Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 696
The daily grind was beginning: the preparing of ground for new publics: the encroaching on the markets of others. Professor Gresham Hacker was coming with an elaborate plan, the outline of which he had already presented - for a whole series of school-books for use by the State Education Authority. That market was immense, permanent and almost unthinkably profitable. It was a department that had hitherto been unexploited by Post, Gellatly & Jeaffreson. It was practically monopolized by three old-fashioned houses. If they were not so august or quite as ancient, they were larger and till lately immensely more secure and wealthy than the House.
But Notterdam had a scheme by which, with Professor Hacker’s aid, he might break in on that monopoly. Something might be done towards it by the dispensing of some thousands of dollars in the corridors of a certain State Capitol; something more by the thunderings of Professor Hacker against the present textbooks in use in the State Institutions... The House might either seriously undertake a great series of educational works in cheapened forms. Or the other Houses, at the threat, might buy them out - to the extent of surrendering one or other educational branch to Notterdam’s undertaking... That was precious like blackmail. But that was what business was, and the pickings would be enormous....
If, then, Professor Hacker had his scheme cut and dried Notterdam had proposed to put it to the Editorial Conference which could be trusted to receive it with enthusiasm - as they would receive anything that savoured of blackmail. If it were not it must stand over.
It had not been quite ready, nevertheless Notterdam had spent nearly an hour discussing details with the professor, a lean, brown-bearded fellow who would not go away. He had also interviewed a binder who had got hold of an invention of a very marketable and colourable imitation of morocco leather for binding - an invention of which Notterdam wanted to have the monopoly for a year or so; and a commercial artist who had made a rather ingenious adaptation of cardboard marionettes to children’s Christmas books. You pulled strings and figures danced on the page. But the thing would not wear.
... So that, having glanced through and signed a number of letters that Miss Cresswell had prepared for him, Notterdam had arrived at the hour for the Editorial Conference. He had been having a short, preliminary talk with Miss Brooke Phelps whose legs, cased in something silver-grey and electrically shining as it had seemed to Notterdam, had been even more exciting than usual. The newly typed Porter contract, ready for his signature, and Messrs. Holzhauer and Walpfortzheimer had arrived together. Notterdam had placed the contract and the soiled original in his drawer and had talked to the others about a very disappointing fight that had taken place at Miami the night before. Then the rest had dribbled in.
But the contract, invisible in its drawer, had seemed to burn itself into Notterdam’s consciousness as radium will send its rays through the most opaque substances. All through the conference, that discomfort and the disquieting - the maddening - thoughts about his health had formed a troublesome sub-conscious layer to his awareness of the proceedings.
And, at the end of the conference there had come that odd vision of himself. And numbness.
It had invaded all his senses. Miss Brooke Phelps had pushed Kratch out of the room. He had sat for a long time huddled down in his chair. He had looked at his desk instruments. Kratch’s little secretary had groped silent, before him.
CHAPTER III
He took it that that had been a fit of indigestion and sat back in his chair feeling exhausted. But in a sense glad.
And then suddenly warmly sorry - for Kratch was gone. Not merely to his own rooms in another part of the building, but gone absolutely. To Mesopotamia? To Padan-Aram? Who knew where? There was something mysterious about his sudden departure and the preposterous name of his destination. It had all the appearance of flight - as if of a sick man fleeing from the arrows of Death. All the more imperatively he, Notterdam, ought to have been down on the quay with bouquets and chocolates and novels to give glory to his send-off - on his own ship. He hadn’t. He had been sick. He did not know quite what had happened and he could not ask the girl who sat opposite him. She seemed nevertheless unconcerned.
There succeeded immediately like an ache in his tired brain the muddle of the Porter agreement. It had obtained an added importance from the nature of the quarrel with Kratch. Since, although not of importance itself, it embodied exactly the type of chain contract that Kratch so detested... Dreaded was perhaps the better word. That was a sort of madness... what of it? They were all mad. Or just going mad... Or drifting into superstitions that were disguised madnesses!
Things hung together - one damn thing tangled up in another. Take this Porter agreement! The mere thought of Porter, because he came from Notterdam’s own birthplace, was no doubt responsible for the memories of his own youth and conviction of his subsequent deterioration. That morning they would not let him alone....
He had not thought of himself, lanky, raw-boned, unable to manage his hands and feet and able to follow hounds all through a winter’s day and dusk - for nine hours at a stretch... He had not thought of himself as a separate being - not in ten years. Perhaps not ever. He no doubt subconsciously felt himself till that day still able to carry a golf bag for hours and follow the hounds, afoot, from Pulborough to Lewes. Or he had never given it a thought.
He said to the girl in front of him:
‘I hope you have not been depressed... Do you know if they have got the body out of the elevator?’
It had been just his luck that a decrepit Irish charwoman should that morning have got her body ingeniously jammed into the elevator shaft. All the current had had to be cut off. He had had to come upstairs to the office on foot and discover how shockingly out of condition he was....
When she leaned back in her chair she had looked domesticated, like a girl sewing, her head bent forward, Now that she was about to speak to him she sat singularly rigid, her spine erect as if she were horse-riding.
From his earliest days when he had learned to read French from his mother who was of Huguenot extraction he remembered a phrase from a child’s book:
Nicolete au clair visage... He had never known what it meant but it ran now and then in his head.
This girl’s face was coloured and clear: the high, delicate red of the cheek-bones, the amber brown of the eyes; the bright red of the mouth; the whiteness of the little teeth... And the mournful and puzzled expression. She had round her neck a little necklace of pink coral. She said: ‘It was odd. I never thought about the poor woman personally.’
He experienced a singular revulsion of feeling at her voice. He thought that it resembled that of his mother, teaching him French. Then perhaps clair meant highly and delicately coloured and contemplatively submissive.
She said:
‘No, I did not think about my own reactions. It affected Mr. Kratch so painfully.’
She was very small. Exceedingly small and fragileboned: if she had not appeared so healthy you would have had to call her miniature. Her hair was mouse-coloured and extremely fine. If he had to give her a nickname he might have called her: ‘Mouse.’
‘It was the little Mouse,
That ate my heart away,
The little peeping, creeping Mouse
That creeps at dawn of day....’
Something like that. An old rhyme.
Her lips were very full and pouted; her eyes, extremely large-pupilled, appeared above all to be puzzled.
Puzzled about you, about life, about her own self. Their glance ran over your brows, your cheeks, your mouth, to return to your eyes. She sat up, holding her note-book as if it had been gathered reins, her elbows close to her sides, her chin singularly tucked into her neck. She might have been reining in an elegant horse, to music, in a haute école act.
She said:
‘It put the finishing touch to the superstitious fit he had on. I was so sorry.’
She had a soft cool voice; a slightly dusky accent.
She was from Missouri or Tennessee.
He felt invigorated: as if he were going to do what he wanted... in the matter of Porter, perhaps. There was that to think about. He said:
‘You think Mr. Kratch is ill... Mentally? Seriously? I too have thought...’ She said:
‘I am so sorry... I am so very sorry... He has been having these horrible...’ He was unable to hear her.
That of course was to be expected: it was the sign that Kratch was actually gone. Across the way the rivet-drivers of the New Providence Essential Building that Kratch had had silenced for the meeting, were again performing as they performed every four minutes or so. The sound entered Notterdam’s room like contemptuous personal assaults, delivered by the million a second. They destroyed speech, destroyed all thought - except as to how the city was getting ahead. For the matter of that it almost dimmed the sight.
There remained nothing but to look round the room. He could not even go on looking at the young woman. His room felt sumptuous in atmosphere and proportion but there was little to account for this, except for the electric blue divan before the high fireplace that burned electric logs and the high pile of the red carpet. There were carnations in a green glass vase on his leather-padded table - the golden mahogany table that had stood since 1816 in the office of Post, Gellatly & Jeaffreson.
Except perhaps too for the standard telephone and the globular brass inkstand and brass pen-tray....
These were what everyone else might have had. Nevertheless in their fusion of line and their shine they had, Mr. Notterdam considered subconsciously every time that he entered his room, a quality of design - of personality!
It was something that pleased him intimately. In secret, he even disliked taking the telephone receiver off the hook because it disturbed that harmony. It was something that gave to the office the only touch of home life that he considered himself to know. Getting fatigued at about the eleventh hole of his golf course whilst his horselike wife strode ahead with the pace of a three-year old or struck balls with dismaying precision, he would find himself thinking with affection of his leather-covered desk, his telephone, his domed brass inkstand and his pen-tray.
In the same way, as a boy of seventeen, he had liked, at the day’s end, to reach his own bedroom. On the oaken beam of the mantel-shelf there had been a stuffed duck’s head, a cheap Japanese vase, an old brass-mounted duelling pistol and a small, calf-bound edition of the works of Sterne. It had always seemed to him then that those five feet of oaken beam were himself, his own expression, his home.
So now it was with his table. He would re-arrange those shining objects to the shade of a hair every morning when, coming in, he would observe that the cleaner had disturbed them.
And, suddenly, it occurred to him to think that it was much more home-like. The young woman opposite him bent her head over her notebook as if she were sewing. That was perhaps all the domesticity he was ever to know.
He did not have to turn his head to know that there were books - rather untidy books in foreign languages - innumerable books stacked on a table; on two chairs; even on the floor. He considered books. He had never liked books; he had never liked reading. He did not suppose that he had read a book for pleasure since he had been twenty. It was queer. He disliked books; he disliked authors. Yet he lived surrounded by books and authors and had an almost unerring flair about them. He did not read a book, professionally, for any purpose of reading words. It was done with some sort of instinct. He regarded books as cardboard cubes. When he took a manuscript - of, say, a German book - in his hand he saw - not distinctly of course, but like thin jelly in the mind - such and such a heap of cardboard cubes. If it was a small heap he threw the book away; if it was a great heap, falling over and trailing away in perspective into space he would take it then and there. If the apparition were moderate he would see the writer. If he felt safe with the author — safe! a feeling of safeness, like the feeling of safeness that came from the girl opposite him — he bought the book. If he felt very safe he commissioned a series of books - sufficient sometimes to last the fellow’s life. That was what Kratch hated... But you had to play for safety now and then to have in your storehouses a certain proportion of merchandise that was assured of a lasting, if slow, sale. You had to aim at that. It was unfortunate that he had felt safe with the fellow, Porter, the other evening. That was because he had been drunk: alcohol makes you feel safe. Otherwise he had never felt like that before with Porter. The fellow came from his home village and they talked of old times. So Notterdam was perhaps more familiar, saw more of, was less de baut en bas with Porter than any other writer. No doubt also, too, because he was an ex-compatriot, lonely-ish and down on his luck in a formidably vast foreign city.
The fellow had married a queer, very tall, thin, gipsyish creature. He never should have. She had an always hungry air and was alarmingly liable to get intoxicated.
But there he was - Porter. Almost destitute, with his little shred of professional reputation and that alarming woman - in danger of starving to death.
By God, they wouldn’t. The House was going to support them for the rest of their lives!
He said:
‘Damn, damn, damn.. a great many times.
That was only partly because of the infernal noises of the riveters. The idea of Porter was beginning too to get on his nerves. That unlucky affair needed close consideration. He would have preferred to consider the domesticating young woman in front of him.
She had on a dark blue dress of extreme elegance. There were little holes in embroidery all round the shoulders and across the upper chest. You could see the white of the flesh under the holes. The thinnest, dark blue... Silk, presumably.
She looked quickly round at him and said that she begged his pardon; she had not heard. His lips, moving in damning the last cachinnations of the riveters, had made her think that he was talking to her.
He said:
‘I do not even know your name!’ He rather wished he had not said: ‘even.’ It might look like an attempt to begin a familiarity.
She answered:
‘Henrietta Faukner Felise.’ She pronounced it ‘Fehleese.’
It was a delicious name. On the other hand she said it with the carelessness of a lady of family.
He said:
‘We both have queer names. My father used to think that we were descended from Nostradamus, the magician. But my mother was certain that it came from Notredame - an Englishman whose mother gave birth to him in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris... At the time when France belonged to England.’
She said:
‘How singular that is — My father used to say that we must be descended from an Italian called Felice.’ Her father had been a doctor in Mile End, a village near Memphis, Tennessee. But her mother really thought that she had traced out that there had been an Englishman who had come to Virginia very early and was called Falaise. ‘Because he was descended from a man who came from Falaise in Normandy at the time of the Conquest.’
Notterdam said:
‘That was more probably the case.’ If her mother had been of French descent, like his, that would account for her voice resembling the voice of his mother. Rounded, soft, but rather deep. There had been Huguenots in Normandy.... La Falaise.... No, La Rochelle!.... Our own Rochelle, bright city of the waters.... But perhaps La Rochelle was not in Normandy.
She said:
‘There really was an Englishman in Virginia, very early, called de Falaise....’ Her father had attended on Mr. Kratch when he had been stopping over in Memphis, Tennessee. Mr. Kratch had promised to find her a job when her father should die. Her father had been dying very painfully himself, then. He was struggling on with his work to provide for her and her mother.... ‘Mr. Kratch has been very good to us. He had those horrible pains for the first time then. Father gave him relief. I wish he was not so ill now.’
She stopped and reddened slowly.
‘I’m sorry, Mr. Notterdam.’ She touched her hand under her side and drew a little breath. ‘I’m sorry, I mean, that I said so much when you are wanting to work.’ It was a bad habit. But Mr. Kratch used to ask her to talk to him often for three or four minutes at a stretch. When he was exhausted after a bad spell. Above all when he was frightened. As he had been that morning. But it was a bad habit for a stenographer to get into.
Notterdam said:
‘I suppose then my... my friend... Kratch... was in terrible pain all through the Meeting... How is it that I did not know about his pains?’
She said:
‘No. It was before the Meeting. When I went to fetch him in the corridor. I do not like his poor eye being like that. It is a new symptom father never saw.’ Notterdam asked:
‘Before the Meeting.... Then his behaviour at it....’ She said:
‘That was fear. I wish I could make you understand.... His pains before the Meeting came from agitation at the thought of the fear that he was going to have at the Meeting. From fear of fear.’
Notterdam said:
‘There is too much fear about all this. Every one was afraid at the Meeting. They seemed to be....’
‘We are all so afraid of losing our jobs...’
He said rather harshly:
‘You... What are you afraid of?... Me?... Do you think I shan’t be as good to you... and your mother, as Kratch was?.. And Kratch.... He could not be afraid of losing his job...’
‘Oh, it was...’ she began agonizedly, ‘his... his touch.... He was afraid he was losing his lucky touch.
... His... you know, Napoleonic star. Yes, he was afraid of you. He thought you stood - had always stood between him and his star. And now more than ever.’ Notterdam said:
‘This is like being mad... I was his best friend always...’
She said:
There are the things you don’t... But I ought not to say that...You must have hated the way he imposed me on you... He had reasons.’
