Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 382
For a moment Miss Peabody really looked quite dangerous, but she sat down after she had shrugged her shoulders.
“Of course” — she addressed herself markedly to Mrs. Foster—”a young man can always propose by letter, preferably addressed to the parents of his intended. That is a very great advantage, for a young man cannot afterwards get out of his engagement as he could if the proposal were made in the private circumstances that are usual in Europe. I expect to see a complete disappearance of the Breach of Promise Suit in the United States.”
Mrs. Foster, who was really placable enough, remarked:
“Oh, well, my dear, I have no doubt that if you are managing the United States, they’re well managed. But if you didn’t sleep well, I hope there wasn’t anything the matter with your room; because, of course, that’s my business, and not these things that I don’t understand very well; though Admiral Brent was accustomed to say, that for all I was so quiet, I could see as far over a millstone as the man who made the sixty-two foot telescope that there was such an excitement about in the year 1852, which was two years after I was born.”
Olympia said:
“Oh, there was nothing the matter with the room. I had anxieties.”
Miss Jenkins said suddenly:
“Will you not take some more coffee, miss?”
And Miss Peabody answered tartly: “I have already signified that I desire more coffee. It stands to reason as I upset my first cup.” Mr. Foster exclaimed:
“Anxieties, my honoured guest? I hope not. Not about money, or — er — about my nephew?” Miss Jenkins said:
“Miss Peabody’s little dog was lost nearly all night, sir.”
“And enough to make anybody anxious,” Mr. Foster commented.
Olympia said coldly:
“It is extraordinary how servants interrupt in this country. In Boston we should not stand it for a minute.”
Mrs. Foster really trembled with nervousness.
“Oh,” she said, “Miss Jenkins is hardly a servant. She’s the Lady Savylle’s confidential attendant. She has very kindly consented to wait upon us because the butler has a bad foot, and though I’m sure we have got other servants enough. I don’t think I should like to see them handle her Ladyship’s best breakfast service, which is all real Spode, though I am sure I don’t know what that may mean. But perhaps,” she continued anxiously, “your little dog doesn’t like your room. Perhaps you would like to change on that account?”
Again Miss Jenkins interrupted.
“Major Foster doesn’t like his room. Perhaps her Lady — I mean Miss Peabody — would like to change with him?”
“I shall certainly do nothing of the sort,” Miss Olympia said. And then Mrs. Foster continued: “As for Edward, I’m perfectly certain he never gave anybody any anxiety in his life, except when he went away like that. I had a long conversation with him last night, and it quite brought the tears to my eyes. We have been cruel and misjudging to him all these years, and I’m not going to sit here and listen to suggestions that he cost anybody any anxiety. It’s not fair, and I won’t.” And Mrs. Foster, who was really shaking with anger, stood up and began to move along the table. “I’m sure,” she exclaimed, “if there’s anything I can do to make up for it I will; and it’s the greatest satisfaction to me to have him in this house, and I hope he will never leave it.”
“But it’s Lady Savylle’s house,” Mr. Foster said. “I don’t care,” Mrs. Foster replied; “I don’t care whose house it Is. It’s the house he likes best in the world, and I hope he may never leave it.” And Mrs. Foster went agitatedly out of the room.
It was not really a very comfortable breakfast for anybody. The major and Miss Delamare and Mrs. Kerr Howe drifted in one after the other. But Miss Peabody, who had finished her breakfast at least half an hour before, was peering into the breakfast-room from behind the statue of a plaster lion that was gnawing the head off of a plaster serpent. Miss Jenkins was careful to inform them of this fact, and indeed they could see George Washington frisking round the base of the statue itself, so that they all sat as far away as they could from each other at the long table and spoke hardly at all. And after that they had a long day of the park, and the piano, and the proofs, which were corrected against tree-trunks, all of them being under the surveillance of Miss Peabody. And in the evening the major and Mrs. Kerr Howe and Miss Delamare tried to play bridge, but, as Miss Peabody was in a mood to unbend and desired to learn this frivolous and innocent game, they all retired to bed at a quarter to ten, having got with difficulty through one rubber.
The major had changed his bedroom because, as he remarked to his aunt, the noise in the huge chimney was distracting. And, as he also remarked, if his day could not have been said to resemble the dazzling glitter of life which he had not been accustomed to lead among the idle and dissolute Smart Set, it could not, on the other hand, be said to differ very much from a rest cure in the country which the doctors had recommended him to take. So that there, as he said, they all were.
In this singular peace three days passed. They were all really very tired people on whom London had enforced a desire for rest — all except Miss Peabody, who desired not so much rest as a period for reflection. Miss Peabody, of course, did not desire that any of Mr. Foster’s money — which she regarded as already her own — should go to Miss Delamare’s theatre. At least, she was not quite sure that she did not desire it. She had a natural hatred for Miss Delamare, as she had a natural hatred for most people. And she would very much have liked to have hit Miss Delamare very hard, just as she would very much have liked to have hit Mrs. Kerr Howe harder still. But when it came to the theatre she was not quite certain. She was even not quite certain that she would be able, by any amount of denunciation, to make Mr. Foster abandon that scheme — but these were not quite ordinary circumstances. Mrs. Foster was now deeply engaged on the side of Miss Delamare, and although Miss Peabody had the greatest contempt in the world for Mrs. Foster, she could not help seeing that Mr. Foster was really extremely afraid of his wife. And even if Miss Peabody had wanted to smash Miss Delamare and Mrs. Kerr Howe over the incident of the panel, she was not by any means certain that they could be proved to have behaved disreputably enough to give her the handle which she wanted.
She considered that they had been hateful, but she could not prove that they had acted disreputably, without at least showing that she herself had been rather ridiculous.
She had, indeed, had a haughty interview with Miss Jenkins on the following night, and Miss Jenkins’s tale had so exactly coincided with the version that she got from the major himself, that Miss Peabody simply did not see how she could get any kind of guilt out of the proceedings.
And indeed she was not quite certain that she wanted the new theatre suppressed. She would have liked to have smashed Miss Delamare without smashing the theatre. She had tried to point out to Mr. Foster that Miss Delamare, whose chief accomplishments were that she could sing five notes and kick down her own back hair, was not exactly the sort of person to run a theatre which, she imagined, would be chiefly concerned with the plays of Ibsen and Mr. Bernard Shaw. But when she had propounded this theory to Mr. Foster it simply did not come off at all. Mr. Foster was so entirely ignorant of any theatrical knowledge, that he did not know the difference between musical comedy and the serious drama. Indeed, the only theatrical performance that he had ever seen was that of “Pigs is Pigs” itself, and this performance had so bewildered and so delighted him, and Miss Delamare had kicked about and sung with such grace, and smiled with such jolly sweetness, that Mr. Arthur Foster seriously considered that she was not only the greatest, but the nicest and most respectable actress in the world. Mrs. Foster, on the other hand, had several times been taken to performances of Shakespeare by her sister, the admiral’s wife, and these performances had so terrified or so bored her, since they all appeared to be gouging out each other’s eyes, or stabbing someone else in the back, or being an unpleasant ghost, or making incomprehensible speeches over skulls — Shakespeare, in fact, had so terrified and agonized Mrs. Foster, that when she came to see “Pigs is Pigs,” and Flossie twirling about and squeaking with her little voice, she really thought that this was, comparatively speaking, heaven. And she had already found Flossie so kind and attentive, and, as it were, daughterly, that she simply told her husband that there was an end of it. He had simply got to consider Miss Delamare as not only the greatest actress in the world, but as absolutely the one most suited to manage the new, pure drama.
