Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 307
“And then there’s the case of poor Somerville, the Earl of Croydon’s oldest tenant, who has been evicted from his farm because he applied to the County Council for land under the Small Holdings Act. Of all the abominable tyrannies committed by the band of dastards who own the pubic lands of England,” she was saying...
Mr and Mrs Melville sat side by side upon a square sofa. They blinked their eyes beneath the torrent of Miss Stobhall’s words. Very quiet and domesticated old creatures, they rather liked the north-country lady’s interminable harangues. When she was once started it appeared to them as if they were setting out for a long and rather sleepy railway journey. They had no particular sympathy with Miss Stobhall’s views and they had no particular views of their own. But Miss Stobhall’s stories, when Mr and Mrs Melville could understand them, partook always very much of the marvellous, and Miss Stobhall’s world was so entirely made up of black-browed tyrants and virtuous and gifted victims that she certainly gave them something picturesque to listen to in the long, quiet day when so little occurred.
A long solitude in each other’s exclusive society had given to these two old people a singular similarity as if they had been painted in the same colours by the same hand and brush. And when they were apart they had that quaint air of incompleteness that will be seen in the case of a small pair of parakeets. Their most engrossing employment was to follow Gerald Luscombe round the garden whilst he weeded or potted out plants. And whilst he crouched down over the dark soil they would stand behind him hand in hand, the one holding his trowel, the other his weed basket. Or else they would go round the garden cleaning the roses of greenfly and caterpillars and calling to each other with expressions of admiration and triumph when they caught a particularly large snail. Sometimes Mr Melville would talk of his adventures in India as a child of eight during the Mutiny, or of the tigers that he had shot. And sometimes Mrs Melville would allude to the Court Ball and the Opera of the late sixties. But it was as difficult to realise that Mr Melville had ever stood up to anything larger than a caterpillar, as it was to believe that Mrs Melville had ever committed such deeds as to earn for her in an unenviable sense, an immense notoriety. It was upon this trio, settled down as they seemed to be, for a long afternoon that Ophelia Bransdon was introduced. Miss Stobhall immediately sprang up with a little expression of astonishment. The old people seemed to twitter with small pleasurable sounds.
“My dear,” Miss Stobhall said, “I should never have recognised you. Has your father come to his senses at last?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Ophelia answered, “but I know I’m very wet.”
Mr Luscombe, with his smiling and diffident air as if he were afraid of having committed an imprudence, begged his mother to take Ophelia up-stairs and to put her into some of his wife’s clothes. And there ensued a little rustling of coming and going which ended in leaving Miss Stobhall alone with Mr Melville and Mr Luscombe.
“Upon my word,” Miss Stobhall exclaimed, “can the great Bransdon have come to his senses?”
She looked enquiringly at Sir Melville and Mr Luscombe who returned mystified glances to her. The young man in the porch had been arranging the bicycles once more but he now stalked into the room holding his wide-awake crumpled up in his hand. He said “Ha!” upon observing Miss Stobhall and nodded perfunctorily to Mr Melville. Then he began to walk slowly up and down the carpet, his hands deep in his pockets and his head hanging upon his chest. He seemed to be aloof from or at least oblivious of his companions. Seen without his hat he appeared even fairer and younger, for his decidedly golden hair had an odd, boyish roughness. He looked, nevertheless, extraordinarily clean — as if he had been washed so often that his features had a semi-transparent quality.
“I’ve just been asked,” Miss Stobhall said to him in her determined voice, appearing ten years older and as much harder by contrast with his frail youth—”I have just been asked — or I was just going to be asked, but they haven’t had time to get it out — what sort of a thing a great Bransdon is. You see, your great man doesn’t bulk much with the outside world. These men have never even heard of him!”
