The Good Soldier (20 page)

It was probably also very good for Edward's health, because he
pranced about mostly with Mrs Basil, who was a nice woman and very,
very kind to him. I suppose she was his mistress, but I never heard
it from Edward, of course. I seem to gather that they carried it on
in a high romantic fashion, very proper to both of them—or, at any
rate, for Edward; she seems to have been a tender and gentle soul
who did what he wanted. I do not mean to say that she was without
character; that was her job, to do what Edward wanted. So I figured
it out, that for those five years, Edward wanted long passages of
deep affection kept up in long, long talks and that every now and
then they "fell," which would give Edward an opportunity for
remorse and an excuse to lend the Major another fifty. I don't
think that Mrs Basil considered it to be "falling"; she just pitied
him and loved him.

You see, Leonora and Edward had to talk about something during
all these years. You cannot be absolutely dumb when you live with a
person unless you are an inhabitant of the North of England or the
State of Maine. So Leonora imagined the cheerful device of letting
him see the accounts of his estate and discussing them with him. He
did not discuss them much; he was trying to behave prettily. But it
was old Mr Mumford—the farmer who did not pay his rent—that threw
Edward into Mrs Basil's arms. Mrs Basil came upon Edward in the
dusk, in the Burmese garden, with all sorts of flowers and things.
And he was cutting up that crop—with his sword, not a
walking-stick. He was also carrying on and cursing in a way you
would not believe.

She ascertained that an old gentleman called Mumford had been
ejected from his farm and had been given a little cottage
rent-free, where he lived on ten shillings a week from a farmers'
benevolent society, supplemented by seven that was being allowed
him by the Ashburnham trustees. Edward had just discovered that
fact from the estate accounts. Leonora had left them in his
dressing-room and he had begun to read them before taking off his
marching-kit. That was how he came to have a sword. Leonora
considered that she had been unusually generous to old Mr Mumford
in allowing him to inhabit a cottage, rent-free, and in giving him
seven shillings a week. Anyhow, Mrs Basil had never seen a man in
such a state as Edward was. She had been passionately in love with
him for quite a time, and he had been longing for her sympathy and
admiration with a passion as deep. That was how they came to speak
about it, in the Burmese garden, under the pale sky, with sheaves
of severed vegetation, misty and odorous, in the night around their
feet. I think they behaved themselves with decorum for quite a time
after that, though Mrs Basil spent so many hours over the accounts
of the Ashburnham estate that she got the name of every field by
heart. Edward had a huge map of his lands in his harness-room and
Major Basil did not seem to mind. I believe that people do not mind
much in lonely stations. It might have lasted for ever if the Major
had not been made what is called a brevet-colonel during the
shuffling of troops that went on just before the South African War.
He was sent off somewhere else and, of course, Mrs Basil could not
stay with Edward. Edward ought, I suppose, to have gone to the
Transvaal. It would have done him a great deal of good to get
killed. But Leonora would not let him; she had heard awful stories
of the extravagance of the hussar regiment in war-time—how they
left hundred-bottle cases of champagne, at five guineas a bottle,
on the veldt and so on. Besides, she preferred to see how Edward
was spending his five hundred a year. I don't mean to say that
Edward had any grievance in that. He was never a man of the deeds
of heroism sort and it was just as good for him to be sniped at up
in the hills of the North Western frontier, as to be shot at by an
old gentleman in a tophat at the bottom of some spruit. Those are
more or less his words about it. I believe he quite distinguished
himself over there. At any rate, he had had his D.S.O. and was made
a brevet-major. Leonora, however, was not in the least keen on his
soldiering. She hated also his deeds of heroism. One of their
bitterest quarrels came after he had, for the second time, in the
Red Sea, jumped overboard from the troopship and rescued a private
soldier. She stood it the first time and even complimented him. But
the Red Sea was awful, that trip, and the private soldiers seemed
to develop a suicidal craze. It got on Leonora's nerves; she
figured Edward, for the rest of that trip, jumping overboard every
ten minutes. And the mere cry of "Man overboard" is a disagreeable,
alarming and disturbing thing. The ship gets stopped and there are
all sorts of shouts. And Edward would not promise not to do it
again, though, fortunately, they struck a streak of cooler weather
when they were in the Persian Gulf. Leonora had got it into her
head that Edward was trying to commit suicide, so I guess it was
pretty awful for her when he would not give the promise. Leonora
ought never to have been on that troopship; but she got there
somehow, as an economy.

