Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (506 page)

Mr. Fleight burst out with:

“Oh, that’s all nonsense!” Wealth was really a bore, so why should it carry any obligations at all. What was wealth? There wasn’t any amusement about it. There wasn’t even any romance, because you couldn’t ever see it. You might be a millionaire twice over; you might be so wealthy you didn’t ever begin to understand how wealthy you were; but you couldn’t ever see it. It was a sort of thing that melted all round you and, if you wrote your name on a piece of paper, wealth was somehow transferred to another man. Or, on the other hand, if some other man wrote his name on a piece of paper, wealth might be transferred to you. But that was the bore — it was invisible. And that wasn’t any fun for a man. It was better, from the romantic point of view, to have a stocking full of halfcrowns hung up the chimney; it was better even to have a till like the one Mrs. Leroy had under the counter, which was pretty full on a Saturday night with small silver in one bowl, and coppers, with fish scales sticking on them, in the other. “For myself,” Mr. Fleight concluded, “I’d rather see — if I was a millionaire I’d rather see a good large table covered with pillars of gold sovereigns about three feet high — which might mean, say,
£
20,000 — I’d rather see that than have a hundred thousand in some stocks or shares. But I couldn’t, of course — not even if I was as rich as Mr. Morgan.”

“But why shouldn’t you?” Mrs. Leroy asked, “supposing you were some very rich man — a soap boiler, now? Sir Pompey Munro, where I was in service, he had a strong room in Lowndes Square. Two foot thick the walls was, and it had a circular door that worked like the back end of the big cannons you sometimes see in the picture theatres.”

“But he never had much gold there,” Mr. Fleight asserted.

“I can’t say that he did,” Mrs. Leroy said. “He used it for his valuable papers and securities, but I can’t say there was ever much gold in it.”

“Would you have known?” Mr. Fleight asked.

“Young man,” Mrs. Leroy answered, “there was nothing that went on in that house that I didn’t know. If he’d had large sums of gold it would have had to be brought in. It would be heavy, in cases. And there was never anything heavy came into my basement but what I knew about it, and about the heaviest thing that ever did come was these here crates of a dozen syphons of soda water. So that settles that!”

“It does exactly settle that,” Mr. Fleight exclaimed. “And I’ll tell you why it does. Any millionaire that kept
£
20,000 worth of gold locked up in his house would be considered a lunatic — because, though wealth breeds wealth, sovereigns wouldn’t increase in number locked up in a cellar. It wouldn’t be safe to do it. It would be almost good enough to prove you were a lunatic and have you locked up in an expensive asylum whilst your heirs spent your income. And the £20,000 in gold would be put into gilt-edged securities by the commissioners in lunacy. It just simply couldn’t be done in secrecy on account of the servants — just because gold is heavy, and you couldn’t have big, heavy cases carried into your house without the cook knowing it in the kitchen, and the butler in the pantry, and the upper parlourmaid in the first-floor drawing-room, and my lady’s maid enamelling my lady’s nose in the boudoir, and the old woman with the large pocket under her skirt who bought the fat from the cook.”

“You seem to know a lot about servants,” Mrs. Leroy said.

“I do,” Mr. Fleight answered grimly. “I have to deal with twenty at a time and they cheat me every minute of the day.”

“Now, I suppose,” Mrs. Leroy said, “you might be an employment agent. I’ve often wondered what you did?”

“No, I’m not an employment agent,” Mr. Fleight answered. “I’ve told you a dozen times that I’m a Jew looking for a job.”

“That’s always the trouble with gentry of your persuasion,” Mrs. Leroy said, “if you ain’t cut out to be sweated tailors and if you won’t lend a shilling on the Monday, to be paid back one and twopence on Saturday night.”

“I don’t hold with usury,” Mr. Fleight said.

“No, I know you don’t,” Mrs. Leroy answered. “But if you won’t do one or the other, you’re precious likely to sink without capital. It’s a wonder to me that you’ve kept yourself neat and clean as long as you have.”

“I never said I hadn’t got capital,” Mr. Fleight answered. “If I had told you that it would have been lying. But I’ve got a job in sight now.”

“Well, I hope it’s a good one,” Mrs. Leroy said.

“Oh!” Mr. Fleight answered, “it’s the sort of thing that leads to from five to fifteen thousand a year and, usually, a peerage.”

“Now, don’t you go and get excited,” Mrs. Leroy said. “I’ve heard tell that them as counts their chickens before they’re hatched, drops the whole basketful of eggs and there’s nothing but a muddle of yolks to show for their pains, so that you have to wipe the mess up with a shovel and sell it to these here cheap pastrycooks at a penny a dozen for making their nasty cakes.”

“Oh, ma!” Miss Leroy said suddenly, “why do you go interrupting the gentleman just when he seemed to be going to tell us something interesting about himself?” She looked yearningly along the counter at Mr. Fleight. “I do hope,” she said, “that you’re going to like your new career. And I don’t suppose we shall see very much more of you.”

“I don’t suppose you will,” Mr. Fleight said; “or perhaps you may. Westminster’s not so very far off. And I’ve told you often enough that I’d rather sit here on a Saturday night when trade’s busy than almost anywhere else in the world.” He added: “Unless it was sitting under an arch in a hot country and selling Damascus silks, cross-legged. As for enjoying the career that’s going to open for me I shan’t enjoy it a bit. It’s the sort of monkey trick of imitation that’s the curse of my race. I don’t want to have to beat Christians at their own swindling games. I can do it, but it isn’t what I’m fitted for — not what I’m best fitted for. It’s a weary sort of nonsense. There’s the palm plants and the marble staircases, and the Christian wife you’ve purchased, standing at the top in white satin to receive 6,000 guests, whilst the invisible orchestra plays the Preislied out of the ‘Meistersingers.’”

“Oh! it sounds like heaven!” Miss Leroy said.

“Sir Pompey,” Mrs. Leroy corrected, “didn’t have a marble staircase, and her ladyship received inside the drawing room door; and, of course, they wouldn’t have a band, they would have thought it vulgar.”

“I daresay they would,” Mr. Fleight said. “So it would be vulgar. But that’s what it is. And your wife has the Duchess of Somebody’s pearl tiara that you’ve bought for her on her brows, and they’re drinking Imperial Tokay at a guinea the drop in the supper room, and wondering why you give them raspberry syrup because they can’t tell the difference. And you yourself are just the dirty little Jew in the shadow of your wife, grinning and holding out your hand, which more than half the people won’t take. And the remainder will be licking your boots because they’ll all suppose you’ve got half the jobs in the kingdom to give away.”

“Oh! but aren’t you cynical to-night, Mr. Fleight!” Miss Leroy exclaimed delightedly. “I love to hear you talk like that. It makes me almost think you could write a penny novelette if you tried.”

For the last ten minutes customers had been scarce in the shop, and suddenly there came a grating rumble from outside the windows.

“That’s your father putting up the shutters,” Mrs. Leroy said to Gilda. “Why don’t you go and help him?”

Gilda rose languidly, but before she had crossed the floor, Mr. Leroy pushed heavily into the shop. He had a gallon jar of beer in one hand, and he was good-natured but not in the least intoxicated.

“What’s the subject of discussion at this meeting?” he asked jovially.

“That’s just it!” Mrs. Leroy exclaimed. “It’s whether wealth has its obligations, or whether you ought to keep your money in a stocking.”

“Of course wealth has its obligations,” Mr. Leroy said. “Up at the Club we’ve been putting our names down for subscriptions for the wife of the under-turncock of the C. division, who died of pneumonia brought on by getting wet at the bursting of a pipe. And my name isn’t down for only a shilling neither.”

“You’re an old fool, father!” Mrs. Leroy said affectionately.

“That’s the obligation of wealth,” Mr. Leroy exclaimed. “But let’s go and have supper.” And he slapped the gallon jar complacently down on the counter. “As for whether it’s better to keep your money in a stocking, I’ll tell you this, my boy — the missus, she trusts her savings to a bank, but as for me, there’s a brick in the scullery, and if you turned it over you’d find all my small savings under it.”

“Oh! you old fool!” Mrs. Leroy said, with an anxious glance at Mr. Fleight.

“Ah! but,” Mr. Leroy continued, “if you turned it over without my leave I’m not a master turncock for nothing, and you’d get a burst of water come out of that hole that’d send you up to the ceiling and drowned you when you come down again.”

“Now, if,” Mr. Fleight said gloomily, “you’d put your money into my hands I’d undertake to put it into something that would double it three times in the course of the year.”

The foreman turncock winked sagaciously.

“Now, if you could put it on to a horse that was a thirty to one cert I wouldn’t mind parting with a quid. But when it comes to dabbling in stocks and shares I like the feel of my money too much.”

Mr. Fleight got up and walked round the counter to the door.

“You offended?” Mr. Leroy asked with mild astonishment.

