Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (612 page)

Clarice Honeywill was at that moment beside me — just touching me in the corridor. And, when he had said that, and when, under the hungry eyes of Miss Jeaffreson, I had asked her to lunch with me, I asked him. He answered:

“I should have been delighted. But I have an engagement!”

That would have been brutal, but for his voice, which was that of a machine. It was exactly that of a machine. He stood, very tall, dressed in a navy blue reefer suit with very white collar and cuffs, and looked away over my head, as if into great distances.

Over some horrible meal in a City chop-house Clarice said to me:

“It’s me he’s avoiding. Not you! But I shall never let him go! Never, never let him go! He must have his... his little bit of fun! He must!”

Women really and truly in love are very wonderful. If you are about to sneeze they will be there with a pocket handkerchief; if Satan is at your side, about to take you down to hell, they will be there to redeem you. But that is as nothing to their comprehension of your more subtle imbecilities. The rather impossible Dr. Robins had put George on his honour not to see Clarice, and I was ready to take that as his reason for refusing to lunch with me and her. He would certainly have lunched with me alone.

Gratitude or the mere fitness of things demanded that of him; but neither gratitude nor the fitness of things was going to stand between him and his honour. So I lunched with Clarice alone in that rather nasty City chop-house off tepid steak and kidney pie.

I said at one point, I remember:

“But surely.... he’s a young man of spirit. And you — I know you are — it isn’t indelicate to say so — are devoted to each other. And made for each other. He’ll no doubt bring you worries, but you have a good broad back. Plenty of couples have married in spite of a father’s disfavour. Why don’t you tell him....”

In the City Clarice did not look the great actress. The lugubrious clerks were gulping down their portions of tepid food all round her, and she was very much one of them; a little shabby, too, in an old blue coat and skirt. She was still saving up to pay for her father’s practice. She leant over the table and said:

“Oh, don’t believe that I’ve any false delicacy.’ Or any delicacy at all as far as George is concerned. He is mine and I am his to all time. I’ve told him. But it isn’t my father that prevents him. It’s himself. He’s afraid of himself — of his poor brain going. It was perhaps my father that put that into his head, and to that extent my father prevents it. But George is a young man like any other spirited young man... Only they do such dreadful things to him! Just imagine to-day — and yesterday! To save a few fees....”

You know, I had imagined that George had defended himself in court that day out of a sort of bravado. A good many of us, I believe, like the idea of standing up, defending our honours against the shafts of our enemies. And I had really thought that, having as it were tested with his toe the cold water of publicity, George had taken the plunge with a sort of defiant gladness. He had not seemed glad in court. But I had thought that was because he just meant to keep his head and not let himself be run away with. I should try to behave like that myself in a Court of Law!

Clarice was dropping large round tears into her plate full of inedible food.

“It’s the thought of his torture that makes me cry,” she said. “ Not fear of what’s going to happen. Don’t you realise that he stood up there because Marie Elizabeth is wanting to economise?”

And indeed I remembered that in those stony corridors Marie Elizabeth had said in my ear at some point that she wanted to see me in order to talk about business. I was her trustee, of course, under my brother’s will. I had told her that I should have to come up to Town again for that purpose....

Clarice, it appeared, did not hate Marie Elizabeth! After all, one seldom hates the sister of the man one loves. She realised my sister-in-law’s oneness of purpose, determination, and rectitude; but if she did not hate the girl, she hated her actions. For clear and unselfish minds it is possible to make the distinction. And in that clear, unselfish way, Clarice admired George for his devotion to his sister, though it was in a fair way to kill him. Apparently Marie Elizabeth was spending immense sums on counsels’ opinions over her own case — and she had not the least idea that George suffered anything from the publicity.

Not the ghost of an idea. Apparently Clarice had actually seen Marie Elizabeth one day and had told her that George was in danger of mental trouble. And Marie Elizabeth had just, with a sort of aristocratic blankness, told Clarice that it was impossible that her brother could have such weaknesses. She had turned an indifferent shoulder to Clarice, as to a girl with whom her brother had once amused himself for ten minutes, and had gone on talking to Mr. Jeaffreson. It had occurred during one of the adjourned occasions at that court.

You know, there was a great deal of highmindedness knocking about in that collection of people. Well, they were all young and well brought up. Clarice was too high-minded to influence — even to try to influence — George against his sister. Earlier — say, when she had found George wandering in High Holborn, and before she had turned him over to her father — Clarice had, she said, been tempted to make George promise that, whatever happened, he would never live with his sister. She had not taken the opportunity, although then she might have succeeded, for George was not, at that time, so afraid of brain failures and things; she had not taken the opportunity simply because she had not wanted to make mischief between brother and sister!

And George had gone to live with his sister simply because — would you believe it? — he did not wish to have the appearance of giving his sister the lie before Mr. Carstones. In obtaining permission for George to reside at Froghole, Marie Elizabeth had assured that anæmic idiot that she and her brother were on the best of terms. So that when, to her, George had said that he intended to go on living in London, she had only to tell him that that would look like giving her the lie, and he had given in at once. It was true that by that time Dr. Robins had assured the unfortunate young man that, if he married Clarice in his then condition, they would have hydrocephalous children with epileptic tendencies, and George no longer cared what was going to become of him. But Clarice believed that George would have backed his sister in any case — in anything, that is to say, but in the Marsden litigation. Clarice admired him for it.

Once they had got George into their clutches she saw her mistake. They must have been a pretty collection!

It appears that one day Miss Jeaffreson said to George: “How shabby poor Marie Elizabeth is! What a pity she has to be just now!”

And after that it had been the easiest thing in the world, by suggestion, to make George offer to defend his own case and so save counsels’ fees for his sister to put into the pockets of other counsel. Of Miss Jeaffreson Clarice had a pretty fair appreciation!

So there she sat over that indifferent looking food on the stained and coarse tablecloth, and I expressed a good deal of concern as to the upshot of it all. She looked straight into my eyes at that word with an incredulous and as if startled glance. And she exclaimed:

“The upshot! But my dear man, that isn’t at all the word!” She seemed to grow bigger. It was as if my stupidity had forced her to take up for a second or two the other side of her being — that of the great big actress, with the wonderful voice, who could get her own way against the wills of legions of men. “The upshot is not for a moment in doubt!”

And at those tones the dilapidated clerks paused in gulping their foods, for it was truly as if a divinity had got into that chop house and were stirring the tepid airs. But she lowered her voice. Or, no, it was not that she lowered it: it was simply that she removed its vibrating character, to say:

“It is merely the suffering that he has to have! That is what is terrible!” She paused and grew again incredulous:

“Do you think that I am going to let anything
happen
to George?” she asked. “Do you imagine it for a moment? Never... I tell you, even now, if suddenly too terrible thoughts come to him, in the night, whilst I am asleep, I wake. I know it. A week ago I was at his window at four o’clock in the morning. I sleep at my father’s, in the country; I go down there every night. He had been having a dreadful time. They had got an immense batch of papers and had been reading them to him till three. Every sort of paper! American, English! Legal papers; letters that Flemish refugees had had from other refugees abroad about Lord Marsden. The whole lot had come together, and they had been having a field day and night. But I felt it! I felt it even in the theatre. I played like a lay figure.... And there I stood under his window. And he could not not look out. No; it isn’t the upshot that is in doubt: it’s just the Now to be got through!”

I did not know whether she really had that conviction or whether she had just acted it to comfort me. For, faced with the actual state of that unfortunate boy, a great deal of my interest in him had returned, and over that dismal board I had racked my brains before her in the attempt to find devices by which his lot might be relieved. And that might be her way of gallantly taking her lover off my hands.

And she did it: she took him off my hands, I mean. For, somehow, I believed her: I believed that George had an almost supernatural protectress. I fancy the way my mind worked it out for me was that it let me be convinced that, even had she been acting, she could not have acted so convincingly without having the telepathic sense that she claimed. For when she talked like that she seemed to grow very big with the almost menacing bigness of will and of personality of the great public character.

And, as I went North again that afternoon, my brain said to me comfortingly that that boy had always within call that immense will. If his brain were ever
too
tortured it had just to cry out and immediately, with the flight of an eagle, that triumphant creature would be there and would bear him off. So gradually I forgot George.

I saw him, indeed, once after that: in September, at Froghole Summit itself, but only for a minute or two. I was on what was called last leave, and by an accident my leave had been very much curtailed; my name had come through twenty-four hours after it should have by some muddle in the Orderly Room. So I had a rush. I had business to do; I had to see my mother — and I had to see Clarice. Life had not been too easy to me, ever; and latterly the unending struggle with the intelligences of rather dull recruits hadn’t been what I was most fitted for. And I did not feel that France was going to do me good. I daresay everybody had forebodings on these occasions. So I wanted a small, bright hour or so with a kind person. I mean I had promised myself to have a cup of tea with her during my last afternoon in Town.

I had been down to see my mother, spending the night there and, returning to my club, had rung up Mr. Jeaffreson at his office. I was Marie Elizabeth’s trustee — for the matter of that I was also her heir — and Mr. Jeaffreson was her solicitor. On going out I had naturally had to appoint a joint trustee, and I had found a suitable uncle of my own, leaving the deed to be drawn up by Jeaffreson as the person most interested in Marie Elizabeth. It should have been at my club for me to sign and post back. It was not; and I rang up Mr. Jeaffreson in rather a temper. My mother had been very obviously failing; that had depressed me, and I had still a great deal to do.

Over that vile instrument Mr. Jeaffreson asked me if I had not had Marie Elizabeth’s telegram. I said I hadn’t. I don’t know where she had telegraphed to. Mr. Jeaffreson said that it was imperative that she should see me before I went out. She had sprained her ankle, and could not possibly come up to town. He said it was really urgent, but he would not tell me what was the matter. I had to jettison pretty nearly all of my own affairs, but, as I was a pretty solitary fellow and my mother had rather a good solicitor that could be done. Still, I was nearly distracted. I rang up Clarice, and I just said:

“I love you!”

She answered softly — or at least over that wire it sounded soft:

“Yes, I know! You are Mr. Jessop. You are going out soon.”

I said:

“I wanted to have tea with you. I go at nine to-night!”

She answered:

“If you want to... If you think... If you like..

I said:

“I can’t! I have to go down to Froghole Summit. Marie Elizabeth has just wired for me.”

The wire was silent for such a long interval that I thought she had gone away. Then the voice said: