Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (608 page)

And, two minutes after he had seen those trees, he was stopped by a dull-minded policeman with a face like a ham, for having switched on his headlights in a part of the world where that practice was already forbidden.

CHAPTER VII

I HAVE said that Dr. Robins was not perhaps very good for George in that false dawn of his good fortune. He put into the boy’s head ideas of nervous symptoms that would have been just as well not there. He was a specialist; but a specialist up to that time repressed. And the mode of George’s arrival was not what you could call propitious.

He said himself that he had no idea, whilst he whirled round narrow and unbelievably bad Essex lanes, how late it was. He just wanted to see Clarice, who was at her father’s, suffering from influenza. He had learned that much from her theatre before he had started for his sister’s at Froghole.

He had an idea that it was late. The housemaid who had come in, apparently with the idea of laying the table for dinner, had been gone for a long time before George had left the house. She had never laid the table. But they had gone on talking. And the policeman had kept him for some time: he had seemed to be a man of a slow-moving mind, and the pencil with which he had made notes had needed more sucking than pencils usually need. They had made George in a very bad temper, and he had driven that wretched hired car like a madman.

He had come to a stop — in a dungyard, having driven clean through a rotten gate at the bottom of a soft road. To get the car backed out he had had to cover himself with very well rotted dung. He was still “bathed in sweat” — and twelve miles from Dr. Robins’!

He got his direction shortly afterwards from the guard room of some sort of yeomanry camp at the bottom of a greasy hollow, where his revolving wheels left his car stationary. The farm whose dungheap he had charged, and all the cottages he passed, had remained as if dead when he thundered on their doors, dimly lit up by his insufficient lights. The yeomanry guard obligingly turned out and shoved his car up a bank — on to a huge main road! There seemed to be no reason in things! He was, so a signpost showed him, an illegible number of miles from a place called Bungay.

His near sidelights having gone out, he arrived at Dr. Robins’ by crashing his car up a bank and half through a small wicket gate. He didn’t know that that was Dr. Robins’; but he knew he was somewhere near. He began, he said, to curse like a maniac: at the top of his voice, which was resonant. When his curses died away in the deep blackness, a voice said close to his ear:

“All right! I’ll be ready to start as soon as I have had a cup of cocoa! Before you’ve got your car out of my hedge!”

A dog cart with very brilliant lamps shone behind the embedded car. The man with the voice went up the path to the small house, leaving a small door just ajar. George was so really worn out that he followed to look in at that door — in search of human sympathy! He saw a grey man in a macintosh, pottering about with a cup in his hand over a small oil stove. It was Dr. Robins. A small, old clock, the face yellow with age, said that the hour was a quarter to one, on a small mantelshelf between large, dusty medicine bottles. George made some ejaculation. He said his jaw must have fallen at the consideration of the lateness of the hour. Dr. Robins looked up.

He took George then and there through an extremely elaborate examination for neurasthenia — after he had lit a fire in the little grate. That surgery was not much more than five feet eleven in height, and you could reach from side to side of it. He knocked George’s knees with ivory hammers; made him stand to attention for minutes with his eyes closed; asked him questions as to buzzings in the ears, voices, visions, obsessions. He had, of course, heard the outlines of the story of George’s captivity and release. It was not, as I have said, good for George. It gave him ideas! But I do not know that the doctor was to blame.

He had come home, rather early for him, from a confinement. Finding a motor car half through his privet hedge with a violent young man inside had not surprised him, for that was his life — young husbands being excitable. But it was another matter to find that the supposed young husband was a prospective son-in-law, capless, his face streaked with dung and his jaw falling down like that of an idiot — standing there in the crack of the door just after the doctor had heard his voice ringing through the quiet of the night in the most fantastic objurgations. For all the world like a homicide thwarted in his desires!

And I do not know that he was much reassured to hear that the young man’s father had hung himself, so that he asked George innumerable questions as to suicidal tendencies. George was pretty sure that none of his other ancestors had made away with themselves.

The doctor, I think, was predisposed to make a night of it. He asked his questions in a low, methodical voice. Every now and then when George, getting excited about the lateness of his intrusion, would raise his voice in apologies, the doctor would say:

“Hush! hush! My women are light sleepers!”

He remained grim for a long time. His plan, I think, if he was unable to satisfy himself that George was reasonably sound, was to get George away before daylight and to put him on his honour to leave his daughter alone. He said indeed to George:

“If I am dissatisfied as to your being a — a fit subject for marriage — For of course I’m not going to have Clarice martyrised with a neurasthenic husband and degenerate children...

“If you’re dissatisfied,” George interrupted in his most resonant tones. There was a cracking of the floor overhead. The doctor said:

“Hush, you lunatic, can’t you...

George pleaded, in a whisper:

“Look here! I’m enlisting — if Clarice approves.... If you approve!”

The doctor grunted.

“And supposing I stick it!” George said, “Wouldn’t that prove my nerves...

The inner door of the surgery creaked.

There are of course passages of fairy tale in the lives of all men. Just every now and then you get all good and kind people round you, and life moves quietly, in moments when even the figures of Guards’ drill instructors are lovely and your Company Orderly Sergeant says:

“Put you in morning sentry go on Sunday? Want the afternoon with your girl? All right! You’re a rich bloke. Give 09 Jenkins half a dollar to change with you. It wasn’t like that when I was a rookie!”

That — the company office — and the Square, the immense expanse of grey asphalt, between high, liver-grey brick buildings, where battalions could manœuvre together with the stately languor of duchesses or two thousand men at once play leap-frog; the long-route marches down the cordial, curious streets; the long polishings of buttons that, finished, you held out at arm’s length with the satisfaction of the artist; the little car, shooting about like a beetle amidst the immensities of the London traffic; the restaurants where waiters fell upon their stomachs before you and your Clarice; the dim glories of the horseshoe of the packed theatre — that was the midge dance of an atmosphere of George’s forty-eight fortunate days. I am of course aware that George was a doctor of philosophy at the University of Montpellier and of philology at that of Jena.

But he was in the hands of a wise girl who wanted to satisfy her father that George had the instincts of the plain, good boy. She had done that by the forty-seventh day, and, just before the afternoon when I had seen the boy in barracks, the doctor had agreed that those two could be married just before George went out. They were to spend his draft-leave together.

That, then, was the end of George’s narrative.

I may as well sum up in a sort of calendar to date: there may have been obscurities latterly in this narrative. I have told it pretty well in the order used by George himself, going backwards and forwards over his account. For of course when a man tells his story, and the story is very complicated, to be plain, he must emphasize points in advance, go back to others, advance, go back again, and so on.

George Heimann, then, left Froghole for Germany on the third of August, 1914; his father hanged himself on the fourth of that month, probably about three o’clock in the afternoon. George was arrested at about eleven o’clock of that night. He goes out of the story for a time.

I have recorded how Marie Elizabeth met Mr. Pflugschmied (Austrian for Plowright) in Sir Arthur’s office; the date I do not exactly recall. It was perhaps towards the end of November. At any rate it was on the 23rd of December that my mother drove to my rooms to tell me that an American journalist had undertaken to manage the affairs of the Universe, chicken farms, and Marie Elizabeth. I believe he really secured the shipment of several tons of hen-food from New Orleans to Froghole at prices that made the eyes of the old foreman drop out of his head. It was of course a quite illegal proceeding, poultry being rationed in the interests of the civil population. Mr. Pflugschmied, naturally, did not know that.

The union of Marie Elizabeth and that man must have been a queer one. She loved him no doubt for his chivalrous, romantic, and credulous soul; it can hardly have been for his person, though you never know. He loved her, perhaps, for her misfortunes; at any rate it must have been what the French call a
coup de foudre
; they loved and comforted the one the other, and I believe that never in their joint lives did they have a moment of disunion. There
is
no accounting for these things. I did not blame her; neither did my mother. The war had too many violent delights — and violent ends!

It must have been in the beginning of December, 1914, that Mr. Plowright contributed his series of illustrated articles about the family of Marsden (or Marston of Marston Moor) to the Saturday editions of American journals, though George only saw his specimen in March, 1915. That was what was called a “scoop” for Mr. Pflugschmied.

In January, 1915, he went to our line in Armentières to inspect the registers of the village of Ys. But before he got there the Germans had already annihilated and occupied that hamlet. He did not know that. I believe that he was for several hours at least within artillery range of the German lines, in the company of a friendly Staff Officer. Marie Elizabeth loved him the more enthusiastically because of this peaceful heroism.

I will complete here the adventures of this amiable, fat, and incapable man. He left Froghole for Berlin on the sixth of March, 1915 — two days after George had told his sister that the German Imperial Authorities held his father’s “statement.” That statement he succeeded in obtaining during September,
1915, in
return for glowing articles as to the peace, prosperity, and plenty of the German capital. The Imperial Authorities had no particular use for George’s father’s papers, but no doubt they did not believe in letting pins he when they could pick one up. Or possibly they were only just as stupid and purposeless as our own authorities sometimes appear to be. At any rate Mr. Plowright — in Berlin, of course, Mr. Pflugschmied — had a good time, making a great deal of fuss in that city and describing for the benefit of his journal the fusses that he made. It protracted his scoop — for naturally it was thrilling to describe how he, the intrepid son of Old Glory, defied the jack-booted hirelings in his determination to rescue from their hands documents that should return to their rightful owners the battlefields of Marston Moor and Chaldon Field.

In October of that year he visited the German lines in the neighbourhood of Armentières. Here — we having in a temporary foray succeeded in capturing the site of the once existing village of Ys — he had the satisfaction of gazing through excellent German Staff glasses at our practically invisible trenches that zigzagged down where the main street of that poor place had once been.

The visit, however, was not without its profit. For a high official of the then German city of Lille, a gentleman equivalent I fancy to our Town Majors, a lawyer, and at any rate a man in private life of some intelligence, pointed out to Herr Pflugschmied that the marriage registers of Ys had been removed to Paris, where, if Mr. Plowright got there before the Germans, he would probably be allowed to search them for the fee of two francs. At that date Marie Elizabeth was still employing Mr. Jeaffreson and some of the most expensive counsel of the city of London to aid her in her litigation. I suppose, however, that all our lawyers with elementary common-sense were then engaged as Town Majors or sanitary corporals — on our side of the ring fence.

Mr. Plowright, then, arrived in London with a wallet full of papers, including a formal certificate of the death of Mr. Heimann. Its origin was attested by the American Embassy in Berlin, and it was, I believe, regarded as a valid document by our Courts. As a detail I may state that Mr. Pflugschmied was then without a penny. His appointments I believe were princely; but his expenses had been considerable, and he had played poker with other American correspondents all over Germany; and with the staff officers who accompanied him he had played a game called “skat” of which he knew almost less than he knew of stud-poker. He arrived in London in January,
1916, in
that rather mournful condition, and having pawned his suit case set off straight for Paris, where he had no difficulty in procuring the marriage certificate of Miss Hijmann and the third Earl Marsden. But that was of no help in establishing the births of George and his sister.