Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (598 page)

“No; but....”

A singular, as if seraphic expression came over his face. Legitimate or bastard, he was of quite old family and oldness of family makes for a certain, as it were, soft crankiness. I daresay in-breeding has something to do with it. At any rate, he looked for a moment like a saint in some enraptured picture of a Transfiguration. It was just a flash. He exclaimed:

“Oh, but my
father
.... I could tell you anecdotes — of my childhood; b: there isn’t time. Of course I am not going to bore you with anecdotes. Only.... I know him. And he knows me. To the bottom of our hearts.”

He exclaimed:

“If anything happened to him I should go out of my mind.”

I said:

“Does your sister know all this?”

He answered:

‘‘Yes; since the last two days. With so much anxiety it did not seem that I ought to withhold anything from her. And the Jeaffreson brother and sister on the telephone. They drove her out of her mind. They said she would be interned.”

I said:

“You have told her everything you know? That was weak, wasn’t it?”

He said:

“Perhaps! But if a lawyer tells you your sister is in danger of being interned...

My brother suddenly made a remark. He was standing by my pillows, behind the bed curtains. I suppose he had come in by the door at my bedhead. He had a grim expression when I looked round at him. George Heimann must have been looking him straight in the eyes for a second or two.

What my brother had said had been something like: The man who would let his sister be interned would be a pretty bad sort of fellow if he did it for a mere whim. He added some words eulogistic of George’s sister that I cannot remember: the purport was that it was more than hard on Marie Elizabeth that, at such a time, her birth should be left open to question. He said, I do remember:

“Your sister ought really to sign her name: Lady Mary Marsden. Come and have some lunch.”

I knew that George was going to exclaim that he would rather die than that she should do that. I cut in:

“Fred! His father is very ill. He is dying, perhaps. And he — the father — does not wish that. He has reasons that seem good to him.”

Fred answered, harshly:

“What reasons can a man have for treating his daughter so shabbily? There are not any!... He had better come and have lunch.”

I said:

“He can’t lunch till it is settled what he is to do. Then there need be no more talking.”

My brother said:

“There is nothing to talk about. He has just his plain duty!”

I said:

“This boy’s father is very ill. In Germany. What ought he to do?”

“Fetch him back!” Fred said. “England is his only place now.”

The boy said:

“Look here. I am the son of a British peer. I know you suspect me.”

My brother said:

“I don’t. But you can’t go all that way on an empty stomach.”

“My father...” — the boy began.

My brother said:

“Oh, damn! I know all about your father. Your sister has just told me. You’ve got to fetch him, and that’s the end of it.”

It was settled like that, untidily, and with sentences left unfinished. Besides, Dr. Robins was in the room, looking from one to the other of us: that is to say he examined me for three seconds with his intense, screwed-up eyes; then my brother for a mere jerk of time; whilst he hardly looked at George Heimann at all. He said:

“Gentlemen, this is my patient.” I learned afterwards that Fred had telephoned for him. Fred said to the boy: “My brother will look after your sister while you are gone; my aunt will do for chaperon. I shall be called up to-morrow morning: the postcards are in the letterboxes. You will come straight here with your father.”

I said:

“Called up! What’s that?” I did not, upon my soul, know that my brother had been a private in a Territorial regiment for many years. Dr. Robins, holding my pulse, frowned at him. The boy had been gone some seconds. The doctor asked:

“That young fellow isn’t a German, is he? My daughter is dreadfully concerned.” He added: “I’ve never thanked you.” My brother was no longer there. The doctor sat himself stiffly down in an armchair. “Up all night for three nights,” he explained. He began to talk about the terms of his daughter’s agreement. It was an extremely favourable one. Clarice could be trusted to be an excellent woman of business, and she had got that manager in a moment of unguarded enthusiasm. The doctor, however, discussed it with great minuteness, as if he had been a regular Shylock. He was really only trying to stop my thinking: he could tell I was agitated.

I said:

“You’re an oldish fellow. What did a Lord Marsden, Postmaster-General in a Gladstone administration, do — in the seventies or eighties?”

He wrinkled up his eyes still more: I could see him coming to the conclusion that here was a topic that could not excite me. He answered:

“Marsden?... Marsden? There was of course Lord Marsden the poet! But that would be the grandfather.” And then: “Oh,
he
! It was something very obscure. I don’t mean corrupt. What you might call constructive corruption! The Grand Old Man, in his shifty way, was... adamant,’ they used to call it!”

He went on:

“What is that young man going to do? He’s not a bad boy, is he? I suppose he has some means?”

I said:

“He’s motoring to Germany to fetch his father. He thinks his father is dying. Can’t you remember what exactly Lord Marsden did?

He asked:

“What are you digging up old scandals for? It wasn’t about a woman — I didn’t know that boy had a father!.... I remember the fuss in the papers — dimly. It was something like: His sister’s husband’s brother invented something for the telegraphs, and Lord Marsden got it taken by the Post Office. But it was something quite infinitesimal.”

I said:

“Pugh Gomme?”

His face cleared.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the name. My daughter knows a Lady Ada Pugh Gomme. I have been trying to remember what the name reminded me of. It was ‘Pugh Gomme’s forty guineas.’ That, it was said, was what Pugh Gomme made out of the invention. The papers did not have headlines in those days. But they rubbed it in just the same. I think it was the Radicals who made the fuss. They did not approve of having peers in Liberal Cabinets.”

He continued:

“Yes! that was it. There was a fight on between the Whig and the Radical wings of the party, and someone had to be sacrificed for the sake of peace. So old Gladstone threw out that fellow.”

I said:

“He was rather hardly used? He didn’t take it well, did he?”

“He took it damn badly, I seem to remember. There was a scene in the Lords. Something! Perhaps he was drunk. The reporters do not slur over a drunken speech in the Lords as they will for the Commons, where it’s more usual. I believe he talked of organising a new party or doing something violent and unconstitutional. But nothing was ever heard of him after that.”

I said:

“It’s Lord Marsden that young Heimann is going to bring from Germany.”

The old fellow said nothing for some time. He sat with the heels of both his hands on the whipcord inner thighs of his riding-breeches, his lips pursed up. At last he said: “My Kate’s a good girl!”

And then:

“That boy wants looking after. Can’t someone else go? I’d look after him.”

I said:

“How do you know?”

He answered:

“It’s my job: hobby: constant preoccupation. My work is mostly midwifery. But I study: I collect: neurasthenic symptoms. There are more of those in the country than you would think.”

I answered:

“No; there’s no one else to go for the father.”

He began:

“Well, it may not do him any harm. A good dash in a motor. If the Germans don’t get him.” Suddenly he asked, as if with great caution: “There’s nothing fishy? I don’t ask you to say he isn’t that peer’s by-blow. I don’t care if he is. But he isn’t a wrong un?”

I exclaimed:

“I’ll give you my word...”

He said:

“Well, well! The fishiest looking things are often the least fishy. One learns that!”

George Heimann appeared in the window. He was holding a napkin, so no doubt he had lunched. He said: “I’m going. Forgive me, Mr. Jessop, for all I’ve...” There were violent crepitations of an automobile that, filling the room, settled down into a continuous and pervasive throbbing. My brother’s voice called: “
Hei
... mann!”

The doctor said:

“That’s a powerful car!”

I said:

‘‘God bless you, my dear boy. Go and fetch your father.” He was conveying to my right hand a pain worse than gout as I imagine it to be. He said:

“Thank you! There are so many misunderstandings. You can’t tell what people mean when they look at you, now.”

He tiptoed out of the room.

CHAPTER II

THAT boy simply dropped out of life as a plummet drops into the deep sea. Gone! Not a sign! Not a whisper! And I fancy that no soul bothered about it except myself, and I did not bother much. At any rate not a soul that I saw.

There was too much in those days; it seemed as if the very slates on the roofs must be whispering agitated news. And Dr. Robins really calmed me about the boy. He was standing washing his hands in my bedroom on the fifth or sixth morning when, if we were going to worry, we might have begun to worry. He stood still and said:

“That boy is probably hung up somewhere. Everybody has friends who are hung up somewhere.” He turned round to me and went on. “Upon my word it’s the best thing that can happen to him. Even if he’s hung up in Germany. They can’t eat him. And this world is no place for a boy like that!”

I exclaimed:

“Oh, come! He’s not soft. He’s emotional....”

The doctor said:

“He isn’t.” He finished his ablutions and came to where I stood beside the window. I wasn’t stopping in bed any more.

“That boy,” he said, “ is twice as stolid as you by nature. You’re relatively degenerate. But he has been having two years of silent worrying over a subject and at an age when worrying over that sort of thing is the most damnable influence on the brain.”

I said:

“You arrive at that professionally. By symptoms?”

He answered:

“No! I could have, though. But he happens to be courting my daughter. It’s, I can tell you, a worry.”

I said:

“He has known that he was possibly an illegitimate son for two years. I did not know he worried. I thought it was only his sister who worried. He never told me.”

“He never told anyone,” the doctor said. “That has made it so bad. And then comes that infernal Jeaffreson woman: on top of two years’ worrying, six months of disturbed hell!” His daughter must have made him pretty accurately acquainted with George’s family conditions. “ Of course he’s jumpy. Emotional he isn’t. And, mind you, if he reaches this country, unless the father can relieve him of those women, he’s going to have a worse time than any human being could have imagined before these days. Not physical, of course, or material, but just sheer gnawing of the mind.”

I imagined that the doctor must be alluding to some development or other of a medical type, so I did not try to argue with him. “Nerves” was his hobby, as his daughter had told me.

“I’m not going,” he went on, “ to let him marry Clarice, as he calls her, until he’s out of the wood.
All
his woods. That’s flat! And I daresay he won’t want to. He’s a gentleman. But gentlemen should choose better. Their families and friends, I mean.”

I was not going to argue with him about that either.

Suddenly he said — and those words I remember:

“That girl! Is she taking any steps to define her nationality?”

I laughed. I said that I was taking her up to town to see her pet Cabinet Minister about it in ten minutes’ time. He expressed in some glum way so much satisfaction that I laughed again. He said:

“If she does not do something striking about it in, say, a fortnight, all your brother’s chicken coops will be burnt, and she will be tarred and feathered. I give it a fortnight. My patients are slow, if savage.”

I laughed still louder. I said that we were no longer barbarians. We should make war chivalrously, surely, in the twentieth century, talking of our gallant foes. He looked at me under his eyelids and said that I forgot that he was a threepenny doctor. Four of his patients and two village constables had already consulted him as to the methods to be adopted against the German spy that dwelt at Froghole. In any case, he said, I should find the Essex County Constabulary acting this afternoon at two. Miss Heimann’s boxes were going to be searched. And, at a certain dismay that he saw on my face, he said:

“
Homo homini lupus
.... Man is to his brother man a wolf!” And, as if he felt a certain satisfaction at having got off that old Latin saw, he said:

“My dear boy, get it arranged as soon as you can. You will find that four of your brother’s hands will give notice to-morrow.”

I said:

“Two of them gave notice this morning. They are thinking of enlisting!”

He grunted: for he could not resist a rustic epigram:

“Oh, yes! thinking of!” But he ruminated for a moment.

Then he asked:

“Who is the Cabinet Minister?”

I named the large, grey, immensely distinguished looking Sir Arthur. I said that I was vague as to his being in the present Ministry; but he was certainly of Cabinet rank. He had danced with Marie Elizabeth at the Night Club and had distinguished George Heimann by his evident cordiality on the same occasion. The doctor grunted:

“That fellow!” He had apparently been refreshing his mind as to the Marsden affair — naturally enough. He went on: “ That fellow was — what was it? — extra-parliamentary Secretary to Lord Marsden at the time of his misfortunes.”

“You don’t mean to tell me,” he began again, “that he is going to befriend the children! That would be to find gratitude amongst politicians.”

I said:

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t. You don’t find gratitude in any other walk of life. Yet it must exist, or it wouldn’t have a name. And politicians are sentimentalists. They have to be, or they would go mad.”

The doctor said:

“Your brother has joined up. Your duty is to save his property. You get your Sir Arthur to stop the Essex police searching the boxes of that girl!”

I had nothing to do with it myself, except for waiting for several hours on various days outside the door of Sir Arthur in some public building or other. It began on the ninth or tenth of August. Sir Arthur was not at that time, I think, a member of the Government: one forgets the political intrigues of those days.

He must, however, have had a room in some Government office thus early in the war. I daresay he volunteered his assistance, though in Opposition. Which office it was I do not remember. At any rate, that afternoon, I found myself waiting in the square, too tall, squalid, cement-built corridors with floors of only half polished coke-brise, of one of the Government buildings at the bottom of Whitehall. A “first class” Department, like the War Office or the Treasury, it can’t have been; the floors were too littered with bits of soiled paper; the messengers were too disreputable — casual, familiar, and loquacious; and the corridors were crowded with a
clientèle
more untidy than even the messengers.

There I waited in front of a beastly, new-looking, red mahogany door for lost lugubrious hours. Sir Arthur was inside, and so was Marie Elizabeth. I played a dismal game, stepping from piece to piece of paper in the attempt to work out some anodyne pattern. I remember — I remember with startling distinctness, now that I have forgotten so many things of perhaps more importance, that one good-sized and dirty envelope was addressed to “His Honour the Mayor” — of Luton or Kidderminster, at some nasty hotel near the Strand.

A greyish, gentlemanly fellow came out from the other side of that red mahogany door to talk to me. He was very lean, and his aquiline nose was slightly reddened with a cold round the nostrils. A sympathetic fellow; not, I should say, extraordinarily bright, though he may have been good enough at his own job — the sort of man who wears a grey morning coat and stands always with his hands on the back of his hips. At any rate, he always stood like that whilst he talked to me. I fancy that he was employed by Ministries to ask people to be reasonable.

That was how he introduced himself to me. He came out of that badly proportioned doorway quite briskly, bore down on me where I stood with one foot on the Mayor’s envelope and the other on a triangular piece of over-used blotting paper and exclaimed:

“I say! Can’t you induce her to be reasonable?”

I believe I recoiled.

“He,” the rather distracted gentleman said, “is anxious to do all that he can. But he can’t tell how Lady Ada is going to take it. Could he now?”

I agreed that that would be difficult. I even suggested that he might ask her. Such things as telephones existed. He said, with even a sort of archness:

“Oh, come now; you don’t.... not
you
!”

He took a turn of about three steps, his hands immovable on his coat tails. He came back to say:

“You’re a solicitor, aren’t you? You’ll understand that although we’ll do all that we
can,
you must induce your client to be reasonable.”

I said that I was not a solicitor, though I was as a matter of fact a member of the Inner Temple. This appeared to cheer him a good deal. He was the sort of fellow who would prefer talking to a barrister to talking to a solicitor.

But when I said that I did not practise, was not the legal adviser of Marie Elizabeth, and was by occupation a novelist, his distress almost touched me. I didn’t as a rule describe myself as a novelist, but when a new acquaintance had put me aback for any reason I would dismay him in that way. And this fellow had really startled me by popping out of that door and asking me to induce Marie Elizabeth to be reasonable. But my revenge was almost too full. He exclaimed, with every sign of distress:

“A
nov
....! But I might have read some of your books!”

I don’t know what sinister treachery he imagined to lurk beneath that set of facts. But, as if to announce this amazing and suspicious discovery to his Chief, he opened the mahogany door about a foot and introduced his lean, nice head. He withdrew it precipitately.

“HE,” he exclaimed, “ does not appear to be distressed...

I said:

“I hope he’s not...

“
Oh, good gracious, No!” he cried out. “You could trust him with your maiden aunt.”

I declared that I dared say I could. He exclaimed, very earnestly:

“Besides.... his
personal
private secretary is in there. I am merely Departmental... But we...
All
!.... are absolutely devoted to Sir Arthur. He is one of Nature’s gentlemen!”

Rather alarmingly he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and held it for so long that I became really agitated. He told me afterwards — for I got to know him very well — that he kept himself “amazingly fit” by practising lung exercises. A curious, Christlike smile came over his features. He said:

“Then of course you’re Mr. Jedburgh. The one who wrote about her from somewhere in Essex. What do those numbers mean in front of your name?

It was obviously my brother who had written about her from Essex; what the numbers meant I did not know in those days.

“It looks, you know,” he was going on, “as if you were a convict; but I suppose you aren’t? All sorts of people come to this place.” He added: “You know, it’s a difficult job about her nationality. You write imperiously and say do this and do that. And she’s in there telling Him that he has to do something. And he wants to.”

I stood thinking for some time whilst gentlemen whom I took to be mayors of trying places went past, wearing red ties. I confess to feeling a little hurt that Fred should have written “imperiously” to these people without consulting me. But he was his own master. Only, I had to gather from this rather distraught gentleman what was really Marie Elizabeth’s errand in that place. He was going on, something like:

“I don’t say that he doesn’t welcome it. And we welcome any distraction for Him. If you could only see the sort of person with whom his time is taken up in these days. But it makes Us anxious... His staff. Now your letter..

I said, naturally, that I was sorry Sir Arthur was troubled. But the Essex police talked of raiding my brother’s house — or at any rate this young lady’s boxes.