Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (363 page)

“That’s what I always thought,” Mr Everard said.

“But,” Mr Luscombe continued, “if you get a very large body of cranks, they’ll form a government of themselves and then the really cranky crank is against that Government.”

“I suppose you mean he comes out on the other side?” the Countess asked.

“My dear, you’ve exactly hit it,” Gerald answered. “It’s always that. They turn out in the end to be what is called ‘reactionary.’ That’s why the Fabian Society was in favour of the Boer War. I believe it’s in favour of Tariff Reform, too. I don’t quite know.”

“What’s the Fabian Society, anyhow?” Mr Everard asked. But the Countess was ready with another remark.

“It doesn’t matter what it is, or why it is, or what it’s all about,” she said. “The result’s the same.”

“Oh, the result’s the same,” Gerald Luscombe answered. “You can go down to the Communal Hall any evening and you’ll see them sitting round a four-sided fireplace, and as the gentleman says in a hook, whose name I’ve forgotten, you see half a score of assorted varieties of Fabians and Impossiblists, and Individualists and Communist-Anarchists and Vegetarians and Hot Water and Raw Meat Dietarians and Medieval Catholics and Psychics — but the result’s the same. They’d vote Tory if there was an election, but as we never have a contested election in this division it doesn’t matter, and they go to Church on Sundays if I ask them, only as I don’t, they don’t bother much, except the Catholics.”

“But isn’t it a duty,” the Countess said, “to make the lower classes go to Church?”

“You couldn’t exactly call them the lower classes,” Luscombe answered. “Someone told me the other day that they’d got the most middle-class minds of anyone he’d ever seen.”

The Countess said: “Ah! I don’t know anything about
them.”
She added that they did not try to make the shopkeepers and doctors and people in Market Fanner go to Church. That sort of people seemed to do it of its own accord, so she could not say. But she only trusted that the morals of Gerald’s tenants were all right.

“Oh, their morals are all right,” Gerald said. “They talk about the abolition of marriage...”

The Countess exclaimed: “My dear Gerald!” upon a high note, and Mr Everard exclaimed: “Holy Moses!”

“They talk about it,” Gerald said, “but upon the whole they’re the most married people I’ve ever come across. You see them walking in couples, hand in hand, always, and the wives practically never let the husbands out of their sight.”

“That
sounds
sensible,” the Countess said. “But still you never can tell where irregularities won’t come in. I hope you’ll be very careful, my dear boy, and give notice if even you begin to suspect.”

“Oh, the Company has taken steps to see after that.” Gerald answered. “No one is permitted to become a tenant without the agreement of eighty-five per cent, of the community, and no new couples are admitted without their being able to exhibit their marriage lines.” Mr Everard said: “My aunt! You don’t
mean
that?”

“Oh, I’m perfectly serious,” Gerald Luscombe said. “I had the clause put into the agreement myself. Mr Gubb hadn’t the shadow of an opposition to offer. He says that obviously if they’re to be examples to the rest of the world their respectability must be above suspicion.”

“Well, I’m hanged if any man with the spirit of a man would put up with it! I know I wouldn’t,” came from the manager of the Talavera.

“You didn’t think, my dear Ada,” Mr Luscombe said to the Countess, “that I was going to do anything against sound morality or the things we stand for?”

The Countess looked at Gerald for a considerable time.

“I hadn’t quite looked at it in that way,” she said, for she remembered the story of Mr and Mrs Melville. But her heart warmed to his simple, kindly face. “Oh, of course you’re all right, Gerald,” she said. “Who could doubt it? But what a funny idea it all is! What put you up to it?”

“It’s the same all through;” Luscombe continued his train of thought. “They insist on breaking up the home, and talk of the infamous nature of family ties. And all the children are sent to the Communal School, but there are only two of the mothers that don’t insist on being Communal teachers in the school, and one of those is an authoress, who wouldn’t look after her children anyhow. Why, it’s only the spinsters and the unmarried men who sit round the fire in the Communal Hall. And even they aren’t allowed to get engaged to each other without the sanction of the remainder of the community.”

“My goodness!” Mr Everard exclaimed.
“
You will have the biggest scandals in this show that have ever been heard of. You can’t monkey with old Adam like this, if the Countess doesn’t mind my saying so, without upsetting the apple-cart. I have to have some rules in the Talavera, but hang it all, I don’t think even I could run the show on lines like that. I’d have all the men going on strike, and the girls throwing ink over my shirt-fronts, and serve me right too!”

“I don’t believe I agree with you,” the Countess said. “I think Mr Luscombe is perfectly right. It’s the duty of people in our station to do all that we can to see that our inferiors are clean, sober and moral. It’s what I’ve heard that I most approve of in the scheme, so far.”

