he was precious near my taking a shot at him,” Macdonald said.

Again the Duke grew a shade paler, and once more he did not speak for quite a considerable time.

To Kintyre, Sergius Mihailovitch always appeared an extremely dangerous person. Kintyre was always thinking that Macdonald would burst out into a terrible fit of rage, and what he feared was not that Macdonald would call him out, but that he would demonstrate that Kintyre had been lacking somehow, somewhere in delicacy. And Kintyre had reasons for regarding himself as not the person with the cleanest of hands in the world. He couldn’t possibly consider himself as being straight in the absurd way that he considered Macdonald to be straight. Macdonald he couldn’t in the least understand. He admired him, and he was afraid of him because he had met many Russians of good birth not one of whom he could have considered as reasonably honest men. Kintyre couldn’t in the least understand where Macdonald had got his peculiar scrupulousnesses. He could only imagine that Macdonald must have been brought up in some extremely distant region of the Russian provinces, where there might have been some old marshal of nobility who had influenced him to a point of punctiliousness that must have vanished from the world perhaps a hundred years ago. And, of course, he could see that Macdonald, having been educated in his later years at Harrow, had taken seriously all the points of schoolboy honour that he considered most English boys to regard as impracticable and too visionary for daily use. He himself at Winchester had been a most unspeakable little cad, and so he had found most of his comrades.

“It’s all your confounded trying to be delicate.” Kintyre at last faced the matter with a boldness of desperation. “It’s not my fault. I should have been perfectly ready to have told you that the cheque was Emily’s, but you’ve got a manner that absolutely prevents one talking to you. So that it’s just delicacy that’s landed you into what I can see to be a damnably coarse piece of blackmailing on the part of our friend Pett. But I am extraordinarily sorry if you’re inconvenienced.”

“I’m horribly inconvenienced,” Macdonald said.

But they did not speak again until they came to Bodiam. Indeed, two minutes later they came upon a sort of a small squire in a grey woollen sweater, with hob-nailed boots and a light spear tipped with steel. And as this Mr. Monk- house was slightly known to Kintyre, he walked beside the horses talking animatedly about a duty on hops. There wouldn’t be, he said, a single field in East Sussex that wouldn’t be grubbed up if this damned Government didn’t give them the duty that they wanted.

Bodiam was like a pageant. There was the immense castle like a background of stone to a group of people who were assembled on the banks of the slow Rother in broad green fields. There were the mottled hounds and quite a number of terriers. There was the bright sky, the silent glassy waters of the moat that reflected the naked branches of the trees all golden in the aching sunlight. And Macdonald heard a great many Sussex names and met a great many Sussex people. There were Monkhouses, and Vidlers, and Stringers, and Skinners, and Fletchers, and Venuses; and there was here and there a dash of scarlet and the short grey skirts of the women, who were all fair and tanned and loud-voiced. And they found an otter, and it went away downstream while they were trying to head it up; and there was a great deal of talk, but not very much splashing in the water, because the water was very cold. It was, indeed, not much more than a trial meeting to see whether they couldn’t get an early winter hunt, for most of the otter hunting in these parts is carried on in the summer. Macdonald had to hear these facts many times over. They wanted him to get down from his horse and to run with them, but he wasn’t much good at running, nor, for the matter of that, was Kintyre; but as they were both of them good horsemen, the pedestrians couldn’t get anywhere that they couldn’t go.

There was an odd incident of a dog otter in a mill-pond. It was lying in the middle of the water with its nose pushed up through a bunch of floating hay. They wouldn’t even have noticed it at all except the hay kept still whilst the rest of the pond had a slow current. Someone observed the motionless patch, and there beneath it, sure enough, was the otter treading water. They disputed a good deal about it, for not the oldest of them had ever heard the like. Some said that the otter did it to hide its muzzle, and others were of the opinion that it put its nose into the bunch of hay in order that the scent of the hay might prevent its own scent from coming over the water to the hounds. And one of these two theories they disputed and disputed until well into the afternoon, whenever they were not breathless with holloaing and beating the water.

But that was just an interlude that made no impression at all upon the mind of Sergius Mihailovitch. It seemed to be faint and distant, like looking at old-fashioned water-colour sketches, and Kintyre and Macdonald left the river about one o’clock, pretending that they wanted something to eat, though Macdonald couldn’t have swallowed a crust. He took, instead, a great quantity of bad whisky at a little inn on the road, but because of the strength of his raging emotions it did not affect him any more than if it had been water.

The winter sun was settling slowly down to the horizon when they came within a mile of Aldington Towers. Having got through a gateway they were riding in a small copse where the woodmen had been lately at work on the under-wood, though they had all gone home because it was a Saturday. A robin was flitting along beside them, giving its long note of warning, and suddenly Macdonald said:

“You understand, I can have nothing more to do with you. Not ever. Never in this world.”

“But, my dear fellow,” Kintyre exclaimed...

Macdonald suddenly swung himself out of the saddle.

“It’s no use,” he said, “you can see that for yourself. It’s utterly irrevocable. Go on. I am going to sit here. I’ve got to think this out. I’ll have to tell you later whether I must ask you to leave the Galizian business as well, or whether I must leave it. I think one of us must, but I haven’t had time to grasp the situation.” He was looking obstinately down on the ground.

“But, Sergius Mihailovitch,” the Duke began; “but my good fellow...”

Macdonald looked up at him with blue eyes in a bloodshot setting.

“I don’t bear you any ill will,” he said. “I dare say you thought she was free. I don’t know what the situation demands. I’ve only had time to hate the way it’s been talked about. That’s silly of me, but I’ll let you know later if there’s anything to say. Go away now or I think I shall have a fit.”

He sat down on a faggot of cut brushwood, and Kintyre gazed down at him from the saddle.

Suddenly Kintyre raised his shoulders almost up to his ears and let them fall with an air of deep dejection. He caught up slowly the bridle of Macdonald’s horse, which had stood perfectly still with its head hanging down. It was a very favourite mare of the Duke’s that he had mounted Macdonald on for the day, and Kintyre did not like to think of its standing there when the coldness of the night was falling. It was extraordinarily still in the wood, and the slow footsteps of the horses as they went away crackled on the twigs like the report of fireworks.

On all the fallen beech leaves the red sunlight lay like blood and copper. The white round ends of sawn usepoles gleamed out of the green moss on their boles. All the under-wood of those cants was cut for a great distance, but the old timber and the fourteen-year trees that had been spared spread a network of branches all over the underwood, and invested the whole place with a coloured twilight through which the shafts of light pierced from the level sun.

Macdonald sat perfectly still. He had on a long Russian riding-cloak, which he had taken because it might have turned cold, and it had not much mattered what he wore.

He sat motionless, and the robin, defiant, watchful, and yet loving company, approached almost near enough to peck his feet.

And then there came the sound of footsteps running. It was Emily Aldington, running as fast as she could downhill through the twilight. Her face was panic-stricken, and she had an old cloak lined with grey and white fur flying back from over her shoulders. She had been in the housekeeper’s room when Kintyre had come to tell her that Macdonald was ill in the wood, and she had caught up the cloak, which was an old one belonging to the housekeeper herself. She had run and walked nearly a mile, and, although she was always in very good condition, she was out of breath with the hurry and the terror, for Kintyre considered that Macdonald had gone mad and his air had been full of alarm. Macdonald never turned his head to see who was coming, and this alarmed her still more. She cried out:

“My darling, you aren’t dead?” For she thought he might have poisoned himself and was sitting there dead. He looked up at her and exclaimed expressionlessly:

“No, I’m not even ill. I’m thinking about it all.”

“Then if you are thinking,” she said, “remember that I belong to you body and soul.”

And suddenly kneeling upon the ground, she took hold of his hand and began to kiss it. He sat still, but at last he rested his hand motionlessly upon her hair. This was the first motion of affection or of trust that he had ever shown her, and her face became as happy as if she had been looking at little children playing, for she felt that this meant both affection and trust, and she desired to feel in herself nothing but humility, as if the woods were his, and the sky were his, and all of the world was his to do what he liked with. She wrapped his coat over his knees where it had fallen away, and, dropping her own coat over herself, she sat still at his feet. It was the first happiness she had ever known, and she was perfectly happy; she just wanted to sit still, she didn’t doubt that his cloud of depression would pass away from him. She had nothing to do, she had nothing to think; she had nothing left either to command or devise in the world. She could just sit still and look at the robin, and observe that the bright red of its breast merged into a sort of mistletoe greenness of the wings, and she wondered where it slept at night, for as the darkness came down it fluttered away upwards amongst the indistinguishable boughs of the higher trees. And she wondered vaguely where all the beasts of the wood took refuge in the dark long nights, and what one would see if suddenly a bright light could be thrown upon them, or if one could see in the darkness little things, small birds, and rabbits, and the noisy rooks all in the darkness, that must seem warm because it was so black and so still.