Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 570
‘Dining at the club to-night?...’
Tietjens said: ‘No; I’ve resigned.’
With the aspect of a long-billed bird chewing a bit of putridity, Ruggles said:
‘Oh, but we’ve had an emergency meeting of the committee...the committee was sitting...and sent you a letter asking you to reconsider...
Tietjens said:
‘I know...I shall withdraw my resignation to-night...And resign again to-morrow morning.’
Ruggles’ muscles had relaxed for a quick second, then they stiffened.
‘Oh, I say!’ he had said. ‘Not that...You couldn’t do that...Not to the club!...It’s never been done...It’s an insult...
‘It’s meant to be,’ Tietjens said. ‘Gentlemen shouldn’t be expected to belong to a club that has certain members on its committee.’
Ruggles’ deepish voice suddenly grew very high. ‘Eh, I say, you know!’ he squeaked.
Tietjens hid said:
‘I’m not vindictive...But I am deadly tired: of all old women and their chatter.’
Ruggles had said:
‘I don’t...’ His face had become suddenly dark brown, scarlet and then brownish purple. He stood droopingly looking at Tietjens’ boots.
‘Oh! Ah! Well!’ he said at last. ‘See you at Macmaster’s to-night...A great thing, his knighthood. First-class man.’
That had been the first Tietjens had heard of Macmaster’s knighthood; he had missed looking at the honours list of that morning. Afterwards, dining alone with Sir Vincent and Lady Macmaster, he had seen, pinned up, a back view of the Sovereign doing something to Vincent; a photo for next morning’s papers. From Macmaster’s embarrassed hushings of Edith Ethel’s explanation that the honour was for special services of a specific kind Tietjens guessed both the nature of Macmaster’s service and the fact that the little man hadn’t told Edith Ethel who, originally, had done the work. And — just like his girl — Tietjens had let it go at that. He didn’t see why poor Vincent shouldn’t have that little bit of prestige at home — under all the monuments! But he hadn’t — though through all the evening Macmaster, with the solicitude and affection of a cringing Italian greyhound, had hastened from celebrity to celebrity to hang over Tietjens, and although Tietjens knew that his friend was grieved and appalled, like any woman, at his, Tietjens’, going out again to France — Tietjens hadn’t been able to look Macmaster again in the face...He had felt ashamed. He had felt, for the first time in his life, ashamed!
Even when he, Tietjens, had slipped away from the party — to go to his good fortune! — Macmaster had come panting down the stairs, running after him, through guests coming up. He had said:
‘Wait...You’re not going...I want to...’ With a miserable and appalled glance he had looked up the stairs; Lady Macmaster might have come out too. With his black, short beard quivering and his wretched eyes turned down, he had said:
‘I wanted to explain...This miserable knighthood...’
Tietjens patted him on the shoulder, Macmaster being on the stairs above him.
‘It’s all right, old man,’ he had said — and with real affection: ‘We’ve powlered up and down enough for a little thing like that not to...I’m very glad...’
Macmaster had whispered:
‘And Valentine...She’s not here to-night...’
He had exclaimed:
‘By God!...If I thought..’ Tietjens had said: ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. She’s at another party...I’m going on...’
Macmaster had looked at him doubtingly and with misery, leaning over and clutching the clammy banisters.
‘Tell her...’ he said...’Good God! You may be killed...I beg you...I beg you to believe...I will...Like the apple of my eye...In the swift glance that Tietjens took of his face he could see that Macmaster’s eyes were full of tears.
They both stood looking down at the stone stairs for a long time.
Then Macmaster had said: ‘Well...’
Tietjens had said: ‘Well...2 But he hadn’t been able to look at Macmaster’s eyes, though he had felt his friend’s eyes pitiably exploring his own face...’A backstairs way out of it,’ he had thought; a queer thing that you couldn’t look in the face of a man you were never going to see again!
‘But by God,’ he said to himself fiercely, when his mind came back again to the girl in front of him, ‘this isn’t going to be another backstairs exit...I must tell her...I’m damned if I don’t make an effort...
She had her handkerchief to her face.
‘I’m always crying,’ she said...’A little bubbling spring that can be trusted to keep on...
He looked to the right and to the left. Ruggles or General Someone with false teeth that didn’t fit must be coming along. The street with its sooty boskage was clean, empty and silent. She was looking at him. He didn’t know how long he had been silent, he didn’t know where he had been; intolerable waves urged him towards her.
After a long time he said:
‘Well...’
She moved back. She said:
‘I won’t watch you out of sight...It is unlucky to watch anyone out of sight...But I will never...I will never cut what you said then out of my memory...’ She was gone; the door shut. He had wondered what she would never cut out of her memory. That he had asked her that afternoon to be his mistress?...
He had caught, outside the gates of his old office, a transport lorry that had given him a lift to Holborn...
