Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (231 page)

“Well, now, shall I fall down and kiss your native soil?”

The native soil was of tarred planks: the building was apparently miles and miles long, roofed with a waving span of corrugated iron, decorated with the queerest advertisements she had ever seen. It was filled with a crowd of women in Paris frocks being shouldered by men in shirt sleeves — a bewildering crowd in the half light that, little by little, resolved itself into men in blue uniforms with bits of chalk and labels. They wandered about unconcernedly with their hands behind their backs amidst the largest travelling trunks in the world from which there foamed over, as if from tankards of stout, lace undergarments that delighted her eyes. And whilst Don still distractedly pulled her by the arm in the search for what he called “their letter,” she had time to get the distinct impression that they were in France. For in and out among the distracted women, the men in shirt sleeves, the men in uniforms and the overflowing trunks there wandered, melancholy, sad-faced, dark eyed and aloof, a slow army of foreigners in blue blouses wheeling large trunks upon porters’ barrows.

She made out upon the wall, high up between the vast picture of a bull and the vaster picture of a green tin labelled “Baked beans,” a quite tiny letter: “G.” And to this she called Don’s attention.

“Our boxes will be under that,” he said, and he added, whilst behind him a melancholy man in blue uttered a yelp that she took to be Italian: “It’s wearily badly managed.”

“Oh, it’s awful fun!” she reassured him, and she had a view of the Reverend Mr Campbell pushing swiftly past them, very heated and very red, exclaiming to an unconcerned old gentleman, apparently a general, in a blue uniform and a straw hat, that something was a worse scandal than in Italy. And whilst they made their way through the piles of boxes towards the G. that was their sheet-anchor, she had, a little regretfully, a vision of the familiar faces of many fellow-passengers whirling past her. It was the ship’s company dissolving, disappearing, part of a past phase.

But even when, in the comparatively calm backwater of their own extraordinarily huge pile of boxes, she was able to sit down in a deck-chair that Mr Houston was waiting to offer her, she had still before her the task of reassuring Don.

“It’s extraordinary,” he said, “that we can’t manage even a Customs examination better than this!”

“But, dear boy,” she said, “it’s such a vast crowd.”

“Oh, go up the Thames,” he said wearily, “there’s a crowd there every day bigger than they get here in a year and they do it all in ten minutes, without a shove in any single passenger’s back.” She knew very well that he was apologising to her, that he was trying to deprecate to her the sufferings that she was undergoing, and she tried very hard to think of some words of real genius by which she could make him feel certain that she was really going to have a good time: but she had not got a word out before a man in a blue flannel shirt with turn-down collar, buff trousers, a slouch hat and a drooping, blonde moustache, was saying to her in a sharp, clear, odd accent — she took him for a cowboy: “I’m telling Mr Houston here that you won’t want no more’n three cabs. I guess yours ain’t sich a plump lot if yeh’re a sample of the rest!” He had the breezy air of a man used to commanding vast bodies of things, and he didn’t seem to consider her as of more than passing importance.

Don said, and his voice rose a note in agony:

“Oh, for goodness sake don’t think we’re all like that!”

And she had her stroke of genius.

“I expect,” she said, “that he doesn’t know I’m a Greville!” And whilst his eyes devoured her face she put a finger on his sleeve and added:
“
Dear, I’m going to forget it myself.”

And the trouble she was at to persuade him, under the eyes and ears of many people, that she was prepared to take everything as it came — this trouble modified extraordinarily the vividness of her impressions. It took away indeed from the squalor of the singularly squalid approaches: it made her tolerate the odd procession of coaches, like that in a funeral procession at home, with which, when they were finally out of the uniformly brown, rigid and rather appalling quarters of docks and warehouses, they approached the fine untidy streets that led to their quite tremendous hotel. She was indeed so impressed with the fact that Don was suffering mental pains that she couldn’t do more than give half an eye to what passed their carriage windows. If she looked at and if she noticed what at home she would have called the lower classes — but what here she was sufficiently attuned not to be able to call anything at all — if she looked rather at the men driving enormous express waggons, throwing bricks from the housetops or lying on the doorsteps of dingy boarding-houses — if, in fact, she attended rather to the poor it was because she knew that it was the poor who were going to interest her lover. When she passed out of the crosstown street region of dingy, brown stone houses, where she supposed the poor to dwell, she leant back in the carriage. Don told her that they had struck the Avenue that was said to rival or surpass any Boulevard, Allée or Lane of any European city. But she thought she might lean back and rest her eyes, for except for the shape of the policemen’s helmets she wasn’t prepared to see any great differences. Her eyes were a little aching, they had seen so much of what she thought must be poverty, and so much of what, she was quite certain, was Latin blood. There had been paper all over the pavements, endless processions of little brasiers with tin furnaces in the charge of dusky men with vivid whites to their eyes. There had been innumerable children, bare-footed, with broken trousers girt up to their shoulders, red-headed, or with their heads inverted, hidden in tubs that stood upon the stones on the broken sidewalks, their bare, dirty little feet waving in the air; she had seen over the dismally uninviting stores signs that — if they didn’t repel her because she couldn’t imagine herself purchasing anything there — filled her with pity for the poor people who did have to.

It tired her: so that when at last in the more imposing quarters she tried to lean back and rest it wasn’t the least of her troubles to see on Don’s face a look of intense concern.

He leaned forward to touch her knee and said: “Now look, we’re just turning into Fifth. There’s Broadway: this is Madison Square.” And his eyes said: “You’ve looked so hard at all our dirty places, now look at the best we’ve got to show.”

And if her father hadn’t been there, on the seat beside her, silent, but taking it all in with his black eyes she would have said:

“Dearest, I’m only interested in what interests you. And I
know
you don’t care for these streets!” His eyes were saying (for she hadn’t yet been able to make him understand): “I know you’re more interested in what’s fine in life.”

It was at the corner where the 28th Street cars cross the Avenue that Mr Greville spoke his first words since they had crossed the ferry.

“You’ll have an extraordinary difficulty in getting at any facts, Don,” he said: “so far, every single thing that I have seen with my own eyes has flatly contradicted every single piece of information to the same effect that I’ve read or been told on board the ship!”

Don came out of his agonised perturbation about Eleanor to look at his father-in-law. Mr Greville said, pointing a thin finger at the tram that was crossing their route:

“That’s the only tram I’ve seen so far and it’s drawn by horses. You will remember that the
Journal of Engineering
I showed you on board stated that the ugly and insanitary horse-drawn car — I remember the exact words — had been swept entirely from the streets of New York. Another print informed me that the whistles of the pea-nut barrows had been entirely swept out of existence by a law that came into force last March. The streets of the city were said, in consequence, to be absolutely the quietest in the world. I have counted seventy-two pea-nut barrows each with a quite loud whistle.”

CHAPTER II
.

THEIR earliest hours in New York were complicated by family troubles that, for the moment, drove out of Eleanor’s head even her solicitude for Don’s wretchedness. He was, undoubtedly, she considered, quite ill. It seemed as if his arriving on the field of battle caused him an amount of excitement that amounted to nervous prostration.

Don — positively
Don!
— made a wonderful worrying fuss with the clerks at the enormous mahogany counter, in the enormous marble and tiled hall. He had, for reasons that appealed to himself alone, made up his mind that his
fiancée
and her aunt and her father and the maid and the valet should occupy precisely the same suite of rooms with precisely the same suite of furniture — it had belonged to Marie Antoinette — that his father and mother had quarrelled in years before. And the trouble was that the rooms were still there and the furniture was still there, only the furniture — because it was, by that time, too dingy to suit the tastes of succeeding magnates and of at least one Royal Duke — the furniture had been moved several floors higher up. The clerks at the counter were rather impolite: the assistant submanager — a Frenchman — was almost too polite: the sub-manager, an Englishman, was too blandly

explanatory. He explained, that is to say, that, at that hour of the day they simply couldn’t, in that country, expect workmen to move the furniture down. And he pointed out that the change would cost a quite unreasonable amount of money, and that even if they brought the Marie Antoinette chairs down from the upper floors, they would, the chairs, be quite violently out of keeping with the present fixed ornaments of the lower rooms, which, to give a feeling of homeliness to a certain king, had been decorated exactly in the style of the palace at L — n. The rooms presented a singularly dazzling spectacle of plate-glass mirrors, real gold leaf and elephant tusks.

And Eleanor had the spectacle — a little saddening and bewildering — of poor Don battling quite furiously with a number of hard-eyed gentlemen in frock coats and with singularly shining heads of hair. And she had the feeling, too, that they simply didn’t care much whether he were pleased or no. And Augustus, with a sardonic air, was carefully avoiding her eye in his triumph over poor Don’s exhibition of emotion. She fired up in Don’s defence to the extent of assuring herself that she didn’t care if they were, all the body of them, blocking up the tremendous hall, with its marble, its mahogany, its ducal chairs, its lounges, its guests in irreproachable costumes or its guests in cowboy hats, red ties, frock coats and an air of having revolvers somewhere upon their terrific hips. Waiting for Don to get something settled she took in these details little by little and assured herself that if they
were
attracting attention it didn’t matter because they were where they were. But, upon the whole, she was glad when her aunt discovered a faintness. It meant that the five of them — for Canzano was awaiting an opportunity to settle some details before leaving for Boston — the five of them, leaving Don to his battles, could go to lunch in a quite small octagonal lunch room that didn’t positively hold more than twenty-five tables for four. It was indeed her father who made this statistical discovery, just as it was he who, before they had been there two minutes, inquired of Canzano if it was characteristic of the best American hotels to have walls like
that!
And he indicated the yellowish spaces that, beneath arches of green marble, formed a background for all sorts of lunchers’ heads and hats.

It comforted her to have Canzano to direct, in their native Italian, the half dozen waiters who had borne down upon them, and — because she was so anxious to be pleased — it comforted her, too, to be able to feel that this light, gay, well-glazed and domed room was quite as good as anything, anywhere else, could be.

“Like what?” Canzano asked, and he glanced over his shoulder at the notable walls.

“What I mean,” Mr Greville answered, “is that every other piece of wall space here appears to be of marble. These are only painted brick!”

Canzano said, with a sort of gay contempt for his environment: “Oh, my dear sir! This is an extraordinarily old-fashioned place. I should have taken you somewhere quite different.”

“But the walls?” Mr Greville pinned him to his topic.

“What about the walls?” and Canzano wiped his fork with a napkin.

“Are they symptomatic of a want of finish? Or were they once a fashion?”

“Oh, heaven in its wisdom knows,” Canzano answered. “They may have been the fashion. But,” he added brightly, “if you go about this country looking for evidences of want of attention to finish you’ll find plenty.” And he looked significantly at Eleanor: “You’ll find plenty of everything you look for here.”

They did indeed find plenty of everything when, very soon afterwards, they got to the rooms that Don had at last sanctioned. He came in, finally, noticeably calmed and even smiling.

He had satisfied himself after investigation that the suite of rooms that contained Marie Antoinette’s furniture so exactly reproduced those that his father had occupied that except that you had to stay about ten seconds longer in the elevator you couldn’t well tell the difference. And he accepted quite gaily Canzano’s criticism upon his choice of an hotel.

“Well,” he said, “if this hotel’s old-fashioned you can at least get something near what you want by making a fuss here. Anywhere else in America they put you into the elevator and throw you out on a floor that you haven’t a voice in choosing. And there you’ve got to stick.”

He was eating chicken with a cheerful voracity. And Eleanor couldn’t make up her mind whether he’d taken himself in hand very vigorously after an attack of nerves or whether irritation was a necessary concomitant of taking rooms in an hotel over here, a thing that you had to go through and that didn’t leave traces. But that speculation too had to give way to other troubles. They hadn’t, it appeared immediately, come to New York merely to have a good time...

Their great drawing-room, which had six windows in the side street and four looking into Fifth Avenue, had too, along all the wall spaces, priceless, dim tapestry designed by Watteau, and all the chairs and tables had graciously bowed legs and delicately painted tops and lyre-shaped backs of embroidered work faint and paled by age. All these things had known in former days the presence of a dead Queen of France, and in a quite beautifully-conceived contrast there was, in a little Buhl cabinet, a flap that let down and disclosed the black and nickel fittings of a telephone. And to it Canzano attached himself before even their coffee had reached them up there. The problem was to find Mackinnon. And in this search Canzano opened a long battle by saying in at the table: “Get me Boston!” His ear glued at the little cup of nickel, his face went through an attentive pantomime whilst at intervals his mouth uttered: “Boston... Boston, Massachusetts.... I can’t hear... Give me a better connection... Yes... I want Boston... Boston, Massachusetts.... No... Yes... I want Boston... Boston, Massachusetts.” And holding a finger to his disengaged ear he went on uttering these monotonous words with an engrossed expression. Their own man brought them in their coffee with a varied and rather bewildered expression. Mr Greville attentively surveyed Canzano at the telephone, and Eleanor knew that he was noting down facts as to the telephone system of the United States. Don was explaining to Mrs Greville, who, with her bonnet-strings untied, was sipping her coffee vindictively from a gilt cup without a handle, why he had been so careful about the rooms. It was, he said, absolutely imperative that if you wanted in America anything at all out of the ordinary to know what you wanted and to stick out till you got it. As a general rule, he explained, he’d be content himself with everything quite ordinary. But for her and Eleanor he’d wanted to be quite certain of something comfortable and in good taste. And positively the only things he’d been certain of in New York — where everything changes so rapidly — were that suite of rooms and that furniture. So he’d made up his mind to have them. He’d known that that nook was bearable, and he’d been determined to place them just there...

