Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (315 page)

PART II
.

CHAPTER I
.

AND suddenly, in the thick darkness, whirring as if it were a scream, intermitted for a moment and again commencing, a little bell rang out at Dudley Leicester’s elbow. As suddenly, but with a more gracious diffusion, light welled down from above his head, and Etta Hudson’s voice mingling with it:

“Stop that confounded thing! I don’t want all the servants in the house to know you are here.”

She leaned over the white and ormolu banisters: the light swinging over her head made a halo above her disordered hair; her white shoulders gleamed.

“Stop it,” she said; “Don’t fumble so ridiculously. Don’t you know how to take the thing off the hooks?”

She laughed at him derisively; her face disappeared as if she were about to continue her upward journey. Then once more she was looking down at him:

“Tell whoever it is,” she said, “that Sir William is in Paris and Lady Hudson in bed. Say ‘sir’ when you speak, and they’ll think it’s the second footman, Moddle! Don’t you remember Moddle?” And again she laughed, and her ascent of the stairs was marked by the tips of her fingers, visible as if they were little white and creeping mice.

Dudley Leicester put the receiver to his ear. A peremptory “Are you 4,259 Mayfair?” made him suddenly afraid, as if a schoolmaster had detected him in some crime. Hitherto he had had no feeling of crime. It was as if he had merely existed in the tide of his senses. An equally peremptory “
Don’t go away
” was succeeded by the words: “Get down,” and then: “Is that Sir William Hudsons?”

Leicester answered — he had the words clearly fixed in his mind — but already he was panting: “Yes, but Sir William’s in Paris, and Lady Hudson in bed.” And he did not omit to add “sir.”

Through his mind, quickened by his emotions of fear, there shot the idea that now they must go away; that it was all over; that he was very tired; that he must sit down and rest.

Then suddenly — still low, distinct, stealthy, and clear — the voice of the invisible man asked: “Isn’t that Dudley Leicester speaking?”

“He answered” Yes,” and then with a sudden panic he hung the receiver upon the hooks.

And Etta Hudson, descending the stair with the letter in her hand, saw him sitting dishevelled and dejected, as if all his joints had been broken, in the messenger-boy’s chair beside the heavy, dark table.

He rose suddenly, exclaiming: “You’ve got me into this scrape; you’ve got to get me out of it. What’s to be done?”

Standing on the bottom step of the stairs, she laughed at him, and she laughed still more while she listened:

“How do I know who it was?” He poured forth disjointed sentences. “I told you somebody would see us in Regent Street. It might have been your husband, or some blackmailer. London’s full of them. I can’t possibly ring them up again to ask who it was. Perhaps they spoke from a call-office. What’s to be done? What in the name of God is to be done?”

A certain concern and pity were visible in her eyes: she opened her lips and was about to speak, when he exclaimed:

“It would break Pauline’s heart. What’s to be done?” —

The line of her brows hardened, and she uttered a hard little laugh.

“Don’t you know,” she said; “why, my dear Dudley, the answer is: ‘That’s the hare’s business.’”

His first action on awakening was always to stretch out his hand for the letters that his silent man would have placed by his side, and to glance at the clock on his dressing table to see how many hours he had slept. And, indeed, next morning his first sensation was one of bodily well-being and of satisfaction because the clock appeared to inform him that he had slept for three hours longer than was his habit. But with a slight feeling of uneasiness he remembered how late he had been the night before, and stretching out his hand for the letters, he heard a voice say:

“Are you 4,259 Mayfair?”

He had answered “What?” before he realized that this question was nothing more than a very vivid recollection. But even when he had assured himself that it was only a very vivid recollection, he lay still and discovered that his heart was beating very quickly. And so afraid was he that the motion of stretching out his arm would bring again the voice to his ears, that he lay still, his hand stretched along the counterpane. And suddenly he got up.

He opened one white-painted cupboard, then the other. Finally, he went to the door of the room and peered out. His man, expressionless, carrying over his arm a pair of trousers, and in one hand a white letter crossed with blue, was slowly ascending the staircase at the end of the corridor.

“You didn’t ask me a question,” Dudley Leicester said, “about two minutes ago?” Saunders said: “No, sir, I was answering the door to the postman. This, sir.” And he held out the registered letter.

