Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (232 page)

But he’s perfectly capable of transacting business efficiently.”

Eleanor said: “Ah!”

She leaned back a little, with the back of her head against the window panes, and far down the Avenue, which in its very high, straight length seemed to be washed in with clear, purple, beautiful shadows, she saw faintly what appeared to be a tall column of virgin whiteness. Its colour touched her with a certain excitement of pleasure, but she couldn’t, owing to the fact that the window was at right angles, do more than just get occasional glimpses as she moved her head, and at moments she couldn’t get any sight of it at all.

“So that,” she said, “you consider it’s a really efficient arrangement.”

Mr Greville looked at her:

“If you’re thinking of influencing your
fiancé.
..” he began.

She said:

“Oh, goodness, I’m only too anxious to be able to leave him alone.” But she added immediately afterwards: “I mean that I want to be able to help him as much as I can, and yet to be certain that he’s not making mistakes.”

Her father opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again and finally brought out:

“To my mind he’s making a mistake all through...”

She interjected quickly:

“Oh, yes, I know all that, dear. But supposing he wanted the moon I’d try to help him to get it if I were certain that he was going the right way to work. Don’t you see, dear, that my trouble is he doesn’t ever seem able to want anything, much?” Mr Greville raised his head at that and allowed... himself to speak as loudly as usual, as if he didn’t care who heard him:

“Don doesn’t want his father’s business associates to know that he’s here at all. He’s taken it for granted that he must regard them as hostile. I don’t want to comment on that — but — he regards them as hostile! — Then: if he wants to discover how the ground lies without either communicating with them or letting them know of his presence, he must, obviously, employ an agent to make for him as clear a statement of his case as he can.”

“And you think he couldn’t do better than Augustus?” she asked.

Mr Greville hesitated before committing himself.

“I think,” he said, “that Augustus will be at least ten times as efficient as Don could possibly be himself, if only because Don is the soul of honour and Augustus...”

“Isn’t?” Eleanor queried.

“Augustus” — her father made her an inclination that half suggested a bow—” Augustus, in the course of his profession, has come in contact with a great many commercial people.”

Eleanor said: “Oh, dear!” But since, at this point, she had satisfied herself that her father was satisfied she did what she had been wanting to do for some minutes — she looked at Don, who was waiting for that signal from her to let himself approach them.

Canzano had laid down the little bâton of the telephone. He had “got on to” his mother’s house and had now only to wait until his mother should return from her drive in Boston and should come and speak with him. And Don, as Eleanor very well knew, deemed the moment opportune to take them all into his confidence.

“Now,” he said gaily, “we can go into a committee of the whole house.” He liked, indeed, very much to talk if he couldn’t bear to have to come to a decision, and whilst Canzano, fidgetingly, kept putting the ear-piece of the telephone to his ear and idly and tremulously getting up and sitting down again at the inlaid cabinet, Don set before them his facts, walking up and down and rubbing his hands.

The plot of his father’s associates — as he gathered from about twenty newspapers that had been brought on to the ship at Sandy Hook — had reached a point so far successful that at least three of the New York journals were clamouring for his — Don’s — impeachment.

All the papers would all have wanted it, Don said, if the rest of them hadn’t been so lost in admiration for the cleverness of an office-boy called Sherman, who, by inspiration, “operating” exactly along the lines of the Kelleg group, had turned his weekly salary of eleven into a fortune of 72,000 dollars. This, Don said, had so impressed with a sense of admiration a great portion of the Press of New York that they hadn’t much space left for reprehending the Kelleg associates.

“And of course,” he said, “they couldn’t, very logically...” And then, glancing at Canzano’s smiling, sardonic face, a sudden inspiration seemed to strike him, so that he hit his forehead with his right palm.

“By heaven!” he ejaculated, “it
hadn’t
struck me. It
hadn’t!
”

And to Mr Greville’s “What?” he answered:

“Don’t you see? The Press is
in
with my associates. Obviously! Don’t you see? If they can make a gigantic figure of an office-boy making a fortune of 71,888 dollars — if they can make that boy loom immensely large in the public eye — of course they’ll make the public forget the rigging of the market. Why, they’ll make the very rigging of the market appear a meritorious proceeding. The office-boy’s fortune wouldn’t have been possible without it. And consequently every person in the country who wants to make a fortune quickly will look upon them — my associates — as positively public benefactors.” Canzano laughed outright.

“You’re what,” he exclaimed, “they call a chip of the old block after all. That’s exactly your father’s invention. Every time he operated something very atrocious he always had someone — generally a widow or an orphan — whom he guided into making a little pile out of his operation.”

Don said: “It’s appalling!” and Canzano laughed. Mr Greville asked the young Italian, with his expressionless voice:

“But the Press? Why does it support the manœuvre?”

It was Augustus’s turn to contribute his quota.

“Oh,” he said harshly, “even in London Mr Kelleg had what he called his Information Department. I know a chap who keeps a motor out of what he gets for inserting Kelleg paragraphs in quite good papers. It’s done more artistically in London, but, bless you, the effect’s the same.”

And Canzano added:

“Mr Kelleg would have — papers....”

Don groaned:

“Oh, yes: pile it up!” But Eleanor stepped in to his support.

“After all,” she said, “there are papers that clamour for your blood. They aren’t
all
bribed.” Don, however, was not to be comforted.

“How do I know,” he asked, “that
that,
too, is not part of the put-up job? Why, they may be set to do it in order that when the papers like to prove that I’m thoroughly virtuous there may be a revulsion in my favour. Don’t you see what a coup that would be?”

It was, however, Mr Greville who said at this:

“Don’t exaggerate too much. Your father must have had
some
enemies — and there must be about as many honest men here as on the London Press.” Don fronted him with a sort of brilliant dejection. “Oh,” he brought out, “I only want to say that over here you simply don’t know who’s who, or what’s what, or who means anything.”

“That,” Mr Greville said, “is not a characteristic of America alone. It’s part of the Spirit of the Age. It’s everywhere. Even in our town in England we’ve got a brewer who secretly advocates temperance in the local paper, to sell his mineral waters. If you ever want to get at anything you must not exaggerate — and you
must
distinguish. I agree that nowadays anything may belong to anybody. But that’s not peculiar to this country.’ And having delivered himself of that speech, he looked round upon the delicate framed tapestries of shepherds on the walls, as if in them at least he was assured of seeing something that was characteristic of an age, a time and a place. Don passed his hands across his eyes.

“There’s such a frightful lot to say and to do,” he said, “that it’s utterly impossible to know where to begin.” He looked at Eleanor as if for inspiration, uttering: “Where was I?” And then he digressed again so as to attack Mr Greville with a final thrust.

“If never knowing who’s in the pay of whom is a characteristic of the whole age, you’ve got to admit that they’ve brought that to a pitch of perfection here. Why” — and he pointed to the grey-and-golden chandelier—”if you protest against the gas here and have it cut off, the electric light is supplied by the gas trust, and if you don’t like that the candles and the paraffin for the lamps is supplied by the same people. There’s no end to it.... Why, I can’t be certain that I don’t own them too, myself.”

“The point is, dear” — Eleanor’s calm voice came forth as he paused for breath—” what’s Carlo to telephone his mother? and is Augustus to go to Boston...?”

Don was repeating: “There’s so much — so much...” when from the cabinet there came a long, impatient, and as if clamorous, crepitation of the little bell, and Canzano, with a sort of hungry and radiant impatience, seemed almost to stab his ear with the little black and nickel baton.

“Mother,” he said, and then eagerly: “Yes, yes.... And your dear health.... Oh, alas!... You should take your drops more regularly.... Dear, dear, dear me....” And suddenly he dropped into an Italian of little endearments and quivers that they tried hard not to listen to. Even he kissed the mouthpiece. And as if the voice of Canzano, the long dialogue of which they heard only the one half, steadied his nerves, Don managed to give to Eleanor the information that she wanted. So that when at last Canzano, after saying to them: “What a thrice-blessed invention the telephone is for those who live!” added the information: “Mr Mackinnon is in Boston!” Eleanor was fairly certain of who Mr Mackinnon was.

He was, in fact, the gentleman who had sent the cable that she had read in the dining-room at Canterbury — he was the manager of all Mr Collar Kelleg’s enterprises; he had called, as far as Don knew at that moment — and Canzano immediately confirmed it from the telephone — a meeting of all the principal associates of the Kelleg combines at Boston on the following day. At this meeting the will, which was in possession of the Countess Kelleg, was to be read. There couldn’t, in consequence, be anything more appropriate than that Don, through his attorney, should be represented at Boston on the morrow. And Eleanor couldn’t more heartfeltly acquiesce in anything than in the arrangements that she presently heard Canzano making with his mother for the hospitable reception of the man whom — however much she could take care of herself — she would be heartily glad to be rid of so advantageously. Augustus could get to work: Augustus could really earn the money that he was going to receive from Don: Augustus would go, she hoped, gradually out of her life. And, poor fellow, he would be freed from his mother.

CHAPTER III
.

THIS singularly happy consummation, if it brought a considerable peace of mind to Eleanor, caused at least a fit of sufficiently troublesome jibbing from one other member of the team that she had somehow got the impression she was driving. For Mrs Greville, by one of her tremendous reactions, having decided that she would let her own boxes be unpacked by the maid, had decided that she herself would unpack Eleanor’s!

So that, into the end of the discussion in the large room with the delicate, dusty furniture, she came herself to ask Eleanor whether she wanted her cabin trunk unpacked first. It affected her herself with a sense of a finely dramatic irony. Here was the old generation accepting with a splendid humility the changed times! Nieces no longer waited on their aunts: then the aunts must wait on the nieces. And with her long and bony fingers, on which hung Eleanor’s key-chain, with her high nose, hollowed temples and handsome eyes, she thought that, in the high doorway, she must seem like a presentment of Conscience to the erring girl.

She was received with the news that Augustus was going to Boston. It did not entirely root her to the spot, but it was quite a time before she was back through the folding-doors, and quite another little time before her head again came back between the panels to say:

“Charles! Eleanor! — I wish to speak with you.”

The point in the ensuing scene that most touched Eleanor was the extraordinary vulgarity of appearance that her own clothes, her own trunks and her own cosmetics had amongst the trappings of the former Queen of France’s bedroom. For her aunt had actually commenced to unpack three of Eleanor’s trunks before she had decided that the effect of humility of asking the girl which trunk she would have unpacked first would be strikingly greater than merely having all the “things” already stowed away for her when she had finished flirting with Augustus. So that on the high State bed, on the blue-and-silver toilet-table, over the mirror and on the negro’s statuette in the corner Eleanor’s skirts, her underskirts, her blouses were already hanging. There was even a pair of shoes upon the green marble mantelpiece.

Mrs Greville began her campaign with saying to her brother-in-law:

“I suppose then that Kirsen goes with me. And Eleanor too, I presume. She can hardly remain here with you two men alone.”

And upon Mr Greville’s politely but quite vacantly asking her what she meant — he was engaged in his own mind with the statistics of native-born Americans in the population of the city in which they were — she uttered equally unemotionally:

“Of course I go to Boston with my son!”

“Then, of course,” Mr Greville answered her, “the party breaks up. Eleanor, I think, will need her maid herself. Eleanor will certainly remain in New York with me.”

“I can’t,” Mrs Greville said, “allow my son to go about a strange continent alone.”

“And I,” Mr Greville answered, “can’t allow my daughter to travel about a strange continent with a young man who pays her unwelcome attentions.” Mr Greville kept his eyes upon the window: his right ear was towards his sister-in-law.

“Then...” Mrs Greville began. But she dropped into the ferocious but irrelevant remark that she had been a good mother if Augustus had never been a good son. She had never allowed him to be away from her since he had been a baby.

“And surely,” she said, “you can’t approve of my letting him go to such a household — for the first time!”

Mr Greville had a positive gleam of humour.

“It’s about time,” he said, “that he began to sow his wild oats — if he can manage to sow them in a household to which I intend eventually to let my daughter belong.”

“I understand,” Mrs Greville began, “from what several ladies told me on board the boat, that this Countess Kelleg...’ She paused, however, and looked first at Mr Greville and then at Eleanor. Eventually she concluded her sentence:” Whatever may be sanctioned here I shall certainly take Augustus to an hotel...”

Mr Greville avoided the subject with:

“If you intend to go perhaps you’d like to have the Kelleg Pullman. I understand that the Countess sent it down from Boston to meet her son. But Canzano has decided to leave it here at Don’s disposal.”

There seemed to be so absolutely no loophole for a further incision of Mrs Greville’s tongue that she hadn’t anything left to say but that she would go to attend to her re-packing.

“I presume,” she said, “that Kirsen may help me.”

Mr Greville answered:

“If Eleanor does not need her!”

Mrs Greville made a silent exit, whilst Mr Greville was saying expressionlessly to his daughter that he was so extremely angry that he was afraid in his haste he might have done something she disapproved of.

She reflected for a minute.

“No,” she said, “you’re a perfect parent.”

She sank down on a chair rather helplessly and gazed at her various garments hanging in unlikely places.

“Why!” she said, “she’s
torn
my evening skirt!” It hung, black and lustrous, from the candelabra that the little black marble negro in the corner held wearily towards the ceiling. “I wished at first that you’d let her take Kirsen. I don’t now!”

Mr Greville said:

“It was precisely because I observed the disposition she’d made of your belongings that I so decided.”

Eleanor let her arms drop at her sides.

“Upon my word,” she said, “you are a most extraordinary old party! You frighten me out of my life.”

“Well, my dear,” he said mildly, “do you think I should have come upon this voyage if I hadn’t thought I was able to see things?”

She was silent for a minute, then she uttered:

“And, dear, you
do
approve of what I’ve done?”

He answered her with:

“I think it’s an excellent attempt if....” and he added after a pause:” if you’re strong enough to carry it out.
I
shouldn’t be.”

“But I’m so
awfully
fond of him,” she pleaded with him.

Mr Greville made towards the door, but with the long gilt and chased handle in his hand he paused and looked back over his shoulder.

“I don’t know if you understand,” he said, “what your actual problem is.”

Eleanor simply waited for him to speak and he turned round.

“You’ve got,” he continued, “to reconcile Don to his own country. That’s what it amounts to.” And after another moment he added: “The man’s a poet: that’s what the trouble is.”

Eleanor said:

“Oh, dear, it seems rather desperate if you put it like that.” And answering in turn the black glare of his dark eyes: “Is there anything here that you could reconcile a poet to?”

He came right back to her and took one of her hands between his. — , “My dear,” he brought out with a great deal of tenderness, “it all depends if he’s a great
enough
poet!”

He searched her face with his black eyes: they gave to her the idea of something pathetic in his hard glance, for she knew that when he looked at her like that he was really trying to see her. At other times he was too blind really to know her expression.

“You understand, Ellie,” he said, “that to see the trend of a time and a nation like this you have to be a great enough man to appreciate what you can’t like. I don’t think Don’s up to that.”

“But I am!” Eleanor pleaded with him.

Mr Greville reflected for a moment, then he said:

“Women are quite different in these things. They form theories of repulsion: but when they come up against hard facts they’ve the power to accept them. Most men haven’t that faculty — and that’s why men bear things so much worse than women.” He went on to say — and it was a long and sustained speech for him — that why he himself was practically a recluse, why he hadn’t ever taken to even a life so active as that of a civil servant at home, was only partly selfishness. He was selfish enough to be most interested in his own ease. But also he knew that he wasn’t strong enough to keep his head in the face of a modern life that he detested. “I should,” he said, “have committed myself to some foolish, because they’d be impractically retrograde, speeches or polities.” There wasn’t, in fact, in active England or elsewhere any room for what
he
called a decent man; the place of such men was gone from the world. What decent men there were in public life to-day did more harm than good, and they soiled themselves by mixing in pettinesses.

“
And,”
he added, “that’s what will be the trouble with Don. He’s too decent — in an idealist, impracticable way — to handle the problems here. He won’t even begin to understand them.” And Mr Greville said that, for the convenience of speaking, he’d say that Don was a nineteenth-century European Altruist: whereas the United States, whatever else it might be, was not, and was not ever going to be, nineteenth-century, or European, or Altruist.

He silenced the objection that she hadn’t had time to bring to her lips with:

“Oh, I don’t say it’s altogether beastly, or even beastly at all. If it were, I don’t think
you’d
be able to appreciate it, however determined you might be to make allowance.”

“Oh, thank you!” she interjected gratefully. “Because I
do
like it here!”

“But,” he said, “you must remember that your problem is to make Don like it.”

“I think I
can,”
she brought out, though he shook his head.

“The point is,” he said, “whether it’s really any use. I would not mind wagering that within ten days he’ll be so dispirited that he’ll want to be going back to England.”

“If he does....” Eleanor began impulsively. But, although he left her plenty of time, she never finished her sentence.

“Ah!” he uttered, and his voice had even a certain sadness, “that’s just what you’ve got to reflect upon. How will you feel if he does?”

She answered after quite a long time:

“I don’t know.”

“My dear” — he suddenly broke new ground—”I’d advise you to stay in your room until after your aunt and Augustus have started. They will have to in an hour.”

She looked at him eagerly enough and uttered: “Oh, do you think I can? I was just going to ask you.”

He went to the door and once more returned.

“You won’t feel lonely,” he asked solicitously, “if I go out with Don till dinner? It appears that he’s discovered his barber!”

She thought that she would feel so little lonely with all her things to arrange that she kept her thoughts on the other problem.

“I don’t
want
to hurt their feelings. But they’re both of them so terrible.”

“My dear,” Mr Greville said, “I don’t think” — and there was a quite extraordinarily vindictive note in his voice—” I don’t think that any punishment is sufficiently great for your aunt’s proposing to take you to Boston with Augustus.”

“Oh,” Eleanor said, “that was only an insult, you know. She’d have gone mad if I’d come: but she wanted to emphasise the fact that if I stayed it would be improper to be with two men alone...”

Mr Greville found Don telling Mrs Greville — who had her bonnet on already — that one of the chief defects of the United States, and one of the first things that would have to be remedied, was the gradual disappearance of family life. Even among the working classes, Don said, the chief problem of the head of the house was to conceal his income from his wife. If he got a rise in his wage he tried to conceal it. And the chief endeavours of the woman were directed to getting cents and dollars out of her husband. It was a sort of death-grapple between the sexes all up the social scale. There didn’t, he assured her, even begin to exist in America the fine solidarity of feeling that there was in every English family. A country whose family ties were founded upon money could not expect to be far upon the road to civilisation...