Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 454
“If you’ll come to Mr. Fleight’s party,” Mr. Blood said suddenly, “I’ll put my brother Reginald up for Byefleet at the next election, and I’ll stand all the expenses myself. It won’t hurt you to be decent to Mr. Fleight, and some official person ought to be, because he’s the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice. It won’t hurt you to do this one decent thing in the welter of dirty business that politics is. Mr. Fleight hasn’t got the ghost of a chance of getting in for Byefleet.” The Chancellor remained abstracted for a moment, and then he said:
“You’ll put your brother up? He’s the sort of man I very much want. I think — Yes, I think, I say — I’ll come. I’ll almost certainly come. Why shouldn’t I take a line myself for once? It isn’t as if I was particularly satisfied with the lines I’m usually advised to take.”
Mr. Blood rose. “I daresay,” he said, “you’ll get put off, or your official secretary will persuade you not to come. But perhaps you’ll give me permission to include your name amongst the printed list of those who have accepted the invitation?”
“Oh, but I’ll certainly come,” the Chancellor said briskly, “I never go back on my word. Besides, this is rather a romantic expedition. It’ll shake the cobwebs out of me. I like parties of non-political people, only I never get the chance to go to them, and here it appears to be actually a duty. I want to see the Russian dancers, too. I’ve never had time. I hear they’re quite remarkable. Perhaps you’ll keep their performance back until I’m able to get there.”
“Oh, we’ll certainly do that,” Mr. Blood answered. He was preparing to leave the room when the Chancellor exclaimed:
“By the bye, Mr. Blood, if you can spare me another minute — You know those words — or rather that sentiment that you are always using — what I might call the cross-bow sentiment. And the other day you said, you know, that something was going to sweep me over — and then you say we are antediluvian. Now what does that all mean?”
Mr. Blood turned back from the door.
“It’s got a meaning,” he said. “It’s got the precise and actual meaning attaching to the words.”
“But you say we’re old-fashioned,” the Chancellor expostulated in an almost shocked tone of voice. “We can’t possibly be old-fashioned, because we’re inspired by the great fine truths. They don’t ever grow stale. The greatest good of the greatest number, for instance.”
“Well,” Mr. Blood answered, “I’m not going to preach Malthusianism in this atmosphere — you can’t expect it, can you? — since I don’t care a bit for one principle or another. If your opponents had any sense they’d set up the answering war-cry of the greatest good of the most efficient. And that would probably bring them to office for another ten years and set party politics on its legs again. It’s party politics that’s dying and you with it. But your opponents are too stupid and too cowardly, so that they’re done for already. And you’ll be done for soon, because you’ll go howling your old battle-cry until you’ve bored people to death. I don’t mean you, personally, because you’re always exciting to listen to — but all your understrappers — the intolerable bores with their pamphlets and so on. That’s really the point, you won’t have any opponents, and your voice will go on bow-wowing into the empty air. What will overcome you will be corruption and boredom and dilettantism. That’s what our nation wants — a bored dilettante, of the most amiable possible kind, to be a dictator. And no talking. Absolutely no talking. The nation’s sick to death of eloquence and wants to get back to its spillikins and postcard collecting and coon-can. Even bridge has become too exhausting for the tired national brain.”
The Chancellor looked in a depressed manner at Mr. Blood.
“It’s only too true,” he said. “There’s much too little enthusiasm. If only men like you with your brains and intelligence would try to waken the nation up—”
“Heavens!” Mr. Blood said, “you don’t expect me to care about the nation!”
He left the Chancellor slowly shaking his immense head.
CHAPTER II
MR. MACPHERSON, in evening dress, and with the attitudes and action of a mad rabbit, was rushing from end to end of a hall, so brilliantly lit, so immense, and so empty, that, beneath the high pink arches like those of St. Peter’s at Rome, beneath the high dome reminiscent of the Mosque of St. Sofia at Constantinople, in front of the set of boxes in the style of the Empire Music Hall in London, he appeared to be a mere speck of agitated matter. His coat-tails flew out behind him; he pounced upon one end of a pink Turkey carpet as large as an acre field and tried to drag it into a new position over the polished yellow floor that had been prepared for dancing. He failed in his effort, and he tried the corner of another that lay beside the first one and failed once more to move it. In the immense and empty space all his movements echoed and re-echoed, so that he might have been himself initiating another Balaclava Charge, for bullet shots appeared to be aimed at him from beside, from above, and from each end of the hall. The silence seemed to him, so unaccustomed was he to any form of silence, boding, and immensely agitating. Sweat burst out upon his forehead, and he wiped it away with a bright green handkerchief. Then he exclaimed at the top of his voice:
“Oh, why don’t they come! Why doesn’t anybody come?”