It was as if Dudley Leicester recoiled from it. It bore Pauline’s handwriting, a large, round, negligent scrawl.

“Did he ask our number?” Dudley inquired eagerly; and Saunders, with as much of surprise as could come into his impassive face, answered:

“Why, no, sir; he’s the regular man.”

“Our telephone number, I mean,” Dudley Leicester said.

Saunders was by this time in the room, passing through it to the door of the bath- cabinet.

“As a matter of fact, sir,” he said, “the only thing he asked was whether Mrs. Leicester’s mother was any better.”

“It’s very odd,” Dudley Leicester answered. And with Saunders splashing the water in the white bath-cabinet, with a touch of sun lighting up the two white rooms — in the midst of these homely and familiar sounds and reflections, fear suddenly seized Dudley Leicester. His wife’s letter frightened him; when there fell from it a bracelet, he started as he had never in his life started at a stumble of his horse. He imagined that it was a sort of symbol, a sending back of his gifts. And even when he had read her large, sparse words, and discovered that the curb chain of the bracelet was broken, and Pauline desired him to take it to the jeweller’s to be repaired — even then the momentary relief gave way to a host of other fears. For Dudley Leicester had entered into a world of dread.

CHAPTER II
.

HE appeared to have become friendless and utterly solitary Even his man Saunders, to whom he had been attached as he had been attached to his comfortable furniture and his comfortable boots, seemed to him now to be grown reserved, frigid, disapproving. He imagined that Saunders had a threatening aspect. Fear suddenly possessed his heart when he perceived, seated in the breakfast- room, well forward in a deep saddle-bag chair, with Peter the dachshund between his speck- less boots, Robert Grimshaw.

“What have you come for?” Leicester asked; “what’s it about?”

Robert Grimshaw raised his dark, seal-like eyes, and Leicester seemed to read in them reproof, judgment, condemnation.

“To leave Peter with the excellent Saunders,” Robert Grimshaw said; “I can’t take him to Athens.”

“Oh, you’re going to Athens?” Dudley Leicester said, and oddly it came into his mind that he was glad Grimshaw was going to Athens. He wanted Grimshaw not to hear of his disgrace.

For although Grimshaw had frequently spoken dispassionately of unfaithful husbands — dispassionately, as if he were registering facts that are neither here nor there, facts that are the mere inevitabilities of life, he had the certainty, the absolute certainty, that Grimshaw would condemn him.

“I start at one, you know,” Grimshaw said. “You’re not looking very bright.”

Dudley Leicester sat down before his coffeepot; his hand, with an automatic motion, went out to the copy of the
Times
, which was propped between the toast-rack and the cream- jug; but it suddenly shot back again, and with a hang-dog look in his eyes he said:

“How long does it take things to get into the newspapers?”

It was part of his sensation of loneliness and of fear that he could not any more consult Robert Grimshaw. He might ask him questions, but he couldn’t tell just what question wouldn’t give him away. Robert Grimshaw had so many knowledges; so that when Robert Grimshaw asked:

“What sort of things?” he answered, with a little fluster of hurry and irritation:

“Oh, any sort of thing; the things they do print.”

Grimshaw raised his eyelids. “I don’t see how I can be expected to know about newspapers,” he said; “but I fancy they get printed about half-past one in the morning — about half-past one. I shouldn’t imagine it was any earlier.”

At this repetition, at this emphasis of the hour at which the telephone-bell had rung, Dudley seized and opened his paper with a sudden eagerness. He had the conviction that it must have been a newspaper reporter who had rung him up, and that by now the matter might well be in print. He looked feverishly under the heading of Court and Society, and under the heading of Police Court and Divorce Court. But his eye could do no more than travel over the spaces of print and speckled paper, as if it had been a patterned fabric. And suddenly he asked:

“Do you suppose the servants spy upon us?”

“Really, my dear fellow,” Grimshaw said, “why can’t you buy an encyclopaedia of out- of-the-way things?”

“But
do
you?” Dudley insisted.

“I don’t know,” Grimshaw speculated. “Some do; some don’t. It depends on their characters; on whether it would be worth their whiles. I’ve never heard of an authentic case of a servant blackmailing a master, but, of course, one would not hear of it.”

“But your man Jervis? Or Saunders, now? They talk about us, for instance, don’t they?”

Grimshaw considered the matter with his eyes half closed.

“Jervis? Saunders?” he said. “Yes, I suppose they do. I
hope
they do, for we’re their life’s work, and if they take the interest in us that I presume they do, they ought to talk about us. I imagine Jervis discusses me now and then with his wife. I should think he does it affectionately, on the whole. I don’t know.... It’s one of the few things that are as mysterious as life and death. There are these people always about us — all day, all night. They’ve got eyes — I suppose they use them. But we’ve got no means of knowing what they think or what they know. I do know a lot — about other people. Jervis gives me the news while he’s shaving me. So I suppose I know nearly all he knows about other people. He knows I like to know, and it’s part of what he’s paid for. But as for what he knows about me” — Grimshaw waved his hand as if he were flicking cigarette-ash off his knee—” why, I know nothing about that. We never can; we never shall. But we never can and we never shall know what anyone in the world knows of us and thinks. You’ll find, as you go on, that you’ll never really know all that Pauline thinks of you — not quite all. I shall never really know all that you think about me. I suppose we’re as intimate as men can be in this world, aren’t we? Well! You’re probably at this very moment thinking something or other about me. Perhaps I’m boring you or irritating you, but you won’t tell me. And,” he added, fixing his eyes gently and amiably upon Dudley Leicester’s face, “you’ll never know all I know about you.”

Dudley Leicester had become filled with an impetuous dread that he had “given himself away” by his questions.

“Why I asked,” he said, and his eyes avoided Grimshaw’s glance, “is that the postman seems to have been talking to Saunders about Pauline.”

Grimshaw started suddenly forward in his seat.

“Oh,” Dudley Leicester said, “it’s only that I asked Saunders about a voice I had heard, and he said it was the postman asking when Pauline would be home, or how her mother was. Something of that sort. It seems rather impertinent of these chaps.”

“It seems to me rather nice,” Grimshaw said, “if you look at it without prejudice. We may as well suppose that both Saunders and the postman are decent fellows, and Pauline is so noticeable and so nice that it’s only natural that an old servant and an old postman should be concerned if she’s upset. After all, you know we do live in a village, and if we don’t do any harm, I don’t see why we should take it for granted that these people crab us. You’ve got to be talked about, old man, simply because you’re there. Everyone is talked about — all of us.”

Dudley Leicester said, with a sudden and hot gloom:

“There’s nothing about me to talk about. I’ve never wanted to be an interesting chap, and I never have been. I shall give Saunders the sack and report the postman.”

“Oh, come now,” Grimshaw said. “I know it’s in human nature to dislike the idea of being talked about. It used to give me the creeps to think that all around me in the thousands and thousands of people that one knows, every one of them probably says something of me. But, after all, it all averages out, Some say good, no doubt, and some dislike me, and say it. I don’t suppose I can go out of my door without the baker at the corner knowing it. I am spied upon by all the policemen in the streets round about. No doubt half the shop-assistants in Bond Street snigger at the fact that I help two or three women to choose their dresses and their bracelets, and sometimes pay their bills, but what does it all amount to?”

“Hell,” Dudley Leicester said—”sheer hell!”

“Oh, well, eat your breakfast,” Grimshaw replied. “You can’t change it. You’ll get used to it in time. Or if you don’t get used to it in time, I’ll tell you what to do. I’ll tell you what I do. People have got to talk about you. If they don’t know things they’ll invent lies. Tell ‘em the truth. The truth is never very bad. There’s my man Jervis. I’ve said to him: ‘You can open all my letters; you can examine my pass-book at the bank; you can pay my bills; you’re at liberty to read my diary of engagements; you can make what use you like of the information. If I tried to stop you doing these things, I know I should never succeed, because you chaps are always on the watch, and we’re bound to nod at times. Only I should advise you, Jervis,’ I said, ‘to stick to truth in what you say about me. It don’t matter a tinker’s curse to me what you do say, but you’ll get a greater reputation for reliability if what you say always proves true.’ So there I am. Of course it’s an advantage to have no vices in particular, and to have committed no crimes. But I don’t think it would make much difference to me, and it adds immensely to the agreeableness of life not to want to conceal things. You can’t conceal things. It’s a perpetual strain. Do what you want, and take what you get for doing it. It’s the only way to live. If you tell the truth people may invent a bit, but they won’t invent so much. When you were married, I told Hartley Jenx that if you hadn’t married Pauline, I should have. Everybody’s pretty well acquainted with that fact. If I’d tried to conceal it, people would have been talking about my coming here three times a week. As it is, it is open as the day. Nobody talks. I know they don’t. Jervis would have told me. He’d be sure to know.”