“Not a bit,” Mr. Fleight answered, “your sentiments are too exactly my sentiments. I’m just going out to stand something for a treat before the public-houses close.”

“God bless my soul!” Mrs. Leroy exclaimed, “if I haven’t forgotten all about the supper. Come along, Gilda, and help me.”

But when Mr. Fleight returned with two bottles of champagne Mr. Leroy said he couldn’t abide the stuff after the first mouthful, and, as for Mrs. Leroy, whenever she held a cupful of it to her lips, she burst into such fits of coughing that she had to be slapped on the back with her own shoe, and seriously impeded the conversation of Mr. Leroy and Mr. Fleight, who were talking politics. Gilda Leroy, however, had fetched a tumbler and, whilst she gazed into the depths of the light amber-coloured fluid, she was hypnotised by the little columns of ascending bubbles; she felt that she was standing upon the top of a large marble staircase with decorations that reminded her of a popular tea room. A band was playing rag-time marches and the Intermezzo, she was wearing white satin, and she could feel upon her brow the pressure of the Duchess’s tiara formed of enormous pearls. And Mr. Fleight was somewhere in her shadow, only he would look majestic with a broad red ribbon across his shirt front.

After the women had gone to bed Mr. Fleight and Mr. Leroy sat for a long time discussing politics. Mr. Leroy wanted to see the workhouses shut up and all outdoor relief put into the hands of the Salvation Army. He advanced his reasons for this desire whilst Mr. Fleight, desultorily sipping his nauseous public-house champagne, discovered that this liquid tasted comparatively palatable after a supper consisting of very tough cold boiled beef, cucumber that was swimming in herb vinegar and yellow pickles more acrid than anything he could have imagined. He had not been able to swallow a whelk, so that Mrs. Leroy had had three saucerfuls to herself, Gilda having long since discovered that these shell-fish were not things that one could partake of in polite society. Mrs. Leroy’s rest was very much disturbed by a vivid dream in which she saw her daughter, Gilda, cut her throat upon the doorstep of a house in Lowndes Square, next door to that of Sir Pompey, whom she had formerly served, which was number 45.

CHAPTER VII
I

MR. BLOOD and his younger twin brother, Reginald, were sitting together, on the Tuesday morning, in the morning room at Corbury. It promised to be a very hot day. The air, after a long period of rain, had become exceedingly clammy and warm, and this warmth the sun, unable to break through the thick lid of clouds covering the valley of Corbury, rendered every minute more and more intense. Corbury, considering that it was only thirty miles away from London, was extraordinarily remote, solitary and noiseless. It stood in a park of about 4,000 rather untidy acres, so that the nearest main road was fully a mile away, and no sounds of the traffic reached the silent house. In the morning room, which was of great size and unreasonable height, all the shutters were closed save for one leaf at the bottom of an enormously high French window. Thus, bright but moted fillets of light fell upon the backs of gilded books in the immensely high bookcases, upon the polished brass andirons in the immensely high fire-place, and a diffused, reflected light was thrown upwards at the immensely distant ceiling. This was divided into six lozenges, each lozenge displaying a pink but faded cherub disporting himself nakedly against a flat blue sky, in the taste of the eighteenth century. In the air of this enormous room there was a faint odour of wormwood and sandalwood.

Both brothers sat absolutely silent, and there was no sound save the faint and distant click of silver plate from the adjacent breakfast room where the butler was taking away the remains of that meal.

Leaning back in a saddle-bag chair, whose leather was sadly worn and in two places had been scratched into holes by the claws of Mr. Blood’s favourite spaniel, called Grecian, Mr. Blood was reflecting deeply upon the mistakes that had been made by the Italians in their Abyssinian campaign. His mind had been brought to bear on the subject by some news the morning paper contained of a disaster to the Italian arms in the campaign that, at that date, that power was conducting against the Arabs behind Tripoli. And, since Mr. Blood would never reflect upon any news of the day when there was any news of a similar character but from ten to twenty years old for him to reflect upon, he was engaged in calling to mind all that he could remember — and that was a great deal — of Adis Abeba. Mr. Reginald Blood, though he was some three-quarters of an hour younger than his brother, yet appeared, by reason of his leanness, his grey beard, and his worn and troubled features, some twenty years older. Mr. Reginald was considering very deeply whether the time had not come to close the bottom panel of the shutters in the south window, and to open the two top ones in the east window itself. It was in summer his self-elected duty to keep the rooms of Corbury cool. The butler would much have preferred to do this, but Mr. Reginald doubted his efficiency. He looked at his watch. It was 11.15. Precisely at 11.17! the sun would steal round and cast its first rays through the square hole that now let in all the light there was in the room. Mr. Reginald waited, leaning forward over his chronometer, and precisely six seconds before the half minute he sprang for the shutter, closed it, and then in a more leisurely fashion opened that upon the other side of the room.

