Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (606 page)

George said:

“I only landed from Germany at four this morning!” But Mr. Carstones could not grasp that fact. He said: “Mrs. Jessop — we cannot call your sister Lady Mary. It can’t be done — not at this moment — by Us!”

In a corner of the very sumptuous room were deposited a service rifle and a leather cartridge belt. George wondered what the deuce they were doing there, and missed what Mr. Carstones was saying. Later, Mr. Carstones said:

“And if you think of Him! He is standing up in His place in the House. Answering the questions of any damned fool. Like a gladiator, catching them on his shield. So you know it’s rather.... Damn it! It’s pretty mean to hamper him!”

George felt that this man was suffering from acute excitement, or acute depression, and that he was at least very loyal to his superior in some service. A good man, therefore! And experiencing a desire to be of comfort, he exclaimed:

“
Please
! Do, please, understand that I know nothing of the situation. There appears to be a situation. Obviously there must be one. But I know no more of it than I know of why that rifle is there.”

Mr. Carstones started:

“That rifle!” he exclaimed. “Oh!... Oh, some of us do squad drill with arms — in the mornings — before office hours — in the quadrangle.” He looked at George very earnestly: “Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that you do not know that if... Why, if
you
are Earl Marsden, that swine Pugh will begin divorce proceedings against Lady Ada. And the Chief’s career will be ruined!”

George repeated very carefully:

“Will you please understand that I know nothing!” Mr. Dewsbury, the secretary of the bad-tempered man, came in with some papers that he handed to George. He said:

“We have made you out a Frenchman! You won’t mind being made out a Frenchman? You will have to report at Scotland Yard; but they’re very civil. You won’t mind that, will you? It makes it easier for us. Don’t you think so, Carstones?”

He went on explaining that George had come to the Home Office with a French
laisser-passer
; and he told George’s story with reasonable correctness to Mr. Carstones. Mr. Carstones seemed overwhelmed. This was the most intelligent man George met in those offices. But then, Mr. Dewsbury was a Jew whose name had been until quite lately Dietrichsteiner.

And in telling George’s story he had used words intelligible to Mr. Carstones! For, when he had gone, Mr. Carstones appeared no longer hopeless. He gathered his coat-tails briskly up behind him, sat down at his desk, and exclaimed: “You’ll have some tea, won’t you?” Then he began:

“Oh, I see. You only landed from Germany this morning? So you can’t have been staying with Mrs. Jessop! Oh, I see! You have been nearly seven months in Germany?” — and he took George thus, semi-interrogatively, through his latter history.

He had some excuse for being confused! Sir Arthur, gathering up his papers for a rush to the House of Commons, had merely told him to receive George, brother to Marie Elizabeth, to keep him for half an hour, and then to conduct him to Lady Ada in Eton Square.

So, when he had finished narrating George’s history to George, he took a deep breath and brought out:

“And of course! Naturally! Oh, I see! You know nothing of what has been happening here? You wouldn’t, naturally, would you?” And he took George elaborately right through his home and family news:

“You don’t know, then, that your sister lives at Froghole, or that she has married Mr. Frederick Jessop, the brother of the writer, who’s missing in Flanders? You did not put her up to signing the marriage register “Mary Elizabeth Marsden”? You couldn’t, of course!”

He had just gone on talking in a gentlemanly but sometimes agitated monotone. And George said that with every wish, with every motive in the world to get a clear view of what had happened, he could hardly do it. Mr. Carstones was, of course, very allusive. He would say: “You can see, of course, that in Sir Arthur’s delicate situation
vis-a-vis
your.... But perhaps you don’t know! And you understand that we don’t naturally acknowledge that that is the relationship. To you, I mean.. And George’s brain would seem to miss a stroke, as you may sometimes hear your heart do. Now and then it just stopped, as it had done in the train with the poet, Curtius. It had done that often lately. It just would not catch on to long speeches in an equable tone, though short, sharp remarks would still stir him. Thus suddenly Mr. Carstones, who had been talking about those cards: “You know, she really, to my mind” — Mr. Carstones exclaimed:

“Here’s one! Here’s three! — four! She comes in here pretty often. We’re naturally pleased to see her. But—”

He took from a small tray a number of visiting cards, chose out two or three, and put them under George’s nose. George had so much blood in his eyes that he could hardly read. The cards danced about. But he did read:

“Lady Mary Elizabeth Jessop,
née Marsden.”

For some seconds he gasped and stuttered as if he had swallowed the wrong way. That seemed to console Mr. Carstones very much. He exclaimed:

“I’ll take you to Eton Square now. Sir Arthur will have prepared her!”

The room had been very dim. George walked on thick carpet round the curtain of a large state bed. The electric light shone a little through the reddish stuff of the curtain on to an ivory skull that looked at him with immense dark shadows, the eyes. The two arms lay straight down the bed. A smile, instantaneous and gone, just moved the features; one finger on the right hand moved, and a voice like the falling of a dead leaf, ventriloquial, seeming to have no apparent origin, just breathed:

“Bad moment.... Relief....”

Crossing the room he had seen, standing all alone beneath a heavily shaded light, on the dark marble of a brown console table that had florid, thin scrolls of gilding, a squat, violently green, small bottle. The table and the bottle were almost the only things that, without straining the eyes, you could see in the vast, dim room. He ran now to this, took the bottle, and returned to the bedside. He said, using slow and distinct tones:

“Do I ring for the nurse? Or do you take two of these?”

He had had, in Montpellier, an intimate student friend called Odonelly, who had been accustomed to relieve such fits of agony by swallowing two tablets from just such a green bottle. Amyl-nitrate, I think he called it. The chin of the figure lifted itself infinitesimally, like that of a child towards a feeding cup. With extreme care he placed two tablets between the lips.

Lady Ada had come to only very slowly. She said, suddenly:

“Tell me! He died — of a broken heart? Poor child! Your father! They did not... torture him or anything? I have been dreading. The fourth of August. Tell me. You
must
tell me!”

George said that he answered:

“No, no. They were quite decent people. Good to him. He just died. The... the heart! Like you and me. Just died!”

“Thank God! Oh, thank God! I knew he was dead!”

George was seeing, as he must naturally have seen, his father hanging there — as if from the mahogany bed-post. He stuttered:

“Oh, you know... Just... petered out! He said ‘
Domine in manus’.
and... then the heart stopped!”

She said:

“You were there to close his eyes! It is lovely to think there was someone to close his eyes. There will be no one to close mine!” She lay, her own eyes closed, and said: “Most merciful!”

Suddenly she sat up in bed and exclaimed:

“Why, you
are
George!”

She began with extraordinarily busy fingers to tug at black ribbons. Her very long, silver hair was in two plaits, black bows at the end of each. She said:

“I am better! George: it is lovely to see you, my dear!”

He told her his adventures, naturally. But apparently it did not take him and his aunt more than a few seconds to settle what course, for their parts, they were going to pursue to each other. Two speeches did it. George had been telling his aunt how he and the poet Curtius had behaved in the room at the top of the Schloss at Zell. He must have used the phrase “enemy nationals.” She had been sitting up in bed, so that he said he felt like sitting beside a tall woman on a horse. She had before that told him a great deal about the Marsden family: she said that half of them had maniacal obstinacies, the other half were unreasonably mild. George’s grandfather, the epic poet, had been quite historically so quarrelsome as to be nearly a lunatic. His grandfather — her father — the general, had been courtmartialled and dismissed the service over some infinitesimal point of drill. He went on writing pamphlets and letters to the
Times
about it till the end of his life, and his wife — one of the proud Warnes of Hepplewhit, whose names had never since the Conquest been in the papers — had died of it. She went on talking quietly of the family for a long time.

“And,” George said, “just imagine what it did for me to sit in the shadows of her curtains in the warmth and quiet and to hear her say: “Your grandmother,” or “Your great grandfather the poet.” She did it on purpose, of course! She knew! I could feel my brain smoothing itself out with each word she said.”

“That great grandfather of mine, the poet, had to bolt from England because he libelled so many people so badly. Quite harmless neighbours mostly, like doctors and provincial architects. It’s a pity he was born before the days of that fellow Podd!

“My father, she said, was different — and yet the same. He had that unholy row in the Lords. People — even people who knew — put it down to drink. He threatened the Lord Chancellor on the Woolsack with physical violence. But my aunt said it was not drink. She had dined with him just before he went in to the House, and heard him speak. It was just descent from the poet and complete contempt for that legislative assembly. I remember, myself, that now and then he had a pretty contemptuous manner!

“And then, for the rest of his life, he fled over the earth — from the publicity that the row caused. That was the blood of my grandmother — the proud Warne. He despised his kind: he loved a row; but publicity drove him mad....”

His aunt had gone on telling him these anecdotes without saying anything at all about their relationships, except for those words “your father,” or “your grandmother.” And then, quite suddenly, after he had been talking, she looked down at him sideways, and said gently:

“You and I, my dear, apparently are ‘enemy nationals’ one to the other: in the matter of territory and palaces. For Marsden Fell’s a real palace, and either yours or mine. But we need not revolve round each other with hostile glances, as you say you and that poet did, for the sake of correctness! Naturally I do not
want
my son to lose all that since his birth he has expected. But we’ll leave it, won’t we — that’s your desire, too? — to lawyers to settle quietly?”

George said:

“For me they will sit on opposite sides of a table and pass papers across and done with it; or I will lose everything in the world and beg my bread. But I believe with every fibre of my being that I am my father’s heir. He could not have been the man that he was as I knew him and me not be that!”

Lady Ada said:

“I believe, my dear, that you are.”

By that time George had already told her that in the safe-conduct he had been described as “Graf Marsden.” He said that they never mentioned the matter of their successions again. I believe that they discussed possible means of keeping Marie Elizabeth quiet.

George slept that night on the Thames Embankment.

CHAPTER VI

BEFORE dilating on George’s domesticities, I will dispose of his public actions, since it was thus that he told me the story.

He was, then, swallowed up by various Public Offices.

They occupied him for about a fortnight, from the fourth of March.

They were trying to obtain information from him — about Germany. He conveyed to them the German position as it had been represented to him by the Frau Rechtsanwalt. That may have helped them.

The offers of help that he received were innumerable. Thus Sir Arthur’s assistants, Mr. Carstones and his group of acolytes, were all anxious to have him in what was called Propaganda — the propaganda branch of His Majesty’s Secret Service.

But George was romantic, and physically very active. It had for him to be enlistment or nothing as soon as they had pumped him dry. So, in the Home Office, the Board of Trade, the Foreign Office, and even, I believe, the Ministry of Information they tried to elicit “facts” from him.

At last a dark, rather agonised, resentful, youngish man — at the War Office — about thirty, high up apparently in the official world, with a scarlet hat-band, asked George a number of questions about the rate of speed on the eight-lined railway at Zell, where George had seen the reinforcements proceeding to the German-Russian front. George answered as best he could, but his mind being taken up with his desire to enlist he talked about that too.

The Staff Captain finished his questions and looked over his desk, gloomily, into George’s eyes.

“You won’t like being in the ranks,” he said. “You’ll be shouted at and damnyoureyed by babies, and twice every second you’ll have to call some little squit “Sir.’”

He continued to look at George, who did not answer. Then he caught up his swagger cane, slung on his belt, and exclaimed:

“Well, if you’re obstinate, come along. I’ll fix you in my own crowd.”

He walked rapidly down corridors and along blank alleys into a granite box, somewhere where worried men sprang up from tables. He was what George called a dynamic fellow. He caught hold of a buff sheet of paper, filled in a good many words and pushed the result to George.

“Sign that here!” he said to George. “You can report to-morrow. It’s my own regiment. God knows when I shall get back to it; but if you’ll let me know what company you’re in I’ll put in a word for you.”

That was his way of being helpful. He regarded it as a compliment to George to enlist him in his own regiment. Actually it turned out to be rather a disaster, that officer being too hurried. His motto in life, he said, was “ Do it now.”

George really ought to have waited to enlist until the Podd case was settled. But he took the Staff Officer to lunch and, wanting to make conversation, told him all about that criminal-libel case. For, though he had done t involuntarily enough, he had certainly broken his bail in the case of Rex
v.
Heimann, otherwise Pearson (Podd prosecuting). George had wanted to report to the police on his first morning in Town, but the gentlemen who questioned him at the Ministries all told him not to. They said that he would find it disagreeable, and that they would settle the matter for him. They were kind-hearted, but they were also very busy, so that no one had settled it. Only that morning George had heard that, whilst he was out, a policeman had called at his rooms and had inquired for him. The police had done that once a weekall the time he had been in Germany. George had gone again to his old boarding-house in Bloomsbury; and the landlady, a very antique, panic-stricken German, had stupidly told the policeman that George had not returned. He would have gone to Scotland Yard that morning only he had been due at the War Office for his interview with this Staff Officer.

The dynamic energies of that Staff Officer had been even enhanced by lunch. He could hardly wait for George to pay the bill. He was a rather blasted man. His cheek and part of his frontal bone had been knocked away early in September, so now they made him sit in an office with a red hat-band, and he saw no chance of advancement in his profession. This made him violent in frame of mind. He said, wiping his moustache with his napkin:

“Oh, is that all. Come along!”

George caught him up half way down Whitehall. He was making at an extremely rapid pace for New Scotland Yard. He arrived by a sort of process of blasting his way at an upper office in that heavy building. A man in blue, standing by a high desk in a room of his own, red-cheeked, with a sea-lion’s moustache and bright black eyes, looked at the pair of them. The Staff Captain said, with violence:

“This fellow Heimann is a private in my regiment. You cannot touch him for a trifle. We can’t be bothered to train men and have the Civil Police poach them from us!”

The Inspector was slow and self-contained. He leaned sideways on the flap of his desk, appearing to chew and turning over the pages of a large, loose-leaved folio with one negligent hand. He said:

“Heimann! Heimann!” He glanced down sideways at a page and then said:

“That will be all right, Captain.” He appeared to view the world with tranquil humorousness. “As long as Mr. Heimann is in your regiment, we need not trouble him. The prosecution is not anxious to proceed. Of course if he were not on active service, we should have to have an interview with him.” He made with a pencil a tick somewhere on the surface of that sheet.

That seemed to settle it.

It did not. The Staff Captain had been too helpful and, in his misanthropic mood, no doubt too impatient of the Civil Police. That was not unusual. With their slowness and large boots the Civil Police of those days not infrequently enraged the Military Authority. They seemed to move like wooden chessmen.

Mr. Carstones was not very effectual; but if that Staff Officer had allowed George to do what Sir Arthur’s secretary wanted, it might have been much better for George. For Mr. Carstones told me next day that George should certainly have surrendered to his bail, broken though it was. With a little backing from the Home Office the case would have been disposed of. In those days there were still Grand Juries at the London Sessions, and the Common Sergeant was quite able so to direct them that they would throw out the bill against a prisoner, and that would be the end of it, without even any publicity or the smallest fuss. I may have got the technicalities wrong, but that was something like what Mr. Carstones told me.

George considered himself to have no option; and he certainly had no misgivings. The Staff Captain seemed to have settled the matter, and the Military arm to be possessed of a very strong magic. There were above him those invincible men with the voices that clipped all their words, and he seemed to march within a charmed circle where the only care was that you might get your name taken for walking out with a button of your overcoat undone or for sneezing on parade.

So, except for jumping to it, my man, which he did not object to doing, he had arrived at a period of idyll — a time of relatively short winter parade hours, of theatre tickets to give away to his room-mates, which meant great personal popularity, and of physical well-being in an atmosphere of heroism.

His sister he had seen only once — on the day after the night when he had talked with his aunt. He had hired a car and gone down to Froghole in the late afternoon as soon as the Home Office had done with him for the day.

He said that the seven months of his absence had hardened Marie Elizabeth; but it had also in a way improved her. She was as inflexible as agate, but she talked much less. She just asked a question, seemed to think for a long time about the answer she got, and then asked another question. So that there had been nothing in the nature of an open quarrel between those two.

They had faced each other laconically, as if with vibrations passing from one to the other, in a perfect mist of comments from Miss Jeaffreson on one side and, on the other, from Mr. Pflugschmied, Marie Elizabeth’s American champion.

George stood at one end of my brother’s dining table, Marie Elizabeth at the other, and such must have been their engrossment that they stood there, facing each other, for between three and four hours. Miss Jeaffreson sat at the table, her hands back to back, with the little fingers hooked together, her face illuminated by the hanging lamp just above it and her eyes enormous behind unrimmed pince-nez. Opposite her, Mr. Pflugschmied rushed up and down, wiping his face with a huge white handkerchief, throwing out his hands and ejaculating.

I really forget whether I have accounted for the appearance of this gentleman in my poor brother’s house. It hardly needs it.

On one of the occasions when Marie Elizabeth had called on Sir Arthur she had seen, talking to Mr. Carstones in a corner of the immense room, this fat, good-natured, and inaccurate creature. That really finished it, for it became a sort of blaze of recognitions and of joy. Marie Elizabeth had at once known him for her former dancing partner of the Night Club; he had simultaneously recognised her as the divine dancer with whom he had revolved for three hours on end. And, so that their voices confused the one the other, Sir Arthur cried:

“But Mr. Plugsmit is the very man you want...” whilst Mr. Carstones exclaimed: “The very man you want is Mr. Pluhshpit!”

Mr. Pflugschmied, at that time still a neutral, had called in at that office for an interview with Sir Arthur; on the morrow he was to go to Germany for his paper, the
Philadelphia Something.
Or it may have been the
Chicago Something-else.
He was, of course, the journalist impressed by the necessity for rightly reporting names, who had been made known to me at the Night Club by the United States detective, and whom, with some aftermisgivings, I had introduced to Marie Elizabeth.

I need not have had the misgivings. And there, in my brother’s house, plump, agitated, and repeating distortedly, in a sort of high falsetto caused by his excitement Marie Elizabeth’s words, George found him. Marie Elizabeth would say:

“You are determined to take no legal steps — till when?”

Mr. Plowright would exclaim:

“But good heavens, man! Look at the evidence we have. Your own sister, by rights a countess in female succession! To leave her in this ignominious position!” Miss Jeaffreson would cut in, rather coldly, enunciating her words with great distinctness:

“You cannot really think of it, George! With your boasted chivalric sentiments. I remember your saying at the Curtiuses — you emphasized my own views — that the day when women could be left out of family counsels had gone for ever. And do you mean, now, to deny to your sister an equal right with yourself, in the decision of a matter so vital? As if you were the sole feudal head of the clan!” George would then answer his sister:

“I will engage in no litigation at all. Ever. Either our case is silently demonstrable by passing papers across a table or it does not exist. Contentious litigation about it is impossible in the nature of the case.”

Marie Elizabeth would listen to his words with minute attention. As soon as his lips had finished moving the other two would burst out, repeating the same things over and over again, whilst Marie Elizabeth reflected, standing silent in the light of the lamp just above her shoulder.

That discussion lasted for all those hours, not because the brother and sister had very much to say, but because the other two talked so incessantly. George could make his position quite plain in a sentence or two. Litigation was useless. They were what they claimed to be, or they were not. If they were, and ultimately proved it, the matter ceased. If they could not prove it, the matter ceased also as far as he was concerned. He considered that they would be able to prove it at the end of the war. Before then it was impossible.

His sister asked him, passionlessly: If it proved that they were illegitimate but born in such a country and such circumstances as gave them by local law a share in their father’s estates in that country, Lord Marsden having owned a good deal of land in Southern France, would George avail himself of his legal rights in such a country? George said: “Never!”

At that Marie Elizabeth said nothing; the other two burst into outcries. Miss Jeaffreson, too, had hardened a great deal, and had become more openly prurient. Towards the end of the evening she was talking of the late Mr. Heimann as a “shameless libertine,” and of Lady Ada as without shame, abandoned, and mercenary: “the fashionable courtesan!” George said that that gave him a queer feeling; he had hitherto so respected Miss Jeaffreson’s opinions that he had always listened to her with deference as his sister’s close friend.