The Good Soldier (11 page)

What wasn't so well thought out were the ultimate
consequences—our being tied to Europe. For that young man rubbed it
so well into me that Florence would die if she crossed the
Channel—he impressed it so fully on my mind that, when later
Florence wanted to go to Fordingbridge, I cut the proposal
short—absolutely short, with a curt no. It fixed her and it
frightened her. I was even backed up by all the doctors. I seemed
to have had endless interviews with doctor after doctor, cool,
quiet men, who would ask, in reasonable tones, whether there was
any reason for our going to England—any special reason. And since I
could not see any special reason, they would give the verdict:
"Better not, then." I daresay they were honest enough, as things
go. They probably imagined that the mere associations of the
steamer might have effects on Florence's nerves. That would be
enough, that and a conscientious desire to keep our money on the
Continent.

It must have rattled poor Florence pretty considerably, for you
see, the main idea—the only main idea of her heart, that was
otherwise cold—was to get to Fordingbridge and be a county lady in
the home of her ancestors. But Jimmy got her, there: he shut on her
the door of the Channel; even on the fairest day of blue sky, with
the cliffs of England shining like mother of pearl in full view of
Calais, I would not have let her cross the steamer gangway to save
her life. I tell you it fixed her.

It fixed her beautifully, because she could not announce herself
as cured, since that would have put an end to the locked bedroom
arrangements. And, by the time she was sick of Jimmy—which happened
in the year 1903—she had taken on Edward Ashburnham. Yes, it was a
bad fix for her, because Edward could have taken her to
Fordingbridge, and, though he could not give her Branshaw Manor,
that home of her ancestors being settled on his wife, she could at
least have pretty considerably queened it there or thereabouts,
what with our money and the support of the Ashburnhams. Her uncle,
as soon as he considered that she had really settled down with
me—and I sent him only the most glowing accounts of her virtue and
constancy—made over to her a very considerable part of his fortune
for which he had no use. I suppose that we had, between us, fifteen
thousand a year in English money, though I never quite knew how
much of hers went to Jimmy. At any rate, we could have shone in
Fordingbridge. I never quite knew, either, how she and Edward got
rid of Jimmy. I fancy that fat and disreputable raven must have had
his six golden front teeth knocked down his throat by Edward one
morning whilst I had gone out to buy some flowers in the Rue de la
Paix, leaving Florence and the flat in charge of those two. And
serve him very right, is all that I can say. He was a bad sort of
blackmailer; I hope Florence does not have his company in the next
world.

As God is my Judge, I do not believe that I would have separated
those two if I had known that they really and passionately loved
each other. I do not know where the public morality of the case
comes in, and, of course, no man really knows what he would have
done in any given case. But I truly believe that I would have
united them, observing ways and means as decent as I could. I
believe that I should have given them money to live upon and that I
should have consoled myself somehow. At that date I might have
found some young thing, like Maisie Maidan, or the poor girl, and I
might have had some peace. For peace I never had with Florence, and
hardly believe that I cared for her in the way of love after a year
or two of it. She became for me a rare and fragile object,
something burdensome, but very frail. Why it was as if I had been
given a thin-shelled pullet's egg to carry on my palm from
Equatorial Africa to Hoboken. Yes, she became for me, as it were,
the subject of a bet—the trophy of an athlete's achievement, a
parsley crown that is the symbol of his chastity, his soberness,
his abstentions, and of his inflexible will. Of intrinsic value as
a wife, I think she had none at all for me. I fancy I was not even
proud of the way she dressed.

But her passion for Jimmy was not even a passion, and, mad as
the suggestion may appear, she was frightened for her life. Yes,
she was afraid of me. I will tell you how that happened. I had, in
the old days, a darky servant, called Julius, who valeted me, and
waited on me, and loved me, like the crown of his head. Now, when
we left Waterbury to go to the "Pocahontas", Florence entrusted to
me one very special and very precious leather grip. She told me
that her life might depend on that grip, which contained her drugs
against heart attacks. And, since I was never much of a hand at
carrying things, I entrusted this, in turn, to Julius, who was a
grey-haired chap of sixty or so, and very picturesque at that. He
made so much impression on Florence that she regarded him as a sort
of father, and absolutely refused to let me take him to Paris. He
would have inconvenienced her.

Well, Julius was so overcome with grief at being left behind
that he must needs go and drop the precious grip. I saw red, I saw
purple. I flew at Julius. On the ferry, it was, I filled up one of
his eyes; I threatened to strangle him. And, since an unresisting
negro can make a deplorable noise and a deplorable spectacle, and,
since that was Florence's first adventure in the married state, she
got a pretty idea of my character. It affirmed in her the desperate
resolve to conceal from me the fact that she was not what she would
have called "a pure woman". For that was really the mainspring of
her fantastic actions. She was afraid that I should murder
her....

So she got up the heart attack, at the earliest possible
opportunity, on board the liner. Perhaps she was not so very much
to be blamed. You must remember that she was a New Englander, and
that New England had not yet come to loathe darkies as it does now.
Whereas, if she had come from even so little south as Philadelphia,
and had been an oldish family, she would have seen that for me to
kick Julius was not so outrageous an act as for her cousin, Reggie
Hurlbird, to say—as I have heard him say to his English butler—that
for two cents he would bat him on the pants. Besides, the
medicine-grip did not bulk as largely in her eyes as it did in
mine, where it was the symbol of the existence of an adored wife of
a day. To her it was just a useful lie....

Well, there you have the position, as clear as I can make it—the
husband an ignorant fool, the wife a cold sensualist with imbecile
fears—for I was such a fool that I should never have known what she
was or was not—and the blackmailing lover. And then the other lover
came along....

Well, Edward Ashburnham was worth having. Have I conveyed to you
the splendid fellow that he was—the fine soldier, the excellent
landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious
magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking,
public character? I suppose I have not conveyed it to you. The
truth is, that I never knew it until the poor girl came along—the
poor girl who was just as straight, as splendid and as upright as
he. I swear she was. I suppose I ought to have known. I suppose
that was, really, why I liked him so much—so infinitely much. Come
to think of it, I can remember a thousand little acts of
kindliness, of thoughtfulness for his inferiors, even on the
Continent. Look here, I know of two families of dirty,
unpicturesque, Hessian paupers that that fellow, with an infinite
patience, rooted up, got their police reports, set on their feet,
or exported to my patient land. And he would do it quite
inarticulately, set in motion by seeing a child crying in the
street. He would wrestle with dictionaries, in that unfamiliar
tongue.... Well, he could not bear to see a child cry. Perhaps he
could not bear to see a woman and not give her the comfort of his
physical attractions. But, although I liked him so intensely, I was
rather apt to take these things for granted. They made me feel
comfortable with him, good towards him; they made me trust him. But
I guess I thought it was part of the character of any English
gentleman. Why, one day he got it into his head that the head
waiter at the Excelsior had been crying—the fellow with the grey
face and grey whiskers. And then he spent the best part of a week,
in correspondence and up at the British consul's, in getting the
fellow's wife to come back from London and bring back his girl
baby. She had bolted with a Swiss scullion. If she had not come
inside the week he would have gone to London himself to fetch her.
He was like that. Edward Ashburnham was like that, and I thought it
was only the duty of his rank and station. Perhaps that was all
that it was—but I pray God to make me discharge mine as well. And,
but for the poor girl, I daresay that I should never have seen it,
however much the feeling might have been over me. She had for him
such enthusiasm that, although even now I do not understand the
technicalities of English life, I can gather enough. She was with
them during the whole of our last stay at Nauheim.

Nancy Rufford was her name; she was Leonora's only friend's only
child, and Leonora was her guardian, if that is the correct term.
She had lived with the Ashburnhams ever since she had been of the
age of thirteen, when her mother was said to have committed suicide
owing to the brutalities of her father. Yes, it is a cheerful
story.... Edward always called her "the girl", and it was very
pretty, the evident affection he had for her and she for him. And
Leonora's feet she would have kissed—those two were for her the
best man and the best woman on earth—and in heaven. I think that
she had not a thought of evil in her head—the poor girl....

Well, anyhow, she chanted Edward's praises to me for the hour
together, but, as I have said, I could not make much of it. It
appeared that he had the D.S.O., and that his troop loved him
beyond the love of men. You never saw such a troop as his. And he
had the Royal Humane Society's medal with a clasp. That meant,
apparently, that he had twice jumped off the deck of a troopship to
rescue what the girl called "Tommies", who had fallen overboard in
the Red Sea and such places. He had been twice recommended for the
V.C., whatever that might mean, and, although owing to some
technicalities he had never received that apparently coveted order,
he had some special place about his sovereign at the coronation. Or
perhaps it was some post in the Beefeaters'. She made him out like
a cross between Lohengrin and the Chevalier Bayard. Perhaps he
was.... But he was too silent a fellow to make that side of him
really decorative. I remember going to him at about that time and
asking him what the D.S.O. was, and he grunted out:

"It's a sort of a thing they give grocers who've honourably
supplied the troops with adulterated coffee in war-time"—something
of that sort. He did not quite carry conviction to me, so, in the
end, I put it directly to Leonora. I asked her fully and
squarely—prefacing the question with some remarks, such as those
that I have already given you, as to the difficulty one has in
really getting to know people when one's intimacy is conducted as
an English acquaintanceship—I asked her whether her husband was not
really a splendid fellow—along at least the lines of his public
functions. She looked at me with a slightly awakened air—with an
air that would have been almost startled if Leonora could ever have
been startled.

"Didn't you know?" she asked. "If I come to think of it there is
not a more splendid fellow in any three counties, pick them where
you will—along those lines." And she added, after she had looked at
me reflectively for what seemed a long time:

"To do my husband justice there could not be a better man on the
earth. There would not be room for it—along those lines."

"Well," I said, "then he must really be Lohengrin and the Cid in
one body. For there are not any other lines that count."

Again she looked at me for a long time.

"It's your opinion that there are no other lines that count?"
she asked slowly.

"Well," I answered gaily, "you're not going to accuse him of not
being a good husband, or of not being a good guardian to your
ward?"

She spoke then, slowly, like a person who is listening to the
sounds in a sea-shell held to her ear—and, would you believe
it?—she told me afterwards that, at that speech of mine, for the
first time she had a vague inkling of the tragedy that was to
follow so soon—although the girl had lived with them for eight
years or so:

"Oh, I'm not thinking of saying that he is not the best of
husbands, or that he is not very fond of the girl."

And then I said something like:

"Well, Leonora, a man sees more of these things than even a
wife. And, let me tell you, that in all the years I've known Edward
he has never, in your absence, paid a moment's attention to any
other woman—not by the quivering of an eyelash. I should have
noticed. And he talks of you as if you were one of the angels of
God."

"Oh," she came up to the scratch, as you could be sure Leonora
would always come up to the scratch, "I am perfectly sure that he
always speaks nicely of me."

I daresay she had practice in that sort of scene—people must
have been always complimenting her on her husband's fidelity and
adoration. For half the world—the whole of the world that knew
Edward and Leonora believed that his conviction in the Kilsyte
affair had been a miscarriage of justice—a conspiracy of false
evidence, got together by Nonconformist adversaries. But think of
the fool that I was....

LET me think where we were. Oh, yes... that conversation took
place on the 4th of August, 1913. I remember saying to her that, on
that day, exactly nine years before, I had made their acquaintance,
so that it had seemed quite appropriate and like a birthday speech
to utter my little testimonial to my friend Edward. I could quite
confidently say that, though we four had been about together in all
sorts of places, for all that length of time, I had not, for my
part, one single complaint to make of either of them. And I added,
that that was an unusual record for people who had been so much
together. You are not to imagine that it was only at Nauheim that
we met. That would not have suited Florence.