Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (611 page)

In his family life, I believe, he remained thus extremely quiet, and if he was never gay, neither were the others; so that they noticed nothing.

I think it would be true to say that not one of those three had the faintest idea that George objected, say, to Mr. Pflugschmied’s American press activities. As a matter of fact, Marie Elizabeth had no literary taste. She had, indeed, no literary interests, but she had a power of adoration for people who work with the pen. And the childish enthusiasm that she had formerly given to the author of
The Titanic
:
an Epic,
she bestowed upon Mr. Pilugschmied’s articles. She simply yearned to read aloud the tremendous sentences: and George was such a kind brother that he set himself never to betray by so much as pained eyebrows his distaste at either Mr. Pflugschmied’s subjects or his headlines.

Only once did he betray what was going on within him. That happened very much later, but as I am on the subject of the Press I may as well put it in here. It occurred when they were all very hard up — the late Lord Marsden’s bank having stopped supplies. George had been trying to increase the earnings of the poultry farm. You might put it that six of his seven minds that worked simultaneously were by then raging mad, but the seventh remained hard and practical. And he retained, of course, his passion for decorum of behaviour, so that none of them, as the phrase is, “suspected anything.”

My brother, then, being of a reflective nature, and believing that the world could be saved by hens, had made large collections of chicken dung, which he mixed with chopped maize straw and chemicals whose name I have forgotten. With these mixtures he had experimented on certain crops, and found that the yields were very much increased. It would make a long story to go into all that, and I am not a manure expert. It was something to do with conveying to the soil a nitrogenous inoculation from the chicken dung and the chemical through the maize straw. However, that is mere parrot talk on my part.

George, looking among the papers that my brother had left in the corrugated iron hut that he called his Poultry Office, had found poor Fred’s memoranda written out in a neat hand, at great length and very explanatory. And there, in what would normally have been the farm-yard, were great heaps of guano. My brother had kept tens of thousands of chickens for many years, and apparently he had collected their droppings, as you might say, religiously for a year or two.

To George, then, it had occurred that these heaps might be sold with advantage to the family exchequer. There were several tons of it, and German submarines or German naval activities of one kind or another had stopped the coming of guano ships from Pacific or Atlantic islands to this country. So guano — and those heaps were practically guano! — was fetching very high prices. I do not imagine that George had more in his mind — his one sound, practical mind — than to sell my brother’s collections and, possibly, to manufacture some more. And he happened one evening in the family circle to mention this fact. He said indeed to Mr. Pflugschmied — who was just about to become Mr. Plowright! — that as Mr. Pflugschmied was conversant with the newspaper world, Mr. Pflugschmied might get some cheap advertisements of this substance inserted in some paper or other.

Mr. Pflugschmied made out of that a highly romantic article, in which he represented the persecuted heir to the estate of Marsdon Moor as saving the cause of the Allies by patient and self-sacrificing investigation into the subject of soil-inoculation. George was going to save Europe by increasing tenfold the crops outside the territories of the Central Empires. Mr. Pflugschmied quoted my brother’s formula — and quoted it all wrong.

George in the meantime had sold his dung, quite profitably, to a big florist and seedsman, and had secured orders for as much more as he could supply. The seedsman advertised it pretty largely, and made a good thing of it by selling it in small packets to allotment holders. That was very well.

But one day an enraged scientist with very red hair rushed down upon George amongst his chicken pens and told George that he was every sort of a villain and ought to be shot at dawn upon Tower Hill. Mr. Pflugschmied’s formula, as printed in his article, was calculated to kill any green thing that crept upon the earth. Naturally George got the credit of that.

That would be quite late in 1916. I shall have to return to the incident when I come to that date, because it was that scene that finally broke George’s patience. Mr. Plowright, who told me about it in Geneva, was uncertain of the date. I think, myself, it must have been late in 1916, because when I met Clarice in, I suppose, February, 1917, it must have been all over several months.

The final stage of the Podd trial did not come on till the middle of July, 1915, just a year after the day when George had insulted Mr. Podd. It had been put down for trial in May twice, and once in June, but on each occasion Mr. Podd’s counsel had applied for an adjournment because Mr. Podd had not been able to get his accounts together. And, on each occasion, I was summoned to attend as a witness for the defence on the second day and then stopped by wire from attending. If you imagine that my battalion went out immediately after I had been summoned to return and take charge of the entrainment of its bicycles, you know little of war. We were warned for France, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and all our men recalled from leave six or seven times after that; and I had entrained those weary bicycles over and over again, before, at last, in September, 1915, we went to Belgium. And then we went without the bicycles and were converted into Pioneers, a service for which all our men, being London shop assistants by origin, were singularly ill-adapted.

However, in July, 1915, I reached the Court — the Central London Criminal one, I think.

I don’t know why a Court of Law always reminds me of a shallow soap dish or saucer. I suppose the heads of all the seated people, from the bench down into the well of the court and up again to the public galleries, make that sort of bowl-like indentation. Anyhow, I was hurried almost immediately into the witness box, and I felt as if I were perched on a lump of sugar over, but in the midst of, a saucerful of something rather distasteful. Then George stood up below me and began to ask me questions.

I believe I answered collectedly enough; at any rate, with his hand to my ear, afterwards, Mr. Jeaffreson, the solicitor, assured me that I had done splendidly. But what was in my head all the time was the deadness in the voice of George Heimann and the slowness of his movements when he stood up or moved his hands towards me. Of course it was a silly thing — to expect recognition in a court of law; but I had come a couple of hundred miles or so to do him a service, and I kept on waiting for a touch of remembrance to come as it were into some corner of one of his phrases. It never came. He looked down from time to time at a sheet of foolscap in his hand, and seemed to tick off his prepared questions as tiredly as one of our orderly room clerks checking a list of accoutrements with another.

And it worked very well like that. He must have had an absolutely correct memory of that scene with Mr. Podd — and an absolute indifference as to the result of the trial. He had, as I heard afterwards, in his speech for the defence taken the perfectly proper and moderate line that in making certain complaints to Mr. Podd about Mr. Podd’s business methods he had not gone beyond statements that he was prepared to prove. He had spoken quietly; if acerbity had been introduced into that scene it had been the doing of Mr. Podd himself. And, he asked: If a business man breaks a contract with you and refuses to answer your complaints by letter, how, supposing you are not litigiously inclined, are you to obtain information as to whether your complaints are justified or not except at an interview?

He brought out from me, doing it quite listlessly, but with extreme neatness, that before he had even stated to Mr. Podd the nature of his complaints, Mr. Podd had made abusive suggestions against himself. There was no doubt that that had been the case. As I have already recorded of that conversation, the first thing that George had said in that passage had been merely that he was going to rehearse the complaints of his sister. And, before he could go any further, Mr. Podd had said:

“A pretty fellow, you, to pose as the champion of young women!”

And what really astonished me was that George could make that point so completely and so dispassionately. For, to tell the truth, I had always taken him as being so romantic and impulsive that I could never have expected him to be either collected or dispassionate. There he stood, however, drawing out my story in corroboration of his speech, which I had not heard, and getting it exactly to a hair. And, what I believe is rare when a litigant conducts his own case, no one either interrupted him or took exception to one of his questions. But he looked forty! Or, rather, he looked any sort of age with the voice and manners of a man of forty. I daresay that helped him with the jury — if he needed helping. For, if there had been anything to say against his original attack on Mr. Podd, it had been, really, the gaiety of his manner. No one, seeing him in the court, could ever have believed he was once gay.

He sat down, not so much wearily but as if his muscles were stiffened by age; and Mr. Podd’s counsel began to examine me. It was pretty easy to see that that gentleman had only one possible line of attack. He was a greyish complexioned man, rather like Mr. Carstones, only not so thin, and he began at once to cross-question me rather blusterously as to my pro-German sympathies, suggesting my intimacy with the Professor Doctor Geheimrath Curtius as a ground of treason to my uniform. When I said that I had not exchanged more than twenty speeches with the poet, had never read one of his poems through, and did not know a word of German, and when he had asked those questions all over again and had been hauled up by the rather dry, brownish judge, who made a courteous reference to the uniform I was wearing, he tossed his bands about beneath his chin, threatened to resign from the case because of the judge’s persistence in interruptions, and sat down fiercely, exclaiming that he had never thought to live to the day when an Englishman could not hope to get justice in his own courts. I heard afterwards that the same learned counsel had made the same insinuations of enemy friendships in his cross-examination of Lady Ada, who had insisted on giving evidence in favour of George’s character, and against Marie Elizabeth, who had immediately preceded me. In each case the judge had suppressed him, pointing out that Lady Ada had sworn three times that she was the mother of a Guards’ officer then in the firing line, and Marie Elizabeth was the wife of a British officer then missing.

I daresay Mr. Podd’s leading counsel could have taken no other line in the interests of his client, for Mr. Podd’s accounts, when George had cross-examined the plaintiff over them, had proved shocking — absolutely shocking. It was not merely the printer’s vouchers: there were even mistakes in the mere accounting. I have no doubt these were genuine mistakes, Mr. Podd being too mean to employ capable assistants and book-keepers; or his book-keeper may even have been robbing him. But the mistakes had all told against the pocket of the Professor Doctor and against George himself — and in the daylight of the court they looked very bad. So there had been nothing left for Mr. Podd’s side to do but to throw mud at George himself. But George did not put himself into the witness box, so that the accusations fell fairly flat.

The duel between the K.C. and the judge was nevertheless interesting. They did not like each other; and whereas the judge had nothing in particular to expect in the way of advancement, counsel was at that moment standing for a vacant seat in Parliament. So he had his eye on the reporters whilst he made his speeches and asides — and particularly on the reporters of the
Evening Paper.
It would have suited him very well to be a martyr to patriotism just before his election came off. The judge, however, took no notice of his dramatic asides. But, in discharging George — for the jury stopped the case whilst I was still under cross-examination by junior counsel — the judge stated that it was his intention to forward his notes of counsel’s opening speech to — I think it was the Benchers of the K.C.’s Inn of Court. At any rate it was to the body who regulate the behaviour of barristers. Apparently in his frenzied patriotism and with an eye to his constituents counsel had introduced into his opening speech a great many accusations against George that he had taken from the articles of the bird-of-paradise sisters in the
Evening Paper,
but for which he produced nothing like a shadow of evidence. I believe that is a very serious offence for a barrister. And the joke was that the judge made that announcement just at the end of the case, when the K.C. could make no effective protest.

We all met afterwards in a smelly corridor, and there was a great deal of talk. As for me, I was soon feeling bitterly hurt myself by the absolute indifference with which George received my congratulations on his acquittal. I had come hundreds of miles to do what I could for him. But, being taller than I, he just looked over my head and said, in a ghostly — really a ghostly! — voice:

“That’s all right! They hadn’t a leg to stand on from the beginning.”