Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (515 page)

Mr. Blood said, a little more genially:

“I’ll speak to you kindly to-night about the psychological aspect of it, but not till after you’ve spoken at this meeting. If I spoke to you kindly now you’d probably break down.”

Mr. Fleight said:

“Yes, yes, you’re very kind to take so much trouble over me. You’re perfectly right.”

He let himself down from the high chair and crawled miserably out of the room. He was all bent up like a bird whose spine has been injured, and they could see him through the open door scrambling miserably into his motor coat.

“Look here,” Mr. Blood said in a low voice to Augusta, “don’t let him talk about it till after the meeting. After it’s over, in the motor, you turn out the light and let him weep on your shoulder. Try to remember that you’re a woman and not the tin-god of a lot of ha’penny journalists. It’s the duty of a woman to console.”

“I don’t know,” Augusta said, “he’s such a little worm.”

“But remember that he’s a very miserable little worm,” Mr. Blood said.

“Oh, of course, I’ll do my best,” Augusta answered. “I should have done so anyhow.” And she went off after her mother and Mr. Fleight, who were already in the car.

In the dining-room amongst the chairs and port glasses that were still upon the long table Wilhelmina Macphail had sat down unobtrusively beside Mr. Reginald Blood. Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Macpherson and Mr. Raggett had gone off already to form part of the audience at Mr. Fleight’s meeting.

“I wish, Mr. Reginald,” Wilhelmina said, “that you could tell me what all this is about.”

“It’s the usual attempt,” Mr. Reginald said, “the usual attempt of the richer classes to get the poorer into their power by hook or by crook.”

“Oh, I’ve heard all that before,” Wilhelmina answered. “But I do wish you could explain.”

Mr. Reginald repeated:

“It’s the usual attempt — the attempt of the richer classes—”

“No, no,” Miss Macphail said, “you can’t tell me that that good, gentle, little Mr. Fleight wants to get anybody into his power.”

“He’s only the instrument,” Mr. Reginald said grimly. “I thought you could have explained it better than that,” Wilhelmina remarked with a sort of resignation. “You see my mother, she asks me so many questions. She comes straight from Germany, where things are quite different, and she hardly understands it at all. Of course, when I tell her that Mr. Fleight will get four hundred a year in Parliament she understands why Mr. Fleight himself is anxious to get in, because, of course, eight thousand marks seems a lot of money to a person from a small German village. But what she can’t understand is why we’re all helping him, and that’s what I can’t understand myself. Of course, I haven’t told her that he’s a Jew, because we think it a dreadful thing to be a Jew in Germany. And that makes it seem all the odder to me, too, so I thought you might be able to explain it for my sake if not for hers.”

Mr. Reginald looked at her with a kindly expression on his lean and grizzled face.

“My dear,” he said, “my dear Miss Wilhelmina, the explanation is just the same. This is the usual attempt of the richer classes to keep the poorer classes in their power. The appearance of the Jew in our society means that the Jew is an unrivalled soldier of fortune. He isn’t part of our country; he hasn’t got our morality, but he’s extraordinarily able as a ruler. So our side takes him up and uses him. It doesn’t matter to him which side he’s on, because he can’t begin to understand our problems or our ethics or our morality or our way of looking at things.”

“But I can’t help saying,” Miss Wilhelmina said, “that although Mr. Fleight is a Jew, it’s impossible to believe you when you say that he’s a wicked man. I don’t believe he’s capable of a mean action, and I don’t believe he ever did anything wrong in his life.”

Mr. Reginald suddenly quoted Flaubert at Miss Wilhelmina:

“‘And,’” he said, “‘since he was very strong, hardy, courageous and cunning in matters of war, he obtained very soon the command of a battalion.’”

Mr. Reginald nodded his head.

“It’s perfectly true,” he said, “I shouldn’t in the least wonder if he isn’t pretty soon leading us against the Sultan of Trebizond.”

“I don’t quite know what that means,” Miss Wilhelmina said, “but I expect it means pretty well the same as what I mean.”