Lady Croydon, indeed, spoke exactly her own meaning and with a sigh she admitted to herself that even she couldn’t go so far as her second cousin seemed to have got in the feudal direction. The Radical papers had more than once turned their attention to Lady Croydon’s efforts to preserve morality amongst her tenantry at Fanner.

“But what about the financial side of it?” she said suddenly. “You haven’t told us how it pays?”

“Oh, it pays uncommonly well,” Gerald Luscombe said. “The Simple Life Limited has paid a dividend of eight and a half per cent, upon the first year’s workings. You see, being in a way a philanthropic company it will limit its dividends to ten per cent. Anything earned above that will go to pay for the Communal undertakings. There are the Communal work-shops, the dining-room, the kitchen, the swimming-pond and the motor-bus that takes those who work in London to the station.”

Mr Luscombe indicated with his hand the buildings that were grouped together on the edge of the green opposite the village inn, from which, two years before, Mr Gubb had seen the group of geese issue.

From the distance at which they were, the outline of these buildings, which were in silhouette against the sky, were rather heavy, rather grim and gaunt. They gave somehow the impression of resembling sheds for tramcars or the garages of automobiles.

“Well, they’ve got their incubators already,” Mr Everard said.

Luscombe looked keenly across the Countess at the happy manager.

“Oh, I’ve advanced them the money for that,” he said. “They’ll pay me back when the interest rises above that ten per cent. But the thing is that the thing itself really pays.”

“Then,” Lady Croydon said, “if it really pays you and there’s nothing the matter with it3 morals, and if the tenants are ready to go to Church on Sundays — though I’d much rather they went to Church instead of being merely ready to go — I don’t see...” Lady Croydon paused and both men awaited her words. She did not, however, finish her sentence. What she desired to say was after all a little difficult to put into words. The fact was that she was ready to lead the rest of the County in calling on the Luscombes. But she did not quite mean that they would want to call on Mrs Luscombe as the wife of one of themselves. Luscombe, as it were, had forfeited the right to that. But he might climb back to the visiting rank in which, as she saw it, the parsons and curates exist. The County, that is to say, might regard him possibly as a philanthropist like the late Dr Barnardo, or, on the other hand, they might consider him as a person who was going to show them how to make money out of their estates. In that case he might rank with Members of Parliament — not, that is to say, real territorial members, but with carpet-baggers whom you invited to lunch and supported because the Party forced them on you and because they were doing your dirty work. This, however, would have been rather difficult to put into any reasonably polite words, and Lady Croydon liked to be reasonably polite when it did not suit her to be definitely rude. She got, however, somewhere near it by continuing:

“It’s delightfully interesting! You must let me bring Lily Brabazon-Courtlew to look over the place one afternoon.”

And as she felt, and always had felt, a real affection for poor Gerald she added:

“Come and have lunch with Croydon on Thursday. The houses are quite a sight, so he tells me, and I like to have someone to talk to him who can appreciate his fruit. It’s more than I can do.”

CHAPTER II

IT happened that when they reached the Communal Buildings they met Mr Major, the architect, who had come down to attend to some alterations in the new labourers’ cottages that had been built behind the old cottages of the settlement. He had come up from the labourers’ cottages to inspect the Communal dining-room. For this building, though it had been erected somewhat more than nine months, remained obstinately damp. So did the Communal children’s dormitory and the automobile garage. The two latter buildings did not so much matter, because no children as yet slept in the dormitory, and because, the dampness being strictly confined to the walls, the Communal motor exhibited no signs of having suffered. But Lady Croydon was enchanted by the sight of the dining-hall. It was a very large, barn-shaped building, Tunning up clean to the roof with the oaken tie-beams crossing at the top of the walls and breaking the bareness. Down each side of the hall ran long tables. At the end which confronted the door, was the huge cooking-fire formed, as it were, of a great bank of red bricks, the mortar in between the cracks, very white, and a sort of cradle or trough in the middle holding the great sunken fire. In the centre of the Hall was yet another fireplace, round which, after dinner, the Colonists, as Mr Luscombe said, sat and discussed. The windows were long and casemented, high up, so that the diners, who sat with their backs to the walls, might not be inconvenienced by draughts. And from the centre of the roof there descended an enormous cowl, shaped like an inverted funnel and tiled. This was to carry off the smoke from the central fire, which was shaped like an altar of brick, and had no back or chimney. Mr Major had taken the main outline of his architectural idea from the refectory of the monks of St Francis at Bucalamare near Sienna.

The Countess was delighted with the hall because, in its clean whiteness, it pleased her eyes whilst, with its exceeding simplicity, it suggested to her a work-house interior. It was not calculated, she thought, to give these people — who, she could not get it out of her head, were akin to the lower orders — it would not give them ideas above their station. Mr Everard, too, could remark that you could get a jolly good chop from a silver grill over a fire of that size, and for his part he did not like anything better than those old-fashioned restaurants and clubs where you chose your own chop or steak and saw it put over the fire. With a pint and a half of hard, old ale and a bit of Cheshire cheese and half a bottle of tawny port to top off with, if you had not anything special to do in the afternoon, which was not his luck often, you could not ask for a better lunch. As a change, of course. You would not want to do it every day.