Staid and quite unmoved, an elderly waiter appeared in a little doorway below the gallery that faced the stage, and, with a singular and impressive tininess, he walked across the middle of the huge pink carpets.
“Why doesn’t anyone come!” Mr. Macpherson exclaimed to him. “I seem to have been here for hours. Everything will be ruined if someone is not here soon.” The waiter looked at him with a cold and aloof air into which a little compassion gradually filtered at the sight of Cluny’s evident and deep concern.
“It’s only half-past ten, sir,” he said, “and, as the entertainment doesn’t begin until half-past eleven, I don’t think there is any cause for concern.”
“But it’s terrible, the waiting. Supposing nobody should come? No one at all.”
“I don’t see that you need fear that, sir,” the waiter said. “Miss Macphail said that we were to expect between six hundred and a thousand guests.”
“But supposing,” Mr. Macpherson said again, “the stories against Mr. Rothweil—” He stopped and after a moment the waiter said:
“At any rate you can be certain, sir, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is coming. I don’t mind telling you, sir, that the Chancellor’s secretary telephoned through to our manager at least an hour ago to ask what time the Russian dancers would be performing, as he might be a quarter of an hour late, and he begged Mr. Rothweil not to let them begin until he was here.”
Mr. Macpherson heaved a sigh of relief, but immediately afterwards his face became agonised, and he exclaimed:
“But supposing he was the only person who came! Suppose him standing quite alone in the middle of this place looking at the Russian dancers. What would he think? What in the world would he think?”
The head waiter, although he was used to instances of stage fright on the part of hostesses and even of hosts, of large parties, had never seen an individual so panic-stricken as Mr. Macpherson, which struck him as being all the more odd in that it was not Mr. Macpherson who was giving the party at all. He said, however — and it was the usual device that, on such occasions, he adopted to distract the attentions of troubled patrons: “Wouldn’t you like to come and look at the refreshments; it isn’t at all necessary that there should be any superintendence, because we manage these affairs so that the giver of the entertainment can just walk into the place on the minute it begins.”
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Macpherson exclaimed, “let me look at the refreshments.”
The waiter led Cluny through the small door beneath the gallery into another vast apartment, the roof of which was supported by columns of canary yellow marble. Here, upon long tables, there were arranged the viands for a thousand people. In the centre of each table was a great block of ice, as clear as glass and containing, the one a salmon as large as a child, and two others, peacocks with all their feathers on and their plumes erect and shining. There were innumerable peaches, lobsters, mounds of caviar, sandwiches, fruit salads and, sprayed all amongst them, a perfect shrubbery of pink flowers, so that to walk along the tables was like taking an excursion through a nursery garden. Behind these tables, like mournful attendants upon a funeral, stood many men in dress waistcoats, but with their coats still off. And these regarded Mr. Macpherson with such mournful, threatening and condemnatory eyes, and in a silence so dead, that Mr. Macpherson felt forced to rush once more into the lighted room.
If it would be too much to say that Mr. Macpherson was filled with a deep contrition for his exploits at Mr. Rothweil’s meeting — for, typical Englishman as Mr. Blood proclaimed him, he was probably incapable of any deep passion whatsoever — still he kept a little of the Englishman’s spirit concerning an event which he couldn’t regard as anything but sporting. Moreover, he had something of the pride of office, since he, Cluny Macpherson, had been requested by Mr. Blood himself to come to the place early and see that things were all right.
It was the day of the nomination at Byefleet, and Mr. Fleight would have had to hand in his papers personally some time during the afternoon. He might, therefore, possibly be slightly delayed in his journey up to town; a tyre might come off, or something of that sort. Miss Macphail would be rather busily employed because, in the first place, Mr. Fleight desired her attendance on him at Byefleet, and in the second, she, her mother and Wilhelmina were on that very day moving into their new house at Kensington. There might, therefore, be possible difficulties about their dressing for the entertainment. Neither of these things was to be expected, but still they might happen. And Mr. Macpherson spent an agitated half hour in playing, against himself, a game of noughts and crosses. By the grace of God, as he considered it, he discovered an old dance programme with its pencil attached to it by a cord, in one of the tail pockets of his dress coat. And suddenly it came into his head that it would be a glorious lark if neither Miss Macphail nor Mr. Fleight turned up at the entertainment and if, in the capacity of host, he was to receive a thousand guests, including forty-two peers, eleven peeresses, sixty actors and actresses, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer as a bonne bouche. And he almost wished that he had put on the scarlet ribbon of the Hamidjeh of the third class that had been conferred on his father by one of the eunuchs of the deposed Sultan in return for some financial assistance.