Mr Melville appeared full of consternation: Mr Luscombe uttered unintelligible sounds, meaning to say that of course he had heard the great man’s name, though he couldn’t for the moment recall any of the actions by which he had earned his reputation. The young man simply shrugged his shoulders right up to his ears and let them sink slowly again. He continued to pace up and down as if he were thinking very deeply. He and Miss Stobhall were quite old friends, for her colonies of exiles had kept him prowling perpetually in her neighbourhood. He found them so romantic. They had had an immense number of battles of words, for the lady was of an engaging frankness and took in the young man as nearly a maternal interest as a pronounced old maid can be expected to feel. So that the two had a sort of comradeship of battle and it was without annoyance or shyness that the young man began to speak.
“Bransdon,” he said, “is the apostle of the Simple Life.”
“Bransdon,” Miss Stobhall interjected, “is a dirty old man, too slack to keep himself tidy.”
“All over the world,” the young man continued with equanimity, “in thousands and thousands, you will find people trying to lead it, but Bransdon began it. He lives it, he talks it, he breathes it, he is it.”
“You must remember,” Miss Stobhall said, “that in this county of Surrey alone there must be fifty or sixty similar cranks, each making the same claim for himself. But I’ll admit that Bransdon is the greatest fraud and the greatest crank of them all.”
“But,” Mr Luscombe interjected hesitatingly and with some bewilderment, “I don’t know anything at all about these matters, but I’ve always thought you prided yourself, Miss Stobhall, on being something of a crank, too.”
Miss Stobhall made a little, sharp, angry movement with her whole body.
“Oh, good gracious,” she said, “I a crank! I’M just the ordinary, natural woman of common sense. I lead a rational life — the life that any sensible person would lead. I dress myself in suitable clothes, I eat Christian food, I play round games, I drink a glass of wine now and then. I do what I want; I am natural.”
The young man stopped in his pacing, turned his head over his shoulder towards Miss Stobhall, took off his pince-nez and pointed them at her.
“Natural!” he exclaimed. “You’re a savage. You’ve just delivered the profession of faith of one of our remote ancestors. The Pithecanthropus — the missing link — if it could have spoken would have spoken exactly as you have.”
“I’d rather,” Miss Stobhall said, “be the dirtiest savage than a prig.”
“Oh, come now,” old Mr Melville exclaimed, “we’re all friends. I always think political discussions....”
“Oh, rot!” the boy interrupted him. “This isn’t politics. This is the flesh and blood of life. It’s war, deadly war. If you aren’t for us, you’re against us and you’ve got to die.”
Mr Melville fidgeted uneasily on his sofa.
“But still,” he said, “when you’re under a friend’s roof... eh... eh... enjoying hospitality, as you might say...”
Miss Stobhall laughed. “Oh, don’t you bother about us,” she said. “We’re the best of friends. He’s just giving a little display of his imbecility for your benefit. And I’ve just called him a prig as I have a hundred times before, because it’s the true truth.”
“The Simple Life,” the young man explained, “isn’t a mode of living, it’s a habit of mind. It’s beauty. It’s truth.”
“That is why old Bransdon never takes a bath,” Miss Stobhall interjected. “New religions and filth have always gone hand in hand. Early Christians and Dervishes and Buddhist saints and all of them — they’re like the great Bransdon. He sits and meditates over a loom in a dirty little cottage at French Street and his disciple, Gubb, sits and meditates in another over knitting-needles. And Bransdon drops heavy platitudes about beauty and truth and not eating vegetables and the pride of the craftsman, and Gubb snaps them up as they fall from his mouth and writes them down. And they’re set up in type by Bransdon’s daughter and printed on the hand-press by occasional disciples who can be pressed into turning the lever and they’re spread abroad to astonish the world. Sentences like: ‘Whoso eateth of his fellow creature, though it be but a chicken, wrings the angels’ bosoms’ and ‘Sovereigns, corsets and leather boots, these shall bring upon our cities the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.” The American editions have ‘dollars’ instead of ‘sovereigns’ That’s the Simp...” Miss Stobhall broke off suddenly in the middle of the word and began again in the same breath. “Always thinking about yourself — that’s priggishness. But when I said that young man there—” and she addressed herself to Mr Melville—”was a Prig, I was misrepresenting him. He likes it. It’s the sort of life he really and genuinely likes. It’s an extraordinary taste. But then he’s clean. That’s Gubb’s work. Gubb will be a heretic of the Simple Lifers. He’s got a face that shines with soap and he takes a dip in the puddle at the bottom of the garden twice a day, winter and summer. Gubb stands for Hygiene. But upstairs — the Bransdon girl” — and Miss Stobhall pronounced the word “gal” to give a measure of contempt to her intonation—” the Bransdon girl is a real prig. She’s an echo. Her talk’s made up of the post-card sayings: she is the severest, solemnest, priggiest little animal that ever trod an unregenerate soil — the Simple Life won’t let you use manure. They say it’s a ferment and therefore unnatural. So the girl upstairs won’t even walk across a ploughed field. On principle. She says...”
