Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 431
Mr. Blood exclaimed:
“By Jove, you are right!” He looked at Mr. Fleight appraisingly. “You want me to help you. Why?”
“You see,” Mr. Fleight opened his story, and he ventured to sit down, not in the chair opposite Mr. Blood, but on its arm, “I was going mad. No, not mad — on the point of screaming hysteria.”
“That’s good,” Mr. Blood said; “good for a fellow who aspires to my friendship.”
“Oh, not your friendship,” Mr. Fleight answered. “The most I dare to want is to be your instrument — your flail.”
“Eh!” Mr. Blood ejaculated.
“I know that’s too active a simile,” Mr. Fleight said, “but I can’t think of anything better for the moment. I know you’re too lazy even to mock at Society, let alone to hit it or destroy it. But say I’m the fox with the tail on fire that you could set going into the com. If you heartened up a chap like me to becoming a duke and hereditary standard-bearer — and Heaven knows I’m rich enough — you’d laugh. It would be just as funny as watching the cabs on the Embankment.”
“You’re deucedly familiar,” Mr. Blood grumbled.
“I am,” Mr. Fleight said; “and I’m talking some nonsense. But it’s my only chance, and I seem to know you. I seem to know you so well. I met you when you came down to Oxford in’94 to stay with old Plodge. I heard you talking for three whole nights, for three solid hours each. Old Plodge had me in — with an object. I’m not setting up to claim acquaintance with you on that account — only knowledge. I don’t mind saying I’ve followed you about since then. I joined this club when I saw you were a member. I’ve joined every club you belonged to that I could get into. Why, I heard you lecturing the King!”
“The who?” Mr. Blood asked.
“The King,” Mr. Fleight repeated. “The late King. Two years ago — at Goodwood, in the Royal Enclosure. I got there by giving five hundred to Colonel Murchison. And the King was yawning fit to die, watching the horses come in. And he said: ‘Good Lord, what a bore all this racing is!’ And you let loose on him, and he chuckled.”
“He did, did he?” Mr. Blood asked. “And you, you dirty little Jew, you were eavesdropping?”
“I was just that,” Mr. Fleight said firmly. “I don’t eat humble pie for it. It was what I had paid my money for. Time and again I’ve sat at the Royal Sports Club in an armchair with its back to yours, listening to you ragging the fools there. What do you suppose I paid my subscription there for? I hate sport. I hate racing, so what did I pay five hundred to go to Goodwood for? There were the two most distinguished persons, for me, in the whole world. And one of them was shouting a whole lot of interesting stuff at the top of his voice, and the other was chuckling as a king chuckles at a court jester. Was I to stick my fingers in my ears?”
“A true gentleman would have walked away,” Mr. Blood said ironically.
“What price my five hundred then?” Mr. Fleight asked. “You chaps — true gentlemen, as you just sneered — ought to protect yourselves better. You ought not to let little Jews like me buy our way into your swellest clubs.
“That’s true, too,” Mr. Blood conceded peaceably. He sat reflecting for a moment. “Look here, Aaron,” he produced the fruits of his cogitations, “you drop your Scotch name and call yourself not Rothwell but Rothweil — Aaron Rothweil — and hang me if I don’t take you home to tea with me so as to hear the rest of your interesting recital! I want to know about you. I want to know all about you. I always want to know everything, you know. I shouldn’t like to introduce you to anyone that dropped in as Fleight, when your nose says Rothweil.” He added, after a moment, with an air of making a concession that decency called for in him:
“And if I find, after consideration, that you are not a horrid little bore, or a thief, or anything — one can never know with these informal introductions — I shan’t give you the cold shoulder later on. I don’t mean that I shall ask you down to Corbury, but I shouldn’t refuse to chat with you if I met you in Pall Mall. I can’t say more than that, but I’ll go so far in return for your giving yourself the trouble to walk round to my rooms. Some of the members will be coming back here, and I can’t stand the look of them. They make me feel as if I were here for an improper purpose.”
“But look here,” Mr. Fleight said, “I don’t want to waste your time. Either I’m some good or I’m none. About my antecedents.”
