Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (372 page)

“I can’t make you understand anything at all,” Mss Stobhall said. “Hamnet is all the things you say and yet in spite of my efforts — and I’ve tried everything. I’ve read Karl Marks to him night after night, I’ve had over all the Fabian tracts, and I’ve read one to him every night with comments for the last six months.”

“Oh, poor devil,” Mr Parmont said. “What did he comment?”

“But don’t you understand,” Miss Stobhall said with exasperation, “don’t you understand? He listens and he agrees but I can’t get him to take the least interest. He simply says it doesn’t concern him. He says that every word that the Fabians ever uttered is perfectly true and perfectly valid as applying to a state of Society such as ours is. But he says that it simply doesn’t interest
Mm.
Don’t you see, he’s
anti-Social
!” And Miss Stobhall, whose idea of enjoyment in life was to get a quiet evening to herself and read Fabian tract No. 32 by Mr Sidney Webb on “The Breakdown of Individualism,” Miss Stobhall looked at Mr Parmont with eyes of enormous size and full of horror as if he had been accusing her dear Hamnet of an unmentionable crime. For her, indeed, it was a real tragedy.

“I’ve tried to hide it from myself,” she said. “I’ve tried not to think about it, but there it is. Hamnet pays no attention to the problems of the modern world. He has absolutely no feeling for the State: he might be an unrelated corpuscle floating in empty space: he’s... that’s what he is, though it’s horrible to say it... he’s an Individualist.”

“Oh, come,” Mr Parmont said, “there’s no harm in that.”

“And he’s not even,” Miss Stobhall continued, “an Individualist of a reasoned kind. He doesn’t believe that competition is beneficent: he doesn’t care about it: he doesn’t care about freedom for the Individual as long as he’s left alone. He doesn’t care whether anyone else is free as long as he is. Don’t you understand how terrible it is, after I’ve taken so much trouble to put him on the right lines?”

“Well,” Mr Parmont said, “isn’t he just what he started out with you as? Aren’t his doctrines just those of his father and Simon Bransdon? Can’t you see that that’s why Mr Bransdon’s Colony is coming to smash?” Miss Stobhall came for a moment out of her tragic grief to ask:

“Oh, the Colony’s coming to smash, is it?”

“What else could it do?” Mr Parmont asked in turn. “I knew that it couldn’t have the essentials of goodness in it or it wouldn’t have paid. And if you come to look at it philosophically it’s a collection of Individualists organised along Communistic lines.”

“Well, but what’s the matter with it?” Miss Stobhall asked. “Has anything gone wrong?”

“Oh, it isn’t that anything’s gone wrong,” Mr Parmont said. “The thing’s extraordinarily flourishing. I hear it pays dividends to make your mouth water. But there are going to be a whole lot of distasteful scandals.”

“Distasteful scandals?” Miss Stobhall asked. “What about?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr Parmont answered, and he shrugged his uneven shoulders right up to his ears. “One hears such a lot of gossip. I meet some of the fellows from the Colony up in Town. There’s that horrid little cat, Ophelia Bransdon. Why, I’ve seen her myself in a motor-car in the Strand with a greasy-looking man in a white waistcoat. He’s a theatrical manager.”

Miss Stobhall said, “Oh!” reflectively. And then, “Was the great Bransdon with them?”

“No, the great Bransdon wasn’t with them,” Mr Parmont answered. “It was about half-past eleven at night. I think they must have been motoring down to Luscombe Green after the theatre because I heard that next morning she was teaching in the Communal school as usual.”

Miss Stobhall had become rather absent-minded.

“Well, there doesn’t seem to have been any harm in that,” she said.

“Wasn’t there,” Mr Parmont asked, “something between that girl and Hamnet Gubb?”

Miss Stobhall remained gazing into space. “Nothing at all,” she said. “It’s all gossip. I wish you’d deny it as widely as ever you can. What should there be?”

CHAPTER III

THE Communal School Buildings of the Luscombe Green Colony resembled in internal architecture exactly the Communal diningroom except that the great fire-place at the end was replaced by a small stage and the square fireplace in the centre was absent. Upon this stage the Colonists were in the habit of acting mystery plays written by Mr Bransdon and by other members of their own body. There also they were accustomed to hold their meetings to define the activities of the Simple Life Limited and to settle the articles of their belief. The
Simple Life Tracts
had of late grown fewer in number because Ophelia Bransdon had been too busy to give her entire time to the printing works. Indeed, “The Mare’s Tail,” The Monthly Organ of the Simple Life, was being printed in London by Messrs Bickers and Bickers. It had enlarged its scope and its size as well as its circulation, and it no longer limited itself to publishing the work of inhabitants of the Colony. It had, on the contrary, now established a section called “Outsiders’ Views by Sympathisers,” in which it published articles by such gentlemen as Canon Scott Holland on the Church and Social Movements, Mr G. — K. Chesterton on Authority and the Gentlemanly Habit, by Mr Edward Carpenter on Suitable Costumes, Mr Galsworthy on Menus of Modern Prisons, and Mr H. — G. Wells on the Economics of the Simple Life. Indeed, in one number there was printed a letter of congratulation and approval from Count Tolstoi himself. Moreover, the work of conducting this periodical having grown very considerable, a sub-editor from amongst the Colonists — a young Mr Brayle, lately come down from Oxford — was engaged at a weekly salary to assist Ophelia Bransdon. Ophelia Bransdon remained the Editress. Mr Gubb had tried to get Mr Brayle to do the work on the Communal system. He was, that is to say, to receive food tickets for the Communal dining-room. Mr Brayle, however, pointed out that he owed his Oxford tailor £137, and that his parents had absolutely cut off all his means of support upon his joining the Colony. He would have, moreover, to go up to London at least once a week in order to attend to the printing. Mr Gubb, therefore, allowed him a salary of 22s. 6d a week. This was 2s. 6d a week less than would be taken by any other Colonist and 7s. 6d less than any outsider could be found for.

This whole incident had been very much disliked by Mr Gubb. He said that it was re-introducing the commercial element into the Colony and that was what he was trying to stamp out. He had not as yet succeeded in making the Colony self-supporting. He was intending next year to take a farm from Mr Luscombe, and on this farm he intended to raise sufficient sheep to supply the Colonists with all the clothes they would need — though he regretted to see a tendency amongst the younger members to indulge in luxurious and machine-made clothes such as silks and alpacas. He admitted that for certain matters, such as business transactions with the outer world, a certain change of costume was necessary. Thus when he himself went up to London to negotiate with builders or with Civil Service Stores, he had been forced to buy and to wear a blue serge reefer suit after the model of that worn by Mr John Burns, white shirts, with turn-down collars and a scarlet tie. Mr Bransdon, too, owing to the fact that he considered — though in this Mr Gubb disagreed with him — he considered that a certain irritation of the skin of his chest from which he suffered was due to the wearing of the hand-woven woollen shirts — was driven up to Town one day in Mr Everard’s motor-car and measured by Mr Everard’s tailor for six silk shirts, six soft-fronted white ones, six of blue linen and no less than a dozen with the stiff fronts suitable for evening wear. It was discovered later that being at a tailor’s Mr Bransdon had been seduced by Mr Everard into purchasing no less than half a dozen quite conventional suits of various designs and textures. This was hardly believed by the Colony, where the news caused a singular perturbation, and it was officially denied by Mr Gubb. Nevertheless, the Guildford carrier was observed to stop one day before Mr Bransdon’s cottage and to deliver there no less than nine oblong packages, soft in appearance and enveloped in brown paper, neatly tied with string. Mr Gubb declared to everybody that he met, that this could be nothing but manuscript paper, for, according to him, Mr Bransdon being restored to vigorous health by the hygienic life of the Colony, the purity of the air and the removal from the clay soil — Mr Bransdon was once more setting out upon a literary work of considerable extent and undoubtedly of high moral purpose. Nevertheless, a week later a still larger number of packages were brought by the same carrier and almost at the same time, so that the road was blocked up by the two large vans. Messrs Crock of Tottenham Court Road delivered by motor -van a large, varnished and very solid mahogany tall-boy. This article of furniture, which could obviously be intended only to contain clothes, although it was divided into three pieces, could not by any possibility be made to go up the cottage stairs. It was therefore found necessary for the furniture man, assisted by the carrier and by Mr Brayle, who, as well as being sub-editor of “The Mare’s Tail,” had now become amanuensis to Mr Bransdon, it was found necessary to take out the windows of the first floor front bedroom and to hoist into it the article of furniture in detail. There could only be one opinion amongst the Colonists. Mr Bransdon had been rendered mad by his Fight.

For the great Bransdon had had a fight.

The unpopularity of the Colonists amongst the villagers of Luscombe Green had continued very steadily to increase. They could not so much as get any washing done for them. So that if he had had the time Mr Gubb would have started a Communal laundry. He discovered, however, a washing establishment in the neighbourhood of Salisbury where the actual work was done by re-claimed female convicts, and this being as near as that particular trade could come to the co-operative principle, thither once a week the washing of the Colony was sent.

Nor could the villagers be induced to attend to the Colony’s gardening, and the Colonists being nearly all Londoners, the gardens would have become bedraggled in appearance had not Mr Gubb made a contract with a firm of market gardeners not five miles away to keep their front plots spick and span. He was able to beat up a sufficient number of male and female Lifers to put in potatoes, to plant cabbages and to seed peas, beans and spinach.

The villagers refused to find bedrooms for any visitors that the Colonists might have at week-ends. Mr Gubb replied by having the Communal children’s dormitory divided up into cubicles where the visitors could sleep at night.

But the fact that the Colonists were not incommoded by this boycott roused amongst the villagers themselves a deeper and deeper dislike. From time to time the tyres of the motor-bus that carried the Lifers to the station in the mornings and hack in the evenings were maliciously punctured whilst it stood in the garage. And this caused the greatest inconvenience. The various improvements that Mr Gubb had effected had forced him to put up the Colonists’ rents. This fact he explained by setting it about that Mr Luscombe had not allowed him by any means the easy terms that he had been led to expect. Nay, more, he said, Mr Luscombe was pressing him for repayment of the loan that he had made towards the erection of the Communal Buildings. These facts Mr Gubb did not state at a Brotherhood Meeting. He only said at the particular one that was held to deal with the matter, that unforeseen circumstances having arisen, the rents would have to go up. Nay, more, the preceding summer having been lamentably dry, there had occurred entirely unforeseen failures in the crops of potatoes, turnips, nuts and fruits, the soil of Luscombe Green being so exceedingly light and sandy. And whereas it had been arranged that these crops as the Colonists raised them were to be supplied to the Colony as a co-operative body and were expected almost entirely to set off the cottage rents, at Michaelmas of the year before it had been found that no Colonist had any fruit or roots worth speaking of to dispose of. Thus the rents had had to be paid in specie. Living, too, was altogether more expensive than the original estimates had led them to believe, although Mr Gubb could not be called in the least to blame for this. But the economic pressure showed itself in the fact that of all the nineteen cottages and the twenty-four families that now found homes in Luscombe Green, only three, those of Mr Bransdon, Mr Gubb and Mr Tate, a retired tea-merchant who lived on ‘his means, did not have to find work of one kind or another, which took one or more of their members daily up to London. This taxed the capacity of the motor-bus more than it had allowed for. It was a small affair, constructed to carry eight with one on the seat beside the driver, and although at times they managed to make it carry as many as thirteen, there was always a certain number who had to cycle to the station. This matter was amicably arranged, the Colonists taking their turns. But it could not but be felt that it was in the nature of a come-down that the Colony should be forced to avail themselves of the assistance of instruments of locomotion so conventional. The motor-bus they had accepted much more readily because of its Communal nature. And owing to the daily absence of so many of its members the weaving and the applied industries of the Colony showed a distinct tendency to wane, though they always managed to have a yard or two of cloth for sale to any casual visitors at very fancy prices.

It was, however, the innkeeper who finally girded the villagers to an active sense of their wrongs and the innkeeper’s wrath was directed more particularly against Mr Bransdon. For it was not only the Colonists who kept a keen eye upon what went into the master’s establishment, and the innkeeper, a smart young man who had been trained in the Board Schools and had lately married a farrier’s daughter who played the piano — the innkeeper had observed that one day Mr Bransdon had received two cases of half a dozen bottles each of a special brand of whisky.

So it happened that upon Whit Monday, towards eight o’clock in the evening, when the darkness had not quite set in, three hobbledehoys and a lout of about twenty-four came out of “The Green Man.” They were just sufficiently primed with liquor, and their voices sounded raucous in the mists of the tranquil air. They were going to avenge their wrongs.

What exactly their wrongs were they found it hard to put into words. Their most general cry was that they were not going to be “trompled” upon by foreigners. It was not, that is to say, that they regarded even Mr Bransdon as being anything but British born: indeed, to Cyril Brandetski, who quite frequently got drunk with them in the bar parlour and who, on these occasions, was accustomed to sing them incomprehensible songs in a remarkably high falsetto voice with a trill like that of a canary’s, to Cyril Brandetski they showed a kindly and contemptuous tolerance. He was, they said, a sort of a “Rooshan,” a poor creature and harmless as anybody could see. But the Colonists were foreigners because they were not local men. And they were not the Quality, although in some way that they could not at all understand, Squire Luscombe had made himself responsible for them. No, they were not the Quality, and they did not come from that countryside, and yet they gave themselves all sorts of airs. Yet, properly speaking, they were homeless men. They had come there yesterday, where the villagers had been settled for hundreds of years. Who could tell that they would not be gone in a week’s time? And, just as you could heave half a brick at a foreigner because he would not have anybody to bother their heads about him or to avenge him, so they felt they could yell after and insult these poor creatures who had no roots at all in the soil. And they had yelled after the Colonists so often and so regularly and no punishment had come to them for it that they thought they could do exactly as they liked.

In Sir Bransdon’s living room Cyril Brandetski for perhaps the twenty-seventh time was informing Ophelia Bransdon that she was his little chicken, the light of his eyes and the image of the saint before which he said his prayers.

And with an exceeding calmness Ophelia Bransdon was sewing a hook on to the hack of a white muslin blouse. Having very severely slapped Mr Brandetski’s face on the first occasion when he had amorously declared his passion — having, indeed, cuffed him with so heavy and masculine a hand, though with quite good humour, that Mr Brandetski declared he had lost two teeth from each side of his jaw and had retired to weep in the haystack at the end of the row of cottages, Ophelia Bransdon treated her second cousin by adoption with just the air that she would have vouchsafed to an exceedingly tiny puppy, whining to be taken up into her lap.

Mr Brandetski spent very considerable portions of his afternoons in lying upon his bed and learning from the Russian dictionary the translation of various Slavonic terms of endearment into English. And when he could not arrive at any probable form of pronunciation for the words that he found there he would rush wildly from his cottage over the Green, carrying the dictionary open until he found any human being. To his or her eyes he would present the book, pointing a black finger nail at the word and exclaiming, “How you call that?”

This was a very still evening. Two candles burnt on the table, their flames ascending steady and motionless. Between them Ophelia leaned over her sewing. Cyril Brandetski balancing himself on one of the legs of one of the high-backed chairs was fingering a black wooden instrument of foreign construction. From overhead could be heard the creaking of the planks of the first floor bedroom. Mr Bransdon, about five minutes before, had retired for the night.