THE END
THE NATURE OF A CRIME
By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford
First published in two instalments of The English Review in 1909, this collaboration is an epistolary novel that Ford was keen to republish in 1924 in book format, although Conrad was reluctant, most likely due to the work’s uneven nature. The novel mostly concerns an unnamed middle-aged man writing to his lover, threatening to commit suicide. During the course of his letters, he reveals his shady actions of embezzling funds from an estate of which is a trustee. Now that the heir of the estate is about to be married, the narrator is terrified that the books will be audited and his crime discovered. The letters then take on a philosophical air, reflecting on generalities of life and cynical thoughts on the deceit of mankind.
The rushed ending, lack of narration and the unsatisfying conclusion of the novel all testify to Conrad’s foresight, explaining his reasons for finishing the collaboration as quickly as possible.
CONTENTS
PREFACE BY JOSEPH CONRAD
PREFACE BY FORD MADOX FORD
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Joseph Conrad, Ford’s famous collaborator
PREFACE BY JOSEPH CONRAD
FOR years my consciousness of this small piece of collaboration has been very vague, almost impalpable, like the fleeting visits from a ghost. If I ever thought of it, and I must confess that I can hardly remember ever doing it on purpose till it was brought definitely to my notice by my collaborator, I always regarded it as something in the nature of a fragment. I was surprised and even shocked to discover that it was rounded. But I need not have been. Rounded as it is in form, using the word form in its simplest sense — printed form — it remains yet a fragment from its very nature and also from necessity. It could never have become anything else. And even as a fragment it is but a fragment of something that might have been — of a mere intention.
But as it stands what impresses me most is the amount this fragment contains of the crudely materialistic atmosphere of the time of its origin, the time when the English Review was founded. It emerges from the depth of a past as distant from us now as the square-skirted, long frock-coats in which unscrupulous, cultivated, high-minded jouisseurs like ours here attended to their strange business activities and cultivated the little blue flower of sentiment. No doubt our man was conceived for purposes of irony; but our conception of him, I fear, is too fantastic.
Yet the most fantastic thing of all, as it seems to me, is that we two, who had so often discussed soberly the limits and the methods of literary composition, should have believed, for a moment, that a piece of work in the nature of an analytical confession (produced in articulo mortis as it were) could have been developed and achieved in collaboration !
What optimism ! But it did not last long. I seem to remember a moment when I burst into earnest entreaties that all those people should be thrown overboard without much ado. This, I believe, is the real nature of the crime. Overboard. The neatness and dispatch with which it is done in Chapter VIII were wholly the act of my collaborator’s good nature in the face of my panic.
After signing these few prefatory words, I will pass the pen to him in the hope that he may be moved to contradict me on every point of fact, impression and appreciation. I said “ the hope.” Yes. Eager hope. For it would be delightful to catch the echo of the desperate, earnest, eloquent and funny quarrels which enlivened those old days. The pity of it that there comes a time when all the fun of one’s life must be looked for in the past !
J. C.
June 1924
PREFACE BY FORD MADOX FORD
No, I find nothing to contradict, for, the existence of this story having been recalled to my mind by a friend, the details of its birth and its attendant circumstances remain for me completely forgotten, a dark, blind spot on the brain. I cannot remember the houses in which the writing took place, the view from the windows, the pen, the table cloth. At a given point in my life I forgot, literally, all the books I had ever written; but, if nowadays I reread one of them, though I possess next to none and have reread few, nearly all the phrases come back startlingly to my memory, and I see glimpses of Kent, of Sussex, of Carcassonne — of New York, even; and fragments of furniture, mirrors, who knows what? So that, if I didn’t happen to retain, almost by a miracle, for me, of retention, the marked up copy of Romance from which was made the analysis lately published in a certain periodical, I am certain that I could have identified the phrases exactly as they stand. Looking at the book now I can hear our voices as we read one passage or another aloud for purposes of correction. Moreover, I could say: This passage was written in Kent and hammered over in Sussex; this, written in Sussex and worked on in Kent; or this again was written in the downstairs cafe, and hammered in the sitting-room on the first-floor of an hotel that faces the sea on the Belgian coast.
But of the Nature of a Crime no phrase at all suggests either the tones of a voice or the colour of a day. When an old friend, last year, on a Parisian Boulevard, said: “ Isn’t there a story by yourself and Collaborator buried in the So and So?” I repudiated the idea with a great deal of heat. Eventually I had to admit the, as it were, dead fact. And. having admitted that to myself, and my Collaborator having corroborated it, I was at once possessed by a sort of morbid craving to get the story republished in a definite and acknowledged form. One may care infinitely little for the fate of one’s work, and yet be almost hypochondriacally anxious as to the form its publication shall take — if the publication is likely to occur posthumously. I became at once dreadfully afraid that some philologist of that Posterity for which one writes might, in the course of his hyena occupation, disinter these poor bones, and, attributing sentence one to writer A and sentence two to B. maul at least one of our memories. With the nature of those crimes one is only too well acquainted. Besides, though one may never read comments one desires to get them over. It is, indeed, agreeable to hear a storm rage in the distance, and rumble eventually away.
Let me, however, since my Collaborator wishes it, and in the name of Fun that is to-day hardly an echo, differ from him for a shade as to the nature of those passages of time. I protest against the word quarrels. There were not any. And I should like to make the note that our collaboration was almost purely oral. We wrote and read aloud the one to the other. Possibly in the end we even wrote to read aloud the one to the other: for it strikes me very forcibly that the Nature of a Crime is for the most part prose meant for recitation, or of that type.
Anyhow, as the memory comes back to me overwhelmingly, I would read on and read on. One begins with a fine propulsion. Sometimes that would last to the end. But, as often as not, by a real telepathy, with my eyes on the page and my voice going on, I would grow aware of an exaggerated stillness on the part of my Collaborator in the shadows. It was an extraordinary kind of stillness: not of death: not of an ice age. Yes, it was the stillness of a prisoner on the rack determined to conceal an agony. I would read on, my voice gradually sticking to my jaws. When it became unbearable I would glance up. On the other side of the hearth I would have a glimpse of a terribly sick man, of a convulsed face, of fingers contorted. Guido Fawkes beneath the peine forte et dure looked like that. You are to remember that we were very serious about writing. I would read on. After a long time it would come: “ Oh ! ... Oh, Oh ! ... Oh, my God.... My dear Ford.... My dear faller....” (That in those days was the fashionable pronunciation of “ fellow.”)
For myself, I would listen always with admiration. Always with an admiration that I have never since recaptured. And if there were admirablenesses that did not seem to me to fit in with the given scene, I could at least, at the end of the reading, say with perfect sincerity: “ Wonderful ! How you do things ! ... “ before beginning on: “ But don’t you perhaps think....”
And I really do not believe that either my Collaborator or myself ever made an objection, which was not jointly sustained. That is not quarrels. When I last looked through the bound proofs of Romance I was struck with the fact that whereas my Collaborator eliminated almost every word of action and 80 per cent. of the conversations by myself, I supplied almost all the descriptive passages of the really collaborated parts — and such softer sentiment as was called for. And my Collaborator let them get through.
All this took place long ago; most of it in another century, during another reign; whilst an earlier, but not less haughty and proud, generation were passing away.
F.M.H.
June 1924
THE NATURE OF CRIME
I
You are, I suppose, by now in Rome. It is very curious how present to me are both Rome and yourself. There is a certain hill — you, and that is the curious part of it, will never go there — yet, yesterday, late in the evening, I stood upon its summit, and you came walking from a place below. It is always midday there: the seven pillars of the Forum stand on high, their capitals linked together, and form one angle
of a square. At their bases there lie some detritus, a broken marble lion, and I think but I am not certain, the bronze she-wolf suckling the two bronze children. Your dress brushed the herbs: it was grey and tenuous: I suppose you do not know how you look when you are unconscious of being looked at ? But I looked at you for a long time — at my You.
I saw your husband yesterday at the club and he said that you would not be returning till the end of April. When I got back to my chambers I found a certain letter. I will tell you about it afterwards — but I forbid you to look at the end of what I am writing now. There is a piece of news coming: I would break it to you if I could — but there is no way of breaking the utterly unexpected. Only, if you read this through you will gather from the tenor, from the tone of my thoughts, a little inkling, a small preparation for my disclosure. Yes: it is a “ disclosure.”
... Briefly, then, it was this letter — a business letter — that set me thinking: that made that hill rise before me. Yes, I stood upon it and there before me lay Rome — beneath a haze, in the immense sea of plains. I have often thought of going to Rome — of going with you, in a leisurely autumn of your life and mine. Now — since I have received that letter — I know that I shall never see any other Rome than that from an imagined hilltop. And when, in the wonderful light and shadelessness of that noon, last evening, you came from a grove of silver poplars, I looked at you — my you — for a very long while. You had, I think, a parasol behind your head, you moved slowly, you looked up at the capitals of those seven pillars ...And I thought that I should never — since you will not return before the end of April — never see you again. I shall never see again the you that every other man sees ...
You understand everything so well that already you must understand the nature of my disclosure. It is, of course, no disclosure to tell you that I love you. A very great reverence is due to youth — and a very great latitude is due to the dead. For I am dead: I have only lived through you for how many years now ! And I shall never speak with you again. Some sort of burial will have been given to me before the end of April. I am a spirit. I have ended my relations with the world. I have balanced all my books, my will is made. Only I have nothing to leave — save to you, to whom I leave all that is now mine in the world — my memory.
It is very curious — the world now. I walked slowly down here from Gordon Square. I walked slowly — for all my work is done. On the way I met Graydon Bankes, the K.C. It would have astonished him if he could have known how unreal he looked to me. He is six feet high, and upon his left cheek there is a brown mole. I found it difficult to imagine why he existed. And all sorts of mists hurried past him. It was just
outside the Natural History Museum. He said that his Seaford Railway Bill would come before Committee in June. And I wondered: what is June? ... I laughed and thought: why June will never come !
June will never come. Imagine that for a moment. We have discussed the ethics of suicide. You see why June will never come !
You remember that ring I always wear ? The one with a bulging, greenish stone. Once or twice you have asked me what stone it was. You thought, I know, that it was in bad taste and I told you I wore it for the sake of associations. I know you thought — but no: there has never been any woman but you.
