Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 796
He had had to re-arrange his ideas. The king could not be dead... Then why had Penthièvre wept in his cabin? It could hardly be that he was weeping from sheer relief. He was above all a masculine and composed figure except when he was engaged on one of his recklessnesses. And even then he preserved his appearance of calm.
So that Penkethman had either to consider that his ears had deceived him. Or that it had been someone else weeping... which of course had been possible.
Walter’s delay in returning had begun to concern him a little — towards ten, in the Closerie des Lilas. And his concern had grown when the detective had turned up with the book. Obviously Penthièvre, if he had had Walter arrested as a Communist, would be just the person to send Cassie the money. All through, and with absolute consistency, he had shown as much concern for her comfort as he could possibly do without upsetting his own plans... which, she should consider, he regarded as being absolutely necessary for the salvation of his country.
She must remember that, all the time, Penthièvre had those two deep and sombre passions... for what was now only the memory of his king and for turning France into a vast assemblage of self-supporting communes with the merest cobweb of a central authority to hold them together. And almost as much as he desired the accomplishment of his plans he desired that the glory of that accomplishment should be accredited, not to himself, but to the memory of his king. Henri V must be known to all time as the man who gave back the fowl in the pot to France....
Actually the fame would not be so ill-deserved. The real king had seemed to be a contemplative, kindly and by no means unintelligent youth. He had acted with great skill and prudence in all the desperate times that had gone before his success. And, his life in exile having been passed for the most part in relatively unassuming circumstances in one or other country resort, he was the very man to be ready to do what he could for the re-establishment of the small rural producer and craftsman as the really preponderant element in the life of France. With that aim he had assumed the crown and chosen Penthièvre for his Richelieu and it was not altogether improper that, should that scheme succeed, a large portion of the credit should go to his poor but not inglorious shade.
No doubt that had been the chief motive that had inspired Penthièvre to the singular course that he had set out on. The longer he could keep up the pretence that the king had actually directed those affairs the more glory must reflect upon his memory. For himself Penthièvre would be content to remain for ever in the shadow of the throne. He would like to go down to posterity as, like Richelieu or Mazarin, the founder of a great Institute of learning, or still more as the founder of a great College and tradition of the Arts... To that turn in his character Cassie might consider that she owed his real consideration for her. He considered that she had talent.
They had reached the end of the basin and turned slowly to retrace their steps. A little, fresh sunlight shone high on the pinkish, fluffy clouds in the blue sky. The new green was vivid on the avenue of linden trees that on each side of the water slightly veiled the dark red housefronts with their emerald shutters and the red tiles of the roofs. And climate, clouds, skies, trees and houses were so completely different in their hard brightness from the city she had left with its thin mists, blue-grey distances and lizard-grey façades that Cassie cried out suddenly:
“Is it here that I’m expected to spend the rest of my days... so that fowl and veal and beef may be in French cauldrons on Sundays?”
He said:
“Heaven forbid... Though this is the birthplace of Willem Vermeer and, as I have told you, the pictures in the Rijks Museum have been commended by your only great painter James McNeill Whistler. And there are peaceful lives lived in Sluys... More than in better known places. You could paint here... Look at the barge coming down the Sluyt....”
He planted his cane on the flagstone before him and stood still.
“It’s impossible,” he said, “to avoid these digressions. I want to, but too many side aspects come creeping in... We were at the return of the packet to you by that star-detective...
He had continued, he said, of the opinion that Walter had been arrested as a Communist, until very much later... with some faint suspicion that he might have been kidnapped by the dope men. That Penthièvre had had the book returned as well as Cassie’s money, might have been due, he had thought, to his desire to avoid giving Cassie distress before it was necessary. He had been perfectly aware that the book actually contained probably money and certainly a message in code.
The episode of the chauffeur at the commissariat of the V Arrondissement had merely confirmed him in his idea that Walter had been arrested. The fact that the sham chauffeur had said that the book and money had been left in his car outside the Cafe de la Paix had seemed to make it certain that the police had known of the London Party’s plans. Actually that had been the merest coincidence.
Ten Frenchmen out of eleven, if they wanted to invent an American changing money and leaving it in a taxi, would make him take a taxi at some distance from the American Express Company. He would go into the office, change his money, keeping the taxi waiting and would then drive to the Cafe de la Paix. The average Frenchman, that is to say — the commercial Frenchman of the Right Bank — believes that the American in Paris spends all his days driving in taxis from the office of the American Express Company to the Cafe de la Paix and back. The Frenchman of the Left Bank believes that the same American spends all his time drinking fines à l’eau in the hundred square yards that border on the Carrefour du Dome in Montparnasse... But M. de la Penthièvre and his associates and the superior officials of the Surete Generate were all inhabitants of the Right Bank.
