Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 446
She had been looking at Mr. Blood, whom she regarded as the only sane person connected with the enterprise. And Mr. Blood accepted the tribute of her glance as a testimonial to his appearance of common sense.
“My dear,” he said, “that’s exactly the view that the public will take, and you’ve expressed it with extraordinary clearness, and it’s really the one thing that you could have said that will absolutely please Mr. Mitchell, isn’t it, Mr. Mitchell?”
Mr. Mitchell, who had said nothing, and never did say anything, said nothing now. He had made the New Review exactly what he had wanted to make it, and he didn’t mean to talk. Mr. Cluny Macpherson, however, began:
“There was a man called Fulijcks, who started a magazine in Hungary. And I said to him in a mud bath—”
“But that’s really the point,” Mr. Blood’s voice drowned that of Mr. Macpherson. “Mr. Mitchell has produced exactly the article that his employers wanted him to produce. What it amounts to, Miss Shipwright, is that if you’d really liked the magazine you’d have lost your job, because Mr. Rothweil would have shut it up. But as you dislike it so cordially your job will be absolutely safe, and you’ll go on being the secretary to this Review for ever and ever — or, at any rate, until the supply of articles that you don’t like is entirely exhausted in the world.”
“Well, that’s a comfort at any rate,” Miss Shipwright said, “for the work’s well paid and it’s easy — at any rate, it would be if Mr. Mitchell could be prevented from dropping his shaving paper and his washing bills into the basket for rejected manuscripts.”
“You shouldn’t,” Mr. Mitchell said, “have put that basket exactly where the slop basin used to stand.”
“You can’t,” Miss Shipwright retorted, “run this office as if it were a combination dressing room and sitting room for two bachelors. I’m a trained professional secretary and I must have some system.”
Mr. Mitchell, a gentleman of profound laziness, had decided that he would run this periodical from the flat occupied by Mr. Macpherson and himself. And this flat containing only three rooms was extremely inconvenient for the purpose. Indeed, on Thursday nights, which Mr. Mitchell devoted to looking through manuscripts which had been submitted to him, Mr. Macpherson was unable to retire until four o’clock in the morning, since Mr. Mitchell, who was quiet but obstinate, insisted on covering Mr. Macpherson’s bed with the manuscripts that he had accepted. Mr. Raggett, the sub-editor, was occupied until that hour in Mr. Macpherson’s bedroom in the composing of letters, which he wrote on the washhand-stand, to explain why Mr. Mitchell did not like the contributions of various writers whose work he refused. Mr. Mitchell’s own bedroom had to be left intact because immediately after the terrible labours of the Thursday night he had to fall into bed like a log and sleep until one o’clock on the following day.
Mr. Macpherson bore these hardships uncomplainingly and recognised that he deserved them for the honour and glory of it. In those three rooms they were engaged in saving British literature, and that was always something. Moreover, Mr. Macpherson had the great enjoyment of being able to inform rejected contributors of what Mr. Mitchell really said about their work — which differed very much from what Mr. Raggett said in the letters composed upon Mr. Macpherson’s washstand.
Mr. Blood pushed Miss Macphail rather roughly into his motor and told the chauffeur to drive to High Street Kensington Station on the Underground.
“It’s perfectly true!” Miss Macphail said rather angrily. “I oughtn’t to be driving about with you. It was all very well when I was just a roving sort of free lance—”
“I’ll tell you what,” Mr. Blood interrupted her roughly, “if you don’t do what I tell you you’ll find you’ll be just a roving free lance to the end of your days.”
Miss Macphail answered:
“I think I know all there is to know about journalism. And if you think that anything’s going to be done with this rotten Review of yours and Charlie Mitchell’s, you’re absolutely mistaken. It can’t succeed. It can’t pay. The public doesn’t want this high-brow sort of stuff. Why, you can’t make head or tail of a single thing in it! Take the first poem, now—”
Mr. Blood said: “Well!” and Miss Macphail had a sort of shiver of discouraged ill-temper because she couldn’t find any words to characterise the poem which opened the New Review.
“It’s just simply rotten!” she brought out. “I tell you I can’t afford to be connected with a thing that won’t pay and can’t pay. I want to belong to a real live journal.” That was why she had given up the editorship of the Halfpenny Weekly. It was all very well that they were paying her a thousand a year. They wouldn’t be able to carry on this rotten Review for more than a year or so unless they were prepared to drop fifty thousand pounds. And she didn’t suppose they were prepared for that. She didn’t know much about this Mr. Fleight, or Mr. Rothweil, or whatever his name might be, but she had seen too many of these romantic, philanthropic, literary enterprises. They started with a tremendous flare and they banged up and rattled for about three months. Then the proprietor got tired of spending money and the editor went off with the till and they were all left in the cart. “I tell you what it is,” Augusta declared, “either you will make your Review a real five paper or I give you a quarter’s notice right here.”
“Don’t you think,” Mr. Blood asked, “that you’d better listen to me?”
“No, I don’t!” the lady answered. “Not until I’ve had my say. You listen to me. Crowther and Bingham rang me up this morning and offered to start a new paper for me on the lines of the Ha’penny Weekly. They offer me £1,200 a year, a ten years’ contract for editing it, and ten thousand £1 shares as a bonus. That’s what I’ve been playing for all these years and that’s what you’re practically asking me to give up. It isn’t good enough, Mr. Blood.”
“Now you listen to me, Augusta,” Mr. Blood said. “You’re a beautiful woman.”
Augusta answered:
“That’s why I intend to see that I take my pigs to the proper market.”
“You’re a beautiful woman,” Mr. Blood repeated equably. “There really are few women more beautiful than you that I know of.”
“If,” Augusta said frostily, “that’s your way of beginning to ask permission to pay your attentions to my sister Wilhelmina you may as well save yourself the trouble.”
“But,” Mr. Blood pursued his sentence, “for the last year or so you’ve been going off. You can’t stand the life. You want more luxury, more ease.” — She needed domestic surroundings. It was not too late to pick her looks up again but it was almost too late. If she stopped in journalism for another five years she’d be just one of the poor, dried-up hacks of the Pocohontas Club. She might have saved a little money; probably she wouldn’t have; she’d have dropped back into hack journalism. She would be beginning to think of wearing a chestnut front and her complexion would be all little lines and creases as if she had been sleeping on it all day and had only just got up.
Miss Macphail said:
“What’s that? What’s that? You dare to talk to me like that?”
“I’m talking to you for your own good, Augusta,” Mr. Blood said. “You think you know journalism and you don’t. You think I don’t and I do. I’ll tell you, for instance, what’ll become of your ten years’ contract with Crowther and Bingham.” — The paper would be the property of a limited company. Her contract would be with the company. She would make the paper a roaring success. Then the company would go bankrupt owing to faulty financial handling. She must know that was always what happened. Crowther and Bingham would buy the paper. Her contract would be with the company and so it would not be worth the paper it was written on. “You’ll get thrown out and the paper will continue with some poor devil of an editor at £150 a year.” Mr. Blood broke off to see what impression he was making.
He gazed at her meaningly and a strong colour mounted to her forehead.
“If you come to think of it,” he continued, “you’ll see that that’s what’ll happen. That’s what always does happen to journalists nowadays.” — When that did happen she would find it difficult to get another job. She would, may be, get one after a year and lose that in a year more. They were such extraordinarily fleeting persons — the journalists — because their hold on the public taste was so fleeting itself. They caught people now with ladies’ costumes and actresses. But in five years time it would be perhaps slumming and field sports — something like that. Augusta couldn’t go slumming; she didn’t know anything about field sports and she never could. “You’ll just have to go on with your clothes and your actresses,” he finished. “You’ll be tired and so worn out that you’ll drop into the second rank and the third rank. Heaven knows where you won’t descend to!”
“Oh, hang it all!” Augusta said, “don’t go on croaking like that. You give me the shivers. Even if something like that did happen — and I don’t say that things like that don’t in journalism as it is to-day — I’d manage to catch on somewhere. A lucky investment — a hat shop?”
“You’ll never,” Mr. Blood said, “with all your obligations save enough to make an investment, and as for hat shops, did you ever hear of one that didn’t fail? No, I’ll tell you what it is, Augusta, the only thing you could hang on to is a man. You’ll have to marry. It’s the old story. And you’ve no particular hold over men. It’s astonishing how little you attract the decent sort of Englishman. And your beauty will be failing with the hard work, and if you do marry, it will be some sort of journalist like yourself, with a very precarious hold on his income. As likely as not he’ll be an expense on your hands all the time. Now you’re a good common-sensible sort of girl, you just reflect upon what I’ve been saying.”
The car drew up in front of the portico which is before High Street Kensington Station.
“Just wait for me,” Mr. Blood said, and he went down between the shops.
He had to buy a penny ticket before they would admit him to the station. Then he went quickly down the stairs and approached the tobacco stall. A young person with very golden hair and a mealy white complexion was affectionately lighting a cigarette for a boy with many pimples on his face. Mr. Blood waited until the boy had taken the next train. Then he approached the stall and removed his hat with elaboration.
“Mr. Fleight’s friend?” he asked, with a comparatively deferential manner.
“I don’t know who he may be,” the young person answered.
“He’s a man,” Mr. Blood said, “who comes here rather frequently to talk to the young lady in charge.”
“Then it can’t be me,” she answered. “I’m only a substitute going from place to place when one of the young ladies is taken ill. It’ll be Gilda Leroy you want.”
“Yes, it’s Miss Leroy I want,” Mr. Blood said. “Can you give me her address?”
The young person called to a porter who was sweeping the platform.
“Hi!” she exclaimed, “here’s a gent wants Miss Leroy’s address. Can you give it him?”
The porter, who had red hair and a rather scowling face, approached Mr. Blood and gazed at his feet.
“You ain’t a tec,” he said, “I can tell by your boots. What’s all this questioning about Gilda Leroy? There’s been one of you here already.”
“She’s likely to come in for a good thing,” Mr. Blood answered. “Money, quite a lot of money.”
The porter pushed forward his peaked cap and scratched his red hair.
“You appear quite the gent,” he said. “I daresay you don’t mean her any harm, and if you did, you could find out her address in no time from the company, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t oblige you.”
Mr. Blood gave him a shilling.
“I don’t rightly exactly know where she does live,” the porter said. “I’ve tried to walk out with her, and I’ve tried to see her home. But she gives herself out as being above the like of me. Though why she should I don’t know, since I’ve every chance of rising to be a station master, or I should have if I hadn’t a bit made a fool of myself with the union in the last strike.”
He considered for a moment and then he said:
“Her father’s a foreman turncock of the C Division in Westminster, and he lives somewhere in Henry Street neighbourhood. You could get certain news of him at the waterworks just near here, because I’ve seen him come about once a week to get his directions from there, and he’ll stop and chat with his daughter for a minute or so.”
“And what sort of girl is Gilda Leroy?” Mr. Blood asked.
“She’s as quiet and as respectable as she could be, and if it’s you that’s going to leave her money, I can only say you couldn’t find a more deserving object.”
“That’s what I expected,” Mr. Blood said. “It would be that sort of person that would appeal to Mr. Fleight.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” the porter said. “Tastes differ.”
During the short drive up to the waterworks Mr. Blood did not say anything material, even though Augusta addressed to him the question:
“I suppose you’ve got some proposition to make to me yourself since you cry so much stinking fish about my chances?”
He only answered:
“You go on thinking it out, Augusta.”
He got the address of Mr. Leroy without much difficulty from the clerk in charge of the waterworks’ office. And then, reseating himself in the motor beside Augusta, he said:
“I want you to get rid of your German accent as much as possible. You need to be as Teutonic as you like in appearance. But not to the ear. It’s apt to make people guy you.”
Augusta said, “Well!”
“I want you, too,” Mr. Blood said, “to use much less slang. Of course, the better classes use a good deal of slang, but it’s not your sort. Your sort is schoolboy and journalist’s slang, and it’s rather too hard and ugly. Similarly, I want you to be less masculine in your attitudes. Don’t you swagger about and pose like the male proprietor of five cheap daily papers. You’ve never known any women; now you’re going to meet a good many. You look out and catch their style. I’m going to introduce you to my cousin, Mrs. Dumerque. You try and get her to like you. I don’t say try to model yourself on her, mind, but if you can get her to like you — if you can key yourself down enough, you’ll do extremely well. You might model yourself on Wilhelmina for the matter of that.”
“I thought that was coming,” Miss Macphail said.
“Well,” Mr. Blood answered, “Wilhelmina is a nice person.”
Mr. Blood remained silent for a moment, looking at the monument to Queen Victoria in front of Kensington Church which the car was passing.
“Did you ever see such a monstrosity?” he exclaimed. Augusta answered:
“It seems all right to me.”
“That’s just what you’ve got to get rid of,” Mr. Blood said. “I don’t say you’ve got to like the right sort of thing, but you’ve got to know when not to praise the Albert Memorial.”
“But the Albert Memorial is a very fine thing,” Augusta said. “It has three stars in the German guide that I used when I first came to London.”
“It would, you know,” Mr. Blood said; “and that’s just what you’ve got to avoid. You’ve got to make your husband pension the right sort of young poet and buy the right sort of picture.”
Miss Macphail said:
“What is all this fairy tale?”
“This is your life, Augusta,” Mr. Blood said. “Your life and my fun.”
“You talk like God Almighty,” Augusta commented. “That is rather my attitude,” Mr. Blood answered. “You seem such an extraordinarily ignorant lot of people. You’re all climbers more or less, and I am so exactly where I want to be that I seem to sit on a pinnacle. If it amuses me to stick a finger down into the middle of you and give some of you a lift, why shouldn’t I?”
“That’s all very well,” Augusta said, “but business is Geschaeft. I want to know what my salary is to be?”
“Now, look here, Augusta,” Mr. Blood answered; “now you’ve got over your bad temper, you know perfectly well that Mr. Fleight will keep the Review going for five years at the very least. He couldn’t afford to stop it. It would make him too much of a laughing stock. You don’t know much about this sort of life.”
“Do I get a five years’ contract?” Miss Macphail asked.
“Yes, of course you do,” Mr. Blood answered. “Five years at twelve hundred a year. We aren’t going to give you less than Crowther and Bingham have offered you. But understand you must spend it.” She was to have her old mother over from Germany and to take a nice house down Kensington way. She was to have a studio for Wilhelmina and a brougham for herself and for her mother to take the air in. She could just about do that much on twelve hundred a year.
“But who’s my contract with?” Augusta asked. “A limited company?”
Mr. Blood answered:
“Don’t be a fool, Augusta! I tell you you’re in a different sort of life. You can have a contract with Mr. Fleight or with me personally. Or you may have six thousand pounds down for the five years if you like, though I shouldn’t advise it.”
“No,” Augusta said reflectively, “I don’t think I want six thousand pounds down. I should get the interest, of course, but it might make me extravagant. You never can tell. I’d like a contract with you personally.” She knew he was a very rich man and she could understand his sort of honour. She continued:
