Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (581 page)
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Authors: Ford Madox Ford
When he mentioned the figure of £90 which Mr. Podd had repeatedly given as the amount of his loss over the book, a dirty-faced man leaning out of a door beside me gave a sort of yelp — just like a dog’s — and then covered his mouth with his green baize apron.
It was obvious that Mr. Podd was much disappointed at the boy’s tone. He began to fidget towards the end, and called out:
“You’re watering it down, my fine fellow. This isn’t the way you talked before Mr. Jessop!”
The young man finished his sentence.
Then he continued:
“I have said categorically that you have robbed Professor Curtius and swindled my sister. That should be sufficient for any litigation you want to initiate. One doesn’t —
I — couldn’t — call any man names before his own servants. It isn’t done. Mr. Jessop is different.”
He smiled suddenly towards me.
“If Mr. Podd,” he said, “doesn’t want to repeat
his
slanders, we might go to lunch.”
Mr. Podd said nothing. I fancy that, now that he was up against the absolute necessity of a prosecution, that story, told just baldly, had frightened him a good deal more than when it had been decorated with picturesque comment. He appeared to dwindle; perhaps really he stepped backwards into his book room, the electric light of which still burned. We passed between the two rows of his retainers, whose round eyes were like those of bemused sentries, out into the open air.
TALKING to Miss Jeaffreson — who really was the villainess of this particular stage of George Heimann’s trials — was like an interlude of Cambridge after a knockabout farce.
And it is talking to Miss Jeaffreson, after lunching with George Heimann and his sister, that always comes back to me as the next strong point of the affairs of that harassed boy. During that talk I had a real revelation of the predicament in which the victim of Mr. Podd found himself. If Mr. Podd had not called him that brutal name I daresay I might never have seen him again. I didn’t want to lunch with him and his sister, but once in the street I hadn’t found it in me to refuse his invitation. I should have been afraid of the hurt look that I was convinced would have come into his eyes. He was in too much pain already.
So, even in the midst of the rapidities of the London season of 1914, this turned out to be a rather busy day. I had my own preoccupations: the affairs of George Heimann were not by any means my only affairs, and I was younger in those days, so that things bore more heavily on me — .....A woman was treating me rather cruelly; I was spending more than I ought to spend; the man who valeted me at my chambers was unsatisfactory, and I had before me the disagreeable job of getting rid of him and finding someone else; I had not settled where I was going at the end of the season, and it was already late; I had to speak that afternoon at a Ladies’ Club — to oppose or propose some such motion as: “ That the Irish are a Race of Poets” — and I had another silly affair at yet another club — the Night Club. Oh! don’t imagine it was anything to do with dissipation!
In short, I had a life of my own, and my thoughts were already well occupied. So that a good many of the adventures of my young friend Heimann passed as if behind a transparent veil, and, if I don’t tell them straightforwardly, as stories are usually told, that is simply because I had so many things on my mind. I try, I mean, to be accurate after my own fashion, which is no doubt not the fashion of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, my conscience leading me to reproduce the story only as it occurred to my attention and as it now comes back to me — accurately, with the help of such insight as I possess, but certainly without any invention. That limitation forces me to tell the story in spots — as the spots come back to my mind. I think, in that way, you will get the feeling of the world into which poor Heimann had got, and so you will better understand the pressure to which his poor brain was subjected.
Other people might tell it straightforwardly and, as it were, to a time table. Thus it was at about 12.50 p in on the thirteenth of July, 1914, that George Heimann, still very excited about his origin, drew me into the street — next door to the Police Court. (At 12.55 Mr. Podd must have been applying to the magistrate for the warrant against the boy.) By 1.20 p in we must have reached the rather nauseous Bloomsbury boarding house where George Heimann lodged with his sister and Miss Jeaffreson. By 1.30 I must have been being introduced in the dark, large hall of the place to Miss Heimann and Miss Jeaffreson, who had been “ getting their things on.” At a quarter to two we had reached the little bun-shop place where the young people proposed to give me lunch — in a street running up to the British Museum. By 2.15 our food was ready, and extraordinarily indigestible it was, though the young people revelled in it. At 2.45 I remembered suddenly that I was due to speak at 3.15 at the Ladies’ Club, and that I hadn’t given a thought to my quite unknown subject. It struck me that I should do best to walk to the Club, thinking on the way. I rose hurriedly. Miss Jeaffreson, who was a member of the Club, and was to form one of my audience, also rose hurriedly, and stated that she desired to walk with me.
We walked, the other young people remaining to pay the bill, and no doubt further to discuss the events of the morning. At
I did not at first pay a great deal of attention to the conversation of Miss Jeaffreson during that walk. It began by being about Nietzsche. It was a bright July day; there were a great many people in the streets; I had to say “ How do you do?” to several men whom we passed, and I was thinking really hard about Irish poetry. It was a thing for which I had never cared much. I remembered the names of Carleton and Banim, two poets of the 1820’s or so. But all I knew of them was that they had been unfortunate in their lives. Miss Jeaffreson talked of a
Child’s Guide to Nietzsche
that she had written. She said that she wanted a publisher for it. I was then thinking of Thomas Moore and of William Allingham, who wrote
Up the Airy Mountains.
A man called Reggie stopped me — it was outside an old clothes shop — to ask me if I hadn’t a shadow play being produced at a celebrated cabaret that evening. I said it ought to be — but the manuscript had been lost. He said that that was awkward, and I agreed. I was annoyed because I was sure that he thought me an untidy minded fellow.
Miss Jeaffreson, as soon as he passed on, resumed her Nietzsche conversation. She was abusing the English nursery, with its golden-haired and ringletted occupants in long flannel nightgowns before high fenders, saying: “God bless Papa! — and qualifying for illustration in a periodical that Miss Jeaffreson disliked. She said how preferable was the
Kladderadatsch
! I agreed. I was thinking that, taking just a glimpse at the Irish poets I have mentioned, I must devote the rest of my speech — it was only a ten-minute affair — to the misty atmosphere of Ireland. Miss Jeaffreson said that she supposed she could not, now, think of Mr. Podd as her publisher.
This being a personal matter, my subconscious self warned me that I must rouse my surface-self to reply with some animation. She certainly couldn’t think of employing Mr. Podd as a publisher if she wanted to remain intimate with the Heimanns. She began to say that of course she must remain intimate with them: they were her dearest friends. My mind reverted to the misty atmosphere of the lakes of Ireland. But a portion of it was considering how I could get hold of a telephone and, if I did get hold of a telephone, how I was going, on it, to get hold of a young actress who, I was assured, was charming, who was just starting her career and of whose professional name I was not sure, though I thought it was something like Honeywill.
I had also to pilot Miss Jeaffreson, who was saying what charming people the two young Heimanns were, over the rather complicated crossing in front of a great music-hall.
I didn’t have to listen with attention to the lady’s eulogies of the Heimanns,
frère et sœur.
I imagined that I was done with them except for occasional contacts, here and there, as one meets people. And I was really concerned to discover whether Miss Honeywill was yet in possession of the manuscript of my shadow play that was to be produced that night. Miss Honeywill — if that were her name — was to recite the words of it. My eyes explored the facias of the Salvage Station by which we were passing, absently looking for a telephone sign.
Miss Jeaffreson brought me, with a jerk, back to myself by saying:
“It makes it extremely awkward for me.... The question of their parentage. And you could see.... they begin to feel it themselves.... deeply!”
I don’t know what I said. But I know I was aroused. The unknown actress and the island hermitage in Ireland — the poem about which I had been trying to remember for quotation at the Ladies’ Club — disappeared. I was in Shaftesbury Avenue, looking, for the first time, really, at Miss Jeaffreson. She was uglyish, youngish, nondescriptly dressed and unnoticeable enough for me, though I had lunched in her company off some sort of tepid cakes and treacle, not to have noticed her till that moment. She had appeared to me to belong to the
genus duenna
; or at least in that way my mind, whilst ignoring her, had accounted for her presence at that board with the terrible viands. They had pushed together two small, tile-topped tables. Miss Heimann, flashingly, had sat opposite me; George Heimann close at my right hand. Miss Jeaffreson, silent, had been as it were on my half right. She might as well have been quite at a distance. But the race is not always to the swift.
And Miss Jeaffreson showed that, if I had not noticed her, she had certainly read something of my mind when she said that I had been able to see they were beginning to feel it deeply.
It was what had struck me most in the whole affair.
London of those days had enough of charming, vital and attached brothers and sisters; but none of those that I knew had that note — of pain in the one and passion in the other. Now that I had seen them I had got, disconcertingly, the impression that, for them at least, any doubt as to their origins was a new consideration.
That idea had arisen in me during the 12.50 — 1.20 walk I had taken with the boy from Mr. Podd’s office to Bloomsbury. He was partly apologetic and partly as if stunned. He said something like: “Of course I ought never to have gone there. It wasn’t fine. Like condescending to a tradesman. And then... to have let you in! Perhaps I have spoilt some business for you?”
I said I hadn’t been going to have business with Mr. Podd.
When we walked in silence he said once or twice between his teeth: “
Oh, damn
!...
Oh, damn
!” — clenching his right fist downwards towards the pavement. Once he appealed to me:
“That fellow,” he asked, “
is
practically only a tradesman? I oughtn’t, ought I, to have punched his head? You see, living a good deal abroad, one doesn’t have exact pointers as to the standards of English gentry. It’s difficult. One has to follow one’s impulses.”
I assured him that his impulses had led him perfectly right. Mr. Podd was below having his head punched. He said, gladly:
“I thought so. I thought so... I was right.” He said that he had been afraid for a moment that he had been influenced by fear into doing the wrong thing.
“For I’ve got,” he said, “a tic... I can’t call it anything else. I hate seeing my name in print. I wrote once a doctoral thesis: for the University of Montpellier in the South of France, you know. And when I saw my name printed on the title-page I came all over queer, as charwomen say. And I hid the thing at the bottom of my trunk and have never seen it again.”
I said that, in that case, he would find it difficult to pursue the career of a poet. He answered something like: “Ah, but... the privacy of one’s personal life comes before anything. Besides, bless you, who wants to be a poet? You don’t think I signed my own name to that hideous translation? It shows you haven’t read it. It purported to be by “James Pearson.” My sister was angry. But over that I was firm.”
He brushed aside my apologies for not having read
The Titanic: An Epic
in English. I said I had glanced at the German text and had found it rotten. He answered that that was all right; but what he had wanted to say was, in the midst of his scene with Mr. Podd — at the hideous part — it had come into his mind that if he had punched the publisher’s head it would get into the papers. They publish names over that sort of thing in the English papers? he asked. And if his impulses hadn’t stopped his hitting Mr. Podd he was afraid that his fear of seeing his name in the papers might have done it. He said:
“I can’t tell you how I should have hated that.,. It’s absurd. I suppose it must be something atavistic.... something in one’s ancestry.. And then, after a minute he said: “Oh...
damn
!” — and made that motion with his right hand. But it was as if he faced it again with the words:
“And yet it can hardly be that. For Mary Elizabeth, my sister, hasn’t got a trace of it.”
He was brave, the boy. He certainly didn’t funk his painful story.
And I suppose it has never been really settled whether, if you have a sensitive spot in your consciousness, it is better to avoid dwelling on it so that it may heal, or to dwell on it so that, as it were, you may efface it by the friction — as you may rub spots out of clothing. There is one school that holds that you should “dwell” — that if you, as the French say,
piocher
round and round your mental weakness, you will at last hit upon a spot like the button of an electric bell — and, heigh presto, the whole thing will clear itself and disappear from your consciousness. But there are others who say that, by dwelling on these painfulnesses, you raise all sorts of buried reminiscences, all sorts of remorse for past sins, omissions, or mere foolishness. Well, this boy certainly “dwelt.” And certainly he didn’t do it by any healer’s advice. It was simply that his natural braveness wouldn’t let him run away from anything. Not from his own thoughts: not from what I might think of his ancestry. Then he went on: —
“But you have been present at... at an atrocity... It
was
an atrocity, wasn’t it?”