“Have you heard,” Mr. Blood said, “whether Aviator is any better after being fired?”

“I haven’t,” Mr. Reginald said, with the air of a man who spoke very seldom, since his voice came from a husky throat.

“I should suggest,” Mr. Blood continued, “that you would favour me by going down and taking a look at him. I think it was a mistake to fire him in such hot weather.”

“I think it wasn’t,” Mr. Reginald said.

After a minute of silence he looked at his watch. It marked exactly eighteen and a half minutes past eleven.

“I haven’t got time,” he said, after making a mental calculation. “It would take me six minutes to get to the home farm, and five minutes to catch up Aviator and examine him, and six minutes more to get back, and I shall have to close all the shutters in the red wing in ten minutes’ time and pull the sun-blinds over the back door two and a half minutes later.”

“Oh, very well!” Mr. Blood said; “but you might just as well let Lennards do your heat dodging.”

“I can’t trust him,” Mr. Reginald retorted. “The last time I went into Byefleet, in July, he left all the shutters in Aunt Margaret’s room open all day.”

“That was six years ago,” Mr. Blood said. “I should think he’d have had time to learn wisdom since then, even if the row that you kicked up at that date hadn’t cured him.”

“You don’t seem to appreciate,” Mr. Reginald began. And they held precisely the same dialogue every day from the beginning of June to the end of September, whenever there happened to be any sun and whenever Mr. Blood himself happened to be at Corbury. Mr. Reginald had never been outside the gates of the park in the summer for six years — since the lamentable accident to which he had referred. In the winter he hunted a good deal, since the servants could be trusted to keep up the fires. “You don’t seem to appreciate what a ticklish job it is, keeping this house cool. It’s every bit as bad as trimming the sails of a ship.”

Mr. Blood was silenced by this reply, as he had been silenced almost any day during the summers of the six preceding years. And Mr. Reginald stood silent until, just as his hand was wandering to his watch pocket, Mr. Blood said:

“You’re still a Papist, aren’t you?”

“Of course I’m a Papist,” Mr. Reginald said, with some agitation.

“Oh! I didn’t know whether you mightn’t have changed,” Mr. Blood exclaimed negligently. And then, after a pause he asked: “And you still have the same feelings?”

“Exactly the same feelings,” Mr. Reginald answered. “How am I going to change?”

“You intend to go on here for the rest of your life?” Mr. Blood asked. “What would you do if I sold Corbury, or let it, or got married or something of that sort?”

“In that case,” Mr. Reginald said, “Lennards would leave the place also. And I should go and live with him in the Oast Cottages on the Bensyde Road.”

“And supposing,” Mr. Blood asked, “I ordered you to do something for your living?”

“I suppose,” Mr. Reginald answered, “I should just have to do it. Of course, if I cut my throat in the middle of it that would be your affair.”

“So it would,” Mr. Blood answered.

Mr. Reginald lifted his head with an acute air of listening.

“There’s a motor coming up the park drive,” he said. “It’s just over the bridge by the second gate.”

Mr. Reginald Blood was a gentleman of great ability, utterly blighted by the most ridiculous divorce affair the world had ever seen. The poor man was known indifferently as Falstaff Blood or Buck-Basket Blood, for his adventures had almost exactly duplicated those of Falstaff. He had had a remarkably promising career as a mathematician at Oxford, and he had just begun to dawn upon the world as a dock engineer when the dreadful thing had occurred. He had built two docks in South America, one in the Straits Settlements and one in Australia, and his design for the new docks at Bristol had just been accepted and got under way when his form was discovered in a large hamper of dirty clothes at Bristol Goods Station. And the mortifying, the horrible aspect of the whole incident was that the supposedly injured husband — a Bristol cheesemonger, with an immense shop in the market-place — failed in his petition for divorce. The lady in the case was able to prove by every possible circumstance of time and alibi that she hadn’t been in the house when Mr. Tonks, her husband, had returned suddenly, and Mr. Reginald Blood had thought fit to jump into the large hamper of clothes that was going to Salisbury to be washed.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Reginald Blood had invaded the lady’s house without any assignation or appointment — in an uproarious, though not absolutely intoxicated frame of mind. If the husband had succeeded, Reginald might have come off in the estimation of the world as a licentious, but high-spirited young aristocrat. And that was, without doubt, what he was. But, as the case turned out, he appeared merely abjectly and irredeemably ridiculous. When he had been taken out of the basket he had been so stiff and speechless and so crumpled and dishevelled as well, that, before he had been able to explain himself, he had been carried by three men to the police station and charged with attempting to travel on the railway fraudulently and with the intent to avoid the payment of his fare. On that score he had got off, but his cross-examination at the hands of Mr. Christian, K.C., who represented the husband, as well as at those of Mr. Heron, K.C., who defended the wife, was more frightful than anyone could conceive. The court had seemed to scream with laughter for upwards of two days and a half.

The result had been a most complicated, nervous breakdown. Mr. Blood had taken his brother down to Corbury; had taken him travelling, and then down to Corbury again. But it had really done poor Reginald very little good at all. Reginald had become a hopelessly morbid monomaniac. Certain vowel sounds made him wince and cringe, and even take to his heels. Thus, once, when in Valetta harbour, the steward of a small steamship had exclaimed, “All clear aft,” Mr. Reginald Blood had screamed out and jumped over the side of the boat, because he imagined that the man had exclaimed “Falstaff.” And he was unable to hear anyone say: “Chuck me this or that,” without imagining the word “buck-basket,” and trembling like an overbeaten horse.

Since that day, though it had been eight years ago and almost everybody had forgotten the incident, Mr.

Reginald Blood had lived on at Corbury avoiding the sight of his fellow men and finding his most vigorous occupation in the closing of the shutters. He had accepted the consolations of religion to the extent of becoming a communicant of the Church of Rome; and that had rendered him even less desirous of again entering a vain world.

Mr. Reginald again pulled out his watch.

“I’m going to the west gallery now,” he said, and he went out into the hall. His footsteps in the long uncarpeted corridors could be heard moving far away. There would be the echoing rattle of shutters being closed to, then more footsteps, then another rattle. Into the silent house came the drilling sound of the approach of a motor car, and, after many more noises echoing and reverberating through the immense pile of Corbury, Lennards, the butler, came to the open door and said that Mr. Drupe would like to speak to Mr. Blood. Mr. Blood said:

“Drupe? Oh! Let him come in.”

Mr. Drupe, the political agent of Mr. Fleight, was introduced. He was a blonde man with a face tanned to the colour of brick dust, little hair upon his head and none upon his cheeks and lips. He was dressed in a long, light brown mackintosh and he was striking his motor gloves together to knock the dust out of them.

“Where’s the candidate?” Mr. Blood said.

“That’s just what I was going to ask you,” Mr. Drupe ejaculated. He began groping in his pocket delicately as if he disliked the feeling of the dust with which he was covered.

“He never turned up last night,” Mr. Blood commented.

“I didn’t suppose he would,” Mr. Drupe answered. “I had a telegram — if you don’t mind I won’t produce it, my pockets are too beastly to put my hands into — it says, however: ‘Detained by urgent private business. Do the best you can alone or resign my candidature.’”

“Where was it sent from?” Mr. Blood asked.

“It was sent,” Mr. Drupe answered, “from the West Strand Post Office at twenty-seven minutes past ten last night.”

“Then that’s no clue,” Mr. Blood said. “He might be in Hampstead and have sent a messenger with it. That Post Office is open all night. Or he might be anywhere else. I’m afraid you’ll have either to go on by yourself or resign for him.”

“How am I to go on by myself?” Mr. Drupe asked. “Well, you’ve got all those front bench speakers coming down to speak for him,” Mr. Blood said. “You could put up a fight.”

“Ah! but consider my reputation,” Mr. Drupe said. “I’ve never had a thing like this happen to me in all the course of my career.”

“But don’t you see, Mr. Drupe,” Mr. Blood pointed out, “if you could get him in the face of such adverse circumstances what an immense score it would be for you?”

“But I can’t!” Mr. Drupe said. “It’s absolutely impossible! Can’t you find him? What’s his confounded business?”

“It’s probably not any business at all,” Mr. Blood said. “It’s probably some woman.”

Mr. Drupe said: “Ah!” and then he added, “that’s the devil! That’s the very devil that all we agents have to contend with, that and thirst. If there’s ever any woman connected with a candidate you can bet your hat she’ll make a burst out just four days before the polling. They never consider the mess it gets us into, and we’ve got wives and families dependent on us like other persons. I’ve got three children myself, but no one ever thinks of the political agent as a citizen and father. What am I to do?”