Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 509
“So you will acknowledge that I am not the man to exercise pressure on these children in a reactionary direction!”
He went on to make the speech that might be expected as to his having no objection to Socialism — to a sane, well thought out and balanced measure of Socialism that should be brought about by the broadening down of precedent to precedent. But, apparently at the University of Berlin, to which city he had been unable to accompany them, the children had picked up from the less desirable students whom they met there, certain doctrines almost of violence.
He stopped. Suddenly he exclaimed:
“I must acknowledge... I must acknowl...”
He stuttered slightly: went on:
“Parliamentary institutions — not yet perfected — but institutions! Must be studied in their birthplace. I must—” He passed his hand suddenly hard down his face, his fingers pressing on his high forehead, and as if snapping off the bottom of his beard. His eyes glared balefully at the young woman, the dewlaps appearing to drip blood. She started against the back of her chair. The hotel servants had told her that this Milor had only one defect: he was subject to violent, sudden, and incomprehensible fits of rage. She had witnessed no such outbreak, and had regarded this story as being merely one of the stupidities of the foreign domestic class. Mr. Heimann, writhing his square, bulky body, shouted:
“I must acknowledge that, though I have every reason ... every reason in the world.... to hate my own country!”
A panic of nervousness invaded Miss Jeaffreson.
There she sat, alone, very late at night, in a dim, bogey-fied room, immense, with aged furniture and a dying fire — with a man whom she was regarding as bad to the core, burdened with an inscrutable but atrocious past, and apparently on the verge of going beyond control.
He recovered his appearance of equanimity with a sort of violence; as if, Miss Jeaffreson said, he had suddenly tightened upon himself a garment of iron bands. But the singular aspect of his jaws and eyes in the firelight, the grating quaver of his voice when he had said the words: “Every reason to hate my own country! “ — these things, as she put it, continued to make her soul shiver.
She was convinced that one day she would be able to prove that this man was a scoundrel — an unpunished criminal. It was her duty to do that: she owed it to womenkind! Men must not escape. And whilst, as she put it, her underself was still shivering, she kept her conscious, physical ears very wide open. She was certain that she would pick up details of the fellow’s past. She imagined by this time that Mr. Heimann must have been a dishonest member of Parliament — or at least a defaulting parliamentary agent!
Mr. Heimann, however, was spinning out generalisations. He would wish the young people, when in London, to witness any great debates in either House of Parliament. That could be arranged for. But he had rather they went slumming than attended lectures on the life and labour of the poor. “Slumming” had been a fashionable-philanthropic pastime in the days of his prime.
It was at this point that Miss Jeaffreson suddenly asked Mr. Heimann if he had made his will. She said that the words sounded like a thunderclap.
I can imagine that they upset her a great deal. Nothing could have been further from her conscious mind than to ask such a question. She said that it was one of the most extraordinary instances of action by a subliminal self that her experience had afforded her. But it should be remembered that her solicitor-brother had asked her to obtain precisely that piece of information, and I am inclined to think that all through this interview, and indeed all through her even casual intercourse with this man, at the bottom of her mind there had always been the passionate desire to know whether Mr. Heimann had made his will!
She heard herself say, baldly, the five words necessary for the question: nothing else, no breaking of the ice And she introduced them into the middle of one of his rounded sentences!
The words did not affect Mr. Heimann as a thunderclap, and the interruption left him perfectly unmoved. He just went on with his sentence. And at that, Miss Jeaffreson said, the half-sense, like a memory, of her mother’s At-homes, twenty years before, became almost overwhelming. She had had it all along; but now it became so strong as to amount almost to a conviction that she was back in her childhood and being talked to interminably by — a Whig statesman.
