Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 346
She looked at him with a keen, hard glance.
“You come from Cyprus,” she said in French. And her words seemed to him the more intelligible because she must speak in a high voice to be heard over the clinking of old chain harness, the jangling of swords, and the brushing sounds of the buskins of her men as they marched over the turf.
“No, I come from New York,” Mr. Sorrell said as loud as he could.
“You come from Palestine,” the lady exclaimed.
“I’ve been to Palestine,” Mr. Sorrell conceded. “I’ve been a little all over the world. I have travelled a great deal.”
“You were born in the East,” the lady exclaimed.
“I was born in Wimbledon,” Mr. Sorrell answered; “that is not the East End. It’s Wimbledon S.W. now, though when I was born it was right in the country.”
“I do not understand you very well,” the Lady Blanche said, “but you are a very holy man, are you not?”
“I say!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed in English,” have we got to go on playing this old pageant all the time? Can’t we let it up just a minute? I should just like to know about the trains from here.”
The Lady Blanche looked at him with the dull eyes of a person who does not understand. She called to her the old man who had the flail with the iron balls hanging from it.
“Thou wast” — and now to Mr. Sorrell she seemed to be speaking a sort of German platt such as you may hear in Hessen-Darmstadt—”Thou wast in the Holy Land. Speak with this man if you may.”
The old man had lost an eye; his face was very brown and clean, though his jerkin was stained, weatherbeaten, and very ragged. He addressed Mr. Sorrell in a dialect that Mr. Sorrell could not catch hold of at all. The words seemed to flow by him.
“Oh! I can’t get the hang of him!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed to the Lady Blanche. “He seems to be talking of Ragussa and Cyprus and Byzantium and Jaffa. What is he acting? A Crusader? The Crusaders did not go to those places, did they? I should have thought they’d have sailed straight to somewhere near St. Jean d’Acre. They wouldn’t want to go fooling up in the Adriatic.”
Still the Lady Blanche appeared to understand none of his words.
“I speak no Greek,” she exclaimed; “but you were born in Byzantium?”
“Well, it’s a funny thing,” Mr. Sorrell commented, “my father’s villa at Wimbledon was called ‘Constantinople,’ because he built it during the Crimean War —
Yes, oui—”
And as she still looked at him with questioning eyes, he added:
“C’est vrai, je suis de Byzance.”
These words appeared to afford her much satisfaction, for her brow cleared, and she asked him if he had not been a slave of Mahomed, rescued and baptized by the good Knight Egerton of Tamworth.
Mr. Sorrell was tired to the point of silliness.
“Oh, hang it all!” he said to himself, “if they’re going to carry on this pageant racket with this deadly seriousness I guess I’ve just got to give in. It beats me. They’re too persistent.” And he added aloud: “Oui, je suis venu à pied de Sandwich tout seul.”
The satisfaction upon the Lady Blanche’s face continued to grow. She said that without doubt he had been protected by the angels of God and by a mother’s gratitude, for the roads were covered by robbers. Mr. Sorrell remarked that he supposed that that was the case, though he did not see where the mother’s gratitude came in. The lady replied that the mother of the knight had been living until a few months ago, and that the knight had sent several messengers home from the Holy Land and whilst he was returning. These messengers had reported how the slave had watched over his master out of gratitude for having rescued him from the hands of the Saracens. And Mr. Sorrell learnt how his prototype had in open battle twice saved his master’s life when his horse was killed; how he had extinguished the Greek fire that the Saracens had cast upon the knight’s helmet; and how when his master had been wounded by a poisoned arrow of the barbarous Ruthenians the faithful slave had sucked the poison from the wound. Moreover, when the knight had slept in the desert the slave had watched over him, and had driven away venomous serpents, or had awakened the knight in time to confront the huge dragons with which the desert abounded. And all these things being reported to the knight’s mother had filled her with very great gratitude to the slave, so that she had passed whole days upon her knees beseeching favour and protection from heaven alike upon the one as the other.
“It seems to me,” Mr. Sorrell thought to himself, “that I run against maternal gratitude all the time. It was only just the other day that Mrs. Lee-Egerton was thanking me for saving the last of the line of Egerton from prison, and calling down the blessings of heaven upon my head. I suppose that wretched little bad hat would be the descendant of this old knight who went walloping dragons round Cairo way.”
And he remembered how Mrs. Lee-Egerton had said that the blessings of heaven would be poured down upon his head if ever he was in a tight place.
“Therefore,” the Lady Blanche said, “because of the gratitude of this mother who was my mother’s sister, you shall be very greatly honoured and feasted at my castle. Baths shall be made ready for you and wine and great feasts, so that you shall eat till your skin cracks.”
“Oh! I have to think of my liver,” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed, “but I could certainly do with a bit!”
“Without doubt,” the Lady Blanche continued, “you are a very holy man, for you have faithfully served your master and travelled in many lands, having been without doubt in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Rome, and in the town of St. Jago of Compostella, and no doubt at Canterbury too.”
“Why!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed, “yes, I have been in all these places, now you come to mention it. J’ai roulé ma bosse un peu partout.”
It was the look of returning non-comprehension in the lady’s eyes that really puzzled Mr. Sorrell. For the slang of his French, if it were slang, was yet so old-fashioned that any one ought to have been able to understand it.
And then, with the slightest queer start, Mr. Sorrell found that he was not any more thinking of these people as taking part in a pageant. They were too much in earnest. And anyhow, they must have been playing the pageant for twenty years at the very least. Their lances were old and rusty; their pikes notched in the blade and greasy in the stave from long handling. Their clothes were practically all very much worn and old. No, he could not get away from the feeling that they were just living their normal lives.
And for a moment he felt like Rip Van Winkle. Supposing that his railway accident had really made him see something queer? Supposing that all these people were really just ghosts? He did not believe in ghosts. But, on the other hand, he was modern enough to know that in these days anything might happen, and suddenly he found himself saying to himself, that though he could not for the life of him say what he believed, he would not equally for the life of him say that he disbelieved any single thing.
Such queer things did happen, that you would have said would have been impossible about the time when he had been born in Constantinople Villa, Wimbledon. What a right down practical modern man like himself had to do before all things was just to keep an open mind. Twenty years ago people would have laughed at the idea of flying as the dream of a visionary. Nowadays, people were flying about just as they liked, so that it was as easy to fly from Putney to the Welsh Harp as it was to go by bus. And it was not only in merely mechanical things that advances had been made, there were all sorts of other queer things. There were new odd religions, which might or might not do what they professed to do. At his club there was old General Lathrop, who had one evening bored him to death by insisting on making him look at portfolio after portfolio of drawings which the General had said had been executed by spirits in his own house.
Mr. Sorrell had never taken much interest in spiritualism and that sort of thing. He had always been too busy. But you could not help knocking against it. There was the drawing-room of his aunt, old Lady Wells, to which he went occasionally, out of a sense of duty, on a Sunday afternoon, and it was always full of estimable people, who told him the most extraordinary things that you could not in the ordinary way believe in. He had heard of the dead speaking from a distance, just as he heard of the stone-blind being cured by Christian science, the new Homoeopathy or by mere psychic force. There was nobody dead with whom he had ever wanted in the least to communicate; he had never been stone-blind. Indeed, he had never had any illness that, in his active life, he had not been able to counteract with a pill or two at the right moment. But he had always held that if he ever came to suffer from nerves, as the result of overwork, it would be a quite rational thing to put himself into the hands of Christian Scientists, or any other healers that claim supernatural gifts. He had never been anything but a perfectly normal, tolerant, open-minded man, without any creed in particular other than that the world was a very large place in which a number of odd things might happen.
And suddenly he asked the lady at his side:
“What year do you call this?”
The lady looked at him with large eyes that were rather mysterious, now that her temper had subsided.
“Have you travelled so far holy man?” she said. “It is the year of our Lord, 1326.”
Mr. Sorrell said:
“The deuce it is! 1326! What happened then?”
And very rapidly in his mind he ran through the dates of the Kings of England from the Conquest upwards. He could not get beyond Henry III, 1216. He positively could not remember a single date between that and the Battle of Agincourt, which he remembered was in the year 1415, because it was just 400 years before Waterloo. Neither of these dates helped him to the year 1326. The Battle of Bannockburn, which he knew happened in the reign of Edward II, must have been somewhere between 1216 and 1326.
For the moment he felt rather ashamed of his ignorance. It was perfectly true that no modern business man need bother his head about history. He would not mind betting that his friend Spicer and Wells, who was, next himself, the smartest man in the book publishing business — he would not mind betting that Spicer would not be able to get as far as Henry III. But the lady beside him was probably chock full of historical knowledge. After all, there was no reason why a woman should not be, for women had nothing else in particular to do, and could monkey with that sort of nonsense. At the same time, though it was nonsense, he did not care to confess himself ignorant even in parlour tricks. The lady would probably look down upon him, for she would not know much of his other varied and splendid attainments. So that he did not pursue his historical investigations any further. On the other hand, because it had struck him as odd that amongst her retainers there was not one in the prime of life, he asked her, in order to make conversation — that would be in the picture — for he was sure that she would not talk about anything modern — he asked her:
“Why is it that the youngest of your men appears to be sixty, and very tender on his feet? The eldest of your boys is that one carrying the large sword, and with golden curls. He can’t be more than fourteen.”
“Holy man,” the Lady Blanche answered, “can you be so ignorant of what is happening to-day as not to know that my husband is away at the wars in Scotland?”
“Oh, I didn’t know,” Mr. Sorrell said. To himself he thought: “Then I suppose that this is about the time of the battle of Bannockburn.” He continued aloud:
“I don’t see why that should leave you with such a singular collection of armed soldiers.”
“Holy man,” the lady said, “are you so ignorant as not to know that my husband will have taken with him all the able-bodied men to fight in the battle of our lord the King? So that in all the countryside there is no man so proper, so fearless, or so erect as yourself.”
“Well, it’s very kind of you to say that,” Mr. Sorrell said, “but I should have thought a husband would have wanted to leave a wife better protected.”
