The Good Soldier (16 page)

Leonora slept for the first time that night with a sleep from
which she never once started.

AND then Leonora completely broke down—on the day that they
returned to Branshaw Teleragh. It is the infliction of our
miserable minds—it is the scourge of atrocious but probably just
destiny that no grief comes by itself. No, any great grief, though
the grief itself may have gone, leaves in its place a train of
horrors, of misery, and despair. For Leonora was, in herself,
relieved. She felt that she could trust Edward with the girl and
she knew that Nancy could be absolutely trusted. And then, with the
slackening of her vigilance, came the slackening of her entire
mind. This is perhaps the most miserable part of the entire story.
For it is miserable to see a clean intelligence waver; and Leonora
wavered.

You are to understand that Leonora loved Edward with a passion
that was yet like an agony of hatred. And she had lived with him
for years and years without addressing to him one word of
tenderness. I don't know how she could do it. At the beginning of
that relationship she had been just married off to him. She had
been one of seven daughters in a bare, untidy Irish manor-house to
which she had returned from the convent I have so often spoken of.
She had left it just a year and she was just nineteen. It is
impossible to imagine such inexperience as was hers. You might
almost say that she had never spoken to a man except a priest.
Coming straight from the convent, she had gone in behind the high
walls of the manor-house that was almost more cloistral than any
convent could have been. There were the seven girls, there was the
strained mother, there was the worried father at whom, three times
in the course of that year, the tenants took pot-shots from behind
a hedge. The women-folk, upon the whole, the tenants respected.
Once a week each of the girls, since there were seven of them, took
a drive with the mother in the old basketwork chaise drawn by a
very fat, very lumbering pony. They paid occasionally a call, but
even these were so rare that, Leonora has assured me, only three
times in the year that succeeded her coming home from the convent
did she enter another person's house. For the rest of the time the
seven sisters ran about in the neglected gardens between the
unpruned espaliers. Or they played lawn-tennis or fives in an angle
of a great wall that surrounded the garden—an angle from which the
fruit trees had long died away. They painted in water-colour; they
embroidered; they copied verses into albums. Once a week they went
to Mass; once a week to the confessional, accompanied by an old
nurse. They were happy since they had known no other life.

It appeared to them a singular extravagance when, one day, a
photographer was brought over from the county town and photographed
them standing, all seven, in the shadow of an old apple tree with
the grey lichen on the raddled trunk. But it wasn't an
extravagance.

Three weeks before Colonel Powys had written to Colonel
Ashburnham:

"I say, Harry, couldn't your Edward marry one of my girls? It
would be a god-send to me, for I'm at the end of my tether and,
once one girl begins to go off, the rest of them will follow." He
went on to say that all his daughters were tall, upstanding,
clean-limbed and absolutely pure, and he reminded Colonel
Ashburnham that, they having been married on the same day, though
in different churches, since the one was a Catholic and the other
an Anglican—they had said to each other, the night before, that,
when the time came, one of their sons should marry one of their
daughters. Mrs Ashburnham had been a Powys and remained Mrs Powys'
dearest friend. They had drifted about the world as English
soldiers do, seldom meeting, but their women always in
correspondence one with another. They wrote about minute things
such as the teething of Edward and of the earlier daughters or the
best way to repair a Jacob's ladder in a stocking. And, if they met
seldom, yet it was often enough to keep each other's personalities
fresh in their minds, gradually growing a little stiff in the
joints, but always with enough to talk about and with a store of
reminiscences. Then, as his girls began to come of age when they
must leave the convent in which they were regularly interned during
his years of active service, Colonel Powys retired from the army
with the necessity of making a home for them. It happened that the
Ashburnhams had never seen any of the Powys girls, though, whenever
the four parents met in London, Edward Ashburnham was always of the
party. He was at that time twenty-two and, I believe, almost as
pure in mind as Leonora herself. It is odd how a boy can have his
virgin intelligence untouched in this world.

That was partly due to the careful handling of his mother,
partly to the fact that the house to which he went at Winchester
had a particularly pure tone and partly to Edward's own peculiar
aversion from anything like coarse language or gross stories. At
Sandhurst he had just kept out of the way of that sort of thing. He
was keen on soldiering, keen on mathematics, on land-surveying, on
politics and, by a queer warp of his mind, on literature. Even when
he was twenty-two he would pass hours reading one of Scott's novels
or the Chronicles of Froissart. Mrs Ashburnham considered that she
was to be congratulated, and almost every week she wrote to Mrs
Powys, dilating upon her satisfaction.

Then, one day, taking a walk down Bond Street with her son,
after having been at Lord's, she noticed Edward suddenly turn his
head round to take a second look at a well-dressed girl who had
passed them. She wrote about that, too, to Mrs Powys, and expressed
some alarm. It had been, on Edward's part, the merest reflex
action. He was so very abstracted at that time owing to the
pressure his crammer was putting upon him that he certainly hadn't
known what he was doing.

It was this letter of Mrs Ashburnham's to Mrs Powys that had
caused the letter from Colonel Powys to Colonel Ashburnham—a letter
that was half-humorous, half longing. Mrs Ashburnham caused her
husband to reply, with a letter a little more jocular—something to
the effect that Colonel Powys ought to give them some idea of the
goods that he was marketing. That was the cause of the photograph.
I have seen it, the seven girls, all in white dresses, all very
much alike in feature—all, except Leonora, a little heavy about the
chins and a little stupid about the eyes. I dare say it would have
made Leonora, too, look a little heavy and a little stupid, for it
was not a good photograph. But the black shadow from one of the
branches of the apple tree cut right across her face, which is all
but invisible. There followed an extremely harassing time for
Colonel and Mrs Powys. Mrs Ashburnham had written to say that,
quite sincerely, nothing would give greater ease to her maternal
anxieties than to have her son marry one of Mrs Powys' daughters if
only he showed some inclination to do so. For, she added, nothing
but a love-match was to be thought of in her Edward's case. But the
poor Powys couple had to run things so very fine that even the
bringing together of the young people was a desperate hazard.

The mere expenditure upon sending one of the girls over from
Ireland to Branshaw was terrifying to them; and whichever girl they
selected might not be the one to ring Edward's bell. On the other
hand, the expenditure upon mere food and extra sheets for a visit
from the Ashburnhams to them was terrifying, too. It would mean,
mathematically, going short in so many meals themselves,
afterwards. Nevertheless, they chanced it, and all the three
Ashburnhams came on a visit to the lonely manor-house. They could
give Edward some rough shooting, some rough fishing and a whirl of
femininity; but I should say the girls made really more impression
upon Mrs Ashburnham than upon Edward himself. They appeared to her
to be so clean run and so safe. They were indeed so clean run that,
in a faint sort of way, Edward seems to have regarded them rather
as boys than as girls. And then, one evening, Mrs Ashburnham had
with her boy one of those conversations that English mothers have
with English sons. It seems to have been a criminal sort of
proceeding, though I don't know what took place at it. Anyhow, next
morning Colonel Ashburnham asked on behalf of his son for the hand
of Leonora. This caused some consternation to the Powys couple,
since Leonora was the third daughter and Edward ought to have
married the eldest. Mrs Powys, with her rigid sense of the
proprieties, almost wished to reject the proposal. But the Colonel,
her husband, pointed out that the visit would have cost them sixty
pounds, what with the hire of an extra servant, of a horse and car,
and with the purchase of beds and bedding and extra tablecloths.
There was nothing else for it but the marriage. In that way Edward
and Leonora became man and wife.

I don't know that a very minute study of their progress towards
complete disunion is necessary. Perhaps it is. But there are many
things that I cannot well make out, about which I cannot well
question Leonora, or about which Edward did not tell me. I do not
know that there was ever any question of love from Edward to her.
He regarded her, certainly, as desirable amongst her sisters. He
was obstinate to the extent of saying that if he could not have her
he would not have any of them. And, no doubt, before the marriage,
he made her pretty speeches out of books that he had read. But, as
far as he could describe his feelings at all, later, it seems that,
calmly and without any quickening of the pulse, he just carried the
girl off, there being no opposition. It had, however, been all so
long ago that it seemed to him, at the end of his poor life, a dim
and misty affair. He had the greatest admiration for Leonora.

He had the very greatest admiration. He admired her for her
truthfulness, for her cleanness of mind, and the clean-run-ness of
her limbs, for her efficiency, for the fairness of her skin, for
the gold of her hair, for her religion, for her sense of duty. It
was a satisfaction to take her about with him.

But she had not for him a touch of magnetism. I suppose, really,
he did not love her because she was never mournful; what really
made him feel good in life was to comfort somebody who would be
darkly and mysteriously mournful. That he had never had to do for
Leonora. Perhaps, also, she was at first too obedient. I do not
mean to say that she was submissive—that she deferred, in her
judgements, to his. She did not. But she had been handed over to
him, like some patient medieval virgin; she had been taught all her
life that the first duty of a woman is to obey. And there she
was.

In her, at least, admiration for his qualities very soon became
love of the deepest description. If his pulses never quickened she,
so I have been told, became what is called an altered being when he
approached her from the other side of a dancing-floor. Her eyes
followed him about full of trustfulness, of admiration, of
gratitude, and of love. He was also, in a great sense, her pastor
and guide—and he guided her into what, for a girl straight out of a
convent, was almost heaven. I have not the least idea of what an
English officer's wife's existence may be like. At any rate, there
were feasts, and chatterings, and nice men who gave her the right
sort of admiration, and nice women who treated her as if she had
been a baby. And her confessor approved of her life, and Edward let
her give little treats to the girls of the convent she had left,
and the Reverend Mother approved of him. There could not have been
a happier girl for five or six years. For it was only at the end of
that time that clouds began, as the saying is, to arise. She was
then about twenty-three, and her purposeful efficiency made her
perhaps have a desire for mastery. She began to perceive that
Edward was extravagant in his largesses. His parents died just
about that time, and Edward, though they both decided that he
should continue his soldiering, gave a great deal of attention to
the management of Branshaw through a steward. Aldershot was not
very far away, and they spent all his leaves there.

And, suddenly, she seemed to begin to perceive that his
generosities were almost fantastic. He subscribed much too much to
things connected with his mess, he pensioned off his father's
servants, old or new, much too generously. They had a large income,
but every now and then they would find themselves hard up. He began
to talk of mortgaging a farm or two, though it never actually came
to that.

She made tentative efforts at remonstrating with him. Her
father, whom she saw now and then, said that Edward was much too
generous to his tenants; the wives of his brother officers
remonstrated with her in private; his large subscriptions made it
difficult for their husbands to keep up with them. Ironically
enough, the first real trouble between them came from his desire to
build a Roman Catholic chapel at Branshaw. He wanted to do it to
honour Leonora, and he proposed to do it very expensively. Leonora
did not want it; she could perfectly well drive from Branshaw to
the nearest Catholic Church as often as she liked. There were no
Roman Catholic tenants and no Roman Catholic servants except her
old nurse who could always drive with her. She had as many priests
to stay with her as could be needed—and even the priests did not
want a gorgeous chapel in that place where it would have merely
seemed an invidious instance of ostentation. They were perfectly
ready to celebrate Mass for Leonora and her nurse, when they stayed
at Branshaw, in a cleaned-up outhouse. But Edward was as obstinate
as a hog about it. He was truly grieved at his wife's want of
sentiment—at her refusal to receive that amount of public homage
from him. She appeared to him to be wanting in imagination—to be
cold and hard. I don't exactly know what part her priests played in
the tragedy that it all became; I dare say they behaved quite
creditably but mistakenly. But then, who would not have been
mistaken with Edward? I believe he was even hurt that Leonora's
confessor did not make strenuous efforts to convert him. There was
a period when he was quite ready to become an emotional
Catholic.