The Good Soldier (6 page)

And she laid one finger upon Captain Ashburnham's wrist.

I was aware of something treacherous, something frightful,
something evil in the day. I can't define it and can't find a
simile for it. It wasn't as if a snake had looked out of a hole.
No, it was as if my heart had missed a beat. It was as if we were
going to run and cry out; all four of us in separate directions,
averting our heads. In Ashburnham's face I know that there was
absolute panic. I was horribly frightened and then I discovered
that the pain in my left wrist was caused by Leonora's clutching
it:

"I can't stand this," she said with a most extraordinary
passion; "I must get out of this." I was horribly frightened. It
came to me for a moment, though I hadn't time to think it, that she
must be a madly jealous woman—jealous of Florence and Captain
Ashburnham, of all people in the world! And it was a panic in which
we fled! We went right down the winding stairs, across the immense
Rittersaal to a little terrace that overlooks the Lahn, the broad
valley and the immense plain into which it opens out.

"Don't you see?" she said, "don't you see what's going on?" The
panic again stopped my heart. I muttered, I stuttered—I don't know
how I got the words out:

"No! What's the matter? Whatever's the matter?"

She looked me straight in the eyes; and for a moment I had the
feeling that those two blue discs were immense, were overwhelming,
were like a wall of blue that shut me off from the rest of the
world. I know it sounds absurd; but that is what it did feel
like.

"Don't you see," she said, with a really horrible bitterness,
with a really horrible lamentation in her voice, "Don't you see
that that's the cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole
sorrow of the world? And of the eternal damnation of you and me and
them... ."

I don't remember how she went on; I was too frightened; I was
too amazed. I think I was thinking of running to fetch assistance—a
doctor, perhaps, or Captain Ashburnham. Or possibly she needed
Florence's tender care, though, of course, it would have been very
bad for Florence's heart. But I know that when I came out of it she
was saying: "Oh, where are all the bright, happy, innocent beings
in the world? Where's happiness? One reads of it in books!"

She ran her hand with a singular clawing motion upwards over her
forehead. Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was exactly
that of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors
there. And then suddenly she stopped. She was, most amazingly, just
Mrs Ashburnham again. Her face was perfectly clear, sharp and
defined; her hair was glorious in its golden coils. Her nostrils
twitched with a sort of contempt. She appeared to look with
interest at a gypsy caravan that was coming over a little bridge
far below us.

"Don't you know," she said, in her clear hard voice, "don't you
know that I'm an Irish Catholic?"

V THOSE words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had
in my life. They told me, I think, almost more than I have ever
gathered at any one moment—about myself. I don't think that before
that day I had ever wanted anything very much except Florence. I
have, of course, had appetites, impatiences... Why, sometimes at a
table d'hôte, when there would be, say, caviare handed round, I
have been absolutely full of impatience for fear that when the dish
came to me there should not be a satisfying portion left over by
the other guests. I have been exceedingly impatient at missing
trains. The Belgian State Railway has a trick of letting the French
trains miss their connections at Brussels. That has always
infuriated me. I have written about it letters to The Times that
The Times never printed; those that I wrote to the Paris edition of
the New York Herald were always printed, but they never seemed to
satisfy me when I saw them. Well, that was a sort of frenzy with
me.

It was a frenzy that now I can hardly realize. I can understand
it intellectually. You see, in those days I was interested in
people with "hearts." There was Florence, there was Edward
Ashburnham—or, perhaps, it was Leonora that I was more interested
in. I don't mean in the way of love. But, you see, we were both of
the same profession—at any rate as I saw it. And the profession was
that of keeping heart patients alive.

You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become.
Just as the blacksmith says: "By hammer and hand all Art doth
stand," just as the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves
around his morning delivery of rolls, as the postmaster-general
believes that he alone is the preserver of society—and surely,
surely, these delusions are necessary to keep us going—so did I
and, as I believed, Leonora, imagine that the whole world ought to
be arranged so as to ensure the keeping alive of heart patients.
You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become—how
imbecile, in view of that engrossment, appear the ways of princes,
of republics, of municipalities. A rough bit of road beneath the
motor tyres, a couple of succeeding "thank'ee-marms" with their
quick jolts would be enough to set me grumbling to Leonora against
the Prince or the Grand Duke or the Free City through whose
territory we might be passing. I would grumble like a stockbroker
whose conversations over the telephone are incommoded by the
ringing of bells from a city church. I would talk about medieval
survivals, about the taxes being surely high enough. The point, by
the way, about the missing of the connections of the Calais boat
trains at Brussels was that the shortest possible sea journey is
frequently of great importance to sufferers from the heart. Now, on
the Continent, there are two special heart cure places, Nauheim and
Spa, and to reach both of these baths from England if in order to
ensure a short sea passage, you come by Calais—you have to make the
connection at Brussels. And the Belgian train never waits by so
much the shade of a second for the one coming from Calais or from
Paris. And even if the French train, are just on time, you have to
run—imagine a heart patient running!—along the unfamiliar ways of
the Brussels station and to scramble up the high steps of the
moving train. Or, if you miss connection, you have to wait five or
six hours.... I used to keep awake whole nights cursing that abuse.
My wife used to run—she never, in whatever else she may have misled
me, tried to give me the impression that she was not a gallant
soul. But, once in the German Express, she would lean back, with
one hand to her side and her eyes closed. Well, she was a good
actress. And I would be in hell. In hell, I tell you. For in
Florence I had at once a wife and an unattained mistress—that is
what it comes to—and in the retaining of her in this world I had my
occupation, my career, my ambition. It is not often that these
things are united in one body. Leonora was a good actress too. By
Jove she was good! I tell you, she would listen to me by the hour,
evolving my plans for a shock-proof world. It is true that, at
times, I used to notice about her an air of inattention as if she
were listening, a mother, to the child at her knee, or as if,
precisely, I were myself the patient.

You understand that there was nothing the matter with Edward
Ashburnham's heart—that he had thrown up his commission and had
left India and come half the world over in order to follow a woman
who had really had a "heart" to Nauheim. That was the sort of
sentimental ass he was. For, you understand, too, that they really
needed to live in India, to economize, to let the house at Branshaw
Teleragh.

Of course, at that date, I had never heard of the Kilsyte case.
Ashburnham had, you know, kissed a servant girl in a railway train,
and it was only the grace of God, the prompt functioning of the
communication cord and the ready sympathy of what I believe you
call the Hampshire Bench, that kept the poor devil out of
Winchester Gaol for years and years. I never heard of that case
until the final stages of Leonora's revelations....

But just think of that poor wretch.... I, who have surely the
right, beg you to think of that poor wretch. Is it possible that
such a luckless devil should be so tormented by blind and
inscrutable destiny? For there is no other way to think of it.
None. I have the right to say it, since for years he was my wife's
lover, since he killed her, since he broke up all the
pleasantnesses that there were in my life. There is no priest that
has the right to tell me that I must not ask pity for him, from
you, silent listener beyond the hearth-stone, from the world, or
from the God who created in him those desires, those
madnesses....

Of course, I should not hear of the Kilsyte case. I knew none of
their friends; they were for me just good people—fortunate people
with broad and sunny acres in a southern county. Just good people!
By heavens, I sometimes think that it would have been better for
him, poor dear, if the case had been such a one that I must needs
have heard of it—such a one as maids and couriers and other Kur
guests whisper about for years after, until gradually it dies away
in the pity that there is knocking about here and there in the
world. Supposing he had spent his seven years in Winchester Gaol or
whatever it is that inscrutable and blind justice allots to you for
following your natural but ill-timed inclinations—there would have
arrived a stage when nodding gossips on the Kursaal terrace would
have said, "Poor fellow," thinking of his ruined career. He would
have been the fine soldier with his back now bent.... Better for
him, poor devil, if his back had been prematurely bent.

