Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (516 page)

It was at this point that Miss Macphail, whose mind worked very rapidly, exclaimed suddenly at the top of her voice that Macpherson was an idiot. Until that moment she had been imagining that her failure as a speaker was due almost entirely to her accent and to her manner, which might well strike such a stiff and glacial audience as being vulgar. And she had made up her mind to deliver several speeches to Mr. Blood’s cousin, Mrs. Dumerque, in the hope that that lady would correct her when she appeared vulgar. With her German thoroughness Augusta was always perfectly ready to be instructed upon every possible point.

But Mr. Macpherson’s admission let her see, with the quick certainty of a suspicious woman, that at least half the frigidity of her reception had been due to the gossiping propensities of Mr. Macpherson. She told him so.

She told him so in the most violent English and then, for further relief, she repeated it all in German. This let loose the Frau Macphail who, giving free rein to her emotions expressed herself to the same effect but in an almost incomprehensible dialect, which she used when she was excited because, at the best of times, high German was almost a foreign language to her. Mr. Macpherson understood practically no German, but he realised that in various forms he was being called almost every possible sort of Jewish dog. This enraged him very much, so that he found it necessary to explain in a voice so high it tore all their ears, that he was an Armenian with a Scotch name and a Circassian mother. He explained also that Armenians are almost the same thing as Scottish Highlanders and that he had one more grudge to score off Augusta. One of these days he would tell everybody that her hair was dyed, and that would be an end of her.

The noise in the car was really considerable, and Mr. Fleight, though he had tried conscientiously to learn some Yiddish, had no German at all. Thus he could hardly understand what they were all talking about. Nevertheless, he had a pronounced sense of discomfort and of danger. He knew that in England it is almost impossible for any enterprise to keep together because there is so little sense of cohesion in this proud and formidable people that, at the outset of any communal enterprise, quarrels invariably arise and the enterprise itself comes miserably to the ground. And he took the fearful row that began in the motor car as the beginnings of such disruption amongst his own supporters. He did not know where it might not end.

Mr. Fleight, in spite of his upbringing, had the clan spirit very strongly developed. He considered himself far less a person to become, as it were, Prime Minister, than the advisory head of a predatory tribe. He had, to use a cant phrase, “frozen on to” the small band containing Mitchell, Raggett, Macpherson, Augusta, Wilhelmina, and the contributors to his
Review,
and for the matter of that, to Frau Macphail; he had really identified himself with their interests as if they had formed a part of his family in a tent. He had done it from the moment Mr. Blood had started him off. And this was automatic in his nature; he couldn’t have helped himself if he had wanted to. He would probably have preferred them to be Jews, and it had given him a certain satisfaction to cherish the error that Cluny Macpherson belonged to his own race. On the other hand he was, perhaps, glad that they weren’t Jews because Jews always made him feel a little shy. His exclusively English upbringing had got him very much out of contact with their manners and their point of view, and the large saloons of Bayswater really rather frightened him, because, although he wished to approve of them, he couldn’t help thinking that they displayed elements of bad taste. He was like a not very good Catholic who should have been brought up in an English cathedral city and should have been then asked to see the beauty in a chapel of the Spanish Jesuit type. There would be too much gilding; too many doves, cherubs, eagles, and gilt thunder-bolts. At the same time, Mr. Fleight’s sympathies from a distance were very intense and very sincere. He had given at different times, nearly a quarter of a million sterling to one Jewish charity and another, and he had, anonymously, subscribed half the cost of producing an opera by a Jewish composer at Covent Garden.

And as regards his special band of
protégés
he felt, comfortingly, that if they didn’t belong to the chosen people they belonged at least, to the hungry ones of the earth; to the people who, with indifferent means, desired avidly great careers. They were the climbers, and it was his instinct to help them to climb and, languidly, to climb with them.

He went, therefore, with some perturbation to Mr. Blood at the moment of the car’s arrival at Corbury.