Mr. Blood said: “Well?”
“This is me,” Mr. Fleight continued: “I was born in Pont Street, Glasgow, behind the Union Music Hall. I was brought up by a bricklayer’s wife in a place called Pluckley. I was sent to the Pluckley National School till I was twelve. Then I was sent to Bludger’s — taken away by I didn’t know who. Then I went to St. Paul’s for one term. Then I was sent to Harrow. You will observe that the person looking after me was evidently going up in the world. Then I went to Brasenose.”
Mr. Blood said:
“The devil you did!” And then: “Oh, yes, I remember, you told me. You were under my old tutor — the great Plodge.”
“Yes,” Mr. Fleight continued; “that was where I learned that you were the greatest intellect of the day. Old Plodge used to talk of you. He took me up no end — that was why he had me in to hear you talk, three nights running. He said you sounded the note of the modem world — which was not so bad for old Plodge! He used to say to me: ‘Moses, though you’re what you are, I’ll make you a shining light of the New Jerusalem that this mighty Empire is. You shall be what Blood ought to have been, if he wasn’t lazier than a buffalo and prouder than a hog.’ You were up ten years before me, of course.”
“Yes,” Mr. Blood said reflectively, “I suppose I was poor old Plodge’s pet tragedy. It makes it a sort of duty in me to give you a lift, if I’m worth anything to you — nearly broke the poor old man’s heart, I did. I guess I was the only one of his hot-house blooms that did not die at least Pro-Consul. Go on with your biography.”
“I took everything that any one chap could take,” Mr. Fleight said, and he added modestly: “With old Plodge shoving me it wasn’t any great miracle.”
“I observe,” Mr. Blood said, “that you spare me the list of your academic distinctions.”
“What use are they to me?” Mr. Fleight retorted. “I’m a millionaire. But I ate my dinners at the Middle Temple.”
“By Jove!” Mr. Blood exclaimed. He reflected, and then he added slowly: “If you come to think of it, you have every qualification for real greatness. A Scotsman, a Jew, a barrister. You know you are really Leader of the House of Commons by your triple birthright. And rich, too! And you recommend yourself to me for help, as being a hot-house shoot of poor old Plodge! Of course, I owe his unhappy ghost the reparation of helping you to do what I didn’t care to do myself. Let’s talk about your making a career. Good heavens! Undoubtedly you are cut out to be the saviour of these realms in the troublous times through which we are passing.”
“I think I really ought to be cut out for it,” Mr. Fleight said, with great modesty in his manner.
A shabby man — it was really the clockwinder — peered in at the door, and Mr. Blood ejaculated in tones of panic:
“Here’s one of the members. I can’t stand this. Come along.” They hurried out of the building and into Mr. Fleight’s motor, which was one of the largest in this country.
Mr. Blood was a singular and mysterious person to such of his world as had observed his existence. A hundred years ago he would have represented the Englishman and the gentleman. Then, the business of the world being the struggle with Napoleon, all the legions of Europe were being conducted across the campaign grounds of a continent — but exclusively by younger sons. At home in England the real Squires in their scarlet coats were tranquilly jumping over hedges in pursuit of the fox. In that age Mr. Blood would have been the commonest thing of his class and station. He would have been a “character” when all the population were characters; he would not have cared a halfpenny whether the nation was going to ruin, just as to-day he cared even less. This seemed amazing to his contemporaries.
He was, in fact, just an anachronism, and an inactive one at that. He hunted the fox, but he seldom troubled to try to be in at the death; he was very wealthy, but he made not the least use of his wealth. He did not marry; he did not sit in Parliament. He hardly entertained at all His racing stable was so small as to be almost immaterial; his yellow and green colours were practically never seen in anything better than a small selling sweepstake. His house at Corbury, in North Kent, was big, stood in a huge park, and was moderately well appointed, but he very seldom lived in it. He gave it over to his brother Reginald, for it was part of his oddity that he should have a brother three-quarters of an hour younger than himself.
He pleased himself pretty well about the company he kept. Smart people liked him because he said caustic, outrageous or perfectly scandalous things; sober people, because of his official Radicalism. Tories approved of him because he, better than any other, could demonstrate, when he took the trouble, that the country was going to the dogs. He got more invitations than any other man in London, and he accepted some of them. He appeared to have no principle of selection.
But what attracted him more than anything to any particular set of people was an avid curiosity. If he didn’t in the least desire to do anything, he was possessed by an insatiable desire to know everything that there was to know. His rooms at 22a, Burton Street, Mayfair, where he was waited on by a man who had been the son of the gamekeeper at Corbury, were lined with books, for he was a great reader. There were books about forestry, about seamanship, about the state of the army, about mining, about engineering, about the suppression of mutinies, political memoirs, social memoirs, memoirs of tramps and rogues like Carew, military biographies, and the histories of theatrical touring companies. His books, in fact, were all about “things” — solid, real things or solid, real people.
In his sitting room, on the black marble mantelshelf, there were specimens of six kinds of quartz, of the regulation army cartridges of Austria, Prussia, France, Russia and the United Kingdom. On the highly-polished, heavy, black walnut table there were hoofs of two of his favourite horses set in silver, the one serving as a pen rack, the other as an inkstand. On this table there was also a large mother-of-pearl blotting book. A smaller table near the door supported about twenty of the journals of the day, from the Field to the Athenaeum, and the Times and Punch to the Manchester Guardian and the Quarterly Review. There was a still larger table beneath the windows, and here, on an embroidered and very white cloth, were laid out tea-things for six people — the tea-pot, the kettle and the jugs being of the heaviest and ugliest solid silver, dating from the year 1856. Behind the tea-things was an immense cigar-box, also of silver, a smaller cigarette-box, a silver spirit light for the cigars, and a large silver Tantalus, with square, heavy, cut-glass bottles, containing six different varieties of whisky and brandy.
It was into this room that he introduced Mr. Fleight, who felt, with his quick sense of artistic atmospheres, that he might have been back in 1860. For it was part of Mr. Blood’s attitude absolutely to ignore the art, literature and furnishing of his day — though, indeed, he professed a contempt almost equally absolute for the arts of the ‘sixties. But you’ve got to have something, as he said to Mr. Fleight, who had been moved to exclaim on entering: “How awfully complete!” These things — even these very rooms — had been his father’s in his bachelor days, for Mr. Blood owned not only this house, but all the houses in Burton Street, Mayfair.
He let Mr. Fleight in, sat him down on a heavy walnut-wood chair, and then rang for his man, who occupied a room amongst the attics, and was allowed to consider the afternoons from one till half past four as his own time.
“Now you can go on with your biography,” he said, planting himself before his black marble mantelshelf. “We won’t smoke, if you don’t mind, because some women will be coming in.”
“I’d just like to know,” Mr. Fleight asked, “what you’ve gathered from my biography hitherto?”
“I should say,” Mr. Blood answered, “that you were the illegitimate son of an actress, because you have a faint tinge of the theatrical manner. Your father, I know, was Aaron Rothweil, who was probably a Jew in a small way when you were born. But as he got richer he looked after you progressively better. Then he left you all his money.”
“Those are about the facts of the case,” Mr. Fleight said; “but it might make things clearer if I told you that there were more romantic circumstances attaching to the matter.”
“There are no such things as romantic circumstances,” Mr. Blood commented. “A man’s a man; a woman’s a woman. And we are all odd creatures. But, of course, the odder your parents were, the better chance you have.”
“That’s what I was trying to bring out,” Mr. Fleight continued. “My mother was Maggie Tallantyre and my father was the proverbial one Jew who ever went to Glasgow. He did not die in the workhouse because my mother lent him money and packed him off South again. But he had come down to being a scene-shifter at the music-hall before my mother picked him up.”
“So your mother was Maggie Tallantyre? You’re a lucky devil to have had such a clever mother!” Mr. Blood commented.
“She died about eighteen months ago,” Mr. Fleight said. “She left me just over fifty thousand pounds.”
“I suppose she would,” Mr. Blood answered. “There was never any one like her. They used to say that the gags she put into her songs were her own gags.”
