Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (457 page)

“But confound it!” the Duke said. “Your faithful services... They can’t go unrewarded.”

“I have chosen for Your Highness,” Macdonald said amiably, “three hundred and forty neckties. I have read the papers for six months for Your Highness to discover any amusing paragraphs, Also, I have carried three bouquets to Madame La Baronne Sassonoff, and I have bought Your Highness a novel without illustrations. I do not ask for a reward commensurate with these enormous services.”

“No! no!” the Duke said. “You are a very amusing person. You must be rewarded. Wait! I will make you my supernumerary aide-de-camp with permission to reside in London. But no! no! then I should have to pay your salary. — I will name you supernumerary aide-de- camp to my nephew, with forty thousand roubles a year from the private purse, and the Order of Alexander II of the First Class, and rooms in the embassy. In that way you have an official position that will be of great service to you.”

“I must still,” Sergius Mihailovitch said, “take up the position of manager of motor cars. It is part of the plan.”

The Grand Duke said amiably: “Damn your motor cars! Become the manager of a pawnshop, if you like. I need not interfere with your duties, for you will have no duties. To-night I will give a banquet in your honour.”

“I had rather,” Sergius Mihailovitch said, “that you commanded me to attend the opera.”

“Aha!” the Grand Duke said, “that icicle will be there.”

“Lady Aldington will be there,” Macdonald said.

“And you are passionately devoted to her?” the Grand Duke asked.

“Passionately!” Macdonald answered.

“But you will never melt that icicle,” the Grand Duke said.

Macdonald smiled faintly. “Do you know,’’ he answered,” I do not know that I really want to.”

“Oh, you are incorrigible!” His Highness commented. “But I would not mind being you.”

As Macdonald went through the next room, the tall, dark man who had been looking at the prints in the portfolio turned slowly upon him.

“Have you any idea,” he said, “when the Grand Duke will be disengaged?”

With his unfailing light smile Macdonald answered: “I don’t really know. I’ll send a man, if you like. Or, no, I’ll go and ask him myself.”

But at that moment the Duke threw the door open. With his immense bulk swathed in its pink bath robes, he had the air of having burst it open with his heavy shoulder.

“My God, Kintyre,” he said, “I’ve kept you waiting. My dear fellow, I was having a bath.”

The tall, dark man smiled faintly. “Oh, it’s all right,” he said. “I only came to look at your Rops’s. I’ve been right through the portfolio.”

Macdonald was going out of the room when the Prince said: “Wait a minute, Sergius Mihailovitch. This gentleman may be of use to you. He is the Duc de Batalha.”

The tall, dark man gathered the point of his beard in rather spidery fingers and bit it reflectively.

“I’d be delighted to be of service to your friend,” he said; “but I’m not the Duke of Batalha, you know. I feel as if I ought to be. But I’m not.”

The Grand Duke muttered some genial curses against English titles and their complexity.

“I thought you were Kintyre, Dijon, and Batalha,” he said. “Your uncle was.”

“No,” he got his answer. “I’m only Kintyre and Dijon. Batalha went to my cousin, Lady Aldington, along with almost everything that was worth having in the beastly titles. That’s why I am so poor.”

“Poor!” the Grand Duke grumbled. “You’re all alike, you people. You don’t know what poverty is.”

“I wish,” Kintyre said meditatively, “that my cousin Emily Aldington was dead. I’m her heir.”

The Grand Duke put his finger upon his Ups. “Oh, you mustn’t say that here, Duke,” he said. “We have the highest admiration for that lady. We are going to the opera to-night in her honour.”

Kintyre said: “Oh, I didn’t know, I am sure.”

And then Macdonald asked him: “Is Lady Aldington really the owner of Batalha? I had heard that the person one had to negotiate with was a Scotchman of my own name. They call him
le rey de Batalha.”

Kintyre looked him up and down with a leisurely glance. “This is Count Macdonald,” the Grand Duke said, the spoiled baby of all the Russias.’

Kintyre uttered an “Oh!” that expressed the fact that in that case Sergius Mihailovitch was a person that he could talk to.

Then he addressed him: “Of course, if you wanted to buy tin or cobalt or whatever it is that they get out of the mines, you would have to address yourself to a Scotchman, and probably his name would be Macdonald. All large undertakings are managed by Scotchmen, and they are generally called Macdonald. Sometimes they’re called Graham.” He looked at Macdonald carefully again. “But I don’t suppose you want tin or cobalt?” he added.

“Sergius Michailovitch,” the Grand Duke said, “only wants to give money away. I kept you waiting all this time because I was trying to make him accept a high position with a salary. And it was so much trouble that I perspired until I might just as well have never taken a bath at all.’’

Again Kintyre surveyed Macdonald curiously.” I suppose you can afford it,” he said at last. “I only wish somebody would offer me a salaried position.”

“Well, you know,” Macdonald said amiably, “I could always take you as assistant manager in a motor car shop.”

“Oh, you’re interested in motor cars?” the Duke questioned. “I wish I was. I wish I was interested in anything.”

“What a confoundedly discontented fellow you are, Kintyre!” the Grand Duke said.

“Oh, they’re all like that,” Macdonald explained to him. “You don’t know these English as I do. Now, there’s Aldington. He must be richer than the Czar, and he is always groaning. He says the Government has ruined him.”

“Oh, Aldington!” Kintyre said, with a shrug of his shoulders. “He’s got no money. It’s his wife that’s got it all. And it ought to be mine.”

“Grumble! grumble! grumble!” the Grand Duke muttered. “You’re as bad as a crow to-day, Kintyre.”

“Well,” Kintyre said, “you’d be as bad as a crow if you were me. I’ve just had to write a cheque for £50,000 as the last instalment of succession duty to my uncle’s estate.”

“There you are!” Macdonald said to the Grand Duke.

“These are our English. That means that the last instalment of his succession was about five million roubles, and God knows what the other instalments were. Yet they will all tell you the same tale. Black ruin stares them in the face.”

“Black ruin would stare you in the face, my friend,” Kintyre said, with an amiable moodiness, “if you stood in my boots. But if you want to do anything in Batalha — if you want to sell motor cars — you’ll have to ask Lady Aldington.”

“I’ll tell you,” the Grand Duke said. “Sergius Mihailovitch doesn’t want to sell. He wants to give. He wants to give Batalha a king now.”

Kintyre rounded his thickly haired red lips to a slight whistle.

“And,” the Grand Duke continued, “if you can do anything to help him, you’ll personally oblige myself.”

Macdonald flushed a little with pleasure. “Now, that’s really generous of Your Highness,” he said.

The Grand Duke looked at Kintyre. “Of course,” he said, “that does not go beyond these four walls. I cannot be officially implicated in restoring kings. But if you hear that Macdonald wants a backing anywhere, you may let people know that he has a backing from me. Not for any particular purpose, you understand, but just a general support.” — , And, just as His Highness had meant, there came into the English Duke’s whole demeanour an entirely different attitude towards Sergius Mihailovitch. So that it was as if with a regretful candour that he said:

“I’m afraid I can’t be of much use to you in Batalha.

I wish I could. But you may take it from me that my cousin Emily really rules the roost there, and not any Scotchman.” He looked at the bulky Russian prince.

“You might introduce me to Lady Aldington,” he said. “I haven’t met her since she was three.”

“Oh, I don’t know her,” the Grand Duke said. “I should think she thought I wasn’t respectable enough to know. I’ve heard that English women say that of me.” And the Grand Duke chuckled pleasurably.

Kintyre looked at Macdonald, and this time his glance entirely accepted him. If Sergius Mihailovitch, the glance said, not only had the backing of the Russian prince but was also
au mieux
with an English member of his own more than princely family, there was no earthly reason why he should not treat him as a man and a brother.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, “who have the soft spot for my cousin! My dear fellow, do me the favour to introduce me to her to-night. I’m going on to Ostend to-morrow, so it will have to be to-night.”

“Well, of course I will,” Macdonald smiled.

“You don’t think,” Kintyre said, “that she’ll object to knowing a poor relation?”

“Why,” Macdonald answered, “she was saying this afternoon that she rather wished she knew you. She just remembered you as a boy of thirteen when she lived at Chiswick.”

Then that’s all right,” Kintyre answered. “I thought my beastly old uncle might have set her against me. I’ll come round to your box at the second act, and you shall take me to her.” And Kintyre sauntered amiably out of the room.

Sergius Mihailovitch remained once more to thank the Prince, for the few words that he had uttered had, Sergius Mihailovitch was aware, done him an immense service. He knew that when he got to London he wouldn’t be merely an adventurer floating indefinitely in the air; he would have the safe anchorage of the Grand Duke’s good word that Kintyre would quite certainly put about in discreet quarters.

“My good fellow,” the Grand Duke answered his thanks, “don’t you see that I stand to make money out of it?” And he smiled grimly in his beard.

Sergius Mihailovitch permitted himself to remark: “You know, I.H., you are rather a mystery. I shouldn’t wonder it at the bottom of you there wasn’t some of our Russian mysticism. I shouldn’t wonder if, like myself, it worries you to think that Rome is on fire, and you wanted to help put it out.”

“Mystery yourself,” the Duke retorted grimly. “What do you go on these wild goose chases for? You aren’t going to tell me that it’s because Lady Aldington has interests in Batalha, and you want to protect her against republicans. You wouldn’t want to protect anybody’s interests if you loved them till you wanted to scream.” Sergius Mihailovitch set his heels together, and bowed for the last time.

“I.H.,” he said, “it is well known that science is the ruling passion of this age. I have a friend and teacher called Pett, who would lecture you on this subject by the hour together. He says ‘he is to inherit the earth.’” And Sergius Mihailovitch smiled faintly. “My interests in this mission are purely scientific. Perhaps that is what Socrates meant when he said that we owe a cock to Æsculapius.”

“Well! well!” The Grand Duke resigned the discussion. “As the Russian proverb says, ‘The heart of another is a dark forest.’”

“A dark forest,” Sergius Mihailovitch repeated.

PART II

CHAPTER
I

“WELL, we’re all English now, at any rate,” Mr. Pett said, and he stretched his knickerbockered legs with the grey worsted stockings luxuriously out in front of the red velvet cushions of the Pullman armchair. “I’m not certain that’s not a comfort.”

“It feels a little like what it feels like when the ladies go up to the drawing-room after dinner, doesn’t it?” Lady Aldington asked. The train was running smoothly out of the large station. “It’s as if nobody had their eyes on us any more.”

“
I
always feel, too,” Mrs. Pett said, “as if foreigners were spying on me.”

“That, you know,” Kintyre said a little ironically, “is because the Briton is always conscious that he’s a superior animal. He thinks the eyes of the world must be upon him wherever he is.”

“Well, they may look at me as much as they like, and be damned to them,” Lady Aldington’s husband grunted, “I’m not going to change my habits for anybody.”

“You would not, of course, Aldington,” the Duke said, as if he were talking amiably to a butt. “You wouldn’t, and you couldn’t, and you don’t want to, and you won’t.”

“Now we have all spoken once,” Mr. Pett said cheerfully—”except the puke of Kintyre, and he’s had two goes. Oughtn’t we to elect a president to this debating society?”

Kintyre looked slightly puzzled. He had not yet gathered how Mr. and Mrs. Pett came to be travelling in his cousin’s private car, and he didn’t quite know who Mr. and Mrs. Pett were, so he supposed that it was all right. Even Lady Aldington looked in the least apprehensive, as if she did not know what Mr. Pett might not be going to say next. But Mr. Pett was not going to have any silence.

“It’s a pity Comrade M. isn’t with us,” he said reflectively; “he’s capital in a mixed party. I always say he’s like the oil that binds a salad together.”

“I never saw him at the station,” Emily Aldington said, “or I should have asked him.”

“
I
saw him
and
asked him,” Mr. Pett said, “but he wouldn’t come.” And then Mr. Pett appealed confidingly to Lady Aldington upon a point of etiquette. “I suppose I oughtn’t to have asked him into
your
saloon.”

“Oh, you did perfectly right,” Emily said. “Of course we want him.”

“Ah, but I mean as a matter of good form,” Mr. Pett insisted. “What would be the rule, now, in the best society?”

Emily Aldington really flushed a little. “Amongst really good people,” she said, after a pause, “there aren’t any rules at all, you know. People just do what they want, and it turns out all right. You couldn’t have done anything I wanted more.”

“Of course, it was really the Countess,” Mr. Pett said, “that wouldn’t let him come. She said you hadn’t called on her.”

“I will call on Countess Macdonald the moment I get to London,” Lady Aldington said. And again a slightly painful silence fell upon them. Mrs. Pett, who was not able at all times to muster up her husband’s purposeful self-assertion, sat with her hands clasped before her. Her face looked tiny, slightly anxious, and very weather-beaten.

She was wearing in honour of the occasion — for the night before Lady Aldington had already invited them to travel with her, — she was wearing a little ready-made coat and skirt of white canvas that she had purchased in great haste that morning. It was very stiff and did not fit her at all, and the steady gaze with which Aldington all the time regarded her was embarrassing her.

Mr. and Mrs. Pett and Emily sat on the red velvet armchairs; the Duke of Kintyre, with his sallow face and black beard, strolled up and down the long carriage as if he wished slightly to dissociate himself from his cousin’s protégés. Only now and then did he drop in a word. Aldington, behind his wife’s chair, leaned heavily against the plate-glass panel of the window that showed, rapidly moving, the factory chimneys and the slag heaps of the German landscape. He gazed all the time with a sort of fascinated, smouldering passion at the tiny little woman. She reminded him of the woman who was known to Lady Aldington only as Matilda. She wasn’t in the least like Matilda, who was large, painted, and inclined to grow fat;
but every one of Mrs. Pett’s motions and every note of her voice reminded him of Matilda, who, in Curzon Street, was known as Mrs. Montmorency De la Cour.

Suddenly Kintyre, sauntering towards Mr. Pett with his hands deep in the pockets of his pilot coat, and swaying slightly in a nautical manner to the swaying of the train — before his accession Kintyre had passed the greater part of his life yachting — Kintyre exclaimed:

“I didn’t quite catch the name of your constituency.”

“I’m not in Parliament,” Mr. Pett said. “I haven’t time for fancy frills. I am a thinker.”

Kintyre said: “Ah!” And before he sauntered away again he let drop the words: “I thought my cousin did not know anyone who wasn’t a Radical member. It’s generally considered rather desirable, you know.”

Mr. Pett refrained from letting his retort fly at the Duke’s back, which was already towards him.

“It’s extraordinary,” he said to Lady Aldington, “how little these dilettantes know of the value of life. Who’s got time to sit in Parliament now that it’s such a discredited institution? It was all right in the ‘forties. But I’d as soon be on the London County Council or Islington Vestry nowadays. That’s what your friend means by saying that Rome is on fire. That’s part of what he means.”

“But what does all that he means come to?” Lady Aldington asked. “He said that it meant several thousand things in one.”

“Ah!’’ Mr. Pett answered,” he means everything that’s going on in the world. All the movements in this immense jungle that we live in; all the things that it takes a mind like mine to catch hold of and understand.”

“Well, it
is
rather like a dark forest,” Lady Aldington said.

“You got that from Comrade M.,” Mr. Pett accused her.

“Yes, I did,” Lady Aldington answered; “he used the phrase last night.”

“He’s always using it,” Mr. Pett said. “He’s a most extraordinary chap, is Comrade M.”

“May I ask,” Kintyre’s voice suddenly interrupted, “why you always call Count Macdonald Comrade M.?”

“Well, you see,” Mr. Pett answered, “once he was an Anarchist, then he was a Socialist, then he was a member of the first Duma...

“Oh, we know all about his wild oats,” the Duke said. “My good chap,” Mr. Pett raised his voice to say sharply, “I dare say you do. I was just uttering those words so as to get hold of my subject. I am trying to tell Lady Aldington all about His Excellency Count Sergius Mihailovitch Macdonald. She likes to hear about him.”

The Duke slightly raised his eyebrows and turned away. He found it necessary to reflect for a moment or two when he had been sharply rapped over the knuckles. Mr. Pett turned immediately once more upon Lady Aldington.

“Of course, your ladyship isn’t to understand,” he said, “that Macdonald is a regular Admirable Crichton. He isn’t a thinker in the sense that I am. He acts along the lines of his generous impulses. That is to say that he feels; he doesn’t think.”

“I should think,’’ Emily said,” that that is what gets him into trouble.”

“Trouble?” Mr. Pett said. “He’s never been in any trouble that I know of.”

“But he’s lost all his money, hasn’t he?” Lady Aldington asked.

“That’s not a trouble,” Mr. Pett answered. “It might be for you; it might be for me, since I have managed to put by a little for a rainy day. But it’s not a trouble for Macdonald; it’s just fun.”

“Then I suppose it’s creditable of him,” Emily said.

“Creditable,” Mr. Pett answered. “Yes, it’s creditable if it’s creditable for the sun to shine or for vines to grow grapes. Don’t you understand? It’s just Macdonald. He can’t help himself.”

“But it shows at least that he has a generous nature,” Lady Aldington said.

“He’s got a generous nature right enough,” Mr. Pett said. “But that’s no particular credit to him. He’d give a fortune away to a cause that appealed to him, just as easily as you’d throw a lump of sugar to a dog if the dog happened to be begging of you when you were sitting at a table with the sugar basin on it.”

“Still—” Lady Aldington began.

Mr. Pett became almost exasperated, so much did he dislike to hear anyone praised when he was present.

“
Can’t
your ladyship understand?” he said. “You appear to be quite an intelligent person.” And Mr. Pett sputtered a little under his heavy moustache. “Look here, I’ll try to give you an illustration! Once Macdonald and I were on a bus coming from a Fabian meeting at Ealing. The bus ran into a lamp standard, and there was a girl hurt — a servant or a factory hand, of the same class that I come of. Well, of course a crowd collected and the police came. And of course the police, who hate the lower classes like poison, were down upon the girl at once. They said she was shamming. The girl had fainted, but they shook her out of the faint — the policemen did — and tried to make her say there was nothing the matter with her. The police, of course, are on the side of the big omnibus companies, and were trying to prevent the girl getting damages against the company. I tell you the police hate the poor like poison
— I
knew that. I stood on top of that bus with the large crowd all round it. I didn’t want to do anything. I only wanted to get back home. I knew that if I spoke to the police they’d run me in for being drunk and impeding them in the course of their duties. Regular nasty temper they were in, and I’d instinctively got the poor man’s fear of the police. If you’d ever been one of the lower classes you’d have known what it meant. But what did Macdonald do? Just exactly what was natural to him. He walked down those bus steps smiling that smile of his, and he put his hand into his breast pocket and took out his card-case and gave a card to a policeman. He was actually humming. Yes! humming! And he produced half a sovereign to guarantee the doctor’s fee in case the omnibus company didn’t have to pay damages. And the police touched their helmets and kowtowed all round him, and then the crowd and the police and the whole lot of them streamed off up the road to the nearest doctor’s, with Macdonald at their head still humming. And four policemen were carrying the girl as if she had been made of glass. Arid I stood on top of the bus with my jaw hanging down in sheer amazement. I shouldn’t have thought it was possible. But when Macdonald came back he was rolling a cigarette and still humming. He couldn’t see that he’d done anything at all, while as for me, it struck me as the bravest action I’d ever witnessed. And as for producing the half-sovereign — why, I dare say it was Macdonald’s last coin. I know it was. And I was fairly well off, because I was beginning to make money then, owing very much to the way Macdonald had helped me to make a start. And I’m not at all close with money, but it would no more have entered my head to produce the half-sovereign.... Why, it
couldn’t
have entered my head. It was never there among the traditions of my ancestry.”

“But he only did his duty,” Lady Aldington said. “He couldn’t see a poor girl ill-treated by the police. He would have to interfere.”

“His duty!” Mr. Pett exclaimed. “Yes, his duty, and your duty, and your husband’s duty. But not mine. It would never have entered my head. Not if I sat on the bus and reflected on it to this day. But it never had to enter his head at all. It was there all the time. He just got up and did it. Automatically, as a cat catches a mouse or water puts out fire.”

“Well, of course he would,” Lady Aldington said.

“
But why?
—”
Mr. Pett caught her up.

“Because he’s a member of the ruling classes. Just as you are. Just as your husband is. Just as the Duke of Kintyre is. But Anne and me...”

And Mr. Pett pointed to his wife, who sat silent under the embarrassing gaze of Lord Aldington.

“Anne and me, we’re just the lower classes. We accept the brutalities of the police. We don’t try to rescue each other. We don’t even know that it can be done.”

Oh, come!” Lady Aldington said amiably.

“It’s true, your ladyship,” Mr. Pett asseverated vigorously. “Of course, I know now that it can. I have seen it done. But even now I should have to think twice before doing it. For all I’ve grown so conceited and sure of my place in the world.”