Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 201
“I don’t care what father may say,” she was saying.” but I’m sure it’s worth living here to have that to come to look at.” Miss Dubose, with her gay, short-sighted, slim grace suddenly put her umbrella before her face and said:
“There are a dozen fellows sketching us. I suspicioned they were following us all the afternoon.” The avalanche, in fact, had come. It wasn’t a minute before, aware that by now they were detected, the journalists closed upon her and asked her what her impressions were. And the cab in which they fled back to their hotel was followed by a procession of other cabs, bearing each two men in Derby hats, with notebooks and pencils. It seemed to stop everything else in the world: and the few remaining hours that Eleanor spent in New York were passed, as it were, cloistrally, in the Marie Antoinette room, with the Fragonard panels. For there were journalists everywhere — in the elevator, in the office, in the Oriental lounge. And when, for the last time, she went to dine with her father in the octagonal dining-room that had the painted brick walls, whilst she herself was saying her grace, and whilst her father was awaiting his soup, standing tall and frock-coated with his hands folded before him, she was aware that three men at the next table were busy with tablets and pencils. It wasn’t as blackly unpleasant as she had imagined it might be, but it was sufficiently disturbing to make her whisper to her father, to make her keep her lips closed in the elevator that took them back to their rooms — because a gentleman came running after them and jumped in as it rose — and to make her give up her idea of going, for the last time, with Miss Dubosc to a roof-garden theatre on Broadway. She had instead to pass an evening alone with the stenographer.
The energy of these servants of the public was, finally, brought home to her by the odd detail that Kirsen — a sedate, sour-faced Scotchwoman, born in Pimlico — received from the reporter of the most enterprising of all New York papers an offer to marry her to a German saloon-keeper if only she’d stay in New York and for four weeks furnish, for the Sunday editions, intricate details of Eleanor’s toilettes, temper and the cosmetics that she used. But it was characteristic of Mr Greville’s passion, even in New York, for the accurate presentation of facts, that he should spend his last evening in drawing up, for the use of the reporters, an exact statement of how New York had affected him, of how it had affected Eleanor, and how Don. If, he said to Don, when he arrived by the last train from Boston, the public here was actually interested in contemporary history of that sort they might as well have it with a reasonable accuracy. He even persuaded Don — and did so himself — to stand still for four minutes on the road to the elevator in the midst of a little crepitation of pencils.
So that they left the city next morning as it were with the crackle of a million fireworks attached to their tails, but with practically no one save Miss Dubosc to wave to them, from the tiny crowd on the little, rough wharf, a Stars and Stripes. “Pop Greville carries Collar captive” was an excellent headline: “Kelleg sick at old Man Manhattan!” was an accurate expression of fact: but “Eleanor’s eyes water,” with a smaller “British Maiden sad to leave Flat Iron City” beneath it, came nearer to a roughly poetic justice. It is true that when, four days out from New York, she discovered that a discreet, pleasant young Harvard man with whom she’d conversed friendlily from her deck chair — when she discovered him camera-ing her and Don from a corner as they visited the silent beasts in the dim cattle-decks — and discovered too that he’d positively taken the voyage in order to “report” for the New York H — , she was inclined to say that it grew mildly troublesome.
But it is equally true that as, gravely and gradually, they swung out from the little black wharf into the shining stream torn up with its innumerable shuttles she couldn’t quite realise that they were leaving New York for good. She certainly couldn’t realise it without regret. The flag-waving group — it was tiny indeed by comparison with the thousands that had greeted their arrival — disappeared. From further out she could see alike the immense name of the Pattern King and the smaller, but still vast, black and white announcement of Kelleg’s name. ‘It was very clear this time: they could see right up the Palisades and up the Hudson. The tall chimneys sent forth no black smoke, but from the cliffs that grouped themselves above the little green Battery there went up against the grey sky little plumes of white vapour. Tall, vast, grouped together, she couldn’t help still regarding them — all those grey, immense buildings — as a fine expression of a humanity that reaches towards the heavens. And then they “raised” Brooklyn Bridge — high, thin, like a spider’s web: and then the little island with its grim suggestion of railway sheds: and then the clumsy figure in a nightgown, with its torch like a policeman’s stave held in the middle...
“But isn’t it,” she said to herself, “all tranquil and peaceful and blessed?...” And then she noticed that on the white staff at the stem they carried the British flag.
“Oh, well,” she said — and the echo of a phrase came to her lips: “Little old New York is good enough for me.” And in a sense she really meant it.
Don didn’t want to see his city, he was below in his berth: Mr Greville was forward choosing deck chairs. The ship, in the clearness and silence beyond the final spit of sand, stayed a little to drop the pilot, curtseying in the rolling water. Then, engrossed and formidable, it made its way towards the nothingness of the horizon. Before them, a little to the right, a large Italian liner — British owned — was high out of the water, pouring away over its shoulder a great fillet of grey smoke; behind them another, British too, was overhauling them fast, gay and red and white in the sunlight that waited for them just beyond the Hook. Then the long, grey, whale-like piece of land that had greeted her arrival appeared in the distance and dropped astern. Then she was free.
And Eleanor too was free to pass through the stages and frames of mind that one has to — when one is an Englishwoman — in coming back to England. She had to do it for Don’s sake: it was, it seemed to her, her woman’s duty. It was a part of the “backing him up” in his actions; it was a part of her loyalty to him. She hadn’t, after all, the duty of forming conceptions: she had, as she saw it, only that of making the best of what he gave her.
It is true that her task was rendered singularly easy for her by Don’s compatriots: for she couldn’t be told that New York trolleys were faster than London trams (she knew they weren’t); that American women had the finest complexions in the world (she thought it was a matter of taste); that the American language was the language of Shakespeare; she couldn’t be overwhelmed — as she had to be — by the terrific blaze and bang of assertions of people who had never seen land to the eastward of them; she couldn’t be out-shouted, out-talked and reduced to a placid silence on these matters for ten days without gently taking up the cudgels. And she took them up, not so much for England as for Europe. She seemed to feel an extraordinary solidarity, a thing that she hadn’t ever before known, with Frenchmen, with Italians — even with the Scots.
When the slow vessel was finally surging mud in the Thames she didn’t remember to compare the gentle swiftness of the Customs men; she didn’t even remember to say that the silent departure in a little steamer from the great boat’s side was touching, dignified and gentlemanly compared with the moaning savage sound that had greeted their arrival in New York.
Nothing, indeed, marked any definite stage of her psychology until they were, all three together, walking up the crowded, dirty High Street that in Gravesend leads from a squalid pier to an incredibly dismal railway station. By that time, in the face of the vastness of the ocean, New York had assumed in her mind an air of littleness — of cleanness, of whiteness, of climbing towards the skies — but above all of tininess. And with its irresponsibility, its crowding, its noises — which did not any more seem to matter much now that she was separated from them by several thousand tranquil minds — it had taken to itself too an air of something pathetic and touching. She wasn’t any more, she supposed, ever going to see it again — and it became like a person that one has known well, a frail, small, chattering, fluttering, bright person that has died and that one regrets.
But the High Street of Gravesend, with its steepness, its unpresentable shops, its sooty roofs and its sauntering crowds — and perhaps above all the sight of a yellow, varnished canvas sou’-wester that, hanging outside a shop door in the foreground, seemed to give the note to the whole little picture, drew from her irresistibly the words:
“How picturesque!”
That was it: that was what New York hadn’t got: that was what she imagined there wasn’t to be found in all the Western continent. It was squalid, all this, it was crowded — it was, rationally considered, all as evil as you pleased. But in its huddling together of roofs beneath a grey, moist, fresh and gleaming atmosphere — an atmosphere that fused, that didn’t reveal details nakedly but shrouded them as beneath a gentle cloak — in all this there was a tenderness, a sort of humility. And when, in the evening, above dirty coal paths, above gleaming lines of rails, at Maidstone, they walked from one junction to another and she saw, above the indistinct mass of blackness, against a liquid, pale rift in the clouds that were folding in for night and rest, the square, black tower, the four attenuated little turrets at the angles, in the intense quiet that the hoot of engines didn’t even disturb, she suddenly felt — and it reassured all her misgivings — that this really was her home!
It reassured her in all her misgivings. For she couldn’t disguise from herself the fact that she had rather dreaded the home-coming. Suppose, she had said to herself, that she had acquired a “taste” for the clearness, the excitement, the contagious bustle of that other land! Suppose that really that was at bottom what appealed to her! Suppose that it should prove that she simply wasn’t able to accompany Don back into the atmosphere of Cathedral closes that, as he saw it, was the best that Europe had to offer! But she could! She could! And that night, as she knelt beside her bed, with all the old emotions coming back to her — with an immense awakening of satisfaction at the fact that she could be interested in the restful gossip that their old, fat, irritating cook had to tell her in a kitchen that gleamed with tin utensils and shone with its white tables and dressers — it was tears of thankfulness that really filled her eyes. She was going to be able to keep Don!
CHAPTER II.
THEY happened to be in the Tottenham Court Road two months later, because they were purchasing furniture for the servants’ bedrooms at Cuddiford House. They wouldn’t have wanted to furnish the servants’ rooms from Tottenham Court Road: they would have liked, both, to give the maids the sort of good, old, really substantial furniture that they had managed to assemble for the rest of the house. But it had taken, they had found, such an extraordinarily long time to fill their own rooms! They had been at it for days and days. They didn’t want anything too new or too battered; they didn’t want anything that had been restored by furniture-dealers, or anything, on the other hand, that was too expensive. And they had been at it, day in, day out, ever since they had landed. So that if they had had to continue the same search on behalf of the upper rooms they might have had to put off their wedding till Heaven knew when.