“What’s all that got to do with it?” Dudley Leicester said with a suspicious exasperation.

Robert Grimshaw picked up on to his arm Peter the dachshund, that all the while had remained immobile, save for an occasional blinking of the eyelids, between his feet. Holding the dog over his arm, he said:

“Now, I am going to confide Peter to Saunders. That was the arrangement I made with Pauline, so that he shouldn’t worry you. But you can take this as a general principle: ‘Let your servants know all that there is to know about you, but if you find they try to take advantage of you — if they try to blackmail you — hit them fair and square between the jaws.’ Yes, I mean it, literally and physically. You’ve got mettle enough behind your fists.”

Robert Grimshaw desired to speak to Saunders in private, because of one of those small financial transactions which the decencies require should not be visible between guest and master and man. He wanted, too, to give directions as to the feeding of Peter during his absence; but no sooner had the door closed upon him than Dudley Leicester made after him to open it. For he was seized by a sudden and painful aversion from the thought that Saunders should be in private communication with Robert Grimshaw. He strongly suspected that Saunders knew where he had spent those hours of the night — Saunders, with his mysterious air of respectful reserve — and it drove him nearly crazy to think that Saunders should communicate this fact to Robert Grimshaw. It wasn’t that he feared Grimshaw’s telling tales to Pauline. It was that he dreaded the reproach that he imagined would come into Robert Grimshaw’s dark eyes; for he knew how devoted Grimshaw was to his wife. He had his hand upon the handle of the door; he withdrew it at the thought that interference would appear ridiculous. He paused and stood irresolute, his face distorted by fear, and his body bent as if with agony. Suddenly he threw the door open, and, striding out, came into collision with Ellida Langham. Later, the feeling of relief that he had not uttered what was just on the tip of his tongue — the words: “Has Pauline sent you? How did she hear it?” — the feeling of relief that he had not uttered these words let him know how overwhelming his panic had been. Ellida, however, was bursting into voluble speech:

“Katya’s coining back!” she said. “Katya’s coming back. She’s on one of the slow ships from Philadelphia, with an American. She may be here any day, and I did so want to let Toto know before he started for Athens.”

She was still in black furs, with a black veil, but her cheeks were more flushed than usual, and her eyes danced.

“Think of Katya’s coming back!” she said, but her lower lip suddenly quivered. “Toto hasn’t
started
?” she asked. “His train doesn’t go till one.”

She regarded Dudley Leicester with something of impatience. She said afterwards that she had never before noticed he was goggle- eyed. He stood, enormously tall, his legs very wide apart, gazing at her with his mouth open.

“I’m not a ghost, man,” she said at last. “What’s wrong with you?”

Dudley Leicester raised his hand to his straw-coloured moustache.

“Grimshaw’s talking to Saunders,” he said.

Ellida looked at him incredulously. But eventually her face cleared.

“Oh, about Peter?” she said. “I was beginning to think you’d got an inquest in the house....”

And suddenly she touched Dudley Leicester vigorously on the arm.

“Come! Get him up from wherever he is,” she said, with a good-humoured vivacity. “Katya’s more important than Peter, and I’ve got the largest number of things to tell him in the shortest possible time.”

Dudley Leicester, in his dull bewilderment, was veering round upon his straddled legs, gazing first helplessly at the bell beside the chimney-piece and then at the door. Even if he hadn’t been already bewildered, he would not have known very well how properly to summon a friend who was talking to a servant of his own. Did you ring, or did you go to the top of the stairs and call? But his bewilderment was cut short by the appearance of Grimshaw himself, and at the sight of his serene face just lighting up with a little smile of astonishment and pleasure, Dudley Leicester’s panic vanished as suddenly and irrationally as it had fallen on him. He even smiled, while Ellida Langham said, with a sharp, quick little sound, “Boo!” in answer to Robert’s exclamation of “Ellida!” But Grimshaw took himself up quickly, and said: