Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (212 page)

CHAPTER II
.

THE death of his father put all this in an entirely different light. She felt herself, vaguely, that his inheritance of immense “interests” in the country across the water must render him infinitely more American. You might mitigate the fact that he had been born in Idaho and had lived till he was four in the town of Hut, Montana. The truth suggested itself at once that to be born in a stable does not make a man even a groom. But to have been born there, and then, in addition, to control the output of thirty-seven billion loaves of bread, three railway and eleven steamship lines — all these things together would make it impossible for him to pass as one of “ourselves.” There was, of course, the immense wealth, but that was a thing so invisible that it could not be called any equivalent for the age, comfort and presentability of Cuddiford House — the small manor that they had half decided to take. At the same time it rendered Cuddiford House impossible. You could not live in it and be the wealthiest commoner in England! A week ago they had not been certain that they could afford even Cuddiford! Now...

Sitting on the edge of her chair in her father’s dining-room, where he had awaited her, she said almost faintly:

“Oh, it can’t be as bad as that?”

He looked at her with his brows wrinkled.

“As bad as what?” he asked.

“As that you’re the richest citizen in the world!” His face cleared, and from the rich enhancing of his colour it might have been said that he blushed with pleasure.

“You can’t tell how glad I am,” he answered, “that you call it bad!” He hesitated, and then added: “But I’m determined to end it. To end it or mend it. I’ve been thinking of that — if you agreed, and I was certain you
would
agree — all the way down from town.”

He had brown hair that waved a very little; he had a straight nose; he was dressed in a very perfect suit of brown, and you certainly could not have called him anything but a very perfectly typical Englishman, if it had not been that, just at times, his brown, seal-like eyes were a very little too intelligent. He was so tall that his motion across the room was a noticeable fact: he was so good to look upon that to be towered over by him was a pleasure: and the fact that he only held out to her both his hands to take both hers was so exactly the right resealing of their bond of union that, as his large, firm fingers closed upon hers, she felt impelled to utter the words: “Oh, I don’t
like
Americans!” in an intermezzo of pleasure and relief.

It was the little intimacy that she allowed herself — as another girl might whisper to her lover: “I don’t, as a rule, like Roman noses — but the rest of you makes up for yours!”

He had heard her say the same thing several times before, so that he accepted the compliment with a fine, friendly smile and reverted to the first question.

“It’s the trick of my — my compatriots,” he said, “to call everything they possibly can the largest thing in the world. I suppose it’s because they’re — we’re — idealists.” He pressed her hands gently. “All the same those are the words of my father’s head agent in London — his very words. And he happens to be an Englishman.”

Whilst she walked erectly to the sofa his soft eyes followed her firm figure, dwelt with admiration on the dark hair that rose in the curve of a Phrygian cap, and passed down to her white, firm hands. His brown eyes were indeed full of love and of trustfulness, to which there was added a certain gladness. He had doubted that she would see eye to eye with him, but there had been forced from her, without any lead from him, the one word, “bad,” that he needed. She sat still and pliantly upon the edge of the long, red lounge. Its walnut back above the velvet cushions was carved into tiny, smiling, cherub faces; above her head was a circular mirror that reflected, with gracious distortions, in bows and curves, the long windows and the silver candlesticks upon the table. It was exactly the place in which she should be; if she had not chosen the furniture or the darkish, pleasant atmosphere of the not too old room, she had at least inherited the right to fit into it. Sitting there, doing nothing, waiting for life to pass, she seemed exactly to represent what he most delighted in. If she did not represent — if he did not feel for her — passion, she did represent a feeling of the Best. She held all the charm of a life so ordered that, if you did not inquire too closely into whether its domestics had a share in ideals and comforts, represented something as near a perfect, a heavenly, peace as you could find on this earth...

“Bad!” he repeated, as he moved to sit beside her. “It’s so bad that it will mean an infinite amount of worry for me — on the other side. I’m quite determined — and you will be, when you know, if you ever do, what it’s like — to put things straight.” And he clasped his hands over one knee that he crossed above the other.

She smiled a little.

“Yes. I suppose you’ll have the power to put some things straight now,” she said. He gazed at the blue and red pile of the carpet and his eyes strayed, musingly, up the fluted, dark legs of the dining-table.

“Heaven knows,” he said, “it is not power that’s given me. It’s a burden; it’s a duty.”

She dropped one of her hands affectionately upon his fingers.

“Oh, well, old boy,” she said, after a moment’s thought, “it’s not much good trying to redress the burdens of our ancestry. I’m pretty certain I should not be sitting here if it were not for the crying injustice one of the Grevilles made his money by centuries ago.”

He clasped her hands with some of his long fingers.

“Oh,” he said, “that’s vague and indefinite and long ago and undecipherable. Besides, it was in the spirit of the time of your ancestors.”

She laughed at him still.

“Well, I suppose it would be pretty difficult to discover whom to give
our
money back to.”

He turned to her a face so full of earnestness and force that she did not laugh any more. His voice, if it was tender, came from deep in his chest.

