Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (358 page)

Ophelia seemed to swell it out, to round it off as it were, into large bubbles of a decidedly substantial white froth.

Ophelia swayed round with an awkward and toppling, but still imperious motion. She had never before been so confined at the knees, so that she had the appearance of being about to topple over and of extending her hands to preserve her balance.

“You are,” she addressed Mrs Luscombe, “another of these purely conventional beings. You probably married under the influence of a passion and swore to remain faithful for the rest of your life. And no doubt you will. Your sort of person is quite capable of it.”

Mrs Luscombe ejaculated clearly and emphatically: “Good God!”

She had certainly never in her life used that ejaculation before, and it was only part of her extraordinary bewilderment that she found it in her vocabulary at all. She had had no preparation for Ophelia, she had never had any experience of anything of the sort, she could not begin to classify it. She could not say whether it was — this column in white — of the abandoned aristocracy, or of the licentious stage or of the incalculable societies for procuring the franchise for women.

“Who is the girl?” she exclaimed to Mrs Melville, “Where does she come from?”

She had one brief moment of imagining that Ophelia must be from Idaho or from Montana, or at any rate from the State of New York. Then Ophelia overwhelmed her with another torrent of words.

“But as for us,” the young lady continued, “ours is a union of reason. We enter upon it without any passion; it is purely utilitarian.”

“My dear,” Mrs Melville said admiringly, “you do speak like a book. I wish I could.”

“It’s practice,” Ophelia said. “We have been being trained to be public speakers — apostles, that is, of the Simple Life ever since we were twelve and thirteen respectively.”

Mrs Melville suddenly went down on her knees to gather up the pins that she had dropped, and MRS Luscombe, who couldn’t see her mother-in-law do anything of the sort alone and who was herself too speechless to say any words to prevent it — Mrs Luscombe also knelt down and aided her. So that it was as if she were triumphing over captives when Ophelia Bransdon continued her oration.

“You,” she said, addressing the back and the back of the head of MRS Luscombe—” you would never leave your husband if you desired to do it, or if you were overcome by another passion. Or perhaps
you
might, for you are upstanding and when you have listened to reason you may be fitted to become a banner-bearer in the cause of Freedom. But
you,”
and she addressed Mrs Melville, “
you
would never do anything of the sort. Of that I am convinced, for you are not of the stuff of which heroines are made.”

Mrs Melville slowly raised her head and a deep flush as slowly covered her face.

“You are talking nonsense,” she said sharply, “and moreover you are exceedingly cruel. What can you know of these things?”

“In the cause of spreading the light,” Ophelia Bransdon exclaimed, “cruelty is a merit. We shall have to take many hard blows. We shall have to be stoned perhaps, but we mean to hit back. For that reason we have determined to get our blows in first. That is why I am sometimes called a little aggressive.”

Mrs Melville had risen to her feet and stood with her hands clasped before her.

“You are more than aggressive,” she said with a sharpness that appeared extraordinary. “You are even odious. And if being put into people’s best gowns is what you call being stoned... Mrs Melville, faced with the cruelty of youth, had a gentle little passion of extreme anger. She remembered how obstinately and how helplessly in her obstinacy she had done exactly what this ignorant child had said she would never be capable of doing. And at the same time she felt oddly bitter to think that all the obloquy which she had had to endure had not been enough to insure her immunity on such a subject from this child’s tongue. For she was certain that Ophelia had never heard of it: if she had she would never have spoken. But Mrs Luscombe, looking up from her knees, interrupted her suddenly with:

“How in the world does she come to have on my dress and who in the world is she?”

“You know,” Ophelia said with a bland reasonableness as if she were about to concede a point, “there is really no such thing in the world as property. This dress is very much more mine than yours by reason of my necessity. Just as it’s very much more poor Betty Higden’s than mine. For poor Betty hasn’t sufficient clothes at all, whereas mine only need drying.”

“I don’t know who she is,” Mrs Melville said, relapsing into a sort of helplessness when she had to face her daughter-in-law. “Gerald invited the two of them to come out of the rain.”

“I went through the rest of your wardrobe that was offered to me,” Ophelia explained, “and it appeared to me to be frivolous and unsuitable, with the exception of this garment. This in some ways fulfils the canons of our requirements, since it is made all in one piece and of a fabric which, if it is slightly ornate, does not appear to be exceedingly costly.

“My real lace dress!” Mrs Luscombe exclaimed. “You’ll have stretched it till it hangs round me like a blanket. And oh, it’s the first of this model to reach England!”

“I might buy it of you,” Ophelia said hesitatingly. It was the first hesitation she had shown since she was a child.

“It cost eleven hundred and twenty-five francs!” Mrs Luscombe rejoined. “And even if you could buy it, it wouldn’t help me — for I should have
nothing
new to wear at Lady Joins’ on Saturday.”

“Oh!” Ophelia said with the air of a child who is startled at a tremendous falsehood. “There are eleven dresses on that bed — I’ve been through them and counted them. And you can’t have worn the oldest of them five times.”

“The child, my dear,” Mrs Melville, said, “is just a savage. It was
Gerald
who told me to bring her up here and lend her a dress of yours, not I.”

“I didn’t suppose you would have,” Mrs Luscombe answered.

“And she seized on that,” Mrs Melville continued to excuse herself. “I believe her parents are quite respectable — friends of Miss Stobhall’s — but odd!”

“I don’t care how respectable or how odd they are,” Mrs Luscombe said rising from her knees. “If it’s merely a question of a change while her things are drying, a blouse and skirt are good enough for her.”

“I told her so: oh, I told her so!” Mrs Melville exclaimed.

Mrs Luscombe approached Ophelia who was saying:

“One thousand, one hundred and twenty-five francs are forty-five pounds — enough to keep Hamnet and me for a year, for our habits are very simple!”

“I don’t,” Mrs Luscombe said with a good humoured determination, “in the least want to keep anybody for a year.”

She had walked round Ophelia and suddenly put her hands to the hooks and eyes that fastened the dress on the shoulder.

“And I want you out of my frock,” she added with determination. “Keep deadly still if you don’t want to die.”

“Oh,” Ophelia pleaded, “couldn’t I keep it on just a little longer?”

Her fair brow clouded over: her blonde hair seemed to droop: a corner of her bare shoulder appeared through the opening.

“Keep still,” Mrs Luscombe said grimly.

“Oh, I
should
have liked,” Ophelia said, “to discuss it with Hamnet. We
never
could sanction a blouse and skirt. I’m certain of that. But this is all in one piece and if it’s foolishly luxurious there is possibly something to be said....”

Mrs Luscombe had moved round to the front of her motionless and columnar figure. She was sedulously and delicately drawing the sleeve off Ophelia’s white arm.

“You can have a tea-wrap if you don’t like a blouse and skirt,” she added. “You and the gentleman called Hamnet will have plenty of opportunity to discuss this frock. But it will have to be...” she paused for a moment of anxiety as the lace slipped down Ophelia’s other arm... “on me!” she added with relief as the dress dropped free on to the girl’s hips.

CHAPTER V

“So you have sold the cottages to old Rossiter,” Mr Parmont, the London critic, said to Mr Bransdon. “I hope you got good terms out of him?”

Frog’s Cottages hung half-way down a steep hill, a little way on the Kent side of the Surrey border. They were very old and red-tiled over weather-boarding. The three of them stood side by side, the hill coming very steep down in a bank behind them, the gardens sloping not quite so sharply in front. On the top right-hand corner of the steep path leading down was a spring approached by mossy and greenish stones. A sort of niche was cut in the solid rock over the spring so that it covered the hollowed trough into which it was the habit of the advocates of the Simple Life to dip their buckets. The overflow of the spring ran down alongside the garden to form at the bottom a shallow pond flagged with stones. Here such of the “Lifers” as were accustomed to bathe, bathed. Others who disliked the chill of water upon the skin of their bodies would sit dabbling their feet in the clear liquid. Yery tall and very old trees towered upon the bank behind the cottages, overshadowing them so that the russet tiles of the uneven roofs and sides were streaked here and there with green tracks from dripping water. These trees caused the cottage chimneys occasionally to smoke in spite of the ingenious devices employed against it by an occasional inhabitant of the colony who was by profession an architect and a Craftsman. These devices had consisted in making brick erections on top of the chimneys, in attaching ridge tiles to ordinary earthenware chimneypots, in placing over the pots old zinc buckets pierced with holes or in knocking bricks right out of the chimney stacks. During the last winter Mr Major, the architect in question, had tried with some success a contrivance from London, a modem invention which resembled nothing so much as a gigantic zinc corkscrew stuck into a common zinc chimneypot. This had indeed cured the down-draught in Mr Bransdon’s cottage. But the Colonists loudly protested that its modern hideousness pained their eyes when they went outside, much more than the wood smoke when they remained within. And the Architect was already suspected of unorthodox tendencies. In some houses that he had built at Frog Hole he had actually, to please his patrons, consented to let the oak front door be treated with a composition in order to prevent their virgin surfaces of adzed oak from shrinking and warping. The architect thus suspected of a heresy against absolute simplicity found himself to have become so unpopular that that Spring he had had the offending chimneypot removed. This change had been made at the beginning of those months when there is officially a reasonable anticipation of fine weather. But all that summer it had poured incessantly so that some of the Simple Lifers had degenerated even so far as to purchase waterproofs. It is true that they compounded with their consciences by acquiring, instead of anything so vulgar as mere macintosh, fishermen’s coats of shiny yellow varnished canvas with sou’westers to match. These they considered were more legitimate since they were authentic costumes, since they were certainly not conventional and since, equally certainly, they lent a touch of colour to the countryside. The evil weather, however, eventually forced Mr Bransdon, Mr Gubb, and Miss Egmont, who occupied the third cottage, to set up large oil-stoves, a fact which caused a general horror in the community and — since the stoves were, as if out of protest, invariably badly trimmed — caused a perpetual odour of carbonised petroleum to penetrate subtly into every corner of every room of Frog’s Cottages. Indeed, even the cheese and nuts, which were the staple of their diet, tasted of American oil; even the very mead which Mr Brandson, on account of his age the sole non-abstainer of the colony, drank out of a bullock’s horn decorated with silver by Mr Major in his capacity of Craftsman — even the very mead tasted of paraffin, and so for the matter of that did the morning eggs and bacon which Mr Bransdon ate from a pewter plate. Mr Bransdon, indeed, was the only flesh-eater of the colony, but then wasn’t he, figuratively speaking at least, the father of them all?

But what was the colony to do? They had reduced almost everything to the very simplest. They did no cooking at all. They lived mostly on nuts, cheese, sour milk and wholemeal biscuits. But they found they could not do without hot water. They needed it to drink for indigestion if they did not need it for anything else. They needed it for washing their clothes with; they needed it even for washing the tables off which they ate their food, for the vats in which they steeped and dyed such fabrics as they manufactured. They could not, in fact, do without it, and some of them even were so unregenerate as not to be able to do without their cup of tea. So that heat of some sort they had to have, and all their eyes, they were agreed, were so much damaged by the smoke that they were gradually losing the power to achieve the delicate work that their Craftsmanship depended on. One other very serious burden they laboured under, and that was rats.

The farm across the road having been vacant for some time, rata had poured in upon them. They found them in their water-jugs, they found them in their beds; at night rats ran across their faces; it was impossible to open the door of any unoccupied room without hearing rustlings, squeaks and loud humps. Nay, that very night Ophelia and Mr Bransdon, hearing a terrible thud, an appalling crash, had descended in their night things to discover that the brick floor of Mr Bransdon’s loom-room had caved completely in. Eats had absolutely undermined its whole surface. Whereas, before, the bricks had been laid on the earth, now they had descended a full six inches, except for a portion in the middle of the room where there was, as it were, a sort of mound beneath the cocoanut matting. This was extremely inconvenient, because it was difficult to find any other spot where the eating-table would stand level, so much the greater portion of the living space being taken up by the dusky outline and network of Mr Bransdon’s looms. Ophelia, however, had gone out early that morning and had not yet returned, and the charwoman was laid up with a cruel rheumatism. Mr Bransdon, therefore, sat with the helpless appearance of a monstrous idol in the shrine of his loom, framed duskily, as it were, in the rather dim apartment. The rain dripped and gurgled dismally from the tiles. There were no water-shoots. The rough oak table heeled lamentably askew with two of its legs six inches below the other two. A litter of papers, a pewter platter and the remains of a loaf of bread, together with a number of nutshells and a coarse earthenware pot which had contained honey, having slipped off the table when it had subsided in the night, lay on the cocoanut matting. The men present had set their Windsor kitchen chairs as it were in islands of this disorder.

The walls of the room had once been of a cream colour, the mixture applied being composed of quick lime slaked with skim-milk — a mixture which was supposed not to come off on clothes. The room was fairly deep — perhaps thirteen feet by eight and so low that the uneven and bulging ceiling rested at one point upon the upper framework of the loom. But the walls had gone, on account of the wood-smoke, all sorts of darkish colours in patches and swirls; only here and there, where prints which had been tacked against the lime-wash had fallen away, were there squares and oblongs of vivid paleness. The prints which remained were all either of the size of picture postcards or of that of an ordinary novel’s leaf — the only two sizes that Ophelia Bransdon’s press could turn out. They represented mostly outlines of ladies very developed about the hips and obviously with no stays, who leaned their heads back in strained attitudes and saluted doves, the emblems of peace; butterflies, the emblems of the soul; or roses and vines, which are the emblems of the beauty and bounteousness of nature. As a rule this figure wore round her head a spiky halo of rays in the midst of which there was generally inscribed the words: “Sancta Beata Simplicitas!” These designs were from the pencil of Miss Egmont, who lived in the third cottage. The plates from which they were printed were, however, executed by the Hildersheim Electrotype Company of Düsseldorf, and bore in consequence the words “made in Germany.” They were, however, printed at Ophelia’s press, which stood in the little room behind where the rain came in through the pent roof. This room had once been the dairy.

The afternoon, which saw Miss Stobhall bearing down, purposeful and horrified, to take Mr Bransdon and Mr Gubb to Gerald Luscombe’s house, where they were to separate Hamnet and Ophelia by argument or by force — this afternoon witnessed no very considerable gathering of Lifers in Mr Bransdon’s room. Mr Bransdon sat in the shadows of his loom. At his side was Mr Gubb, very pink, bald and shining, holding ready a reporter’s notebook and a pencil. These two gentlemen were known respectively as the Sunfish and the Sea Anemone. And indeed, exceedingly round, pursy and pink and white with a bald head and what of his hair remained, very golden, Mr Gubb did very much resemble a Sunfish in outline. But Mr Bransdon was a much more difficult matter to tackle. He was so large, so flabby, and hair seemed so to drip from all over him. The hair of his head was extremely long, of a bluish grey tinged with flakes of bluish white. His face was almost obscured by a long beard, irregular in its outline, so that it seemed to be ragged. That also was of a bluish grey tinged with bluish white. His eyelids drooped very deeply over very black eyes, so that at times he had the appearance of oriental and semi-blind imbecility. His eyebrows were of extreme length and drooped in similar lines to those of a weeping willow. And even the backs of his hands, which were always damp and clammy, were covered with a tangle of long blue hair. He sat, however, so perpetually in the shadowy depths of his loom — though he only wove spasmodically and at rare intervals for five-minute spaces... he sat there so continually in the shadows that really, for all those who saw him, he might have been some strange gelatinous creature existing amongst the weeds and twilight at the bottom of the sea. On the other hand one of his enemies, who had seen a young pigeon in the nest, covered with bluish feathers just protruding from the quills — this someone had nicknamed him “The Squab.” His voice was soft, agreeable and rather hesitating. On the face of him he had no ambitions, save that to be allowed to sit still, to be fed rather profusely and at frequent intervals. But if he heard of some case of injustice sufficiently picturesque to strike his comparatively capricious imagination — of any cruelty to an animal, for instance, or if equally his meals were late or insufficient, an extraordinary emotion would visit him. His eyelids would rise up over his black eyes; they would appear very large and sparkling, he would jibber in an incomprehensible manner and his hands would wave over his head. He had, indeed, an unusual sympathy with animals and they with him. Thus stray dogs would enter and coil themselves to sleep between his feet and there was one rat which would come out from its hole to sit on one of his shuttle boxes. And this animal would permit itself to be stroked by him, nibbling from time to time his fingers with little and affectionate nips.

Both Mr Bransdon and Mr Gubb wore singularly loose-fitting coats and trousers of the hodden grey material that Mr Bransdon manufactured. They wore, also, grey shirts with turn-down collars knitted by Mr Gubb from thread of the same texture as Mr Bransdon’s cloth, and each had a sailor’s knot knitted slightly more finely from thread dyed indifferently blue with woad, and round their hips they had belts woven of a similar colour. But it was characteristic that his clothes hung upon Mr Bransdon so that he appeared hollow-chested and mysteriously ragged whereas Mr Gubb had always the air of being a plump and prosperous stockbroker disguised, to please himself, as a convict.

In the inglenook, behind the paraffin stove, sitting upon the floor with his back against the wall, dressed like his teachers and with his feet protruding in sandals of webbing, sat one of Mr Bransdon’s disciples. He was a dark young man with a pained expression, called Pomeroy Roden. His unsympathetic parents forced him to be an undergraduate at Oxford but he invariably spent the long vacation at Frog’s cottages. Mr Pomeroy Roden, who contributed nothing to the ensuing discussion but appeared nevertheless to be always upon the point of tears, was engaged with a pestle and mortar in which he was attempting to bray two ounces of plug tobacco. He had read of this proceeding in one of the works of Mr Ford Madox Hueffer, an author esteemed by the Lifers as an authority upon the habits of the Middle Age and the Renaissance. In this book he had read that the braying of tobacco in a mortar was considered a suitable occupation for the disciple of a Dutch Anabaptist pastor and the occupation appearing picturesque was adopted by this disciple of Mr Bransdon. As, however, Mr Roden was unacquainted with the fact that in the seventeenth century tobacco was pounded in leaves as dry as tinder and as Mr Roden’s material was of the consistency of American chewing-gum, the affair, except from its spectacular point of view, was a comparative failure.

Mr Parmont, the London Critic, was not by any means an orthodox Simple Lifer. Exceedingly fat and round stomached, his features were of a sallow brown and contained as a rule an ironic or at least an enigmatic grin. He spoke with a very slight lisp and generally had some difficulty in finding words. The topics of his conversation were, as a rule, connected with attacks on the conventional, yet he had been seen in London — when on his way to procure novels from the office of the paper for which he reviewed — he had been seen wearing a white stand-up collar. Nay, three weeks before, Mr Parmont had caused grave consternation by appearing at Frog’s Cottages in a check cap. It had happened that his hat, which was of comparatively orthodox shape resembling a pudding-basin, made of tweed, had been blown into the river whilst he was crossing Waterloo Bridge on his way down to Sevenoaks. He had purchased, unthinkingly, at Smith’s Book Stall the only head-covering there to be had, and having it on his conscience to deliver to Mr Bransdon as fresh as possible a lobster which he had purchased in the City, he had looked in upon the great man on his way to his own cottage which was a mile further upon the road. In the result, the Lifers had held a meeting — a quite informal meeting — at the house of Mrs Lee to show that they were not officially interfering in the habits of a gentleman who, after all, was only unofficially one of themselves — but nevertheless a meeting very largely attended of which the outcome was a visit from Hamnet Gubb to Mr Parmont. As a spokesman, Hamnet had very delicately pointed out the pain and consternation that Mr Parmont’s wearing of such a garment had caused to all his friends of the colony. It was only on principle that they objected to it. The wearing of it was only a beginning. But to what dreadful ends of conventionality might such beginnings not tend? Mr Parmont might end, that is to say, in wearing brown boots or returning the Squire’s call.