Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (216 page)

“You say” — Don’s pleasant organ took up the tale after he had had time to recover himself—” that copper was the distinguishing characteristic of the State of Montana; my impression of it was dust and petroleum. I do not in the least remember what the town of Hut, Ma., may have looked like when I was four.” But he did know that when, by any chance, he nowadays got on a country road and an automobile passed, in the summer time, it made him feel four years old again. There was dust everywhere and paraffin in most places. And perhaps that was why — as he put it — he passed most of his earliest recollected years in the barber’s shop. It had linoleum sides decorated with the portraits of ladies, whom he remembered as supremely beautiful, and portraits of gentlemen lathered up to the ears. And it had, above all, a heavenly odour! The oil of the essences and perfumes must so have pervaded the hot air that the dust could not there find entrance. He must have seen several thousand men shaved there — and half of them had since been hung and half had cottages at Newport. He could not remember them — but he could remember Miss Judie Cole, who was now Princess Abucatti. She had been the most disagreeable and the dirtiest child of four he had ever known, and they had fought a desperate battle in the barber’s saloon, using the pots of massage cream and the essence bottles for missiles. “I remember,” he concluded, and he supposed that the remembrance was typical of the sort of thing that impressed him, “a pot of cold cream was broken against a chair by us and we sprawled in it — Judie Cole and I — and I clawed the blue bows out of her dirty yellow pigtails.”

He paused to take breath and to light a cigarette.

“That,” he said, “was the sort of infancy I had. Imagine the frail child amongst desperadoes and swindlers — and Jews! I remember the German voice of the barber — I can’t remember his face or his name or what his figure was — but his way of accenting ‘Ach! Der Goods!’ I suppose they tried to beat down his prices!”

He paused again.

“And positively the next thing I remember was — Bournemouth!” He looked round at Eleanor and interjected: “I told you all this part on top of a ‘bus. Do you remember? In Tottenham Court Road? Yes,” he continued to Mr Greville. “Not Bournemouth, Mass., nor Bournemouth, Fla., but Bournemouth, Hants, Eng., and a preparatory school — for the sons of gentlemen.”

He became speculative once more.

“It’s odd how absurd coincidences — silly synchronisations — get into one’s life. I relate my biography to you in Canterbury, England, exactly thirty years later, on the very day of the year on which I was born in a nameless spot in Idaho, U.S.A. And on the very day on which I broke the pot of cold cream in the barber’s shop my father struck oil, or copper, or whatever it was that he did strike. I suppose that’s why I can’t remember being strapped for wrecking the barber’s. Perhaps my father was too engrossed with his success to attend to me.”

He reflected again.

“But no!” he said, “that’s not accurate. My father would not have strapped me for wrecking a barber’s shop. He’d have given me shares in his mine instead. He’d have applauded the outbreak.” He once more reflected and then added eagerly: “Yes, that’s it. I got to Bournemouth precisely because my father did applaud that sort of thing.” Mr Greville turned his face interrogatively towards his prospective son-in-law.

“Don’t you understand?” the young man asked. “That was where my mother came in. And no doubt that was why I loved my mother and never bothered about my father.”

“You’re awfully obscure, Don dear,” Eleanor interjected. “You must remember that my father hasn’t heard all this as often as I have.”

“That’s true!” Don said. “I want to be clear. The fact is that my mother was fond enough of me to use the strap mighty often — and my father was fond enough of me to prevent her as often as he could.”

It was at this point that Mr Greville astonished them both by sitting down — a thing he had not been known to do, save when he was “reading for review,” for thirty years. He set both his hands upon his thin knees, and with the two tails of his frock-coat dropping behind his shins, and his face for the first time turned to Don, he uttered, with an accent of hollow attention:

“Let me understand. How did these facts conduce to your arriving at Bournemouth?”

As a matter of fact Don’s involved unfolding of his biography so nearly affected him as a very inferior but interesting book for review would have done; it gave him so much necessity for thought that, as he always thought sitting, he now found it necessary to sit.

“But it’s as plain as Domesday Book,” Don said with exasperation. “My mother took me to Bournemouth, England, so as to be able to clout me as much as she thought fit!”

Mr Greville ejaculated a deep-lunged “Ah!” which gave Don Kelleg a moment to find contrition in.

“No, that’s not a fair statement!” he uttered.

“But there are too many aspects. It is difficult. The coincidences come in again here.” He passed his hand up his forehead. When he, as it were, emerged, it was to state that his breaking loose in the barber’s shop had so exactly synchronised with his father’s first fortune that it had precipitated the break between his parents. For, on the one hand, his mother had direfully proclaimed that such a day of outrage
must
be ended with a thrashing. His father had declared that such a day of good fortune would be celebrated by an absolute amnesty. “He simply would not let her wallop me,” Don concluded. “He’d suffered it no doubt in silence before or argued against it. But that day he obstructed it actually.”

Mr Greville nodded.

“And on that day particularly my mother felt sore.”

Mr Greville interjected the one word, “Why?” as if he knew the answer.

“Because” — Don Kelleg faltered a little—” I suppose because on that day he’d found immense deposits — or whatever the word is — of copper on his mine.”

“But your mother,” Mr Greville continued without passion, “your mother must have been aware, before that day, that your father had stolen the mine...”

It was at this point that Eleanor leaned forward and exclaimed, “
Father!
” For it occurred to her, though it missed Don’s perception altogether, that her lover had told her that his father had stolen a mine before her father had come into the room.

“The late Mr Kelleg had stolen the mine at least three months before the day on which he discovered the great stores of copper that it contained. Your mother must therefore have been aware of the theft!”

Don scratched his head.

“Upon my word,” he said, “you’re right! I don’t see how it works out.” He halted, discomfited for a minute, and then he jumped at it. “Why, it’s plain enough,” he said, “she could not stand the two things. She might have stood his stealing a worthless mine, but she could not stand that the mine should be valuable and that I — I should be corrupted as well. The two together were too much for her.”

Mr Greville moved his hands from his knees and folded his arms. His gesture reminded Eleanor for some vague reason of the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. It was as if he had really uttered, whilst he closed up his telescope: “Order the whole line to advance!”

“My dear Don,” he said, “that’s what I’ve been wanting to get at all along. You’ve had a decent upbringing.”

He paused and looked at Eleanor.

“You’ll do me the justice to say,” he continued, “that I have not opposed your freedom of choice. I have not, till now, sanctioned your engagement. Now...”

With a swift rush Eleanor was already half way round the table.

“You inscrutable person!” she said, and by that time she had her arm on his shoulder. “Why in the world should you do it now that you’ve discovered his father was a thief?”

“I’ve known that all along,” Mr Greville said, expressionlessly. Eleanor shrank back from him.

“You
are
incredibly mysterious!” she said. “Have you been using detectives? How
did
you know? Don does not.”

“Don certainly doesn’t,” her suitor echoed her.

“That’s because,” Mr Greville said, “Don hasn’t as much desire to know about his antecedents as I have.” He repeated, after Eleanor had kissed him:

“Don is not going to marry his own daughter. He’s going to marry mine. He mayn’t want to know the worst about himself: I do.”

Don uttered: “By Jove! it’s
true.”
But Eleanor, putting her cheek against his as she leaned over his stooped figure, pointed at her lover.

“You could see for yourself,” she said, “that he’s the dearest and best and gentlest person in the world. Was not that enough?”

Mr Greville, who had an air of being politely discomforted by her embraces, lifted his head so that his piercing glance appeared hotly to challenge the young man whilst his words corrected her inexact superlatives.

“He appeared,” he said to her, “to be excellent and gentle — and no doubt he was dear to you. But that does not provide settlements for you or a good strain for future generations.”

Eleanor left him, to sit down on the chair that faced his across the window space. With
her
hands on her knees, imitating his attitude, she had the air of making, with him, a pair of wardens of a gateway.

“Then let’s have something definite from
you!
” she challenged him affectionately. “You don’t mean — you don’t mean to say that you’ve written about settlements to his father.”

“I certainly wrote,” Mr Greville said, “as soon as I’d had time to consider what it was my duty to do — about a couple of months after you had told me of your engagement and when I’d had the chance to satisfy myself that — that Don was not entirely unpresentable.”

Eleanor said:

“I shall kiss you because you call him Don. It means that you are not going to be very horrid.”

“It means that you
do
accept me,” Don uttered joyfully.

“I wrote,” Mr Greville said, when he once more emerged from his daughter’s embrace, “to Mr Charles Collar Kelleg and asked him what settlements he proposed to make upon the occasion of his son’s marriage with my daughter.”

“How
could
you?” Eleanor said, but her reasonable nature, which was so like his, coming almost immediately to her rescue, she added in the same breath: “But of course it is exactly what you
ought
to have done.”

“I understood,” Mr Greville said, “that Don had from his mother an income of about two hundred a year invested in English railways. He made about another two hundred a year by illustrating stories in magazines. I told him that you had about as much as Don from
your
mother’s estate. And I gave him to understand that you might live comfortably and decently upon twelve hundred a year as a certainty. I was ready to secure my daughter, after my death, another four hundred a year if he was prepared to do the same for his son. I told him that large incomes are rather a curse than the reverse in this country. Of course Don might go on making money by illustrations. But he’s not very persevering and magazines are precarious things to have to do with.”

“What in the world,” Eleanor asked Don, “would your father have thought at receiving such a letter?”

“Oh, heavens,” Don said, “there is not the least means of knowing. I guess he’ll have liked it though, if he wasn’t in one of his spread-eagling fits when everything English was hell to him.” He stuck his head on one side. “But no: I’m pretty certain he’d like
any
straight business proposition.”

“He answered in about twelve words upon his business paper, written by a typewriter,” Mr Greville continued.

“But
what?
” Eleanor asked. Mr Greville erected his head to make an effort of memory.

“His exact words were: ‘Dear Sir: I shall leave my son all my enterprises. But I think he’s got too much conscience to make a good husband or anything else. He’ll worry your daughter to death.’” Eleanor let forth a long peal of laughter.

“Well, that’s a prophecy!” Don said slowly. “My father was not so muddy witted.”