The Good Soldier (14 page)

And, in speaking to her on that night, he wasn't, I am
convinced, committing a baseness. It was as if his passion for her
hadn't existed; as if the very words that he spoke, without knowing
that he spoke them, created the passion as they went along. Before
he spoke, there was nothing; afterwards, it was the integral fact
of his life. Well, I must get back to my story.

And my story was concerning itself with Florence—with Florence,
who heard those words from behind the tree. That of course is only
conjecture, but I think the conjecture is pretty well justified.
You have the fact that those two went out, that she followed them
almost immediately afterwards through the darkness and, a little
later, she came running back to the hotel with that pallid face and
the hand clutching her dress over her heart. It can't have been
only Bagshawe. Her face was contorted with agony before ever her
eyes fell upon me or upon him beside me. But I dare say Bagshawe
may have been the determining influence in her suicide. Leonora
says that she had that flask, apparently of nitrate of amyl, but
actually of prussic acid, for many years and that she was
determined to use it if ever I discovered the nature of her
relationship with that fellow Jimmy. You see, the mainspring of her
nature must have been vanity. There is no reason why it shouldn't
have been; I guess it is vanity that makes most of us keep
straight, if we do keep straight, in this world.

If it had been merely a matter of Edward's relations with the
girl I dare say Florence would have faced it out. She would no
doubt have made him scenes, have threatened him, have appealed to
his sense of humour, to his promises. But Mr Bagshawe and the fact
that the date was the 4th of August must have been too much for her
superstitious mind. You see, she had two things that she wanted.
She wanted to be a great lady, installed in Branshaw Teleragh. She
wanted also to retain my respect.

She wanted, that is to say, to retain my respect for as long as
she lived with me. I suppose, if she had persuaded Edward
Ashburnham to bolt with her she would have let the whole thing go
with a run. Or perhaps she would have tried to exact from me a new
respect for the greatness of her passion on the lines of all for
love and the world well lost. That would be just like Florence.

In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one
constant factor—a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives
as to some weak spot in one's character or in one's career. For it
is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who
perceives one's small meannesses. It is really death to do so—that
is why so many marriages turn out unhappily.

I, for instance, am a rather greedy man; I have a taste for good
cookery and a watering tooth at the mere sound of the names of
certain comestibles. If Florence had discovered this secret of mine
I should have found her knowledge of it so unbearable that I never
could have supported all the other privations of the régime that
she extracted from me. I am bound to say that Florence never
discovered this secret.

Certainly she never alluded to it; I dare say she never took
sufficient interest in me.

And the secret weakness of Florence—the weakness that she could
not bear to have me discover, was just that early escapade with the
fellow called Jimmy. Let me, as this is in all probability the last
time I shall mention Florence's name, dwell a little upon the
change that had taken place in her psychology. She would not, I
mean, have minded if I had discovered that she was the mistress of
Edward Ashburnham. She would rather have liked it. Indeed, the
chief trouble of poor Leonora in those days was to keep Florence
from making, before me, theatrical displays, on one line or
another, of that very fact. She wanted, in one mood, to come
rushing to me, to cast herself on her knees at my feet and to
declaim a carefully arranged, frightfully emotional, outpouring as
to her passion. That was to show that she was like one of the great
erotic women of whom history tells us. In another mood she would
desire to come to me disdainfully and to tell me that I was
considerably less than a man and that what had happened was what
must happen when a real male came along. She wanted to say that in
cool, balanced and sarcastic sentences. That was when she wished to
appear like the heroine of a French comedy. Because of course she
was always play acting.

But what she didn't want me to know was the fact of her first
escapade with the fellow called Jimmy. She had arrived at figuring
out the sort of low-down Bowery tough that that fellow was. Do you
know what it is to shudder, in later life, for some small, stupid
action—usually for some small, quite genuine piece of
emotionalism—of your early life? Well, it was that sort of
shuddering that came over Florence at the thought that she had
surrendered to such a low fellow. I don't know that she need have
shuddered. It was her footling old uncle's work; he ought never to
have taken those two round the world together and shut himself up
in his cabin for the greater part of the time. Anyhow, I am
convinced that the sight of Mr Bagshawe and the thought that Mr
Bagshawe—for she knew that unpleasant and toadlike personality—the
thought that Mr Bagshawe would almost certainly reveal to me that
he had caught her coming out of Jimmy's bedroom at five o'clock in
the morning on the 4th of August, 1900—that was the determining
influence in her suicide. And no doubt the effect of the date was
too much for her superstitious personality. She had been born on
the 4th of August; she had started to go round the world on the 4th
of August; she had become a low fellow's mistress on the 4th of
August. On the same day of the year she had married me; on that 4th
she had lost Edward's love, and Bagshawe had appeared like a
sinister omen—like a grin on the face of Fate. It was the last
straw. She ran upstairs, arranged herself decoratively upon her
bed—she was a sweetly pretty woman with smooth pink and white
cheeks, long hair, the eyelashes falling like a tiny curtain on her
cheeks. She drank the little phial of prussic acid and there she
lay.—Oh, extremely charming and clear-cut—looking with a puzzled
expression at the electric-light bulb that hung from the ceiling,
or perhaps through it, to the stars above. Who knows? Anyhow, there
was an end of Florence.

You have no idea how quite extraordinarily for me that was the
end of Florence. From that day to this I have never given her
another thought; I have not bestowed upon her so much as a sigh. Of
course, when it has been necessary to talk about her to Leonora, or
when for the purpose of these writings I have tried to figure her
out, I have thought about her as I might do about a problem in
algebra. But it has always been as a matter for study, not for
remembrance. She just went completely out of existence, like
yesterday's paper.

I was so deadly tired. And I dare say that my week or ten days
of affaissement—of what was practically catalepsy—was just the
repose that my exhausted nature claimed after twelve years of the
repression of my instincts, after twelve years of playing the
trained poodle. For that was all that I had been. I suppose that it
was the shock that did it—the several shocks. But I am unwilling to
attribute my feelings at that time to anything so concrete as a
shock. It was a feeling so tranquil. It was as if an immensely
heavy—an unbearably heavy knapsack, supported upon my shoulders by
straps, had fallen off and left my shoulders themselves that the
straps had cut into, numb and without sensation of life. I tell
you, I had no regret. What had I to regret? I suppose that my inner
soul—my dual personality—had realized long before that Florence was
a personality of paper—that she represented a real human being with
a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a
bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold. I know that sort
of feeling came to the surface in me the moment the man Bagshawe
told me that he had seen her coming out of that fellow's bedroom. I
thought suddenly that she wasn't real; she was just a mass of talk
out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates. It is even
possible that, if that feeling had not possessed me, I should have
run up sooner to her room and might have prevented her drinking the
prussic acid. But I just couldn't do it; it would have been like
chasing a scrap of paper—an occupation ignoble for a grown man.

And, as it began, so that matter has remained. I didn't care
whether she had come out of that bedroom or whether she hadn't. It
simply didn't interest me. Florence didn't matter.

I suppose you will retort that I was in love with Nancy Rufford
and that my indifference was therefore discreditable. Well, I am
not seeking to avoid discredit. I was in love with Nancy Rufford as
I am in love with the poor child's memory, quietly and quite
tenderly in my American sort of way. I had never thought about it
until I heard Leonora state that I might now marry her. But, from
that moment until her worse than death, I do not suppose that I
much thought about anything else. I don't mean to say that I sighed
about her or groaned; I just wanted to marry her as some people
want to go to Carcassonne.

Do you understand the feeling—the sort of feeling that you must
get certain matters out of the way, smooth out certain fairly
negligible complications before you can go to a place that has,
during all your life, been a sort of dream city? I didn't attach
much importance to my superior years. I was forty-five, and she,
poor thing, was only just rising twenty-two. But she was older than
her years and quieter. She seemed to have an odd quality of
sainthood, as if she must inevitably end in a convent with a white
coif framing her face. But she had frequently told me that she had
no vocation; it just simply wasn't there—the desire to become a
nun. Well, I guess that I was a sort of convent myself; it seemed
fairly proper that she should make her vows to me. No, I didn't see
any impediment on the score of age. I dare say no man does and I
was pretty confident that with a little preparation, I could make a
young girl happy. I could spoil her as few young girls have ever
been spoiled; and I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive.
No man can, or if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.
But, as soon as I came out of my catalepsy, I seemed to perceive
that my problem—that what I had to do to prepare myself for getting
into contact with her, was just to get back into contact with life.
I had been kept for twelve years in a rarefied atmosphere; what I
then had to do was a little fighting with real life, some wrestling
with men of business, some travelling amongst larger cities,
something harsh, something masculine. I didn't want to present
myself to Nancy Rufford as a sort of an old maid. That was why,
just a fortnight after Florence's suicide, I set off for the United
States.

IMMEDIATELY after Florence's death Leonora began to put the
leash upon Nancy Rufford and Edward. She had guessed what had
happened under the trees near the Casino. They stayed at Nauheim
some weeks after I went, and Leonora has told me that that was the
most deadly time of her existence. It seemed like a long, silent
duel with invisible weapons, so she said. And it was rendered all
the more difficult by the girl's entire innocence. For Nancy was
always trying to go off alone with Edward—as she had been doing all
her life, whenever she was home for holidays. She just wanted him
to say nice things to her again.

You see, the position was extremely complicated. It was as
complicated as it well could be, along delicate lines. There was
the complication caused by the fact that Edward and Leonora never
spoke to each other except when other people were present. Then, as
I have said, their demeanours were quite perfect. There was the
complication caused by the girl's entire innocence; there was the
further complication that both Edward and Leonora really regarded
the girl as their daughter. Or it might be more precise to say that
they regarded her as being Leonora's daughter. And Nancy was a
queer girl; it is very difficult to describe her to you.

She was tall and strikingly thin; she had a tortured mouth,
agonized eyes, and a quite extraordinary sense of fun. You, might
put it that at times she was exceedingly grotesque and at times
extraordinarily beautiful. Why, she had the heaviest head of black
hair that I have ever come across; I used to wonder how she could
bear the weight of it. She was just over twenty-one and at times
she seemed as old as the hills, at times not much more than
sixteen. At one moment she would be talking of the lives of the
saints and at the next she would be tumbling all over the lawn with
the St Bernard puppy. She could ride to hounds like a Maenad and
she could sit for hours perfectly still, steeping handkerchief
after handkerchief in vinegar when Leonora had one of her
headaches. She was, in short, a miracle of patience who could be
almost miraculously impatient. It was, no doubt, the convent
training that effected that. I remember that one of her letters to
me, when she was about sixteen, ran something like:

"On Corpus Christi"—or it may have been some other saint's day,
I cannot keep these things in my head—"our school played Roehampton
at Hockey. And, seeing that our side was losing, being three goals
to one against us at halftime, we retired into the chapel and
prayed for victory. We won by five goals to three." And I remember
that she seemed to describe afterwards a sort of saturnalia.
Apparently, when the victorious fifteen or eleven came into the
refectory for supper, the whole school jumped upon the tables and
cheered and broke the chairs on the floor and smashed the
crockery—for a given time, until the Reverend Mother rang a
hand-bell. That is of course the Catholic tradition—saturnalia that
can end in a moment, like the crack of a whip. I don't, of course,
like the tradition, but I am bound to say that it gave Nancy—or at
any rate Nancy had—a sense of rectitude that I have never seen
surpassed. It was a thing like a knife that looked out of her eyes
and that spoke with her voice, just now and then. It positively
frightened me. I suppose that I was almost afraid to be in a world
where there could be so fine a standard. I remember when she was
about fifteen or sixteen on going back to the convent I once gave
her a couple of English sovereigns as a tip. She thanked me in a
peculiarly heartfelt way, saying that it would come in extremely
handy. I asked her why and she explained. There was a rule at the
school that the pupils were not to speak when they walked through
the garden from the chapel to the refectory. And, since this rule
appeared to be idiotic and arbitrary, she broke it on purpose day
after day. In the evening the children were all asked if they had
committed any faults during the day, and every evening Nancy
confessed that she had broken this particular rule. It cost her
sixpence a time, that being the fine attached to the offence. Just
for the information I asked her why she always confessed, and she
answered in these exact words: