The Good Soldier (19 page)

When the palpitating creature was at last asleep in his arms he
discovered that he was madly, was passionately, was overwhelmingly
in love with her. It was a passion that had arisen like fire in dry
corn. He could think of nothing else; he could live for nothing
else. But La Dolciquita was a reasonable creature without an ounce
of passion in her. She wanted a certain satisfaction of her
appetites and Edward had appealed to her the night before. Now that
was done with, and, quite coldly, she said that she wanted money if
he was to have any more of her. It was a perfectly reasonable
commercial transaction. She did not care two buttons for Edward or
for any man and he was asking her to risk a very good situation
with the Grand Duke. If Edward could put up sufficient money to
serve as a kind of insurance against accident she was ready to like
Edward for a time that would be covered, as it were, by the policy.
She was getting fifty thousand dollars a year from her Grand Duke;
Edward would have to pay a premium of two years' hire for a month
of her society. There would not be much risk of the Grand Duke's
finding it out and it was not certain that he would give her the
keys of the street if he did find out. But there was the risk—a
twenty per cent risk, as she figured it out. She talked to Edward
as if she had been a solicitor with an estate to sell—perfectly
quietly and perfectly coldly without any inflections in her voice.
She did not want to be unkind to him; but she could see no reason
for being kind to him. She was a virtuous business woman with a
mother and two sisters and her own old age to be provided
comfortably for. She did not expect more than a five years' further
run. She was twenty-four and, as she said: "We Spanish women are
horrors at thirty." Edward swore that he would provide for her for
life if she would come to him and leave off talking so horribly;
but she only shrugged one shoulder slowly and contemptuously. He
tried to convince this woman, who, as he saw it, had surrendered to
him her virtue, that he regarded it as in any case his duty to
provide for her, and to cherish her and even to love her—for life.
In return for her sacrifice he would do that. In return, again, for
his honourable love she would listen for ever to the accounts of
his estate. That was how he figured it out.

She shrugged the same shoulder with the same gesture and held
out her left hand with the elbow at her side:

"Enfin, mon ami," she said, "put in this hand the price of that
tiara at Forli's or..." And she turned her back on him.

Edward went mad; his world stood on its head; the palms in front
of the blue sea danced grotesque dances. You see, he believed in
the virtue, tenderness and moral support of women. He wanted more
than anything to argue with La Dolciquita; to retire with her to an
island and point out to her the damnation of her point of view and
how salvation can only be found in true love and the feudal system.
She had once been his mistress, he reflected, and by all the moral
laws she ought to have gone on being his mistress or at the very
least his sympathetic confidante. But her rooms were closed to him;
she did not appear in the hotel. Nothing: blank silence. To break
that down he had to have twenty thousand pounds. You have heard
what happened. He spent a week of madness; he hungered; his eyes
sank in; he shuddered at Leonora's touch. I dare say that
nine-tenths of what he took to be his passion for La Dolciquita was
really discomfort at the thought that he had been unfaithful to
Leonora. He felt uncommonly bad, that is to say—oh, unbearably bad,
and he took it all to be love. Poor devil, he was incredibly naïve.
He drank like a fish after Leonora was in bed and he spread himself
over the tables, and this went on for about a fortnight. Heaven
knows what would have happened; he would have thrown away every
penny that he possessed.

On the night after he had lost about forty thousand pounds and
whilst the whole hotel was whispering about it, La Dolciquita
walked composedly into his bedroom. He was too drunk to recognize
her, and she sat in his arm-chair, knitting and holding smelling
salts to her nose—for he was pretty far gone with alcoholic
poisoning—and, as soon as he was able to understand her, she
said:

"Look here, mon ami, do not go to the tables again. Take a good
sleep now and come and see me this afternoon."

He slept till the lunch-hour. By that time Leonora had heard the
news. A Mrs Colonel Whelan had told her. Mrs Colonel Whelan seems
to have been the only sensible person who was ever connected with
the Ashburnhams. She had argued it out that there must be a woman
of the harpy variety connected with Edward's incredible behaviour
and mien; and she advised Leonora to go straight off to Town—which
might have the effect of bringing Edward to his senses—and to
consult her solicitor and her spiritual adviser. She had better go
that very morning; it was no good arguing with a man in Edward's
condition.

Edward, indeed, did not know that she had gone. As soon as he
awoke he went straight to La Dolciquita's room and she stood him
his lunch in her own apartments. He fell on her neck and wept, and
she put up with it for a time. She was quite a good-natured woman.
And, when she had calmed him down with Eau de Mélisse, she said:
"Look here, my friend, how much money have you left? Five thousand
dollars? Ten?" For the rumour went that Edward had lost two kings'
ransoms a night for fourteen nights and she imagined that he must
be near the end of his resources.

The Eau de Mélisse had calmed Edward to such an extent that, for
the moment, he really had a head on his shoulders. He did nothing
more than grunt:

"And then?"

"Why," she answered, "I may just as well have the ten thousand
dollars as the tables. I will go with you to Antibes for a week for
that sum."

Edward grunted: "Five." She tried to get seven thousand five
hundred; but he stuck to his five thousand and the hotel expenses
at Antibes. The sedative carried him just as far as that and then
he collapsed again. He had to leave for Antibes at three; he could
not do without it. He left a note for Leonora saying that he had
gone off for a week with the Clinton Morleys, yachting.

He did not enjoy himself very much at Antibes. La Dolciquita
could talk of nothing with any enthusiasm except money, and she
tired him unceasingly, during every waking hour, for presents of
the most expensive description. And, at the end of a week, she just
quietly kicked him out. He hung about in Antibes for three days. He
was cured of the idea that he had any duties towards La
Dolciquita—feudal or otherwise. But his sentimentalism required of
him an attitude of Byronic gloom—as if his court had gone into
half-mourning. Then his appetite suddenly returned, and he
remembered Leonora. He found at his hotel at Monte Carlo a telegram
from Leonora, dispatched from London, saying; "Please return as
soon as convenient." He could not understand why Leonora should
have abandoned him so precipitately when she only thought that he
had gone yachting with the Clinton Morleys. Then he discovered that
she had left the hotel before he had written the note. He had a
pretty rocky journey back to town; he was frightened out of his
life—and Leonora had never seemed so desirable to him.

V I CALL this the Saddest Story, rather than "The Ashburnham
Tragedy", just because it is so sad, just because there was no
current to draw things along to a swift and inevitable end. There
is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there
is about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two noble people—for
I am convinced that both Edward and Leonora had noble natures—here,
then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships
afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heart-aches, agony of the
mind and death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why?
For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all a darkness.

There is not even any villain in the story—for even Major Basil,
the husband of the lady who next, and really, comforted the
unfortunate Edward—even Major Basil was not a villain in this
piece. He was a slack, loose, shiftless sort of fellow—but he did
not do anything to Edward. Whilst they were in the same station in
Burma he borrowed a good deal of money—though, really, since Major
Basil had no particular vices, it was difficult to know why he
wanted it. He collected—different types of horses' bits from the
earliest times to the present day—but, since he did not prosecute
even this occupation with any vigour, he cannot have needed much
money for the acquirement, say, of the bit of Genghis Khan's
charger—if Genghis Khan had a charger. And when I say that he
borrowed a good deal of money from Edward I do not mean to say that
he had more than a thousand pounds from him during the five years
that the connection lasted. Edward, of course, did not have a great
deal of money; Leonora was seeing to that. Still, he may have had
five hundred pounds a year English, for his menus plaisirs—for his
regimental subscriptions and for keeping his men smart. Leonora
hated that; she would have preferred to buy dresses for herself or
to have devoted the money to paying off a mortgage. Still, with her
sense of justice, she saw that, since she was managing a property
bringing in three thousand a year with a view to re-establishing it
as a property of five thousand a year and since the property
really, if not legally, belonged to Edward, it was reasonable and
just that Edward should get a slice of his own. Of course she had
the devil of a job.

I don't know that I have got the financial details exactly
right. I am a pretty good head at figures, but my mind, still,
sometimes mixes up pounds with dollars and I get a figure wrong.
Anyhow, the proposition was something like this: Properly worked
and without rebates to the tenants and keeping up schools and
things, the Branshaw estate should have brought in about five
thousand a year when Edward had it. It brought in actually about
four. (I am talking in pounds, not dollars.) Edward's excesses with
the Spanish Lady had reduced its value to about three—as the
maximum figure, without reductions. Leonora wanted to get it back
to five.

She was, of course, very young to be faced with such a
proposition—twenty-four is not a very advanced age. So she did
things with a youthful vigour that she would, very likely, have
made more merciful, if she had known more about life. She got
Edward remarkably on the hop. He had to face her in a London hotel,
when he crept back from Monte Carlo with his poor tail between his
poor legs. As far as I can make out she cut short his first
mumblings and his first attempts at affectionate speech with words
something like: "We're on the verge of ruin. Do you intend to let
me pull things together? If not I shall retire to Hendon on my
jointure." (Hendon represented a convent to which she occasionally
went for what is called a "retreat" in Catholic circles.) And poor
dear Edward knew nothing—absolutely nothing. He did not know how
much money he had, as he put it, "blued" at the tables. It might
have been a quarter of a million for all he remembered. He did not
know whether she knew about La Dolciquita or whether she imagined
that he had gone off yachting or had stayed at Monte Carlo. He was
just dumb and he just wanted to get into a hole and not have to
talk. Leonora did not make him talk and she said nothing
herself.

I do not know much about English legal procedure—I cannot, I
mean, give technical details of how they tied him up. But I know
that, two days later, without her having said more than I have
reported to you, Leonora and her attorney had become the trustees,
as I believe it is called, of all Edward's property, and there was
an end of Edward as the good landlord and father of his people. He
went out. Leonora then had three thousand a year at her disposal.
She occupied Edward with getting himself transferred to a part of
his regiment that was in Burma—if that is the right way to put it.
She herself had an interview, lasting a week or so—with Edward's
land-steward. She made him understand that the estate would have to
yield up to its last penny. Before they left for India she had let
Branshaw for seven years at a thousand a year. She sold two
Vandykes and a little silver for eleven thousand pounds and she
raised, on mortgage, twenty-nine thousand. That went to Edward's
money-lending friends in Monte Carlo. So she had to get the
twenty-nine thousand back, for she did not regard the Vandykes and
the silver as things she would have to replace. They were just
frills to the Ashburnham vanity. Edward cried for two days over the
disappearance of his ancestors and then she wished she had not done
it; but it did not teach her anything and it lessened such esteem
as she had for him. She did not also understand that to let
Branshaw affected him with a feeling of physical soiling—that it
was almost as bad for him as if a woman belonging to him had become
a prostitute. That was how it did affect him; but I dare say she
felt just as bad about the Spanish dancer.

So she went at it. They were eight years in India, and during
the whole of that time she insisted that they must be
self-supporting—they had to live on his Captain's pay, plus the
extra allowance for being at the front. She gave him the five
hundred a year for Ashburnham frills, as she called it to
herself—and she considered she was doing him very well.

Indeed, in a way, she did him very well—but it was not his way.
She was always buying him expensive things which, as it were, she
took off her own back. I have, for instance, spoken of Edward's
leather cases. Well, they were not Edward's at all; they were
Leonora's manifestations. He liked to be clean, but he preferred,
as it were, to be threadbare. She never understood that, and all
that pigskin was her idea of a reward to him for putting her up to
a little speculation by which she made eleven hundred pounds. She
did, herself, the threadbare business. When they went up to a place
called Simla, where, as I understand, it is cool in the summer and
very social—when they went up to Simla for their healths it was she
who had him prancing around, as we should say in the United States,
on a thousand-dollar horse with the gladdest of glad rags all over
him. She herself used to go into "retreat". I believe that was very
good for her health and it was also very inexpensive.