The Good Soldier (2 page)

I don't want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham
down a brute. I don't believe he was. God knows, perhaps all men
are like that. For as I've said what do I know even of the
smoking-room? Fellows come in and tell the most extraordinarily
gross stories—so gross that they will positively give you a pain.
And yet they'd be offended if you suggested that they weren't the
sort of person you could trust your wife alone with. And very
likely they'd be quite properly offended—that is if you can trust
anybody alone with anybody. But that sort of fellow obviously takes
more delight in listening to or in telling gross stories—more
delight than in anything else in the world. They'll hunt languidly
and dress languidly and dine languidly and work without enthusiasm
and find it a bore to carry on three minutes' conversation about
anything whatever and yet, when the other sort of conversation
begins, they'll laugh and wake up and throw themselves about in
their chairs. Then, if they so delight in the narration, how is it
possible that they can be offended—and properly offended—at the
suggestion that they might make attempts upon your wife's honour?
Or again: Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of
chap;—an excellent magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the
best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire, England. To the poor
and to hopeless drunkards, as I myself have witnessed, he was like
a painstaking guardian. And he never told a story that couldn't
have gone into the columns of the Field more than once or twice in
all the nine years of my knowing him. He didn't even like hearing
them; he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a cigar or
something of that sort. You would have said that he was just
exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife
with. And I trusted mine and it was madness. And yet again you have
me. If poor Edward was dangerous because of the chastity of his
expressions—and they say that is always the hall-mark of a
libertine—what about myself? For I solemnly avow that not only have
I never so much as hinted at an impropriety in my conversation in
the whole of my days; and more than that, I will vouch for the
cleanness of my thoughts and the absolute chastity of my life. At
what, then, does it all work out? Is the whole thing a folly and a
mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man—the man
with the right to existence—a raging stallion forever neighing
after his neighbour's womankind?

I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if
everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the
morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle
morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and
activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a
darkness.

I DON'T know how it is best to put this thing down—whether it
would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if
it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time,
as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward
himself.

So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side
of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul
opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the
sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of
wind polishes the bright stars. From time to time we shall get up
and go to the door and look out at the great moon and say: "Why, it
is nearly as bright as in Provence!" And then we shall come back to
the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are not in
that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay. Consider the
lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago Florence and I
motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the Black
Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up an
immense pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles—Las Tours,
the Towers. And the immense mistral blew down that valley which was
the way from France into Provence so that the silver grey olive
leaves appeared like hair flying in the wind, and the tufts of
rosemary crept into the iron rocks that they might not be torn up
by the roots.

It was, of course, poor dear Florence who wanted to go to Las
Tours. You are to imagine that, however much her bright personality
came from Stamford, Connecticut, she was yet a graduate of
Poughkeepsie. I never could imagine how she did it—the queer,
chattery person that she was. With the far-away look in her
eyes—which wasn't, however, in the least romantic—I mean that she
didn't look as if she were seeing poetic dreams, or looking through
you, for she hardly ever did look at you!—holding up one hand as if
she wished to silence any objection—or any comment for the matter
of that—she would talk. She would talk about William the Silent,
about Gustave the Loquacious, about Paris frocks, about how the
poor dressed in 1337, about Fantin-Latour, about the
Paris-Lyons-Mediterranée train-deluxe, about whether it would be
worth while to get off at Tarascon and go across the windswept
suspension-bridge, over the Rhone to take another look at
Beaucaire.

We never did take another look at Beaucaire, of course—beautiful
Beaucaire, with the high, triangular white tower, that looked as
thin as a needle and as tall as the Flatiron, between Fifth and
Broadway—Beaucaire with the grey walls on the top of the pinnacle
surrounding an acre and a half of blue irises, beneath the tallness
of the stone pines, What a beautiful thing the stone pine
is!...

No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to
Hamelin, not to Verona, not to Mont Majour—not so much as to
Carcassonne itself. We talked of it, of course, but I guess
Florence got all she wanted out of one look at a place. She had the
seeing eye.

I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to
which I want to return—towns with the blinding white sun upon them;
stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all
carved and painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped
gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi
and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the
Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples. Not one of them did we
see more than once, so that the whole world for me is like spots of
colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren't so I should have
something to catch hold of now.

Is all this digression or isn't it digression? Again I don't
know. You, the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent.
You don't tell me anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to
see what sort of life it was I led with Florence and what Florence
was like. Well, she was bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance
over the floors of castles and over seas and over and over and over
the salons of modistes and over the plages of the Riviera—like a
gay tremulous beam, reflected from water upon a ceiling. And my
function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it
was almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that
dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years.

Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in
Philadelphia. They had never been to Philadelphia and they had the
New England conscience. You see, the first thing they said to me
when I called in on Florence in the little ancient, colonial,
wooden house beneath the high, thin-leaved elms—the first question
they asked me was not how I did but what did I do. And I did
nothing. I suppose I ought to have done something, but I didn't see
any call to do it. Why does one do things? I just drifted in and
wanted Florence. First I had drifted in on Florence at a Browning
tea, or something of the sort in Fourteenth Street, which was then
still residential. I don't know why I had gone to New York; I don't
know why I had gone to the tea. I don't see why Florence should
have gone to that sort of spelling bee. It wasn't the place at
which, even then, you expected to find a Poughkeepsie graduate. I
guess Florence wanted to raise the culture of the Stuyvesant crowd
and did it as she might have gone in slumming. Intellectual
slumming, that was what it was. She always wanted to leave the
world a little more elevated than she found it. Poor dear thing, I
have heard her lecture Teddy Ashburnham by the hour on the
difference between a Franz Hals and a Wouvermans and why the
Pre-Mycenaean statues were cubical with knobs on the top. I wonder
what he made of it? Perhaps he was thankful.

I know I was. For do you understand my whole attentions, my
whole endeavours were to keep poor dear Florence on to topics like
the finds at Cnossos and the mental spirituality of Walter Pater. I
had to keep her at it, you understand, or she might die. For I was
solemnly informed that if she became excited over anything or if
her emotions were really stirred her little heart might cease to
beat. For twelve years I had to watch every word that any person
uttered in any conversation and I had to head it off what the
English call "things"—off love, poverty, crime, religion and the
rest of it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she was carried
off the ship at Havre assured me that this must be done. Good God,
are all these fellows monstrous idiots, or is there a freemasonry
between all of them from end to end of the earth?... That is what
makes me think of that fellow Peire Vidal.

Because, of course, his story is culture and I had to head her
towards culture and at the same time it's so funny and she hadn't
got to laugh, and it's so full of love and she wasn't to think of
love. Do you know the story? Las Tours of the Four Castles had for
chatelaine Blanche Somebody-or-other who was called as a term of
commendation, La Louve—the She-Wolf. And Peire Vidal the Troubadour
paid his court to La Louve. And she wouldn't have anything to do
with him. So, out of compliment to her—the things people do when
they're in love!—he dressed himself up in wolfskins and went up
into the Black Mountains. And the shepherds of the Montagne Noire
and their dogs mistook him for a wolf and he was torn with the
fangs and beaten with clubs. So they carried him back to Las Tours
and La Louve wasn't at all impressed. They polished him up and her
husband remonstrated seriously with her. Vidal was, you see, a
great poet and it was not proper to treat a great poet with
indifference.

So Peire Vidal declared himself Emperor of Jerusalem or
somewhere and the husband had to kneel down and kiss his feet
though La Louve wouldn't. And Peire set sail in a rowing boat with
four companions to redeem the Holy Sepulchre. And they struck on a
rock somewhere, and, at great expense, the husband had to fit out
an expedition to fetch him back. And Peire Vidal fell all over the
Lady's bed while the husband, who was a most ferocious warrior,
remonstrated some more about the courtesy that is due to great
poets. But I suppose La Louve was the more ferocious of the two.
Anyhow, that is all that came of it. Isn't that a story?

You haven't an idea of the queer old-fashionedness of Florence's
aunts—the Misses Hurlbird, nor yet of her uncle. An extraordinarily
lovable man, that Uncle John. Thin, gentle, and with a "heart" that
made his life very much what Florence's afterwards became. He
didn't reside at Stamford; his home was in Waterbury where the
watches come from. He had a factory there which, in our queer
American way, would change its functions almost from year to year.
For nine months or so it would manufacture buttons out of bone.
Then it would suddenly produce brass buttons for coachmen's
liveries. Then it would take a turn at embossed tin lids for candy
boxes. The fact is that the poor old gentleman, with his weak and
fluttering heart, didn't want his factory to manufacture anything
at all. He wanted to retire. And he did retire when he was seventy.
But he was so worried at having all the street boys in the town
point after him and exclaim: "There goes the laziest man in
Waterbury!" that he tried taking a tour round the world. And
Florence and a young man called Jimmy went with him. It appears
from what Florence told me that Jimmy's function with Mr Hurlbird
was to avoid exciting topics for him. He had to keep him, for
instance, out of political discussions. For the poor old man was a
violent Democrat in days when you might travel the world over
without finding anything but a Republican. Anyhow, they went round
the world.

I think an anecdote is about the best way to give you an idea of
what the old gentleman was like. For it is perhaps important that
you should know what the old gentleman was; he had a great deal of
influence in forming the character of my poor dear wife.

Just before they set out from San Francisco for the South Seas
old Mr Hurlbird said he must take something with him to make little
presents to people he met on the voyage. And it struck him that the
things to take for that purpose were oranges—because California is
the orange country—and comfortable folding chairs. So he bought I
don't know how many cases of oranges—the great cool California
oranges, and half-a-dozen folding chairs in a special case that he
always kept in his cabin. There must have been half a cargo of
fruit.

For, to every person on board the several steamers that they
employed—to every person with whom he had so much as a nodding
acquaintance, he gave an orange every morning. And they lasted him
right round the girdle of this mighty globe of ours. When they were
at North Cape, even, he saw on the horizon, poor dear thin man that
he was, a lighthouse. "Hello," says he to himself, "these fellows
must be very lonely. Let's take them some oranges." So he had a
boatload of his fruit out and had himself rowed to the lighthouse
on the horizon. The folding chairs he lent to any lady that he came
across and liked or who seemed tired and invalidish on the ship.
And so, guarded against his heart and, having his niece with him,
he went round the world....