Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (496 page)

He pleased himself pretty well about the company he kept. Smart people liked him because he said caustic, outrageous or perfectly scandalous things; sober people, because of his official Radicalism. Tories approved of him because he, better than any other, could demonstrate, when he took the trouble, that the country was going to the dogs. He got more invitations than any other man in London, and he accepted some of them. He appeared to have no principle of selection.

But what attracted him more than anything to any particular set of people was an avid curiosity. If he didn’t in the least desire to do anything, he was possessed by an insatiable desire to know everything that there was to know. His rooms at 22a, Burton Street, Mayfair, where he was waited on by a man who had been the son of the gamekeeper at Corbury, were lined with books, for he was a great reader. There were books about forestry, about seamanship, about the state of the army, about mining, about engineering, about the suppression of mutinies, political memoirs, social memoirs, memoirs of tramps and rogues like Carew, military biographies, and the histories of theatrical touring companies. His books, in fact, were all about “things” — solid, real things or solid, real people.

In his sitting room, on the black marble mantelshelf, there were specimens of six kinds of quartz, of the regulation army cartridges of Austria, Prussia, France, Russia and the United Kingdom. On the highly-polished, heavy, black walnut table there were hoofs of two of his favourite horses set in silver, the one serving as a pen rack, the other as an inkstand. On this table there was also a large mother-of-pearl blotting book. A smaller table near the door supported about twenty of the journals of the day, from the
Field
to th
e Athenaeum,
and the
Times
and
Punch
to the
Manchester Guardian
and the
Quarterly Review.
There was a still larger table beneath the windows, and here, on an embroidered and very white cloth, were laid out tea-things for six people — the tea-pot, the kettle and the jugs being of the heaviest and ugliest solid silver, dating from the year 1856. Behind the tea-things was an immense cigar-box, also of silver, a smaller cigarette-box, a silver spirit light for the cigars, and a large silver Tantalus, with square, heavy, cut-glass bottles, containing six different varieties of whisky and brandy.

It was into this room that he introduced Mr. Fleight, who felt, with his quick sense of artistic atmospheres, that he might have been back in 1860. For it was part of Mr. Blood’s attitude absolutely to ignore the art, literature and furnishing of his day — though, indeed, he professed a contempt almost equally absolute for the arts of the ‘sixties. But you’ve got to have something, as he said to Mr. Fleight, who had been moved to exclaim on entering: “How awfully complete!” These things — even these very rooms — had been his father’s in his bachelor days, for Mr. Blood owned not only this house, but all the houses in Burton Street, Mayfair.

He let Mr. Fleight in, sat him down on a heavy walnut-wood chair, and then rang for his man, who occupied a room amongst the attics, and was allowed to consider the afternoons from one till half past four as his own time.

“Now you can go on with your biography,” he said, planting himself before his black marble mantelshelf. “We won’t smoke, if you don’t mind, because some women will be coming in.”

“I’d just like to know,” Mr. Fleight asked, “what you’ve gathered from my biography hitherto?”

“I should say,” Mr. Blood answered, “that you were the illegitimate son of an actress, because you have a faint tinge of the theatrical manner. Your father, I know, was Aaron Rothweil, who was probably a Jew in a small way when you were born. But as he got richer he looked after you progressively better. Then he left you all his money.”

“Those are about the facts of the case,” Mr. Fleight said; “but it might make things clearer if I told you that there were more romantic circumstances attaching to the matter.”

“There are no such things as romantic circumstances,” Mr. Blood commented. “A man’s a man; a woman’s a woman. And we are all odd creatures. But, of course, the odder your parents were, the better chance you have.”

“That’s what I was trying to bring out,” Mr. Fleight continued. “My mother was Maggie Tallantyre and my father was the proverbial one Jew who ever went to Glasgow. He did not die in the workhouse because my mother lent him money and packed him off South again. But he had come down to being a scene-shifter at the music-hall before my mother picked him up.”