A slight brushing sound made itself heard near the central door, and Mr. Fleight came in, looking intensely dejected, and tinier even than Mr. Macpherson in the enormous and deserted space.
He came up to Mr. Macpherson, holding out his gloved hand and expressing his cordial sense of the trouble that gentleman had taken in coming so early, and in his real lightness of heart, Mr. Macpherson at once burst into a long story of a chap he knew called Block, whose sister lived in Colombo, and invited the Crown Prince of Germany to tiffin. Mr. Fleight listened to him with polite and deep attention.
There came in Mr. Charles Mitchell in a very old evening suit as well as Mr. Raggett in a very new one. Immediately afterwards Mr. Blood appeared and then, with a considerable rustling, Frau Macphail, Augusta, and Wilhelmina. Frau Macphail was in a dress of stiff black silk, and wore a great widow’s cap of white frilled muslin. Wilhelmina was in white, Augusta in dark blue with silver ornaments. To Mr. Fleight she appeared to realise exactly the lady in a poem called “Epipschidion” about which he had written an essay at St. Paul’s school. She had met him, as he told Mr. Blood, on life’s dark way and lured him towards sweet death.
The voice of Frau Macphail, so high that it resembled a scream, and echoed from all the empty boxes and from the high dome, burst into a torrent of ravished delight at the appearance of the hall. It was the first thing she had seen since her arrival in the country which had filled her with any admiration for the genius of the British race. Two immense footmen, with powdered hair, marched side by side across the empty hall, to push back the great French windows; beyond them the black depths of garden dimly suggested themselves. Then a remarkable butler came out from between two marble pillars and shouted in an enormous voice:
“Mr. and Mrs. Chivers.”
The party had begun.
Mr. Chivers had a red nose and extraordinarily red hair; Mrs. Chivers had red hair and an extraordinarily white face. Mr. Fleight, standing like a depressed Field Marshal at the head of a staff, shook hands with each of them. To Mrs. Chivers he said that he would always remember her remarkable novel “The Wiles of Pompey,” and to Mr. Chivers that it would be a long time before he forgot his able book “Turkish Harems from the Inside.” He passed them on to Mr. Mitchell, who, with Mr. Raggett at his side, represented Editor and Sub-editor. Mr. Mitchell got up a conversation with Mr. Chivers about motor buses, although Mr. Chivers wanted to talk literature. Mrs. Chivers got up a conversation with Mr. Raggett about the burden of the rates in Wimbledon, where she resided, although Mr. Raggett desired to improve his knowledge of the German language by some conversation in that tongue with Frau Macphail. Augusta stood a little further from the door than Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Raggett, and just behind her was her mother, representing chaperonage. Mr. Blood and Wilhelmina were walking slowly side by side round and round the edges of the enormous hall.
Because Wilhelmina was up to the eyes in the details of furnishing the new house in Kensington, she talked about house keeping; and gradually their conversation drifted into a dissertation by Mr. Blood upon the topic of how’ the keepers of Soho restaurants made such huge fortunes. Mr. Blood explained that the chief expense of those hosts lay in the cost of washing table linen. They could buy up the lease of a dirty little house quite cheaply and clean and paper it even more cheaply. Most of their meats they could buy from the large hotels, being what was left over from the day before, at very cheap rates. But washing was always washing. Table napkins cost always a penny per diner, and cloths twopence — on the average. So the restaurant keeper, if he was to prosper, had to scrape together enough capital to start a little laundry of his own in the country; and this paid him remarkably well. He added many details as to the lives of restaurant keepers, so that Wilhelmina and he quite enjoyed themselves, Wilhelmina wondering where he got his knowledge, and he being proud to exhibit it to anyone so docile and at the same time so intellectual. For Wilhelmina, besides being a delicate artist, had a remarkable gift for languages; had written sonnets in Italian and, though she seldom talked about it, knew more about Leopardi than most people.
