The Good Soldier (15 page)

"Oh, well, the girls of the Holy Child have always been noted
for their truthfulness. It's a beastly bore, but I've got to do
it."

I dare say that the miserable nature of her childhood, coming
before the mixture of saturnalia and discipline that was her
convent life, added something to her queernesses. Her father was a
violent madman of a fellow, a major of one of what I believe are
called the Highland regiments. He didn't drink, but he had an
ungovernable temper, and the first thing that Nancy could remember
was seeing her father strike her mother with his clenched fist so
that her mother fell over sideways from the breakfast-table and lay
motionless. The mother was no doubt an irritating woman and the
privates of that regiment appeared to have been irritating, too, so
that the house was a place of outcries and perpetual disturbances.
Mrs Rufford was Leonora's dearest friend and Leonora could be
cutting enough at times. But I fancy she was as nothing to Mrs
Rufford. The Major would come in to lunch harassed and already
spitting out oaths after an unsatisfactory morning's drilling of
his stubborn men beneath a hot sun. And then Mrs Rufford would make
some cutting remark and pandemonium would break loose. Once, when
she had been about twelve, Nancy had tried to intervene between the
pair of them. Her father had struck her full upon the forehead a
blow so terrible that she had lain unconscious for three days.
Nevertheless, Nancy seemed to prefer her father to her mother. She
remembered rough kindnesses from him. Once or twice when she had
been quite small he had dressed her in a clumsy, impatient, but
very tender way. It was nearly always impossible to get a servant
to stay in the family and, for days at a time, apparently, Mrs
Rufford would be incapable. I fancy she drank. At any rate, she had
so cutting a tongue that even Nancy was afraid of her—she so made
fun of any tenderness, she so sneered at all emotional displays.
Nancy must have been a very emotional child.

Then one day, quite suddenly, on her return from a ride at Fort
William, Nancy had been sent, with her governess, who had a white
face, right down South to that convent school. She had been
expecting to go there in two months' time. Her mother disappeared
from her life at that time. A fortnight later Leonora came to the
convent and told her that her mother was dead. Perhaps she was. At
any rate, I never heard until the very end what became of Mrs
Rufford. Leonora never spoke of her.

And then Major Rufford went to India, from which he returned
very seldom and only for very short visits; and Nancy lived herself
gradually into the life at Branshaw Teleragh. I think that, from
that time onwards, she led a very happy life, till the end. There
were dogs and horses and old servants and the Forest. And there
were Edward and Leonora, who loved her.

I had known her all the time—I mean, that she always came to the
Ashburnhams' at Nauheim for the last fortnight of their stay—and I
watched her gradually growing. She was very cheerful with me. She
always even kissed me, night and morning, until she was about
eighteen. And she would skip about and fetch me things and laugh at
my tales of life in Philadelphia. But, beneath her gaiety, I fancy
that there lurked some terrors. I remember one day, when she was
just eighteen, during one of her father's rare visits to Europe, we
were sitting in the gardens, near the iron-stained fountain.
Leonora had one of her headaches and we were waiting for Florence
and Edward to come from their baths. You have no idea how beautiful
Nancy looked that morning.

We were talking about the desirability of taking tickets in
lotteries—of the moral side of it, I mean. She was all in white,
and so tall and fragile; and she had only just put her hair up, so
that the carriage of her neck had that charming touch of youth and
of unfamiliarity. Over her throat there played the reflection from
a little pool of water, left by a thunderstorm of the night before,
and all the rest of her features were in the diffused and luminous
shade of her white parasol. Her dark hair just showed beneath her
broad, white hat of pierced, chip straw; her throat was very long
and leaned forward, and her eyebrows, arching a little as she
laughed at some old-fashionedness in my phraseology, had abandoned
their tense line. And there was a little colour in her cheeks and
light in her deep blue eyes. And to think that that vivid white
thing, that saintly and swanlike being—to think that... Why, she
was like the sail of a ship, so white and so definite in her
movements. And to think that she will never... Why, she will never
do anything again. I can't believe it...

Anyhow, we were chattering away about the morality of lotteries.
And then, suddenly, there came from the arcades behind us the
overtones of her father's unmistakable voice; it was as if a
modified foghorn had boomed with a reed inside it. I looked round
to catch sight of him. A tall, fair, stiffly upright man of fifty,
he was walking away with an Italian baron who had had much to do
with the Belgian Congo. They must have been talking about the
proper treatment of natives, for I heard him say:

"Oh, hang humanity!"

When I looked again at Nancy her eyes were closed and her face
was more pallid than her dress, which had at least some pinkish
reflections from the gravel. It was dreadful to see her with her
eyes closed like that.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and her hand that had appeared to be
groping, settled for a moment on my arm. "Never speak of it.
Promise never to tell my father of it. It brings back those
dreadful dreams..." And, when she opened her eyes she looked
straight into mine. "The blessed saints," she said, "you would
think they would spare you such things. I don't believe all the
sinning in the world could make one deserve them."

They say the poor thing was always allowed a light at night,
even in her bedroom.... And yet, no young girl could more archly
and lovingly have played with an adored father. She was always
holding him by both coat lapels; cross-questioning him as to how he
spent his time; kissing the top of his head. Ah, she was well-bred,
if ever anyone was.

The poor, wretched man cringed before her—but she could not have
done more to put him at his ease. Perhaps she had had lessons in it
at her convent. It was only that peculiar note of his voice, used
when he was overbearing or dogmatic, that could unman her—and that
was only visible when it came unexpectedly. That was because the
bad dreams that the blessed saints allowed her to have for her sins
always seemed to her to herald themselves by the booming sound of
her father's voice. It was that sound that had always preceded his
entrance for the terrible lunches of her childhood... .

I have reported, earlier in this chapter, that Leonora said,
during that remainder of their stay at Nauheim, after I had left,
it had seemed to her that she was fighting a long duel with unseen
weapons against silent adversaries. Nancy, as I have also said, was
always trying to go off with Edward alone. That had been her habit
for years. And Leonora found it to be her duty to stop that. It was
very difficult. Nancy was used to having her own way, and for years
she had been used to going off with Edward, ratting, rabbiting,
catching salmon down at Fordingbridge, district-visiting of the
sort that Edward indulged in, or calling on the tenants. And at
Nauheim she and Edward had always gone up to the Casino alone in
the evenings—at any rate, whenever Florence did not call for his
attendance. It shows the obviously innocent nature of the regard of
those two that even Florence had never had any idea of jealousy.
Leonora had cultivated the habit of going to bed at ten
o'clock.

I don't know how she managed it, but, for all the time they were
at Nauheim, she contrived never to let those two be alone together,
except in broad daylight, in very crowded places. If a Protestant
had done that it would no doubt have awakened a self-consciousness
in the girl. But Catholics, who have always reservations and queer
spots of secrecy, can manage these things better. And I dare say
that two things made this easier—the death of Florence and the fact
that Edward was obviously sickening. He appeared, indeed, to be
very ill; his shoulders began to be bowed; there were pockets under
his eyes; he had extraordinary moments of inattention.

And Leonora describes herself as watching him as a fierce cat
watches an unconscious pigeon in a roadway. In that silent
watching, again, I think she was a Catholic—of a people that can
think thoughts alien to ours and keep them to themselves. And the
thoughts passed through her mind; some of them even got through to
Edward with never a word spoken. At first she thought that it might
be remorse, or grief, for the death of Florence that was oppressing
him. But she watched and watched, and uttered apparently random
sentences about Florence before the girl, and she perceived that he
had no grief and no remorse. He had not any idea that Florence
could have committed suicide without writing at least a tirade to
him. The absence of that made him certain that it had been heart
disease. For Florence had never undeceived him on that point. She
thought it made her seem more romantic.

No, Edward had no remorse. He was able to say to himself that he
had treated Florence with gallant attentiveness of the kind that
she desired until two hours before her death. Leonora gathered that
from the look in his eyes, and from the way he straightened his
shoulders over her as she lay in her coffin—from that and a
thousand other little things. She would speak suddenly about
Florence to the girl and he would not start in the least; he would
not even pay attention, but would sit with bloodshot eyes gazing at
the tablecloth. He drank a good deal, at that time—a steady soaking
of drink every evening till long after they had gone to bed.

For Leonora made the girl go to bed at ten, unreasonable though
that seemed to Nancy. She would understand that, whilst they were
in a sort of half mourning for Florence, she ought not to be seen
at public places, like the Casino; but she could not see why she
should not accompany her uncle upon his evening strolls though the
park. I don't know what Leonora put up as an excuse—something, I
fancy, in the nature of a nightly orison that she made the girl and
herself perform for the soul of Florence. And then, one evening,
about a fortnight later, when the girl, growing restive at even
devotional exercises, clamoured once more to be allowed to go for a
walk with Edward, and when Leonora was really at her wits' end,
Edward gave himself into her hands. He was just standing up from
dinner and had his face averted.

But he turned his heavy head and his bloodshot eyes upon his
wife and looked full at her.

"Doctor von Hauptmann," he said, "has ordered me to go to bed
immediately after dinner. My heart's much worse."

He continued to look at Leonora for a long minute—with a sort of
heavy contempt. And Leonora understood that, with his speech, he
was giving her the excuse that she needed for separating him from
the girl, and with his eyes he was reproaching her for thinking
that he would try to corrupt Nancy.

He went silently up to his room and sat there for a long
time—until the girl was well in bed—reading in the Anglican
prayer-book. And about half-past ten she heard his footsteps pass
her door, going outwards. Two and a half hours later they came
back, stumbling heavily.

She remained, reflecting upon this position until the last night
of their stay at Nauheim. Then she suddenly acted. For, just in the
same way, suddenly after dinner, she looked at him and said:

"Teddy, don't you think you could take a night off from your
doctor's orders and go with Nancy to the Casino. The poor child has
had her visit so spoiled."

He looked at her in turn for a long, balancing minute.

"Why, yes," he said at last.

Nancy jumped out of her chair and kissed him. Those two words,
Leonora said, gave her the greatest relief of any two syllables she
had ever heard in her life. For she realized that Edward was
breaking up, not under the desire for possession, but from the
dogged determination to hold his hand. She could relax some of her
vigilance.

Nevertheless, she sat in the darkness behind her half-closed
jalousies, looking over the street and the night and the trees
until, very late, she could hear Nancy's clear voice coming closer
and saying:

"You did look an old guy with that false nose." There had been
some sort of celebration of a local holiday up in the Kursaal. And
Edward replied with his sort of sulky good nature:

"As for you, you looked like old Mother Sideacher."

The girl came swinging along, a silhouette beneath a gas-lamp;
Edward, another, slouched at her side. They were talking just as
they had talked any time since the girl had been seventeen; with
the same tones, the same joke about an old beggar woman who always
amused them at Branshaw. The girl, a little later, opened Leonora's
door whilst she was still kissing Edward on the forehead as she had
done every night.

"We've had a most glorious time," she said. "He's ever so much
better. He raced me for twenty yards home. Why are you all in the
dark?"

Leonora could hear Edward going about in his room, but, owing to
the girl's chatter, she could not tell whether he went out again or
not. And then, very much later, because she thought that if he were
drinking again something must be done to stop it, she opened for
the first time, and very softly, the never-opened door between
their rooms. She wanted to see if he had gone out again. Edward was
kneeling beside his bed with his head hidden in the counterpane.
His arms, outstretched, held out before him a little image of the
Blessed Virgin—a tawdry, scarlet and Prussian blue affair that the
girl had given him on her first return from the convent. His
shoulders heaved convulsively three times, and heavy sobs came from
him before she could close the door. He was not a Catholic; but
that was the way it took him.