Augustus, who had been looking out of the window at the tops of the carriages in — th Street, suddenly turned and came to where Eleanor was sitting by the coffee equipage on a blue and gold and white table. He stood holding his cup and surveying her sardonically.

“I’m to go to Boston,” he said at last.

Eleanor made a swift review of the position. It meant that poor Augustus would be separated not only from her but from his mother.

“How splendid!” she blurted out.

He scowled and uttered:

“Yes;” and then, glancing at Canzano at the telephone: “That fellow’s mother is the chief executrix of the will! He’s going to talk to her now.” He shrugged his shoulders and his eyes had in them so much of gloomy malice that she felt irresistibly called to ask what he meant.

“Only,” he answered gleefully, “I fancy there won’t be much left for you and Don when they’ve finished.”

It was at this point that Mrs Greville, with an extraordinary rustling of her black silk petticoat, rose and said that she must go to superintend the unpacking.

“I suppose,” she added, “that Kirsen will have to do for me. I suppose a maid is quite good enough to help
me!
” Don hastened to assure her that there was in the hotel a whole staff of professional unpackers, but with her head rigidly fixed away from them she passed through the doors with their gracious scrolled panel work and their paintings by Fragonard of
décolletée
shepherdesses with beribboned necks.

She put, indeed, her head once more out between the panels to utter:

“Augustus, I want you!”

But Augustus remained standing by Eleanor, his hands deep in his trousers pockets, his lips lifted to show his teeth in a snarl.

“Funny, isn’t it?” he asked. And, at her asking what was funny, he brought out in a whisper: “That I’d like to see him jolly well ruined — and yet I’m sent to defend his interests!” Don, indeed, approached them nearly on his way over to Canzano at the telephone: but under cover of the Italian’s patient but persistent calls, he had by this time “got on to” Boston and was asking by turns for the Information Bureau, so that he might discover his mother’s number and for a better connection, Augustus was able to raise his voice and bring out with an effective hiss: “What you might call, ‘Twixt hate and duty!’”

“Oh, well,” Eleanor laughed at him, “you’ve got to remember that
my
interests are concerned as well.”

She moved across the large room, with its old, bluish mirrors, its dusty, charming and precious clock upon the mantel, and she took her father by the elbow where he stood with his hand on the gilt, scrolled back of a chair with a faded tapestry seat. She moved him right across from the telephone, which was near the last window giving on to — th Street, and sat herself down on the panelled seat of a window that overlooked the Indian knicknack shops on Fifth Avenue. The October afternoon sun was shooting right down the side streets so that, at the parts of the Avenue between the blocks, the few carriages, the many hansoms, and the occasional motor vans were spangled with dusty light. There were visible upon the broad side-walk just three well-dressed men and four ladies, but, just opposite, an immense building was being dustily pulled to pieces, and a great crowd of Italian workmen, in blue blouses and with battered straw hats, was surging out, and welling on to the carriage way, like a congregation leaving a church. She was far enough away, with her father, from the others to talk discreetly to him if he bent his ear, and pulling the elbow of his coat she lifted her head to his with a query: Was it true that Augustus was going to Boston to see the will? Mr Greville said that it was, apparently, perfectly true. Canzano had found from letters forwarded to him on the steamer that Mr Kelleg’s will was definitely in the hands of Mrs Kelleg — the Countess Canzano. Eleanor whispered again:

“Augustus says that he suspects the Canzanos of desiring to swindle Don. Do you think it’s in the least true?”

Mr Greville, with his head a little inclined, looked at the floor and said:

“It’s utterly untrue, and Augustus doesn’t think anything of the sort.”

“I didn’t think he
did
,” Eleanor answered, “but if he’s capable of talking like that, do you think he’s capable of doing what Don wants done?” Mr Greville still retained his head’s inclination and still looked at the floor.

“Augustus,” he said, “only talks in that silly way in order to give the effect of being cynical. He only succeeds, to my mind, in appearing idiotic.