Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (519 page)

“Now, look here, sonny,” he said, “you be a decent, straight sort of man. I don’t like to see you going into the homes of the poor and pretending to yourself that you’re looking out for a way to better their conditions. You’re an employer of labour, and it looks too much like spying out an enemy’s country. It looks a dirty trick, and I don’t like seeing you do it. You keep clear in your mind the fact that what you’ve got to do — that your function in society — is to grind the working class down. If you give your working men better cottages you realise perfectly straight in your mind that what you’re doing is making him contented with a kitchen dresser when, if the poor devil had any sense, he’d see that his only chance in life would be to be so discontented that he’d never stop until he had looted Palatial Hall.”

“I don’t believe,” Mr. Fleight said, “that you’re talking at all cynically now. I believe you’re perfectly in earnest.”

“I’m absolutely in earnest,” Mr. Blood answered. “I like the working man — well, I like men, and I like to see a clear and straight fight. I’d like to see the working man looting Palatial Hall, because it’s what God would let him do if God weren’t asleep above this miserable country.”

“It sounds very barbaric,” Mr. Fleight said. “It’s not at all the sort of thing I like.”

“Well,” Mr. Blood answered, “I’m not asking you to do anything about it — or anything to bring about the sacking of Palatial Hall, for the matter of that. I don’t object to crime, and I don’t object to robbery, and I don’t even object to sanctimoniousness or to hypocrisy. But I like a hypocrite to know that he’s a hypocrite and a criminal to know that he’s a criminal. What I want you to do is not to cant to yourself. I want you to say to yourself that you’re one of those men who are predestined to grind the faces of the poor.”

“Well, I suppose I am,” Mr. Fleight answered.

“And I want you to realise,” Mr. Blood continued, “that you’re one of those men who are making the people useless.”

“I won’t deny it,” Mr. Fleight answered, “if you’ll tell me how.”

“Well, look at the telegraph clerk that you told me about,” Mr. Blood said. “That’s the type of the utterly useless person your conditions have produced. An almost incredible chatterer with a head full of snippets and a mouth that was a perfect geyser of democratic balderdash. That’s what you produce. That’s what you’ll be producing through the whole nation — a crowd of fools, too discontented to do an honest job, but too filled by their education with uneasiness to do anything to lose the job they’ve cadged themselves into. It’s the worst type the world has ever produced in any age or in any nation, and the circumstances that have produced you are responsible for it. You went ferreting about in the household of the Leroys, and what was the political message that you brought out of it? What did Mr. Leroy want most?”

Mr. Fleight waited for a moment until he was certain that Mr. Blood wanted an answer. Then he said:

“What he seems most to want politically — is to be let alone.”

“Then that’s all there is to it,” Mr. Blood said. “That’s what that uneducated man feels with the passionate and certain instinct of race preservation. Don’t you understand? These lower classes are a race. In this country the difference between class and class — between one immense revolving iron disc and the other — the difference is so vast that you can’t go down into the class below you without causing infinite disaster — disaster to the individual and to the class. You mixed with that working family and you’ve brought disaster on them and on yourself. There never was an instance of the kind that wasn’t disastrous. There are people who have working men to table with them, and at the very best the working man just becomes a cadging snob, reading William Morris and expecting you to leave him large legacies. I tell you it’s a thing that’s bound to bring disaster. India, for instance, was a contented place when the British treated all the natives as dogs who were inconceivably outside their range of society — when they just didn’t mix socially. It became the bear garden of ineffective education that it is as soon as the Whigs let the brown men into their drawing-rooms. That, I assure you, is the moral of the world.”

“It’s a pretty beastly moral,” Mr. Fleight said.

“It’s a pretty beastly world,” Mr. Blood answered,
“
What else do you expect?”

“That’s why I want to get out of it,” Mr. Fleight answered. “I want to sit quiet in the corner.”

Mr. Blood remained lost in reflection for quite a long time. The candles had burnt down nearly into their sockets on the tall mantelpiece, and Mr. Blood got up to blow out three of the six. The dawn showed itself pointing round the cracks of the tall shutters. Mr. Blood stood looking at Mr. Fleight with an aspect of commiseration and of kindliness.

“Yes, it’s an intricate, incomprehensible life you’re in for,” he said. “No one has ever sounded it, and no one ever will. We’ve all got too polite, you see, and too kindly and too friendly ever to look anything in the face. That’s the real trouble’ — Civilisation. But as for your getting out of it,” he said quickly, “Augusta just won’t let you.”

And then he said: “It’s four o’clock. I shall probably never speak to you like this again. As far as I’m concerned you’ve reached the high-water mark of your career of intimacy with me, and to-morrow we go back into — what is it — the giddy whirl of fashion and corruption and inquests and entertainments.”

He went towards the door and yawned deeply.

“I’ll just sit here and think, if you don’t mind,” Mr. Fleight said. “I suppose it won’t matter if I open one of the shutters and go out into the garden?”

“Oh, it won’t matter,” Mr. Blood answered; “and you can compose a splendid sonnet to the lady who is sleeping overhead.”

“It isn’t that that bothers me so much,” Mr. Fleight answered. “I want to consider the case of the unfortunate Mr. Gregory and the lunacy people.”

“Ah!’’ Mr. Blood said;” I thought that that of all my conversation would appeal to you most. You want to sweep the old sort of corruption out of the country. The new sort hardly appeals to your imagination enough to make you want to stop it.”

“Well, I’m a modern man,” Mr. Fleight answered.

“So you are,” Mr. Blood said, not unkindly, and he went up to bed.

PART II
I

CHAPTER
I

THE party to celebrate the founding of the
New Review
was in every way an immense personal success for Mr. Fleight. The
Review
itself had a dark-green cover, a solid, and, as it were, a somewhat threatening aspect. It existed, and it appeared as if it might have existed, for fifty years, and as if you would not dare to speak lightly of it, though you might, if you were someone quite distinguished, dislike it. It really exemplified what Mr. Debenham had said of the intellectual classes, and, at the same time, it found its way into a large number of influential homes. That was due to the activity of Augusta, who, fortified with a brougham, covered quite an astounding amount of space. To give an example:

There was a venerable, slightly muddled, but extremely talkative Dowager Countess of Essex. She was the president of the Domestic Servants’ Rescue Society, which was an affair having sixty lady patrons and somewhat over two hundred servants on its books. Augusta wrote to this lady and stated that she wished, in the interests of the
New Review,
to have a conversation with her ladyship. She imagined that the valuable institution over which her ladyship so ably presided might very well, at some future time, form the subject of favourable comment in the
Review.
The Dowager Countess replied sleepily that she would be delighted if Miss Macphail would call upon her.

She gave Augusta a sleepy interview that was, nevertheless, fluttered by the Countess’s imagining that she really was being interviewed. For, in these days, interviews being much rarer than they used to be, it is an agreeable thing for a Dowager Countess to see her name in print. Augusta, therefore, received a cup of weak tea and a considerable amount of information concerning Lady Essex’s grandmother, the Duchess of Renfrew, whose letters Lady Essex vaguely proposed to print. And Augusta went away, leaving upon her ladyship an impression at once of prosperity and bewilderment, and leaving also a copy of the
New Review
upon the Countess’s tea table.

The general effect of this proceeding was to make her ladyship talk to all her friends for a fortnight afterwards about the editor of
The Fortnightly Review
whom she imagined to have called upon her in a brougham. Then one of her ladyship’s friends would announce that this seemed improbable, and her ladyship would send her ancient butler for the copy of the journal that Augusta had left. And when it was discovered that the periodical was not the
Fortnightly
but the
New Review,
the Countess, who had some sort of muddled pride, would assure everybody that the
New Review
was much the more important of the two, because its representative certainly drove about in a brougham. This, Lady Essex had seen, Augusta having called attention to it by saying she had a humane heart and didn’t like to keep her horse standing. In that way Lady Essex became an ardent champion of Mr. Fleight’s enterprise, for, in order to make herself seem important — and, poor woman, she hadn’t had the chance of that for years and years — it was necessary that she should make the
Review
itself seem as important as possible.

It is not to be imagined that these proceedings had any effect whatever upon the sale of the
Review,
for no friend of Lady Essex could, by any imaginable possibility, be thought of as expending half a crown upon any form of literature. Indeed, when the accounts of the new periodical came to be made out, it was found that the number of copies sold of the first and all the subsequent numbers was well under three hundred. This came about because every member of the intellectual classes of this country imagined that he or she had a right to a free copy, and got it by one method of cadging or another. There was only one type of person to whom Mr. Fleight resolutely ordered that the periodical was not to be sent free, and that was the secretary of working men’s clubs. Mr. Mitchell received several letters, all very similar in tone, stating that the members of one or other working man’s club, numbering from three hundred to six hundred members, considered that the
New Review
was absolutely necessary for the good of their intellects or their souls as the case might be. The secretaries were perfectly certain, considering the worthy and philanthropic nature of their institutions, as well as the good they were doing to the cause of progress, that Mr. Mitchell would certainly let them have from one to three free copies of his
Review,
to be placed on the reading-room tables.

To each such letter Mr. Fleight determinedly ordered a stereotyped reply to be sent. Mr. Fleight said that the memberships of these clubs were large, and if thirty of the members could be found once a month to walk a penny tram fare, smoke a quarter of an ounce of tobacco less, drink one pennyworth of beer less or go without two halfpenny papers, they could not only improve their physical conditions, but would provide the half-crown necessary for the purchase of an organ that would do so much good to the spiritual side of their beings. Mr. Fleight was, indeed, thinking of the moral lesson that Mr. Blood read him, and was refraining from pauperising the working classes. But, ignorant of the fact, and alarmed at the failure of what had been a hitherto invariably successful form of blackmail, the secretaries of the clubs with one accord, and in almost the same form, replied that Mr. Fleight was a brute with no knowledge of the life of the working classes and no love for progress. The secretary of an institution situated in Fulham went so far as to make biting allusions to Mr. Fleight’s appearance, not only in the hooligan case, but at the inquest on Miss Leroy. And it is not to be said that Mr. Fleight did not find these painful.

Indeed, the trials themselves proved quite as painful as anyone could have expected, though the coroner’s inquest was very decorously conducted. Mr. Fleight gently gave evidence that there was no particular reason why Miss Leroy should have called upon him, though there was certainly no reason whatever why she shouldn’t. It appeared, indeed, from the evidence of Mrs. Leroy that Gilda’s only motive was to gaze upon Mr. Fleight’s marble halls before she committed suicide. And she had determined to commit suicide as soon as, behind the sheet, she had heard that Mr. Fleight was unquestionably not for her. And Mrs. Leroy, who was really quite sorry for Mr. Fleight. did her very best to make him come off without the reputation of the betrayer of her daughter.

As has been said, the proceedings before the coroner were perfectly decorous, and, although they were very widely reported, the only thing that appeared at all discreditable to Mr. Fleight was the question of his name.

The coroner, a quite amiable but rather old gentleman, could not understand how or why at Palatial Hall, Mr. Fleight should be Mr. Fleight whilst at Byefleet he was Mr. Rothweil. The reason that Mr. Fleight gave was that his legal name was Rothweil, he being the legitimate son of the late soap-boiler, and, coming for the first time before the world, he had thought that it was proper and more formal to use his legal name. The coroner however, was unable to understand why he should ever have used any other. And it was a little unfortunate that, just as Mr. Fleight was explaining that the real name of his mother, Miss Maggie Tallantyre, was Fleight, the coroner should say:

“Well, well, I suppose it’s no affair of mine, and it certainly appears to have nothing to do with this case. I ought not, perhaps, to have asked the question.”

Reported in the newspapers this gave the general impression that there were discreditable episodes in the past career of Mr. Fleight, and that he had used that name for the purpose of masking his identity. That, however, had been only an impression.

The preliminary trial of Mr. Fleight’s assailants went off very quietly, too. Mr. Fleight had had practically no evidence to give at all. The assault had taken place in the dark and he had no means of identifying the men. The prisoners were indeed identified mainly by their own confessions, and they were sent to take their trial at the Quarter Sessions, the two soldiers being allowed out on bail. There were five prisoners altogether.

The trial at the Sessions took place in a fortnight. This was just five days before Mr. Fleight’s entertainment, and five days also before the nomination for the Byefleet election. Everyone had expected the election to come much sooner, but the Government had determined to put it off as long as possible in order to give their candidate time to mature his organisation. They had, therefore, refrained from conferring on Mr. Cronck, who was in Spain, the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, and they had not even applied for the writ until three days after the suicide of Miss Leroy.

The trial at the Quarter Sessions was a really horrible ordeal for poor Mr. Fleight. The counsel defending two of the prisoners was a smart man with an oily manner; the counsel defending the other three was a loud-mouthed brute, and Mr. Fleight had to undergo cross-examination at the hands of both of these gentlemen. He remained perfectly calm and quite adroit in his replies, but it was altogether an agony for him, and he was in the witness box over a couple of hours.

It probably would not have been so bad if everyone in court, and particularly the Common Sergeant, had not been in various stages of great ill-humour. This was principally on account of the hot weather, which had by that time begun to be very severe, and indeed that afternoon a great thunderstorm broke over the city. Throughout the whole of the case the Common Sergeant said, at almost every remark uttered by either counsel, “Get on, get on! What has that got to do with the matter?” So that Mr. Fleight’s counsel, who was a mild, incompetent man, the brother-in-law of the solicitors whom he employed, hardly managed to get a speech out at all, because the Common Sergeant so dazed and muddled him. Both the barristers for the defence harped eloquently on the fact that the prisoners they represented were heroes trying to rid their neighbourhood of a public pest, and the Common Sergeant refused to allow either of the Leroys to be called to give testimony as to the excellence of Mr. Fleight’s behaviour and the purity of his intentions. One of the defending barristers stated that Mr. Fleight was a monster in human form; the other hinted with great effect that the candidate for Byefleet had made the larger part of his fortune in what is known as the White Slave Traffic.

In his summing up the Common Sergeant remarked that that hadn’t anything to do with the case. Probably, Mr. Fleight had come into the Leroy’s neighbourhood with the most sinister intentions. What other reason had he, a very rich man, for going to such a place? But that was none of the Common Sergeant’s business. And having done his best to smash Mr. Fleight he went on to smash the prisoners. He said that the law had nothing to say to the motive for a crime. It was possible that the prisoners had acted with the intention of clearing their neighbourhood of a person dangerous to the females residing there. But that sort of thing must be stopped. And after the finding of the jury he sentenced each of the prisoners to two years’ hard labour in spite of the fact that all five of them had excellent records and that they were all below the age of nineteen. His final remark was that he hoped that the suicide of Miss Leroy would be a warning to Mr. Fleight, or one of these days that gentleman would find himself in serious trouble.

It was astonishing to Mr. Fleight himself how much these imbecile remarks hurt him. They were simply imbecile, but each of them rankled because, in an odd sort of way, he found it almost impossible to differentiate himself in his own mind from the criminal that they tried to make him out to be. He kept himself perfectly calm by an effort of will, but within himself he felt an individual boiling over with the desire to treat the Common Sergeant and all the counsel as the hooligans had treated him. And, if he hadn’t had Miss Macphail seated as his secretary in the body of the court, so that he could look down upon her when he was in the witness box, it is probable that he would have given violent expression to his feelings. His great wealth had bred in him a certain recklessness. Outside the realm of crime there was practically nothing that he could not have been able to afford himself, and contempt of court wasn’t a thing that would have bothered him very much.

With his eyes on Augusta, he had to feel that he couldn’t afford to jeopardise any further his endangered career. Besides, after he was out of the box Augusta, sitting beside him, didn’t refrain from uttering the words, “Rot” and “Perfectly rotten” when the defending counsel and the Common Sergeant in their speeches made references to Mr. Fleight. And, as they went out of the court together, she remarked:

“This is the most disgusting instance of British justice that even I have ever heard of.”

So that Mr. Fleight remarked to her:

“You don’t believe in the charges made against me?”

“Do I look such a fool?” Augusta answered almost contemptuously.

This speech emboldened Mr. Fleight to invite Augusta to lunch with him at the Carlton, and in the lounge he proposed to her.

She told him she wouldn’t even think of marrying him, and she gave him her reasons. She said she didn’t care for him, but that wouldn’t matter because she hadn’t ever cared for anybody and she didn’t suppose she was going to. What did really matter was that she couldn’t bring herself to believe in him. Augusta’s attitude, indeed, even towards Mr. Fleight’s fortune was very curious. She could not bring herself to believe in it, just as she could not understand why you couldn’t give a British voter two pounds by way of bribery when you might spend four thousand in erecting a bath for two hundred of them. What she probably really felt, though she never analysed herself far enough to discover it, was that although she knew Mr. Fleight had a great deal of money, she couldn’t believe that he was the sort of person to take care of it, and in that case he might just as well not have had it. She regarded him in fact as unlucky. So that when Mr. Fleight said: