Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (154 page)

“You’d better take a sedative and go to bed,” George said. “You will look like a scarecrow if you don’t.”

Thwaite said:
“
How can I go to bed when we haven’t even settled about an hotel?” He rose to his feet and stamped about the room. “It’s no joke.”

“It doesn’t seem to be,” George answered. He felt a moment of misgiving, Thwaite was so unrecognisable. He said that he couldn’t take Dora to
any
sort of hotel; you never knew what sort of people you mightn’t meet, or what sort of shocking scenes you mightn’t see in the streets.
He
knew the Quartier Latin. At the same time he didn’t want to have to pay Grand Hotel prices; it was out of the question. He wanted to find a decent middle-class hotel with a
cuisine bourgeoise.
And you couldn’t tell where to find one. It would be ridiculous to arrive in Paris without knowing where they were going.

George said: “But, my dear fellow. This dreadful respectability! Dora would, I am perfectly sure, like a sort of chastened Bohemianism. And, bless my soul, all the quartier round the School of Medicine’s as staid as Bloomsbury.”

Thwaite said:
“
It’s a responsibility — a young girl’s soul like Dora’s.”

George interrupted, mildly: “But she’ll have to—”

“Her — her unsullied outlook,” Thwaite caught him up, “I’ve got to preserve that. And she must be decently comfortable. I haven’t undertaken this thing without looking it in the face.”

George sighed a little. “I think you’re most beautifully wrong,” he said. What Dora wanted was just
not
the decent
cuisine bourgeoise
that she’d had all her life. “She expects you to give her a holiday — the rich and strange, the finer spirit. You’d get it by a little roughing it, by a softened touch of your tramping in the Abruzzi.” He went on to explain that Dora, once blooded in that way, would return with all the delight in the world to his life of eminent respectability.

“But all this doesn’t give me the name of an hotel,” Thwaite said, with a touch of insolence.

George, in his turn, felt remotely nettled. “You’d better take her to the Grand Hotel,” he said. “I daresay the marble and gilding would amuse her childish innocence.”

Thwaite flashed at him pragmatically: “And pay their abominable prices?” He adopted a rather lofty tone. “You can’t — you won’t seem to understand that I’ve undertaken this affair in a serious spirit. I suppose you think that, because I’ve been a vagabond once, I’m always going to be one. It isn’t so. I’m going to begin from the very beginning with moderation and common-sense. I’ve got a certain income. If it weren’t for that confounded Clara, Dora would be sure of a decent competency.” He spoke with astonishing bitterness.

Clara had remained silently obdurate. To George himself she had vouchsafed no kind of explanation, and it wasn’t the kind of subject that George could harp on or return to.

“What does she mean to do?” Thwaite asked. “Dora’s aunt advised me to bring an action about it.”

George raised his hands.

“Oh, I’m not mercenary,” Thwaite said. “But it’s a matter to be looked at in a serious way. You, of course, can’t look at it like that. You’ve never had to think about a penny, and you’ve not got a young girl to provide for.” George’s back suddenly stiffened. His gaze at Thwaite became extremely direct. Thwaite, as a matter of fact, had never seen George angry; he did not recognise the signs.

“As I say,” he went on, “you can’t understand; you’ve never had to look forward or wanted money. I’m a man of the world in some matters. I’ve got a certain income assured, and—”

George suddenly sat up.

“If it hadn’t been for me—” he began.

Then he paused and leant back in his chair. He had meant to finish with: “you wouldn’t have had any position at all.”

But, between word and word, the dislike for saying anything of the kind quenched his anger suddenly. He saw the humour of the situation — the absurdity of quarrelling with a man of Thwaite’s calibre, of raising an unpleasantness over the selection of an hotel.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “you’re rather insufferable to-night. You are, really.”

“Well, I’ve things to worry me,” Thwaite said.

George answered:
“
And heaven knows, so have I.”

It was true enough, and perhaps Thwaite’s sudden reminder of his private trouble had been the cause of his sudden anger. George had that morning received the first demand from the creditors of the Renaissance Press; it had been for a good round sum. George’s affairs
were
involved in a tangle that might unravel very blankly indeed. He had thrown the affair off his mind. He had forwarded the creditors’ demand to his brother Gregory to attend to in his solicitor’s capacity. But Thwaite’s harping on a string of much the same tone had brought it back to his mind.

Gregory’s answer might mean that the cupboard was more than bare. He remembered suddenly all sorts of manipulations of investments, all sorts of equitable mortgages, and he equally couldn’t remember whether certain shares in a South American Railway had or had not been sold. They would make all the difference. He pressed the subject out of his mind once more, replacing it with his genial fatalism. Thwaite was regarding him remorsefully enough.

“Oh, I’m immensely sorry,” he said, “I really am.”

George, laughing, said that it was all right; that he could make allowance for Thwaite, whose position obviously called for nervous irritation. “But really, Thwaite, your hotel needn’t cause us the least worry if we can only keep a level head between us.” He explained that Thwaite could drive to one of the tourist agencies in the Avenue de l’Opera, and get details of all the
cuisines bourgeoisies
in the dangerous city.

Thwaite’s face expressed joy; his brow unclouded. He suddenly saw prospects of hotel-board tickets at greatly reduced prices.

“I’m such a child in travelling of this sort,” he said gratefully. “It would never have occurred to me.”

“You certainly don’t shine — without a knapsack,” George said. “I can’t for the life of me think why you’re going to Paris at all. Dora would much rather go to a wilder place.”

“It’s the proper thing,” said Thwaite.

Before leaving, he for a time became the old Thwaite — exaggerated a little toward a sentimentalism that, George excused him, was in the circumstances not inappropriate. He talked a great deal of his plans; aired his theories of domesticity, which strangely enough were almost Oriental. Seclusion from an unpleasant world — that ought to be the lot of woman in life. George had a sudden vision of Dora darning stockings beneath the darkened beams of the weather-boarded cottage, whilst Thwaite read poetry aloud and rocked a cradle with his foot. It tickled his humorous nerves, and as, with his hand affectionately on Thwaite’s shoulder, he saw the bridegroom out of the house, he said:

“Well, my dear boy, all these things are — aren’t they? — very much on the knees of the gods. But if I were you — if I were young and very much in love, I don’t think I should have all these — all these moral scruples.”

“Oh, you would,” Thwaite said. He added: “I wish — I wish you would try to influence Clara about that money.”

He returned after he had been gone some minutes to bring out the fact that what was at the bottom of his extreme care, pecuniarily, was his desire to repay the really large sums that he owed George. “And if Clara would give Dora the money that morally (and I’m not sure that it isn’t legally, too) is Dora’s, I could with a clear conscience set about repaying you. Because I’m not ungrateful; I don’t forget my oblations to you. I owe you everything.”

It was a moment of
attendrissements.
The late-at-night emotions that Thwaite’s moved voice caused in George overwhelmed his slight shudder at the recurrence of the word
“
money.” Thwaite went on to give details of a scheme for insuring his life.

CHAPTER IV
.

THE wedding breakfast, a sufficiently imposing affair, had taken place in George’s large dining hall; the Bredes’ hired house contained no room sufficiently noble. It was Thwaite’s idea; Clara had opposed it strenuously, and with some show of emotion. Her ingenuous cheeks flushed, and the discussion had left her brother-in-law a no better friend. Thwaite had said that he did not wish Dora’s wedding to be a hole and corner affair.

“I think,” Clara had answered,
“
that people won’t think any the better of us for imposing on a friend who is more than enough imposed on.”

But George had made Thwaite’s idea his own, and there wasn’t any opposing George.

Relatives had accepted, in a disconcerting manner; two families of Bredes who were not on terms with each other; two sisters of Clara’s, whom the care of considerable nurseries had made prematurely querulous; an Honourable Aunt Hilda on the mother’s side; and a bearded, half-centaur cousin from La Plata by accident in England.

The two bridesmaids came from Mr. Brede’s own parish — they had been to college with Dora. Their bustling and amiably fresh county-family mothers disapproved of the aunt, who was understood to have had a past of aristocratic and ancient liveliness. The aunt, on the other hand, disapproved, without any mincing matters, of Clara and her earlier scholastic career.

“Colleges for gals,” she exclaimed in the ear of the cousin from La Plata, who had acted as best man. “It’s Greek to me what they’re for. And what’s Greek to them?
I
don’t like spectacles on débutantes.”

“I don’t agree with you, ma’am,” the bearded cousin exclaimed. He twirled a champagne-glass by the stalk in his enormous fingers, and spoke indulgently. “Out in the Pampas they make the best wives. They’ve something to think of, and don’t mope. Give me that sort.”