So, in thinking out what Walter might be expected to have done, they had had to imagine his leaving those things in the taxi outside the Cafe de la Paix, simply because they could not think of anywhere else where he could have gone. It had been too early for Montmartre and he could not have left the money in the taxi outside the American Express office because he could not have changed the American notes before he got there.
Cassie said:
“You know all this as a fact? You have not merely surmised it?... I know how wonderful your surmises are.”
He looked at her rather humorously for a moment.
“I could have surmised it,” he said, “or even have deduced it, reasoning a thing out being better than guessing... But, as a matter of fact I didn’t.”... He added: “I had it from the lips of the Grand Chamberlain.”
She exclaimed:
“You... You saw M. de la Penthièvre... In spite of the danger you must have run!... You must have been mad... You ventured to go to the Palace: whilst I rested at the office of the League?”
“It wasn’t,” he said, with a slightly roguish intonation, “as dangerous for me as all that... I wasn’t mad but merely nervous and irritated. I became nervous and irritated and alarmed for your safety — and for Walter’s safety too — as soon as you had called out that the corpse was not Walter’s... in those vaults in the Mairie. I assure you I have never been so alarmed as when I had to hold you up and watch the police arresting the camelots du roi. That was a moment!... And as soon as I had you in safety in bed in the office I saw that something must be done to ease the strain.”
He had done, he said he could assure her, some serious thinking during the night. And then he had arrived at certain conclusions. He could, in the first place, supposing he went to the palace, make himself fairly sure of returning. He had only to leave with the secretary of the League a sealed envelope containing an account of the whole affair, the said envelope to be opened only in case he was not back in the League offices by a certain hour — in this case half past five — and they would be only too anxious to return him.
“And,” he concluded, “I had only to put them in the way of assuring themselves that I was really the father of the man they had converted into the king and they would be pretty sure that certainly I — and possibly you — would have no desire to interfere with the career of usefulness of that royal personage.”
She exclaimed:
“Assure themselves...”
He almost smiled, a little more roguishly than before. “Have I not already told you,” he asked, “that the methods and the records of the French police are extraordinarily efficient and minute — particularly when it is a matter of foreigners and still more minutely when they are foreign officials. Consider:”... He had already told her how he had met Berthe Leroy in Paris when as a young man he had been there in the capacity of a detective inspector of the Special Branch of Scotland Yard. No figure could be more interesting to those Parisians than that of a member of the Special Service since, if it was a matter of international crooks, it was with the members of that Service that they would have to co-operate in the most delicate affairs.
Mr Penkethman had to chance it that they had made, all those years ago, those minute records of his actions. They had had him as carefully sleuthed as if he had been Harry the Valet, the king of international crooks, himself. They had to be assured that he was incapable of double-crossing...
And, he concluded, within half an hour after he had assured M. de la Penthièvre over the private phone between the League and the Palace, that he considered himself to be the father of Walter Leroy and to have very genuine paternal feelings towards that young man, they had from the Quai des Orfevres — which is the Paris equivalent of New Scotland Yard — the most absolute assurance at least of his paternity. They had the most minute records, he said. Even of the number of times he had waltzed with poor Berthe in the public ball in the Mairie of the VI Arrondissement — dancing above the place where later he was to see the body of the king on its wheeled bier.
And at that time the putative father of Walter — Mr Leroy — had retired to a maison de santé, in a fit of chronic imbecility caused no doubt by his mortification at having been egregiously trimmed by that same Harry the Valet and his associates.
“So that,” Mr Penkethman went on, “I could go to the Palace with some assurance of safety... It is ironic to think of young romance — the only romance I ever had — being attended on by a swarm of spies and it is queer that the circle should have come true, as it were, in the Mairie of the VI Arrondissement — which must be one of the most commonplace locations in the world... But there it is... Those spyings and that coincidence probably saved our lives....”
The French, he commented, and particularly the French of that class are of curious psychologies. They insist on believing that irregular ties are the ones that most conduce to loyalty and good faith. For, once they had all their cards on the table, even the intransigent members of the council became almost at once convinced that their régime would not be in the least danger not merely from Mr Penkethman but even from Cassie herself. They could trust both of them not to do anything to injure the career of their pseudo-royal son and lover. A father is infinitely more solicitous for the welfare of an illegitimate son, once he has acknowledged him, than for that of any son born in wedlock and a mistress or a wife whose marriage lines are a little sketchy will be infinitely more tender towards a lover than towards a husband of whom she is assured. The Duke and Marquis — the intransigents of the Council — even progressed so far as to find satisfaction in the fact that the supposed common-law marriage of their king with Miss Mathers could be disputed in the State of New York.
“So that,” Cassie said vindictively, “they can marry Walter to the first Dago Princess that comes along.”