He addressed his remarks to Gerald Luscombe, the Countess having immediately fixed upon Mr Major and becoming engrossed in what, mildly, he told her about the large, damp stain that shewed obstinately in the white wall on the right, and in the fact that the table-cloths and napkins became sopping wet if they were left on the table between supper and breakfast.

The problem of this dampness was a matter of calm, deep interest for Mr Major. He was inclined to think that the small spring which fed what was formerly the duck-pond and was now the Communal bathing-shed — that the small spring must have its rise immediately beneath the foundations of the right wall.

But, on the other hand, there was a perfectly adequate damp-course in the wall itself, and the floor was made on a substructure of puddled coke-breeze that should be as impervious to damp as a sheet of zinc. That did away with the idea that the damp rose from the soil and dispelled itself through the atmosphere. If it had been near the coast Mr Major might have thought that the builders had used sea-sand in making the mortar. For where sea-sand is smuggled in, contrary to contract, the salt which it contains attracts atmospheric moisture so that walls, of whose fabric it forms a part, are perpetually in a dripping condition. But they were far from the sea, and in the surrounding country itself there were such large quantities of sand, the most proper for the purpose, to be had only for the digging. Besides, aware of the perversity of builders, which is a perversity beyond reason and measure, he had himself very carefully tested samples of all the sand which had been used. Lady Croydon really hung upon his lips. These material particulars of how things could be done, and how they ought to be done, had for her a real fascination. And there did not seem to be about Mr Major the least touch of Idealism, except that he talked of fine proportions and harmonious sky-lines. There did not seem to be about him a touch of Humanitarianism; though he was explaining things to her all the time, he seemed to her a very quiet man, and he gave no idea of ever thinking about the Simple Life at all.

Mr Major, indeed, never did give the Simple Life a thought. He neither discussed nor argued, but a long apprenticeship to Architecture, spent as to part of it in doing actual stone-mason’s work upon old Churches in Wiltshire, and spent as to another part of it in a long inspection for a learned society, of the decaying Cathedrals and Churches of Southern France and Central Italy — these long, solitary years in ecclesiastical surroundings had inspired him with a deep ascetic piety. It was only, perhaps, because he was too silent and too modest ever to talk about his religious feelings that he had escaped becoming a member of one of the religious Orders. But if, at certain seasons of the year, you chanced for a moment to be in a position to glance down the sleeve of his coat you could perceive that he wore, for the time at least, a hair shirt. This asceticism, and a very considerable measure of poverty, had made him able to put up with the sumptuary methods of the Simple Life. And as he never talked about anything but his work, and that only to an employer, the Simple Lifers never discovered that he was not, to the very bottom of his heart, one of themselves. The rooms of the tiny cottage that he had taken at Cowbridge, on his return from Italy, had been absolutely bare of ornament, and as he observed the fasts of the Church with an extreme rigour, and on ordinary days was hardly less abstemious, they found nothing whatever in his mode of life to put them on the scent. He had been introduced to Cowbridge by Mr Parmont, who had met him on the top of a ‘bus, and for some years he had gained a laborious means of existence by spending hours and days in illuminating manuscripts, chiselling pewter and making beaten copper-ware. Latterly, however, having become known to and very much liked by various patrons of the Artistic, who were wealthy and inclined to dally with Socialism or the more advanced economic ideas, Mr Major had received several commissions for the building of houses in the country. And one thing having led to another he had then on his hands as much work as he could at all get through. In order to be able, as he must, to travel from end to end of the Home Counties at frequent intervals, he had had to leave Cowbridge and to settle himself in one of the old streets behind Westminster Abbey. Here he occupied for the convenience of his clients, as an office, a room on the first floor, and in the sloping roof, a small, cell-like garret for his own life and sleep. His entire income beyond his living and travelling expenses he gave to the Little Sisters of the Poor, and to a society which does its best to prevent the restoration of historic buildings; he was then thirty-two; he dressed always in black broad-cloth, wore a black, round hat like a curate’s, had a pale, emaciated and rather aquiline face and a manner that was always very absorbed.

“I could make a place like this into a jolly good sort of hotel and home of rest for actors who want a week-end or who are resting,” Mr Everard said. “I should like to try my hand at it. But there wouldn’t be any benevolent tosh about it. It would just be sound, hard business.”

“Well, there isn’t, we hope,” Lady Croydon appealed to Luscombe, “anything benevolent about this. It’s our first duty not to demoralise our dependents by anything of that sort.”

Gerald Luscombe smiled a little vaguely but quite friendly. He did not commit himself more than to say: “Oh, if an idea sounds as if it had something in it, someone had better have a shy at it.”

“Yes, Gerald,” the Countess agreed, “except if there’s a possibility of doing harm. If there’s a chance of that it’s much better to leave things alone. And to give people more than they deserve does inestimable harm.”

“I quite agree with Lady Croydon,” Mr Everard said, “though the papers often say that they can’t for the life of them see how I give the public as much as I do for the money they pay for their seats. But it’s attention to detail that does it. The
Referee
said that I was a public benefactor last Sunday, and I maintain that I am.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” the Countess said, “I have a box in the hall with a slit in the lid, and I always beg visitors to put their tips for the servants into it. I’m very much against tipping. It’s so demoralising, and one’s friends, I am sure, are all so poor nowadays that they certainly can’t afford tips to servants who, for their station, are infinitely better off themselves.”

“The only thing I can think about the dampness,” Mr Major came back from a short inattention to remark, “is that the place isn’t sufficiently occupied so that it hasn’t had a chance to dry out. You see the fires are practically only ht on Saturdays and Sundays. I should advise you,” he addressed Luscombe directly, “to have them kept up for a whole week on end. If you try that in the meanwhile I’ll have another look at the place when I come down in ten days’ time. I don’t think we can quite expect it to dry out if it’s only used at the week-ends.” And Mr Major made his silent leave-taking with the slightest priestly air of a man who is withdrawing not only from his society, but into himself.

“What an entirely excellent young man he appears!” the Countess said. “If they’re all like that I don’t see there can be very much to be said against them.”

» “So the dining-hall isn’t used all the week?” Mr Everard said. “Why is that?”

“Oh, they’re all very much like that,” Gerald Luscombe answered the Countess first, and then he turned his attention to Mr Everard. His face wore the gentle smile that it always had when he talked of the Colonists, a smile half ironical, half as if he were talking of rather engaging but wayward children.

“No,” he said, “the dining-hall isn’t used during the greater part of the week. The original idea was that it should he; but the greater number of the Colonists find that they have to make their livings up in Town, so it’s used only at the week-ends. You see, nearly all of them who stop here all the time are so simple in their habits that what they eat they can eat sitting on their back doorsteps just as well as anywhere else.”

“I hope you don’t let them eat on their back doorsteps?” the Countess said. “It must be very untidy!”

“Oh, I don’t mean it literally,” Gerald answered. “I only mean that they seem to prefer eating what they do eat in their own houses.”

The Communal buildings, which they were then engaged in inspecting, were situated at the very edge of Luscombe Green, where the road turns in a broad curve, and Mr Major had adapted the exteriors of the edifice to this curve, so that the fronts of the buildings were all slightly bowed and towards the rear their breadths diminished. There came first the children’s dormitory, then the shed for the automobile and the bicycles, then the dining-hall itself, then the Communal schoolroom, which contained a platform serving for a theatre or for the purpose of meetings and concerts, and then the bathing shed, which had been erected over the former duck-pond. All these buildings were of a very rough-hewn, brownish, local stone, studiously severe, very thick in the walls and without any ornament at all, and it had been at first the desire of the Colonists, passed by a general vote at a Sunday meeting, that they should be thatched. This laudable effort after picturesqueness was, however, defeated by the County Council Bye-Laws, and Mr Major, who had no particular love for thatching, since he considered that it imparted to buildings a top-heavy and untidy appearance — Mr Major had fallen back upon tiles made by hand in the neighbourhood. It was a canon of the Simple Life that everything employed in their buildings must come from the immediate neighbourhood, and as even the nearest brick clay contained an appreciable quantity of sand and silicates, the tiles themselves had a yellowish, brownish, rather rusty appearance and Mr Major was afraid that they would not prove, after a year or so, altogether satisfactory in keeping out the weather. Indeed, it was only because he did not wish to hurt his clients’ feelings that he had not attributed the general dampness of the structures to this source. Thus with the brownish roofs and the rusty walls the group of buildings had a rather gaol-like aspect. Indeed, the tenants of the inn, a long lease of which had been granted to the local brewers so that they could not be ejected to make room for Simple Lifers, were in the habit of referring to the group of buildings as “The Reformatory,” and, since there was no night-watchman and police were rare upon the roads, the buildings were occasionally broken into by tramps who passed the night there, and left behind in the morning old rags, whisps of straw, the ashes of fires and empty bottles. The backs of the bathing-shed and the garage had been laid out as fives courts, and behind them the grass of the Green had been rolled so as to form tennis and bowling lawns. Another piece of grass, intersected with lines and pocked with small depressions of about the dimensions of a soup-plate, was the Nine Men’s Morris which Mr Gubb had learned how to lay out from Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes.”