Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (235 page)

“Eat it: eat it right now. It’s a peach!”

And Mr Greville, reclining in the palm-filled marble office of the hotel, had taken the apple from the tail-pocket of his frock-coat and had remarked to an interested stranger on the oddness of that locution. And next day all the New York papers were filled with headlines: “
British Peer and Peach. Earl of Greville goes one on Adam.”
Because Mr Greville had refused to eat an apple.

But if, on the other hand, Don had set out to see the blacknesses, Eleanor had found the good time that Don was so anxious for her to have — the good time that, for his sake, she was quite determined to secure. The train that brought the travelling secretary of Mr Kelleg had brought also his travelling stenographer — a lady called Dubose, half Irish and half Manhattan Dutch. Tall, with a tight, sweet figure, reddish hair, and brownish, golden, shortsighted eyes, Miss Dubose was, Eleanor found, exactly the person to help her in seeing New York. They went to all sorts of places that Eleanor found gay and excellently arranged; they walked with a sense of freedom and delight right from Washington Square to the Art Gallery; they shopped at the hugest shops; they went even with a gay male friend of Miss Dubose to the last big baseball match of the season: they lunched, with the same young friend, in the last-discovered Italian restaurant, where, on broken - backed chairs, in a backyard, beneath strings of washing, they ate little messes of rice and tomatoes and laughed extravagantly.

They spent the evenings — Don and Eleanor alone — in going to innumerable theatres that Don found uniformly vulgar and abject. And Eleanor reminded him that there weren’t two decent pieces ever to be seen in London at once. And when they went with her father to Coney Island by boat — she insisted on it because she was certain that Don was growing ill — she became almost angry because he refused to see how fairy-like was the aspect of New York Bay at night. He couldn’t see it simply because he was so filled with the idea that the illuminated dime-shows to be found in Coney Island itself were imbecile and degrading that he couldn’t see anything at all. The good behaviour, the good order, the cheerfulness, the decorum of the crowd — the things that to her were noticeable — counted to him for nothing: the lights counted for nothing: the pleasure counted for nothing. He couldn’t let himself go: he wandered in the blaze, in the crowd, by her side or by her father’s with a dizzy gloom. This, he said, was the best they could do then! And there wasn’t a trace of refinement, of intellect — even of thought.

And if Eleanor could not, truthfully, contend that there was any trace of thought in watching dazed-looking Indians playing with rattlesnakes, in having a megaphone bellow in your ear that for ten cents you could have your future husband’s name told, in watching innumerable dancers in a diffused blaze of light whirl with set faces to the sound of the most brazen band on earth on a floor that was so much the largest and slipperiest on earth that you couldn’t distinguish objects at its further end — if she couldn’t, in Coney Island, find anything uplifting, she could, when they were in the blue night of the steamer, going back, confess that it had made her contagiously happy to be with so many nice people who themselves were all so happy. It was true that at the Bowery Restaurant, where they had eaten a dinner that was quite better than anything they got at their hotel, served by waiters at least more cheerfully polite than any they had at their hotel, in a crowd that numbered three thousand, the night before a gentleman had gone mad and emptied his revolver, killing three people and escaping entirely. But she remembered that two years before the same thing had happened in the best
café
in Rome five minutes after she had left it — and poor, bright, luminous, happy Coney Island had been built in a day. And, as she put it, she had been going about with forty thousand people for four hours yet not a single unpleasant word had been uttered to her; it couldn’t, she triumphantly said, have happened anywhere in Europe. She couldn’t even imagine herself doing such a thing.

And where, she asked, when the steamer had put off, could they find anything more really beautiful than that scene!
 
They were, in deep blackness, on a crowded deck, in air so fresh that it was more than comfortable for her father when she insisted on turning up his collar. They were upon smooth, dimpled water, and in the blue-black nothingness of the night, with the heads of the passengers, the funnels and rails silhouetted in a singular effect of silence, they saw the domes, the minarets, the towers, the fountains, existing in lines, in masses, in globes, in flames of fire, with below them a blaze of reflection streaking down the black waters. The stillness, the absolute beauty and the distance made her say:

“It’s taken New York to make that!”

Don groaned, and the voice of a young girl, with a burred, hard accent that she could already distinguish as of New England, uttered a long string of incomprehensible words. “One — two — nine — paper — seven — four — sumach — eighteen — eleven — ninety-one — orange....” And the voice, lowered and confidential, that Eleanor knew to be the girl’s lover’s, corrected her gently from time to time. They sat there in the beneficent coolness surrounded by lovers, and the sound of this little, idiotic ritual — for it was evidently some ritual — filled her with such satisfaction — it was all so appropriate a setting for love and satisfaction — that she half had it in her to add to her:” It’s taken New York to make that!” a rather heated: “And if it were all New York had done, it’s so ideal, for simple people, that New York would be justified of its existence.”

She did not say so, because at the same moment it struck her that it was like Canzano — that it would seem tantamount to saying that because New York had given
her
a new sensation New York was justified of its existence. But she was aware, too, that what in justice to herself she really meant was that New York was justified because it could give to so many of its very poorest a sight that was so supremely touching. It had taken New York to make a Coney Island — to set so many ingenious brains working to turn out little, meretricious, thoughtless “attractions” that in the sum made up a mass of light and gaiety, in the dark night, so supremely attractive. She had had at least enough of an art student’s education to be able to believe that the emotion one feels before something of a unique beauty was as valuable as an ethical or intellectual discovery.... And here she had felt an emotion — and she believed that it was open to every New York pauper to have identically such an emotion. But she hated even to feel angry with Don, and she uttered a quite pleasantly bantering:

“Dear boy! If you want William Morris effects and floppy gowns this isn’t surely the place to come to for them!”

She had, the afternoon before, visited with his father’s stenographer, the attractive Miss Dubose, a Settlement way back in the State of New Jersey, a settlement that had seemed to her the most unattractive, because it was the most self-conscious thing she had yet seen. Here there were disagreeable-looking women talking of book-bindings, unhealthy-looking men talking about printing, egregiously precocious children talking about living a higher life — people in ugly woollen garments and people with practically no garments at all — all talking about turning out rough, ugly china, books, or axe handles with rough, ugly ornamentations. She had seen, of course, the same sort of thing at home, but in Jersey State it appeared to her to be vicious instead of merely silly...

Seated beside her, his collar, too, turned up to his ears, Don groaned again.

“Listen to those idiots!” he said.

He was referring to the lovers who were drawling out — together now—”Ninety-three — ninety-seven — pumpkin — ninety — a hundred — Hallelujah—”

And at his contemptuous reference to what to her seemed so sacred just because it was so senseless, so healthy just because it was so unself-conscious, she could not help saying hotly:

“Don’t you think
we
should be better employed...”

But she didn’t finish her sentence because the steamer happened to hoot, and when it had finished a couple of dimly-visible Italians, with hardly visible, odd, musical instruments, appeared in the gloom and began to bring out strangely and glamorously the sounds of a lilting song that she recognised as having set to it the words: “On the shady side of Broadway...”

Don said: “Oh, hell!” and plunged from her side. Immediately afterwards she heard his voice saying: “I’ll give you a hundred-dollar bill to throw those fiddles over the side....”

She was on her feet: she had already said hotly:

“Oh, it’s too bad! All these people
want
the music!”

But he did not hear her because one of the Italians was trying to explain to him in incomprehensible language that the violin and the odd wind-organ were the property of the shipping company... Don slunk back bitterly to his seat.

“For all I know,” he said to Eleanor, “the shipping company’s my property too. But I tell you I’ll buy it up if it isn’t. I’ll buy up Coney Island. I’ll suppress the whole thing!”

Eleanor was dejectedly silent. It occurred to her that she had been frightfully angry, with Don too: and she hated to have been angry: she couldn’t remember to have been angry for years and years. And then she began to argue with him, gently and calmly. In the darkness she took hold of his hand. She was determined to make him see that the scene was beautiful, and the lovers around them in the right to love rhythmical, inane tunes and rituals. She pointed out to him, in the darkness, how orderly and how gentle all these people were.... And at last, quite suddenly, the inevitable happened. He brought out:

“Then I’d better go back to England!”

She said:

“Oh, dear! Why in the world?”

“Because,” he said, with an agitating energy of self-depreciation, “you’re right and I’m wrong. Of course you’re right. There isn’t anything more poetic than poor, gentle, little people seeking for pleasure. What can
I
do here? I can’t see anything.”

But the suddenness with which he had reacted from his quite passionate point of view towards hers that was so entirely opposite was to her as disturbing as his former fury.

“Dear,” she said, “the trouble is that you see too much.”

He let his head hang dejectedly for a long while. The water rustled loudly around the steamer: the sound of the fiddle and the organ came from within the boat: a tired father for the fourth time picked up a little boy that
would
fall from a too crazy stool, and like a portent, far away to the left, another of those centres of pleasures, with domes and pyramids of fire, hung in the blue, dark sky and sent trails of fire towards them down the waters. He said at last:

“I’m no use. I think and think. And then at the last moment I do the very wrongest thing. I see now that it was positively cruel to interfere with that little tinkling noise. But at the time I thought it was degrading. The fact is that there’s a poetry in these things that I don’t see and that you do....” He reflected again and then added:

“No: I tell you quite plainly that if it weren’t that I can break up my father’s Trusts I’d go back to England to-morrow.”

“If you did...” Eleanor was beginning. But from the dark, silent, but always attentive, form of Mr Greville there came decisive tones:

“Before you speak, my dear,” he said—” I may say before you even form an opinion, just reflect upon what Don’s position actually is.”

Mr Greville stood up before them and his hat became bluishly silhouetted against the clear sky.

“You were meaning to say that Don would make you angry if he committed himself to any course of action and then drew back. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t that what he would be doing?” Eleanor asked.

A very decided “No!” came from Mr Greville. Eleanor reflected for a long time: at last her father continued:

“Get the facts quite clear in your mind. The facts are the only things that matter. Don’t let yourself be carried away by your own personal emotions. Don hasn’t committed himself to anything but breaking up his father’s Trusts. He still, you may say, means to do that. But to do that doesn’t postulate remaining in this country. It doesn’t mean that he must remain in a country that he obviously can’t understand or sympathise with. It doesn’t necessitate that: he may or he may not...”

“But how,” Eleanor asked, “can he be certain that it would be for the good of the country if he did break up the Trusts? Mayn’t they be good too? Can he decide before he’s seen more?”

Mr Greville pondered for a very little while.