Mr Penkethman said sharply:
“Not in the least. Use your brains. There are two royal princes, the children of the late king and his queen. The last thing those aged fanatics for royalty could desire would be for their present king to marry any royal person and set up a situation resembling that of the supposed story of the Man in the Iron Mask who, you remember, was supposed to be a half brother of Louis XIV.... No, no: what they dimly envisage is that when the eldest of the princes shall be of any sort of age to ascend the throne Walter shall abdicate and retire into private life...”
“After having divorced his pseudo queen,” Cassie exclaimed.
“After having of course divorced his pseudo queen,” Mr Penkethman gravely corroborated. He went on quickly: “To make an end then... As soon as I had assured myself that Walter was well and resigned to his position... He told me that at first that had been far from being the case....”
Cassie said with some wonder:
“You saw Walter... then?”
He said:
“What sort of a father do you take me for? Should I make a bargain involving him if I were not assured from his own lips, in a private interview, that the bargain suited him?”
He smiled a little.
“The interview was shorter than I could have wished — in part owing to my own precautions. It began about a quarter past five and ended suddenly at twenty-five after, by the Secretary of the League telephoning through that if I was not back in his chancellery in five minutes he should open the envelope that I had left with him and at once wire its contents to Geneva...”
He smiled still more broadly.
“Even,” he said and began to chuckle, “he refused to make any concessions when I spoke to him myself. He had too high an opinion of the ingenuity of the French police in inventing voices or discovering passwords. So I had to leave hurriedly and what I gathered in that conversation was rather what had already happened to him than how he regarded the future....”
It appeared, he went on, that after Walter — without of course his precious book — had been led up the palace stairs through a wilderness of painters’ ladders and pots he found himself in a little bare room where he had been confronted by M. de la Penthièvre and the old intransigent Duke and afterwards by the Queen herself—” whom,” Mr Penkethman hastened to say, “he had at once heartily disliked.”
He had absolutely refused to have anything to do with their proposals. They had been at first merely that he should keep up the pretence of being the king for a few months until the regime should find itself in the saddle. Even that he had refused. He said he was a republican, a Communist even. He utterly despised all royalist ideas and procedures. They had at first treated him decidedly coercively. The first ride in a royal carriage that he had taken had been as it were at the end of a gun held by the young Meung who sat opposite him with the old duke — holding a hypodermic syringe — at his side. They had made him bow and accept petitions in several places in the City of Paris.
This had irritated him a good deal, more particularly because he thought he must have presented a rather ridiculous spectacle. But a long night’s sitting, alone with Penthièvre, had a good deal modified his views. He had already a good deal of affection for the shiningly-funereal statesman and, in the course of that night, he came to regard him also with a great deal of respect. As Cassie had foreseen, Penthièvre’s agricultural programme had not seemed at all undesirable to him and he considered the experiment well worth making. So he had become inclined to enter into a good-humoured partnership as long as he could be protected from Meung and the others who seemed to him at once fantastic and dangerous.
He had quite realised Penthièvre’s position and its difficulties....
“According to you,” Cassie said, “he seems to have left me, at that moment, quite out of his thoughts.”
“The hell he did,” Mr Penkethman remarked amiably. “He had already endangered his life by sending that note to you.”
What he would call the Elderly Party in the Council, he said, had surrounded him all the time till then, gibbering ferocities. They had assured him that if he tried in any way to communicate with Cassie that moment would be his last. But they had had to provide him with uniforms — and Providence had a little intervened. They had had to be secret so that they could not let his old groom of the chamber who knew intimately all his ways attend to his wardrobe. They had sent him to England on some sort of mission connected with state robes and had entrusted the inspection of the civilian wardrobe to the functionary’s deputy, deputy assistant who actually was an English trouser cutter — the most eminent of his kind. This man had actually never seen the king near by so that he could be trusted with the fitting of Walter. The man had in addition a great admiration for the king and Walter had eventually had no difficulty in slipping him the tiny note and giving him instructions how to deliver it. He had had to do it whilst under the surveillance of Meung and that was where Providence had come in.
An elderly noble with rights to apartments in the palace dating from the time of Louis XI had been allotted rooms that had not been occupied for a number of years. His kitchen fire had been lit for the first time about an hour before the fitting had begun and, the old court’s servant knowing nothing about old-fashioned ranges, the boiler had blown out just as Walter had begun to whisper to the trouser-cutter in English.
The sound of the explosion had been considerable and Meung, imagining that it had been a Communist outrage had rushed from the room determined to see that vengeance was inflicted on the perpetrators. During his absence Walter had been able to explain very carefully to the cutter what he wanted and the cutter, imagining that he was being asked to carry a note to the king’s latest mistress, had accepted the commission with enthusiasm.
