Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 721
It had been a confused time.... That was no doubt what was the matter with him. He was perhaps one of the génération perdue that the French talked of. The Lost Generation.... They were said to have been so disturbed in their equilibrium by the distortions of the late war that they had no sense of the values of life.
... That might of course be the case. But he could not see why he should have been affected. He certainly had not taken the war hard. He had shuffled, really, through it. Not of his own will. He had not asked for easy jobs. They had just been given to him.
It came back to him as a period of fever. After fevers you do not remember what has happened. Or you remember most things only dimly. Then some things with great clearness.... You wake up in the night with an unbearable headache. The water glass is at a great distance. You cannot get at it.
That had been just his case in the war. He could, he supposed, disentangle its chronology if he tried. But he had never bothered to try. He remembered the declaration of war in Springfield. Or rather he didn’t - because he had been recovering from a dull carouse with some girl. Shut up in her father’s house and afraid to stir out in daylight for fear the neighbours saw him.... And he remembered the end of the war.... Hearing of it in a mountain valley in the Cevennes where he had been in charge of a saw mill and a canning factory. Why should they have set up a canning factory in the Cevennes? There was no knowing. Perhaps because of water power. Most likely it was just a piece of graft. But why should he have been in charge of it?... Well, that was because he had made for his Captain a portrait that his Captain had found satisfactory.... A fat man with a blue grey walrus moustache - bulging out above and below his new belt.... The Captain had detailed him to look after the saw mill and the cans.... He had taken up Art by that time.
That had been to please Wanda.... Or to please the memory of Wanda. Because, of course, Wanda had given him up by then. At the request of his father and her husband.... Still he had gone on making watercolours. Without enthusiasm....
There had not been any vividness about Armistice Day in the Cevennes. Snow had already begun to fall up where the saw mill was. One of the men had broken his leg and he had gone up with the syphilis inspector to see about it. The saw mill had been higher up in the mountains than the canning factory.... Félicité had raised Cain about his going up. Because of the snow and because he had promised to take her in to Valence. She had raised Cain. She had been certain he would fall down a ravine and be hidden by the snow until next May. Then what would become of her if, as she suspected?...
What in the world did they want with a U.S. Inspector of Syphilis in Troops in a lost valley in the Cevennes? There weren’t any troops. Henry Martin had a corporal in charge of the saw mill. That was the fellow who had broken his leg. And an artillery quartermaster at the canning factory.... Why artillery? Were they going to use canned salmon for shells?... In the Argonne?...
The syphilis inspector had turned out to have no medical qualifications. He was a poet by profession. Stoutish and chuckling. He turned out doggerel about the local legends by the hundred lines an hour.... Legends about the religious wars of the district....
‘And so the battle this and that way goes....
Hurrah for something in the mantling snows....’
The Inspector said that he had been marooned there because he had discovered things that the Great Medical Staff had not wanted spoken about. Henry Martin had strongly suspected they had put him there because they could not bear his verse....
Anyhow their arts had done them proud.... They had lived warm, quartered in a good farm, low down. They had written verses and made water-colour sketches and played craps and spit in the ocean day after day. Félicité - who was well educated - would recite Victor Hugo in her pink robe de chambre at bedtime.
‘Enfant si j’étais roi je te donnerais l’Empire Et mes flottes et mes something et mes something et mes something...
Pour un baiser de toi....
Enfant si j’étais Dieu....’
He would give something else.... It was Félicité’s way of suggesting that he did not requite her kisses with sufficient passion. She wasn’t mercenary. But her old mother would have coerced him into marrying her if he hadn’t kept his head. Or course she hadn’t been with child....
What had become of Félicité? A little clean browneyed filly. Or the Syphilis Inspector? Or the Captain? Or all the crowd?... Hundreds and hundreds with whom he had rubbed shoulders. Friendly nearly all. Loud voiced. Roistering.... Or even Wanda? She did not appear to have made good. At Hollywood or anywhere else. Yet undoubtedly she had talent.... This Gloria Sorenson reminded him of her - deep chested with luminous flesh, large nostrils and wide mouth. She might have made a man of him if father hadn’t butted in.
Of all of them he had only kept track of Leopold Kuhn and, God, he wished he hadn’t.... Though if it hadn’t been Anacondus and Kennecotts it would have been something else.... As corporal in charge of the Y.M.C.A. canteen in that accursed White Star transport Kuhn had seemed a mighty potentate.
A hell of a ship with all those starving thousands on board! He didn’t even know whether it had been the fault of the shipping company or merely of the grafters. He had had indignant ideas of exposing the affair - but they had died away. He couldn’t be said to have suffered himself. His art had saved him. He had passed the voyage on the poop - painting, in water-colour, portraits of the officers of his regiment. That had cured him of ever wanting to paint again. The sight of a tumbler of discoloured water still made him inclined to vomit.
But his occupation had assured him of the right of access to the canteen and the society of Mr. Leopold Kuhn when he wanted it. Kuhn struck him as the calmest person and one of the greatest savoir-jaire that he had ever met. He cleaned his canteen-zinc with great masterstrokes whilst talking of continental literature. The impassivity with which he had his canteen cleared of the starving, yelling soldiery by the Marines was enough to make you respect him permanently. His canteen would be packed with the upper parts of the poor doughboys six deep. They yelled and gesticulated, their faces convulsed. Mr. Kuhn served them with extreme deliberation in complete silence for the ten minutes that the canteen was open. Then he would make a half-visible sign to the Marine corporals and those pugilists would fall on the miserable doughboys and heave them out of the confined space, down the pitch black companion.
He would remove his great spectacles, close and open his eyes a great many times, readjust his spectacles and begin throwing craps with the Marines for who should cook the corned beef-hash or chile con came whilst the others played spoil five and drank cocktails made from the applejack of which Mr. Kuhn had a couple of casks beneath the zinc.
It wasn’t till the vessel had been some days out that Henry Martin had discovered the real state of affairs. Mr. Kuhn saw that the Marine corporals who were detailed to help him and that Henry Martin and one or two other fellows who were officially scheduled to him as helpers but who really did odd jobs for the officers — Mr. Kuhn saw that these were lavishly fed by the canteen. But there were no stores at all on board for the soldiers. The holds were completely filled with typewriters and sewing machines. Even some of the cabins were occupied with that merchandise.
So that the men were actually starving. They had for dinner a piece of bread - begged by the cooks from the British sailors - of about the size and not much more than the thickness of a playing card, and watergruel made with coarsely ground corn that the cooks stole from the mangers of the horses on board. For supper they had a couple of spoonsful of the same gruel.
The ships had been driven up north of Scotland in the evasion of enemy submarines so even those rations had been halved. And when Henry Martin had pleaded with Mr. Leopold Kuhn to let the canteen be open a little more than for the two periods of ten minutes which was all that he allowed, Mr. Kuhn answered phlegmatically that it was forbidden by all the articles of his association and the Secretary of State. Mr. Kuhn admitted that it seemed a shame. But a deputation of the Women’s Clubs of - Mr. Kuhn thought — Ohio, Missouri and North Dakota - had waited on the department and extracted that promise in the interests of the poor boys themselves. The canteens were of course bone dry. But they purveyed cigarettes. Some ladies of these states considered that cigarettes were nearly as pernicious as drink....
The effect of that voyage, Henry Martin was now aware, had been to cure him of all respect for the louder virtues.... Perhaps for all virtues! It — and all the enterprises connected with it - seemed to be like a vast smudge across the landscape of his life.... He could almost mark the very moment when the sunshine of virtue - and of vice - had gone out of it. That was of course unsophisticated. But it had marked the last glow of conscious patriotism in him. Of patriotism as a glow - and even of adultery as a glow!
It had been very shortly before his going out to France. He had been sent as clerk to an officer who was supposed to arrange for the embarkation of Ohio and Middle Western troops. At New York. As the officer had not given more than half an hour a day to his duties - which had been taken over obligingly by an officer once a partner in the firm which belonged to the family to which Mr. Leopold Kuhn belonged - Henry Martin had had the whole inside of a week to himself. He had been very flush of money and having hired a car had amused himself with exploring the State of New York.
It had occurred in a dilapidated village below Redding Ridge - rather towards Danbury, Conn., than the other way. He had persuaded Wanda to spend three days - and two nights - with him in a summer boarding place on the Ridge. They had been waited on by the most perfectly elegant coloured girl with a most amazing head of unkinked hair. All around them at separate tables had sat elderly ladies overflowing with sentiments of goodwill to the young hero and his war bride. It had not been his first adultery. It had certainly been his most glorious. Wanda had given to his nights raptures that could only be read into the ends of fairy tales.
By day, a rather faded, blue woollen Norwegian garment masking the extraordinary glow of her glorious flesh and most of her amazing hair being hidden by a knitted purple cap like a tam o’shanter, she had resembled a bird of Paradise before it dressed up for a party. She had a good, Scandinavian, utilitarian tinge to her daytime personality. She believed in employing the shining hours. Henry Martin had been compelled to paint in water-colours the decayed villages that were sprinkled over the countryside, whilst Wanda sat on a tree stump beside him and memorized a new part in which she was understudying Miss. — But Henry Martin could not remember the name!... That gave to the last shining days of his youth a feeling of duration and domesticity as well as of glory.
He couldn’t remember, either, the name of the village. It had not been far from the Mark Twain homestead. They had smashed the car up on the extraordinarily bad sunken road that ran along under the ridge - near a pile of stones in a ragged little wood where a huge bunch of rattlesnakes were sunning themselves. You might have expected Norwegian Wanda to be scared of rattlesnakes. But she hadn’t been. She had pelted them with small rocks, leaning forward to see where they fell and opening her large, healthy, rosy mouth in great gusts of laughter when the sinister, dry, churning sounds answered her efforts.... She had been glorious, with her large mouth and shining eyes that were in her moments of merriment, like those of a fine dog that laughs when you wave a bit of stick as if you were going to throw it....
They had walked on until they came to the village. They found a farmer who agreed to take a couple of horses and tug the car after them. Henry Martin had carried his colour and sketching board, Wanda the blue-paper covered parts. The village had consisted of a broad street of dust with, on each side of it, a border of grass and then, beneath very tall, thin-leaved elms, the unusually high gables of brown-shingled, dilapidated houses. As far as he could remember the village had once been much more prosperous. It had been the centre of a cotton-spinning industry that had long since died. Or perhaps it had not been cotton. It might have been wool - or lumber - or chair-making.... But there were the high, mournful, shadowed gables, suggesting very old European villages. And Henry Martin remembered thinking that, if your prosperity had departed, it was all one whether that had happened forty years ago or four hundred. You were a relic of the past. There must, however, have still been some inhabitants. In the street were a general store, a drug store and a little one-windowed store where ‘Miss Twisden, Dressmaker,’ manufactured and showed for sale, baby linen, or at least crocheted caps.
Henry Martin wondered idly whether Pisto-Brittle could be bought in either of the stores. But he remembered to have heard his father say that he had never been able to penetrate into New England. And they were just across the border of New York State - in Connecticut.
An ice-cream wagon had come lumbering through the flat dust of the road to the steps of the drug store. It had been then that Henry Martin had felt his glow of patriotism. He did not believe that any of the other nations taking part in the war had ice-cream delivered daily in its remotest villages. This seemed to him the high-water mark of civilization. The starving millions of Europe could not any one of them show the like of that. Let alone the other continents.
The episode remained among his other memories like a bright spot.
Thunder had descended on his head immediately afterwards. One of the old ladies at the boarding house had written to father to congratulate him on his daughter-in-law. The old man had stormed down to war-time New York, seeming to add new noises to that already sufficiently noisy city. He had however relapsed into his wild boarish good humour as soon as he learned that Henry Martin was not married to Wanda.
Henry Martin could not see what it mattered to his father whom he married. Father let him go roaming about the world - or necking in Springfield. He even appeared to have no views on masculine sexual morality. His character did not hang together. When it came to this marriage he got raging on to his hind legs. Why?
He blinked at Henry Martin with his inflexible little eyes and said over and over again:
‘No, sonny. It isn’t this star that you’re going to hitch your wagon to. Not this star! You go find another....’
Henry Martin had treated his father with cold indifference. He did not see what his father could do about it. He was free, male and still twenty-one. He imagined that, when the war was over, he would be perfectly capable of supporting Wanda. In the meantime she would be quietly getting her divorce. Her husband was a frank undesirable - a possibly Norwegian violinist who led an unspeakable life in Paris.
Two days later the troopship had sailed.
His father had seemed to get busy pretty soon. For quite a time Wanda had written to Henry Martin every day. He had got her letters in bundles in various odd corners of England and France to which his military jobs had taken him. They were always connected, ingloriously, with commissariat or supplies. He had never come within two hundred miles of the enemy forces.
It had been difficult, even at first, to gather much about the state of Wanda’s feelings. She wrote singularly foreign English considering that in her small parts on the stage she had no noticeable accent. Her endearments which were unusually phrased might have meant the deepest of passions; her assurances of fidelity might have meant equally the deepest of passions.... But they might have meant nothing of the sort.
Gradually her letters began to mention his father. The old man seemed to have gone to Detroit to see her company play. They must have become as thick as thieves. After all, they were both European. It became a European sort of an intrigue. Father had gradually persuaded her that the marriage could not possibly be a success. Henry Martin had no means. He was a trifler. He was, moreover, several years younger than the girl....
The effect of these conversations penetrated gradually to Henry Martin in his Cevennes valley. They had driven him nearly mad. He had written: he had cabled — two or three times a day.... It was an infamous lie to say that he was without means. Being of age he had come into a third part of his mother’s property. It consisted of the drug store of her father and a small piece of real estate. The drug store which was managed by a company was by now a good property. He expected to draw from it as much as four or even five thousand a year. On that they ought to be able to live comfortably when these troubles were over....
Wanda’s letters could not be said to grow colder. But they did begin to allow weight to his father’s arguments. She was certainly three - nearly four - years older than he. At the time that seemed a small matter. But as the years went by the difference would be more perceptible. A young man of twenty-five married to a woman of thirty was considerably handicapped.
Henry Martin had answered everything he could think of.
He remembered he had written frantically’ and had indeed gone almost out of his mind, shut up in the valley with his saw mill. At the same time he was living with Félicité.... If you had told him that it was possible to be in love with one girl and live with another he would have said that you lied. Yet the books were wrong. Indeed when Wanda had come over to Paris definitely to break with him he was already living with Alice.
Wanda had walked into the apartment on the Rue des Saints Pères while Alice was laying the table for lunch. She had left her almost incapable husband propped up against the wall outside, drumming a tattoo with his hands behind him. The sun had shone into the apartment and on the white, orange and blue of the Breton crockery on the table.
A little, as he remembered, to his mortification she had hardly taken any notice of the presence of Alice... though Alice was not altogether unnoticeable. But Wanda had talked to him as if the other did not exist. That was partly due to her stage habit of mind, partly to her Scandinavian earnestness. She had not only ignored the existence of all women who were not on the stage, she ignored the existence of all human beings who did not practise one or other of the arts. That point of view as a pious expression of opinion was not unknown to Henry Martin. He had heard it at Dartmouth amongst young men who intended to ‘write’ and at Magdalen from a small clique who had called themselves the Ten, but were better known as the Yellow Pants. These choice souls had all expressed the opinion that a person who did not practise one of the arts belonged to the outer darkness and was merely stuff to fill graveyards. All these young men, however, had either gone into their fathers’ businesses or one or other trade or calling that they would once have called bourgeois. So that, with the exception of two who had stuck together and become reporters on a Brooklyn paper, Henry Martin was the only one who had so much as used the Arts as an excuse for a purposeless life.