Major Basil discovered his wife's relation with Edward just
before he was sent to his other station. I don't know whether that
was a blackmailer's adroitness or just a trick of destiny. He may
have known of it all the time or he may not. At any rate, he got
hold of, just about then, some letters and things. It cost Edward
three hundred pounds immediately. I do not know how it was
arranged; I cannot imagine how even a blackmailer can make his
demands. I suppose there is some sort of way of saving your face. I
figure the Major as disclosing the letters to Edward with furious
oaths, then accepting his explanations that the letters were
perfectly innocent if the wrong construction were not put upon
them. Then the Major would say: "I say, old chap, I'm deuced hard
up. Couldn't you lend me three hundred or so?" I fancy that was how
it was. And, year by year, after that there would come a letter
from the Major, saying that he was deuced hard up and couldn't
Edward lend him three hundred or so? Edward was pretty hard hit
when Mrs Basil had to go away. He really had been very fond of her,
and he remained faithful to her memory for quite a long time. And
Mrs Basi had loved him very much and continued to cherish a hope of
reunion with him. Three days ago there came a quite proper but very
lamentable letter from her to Leonora, asking to be given
particulars as to Edward's death. She had read the advertisement of
it in an Indian paper. I think she must have been a very nice
woman....

And then the Ashburnhams were moved somewhere up towards a place
or a district called Chitral. I am no good at geography of the
Indian Empire. By that time they had settled down into a model
couple and they never spoke in private to each other. Leonora had
given up even showing the accounts of the Ashburnham estate to
Edward. He thought that that was because she had piled up such a
lot of money that she did not want him to know how she was getting
on any more. But, as a matter of fact, after five or six years it
had penetrated to her mind that it was painful to Edward to have to
look on at the accounts of his estate and have no hand in the
management of it. She was trying to do him a kindness. And, up in
Chitral, poor dear little Maisie Maidan came along....

That was the most unsettling to Edward of all his affairs. It
made him suspect that he was inconstant. The affair with the
Dolciquita he had sized up as a short attack of madness like
hydrophobia. His relations with Mrs Basil had not seemed to him to
imply moral turpitude of a gross kind. The husband had been
complaisant; they had really loved each other; his wife was very
cruel to him and had long ceased to be a wife to him. He thought
that Mrs Basil had been his soul-mate, separated from him by an
unkind fate—something sentimental of that sort.

But he discovered that, whilst he was still writing long weekly
letters to Mrs Basil, he was beginning to be furiously impatient if
he missed seeing Maisie Maidan during the course of the day. He
discovered himself watching the doorways with impatience; he
discovered that he disliked her boy husband very much for hours at
a time. He discovered that he was getting up at unearthly hours in
order to have time, later in the morning, to go for a walk with
Maisie Maidan. He discovered himself using little slang words that
she used and attaching a sentimental value to those words. These,
you understand, were discoveries that came so late that he could do
nothing but drift. He was losing weight; his eyes were beginning to
fall in; he had touches of bad fever. He was, as he described it,
pipped.

And, one ghastly hot day, he suddenly heard himself say to
Leonora:

"I say, couldn't we take Mrs Maidan with us to Europe and drop
her at Nauheim?"

He hadn't had the least idea of saying that to Leonora. He had
merely been standing, looking at an illustrated paper, waiting for
dinner. Dinner was twenty minutes late or the Ashburnhams would not
have been alone together. No, he hadn't had the least idea of
framing that speech. He had just been standing in a silent agony of
fear, of longing, of heat, of fever. He was thinking that they were
going back to Branshaw in a month and that Maisie Maidan was going
to remain behind and die. And then, that had come out.

The punkah swished in the darkened room; Leonora lay exhausted
and motionless in her cane lounge; neither of them stirred. They
were both at that time very ill in indefinite ways.

And then Leonora said:

"Yes. I promised it to Charlie Maidan this afternoon. I have
offered to pay her ex's myself."

Edward just saved himself from saying: "Good God!" You see, he
had not the least idea of what Leonora knew—about Maisie, about Mrs
Basil, even about La Dolciquita. It was a pretty enigmatic
situation for him. It struck him that Leonora must be intending to
manage his loves as she managed his money affairs and it made her
more hateful to him—and more worthy of respect.

Leonora, at any rate, had managed his money to some purpose. She
had spoken to him, a week before, for the first time in several
years—about money. She had made twenty-two thousand pounds out of
the Branshaw land and seven by the letting of Branshaw furnished.
By fortunate investments—in which Edward had helped her—she had
made another six or seven thousand that might well become more. The
mortgages were all paid off, so that, except for the departure of
the two Vandykes and the silver, they were as well off as they had
been before the Dolciquita had acted the locust. It was Leonora's
great achievement. She laid the figures before Edward, who
maintained an unbroken silence.

"I propose," she said, "that you should resign from the Army and
that we should go back to Branshaw. We are both too ill to stay
here any longer."

Edward said nothing at all.

"This," Leonora continued passionlessly, "is the great day of my
life."

Edward said:

"You have managed the job amazingly. You are a wonderful woman."
He was thinking that if they went back to Branshaw they would leave
Maisie Maidan behind. That thought occupied him exclusively. They
must, undoubtedly, return to Branshaw; there could be no doubt that
Leonora was too ill to stay in that place. She said:

"You understand that the management of the whole of the
expenditure of the income will be in your hands. There will be five
thousand a year." She thought that he cared very much about the
expenditure of an income of five thousand a year and that the fact
that she had done so much for him would rouse in him some affection
for her. But he was thinking exclusively of Maisie Maidan—of
Maisie, thousands of miles away from him. He was seeing the
mountains between them—blue mountains and the sea and sunlit
plains. He said:

"That is very generous of you." And she did not know whether
that were praise or a sneer. That had been a week before. And all
that week he had passed in an increasing agony at the thought that
those mountains, that sea, and those sunlit plains would be between
him and Maisie Maidan. That thought shook him in the burning
nights: the sweat poured from him and he trembled with cold, in the
burning noons—at that thought. He had no minute's rest; his bowels
turned round and round within him: his tongue was perpetually dry
and it seemed to him that the breath between his teeth was like air
from a pest-house.

He gave no thought to Leonora at all; he had sent in his papers.
They were to leave in a month. It seemed to him to be his duty to
leave that place and to go away, to support Leonora. He did his
duty.

It was horrible, in their relationship at that time, that
whatever she did caused him to hate her. He hated her when he found
that she proposed to set him up as the Lord of Branshaw again—as a
sort of dummy lord, in swaddling clothes. He imagined that she had
done this in order to separate him from Maisie Maidan. Hatred hung
in all the heavy nights and filled the shadowy corners of the room.
So when he heard that she had offered to the Maidan boy to take his
wife to Europe with him, automatically he hated her since he hated
all that she did. It seemed to him, at that time, that she could
never be other than cruel even if, by accident, an act of hers were
kind.... Yes, it was a horrible situation.

But the cool breezes of the ocean seemed to clear up that hatred
as if it had been a curtain. They seemed to give him back
admiration for her, and respect. The agreeableness of having money
lavishly at command, the fact that it had bought for him the
companionship of Maisie Maidan—these things began to make him see
that his wife might have been right in the starving and scraping
upon which she had insisted. He was at ease; he was even radiantly
happy when he carried cups of bouillon for Maisie Maidan along the
deck. One night, when he was leaning beside Leonora, over the
ship's side, he said suddenly: