Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 754
So that officer’s life had become, if not a bed of roses, then at least supportable. He could take afternoons off for little social occasions, he could go sick if it was necessary, he could go with confidence on week-end leaves and be certain, on coming back, that the office work would not be inextricably boxed.... With all these attributes, Henry Martin thought, he might well be pleasurably remembered. Certainly Hugh Monckton was not mad in believing that Henry Martin would be the very man to manage the complicated operations on paper called for by the transference of those museum pieces to their destinations... and it was reasonable that that work should be paid for....
And of course if they were actually blood relations, even without knowing it, that would render natural a certain spontaneous affection and similarity of tastes.... Relations with whom you have to have intimate affairs are frequently bores of the first water. But to meet quite unknown relatives — and by accident — was always pleasurable and exciting.
He could remember, once in New York, meeting at a party a shy young girl who said she was a cousin — a Dutch girl who had come to New York to help a married sister with a baby.... That had been a pleasure that still remained in his memory — a sudden rising of interest and affection — a quiet intimacy such as few casual contacts bring you. It had been an incident that had come back very often to his mind. It had led to nothing — but he was sure that if after years he met her again he would befriend and would do all the service to her that he could.
No doubt Hugh Monckton had felt something of the sort: no doubt they both had. The mere fact that Hugh Monckton — who had forgotten his bill-fold — should have strolled, as he had, casually over to Henry Martin’s table and have asked him to pay his bill — that alone was enough to establish that there had been a premonition of intimacy. You do not ask a casual stranger to pay your drink-bill unless you have some feeling of at least mental kinship....
So that it might have been natural for Hugh Monckton to pitch on him as an object for his last benevolence — one who should prolong, if not the actual life, then at least the sort of life that Hugh Monckton had proposed to lead — the jolly old beanfeast that, by all odds his mortal career should have witnessed!
And by God... that was exactly what Henry Martin was doing — the exact parallel! Hugh Monckton had wanted him to pick up some skirt and, hiring the yacht, le Secret, to sail away for ever, looking at blue seas and sparkling islands, over the taffrail.... The jolly old beanfeast!...
He hadn’t hired le Secret. He had been in no condition to sail away. But he had hired the Villa Niké. And with its long terrace, giving over the foam of the Mediterranean, with the shade-trees for masts, and the balustrade over which to look at the hyacinthine sea and the sparkling island of St. Mandrier — with that for taffrail, wasn’t the Villa Niké exactly an enchanted ship anchored for ever in the Islands of the Blest?... And wasn’t there Eudoxie, forbidden to him as Gloria Malmström had forbidden herself to Hugh Monckton?... And wasn’t there, sleeping in the next room, Jeanne Becquerel, neglected, just as, neglected there too, she had slept in the next room to Hugh Monckton’s in the hotel?...
And, damnation, wasn’t he, Henry Martin, just as Hugh Monckton had been, shut off from all sexual relations with any woman?... For fear of that blinding pain in the head!...
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
Jeanne Becquerel was sleeping, uncovered, on her bed that was bluish because of the dim light of the dawn and the moon. Her left hand was across her chest and her right was extended above her head. She was moaning a little in her sleep. She lay flat on the bed, her hair spread over the pillow above her — like a South Sea island fan of perfumed fibre.
She had lain like that when he had taken over from Hugh Monckton.... “Taken over” was the exact phrase. In the army you took over from another officer when you assumed responsibility for shells, tins of salmon, or a regiment, or batteries of artillery.... So he had taken over from Hugh Monckton — the museum objects, his money, his paraphernalia of leather goods, his reputation, even... and this girl.... They were not his, Henry Martin’s, property. He was in charge of them, “O.I.C.” — Officer in charge....
The parallel was exact. It was all the more exact because Hugh Monckton himself could well be said only to be in charge of most of them. He had bought the museum pieces, but they had never been intimately his. They had probably never come out of their packing-cases in his time. Even the money, the twenty thousand pound notes, had not been his property in the sense of coins that you jingle in your trouser pockets. It had been a coldly floating sum intended to go to the purchase of le Secret — the yacht in which, with Gloria Malmström and the museum pieces, he had meant to sail to the Islands of the Blest. Hugh Monckton had merely been in charge of them in the interests of an expedition that had never come off....
And this girl.... She too had been merely part of the decoration of his career. She had certainly never been his mistress. At most she had moaned for eight days in the hotel bedroom next to his.... As she was moaning now in her sleep. Only awake then and louder.... And, to a man like Hugh Monckton, if you have been kept awake for a week by moaning — that is enough to constitute a claim on you. Something like that! Apparently he had talked to her. About love.... Sub-acid fragments of wisdom, inspired no doubt by the bitterness of having been let down by Gloria Malmström. Apparently Gloria Malmström had come to that harbour town for an engagement, letting him jolly well believe that that would be her last appearance on any stage other than that deck of the schooner-yacht, le Secret.... All the while she had been booked for the Spanish tour.... That was certainly treachery....
That afternoon she had been perfectly defiant about it.
Or not even defiant — perfectly calm. She had regarded him, Henry Martin, with a fixed, Scandinavian stare that was without passion as without life. She had begun by saying that he saw, didn’t he? that everything had passed off for the best.... She inferred that that had been due to her unerring knowledge of how life worked....
It had been curious to think out what Hugh Monckton had found in her. It was not astonishing that he had fallen for her — and disastrously. Any man might have done that, if only because of her double personality. On the boards she ran through the whole gamut of feminine personality. She was espiègle, sulky, soulful, sunk in culture, Bacchic — all by turns, for the duration of a song. And she could even turn on her natural and sinister self. Though, as hardly anyone but Verlaine in a gay mood or Baudelaire when sardonic could have written songs to her natural self, she had few occasions for appearing in that mood....
On the whole, however, her stage personality was a gay one. Her most tragic impersonation normally might be taken to be that of Carmen coming upon the card that foretold her death and then dancing to ecstasies in a shawl that disclosed to the full her wonderful shoulders.... For, after all, Hugh Monckton might very well have loved her for her shoulders alone!
It must have been the queerest affair — and in spite of all the sidelights that had come to him about it there remained great gaps in Henry Martin’s knowledge of it. It appeared that she had seriously contemplated sailing with him on le Secret. Why? What could she possibly have seen in Hugh Monckton?... When she had talked to him that afternoon in the character of that poor fellow it had been as if to the lowest and most insensitive of captains of industry....
To begin with she was of course a Communist....
It was astonishing how Communism everywhere cropped up nowadays and how much contempt he, Henry Martin, in the guise of Hugh Monckton, received as being a soul-less capitalist. It was not merely the diatribes of Macdonald the secretary. Pamphlets and long manifolded scripts had reached him at least half a dozen times from the town below, where apparently Macdonald had a little nest of Communist-Intellectual friends... mostly American. They all proposed, whatever the nature of their other panaceas, to stand Hugh Monckton and all of his kidney “up against a wall”... when the great day came!
A German young man and woman, of astonishing nudity and bronzed flesh, had even penetrated to him when he lay in his deck chair, the picture of Mammon. The nails of their fingers and toes were lacquered in bright silver and their spirits had been overwhelmingly high. The young man had been an engineer, unemployed but with a great number of State engineering diplomas. Apparently they had got married — or perhaps only united — on the strength of a number of gold marks that their parents had disinterred from beneath pear-trees in their gardens. On these they were to make whoopee in the lands where the orange flower grew. When they were spent they were to go back to Germany and, if they had luck, to sweep roads. If not they would starve.... In the meantime, the young man had tried to sell Henry Martin an invention of his own — for stabilising and heating in wintertime, the steering wheels of automobiles. Henry Martin had tried to take an intelligent part in the conversation. But he knew nothing about metals or their powers as conductors and, although he had agreed that it might be desirable to heat the steering wheels of cars in wintertime, he had had to recommend the young man to address himself to Eustace Monckton as secretary of Monckton’s Ltd.
“And this,” the young man had then said, “is, as I had suspected, the famous Hugh Monckton Allard Schmidt — the great engineer who by his sole brain has given employment to thousands; the renowned renovator of a national industry whose name is the capitalist’s greatest argument; who in his sole person is the refutation of all that Karl Marx laboriously wrote.....”
Henry Martin perceived that he had let Hugh Monckton’s reputation rather disastrously down. He tried to say that it had been Monckton senior who had been the mechanical genius.... But before he could finish getting out the Briton’s introductory speech — before he could bring out so much as:
“Oh, I say...” that young-fellow-my-lad with the shining toe nails had been up and away. Though speaking English for the benefit of Henry Martin, he had addressed himself to his companion. He said that it had been as he thought. This long fellow could not tell the difference between something and something else. It was obviously metals that were in question. But Henry Martin knew next to nothing about metals and the young man’s pronunciation of their names had been bewildering. The young man had gone on to say that Hugh Monckton was just a loathsome financier like any other loathsome financier. His sole claim to fame — and damnation — was that he juggled with the sweat of toiling millions which was called gold.... That young man had gone on till he came to gloating over the day when they would get Henry Martin up against a wall!...
Henry Martin had said — the young fellow’s peroration had been so long that he had had time to get his wits together:
“And very nice too!” That he thought was how Hugh Monckton would have put it. And he had added: “And in the meantime suppose you trot over to London and shew your jolly old gadget to cousin Eustace. And if you need it I’ll treat you to a pair of pants and a jacket. And a ticket to Blighty — that’s London — and back!” That, he had imagined, would have been Hugh Monckton’s reaction.
The subject cropped up so often and in such unexpected persons that, having no views of his own on the matter he felt as if he had been absent from life for a long time and had come back to find the whole world playing a new and unknown game. It was perhaps the terrible winter that the world had passed through. That Mrs. Freiligrath should be prepared to fold her hands before the new movement did not astonish him. Her own clan seemed to her to be wiped out and she could see no reason why another class should not try other methods. She even expressed regret that the Socialist Government in England should have made such a poor thing of it and should be tottering towards its fall.
He wasn’t astonished either that Eudoxie should passionately desire a new order of things. Her father from the French Consulate General had continued to write her terrible details as to the state of things in New York. The dreadful image of the breadlines stretching from West Eleventh Street far uptown had been enough to drive her at times nearly mad. She might be a Frenchwoman but she was a born New Yorker and the image of the city was never for long out of her mind’s eye.
It was distracting to have to think of your shining and confident city as filled with those millions of near-ghosts drifting in endless strings!
No: Eudoxie’s attitude was not astonishing.... It had been perhaps at first sight startling to hear the Commissaire — the striking Coco — speculate on the situation. He said that Communism was certainly on the increase. One of the towns that made up the agglomeration called St. Jean du Var had just elected a Communist mayor by a vote of eighty per cent of the population. The police there had to take orders from a Communist. That appeared to him singular. But if the Chambers should return a Communist government to power he himself would have to take orders from the Communist Minister of Police and would probably have to arrest all those who were his then masters.... And put them to the third degree, no doubt. He would do it too with as much equanimity as now he displayed in arresting Communists. That was the law and the constitution and he would be as loyal to a Communist, as to a republican government. It was for that reason no doubt that the Right and Centre in parliament — and indeed a part of the Left and most reasonable citizens — clamoured that the police had nowadays altogether too much power — as they probably had if you looked at it in that way. That was contrary to what you would expect. You would imagine that law-abiding citizens would want the law to be as strong as possible. What he himself would be able legally to do to perfectly respectable and innocuous citizens would, when the Communist day came, be something almost too diabolical to think of. He — M. le Commissaire — might not personally approve. But that would be his duty. He would do it.
But the person who had altogether astonished Henry Martin had been Jeanne Becquerel, who was there sleeping beneath his eyes.
It had not been merely that she had agreed with Eudoxie’s wildest outburst or had enthusiastically backed up Mrs. Freiligrath’s suggestion that her and Hugh Monckton’s class had so ruined the world that they might as well retire into limbo. But she had displayed an almost sadic delight at the commissaire’s predictions as to the fate of the middle classes in France under Communism. And she had almost hung upon Macdonald’s lips. Macdonald’s statements as to the habits and motives of employers in America had an almost lunatic ferocity. It appeared that, after being released from Dartmoor he had been deported from the United States — as a Communist!... What he had seen in ten days in Fall River and five in Pittsburg had beggared even his powers of description. That is not unusual with visiting Englishmen.
Henry Martin had till then been silent during the whole discussion. But he remembered that as Hugh Monckton he could claim to have passed several months in industrial towns in America — and he was certain that Hugh Monckton could not have let all that pass without some protest. So, with languid mannerisms he had corrected that fellow.... As to geographic details — for Fall River is not in Rhode Island; as to rates of pay in Detroit, Michigan, and the state of Ohio and as to the name of the residential parts of Pittsburg. He had to remind Macdonald that he had been in America for much longer than he.
Macdonald had burst out:
“And bloody well you don’t have to remind me of it. One would say you had lived in that filthy country all your life. And been born there....” He considered that Hugh Monckton had so bathed in their illiterate jargon that you would never take him for an Englishman at all. And he had picked up their atrocious, bloodsucking methods of employment and adopted them in his own hypocrite’s works where the famine conditions of the workers were supposed to be hidden from them hypocritically by the flower beds around the buildings and by the glass basins and automatic soap-and-towel delivery machines in the lavatories. “But let me tell you, Mr. Hugh Monckton Allard Smith, if that’s your name, I could let you into a thing or two about your ‘model’ works and I can tell you what your miserable workmen will want to do to you when the day comes.”
Henry Martin said:
“Carry on, sonny, with the awful news!” But he could not let Hugh Monckton take all of this lying down. He had not the least idea of what Hugh Monckton had thought about these matters and, with Mrs. Freiligrath, listening, he might well come a cropper in her eyes. But he might take it for granted that Hugh Monckton would not have poured out his heart to this fellow. He dropped therefore into French: the majority of that party was French so that that was mere politeness:
“Et en attendant’,’ he said,” avant que... Before Mr. Macdonald burst into a further account of what would happen before they put him, Hugh Monckton, up against the so indispensable wall, let Mr. Macdonald answer one question: “Je suis absolument prêt a... He was absolutely ready if Mr. Macdonald wished it to put down his works. He had all the money that he needed: the works were a trouble and a responsibility. Mr. Macdonald had eloquently declared that the works were a living hell and that the workmen asked nothing better than to take him, Hugh Monckton, for a ride and dispose of him with appropriate tortures....” Mais que Monsieur réponde à cette question....”Let him answer this question: “What in that case would the thousands of inhabitants of Smithville, with their wives and children — of Smithville, a city of relative comfort and decency which had arisen and almost alone in the world still more and more flourished, which took on daily more workmen and spread their products throughout the world... and this by the mechanical genius or the genius for organisation,” non pas de moi, Asch Emma Smeez,” — not of me, H. M. A. Smith, but by the genius of Henry Monckton Smith, père, and of his father Hugh Faber Smith and of ancestors who for generations had worked with hammer and hand.... What would those workmen and their wives and children, deprived of their employment, thrown out of their decent houses, forced to wander along the roads in the hopeless search for work and to die eventually in the ditches — for what sort of a ride would those miserable creatures want to take M. Macdonald who by his genius for destruction and disorganisation should have brought them to that state?