CHAPTER VI
I

MR. MACPHERSON had really the time of his life at Mr. Fleight’s meeting. There is just no knowing — for he could never afterwards tell himself — how he got hold of the information about Mr. Fleight. It is probable that it came from the chauffeur, by whose side he sat to drive to the meeting. But it almost certainly began with the housemaid, for whom he had rung to tell her that, when she laid out his dress clothes, he liked to have a new tie and a clean shirt every evening. The girl must have given him some information, because the two policemen, drinking their beer in the servants’ hall, had talked about their errands. And Mr. Macpherson probably got exact news from the chauffeur who, as a scientist in machines, had a clear and definite mind. Thus, from group to well-dressed group in the County Hall, before the speaker’s arrival, Mr. Macpherson ran. It didn’t matter whether he knew them or whether he didn’t know them; his speech always began:

“I say, you know, Mr. Rothweil’s got into an extraordinary mess. Just listen to me—”

And, as Mr. Blood said afterwards, they couldn’t grumble about Cluny. They had introduced him into their affairs with their eyes open, that he might spread the news. And if the news that he had now to spread wasn’t exactly what suited them, that wasn’t Cluny’s fault.

Cluny himself wasn’t actuated by the least grain of malice. He didn’t see that the story, even if it were put at its most discreditable for Mr. Fleight, really discredited him. It was just a matter of latitudes. In the slightly imbecile but very rich circle to which, in London, Mr. Macpherson was accustomed, the story that a woman had committed suicide on account of one’s
beaux yeux
was a thing rather to make a hero of you. Life in those circles is a thing so dull and so dilettante that anything of a real nature, like a passion or a suicide, is a thing for which you should almost be congratulated in your private personality. As a public character you could almost be applauded because you gave people, whose sole interest was gossip, something real and vivid to talk about. That was why Cluny, with his endless digressions, was tolerated, welcomed, or even really beloved in innumerable drawing-rooms from Bayswater to Mayfair, and from Kensington to Mayfair again. For each of his digressions contained a story, and each story was a piece of gossip about someone known in those regions — a piece of gossip that you could repeat to eager ears. It was, however, a matter of latitude, and the Byefleet division in North Kent was geographically thirty miles to the east of Mayfair. You would have to put back the clock exactly a century to get at its public opinion. In that constituency, for instance, a married lady could not ask a young girl and her
fiancé
to spend a week-end together in her house. Bayswater would never even have heard of that convention.

The people amongst whom Mr. Macpherson found himself — the supporters of Mr. Rothweil’s candidacy — came from mouldy old houses, like Corbury — old houses in hollows, old houses on the tops of downs, old houses surrounded by woods, and old houses that had British remains still standing in their walled gardens. They saw a person whom they took to be a maniac — for Mr. Macpherson just spoke to them without any introduction, as he would have done at an evening party in Hans Place, S.W.

In what they designed as a final uprising against the forces which threatened to subvert the State, to deprive them of their diminished acres, to turn them out of their old houses, the County had had out its old carriages, had dressed its daughters in their finest finery of three years ago; it had beaten up its sons, and sent them into the meetings on bicycles. It had given its clergyman a seat in the carriage where he would be crushed between the forms of two daughters with his knees pressing hard into the knees of a third daughter, crushed between her father and mother. It had set its butlers on the box-seat beside the coachman, so that they, too, at the back of the hall, might give the champion an enthusiastic greeting.

And it was to the daughters mostly of these people that, without introductions, but in a very high voice, Mr. Macpherson addressed himself. He was very short-sighted and, as he had had the misfortune to drop his glasses into the fish stews at Corbury, he really couldn’t just tell what sort of people he was among. He saw only a great deal of pink and white material, and he couldn’t see that the dresses were three years old at the newest. But he knew that the audience was the smart audience of the place, and he addressed them in terms that would have suited the members of smart audiences in Hyde Park Square. He couldn’t even see the looks of disgust on people’s faces, nor did he observe that elderly and stout mothers gathered their long trains round them as if they feared to be defiled.

And, since Mr. Macpherson concluded each retailing of the argument with the words:

“I’m an intimate friend of Mr. Rothweil, though he called himself Fleight till the other day, which was a stupid thing to do. So you can take it that what I am telling you is the exact truth.” Since he concluded each narration of the anecdote with these words, he succeeded in making Mr. Rothweil fairly unanimously disliked by the women members of the great families of that neighbourhood. They were accustomed to carpet-baggers — indeed, mournfully, they would have acknowledged that of late years they had never been represented, on either side of the House, by anybody but a carpet-bagger because, with the exception of Mr. Blood, there was no local person rich enough to put up for the division. But a carpet-bagger so odious as Mr. Fleight appeared to be from his friend’s anecdote, and a friend so odious as Mr. Macpherson they had never had to face. In an assembly that would have been brilliant three years ago, the word passed from lip to lip that Mr. Rothweil was a little horror.

There was some, but very decorous applause when the Earl of Ballyowen appeared as usual on the platform, and Mr. Fleight and Miss and Frau Macphail might be said to be included in the skirts of it. And there was hardly any applause at all, but mere astonishment when the Earl of Ballyowen, at the end of a stumbling speech, announced that, not Mr. Rothweil but Miss Macphail would address some words to the meeting.

Mr. Fleight thought suddenly that he had never seen anyone so beautiful as Miss Macphail. She leant slightly forward in her large, blonde beauty, and she suggested to him Britannia, suggested to him a mythical figure, some Victory that the Greeks had carved and coloured for the prow of a war galley. And, in this sudden arising of admiration, he caught his breath sharp and painfully, since the whole of his being was already shaken with one painful emotion and another.

Miss Macphail, however, was dressed in the very newest dress that she had, a confection from the great Frankfurt House of Glogenau. It was made up of a smoke-grey satin so that it added to the enormousness of her figure. It was cut very tight in the lower part of the skirt and it had, which was the fashion of the moment, a little snaky tail by way of a train — a tail that the Earl of Ballyowen trod on when he walked behind her on to the platform. The whole of the corsage and the greater part of the skirt were covered with silver glass bugles alternating with hollow glass beads of the size of a pigeon’s egg, so that when the Earl trod upon the dress it gave out reports resembling loud explosions, and these continued when anyone else, walking across the platform, trod upon the fragments of glass and bugles that the Earl’s foot had detached from amongst the other ornaments. All this disgusted exceedingly the female part of the audience. And the female part of the audience made up at least two-thirds, half of the remainder being parsons. But what finally, as it slowly penetrated to their senses, filled them with absolute disgust was the fact that Augusta’s dress was split up from the ankle to about the knee, and that she wore stockings of smoked-grey silk. Such a thing had never been heard of.

She spoke in a loud voice and with great volubility. She claimed their indulgence for the gentleman whom they all hoped to see representing them in Parliament. She said — and at this a disagreeable shiver ran through the hall — that he had lately, that he had only that day, received news of a most painful kind happening in circumstances that were perfectly rotten.

At this point Mrs. Lathbury, of Holmhunt, arose with some rustling and with intent to leave the hall. Mrs. Lathbury was the leading member of the Church of England Temperance Society in that part of the world, and she was very Low Church in her sympathies, though actually she was somewhat stout. The clergyman who was sitting next to her begged her to resume her seat, for he knew that the stewards of the meeting had received private instructions from the agent to treat with great violence anyone who might be so much as mistaken for a suffragette.

The bereavement that Mr. Rothweil had suffered, Miss Macphail went on, was that of a humble and attached friend, and knowing as they did Mr. Rothweil’s interest in the lower classes, they would realise that the very humility of that friend would render the bereavement all the more painful.

It was unfortunate that Miss Macphail dwelt upon the words “bereavement” and “painful’ since in each instance she inverted the
b
and the
p.
It was unfortunate, also, that she pronounced the candidate’s name correctly after the German fashion, since throughout the constituency he was known as Roth-Wheel. A supporter of the Government who had introduced himself into the back of the hall commented frequently on these peculiarities, and, since his voice was loud and raucous, Augusta suddenly lost her temper. She proclaimed that she was no more German than her interrupter, since she came of excellent Scottish family. This tickled the nerves of the interrupter and he exclaimed:” Ah, yes, London Scottish.”

Augusta understood quite well that she was being called a Jewess, and this irritated her to a pitch of real rage, since nothing could have more revolted all that was German in her. She proclaimed loudly that what you call others you are yourself, and that her interrupter must be a dirty Chew.

It was in all respects a most unfortunate meeting.

When Augusta sat down one single and deadly hiss drilled through the rather coarse applause that her appearance elicited from the servants from the end of the hall. This came from Mrs. Lathbury of Holmhunt. But there were many hisses when Mr. Rothweil concluded his discourse.

Academically considered Mr. Rothweil’s speech was really excellent. Because he was in genuine tribulation, he imparted into it a note of the highest passion. And all his reading came to his aid. He spoke as the late Robert Louis Stevenson might have written, and his peroration, which was a peroration like those of the late W. E. Gladstone, contained some violent allusions to the vipers who were attempting to poison the life of their nation by spreading mephitic falsehoods against the private affairs of a person who, however humble, was attempting to arrest the nation in its disastrous plunge over the precipice of folly.

Unfortunately the audience was in no mood for that sort of thing. It felt, as far as the men were concerned, that the thing to do when you were in a scrape was, not to attempt to justify yourself, but to try to get your excellent family lawyer to buy you off. The women felt that it was disgusting to be in a scrape at all, but disgusting beyond belief to allude to it in any way. Thus when Mr. Rothweil sat down there was only Mr. Macpherson who applauded really rapturously. He considered the speech an extraordinarily fine performance, the sort of thing he would have wished to have done himself. Mr. Mitchell, who had recognised the influence of the late R L. Stevenson and the late W. E. Gladstone, applauded only in an official manner. He despised the one and cordially disliked the other ornament of the Victorian age. Mr. Raggett, the sub-editor, followed the example of his chief. Miss Macphail applauded volubly from the platform, and her mother, nodding her portentous bonnet, followed her example. The Earl clapped together his hands, which were held high in the air as if for a signal to the better classes. His example was followed by almost no one in the body of the hall. And, although the lower classes at the back cheered rapturously a free fight broke out amongst those benches and the Earl, in the tumult, was unable to put the usual vote of thanks. His voice could not be heard.

In the journey back to Corbury, in Mr. Fleight’s large, illuminated car, a remarkable
rapprochement
took place between Mr. Fleight and Miss Macphail. Miss Macphail was still in a tremendous rage at having been called a Jewess. She reported the repulsive occurrence to her mother, who broke out into torrents of horror. Frau Macphail, indeed, went through the motions of wiping out her mouth, so disgusting did she find the attribution of her daughter to that dispersed but triumphant race. And it fell to Mr. Fleight to console Augusta. He saw that he could quite understand how trying it must be for a person half Scotch, half German, to get called a Jew in public. It was never nice to be called a Jew; he himself never liked it, although he was proud enough of his ancestry.

On the other hand, Mr. Macpherson said he couldn’t understand what Augusta’s fuss was all about. He, Cluny himself, was an Armenian with a Scotch name; his mother was also a Circassian, and many people considered him to be a Jew. But what did it matter? He didn’t care. The Jews were a hardy, courageous and honourable race. He couldn’t see why Augusta, who was, anyhow, by birth some sort of a foreigner, should object to promotion into a race with traditions so honourable. He tried to remind Augusta that, at any rate, the Jews had written the Bible, and he stated that he had known a man called Shimono Boski, who considered that his name was the most euphonious in the world. And, anyhow, the meeting had been a most tremendous success. That was why he had come in the car with them to congratulate Mr. Fleight upon his speech. He flattered himself that he had prepared the meeting to hear Mr. Fleight favourably, because he had told almost everybody in the hall all about the unfortunate things that had happened to Mr. Fleight himself.