Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 526
George really ought to have waited to enlist until the Podd case was settled. But he took the Staff Officer to lunch and, wanting to make conversation, told him all about that criminal-libel case. For, though he had done t involuntarily enough, he had certainly broken his bail in the case of Rex v. Heimann, otherwise Pearson (Podd prosecuting). George had wanted to report to the police on his first morning in Town, but the gentlemen who questioned him at the Ministries all told him not to. They said that he would find it disagreeable, and that they would settle the matter for him. They were kind-hearted, but they were also very busy, so that no one had settled it. Only that morning George had heard that, whilst he was out, a policeman had called at his rooms and had inquired for him. The police had done that once a weekall the time he had been in Germany. George had gone again to his old boarding-house in Bloomsbury; and the landlady, a very antique, panic-stricken German, had stupidly told the policeman that George had not returned. He would have gone to Scotland Yard that morning only he had been due at the War Office for his interview with this Staff Officer.
The dynamic energies of that Staff Officer had been even enhanced by lunch. He could hardly wait for George to pay the bill. He was a rather blasted man. His cheek and part of his frontal bone had been knocked away early in September, so now they made him sit in an office with a red hat-band, and he saw no chance of advancement in his profession. This made him violent in frame of mind. He said, wiping his moustache with his napkin:
“Oh, is that all. Come along!”
George caught him up half way down Whitehall. He was making at an extremely rapid pace for New Scotland Yard. He arrived by a sort of process of blasting his way at an upper office in that heavy building. A man in blue, standing by a high desk in a room of his own, red-cheeked, with a sea-lion’s moustache and bright black eyes, looked at the pair of them. The Staff Captain said, with violence:
“This fellow Heimann is a private in my regiment. You cannot touch him for a trifle. We can’t be bothered to train men and have the Civil Police poach them from us!”
The Inspector was slow and self-contained. He leaned sideways on the flap of his desk, appearing to chew and turning over the pages of a large, loose-leaved folio with one negligent hand. He said:
“Heimann! Heimann!” He glanced down sideways at a page and then said:
“That will be all right, Captain.” He appeared to view the world with tranquil humorousness. “As long as Mr. Heimann is in your regiment, we need not trouble him. The prosecution is not anxious to proceed. Of course if he were not on active service, we should have to have an interview with him.” He made with a pencil a tick somewhere on the surface of that sheet.
That seemed to settle it.
It did not. The Staff Captain had been too helpful and, in his misanthropic mood, no doubt too impatient of the Civil Police. That was not unusual. With their slowness and large boots the Civil Police of those days not infrequently enraged the Military Authority. They seemed to move like wooden chessmen.
Mr. Carstones was not very effectual; but if that Staff Officer had allowed George to do what Sir Arthur’s secretary wanted, it might have been much better for George. For Mr. Carstones told me next day that George should certainly have surrendered to his bail, broken though it was. With a little backing from the Home Office the case would have been disposed of. In those days there were still Grand Juries at the London Sessions, and the Common Sergeant was quite able so to direct them that they would throw out the bill against a prisoner, and that would be the end of it, without even any publicity or the smallest fuss. I may have got the technicalities wrong, but that was something like what Mr. Carstones told me.
George considered himself to have no option; and he certainly had no misgivings. The Staff Captain seemed to have settled the matter, and the Military arm to be possessed of a very strong magic. There were above him those invincible men with the voices that clipped all their words, and he seemed to march within a charmed circle where the only care was that you might get your name taken for walking out with a button of your overcoat undone or for sneezing on parade.
So, except for jumping to it, my man, which he did not object to doing, he had arrived at a period of idyll — a time of relatively short winter parade hours, of theatre tickets to give away to his room-mates, which meant great personal popularity, and of physical well-being in an atmosphere of heroism.
His sister he had seen only once — on the day after the night when he had talked with his aunt. He had hired a car and gone down to Froghole in the late afternoon as soon as the Home Office had done with him for the day.
