Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (493 page)

“Yes, I don’t think I particularly want you to do that,” Lady Aldington said.

And the Grand Duke grumbled that he remembered to have heard it said that the Duchess of Batalha had once said of him that he wasn’t respectable enough to call upon.

“So that you see,” he said sardonically, “I’ve got a royal memory if I haven’t got anything else.”

Suddenly Macdonald looked at his watch. It was a quarter to two. He whispered in his wife’s ear:

“You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got to go out.”

She said: “Where to?”

And he answered: “To the palace.”

She said:” Oh no,” and put her hand over her heart. But he was gone.

The King came after him. They pushed their way, both laughing a little, through the immense crowd. There were Russian sailors who smelt of smoke, and Galizians who smelt of garlic. The King was uproariously happy. He kissed three old women upon their cheeks and shouted into their ears, “I am your King.” But the crowd was so dense, and all the Galizians were so tall, that they could hardly see where they were going. But one man and another helped them.

There was an enormous roaring at half a dozen windows round the plaza. Newspaper placards were being hung out bearing the words: “Proclamation of Dom Pedro in Batalha.” The King kept pointing to these, and exclaiming:

“That’s me! that’s me!” It is very probable that he would have got shot, but the soldiers were all jammed up in the crowd.

The inside of the palace was as still as the grave and as silent and as cool. The grey plaster of the corridors was falling off in places, and it smelt all very earthy. An officer led them to the ministerial chamber. The President was sitting there alone. He said harshly:

‘‘Who are you?”

And Macdonald answered:

“I am the Duke of Batalha, and I have the honour to introduce you to your King.”

The President said sharply:

“No, I am the ruler of this country. I will never resign.”

Macdonald pulled the revolver out of his hip-pocket. The President was a very obese man, with a pasty face and with black whiskers. He sat inertly in a red velvet chair looking into the muzzle of the revolver.

“I am afraid I must shoot you,” Macdonald said, “unless you will acknowledge that this is overwhelming force. It was agreed that you would resign if you came face to face with overwhelming force.”

“No, that is not overwhelming force,” the President said. “It is force that will annihilate me, but it will not kill my country. I will resign when you show me that force.”

“Will you take my word for it,” Macdonald said, “that a first-class battleship with eight hundred men is in the harbour?”

“No, I will not take your word for it,” the President said. “Ten minutes ago I telephoned to ask if the battleship was there, and they said that she was not yet in the harbour. Now they do not answer any more on the telephone.”

“I am afraid that I must shoot you,” Macdonald said, “in order to show your dead body to the people if you will not go to the window and announce your resignation.”

“I will not do it,” the President answered—”not until the battleship is there. That was our agreement. I will not resign one minute before the force is overwhelming.” He sank lower and lower in his chair, his pale eyes gazing into the barrel of the pistol.

“You will not shoot that old fat man,” the King said suddenly. “I don’t want to see him shot.”

A folding-door behind the President’s back opened for a minute, and a girl’s face peered round the leaf of the door.

Macdonald slipped the revolver under the table.

“Tell them to go away,” he said to the President. “We are talking business.”

The President nodded his fat head. “Go away, Chiquita,” he said. “We are talking business.”

‘‘You had better say your prayers. In two minutes,” Macdonald said.

The girl’s face had gone, but there were loud sobs coming from behind the door.

“I don’t understand,” the King said querulously, “why you want to shoot this old fat man. I don’t want to see it done!”

“I do not say my prayers,” the President said. “I am an atheist.”

“Majesty,” Macdonald explained to the King, “I do not want to shoot this man, but otherwise he will never resign, and there will be a great deal of bloodshed in the square. I do not doubt that the
Trogoff II
is in the harbour. But nothing will convince this man, and if this man will not announce his resignation to the troops in two minutes, when it will be on the stroke of two, or if we do not show this man’s dead body to the troops, the troops will fire upon the people. There is no way of showing this man the
Trogoff II.
So there is no way but to shoot him.”

The King hung his head.’ I would almost rather not be the King than have him shot!” he said.

“It is too late for that,” Macdonald answered. “This man is a brave man, but many hundreds of men as brave will have to die if the troops begin to shoot on account of this man’s obstinacy.” He looked at the President. “When the palace clock strikes two,” he said, “I must shoot you.”

The President stammered: “Vaya, it is your duty.”

There came a quaking, muttering sound. Macdonald imagined that one of the girls had fallen to the ground in a faint behind the door. A deadly silence fell upon the crowd outside. The sunlight was extraordinarily bright, and it was as still as the inside of a church. Macdonald’s finger pressed slowly on the trigger of the revolver. His eyes were fascinated by the fat man’s pale pupils and by his pallid forehead at the place where the bullet would go in.

There was a sharp snap from over their heads. The President grunted suddenly with his eyes upon the window. Macdonald threw up his hand, and the bullet from the revolver knocked the nose off a plaster figure of Justice that stood behind the presidential chair. A cloth of green, white, and yellow stripes had dropped on to the balcony with half a flagstaff attached to it.

Macdonald said: “My God!”

There came again a quaking, grunting noise.

“That drunken idiot!” Macdonald said. He looked at the President... “I have the honour to inform you,” he said, “that a shell from a thirteen-inch gun on the first-class battleship the
Trogoff II
has broken your flagstaff in two.”

Commander Grant of the
Trogoff II
was firing his three shots. But the other two were directed good and true at the Flagstaff-Hill behind the town.

The President sat for a long minute with his head hanging forward. Then he pulled himself out of his chair and staggered towards the balcony.

“You’d better go behind him,” Macdonald said to the King.

The President took Dom Pedro by the wrist. They heard him whisper in a sick, ironical voice:

“Sirs, I here present to you...”

He was parodying the English Coronation Service, which he had read with great disgust six months before. But they did not hear any more of his voice, because the cheering was so loud. Then he shook his fist at the clear blue sky.

CHAPTER I
V

WHEN Mr. Pett woke it was very black night, and by pressing the head of his repeater he discovered that it was a quarter to eleven.

He had slept for fourteen hours. That showed that he had been very much overwrought.

There was not a sound to be heard on the ship and it was entirely in darkness. He switched on the light in his cabin. He felt cool, calm, and very well. There was not a sound to be heard on the ship, but through his porthole he could see reflected on the dark waters of the harbour sudden flashes of light, and he could hear sharp crackling sounds. He made his way up the companion and on to the deck. There was no light on the ship at all, but all over the sky, close at hand and far away, there were the dropping stars of rockets, and from the Signal Hill behind the town there went up a murky glare of light. Mr. Pett recognised it for a bonfire. He went down the gangway on to the quay. It was very deserted and dark, but he found an old man sitting upon the lowest of a pyramid of barrels — some sort of watchman. The old man had practically no English; all he could say was “God save the King!” which he had no doubt learnt from the crews of the English ships. Mr. Pett had no Galizian, but he realised very well that the counter-revolution must have succeeded. He returned to the ship thinking hard.

He couldn’t get away from the fact that he didn’t come very well out of the whole matter, but he didn’t care very much. He remembered that in the end he was really a philosophic writer, and it affected him rather more as a scientific fact than as a personal detail. He would be able to describe in a future book exactly how a man of genius behaved when it came to action. His stomach had betrayed him. That was what you had to expect, because thought had deprived his stomach of blood and taken it to the brain.

And suddenly Mr. Pett felt a warm admiration for Sergius Mihailovitch. There was no doubt that Macdonald had carried off this affair extremely well. No, there wasn’t any getting away from it. And, indeed, Mr. Pett’s admiration for Lady Aldington having died a natural death — her ladyship had on board a very pretty, pert, and vulgar lady’s maid who had captured Mr. Pett’s vagrant attentions — Mr. Pett began to see that everything had worked out in a satisfactory and scientific manner. It really supported his own theories exactly, for in the end Macdonald, with Emily Aldington and Kintyre, belonged to the ruling classes. You couldn’t get away from it. It was an authentic fact; they worked in that way really without thinking of it. He remembered how Macdonald had protected the poor girl on the top of the bus whilst he was humming a tune. That, after all, was how the ruling classes ought to behave.

He went slowly back along the ship, turning on the electric lights on the main-mast down the principal deck, down the saloon way, down the companion. On the great dark yacht he left a little trail of light to mark his passage. What he had to decide was, how to act with exact correctness as became an English gentleman, because, if he hadn’t got the ruling tradition in his own blood he hoped to transmit that habit of mind to his sons and their children. He hoped that he was going to found a ruling house. That would be in the proper fitness of things. He supposed that the King of Galizia would give him a title, because it was just a mark; a visible sign to the world that one belonged to the ruling classes.

He decided that what he would have, to do was to dress himself in his evening clothes and to go to the palace. He would felicitate the King and the Queen-Mother in three words of proper respect. He would congratulate Lady Aldington warmly, and to Macdonald he would make a perfectly sincere speech of extreme admiration. He was going to act with perfect correctness to the others, and with extreme generosity to Macdonald. He went into the saloon to get a drink of soda water, for he felt extremely thirsty.

The idea of Macdonald was extremely strong upon him. It was so strong that it seemed odd. He seemed to remember a chain of Macdonald’s hopefulnesses, generosities, delicacies, and attempts to be of service. He could almost see the smiling, rather tender face. He remembered their first meeting. Mr. Pett had been speaking at an assembly of the Putney Fabian Society. He had spoken with extreme passion about equal opportunities for all. At that time he had been a booking-office clerk. The meeting had been breaking up, and then, pushing through the departing people, there had come this long, fair, enthusiastic Russian, overwhelming him with praises of his speech....

At that date Mr. Pett had considered Macdonald to be weak and flexible. He had discovered him also to be enormously rich, and, with quite a deliberate purpose, Mr. Pett had set to work to use Macdonald’s riches for his own advancement. He didn’t in the least repent of it; it had been exactly the right thing to do. Mr. Pett had made himself famous. Macdonald, owing to Mr. Pett’s exhortations, had found exactly the right billet. Without Macdonald he himself would have been nothing; without himself Macdonald would have remained negligible and purposeless. He remembered very vividly how strong and how determined Macdonald had been of late. His last interview with Sergius Mihailovitch had been in the garage, when Macdonald had insisted on Mr. Pett’s writing that letter of apology. And Mr. Pett laughed to himself to remember that affair. He was laughing to think how well Macdonald had done it. He was not particularly ashamed of himself. He had not come very well out of the blackmailing incident; but then that sort of thing was not what he was calculated to do well.

It wasn’t really his sort of business. He had been making experiences for himself. And he had made the experience. Fortunately he had done no harm at all, and in any emotional experience of that sort in the future he was perfectly certain that he would act not like a blackguard and little cockney cur, but like an English gentleman. That was the only way one could’ rise from the ranks — by learning how to act well.

With himself Mr. Pett was extremely frank, and indeed he was really very practical in his determination to learn how to behave well. The only thing that he really regretted in the whole matter was the way he had harangued the Marquis da Pinta and Dom Crisostomo Carrasco against Macdonald. And that he did not so much regret, because he had not really and personally meant anything more than a nonsensical rodomontade. But it left a sort of uneasy sting in his consciousness. He couldn’t get away from the feeling that that Dom Carrasco really meant to shoot Macdonald in the back. He even had an uneasy feeling over his own loins as if a revolver bullet were lodging itself there.

He was just pottering about, thinking and trying to find a soda-water syphon. But there wasn’t one in the saloon at all. Then he found his way into a steward’s pantry — a sort of cupboard giving out of the saloon. Here, sure enough, was a syphon. He found also a very long fragile glass, and then he noticed an ice-locker. The ice was nearly all melted, but he got enough of small flakes to make an agreeable tinkling in his long tumbler. He squirted the soda-water into it, and was just about to drink when he heard a slight noise in the saloon. He looked out of the cupboard. The Countess Macdonald was standing at the head of the dining-table. He drank his soda water, and then came out with the glass in his hand.

“So you’re back already,” the Countess said. She was extraordinarily pale for her. “I suppose the others will be coming soon?” she continued. “I followed you along the deck when you lighted the lights.”

“That’s all right,” Mr. Pett said. “Have some soda water?”

“No; I don’t want any,” she answered. “Give me the glass.”

He handed the glass to her and she set it down upon the table. He noticed that she had already laid there a Galizian country basket made of rush work. She said:

“Sit down. I want to address some remarks to you. When will the others be back?”

“I don’t want to sit down,” Mr. Pett said. “I’ve got to dress and go to the palace. I don’t know where the others are. I’ve been asleep.”

He was really very anxious to get to the palace, he was so dominated by the absurd idea that Dom Carrasco would shoot Macdonald in the back. He felt himself extremely full of affection for Sergius Mihailovitch. He wanted to make such a speech to him in the presence of the whole Court that Dom Carrasco should be convinced of what a fine fellow Macdonald was.

“Sit down,” the Countess exclaimed rather more peremptorily.

She took from the rush basket a revolver, a long envelope, and a little bottle of yellow fluid.

“You had better sit down,” she said.

Mr. Pett felt the strongest possible disinclination to sit down, but he took a chair at the table just facing her. She had an engrossed and perfectly quiet manner. In the long, wide-mouthed glass there were still some fragments of ice. She emptied them on to the red velvet table cover. Then she uncorked the bottle of yellow fluid. She poured it into the wide glass, and to Mr. Pett’s nervous eyes it appeared to bubble and to smoke.

“What’s that?” Mr. Pett exclaimed.

“Vitriol,” she answered. She looked at Mr. Pett calmly and resolutely. Then she placed the long envelope over the mouth of the glass. “You can’t throw it so well out of a bottle,” she explained. “This large glass was exactly what I wanted.”

Mr. Pett exclaimed: “Good God!”

She looked at him with the calm satisfaction of a person who is at once a just judge and a passionless executioner.

“I’ve debated it with the President’s eldest daughter,” she said. “She’s a stupid weak fool, but she agrees with me. I have told her the whole story of this man.”

“Sergius Mihailovitch?” Mr. Pett answered.

“Sergius Mihailovitch Macdonald, Duke of Batalha,” she said passionlessly.

“So they’re married?” Mr. Pett asked.

“Yes,” she answered, “
they’re
married. But don’t think that I am going to revenge my private wrongs. You know me better than to think that. I have never wanted private revenge. I am here in the capacity of a public executioner. I have hated this man’s detestable morals, not because they hurt me; they didn’t hurt me. I am too proud to be hurt.

But it is his hateful and deleterious example that must be visited with the vengeance that it merits.”

Again Mr. Pett ejaculated: “Good God!”

“This envelope,” the Countess continued, “contains an exact statement of my attitude. It relates the whole baseness of this man from beginning to end. I have written it out so plainly that I never can be misunderstood again. I have written it out because probably one of you will murder me when I shall have executed justice on this man. When he comes in at that door....”

“He mayn’t come in at that door,” Mr. Pett said.

“Oh yes, he will,” the Countess answered. “I have ascertained that there are no bedrooms ready at the palace. Sooner or later he must come here. And when he comes in at that door I shall cover him with this revolver so that he will not dare to move, and then I shall tell him what I think of him, and he will see the vitriol in the glass. And when I have talked enough I shall pour it over his face. I shall be perfectly calm. I shall keep the rest of you covered with this revolver, so that you won’t dare to go to his assistance. And then, when the liquid has done its avenging work, I shall do my best to escape. I don’t want to have to shoot myself. I’m not in the least afraid of death. But that would be too much like heroics. I may shoot him? I don’t know. That will depend on how I feel at the moment.”

It came into Mr. Pett’s head that this woman must be mad, and that you can generally defeat mad people by some petty stratagem. He stood up and said:

“Well, all this doesn’t concern me. I’ve got to dress and go to the palace.”

The Countess took up the revolver. Then she sat down, and resting her elbows upon the table to steady her aim, she pointed it straight at Mr. Pett’s mouth.

“Oh no, I’m not mad,” she said, “not in the least. I’m perfectly calm, you see; my hands don’t tremble at all, though the revolver’s rather heavy. If you attempt to go away I shall shatter your jaws with a bullet. It won’t kill you? Why should I want to kill a worm like you? You’re a dirty little member of the lower classes. You’re an accomplice of the disgusting practices of this shameless man, just because you’re a member of the lower classes, and you’re only too glad to be taken up by these smart people on any kind of dishonourable terms. That’s what you are! So I shan’t kill you, but I shall shatter your jaw. You won’t be able to play the informant then.”

Mr. Pett looked at the door. He wished desperately to make a dash for it, in order to save Macdonald, but the dark muzzle seemed to paralyse him. He couldn’t take his eyes away from it. A cold sweat prickled out all over his forehead, then he sat down again. And again he made a mental note of the way of the mind of a man of genius worked in such a situation. He was in an agony, but he knew that he had done all that could have been expected of him, and what worried him most at the moment was that he couldn’t remember whether oil was the proper thing to apply to vitrol bums. He couldn’t positively remember whether vitriol was an acid or an alkali, and whether oil would float it off the skin? He knew that water was a very bad thing. And then suddenly he began to talk. Positively he felt himself such a cur that he hoped he would force this woman to shoot him. He said: