Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (322 page)

“Why don’t you let me mote you down to Well-lands one day, Mrs. Leicester? You ought to know the Hudsons. Lady Etta’s a peach, as I learned to say when I went over with the Newfoundland Commission.”

And at that even Ellida threw up her hands and gazed, her lips parted, into Grimshaw’s eyes. From behind his back, a minute before, there had come little rustlings of people standing up. He had heard Pauline say:

“What, you can’t all be going at once?” and he had heaved a great sigh of relief. But in the dead silence that followed Mr. Bales- tier’s words, whilst Robert Grimshaw was wondering whether Balestier had merely and colossally put his almost ox-like foot into it, or whether this actually was a “try on,” Pauline’s voice came:

“Oh, not just yet. I’m in mourning, you know. I think I go out a little too much as it is.”

“Oh, she’s saved the situation again!” And then irresistibly it came over him to ask what was the good of this eternally saving the situation that neither of them really wanted to maintain. “She should,” he said to himself fiercely, “give it up.” He wasn’t going to stand by and see her tortured. Dudley Leicester had given in, and serve him right, the cad! For all they could tell, he was having the time of his life. Why shouldn’t they do the same?

“Oh, isn’t she
wonderful!”
Ellida exclaimed suddenly. “I don’t wonder....” And then she gazed at him with her plaintive eyes. The slim, dark Mr. Held brought out suddenly:

“It’s the
most
wonderful...” but his voice died away in his jaws. “After all,” he continued as suddenly, “perhaps she’s holding the thought. You see, we Christian Scientists...” But again his voice died away; his dark eyes gazed, mournful and doglike, at Pauline’s dimly-lit figure.

The tall, small room, with its large white panels, to which the frames of pale-tinted pictures gave an occasional golden gleam, had about it an air of blue dimness, for the curtains, straight at the sides, and half concealing the very tall windows, were of a transparent and ultramarine network. The little encampment around Dudley Leicester occupied a small back drawing-room, where the window, being of stained glass that showed on its small, square panels the story of St. George, was, on account of its tall, dark furniture, almost in gloom. Little, and as it were golden, Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room; she looked upon the floor, and appeared lost in reflection. Then she touched one side of her fair hair, and without looking up she came silently towards them. Ellida was upon the point of running towards her, her arms outstretched, and of saying: “You
are
wonderful!” but Pauline, with her brown eyes a little averted, brought out without any visible emotion, as if she were very abstracted, the words: “And how is your little Kitty? She is still at Brighton with Miss Lascarides? Robert dear, just ring the bell for the tea- things to be taken away.”

It was as if the strain upon her rendered her gently autocratic to Robert Grimshaw, who watched her from another point, having settled himself down in the arm-chair before the window looking into the little back room. Against the rows of the stained-glass window Ellida Langham appeared all black, impulsive, and ready as it were to stretch out her arms to enfold this little creature in her cloak, to hide her face under the great black hat with the drooping veil and the drooping feathers. But as he understood it, Pauline fended off these approaches by the attentive convention of her manner. They were in face of Dudley Leicester’s condition; they had him under their eyes, but Pauline was not going — even to the extent of accepting Ellida’s tenderness — to acknowledge that there was any condition about Dudley Leicester at all. It wasn’t, of course, that Ellida didn’t know, for Robert Grimshaw himself had told her, and Ellida, with her great and impulsive tenderness, had herself offered to come round and to play at animated conversations with Dudley and Mr. Held. But except by little pressures of the hand at meeting or at parting, and by little fluttering attentions to Ellida’s hats and toilets when she rose to go, Pauline was not going to show either gratitude or emotion for the moment. It was her way of keeping her flag flying.

And he admired her for it as he admired her for everything, and looking down at Peter between his feet, Robert shook his head very sadly. “Perhaps,” he thought to himself, “until she knows it’s hopeless, she’s not going to acknowledge even to herself that there’s anything the matter at all.”

CHAPTER II
.

BETWEEN his feet Peter’s nostrils jerked twice, and a little bubble of sound escaped. He was trying to tell his master that a bad man was coming up the stairs. It was, however, only Sir William Wells who, with his brisk straightforwardness and his frowning authority, seemed to push himself into the room as its master, and to scatter the tables and chairs before him. In his harsh and minatory tones he informed them that the Marchioness of Sandgate had gone to Exeter with Mrs. Jjohns, and then he appeared to scatter the little group. It was, indeed, as if he had thrown Ellida out of the room, so quickly — whilst she exclaimed over her shoulder to Grimshaw: “Well, you’ll be round to dinner?” — did she disappear.

