Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (599 page)

He said:

“I know. I know. They’ve been telephoning to the Home Secretary about it. That’s reasonable. If that Office chooses to act on her behalf — and they do choose — it’s not for us to object. And they are ready to give her — whatever sort of pass it is they are going to give her. But Sir Arthur is so impulsive. It makes us all anxious. Not for the Office. But for Himself.”

I said that I didn’t see what harm could come of asking the Home Secretary to stop Marie Elizabeth’s boxes being searched by village constables.

He exclaimed:

“It isn’t that. Oh, it isn’t that. It’s what He’s up to now. He says she’s the most divine dancer he ever stood up with.”

I said she was a block of wood; she had no temperament. But apparently he had seen Marie Elizabeth, the other night at the Club, dancing, softly embedded as it were, with his chief.

“But,” he said, “the point is what are the Pughs going to do if he persists in saying she’s the daughter of.. For that’s what he was saying just now — blurting out: ‘My child! anyone could see with their eyes shut that you are the child of my old friend — and your aunt hasn’t any doubt of it!’ And then he looked at me and said: ‘Carstones’ — that’s me—’ Carstones, perhaps you’re not wanted here. Go and talk to Mr. Jedburgh. Tell him we’ll do all we can!’”

He broke off, and then began again:

“Of course he’s a perfect angel! So I thought if you had any influence at all with the young lady....”

I said:

“I haven’t.”

“The Chief thought, while he was reading your letter... There was, you know, something! That you might be going to....”

I said:

“I’m certainly not....”

The tentative light died out of his eyes. He said:

“Because, of course, if you were... It would not matter twopence to us or to you or to anyone if she had her cards printed with ‘Lady Mary Jedburgh.’ And it would settle her nationality. It would be the solution. Whereas, if she called herself Lady Mary Marsden, old Pugh might raise Cain. He’s a nasty fellow, old Pugh. I was under him at the Colonial place. One of the nastiest. From Balliol, and nasty at that. And ingeniously nasty. He might make it so rough for the Chief!” He broke off again, and then said, with a deeply and sweetly imploring tone:

“
Do
use your influence!”

I said:

“My good fellow, she’s my brother’s guest, and I am stopping in his house. That exhausts it. I’m just meant to see her in and out of crowded trains. And they’re confoundedly crowded.”

A bell in the mouldings of the mahogany door before which we were conversing began to ring with great violence. My greyish friend with the incipient cold in the nose was no longer there. I went on for some time, stepping carefully from piece to piece of defiled paper on the half-polished coke-brise floor.

It struck me suddenly that, just before, I had summed up my position with exactitude, though I was only meaning to make conversation for that distracted fellow. I found him afterwards reasonably acute when he was outside that office. But that monstrous drone’s hive had the effect of stupefying him. He had that morning interviewed eleven hundred mayors, and that afternoon he was going to interview sixteen hundred more. The figures were his, and no doubt he was exaggerating.

That, at any rate, was the temporary function of Sir Arthur and himself — to assuage the burning patriotism of provincial corporations. And Marie Elizabeth was just calmly holding up the activities of that whole State Department by using the telephone. It meant that poor Mr. Carstones would that night not get to bed before half-past one....

I had better, perhaps, put in here what I learned really only the other day: it casts light as to what must have been going on behind that mahogany door, since it shows just how much Lady Ada knew of the parentage of those children.

The letters from Earl Marsden that I am going to quote came from among my mother’s papers that I have only very lately had the time to look through. Just when they came into my mother’s possession I don’t know: I imagine it must have been after Marie Elizabeth’s marriage to my brother. There were not so many of them, and they were all in a stoutish envelope with a covering letter, obviously from Lady Ada herself, though it was not actually signed.

My mother, I ought perhaps to say, was one of those women of great character, whom the young of late Victorian days had been in the habit of consulting — and she had known Lady Ada since Lady Ada had been a child of six. And when the serious trouble came, Lady Ada seems to have tried to put herself into my mother’s hands — as if into the hands of an arbitrator by whose decision she would be content to abide. I gather that my mother refused to have anything to do with the matter. It would have been for her a delicate position: if the young woman her son was going to marry were legitimate, Lady Ada would have to lose the succession, for herself and her son, to an Earldom, and she was not going to advise Lady Ada as to the attitude to adopt towards those young people, or even to strengthen her in any course or with any sort of moral support.

My mother never discussed these matters with me. We were not a discussing family; I daresay she never even discussed them with my brother or with Marie Elizabeth. But I know she contemptuously disapproved of all the Marsdens down to Mr. Heimann and Lady Ada herself: she said they were all wanting in strength of character, were all high-falutin, sentimental, unpractical, and too clever by half. She objected to Lady Ada that, although she had been taught to docket her letters as “answered,” with the date, she had never been taught how to select a maid. And of the third Earl — Mr. Heimann — she said that although he had been taught elocution of a pompous nature for use in the House of Lords he had not been trained to abstain from the bottle before speaking. Of Lady Ada she once or twice contemptuously told an anecdote: She had had, at some garden party, years ago, to do up Lady Ada’s blouse at the back. The poor child had appeared at that function, as my mother expressed it, half naked — because her mother had not the sense to get a maid who could turn her out properly. My mother, I daresay, was unjust; but then she came of a Tory Scotch house, whilst the Marsdens were a great Whig family.

I daresay my mother never even really read those letters: that would have been like her. At any rate, here they are:

The earliest was dated:

“
Brussels, the fifteenth of May, eighteen hundred and ninety,”
all the figures being written out. It ran:

“
My darling, ever dear Ada: This is to tell you that I have contracted an alliance with a young Frenchwoman, Miss Hijmann, not conventionally of our station, but, as they say in these parts, as pure as God’s mother. In case of my death, which I do not anticipate, for I am sound, wind and limb, I ask you solemnly to look after her interests. I suppose this will lock the door finally on my resuming office.”

Lady Ada had written on this, in 1890:

“I wrote to him that I was glad indeed to hear that now he would have someone to look after his poor clothes. But was I to gather that he had married the young lady by French or any other law? I begged him to give her, however that might be, my very dear love. A true union of kindness and worth was a thing we Marsdens had, alas, seldom if ever found!”

As a note to this she had written to my mother in 1914: “So you see, my dear Lady Jessop, I did not know then, and I do not now: how can I? — for he never answered: whether he married the mother. He was thus solemn when he put pen to paper, though never in family life. ‘Contracted an alliance’ might mean only what the French call a
collage sérieux.
It might seem unlikely that he would announce with solemnity such a union — but he took things seriously, and he might well wish me, as his legal heir, to know that such a woman had genuine claims on him. On the other hand it might well mean a marriage. I am still in the dark!”

After that came a great number of notes, all in Mr. Hermann’s large hand on the blue-grey paper that he always used. They said that the writer was well and wished his beloved sister an eternity of happy returns of that day: they were written on successive 15ths of August.

Finally there was another long letter, dated the 13th of December, 1913.

It said that the writer had just heard from his friend Prince Something of Prussia that:

“Two young people in whom I am sincerely interested, a boy of the greatest ability and a lovely girl, are staying in a doubtful household — that of a German Professor of English Literature. I thought all such people were respectable.”

He goes on to ask Lady Ada to find for him a companion for Marie Elizabeth. He describes this companion minutely: he might almost have been asking for Miss Jeaffreson, as if he had known her. Then he began a new page:

“They think I am their uncle, and I do not wish this impression to be disturbed. The boy I intend to embrace a public career. He gives me great pride and satisfaction: the girl to marry well. I do not think it would conduce to the fruition of either of these projects if it were known that these two were connected with or protected by a man so disgraced as I, though unjustly. They are aged about twenty and twenty-two, the boy the elder. When they appear in London I shall look to you to assist them. If you could get him started on nursing a good constituency I will make it worth the Party’s while. Consult Arthur as to that. You may let him know that I support the boy.
I can rely on your self-sacrifice.
The name they will go by is Hijmann, pronounced Heimann, a Franco-Flemish name.”

On this Lady Ada had commented to my mother:

“Can you, my dearest old friend, blame me if I am still uncertain whether these children will take my children’s expected rights or no. You observe the sentence about self-sacrifice underlined. It might mean no more than taking the girl to my own dressmaker, which would be a bore; or it might mean a great deal more. Only it could not, could it, leave any doubt that they are his children?”

It is possible that, before sending these letters to my mother, Lady Ada had even talked with her; for she goes on to write a great deal, arguing rather passionately that she had done right in befriending the young people. That would have been just the thing of which my mother would have most disapproved. Indeed, I have frequently heard her make fun of the tradition of the great Whig houses which, so history tells us, from time immemorial to the spacious days of Victoria, had always been to bring up bastards and heirs under one roof. My mother, as a Tory, was always contemptuous of this arrangement.

But it may not have been against my mother that Lady Ada argued; she may have been justifying herself against her husband. By the time she wrote, Mr. Pugh Gomme must have begun to make himself nasty — about the Heimann pair, whom he must have seen about his house without much noticing them.

And Mr. Pugh Gomme, the Balliol-trained pro-consul, was a thoroughly unsatisfactory fellow. He was small, with orange hair and whiskers, and he had climbed high — by availing himself of the support of Sir Arthur. I suppose the world to be aware of the relationship of that statesman with Lady Ada: it was sufficiently acknowledged to be tranquil and unobjectionable as these things go. In any case, Lady Ada and her husband had not spoken for many years, though they lived in the same house. So he might well, as poor Mr. Carstones put it, be expected to turn nasty if the young Heimanns were to be acknowledged as the heirs to the Marsden estates and jointures. For an
arriviste
of his type, high though he had climbed, to be the husband of a Countess and the father of a prospective Earl was still something desirable. I daresay that he would have divorced Lady Ada years before if he had thought that Mr. Heimann would marry.

At the time when I had my interview with Mr. Carstones outside that mahogany door, Mr. Pugh Gomme can have had no inkling of any claim made against his fair prospects of future glory to be obtained through a wife and son who were only legally his. But that knowledge must obviously come to him sooner or later — and it was to the interest of both Sir Arthur and Lady Ada that it should come as late as possible.

Sir Arthur, though giving War Assistance to the Government, was at that time in Opposition, and the possible nasty divorce case that Mr. Pugh Gomme might get up against him would certainly prevent his ever holding office again; and, even if it never came to that, Mr. Pugh Gomme in his red-whiskered way might well render himself extremely objectionable to Lady Ada.