“So your mother was Maggie Tallantyre? You’re a lucky devil to have had such a clever mother!” Mr. Blood commented.

“She died about eighteen months ago,” Mr. Fleight said. “She left me just over fifty thousand pounds.”

“I suppose she would,” Mr. Blood answered. “There was never any one like her. They used to say that the gags she put into her songs were her own gags.”

“They were her own songs,” Mr. Fleight asserted. “She wrote the words and she made up the tunes, and later on she even orchestrated them — when she had had time to take lessons.”

“Well, well,” Mr. Blood said. “Have you inherited any of her talents?”

“I like good light music,” Mr. Fleight informed him. “I like good light literature; I like good pictures, and I loathe horse-racing.”

“Good for you!” Mr. Blood said. “You’re a paragon!”

“I don’t see how that helps,” Mr. Fleight enquired, “in a hopeless, inartistic country like this.”

“I’ll tell you how it will help,” Mr. Blood exclaimed. “I understand you want to be a climber. If you’re going to succeed at it you’ll have to do it by backing light arts. The people who make your reputation nowadays are the cheap novelists, the cheap journalists — any kind of cheap talker who will talk about you in return for meals in marble halls. You can’t do it by going racing. This is a democratic age and racing is played out. The way you rise nowadays is through the bookstalls.”

“I know,” Mr. Fleight said. “That was why I dropped Colonel Murchison.”

“And that, I suppose, is why Murchison cut his throat?” Mr. Blood commented. “I thought it was because he had taken your forty pieces of silver.”

“Oh, Lord, no!” Mr. Fleight answered. “He’d had a couple of thousand from me, and he thought he was going to make it fifty. But the chaps he introduced to me weren’t the least good to me. They thirsted for my money and what my money could buy. I tried about six months of them — took a shoot down in Hants and another in Scotland, and let Murchison ask parties down for me. Of course, I’m a dead shot, but it bored me — it bored me crazy. I’m a plus man at golf, too — and that bores me dead. And that sort of man — I can’t listen to his sort of talk and they won’t listen to mine. And I couldn’t see where Murchison’s men were going to lead me. I don’t want to own a Derby winner. Think of the boredom of it! Of course, his getting me into the Royal Box at Goodwood was worth the five hundred I paid him for it, because I overheard your conversation, and that gave me the sort of idea of a life that I shouldn’t be like a fish out of water in — though I believe what would suit me best would be to sell second-hand clothes over the counter. But of course, I can’t do that. Anyhow, I told Murchison I was going to drop sport and he went and cut his throat. Pigeons were getting so deuced scarce.”

“And a good job, too,” Mr. Blood commented. He stood reflecting for a moment or two. “What was it I said to the late King?” he asked at last. “I don’t want the whole of it, but just a pointer — the thing that impressed you.”

“It was when you said that the last action recorded in the history of modem civilisation — the last action that was worthy of a gentleman — was when your ancestor stole the Crown jewels. Then the King chuckled.”

“Oh, I remember now,” Mr. Blood said. “I’d lost my temper. He had just said to me: ‘What a confounded bore all this racing is!’ — and he really felt it, poor dear! But what the deuce did it matter to me if this country is given up to advertising agents and if the Throne is the worst agency of the lot? What else did I say? How far did I go?”

“I should say you went a long way,” Mr. Fleight answered. “You told him that he was just an advertising agent for the Crown; that he lay awake all night inventing spontaneous acts of graciousness and bored himself to death all day in the effort to appear like a sportsman, sticking over the front of the Royal Box with a white hat and a twenty-five shilling cigar. And you went on and on and he kept on laughing.”

“Well, I must have been in the vein, that day,” Mr. Blood said. “I’d forgotten all about it.”

“I suppose,” Mr. Fleight said meditatively, “you really are something tremendous?”