The lady’s eyes hardened; her chest heaved very high and swiftly under her green dress, and she began to speak so fast that Mr. Sorrell had the greatest difficulty in following her.
“There you speak the very truth of God,” she said; “this is what the lords of to-day are. There you have my lord and master gone away. A thousand or two thousand pounds he will squander, and what will he bring back of booty? Not one penny’s-worth. What honours? None at all, for he is embroiled with the Queen Mother past mending. Holy man, you do not know what a fool my lord and master is.”
And with an enormous swiftness the Lady Blanche poured a torrent of words in some story of how the Knight Enguerrand de Coucy and his cousin Egerton of Tamworth had set their archers to shoot arrows upon the knights of Sir John of Hainault, who lay with the King at Newcastle.
“By little good St. Luke,” the lady concluded, slackening the speed of the torrent of words and gazing almost affectionately into Mr. Sorrell’s eyes, “can you wonder that some ladies are unfaithful to their lords, as is the common complaint nowadays? Do our lords pay us the proper attention which wife ‘would exact of husband? no! Not at all. In the last nine years, my Lord of Enguerrand has spent not six weeks quiet at home, but when he was not prancing in Scotland he was laying waste in Flanders, or tilting against the Saracens in Spain. And are not women of certain beauty made to be courted and made much of? But indeed you will see that in all the country round there is not a personable man. So that I think the best of them is my little page Jehan, who you will perceive struts gallantly enough, carrying the large sword. But for anything else, it is a very tedious and disgusting life that we lead who are the great ladies of the realm of England. And for myself, I spend days in plotting revenge upon this monstrous husband of mine.”
She looked fixedly into Mr. Sorrell’s eyes.
“Yes, I will take such a revenge — if only I can think of one — as shall render my lord and master a laughingstock through all the realms of chivalry.”
“Oh, I say,” Mr. Sorrell said, “you oughtn’t to think of that sort of thing — men will be men, you know — and dissensions between husband and wife are very unpleasant. As for myself, I detest family quarrels. They just lead to everybody being hurt, and nobody gaining the value of a centime.”
“Ah!” the Lady Blanche said, “if I can only think how, I will have such a revenge!...”
“Oh, but my beautiful and dear lady,” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed, “that is a most unfortunate frame of mind to have got into. Just let us see if I can’t help you with your business affairs, and then you’ll feel better. You can get up some little fêtes — things like tennis tournaments with your neighbours — that will make the time pass more easily.”
“Tournaments!” the lady exclaimed, for in her turn she had not understood more of Mr. Sorrell’s French than that one word. “Why, that is a very splendid inspiration.”
They passed at that moment under the great archway, and came into the courtyard, which was all in shadow because of its very high walls.
“Now I will take you to your bath,” the lady said. “I hope you will clean yourself very well, for in order to do you honour I will have you eat out of the same plate as myself at supper to-night.”
CHAPTER IX.
THE armed men all around them had dispersed at the voice of the page Jehan, and the Lady Blanche was directing Mr. Sorrell’s steps towards the gate of the large keep. In the middle of the courtyard it frowned, a great mass of stone, towering high up above the surrounding walls.
“But, look here,” Mr. Sorrell said in English, “isn’t it about time this pageant business came to an end? I am always anxious to oblige, but I’ve really got business on hand that makes me want to get up to town as quickly as possible.”
The Lady Blanche shook her head, and then the two ladies attendant upon her came upon them. They were somewhat out of breath, for they had not been able to keep step with the armed men.
“Ladies,” the Lady Blanche said, “it is very negligent of you not to have attended on me better; but take now this holy man to his bath, and attend upon him with all the diligence that you may, for such an excellent man as this is not often seen, and he has put into my head such an idea as, by God’s grace, shall win us great honour, and redound for ever to the ridicule of our abominable men-folk.”
All these things seemed to move somewhat too fast for Mr. Sorrell exactly to get the hang of them. He had a vague idea that he ought to put his foot down and insist upon some sort of explanation, but his feet were quite literally the weakest part of him, and on the rough paving of the courtyard they betrayed him at every step. He felt that he was being gently coerced by people who were the most amiable in the world, but by people who did not pay the least attention to any of his desires or even to any of his words. The Lady Blanche had already, with her swift and determined gait, entered the arched door of the Inner Keep, the pendant cloth from her high steeple hat fluttering bravely behind her. The bowmen and pikemen had mostly disappeared into what appeared to be the stony hollows of the great walls. But he had the feeling that all sorts of shaggy and tousled heads were peering at them out of crevices and crannies that formed the windows in the immense cliff of stone that shut them all in. A certain grimness, a certain ugliness rather astonished Mr. Sorrell; he could not see why if people could afford to build a castle like this, they could not equally afford to beautify it. But there were no rose bushes on the bare stone of the wall; there was no ampeloposis; there was not even any ivy. It was all straight up and down hard, grey stone, so that he had the feeling of being at the bottom of an immense well; whilst far up above them a flag of red and white chequers fluttered lazily against the blue sky.
