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.
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.
THE END.
'The Good Soldier', by Ford Madox Ford.
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