The Good Soldier (29 page)

And, after that, a holy peace, like the peace of God which
passes all understanding, descended upon Branshaw Teleragh. Leonora
went about her daily duties with a sort of triumphant smile—a very
faint smile, but quite triumphant. I guess she had so long since
given up any idea of getting her man back that it was enough for
her to have got the girl out of the house and well cured of her
infatuation. Once, in the hall, when Leonora was going out, Edward
said, beneath his breath—but I just caught the words:

"Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean." It was like his
sentimentality to quote Swinburne. But he was perfectly quiet and
he had given up drinking. The only thing that he ever said to me
after that drive to the station was:

"It's very odd. I think I ought to tell you, Dowell, that I
haven't any feelings at all about the girl now it's all over. Don't
you worry about me. I'm all right." A long time afterwards he said:
"I guess it was only a flash in the pan." He began to look after
the estates again; he took all that trouble over getting off the
gardener's daughter who had murdered her baby. He shook hands
smilingly with every farmer in the market-place. He addressed two
political meetings; he hunted twice. Leonora made him a frightful
scene about spending the two hundred pounds on getting the
gardener's daughter acquitted. Everything went on as if the girl
had never existed. It was very still weather.

Well, that is the end of the story. And, when I come to look at
it I see that it is a happy ending with wedding bells and all. The
villains—for obviously Edward and the girl were villains—have been
punished by suicide and madness. The heroine—the perfectly normal,
virtuous and slightly deceitful heroine—has become the happy wife
of a perfectly normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful husband. She
will shortly become a mother of a perfectly normal, virtuous
slightly deceitful son or daughter. A happy ending, that is what it
works out at.

I cannot conceal from myself the fact that I now dislike
Leonora. Without doubt I am jealous of Rodney Bayham. But I don't
know whether it is merely a jealousy arising from the fact that I
desired myself to possess Leonora or whether it is because to her
were sacrificed the only two persons that I have ever really
loved—Edward Ashburnham and Nancy Rufford. In order to set her up
in a modern mansion, replete with every convenience and dominated
by a quite respectable and eminently economical master of the
house, it was necessary that Edward and Nancy Rufford should
become, for me at least, no more than tragic shades.

I seem to see poor Edward, naked and reclining amidst darkness,
upon cold rocks, like one of the ancient Greek damned, in Tartarus
or wherever it was.

And as for Nancy... Well, yesterday at lunch she said
suddenly:

"Shuttlecocks!"

And she repeated the word "shuttlecocks" three times. I know
what was passing in her mind, if she can be said to have a mind,
for Leonora has told me that, once, the poor girl said she felt
like a shuttlecock being tossed backwards and forwards between the
violent personalities of Edward and his wife. Leonora, she said,
was always trying to deliver her over to Edward, and Edward tacitly
and silently forced her back again. And the odd thing was that
Edward himself considered that those two women used him like a
shuttlecock. Or, rather, he said that they sent him backwards and
forwards like a blooming parcel that someone didn't want to pay the
postage on. And Leonora also imagined that Edward and Nancy picked
her up and threw her down as suited their purely vagrant moods. So
there you have the pretty picture. Mind, I am not preaching
anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free
love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and
society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the
slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong,
and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness. But I
guess that I myself, in my fainter way, come into the category of
the passionate, of the headstrong, and the too-truthful. For I
can't conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward
Ashburnham—and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had
had the courage and virility and possibly also the physique of
Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did. He
seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on several
excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him
robbing the orchards, from a distance. And, you see, I am just as
much of a sentimentalist as he was.. ..

Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is
what we are here for. But then, I don't like society—much. I am
that absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of
the ancient haunts of English peace. I sit here, in Edward's
gun-room, all day and all day in a house that is absolutely quiet.
No one visits me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me,
for I have no interests. In twenty minutes or so I shall walk down
to the village, beneath my own oaks, alongside my own clumps of
gorse, to get the American mail. My tenants, the village boys and
the tradesmen will touch their hats to me. So life peters out. I
shall return to dine and Nancy will sit opposite me with the old
nurse standing behind her. Enigmatic, silent, utterly well-behaved
as far as her knife and fork go, Nancy will stare in front of her
with the blue eyes that have over them strained, stretched brows.
Once, or perhaps twice, during the meal her knife and fork will be
suspended in mid-air as if she were trying to think of something
that she had forgotten. Then she will say that she believes in an
Omnipotent Deity or she will utter the one word "shuttle-cocks",
perhaps. It is very extraordinary to see the perfect flush of
health on her cheeks, to see the lustre of her coiled black hair,
the poise of the head upon the neck, the grace of the white
hands—and to think that it all means nothing—that it is a picture
without a meaning. Yes, it is queer.

But, at any rate, there is always Leonora to cheer you up; I
don't want to sadden you. Her husband is quite an economical person
of so normal a figure that he can get quite a large proportion of
his clothes ready-made. That is the great desideratum of life, and
that is the end of my story. The child is to be brought up as a
Romanist.

It suddenly occurs to me that I have forgotten to say how Edward
met his death. You remember that peace had descended upon the
house; that Leonora was quietly triumphant and that Edward said his
love for the girl had been merely a passing phase. Well, one
afternoon we were in the stables together, looking at a new kind of
flooring that Edward was trying in a loose-box. Edward was talking
with a good deal of animation about the necessity of getting the
numbers of the Hampshire territorials up to the proper standard. He
was quite sober, quite quiet, his skin was clear-coloured; his hair
was golden and perfectly brushed; the level brick-dust red of his
complexion went clean up to the rims of his eyelids; his eyes were
porcelain blue and they regarded me frankly and directly. His face
was perfectly expressionless; his voice was deep and rough. He
stood well back upon his legs and said:

"We ought to get them up to two thousand three hundred and
fifty." A stable-boy brought him a telegram and went away. He
opened it negligently, regarded it without emotion, and, in
complete silence, handed it to me. On the pinkish paper in a
sprawled handwriting I read: "Safe Brindisi. Having rattling good
time. Nancy."

Well, Edward was the English gentleman; but he was also, to the
last, a sentimentalist, whose mind was compounded of indifferent
poems and novels. He just looked up to the roof of the stable, as
if he were looking to Heaven, and whispered something that I did
not catch.

Then he put two fingers into the waistcoat pocket of his grey,
frieze suit; they came out with a little neat pen-knife—quite a
small pen-knife. He said to me:

"You might just take that wire to Leonora." And he looked at me
with a direct, challenging, brow-beating glare. I guess he could
see in my eyes that I didn't intend to hinder him. Why should I
hinder him?

I didn't think he was wanted in the world, let his confounded
tenants, his rifle-associations, his drunkards, reclaimed and
unreclaimed, get on as they liked. Not all the hundreds and
hundreds of them deserved that that poor devil should go on
suffering for their sakes.

When he saw that I did not intend to interfere with him his eyes
became soft and almost affectionate. He remarked:

"So long, old man, I must have a bit of a rest, you know."

I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say, "God bless you", for
I also am a sentimentalist. But I thought that perhaps that would
not be quite English good form, so I trotted off with the telegram
to Leonora. She was quite pleased with it.

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