They had fixed it between them that they weren’t to spend in any one year more than a couple or three thousand pounds. It would be making a sort of game of life — but what more could they do? Don simply hadn’t got the imagination of an Aladdin. He not only hadn’t the least desire to buy up castles or build marble palaces: he couldn’t even begin to think of how he could throw himself into the frame of mind. And Eleanor, with her shrinking from noticeability, accepted his lack of imagination with a very thankful heart. They simply weren’t going, ever, to mention his money. It was left to the stewardship of Augustus — and Augustus was to remain in Boston. His mother, it appeared, was to remain with him.
And everything ran so smoothly. Eleanor didn’t even, to her friends, do more than say that she’d liked America pretty well; she didn’t want to open sores in front of Don, and Don was always with her. And it is to be said that her task was a very easy one — for no one in Canterbury appeared to her to take the least interest in America. Their absolute, tranquil, immutable want of curiosity even astonished her — for in the United States the United States had seemed to her to be of importance. But there, in the Cathedral city, not a sound of it reached her ears: her father never mentioned it — and Don appeared at last to breathe again. It really seemed, more and more, as if they had only made his excursion into the basement to find a hammer that hadn’t been there.
They had come up to town in the last quiet month of the year. She was staying with an aunt in one of the quietest of the London squares. They had bought neat, white, light furniture and neat, white, brass-bound beds, and in the bright, mist-diffused light of the arc lamps they had climbed to the top of a motor ‘bus.
“Oh, isn’t it,” she had said to him as she snuggled herself against him on the seat, “isn’t it heaven to be in Tottenham Court Road again?”
The crowds wandered past on the narrow pavements; the low, yellow, painted house fronts — her eyes had been accustomed to looking so much higher! — seemed wonderfully low and cottage-like. The traffic seemed so quiet: there was no sound of metal, no clash; but they jolted and bumped serenely in the yellow keen air.
“Isn’t it heaven?” she repeated. And all the early days of their association came back to her.
The ‘bus jolted, bumped, and came to a stop, sideways across the road. The passengers behind them descended; cabs drove out of the way to pass them. They didn’t descend: they hadn’t any hurry at all. It was even like the old days because, since she was staying with her aunt, when she got home to the square a discreet, heavy hall door would close upon her and Don would have to go away.
Suddenly he struck his fist upon the back of the seat before them.
“I can’t do it!’ ‘he said.” I can’t do it!”
And she, in the midst of her happiness, was so ready for disaster that she hadn’t any need to ask him what he meant.
“I must go back to America!” he muttered huskily. “I can’t funk it. I must go back. Even if I can’t do what I wanted there are other abuses to remedy.”
At the very back of the empty ‘bus top the conductor’s figure appeared in the mist. He told them that if they wanted to go on another ‘bus was coming. But as they didn’t move he once more disappeared.
And the interruption had given Eleanor time to see what she had to do. She had thought it all out before: she had thought it all out on the evening when they had come back from Coney Island. She had seen it coming: she had known it must come. She stood up, moved past him, and then remained looking at him in the passage way.
“Then you know it means good-bye?” she said.
He didn’t move: his head was sunken beneath his shoulders: through the misty air from above a lamp shed scintillating rays upon him. She waited for a moment to see if he would speak.
And then the next image that she had of him she had from the pavement. Above the high rail of the ‘bus that slewed across the road, with the silhouetted figures of two men in uniform crouched solitarily in the mist above the bonnet, his hat and shoulders, silhouetted too, were black and perfectly motionless. She turned down the side street; she found herself in a square with a circular patch of trees that disappeared, black and silent, into the invisible sky. She walked once round the railings, sobbing aloud, but at the sight of a gentleman who crossed the road, evidently attracted by her solitude, she stayed her tears and walked away southwards.
And positively the only comment she had to suffer from came from Canzano in a letter of astonishing eloquence that she never brought herself to answer. As for her father, he never spoke; he didn’t even look at her when she made the announcement to him. She had somehow a sense that he was saddened; but she couldn’t be certain whether he approved of her decision for its promptness or whether he condemned her. He might condemn her for having taken up an enterprise and for having dropped it. But she simply couldn’t tell. Augustus remained in Boston, his mother remained with him. They never, either of them, wrote, and she attributed to the silence of one of them a black and malicious glee, and to the other a black and malicious hatred. But there wasn’t any doubt about Canzano’s disapproval.
“Why. did you do it?” he wrote. “Why did you do it? I can imagine two reasons: the one that your ideal is merely to enjoy life: the other that Don — oh, poor Don! — isn’t the sort of man to fit in with your scheme of life as it should be lived. You will wish me to dismiss the first reason at once, without a word of comment. You will say that your ideal is not merely to enjoy life. But think about it for a moment. Question your conscience. I admit at once that my poor half-brother is not the sort of man with whom at one’s side it would be possible to enjoy life. I will admit that he would have worn you out.... But there! Think about this reason for a little while. Perhaps I will return to it.
