Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 734
He felt wild elation. Like a drunken motorist racing through traffic. Or like Hugh Monckton charging his bullfinch. Well, he was probably the better man of the two. It was unlikely that he had done what he said. Whereas he, Henry Martin, was actually charging an unknown obstacle at breathless speed....
He would have to borrow some money of Hugh Monckton. So as to be able to sleep for two days on end. He would have to have two days’ sleep before he would have the nerve to commit suicide again.
Well, why not borrow of Hugh Monckton? They had been in the same regiment! Besides, Hugh Monckton had offered to lend him twenty thousand pounds to have a gamble with. Surely he would let him have five hundred francs for a sleep.... One five-thousandth of the sum!
He exclaimed suddenly:
‘Good God!’
They had leapt into perfectly still water. They were doing very likely thirty! With a furious kick at the pedal and pushing the lever completely over he reversed the engine. He did not dare to go about in the effort to reduce speed. They must have struck the mouth of the little cove beneath the stone pines. He was thrown against the wheel as the reversing engine began to take effect. All the breath left his body. The cove was perhaps two hundred yards across and a quarter of a mile deep. The sides were lined with red granite but at the bottom was the stretch of silver sand. The very thing to land on if they were not going at express speed.
But there was no knowing how far they were down the cove. The cove it must be because there was no other. But the rain falling direct into the windless space hid everything. He might well be going to crash her on to that sand with a force that might stave her bottom. What a thing to do to your only friend!
But perhaps Hugh Monckton was also a friend. He seemed to hear his voice say: ‘Old Bean!’... Male and female created He them.... The boat was a female....
There appeared dim and wet through the glassy rods of the rain a red brick blockhouse, a hillside and a white path that divided it at a slant. It was indeed the cove.
These things came toward him rapidly. But the reversed screw had taken hold. Every half second the speed decreased. He stood up to see exactly at what moment to stop the engine. Some men were running out of the red blockhouse. If the engines ran after she was stopped they might strain their bearings. He thought so.
She checked glutinously as she were on the bottom ooze. He half fell forward. She proceeded: then checked more determinedly. He felt a violent, an incredible blow on his cheek. Incredible pain.
The yard that had been completely divested of its canvas had swung round on the mast at the checking of the keel. The end of the yard was bound in iron.
The blow knocked him sideways. Immediately a fearful sear of pain existed in his right temple. That flail had swung completely round on the mast. He screamed. He fell desperately forward on to the hood that covered the engines....
The only thing that existed was pain. Men stopped him on the sand and told him he was bleeding.
‘Vous saignez!’...’Mais vous saignez!’...’Saignez.’
He struck at them and ran. He thought that if he ran fast enough he could escape from the pain. And they were barring his way.... What sort of life was this?
They shuffled back stupidly. He ran for the foot of the path. He must obtain insensibility. He desired to bite at the tufts of rosemary that on the pathside brushed his cheek. He was past them before he could bite.
He came to the top and sat down on a ledge. The rain had stopped. The sunshine fell on the island of Porquerolles - the high blue island over the ruffled sea. He could do no more.
He held his hand to his right temple. It came down glutinous and scarlet. He held his other hand to his other cheek. He desired to vomit. To have escaped war, tempest and self-given death and to come to this! The impulse to vomit made him remember his brandy flask. It was still half full.
The men on the sand below had given up looking at him and had gone back to the blockhouse. With the impulse of the brandy within him he stood up. The day was growing brighter and brighter. He must be going on!
CHAPTER II.
HUGH MONCKTON was lying on his face. On pine-needles.
Henry Martin said:
‘“Men fall on their faces when shot through the medulla: on their backs when...’
‘Medulla’ was no doubt not the word in the quotation.
Some people had all the luck! Hugh Monckton was lying on his face in the place where Henry Martin had meant to lie. When he had thought, in the boat, of lying on the ground on pine-needles, that was where he had meant to lie. Undoubtedly!
The umbrella pines towered up. A light breeze shook their tops. As they moved pools of sunlight moved over the still, wet needles.
His passport was in some sort of celluloid casing. Stamped with a large plaque of gold. The Smith arms perhaps. Or the British Royal ones. It was in his left hand. His gun had the barrel and the carrier curiously damascened. It was in his right hand.
The Mediterranean shone through the trunks. From that height he could see that around the semaphore on the promontory across the water there was a brown open space. In the early spring no doubt it had been a green lawn.
It was troublesome to attend to immediate details. The alcohol he had lately swallowed probably confused him. He had never seen a dead body. Mother’s coffin had been screwed up when he got back from Dartmouth. He did not know what you had to do for the comfort of the dead. He had an idea that you put pennies on their eyes. He had read that somewhere. In this case you could hardly do that.
What was he to do then? It was troublesome to think. He ought presumably to call assistance. That would mean that his friend’s rest would be the earlier broken. Rough and careless men would eventually disturb him. Let him lie as long as he could.
It was evident that he had desired his body to be as little as possible rifled. He had had the same idea as Henry Martin, his passport being in his hand.
That fellow had succeeded in killing himself when he, Henry Martin, had ignominiously failed.
Henry Martin had been considering that matter when he had come into the grove. He had said to himself with bitterness:
‘Here’s the sort of fellow I am. I set out to drown myself - then run away from a storm that would have drowned me. What sort of a spectacle shall I present?’
He had said to himself that that was all one with his grotesquely futile life.
Then he said fiercely:
‘Damn it all: I didn’t run away from the storm. I fought it as few men not six feet in their stockings could have fought it. And precious few who were!’
There was no one but himself to whom he would present any spectacle. No one else knew that he had set out to commit suicide. It was merely with himself that he had to argue for it was only before himself that he could be ashamed. He was not going to be! His fighting the storm had been a courageous action. He was saving the boat. You had to save boats. There were two of them. He and the boat.
It was all very well to say that he had set out to commit suicide. But his pact with Providence had been to do it in a warm still sea. With the sun on the island.
He took the passport from the leaden fingers. He had touched a dead friend! How quickly Hugh Monckton had become his friend. In the boat he had said that she and Hugh Monckton were his only friends. It had then seemed a little fantastic. Now it seemed the exact truth. At any rate as regarded Hugh Monckton.
They had had exactly the same idea. The celluloid casing! Those were certainly not the British Royal Arms stamped upon it. The crest was recognizably a pelican of the wilderness. There were two quarterings of things like hammers. Punning heraldry. The motto was Sine Fabro Ars Nulla.... There is no art without a Smith.
... There was an old saying: ‘By hammer and hand all Art doth stand.’... Father had said that in Luxemburg his crest had been a mailed hand holding a hammer.... Henry Martin felt towards the arms stamped there a sort of intimacy. As if they ought to have been his own arms. Perhaps he and Hugh Monckton had been related! That might account for their sudden friendship.
The celluloid casing, then, contained a blue British Passport inscribed in a little slot: H.M.A. Smith, a thousand franc note and a letter addressed: ‘A celui qui trouvera mon corps!’... ‘To whoever finds my body.’
The letter said:
‘Je préférerais....’
‘I should prefer.’... That no one should search his body! His pockets were completely empty. He died by his own act. He had no ill feeling towards any human being. If French law insisted on an autopsy it must be so. But he would prefer to be buried in his clothes as it were. He died because the after effects of the late war had become too intolerable to him. He was completely useless to man or beast and suffered terribly. He begged whoever found his body to communicate with his relatives - communiquer les nouvelles à ses parents... and war comrade - comarade de guerre... Henry Martin Aluin Smith of Springfield, Ohio, at present staying... qui demeure actuellement Hotel du Port, Carqueiranne, Var.
