Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 719
It might have been indeed that he had lost all spirit when he lost Carrie. He was probably deeply - deep-rootedly - attached to her.
At any rate, before consenting to the marriage, he had called her into his office and, fingering her necklace pathetically as she stood before him, had asked her if she really knew what she was in for if she married Van Heldenstamm. He drew for her vivid pictures of the habits of the Belgian aristocracy. They were apparently the only aristocracy left that were aristocratically outrageous in the old style. They carried off each other’s wives on coal-black chargers, shot injured husbands across the moats of châteaux, kidnapped the children awarded by courts to injured spouses, flogged their butlers, maintained harems in Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp or on their properties under the nose of their wives. They had, the old man said, all the black properties of the old-time Spaniards and Netherlanders from whom they drew their blood. And he pointed out that if Van Heldenstamm proved an exception Sister Carrie couldn’t expect to find in Europe the freedom and the affection that young American girls expected as theirs of right. At best the life of a European château is one of unceasing calls on you. There are the servants, the priests, the peasants, the poor neighbours, making perpetual calls on your purse, your needle, your poultry yard and, above all, your time. He would not want a daughter of his, if she was to occupy a prominent position in a country bordering on one that had been his own to occupy that position with any want of dignity....
As far as Henry Martin could see, the old man had come with more dignity himself out of that interview than out of any other that he had had with his children. Perhaps he had felt it more! With Henry Martin and Brother Hal he had never come off well. Brother Hal had simply defied him at every turn. He had done what he wanted, never asked his father for a penny and had prospered boisterously in half-opened territories and markets. He had worked on bridges in Spain, Mexico, Sweden, Buenos Aires, and New Mexico - on the machinery of gold mines in Ballarat, South Africa and now, in the Klondike. He had earned good money and had even now a good sum invested in one or two inventions that, in spite of the times, were beginning to do well.
His own career Henry Martin was shy of recalling in this his final review of it. He was strolling desultorily along the pier. Old Marius Vial, having given up the struggle to dissuade him, had hobbled forward to gloat over the boat as he gloated over all his property.
What was the good of reviewing a career that was so soon to run inside a lump of pink granite with one polished side? As if it were an automobile running into its last garage. He didn’t want to think of his perpetual wanderings with Springfield as a base - the town to which he had as perpetually returned to make new beginnings. And new excursions under the sardonic eyes of his father.... Surely if father had loved his wife he would have shown more sympathy with the aspirations of her son!
He had never seemed to.
Their first wounding and atrocious quarrel had come just after Henry Martin’s return for the first time from Dartmouth. He had still been a freshman and still had ambitions to become a writer. Over that they had not directly quarrelled. Not ostensibly!
If he was now thirty-five he ought to have been born in 1896. Actually he had been born in 1895. He would be thirty-six in three months’ time.... But he would not, of course. ‘He would have been’ was perhaps the way to express it. It was a mistake to have been born in the nineteenth century when the whole of your life was to be passed in the twentieth.
Carrie had been born on July nth, 1894. It was just over a month since he had sent her his last birthday telegram. Hal had been born on January 9th, 1901.... It was perhaps a mistake to have been born between an early maturing, soft natured sister and a brother much smaller than oneself. He had no doubt been rendered soft by his sister’s solicitude.... It was not good for a boy to go to his first socials under the wing of an elder sister. It had got him into the early habit of relying on women for advice and support.
Carrie had been married early in 1915 - when she had been just under twenty-one. He had been at Dartmouth... was it a year, then? He was not certain. These dates confused themselves. There were too many of them.
Mother had died in... yes, in late 1915. She had only had a countess of her own blood for four months! And a son at Dartmouth for fifteen.
He had come home for her death. She had, it then appeared, only just kept up for the wedding and had been under opiates for most of the time since then. The old man must have suffered like hell all those months. But to Henry Martin he had seemed merely callous.
Coming home from the funeral he had gone straight to the kitchen door and had shouted to the cook in Luxemburg Flemish that she would cook Luxemburg fashion from then on. He had afterwards gone up to his bedroom, opened the drawer and taken out from its tissue paper his gold-knobbed cane.
Coming straight back from college triumphs Henry Martin had regarded that as an offensive assertion of recovered freedom. At Dartmouth he had been quite popular. He had had money to throw away. He stood already six feet in his gym shoes and was very large boned. Taking college life with immense seriousness he had united to a studiousness sufficient to make him stand very well with the English teaching staff, a zealous observance of fraternity necessities. He had, too, a great devotion to athletics. He was light of foot in spite of his weight, very muscular and of remarkable balance for a cub. He knew that he was already under observation for the Rhodes Scholarship list of 1916.
Three days after mother’s funeral father had sent for him to the office and had told him that he would not be going back to Dartmouth. His blinking eyes had watched Henry Martin’s face with the effect of a medieval executioner taking stock of the emotions of a victim to whom he had announced sentence of death. He had said simply: ‘You won’t be going back to Dartmouth.’ Without any breaking of the news.
Henry Martin had stood like a pole-axed ox. Swaying. After a long time father had added:
‘You will be going to learn the business from the bottom. American fashion. Stoking. Boiling. Cutting. Packing. Carting, travelling, retail selling. Boy clerk. Head cashier.... Partner.... Sole owner.’
Henry Martin did not think he had shown himself wanting in resolution. Then, or ever! Then why did he seem like Hamlet to himself? He was now bronzed to the shade of a quadroon, over six feet in his stockings. He was perhaps too aware of his height. It had done him no good.
Conscious of his own prowess on the football field he had asked his father: Was wrapping candy the job for a fellow who stood over six feet? His father had heaved his great bulk humorously back in his chair. Henry Martin had been conscious, then, that he had behind him he did not know how many generations of ancestors all, like his father, six feet two and over. And - back into the remotest recesses of time! - they had all wrapped toffee in the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg.
He had no instinctive repugnance for the trade. Even in the social stiffness of Magdalen College, Oxford, England, he had not felt ashamed of his descent. Not amongst the descendants of a hundred belted earls.
He had got his Rhodes Scholarship all right - at the cost of working as a dishwasher and cleaner in his off moments at Dartmouth. Or a little perhaps because of it! The governing authorities of that place of education had no doubt looked with a kindly eye on that gentle six-footer who indomitably washed dishes and scrubbed floors - in the determination of being a scholastic and athletic honour to his Alma Mater.
He had got to Oxford all right. But he had not stayed there long. He had found the dreaming spires as disagreeable as the Lutheran College of Springfield, Ohio. Not as painfully sordid but more minatory. He felt that he would turn pudding-faced and rice-milky in the brain. The war had been on then, of course, and the contents of the cloisters and courts was distinctly what was there called off-colour - or too coloured. He had found himself a lanky giant amongst copper, coffee, or saffron-hued midgets - from Paraguay, the hinterlands of Bengal or Monrovia. Or else they were odd-come-shorts from obscure London suburbs with grotesque names.
Other colleges indeed had been more highly-coloured in spots. Once the Queen had been dining at Balliol and the more truculent spirits of Magdalen had paraded before that college shouting: ‘Bring out your black man, Balliol.’ Balliol had amongst its undergraduates at the moment the coal blackest negro that those climes had ever seen.
In the return party Balliol had paraded before Magdalen yelping:
‘Bring out your white man, Magdalen.’
And they had seized on tall, white Henry Martin and dragged him along the High whilst little, yellow and parti-coloured fellows had tried to rescue him.
He had frequently wondered whether that confusing experience had not considerably influenced his life. For the worse! At any rate it had been there that, as far as he could remember, he had for the first time wished seriously to be someone else. He had wished intensely to be a certain broad-faced Japanese - a little man with an immense mouth over-filled with gigantic teeth!
It was the measure of his discontent with himself that he should have wished to be something so completely unpresentable. To have wished to be a Japanese was unthinkable. But to have wished to be such an ugly one!...
Yet on the face of it he had at that date nothing to be ashamed of. He might, had he wished it, have been Smith’s Pisto-Brittle, Junior. That was a position equivalent - not to that of a crown prince or an archduke heir-apparent.... But equivalent to that of a quite considerable earl’s eldest son. Or he might have been well in the running towards representing his country at the next Olympic Games - and so a world hero, though at that date the Olympic Games had seemed remote enough.
But he could have had his father’s money if he had chosen to pretend enthusiasm for his father’s business. Or if he had chosen to take a little trouble in the way of wire-pulling he could have had the support of the professional speculators in brawn and muscle who turn you into the meat of which heroes are made....
On the face of it his record when he had again faced his father and Springfield had been one of sufficient toughness! He had toughly defied his father, the dons of Oxford, the sergeants of a British regiment. He had toughly followed the true national tradition in performing menial functions in a café whilst proving himself a credit to the place of his education.
Where then was the snag?
He was walking along the pier... towards suicide. Suicide is an act of despair. Still more it is a confession of ineffectualness.
Yet it calls for resolution.... No, he had never been wanting in resoluteness.... Then....
It was as if he were not all of one piece. It was perhaps that. Born in the nineteenth and having lived the great part of his life in the twentieth century.
Resolution was the note of the nineteenth, mental confusion of the twentieth. Perhaps it was that.
He remembered motoring in a public motorbus in the Pyrenees last year. An incredibly arid region of bare, piled up rocks. He had been even then not so far from his bedrock bottom dollar. ‘Anacondas’ were hovering at the thirty mark. He had bought at 115 - as an investment. With the highest possible advice. The man who had advised him was said to have lost seventy million - out of one hundred and twenty. It was very likely true, too... ‘Kennecotts’ had been even worse than ‘Anacondas’.
Well, that arid region like one of the circles of Dante’s Hell, had made him think prophetically of ‘Anacondas’ at 15.... And passing their dividend as like as not!... So he had said to the fortyish lady next him in the bus.
‘What would you do if you found yourself on the roadside here? Without a cent!’
His mind had run through a number of expedients. You could wire to people across the Atlantic for funds, you could find the nearest American Consulate and apply for relief.... At that time he could still have cabled to the First National....
The grey, firm-looking lady with brown eyes had gazed at him with amazement.
‘Do?’ she had answered. ‘What should I do... I should find a job!’
He had felt crushed to abashment.... That was the nineteenth century speaking. America of the nineteenth century.... She was five... or at the most seven years older than he. A few years more spent in that hardier century had sufficed to give her the gift of incisive resolution. And Valour. She was ready to take her life in her hands and establish it in that arid waste. At a moment’s notice....
What then was the matter with him?... He had had quite - a time - a full year, whilst Anacondas and the rest wavered slowly down to 15-14 — 13... like a flock of sheets of paper dropped from a height and darting sideways; to right, to left, inward, outward... but always down. He had had a full year in which impatiently to watch that decline and to know that destitution approached. He had known that he would ultimately find himself where he now was.... In a stern, if not arid, district of the South.... Without a cent....
That lady had looked out over the side of the bus at the pink rocks and, without a moment’s hesitation, had declared that she would find a job.... He had hardly so much as written a line. It had been before the publication of his unfortunate book. Yet he had gone to Paris and settled there... as a ‘writer.’
On the occasion of his momentous and quivering interview in 1915 - sixteen years ago - he had told his father he intended to ‘write.’... He was going to get a Rhodes Scholarship and then with the requisite culture behind him follow in the footsteps of... Shakespeare... Goethe.... Possibly Sainte-Beuve....
His father had looked at him with little, twinkling, chuckling eyes. For a long time. Then he had said:
‘My boy... if you want to hitch your wagon to a star you can. But not on my money!’ He had lifted his hand and dropped it heavily on the desk. He had added:
‘Never!’
Henry Martin, at Dartmouth, had found himself attracted to the group that ran the collegiate periodicals. They had all announced themselves as having the intention of ‘writing.’... Just writing, without much intimation of whether they intended to produce verse or prose, novels or volumes on metaphysics.
His father had chuckled again and had repeated:
‘Yes, my boy. Hitch your wagon to a star. But not on my money....You come of an honourable line of sugar boilers.... I assure you they would all turn in their graves.... Yes; turn in their graves if they thought the tombstone of one of their family would say “lousy ink-slinger”... Yes... “Lousy ink-slinger.”’
In his rare anti-American, or rather anti-New England moments when debating with mother, father was accustomed to cite the phrase about the wagon and the star with derision as proof of New England craziness.
... It was the product of a New England writer.... Holmes maybe. Or Emerson.
‘Hitch your wagon to a star!’ he used to exclaim, rolling his shoulders against the back of his chair. ‘Who ever heard of such nonsense! Ain’t hitchin’ posts good enough for Fall River?’
Poor mother, who was reduced to silence when father really kicked over the traces, would say that the sentiment was allegorical and beautiful. The old man would go on jerking in his chair till he had become motionless and exclaimed earnestly, leaning forward and demonstrating with his short fingers:
‘Why, if you hitched your wagon to a star it would go flying away. Maybe it would knock other stars out of their places. Then your candy would fall all over the world.... A nice figure you would look! And they’d carve on your tombstone: “Phaeton of Fall River fell in the river.”’
His mind ran on tombstones. European Teuto-Frankish minds still did. Father, in private, thought Holbein’s ‘Dance of Death’ the finest humour in the world.... And, when Henry Martin came to think of it, he was not averse from thinking of tombstones himself. There was a mural inscription at Antibes, a few miles from where he then stood. It was on the wall of the Roman Theatre - to the memory of a boy dancer who had died young.
‘SALTAVIT. PLACUIT. MORTUUS EST.’
‘He danced. He gave pleasure. He is dead.’
It would be nice to have that on one’s tombstone. But he never would. That would no doubt make his real epitaph - that he had never given pleasure. He had certainly danced. Only last night he had danced - well enough. But he could feel that he gave no pleasure to the little, depressed French poule who was in his arms.... He could not attribute many sins to himself. But he had never given pleasure. Not to his father; not to his college friends: not to his Magdalen tutor: not to the sergeants of his British regiment. Not to Wanda... certainly not to Alice. Not on necking parties in the corners of woods with girls who had to neck someone or socially fade.... Well, he had danced, he had given no pleasure. He would certainly be dead. In an hour and a half maybe.
The sun was now gloriously up. He was at the end of the pier. Long, glutinous flakes of brilliance were reflected from folds of the glassy water. In its translucent depths beneath his nose the negligible oursins were like remote doorknobs. One of them was dead. It was not brown but skeleton grey. What could be more negligible than a dead sea-urchin? The most negligible thing in the world!
He was going to step off the half-deck above the motor of the boat - a hundred yards from the opening through the mole.... Step off. Like a sentry on his beat. Stiff! In a soldierly manner.
That was how he had arranged it with himself.
You could not dive effectively off a boat. Or he could not. To slip over the side would, considering the circumstances, be undignified. Like shuffling out of the world.... But to step stiffly, find nothing for the foot and chance what came....
CHAPTER II.
Hugh Monckton Allard Smith had strolled across the floor of the little dancing to where Henry Martin had sat beside the silent and depressed poule. Hugh Monckton, who had been rolling a cigarette as he walked, looked down on them from his considerable height, and, still rolling, had remarked nonchalantly to Henry Martin:
‘Met you somewhere, haven’t I? Know your face. Because it’s damn like my own.’ He added: ‘Would you pay for my drinks? I find I’ve left my note-case at home.’
