Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (518 page)

“Well, it’s very satisfactory,” Mr. Blood said.

“It isn’t, damn you, it isn’t!” Mr. Fleight answered. “It’s damnable! That woman would marry you — a great, ugly, rough monster of a thing like you!”

“Well, I daresay she would,” Mr. Blood said complacently, “but then I’m rather impressive. What you’ve to do, is to assure her of the sterling merits of your character. Or rather with the idea that you’re going to get on. What she despises you for is that she thinks you such an arrant duffer.”

Mr. Fleight suddenly sat up.

“I say,” he brought out, “I’ve been frightfully disrespectful, but you won’t mind; you understand how it is.”

“Oh, I quite understand,” Mr. Blood said, “that when you get really shaken up, the black pride that’s at the bottom of you comes up, and the blood of Moses and Sennacherib. Because, although you mayn’t know it, a grand-daughter of Sennacherib was your ninety-fifth grandmother. So that you speak to me as if you were Saul the bad-tempered addressing a Numidian slave.”

“Did I really speak to you like that?” said Mr. Fleight, with something like awe in his tone. “Isn’t it terrible the way it takes one?”

“There’s a little sentence,” Mr. Blood said, “that I’ll just read you so that you may understand how I take it. It’s this:” He went to one of the bookshelves in the far dark corner of the room. He pulled down a book and, after a moment, he read from the shadows; for his eyes were extraordinarily keen, and he liked to show off his power:

“‘I
am glad that my hero showed himself not too reasonable at that moment, for any man of sense will always come back to reason in time; but, if love docs not gain the upper hand in a boy’s heart at such an exceptional moment, when will it?
’ That’s how I look at
yon.
That’s written by a Russian.”

“Those Russians!” Mr. Fleight exclaimed, in a tone of deep disgust. “This disgusting world! Look here, do you suppose, if I gave her my Norfolk Rembrandt?
...”

“Now, there’s enough of this,” Mr. Blood said, and coming over to his desk he took up a pamphlet that, in lettering of silver and black upon a violet cover, displayed the words “
Monumental Architecture.”

“
What you’ve got to think of is a tombstone for Gilda Leroy, and what I should advise you to do is to take this book with you to the inquest to-morrow and let Mrs. Leroy choose from it the most expensive tomb she can possibly long for. Here’s, for instance, Style I. A marble Latin cross with finely carved lilies in relief; it comes to
£18.
Or there’s a marble sculptured angel, or a real marble anchor that they stick down on the turf. Or here’s a marble and granite spiral monument, eighteen feet high. But what I’m pretty certain Mrs. Leroy will really prefer, is some sort of marble angel. Anyhow, you remember to console Mrs. Leroy. And if you give her a ninety-two pound necropolis funeral with walking mutes, and a monument that she can take half Westminster to see every Sunday of the year, you’ll make Mrs. Leroy feel that, if it isn’t a good thing that her daughter’s dead, at least, it might have been very much worse if she’d lived. For Mrs. Leroy is a sensible woman.”

“It’s extraordinary,” Mr. Fleight said, “how you know things! That is precisely how it will strike Mrs. Leroy.”

“And how the devil should it strike any other sensible person?” Mr. Blood said. “That girl was too sensitive to live. So it’s a great deal better she’s dead; and a funeral like that will be fame and glory to Mrs. Leroy, and something she can remember with pleasure for the rest of her life. She couldn’t possibly ever have remembered her daughter in anything but the way a hen remembers a nightingale after it’s hatched it. That’s the fortune of war.”

Mr. Fleight sighed.

“The fortune of war,” he answered. And then he added, “But I can’t blame myself, and I’m not going to blame myself.”

“You’ll get all the blame you need when the papers with the report of the inquest come along,” Mr. Blood said. “Wait till the counsel who defends the hooligans gets on your track.”

“Well, I can stand that,” Mr. Fleight answered.

“You’ll jolly well have to,” was Mr. Blood’s comment, and then proceeded, “Now let’s get to the remainder of the business. What I’ve arranged with the Baroness is that you’re to give her Palatial Hall, and to pay its bills for her and to give her £3,500 a year for pin-money. And you’re to give her about half your spare time.”

“I can’t do that,” Mr. Fleight said decidedly. “It would be immoral.”

“It’s all really fixed up for you,” Mr. Blood said reasonably. “You’ve just got to do what I tell you or have nothing more to do with me. Look here; you’re a polygamist. It’s in your race as a Jew, and it’s in the English race owing to the circumstances of the times. Now, you must have an official wife, as I have told you before — someone blonde and large and showy, because all the other Jews in London would despise you if you married a Jewess. And if the other Jews of London don’t back you, you wouldn’t have any more chance than a Christian. It’s positively necessary for a Jew to have a Nazarene captive of his bow and spear. As I’ve said before, you can’t go on living at Palatial Hall for a day longer. It’s too like the restaurant buildings of an exhibition. While you’re a bachelor you’d better take a little furnished house in Curzon Street. When you’re married you’ll have to have a mansion in one of the big squares — Eaton Square, Cadogan Square, it doesn’t much matter which. As for the Baroness, she’ll keep you out of mischief. The sort of career you’re going in for is amazingly apt to get a man like you into some sort of scandalous position. It’s the late hours and perpetual nervous excitement that do it.”

“But I want to give up the career,” Mr. Fleight said. “I want what you call the Christian fireside.”

“Then,” Mr. Blood answered, “the woman that you want to marry won’t marry you. What she wants is a career, and if you can’t give her that, nothing in the world that you can give her will attract her. The woman you want to marry has spirit enough to be jealous, and common sense enough not to make public rows. Or if you can’t marry her—”

“If I can’t marry her,” Mr. Fleight interrupted, “I shall cut my throat.”

“If you can’t marry her,” Mr. Blood continued equably, “any woman that I let you marry will be of that type. Then you’ll be in the really ideal position. You see, every blessed member of every cabinet there’s been for the last fifty years has always been in danger of terrific scandals because they behave like wild asses when they get a holiday. They can’t help it, the work is so frightfully hard. You won’t be in that danger, and that will be a tremendous advantage for an artistic, nervous sort of chap like you. You see, the two women you’ll have tacked to your tail — the one perpetually prodding you up and the other perpetually nagging you to death — will so exhaust you with feminine society that you’ll be out of danger altogether.”

“But it’s a cynically and scandalously immoral position,” Mr. Fleight expostulated. “It’s the most scandalous proposition I’ve ever heard made.”

“It’s the position you’ll have to take up,” Mr. Blood said grimly, “if you’re ever going to marry the woman you want to marry.”

“But my future wife—” Mr. Fleight began.

“Mrs. — afterwards Lady — Rothweil will kick up no end of a racket about it,” Mr. Blood said calmly, “but she’ll like it to continue just the same. She’s got too much common sense to want anything else. She’ll like making a row, too. That’s what women are. She’ll have a first-class grievance to talk about when your conversation slackens, and that’s always a good thing for a young married couple, because it gives them something to talk about. The real strain in married life comes when the husband goes nearly crazy over trying to find things to talk about to his wife, and the wife goes nearly crazy over trying to find things to talk about to her husband. That’s what you’ll be protected from. Lady Rothweil will always have the Baroness for a topic and the Baroness will always have Lady Rothweil, and between them you’ll be the most miserable man in London. But you’ll be extraordinarily free of entanglements. You won’t have any time for them, and Lady Rothweil will know it, and the Baroness will know it, and they’ll be perfectly happy.”

“But I couldn’t bear to think of giving that glorious creature one moment’s uneasiness.”

“Of course you couldn’t,” Mr. Blood answered; “that’s what’s expected of you.”

“I think when I see her—” Mr. Fleight was beginning.

“I don’t in the least care what you think when you see her,” Mr. Blood said. “What you’ve got to get into your head at this moment is that you must stop making your Haroun al Raschid visits amongst the lower classes. That’s the most dangerous thing you can possibly do.”

“I don’t see that,” Mr. Fleight answered.

“Well, listen to me,” Mr. Blood said, “and I’ll deliver a lecture to you — on the lower classes.”

He paused to draw a deep breath and then, leaning forward in his chair beside his large desk, he fixed Mr. Fleight with his eyes, and began:

“Now I’m going to tell you the absolute truth about Society as it is, and the life we lead. The society we live in is an extraordinarily cruel and disordered machine. It is like a quantity of huge metal discs whirling round and running the one upon the other. In this society your business is not to love the classes below you or to sympathise with them, or to seek to help them; your business is to seek to crush and to extract the last drop of blood from their mangled bodies, the last drop of sweat from their dripping brows. That is the meaning of the word democracy as we understand it to-day. It is better, because it is more scientifically honest to look at the matter in that way. You must regard yourself as a member of the governing classes just as you regard yourself as a Jew. You are as distinct from them as you are from any Gentile race. They are the material to be exploited; you are the exploiter. There is no other way of looking at it.

“I was talking the other day to Sir Benjamin Blind — it’s some years ago now. You remember that labour was utterly smashed. They’d tried every possible kind of violent strike, and they’d failed, and there wasn’t a penny in the trades union coffers. Not any! They were done.

“And I met Sir Benjamin Blind — the chap who was financing the Government at the time — and I was very angry. Yes, I was really quite angry. So I reviewed the position for him. I said that this was the pretty pass to which a century of Whig democracy had brought our working people — they were grovelling before that obscene Eastern figure, who had been pulling the Whig strings for the last twenty years. I told him that with their Education Bill they had softened the working men until not only they couldn’t fight, as their uneducated fathers had fought, the battles of labour, but until they couldn’t even produce leaders. I told him that the old type of labour leader was a man with a dirty beard and a loud voice, who could command his followers to break spindle frames and to blow up forges. The present type of labour leader was an M.A. — a fellow who’d gone up through the Board Schools and looked like a Nonconformist parson — a man who so well understood the problems of labour that just before declaring, say, a coal strike, he would buy fifty thousand tons of coal and hold it for the rise whilst his men starved with their educated bellies. I told him that that was what Whig education had done for the working man. And then I went on to Whig legislation. I pointed out with great amiability that the Whig system of doles prevented the revolutions that the Whigs were so much afraid of. Well, I summed it up in the words of a rivetter that I happened to meet when I was looking over a workhouse near Middlesburgh. The man was commenting on the Government of the day. He said:

“‘This here blooming Government come in as the working man’s friend! If they hadn’t a come in we’d have jolly well smashed up everything. Before they come in they promised us six hundred a year per man. And what have they given us? What have they given us? Seven and sixpence a week when we’re ill and can’t tell whether the beer’s good or bad, and ten shillings a week when we’re in the blooming grave — for who of us chaps is going to live to be seventy?’

“That’s the Whig trick.

“So I began to get angry because of the way Sir Benjamin Blind grinned, and because of the fatness of his stomach. And I said that his dirty crew had pulled the strings of that machine. They were all employers of labour. And Sir Benjamin winked an obscene eye and remarked: ‘What do
you
think?’ I won’t trouble you with what I remarked to Sir Benjamin after that.”

Mr. Blood paused for a moment and took a deep breath. He stretched out a hand towards Mr. Fleight.