Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (501 page)

“Oh, come!” the Chancellor said, and he was suddenly aroused to a feeling of deep shockedness; “you mustn’t talk like that — you really mustn’t.”

“Ah, you don’t know the good old county of Kent,” Mr. Debenham said. “How do you suppose one of our men is going to get in there? Love of democratic measures? Hatred of tyranny? Not half!”

The Chancellor said: “But still, we mustn’t say so.”

“I suppose,” Mr. Debenham said, “that’s the way you work yourself up for your rare old spread-eagle, smash-their-coronetted speeches. I’ve often wondered how you could manage that virtuous indignation. Mind you, it’s fine, the way you do it. It carries even me away now and then. But, of course, you
couldn’t
do it if you lived in the world as it is — not as I have to see it. Did you ever hear of Lady Guestling’s head gardener? I must tell you. Lady Guestling is one of our thick-and-thinnest supporters now. There was a time... Well, you know... So, of course, all her servants had to be...”

“If you don’t mind,” the Chancellor said, “I’d rather not hear the story. I have to cultivate the very deepest respect for Lady Guestling.”

Mr. Debenham opened his mouth in the widest astonishment. For a vague minute he had a slight sense of seeing something dangerous and sinister lurking behind the hitherto flabby jocularity of the Chancellor’s enormous, grey personality. Because the Chancellor always wore a light grey frock coat, and was all light grey, he suggested to Mr. Debenham for a moment what one feels in looking at a friendly elephant — the idea of the formidable and dangerous energy that lies always at the disposal of such a beast. But then Mr. Debenham exclaimed:

“Oh, I see, that’s irony!”

“It’s partly irony,” the Chancellor said; he looked at Mr Debenham, his head being bent down and his eyes very tired and small, and since he swayed slightly with an endless and persistent motion, lifting up first one foot and then the other, he resembled still more exactly what in our copybooks we were taught to call a monarch of the jungle. “Partly that I find it best to follow the gleam; to cultivate it, even, you know. It would be a good thing for you to do. Half you young private members get corrupted and ruin your careers by cultivating a sort of cheap cynicism.”

“But hang it all!” Mr. Debenham said, in a really injured tone, “I am
not
a private member. I’ve got my nose in the mud. I can’t help seeing these things. It is what you big men keep me for. It’s what I have to do to keep you going.”

The Chancellor said:
“Yes,
yes! But it’s much better not to talk about it in a cynical manner. That gets you into a cynical tone, and that ruins you. It’s not so much a matter of sentiment or morals, as just of practical wisdom.”

“But you asked me about it,” the young man said, still in an injured voice. “I didn’t want to talk about it. It’s I that have got to trot round and find a silly candidate with money enough for the rotten hole. I can’t think of anybody except a cotton glove maker, with a perpetual cold in his head. There isn’t anybody else. And old Mungo says the party is so hard up that the place has got to pay for itself. I don’t know what we do with the money. I can never squeeze any out for anything I think needs doing in the South East, that I have to look after. I tell you the confounded party finances will be the death of me.”

The Chancellor said:

“Oh, hush! At any rate
that
isn’t any part of your business.”

“Well,” Mr. Debenham said more mildly. “No, it’s supposed to be part of the Organiser’s department. But everything is so mixed up.”

The Chancellor said:

“Yes, yes!” and then: “I know—”; and Mr.

Debenham stood looking at him, his mind appearing to have gone away into space. He hung his head further and further over on his breast, and still he swayed very slightly from side to side. For a moment Mr. Debenham was perfectly convinced that he had gone mad.

“What we have got to do,” the great man said suddenly, “is, as I have said, to cultivate idealism. One arrives at a stage when there’s nothing else. Now you — now you, when you get to the top of the tree—”

“Oh, come!” Mr. Debenham said.

“There’s nothing to stop your getting to the top of the tree,” the Chancellor retorted. “You’re not too intelligent. You’re not too unsteady. You’re not disloyal.”

Mr. Debenham said: “H’m!”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” the Chancellor said. “It’s said — your father has told me himself — that you have some idea of going over to the other side because — well, it doesn’t matter why.”

Mr. Debenham said hotly: “I never had the remotest idea of the sort. I daresay my father would like to get me into a better sort of shop to save his confounded pocket, but I’m not that sort of skunk.”

The Chancellor looked for a moment rather vaguely at Mr. Debenham as if he hadn’t heard what was said.

Then he collected himself and smiled with a friendly assurance. “But you just wait,” he went on. “Cultivate idealism in the meantime. Read history. Consider how precedent broadens down to precedent. That’s it! The great truths — the great, fine truths!”

Mr. Debenham said:

“I say!”

“Oh, I know,” the Chancellor said, “you’re inclined to laugh at me. Just as you used to do when I was a dependant in your father’s house. But these things are not just matters of coincidence. There’s the finger of Fate, too.”

“This is all very funny,” Mr. Debenham said.

“It isn’t a bit funny,” the great man said wearily. “It’s just inevitable. That’s it! When you come out at the top, you come out at the other end, too. I suppose you have got a job now because I’ve looked after you. And I suppose I’ve looked after you because you used to ride round on my shoulder. There are changes coming.”

Mr. Debenham said: “Oh!”

“Considerable changes!” the Chancellor repeated.

Mr. Debenham said: “Ah!”

“Anyhow,” the other answered, “you go to this dinner. That will give me a chance to say you aren’t above doing little, useful things. And cultivate idealism. Yes, that!”

It was in this way that Mr. Debenham came to be at the dinner of the Enamel Club.

CHAPTER
V

MR. DEBENHAM’S mind was an odd mixture of amazement at his interview with the great man and of astonishment at the company in which he found himself.

The chair was unoccupied, the chairman being Pal Ho Pi, a Chinaman who, in the fourteenth century before Christ, had invented the art of enamelling on copper. But a purple and green silk dressing-gown was hung over the back of the vacant chair, and to this Mr. Macpherson, as perpetual vice-chairman of the club, addressed his remarks.; He styled the garment: Great Grand Chairman.

The room itself was rather low. It was T-shaped, allowing for a high table and two lower ones. The waiters were dirtier than the guests; the soup was smoked, but the
hors d’œuvres
were quite possible, and Mr. Debenham, seated next Mr. Whail, who was himself next the vacant chair, ate so much of the
filets d’hareng
that for the rest of the evening he felt positively unwell, this colouring his views of the remaining guests.

He had never been at such a disgusting exhibition; he had never heard such voluble talk in his life. He had never taken much stock of artistic people — you did not meet them at Cambridge, or at the tables of provision merchants, or in the House of Commons much, and he had always avoided them. And it seemed to him positively indecent that people should really enjoy themselves as these seemed to be doing.

There were men who looked like weasels and others like the tops of bass brooms; there were women who looked like eels with green dresses falling off their shoulders and others who resembled over-ripe pears. There were other individuals who appeared unreasonably smart. It could not even be said that he did not know anybody there. There were two men — the one grey and rather bald, the other, fat, blonde, gold-spectacled, and wearing an immense white waistcoat because he was going on somewhere.

These two he had certainly met — they might, of course, be gentlemen’s servants, he didn’t know. And then, with a dismayed feeling, he made out Mrs. Bleischroeder, the wife of the senior member for Ealing. She was there with her husband’s secretary, a dark, thin young man, only known as Harry.

This dissatisfied Mr. Debenham exceedingly. Mrs. Bleischroeder was the most determined climber of Mr. Debenham’s acquaintance. She had worried him so much in his official capacity; he seemed to know her so well as to be absolutely convinced. If she was sitting amongst these absurd and disagreeable people it was because these absurd and disagreeable people were worth cultivating.

This was appalling! This was very wearisome to Mr. Debenham. He knew he was not a very clever fellow, he knew he had a great deal to learn, and he knew he had to do his duty. As a junior whip it was his duty to make the party popular wherever it could be made popular by personal attentions and politeness. That was his job. He had to cultivate everybody who was worth cultivation, but he had never contemplated the necessity of being polite to the intellectuals.

He detested the intellectuals because they sneered so. At Cambridge you sneered, too. It was the tone of the place — a lofty aloofness. But there were, even at that, certain things — the moral, nobler aspects, the manly gentlemanliness, the non-emotional English novelists, like Surtees — that you spared. But these people! He had always thought that they ought not to be allowed to exist, at any rate outside Oxford, where they sometimes had crazes for chaps like Swinburne.