Again the young man pointed his chin to her over his shoulder.
“Perhaps you don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t affect me because I’m emancipated from all these ideas of possession and marriage. But perhaps you don’t know that the Bransdon girl is my wife?”
Miss Stobhall said:
“Good God!”
Her mouth fell open, her hands fell apart at her side. The boy continued his pacing up and down.
“The principle of my existence,” he said, “is protest: I protest against all forms and against all conventions. Thus when two people marry it is the custom for them to let one of their surnames be suppressed. For this custom there is something to be said, for it was manifestly more convenient to speak of the Bransdons rather than of Mr Gubb and Miss Bransdon. So that Ophelia and I have decided that for such purposes we would merge our identities under a common name. But there is no more necessity for the name to be the man’s name than for it to be the woman’s. We decided, therefore, to call ourselves Hamnet and Ophelia Bransdon. There is more in this principle than meets the eye, for apart from the natural desire I have to be associated, even if only by name with the great man, the name Bransdon is in itself harmonious, of fine appearance when written and easily remembered. Thus we have the basis of a very rational principle. For supposing that when a couple married they invariably adopted the more euphonious of their two names a very great gain would ensue. Fine-sounding names would be perpetuated, ugly or grotesque ones would disappear and to that extent the world would be reckoned more beautiful.”
“It’s not such a very new thing,” Mr Luscombe said. “In fact it’s rather an old thing. Our family name was Rattrey until one of the Rattreys in the seventeenth century married the Miss Luscombe who brought Coombe into the family. And for the matter of that, for a similar reason, the Duke of Northumberland’s’ name, if one of his ancestors hadn’t imitated you, would have been Smithson, not Percy.”
“Oh, that’s mere snobbishness,” the boy exclaimed. “We acted on principle.”
Miss Stobhall’s eyes had in them a look almost of horror.
“You married the Bransdon girl?” she said.
Hamnet Bransdon smote the fist of one hand into the palm of the other with an air imitating truculence.
“Yes, married her. By bell, book and candle. Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine! and all that sort of thing. That’s to say that at Westerham registry office this morning we went through the imbecile ceremony of marriage.”
Again Miss Stobhall exclaimed: “Good God!”
“Oh, I daresay it’s surprising,” the young Hamnet exclaimed, “but we’re quite determined not to do anything that’s conventionally expected of married people. Not anything! It’s a method of being able to travel about together without giving rise to silly and invidious comments that would damage the cause.”
There was still a sort of horror in Miss Stobhall’s voice.
“Does Bransdon — does Gubb — know what you have done?”
“I don’t know,” the young man said nonchalantly. “It was such a rotten, silly proceeding that we weren’t anxious to boast of it. Besides, neither of them was in favour of it. In fact they were decidedly opposed. But as the reasons they gave for their opposition seemed to us to have no grounds at all, we decided that we would do it if only as a protest.”
“Poor Bessie!” Miss Stobhall exclaimed.
Hamnet Bransdon looked at her with his eyebrows quizzically arched.
“Why, where does my mother come in?” he said.
“I was her oldest and her best friend,” Miss Stobhall said with a rising agitation. “It was me she came to, to get away from those Beasts, just before she died. And I tell you....” Her voice died away and then, suddenly, she continued with tremendous emotion: “Horrible Beasts. Slack, idle, worthless! They killed poor Bessie and even the cloth they make won’t keep a shower of rain out.” She got up and began to pace about the room, too, with quick, feverish steps. “The Simple Life!” she exclaimed. “It’s the most accursed, the most complicated tangle there ever was in this world.”
And suddenly with a great deal of sound Miss Stobhall went out of the room. She pushed her head again round the corner of the door to exclaim:
“Don’t you go — don’t you dare to go out of this room before I come back. I’m going to see the great Bransdon.”
“She certainly doesn’t,” Hamnet Bransdon exclaimed to no one in particular, “trouble to be conventional in her disposing of other people’s houses. How does she know that one of you won’t turn me out before she returns?”
He fixed Mr Melville as he had done Miss Stobhall, with the end of his pince-nez.
“You would, if you understood the seriousness of my convictions.”
Mr Melville tapped the ends of his carefully tended nails together. He had risen with little stiff motions, bringing together the heels of his pointed leather boots when Miss Stobhall had risen to leave the room. He had lived, for so long in the East and on the Continent that he had about him a little punctiliousness of air that was remotely un-
English. His short, silver beard was carefully tended, his boots were neat little varnished cases, his clothes were cut with an exotic air of fitting his small compact form. Only the ring about his silk tie which repeated in its blueness the blue of his kind and timid eyes — only the broad gold, tranquil ring had about it a suggestion of the true Briton. Because he was aware of a slight lisp which intensely annoyed him, he spoke always in tones of extreme slowness and precision, but always, also, in very low notes.
“I do not think....” eh....” eh...” he began, “that my stepson would be led by anyone’s opinions to turn anyone out of his house upon such a day as this. Opinions, after all, eh....” eh... don’t really matter. It’s only what you do.”
Hamnet Bransdon turned with extreme vehemence upon Mr Melville.
“Do you know what circle in hell,” he exclaimed, “is reserved by Dante for those who are lukewarm?”
“I never,” Mr Melville answered with an air at once abashed and apologetic, “I never read Dante. I have always wanted to. I have always meant to, but there seems to be always such a great deal to do....”
“They freeze,” Hamnet Bransdon exclaimed with extraordinary vehemence. “They are sunk up to the heads and over in eternal ice.” He paused and became more calm. “Not,” he continued argumentatively, “that too much attention is to be paid to Dante. His is one of the established reputations...”
“But surely,” Mr Luscombe interrupted in his turn, “Dante....”
There was a tone of distant awe in his voice. The Divina Commedia had been one of his special subjects at Cambridge.
“One of those established reputations,” the young man swept him away in the flood of his eloquence, “whose merits we have not yet had time to weigh in the balance and to restore or throw away, as the case may be. We have not yet had time to arrive at Dante. We have been occupied with the Greek and Roman classical authors till now. And you will be astonished,” he continued, turning upon Mr Luscombe, “you will be astonished how much of that lumber we shall throw into the wastepaper basket of eternity.”
Mr Luscombe opened his eyes with a little amused and pleased astonishment. Being as it were of a slow and ruminative nature, he had not moved once since he had entered the room with Ophelia. He had stood, gentle and attentive, with about him just a suggestion of the air of a large and docile spaniel, his feet far apart, his hands so deep in the pockets of his old shooting-trousers that his shoulders of great breadth had just the suspicion of a slouch in their lines. He appeared even more blonde in the dark room than in the broad light of day. And if he was silent he seemed to be in no way embarrassed; if he was shy he seemed in no way self-consciously desirous of making his mark in the conversation. He was just modest and there wasn’t about him the very least shade of awkwardness. Now, however, he let himself down gently, if weightily into a deep chintz-covered chair. If he had to listen to a lecture, he liked to have his limbs at ease.