In those days there had been a Liberal Minister who had come pretty frequently to Lady Jeaffreson’s parties and had overwhelmed those not very festive gatherings with long and resonant harangues on, precisely, the Enlargement of the Franchise or the Abolition of the House of Lords. And once, just as a monotonous sentence was swelling to an intolerable conclusion, Eleanor, then ten or eleven, and beyond herself with sitting on the great man’s benevolent knee whilst he declaimed, had asked the gentleman whether the animals in the Zoological Gardens were happy.
The great man finished his sentence. Then, setting his bearded head on one side, he repeated the child’s question, seriously, deferentially, and word for word. He answered it, dividing his reply into careful and balanced headings, with a summing up.
And she said that Mr. Heimann’s voice and mannerisms were so exactly those of that Liberal peer that, for a moment, she shut her eyes and felt herself to be back, overpoweringly, in the Museum drawing-room, on a November afternoon, with the fog filtering in beside the high window sashes. Of course Mr. Heimann wasn’t that peer, who was still alive, though going about usually in a bath-chair.
Mr. Heimann finished his sentence, which had had to do with the life and labour of the poor in London, and contained the words “industry,”
“sobriety,” and “application.” He said:
“Have I made my will? No!” Then he set his head on one side and continued — exactly in the voice and traditions and with the mannerisms of Lord — ! — something like:
“Nor — though I appreciate your motives for asking the question! — do I perceive any immediate necessity for doing so. I have no surviving friends to whom I could wish to leave keepsakes or memorials, for I have no wish to be remembered by anybody. Nor do I acknowledge any claims, obligations, or responsibilities to any soul. Not to one! The world has cast me aside, so I have cast it off.
“I have, in the second place, no need to anticipate a speedy dissolution. Except for occasional indispositions, I am sound in health. Should I, in the course of my remaining years, incur obligations — which is very unlikely — I expect to have ample time to make testamentary acknowledgments before my decease. And from my observation of their dispositions I am confident that my heirs would behave handsomely in such circumstances. Thus situated, and after mature consideration, I have arrived at the conclusion that the making of testamentary dispositions, necessitating as it would my entering into painful matters with some solicitor or other, would be entirely supererogatory.”
Those, Miss Jeaffreson said, were nearly his words.
They filled her with such indignation that she could hardly bear herself. For what, she asked, could be plainer than his brutal selfishness? He declared himself ready to risk casting his illegitimate children, her charges, unprovided for upon the world. Merely because he just funked talking to his solicitor about his miserable past. No doubt he meant to provide, during his lifetime, for their futures. But supposing he died before so doing? The children had been brought up to lives of idleness in every circumstance of luxury; they might at any moment be cast penniless upon the world. A fine lot — as she expressed it to herself — his legal heirs could be expected to do for them!
She was about, she said, to make some comment, which would no doubt have been timid enough, when he claimed her attention with a “Miss Jeaffreson!” — so loud that it might have been a clarion call to a political following. He had even risen from his chair.
And, swaying to his feet, apparently apropos of nothing, he let out an extraordinary harangue against inherited privileges. He said they cursed both him that was subject to and him that possessed them. His eyes, she said, were “thunderous,” and he went on for a long time. For his part, he said, he would have a young man come into life without any such hindrance or advantage. Let him, if he might, inherit a competence, or even great wealth or a great name honoured amongst the Humanities. Let his parents train him as best they might; then let him go out on to the broad sea of public life. But with no shackles about his feet! He called out suddenly:
“Damn it! So I will it and will have it.... Look at me! What should I have been without... If I had been able to defend myself in a house that was alive, not a mausoleum!”
He sank down suddenly into his chair, and remained for as long as Miss Jeaffreson was in the room, looking at the dead fire, without speaking.
CHAPTER V
I GO back, then, to my own story.
But I defy anybody to render, in words and on the scale that I have hitherto devoted to it, the rest of that day of mine.
The least important part — my speech before the serried rows of the Ladies’ Club gathering — remains clearest in my mind.
I got back in time for it. I got back, indeed, to hear all but the first sentence or two of my opponent.
It must have been about 4.20 by then; the police court business being over about 4.0. I am not going to say much about that. For one thing, I did not get into the Court itself; for the other, the actual proceedings were of no dramatic importance. Mr. Podd swore to his case, and George Heimann was sent down, to be released when his bail arrived. That I heard when I got to the Police Station. I was marched along white-tiled — I think they were white-tiled, but they may have been merely stucco — passages by Lady Ada Pugh Gomme and a really extraordinary solicitor-brother of Miss Jeaffreson. I hardly got, at that time, any sense of Lady Ada, except that she was tall, dressed in black, low-voiced, and very persuasive. There was also an extremely tall German with a dark, fiery aspect and a deep voice, who appeared to be bewildered —
Anyhow, there was quite a crowd in those white corridors with the green doors.
They wanted me to go bail — the second bail, of course — for that boy, and I was quite ready, as long as they got me through it quickly. And they did. They secured me in a room where there were people of another type — police, I suppose — behind desks. I signed my name at a sort of pulpit.
I must be absolved from the suspicion of having been weak. I was not at all. I was quite ready to trust George Heimann for bail to any amount — on his face. Besides, Lady Ada Pugh Gomme was the other bail. But I was in a hurry.
I daresay I should have got through it all like a flash if it had not been for all those people who wanted to talk to me. And that extraordinary solicitor fellow — he was small, blonde, had pince-nez that would not keep on, and exactly resembled a cod-fish — gripped my arm all the time with his left hand. At the top of his voice, but with his right hand to his mouth and his mouth close to my ear, he was telling me rather damaging anecdotes about other clients of his. I suppose he imagined that the action of putting his hand between his mouth and my ear converted his high-pitched shouting into a whisper. It was a very disagreeable sound. On the other side, Lady Ada Pugh Gomme began sentences that that noise drowned. He also asked me if I had made my will, and I had to confess, before such witnesses as were present in the Bail Office, that I hadn’t.
Anyhow, Lady Ada detached me, and we reached the taxi-cab, after a little conversation with that tall German fellow. I was squeezed so close to him in the corridor that I had no particular impression of him at the moment except that he was certainly the Professor-Poet Curtius, and that he had an extremely powerful hand grip — a giant; but not disagreeable.
His accent off the telephone was much less German. He said:
“So you are the second pail after all. Good. Gemuethlich!” He was going on to say something about my “pudiful book,” but someone or other interrupted him. His ceremonial sentences took too long to get under way. I had a glimpse of George Heimann, pale, but quite composed, leaning back in the street, with Miss Jeaffreson and his sister clawing all over him. They ought to have left him alone to recover from the painful emotions of the police court. But leaving him alone was the last thing those women would ever do.
All the others were getting themselves cabs. They said they wanted to hear me speak; but what they really wanted was to talk to me clamorously about George’s case. So we went in a racing trail down Constitution Hill.
In my conveyance — it was a rather atrocious specimen — Lady Ada was being thrown against me and was uttering a string of kindly hints that I could not quite catch about George Heimann and his sister. I think she wanted to reassure me as to the bail I had gone for George. But it was difficult to hear her, and altogether it was not a very good preparation for my lecture.
She was a very kind and beautiful woman — statuesque, as if she really did exercises every morning after her cold bath. She had a great deal of uniformly grey hair, from which looked out her youngish, very dark face with black horseshoe eyebrows and singular prune-black eyes. She was dressed in close-fitting black, so that she had the air of wearing a riding-habit. The wife of an extremely high — and, I believe, an extremely disagreeable! — British Imperial official “ from Balliol,” Lady Ada Pugh Gomme spoke in hints because, I suppose, she had lived most of her life amongst State secrets in a society of intimates who could easily take half-hidden meanings. But she had an unusually fine smile. It was astonishingly like George Heimann’s — quick to come, but a little deprecating.
I fancy she wanted me to gather that even she did not know everything about the young people and their ancestry. But she certainly conveyed to me the impression that auspicious if indefinite Fates might be considered as attendant on those two young things, and that I need not have the least alarm as to the safeness of my bail. She even let me know that she did not prohibit her own young people from, as it were, playing with the little Heimanns. The backing that they had had from their mysterious “uncle” had warranted her, she hinted, in that. And I gathered that Lady Ada herself desired me to take an interest in the young people. It would, she said, so please her connection, Mr. Heimann, whom she wanted to please above almost anyone else in the world.
At any rate, long before I reached the Ladies’ Club, I could see that those two young people were not merely unbefriended waifs. Indeed, I began to think that that young man had almost too many people to take passionate interests in him. At the Bail Office of the police court there had seemed to be a crowd of them. And none of them had appeared to be very wise.
That boy certainly did have a good deal to contend with. My impression was in no way wrong! For it was certainly an ironic jest of Fortune that made him deliver, on that 13th of July before a gathering of the Ladies’ Club, of all unfortunate places in the world, a semi-jocular oration in praise of Germany. Yet that was inevitable.
It came about in this way:
My opponent for the afternoon, an Irish poet, a charming fellow, made a speech in favour of the Muse of Eirinn.
I myself made a silly, facetious speech that no one was meant to take seriously.
But the feeling of being at last alone upon that platform where no one could touch me, and no one above all could speak to me, was merely blissful. I had to oppose a personally charming Irish poet. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to oppose anybody. I daresay I did it all the better because of that.
I had before me three or four hundred attentive ladies and six or seven men. Immediately under my nose, in the first row, were the two women in electric blue, who had come to sneer at me — and Professor Doctor Wirklicher Geheimrath Curtius. Somewhere in the dimmer part of the horseshoe of audience were all those others, from Lady Ada Pugh Gomme to that queer solicitor fellow. They had followed me with the avowed purpose of further discussing that boy’s case; and I recognised with a sinking of the heart that, when I ended, the charmed circle around me would dissolve. So I finished by saying that even my distinguished opponent, the Irish poet, had had to come to England to find amongst the despised, Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon race, a profitable, an appreciative, and even an adoring audience. I had a sense of him, leaning at a table, behind me, smiling, a little like Shakespeare. I concluded by quoting from memory one of his poems about the Dark Rosaleen.
Almost before the sound of my purposedly chanting voice had died away, and certainly before what applause there was had ended, the athletic Professor Doctor was on his feet. The extremely capable Miss Scott had asked him, as soon as he entered the Club, to follow me in the tale of speakers.
He was an immense, thin, large-boned man, with very sunken, intent, dark eyes and high cheek-bones; a Silesian Slav, I should imagine, rather than a Teutonic-German; with a very deep, vibrating chest voice. And he was in a state of emotion. There were, even then, too many war rumours in the air for him to be perfectly calm. He was, moreover, a Romantic: a good fellow!
A gentleman of this country who wrote modern epics, built castles in facsimile for himself and his unsympathetic wife, exclaimed that he felt the laurels fade on his brow when the binding of his book fell to pieces, and lived, though I believe quite platonically, with a Muse called Clara — such a gentleman in England would appear either imbecile or else improbable. But the Germany of those days was not only the land of innumerable allegories in stone, in orations, on paper or canvas; it was a land of great sales for epics. So that Curtius was immensely wealthy, and could spoil himself when he had a mind to.
Obviously no English poet would erect a Gothic castle in stone for his divorced wife; but then, no English poet could. Nor do our own bards bother much about their print or bindings; they are only too glad, poor devils, if they get printed on sugar paper and bound in flour-sacking. And I do not believe that any English poet would live with a Muse called Clara — platonically.
But in Germany, if the Professor Doctor Wirklicher Geheimrath dropped his fountain pen, the All-Highest of Germany hastened to pick it up. He was killed quite early in the war, near a place called Béthune, and my own regiment must have killed him. I wish they hadn’t.