“Well, take ‘em all out to the Pampas and keep them there,” the aunt exclaimed with a good-natured intonation for the handsome nephew.

“You ought to remember, aunt,” one of the querulous sisters interjected, “that Dora’s a Girton girl. And the bridesmaids.”

“Oh, Dora’s married,” the old lady rang back. “She’ll do no more mischief. Besides, not even a college could do Dora any harm. You’ve got the best of the bunch, Mr. — Waite! — Thwaite! A Shropshire Thwaite — oh, I beg pardon.”

Clara had smiled all the time.

Mr. Brede — it was quite one of his best days — blinked amiably, like an owl dragged from a hollow. He quoted Horace three times in a short but weighty speech. The cousin from La Plata in
his
speech remarked, swaying bulkily and easily:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I haven’t learnt the art of oration from cattle on my ranche. The bride’s charms speak for themselves. I could make a speech — an excellent quotation — if I’d to speak for the best man. As it happens, I’m that functionary myself. I should say, may the best man win.”

He sat down heavily, and with a certain air, pulling at his heavy moustache, and casting at Clara an unconcealed glance of admiration. No one laughed.

Afterwards, Mr. Brede’s two sisters, who had not met for seven years, began a formal reconciliation. It was interrupted by a violent and quite unmitigated quarrel between their husbands about “poor Jane’s will.” Clara, with her swift grace and air of patience, had separated them. “I should think, Uncle James,” George caught her saying to one immense, coal black-haired creature, “that you would be quiet in the house of a gentleman who had been kind to us—”

The uncle muttered something apologetic. Subsequently, he came up to George, and, with a deferential air, began to talk about the Highlands. When Thwaite and Dora drove away, a period of great misery for Clara Brede came to an end. It wasn’t only, as she said to George, that the violence of her relatives had “got on her nerves.” It wasn’t even that she was horribly distracted by the idea of what George must be thinking of them. Dora had smiled radiantly at her; Thwaite scowled and looked away. He had been scowling like that at her all these months. Once he had begun to talk to her about the money. She had answered him with a settled “No!”

It had never shown on the surface how near she was to telling him everything; and it had made her the more miserable that she could not bring herself to tell him. She could not. She had been again and again on the point, but she was always afraid. He hated her so much, that she was sure he would tell George, in order to discredit her in George’s eyes. She couldn’t trust Thwaite, and all the time he was trying to make Dora hate her.

She ought to have told Thwaite. She ought never to have withheld the money. She had recognised that as soon as she knew that she loved George. It was a mistake, a disaster, and, when she recognised it, it was a new calamity. She remembered that she had thought about it for a long time one night. Her reasons had seemed to her so good then — but now, all these reasons seemed to have vanished. She couldn’t put them together again. It seemed to her, when she looked back, that her only real reason had been that she was in love with George. She had not known it, but it had biassed her.

Oh, she had thought she had been acting so justly! She wrung her hands. She craved for the real heroism that would make her confess to Thwaite. It did not come, and for all those months he had gone on hating her, and trying to make Dora hate her.

She had remained doggedly mute. She had spent all her savings on Dora; she had bought her whatever she idly wished for. It had not appeased Thwaite. Dora, however, had not seemed to listen to him, though it made her the more in love with him because he was defending her interests. And she loved Clara more because Clara was unhappy.

On the night before the wedding Dora had been over at the cottage. She came hurrying back to Clara. Thwaite had gone into George’s.

“Oh, Clara,” she said. Her delighted face was flushed; her blue eyes sparkled. “Come and see what Mr. Moffat has given us.”

All round the walls of the living room there hung frames of delicate drawings, touching closely one on the other. It was George’s surprise. Whilst Thwaite and Dora had been out in the afternoon he had come round to the cottage with his gardener, wheeling all the frames in a truck. He had spent the afternoon in directing the gardener where to hang them.

Clara stood motionless and looked. She saw row upon row of faces, delicately touched in and tinted, the faces of very beautiful women and of very famous men. They were intimately familiar to her, and it was like a calamity.

Dora was saying that Thwaite said they were worth some hundreds of pounds.

They were the complete series of Sir Graham’s small sketches for his most famous portraits. They were practically the only things of value that George still had. They had always been in a great portfolio on a special stand in George’s drawing room; Clara had looked through them many times.

Dora said: “Mr. Moffat has given them to William, because he is his dearest friend and pupil.”

Clara leant a hand against the table. There were tears warm in her eyes. She thought swiftly: “He is ruined, then. He gave them because he had nothing else to give.” The bright, rich little room wavered and became invisible in the blur of her tears. Suddenly she gave one long sob. She saw Dora’s alarmed young face, then she sank down on her knees and hid her own on her arms. “Don’t you know he is ruined?” she sobbed. She began to cry unrestrainedly; the rough stuff of her sleeve smarted on her face. It was beneficent and soothing, as if he himself were there. In the abandonment of her grief she closed her eyes, to see nothing, and sought blindly for a resting-place on her sister’s breast as a child would do on its mother’s. “I love him so,” she said.

She told her sister everything; it was wonderful how Dora understood. It was as if Clara were talking to herself.

“You misunderstood Willie,” Dora said. Of course Thwaite would have paid George if he had known.

“But I couldn’t tell him,” Clara said. She hadn’t wished to diminish George’s noble figure. She had wanted to keep the secret for her own.

“Oh, I know,” Dora said. It was wonderful how she understood and how she pardoned.

It wasn’t indeed a matter of pardon. She would have wanted her sister to have acted as she had done. It was romantic and it was charming. This new sensation seemed somehow to have made the cottage itself become suddenly a home, a place one already had lived in. She was open to all tender emotions because it was the night before she was to be married, and she was very happy.

Clara lay back, softly and wearily, in a long chair before the high fire-place, and Dora sat on the ground at her feet. Her arms were across her sister’s knees, and Clara’s hand lay on her head. The long, polished oak table reflected the light of the lamp like a brown millpond. The darkened joists ran parallel overhead in long lines, the air was heavy with the scent of jasmine from the open casement. Large moths blurred suddenly, pale from out of the blue night outside. The silence was filled with the sound of gnats, faint like a dull vibration, or sharp like tiny horns.

This was to be Dora’s home. The idea of Clara’s loving a man filled her with young and tremulous delight. She said suddenly:

“Oh, Clara, would you go away with him if he asked you to?”

Clara said: “Yes,” with her soft resoluteness, and Dora nodded her head gently. It was as if she considered for a short time, and then thought that Clara was right. She pressed Clara’s knees gently in token of sympathy.

“Only I can’t leave father,” Clara said.

Dora answered: “Oh, Clara!”

“No one else could do for him so well,” Clara said.
“
And I couldn’t bear to let anyone else know how bad he really is.”

Dora said: “Oh, Clara!” again.

“Even George doesn’t really know,” Clara said. Dora suddenly had a swift and sinister glimpse of how much Clara must have suffered. She herself had heard noises in the house at night when she had been half asleep. And she could understand Clara’s jealous and intense pride that wished to conceal, even from a professional attendant, that dreadful weak place in their house, Clara said proudly now, with a pride in her lover, “He would want me to see it through.”

She suddenly stopped stroking Dora’s hair. “Besides, he’s never even looked at me!” she said bitterly. “He thinks I’m only a drudge; and that’s all I am.”

Dora said: “Oh, Clara! You’re a beautiful woman, and sweet — and charming — and clever — and — and — there’s no one like you, my Clara.”

She rose up and took Clara’s face between her hands. She kissed her many times, and said in between: “No one — no one — no one — no one.” She paused to push back a wisp of her hair.

“Oh, Clara,” she went on, “he
does
admire you. I have heard him say you were shamefully used. He did; and that you ought to marry some good man. But there’s no one good enough.”

Clara’s head lay back in the chair. Her eyes were closed, and her face looked like a tranquil, pale mask of a classic head.

“And he said you had a splendid nature. I heard him.”

“He means that I am an efficient housewife,” Clara said, with a listless and weary disdain.

“No, no.” Dora flushed. “He means that you’re good and generous and clever.”

Before they went home Clara said swiftly:

“Don’t tell Willie!” Then she hesitated. No! she mustn’t come between man and wife. She had told her sister. She must take the consequences, “Oh, but Willie would
understand”
Dora said. She meant that Thwaite had a heart as romantic as her own. She thought that he would even be charmed, and that from now he
must
begin to admire Clara.

Clara shook her head slightly.

“Why, yes; tell him about the money,” she said. “And that I beg his pardon. But not that I love George Moffat.”

That, at least, was her own story.