With his rasping voice, shaking his glasses at her, Sir William continued for some minutes to inform Pauline of the movements of those of his patients who were of political prominence. They were his patients of that class uneasily dispersing over the face of the country, opening bazaars, bowling the first balls of cricket- seasons, devising acts of graciousness all night, putting them into practice all day, and perpetually shaking hands that soiled their delicate gloves. For that particular world was full of the whispered words “General Election.” When it was coming no one seemed to know, for the Prime Minister with his amiable inscrutability very reasonably distrusted the great majority of his followers. This disconcerted innumerable hostesses, for no one knew when they wouldn’t have to pack up bag and baggage and bolt like so many rabbits back to their burrows. This febrile condition gave occupation of a secretarial kind to great numbers of sleek and smooth-haired young gentlemen, but it was very hard upon the London tradesman.

It was, Robert Grimshaw was thinking, very hard upon Pauline, too. He couldn’t be absolutely certain what she meant to do in case the General Election came before Dudley could make some sort of appearance in the neighbourhood of Cove Park. In the conversations that he had had with her they had taken it for tacitly understood that he was to be well — or at least that he was to be well enough for Pauline to run him herself.

But supposing it was to be a matter of some years, or even of some months? What was Pauline thinking of when she thought of the General Election that hung over them? Mustn’t it add to her suspense? And he wondered what she meant to do. Would she simply stick Leicester in bed and give it out that he had a temporary illness, and run the election off her own bat? She had already run Leicester down in their car all over the country roads, going dead slow and smiling at the cottagers. And there wasn’t much chance of the other side putting up a candidate....

Between his feet Peter was uttering little bubbles of dissatisfaction whenever Sir William spoke, as if his harsh voice caused the small dog the most acute nervous tension. Grimshaw whistled in a whisper to keep the animal quiet. “All these details,” Grimshaw thought, Pauline had all these details to attend to, an incessant vigilance, a fierce determination to keep her end up, and to do it in silence and loneliness. He imagined her to be quivering with anxiety, to be filled with fear. He
knew
her to be all this. But Sir William, having ceased to impart his social information, turned his brows upon his patient, and Pauline came from the back room to sit down opposite him by the fireplace. And all she had to say was: “These coals really are very poor!”

Silence and loneliness. In the long grass, engrossed, mere small spots of black, the starlings in a little company went about their task. From beneath the high trees came the call of the blackbirds echoing in true wood- notes, and overhead a wood-pigeon was crooning incessantly. The path ran broad down the avenue. The sounds of the wood-cutters at work upon the trees felled that winter were sharp points in the low rumble from a distance, and over all the grass that could be seen beneath the tree-trunks there hung a light- blue haze.

Having an unlit cigarette between his fingers Grimshaw felt in his pocket for his matchbox, but for the first time in many years the excellent Jervis had forgotten to fill it. And this in his silence and his loneliness was an additional slight irritant. There was undoubtedly a nostalgia, a restlessness in his blood, and it was to satisfy this restless desire for change of scene that he had come from his own end of the Park into Kensington Gardens. Peter was roaming unostentatiously upon his private affairs, and upon his seat Grimshaw leaned forward and looked at the ground. He had been sitting like that for a long time quite motionless when he heard the words: “You will not, I think, object to my sharing your seat? I have a slight fit of dizziness.” He turned his head to one side and looked up. With a very long, square and carefully tended grey beard, with very long and oiled locks, with a very chiselled nose, high dark brows and complexion as of marble, and upon his head a black cylindrical hat, wearing a long black cassock that showed in its folds the great beads of a wooden rosary, an Orthodox priest was towering over him. Robert Grimshaw murmured: “Assuredly not, Father,” in Greek, and silently the priest sat down at the other end of the bench. His face expressed aloofness, severity, and a distant pride that separated him from all the rest of the world. He, too, sat silent for a very long time, his eyes gazing down through the trees over the Serpentine and into immense distances. Robert Grimshaw looked distastefully at the unlit cigarette which he held between his fingers, and then he observed before him a man who might have been fifty, with watery blue eyes and a red nose, his clothes and hat all a mossy green with age and between his lips a misformed cigarette.

“You haven’t got a light?” Grimshaw said, and the man fumbled in his pocket, producing a greasy, blue box which he pushed open to exhibit its emptiness.

“Oh, well, give me a light from your cigarette,” Grimshaw said.

A hesitancy came over the man’s whole being, but reluctantly he surrendered the feeble vapour tube. Grimshaw took his light.

“Oh, here,” he said, and he drew out his bulky case, “that your last? Here, take one of mine,” and he shook his case over the extended palm. The cigarettes fell into it in a little shower.

“That’ll keep you going for a bit. Thanks, it’s nothing. I’m only obliged to you for the light. I wanted it.”

“Ah, you do want it when you do, guvnor,” the man said. Then he walked off, lifting his feet a little higher, with a little colour in his cheeks and his back more erect.

“Poor devil!” Grimshaw said, half to himself.

“Surely,” the priest said beside him in fluting and lofty tones, “are we not all poor devils in the sight of the Ruler of Ages?”

Robert Grimshaw minutely bowed his head.

“Your dizziness has left you, Father?” he asked. “It is the long fasting. I was on the watch for you to fall.”

