Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 746
So there Henry Martin had walked - a milor, a Rockefeller - before a parterre of ragtag and bobtail, with, on each arm, a whore of surprising costume and grace.... And expected to acquire an even more dissolute and alluring third!
But underneath that magnificent, international figure there had still been the lean, troubled Henry Martin of Fall River Conscience. He had money and was afraid to use it. He had actually said to Jeanne Becquerel that they must keep within a margin of fifty thousand francs a year. Not out of a spirit of economy, but because he shrank from the fiercer pleasures that might be earned from the millions - in francs - that he had gotten, for nothing! He could not see how he had earned even the use of the twenty thousand pounds with which he had speculated....
Those two girls had accepted his orders with delight. They seemed to make him almost French. That was what they wanted to complete their idyll.... He could see, however, that Eudoxie was puzzled. It appeared to her not to fit in with the spirit of a gentleman who gave away gold rings on sight and presented his last three hundred and ninety-four francs to a mere acquaintance!... She had taken him for a bold and ingenious thief. That had troubled her because she had thought she might have to worry over his arrest.... But thieves squandered. One who, having millions at his disposal, proposed to live with a lovely mistress on a sum fitted only for a comfortable but careful middle class family - that puzzled her. It ravished Jeanne Becquerel, who asked for nothing better than comfort based on economy.
But Eudoxie had arrived very near the truth. By the morning on which they went fishing! It was obvious to her that he was not a thief. That he had been given a moderate sum that he might conceal from the world the fact that Hugh Monckton had committed suicide.... For the sake of the shareholders of the Monckton concerns!... And she had felt immense relief when he had told her that that ominous letter had made things all right once and for all.
It was whilst re-reading Hugh Monckton’s letter that he had the full sense of her perspicacity! With an immense amount of beating about the bush, army slang and endearing epithets Hugh Monckton asked that Henry Martin should do his best to conceal his suicide. That request was the occasion of the letter. Whilst speeding between St. Jean du Var and Hyères the idea had come into his aching head. If the startling news of his death by his own hand were broadcasted across the world there was no knowing what effect it might not have on the Monckton concerns.... His shareholders were mostly old-fashioned, quiet investors who would be so troubled by sudden fluctuations that he almost thought he had not the right to kill himself. But, relying on Henry Martin, he was going to take the chance. If he didn’t kill himself by putting his Monckton at the bullfinch he would do it with his revolver.
But he begged Henry Martin to do his best to suppress the news. Temporarily at least. For good if possible. It would do his father’s memory no good; it would militate against all that he stood for. It might even hurt Gloria. And, Henry Martin knew that he would give away everything that he possessed rather than that for one second Gloria’s white brow should be wrinkled by pain.
What Hugh Monckton wanted was to drop out. Unnoticed. If all trace of him could be lost so much the better. He had already done what he could to cover his tracks. That was why he had been staying in that unspeakable hotel. He had told his boring cousin Cyril Monckton that he was going away for years - with a woman unnamed.... At the end of years, the English courts would give leave to ‘presume his decease.’... It was doing Cyril Monckton no great injustice. He was rich enough already and in due course would come into his, Hugh’s, shekels.
There was money in lashings to effectuate this. Henry Martin could buy up the reporters; he could bribe officials wholesale. As residuary legatee all the money lying about was at his disposal.... There was no end to the considerations that Hugh Monckton produced.... It was tragic to hear his lamentable voice pleading!
Henry Martin read the sixteen scrawled pages of the letter by the light of a single candle in the dim saloon of the Villa Niké. As happens in France the electric light had not yet been put on. And it was as if, from standing astride of the grips in the hotel room, Hugh Monckton had come to stand in the shadows of that place. Henry Martin could see his very hand, with the strap of the gun about the wrist, move in that passionate pleading.
And there was the final plea.... It was Henry Martin who had killed him. Until they had been walking across the painted Place du Théâtre in the deathly sirocco there had seemed still one possibility of escape for that tormented mortal. But the contempt in Henry Martin’s voice when he had uttered the words: ‘The Foreign Legion!’ - that had made Hugh Monckton see that there was only one means of escape! How indeed was he with his destroyed physique to stand the businesslike gruelling of that life under a torrid African sun?... What a hope indeed!
‘Then,’ Hugh Monckton adjured, ‘do me this favour, old bean. It is all one whether I die to-night or after two months of hell in Oran. I shall go certainly to a far better place than that stink-hole. I have no remorse. But do this in expiation. Old bean, I have never been so grieved. Surely my awful shade shall be unappeased in Phlegethon.... Good old Achilles, you know.... Then to appease me - For indeed old bean, you’re the first man I felt I could talk to - unburden myself - in donkeys’ ages - donkeys’ and donkeys’ ages.... Except Gloria and she took insufficient pleasure in my unburdenments....’
He begged Henry Martin to hire Le Secret - or any equivalent abode of bliss on the earth, the waters of the earth or the waters under the earth. And to take any little piece.... And the remains of the Fine de la République. And any oddments and spondulicks as he believed they called it beneath the folds of the star-spangled one.... And so to prolong for Hugh Monckton, here on earth, the jolly old beanfeast that, by all odds his own mortal career should have witnessed....
HENRY FOR HUGH
Ford’s penultimate novel is a sequel to the previous work The Rash Act, reprising the story of Henry Martin, who had faked his own suicide and adopted the persona of the man he had always wanted to be. In this sequel, Henry, in the guise of Hugh, tries to convince Hugh Monckton’s elderly aunt to accept him as her nephew. Only on her deathbed, does Henry learn the true connection he has with Hugh Monckton.
Published in 1934, Henry for Hugh is a very difficult novel to read, with abundant use of ellipsis, slang words and outdated expressions, perhaps suggesting that Ford’s own hardening to sensibility was the cause of the harsh nature of language in his last novels.
The first edition
CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
PART THREE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
PART FOUR
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
EPILOGUE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
HENRY MARTIN, ON HIS TERRACE, LAY IN HIS DECK CHAIR waiting for his secretary, an ill-humoured, spectacled, young Englishman of the name of Macdonald who, not unusually, failed to keep his engagements. You could find no one better in St. Jean du Var.
The lady came almost imperceptibly round the pink, blue and white house-end. All grey, she was creeping on tip-toe. To balance herself she extended her palms parallel with the tiles of the terrace. She was like a child stealing home in a game of prisoner’s base....
Suddenly his throat became dry. His heart beat atrociously. It was a noticeable globe, its beat like the tocsin strokes of a great bell in a cathedral steeple.... What else could you expect? When you were one man masquerading as... Or not masquerading as — passing for, another man of the same surname and initials... H.M.A.S.... Then... He lost the train of his thought.... He was nearly recovered now, but he had been ill for a long time and was never certain of not having a temporary relapse. But the illness had followed an accident. It had had nothing to do with the heart. This was just nerves. He was in a horrible funk.
He did not suppose that it was the proverbial policeman’s hand on his shoulder of which he went in dread. He imagined that if he, Henry Martin Aluin Smith, hidden in his little villa on the mountain-side above the port of St. Jean du Var — Henry Martin Aluin Smith of the Pisto-Brittle Works, Springfield, Ohio, was accused of not being Hugh Monckton Allard Smith of Monckton-Warminster, Salop. Eng., and the Monckton Car Co. Ltd. the French police would not be at all interested. More likely they would be brutally irritated with anyone who denounced him. They would be afraid of looking like fools. After the accident they, as much as anybody, had contributed to fixing on him that poor dead fellow’s name. Henry Martin, having been laid out by the yard of his boat had scarcely had the strength to interfere. Indeed they had the accident so documented up that he imagined that he himself would have great difficulty in proving that he was not Hugh Monckton but Henry Martin. They held for instance his passport and other papers and had fully satisfied themselves that they applied to that poor fellow sleeping on the mountain near le Revest les Eaux. And him they had formally registered as Hugh Monckton Allard Smith. The French police are terribly tenacious when it comes to papers. If a man announced as dead in the War — there had been hundreds of instances of this — afterwards came back he had to remain dead by law! It would be almost impossible to bring him back to legal life.
No, it had not been the police that he had dreaded all those six months or so. It had been other bothers and humiliations. Jeanne Becquerel, for instance, would be broken-hearted at losing her millionaire milord; Eudoxie would jeer.... And the Lamoricières and Dr. Grouault, and Coco, the commissaire who was Eudoxie’s cousin.... And then Hugh Monckton’s relatives and friends! What would they feel and do?...
And the publicity, if it came to a case of any sort! That would be simply hideous. He would be the mock of the world. At the beginning he had imagined that Hugh Monckton was like any other private person. He should have been able to slip into what passed for a little love-nest and disappear.... Alas! Hugh Monckton’s relatives had apparently supposed that that was what Hugh Monckton had been up to. But to Henry Martin it had very soon appeared that the Hugh Monckton who had seemed so modest and unobtrusive excited a very great curiosity. Even in that place, Henry Martin had been perpetually plagued from the town below with letters from down and outers of one or the other branch of Anglo-Saxondom. Hugh Monckton and the light cars of Monckton’s Ltd. had been almost as much observed in France and America as in England....
And Henry Martin’s trepidations whenever any stranger had approached him had for a time been very disagreeable. No one before known to either Hugh Monckton or himself had actually done this. But before anyone — and they had proved nearly all to be beggars — before anyone had addressed him he had always felt some alarm. Indeed for weeks he had not set foot from the car when he had gone outside the garden.
He could not say that this lady seemed a sinister figure. She resembled a gentle sleuth chasing a butterfly. He had been looking at the exact spot on the house-end where first the brim of her large black hat had appeared. He had turned his head on his cushions to rest his eyes from the white glare over the Mediterranean. The house-end was in the deep shadow from the great Japanese lilac. Thus that apparition had had the air of something growing very quietly.... As if he had been watching the opening of a plant.
He seemed to have been watching her for a long time before her eyes met his. Hers had made a minute examination of every object on the terrace — the urns, the trees in the white sunlight, a pale tea-rose that climbed to the balustrade. Eudoxie had hung her large white palmetto hat on a deck chair in the shadow of the lilac; on the stone table near it was Jeanne Becquerel’s black satin pocket that held her manicuring things, beside a huge pyramid of oranges in a green earthenware bowl....
It had been more than panic that had descended on Henry Martin! Panic makes you run.... He was held as if by fascination — like a rabbit before a boa constrictor....
She was all grey: large-built and athletic. Or once she had been athletic.... It was the world breaking in! She came obviously from New England. Or perhaps Hampstead, London. Probably the latter. The grey-cloth jacket and the grey silk blouse hung loose from the large frame. But she might have been recently ill. Probably she had been recently ill. The face was grey... High-featured, but grey. As if an open-air woman had been kept for a long time indoors, or on a hospital bed....
The face seemed familiar. There was a likeness: to whom God knew! She reminded him of... of... She had a little the air of his Belgian aunt who had scandalised Springfield, Ohio.... That Belgian countess had only seldom been sober. But when she had been sober she had had a likeness to this lady. It might, then, be a connection of his own. Through sister Carrie. The countess had been father’s sister. Carrie had married her nephew.... But why should she come spying on him? It was not reasonable. They thought he was dead. They must think he was dead....
Then if it was a relation it was a relation of the dead man’s.... Even at that, what could they do to him? He had done nothing wrong.
She had been examining the terrace from left to right. Now her eyes were upon his. He supposed that she could only see his forehead and his two eyes above the chair-back. She had very mobile features.... Full of expression! They expressed the humorous fear of a child caught out in a game....
She hadn’t then come with any idea of molesting him.
But perhaps she was merely a lady who had lost her way. People were always losing their way in the unintelligent muddle of paths around the villa.
She ran out suddenly. With long steps. She was beside Eudoxie’s hat. She fingered it for a moment as if with an irresistible impulse.
“What have you done to Gloria?” she asked. “Such a hat!... Fifteen francs at Antibes....”
Then she was connected with the Other. With Hugh Monckton who had loved Gloria! She was no doubt of that blood. You might face a worse accuser. It might have been Hugh Monckton’s cousin Eustace. That was a vindicative name.
She said sharply:
“Let me tell you I should not have been frightened if you had turned out to be a blue-bearded commissaire de Police! Not as frightened as I am... of you in a beard.... Is the scar under it so very bad?”
He didn’t know whether the scar under his beard was bad or not.... He had grown the disagreeable ornament to his face to aid confusion as to his identity, the wound under the jaw made by the yard of that boat serving as an excuse.... So that he had become Hugh Monckton plus a square, cropped, brown beard.... The lady went on:
“I must have looked ridiculous. Stalking you as if I had been a cat....” Or not, of course, a cat.... There are other things that stalk you.... Destiny does. And policemen!...
She said with sudden energy:
“Damn it all, Posh, say it’s all right... My coming!... You couldn’t expect me to be living not four miles away... Not three as the crow flies and not...”
She added:
“And with everything going to rack and ruin... Claude and Clotilde are beggared... and still in California... And you head of the family...”
She broke off to repeat with energy:
“Damn you, Posh, speak... It is all right, isn’t it?...”
Her grey eyes implored his face for a sign....
“I won’t have you think me not a sport....”
His dry throat brought out the words:
“My dear Lady!”
He was terribly frightened....
It was inevitable that he should call her “Lady.” She had struck him as so essentially that... Of New England... Of the English shires, as they call them... It was a kind of surrender too. If this lady was one of Hugh Monckton’s intimates and he confessed to not knowing her name... that meant acknowledging that he was an impostor!... “Impostor” was a nasty word... An impostor was a man who assumed another man’s identity.... He had done that... But the word connoted the idea that the person who changed his identity did it because he wished to rob the person whom he deceived.... He could swear he had no designs against this lady.
She advanced upon him. Her face had become suffused with joy. She said:
“Oh, Posh, that’s kind of you... to remember that... How did you remember that?”
She stooped above him and with a grey-gloved hand lifted the hair from above the scar that the other end of the yard had left on his forehead.
“Decent of you, dear boy,” she said. “Don’t dare to move!” She kissed him on the forehead.
She sat down on the chair Jeanne Becquerel generally used and stared at him from near his right hand....
“Yes: kind of you,” she said absently. “I’m such a lonely woman,... Think of how we’re all gone.... You’d say Destiny was determined to wipe us out...
She asked again:
“Is the scar on your jaw so very bad?... My dear, what a terrifying thing!... As if Destiny had taken another swipe at you.... Poor you... and I used to be so proud of the angle of your jaw....”
She exclaimed with a sudden energy:
“I swear that if you... if you had been taken I should have said there was no God.... I did say that... When I read, suddenly in the papers...”
He whispered:
“In the…”
She said:
“Don’t talk if it exhausts you.... But of course the accident was in the papers.... You’re you, aren’t you? Not a sparrow that falls to the ground.... It was in the papers that you had been killed. It was a muddle of course with the other poor fellow called Smith too.... He was, wasn’t he, an American cousin?... That was perhaps why he was in your regiment!... He really was in your regiment, wasn’t he?... Some papers even had the report that it was not he but you that had committed suicide. Because Gloria had left you!... Or to rig the market for our shares....”
