Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (495 page)

MR. FLEIGHT

“In no faltering tones the candidate proclaimed the virtues of the constitution of our country, the twin pillars of its shining façade being the unspotted purity of the British Parliamentary machine, and the inviolability of the British hearth.”

Herefordshire Weekly Chronicle.

“Stat insignissimum templum.... accedente consensu cleri et populi tanquam eis fuisset a Domino inspiratum.”

Chronicle of Amiens.

TO THAT UNSURPASSED WRITER OF ENGLISH,

UNVEILER OF MOGREB EL ACKSA AND

CHRONICLER OF THE CONQUISTADORES

R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

OF RIGHT KING OF SCOTLAND, KNOWN TO THIS DULLY REVOLVING WORLD AS A REVOLUTIONIST

AND IN ALL REALMS OF ADVENTURE

MOST CHIVALROUS

PART I

CHAPTER
I

A LITTLE, dark man approached Mr. Blood, who sat in a deep armchair of the What Not Club. Mr. Blood, a heavy, grey man of ferocious aspect, was surveying the Thames, the Club occupying ground floor rooms of the great pile of buildings called Whitehall Court.

It was not a good club; its membership conveyed no social prestige. Mr. Blood took no active part in the affairs of the world. That he was a nonsensical Radical amused his friends, since he was a large landowner; that he had a violent character gave him a certain distinctness. He was said to have strangled a groom at Newport, Rhode Island, where, presumably, grooms are cheap.

The little dark man was known to the waiters as Mr. Fleight, but none of the members knew him. He had sat for half an hour gazing at Mr. Blood; Mr. Blood had gazed at the Embankment. There had been no other soul in the room, for it was Derby Day. And then Mr. Fleight, as the clock finished striking four, jumped up and went with a hurried determination towards Mr. Blood.

“My name” — he really shivered the words out—”is Fleight — Aaron Rothwell Fleight — and I want to do something.”

Mr. Blood exclaimed:

“Good God!” in tones of such disgust that he appeared on the point of being sick.

“I’ve known you — I’ve known of you — for years,” Mr. Fleight stammered; “ever since I was at Oxford. My tutor was old Plodge. He had been yours, too. He always spoke of you as the strongest irregular intellect of his day. I’ve followed your — your career. No, it’s not a career. But if you’ll let me... Half an hour.”

Mr. Blood kept his gaze fixed on the Embankment and exclaimed further, but with abstraction:

“Ninety-six: three hundred and eight.”

“It doesn’t prove anything,” Mr. Fleight said desperately.

“Who the devil said it did?” Mr. Blood ejaculated. “What’s it got to do with you? What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been counting the motors against the horse traffic,” Mr. Fleight said. “In the last half hour you have counted those numbers. But it does not prove anything because this is Derby Day, and the traffic is out of the normal.”

“Aaron Roth well Fleight!” Mr. Blood speculated as disagreeably as he could. “What sort of a name is that for a human being? Half Scotch, half Hebrew! That’s what it is.”

“I’m not saying that it’s anything else,” Mr. Fleight conceded humbly.

“And with that record you come to me?” Mr. Blood cried out. “To me!”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t.” Mr. Fleight advanced more boldly.

“You don’t!” Mr. Blood whispered in a tone almost of awe. “Have you any idea why I come to this unspeakable club and risk getting spoken to by its unspeakable members?”

“To count the traffic on Derby Day,” Mr. Fleight said. “I don’t know any other reason. You have been here on Derby Day for the last three years. I suppose it’s a hobby, and you come on Derby Day because racing rather bores you, but the Club is empty. I don’t suppose there is any other reason.”

Mr. Blood looked round on Mr. Fleight with the air of, for the first time, almost acknowledging that he existed.

“You’re not such an abject ass,” he conceded unwillingly.

“I never said I was,” Mr. Fleight said. “I only want to complain that I am nobody. Nobody! The unknown member of a rotten club, although I’ve got pots of money. Enormous pots of money. All the money of Aaron Rothweil, the soap man. And Palatial Hall, at Hampstead. And all his factories and works. Everything. So it does not seem
right
that I should be nobody. Society being what it is, I feel that I ought to be Prime Minister, or a Privy Councillor at least.”

Mr. Blood exclaimed:

“By Jove, you are right!” He looked at Mr. Fleight appraisingly. “You want me to help you. Why?”

“You see,” Mr. Fleight opened his story, and he ventured to sit down, not in the chair opposite Mr. Blood, but on its arm, “I was going mad. No, not mad — on the point of screaming hysteria.”

“That’s good,” Mr. Blood said; “good for a fellow who aspires to my friendship.”

“Oh, not your friendship,” Mr. Fleight answered. “The most I dare to want is to be your instrument — your flail.”

“Eh!” Mr. Blood ejaculated.

“I know that’s too active a simile,” Mr. Fleight said, “but I can’t think of anything better for the moment. I know you’re too lazy even to mock at Society, let alone to hit it or destroy it. But say I’m the fox with the tail on fire that you could set going into the com. If you heartened up a chap like me to becoming a duke and hereditary standard-bearer — and Heaven knows I’m rich enough — you’d laugh. It would be just as funny as watching the cabs on the Embankment.”

“You’re deucedly familiar,” Mr. Blood grumbled.

“I am,” Mr. Fleight said; “and I’m talking some nonsense. But it’s my only chance, and I seem to know you. I seem to know you so well. I met you when you came down to Oxford in’94 to stay with old Plodge. I heard you talking for three whole nights, for three solid hours each. Old Plodge had me in — with an object. I’m not setting up to claim acquaintance with you on that account — only knowledge. I don’t mind saying I’ve followed you about since then. I joined this club when I saw you were a member. I’ve joined every club you belonged to that I could get into. Why, I heard you lecturing the King!”

“The who?” Mr. Blood asked.

“The King,” Mr. Fleight repeated. “The late King. Two years ago — at Goodwood, in the Royal Enclosure. I got there by giving five hundred to Colonel Murchison. And the King was yawning fit to die, watching the horses come in. And he said: ‘Good Lord, what a bore all this racing is!’ And you let loose on him, and he chuckled.”

“He did, did he?” Mr. Blood asked. “And you, you dirty little Jew, you were eavesdropping?”

“I was just that,” Mr. Fleight said firmly. “I don’t eat humble pie for it. It was what I had paid my money for. Time and again I’ve sat at the Royal Sports Club in an armchair with its back to yours, listening to you ragging the fools there. What do you suppose I paid my subscription there for? I hate sport. I hate racing, so what did I pay five hundred to go to Goodwood for? There were the two most distinguished persons, for me, in the whole world. And one of them was shouting a whole lot of interesting stuff at the top of his voice, and the other was chuckling as a king chuckles at a court jester. Was I to stick my fingers in my ears?”

“A true gentleman would have walked away,” Mr. Blood said ironically.

“What price my five hundred then?” Mr. Fleight asked. “You chaps — true gentlemen, as you just sneered — ought to protect yourselves better. You ought not to let little Jews like me buy our way into your swellest clubs.

“That’s true, too,” Mr. Blood conceded peaceably. He sat reflecting for a moment. “Look here, Aaron,” he produced the fruits of his cogitations, “you drop your Scotch name and call yourself not Rothwell but Rothweil — Aaron Rothweil — and hang me if I don’t take you home to tea with me so as to hear the rest of your interesting recital! I want to know about you. I want to know all about you. I always want to know everything, you know. I shouldn’t like to introduce you to anyone that dropped in as Fleight, when your nose says Rothweil.” He added, after a moment, with an air of making a concession that decency called for in him:

“And if I find, after consideration, that you are not a horrid little bore, or a thief, or anything — one can never know with these informal introductions — I shan’t give you the cold shoulder later on. I don’t mean that I shall ask you down to Corbury, but I shouldn’t refuse to chat with you if I met you in Pall Mall. I can’t say more than that, but I’ll go so far in return for your giving yourself the trouble to walk round to my rooms. Some of the members will be coming back here, and I can’t stand the look of them. They make me feel as if I were here for an improper purpose.”

“But look here,” Mr. Fleight said, “I don’t want to waste your time. Either I’m some good or I’m none. About my antecedents.”

Mr. Blood said: “Well?”

“This is me,” Mr. Fleight continued: “I was born in Pont Street, Glasgow, behind the Union Music Hall. I was brought up by a bricklayer’s wife in a place called Pluckley. I was sent to the Pluckley National School till I was twelve. Then I was sent to Bludger’s — taken away by I didn’t know who. Then I went to St. Paul’s for one term. Then I was sent to Harrow. You will observe that the person looking after me was evidently going up in the world. Then I went to Brasenose.”

Mr. Blood said:

“The devil you did!” And then: “Oh, yes, I remember, you told me. You were under my old tutor — the great Plodge.”

“Yes,” Mr. Fleight continued; “that was where I learned that you were the greatest intellect of the day. Old Plodge used to talk of you. He took me up no end — that was why he had me in to hear you talk, three nights running. He said you sounded the note of the modem world — which was not so bad for old Plodge! He used to say to me: ‘Moses, though you’re what you are, I’ll make you a shining light of the New Jerusalem that this mighty Empire is. You shall be what Blood ought to have been, if he wasn’t lazier than a buffalo and prouder than a hog.’ You were up ten years before me, of course.”

“Yes,” Mr. Blood said reflectively, “I suppose I was poor old Plodge’s pet tragedy. It makes it a sort of duty in me to give you a lift, if I’m worth anything to you — nearly broke the poor old man’s heart, I did. I guess I was the only one of his hot-house blooms that did not die at least Pro-Consul. Go on with your biography.”

“I took everything that any one chap could take,” Mr. Fleight said, and he added modestly: “With old Plodge shoving me it wasn’t any great miracle.”

“I observe,” Mr. Blood said, “that you spare me the list of your academic distinctions.”

“What use are they to me?” Mr. Fleight retorted. “I’m a millionaire. But I ate my dinners at the Middle Temple.”

“By Jove!” Mr. Blood exclaimed. He reflected, and then he added slowly: “If you come to think of it, you have every qualification for real greatness. A Scotsman, a Jew, a barrister. You know you are really Leader of the House of Commons by your triple birthright. And rich, too! And you recommend yourself to me for help, as being a hot-house shoot of poor old Plodge! Of course, I owe his unhappy ghost the reparation of helping you to do what I didn’t care to do myself. Let’s talk about your making a career. Good heavens! Undoubtedly you are cut out to be the saviour of these realms in the troublous times through which we are passing.”

“I think I really ought to be cut out for it,” Mr. Fleight said, with great modesty in his manner.

A shabby man — it was really the clockwinder — peered in at the door, and Mr. Blood ejaculated in tones of panic:

“Here’s one of the members. I can’t stand this. Come along.” They hurried out of the building and into Mr. Fleight’s motor, which was one of the largest in this country.

Mr. Blood was a singular and mysterious person to such of his world as had observed his existence. A hundred years ago he would have represented the Englishman and the gentleman. Then, the business of the world being the struggle with Napoleon, all the legions of Europe were being conducted across the campaign grounds of a continent — but exclusively by younger sons. At home in England the real Squires in their scarlet coats were tranquilly jumping over hedges in pursuit of the fox. In that age Mr. Blood would have been the commonest thing of his class and station. He would have been a “character” when all the population were characters; he would not have cared a halfpenny whether the nation was going to ruin, just as to-day he cared even less. This seemed amazing to his contemporaries.

He was, in fact, just an anachronism, and an inactive one at that. He hunted the fox, but he seldom troubled to try to be in at the death; he was very wealthy, but he made not the least use of his wealth. He did not marry; he did not sit in Parliament. He hardly entertained at all His racing stable was so small as to be almost immaterial; his yellow and green colours were practically never seen in anything better than a small selling sweepstake. His house at Corbury, in North Kent, was big, stood in a huge park, and was moderately well appointed, but he very seldom lived in it. He gave it over to his brother Reginald, for it was part of his oddity that he should have a brother three-quarters of an hour younger than himself.