Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (579 page)
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Authors: Ford Madox Ford
But, at any rate, there is always Leonora to cheer you up; I don’t want to sadden you. Her husband is quite an economical person of so normal a figure that he can get quite a large proportion of his clothes ready-made. That is the great desideratum of life, and that is the end of my story. The child is to be brought up as a Romanist.
It suddenly occurs to me that I have forgotten to say how Edward met his death. You remember that peace had descended upon the house; that Leonora was quietly triumphant and that Edward said his love for the girl had been merely a passing phase. Well, one afternoon we were in the stables together, looking at a new kind of flooring that Edward was trying in a loose-box. Edward was talking with a good deal of animation about the necessity of getting the numbers of the Hampshire territorials up to the proper standard. He was quite sober, quite quiet, his skin was clear-coloured; his hair was golden and perfectly brushed; the level brick-dust red of his complexion went clean up to the rims of his eyelids; his eyes were porcelain blue and they regarded me frankly and directly. His face was perfectly expressionless; his voice was deep and rough. He stood well back upon his legs and said:
“We ought to get them up to two thousand three hundred and fifty.” A stable-boy brought him a telegram and went away. He opened it negligently, regarded it without emotion, and, in complete silence, handed it to me. On the pinkish paper in a sprawled handwriting I read: “Safe Brindisi. Having rattling good time. Nancy.”
Well, Edward was the English gentleman; but he was also, to the last, a sentimentalist, whose mind was compounded of indifferent poems and novels. He just looked up to the roof of the stable, as if he were looking to Heaven, and whispered something that I did not catch.
Then he put two fingers into the waistcoat pocket of his grey, frieze suit; they came out with a little neat pen-knife — quite a small pen-knife. He said to me:
“You might just take that wire to Leonora.” And he looked at me with a direct, challenging, brow-beating glare. I guess he could see in my eyes that I didn’t intend to hinder him. Why should I hinder him?
I didn’t think he was wanted in the world, let his confounded tenants, his rifle-associations, his drunkards, reclaimed and unreclaimed, get on as they liked. Not all the hundreds and hundreds of them deserved that that poor devil should go on suffering for their sakes.
When he saw that I did not intend to interfere with him his eyes became soft and almost affectionate. He remarked:
“So long, old man, I must have a bit of a rest, you know.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say, “God bless you”, for I also am a sentimentalist. But I thought that perhaps that would not be quite English good form, so I trotted off with the telegram to Leonora. She was quite pleased with it.
SE
Written before Ford’s departure from England to live in France, this 1923 novel is, except for
No Enemy
, Ford’s most autobiographical novel.
Sadly, it has also become one of the author’s most neglected works, now scarcely surviving in any bookshops or libraries.
The novel is based in England shortly before and during the conflict of World War I.
The Marsden Case
tells the story of two central figures.
Firstly, it concerns the life of the young George Heinmann, the son of the intellectual Earl Marsden, who has exiled himself in Germany for an unknown reason.
When travelling to Germany to discover why, Heinmann is unwittingly suspected on his return of being a spy.
The sub-plot of the novel also involves Ernest Jessop, the novel’s narrator, a literary figure – much like the author – who finds himself going out to war.
Jessop sympathises for Heinmann’s tragic discoveries in the novel and suffers silently by falling in love with the woman that the younger Heinmann ultimately marries.
By the time of the Armistice, Jessop feels entirely alienated due to his experiences, trapped within a barren world, mirroring Ford’s own disillusionment after his wartime experiences.
Complex and sensitive in its portrayal,
The Marsden Case
successfully depicts the atmosphere of pre-war London, following the assassination in Sarajevo.
The first part of the novel offers a particularly rich array of scenes, with the detailed exploration of various characters and an experimental varying of chronology in the narrative.
Critics, however, have argued that the novel’s greatest achievement is the complex character of Jessop the narrator, whose sensitive and complexly troubled persona charges the second part of the novel, offering what could well be Ford’s most accomplished character yet.
Stella Bowen (1893–1947) was an Australian artist, with whom Ford led a secluded life during the the composition of this novel.
Ford with Stella, close to the time of publication
CONTENTS
Ford, outside the rural home he shared with Stella.
They soon tired of the hardships of their coutrnyside life and left for France.
The author would never see England again.
TO EDGAR JEPSON
VERY GRATEFULLY.
SUSSEX,
September, 1921.
ST. JEAN-CAP-FERRAT,
January, 1923.
I FIRST saw George Heimann on the 13th of July, 1914, just three weeks before the outbreak of the war with Germany, in a place that is usually veiled from the public eye — I mean a publisher’s office. Not in the publisher’s inner chamber from which I had just emerged, but in a slip of an ante-room, walled-in completely with books that all wore their paper wrappers.
In such a place books are at their most sinister and their most forlorn. They await sales, and are I suppose more new than they will be if ever they reach the booksellers’ shelves; but they appear wearisomely old, with the oldness of a last week’s daily paper. Upon them there will be always a film of dust, and they fit too rigidly into the white deal shelves. A limbo of books! A place where the Unborn float pallidly in dimnesses!
It was in such a limbo that I first saw George Heimann, three weeks before the war with Germany. Yet few young men were more unliterary. And, indeed, though he had come to make a scene, few young men were ever less inclined to make scenes. A regular false position! for, in that dim, unreal place, I was to witness one of the most repulsive rows I have ever known. One of the nastiest! It was as if fishes in a tank had suddenly determined to fling at each other the most obscene epithets of which they could think.
The publisher — I did not like him! — had just made to me an offer that had not at all appealed to me. He had wanted my name to give respectability to his list of books, which was not a very attractive one, and he had wanted to get it so cheaply that if the offer was not an insult it was a piece of sharp practice. I had at that date published ten or eleven rather lazy volumes. I had not made much money by them; my circumstances had rendered that unnecessary. But I knew enough about books and the money there was in them to be aware that his offer was sheer insolence. Perhaps he had expected me to bargain with him: I don’t know.
There are of course perfectly decent publishers: actually, most of them are men and brothers, much like other men and brothers. But Mr. Podd was not of this description; indeed, he was less of a publisher than a glorified dealer in old furniture, having another business under some such name as Short and Robinson, by which he was said to have amassed a considerable fortune. So that he could give himself comfortable airs of being a benevolent patron of the needy
littérateur.
He wasn’t.
Beneath a blue-white beard he had a face like a tomato: its colouration was, I think, caused by some sort of disease of the skin, over the nose and upper cheeks. It was he that had the tremendous law-suit with an American senator about spurious Chippendale chairs. A nasty tempered man: honeyed when he desired to swindle you, but extremely unpleasant when you showed that you recognised him as, let us say, no philanthropist.
I had not, however, uttered any opinion about his offer, and, coming out of his inner office — his sanctum, a holy place, he called it! — he remained honied but patronising. His waistcoat protruded rather over his trousers. I wish I knew what the stuff was called that he wore. At any rate it was a smooth, blue-grey cloth — rather festal. He had been expatiating on the delight I should feel at seeing my books enshrined in what he called his “format,” rhyming the word to “ doormat”; and, as we went along the corridor, he showing me out, haughtily, yet with deference, he detained me for a moment outside the door of the store-room that I have described. He wished me to see how he got his books up.
The store-room was very dim. A man in silhouette like a chimpanzee was crouched in a bent-wood chair over a deal table. Mr. Podd, intent on finding some book and browsing at once along the shelves, did not notice him at all. I suppose he took him for his chief assistant, who must really have gone to lunch. Mr. Podd muttered:
“
The Palace of Peace
! Where’s
The Palace of Peace?
It ought to be here!”
Suddenly he switched on an electric light in a shadeless bulb, and the place grew brilliantly sordid.
Having found his book and taken down a copy, Mr. Podd was turning on his heel. He moved in a sort of rhythm with the figure at the table. I mean that they turned as if they had been interlocked cog-wheels, so that their faces came the one opposite the other at the same moment.
In spite of profuse, blue-black growths of hair and beard, that chimpanzee’s profile revealed itself as that of quite a young man with a face, by contrast, alabaster white and aquiline; intent under a slouch hat. Mr. Podd started back against his shelves. His face contrasted very violently with the other’s, exhibiting at first a sudden panic and then slowly assuming a sort of uneasy arrogance. The other remained gazing at him with fixed and good-humoured irony. At last Mr. Podd exclaimed:
“You! I gave orders that I was not to see you! Never!” I have an unusually good memory for speeches, and I recall these with some exactness.
“It’s a duty,” the young man said; “a police duty, to see people of your kidney, Mr. Podd.”
“I gave orders....” Mr. Podd repeated. The boy looked suddenly concerned.
“Don’t you,” he exclaimed, “victimise the wretched little boy in your outer office for letting me in. I walked past. I knew the way. We have been here too often, my sister and I.” He added:
“I do not want to talk to you before this gentleman. I don’t want to talk to you at all. It is my sister who forces me into this false position. And if I let you escape now you’ll bolt off and lock your door. Ask this gentleman to go!” Mr. Podd’s uneasy eyes rolled towards me; then he said:
“No! Don’t go, Mr. Jessop! I have no secrets. From my clients. Besides... Undoubtedly he felt unsure of his ground. He stammered. “You perhaps are aware.... There has been of course talk... These young lunatics have been roping in the German Emperor — of
all
people in the world! By ambassadors, you know! To remonstrate with me because I can’t sell their absurd translations from the German. Don’t go! Do me the favour!”
I fancy that, if Mr. Podd had known what was coming, he would have let me go. The boy said regretfully:
“If you wish Mr. Jessop to hear you, as it were, horsewhipped — He waved his hand over the deal table.
The young man’s accent was faultless, his voice a noticeable, deep organ. I gathered that the foreignness of his aspect, his high-crowned hat, his coat, black and buttoned-up round his neck, like a uniform — always a startling effect, his immense black Inverness cloak, his young beard and his long black hair drooping over his ears, all these things were the products of a sojourn in Bohemia, not of foreign birth. It was a costume common enough to spirited and nonsensical youth all over the world in the days just before the war.
Mr. Podd suddenly stuttered out the word:
“Horsewhipped!” He compressed his stomach and flattened himself still more against his shelves.
The young man remained impassive, as if he were rather depressed. Mr. Podd edged towards the door and, when he was able to imagine himself beyond the reach of the young man’s hands, he swelled a little. It was then that he made me irrevocably that young man’s supporter.
With an odious patting motion on my shoulder, as soon as he was past the doorway, and with a sort of patronising note that no doubt he meant for the young man, but that I took to myself, he said:
“Look here, Jessop!” (I fancy it was sheer physical funk that made him drop the “Mr.”) “Take this young madman: Herr Georg Heimann, translator of that long German poem I published. Give him a good lunch — at my expense, of course! — and explain to him that in this country we cannot sell foreign epics as we do shilling shockers.”
To be fair to him I ought to have said: “Curse your familiarity.” But the young man flew through that door into the passage, and Mr. Podd, being pressed thus against me, I could not have spoken to him if I had wished.
I knew by then more or less what the trouble was; London of those days was a beehive of gossip. In the clubs it had been said that Professor Edouard Curtius, a preposterously important German poet, had been getting dreadful things done to some publisher. A Foreign Office patron of poets had let it be known that German Augustness had instructed its Ambassador to help the author of
The Titanic: an Epic
in some affair of accounts. It was vague, like that; but it sounded amusing, and possible! There were, in those days, these tremendous German poets, terrible fellows with world-wide haloes; and statesmen, Chancelleries and Augustnesses were glad to be able to serve them. —
This young fellow could hardly be the Poet; he must therefore be the translator. I felt vaguely rather sorry; for
The Titanic: an Epic,
was not a very good poem, and beautiful young men ought not to waste their time over translating dubious poetry and then quarrelling over the results. And certainly, in spite of his hair, this was a beautiful young man, with the agility of a music-hall gymnast. He showed that by the way he intercepted the retreat of Mr. Podd. It was done with one bound from the chair on which he sat, out through the doorway, into the passage. He achieved that feat of diagonal flight without hurtling against the doorpost, without touching me, and even without brushing against Mr. Podd. It made me have a warm feeling towards him, for it was like politeness. And it was astonishing — as if a black peacock had flown through dusk to alight consummately. In passing, he said between his teeth:
“No, you don’t!”
That made me certain that he was as English as could be. He stood there with one finger on the top button of Mr. Podd’s waistcoat, and said with perfectly controlled breathing:
“I am going — because I promised my sister — firstly, to give you the details of your small sneak-thieving that my sister has collected against you; then I shall repeat to you the comments of my sister, of Miss Jeaffreson, and Professor Curtius. Then I shall go away.”
Mr. Podd said, astonishingly, but in a sort of mumble: “A pretty fellow! With your origins, to pose as a protector of young women!”
The boy’s features tightened a little; but he continued good-humouredly:
“You have got to go through with it, Mr. Podd. You have set that child’s teeth on edge. Now you must consume the sour grapes — the very sour grapes I”
It struck me, even then, that that boy must have had a good training as a political debater. He might have been a practised member of the House of Peers, speaking easily, collectedly, lightly, with good humour and above all with complete control of his hands and feet.
He said:
“You are a thoroughly dishonest person, Mr. Podd. I regret to say it, but you are. In these transactions you have been dishonest over and over again. It has not been chance swindling: it has been a system in action. I do not say it is your usual system; but, seeing what a child my sister was, in this matter of the translation of the Professor’s epic, you have not been able to resist going to almost impossible lengths. You have swindled the Professor out of small sums in royalties and, as he is a foreigner, that is very mean. To my sister you have behaved like a bad horse-coper. All horse-copers swindle, but you have swindled a child beyond imaginable bounds. You have robbed her fantastically.”
Mr. Podd at that point smiled at me — uneasily, but recognisably, and the boy addressed himself to me. He said:
“My sister, for reasons of a foolishly chivalrous but not discreditable kind, wished Professor Curtius’ book to appear with great luxury. Professor Curtius is a good fellow; though his poem is tripe. We are under obligations to him. So my sister made over some of her possessions in the way of old furniture to Mr. Podd — to pay him for issuing a specially well-printed and well-bound volume. Mr. Podd undertook to do this. He has issued a book that looks like a cheap railway guide. That is a breach of agreement. But, what’s morally worse, is this: Mr. Podd assured my sister that her possessions — we’re always short of ready cash; who isn’t? — her possessions were just worthless junk....”
Mr. Podd said:
“The fellow’s a blackmailer. That’s what he is, a blackmailer...
Heimann answered:
“Oh no, he isn’t. He has not asked you for a penny of money. Only for this pound of flesh! If you offered us all the money in the world, not one of us would touch it. Not I: not Marie Elizabeth; not Professor Curtius...
Mr. Podd mumbled:
“This fellow... coming from nowhere... with his two girls...”