Mr. Blood was sitting beneath a green reading lamp, attempting to compute with exactitude how many of the Ten Thousand had fallen before they reached the sea. Mr. Blood appeared keenly interested in Mr. Fleight’s narration.

“Of course,” he said, “as to the quarrel, that’s nothing at all, but as to the other thing, it’s probably serious. I’ll tell you why.”

He explained carefully and with patience that, if Mr. Fleight came to think of it, none of the people were English. Miss Macphail was half Scotch, half German; Frau Macphail was pure German, but, taking into account her place of origin, she was probably more than half Celtic. Mr. Macpherson was half Armenian, half Greek, though he preferred to call himself Circassian for purposes of romance. He, therefore, didn’t see that Mr. Fleight need fear any falling out of a type so peculiarly English. These people just liked rows and recriminations, and they took them out when they were at leisure as the servants quarrel in the back offices of a Malay Sultan’s reed palace.

“They won’t cook the dinner or cut off the enemies’ heads any less efficiently for that,” Mr. Blood concluded. “And as for Mr. Macpherson, in spite of his having made a hash of your meeting, he’s extraordinarily valuable. He’s valuable not so much as a practical man but as a symptom. He’s so exactly the Englishman of to-day.”

“But,” Mr. Fleight said, “he’s half Armenian, and half sham Circassian.”

“Well,” Mr. Blood answered composedly, “doesn’t that make him typically English? Just you think for a moment.”

Mr. Fleight reflected for it could hardly be called a moment.

“I suppose,” he said, “that what you mean is that to be a German to-day is to be something; and to be a Jew is to be something; and to be a Southern or a Northern Frenchman is to be something. But to be a Londoner or a Parisian, or let’s say, to come from Berlin, is to be just nothing at all — a product of restaurants and the bucket shops.”

Mr. Blood said ironically:

“You’re getting on. You’re really getting on.”

“And if,” Mr. Fleight continued seriously, “you’re a Londoner — a cosmopolitan — and come from some place where there are real people, like North Germany or South Germany or North France or South France, it will really handicap you for a Londoner because you’ll still retain characteristics that will hamper you. But if you come as a sort of hybrid from a couple of races, that don’t matter, like Greeks and Armenians, or any sort of Central American republic, you’ll just be chattering enough and imbecile enough and romantic enough and sufficiently utterly useless to be the typical Englishman of to-day, because the Londoner is the Englishman, whatever they may say north of the Humber.”

“And that,” Mr. Blood confirmed him amiably, “is why this country is rotting away.”

“Of course,” Mr. Fleight differed from him, “that’s why I find this country so comfortable to live in.”

“You mean,” Mr. Blood said, “that you’d rather rule over a population of gentle imbeciles like Cluny Macpherson than over a set of brutes like myself.”

“I suppose that’s what I really do mean,” Mr. Fleight said reflectively. “That’s certainly what I do mean.”

“Well, you can do it, my friend,” Mr. Blood said. “I’m not hindering you. Inscrutable and august Providence can have its own fun for all I care.”

He pressed the electric bell that was upon the desk, and told Lennards to beg Mr. Macpherson to come down and speak to him if he wasn’t tired. There was an important piece of news for him.

“I rather gather,” he said to Mr. Fleight, when the butler had gone, “that your candidature is in a bad way.”

“I rather guess it is,” Mr. Fleight said. “It was a most disastrous meeting, anyhow.”

“Well,” Mr. Blood answered, “the piece of news that you’ll hear in a minute may change the aspect of things. I’ll tell you how I know it. Mrs. Dumerque’s second cousin married Captain Hemsterley, who’s the brother-in-law and heir, through his wife, of Mr. Gregory, your rival, the Government candidate. You’ll see how that bears in a minute. You remember that Hemsterley is Gregory’s heir.”

“Gregory seems to be an unhappy sort of person,” Mr. Fleight said. “I shook hands with him in front of the Town Hall yesterday. His hand felt more like a piece of wet cheese than anything I’ve ever felt. And he’d a most beastly cough. He couldn’t speak for it. They oughtn’t to have had him out in that rain.”

Mr. Macpherson entered quite vividly. He was wearing an emerald green satin dressing gown with bright scarlet revers and cuffs, and, when this garment parted it displayed pink silk pyjamas. Upon his feet he had Turkish slippers of scarlet morocco and upon his head a scarlet fez with a purple tassel. He thus resembled exactly one of the calenders out of the Arabian Nights, and in his arms gently and carefully he carried a brindled kitten that bit at his delicate fingers.

“You perceive,” Mr. Blood said to Mr. Fleight, “the typical Englishman.”

“Well, I hope,” Mr. Macpherson said, “that I’m English enough,” and then he added, “This is a most interesting kitten. The mother of the man the housemaid had it from lived with—”

“Now, listen to me,” Mr. Blood said, “you’ve been trotting round spreading the news. Now you trot round and spread some more.”

Mr. Macpherson’s amiable oriental face fell for a moment into an expression of contriteness.

“I say,” he exclaimed, “I hope I haven’t done any harm; I wouldn’t for worlds have done any harm.”

“Oh, that’s all right.” Mr. Fleight took the words that he had just heard from Mr. Blood and repeated them. “You’ve only been a day in front of the fair. It will all be in the newspapers the day after to-morrow. You’ve probably broken the shock.”

Mr. Macpherson heaved a sigh of genuine relief, and the kitten crawled out of his arms to sit upon his shoulder and bite the black tassel of his fez. As the tassel dropped over Mr. Macpherson’s ear, the kitten bit the lobe also, but, although this hurt him quite considerably, he was too amiable to interfere with the little animal’s pleasure.

“Now just listen,” Mr. Blood said, “listen carefully.” He paused and then said, “Captain Hemsterley, the brother-in-law of Mr. Fleight’s opponent, who is also his heir through his wife, has filed a petition in lunacy against the candidate. The Hemsterleys are enraged at his spending so much money to get into Parliament. They’ve let him alone hitherto, when it was only a matter of a cold in the head, because the doctors have said he can’t possibly live a year. But they want to stop his wasting money on the party funds, and so the summons to appear before the commissioners on lunacy was served on him only the day before yesterday.”

A great joy lit up the features of Mr. Macpherson, and he turned to rush from the room.

“Wait a minute,” Mr. Blood said. “Before you wake everybody in the house in order to tell them, you had better hear some of the aspects of the case. In the first place it’s an absolutely infamous proceeding. Mr. Gregory is weak and ill, but he’s no more insane than you are and certainly not half as insane as I.”

“Then he won’t be declared a lunatic,” Mr. Macpherson exclaimed.

“Oh, yes, he will,” Mr. Blood answered, “at least he’ll be declared incapable of managing his own affairs. You see he breeds bull terriers.”

“But, great heavens!” Mr. Macpherson exclaimed, “anybody can breed anything. I knew a man who bred Angola bats. His name was Child, and his sister—”

“But the point is,” Mr. Blood said, “that poor Mr. Gregory has odd ideas about bull terriers. He thinks that a bull terrier ought to be a cross between a terrier and a bull-dog. So he’s spent many thousand pounds on purchasing bull-dog sires and champion terrier mothers.”

“But, great heavens!” Mr. Macpherson said.

“The point is,” Mr. Blood interrupted him again, “that the Hemsterleys have got bull terrier experts to swear that bull terriers can’t be produced by that crossing. They’re probably lying. I don’t know. Then, for instance, Mr. Gregory is interested in pigs. He has the theory that pork is not sufficiently eaten in England. Every continental doctor would back him up in that. But the Hemsterleys have got several doctors to swear that pork is highly dangerous food. Gregory has spent a good deal of money on patent portable sties. He thinks that by moving pigs about in grass land they can be made more healthy.”