“You speak Greek,” the priest said, “and are acquainted with the practices of the Church?” It was then just the end of Lent, for Easter fell very late that year.

“My mother was a Lascarides and I have many interests in Greece,” Grimshaw answered.

“Ah! the Lascarides were very faithful,” the priest said. “It was they in the main who helped us to build the church here.”

“The church can’t be much more than a stone’s-throw from here. I was wondering what brought you.”

“I am glad you are Greek,” the Father said, “for I think it was a very good charity you did just now, and you spoke to that man like a brother, which is not what the best of these English can do.”

“Oh, come!” Grimshaw said, “the English have their virtues.”

The priest bowed his head in courtesy.

“It is one of their traditions,” Robert Grimshaw said, “to give tobacco instead of pence to beggars. It is less demoralizing.”

Again the priest bowed.

“Precisely so,” he said. “It is less demoralizing. It gives less pleasure. I imagine that when the English blest spirit descends from heaven once a year to the place of torment, he will bear a drop of water to place upon the sufferer’s tongue. It will be less demoralizing than the drop of healing oil that you and I will bear. Also, it will teach the poor soul to know its place.... Tell me, my son,” he added suddenly, “do we not, you and I, feel lonely in this place?”

“Well, it is a very good place,” Robert Grimshaw said. “I think it is the best place in the world.”

“
Eemeision!
” the priest said. “I do not say that it is not. And in that is shown the truth of the saying: ‘How evil are the good places of this world!’”

“Assuredly you have fasted long, Father,” Grimshaw said.

“To a demoralizing degree!” the priest answered ironically. “And let us consider where that leads us. If we have fasted long, we have given ourselves to the angelic hosts. We have given our very substance to these sweet beggars. So we have demoralized the poor of heaven by the alms of our bodies.”

“Surely,” Robert Grimshaw said, “if we overburden our bodies with fasting, we demoralize the image of our Creator and Saviour?”

“Not so!” the priest thundered suddenly, and his eyes blazed far back in his skull. “We have mortified this our body which is from the devil, and in the lowness of the tides of this life we see the truth. For I tell you that when we see this place to be lonely, then, indeed, we see the truth, and when we say that it is pleasant, we lie foully.”

“Then, indeed,” Robert Grimshaw said, “we — I mean you and I — are to be creatures of two natures. We shall follow our passions — if they be passions of well-doing — till they lead us, as always they must, into evil.”

“And,” the priest assented, “we must purge then from us that satisfaction of well-doing and well-being by abstentions and by fastings, and by thinking of the things that are not of this world.”

“It is strange,” Robert Grimshaw said, “to hear your conversation. I have heard so little of these things since I was a very young man. But you teach me now as my aunt and foster- mother taught me at her knee. She was Mrs. Peter Lascarides.”

“I knew her,” the priest said. “She was a very good woman. You could not have had a better teacher.”

“And yet,” Robert Grimshaw said, “it was from her teaching that I have evolved what has been the guiding phrase of my life: ‘Do what you want and take what you get for it.’”

“And God in His mercy pardon the ill we do.” The priest crossed himself.

“I had forgotten that,” Grinishaw said, and he added gravely: “God in His mercy pardon the ill I have done.”

“May it be pardoned to you,” the priest said. He stopped for a moment to let the prayer ascend to Heaven. Then he added didactically: “With that addition your motto is a very good one; for, with a good training, a man should have few evil instincts. And to do what you want, unless obviously it is evil, is to follow the dictates of the instincts that God has placed in you. Thus, if you will feast, feast; if you will fast, fast; if you will be charitable to your neighbour, pour out your goods into the outstretched hands of the poor. Then, if you chance to give three scudi into the hands of a robber, and with these three scudi he purchase a knife wherewith he slay his brother, God may well pardon it to you, who hung, omnipotent, upon the Cross, though thereby to Caesar was left power to oppress many of the Churches.”

“So that we should not think too much of the effects of our deeds?” Robert Grimshaw asked.

“Not too much,” the priest said. “For then we shall lose much Christian charity. I know a lady who resides near our church and is noted for a frosty sort of charity, going with tracts into the poorer regions. I have heard that she said once to her niece: ‘My dear, never keep a diary; it may be used against you!’” The priest pronounced these words with a singular mixture of laughter and contempt. “Do you not hear all England speaking in these words?” he asked suddenly.

A nurse, tall, pink and white, with a dove- coloured veil and cloak, passed them, with averted face, pushing in a low cart a child, whose blue eyes gazed with contentment upon the tree-tops.

“Well, hasn’t it given us that?” Grimshaw said.

“Yes, it has given that to the world,” the priest said. “A menial who averts her eyes — a child who is inanimate by force of being kept ‘good’ — a ‘good’ child. My son, a ‘good’ child is a thing to make the angels cry; for is it not recorded of our Comforter that once He struck His mother?”

“But should not the nursemaid avert her eyes?” Grimshaw said.