Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 393
With the regularity of the hands of a clock the Aldingtons had pursued this circular itinerary for seven years — London, Aldington Towers, Fawkenhurst, London, Egypt and then Batalha. But three years before Aldington himself had developed stomach troubles. So, at the recommendation of Sir Chrested Joins, they had managed to squeeze three weeks at Wiesbaden into their yearly round. Lady Aldington herself suffered from no troubles of any physical kind.
She was thirty-one. She stood five foot nine in her stockinged feet. She rode ten stone, and she rode it for an hour and a half every morning of the year, wet or fine. She was called a hard woman, and she had few preoccupations in life except that she desired to be able to classify her husband’s attacks of bad temper and insubordination. She put these down as a rule to ill health. Thus she discovered that Aldington never attended a sitting or voted in the House of Lords without on the next day behaving like a sulky wild beast with criminal leanings. She was, therefore, fairly certain that this came from the fact that the Upper Chamber had a particularly bad atmosphere, and that its wine list contained the name of one really good wine — a Pontet Canet of which Aldington was particularly fond. Thus four years before she had got her husband to pair with a Tory peer who had become incapable of putting in an appearance through confirmed and premature senile decay.
It was part of Aldington’s disagreeable eccentricities that he obstinately insisted on remaining a Whig. He did not even follow the Marquis of Hartington into the Unionist fold. Nay, he had once, for a period of two months, held an inferior office in a Liberal Ministry; but two months after the general election he had had to resign. Fourteen cottages on the Fawkenhurst estate had been peremptorily closed by the local sanitary authority, and the Liberal Government being engaged at that time in promoting a bill for the housing of the poor, Lord Aldington’s name, however short the party might be of peers, was held not to decorate the roll of the ministry. Indeed, it was quite as disagreeable to the Liberals to have Lord Aldington for a supporter as it was to the Tories that he should vote against them.
CHAPTER III
THEY had been at Wiesbaden exactly twenty days and they were to leave for Aldington Towers on the next day but one. On the following day Lady Aldington was going over to Nauheim to lunch with her aunt, Mrs. Crewkerne, who was taking the waters there. And suddenly, whilst her husband was bearing down upon her over the red velvet carpet from out of the crowd that surrounded the bars, it occurred to Lady Aldington that her husband for the last three years had always had one of his fits of bad temper on the twentieth day of their stay at Wiesbaden. Undoubtedly the curative waters did something to his liver. She replied to him:
“I do not think I feel like being introduced to anyone at this moment.”
But Aldington positively caught hold of her elbow. His face had a malicious grin that showed ugly teeth, discoloured by excessive smoking.
“I tell you the man is an idiot,” he said; “come and be introduced to him. You can’t tell he won’t be your last and dearest love.”
Lady Aldington moved slowly round, and faced once more the cockney and his wife. Of the man they were speaking to she could perceive only the point of a patent leather shoe, because he was sitting down upon the grey velvet seat. And suddenly Lady Aldington felt contented. She imagined —
nay, she was certain that she had discovered another cause for one of her husband’s bad days, and if she knew the cause she could put up with it. For the point was that she had to keep Aldington in order. She could be deaf to his brutal speeches; she did not like them, but she could put up with them. But she was afraid — she was always afraid, that there would come an extended period of time in which he would defy her. Then she would have but one remedy, and a remedy that she could only apply once. She would have to have him imprisoned. He forged her cheques from time to time. But for the moment she felt almost happy.
Aldington was really pulling her down the slightly sloping velvet carpet. A little in advance of her he cannoned against the two cockneys, as a billiard ball might do, and they fled apart to left and to right. Lady Aldington heard his rough voice exclaim:
“I want to introduce you to my wife, Macdonald.”
And then: “Count Macdonald, Lady Aldington.”
She was so occupied in her mind with the problem of her husband’s health that she hardly raised her eyes to the young man’s face. She had the impression that he was very tall, and that his dress clothes fitted him quite well, which she wouldn’t have expected of anyone who was a friend of the two cockneys. She murmured the indistinct sounds — the little meaningless whispers that, in England, betoken pleasure at making a new acquaintance. Then she asked:
“Are you taking the waters? Do you find that they affect your temper?”
She became still more aware of the great height of the man when she observed that he appeared to be slightly bending his knees in order to come within range of her ear. She became aware, too, that he was making slight lateral gestures with his long and nervous hands; and she bowed minutely, first to the right to the cockney man and then to his wife upon her left, for she realised that, in a correctly English manner. Count Macdonald was effecting an introduction. She realised also that the name of these people was Pett, and that Count Macdonald had the slightest possible suspicion, for all the singular Englishness in his appearance, of a foreign accent. It was just that he pronounced his words too well — he pronounced them as well as Lady Aldington herself did, and she knew that she was regarded as pedantic. And then he said:
“No; I’m in attendance on the Grand Duke, in order to cement our reconciliation.”
And at that moment the cockney man entered the conversation.
“The Wiesbaden waters,” he said, “contain sulphur, strontium, and barytes. The bath doctors are always claiming that they find radium, too. You’ll find about as much radium in a penny packet of Epsom salts.”
There was about all his vowels the faint tinge of the jargon of West Essex. Thus if he did not actually say “abaht” and “all-wise,” he at least suggested those sounds. His voice, however, had a slightly aggressive and slightly authoritative ring, and then his wife spoke.
“Your ladyship needn’t,” she said, “that is to say, no one really need feel distress if their tempers are slightly altered by the action of the waters — if they’re following the regime.”
“It’s very kind of you,” Lady Aldington said. “My temper is all right, thank you.”
And then Aldington put in: “It’s me she means. We’ve been behaving like cat and dog all the evening.” Mr. Pett giggled. But his wife looked seriously at the peer. She had the air of a small pink sparrow who might be thoughtfully considering the case of a half-bred Newfoundland.
“Oh, you needn’t be concerned,” she said. “It won’t last. People are rather morbid nowadays, and they’re apt to think that temporary depressions are becoming incorporated into their characters. But it isn’t so in this case. At least, I have never heard of any ill resulting from the use of these waters. There are, of course, baths that can only be used with extreme caution.”
Aldington stuck his hands into his trousers’ pockets; he leaned back the upper part of his body, and guffawed. And then a little bell rang. Macdonald moved slightly forward, bowing minutely to Lady Aldington.
“I am afraid that means,” he said, “that I must get back to the Grand Duke.” He muttered some more words in which “delighted” and “acquaintance” could faintly be distinguished; and then he slipped between Lady Aldington and Mr. Pett, and sauntered towards the white door of a box.
Mr. Pett called jocularly after him: “Ain’t the old Duke afraid you’ll stick a dagger in his back?”
And then he continued to Lady Aldington: “Used to be a first-class anarchist in the old Houndsditch days.”
“He looks extraordinarily English,” Lady Aldington said vaguely.
“Oh, he’s as Russian as they make them,” Mr. Pett answered. “His ancestors went over to Russia in the time of Peter the Great. But if you’d read my travel notes in the Daily Herald you’d have seen how I proved that they don’t turn out any Russians or French or Germans or niggers any more. The whole world’s just engaged in manufacturing middle-class Englishmen, whether it’s me or you, or Mrs. Pett, or your husband, or the man I bought Ansichtskarten of this morning. He looked exactly like any English clerk, and he thought like any English clerk from what I could gather in conversation with him. The same with the porter at the hotel where we’re stopping. He’s a nigger, but he ought to have been born in Acton.” Mr. Pett pronounced it Ecton.
Lady Aldington said: “That’s very interesting, now.”
“It means,” Mrs. Pett said, “that we’re gradually approaching to a unity of mankind. We’re bringing the whole world to one standard. Then the brotherhood of man will begin.”
“When we’re all English middle-class?” Lady Aldington asked.
“Your ladyship means lower middle-class,” Mr. Pett said.
“Well, I suppose I do,” Lady Aldington conceded amiably.
CHAPTER IV
LADY ALDINGTON was on the platform waiting for a train that was to take her to Nauheim. She was going to spend the day with her aunt, Mrs.
Crewkeme, a disagreeable old lady, who was troubled with her heart. She had written very minutely to Emily with the programme of her day of cures. Thus, Lady Aldington was to be at the hotel at a quarter to eleven. She might walk with her aunt to the baths, and then she might wait outside for half an hour, after which she would be permitted to walk back with Mrs. Crewkerne to the hotel. The cure, Mrs. Crewkerne wrote, was very severe. Thus, she would have to go to bed from a quarter-past eleven until one-fifteen. It would take her till half-past one to dress, so that Lady Aldington would be free to pay calls. She had better leave cards on Mrs. Sidney Trench, the wife of the Minister for Education, and on Lady Jane Wills, who was a particular friend of Mrs. Crewkerne’s and would feel offended if Emily neglected her. There was also Baroness Sassonoff, the delightful lady they had met in Cairo three years before.
Lady Aldington was quite determined that she would not call upon either the wife of the Education Minister or Lady Jane Wills. But the thought of seeing the Baroness Sassonoff gave her some pleasure, and she determined, after she had taken a little walk in the park, that she would take her chance of finding that cosmopolitan lady at home.
Aldington, true to their tradition of presenting to the world the aspect of a model couple, had sauntered down to the station with her. He wore a rough suit of light grey tweed which made him appear enormous, and a panama hat which gave him more than his usual aspect of untidiness. Lady Aldington wished that he had not, and he knew it. It was one of his ways of administering a pin-prick. They did not, however, speak a single word all the way along the ugly, broad, new streets until they reached the ugly, squat, new railway station with its aspect of being half music-hall and half prison. Lady Aldington managed to take her own ticket, for she could get as far as three or four words in German, and Aldington was able to get from an automatic machine the penny ticket that admitted him on to the platform. Then he went to the bookstall to buy for his wife a copy of the Daily Mercury, a journal which her ladyship cordially detested.
Lady Aldington was standing on the platform meditatively tapping the ground between her feet with the point of her parasol, and she was regarding the place where she was tapping, for a quick glance had shown her that there were upon the platform at least half a dozen people whose existence she did not want to acknowledge. She was wearing an immense hat of thin straw, with a single very long pheasant’s feather buckled into it, so that, since it came down well over her ears, she was quite able to avoid anybody’s glances. For the rest of her she had on a costume of white linen touched off about the shoulders and breast with passementerie work in pink. She had also a diaphanous cloak of ivory-coloured lace that fell from her shoulders right down to her feet. It was very hot weather that summer. And suddenly she heard a voice, with the slightest possible foreign intonation, saying:
“It is Lady Aldington, isn’t it?”
She had to look up, and then she smiled.
Count Macdonald was standing before her with his hat off. He had in his left hand a truly enormous parcel of an irregular funnel shape, enveloped in white tissue paper. He waved the great object lightly in the air, and exclaimed: “I’m taking these as a compliment from the Grand Duke to Madame Sassonoff in Bad-Nauheim;” and then he added rather gaily, “I want to apologise immensely...”
“But there’s nothing to apologise for, in taking flowers to Madame Sassonoff,” Lady Aldington said. “I’d take some myself if I could find them on the road.”
At that moment Aldington came up, waving as ostentatiously as he could the paper that he had bought. He knew that, much as his wife disliked reading it, she disliked other people to see her with it immensely more.
“Sassonoffs!” he said; “are they at Nauheim? If I’d known I would have come along.”
“Well, come,” Macdonald exclaimed sunnily. “We are both going to pay our respects, as it appears.”
“Ah,” Aldington said, with a grin that disclosed all his bad teeth beneath his ragged clipped moustache, “I knew you were birds of a feather.”
“It looks as if your feathers were the same,” Macdonald said, “if you want to call on Madame Sassonoff too.”
“There you’re wrong,” his lordship answered. “I want to, but I want to meet your friends, the Petts, more.” He added, “I’m going to meet them at the Pump Room in a quarter of an hour and motor them to Mainz.”
“It’s an odd taste,” Macdonald said; “but they’re quite dear people.”
Lord Aldington looked his wife straight in the eyes. “Mrs. Pett,” he said, “reminds me of someone I know.”
A small invincible shudder went all over Lady Aldington’s tall white figure. Aldington grinned pantomimically, and at that moment the train wandered into the station with its genial air of not knowing exactly where it wanted to go. It happened that the steps of a long car stopped just in front of them. And Lord Aldington, taking each of them by a shoulder, fairly pushed them in. Macdonald found an empty compartment, into which he introduced Emily. He stood in the doorway.
“I don’t in the least know,” he said, “whether you want me with you?”
“Oh yes, come in,” she said. “Sit down quickly so as to show that you are with me.”
She indicated with her eyes the corridor behind him, and Macdonald perceived a man with a head covered with an immense growth of tawny hair flecked with white, and a great beard resembling a bird’s nest. He was surveying Lady Aldington with his head bent down, his eyes looking beneath his brows as if he intended to butt her.
“Please don’t look at him,” Lady Aldington said. “Please don’t! At the slightest encouragement he’ll come in.”
The man passed lingeringly onwards, the last Macdonald saw of him being his enormous calves, that were encased in grey worsted stockings.
“He might have chaperoned us, you know,” Macdonald said.
“He might, of course,” Lady Aldington said coolly; “but I want to ask you half a dozen things, and if he had come in we should have had to listen all the way to a rehearsal of his next speech, asking that the carriage of whisky by rail should be suppressed by law in Scotland.”
“Oh, you know him, then?” Macdonald said.
“Of course I know him,” Lady Aldington answered. “He is Dr. Farquhar, the member for the Mull of Cantyre.”
“But how do you get to know such people?” Macdonald asked. “The welts of his boots must have been three inches broad. I thought he was just a substantial butterfly attracted by the flame.”
“Oh no, he wasn’t,” Lady Aldington said; “if he’d been that I could have managed to deal with him. He is an awful inheritance of my husband’s Whig traditions. We’re one of the great Whig Houses, you know.” Macdonald raised both his hands in a slight foreign gesture that might have been one of horror or it might have been mere pity.