No other guests arrived for three-quarters of an hour, so that conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Chivers became rather a languishing affair, more particularly as Mrs. Chivers, who had seen Augusta out of the corners of her eyes, had decided that she was not the sort of person that a woman really likes her husband to be introduced to, and obstinately refused to move away from Mr. Raggett and Mr. Mitchell. Their voices echoed in mournful whispers through the immense space. Mr. Fleight, nearest the door, stood perfectly silent with an air of deep dejection. He was probably the only person there who wasn’t thinking about the party at all; for even Mr. Mitchell was so agitated that he mixed up the works of André Gide, the prose writer, with those of Saint Pol Le Magnifique, who was a poet, although Mr. Mitchell really knew every word that each of these authors had written. This gratified Mr. Chivers, to whom he was talking, though Mr. Chivers knew nothing whatever about the matter. Mr. Raggett, too, was so agitated at the absence of guests that for five minutes he said nothing whatever to Mrs. Chivers, and during that space of time he and that lady gazed at each other with eyes that seemed to express a deep and mournful sympathy, though actually they were racking their brains for something to talk about. At 11.35 Mr. Macpherson dashed into the hall exclaiming:
“Hurray, it’s all right now!”
He explained that twenty-five motor cars, eleven taxis, nine broughams and three carriages and pairs had been held up by the collision of two buses, slewing right across the top of the road and inextricably locked together, whilst the road opposite Marlborough House was “up” and completely impassable. All these vehicles had, at Cluny’s suggestion to a policeman, been deflected through St. George’s Square, and were now, all of them, setting down guests for Mr. Fleight.
“And it’s all my doing,” Mr. Macpherson explained jubilantly, “if it hadn’t been for me that policeman would never have thought of sending them round.” And having made this announcement to Mr. Fleight, to Mr. and Mrs. Chivers, to Mr. Mitchell and to Mr. Raggett, he plunged at Augusta and made it over again and then rushed across the room to Mr. Blood and Wilhelmina, who were just going into the garden:
“Thousands of people are coming,” he exclaimed, “you never saw such a sight!”
And indeed they came. It was like a presentation at Court; it was like a bargain sale; it was like a battlefield, and the great actors and actresses of the day poured in with such speed and volubility that the other guests had the sensation of assisting at a gigantic theatrical gala incorporating all the ball-room scenes of every drama of manners that had been produced during the last twenty years.
The theatrical people in fact gave the note of the party. You couldn’t look anywhere without seeing one of them being himself or herself, in a loud voice and with attitudes borrowed from the favourite character of his most successful piece. The orchestra from the Opera had arrived and began the overture to Strauss’ Rosenkavalier. But so deafening was the noise of tongues and so close the pressure of bodies, that the orchestra remained inaudible and unseen. People swept past Mr. Fleight in droves, as if every glitteringly dressed person in London had turned into an emigrant and was rushing on to the decks of a steamer along a gangway. The remarkable butler never missed one of them, and a perfect fusillade of well-known names burst and rattled near the doors. It was as if a brazen megaphone were braying out the results of a perusal of the work of reference called “Who’s Who.” There were Mr. and Mrs. Cocks and Dickinson who wrote for the Review. Mr. Dickinson was a large and impressive person with curls like Lord Byron’s, and normally he stood out in a crowd. But that evening his coat was nearly pulled off his back by Madame La Comtesse de Girouette, who had come from the French Embassy along with Mr. Picpus, extra Secretary of Legislation. She slipped upon the marble steps and only saved herself by catching hold of Mr. Dickinson’s coat tails. Field-Marshal Sir Andrew How, who had been induced to come by Mr. Blood himself, a very shy man, was overwhelmed with confusion at the sight of this immense gathering and tried to go away. But he was pushed by the oncoming Castors, Chilcotts, Nelsons and O’Donoghues, positively into the arms of Mr. Fleight, who had to save him from falling. When Lord and Lady Cummyns, very shy people too, who had an income of about three hundred pounds a year, and hardly ever went to parties because they couldn’t afford to dress, had just given their names to the butler, Miss Clare Langham, the illustrious novelist, was so determined to be announced at the very earliest opportunity that she pushed right between the frightened peer and his wife and put her own foot through her red plush skirt. This caused some dismay, but she too was brushed aside. Mr. Parment entered without attracting any attention at all, and he stood saying some kind words about Mr. Fleight’s efforts on behalf of Mr. Gregory.