He thought these people were even worse than Jews; he did not personally object to Jews, though there were certainly getting to be a deuced lot of them. But they could be trusted to turn on a good cigar and to go into whichever lobby they belonged to without any trouble whatever.

Hitherto Mr. Debenham had had to consider and to conciliate the society that hung round the first class offices — the Foreign Office, and the rest. This was because those chaps mostly belonged in private to the opposition and grew sulky if you did not pet them. He had had to pet working men, too; to pat their wives on the back and see that they got good places in the ladies’ galleries. Tradesmen of importance in one constituency or another he had to consider, and he had had, of course, to lick the very boots of journalists. In that way, from time to time, he had got mentioned in the Lobby Notes of the various periodicals supporting the Government as the “efficient,” the “helpful,” or even the “highly popular and genial,” fourth Junior Whip. He did not want those tributes for his private comfort, but he had to earn them just for the sake of the party. The first two styles meant about three whiskies; the last implied at least champagne. That was a bore, but there it was.

But it seemed to him at that moment that, when it came to kowtowing to these people, it was almost as far as he could go. Yet Mrs. Bleischroeder was there.

He became possessed with a sudden desire to know who all these people were. And, putting on his especial, junior whip’s professional smile, Mr. Debenham asked his next door neighbour, without looking at him:

“Who are all these people?”

And then he started. His next door neighbour was a little yellow man, with narrow, expressionless eyes, in a black suit; his black, thick hair and moustaches seemed to be kept stiffly in their places with boot polish.

This gentleman said:

“I do not know. I am, like honourable self, an honoured guest of the evening without merit.”

Mr. Debenham considered, from this exhibition of suspicion, that the Siamese must be in the Diplomatic service of his country. Yet it was odd that the F. O. had not asked him to take charge of the Siamese as well as the Yankee. But the Oriental continued gravely: “lam myself a humble artist of execrable technique, not like yourself a mighty genius, probably, of the pen, which is more mighty than the sword.” He continued that he came to this country in order to draw execrable pictures of all Society, from the high brow to the lowest on Bank Holiday. If, politely, Mr. Debenham would lend him his honourable ears, he would attempt to recount the catalogue of the other honourables.

It seemed to Mr. Debenham that nearly everybody present was a translator. There was Miss Dugong, a very mild and quiet old lady, who translated from the Persian; there was Mr. Hopple, who interpreted French lithographs for the honourable British public. Mr. Debenham did not know what the Siamese gentleman meant by this, and it did not seem to matter much. Mr. Hopple had very long, greenish hair and practically no teeth. The Hon. Roden Cam, who looked clean enough, translated Chinese enigmas. Miss Marchant, a handsome, dark girl, wore a white turban over her black hair, and a dress of scarlet and green Paisley shawls. She had spent six months among the Vlachs and, after dinner, she was going to sit cross-legged upon the table and intone some of the love songs of that people. Next her sat Mr. Lidgate, the only person who understood Walloon. He was going to make some very spirited translations, though as yet he had not begun. The fat, blonde man, whose face Mr. Debenham had known, was Keddle, the publisher. He was being almost torn open — as to his upper garments — by Miss Honor Sima Charpoy, on the one side, and, on the other, by Miss Childy. Miss Childy wrote books about the Poor Law and its incidence, and was known to have spoken to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for a quarter of an hour. Miss Charpoy’s poems, according to the Siamese, ought certainly to be in their fifty-fourth edition. They were written against female suffrage, but no one had been found to publish them. Beyond Miss Charpoy the faces grew rather dim on account of the distance and the blur of the lights, but Mr. Debenham was assured that every person there was someone of immense celebrity and importance. He thought impatiently that this was only the Oriental’s politeness, but he had to remind himself that in these days of the four-hundred-pounder in the House of Commons almost anybody might become almost anything. And at that moment the Siamese said:

“Jolly influential crowd! So am I credibly informed by Hon. Mrs. Bleischroeder. Hon. Mrs. Bleischroeder proclaims that this crowd not only presents decorative appearance in gilded saloons, and impeggably impresses constituents, what you call voters, of Hon. husband’s suburb, but will talk about you day and night if you agreeably fill their bellies with continental comestibles and leave their volumes lying on marble tables.”

Mr. Debenham fell into gloomy reflections over a green, white and pink ice that was melting into a frilled paper bearing two black finger-marks. That, he said to himself, was what Mrs. Bleischroeder was up to. That was, perhaps, what the new tendencies came to, with the four-hundred-pounders and all. The husband of Mrs. Bleischroeder undoubtedly had a reputation for knowledge of finance such as was possessed by no other private member. Yet there were at least a dozen men who were quite as good as he, but never got listened to. That had always struck Mr. Debenham as odd.

Mr. Bleischroeder was quite unreasonably unpresentable, even for the House of Commons. He wore his hat grotesquely, but not at all jauntily, on the back of his head; his waistcoat was always decorated with the remains of his last meal, and to be addressed by him at all close quarters was like being confronted by a small fountain. Moreover, his German accent was so extraordinarily strong that once that rude man, Mr. de Soissons, had interrupted one of Mr. Bleischroeder’s speeches to ask the Speaker whether the hon. member was in order in addressing the House in an unknown oriental dialect.

Yet Mr. Debenham knew very well that, when he made up his lists of members who were to be allowed to catch the Speaker’s eye on any debate whatsoever, he might ruthlessly cross out the names of the largest ship-owner, or the largest banker, or the director of the largest railway in the empire, but that a great deal more care had to be exercised over the case of the senior member for Ealing. A sort of awe seemed to attach to his name. Anybody who happened to be about would say:

“Oh, you mustn’t chop him out! He’s one of the intellectual strong men of the day.”

At Mr. Debenham’s elbow the voice of the Siamese was going on, slowly, clearly, with foreign intonations like the voice of fate.

“That is,” he was saying, “so Hon. Mrs. Bleischroeder was asseverating, the straight tip! This she told me as a man making desirous a splendacious career in this portion of the Western hemisphere.”

And suddenly there came into his head a picture of that lady as he had often seen her on the Terrace, carting about little parties of odd-looking people.

The grubby intellectuals! He detested them, for they were, in a sense, tyrants. They came along and told you that a certain book which was dull, repulsive, or dirty was the living masterpiece of the world. You didn’t have to read the beastly thing, but at the same time you just had to shut your mouth about any kind of book. They made you timid. And as it was with books, so it was with pictures, with musical comedy, with politics, with the Poor Law — when she had fed them well, Mrs. Bleischroeder had simply trotted gangs of them down to the Terrace of the House of Commons. And they had just clawed on to the buttonholes of any member that came along, and howled to him that Mr. Bleischroeder was the greatest financial intellect of the age. And the poor members were blackmailed and tyrannised into believing this, so that not only was Mr. Bleischroeder bound to be in the Speaker’s list; he had to be listened to with respect by the tyrannised members. Of course he had some ability.

“It’s a beautiful plant!” Mr. Debenham found himself saying aloud.

The Siamese gentleman, thinking that he referred to a sad looking aspidestra decorated with paper roses, which stood on the cloth in front of the chairman’s vacant chair, remarked:

“Yes, indeed, it is remarkable at what a standard the arts have arrived in this honourable country.”

“Now you really think that?” Mr. Debenham asked. “That’s your view as an independent observer?” The Siamese began a panegyric of English rock gardens, mentioning the name of several firms of seedsmen, and of one or two gardens in the county of Surrey. And, since Mr. Debenham could not in the least understand why he had taken this sudden start, he was really rather relieved when Mr. Cluny Macpherson rapped on the table. He stood up and announced that he was about to deliver his vice-presidential address on the question: “Is life worth living unwashed?”

There were digressions in Mr. Macpherson’s speech that, in Mr. Debenham’s opinion, would have done credit to any minister who was trying to talk out a subject; there was a gay spirit, a childlike imbecility. There were occasional passages of indelicacy. That, of course, is the salt of life, but you cannot, as a rule, get it into a speech for fear of offending susceptibilities. Mr. Macpherson, however, without doubt, knew his audience.

“There was a chap called Michelangelo,” Mr. Macpherson began his peroration. “I daresay some of you know his name.” At this there was some laughter, and Mr. Debenham could not help feeling his disgust rising. Mr. Macpherson’s speech had excited in his inexperienced mind a feeling almost of nausea — it was the irresponsible tone acting on the Cambridge moral sense that was never very long dormant in the mind of the junior whip.