He said that the seven months of his absence had hardened Marie Elizabeth; but it had also in a way improved her. She was as inflexible as agate, but she talked much less. She just asked a question, seemed to think for a long time about the answer she got, and then asked another question. So that there had been nothing in the nature of an open quarrel between those two.
They had faced each other laconically, as if with vibrations passing from one to the other, in a perfect mist of comments from Miss Jeaffreson on one side and, on the other, from Mr. Pflugschmied, Marie Elizabeth’s American champion.
George stood at one end of my brother’s dining table, Marie Elizabeth at the other, and such must have been their engrossment that they stood there, facing each other, for between three and four hours. Miss Jeaffreson sat at the table, her hands back to back, with the little fingers hooked together, her face illuminated by the hanging lamp just above it and her eyes enormous behind unrimmed pince-nez. Opposite her, Mr. Pflugschmied rushed up and down, wiping his face with a huge white handkerchief, throwing out his hands and ejaculating.
I really forget whether I have accounted for the appearance of this gentleman in my poor brother’s house. It hardly needs it.
On one of the occasions when Marie Elizabeth had called on Sir Arthur she had seen, talking to Mr. Carstones in a corner of the immense room, this fat, good-natured, and inaccurate creature. That really finished it, for it became a sort of blaze of recognitions and of joy. Marie Elizabeth had at once known him for her former dancing partner of the Night Club; he had simultaneously recognised her as the divine dancer with whom he had revolved for three hours on end. And, so that their voices confused the one the other, Sir Arthur cried:
“But Mr. Plugsmit is the very man you want...” whilst Mr. Carstones exclaimed: “The very man you want is Mr. Pluhshpit!”
Mr. Pflugschmied, at that time still a neutral, had called in at that office for an interview with Sir Arthur; on the morrow he was to go to Germany for his paper, the Philadelphia Something. Or it may have been the Chicago Something-else. He was, of course, the journalist impressed by the necessity for rightly reporting names, who had been made known to me at the Night Club by the United States detective, and whom, with some aftermisgivings, I had introduced to Marie Elizabeth.
I need not have had the misgivings. And there, in my brother’s house, plump, agitated, and repeating distortedly, in a sort of high falsetto caused by his excitement Marie Elizabeth’s words, George found him. Marie Elizabeth would say:
“You are determined to take no legal steps — till when?”
Mr. Plowright would exclaim:
“But good heavens, man! Look at the evidence we have. Your own sister, by rights a countess in female succession! To leave her in this ignominious position!” Miss Jeaffreson would cut in, rather coldly, enunciating her words with great distinctness:
“You cannot really think of it, George! With your boasted chivalric sentiments. I remember your saying at the Curtiuses — you emphasized my own views — that the day when women could be left out of family counsels had gone for ever. And do you mean, now, to deny to your sister an equal right with yourself, in the decision of a matter so vital? As if you were the sole feudal head of the clan!” George would then answer his sister:
“I will engage in no litigation at all. Ever. Either our case is silently demonstrable by passing papers across a table or it does not exist. Contentious litigation about it is impossible in the nature of the case.”
Marie Elizabeth would listen to his words with minute attention. As soon as his lips had finished moving the other two would burst out, repeating the same things over and over again, whilst Marie Elizabeth reflected, standing silent in the light of the lamp just above her shoulder.
That discussion lasted for all those hours, not because the brother and sister had very much to say, but because the other two talked so incessantly. George could make his position quite plain in a sentence or two. Litigation was useless. They were what they claimed to be, or they were not. If they were, and ultimately proved it, the matter ceased. If they could not prove it, the matter ceased also as far as he was concerned. He considered that they would be able to prove it at the end of the war. Before then it was impossible.
His sister asked him, passionlessly: If it proved that they were illegitimate but born in such a country and such circumstances as gave them by local law a share in their father’s estates in that country, Lord Marsden having owned a good deal of land in Southern France, would George avail himself of his legal rights in such a country? George said: “Never!”
At that Marie Elizabeth said nothing; the other two burst into outcries. Miss Jeaffreson, too, had hardened a great deal, and had become more openly prurient. Towards the end of the evening she was talking of the late Mr. Heimann as a “shameless libertine,” and of Lady Ada as without shame, abandoned, and mercenary: “the fashionable courtesan!” George said that that gave him a queer feeling; he had hitherto so respected Miss Jeaffreson’s opinions that he had always listened to her with deference as his sister’s close friend.
Mr. Pflugschmied, on the other hand, whilst he uttered comfortable and rather feminine ejaculations of shockedness over George’s recalcitrance, limited himself on the whole to assuring George that George did not know how the Chancelleries of an exhausted Europe bent before the will of a live Philadelphia — or it may have been by that time a Chicago — pressman.
George said he had not imagined that any man could be so inaccurate. It even distracted him a good deal because he kept listening for the next inaccuracy. And it was all very exhausting. George said that at a very early stage of the discussion he was already “bathed in sweat.”
He said, too, that being so battered with moral censure certainly affected him a good deal. It gave him again the sensation he had had when a number of Germans in Zell talked about the events and moral aspects of the war.
He was not weakened in his attitude. He stuck to the assertion that he would not initiate, counsel, or assist any kind of litigation. It was like hanging on to a stick in a gale of wind. Fortunately not one of them asked him to give any reasons for his outrageous behaviour. They just took for granted his mental obliquity and battered away at him as if for practice in argument. A housemaid came in once or twice, tentatively, as if to see whether she could lay the table for dinner; but they took no notice of her. They seemed to have forgotten eating. But George said the sight of the pretty, fresh girl in cap and apron-strings rested his mind. It reminded him that the whole world was not one immense parrot cage.
They got at last to all talking at once. That was inevitable. He did not blame Marie Elizabeth. It was necessary that she should talk. That was why he was there. And he maintained that she was always dignified; stony, but “correct.” The other two were just shouting alongside her voice. So that once he found himself roaring at the full depth of his lungs to Mr. Pflugschmied: and George’s was no mean voice when he raised it:
“For heaven’s sake, say for once something accurate and precise, or hold your tongue. The King is not the uncle of the German Emperor: he is the cousin. The German Emperor is not the Emperor of Germany but the German Emperor!”
Mr. Plowright (otherwise Pflugschmied) had been describing how he was going to start for Germany at once and the things he was going to say to the ruler of that Empire in order to recover the documents of George, a subject of that sovereign’s uncle.
George said that after he shouted like that a dead and astonishing silence existed in that room. Mr. Plowright was suddenly without motion, his jaw hanging down; and his round eyes which, behind his opulent gold-rimmed glasses, had the air of being wet, were fixed on George’s face with the expression of one suddenly overwhelmed by hopeless and irrevocable disaster. The two girls looked down, Eleanor at the table between her elbows, Marie Elizabeth at the floor. The silence was so oppressive that George could hear the drip of the water on to the carbide of the hanging lamp. And George said that the pain of that kindly squat man was so distressing that he said: “I’m sorry! Do go on talking. I believe you have been very good to my sister. I am deeply grateful!”
No one spoke; no one moved. George went on:
“It’s a little madness of mine. Technical inaccuracies distract me. Of course you do not know our European fine shades. Why should you? — they’re quite unimportant. And of course American newspapers do not mind technical inaccuracies. You get out of the habit, I daresay.”
It was as if Mr. Plowright had been stung by a wasp. He began in the tone of a little squeal:
“My Lordship! If the reporter of any American paper..” Marie Elizabeth said:
“Yes, Otto! Yes, Otto! Another time!”
George said that he was amazed at the softness in his sister’s voice. It was that of a tall mother talking to a wounded child. She even looked at George appealingly. The passionless intonation nevertheless returned to her voice when she said to her brother:
“You refuse, then, all help and countenance?”
Miss Jeaffreson said:
“What is the use of talking, Marie Elizabeth? That idle and discredited woman has got at him first. They are in agreement to whistle you down the wind. A certain type of man is born to be blinded by that meretricious type of woman!”
Mr. Plowright — he must really have been a gentleman — began timidly:
“No! Countess Pugh appears to be a real kind woman. But her judgment is obscured. Rheumatoid arthritis, from which she suffers, is one of the worst scourges....” George looked in his direction. His eyebrows winced slightly; his aunt was suffering really from hysterical angina pectoris complicated by a still more awful disease. Mr. Plowright babbled down into an unintelligible and uneasy silence. George said to his sister:
“I refuse you countenance. I do not refuse you a brother’s love. I have told you all I could think of to-night. And you know that helps you in a course of action that, frankly, breaks my heart. If your solicitor wishes to question me as to details I will answer all that I know. In addition, our father placed in our hands a considerable sum that he said was to be for the express purpose of litigation. He meant it to serve against Mr. Podd: I cannot have used much of that; your Mr. Jeaffreson will tell you when he makes up his accounts. It was some hundred pounds. What I have not used is at your disposal. Your expenses have no doubt been heavy.”
It was as if a sombre flame of satisfaction ht up for the moment the eyes of Marie Elizabeth. She said nothing, however. Mr. Plowright exclaimed something that George did not catch; but he felt that the kindly fat man had commended him in tones that resembled those of an American university cheer. Marie Elizabeth looked at him softly, and said:
“Of course, Otto, my brother is always generous!”
She added something else that again George did not catch. It was as if those two had a private and intimate language of half-words and allusions. George imagined that Mr. Pflugschmied had been trying to lend her money with which to prosecute her romantic suits. And George got rather strongly the impression that his sister could not have been managing her finances very well.
She must have had a reasonable income. The Scotch Bank continued to pay her the allowance that Mr. Heimann had directed; she had from four to five hundred a year from my brother’s estate, and Miss Jeaffreson ought to have been able to defray most of the household expenses out of her allowance for that purpose from the late Mr. Heimann. Possibly they lived extravagantly; anyhow, prices were rising already; and no doubt neither Marie Elizabeth nor Eleanor Jeaffreson was a good housekeeper. On the top of that Marie Elizabeth seemed to be constantly taking “counsel’s opinion” on small points in her case. That would certainly be expensive.
George said that if any man was to lend money to his sister he had rather it had been Mr. Pflugschmied than anyone else. He was so obviously without guile or even ordinary knowledge of the world. He said, nevertheless, to that gentleman that he hoped no occasion of the sort had yet arisen, and he would certainly take steps to see that none did in the future.
Mr. Pflugschmied began to stutter. He was affectingly distressed. He said that Marie Elizabeth’s “story” had been one of the greatest press-scoops he had ever handled. It had been worth a thousand pounds to him — Mr. Pflugschmied; so why should not Marie Elizabeth.... He began to blush as well as to hesitate for words. He hoped, he said, as soon as certain formalities could be concluded, since there could be no doubt of the lamented death of her late husband, “to enter into so tender a relationship with Lady Jessop, née Marsden, that...” George said that he cried out:
“You mean to say that you have been writing about us in your accursed prints?”
Mr. Pflugschmied said, with composure: in this matter he was certain of his ground. He said:
“Only, I assure your lordship, in gilt-edged journals of our greatest cities — and with extreme delicacy!”
He added:
“Why should I resist the urge? I want her to win her case. And our journals secure enormous attention to-day in feudal England.” He said that only ten days ago he had had an interview with our Lord Chief Chancellor — the head of the Law Courts. Perhaps he did not get the title quite right.
He seemed to have exhausted his words. Miss Jeaffreson, too, had kept silence after George had promised his sister that money. Marie Elizabeth said:
