Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (229 page)

“It is not,” she said, “that I’ve a talent for arranging things. It is simply that I’m determined to have around me the sort of things that are capable of arranging themselves!”

In his gladness he brought out with a laugh:

“You don’t think I’m a sort of thing that is capable of arranging itself.”

She answered:

“If I didn’t hope it — if I didn’t think that you’d have a chance of becoming a decent being when Don’s taken you away from Aunt Emmeline I shouldn’t be-here.”

He reflected for a moment:

“You think that when Don leaves me in America to look after his affairs I shall turn into an — an English gentleman?” he asked half sardonically.

“I hope,” she retorted, “that you’ll have a chance to grow up — and take it.”

And whilst he still reflected she added:

“I
won’t
have scenes: I won’t have ourselves made noticeable. No Grevilles that counted have ever been noticeable. I won’t have my father worried: I won’t have Don worried: I won’t be worried myself.”

“So you won’t tell Don about this night.”

She reflected for a moment:

“No,” she said at last; “if I couldn’t take care of myself I’d tell him. If it would do any good I’d tell him. But I think it was all a silly freak: it’s not a matter of the least importance.”

He too was silent for a minute and then he said: “By Heavens, I’d like him to know. It would gall even his self-complacency.”

“It is precisely because of that that I shan’t tell him,” Eleanor said. “You’d like to sacrifice your position and all you’ll probably ever be worth for the chance of hurting his feelings. It probably would hurt his feelings. If telling him would undo it, I’d tell him. But your kiss is irrevocable — and just because it’s irrevocable I choose to regard it as unimportant. If I liked to consider it worth making a fuss about, it would be important. But it doesn’t dishonour
me
— and if I like to look at it as the unimportant act of an oaf — why, that’s your punishment. You’ve kissed me at good-morning and goodnight often enough when we were children. It’s
not
a great achievement to have done it again, so don’t look upon it as a feather in your cap!”

She felt a sudden, rather inexplicable anger rising in her. Now that she had explained for herself as for him that it
was
unimportant, there was coming upon her a strong feeling of the indignity she had suffered. And because she never liked to speak bitter words she said suddenly that he’d better go now...

And because, too, she felt in need of some tenderness it distressed her to find that on the lee side of the deck-house, where her aunt and Don were ensconced in darkness, there was also Canzano, smoking his last cigar of the day. Her aunt indeed rustled silently away at the first showing of Eleanor’s cloak round the house-side, but Canzano stayed, smoking and talking softly and mellowly about the glory of the immense moon, about the warmth of the Gulf Stream that they had dipped into for a few hours, about the goodness of the band whose soft strains reached them on that side of the deck.

Nevertheless, sitting close to Don upon another life-raft that had been arranged to take the form of a garden seat, she did feel a pervasion of her spirit by lassitude and satisfaction. They could feel the immense vessel as it seemed to soar through the night: the air was very warm and, where the light waves broke, there was, even in the moonlight, a glow of phosphorescence. She had set her aunt in her place: she had settled Augustus. The outbreak had been bound to come, now it was over and done with. It seemed to her as if, having done her duty, she might now rest, and her limbs felt filled with a soft warmth, a good and pleasant heaviness. So that when, after a decent interval, Canzano drifted away she let her head rest against her lover’s shoulder and, looking at the track of the moon through the spidery railings that swayed very slowly, she listened to his pleasant talk...

On the morrow their real life work would begin, he said. And, as if it were miles high, towering above the masts of the ship, New York seemed to be just on the horizon.... And to think, he said, that he should be about to attack his problems with her at his side! They were, all of them, such a united and tranquil band. It wouldn’t be easy — but it would be just good hard work. Things after all would be simpler there, and since he would have her with him there wouldn’t be any uprooting or any pain.

And he began to mingle little definite plans with the broad forecast. Augustus was to be detailed to make a study of just what his resources were. He himself wasn’t much good at that: but Augustus would have to see how things were run in the offices and give him a bird’s-eye view of the whole. And he himself would study, as best he could, the conditions of life. He was going to visit schools and workshops, factories and large stables. He had made some useful acquaintances on board — an inspector of schools with a German name and an entertaining Irishman who seemed to know all the slums in every city in the States. And she herself could go with him as much as she liked, and her father. Or there were all sorts of pleasant sights for her to see, and quite nice people, whilst he was at work. Assuredly life wasn’t going to be dull for them...

The moon sank a little towards the bow of the ship: the air seemed to grow warmer: the ship’s bells rang out in little dings, in sonorous notes that were echoed from fore and aft: the last sounds of the band died away over the moonlit stretches and there was nothing save the pervading rustle of the waters...

From time to time she kissed his shoulder upon which her cheek rested, and she whispered:

“You’re a dear! A dear! A dear! A dear! A dear!...”

He held her in his arms and once he kissed her on the forehead and whispered that he thought of her as a Papist thinks of his saints...

But when, in her cabin, between the cool sheets, she had turned out the light, there came to her the dreadful thought that Augustus might, at that moment, have been, wet and ghastly, somewhere in the miles and miles of water behind them. And she felt on her face, on her lips, on her eyelids, the hungry warmth of his kisses. It was so disagreeable, the one vision, and it was so strange that the feeling was not more disagreeable, that for quite a long time she could not turn upon her side to sleep. She rose at last, and kneeling upon her bed looked out of her port-hole. The ship’s bells were answering each other again. And suddenly, in the light of the moon, she saw a man’s figure, black and indistinct, leaning against the rail and looking towards her. She thought she could recognise Augustus, and with a feeling now of pure dislike for the hungry and the outcast — such as the rich and the wealthy feel — she lay down once more and pulled the linen to her face. She fell asleep wondering how Don would be behaving if she had refused herself to him.

PART III. THE SOLID LAND
.

CHAPTER I
.

IT was odd how bustle seemed to pervade the ship. You couldn’t tell how. It showed itself most in the emptiness of the decks when she stepped out of her door in the morning, in the engrossed air of hastening passengers, listening deck stewards, in the fact that no one turned on their heel at the corners as they had been wont to do. They seemed, instead, to be all bent upon errands. It was extraordinary, too, how tepid the air was, how pervaded by a mist of a new yellow colour. The ship seemed to be speeding through a mill-pond of yellow satin, and the peopled nature of the highway made itself manifest in a train of tugs drawing each six or seven black, long cylinders almost awash in the tepid waves. It wasn’t like being in a hothouse exactly, but it wasn’t at all like being anywhere out of doors that she had experienced, and it was with an abiding sense of oddness that she heard Canzano’s voice greeting her with:

“Well, here’s your first sight of the New World!” In his shore-going clothes of black cloth, with his black tie and his very black hair, he too seemed more foreign, more odd than he had ever seemed before. His hand seemed whiter and the lapislazuli ring upon his little finger once more caught her eye as he pointed straight before him — she had come out upon the covered deck to stand beside him — and said:

“There it is!”

And she was aware, in the yellow tones of sea and sky, of something long, blue and tranquil — a smudge in shape like a gigantic whale. And it did affect her with a minute touch of hostility when he said: “That is the Jersey coast!” — for all the world as if he too were not a European to know that Jersey is a European possession. It was so big, so intangible, that great smudge, that it seemed to her to savour almost of disloyalty to really appropriate that old, real name to something belonging to what after all was all new and not very seriously to be considered. The ship moved onwards with a more steadfast tranquillity, so that almost for the first time she seemed to realise the irrevocability of their journey. It
hadn’t
seemed perfectly serious before.

“The New World!” he said again, “what a fine sound there is in those words! Aren’t they full of promise and irresponsibility and romance? I always think, still, that it’s the finest thing in the world coming in here.”

She felt almost injured as she said:

“But
you
aren’t an American!” for it seemed to her as if they ought to have drawn closer together in a common bond of protest.

“Why,” he answered, “if I
were
an American I might not say it. The New World would probably be as dull to me as the Old.”

She looked at his foreign, olive face with a new interest.

“Is that the way to take it?” she asked.

“Oh, that’s the way,” he answered; “if you take it like that you’ll find it’s awfully good. It’s not a medicine you’re going to swallow: it’s a purely irresponsible joke.”

She began:

“But surely we
are
Europeans.”

When he interrupted her quite earnestly:

“No, assuredly we
aren’t.”
And he put both his hands upon hers as it lay upon the dull red wood of the rail. “For Don’s sake consider that we aren’t anything that we started out with being. We’ve got to leave all our standards behind: we’ve got to leave our prejudices. Do, for Don’s sake, make the effort.”

“It needn’t be an effort,” she said, “if it’s really the way to take it.”

“It’s the only way,” he said. “For you won’t find here anything that you’ve ever valued before. I don’t find anything that I should think amusing on the other side. But
ciel!
I amuse myself. I forget that I am a Canzano: I am just a person at a picnic. And believe me, it’s very funny.”

She didn’t remove her hands from his when she asked: “But surely it isn’t fair to...” and she indicated with her chin the Jersey hills that they were leaving behind—” it isn’t fair even to these people not to judge them by our standards.”

He clasped her hands more tightly:

“Believe me,” he said, “believe me, it wouldn’t be fair to Don to do any such thing.”

“You mean,” she said, “that if I don’t leave my prejudices behind me....”

He interrupted her with, “Don’t call them prejudices: call them standards — the highest standards in the world. But all the same they don’t apply here; they don’t begin to apply. And if you can’t leave them in abeyance you’ll be miserable yourself all the time. And you’ll draw a trail across Don’s activities, and that will make him unhappy, and...”

She interrupted him in her turn with: “But wouldn’t Don want me to judge...”

“Don might or Don mightn’t,” he was quick to catch her up. “Half he would or half he wouldn’t. He’d want you to judge and to be tender. But that isn’t possible here. I assure you it isn’t. The moment that one begins to judge one condemns. But as long as one forces oneself to accept one has the best time in the world....” He broke off and suddenly appealed to someone who was behind her back. “Isn’t what I’ve been saying perfectly true?”

“I imagine: singularly just!” she heard her father’s voice say.

Mr Greville was leaning against the doorway; his long coat flapped in the hot draught that came from the interior of the vessel; he was rubbing his eyes in preparation for putting on his glasses.

“You’ve got, my dear, to consider,” he said, “that you’re in the position of making a visit to your husband’s people.”

“As if I were visiting a coachman’s lodge?” she asked a little rebelliously.

Mr Greville shrugged his shoulders.

“That’s as you like to take it,” he said, “but it would be more discreet to put social conventions out of your head.”

“Oh, put all conventions out of your head!” Canzano urged her. “It’s not a question of class and class. Believe me, it isn’t. It’s a question of another race; of a different planet: of a different species even. Don’t judge: observe. Don’t condemn: just have a good time.”

She felt as if, in this discussion, she could trust even more to Canzano than to her father. For Mr Greville affected her as being too reasonable. He hadn’t, at bottom, any respect for class. He wouldn’t, she felt, have liked her to marry a shopkeeper or a clerk, because these professions were sedentary and mean-spirited upon the whole. He wouldn’t have minded — theoretically at least — an efficient ploughman.

But Canzano was a mine of class-prejudices: he didn’t, she had discovered, consider his inferiors as even human. He would be polite to them, but they were
canaglia.
So that if he, who in this matter came closer to her than even her father did — if he advised her that it was possible to abandon oneself and, over here, just have a good time, she could vaguely see the possibilities of a workable point of view.

“I’m not, in short,” she said, “to consider... these people... as if they were Europeans — or even as grown-up people at all.”

Canzano positively rubbed his hands.

“Consider them as children!” he said. “Excellent! Excellent! Then they’ll hardly worry you at all.”

He appealed suddenly to Mr Greville.

“You don’t know,” he said, “you can’t — what an excellent fellow Don is. I love him quite unspeakably. And just as if he were a child too. I want
him
to have a good time if no one else has. And I want him to have it at the hands of us Europeans too.”

Mr Greville looked away from him with his mouth open: he didn’t, however, utter anything.

“You think I’m a rock on which he might possibly split?” Eleanor laughed.

“Oh, heavens!” Canzano answered, “I think you’re the only island upon which he could ever really taste felicity.”

“But you don’t,” Mr Greville brought out, “imagine that he’s going to attain to felicity with his own countrymen or his own schemes.”

Canzano shrugged his shoulders up to his ears.

“His poor old schemes!” he said.

“Why don’t you say his poor old countrymen?” Mr Greville asked.

“Look here!” Canzano said, “we’ve got — we three — to work for his happiness. We’ve got to rescue him from his follies — not by telling him that they’re follies, but by letting him prove to himself how futile they are. And,” he bowed to Eleanor, “by proving to him how much more charming life elsewhere may be.”

“You think, in fact,” Eleanor said, “that if I try to cross him he’ll feel homesick for his ideals for ever and ever.”

Canzano embraced the sea, the sky, the sludge boats, and a lady in a bright green satin dress, with a circular shrug of his shoulders.

“Poor dear Don,” he said, “will soon get tired of trying to put the sky where the sea is, and trying to make
cette dame
wear colours that won’t set our teeth on edge. He’ll have, eventually, the sense to see that his compatriots too are having in their own way the best kind of time and only want to be let alone.”

Mr Greville interrupted him to say that though he perfectly agreed he’d like to suggest that they breakfasted in time for Eleanor to get up her strength for when she was asked what were her impressions of New York Bay. Noting pleasantly that her father must be in the best of spirits, for she couldn’t believe that he was serious in saying that these people would really ask her what her impressions were, Eleanor turned in at the doorway, leaving behind her a glimpse of yellow sky, yellow sea, a yellow spit of sand and a house, resembling, with its yellow sides and red roof, a Shoreham bungalow. And at Canzano’s saying that that was Sandy Hook, she couldn’t help wondering if the United States expressed its considerable majesty always in edifices so like the houses that the retired tradesmen ran up round her Canterbury. The spirit of hurry pervaded now every corner of the ship. It rendered their breakfast perfunctory, for the stewards fidgeted on thin ankles around Mr Greville’s standing figure: half of the tables had no cloths, and already the passengers were grouping themselves in the chairs in the middle of the saloon to await the Customs officers. There were bags in all the corridors, and even Don twice left the breakfast-table at the summons of the distracted maid. It was, however, Mr Greville who — to have the experience — was to make the declaration in the saloon, and it was upon Don’s arm that, hurrying a little to see the entrance to the finest bay in the world — Don had told her that it really
was
fine — she stumbled slightly over the threshold of the promenade deck and was immediately rushed up to by a girl in blue with red hair — a girl who, like half the other passengers, appeared now for the first time to have emerged from some hidden place to ask breathlessly:

“Well, and what are your impressions?” and to dash away without waiting for an answer.

Immediately confronting them, above the slate-grey sails of an immense schooner, dominating Eleanor’s slight bewilderment, greenish grey, and with a dull gilt crown of spikes, there rose a colossus in a bronze nightgown.

“So there it is!” Don said beside her.

But to her it didn’t lend itself to any impression at all and she asked gaily — for after what Canzano had said she was determined to be gay:

“So there is what?”

“Liberty!” he answered.

Her gayness — though she apprehended that he was referring to what must be the statute — made her say:

“The liberty of an absolute stranger’s asking me what my impressions are? I’ve never seen that girl before.”

His face expressed a sudden concern.

“Oh, don’t take it as an odious liberty,” he said, “it isn’t. You don’t probably realise what it is to these people to be able to show someone what they really believe’s fine....”

“Oh...” she was beginning.

“It is part of their lives,” he continued nevertheless to plead with her. “It is the oldest and the finest thing they can remember. It’s as old for them as Canterbury Cathedral, because it’s been here all their conscious lives. And remember, too, that they’ve probably — all of them — been being ‘shown’ things innumerable for months past...”