Monsieur Henry Martin Aluin Smith trouverait sur la cheminee de la chambre seize, Hotel des Négociants.... Henry Martin would find on the mantelshelf of Hugh Monckton’s room a letter containing a codicil to his will. It begged him as knowing all the circumstances better than another to take care of the disposition of such of his property as should find itself in that city.... It came with a sort of tranquillity to Henry Martin to turn the page and to see a rough design....
CI GIT
UN ETRANGER
OBIT
XVI. VIII.MCMXXXI MISERERE MEI DOMINE
QUIA MULTUM AMAVI
He desired to be buried in the graveyard of Le Revest des Eaux, looking over the Mediterranean and to be covered by a single slab of granite bearing the inscription: ‘Here lies a stranger who died on the sixteenth of August, nineteen hundred and thirty-one. Have mercy on me O Lord in that I have loved much.’ Hugh Monckton made that request in that letter that might be made public because he did not wish the inhabitants of that countryside to think his heirs niggardly in giving him such simple sepulture.
For a moment Henry Martin felt that that was himself writing! And then that it was himself lying face downwards there. A sharp spat of noise came from the paper. It was a gout of blood that had fallen on the signature. It seemed to cement whatever was the odd relationship since it related Henry Martin’s blood with the other’s name. The signature was extraordinarily like his own.
The pain which had ceased at the discovery of that body now began again. The sight of the blood had recalled him to himself. He must go somewhere and get something done to himself. His chest was covered with blood that had streamed from his cheek and his temple. He imagined Hugh Monckton was shot through the right temple but not through the left jawbone.
Now was the time to commit suicide. But he admitted that he had not the nerve. He must have a couple of nights’ sleep. He could not face it as he was.
He was wretchedly worried by the spot of blood on Hugh Monckton’s signature. How would the people who found him account for that? He had the strongest possible revulsion from the idea that it should be he who denounced Hugh Monckton to the police. It would be denouncing! Those ravens would fall upon him; they would drag him about and shout in his silent presence. They would perhaps accuse him of cowardice.... But there was one incontrovertible excuse for suicide. To be abandoned by a woman. That was the one absolute finality: your whole being was halved. The very reason for your existence ceased.
No: he would not be the one to do the denouncing!
Then the blood on the letter? How would they account for that? Blood on a letter inside a celluloid casing! And he, Henry Martin, bleeding and having passed that way.... Hugh Monckton must have a clean letter....
He thought of substituting his own letter from his own passport.... It was just such another letter.... The throbbing in his head became intolerable. He heard voices. He ran to the edge of the clump of trees and looked down on the path. He had his own celluloid wrapped passport in his right hand because he had just taken it out. Hugh Monckton’s was in his left.
Four fat men in black were beginning the ascent of the path. They pointed to Henry Martin’s blood on the track and interrogated each other. Henry Martin panted. He felt himself a hunted animal. He ran. He staggered a minute ago. Now he ran.
Hugh Monckton’s fingers were cold. He pressed them. That was the last time they would be pressed on this earth.
He ran across the pine-needles, and, in the blazing light of the sun, down the slope that gave on to the meadow beneath the real estate agent’s villa. Hugh Monckton’s car was standing in the field. Henry Martin’s passport was in Hugh Monckton’s fingers! He had a clean letter.
The slope was slippery, the sun blinding. His miserable feet slipped: slipped again. They would not sustain him. They slipped away beneath him. For a moment it was ease to fall. He rolled over and over, he did not know how far. The jabs of pain at each turn made eleven!
He rolled over the hard roadway with the impulsion and into the meadow. He was escaping from the fat men in black! He climbed to his knees: then to his feet. He was screaming with rage and waving his arms with madness of fury. He ought to have been spared this. It was indecent. To make a sport of him when he had just lost his only friend. Destiny was indecent.... He was running towards the car. You do not take liberties with people who owned cars. He was running on a serpentine track. The car was as good as his. Hugh Monckton would lend it to him. Hugh Monckton had left all his property at his disposal. He was as good as Hugh Monckton himself.
He staggered two yards to the right: he was erect again but the earth was trying to strike him. He fell in mounting the step of the car. He gripped the metal but his hand had no holding power. He was on the ground....
A gentle voice was saying:
‘My wife with her opera glasses which explored the harbour....’..,’Ma femme avec ses lorgnettes qui explorait le port....’ But it must be the plural: ‘exploraient.’ It was extraordinarily luxurious to lie on the ground in the sunlight.... Or it might have been the wife not the glasses which explored the port.
This black-bearded undertaker was trying to make him get up. He had a large, shining car.
After a time they were in the car. The undertaker, in black alpaca, was driving it with one arm round Henry Martin’s shoulders. They were going very slowly.
Henry Martin said:
‘You will spoil your alpaca!’
The funereal fellow said:
‘That will make nothing.’... Meaning that it did not matter. He went on: ‘Make yourself comfortable my dear Monsieur Smeez. Lean heavily upon me.’
He had a gentle voice. It was M. Something or other, the real-estate man. Henry Martin hoped that his migraine was not troubling him. He said:
‘You recognize me? You are very kind... très gentil. We are going to Carqueiranne?’
M. Something said:
‘No: Carqueiranne is near. But they have little accommodation there. I thought it better to go to your own hotel in the town.’ He added: ‘I should not, my faith, have recognized you.... But I saw your name on the silver plate in your car. And I am naturally familiar with your figure.... You, of course, mistook your road in the storm. You must have charged right through the hedge at the turn of the road.... Famous cars that your House builds! Your specimen appears very little injured.’
The pain of someone cleaning his face with gentle dabs was very sharp. The pungent odour of an anaesthetic burned his nostrils. A man in white was hanging over him. A voice said:
‘This is Monsieur Monckton Smeez....’
Another:
‘Vous ne le dîtes pas!... You don’t say! I wish I had his money. But not at the moment his face.’
Henry Martin said:
‘Non... non....’
He was no doubt repenting of his rash act!
If he wasn’t at the bottom of the Mediterranean he was at the side of a road under some plane trees and he had changed his identity. The firm husky voice said:
‘It is necessary, Monsieur, that I get the gravel out of the wound. Otherwise you will have a very great scar.’
The voice of the man in alpaca said:
‘Monsieur has already a very great and most honourable scar. From a Boche sabre.’ He was one of the first hundred thousand of his compatriots to land in this country in 1914.’
Henry Martin writhed. This was one of the consequences of his act that he had not expected. He tried to say:
‘You must not say that.’ But they were binding his jaw over his head with a lint bandage.... After all he had wished to be Hugh Monckton. Now he was.
A mournful face with brown eyes immensely magnified by the lenses of spectacles was gazing at him from very near.... A square brown beard. A black skull cap. All in white. He said - in English:
‘Be assured, sair, I weel hairt you as leetle as is not nécessaire.... C’est vous qui avez sauvé la France....’
Henry Martin remembered the canning factory in the Cevennes. And the Syphilis Inspector! They might between them have saved France.... With preventive instruction and canned salmon from the Rhone! But he tried to remember himself standing up to a mounted figure in a blue uniform with silver buttons. Galloping upon him with a waving sabre. It was a less satisfactory way of saving France. But more likely to be applauded by a wayside druggist.
The man then said he would give Henry Martin a composing draft. He was still in the automobile. There was a little crowd round it. Monsieur Lamoricière, the real-estate agent... that was his name... was explaining with grave unction.... This was Mongtong Smeez. The famous proprietor of the Mongtong car and a hero of the first water - during the Great War. During the storm he had mistaken his road and the car had charged a wall and hedge. At right angles. Monsieur Mongtong Smeez had been thrown out of his vehicle. But the car and the hero had each been very little damaged.... Monsieur Smeez appeared to have no broken bones.... A tribute to the build of both car and hero! Madame Lamori-cière surveying with her opera glass the port extérieur for relics of the great storm had turned it negligently on the field. She had exclaimed to Monsieur:
