The Good Soldier (28 page)

He answered: "I don't want it; I don't want it; I don't want
it."

And he says that he didn't want it; that he would have hated
himself; that it was unthinkable. And all the while he had the
immense temptation to do the unthinkable thing, not from the
physical desire but because of a mental certitude. He was certain
that if she had once submitted to him she would remain his for
ever. He knew that.

She was thinking that her aunt had said he had desired her to
love him from a distance of five thousand miles. She said: "I can
never love you now I know the kind of man you are. I will belong to
you to save your life. But I can never love you."

It was a fantastic display of cruelty. She didn't in the least
know what it meant—to belong to a man. But, at that Edward pulled
himself together. He spoke in his normal tones; gruff, husky,
overbearing, as he would have done to a servant or to a horse.

"Go back to your room," he said. "Go back to your room and go to
sleep. This is all nonsense."

They were baffled, those two women.

And then I came on the scene.

VI MY coming on the scene certainly calmed things down—for the
whole fortnight that intervened between my arrival and the girl's
departure. I don't mean to say that the endless talking did not go
on at night or that Leonora did not send me out with the girl and,
in the interval, give Edward a hell of a time. Having discovered
what he wanted—that the girl should go five thousand miles away and
love him steadfastly as people do in sentimental novels, she was
determined to smash that aspiration. And she repeated to Edward in
every possible tone that the girl did not love him; that the girl
detested him for his brutality, his overbearingness, his drinking
habits. She pointed out that Edward in the girl's eyes, was already
pledged three or four deep. He was pledged to Leonora herself, to
Mrs Basil, and to the memories of Maisie Maidan and to Florence.
Edward never said anything.

Did the girl love Edward, or didn't she? I don't know. At that
time I daresay she didn't though she certainly had done so before
Leonora had got to work upon his reputation. She certainly had
loved him for what I call the public side of his record—for his
good soldiering, for his saving lives at sea, for the excellent
landlord that he was and the good sportsman. But it is quite
possible that all those things came to appear as nothing in her
eyes when she discovered that he wasn't a good husband. For, though
women, as I see them, have little or no feeling of responsibility
towards a county or a country or a career—although they may be
entirely lacking in any kind of communal solidarity—they have an
immense and automatically working instinct that attaches them to
the interest of womanhood. It is, of course, possible for any woman
to cut out and to carry off any other woman's husband or lover. But
I rather think that a woman will only do this if she has reason to
believe that the other woman has given her husband a bad time. I am
certain that if she thinks the man has been a brute to his wife she
will, with her instinctive feeling for suffering femininity, "put
him back", as the saying is. I don't attach any particular
importance to these generalizations of mine. They may be right,
they may be wrong; I am only an ageing American with very little
knowledge of life. You may take my generalizations or leave them.
But I am pretty certain that I am right in the case of Nancy
Rufford—that she had loved Edward Ashburnham very deeply and
tenderly.

It is nothing to the point that she let him have it good and
strong as soon as she discovered that he had been unfaithful to
Leonora and that his public services had cost more than Leonora
thought they ought to have cost. Nancy would be bound to let him
have it good and strong then. She would owe that to feminine public
opinion; she would be driven to it by the instinct for
self-preservation, since she might well imagine that if Edward had
been unfaithful to Leonora, to Mrs Basil and to the memories of the
other two, he might be unfaithful to herself. And, no doubt, she
had her share of the sex instinct that makes women be intolerably
cruel to the beloved person. Anyhow, I don't know whether, at this
point, Nancy Rufford loved Edward Ashburnham. I don't know whether
she even loved him when, on getting, at Aden, the news of his
suicide she went mad. Because that may just as well have been for
the sake of Leonora as for the sake of Edward. Or it may have been
for the sake of both of them. I don't know. I know nothing. I am
very tired. Leonora held passionately the doctrine that the girl
didn't love Edward. She wanted desperately to believe that. It was
a doctrine as necessary to her existence as a belief in the
personal immortality of the soul. She said that it was impossible
that Nancy could have loved Edward after she had given the girl her
view of Edward's career and character. Edward, on the other hand,
believed maunderingly that some essential attractiveness in himself
must have made the girl continue to go on loving him—to go on
loving him, as it were, in underneath her official aspect of
hatred. He thought she only pretended to hate him in order to save
her face and he thought that her quite atrocious telegram from
Brindisi was only another attempt to do that—to prove that she had
feelings creditable to a member of the feminine commonweal. I don't
know. I leave it to you. There is another point that worries me a
good deal in the aspects of this sad affair. Leonora says that, in
desiring that the girl should go five thousand miles away and yet
continue to love him, Edward was a monster of selfishness. He was
desiring the ruin of a young life. Edward on the other hand put it
to me that, supposing that the girl's love was a necessity to his
existence, and, if he did nothing by word or by action to keep
Nancy's love alive, he couldn't be called selfish. Leonora replied
that showed he had an abominably selfish nature even though his
actions might be perfectly correct. I can't make out which of them
was right. I leave it to you.

It is, at any rate, certain that Edward's actions were
perfectly—were monstrously, were cruelly—correct. He sat still and
let Leonora take away his character, and let Leonora damn him to
deepest hell, without stirring a finger. I daresay he was a fool; I
don't see what object there was in letting the girl think worse of
him than was necessary. Still there it is. And there it is also
that all those three presented to the world the spectacle of being
the best of good people. I assure you that during my stay for that
fortnight in that fine old house, I never so much as noticed a
single thing that could have affected that good opinion. And even
when I look back, knowing the circumstances, I can't remember a
single thing any of them said that could have betrayed them. I
can't remember, right up to the dinner, when Leonora read out that
telegram—not the tremor of an eyelash, not the shaking of a hand.
It was just a pleasant country house-party.

And Leonora kept it up jolly well, for even longer than that—she
kept it up as far as I was concerned until eight days after
Edward's funeral. Immediately after that particular dinner—the
dinner at which I received the announcement that Nancy was going to
leave for India on the following day—I asked Leonora to let me have
a word with her. She took me into her little sitting-room and I
then said—I spare you the record of my emotions—that she was aware
that I wished to marry Nancy; that she had seemed to favour my suit
and that it appeared to be rather a waste of money upon tickets and
rather a waste of time upon travel to let the girl go to India if
Leonora thought that there was any chance of her marrying me.

And Leonora, I assure you, was the absolutely perfect British
matron. She said that she quite favoured my suit; that she could
not desire for the girl a better husband; but that she considered
that the girl ought to see a little more of life before taking such
an important step. Yes, Leonora used the words "taking such an
important step". She was perfect. Actually, I think she would have
liked the girl to marry me enough but my programme included the
buying of the Kershaw's house about a mile away upon the
Fordingbridge road, and settling down there with the girl. That
didn't at all suit Leonora. She didn't want to have the girl within
a mile and a half of Edward for the rest of their lives. Still, I
think she might have managed to let me know, in some periphrasis or
other, that I might have the girl if I would take her to
Philadelphia or Timbuctoo. I loved Nancy very much—and Leonora knew
it. However, I left it at that. I left it with the understanding
that Nancy was going away to India on probation. It seemed to me a
perfectly reasonable arrangement and I am a reasonable sort of man.
I simply said that I should follow Nancy out to India after six
months' time or so. Or, perhaps, after a year. Well, you see, I did
follow Nancy out to India after a year.... I must confess to having
felt a little angry with Leonora for not having warned me earlier
that the girl would be going. I took it as one of the queer, not
very straight methods that Roman Catholics seem to adopt in dealing
with matters of this world. I took it that Leonora had been afraid
I should propose to the girl or, at any rate, have made
considerably greater advances to her than I did, if I had known
earlier that she was going away so soon. Perhaps Leonora was right;
perhaps Roman Catholics, with their queer, shifty ways, are always
right. They are dealing with the queer, shifty thing that is human
nature. For it is quite possible that, if I had known Nancy was
going away so soon, I should have tried making love to her. And
that would have produced another complication. It may have been
just as well.

It is queer the fantastic things that quite good people will do
in order to keep up their appearance of calm pococurantism. For
Edward Ashburnham and his wife called me half the world over in
order to sit on the back seat of a dog-cart whilst Edward drove the
girl to the railway station from which she was to take her
departure to India. They wanted, I suppose, to have a witness of
the calmness of that function. The girl's luggage had been already
packed and sent off before. Her berth on the steamer had been
taken. They had timed it all so exactly that it went like
clockwork. They had known the date upon which Colonel Rufford would
get Edward's letter and they had known almost exactly the hour at
which they would receive his telegram asking his daughter to come
to him. It had all been quite beautifully and quite mercilessly
arranged, by Edward himself. They gave Colonel Rufford, as a reason
for telegraphing, the fact that Mrs Colonel Somebody or other would
be travelling by that ship and that she would serve as an efficient
chaperon for the girl. It was a most amazing business, and I think
that it would have been better in the eyes of God if they had all
attempted to gouge out each other's eyes with carving knives. But
they were "good people". After my interview with Leonora I went
desultorily into Edward's gun-room. I didn't know where the girl
was and I thought I mind find her there. I suppose I had a vague
idea of proposing to her in spite of Leonora. So, I presume, I
don't come of quite such good people as the Ashburnhams. Edward was
lounging in his chair smoking a cigar and he said nothing for quite
five minutes. The candles glowed in the green shades; the
reflections were green in the glasses of the book-cases that held
guns and fishing-rods. Over the mantelpiece was the brownish
picture of the white horse. Those were the quietest moments that I
have ever known. Then, suddenly, Edward looked me straight in the
eyes and said:

"Look here, old man, I wish you would drive with Nancy and me to
the station tomorrow."

I said that of course I would drive with him and Nancy to the
station on the morrow. He lay there for a long time, looking along
the line of his knees at the fluttering fire, and then suddenly, in
a perfectly calm voice, and without lifting his eyes, he said:

"I am so desperately in love with Nancy Rufford that I am dying
of it."

Poor devil—he hadn't meant to speak of it. But I guess he just
had to speak to somebody and I appeared to be like a woman or a
solicitor. He talked all night.

Well, he carried out the programme to the last breath.

It was a very clear winter morning, with a good deal of frost in
it. The sun was quite bright, the winding road between the heather
and the bracken was very hard. I sat on the back-seat of the
dog-cart; Nancy was beside Edward. They talked about the way the
cob went; Edward pointed out with the whip a cluster of deer upon a
coombe three-quarters of a mile away. We passed the hounds in the
level bit of road beside the high trees going into Fordingbridge
and Edward pulled up the dog-cart so that Nancy might say good-bye
to the huntsman and cap him a last sovereign. She had ridden with
those hounds ever since she had been thirteen.

The train was five minutes late and they imagined that that was
because it was market-day at Swindon or wherever the train came
from. That was the sort of thing they talked about. The train came
in; Edward found her a first-class carriage with an elderly woman
in it. The girl entered the carriage, Edward closed the door and
then she put out her hand to shake mine. There was upon those
people's faces no expression of any kind whatever. The signal for
the train's departure was a very bright red; that is about as
passionate a statement as I can get into that scene. She was not
looking her best; she had on a cap of brown fur that did not very
well match her hair. She said:

"So long," to Edward.

Edward answered: "So long."

He swung round on his heel and, large, slouching, and walking
with a heavy deliberate pace, he went out of the station. I
followed him and got up beside him in the high dog-cart. It was the
most horrible performance I have ever seen.