The Good Soldier (9 page)

She should not have done it. She should not have done it. It was
playing it too low down. She cut out poor dear Edward from sheer
vanity; she meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer, imbecile
spirit of district visiting. Do you understand that, whilst she was
Edward's mistress, she was perpetually trying to reunite him to his
wife? She would gabble on to Leonora about forgiveness—treating the
subject from the bright, American point of view. And Leonora would
treat her like the whore she was. Once she said to Florence in the
early morning:

"You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is
my proper place. I know it, thank you."

But even that could not stop Florence. She went on saying that
it was her ambition to leave this world a little brighter by the
passage of her brief life, and how thankfully she would leave
Edward, whom she thought she had brought to a right frame of mind,
if Leonora would only give him a chance. He needed, she said,
tenderness beyond anything.

And Leonora would answer—for she put up with this outrage for
years—Leonora, as I understand, would answer something like:

"Yes, you would give him up. And you would go on writing to each
other in secret, and committing adultery in hired rooms. I know the
pair of you, you know. No. I prefer the situation as it is." Half
the time Florence would ignore Leonora's remarks. She would think
they were not quite ladylike. The other half of the time she would
try to persuade Leonora that her love for Edward was quite
spiritual—on account of her heart. Once she said:

"If you can believe that of Maisie Maidan, as you say you do,
why cannot you believe it of me?" Leonora was, I understand, doing
her hair at that time in front of the mirror in her bedroom. And
she looked round at Florence, to whom she did not usually vouchsafe
a glance,—she looked round coolly and calmly, and said:

"Never do you dare to mention Mrs Maidan's name again. You
murdered her. You and I murdered her between us. I am as much a
scoundrel as you. I don't like to be reminded of it."

Florence went off at once into a babble of how could she have
hurt a person whom she hardly knew, a person whom with the best
intentions, in pursuance of her efforts to leave the world a little
brighter, she had tried to save from Edward. That was how she
figured it out to herself. She really thought that.... So Leonora
said patiently:

"Very well, just put it that I killed her and that it's a
painful subject. One does not like to think that one had killed
someone. Naturally not. I ought never to have brought her from
India." And that, indeed, is exactly how Leonora looked at it. It
is stated a little baldly, but Leonora was always a great one for
bald statements.

What had happened on the day of our jaunt to the ancient city of
M—— had been this:

Leonora, who had been even then filled with pity and contrition
for the poor child, on returning to our hotel had gone straight to
Mrs Maidan's room. She had wanted just to pet her. And she had
perceived at first only, on the clear, round table covered with red
velvet, a letter addressed to her. It ran something like:

"Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, how could you have done it? I trusted you
so. You never talked to me about me and Edward, but I trusted you.
How could you buy me from my husband? I have just heard how you
have—in the hall they were talking about it, Edward and the
American lady. You paid the money for me to come here. Oh, how
could you? How could you? I am going straight back to Bunny...."
Bunny was Mrs Maidan's husband.

And Leonora said that, as she went on reading the letter, she
had, without looking round her, a sense that that hotel room was
cleared, that there were no papers on the table, that there were no
clothes on the hooks, and that there was a strained silence—a
silence, she said, as if there were something in the room that
drank up such sounds as there were. She had to fight against that
feeling, whilst she read the postscript of the letter.

"I did not know you wanted me for an adulteress," the postscript
began. The poor child was hardly literate. "It was surely not right
of you and I never wanted to be one. And I heard Edward call me a
poor little rat to the American lady. He always called me a little
rat in private, and I did not mind. But, if he called me it to her,
I think he does not love me any more. Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, you knew
the world and I knew nothing. I thought it would be all right if
you thought it could, and I thought you would not have brought me
if you did not, too. You should not have done it, and we out of the
same convent...."

Leonora said that she screamed when she read that.

And then she saw that Maisie's boxes were all packed, and she
began a search for Mrs Maidan herself—all over the hotel. The
manager said that Mrs Maidan had paid her bill, and had gone up to
the station to ask the Reiseverkehrsbureau to make her out a plan
for her immediate return to Chitral. He imagined that he had seen
her come back, but he was not quite certain. No one in the large
hotel had bothered his head about the child. And she, wandering
solitarily in the hall, had no doubt sat down beside a screen that
had Edward and Florence on the other side. I never heard then or
after what had passed between that precious couple. I fancy
Florence was just about beginning her cutting out of poor dear
Edward by addressing to him some words of friendly warning as to
the ravages he might be making in the girl's heart. That would be
the sort of way she would begin. And Edward would have
sentimentally assured her that there was nothing in it; that Maisie
was just a poor little rat whose passage to Nauheim his wife had
paid out of her own pocket. That would have been enough to do the
trick.

For the trick was pretty efficiently done. Leonora, with panic
growing and with contrition very large in her heart, visited every
one of the public rooms of the hotel—the dining-room, the lounge,
the schreibzimmer, the winter garden. God knows what they wanted
with a winter garden in an hotel that is only open from May till
October. But there it was. And then Leonora ran—yes, she ran up the
stairs—to see if Maisie had not returned to her rooms. She had
determined to take that child right away from that hideous place.
It seemed to her to be all unspeakable. I do not mean to say that
she was not quite cool about it. Leonora was always Leonora. But
the cold justice of the thing demanded that she should play the
part of mother to this child who had come from the same convent.
She figured it out to amount to that. She would leave Edward to
Florence and to me—and she would devote all her time to providing
that child with an atmosphere of love until she could be returned
to her poor young husband. It was naturally too late.

She had not cared to look round Maisie's rooms at first. Now, as
soon as she came in, she perceived, sticking out beyond the bed, a
small pair of feet in high-heeled shoes. Maisie had died in the
effort to strap up a great portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely
that her little body had fallen forward into the trunk, and it had
closed upon her, like the jaws of a gigantic alligator. The key was
in her hand. Her dark hair, like the hair of a Japanese, had come
down and covered her body and her face.

Leonora lifted her up—she was the merest featherweight—and laid
her on the bed with her hair about her. She was smiling, as if she
had just scored a goal in a hockey match. You understand she had
not committed suicide. Her heart had just stopped. I saw her, with
the long lashes on the cheeks, with the smile about the lips, with
the flowers all about her. The stem of a white lily rested in her
hand so that the spike of flowers was upon her shoulder. She looked
like a bride in the sunlight of the mortuary candles that were all
about her, and the white coifs of the two nuns that knelt at her
feet with their faces hidden might have been two swans that were to
bear her away to kissing-kindness land, or wherever it is. Leonora
showed her to me. She would not let either of the others see her.
She wanted, you know, to spare poor dear Edward's feelings. He
never could bear the sight of a corpse. And, since she never gave
him an idea that Maisie had written to her, he imagined that the
death had been the most natural thing in the world. He soon got
over it. Indeed, it was the one affair of his about which he never
felt much remorse.

THE death of Mrs Maidan occurred on the 4th of August, 1904. And
then nothing happened until the 4th of August, 1913. There is the
curious coincidence of dates, but I do not know whether that is one
of those sinister, as if half jocular and altogether merciless
proceedings on the part of a cruel Providence that we call a
coincidence. Because it may just as well have been the
superstitious mind of Florence that forced her to certain acts, as
if she had been hypnotized. It is, however, certain that the 4th of
August always proved a significant date for her. To begin with, she
was born on the 4th of August. Then, on that date, in the year
1899, she set out with her uncle for the tour round the world in
company with a young man called Jimmy. But that was not merely a
coincidence. Her kindly old uncle, with the supposedly damaged
heart, was in his delicate way, offering her, in this trip, a
birthday present to celebrate her coming of age. Then, on the 4th
of August, 1900, she yielded to an action that certainly coloured
her whole life—as well as mine. She had no luck. She was probably
offering herself a birthday present that morning.... On the 4th of
August, 1901, she married me, and set sail for Europe in a great
gale of wind—the gale that affected her heart. And no doubt there,
again, she was offering herself a birthday gift—the birthday gift
of my miserable life. It occurs to me that I have never told you
anything about my marriage. That was like this: I have told you, as
I think, that I first met Florence at the Stuyvesants', in
Fourteenth Street. And, from that moment, I determined with all the
obstinacy of a possibly weak nature, if not to make her mine, at
least to marry her. I had no occupation—I had no business affairs.
I simply camped down there in Stamford, in a vile hotel, and just
passed my days in the house, or on the verandah of the Misses
Hurlbird. The Misses Hurlbird, in an odd, obstinate way, did not
like my presence. But they were hampered by the national manners of
these occasions. Florence had her own sitting-room. She could ask
to it whom she liked, and I simply walked into that apartment. I
was as timid as you will, but in that matter I was like a chicken
that is determined to get across the road in front of an
automobile. I would walk into Florence's pretty, little,
old-fashioned room, take off my hat, and sit down.

Florence had, of course, several other fellows, too—strapping
young New Englanders, who worked during the day in New York and
spent only the evenings in the village of their birth. And, in the
evenings, they would march in on Florence with almost as much
determination as I myself showed. And I am bound to say that they
were received with as much disfavour as was my portion—from the
Misses Hurlbird....

They were curious old creatures, those two. It was almost as if
they were members of an ancient family under some curse—they were
so gentlewomanly, so proper, and they sighed so. Sometimes I would
see tears in their eyes. I do not know that my courtship of
Florence made much progress at first. Perhaps that was because it
took place almost entirely during the daytime, on hot afternoons,
when the clouds of dust hung like fog, right up as high as the tops
of the thin-leaved elms. The night, I believe, is the proper season
for the gentle feats of love, not a Connecticut July afternoon,
when any sort of proximity is an almost appalling thought. But, if
I never so much as kissed Florence, she let me discover very
easily, in the course of a fortnight, her simple wants. And I could
supply those wants....

She wanted to marry a gentleman of leisure; she wanted a
European establishment. She wanted her husband to have an English
accent, an income of fifty thousand dollars a year from real estate
and no ambitions to increase that income. And—she faintly
hinted—she did not want much physical passion in the affair.
Americans, you know, can envisage such unions without blinking.

She gave cut this information in floods of bright talk—she would
pop a little bit of it into comments over a view of the Rialto,
Venice, and, whilst she was brightly describing Balmoral Castle,
she would say that her ideal husband would he one who could get her
received at the British Court. She had spent, it seemed, two months
in Great Britain—seven weeks in touring from Stratford to
Strathpeffer, and one as paying guest in an old English family near
Ledbury, an impoverished, but still stately family, called
Bagshawe. They were to have spent two months more in that tranquil
bosom, but inopportune events, apparently in her uncle's business,
had caused their rather hurried return to Stamford. The young man
called Jimmy had remained in Europe to perfect his knowledge of
that continent. He certainly did: he was most useful to us
afterwards.

But the point that came out—that there was no mistaking—was that
Florence was coldly and calmly determined to take no look at any
man who could not give her a European settlement. Her glimpse of
English home life had effected this. She meant, on her marriage, to
have a year in Paris, and then to have her husband buy some real
estate in the neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, from which place the
Hurlbirds had come in the year 1688. On the strength of that she
was going to take her place in the ranks of English county society.
That was fixed.

I used to feel mightily elevated when I considered these
details, for I could not figure out that amongst her acquaintances
in Stamford there was any fellow that would fill the bill. The most
of them were not as wealthy as I, and those that were were not the
type to give up the fascinations of Wall Street even for the
protracted companionship of Florence. But nothing really happened
during the month of July. On the 1st of August Florence apparently
told her aunts that she intended to marry me.