Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (609 page)

When he again reached London he found that Marie Elizabeth, on the strength of his Berlin documents, had applied to our Courts to presume the death of her father. Her Bank had at once stopped payment of the allowances of herself, George, and Miss Jeaffreson — as of course it had to do. So the whole lot of them were penniless in February, 1916.

During all this time I never saw anything of Mr. Pflugschmied myself. I daresay Marie Elizabeth kept us apart. She must have thought me a nasty sort of man, who would behave with incivility to my brother’s successor. I heard of him vaguely; principally from my mother, but she never got his rather difficult name right. I had of course seen him at the Night Club; but there, too, I had not caught his name: it is no easy one for casual introduction.

So that when, at Amiens, about the end of July, 1916, he introduced himself to me and my comrades, and fed us with whisky of amazing quality, I hadn’t the deuce of an idea who he was. He appeared just a casual, hospitable, rather wistful American journalist who came and talked to me when I had leave to spend a night in that city, purchasing supplies for the battalion. I did not know why he singled me out: he had on the first night mumbled something about some people whose name I took to be Mostyn (Philadelphia pronounces the name
Marsden
much as S.W. London says
Mostyn).
I did know some very unpleasing people called Mostyn; but I did not want to hear about them, and told him so with some vigour.

He himself wanted to talk to me about Marie Elizabeth: he was homesick for her. So he imagined that I disliked my sister-in-law for re-marrying. Nevertheless he wanted to be nice to me — that was why he was wistful. He was going to own my brother’s View. So he lost money to me at poker whilst talking interminably of how he had detected and confounded all the toughest poker sharps of New York and Denver, Colorado. It is as good and flattering a way of being nice to a man as any other!

George had intended, before enlisting, to have taken a week’s rest with his Clarice; but that impetuous Staff Officer threw him into the Guards on the seventeenth of March, so that he remained at Chelsea until the twenty-eighth of April, or thereabouts; on that day I visited him in barracks, and he came to my rooms and told me his story. (If anyone takes the trouble to look up an old calendar and tells me that the 28th of April, 1915, does not fall on a Saturday, I do not much care. At any rate George came to my rooms on the last Saturday in April.) A fortnight before, Marie Elizabeth, acting through the impressionable and much worried Mr. Carstones, had persuaded Sir Arthur to apply from the Foreign Office for his discharge; on the same day — that Saturday — the request for information as to George Heimann, otherwise Pearson, had reached George’s Company Office from Scotland Yard. This I may as well explain now.

On nights when he could get a midnight pass George was accustomed to occupy a seat in the dress circle of Clarice’s theatre, being of course in uniform. One night, about a week before that Saturday, he sat next to two ladies with reddish hair and ermine tippets who, when they discovered that he was a Tommy and not an officer, talked to him for some time in the condescending way adopted by unpleasant people to army privates. Suddenly one of them, gazing at him through tortoiseshell lorgnettes, exclaimed:

“Why, you must be the Mr. Heimann who lectured at the Ladies’ Club last year and afterwards accompanied Miss Honeywill on the piano at the Night Club!”

That circle had come full! They began to whisper the one to the other with such vehemence that the back rows protested.

George had attached no importance to them: about seven hundred people had seen him accompanying Clarice at the Night Club. Afterwards it occurred to him that they had been the two sisters who disliked me and who, in combination, had written the paragraph about Mr. Podd and the German Emperor. And so they were. He had seen them, giving evidence in the case that Marie Elizabeth had had brought for “contempt” against the
Evening Paper,
only then they had not been wearing their blue hats with the birds of paradise, or no doubt he would have recognised them sooner. He never gave them another thought at that time.

He had been occupying an end seat; it was towards the close of the last act, and he had slipped suddenly away to go to Clarice’s dressing-room whilst they were still whispering, or no doubt they would have tried to have him arrested in the theatre. That might have “put him wise,” as the saying is. But he had been too busy to remember them.

They, too, had not been idle. The meeting could be made worth fifty or sixty guineas to them, and a possible rise in their profession. Besides, they were stalwartly patriotic. And the
Evening Paper,
naturally, did not like George Heimann, who had brought against it the abortive action for “contempt”. Papers have memories!

They might have got on to poor George a day or two sooner had the romantic spirit of the two ladies, their ignorance of military costume, and the necessities of the sensational press not made them insist in their several articles that George had been attired as a Guards’ officer. George had said that he was only a common soldier, but they declared that that had not deceived them; his buttons and his numerals had shone too much, and he was too obviously the gentleman.

It made a splendid newspaper story: There was the dangerous alien, speaking English “to perfection”; recognised by the representatives of the
Evening Paper
as one directly protected by the German Emperor before the war; now a fugitive from justice; a prominent figure “in a certain class of society” of pre-war days; an obviously aristocratic alien who had made an amazingly insulting speech in favour of Germany at a well-known club. And now, in public, in the more expensive seats of a theatre, he sat in the uniform of an officer in the Guards. From conversation with him the representatives were fairly certain that he was actually serving. Then.... What was Scotland Yard doing in the midst of this hideous national peril? Names were suppressed for the time, out of public spirit, so that the police might not be hindered. What was Scotland Yard doing?

You may imagine the headlines and the posters of the
Evening Paper.
It went on for days. The sisters interviewed all sorts of people: retired sergeants-major, generals of extreme age, doorkeepers — and of course Mr. Podd, who said: “England, wake up!” The Hidden Hand was seated at the Guards’ mess table! This desperate and mysterious fellow, protected by the German Emperor and his exalted allies in the British official class, must be run to earth!

A lady school teacher returning from Switzerland brought with her copies of obscure Swiss papers of the beginning of February. These stated that, detained at the Swiss frontier, there had been an individual of the name of Heimann, whose only credentials were a
laisser-passer
of German Imperial origin, endorsed to the effect that the bearer was a good friend and had rendered great service to — the German Fatherland.

The
Evening Paper
printed translations in full of these paragraphs — with immense headings. This time they gave the name: George Heimann, claiming to be Earl Marsden. And they stated that this was the individual in Guards’ uniform that their representatives had unearthed. They asked again what was Scotland Yard doing, since this scoundrel was already wanted on a criminal charge, having absconded from his bail. They printed that on the 28th of April, or at any rate on the last Saturday in that month. The paper was being sold in the streets whilst George Heimann was telling me of his good fortune and of the peace that had descended on him.

We picked Clarice Honeywill up at the stage door of her theatre and ran her to the little restaurant, where we were to dine in a tiny private room. Going up the steps George bought an
Evening Paper,
mechanically, as one does, from a man beside the entry. In the little hall Clarice twitched the folded sheets from his fingers, saying, with a little grimace:

“Mr. Jessop won’t thank you for reading papers on your first night, for years, in his society.”

The room was small and garishly painted; the waiters, truly, fell on their stomachs before these two, and we ate a good deal of food, the place being foreign and the war still young. And George was an adept with a foreign menu. It was touching to see those two together.

There are certain unions of simple and kindly people that confer almost a blessing on the beholder because they are like musics blent together. And it was the fate of those two so to live. They were both so simple; they were both so kindly. Upon my word I have hardly heard one of them say a harsh word of any person or of any thing; I never heard one of them wish harm to a human soul; I never heard either express any envy or any uncharitable judgment. And they were both beautiful: full of life, clean limbed, with straight, clear eyes.

And there in that garishly painted room I could see them building up a joint life in small consultations. They consulted, heads together, over the menu, over the wine card, as to whether, one day, they would have more carnations or more roses in their garden; and they discussed “prices” with an extreme intentness, because they were by way of economising — in order to buy Dr. Robins a specialist’s practice in Harley Street.

They were indeed actually engaged in purchasing him one at that moment. What exactly the arrangement was I don’t know. Dr. Robins, at any rate, was already installed in that long street where we wait for verdicts of life or of death. I think he was acting as
locum tenens
to some great man who had gone to France, and, if the nature of the work suited him he was to have the offer of a share in the business at a certain price. It was, I suppose, in order to get that price together that the young people were saving up, George being as enthusiastic as Clarice in his desire to repay her father for all that he had expended for her and for all his toil in the mud.

After we had dined they took me to see her play, I sitting with George rather high up in the large theatre. It was from there that one heard her best, she said.

There are certain wonderful sensations in the world, though they are very evanescent. At that time she had nothing very much to say on the stage, and nothing at all striking to do; but when she came upon those boards it was suddenly so painful for me that I found it almost unbearable. It is always very moving to see in public, and above all to hear, a being and a voice that you know very well and like very much. It is as if the world grew intent. You hold your breath for a whole second and then, with the coming of the voice everything seems to go well. Then there begins in you a sort of longing. And, if the whole hall, in its yellowish twilight, with the strong, brighter shaft from the lit stage, longs with you, it is almost more than you can stand. And the world of those days was such a dreary world: one could hardly bear to think that she would be there upon the stage for only an hour or an hour and a half, and that, then, one would be out again in the strong currents, the irresistible, dark pre-occupations of those moments.

We had a supper in the same little place where we had dined. George said:

“You were very good to-night, Clarice. Better, I think, than I have ever seen you. Have you come into a fortune?”

She said:

“Oh, it helps one to have one’s first patron amongst an audience. You had better go now, or you will miss the midnight roll-call. You don’t want C.B. for to-morrow!

He stayed for a minute or two. They discussed first by which road they were going to take me down to her father’s house next day; and then whether he or she should drive. He said she took you too fast. She maintained that, according to the law of chances, speed made no difference. If an obstacle was going to be on the road, say, at 6.41 p m., you might hit it if you travelled at only thirty miles an hour; whereas if
 
you were doing seventy you would be ten miles away before it got there at all.

There was in the centre of the room a gas lamp with a mantle that made a hateful light. The walls were decorated with paintings of menlike objects that had the faces of enlarged ants and blue, reticulated limbs like rolled paper cylinders. That fellow stood there, trifling and shining in his honourable livery; Clarice sat at the table behind piles of fruit, answering him negligently. He went. On the walls the slate-green men with the cylindrical, dirty blue limbs ministered to each other in scarlet landscapes. A strong scent was in my nostrils from orange peels that lay on plates beneath that hot lamp. It had brass scollopings round the burner.

Clarice stood up. She moved to the mantelshelf of that small room, and from behind a cheap vase took a wad of pinkish paper. She held it towards me. It was the very copy of the
Evening Paper
that George had bought when we had first come in there by the private staircase. It had then been raining. She had taken it from him, as I have related, and she had put it behind that vase. That was, I suppose, a final feminine economy. We could just as well have supped elsewhere; but she had brought us back there, thinking of the copy of that horrible sheet that she had tucked behind that cheap vase.