“It’s precisely because it is not difficult to discover whom my father robbed that I’m going to stop the robbery,” he said. “Why,” he continued, “at this moment you’re paying my father — you’re paying
me
— half as much again as you ought to for half the things you wear and half the things you eat. It’s worse for the poor people here: it’s infinitely worse for the poor over there. They’ve paid taxes to him — they’re paying them to me — at this moment — on light, on house rent, on locomotion, on bread, on salt. There’s hardly a thing that my father has not made the starving starve worse for need of. Ice now is a necessity in the slums of New York — and you don’t know what slums there are in New York.” His voice got deeper: he was taking breath for a new outburst. “What do you think my father and his associates have done for ice? They’ve let the sun into their blockhouses on the Lakes: they’ve kept back all the ice-fleet a whole month: they’ve...”

“But is not that,” she interrupted him with her slow, submissive and deep tones, “isn’t that in the spirit of the time — over there? Just as much as the peculations of our ancestors, here, were in the spirit of their time?”

He swept back a heavy lock of hair from his forehead.

“Good heavens, no!” he said. “Do you think that was what the Minute men died at Lexington for? Do you think that’s what humanity’s come to? It is not in the spirit of the time. It’s a throwback: it’s a survival. It is not — it is not. What America’s there for, is to carry the thing one step further: to do what Europe is too tired to do: Heaven help us: what’s America for in the scheme of things if it isn’t for that?”

She said, lightly and tenderly:

“I did not know you were as American as all that!”

He bent his head close to hers.

“It’s just because I’m not American: it’s just because I’m suspended between heaven and earth, like Mahomet’s coffin, that I see things so clearly. Consider: you’ve struggled up here, in Europe, to a certain stage of justice, of peace, of goodness of heart. It’s taken you ages to do it. But you
are
at a fine pitch. Over there they’ve started from where you left off: they’ve had the freedom you’ve had to fight for: they’ve had the wealth that it’s been always so difficult to wring from the earth here. Don’t you see? Don’t you
see?
It is not in the spirit of their time: it is not in the spirit of yours. He’s an accident — a phenomenon such as my father and his fellows: it’s due to the fact that they have to handle such tremendous masses of things. But I, just because I’m not an American, nor yet a European — I want, now I’ve got the duty laid on me, to break up one of the boulders that’s in the way of their car. They need a fair chance: they need decent treatment from Providence. It’s too bad that, just because accident has placed the power in the hands of a few throwbacks, a whole, fine, generous step in the progress of humanity should be hindered.”

“You know you
can
talk,” she said. “But I really believed that they were all the same over there — that it
was
in the spirit of the age to make trusts.”

He came back from the state of mind in which he had allowed himself to voice a great many pent-up thoughts — thoughts that he had repressed for years in order to come into line with his undemonstrative environment.

“Yes,” he laughed, “I have been treating you as if you were a public meeting. But whom am I to talk to if I do not to you?”

“Oh, I quite like it,” she said almost shyly. “I do like to hear you say you’ll do things. And I don’t doubt you’re right.”

“It isn’t a change in me,” he answered. “I don’t change. It would have been foolish to talk of doing things when there did not seem the ghost of a chance that I’d ever have any power. Now it’s different.” He accepted the shy tone of her voice then. “Of course you’d like me to do things. I daresay it’s seemed a defect in me that I was mild and ineffectual. But you’ll see a change!”

She smiled.

“I don’t mean to let you upset things here. There’s nothing that really wants changing. But out there — if you don’t go away from me to do it — it doesn’t seem to matter.”

He shook his head and put the tip of her ring finger to his lips. When his eyes came back from the carpet to her face he began again:

“Of course it’s a mathematical absurdity,” he laughed, “that
all
the eighty million inhabitants of the United States should be engaged in founding Trusts. It’s the infinitely few that do it.”

“That’s why it is not in touch with the spirit of the age?” she asked.

“That’s why,” he nodded. “The huge — the infinite — mass of the people are good, decent, hardworking, and awfully idealist. Think of their record! They want Liberty, they want it as they want the air they breathe. And that’s fine. It
is.
Why, it’s a fine imagination — even if it’s a clumsily-executed lump — the figure of Liberty that you’ll have to see for yourself before very long. It
is
fine. Only it’s always so tremendously in evidence that you forget it — just as you’d forget the sun here if you ever saw enough of it to make you get used to it.”

She mused.

“I suppose I
shall
have to go with you — out there — one day, for a time at least.”

“Yes.” He caught at her thoughts. “It will make an incredible change all this. But only for a time. I shall get rid of it all. It won’t be very difficult — only, there will be arrangements to make — employees to settle. I’ve an idea of co-operative factories — something large and fine. But of course the ground will have to be studied. It will take time — you’ll have to help me. And then, when it’s all fixed up, we shall come back here as if nothing had happened — and no doubt we shall be able to afford Cuddiford House. I don’t imagine that
all
my father’s money was made nefariously.”

She startled him by saying:

“I suppose your father
is
actually dead.”

His mind was so distinctly more upon the future than upon even the immediate present that it was a moment before he could bethink him to draw from a side pocket a long slip of bluish paper.

“Here’s the private cable,” he said. “Mackinnon deciphered it.”

And whilst, with her eyebrows raised, she ran her glance down the paper, he moved beside her so that his head nearly touched her shoulder, and gave fragmentary explanations.