Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (83 page)

My lady stopped and sighed from a broad bosom. “What could I say?” she went on again. “I know Mr. Churchill and I like him — and everyone that knows him likes him. I’m one of the stalwarts, mind you; I’m not for giving in to popular clamour; I’m for the ‘saner policy,’ like Churchill. But, as the man said: ‘There’s a many that believe the hintings.’ And I almost wish Churchill…. However, you understand what I meant when I said that one had had to suffer.”

“Oh, I understand,” I said. I was beginning to. “And Churchill?” I asked later, “he gives no sign of relenting?”

“Would you have him?” she asked sharply; “would you make him if you could?” She had an air of challenging. “I’m for the ‘saner policy!’ cost what it may. He owes it to himself to sacrifice himself, if it comes to that.”

“I’m with you too,” I answered, “over boot and spur.” Her enthusiasm was contagious, and unnecessary.

“Oh, he’ll stick,” she began again after consultation with the parasol fringe. “You’ll hear him after a minute. It’s a field day to-day. You’ll miss the other heavy guns if you stop with me. I do it ostentatiously — wait until they’ve done. They’re all trembling; all of them. My husband will be on the platform — trembling too. He is a type of them. All day long and at odd moments at night I talk to him — out-talk him and silence him. What’s the state of popular feeling to him? He’s for the country, not the town — this sort of thing has nothing to do with him. It’s a matter to be settled by Jews in the City. Well, he sees it at night, and then in the morning the papers undo all my work. He begins to talk about his seat — which I got for him. I’ve been the ‘voice of the county’ for years now. Well, it’ll soon be a voice without a county…. What is it? ‘The old order changeth.’ So, I’ve arranged it that I shall wait until the trembling big-wigs have stuttered their speeches out, and then I’m going to sail down the centre aisle and listen to Churchill with visible signs of approval. It won’t do much to-day, but there was a time when it would have changed the course of an election…. Ah, there’s Effie’s young man. It’s time.”

She rose and marched, with the air of going to a last sacrifice, across the deserted sward toward a young man who was passing under the calico flag of the gateway.

“It’s all right, Willoughby,” she said, as we drew level, “I’ve found someone else to face the music with me; you can go back to Effie.” A bronzed and grateful young man murmured thanks to me.

“It’s an awful relief, Granger,” he said; “can’t think how you can do it. I’m hooked, but you….”

“He’s the better man,” his mother-in-law-elect said, over her shoulder. She sailed slowly up the aisle beside me, an almost heroic figure of a matron. “Splendidly timed, you see,” she said, “do you observe my husband’s embarrassment?”

It was splendid to see Churchill again, standing there negligently, with the diffidence of a boy amid the bustle of applause. I understood suddenly why I loved him so, this tall, gray man with the delicate, almost grotesque, mannerisms. He appealed to me by sheer force of picturesqueness, appealed as some forgotten mediaeval city might. I was concerned for him as for some such dying place, standing above the level plains; I was jealous lest it should lose one jot of its glory, of its renown. He advocated his saner policy before all those people; stood up there and spoke gently, persuasively, without any stress of emotion, without more movement than an occasional flutter of the glasses he held in his hand. One would never have recognised that the thing was a fighting speech but for the occasional shiver of his audience. They were thinking of their Slingsbys; he affecting, insouciantly, to treat them as rational people.

It was extraordinary to sit there shut in by that wall of people all of one type, of one idea; the idea of getting back; all conscious that a force of which they knew nothing was dragging them forward over the edge of a glacier, into a crevasse. They wanted to get back, were struggling, panting even — as a nation pants — to get back by their own way that they understood and saw; were hauling, and hauling desperately, at the weighted rope that was dragging them forward. Churchill stood up there and repeated: “Mine is the only way — the saner policy,” and his words would fly all over the country to fall upon the deaf ears of the panic-stricken, who could not understand the use of calmness, of trifling even, in the face of danger, who suspected the calmness as one suspects the thing one has not. At the end of it I received his summons to a small door at the back of the building. The speech seemed to have passed out of his mind far more than out of mine.

“So you have come,” he said; “that’s good, and so…. Let us walk a little way … out of this. My aunt will pick us up on the road.” He linked his arm into mine and propelled me swiftly down the bright, broad street. “I’m sorry you came in for that, but — one has to do these things.”

There was a sort of resisted numbness in his voice, a lack of any resiliency. My heart sank a little. It was as if I were beside an invalid who did not — must not — know his condition; as if I were pledged not to notice anything. In the open the change struck home as a hammer strikes; in the pitiless searching of the unrestrained light, his grayness, his tremulousness, his aloofness from the things about him, came home to me like a pang.

“You look a bit fagged,” I said, “perhaps we ought not to talk about work.” His thoughts seemed to come back from a great distance, oh, from an infinite distance beyond the horizon, the soft hills of that fat country. “You want rest,” I added.

“I — oh, no,” he answered, “I can’t have it … till the end of the session. I’m used to it too.”

He began talking briskly about the “Cromwell;” proofs had emerged from the infinite and wanted attention. There were innumerable little matters, things to be copied for the appendix and revisions. It was impossible for me to keep my mind upon them.

It had come suddenly home to me that this was the world that I belonged to; that I had come back to it as if from an under world; that to this I owed allegiance. She herself had recognised that; she herself had bidden me tell him what was a-gate against him. It was a duty too; he was my friend. But, face to face with him, it became almost an impossibility. It was impossible even to put it into words. The mere ideas seemed to be untranslatable, to savour of madness. I found myself in the very position that she had occupied at the commencement of our relations: that of having to explain — say, to a Persian — the working principles of the telegraph. And I was not equal to the task. At the same time I had to do something. I had to. It would be abominable to have to go through life forever, alone with the consciousness of that sort of treachery of silence. But how could I tell him even the comprehensibles? What kind of sentence was I to open with? With pluckings of an apologetic string, without prelude at all — or how? I grew conscious that there was need for haste; he was looking behind him down the long white road for the carriage that was to pick us up.

“My dear fellow….” I began. He must have noted a change in my tone, and looked at me with suddenly lifted eyebrows. “You know my sister is going to marry Mr. Gurnard.”

“Why, no,” he answered—”that is … I’ve heard….” he began to offer good wishes.

“No, no,” I interrupted him hurriedly, “not that. But I happen to know that Gurnard is meditating … is going to separate from you in public matters.” An expression of dismay spread over his face.

“My dear fellow,” he began.

“Oh, I’m not drunk,” I said bitterly, “but I’ve been behind the scenes — for a long time. And I could not … couldn’t let the thing go on without a word.”

He stopped in the road and looked at me.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “I daresay…. But what does it lead to?… Even if I could listen to you — I can’t go behind the scenes. Mr. Gurnard may differ from me in points, but don’t you see?…” He had walked on slowly, but he came to a halt again. “We had better put these matters out of our minds. Of course you are not drunk; but one is tied down in these matters….”

He spoke very gently, as if he did not wish to offend me by this closing of the door. He seemed suddenly to grow very old and very gray. There was a stile in the dusty hedge-row, and he walked toward it, meditating. In a moment he looked back at me. “I had forgotten,” he said; “I meant to suggest that we should wait here — I am a little tired.” He perched himself on the top bar and became lost in the inspection of the cord of his glasses. I went toward him.

“I knew,” I said, “that you could not listen to … to the sort of thing. But there were reasons. I felt forced. You will forgive me.” He looked up at me, starting as if he had forgotten my presence.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “I have a certain — I can’t think of the right word — say respect — for your judgment and — and motives … But you see, there are, for instance, my colleagues. I couldn’t go to them …” He lost the thread of his idea.

“To tell the truth,” I said, with a sudden impulse for candour, “it isn’t the political aspect of the matter, but the personal. I spoke because it was just possible that I might be of service to you — personally — and because I would like you … to make a good fight for it.” I had borrowed her own words.

He looked up at me and smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “I believe you think it’s a losing game,” he added, with a touch of gray humour that was like a genial hour of sunlight on a wintry day. I did not answer. A little way down the road Miss Churchill’s carriage whirled into sight, sparkling in the sunlight, and sending up an attendant cloud of dust that melted like smoke through the dog-roses of the leeward hedge.

“So you don’t think much of me as a politician,” Churchill suddenly deduced smilingly. “You had better not tell that to my aunt.”

I went up to town with Churchill that evening. There was nothing waiting for me there, but I did not want to think. I wanted to be among men, among crowds of men, to be dazed, to be stupefied, to hear nothing for the din of life, to be blinded by the blaze of lights.

There were plenty of people in Churchill’s carriage; a military member and a local member happened to be in my immediate neighbourhood. Their minds were full of the financial scandals, and they dinned their alternating opinions into me. I assured them that I knew nothing about the matter, and they grew more solicitous for my enlightenment.

“It all comes from having too many eggs in one basket,” the local member summed up. “The old-fashioned small enterprises had their disadvantages, but — mind you — these gigantic trusts…. Isn’t that so, General?”

“Oh, I quite agree with you,” the general barked; “at the same time….” Their voices sounded on, intermingling, indistinguishable, soothing even. I seemed to be listening to the hum of a threshing-machine — a passage of sound booming on one note, a passage, a half-tone higher, and so on, and so on. Visible things grew hazy, fused into one another.

CHAPTER SIXTEE
N

We reached London somewhat late in the evening — in the twilight of a summer day. There was the hurry and bustle of arrival, a hurry and bustle that changed the tenor of my thoughts and broke their train. As I stood reflecting before the door of the carriage, I felt a friendly pressure of a hand on my shoulder.

“You’ll see to that,” Churchill’s voice said in my ear. “You’ll set the copyists to work.”

“I’ll go to the Museum to-morrow,” I said. There were certain extracts to be made for the “Life of Cromwell” — extracts from pamphlets that we had not conveniently at disposal. He nodded, walked swiftly toward his brougham, opened the door and entered.

I remember so well that last sight of him — of his long, slim figure bending down for the entrance, woefully solitary, woefully weighted; remember so well the gleam of the carriage panels reflecting the murky light of the bare London terminus, the attitude of the coachman stiffly reining back the horse; the thin hand that reached out, a gleam of white, to turn the gleaming handle. There was something intimately suggestive of the man in the motion of that hand, in its tentative outstretching, its gentle, half-persuasive — almost theoretic — grasp of the handle. The pleasure of its friendly pressure on my shoulder carried me over some minutes of solitude; its weight on my body removing another from my mind. I had feared that my ineffective disclosure had chilled what of regard he had for me. He had said nothing, his manner had said nothing, but I had feared. In the railway carriage he had sat remote from me, buried in papers. But that touch on my shoulder was enough to set me well with myself again, if not to afford scope for pleasant improvisation. It at least showed me that he bore me no ill-will, otherwise he would hardly have touched me. Perhaps, even, he was grateful to me, not for service, but for ineffectual good-will. Whatever I read into it, that was the last time he spoke to me, and the last time he touched me. And I loved him very well. Things went so quickly after that.

In a moderately cheerful frame of mind I strolled the few yards that separated me from my club — intent on dining. In my averseness to solitude I sat down at a table where sat already a little, bald-headed, false-toothed Anglo-Indian, a man who bored me into fits of nervous excitement. He was by way of being an incredibly distant uncle of my own. As a rule I avoided him, to-night I dined with him. He was a person of interminable and incredibly inaccurate reminiscences. His long residence in an indigo-producing swamp had affected his memory, which was supported by only very occasional visits to England.

He told me tales of my poor father and of my poor, dear mother, and of Mr. Bromptons and Mrs. Kenwards who had figured on their visiting lists away back in the musty sixties.

“Your poor, dear father was precious badly off then,” he said; “he had a hard struggle for it. I had a bad time of it too; worm had got at all my plantations, so I couldn’t help him, poor chap. I think, mind you, Kenny Granger treated him very badly. He might have done something for him — he had influence, Kenny had.”

Kenny was my uncle, the head of the family, the husband of my aunt.

“They weren’t on terms,” I said.

“Oh, I know, I know,” the old man mumbled, “but still, for one’s only brother … However, you contrive to do yourselves pretty well. You’re making your pile, aren’t you? Someone said to me the other day — can’t remember who it was — that you were quite one of the rising men — quite one of the men.”

“Very kind of someone,” I said.

“And now I see,” he went on, lifting up a copy of a morning paper, over which I had found him munching his salmon cutlet, “now I see your sister is going to marry a cabinet minister. Ah!” he shook his poor, muddled, baked head, “I remember you both as tiny little dots.”

“Why,” I said, “she can hardly have been born then.”

“Oh, yes,” he affirmed, “that was when I came over in ‘78. She remembered, too, that I brought her over an ivory doll — she remembered.”

“You have seen her?” I asked.

“Oh, I called two or three weeks — no, months — ago. She’s the image of your poor, dear mother,” he added, “at that age; I remarked upon it to your aunt, but, of course, she could not remember. They were not married until after the quarrel.”

A sudden restlessness made me bolt the rest of my tepid dinner. With my return to the upper world, and the return to me of a will, despair of a sort had come back. I had before me the problem — the necessity — of winning her. Once I was out of contact with her she grew smaller, less of an idea, more of a person — that one could win. And there were two ways. I must either woo her as one woos a person barred; must compel her to take flight, to abandon, to cast away everything; or I must go to her as an eligible suitor with the Etchingham acres and possibilities of a future on that basis. This fantastic old man with his mumbled reminiscences spoilt me for the last. One remembers sooner or later that a county-man may not marry his reputed sister without scandal. And I craved her intensely.

She had upon me the effect of an incredible stimulant; away from her I was like a drunkard cut off from his liquor; an opium-taker from his drug. I hardly existed; I hardly thought.

I had an errand at my aunt’s house; had a message to deliver, sympathetic enquiries to make — and I wanted to see her, to gain some sort of information from her; to spy out the land; to ask her for terms. There was a change in the appearance of the house, an adventitious brightness that indicated the rise in the fortunes of the family. For me the house was empty and the great door closed hollowly behind me. My sister was not at home. It seemed abominable to me that she should be out; that she could be talking to anyone, or could exist without me. I went sullenly across the road to the palings of the square. As I turned the corner I found my head pivoting on my neck. I was looking over my shoulder at the face of the house, was wondering which was her window.

“Like a love-sick boy — like a damn love-sick boy,” I growled at myself. My sense of humour was returning to me. There began a pilgrimage in search of companionship.

London was a desert more solitary than was believable. On those brilliant summer evenings the streets were crowded, were alive, bustled with the chitter-chatter of footsteps, with the chitter-chatter of voices, of laughter.

It was impossible to walk, impossible to do more than tread on one’s own toes; one was almost blinded by the constant passing of faces. It was like being in a wheat-field with one’s eyes on a level with the indistinguishable ears. One was alone in one’s intense contempt for all these faces, all these contented faces; one towered intellectually above them; one towered into regions of rarefaction. And down below they enjoyed themselves. One understood life better; they better how to live. That struck me then — in Oxford Street. There was the intense good-humour, the absolute disregard of the minor inconveniences, of the inconveniences of a crowd, of the ignominy of being one of a crowd. There was the intense poetry of the soft light, the poetry of the summer-night coolness, and they understood how to enjoy it. I turned up an ancient court near Bedford Row.

“In the name of God,” I said, “I will enjoy …” and I did. The poetry of those old deserted quarters came suddenly home to me — all the little commonplace thoughts; all the commonplace associations of Georgian London. For the time I was done with the meanings of things.

I was seeking Lea — he was not at home. The quarter was honeycombed with the homes of people one knows; of people one used to know, excellent young men who wrote for the papers, who sub-edited papers, who designed posters, who were always just the same. One forgot them for a year or two, one came across them again and found them just the same — still writing for the same papers, still sub-editing the same papers, designing the same posters. I was in the mood to rediscover them in the privacies of their hearths, with the same excellent wives making fair copies of the same manuscripts, with the same gaiety of the same indifferent whiskey, brown or pale or suspicious-looking, in heavy, square, cut-glass stoppered decanters, and with the same indifferent Virginian tobacco at the same level in the same jars.

I was in the mood for this stability, for the excellent household article that was their view of life and literature. I wanted to see it again, to hear again how it was filling the unvarying, allotted columns of the daily, the weekly, or the monthly journals. I wanted to breathe again this mild atmosphere where there are no longer hopes or fears. But, alas!…

I rang bell after bell of that gloomy central London district. You know what happens. One pulls the knob under the name of the person one seeks — pulls it three, or, it may be, four times in vain. One rings the housekeeper’s bell; it reverberates, growing fainter and fainter, gradually stifled by a cavernous subterranean atmosphere. After an age a head peeps round the opening door, the head of a hopeless anachronism, the head of a widow of early Victorian merit, or of an orphan of incredible age. One asks for So-and-so — he’s out; for Williams — he’s expecting an increase of family, and has gone into the country with madame. And Waring? Oh, he’s gone no one knows where, and Johnson who used to live at Number 44 only comes up to town on Tuesdays now. I exhausted the possibilities of that part of Bloomsbury, the possibilities of variety in the types of housekeepers. The rest of London divided itself into bands — into zones. Between here and Kensington the people that I knew could not be called on after dinner, those who lived at Chiswick and beyond were hyperborean — one was bound by the exigencies of time. It was ten o’clock as I stood reflecting on a doorstep — on Johnson’s doorstep. I must see somebody, must talk to somebody, before I went to bed in the cheerless room at the club. It was true I might find a political stalwart in the smoking-room — but that was a last resort, a desperate and ignominious pis aller.

There was Fox, I should find him at the office. But it needed a change of tone before I could contemplate with equanimity the meeting of that individual. I had been preparing myself to confront all the ethically excellent young men and Fox was, ethically speaking, far from excellent, middle-aged, rubicund, leery — a free lance of genius. I made the necessary change in my tone of mind and ran him to earth.

The Watteau room was further enlivened by the introduction of a scarlet plush couch of sumptuous design. By its side stood a couple of electric lights. The virulent green of their shades made the colours of the be-shepherded wall-panels appear almost unearthly, and threw impossible shadows on the deal partition. Round the couch stood chairs with piles of papers neatly arranged on them; round it, on the floor, were more papers lying like the leaves of autumn that one sings of. On it lay Fox, enveloped in a Shetland shawl — a good shawl that was the only honest piece of workmanship in the torn-tawdry place. Fox was as rubicund as ever, but his features were noticeably peaked and there were heavy lines under his eyes — lines cast into deep shadow by the light by which he was reading. I entered unannounced, and was greeted by an indifferent upward glance that changed into one of something like pleasure as he made out my features in the dim light.

“Hullo, you old country hawbuck,” he said, with spasmodic jocularity; “I’m uncommon glad to see you.” He came to a jerky close, with an indrawing of his breath. “I’m about done,” he went on. “Same old thing — sciatica. Took me just after I got here this afternoon; sent out one of the messengers to buy me a sofa, and here I’ve been ever since. Well, and what’s brought you up — don’t answer, I know all about it. I’ve got to keep on talking until this particular spasm’s over, or else I shall scream and disturb the flow of Soane’s leader. Well, and now you’ve come, you’ll stop and help me to put the Hour to bed, won’t you? And then you can come and put me to bed.”

He went on talking at high pressure, exaggerating his expressions, heightening his humorous touches with punctuations of rather wild laughter. At last he came to a stop with a half suppressed “Ah!” and a long indrawing of the breath.

“That’s over,” he said. “Give me a drop of brandy — there’s a good fellow.” I gave him his nip. Then I explained to him that I couldn’t work for the Hour; that I wasn’t on terms with de Mersch.

“Been dropping money over him?” he asked, cheerfully. I explained a little more — that there was a lady.

“Oh, it’s that,” Fox said. “The man is a fool … But anyhow Mersch don’t count for much in this particular show. He’s no money in it even, so you may put your pride in your pocket, or wherever you keep it. It’s all right. Straight. He’s only the small change.”

“But,” I said, “everyone says; you said yourself….”

“To be sure,” he answered. “But you don’t think that I play second fiddle to a bounder of that calibre. Not really?”