Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 190
It is probable that he would have applauded this philosophy by at last kissing her, but at that moment, brilliant beneath the light, with his broad bands of gold braid and his bright red face, the captain stepped out of the near doorway and stretched his chest in the night air. Catching sight of Don he remarked pleasantly that it was time to put out the lights on the decks, but if Don desired it they could be left burning a little longer. For that was one of the details of the commissariat: the owner could bear the charge of it if he wished. It wasn’t like the nautical rules that no one could change.
Eleanor, however, had vanished into the doorway, and there wasn’t anything left for the captain but to say that he hoped he hadn’t been indiscreet in talking of owners before Miss Greville, when Don set out on his journey to the smoking-room.
He found Canzano in an evening-dress that one could call faultless, and with a foreign air of being most carefully “got up,” that was as distinct from the English well-groomedness as it was from the American well-washed appearance. It expressed itself, perhaps more than anything, in the singularly iron-trimmed appearance of his glossy black hair, in the polish of his nails that, as they rested on the table, reflected, positively, the brownish tinge of the fumed oak, and the massive ring, a signet of lapis-lazuli, upon his little finger. It had been presented to one of his grandmothers by Pius IX. for services to the Papal troops and he wore it always — he wouldn’t naturally have worn a ring — as a minute but continued protest against the House of Savoy.
If he didn’t stand out from the crowd of men, half Americans interested in the pool and half Germans playing an intricate card game, or from the women — all Germans — who looked on, it was perhaps as much because, in such an environment of smoke, lager-beer glasses, heavy oak galleries and pink sandwiches, it seemed impossible for any man to shine as because he had taken a very retired seat in the angle of the great oak chimneypiece and kept his face down over a journal devoted to the sport of automobiling. It added perhaps a little to Don’s sense of bewilderment and discouragement that this young man who occupied a very definite place in his own mind didn’t, in this place that belonged to him, stand out at all. For, for Don, Canzano represented very exactly and very shiningly the Latin temperament: he was so polished, so unconcerned, so gay, so resigned, so very definitely clear and “all there.” Yet here, somehow, he seemed to sink into the general ragbag of humanity, to become merely one of them, and the train of thought led Don to notice that the Germans weren’t any longer Germans any more than the Anglo-Saxons were any longer distinctive. You seemed there to forget distinctions, so that if, by fixing your eyes very carefully upon a rather haggard man with a heavy moustache, you might say: “He’s probably from Philadelphia,” or if, looking carefully at another, fat, exaggeratedly distinguished, iron-grey, and with a mouth apparently as large as a frog’s, standing with his hands very much in his pockets near the red-faced man in a yachting cap, who was shouting out sums in dollars, you said: “Why, he’s obviously Dash, the actor, or his double!” the effort to keep your mind upon these individuals seemed to become very soon hardly worth the trouble. You were simply in a crowd in the largest, the most undistinguished and the most commonplace smoking-saloon in the world. And the trouble was that though you were in a crowd you didn’t — and no one in it — seemed to belong to the crowd. It hadn’t any common interest... Canzano looked up from his paper and uttered:
“It really looks as if this man’s claim to have discovered a new form of differential was justified. But you never can tell!”
Don slid himself into the polished leather seat beside his friend.
“Is it such a very engrossing topic?” he asked. Canzano raised his eyebrows politely.
“It’s like the new cure for cancer that the papers discover every week,” he said. “It’s the most important thing in the world. Think of being able to go round any corner without the least slackening of speed!” And his eyelids closed almost ecstatically. As suddenly, however, he raised them and regarded Don quizzically.
“Is it possible,” he asked, “that my dear and excellent Don isn’t interested in automobiling? Or is interested in the fate of the miserable canaglia — the pedestrians? Then what in the world is the most important thing in the world in his philosophy?”
And at Don’s pause for evasion he permitted himself to continue rhapsodising, a departure from self-containment that he would never have allowed himself before any other mortal save his mother.
“Confound it,” he said ironically and lightly. “By Bacchus! it’s still some point of conscience with this good gentleman. Then tell me what it is that equals in real importance a new differential? How are you going to add to the sum of human sensation in any other way? Think of being able to ‘speed’ — as your compatriots say — down the most fearful hill in the world without the least fear of the worst corner in the world at the bottom of it. I’ve taken most corners in the world fairly fast. But to do them without a check!....”
“Then you’re interested in motors?” Don asked, carefully using the British word.
“My dear chap!” Canzano remonstrated, “I’m just the same as I always was.” And at Don’s smile he added: “I’m still interested in killing time! An automobile is a clumsy, evilly-smelling, odious contrivance. But so are most human contrivances and nearly all the beasts that you sit on or guide — horses and women and Constituent Assemblies.
They’re all a bother at one time or another, and if they go wrong you have to think yourself a fool for not having managed them better. It’s so with horses: it’s so with women: it’s so with the pictures you used to want to paint. It’s particularly so with votes and voters. Whereas an automobile....”
He paused and then added:
“I’ll bet my hat you’re interested in politics — and women. Or let’s say a woman. I saw it coming in Boston — six years ago.” He went off again at a tangent: “I say, I’m awfully sorry if I’ve given you a bad quarter of an hour.” And still, before Don could get any sort of a say, he continued: “It’s fellows like you who mislead the psychologist. On the face of it it wasn’t any manque de tact to refer to your visit to Boston. After all, you can’t have any considerable peccadillo to conceal in that voyage. I know it: I’ll vouch for it to the lady. Heavens! Did not I meet you on the quay at New York? Didn’t I take you to your father? Didn’t I lead you about Boston? Didn’t I accompany you to the quay and on the very voyage back? I repeat I’ll go to the lady and swear to your utter innocence.”
“My dear Carlo,” Don said, “it’s me you’ve got to come to and convince.”
Canzano raised his eyes in a sort of blank bewilderment, and then swiftly catching at the key of this enigma uttered the words:
“Oh, if it’s a question of your conscience and not her jealousy I don’t volunteer.” He looked at Don with incredulity, half mixed with sardonic pity.
“And you mean to say that you still possess it? You can’t even yet dispense with that luxury?”
“A conscience?” Don asked, and Canzano shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh pour cat” he ejaculated, “we all possess that, I hope. We’ve all — all the benighted of the Old World got things that we don’t do. No, no. It’s not a conscience that you’ve got: it’s.... What’s the phrase? A New England Conscience? Moral nervous dyspepsia. Chi lo sa? No: hypochondria! The finger for ever on the pulse of your ethics!”
He resumed:
“And so the lady? An amourette? But no: one does not take such as that to the graveside of one’s father. At least I shouldn’t. But there’s no knowing what will be done by moral enigmas like you.”
It was at this point that the electric lights, hidden in pink globes in the roof, began to play the bewildering tricks that at sea one accepts as equivalent to the “closing time, guests, please,” of the terrestrial smoking-room. Don, however, called to him a steward, and into the incredulous ear of a semi-insolent man whispered the quite peremptory command that he desired the captain informed that he desired the chief steward to inform the bar-keeper that the lights were to be kept burning till it suited him to finish his conversation.
Canzano, leaning upon one white hand, regarded him with a little smile of sardonic impertinence.
“So you have come into your kingdom?” he asked.
“Well, it’s the first exercise I’ve made of my power,” Don said.
“And how symbolical an exercise,” Carlo said. “He deranges that most perfect of all things — the routine of a ship! Ça sent bon, hein?”
“Oh, it smells good enough,” Don said. “And I hope to derange a few more routines before I’ve done with things.”
Canzano leaned over to pat him on the back.
“My congratulations!” he said. “But have you thought of the poor stewards who must yawn and the poor wives of the Germans who must sit watching their husbands’ skat for hours longer than it is legal for them?”
“No, I hadn’t,” Don said. “But one can’t refine for ever.”
Canzano looked at him with a sudden and radiant smile.
“My dear chap,” he said, “mon bon vieux! It’s good to hear you lay down the law in the old way.” Suddenly he touched Don’s hand on the table with his little finger.
“Mon vieux,” he repeated, “you needn’t avoid me any more...” And at Don’s hasty, finely insincere start of negation he continued: “Oh, là, la! Do not tell me that you have not tried to forget me because it was disagreeable to you to remember me. Why have you never written? Why did you never seek me out? Have I not been in Paris, in London, at the University of Oxford, at the University of Bonn? Might you not have found me at any minute? Weren’t there at least Christmas cards you might have sent? Do you believe I have not understood?”
Don got in an “Oh, well....” but Canzano was beforehand with him.
“I can tell you the very hour the idea came to you. It had missed you in Boston (it hadn’t missed me!): but it came into your head upon the boat when we returned together. We were leaning over the rail looking at the Scillies and the idea came to you. And then, when you received your letters you pretended you had business that called you to London. What was your business? Can you pretend that you had one? Not this lady — for after six years of you it is not such a lady that will look at you as this one does. Hein? Then what was your business? To remove from your mind a disagreeable thought!” Canzano began again.
“Look at me. Look at me very carefully!” And he pushed his face forward.
Don looked instead at the ash-trays on the table. “I know what you mean,” he said. “But it doesn’t seem to me to be very delicate.”
Canzano uttered a rather hard:
“Hein. Then we have different ideas of delicacy we two. I say it is better to settle clearly a thing. You wish to shirk it. But then it will be always there. For obviously you must see my mother in Boston. It is unavoidable. She is coming down from the Berkshires for nothing else but to see you. And as for delicacy! Isn’t it your duty to satisfy yourself? Isn’t it my duty to see that you do so? For her sake!”
It was at least Don’s pleasure — it was always his habit — to let this young man conduct their conversations as he pleased. In his presence Don contracted a power to listen that anyone else, when he talked to them, had to find for themselves. He simply couldn’t, in short, keep up with Canzano. And he didn’t care. He had always found it so pleasant to listen to Canzano’s topsy-turvy moralities that, even at meeting him again, he dropped naturally into his old indulgent part.
“And — as for indelicacy,” Canzano repeated, “I will take it upon my own shoulders: it is I who should suffer, on the point of my mother. Aren’t we, you and I, in what we might call a comité de famille — a family council? For you can’t,” he concluded, “get over the fact that — however it may be with regard to half-brothers — we’re certainly step-brothers.” He reached out his hand and again touched Don’s. “Then look at me minutely: scrutinise each of my features!”
He held once more his face towards Don, a little expressionlessly, as if he were sitting for a photograph. His eyes, when he wasn’t using the lids for purposes of expression, were singularly large and of a dark brown: his nose was very hooked but a little flattened at the extreme tip: the hairs of his moustache ran hard and perfectly horizontal from each side of the little hollow above his lips: and between his lips themselves, in the very centre, there showed a minute gleam of white teeth: his chin, which protruded slightly, seemed to form an almost perfect globe of firm flesh, very slightly bluish with the colour of his beard that ran up the sides of his cheeks to merge beneath the skin into the almost perfect pallor beneath his eyes and of his forehead. You couldn’t, when his face was still, fix him in the least, he was one of a thousand. But when he smiled, as he did the moment Don had finished his scrutiny, you felt at once a whole number of indefinite emotions — that you could trust him to lead a forlorn hope or would pardon him for running away; that you could trust him to take your womenkind to any theatre though conceivably he might — and you would rather like him to — make a commission out of the tickets; that you could trust him to have the most gratifying excuse for missing an appointment; that he would chat gaily with any beggar on any church step or run your motor-car as gaily over the same beggar five minutes later. But you could certainly trust him to keep you entertained; to behave as if you were really lovable and important, and to despise you a little.
“Well, then,” he said at last, “of whom do I remind you?”
And Don answered with irresistible conviction:
“Of your mother!”
Canzano laughed and leant back on the leather cushions.
“You can certainly say that if I’m not a bit like my father, who looked, you probably remember, like a blonde Titian in a cowboy’s hat, I look still less like yours, who had a nose like a gourd, the eyes of a raccoon and your — exactly your — long, low forehead.”
He put both his hands in his pockets and stretched forth his legs.
“Tiens, mon ami,” he-said, “I too had your ideas. But I’m convinced now. After all: consider! I’m twenty-eight: you thirty-three. I don’t say that my father and mother weren’t in Montana prospecting just after your mother deserted your father. But it is hardly probable. I repeat, it is hardly probable. I do not wish to speak evilly of my father, more than is necessary. But at the time your father wasn’t rich enough. You must remember that my father came of the Roman nobility. If they haven’t anything else, they’ve large ideas in money matters.”
“He’s still in the West?” Don asked.
“He’s still there,” Canzano answered. “The last I heard of him was that he had married — positively married — an Indian woman. But I think it is certain that now he will come to blackmail my mother in Boston. Therefore I go to protect her. I have probably a not very pleasant interview to go through with my father.”
He came out from this reflection with:
“So that, for the credit of the family, we may agree to the perfectly true facts.”
Don said:
“I’m not much accustomed to considering the credit of the family.” But the thought of Eleanor came into his mind.
“Why, it is all dead and gone,” he said.
Canzano laughed.
“Consider before you speak,” he added, “there’s a-huge mass of money. Heaven knows what sums your father won’t have left his widow!”
Don brushed his hand lightly across the table, as if, in brushing away the cigarette ash, he brushed away too the consideration of that.
“He has left money — a decent sum — to his stepson too,” Canzano said.
“Oh, I don’t grudge you that,” Don answered; “you understand I quite expected you to have all my father’s money.”
Canzano raised his eyebrows at the statement, but he did not abandon his main line of argument.
“Let’s put it then,” he said, “that we’re immediately concerned for the honour of the family.” Don nodded.
“And the facts, for our public conversation, are the facts exactly as they took place.”
Don nodded again.
“That your mother divorced your father for incompatibilities of temper: that my mother divorced my father for infidelities innumerable: that after your mother was dead my mother married your father and that you and I are the best friends in the world.”
Don considered the matter and added seriously:
“I don’t see why we can’t add the comment that your mother behaved very creditably in not marrying my father till my mother was actually dead.”
“It certainly sounds less... less Transatlantic.” Canzano joyfully accepted Don’s offer. “But I daresay,” he reflected, after an instant, “that it’s really quite Italian. In a sense, I daresay, you don’t realise what it meant to my mother — she is the most wonderful woman in the world! — her marrying your father even after your mother was dead. I discussed it with her whilst you were in Boston. For, in our creed, the marriage wasn’t a marriage as long as my father was alive. She risked, in fact, damnation for your father’s sake. She’d have risked anything for his sake. But she wouldn’t do it whilst your mother lived.” He paused and added: “So that, even as your mother’s son, you haven’t a particular, scrupulous need to avoid either of us.”
And Don nodded his head.
