Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 533
“You’re Pflugschmied, aren’t you? You have been very good to my sister! I’m much obliged to you. I have been remiss myself! I manhandled you this morning, didn’t I? I’m dreadfully sorry. It’s having to write to the papers!”
It was very late when they got to Froghole. That motor-cab must have been a terrible, slow affair. I know it was late, because the police constable wrote to Clarice:
“Honrd Mdam. Your young man as gone. I watched is window till I could no more. And Halien. He caught that fellow by the throat a treat and ran till follow him I could unt. Remaining Mdam your in the pink has I hope it leave me....”
I do not know how that message got to the breakfast table of Clarice in London. There are milk floats and things, and Clarice must have given that constable many pounds. Mr. Pflugschmied had wired to her theatre asking her to come to him at once. But Clarice had been singing, not at her own theatre, but before Royalty in some immense hall, in aid of the blind or something. The performance had not been over till one-thirty, and she had permitted herself not to go down to Froghole that one night, there being no moon.
George must have spent that night in writing to the papers. Mr. Pflugschmied peeped in at the window blinds of the room where once I had lain, and saw him writing, for hours and hours, beyond the dawn.
At any rate, Clarice, arriving at the little sunk terrace in front of my brother’s house, in the sunlight, her furs half off her shoulders, the water-cooler of her car sending up a cloud of steam, the police constable very shaken in the hind seat, saw Mr. Pflugschmied walking up and down on the little sunken terrace, the bright blue sleeves of his shirt showing below the holes of his waistcoat. He was very pleased with himself, and when Clarice, her nostrils working dreadfully, cried out:
“Where is George?”: he answered in his good suety chuckle:
“George is all right. I have kept my eye on him. He wrote some letters. Now he has gone up there with a rope.”
His rather large pipe bubbled complacently. He pointed with his unshaven chin — he had sat up all night — up the road. It was my brother’s beloved private road; from beneath an archway made by the great beech trees he had been accustomed to look at his Great View framed in an immense, Gothic, eelskin arch.
I don’t know how Clarice got at Mr. Pflugschmied. I like to think of her vaulting over the little red brick wall and catching him by the collar of his waistcoat: the brown furs and Clarice all moving together as she went over. She had found the ham-faced constable a few minutes before, plodding on immense boots between the hedgerows in the heat. She liked that fellow, really; she spoke of him with what the French call attendrissement.
Anyhow, there was Mr. Pflugschmied in the car beside her, and the policeman behind!
George must have lost time! He had wanted to reproduce to exactitude the tragedy of his father! The limb of the beech had to be twenty-seven feet above the ground. He would have liked swine to rout in the beechmast beneath his feet. He was an epicure in sensation....
Those unfortunate fat fellows, the constable and Mr. Pflugschmied, gave one scream... They imagined that Clarice was hurling them to death!
George was hanging to the half-right in front of them. He was still swinging with the impetus of his original kick off, a yard or so from the road that, there, skirting the hillside, ran along a steep, wooded escarpment. And Clarice had just turned her little car off the road. She stopped it beneath the feet of her lover. In order to suit his connoisseur’s taste George had hung himself from a very old beech tree that grew out of the bank, so that he had swung out sideways instead of taking a drop.
That police constable must have been a good fellow. He just caught the knees of George, and with all the strength of his panting body took the weight as he stood in the car. And then.... Neither of those men had a knife!
Clarice had to climb up that bank and, desperately, breaking her little pink nails, to loosen the rope round George’s warm throat. The policeman was at the end of his resources; Mr. Plowright had fainted.
Those two lowered George into the car amidst the beechen shadows. Clarice whispered in his ear that it was all right; that he was an Earl; she to be his Countess; there would be no more fusses; just little bits of fun.
His eyes opened.
The policeman said:
“Miss, this is my prisoner!” There was no arguing with him and no bribing him. Mr. Plowright said:
“I will make this all right. I will fix the Press!”
So George had to stand his trial for attempted suicide.
There were seven old men, half of them very blind and nearly all extremely deaf. They sat in a row above a precipice of mahogany in a small hall of the country town and spoke rudely to the police constable. One said:
“Lord Marsden is my landlord. I cannot sit on this case!”
Another said:
“Miss Honeywill’s father is my tenant. I prefer not to sit on this.” He made motions of washing his hands.
There were five left. They put their heads together. An old fellow with untidy grey hair — he was the chairman and he had an affection of the throat — whispered:
“Miss Honeywill. Will you take Lord Marsden away?.... I wish it could be me! That constable appears to be a fool.”
Another magistrate said:
“Obviously a pure accident. Young men do not hang themselves on the morning of their accession to Earldoms. I knew his father well.”
Mr. Plowright moved amongst the reporters in the well of the court like a paternal turkey amongst smaller poultry. He said:
“Gentlemen! If you will leave it to me you will much oblige everybody.”
Being gentlemen, they said:
“Naturally! We would not do anything in the world to inconvenience Miss Clarice Honeywill!”
Clarice had her Earl in her little car. She ran him up to her home in London and hid him in her own rooms; she brooded over him as the Devil might be expected to brood over the Damned, or as one of my brothers’ hens actually broods over its offspring. He was comatose for three days. Clarice was of opinion that his poor mind, set whirring by the mental straightener, was whirring still through all the minutiae of all the unpleasantnesses that had ever befallen him. Then one morning she chanced it. She said:
“Read this!”
George was lying in bed. He looked at the newspaper. He started on to his hips.
He gave a great hoarse shout and said:
“That imbecile! But that’s me: Marsden! Peers spiritual sign their Christian, peers temporal their surnames. With the natural modifications for places.”
She told me that that was what he said. No doubt he had practised his signature as a peer, or his mind was running on a sentence in some book of privileges. Suddenly he laughed.
“Clarice!” he said, “tell that fellow... If I’ve got to stick it I must stick it. But tell that fellow...”
He went on waving the newspaper and looking at it in turns. He was faced by the article that Mr. Plowright had contributed to every journal in the British Empire. He exclaimed violently:
“But, good God! What’s this all about.... He says I walked with a rope! And slipped down a bank! I!” Mr. Plowright, having usurped the functions of the local reporters, who would have left the matter unreported out of decency, had written an amazing account of an accident to a British peer. It combined the feudal spirit of a member of our ancient aristocracy with an amazing ignorance of how a three hundred year old beech tree can be felled. George said:
“Am I such an incompetent ass? Is it imaginable? To take a plough-rope to pull down an ancestral oak. It would have to be an oak. And to mislay — mislay, you understand! my crosscut saw!”
He threw the paper down. And then — and that was what put final tranquillity into the heart of Clarice! — he took it up and read it all over again, with a sort of fascination.
She said that, then, she just said:
“We are, if you feel fit, to lunch with your aunt. Afterwards I have a matinée; I cannot let my people down any more. But I can get a fortnight off after Thursday!”
Thus, simply, they entered Paradise.
A LAST CHAPTER
THERE was no doubt — there couldn’t be any doubt — as to the young man’s handsomeness. Some men without having — as is the fate of so many of us who are more than presentable — to look like barbers, chefs, sergeants-major, or men-milliners, can yet have an aspect, an aura, of great harmony of feature, great amiability, height, erectness, symmetry of leg, display of trousering and what is called immaculateness of evening dress. And one had the conviction that this young man could have carried off anything. At that moment he was carrying off a good deal.
It was natural that all the guests in the hotel should be looking round from their dinner-tables at the party to which he belonged, and a miserable waiter had just upset a full sauceboat over his boots. A section of the fate of a section of the world was in the hands of that young man and his party. That is to say that they were representing Great Britain at some meeting or other of some or other League for the settling of certain boundaries. There were in those days so many of them that one forgets which unfortunate race was being harrowed, and Deputies, Commissaries, and Ministers were such common objects of that lake shore that hotel guests might have been pardoned for not raising an eyebrow. But they did.
And there stood our splendid young man, as it were, upon a dais — it isn’t necessary to go into the architecture of the magnificently white-enamelled hotel dining-room — with behind him an enormous, fat, and good-natured British plenipotentiary, an enormous, fat, and good-natured American plenipotentiary, a concerned, dark Spanish diplomat — all of them looking at our young man’s patent leather boots. His wife was hanging on his arm. You could have recognised her — and it is the measure of what I myself had been through in the way of mental horror that I didn’t at once recognise her — as the heroine of ten thousand illustrated weekly papers and of ever so many thousand-night runs. Yet she said repeatedly — ah, what a charming fair creature! —
“George: all the people are looking at us.”
But he stood perfectly unmoved and easy while the little dark foreign waiter, on his hands and knees, crept towards the soiled boots, dragging a dishevelled napkin and weeping. The offending sauce-boat and its salver had rolled down the carpeted stairs into the body of the dining room. The maître d’hotel, dark-bearded but urbane, had stopped the orchestra that was just behind his back. His voice could be heard — pleading for the little dark foreign waiter who wept.
I said to the man beside me on the lounge — all this was taking place within two yards of our feet: Had the daised place been a stage we should have been in the right wing and hidden from the audience. He very likely, and I for certain, had chosen that relatively concealed place because of a definite shrinking from the human eye. I was supposed to be cured; that was why I was there, having only lately come from a cold-water-cure institute in the neighbourhood. There I had at last gone through what — thank God! — proved to be the last stage of a mental pilgrimage begun among beastly horrors, lasting for horrible years. I said, then to the fat, compact, irritated man on the lounge beside me:
“That young fellow has a nerve.”
Mr. Julius O. Plowright made a sound like “Gur-r-h h” — of violent but contained fury.
I had never known Mr. Plowright well; but I had known him well enough to be aware that if it were not for his journalistic powers there was absolutely nothing that Mr. Plowright could do. He could not ride a horse, could not drive a motor; he could not tell north from south on a map, could not spell “acclimatization” without a dictionary. And certainly he could not drink a pint of post-war beer without going under the table. Why, the only time I ever saw him try to draw his gun in order to show me how a West Idaho cowboy fires from horseback, he could not get the weapon out of his hip pocket — he had put on too much flesh. And as for his poker....
Now the poor, good, plump fellow, it appeared, could not even nerve himself to write the “story” of the particular Congress whose members were under our eyes. It was five years since I had seen him. I had crossed the room to him in answer to his enthusiastic beckoning, not recognising him with any vividness, and we had only got as far in the resumption of our acquaintance as to let him convey to me — with an extraordinary trepidation of manner — that, when he had seen me on the other side of the hall he had let out what he called an S.O.S. of angel-gladness. What precisely was troubling him he had not managed yet to explain: the hints of Americans are brilliantly clear when you understand them; but I sometimes wonder how they ever understand even themselves. I imagined that his trouble was a simple nervous breakdown. After all, he had as much right to a breakdown as I had had. Since our meeting in the Hotel du Rhin at Amiens, he had achieved the greatest scoop ever known in the history of American journalism; since then — or perhaps before — he had been in Berlin, in Jugo-Slavia, in Moldo-Wallachia, in Constantinople, in the Bulgarian advance, in the Servian retreat.... God knows how he had managed these things: he could describe the places and events with enthusiasm and the thrilling inaccuracy of an eyewitness for the papers. I can’t get away from figuring to myself Mr. Plowright as carried through impassable and destroyed wilds in an armoured mummy case with telescopic eyelets — but always full of enthusiasm, loquacity, and unbounded kindness of heart. It was indeed as if he entered into the troubles of others with such immense dash that he never had time really to master what those troubles were. And the resulting impression would thrill New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and other great cities of a great Western continent. I have sometimes wondered if they would so have stirred those great states if the stories had had any relation to the vicissitudes of the victims. I daresay they would not have; but it does not seem to matter much. It was, however, mattering at that moment extraordinarily to Mr. Plowright — as you shall hear....
I was not, however, bothering about what Mr. Plowright said, because I wanted to listen to the measured words that fell from the lips of the hotel-autocrat.
I had the insatiable craving of one nearly come back into active life — for the details of active life. It wasn’t so much curiosity as an instinctive feeling that to rub up against humanity would toughen my nerves. Just that! I could listen to Plowright’s story later. If I missed what Monsieur Chose was then telling I might never hear it again.
M. Chose was brown-square-bearded, frock-coated, with a ramrod spine. He spoke in a low but very clear voice, hardly moving his lips, and seemed to accord to everyone to whom he spoke an equal measure of his own immense wisdom and moderation. And, except for the handsome young man who just pleasantly smiled, his then audience listened to him with parted lips — the British, American, and Spanish representatives and the beautiful star of musical comedy.
He began by begging my lord not to insist on the dismissal of the unfortunate waiter — not because the waiter would not get another job; he could get as many as he liked — but because he was “very warrantably” an extreme nervous subject. He might lose his nerve and be unable ever to wait again. He had so much suffered. Of course if my lord the earl insisted on the man’s dismissal his name must be erased from the roll of the attendants upon the guests of the splendid hotel.
The young man addressed as my lord the earl — and of course he must have been all his life at least an earl — did not make any reply directly to the point. He was anxiously looking down upon the operations of the distressed waiter, who had by this time reached his left boot. He uttered, however, rather absently, something that I did not catch.
No — the hotel-keeper answered with a touch of obviously justified pride, this was no matter of any difficulty in finding trained waiters after the late international conflict. He, M. Chose, flattered himself that if he needed a thousand expert ministrants, one thousand would present themseves at the mere lifting of his little finger. But this was a story to make weep the very walls of stone.
The British representative nudged the American, “Indeed, Crowther,” he said. “Listen to that, Crowther. We must listen to this, Crowther.”
The American Minister said:
“Why, surely, Sir Arthur.” The Spaniard sighed and exclaimed:
“Poor man. And then to have this disaster!”
The hotel-keeper strengthened his position by saying that this was a story that had made the whole hotel-keeping population of the world shudder in its very marrow. The beautiful countess, supporting herself by her husband’s sleeve, leaned over the dishevelled back of the waiter’s head and exclaimed that that was truly dreadful.
This poor waiter, the hotel-keeper continued, prostrate as they now saw him, was once the proprietor of the Hotel Royal of P — , I was unable to catch the name of the place. It was a junction of the Berlin-Paris-Vienna-Ostend — Constantinople-Rome-Trans-Siberian; its hotel had been one of the most magnificent of the world, and this its proprietor.
At this point Mr. Plowright, beside me, whispered with immense enthusiasm:
“There. What did I tell you! The moment I set eyes on that waiter I knew by his cheek-bones that he was a Moldo-Slovakian. P—” — and he repeated the name of the unpronounceable but very important railway junction, “is in South Russia.”
The hotel-keeper was at that moment saying that the waiter was a Belgian from Brussels, and the town of his splendours and misfortunes in Serbia.
Mr. Plowright exclaimed:
“Oh, hell!”
It was because, I suppose, this explosion was distinctly audible, that, to my dismay, the handsome earl looked round at us. I imagined that we two might be drawn into the group — and then, what queer, what embarrassing waves of personality might not pass from them to us. (You are to remember that I was an only just recovering neurastheniac.) But the handsome earl’s eyelids only just raised themselves as his glance reached the sallow, rapidly purpling face of Mr. Plowright. It was the merest flicker of recognition in a man who had himself absolutely under control. It was magnificent.