“They were her own songs,” Mr. Fleight asserted. “She wrote the words and she made up the tunes, and later on she even orchestrated them — when she had had time to take lessons.”
“Well, well,” Mr. Blood said. “Have you inherited any of her talents?”
“I like good light music,” Mr. Fleight informed him. “I like good light literature; I like good pictures, and I loathe horse-racing.”
“Good for you!” Mr. Blood said. “You’re a paragon!”
“I don’t see how that helps,” Mr. Fleight enquired, “in a hopeless, inartistic country like this.”
“I’ll tell you how it will help,” Mr. Blood exclaimed. “I understand you want to be a climber. If you’re going to succeed at it you’ll have to do it by backing light arts. The people who make your reputation nowadays are the cheap novelists, the cheap journalists — any kind of cheap talker who will talk about you in return for meals in marble halls. You can’t do it by going racing. This is a democratic age and racing is played out. The way you rise nowadays is through the bookstalls.”
“I know,” Mr. Fleight said. “That was why I dropped Colonel Murchison.”
“And that, I suppose, is why Murchison cut his throat?” Mr. Blood commented. “I thought it was because he had taken your forty pieces of silver.”
“Oh, Lord, no!” Mr. Fleight answered. “He’d had a couple of thousand from me, and he thought he was going to make it fifty. But the chaps he introduced to me weren’t the least good to me. They thirsted for my money and what my money could buy. I tried about six months of them — took a shoot down in Hants and another in Scotland, and let Murchison ask parties down for me. Of course, I’m a dead shot, but it bored me — it bored me crazy. I’m a plus man at golf, too — and that bores me dead. And that sort of man — I can’t listen to his sort of talk and they won’t listen to mine. And I couldn’t see where Murchison’s men were going to lead me. I don’t want to own a Derby winner. Think of the boredom of it! Of course, his getting me into the Royal Box at Goodwood was worth the five hundred I paid him for it, because I overheard your conversation, and that gave me the sort of idea of a life that I shouldn’t be like a fish out of water in — though I believe what would suit me best would be to sell second-hand clothes over the counter. But of course, I can’t do that. Anyhow, I told Murchison I was going to drop sport and he went and cut his throat. Pigeons were getting so deuced scarce.”
“And a good job, too,” Mr. Blood commented. He stood reflecting for a moment or two. “What was it I said to the late King?” he asked at last. “I don’t want the whole of it, but just a pointer — the thing that impressed you.”
“It was when you said that the last action recorded in the history of modem civilisation — the last action that was worthy of a gentleman — was when your ancestor stole the Crown jewels. Then the King chuckled.”
“Oh, I remember now,” Mr. Blood said. “I’d lost my temper. He had just said to me: ‘What a confounded bore all this racing is!’ — and he really felt it, poor dear! But what the deuce did it matter to me if this country is given up to advertising agents and if the Throne is the worst agency of the lot? What else did I say? How far did I go?”
“I should say you went a long way,” Mr. Fleight answered. “You told him that he was just an advertising agent for the Crown; that he lay awake all night inventing spontaneous acts of graciousness and bored himself to death all day in the effort to appear like a sportsman, sticking over the front of the Royal Box with a white hat and a twenty-five shilling cigar. And you went on and on and he kept on laughing.”
“Well, I must have been in the vein, that day,” Mr. Blood said. “I’d forgotten all about it.”
“I suppose,” Mr. Fleight said meditatively, “you really are something tremendous?”
“Oh, tremendous!” Mr. Blood said. “The only thing of my kind left in the world. Like the last mastodon. I sit and think what would happen if I really got up and moved. But nothing would happen. There would be a conspiracy of silence; the halfpenny papers would not mention it, as they do not mention the chap who stole the Irish insignia. They would not mention my ancestor nowadays. You heard how I strangled the groom at Newport, Rhode Island — strangled him with these two hands that you see? Well, none of the papers mentioned that achievement, and yet that is about all I am fit for.”
Mr. Fleight ventured to ask how Mr. Blood had got out of it.
