Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (584 page)

I was seized by the elbow and torn out of those shades. In the plate-glass light of the immense hall the little page let my elbow go, and said wearily:

“The Night Club wants you in box two! Over there.” Another telephone bell was ringing violently. As if with mania. I saw the bell-boy talking to Miss Jeaffreson. And I saw, plainly and disagreeably, in the brighter daylight outside, the familiar, hideous electric-blue dresses of two red-haired ladies who much disliked me. They were entering by the immense glass doors. And that reminded me that in an hour’s time I should be declaiming an unrehearsed speech, and those two women would be sneering at me from the front row of the audience. They did that whenever they had the chance.

But when again I had the hard pressure of the telephone at my ear it was as if peace descended. A full, purring, perfectly admirable voice said:

“It will be all ra-ight!... It will be all ra-ight!” That was dreadfully, seductively soothing. For if Madame who admirably managed the Night Club was not a Russian — and I had not the remotest idea what she was — she had most of the characteristics of that dreamy but not eminently reliable race. So at least I had been told, for I did not know the lady except by sight. She had written to ask me to write a shadow play for her little theatre, in order to brighten London and to help a young designer who wanted a little advertisement to bring his great talents before a London audience of the wealthy type. So I said:

“Has Monsieur Revendikoff returned my manuscript?” The answer came:

“Ah! you must be Mr. Jessop. I thought it was Miss Honeywill. They say she has been ringing up every five minutes — all day!”

I began again:

“Has M. Revendikoff.. — I think that was the name of the consumptive tenor: but it does not matter. Once again — thus history is said to repeat herself! — that sagacious instrument began one of its maddening soliloquies, and I could not finish my sentence. When, as mists clear off a mountain side, that noise dissolved, the calm voice swam out:

“Lovely Assmannshausen Nineteen-six. Your favourite wine! Just arrived!” It was the song the sirens sang. Yet, how did she know that my favourite wine was Assmannshausen 1906? The voice went on: “Bring your friends! Bring
all
your friends! Sixteen or seventeen! We will have a large table!” That was an invitation worth considering. There was hardly a soul in London Town that would not have jumped at it, that night. Not one! The voice went on, dreamily:

“All your friends! A large table!... It will be all ra-ight!”

And, will you believe it, I was seized by the arm and dragged out of that box. For the second time in one afternoon! Only Miss Jeaffreson did not let me go. She said: “You must come at once to the Police Court. The Professor was telephoning from there to say that they have arrested George. You must be the second bail! Lady Ada Pugh Gomme is to be the first!”

CHAPTER IV

PERHAPS it would be better if at this point I tried to put chronologically the story of that young pair dining the year that preceded that troublesome day. I picked it up, of course, only subsequently.

In the summer of 1913, then, they were living with their uncle in the chief hotel of some small German town that contained a princely court and, near it, a great University. I know very little of German topography: the town may have been Weimar and the university Jena. At any rate they used to go daily from the town to the university.

One day during that time the uncle, Mr. Heimann, discovered that his niece knew nothing at all of English literature. She was brilliant in a number of unusual departments of scholastic knowledge; but of Thackeray, Lord Lytton, George Eliot or Ouida she had hardly heard!

So the uncle insisted that she should sit under the Professor of English Literature at the local university. This had been Professor Doctor Wirklicher Geheimrath Edouard Curtius. It was true that he specialised in Elizabethan literature and said nothing of the great Victorian writers and moralists; but the uncle thought that if you cannot have Alfred Lord Tennyson you had better put up with Ben Jonson. Miss Heimann had been mutinous at first. But, finding the Professor to be really interesting and, moreover, world famous as the author of several epics, she very soon conceived for her instructor an ardent devotion. She was then hardly twenty, or perhaps just over.

The great poet, a very kindly fellow, had taken an interest in the young people. They probably differed much from the other students who sat under him and of whom he was sick and tired. The uncle found it necessary to leave his hotel at a moment’s notice. He was like that. The young people had remained there to end their term. Then the poet invited them to come and stay in his castle. He was going to lecture no more: he was going to devote himself to the production of epics.

By that time Miss Heimann had roped her brother in for the translation of the Professor’s works. He hated the Professor’s works; he disliked all poetry in a youthful way, for he loved rather revolutionary politics and regarded all works of the imagination as fluff and a waste of time. But he was a good and a good-natured brother, and, having a knack of stringing rhymes, he consented to do that translation.

This made it necessary that they should visit the poet’s castle; for Curtius, with his intimate knowledge of English as it was written in the XVII century, would not allow any translation of his own works to be made save under his own eye.

The poet’s castle — of which he had had an exact replica made for his wife — was large enough to house a regiment of young Heimanns. It stood in a wooded valley, and there Curtius dispensed a princely hospitality, for he must have been enormously wealthy. It contained, besides many elaborate frescoes and ancient and barbaric furnishings, a Muse, called Clara.

As large and as flaxen as the Elsa of any German opera, the Muse should not be mistaken for the Mrs. Doctor Geheimrath who inhabited the other castle. She wore always a coronal of pink roses, a green gown with hanging sleeves, and rode a shining white palfrey through the Silesian glades. The boy assured me that the poet’s relations with his Muse were of the most respectable — and I daresay they were. Miss Heimann at any rate became the enthusiastic companion of the Muse’s rides. But no doubt the censorious put evil constructions on the life of that blameless poet.

Mr. Heimann, who had disappeared into North Germany, had offered no objections to their visit. He was unaware of the existence of any Muse, and imagined that a Professor of English Literature must be a highly respectable host for two young people. Who would not!

So they had gone to Silesia, and there they had remained until Christmas, or at any rate until the snow was on the ground. I know that, because young Heimann described rather humorously how a Prussian Royal Prince had come with a train of sleighs to pay homage to the poet. (They used to do that sort of thing in Germany!) The poet, being a Socialist and a vegetarian, had prepared an immense Old German banquet for the Prince, and the Prince, being a vegetarian and teetotaler, a faded, fussy old gentleman, had refused the barbecued boars, the whole sturgeon, and the priceless Tokay, to partake of nothing but boiled cabbage with rice soup.

But this Prince had recognised young Heimann, whom he had seen during a formal call on the uncle at Weimar — I think it must have been Weimar. And he had written to his old friend, Mr. Heimann, senior, to say that the household of a youngish, highly romantic and masculinely handsome poet, living in open sin with a Muse like an operatic Valkyr, was not the proper place for a young and beautiful girl like Miss Heimann.

On receiving this letter Mr. Heimann had written to Lady Ada, revealing to her for the first time the existence of his young relatives and asking her to send out a duenna. This eventually turned out to be Miss Jeaffreson.

This young woman had been exported direct to the poet’s castle, where she seems to have got busy at once! She must have been in correspondence for some time with the Uncle, unknown to her charges; and she had not been three or four days in Silesia before she saw the necessity of sowing in the minds of the young people a gradual mistrust of Mr. Heimann. She said that worked very well, for as soon as they became restless it was no longer difficult to get them to leave the castle. She had scented a mystery after the first few minutes of her interview with Lady Ada. She had found it!

They must have gone up to find their uncle in North Germany with vague ideas of cross-questioning him as to their ancestry. Or perhaps the girl did, and the boy put his foot down and refused.

The uncle proved difficult to find. I think he had been in Brunswick, but had gone precipitately somewhere else — to a place called Zell or Celle. He had not expected the children so soon, and had written to Silesia to advise them of his movements.

And when they did find him they found him alarmingly ill — mentally, rather than physically, Miss Jeaffreson said, though he certainly suffered a great deal from neuritis. His disease she was sure was a Remorse Complex, and if she could only have got at him he would have proved a splendid object lesson in confirmation of her theories. But, apparently, in her humble position in the household, she had had no chance at all to “ get at” him.

She doubted whether anyone, ever, could have got at him. She said he was not like a man; he was a cross between a tyrant of antiquity and a depressed bear. Very large, stooping, with a bearded jowl and lamentable eyes that had red dewlaps — if that is the word!

The young people, for all their proficiencies in unusual academic subjects, remained very young, and took a hearty delight in things like tobogganing, sleighing, figure-skating, and winter shooting. And the uncle gently incited them to these pursuits and dimly and gloomily took pleasure in their prowesses. If you looked up from the young people performing figures of eight on the frozen canals you would see, between the rows of bare poplars on the banks, the shawled figure of the uncle looking at them hungrily. Miss Jeaffreson said he reminded her of the Wandering Jew.

They occupied a whole floor in a very large, ghostly hotel, that must have gone out of fashion a century ago or more, when the reigning prince, who must have been our George II, had gone to live in London. But it had been the chief hotel of a city with a court. I remember one detail: its immense dancing hall, falling into decay, boasted one hundred and sixty-four mahogany chairs with blue velvet seats — but painted on the whitewashed walls! Miss Jeaffreson said that no colder or more draughty place than Zell — if it were indeed Zell! — could have been imagined.

Their evenings there must have been impressive.

After dinner, for which they dressed religiously, they sat in an immense drawing room, with skin rugs on the vast parquetted floor. It was otherwise hardly furnished at all save for a few gloomy pieces of Georgian marquetry, and dimly lit by wax candles, except that Miss Jeaffreson herself, whose eyes were weak, was allowed a tall oil lamp. At one end of the room was the white-tiled stove going right up to the ceiling; in the middle of the longest wall a great open hearth with dogs, on which burned whole trees. Miss Jeaffreson and her lamp would be posted beside the white stove, the other three close to the great blaze. They would all be absolutely silent except when Mary Elizabeth, looking over her brother’s shoulder, would whisper excitedly. Mr. Heimann, leaning back in a stiff armchair, would read one of his volumes of
Lives and Letters,
holding his book to the blaze from the hearth. Young Heimann bending over a little table that was placed for him every evening on a wolf-skin rug before the fire, would write away at his translation, his sister leaning her chin on his shoulder. From time to time she would whisper: “No! that’s not it!”; then, after her brother’s pen had scratched in erasing and had written a few words more she would whisper, falling calmer: “Yes, that’s better!”

Towards half-past ten they would both stand up, and, the boy holding his evening’s work, they would cross the fireplace to place themselves in front of the uncle. He would take the sheets of paper and read them, apparently very slowly, for he would be many minutes over it. And the boy with his black, young beard, his black locks, his pale features and his very long-tailed dress coat and black stock tie; and the girl with her slim figure, in black velvet cut very low over the shoulders and her black hair dressed low over her ears, would stand perfectly silent over the uncle, her lips moving with excitement. Mr. Heimann’s verdict would be always the same:

“A most beautiful poem, my dears! A very spirited rendering!”

They would each kiss him on the forehead, a kiss that he would return hungrily, with a sort of dim passion, raising the dark brown jowl in which the lips showed red for a second. Then they would disappear into the shadows at the end of the room.

Mr. Heimann would go on sitting there for hours and hours. Miss Jeaffreson would hear his slow footsteps, very heavy, making the polished wood blocks of the corridor crackle, going to bed, far into the night. She said it made her shiver to think of what must be on his mind!

She expected to hear from the hotel personnel astonishing things concerning her employer; but she heard very little — a mere nothing of nonsense. Mr. Heimann was said to be an English Milor and the children the quite legitimate children of the Milor by a Frenchwoman of low origin whom he had duly married. Legitimate, but unowned because of that lowly origin, as happens when great Princes make morganatic unions!

This rumour seemed to have come down through many strata of hotels and to have followed Mr. Heimann over several countries, servant passing it on to servant. The children had had an old Flemish nurse, possibly even a relative, who had lived with them until not so long ago — six or seven or at most eight years — when she had died. This old lady stuck stoutly to that story of the children’s origins, and the rumour even assigned a birthplace to the children’s mother, a little town near Lille or somewhere now known to us as French Flanders.

Miss Jeaffreson was rather disappointed at the unpicturesque want of detail in that story. For English peers do not marry, as she knew the world, in that hole and corner fashion, or have legitimate children whom they do not acknowledge!

She had made up her mind that the gloomy man was an absconding banker, and she wrote to her solicitor brother, begging him to examine the annals of financial crime for the last quarter century so that she might identify and, if necessary, confront this questionable fellow. The brother replied that she would be wiser if she limited her discoveries to ascertaining whether her employer had made his will. And curiously enough Miss Jeaffreson was able to discover that he had not.

Mr. Heimann had never really conversed with her during the whole of the three months of their stay in Zell. He spoke to her about the weather every morning; would ask her whether her bedroom suited her or, at dinner, whether she was partial to any particular dishes. It was not that he was discourteous to her; indeed, he would himself and with his own hands move her lamp if the light did not appear to fall full on her book, after dinner in the immense drawing room.

March came in and was half over, bringing very mild weather, with catkins on all the willows along the canals.

On the evening when she had been with them exactly three months the young people went to bed rather early. The officers garrisoned in the neighbourhood kept a pack of hounds, and the young people were going to an early meet six or seven miles off. Of hunting Miss Jeaffreson disapproved.

She had not gone to bed, but was sitting beside the white-tiled stove, just meditating. Her
Child’s Guide to Nietzsche
was finished, and so was the English version of
The Titanic
:
an Epic.
Indeed, a complicated triangular correspondence had for some time been going on between Mr. Podd, the young Heimanns, and the Poet-Professor. Her own book she had finished only two days before.