“Oh, tremendous!” Mr. Blood said. “The only thing of my kind left in the world. Like the last mastodon. I sit and think what would happen if I really got up and moved. But nothing would happen. There would be a conspiracy of silence; the halfpenny papers would not mention it, as they do not mention the chap who stole the Irish insignia. They would not mention my ancestor nowadays. You heard how I strangled the groom at Newport, Rhode Island — strangled him with these two hands that you see? Well, none of the papers mentioned that achievement, and yet that is about all I am fit for.”

Mr. Fleight ventured to ask how Mr. Blood had got out of it.

“Oh, that was the most extraordinary fun,” he got his answer. “The sort of fun that makes you vomit. I went over there for the Horse Show with a team of bays — these are hoofs of the leaders on the table. Pretty decent horses, and I was fond of the leaders. A considerable deal better than anything that they had got against them. And Lord Despion bribed my stud groom to dope my team on the night before the judging. I wasn’t spying on the groom. I just went into the stable after the horses were finished off for the night to see how they took their feeds. And I ran my hand through the oats and I noticed that they were very dusty. So I called Jenkins, the groom, and asked him what the devil he meant by not getting better stuff. And he went purple and puffy and then green. And by God, I stuck my fingers in my mouth and that dust tasted sweetish and saltish! Bromides! And then I got Jenkins by the throat. He had been in my service ever since he could stand — as faithful as the day. His people had been in my village for four hundred and fifty years. He’d have laid down his life for me, I daresay I know he would have. But a thousand dollars had been too much for him. A thousand dollars! He valued them more than the life he’d have laid down for me. You see, that’s it — loyalty, faithful service, devotion to the credit of your horses, they all go for a thousand dollars. I got it out of him with my hands on his neck. Despion had paid him the money at the instance of Vanderput and Guggenhonk, who were showing a team against mine. I found out afterwards that Despion had had five thousand, and had only given that poor devil one. And Despion was the brother-in-law of the Chairman of the Pittsville and South Connecticut Railway Combine, and the cousin of the American Ambassador, and the second cousin of the President’s wife’s sister’s husband — all by marriage, of course. And Vanderput and Guggenhonk were brothers-in-law of two British peers, and nominated all the officials of five states between them. So I strangled Jenkins and walked out into the grounds of the Casino; and I said to every blessed person I met — and Despion and Vanderput and Guggenhonk were there — I said:

“‘I’ve strangled my groom. Now you go and put me in the electric chair.’ D’you think they’d arrest me? D’you think any single person would arrest me? Heavens, no! The aristocracy of two empires and five states stood against it, and the world of American sport and God knows what. I was drugged and in a state-room of an ancient cattle-liner bound for the Cape before sundown, and the groom was found in the harbour, and they decided that he had fallen in in a state of intoxication — a man that was the leader of the Corbury Band of Hope. Isn’t that a funny, filthy tale? Isn’t it the moral of the life we lead? Don’t you see why I can’t get to action?”

“Because you’d have to strangle more grooms?” Mr. Fleight asked.

“Just that,” his host answered. “In this world to-day, if you want to make a career you have to see twenty-fifth barons get five thousand and grooms one. And you have to strangle the grooms. And I don’t like strangling grooms. I like’em too much. That’s my story, and I tell it to you, the first time I tell it, because I’m hanged if I don’t believe that you, the bastard brat of a Scotch music-hall singer and a Frankfort soap-boiler, are about the only person in this country who can understand my emotions over it.” He paused, and then he said: “Now do you understand my emotions? Just you tell me. I’ll let it be a test question.”

Mr. Fleight considered cautiously for a moment.

“I’m not going to say,” he said at last, “that I share your emotions, because I don’t. But I think you feel it like this. If your horses had been racers that you had just bought, and if your groom had been just any jockey that you had employed to bring off heavy money, you would not have minded. That’s the normal state of the Turf. And there’s nothing very particular about ordinary doping in the United States. You don’t object to that; it makes things more picturesque.”