So that when Miss Peabody tried gently to suggest that she could not imagine Miss Delamare playing Nora in “A Doll’s House,” or the heroine in “Man and Superman,” or, for the matter of that, a tragic charwoman who had to be arrested by a policeman for stealing a silver box that she had not stolen, she found that Mr. Foster, though he simply did not understand her, regarded her as talking almost blasphemously, since it was an article of faith in that household to consider that Miss Delamare could do anything. Moreover, Mr. Foster was aware that the greatest and most serious Nonconformist Dramatic Critic of the day had several times called Miss Delamare the symphonic embodiment of quaint imbecility; and although Mr. Foster did not in the least understand what this meant — for the matter of that Miss Delamare herself did not — it seemed to be a satisfactory testimonial to some sort of gifts and obvious respectability, since neither Mrs. nor Mr. Foster could imagine the great critic praising anybody who was not at least as respectable as Mrs. Gurney, of Earlham. They were perfectly convinced that he would not have soiled his pen by praising anyone who was at all disreputable — that was how it struck them; and Miss Peabody knew quite well that if she tried any further to interfere with this belief, they would simply tell her that, being a foreigner, she could not be expected to understand an institution so thoroughly British as musical comedy.
In that way she was really up against it, and, as has been remarked, she was not by any means certain that she wanted to stop the new theatre altogether. For, remarkable as it appeared to her, the prospect of being married, which for many years had seemed to her to be singularly remote, had operated in an extraordinary manner in changing her point of view. She found, when she questioned herself each night over her diary, that, extraordinary as the confession seemed, she was not any longer half so interested in the suppression of sin. She had actually to write down in the pages of that locked book that now that she was going to have — and indeed she was actually having — a good time herself, she was not so anxious to suppress the enjoyment of 640,000 reformed young men. Life, indeed, appeared to have an entirely new aspect for Miss Peabody.
She was beginning in England to discover that there were such things as social amenities, social scales, and social advancements. In Boston she had been a member of a rather disagreeable upper six hundred, but she was beginning to discover that it might be almost more agreeable in England to have the right to go through a door before some other woman. And she was beginning to think that it must be extraordinarily sweet to be called “Your Ladyship.” Once or twice when Miss Jenkins had given her this title by a slip of the tongue, Miss Peabody had positively quivered with delight. And Miss Peabody had been observing the manners and customs of the English people for long enough to know that the stage in some singular way led to titles. As far as she had been able to discover, every wife of an actor-manager was always “Her Ladyship.” So that she was not by any means certain that she desired the scheme for the new, pure theatre to be suppressed.
And even her scheme for the amalgamation of the L.S.S.V. and the B.A.A.S. tended a little in this direction. She was beginning to get tired of these things, and she was beginning to think that she wanted Mr. Foster to drop them too. She could not help seeing that that sort of thing was not really fashionable in England, and she imagined that, by amalgamating the two societies, putting them under the managership of a professional philanthropist like Colonel Hangbird, and nominating herself president and Mr. Foster vice-president — though they would have nothing whatever of the work of the associations, they would get just as much as ever of the glory, and, at the same time, they would not have attaching to them the sort of snuffy Nonconformist feeling that she perceived to attach to most British philanthropists, who generally wore low collars, soft felt hats and untidy beards. Since she had known and become engaged to the major, these adornments of the male being no longer appeared to her as desirable as they had done in the days when they had seemed to her to be the symbols of purity, benevolence and teetotalism. Alas! she no longer cared much for any of these three things, for she could not find any particular trace of them in her “intended.”
So that, as she saw her future life, she was going to be a patroness — a haughty and aloof patroness — of a quite meritorious philanthropic enterprise, and she was also going to be, as Mrs. Edward Brent Foster, quite a distinguished figure in British social life because she would have so much influence with the new theatre. It was an entirely different world. And, indeed, the only use that she had left for the labours of her old life was, that by keeping Mr. Foster hard at work on the amalgamating of the two societies that she intended to throw over, she kept him also entirely under her thumb, and occupied his study, which commanded a view of the entire parkland territory where a few deer wandered about between the characters of the drama that she was engaged in managing.
It was just before lunch on the third day that Miss Peabody observed her Ladyship’s Own Maid, who was all black and white like a magpie in her cap and apron, marching straight over the greensward in a bee-line for where the major was sitting under his oak tree. She was coming from the front door, which was at the end, not the middle, of the house. And Miss Peabody was out upon the greensward before she had breathed twice. And then all sorts of people turned up. Mr. Foster looked out of the window of his study; Mrs. Foster and Miss Delamare came out of the French windows of the drawing-room; Mrs. Kerr Howe, with her long proofs streaming from her hands, was walking swiftly towards the major, and, round the corner of the house, from the direction of the front door, there appeared no less than two policemen with bicycles, and a terrific old gentleman in a fur coat, who sat very high upon an immense horse. And they all of them bore down upon the major.
And the first sound that struck all their ears was the terrific voice of the old gentleman, who had reined up his brown horse within a yard or so of the major, and was extending his arm in a splendid gesture.
“Officers,” he shouted, “do your duty! That is the man. Arrest him at once for drunkenness, assault, the use of obscene language, and theft!”
They all of them stood absolutely still in the sunlight, except the two policemen, sturdy and pink-faced fellows, who pushed their bicycles bashfully towards the major. They each of them touched the glazed black shades of their caps to him, and, pulling their wallets from behind their backs, produced the one a blue, the other a white slip of paper; and each of them remarked, “Very sorry, sir, a summons, sir.”
The major carefully placed his book-mark between the pages of The Sacred Fount, set the book down on the brown rug upon which he was sitting, extended his hand, and exclaimed as he took the papers:
“That’s all right, that’s all right, my good men. Go round to the kitchen and get them to give you some beer.”
The two policemen, with automatic actions, swung their bicycles round and, pushing them at their sides, went away towards the house-end.
CHAPTER II.
IT was Mr. Arthur Foster who broke next the spell of appalled silence. He came out of his French window, and when he was near them he called in agitating and panting tones:
“What’s all this dreadful thing?”
The major was contentedly, and with attentive expression, reading the two summonses whilst he leant his back against the trunk of the oak tree. But the old gentleman, who was surveying them all triumphantly from the top of his immense horse, shouted out:
“This abandoned wretch has been visited by his country’s laws for the offence of drunkenness, assault, the use of obscene language, and theft!” Mr. Foster threw his hands up to the sky; Mrs. Foster remarked beneath her breath that Edward really seemed to have been enjoying life in spite of everything; Miss Delamare laughed so loudly that she really had to hold her sides; Mrs. Kerr Howe shook her proofs at the old gentleman and remarked: “You infamous old scoundrel!” Miss Jenkins stood perfectly still, looking at Miss Peabody with a watchful, attentive and questioning expression; Miss Peabody stood gazing at the major with enormous eyes, and her eyes did not believe and did not understand what they saw. She had observed for one thing, in a sort of a dream, that one of the policemen had, with a sudden, extraordinarily stiff and sharp movement, saluted Miss Jenkins as he went by, and Miss Jenkins had shaken her head and put one finger to her lips. And, in a sort of dream, Miss Peabody had noticed these things with satisfaction, for she considered that they pointed with absolute certainty to the fact that Miss Jenkins had a vulgar intrigue with this policeman, and she considered that this would give her a handle against Miss Jenkins, who was certainly not the sort of person to be the confidential attendant upon a lady of title. She remarked to herself: “I’ve got you, my lady.” And then she shook off her stiffness of consternation and addressed the major in the following terms. She stretched her arms out indeed, and was preparing to fall upon his neck, when it occurred to her that as the major was, sitting against a tree-trunk, that operation would be not only difficult but probably dangerous.
“Edward,” she said, “I don’t for a moment believe these odious and scandalous charges; but even if they were proved to the hilt, believe that your battered and tried heart should find upon this bosom a resting-place.”
Miss Jenkins looked at the major with a cool and dispassionate glance, and they all heard her remark to Mrs. Foster:
“Well then, even that’s no go, ma’am.” She walked away also in the direction of the house-end, and Miss Peabody remarked to herself with satisfaction that the odious creature had certainly gone to rejoin her policeman.
