Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (360 page)

At that time Brandetski was a remarkably good, if somewhat obscure talker. He had rubbed shoulders with all sorts of men; he had cowed all sorts of roughs. But his early habit of reading the newspapers to the navvies on Saturday nights had inspired him with a passion for the perusal of printed matter. And in one way or another he had contrived to read an extraordinary number both of novels and of memoirs. Thus he was as well acquainted with “East Lynne,”

“Lady Audley’s Secret” and “Bootle’s Baby” as with Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” and “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” It is true that in England he had associated only with men of the navigator class. But in South Africa the plate-layers whom he had under his control were most of them — were nearly all of them men of much higher social origin, if of even more disreputable practices. They were, that is to say, younger sons of good families who had come badly to grief and were attracted by the position of comparative responsibility and the high pay that this arduous and dangerous service held out. For each of them was paid a salary of a considerable number of dollars a week, and had under his control from thirty to a hundred negroes who did the actual work. And being, as it were, an officer of this brigade of the lost, Brandetski, who was comparatively clean, abstemious and alert-minded, Brandetski had come into contact with such persons of higher position as South Africa at that time contained — that is to say, with the occasional tourists, with officials of the Government or of the Chartered Companies respectively, and even now and then with their wives and womenkind. And since he was wonderfully alert and imitative, he had very quickly learned how to adopt two distinct manners. To his men he could swear, using a vocabulary of the most extraordinary vileness; to his equals, and more particularly to women, he could speak in tones of the very softest inflections, with a manner of the most exquisite grace, and in English that would not have disgraced the best newspaper of his day.

He had, nevertheless, resisted Mr Parmont’s inducements to him to write down some of his experiences, and the great contractor, being about to commence the construction of a new railway on the other side of the Continent that it was then the custom to call “Dark,” offered Brandetski a post almost similar to that which he had previously occupied. Brandetski once more returned to his niggers, his steel girders, his construction camps and his swamps. But Mr Parmont had put into his soul an entirely new leaven. By inclination, Simeon Brandetski was physically one of the laziest men that ever breathed. Circumstances had forced him into an active career, but he hated the least exertion. He hated to walk, he hated to get on to the back of a pony, he disliked even standing still. He wanted to be in a hammock for ever and ever, and he was convinced that he led a dog’s life. He was, however, too modest to imagine that he could write even as well as Doctor Johnson or Mrs Henry Wood. But Mr Parmont, who had come to see Mm very frequently in his lodgings before he left England for Africa for the second time, filled his baggage with the works of the younger and more extravagant novelists of that day. Nay, more, he pursued Brandetski with parcels of books that reached him in all sorts of odd spots in the dark Continent. Brandetski read “The Green Carnation,”

“The Yellow Aster,”

“Dodo,”

“Dreams,”

“Dorian Grey,”

“Omar Khayyam,”

“Keynotes,”

“The Maiden’s Progress,”

“The Scapegoat” and “The Silver Domino,” and he persuaded himself that, as he said to young Waddell, his deputy, that he could write at least as well as those chaps. He began, therefore, to write on odd scraps of paper in huts at night or at noontide in the shadow of what vegetation he could find. And at last, after about eighteen months, he despatched the bulky, scrappy and discoloured manuscript of a full-fledged Novel to Mr Parmont in London.

He followed it himself almost immediately afterwards, for the Black water Fever got him, and he knew that it was ten chances to one against his ever doing anything active in his life again. But Mr Parmont, who came to his bedside in the Hospital for Seamen, saluted him boldly and without qualification as a master. He had read Brandetski’s manuscript: he had found a publisher for it at once: Brandetski’s fame was certain and was on the road.

Brandetski closed his eyes and let his head fall back on the pillow. He wanted nothing better. He was going to be able, for the rest of his days, to loll about in a chair and do nothing at all but just write. That could not be called doing anything.

So, upon the advice of Mr Parmont, Brandetski changed his name to Bransdon, and later he turned Simeon into Simon, thus becoming equipped with a name becomingly British for the title page of a book. His novel was published upon the day when he left the Hospital for Seamen. Mr Parmont set the note of the criticisms when he said that “Clotted Vapours” disclosed the coming of a new life-force in British Literature. He used the phrase and its inversions in three morning papers on the day of publication, and in four weekly periodicals of the succeeding Saturday. And having caught the phrase from him the reviewers echoed it up and down, through all the papers of the land. Mr Bransdon settled down to a life that for him was one of comparative sloth. He took rather dirty but quite comfortable lodgings in Bloomsbury. He rose late; he strolled down through rather dirty streets to the rather dirty restaurants in Soho, where he lunched daily with rather dirty young men, who mostly wore red ties and suits of no particular colour. He found himself thus, having been given that trend by Mr Parmont, in connection with the most advanced ideas of his day. He was too lazy to accept them with enthusiasm: he never went to a “Meeting” in his life. No performances in Sunday theatres attracted him, but he leaned over tables upon his elbows, and gradually he let his beard grow long, for he disliked having it clipped and he was too lazy to shave. Obesity slowly crept upon him, and his clothes were as often as not unbuttoned about him. He wrote spasmodically and usually late into the night. He wrote articles for newspapers that desired to print “Impressions.” He wrote lazy articles for the monthly reviews. In the course of six years he turned out half a dozen novels, and bought a brindled bull-dog called Fanny. He lived, as a rule, in surroundings of squalor and gloom, but at times his natural desire for gilding and flashiness overcame him, and he would spend a week in the most modern hotel he could find in Brighton with a female companion. He cared, however, comparatively little for women, but a further stage of laziness overcame him. He found it too much trouble to go through the manual labour of writing, and he disliked sitting upright in a chair. He accordingly engaged a female and distant connection of Mr Parmont’s as his secretary, and, his habit of writing late into the night and lying on his back conducing to it, she became in course of time his mistress. When, however, this latter fact came to the ears of Mr Parmont, it caused him an anger which Simon Bransdon could only consider, sleepily, as unreasonable. Mr Bransdon was accustomed to hear Mr Parmont and the young man to whom he had introduced him discoursing freely of Free Love. But Mr Parmont explained with considerable heat that the matter was entirely different when it came to affect the personal relations of one’s friends. The distinction still remained somewhat cloudy to Simon Bransdon, but, to save trouble, he married the girl, and things went on very much as before. He did not outwardly object to his wife’s tidying up their lodgings, but inwardly it worried him a good deal to have his floor or his shirts washed too often.

A rather full meat diet, cooked in the greasy manner of cheap French and Italian restaurants, caused Bransdon to be subject from time to time to fits of unreasoning rage, and when he had been about six years in England, his bulldog, lumbering between his feet in one of the alleys of Soho, caused him to fall forward right upon his face. This gave him a severe shock and roused his choler to such an extent that having in his hand a young oak of the kind affected at that time by people of advanced ideas as a walking-stick, he beat the uncomplaining brute’s brains out upon the spot.

This was the turning point of Simon Bransdon’s career. He never got the animal’s eyes out of his recollection; he never could forget that it might just as well have been his wife who was as silent, as uncomplaining and as faithful as the bulldog had been. And the idea haunted him that by all ordinary law the hangman’s noose should have tightened around his neck. Under these obsessions his power of conversation deserted him almost entirely. He grew almost exclusively interested in the sufferings of animals and he would walk for miles along the streets, more particularly affecting hilly districts, on wet days, to find carters who were maltreating horses. At times he would walk up and down his rooms, holding his untidy head in both his hands, and muttering unintelligibly about the sorrows of the brute creation. At such times the Russian of his childhood, which he had completely forgotten would come back to him and he could understand no English. He finished with an extreme difficulty the novel that he was then engaged upon, for his mind could no longer hold, for any space of time, to any connected idea, the shock of his heavy fall having affected his brain.

At about this time he met a close disciple and friend of the late Mr William Morris, a parasitic gentleman, who fattened entirely upon the associations and upon the ideas of such distinguished people as would permit him to enter their houses. This was Mr Horatio Gubb. Gubb was at that time a solicitor in a fair way of practice. His clients were upon the one hand of an exceedingly settled and conservative kind, and upon the other of an advanced Nonconformity. Mr Morris being dead, Mr Gubb, who had rooms in the Temple and a wife whom he kept for week-ends in Frog’s Cottages — Mr Gubb began to waver in his socialism, which was of the picturesque and medieval order. Meeting, however, with Mr Bransdon, who was at that time considered to be amongst the four or five really “vital “novelists of England, Mr Gubb became once more hardened and confirmed in advanced ideas. He affected even a slight unconventionality of attire, such as he observed in the young men to whom Bransdon introduced him. And in the country, when Bransdon and his wife visited himself and Mrs Gubb, he went so far as to wear a red tie.

Mrs Gubb, a lady of anæmic enthusiasms, had, at the exhortations of the writer of “The Earthly Paradise,” already set up a loom of her own. She also worked in metals, bound books and made cordials after medieval and eighteenth century recipes, and she persuaded Mrs Bransdon to wear loose and flowing garments, and Mr Bransdon to put a sunflower into his button-hole.

At about this date the war in South Africa broke out, and Mr Gubb found himself upon the horns of a dilemma. He had already alienated several of his more considerable clients by standing unsuccessfully as a Liberal in several Scottish parliamentary contests. And now his more violently Nonconformist clients insisted that he should identify himself with the Pro-Boer Movement. Mr Gubb resisted for long enough to find himself deserted by several of his closest friends, who placed their business in the hands of Thaxted & Jackson, the solicitors of the League of Young South Africa. In a panic Mr Gubb threw himself vigorously into the struggle. He began to wear, even in London, clothes of the cut and of the light colour affected by Mr Bernard Shaw; his hat was smashed in, and he was chased up Great Portland Street by the patriotic crowd that howled outside the Queen’s Hall Meeting of September 1900. He addressed with enormous fervour another meeting in Exeter Hall, with a fervour so enormous that — because he was wearing for the first time, in deference to hygienic Puritanism, a belt instead of braces — he had to sit down suddenly, the support for his lower garments proving insufficient.

The meeting passed a vote of thanks to Mr Gubb, and his speech for its extraordinary intemperateness was recorded in full in all the Conservative newspapers of the day. It cost him the last of his conveyancing work, and it came too late to retain for him anything but the shreds of his Nonconformist practice. He began to spend more and more time in the country.’ He tried gardening. He tried planting potatoes. He tried weaving at his wife’s loom and he wrote a book entitled, “Why I became a Pro-Boer,” for which he could find no publisher. At last he persuaded Mr Bransdon to settle in the cottage next door to himself. Bransdon had done no work since he had finished his novel. He did nothing but sit still and gaze in front of him, and, because life was very dull for Mrs Bransdon, Mr Gubb persuaded her to adopt a child of eight, whom he found for her. This was Ophelia Bransdon.

Hamnet Gubb was at that time aged ten.

CHAPTER VII

AT the date when he sold his practice Mr Horatio Gubb was perhaps thirty-five. He had been in one way and another a very hard worker, and he had saved enough money to give him three hundred a year, or a little over. And at the beginning he had had no idea whatever of exploiting the great Bransdon. He had not at first perceived that Mr Bransdon had in him the makings of a prophet as great, nay, greater, than the late William Morris. He had only fastened upon the novelist as the first man of intellect, of distinction, whom he came across, too lazy to shake him off. He had begun by rendering Bransdon some small service with a publisher’s contract: he sent him later some bottles of cheap wine and packets of inferior cigarettes. Once he sent one of his clerks to the British Museum to look up a date that Bransdon needed for a novel. Later, he had got into the habit of dropping in on the Bransdons in their lodgings almost every evening, and he would bring with him potted delicacies or small quantities of caviare of which Mr Bransdon was inordinately fond. He ate it soaked in the juice of lemons and powdered with minced, raw onions.

And gradually it occurred to him to observe that Bransdon was extraordinarily — was grotesquely — poor. Here, Mr Gubb found out, was the fourth novelist in England not only put to it to find the necessary few shillings for his weekly allowance of médoc, but involved in the most hopeless entanglements of debts to publishers for novels that he did not seem to have the slightest chance of writing. Here was immediately Mr Gubb’s chance. He paid the Bransdons’ lodging bill, carried them straight down to Frog’s Cottages, where he displaced the next-door tenant, and, having beaten up from cottage sales in the neighbourhood a couple of roomsful of old-fashioned, rough furniture, he kept the Bransdons as it were under lock and key.

And as soon as everyone who knew them was beginning to say how beneficial was the influence of Mr Gubb over the distinguished writer, Mr Gubb started a subscription. He pushed himself in everywhere; he rubbed shoulders with all sorts of distinguished people whom otherwise he would never have met. He pointed out what a crying shame it was that such a genius as Mr Bransdon should starve; he admitted that Bransdon had lived extravagantly in the past, but he pointed out from what lowly origins the great writer had set out, and he undertook — since he proposed himself to administer any Fund that should be raised — he undertook to see that Bransdon should live upon the smallest possible expenditure. By his first exertions he raised a sum of £542, 13s. 2d., and two years later — having pushed his way into the cognizance of a Cabinet Minister — he extorted from the Civil List a sum of £400. Other friends were persuaded to pay off all Mr Bransdon’s outstanding liabilities to the tune of £339. Nor did Mr Gubb at all dishonestly administer the Fund that with so much labour he had raised. He sold to it, indeed, Frog’s Cottages, which he had purchased some years before from one of his clients, a small yeoman farmer in pressing need of money. He had bought Frog’s Cottages for £230. He sold them to the Bransdon Fund for £400. But even at that price they were cheap, for he proposed to pay the Bransdons a weekly rent of five shillings for his own holding, and he let the third cottage for seven shillings and sixpence a week to Miss Egmont, a miniaturist. From this investment, therefore, the Bransdons received about £35 a year — nearly enough to keep them alive, whilst they lived rent free. The other sums which he collected he doled out at the rate of about a pound or so a week.

It was whilst administering the finances of the novelist, his wife, and their adopted daughter, that Mr Gubb developed his extraordinary passion for minute economies. He cut off everything superfluous. He docked his wife and his son of their clothes, he discovered that meat was a superfluity, that if you did no cooking you saved kitchen coals, that if you did without a servant you saved not only wages but lodging and keep. And in order to be rid of all superfluous household work he got rid of carpets which needed brushing, of all ornaments which collected dust and of all furniture made of polished wood. He instituted horn drinking goblets because glasses broke, and he banished from the wardrobes all finer fabrics which tore easily or wore out soon. In pursuance of this train of thought he scraped moreover all the wall-paper off his own cottage and replaced it with whitewash, leaving bare the rough beams and jagged projections of the wall. He did not do this, of course, without some objections from his wife, who gained, moreover, a certain sympathy from Mrs Bransdon, and it was at this juncture that Mr Bransdon was appealed to. Mr Bransdon responded nobly to his saviour’s call. His brain, as Mr Gubb could see, had so entirely succumbed to shock that it was evident he would never write another novel, but he could still put his ponderous moral force and his language, which was daily becoming more vague and mystical, at the disposal of the man who fed and clothed him. He seemed vaguely to feel — though Mr Gubb never made the threat — that if he did not back Gubb up, Gubb would cut off all supplies. So that when Mr Gubb appealed to him against the mutinous wives Mr Bransdon would display all the furious moral indignation of a cuckoo’s fledgling disturbed in the nest. His sides would heave at the women, his eyelids distend and snap together, and he would pour out disjointedly those aphorisms which became the foundation of the Simple Life. Mr Gubb had succeeded in reducing his weekly expenditure to about twelve shillings and sixpence for the three of them, and Mr Bransdon justified these economies along the lines of the higher morality. To eat flesh was to slay one’s fellow creatures: to cook vegetables was to offend against the laws of Nature: to wear fine clothes was to ape the peacock: to have domestic servants was to enslave the image of God: to put papers upon walls was to offend against the canons of the Decorative Arts, since no man should be ashamed of his materials. These sentiments with their variations Mr Bransdon uttered in a language akin to that of the Celtic school of poetry which was at that time a flourishing affair. And the moral fervour of Mr Bransdon’s self-preservative utterances was so great that both Mrs Bransdon and Mrs Gubb were silenced every time.

Mrs Bransdon disliked having had to adopt Ophelia, and she disliked Ophelia, indeed, with considerable personal feeling. The child grew to appear, to her, pert, disobedient and exceedingly vain. She disliked their mode of life, she disliked what she called Mr Gubb’s “Goings on” with Miss Egmont the miniaturist who inhabited the third cottage. But Mrs Bransdon had never had any spirit to call her own. She sighed for the days when they had lived in the dark and untidy Bloomsbury lodgings. She missed even the smell of cabbage water that had always pervaded the air of those neighbourhoods; she missed the weekly luncheons in the stuffy French restaurants; she missed the monthly meetings of the Loungers’ Club for men and women. She missed even the debts, and she missed — how extremely she missed! — the chance to push into one of the cheap drapers in Oxford Street and to buy a soiled blouse and three and three quarter yards of violet satin ribbon when the remnant sales were on. Mr Gubb, backed up by the moral weight of Mr Bransdon, forced her to undertake the weaving which Mrs Gubb never had the spirit to continue. Mr Gubb had seen how much they might economise on the score of clothes if, in this, too, Frog’s Cottages could become self-supporting. And Mrs Bransdon, having been used all her life to the monotonous existence of shorthand and typewriting, stuck at her task for long enough to turn out from thirty to forty yards of a coarse, knotty, grey material. One night, however, she happened to overhear a conversation between Mr Gubb and Miss Egmont who were in the barn that afterwards became the Craftsmen’s shed. And this conversation, which touched upon liberty, revolted her to such an extent that she ran out of the cottage and wandered for the rest of the night amongst the wet heather of the surrounding hills. She found herself next morning by the cottage of Miss Stobhall. Miss Stobhall took her in, tended her and attempted to soothe her. But she never persuaded her — and indeed she only made very half-hearted attempts — to return to the shadows of Frog’s Cottages. Misa Stobhall employed her for her own secretary; let her hang herself about with bits of lace and cheap jewellery to her heart’s content, and regretted her very much when she came to die next year of lung trouble.

On the same day Mrs Gubb, who was fetching water from the dip behind the cottages, slipped on the green stones and, falling heavily, fractured her hip in two places. She had been anæmic always, and the Simple Life in its severest form had very much depleted her vital forces. She was, moreover, attended by Miss Egmont, the miniaturist, a lady who united to her immediate profession that of healing by the new homeopathy. So that although the New End doctor was called in upon the sixth day, Mrs Gubb was dead of pneumonia on the seventh. Miss Stobhall gave Mrs Bransdon a conventional funeral which was largely attended by former literary friends of the great novelist, though Mr Bransdon himself was not present. Mrs Gubb’s body, on the other hand, was conveyed to the grave in a farm wagon drawn by six cart-horses. The coffin was entirely obscured from view by flowering branches of hawthorn, whilst before it walked Ophelia Bransdon, dropping green rushes and behind it was Hamnet Gubb dispensing from a potato trug occasional sprigs of heather. Very unkind things had been said at the inquest concerning Miss Egmont and the new homeopathy, and the cortège was hooted by the rustics as it entered the churchyard.

At this stage Miss Egmont, a hard lady of may be fifty, with a hooked nose, a tight skin, greyish curly hair and prominent spectacles that hardened already hard eyes — Miss Egmont confidently expected that she would become the bride of Mr Gubb. Mr Gubb, however, pointed out that in the Simple Life there was no room for marriage. Miss Egmont retorted with a great deal of warmth that Gubb would have to have some woman in the house. He, however, with his hard, humorous smile, his hard, humorous eyes and his shining bald head implied that he was not in the least certain that he wanted any woman there at all. He was aiming, he said, at something monastic, for himself and Bransdon — and he departed into the world outside to evolve, as he said, a theory. After all, hadn’t he, though he wasn’t married to her, walked with Miss Egmont all over the countryside from sunrise to sunset, and couldn’t he go on enjoying that spiritual kinship without any tangible ties to destroy it? Left alone with him Miss Egmont proceeded to pour out to Mr Bransdon the tale of her wrongs. She descended to particulars which seemed crude in an idyllic community. She said she was certain that Mr Gubb had gone off to Paris with some hussy as he had done before, and Ophelia Bransdon coming in at that time with some faggot wood that she and Hamnet had been chopping in the copse, Miss Egmont fell upon her neck in floods of tears and declared that Mr Gubb had deserted her and meant to leave them to starve. During these orations, which lasted several days, Mr Bransdon sat stolidly blinking. He had no comments to make of any kind.

Mr Gubb, however, returned at the end of the week bringing with him a Miss Destinn, a lady whose bronze-coloured jibbeh, thin neck, upturned nose and enormous spectacles might have precluded in Miss Stobhall any ideas of jealousy. They did not, for Miss Egmont declared that Mr Gubb was capable of making love to a broomstick. But Mr Gubb treated her with such good humoured impassivity that the poor lady in hysterical despair fled for a fortnight to her studio in St John’s Wood. Mr Gubb calmly appropriated her cottage and housed Miss Destinn in it.

This extremely quiet and bewildered lady had been assistant mistress in the Misses Mannings’ school on advanced principles for children of both sexes at Cowden Heath. And Miss Egmont, when she returned, found Miss Destinn already installed in a rather capacious farm-house a little way up the road and provided already with seven pupils, the two first of whom had been Ophelia Bransdon and Hamnet Gubb. This so much pacified Miss Egmont that she even offered to become drawing mistress to the New School. She was, however, deprecatingly and gently made to understand that her methods were too old-fashioned. She believed in a hard outline: the children of the New School were taught to observe Nature and to record their impressions in flat blobs of wet water-colour. The children were also taught the elements of Social Polity, Domestic Economy and the methods of selecting food, elementary Biology, intensive Horticulture and how to breathe correctly. Gradually the numbers in the school rose to fourteen, of whom nine were boys and five girls.

The Simple Life Colony was, in fact, growing up around Mr Bransdon and Mr Gubb.

All the small cottage property in the immediate neighbourhood became tenanted either by extremely young people just starting out in life or by elderly, rather dowdy creatures who were abandoning the struggle. The young men had mostly rather longish hair and earnest expressions; the young women wore, as a rule, short skirts; the upper parts of their dresses were cut rather low and as a ride smocked or feather-stitched. They nearly all contrived to make their necks appear inordinately long and they were all round-shouldered. The elder women were mostly of grey complexions; they dressed in grey tweeds with boat-shaped hats and they had as a rule timid eyes and very slight, silvery grey, delicately suggested moustaches. Their menfolk wore, as a rule, timid and anxious expressions, cycling breeches and thin, grey beards. On the other hand, there was Mrs Lee, who energetically built herself a large villa on a piece of land that she acquired from Mr Gubb at the rate of £400 per acre — a Scotch lady married to a Yorkshireman with a voice not very shrill but one which irresistibly suggested that she was always speaking against a gale of wind. Her husband was a money-lender, trading under the name of Henry Pierpoint. A quiet, suppressed man, with rather furtive manners, he was very seldom seen in the neighbourhood except on Sundays, for he went up to Town by the 8.12 and returned by the 7.22. But on the other hand Mrs Lee, well over six foot in height, with an enormous mass of black hair and a stride like a grenadier’s, seemed always to be in half a dozen places at once, at first in the company of Mr Major the architect, and, after the house was built, dragging behind her as she strolled along, a donkey-cart containing her four very Scotch-looking children. She did all her housework herself and she described herself as the life and soul of the community. As her house contained as an annexe a large, bare room where she had at first intended to stable her donkey upon hygienic principles, the Lifers acquired the habit of meeting there on Sunday mornings. Mr Gubb would read the week’s moral outpourings of the great Bransdon. Other young men would read papers of their own in breathless voices and discussion was invited though it was very seldom forthcoming. The assemblies numbered sometimes as many as forty and the peasantry were cordially invited. The peasantry however, had been almost entirely ejected from that countryside by the Lifers. There was not a cottage to be had for a ploughman for some distance around, and one shepherd had to travel five miles every night and morning to reach his work in the fields above Frog’s Cottages. The peasantry, therefore, hardly attended the gatherings at all with the exception of two drunken old men called Hodinot and Benjamin who walked over regularly every Sunday from Mersham Hill. They were under the impression that they were attending some new kind of chapel, and when they were informed on Christmas Day that no blankets and coals were to be distributed they declared that they were swindled. On Boxing Night Mr Hodinot broke the windows of the Assembly Hall from a safe position in the darkness behind the fence. Mr Hodinot was sentenced to fourteen days.