Why, it would have been a thousand times better.... For, of
course, the Kilsyte case, which came at the very beginning of his
finding Leonora cold and unsympathetic, gave him a nasty jar. He
left servants alone after that.

It turned him, naturally, all the more loose amongst women of
his own class. Why, Leonora told me that Mrs Maidan—the woman he
followed from Burma to Nauheim—assured her he awakened her
attention by swearing that when he kissed the servant in the train
he was driven to it. I daresay he was driven to it, by the mad
passion to find an ultimately satisfying woman. I daresay he was
sincere enough. Heaven help me, I daresay he was sincere enough in
his love for Mrs Maidan. She was a nice little thing, a dear little
dark woman with long lashes, of whom Florence grew quite fond. She
had a lisp and a happy smile. We saw plenty of her for the first
month of our acquaintance, then she died, quite quietly—of heart
trouble.

But you know, poor little Mrs Maidan—she was so gentle, so
young. She cannot have been more than twenty-three and she had a
boy husband out in Chitral not more than twenty-four, I believe.
Such young things ought to have been left alone. Of course
Ashburnham could not leave her alone. I do not believe that he
could. Why, even I, at this distance of time am aware that I am a
little in love with her memory. I can't help smiling when I think
suddenly of her—as you might at the thought of something wrapped
carefully away in lavender, in some drawer, in some old house that
you have long left. She was so—so submissive. Why, even to me she
had the air of being submissive—to me that not the youngest child
will ever pay heed to. Yes, this is the saddest story...

No, I cannot help wishing that Florence had left her alone—with
her playing with adultery. I suppose it was; though she was such a
child that one has the impression that she would hardly have known
how to spell such a word. No, it was just submissiveness—to the
importunities, to the tempestuous forces that pushed that miserable
fellow on to ruin. And I do not suppose that Florence really made
much difference. If it had not been for her that Ashburnham left
his allegiance for Mrs Maidan, then it would have been some other
woman. But still, I do not know. Perhaps the poor young thing would
have died—she was bound to die, anyhow, quite soon—but she would
have died without having to soak her noonday pillow with tears
whilst Florence, below the window, talked to Captain Ashburnham
about the Constitution of the United States.... Yes, it would have
left a better taste in the mouth if Florence had let her die in
peace....

Leonora behaved better in a sense. She just boxed Mrs Maidan's
ears—yes, she hit her, in an uncontrollable access of rage, a hard
blow on the side of the cheek, in the corridor of the hotel,
outside Edward's rooms. It was that, you know, that accounted for
the sudden, odd intimacy that sprang up between Florence and Mrs
Ashburnham. Because it was, of course, an odd intimacy. If you look
at it from the outside nothing could have been more unlikely than
that Leonora, who is the proudest creature on God's earth, would
have struck up an acquaintanceship with two casual Yankees whom she
could not really have regarded as being much more than a carpet
beneath her feet. You may ask what she had to be proud of. Well,
she was a Powys married to an Ashburnham—I suppose that gave her
the right to despise casual Americans as long as she did it
unostentatiously. I don't know what anyone has to be proud of. She
might have taken pride in her patience, in her keeping her husband
out of the bankruptcy court. Perhaps she did.

At any rate that was how Florence got to know her. She came
round a screen at the corner of the hotel corridor and found
Leonora with the gold key that hung from her wrist caught in Mrs
Maidan's hair just before dinner. There was not a single word
spoken. Little Mrs Maidan was very pale, with a red mark down her
left cheek, and the key would not come out of her black hair. It
was Florence who had to disentangle it, for Leonora was in such a
state that she could not have brought herself to touch Mrs Maidan
without growing sick.

And there was not a word spoken. You see, under those four
eyes—her own and Mrs Maidan's—Leonora could just let herself go as
far as to box Mrs Maidan's ears. But the moment a stranger came
along she pulled herself wonderfully up. She was at first silent
and then, the moment the key was disengaged by Florence she was in
a state to say: "So awkward of me... I was just trying to put the
comb straight in Mrs Maidan's hair...."