Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (237 page)

PART IV. THICKER THAN WATER
.

CHAPTER I
.

HE hadn’t, however, fainted. It was only that his head throbbed, and he didn’t want to hear any more details. He was quite certain that if his father had desired to tie up his businesses his father was a man perfectly able to do so irrefutably. And he had a great desire for something cool upon his forehead. So that, quite composedly, his voice came to Eleanor’s ears: “Oh, don’t make me out a physically weaker man than I am. I’ve not fainted. I’m only putting my head on this cool wood...” And he stood up a little unsteadily, resting the knuckles of his right hand upon the cabinet. His face was a little flushed and his voice a little thick, but he had it in him still to say:

“Aren’t you rather hard on Augustus? It isn’t
his
fault.”

She considered him still so ill that she simply couldn’t bring herself to say that the wretched little man, whom, by setting down the receiver, she had “cut off” for the last time, had done his satanic best to rub the announcement in. And she considered him still so ill that she didn’t go towards him to take him into her arms.

He marched instead across the room, and finally she knew, by the sudden clatter of hoofs and the sudden rustle of indistinguishable, pervading sounds, that he had thrown open a window for coolness.

It came into her head by a little association of ideas, for wasn’t she now bound to send her thoughts homewards?

“Why, it sounds like London!” And she thought swiftly that Fifth Avenue is the only long road in New York that doesn’t clang and rattle with trolley cars — the only place where you get away from the gong-like noise of bells and the metallic jingle of iron and granite — the only place where you hear the subdued, pensive, quick “clock-clock” that is the “note” of London’s quietude.

He knelt upon the window-seat, his head far out, his brows seeking for coolness, his eyes watching with black distaste the wonderful, begemmed night. The house fronts before him were masses of purple, towering dimly on high, chequered with warm squares of light. Below him lights whirled and glided in the roadway, passing each other, turning slowly, or with dizzy and swift rushes interlacing. There was coolness, the rustle of footsteps, the tones of innumerable voices, and from round the corner came faintly and in gusts all the jingle and cries of blazing, contagious, jostling Broadway... —

“It’s all hopelessly material,” he muttered aloud. “There’s nothing that isn’t blatant, vulgar, hideous!”

She had approached him swiftly and solicitously at his first sound...

When he turned his face to the left, Fifth Avenue, with its tall, electric light standards, with its immensely tall buildings, stretched out in the clearness for what seemed an incredible distance up-hill into the pale night of stars. When he looked to the right there rose before his eyes a pale, thin, translucent, immensely high and distant column of twinkling, squared windows. It soared right up, with something classical in its pure lines, with something fairy-like and insubstantial in the way its window spaces seemed to take away from it all its substance, with something gay, childlike and tender in its upward soar towards the shafts of light that whirled across the city. It seemed to stand, a tiny slice of cliff, with its feet in little ripples of humanity and of carriage lights, and towards the stars, from its apex, it threw up a plume of white steam...

“Oh, yes, it’s beautiful,” he muttered, “but it’s the beauty of a sheer accident. It doesn’t count. The man who built it never
thought
it would look like that...”

“Dear,” she said, “isn’t that the... the...” she faltered for a word, “isn’t it just a little symbolical of humanity? It does beautiful things unconsciously.”

He stood up, and at the closing of the window the lights and the sounds were dead at once.

“That’s an end of it!” he said, and he held out his arms to her. “Now it’s only you and me.” And he gave a sudden and radiant smile.

She put both her hands upon his shoulders before she surrendered herself: she couldn’t believe that he could have grown so soon “bitter.”

“Are you certain?” she asked wistfully. “Isn’t it just a phase of nervous excitement?”

“No,” he answered her, “the other was the phase. The other was just the incident. We’re going back. We’re going to be real. We’re going back to Cuddiford. We’re going back....”

He spoke with a rhapsodising voice and she scrutinised his features a little anxiously....”

“Don’t you remember?” he said, “I said — on the day this nonsense first began — that this excursion would be just like going down to the basement to get a hammer. Well, we’ve gone: we’re going upstairs again. We haven’t so much as got the hammer.” She couldn’t even at that quite believe her joy.

“But don’t you regret?” she asked.

“Regret?” he asked. “Regret that we’re going back? Oh, not the least in the world. I regretted bringing you
— you!
— here. Don’t you remember that — on the day this nonsense first began — I said that it wasn’t power that was given to me — it was a burden. It was a duty. It wasn’t even the sort of duty that I was fitted for...”

She still wouldn’t take him: she kept him from her with her hands upon his shoulders. “You’re excited,” she said, “won’t you think differently to-morrow?”

“Oh,” he answered, and he smiled with a sort of radiance, “it was yesterday — it was during all this nightmare — that I’ve been excited. I never really believed in my power. I had all along the feeling that my father was fooling me. It wasn’t the sort of thing to be real. I moved myself to do it. But...” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Why!” he said, “on the morning we started I bought Cuddiford Manor. I
knew
we should go back.”

But even though at that she took him to her, she couldn’t help saying bodingly:

“Oh, I want you, dear, and I want you dreadfully, but I couldn’t bear you to change again!” And sitting beside him on the window-seat, with her hand upon his hot forehead, she told him how, at the urging of Canzano, she had set herself, for his sake, to learn to tolerate these foreign masses — to learn, as it were, so much that she could even teach him to love them.

“Love them!” he said bitterly. “I’ve learned this much: that I shall leave this money to accumulate and accumulate. It’ll end by being all the money in their horrible world. And
then
...”

“And then?” she asked.

“They’ll have,” he said, with a harsh bitterness, “just to see their insensate folly.” He paused and added: “That’s the best thing I can do for them. That’s the only lesson I’m fit to teach.”

“Why,” he began again suddenly, tenderly and humorously: “what a folly to think that you could teach me to love New York! Wasn’t it you who taught me to love just all that’s made this seem unbearable? Wasn’t it you who’ve made me yearn for spirit and fineness? Wasn’t it you?”

“Dear!” she answered. “Dear!”

But a little later she put it:

“You’ve got it wrong,” she said, “and I was wrong.” It wasn’t, she uttered, her business — a woman’s part — to teach him to like things. It was her part to sustain him in what he wished, to bear with him his hardships. She asked him, in her turn, if he didn’t remember what he’d said on the day the news had reached them, over there in the quiet, shadowed dining-room that hourly seemed to be growing more real a part of their lives. He didn’t remember and she put it to him. He had said that what was most astonishing in the lives of American paupers was the way tenderly-nurtured Englishwomen bore hardships by their men’s sides.

“That’s what it’s our business to do,” she said — and she was speaking of her sex, her countrywomen, and above all of her class. “We’ve got to be ready to make the best of things — of easy things and of difficult things. And we’re ready to do it without fuss. Only, it’s
your
business to decide: we’ll back up, always, anything that you do.”

She couldn’t, nevertheless, leave New York without a certain measure of regret. It was to be said for Don that he didn’t now show any indecent haste. He seemed to be calm — and they even debated as to what ship they were to sail in. He didn’t, too, now that there was no longer any question of his having other decisions to make, shrink from going into the details of his fortune. He passed four days in Boston alone, four days that — since she wouldn’t for worlds have gone with him — Eleanor spent in packing and in getting, with Miss Dubosc, her final “impressions.”

And it was whilst she was looking, for the last time, at a spot that — because it pushed the eccentricities of the city to the wildest — she liked best, an incident forced her to see that an avalanche was coming that would have forced her to fly if nothing else had. It was precisely the very heart of New York that she liked quite the best; Broadway as far as the City Hall, except for the trolley lines, was, with its trunk-makers, its tobacco-dealers, its stores and its tourist agencies, so like the Strand that it didn’t much thrill her. But at the Post Office there began what she called the canons — the tremendous beetling, dark rifts between the skyscrapers, the gloomy gulches with the slow, hindered, jostling crowd. She loved it, as she said to Miss Dubosc, simply because the tremendous, towering masses carried her eyes up to the skies. And she was standing looking up Wall Street. The houses there give the effect of an infinite height — and, tiny between them, at the top of the steep hill that Wall Street is, there was the little spire of Trinity Church that anywhere else would have been a landmark. And men pushed and jostled all round her; a long, disorderly line of children with flags on their shoulders marched down to visit the Washington Memorial Hall; orange peels and banana skins covered the roadway, and the granite stones were tom and furrowed as if a mountain torrent had run down that hill...

“I don’t care what father may say,” she was saying.” but I’m
sure
it’s worth living here to have that to come to look at.” Miss Dubose, with her gay, short-sighted, slim grace suddenly put her umbrella before her face and said:

“There are a dozen fellows sketching us. I suspicioned they were following us all the afternoon.” The avalanche, in fact, had come. It wasn’t a minute before, aware that by now they were detected, the journalists closed upon her and asked her what her impressions were. And the cab in which they fled back to their hotel was followed by a procession of other cabs, bearing each two men in Derby hats, with notebooks and pencils. It seemed to stop everything else in the world: and the few remaining hours that Eleanor spent in New York were passed, as it were, cloistrally, in the Marie Antoinette room, with the Fragonard panels. For there were journalists everywhere — in the elevator, in the office, in the Oriental lounge. And when, for the last time, she went to dine with her father in the octagonal dining-room that had the painted brick walls, whilst she herself was saying her grace, and whilst her father was awaiting his soup, standing tall and frock-coated with his hands folded before him, she was aware that three men at the next table were busy with tablets and pencils. It wasn’t as blackly unpleasant as she had imagined it might be, but it was sufficiently disturbing to make her whisper to her father, to make her keep her lips closed in the elevator that took them back to their rooms — because a gentleman came running after them and jumped in as it rose — and to make her give up her idea of going, for the last time, with Miss Dubosc to a roof-garden theatre on Broadway. She had instead to pass an evening alone with the stenographer.

The energy of these servants of the public was, finally, brought home to her by the odd detail that Kirsen — a sedate, sour-faced Scotchwoman, born in Pimlico — received from the reporter of the most enterprising of all New York papers an offer to marry her to a German saloon-keeper if only she’d stay in New York and for four weeks furnish, for the Sunday editions, intricate details of Eleanor’s toilettes, temper and the cosmetics that she used. But it was characteristic of Mr Greville’s passion, even in New York, for the accurate presentation of facts, that he should spend his last evening in drawing up, for the use of the reporters, an exact statement of how New York had affected him, of how it had affected Eleanor, and how Don. If, he said to Don, when he arrived by the last train from Boston, the public here was actually interested in contemporary history of that sort they might as well have it with a reasonable accuracy. He even persuaded Don — and did so himself — to stand still for four minutes on the road to the elevator in the midst of a little crepitation of pencils.

So that they left the city next morning as it were with the crackle of a million fireworks attached to their tails, but with practically no one save Miss Dubosc to wave to them, from the tiny crowd on the little, rough wharf, a Stars and Stripes.
“Pop Greville carries Collar captive
” was an excellent headline: “
Kelleg sick at old Man Manhattan!
” was an accurate expression of fact: but “
Eleanor’s eyes water,”
with a smaller “
British Maiden sad to leave Flat Iron City
” beneath it, came nearer to a roughly poetic justice. It is true that when, four days out from New York, she discovered that a discreet, pleasant young Harvard man with whom she’d conversed friendlily from her deck chair — when she discovered him camera-ing her and Don from a corner as they visited the silent beasts in the dim cattle-decks — and discovered too that he’d positively taken the voyage in order to “report” for the
New York H
— , she was inclined to say that it grew mildly troublesome.