The Good Soldier (22 page)

Yes, Leonora seemed to have got hold of the clue to the riddle.
She imagined herself to have been in the wrong to some extent in
the past. She should not have kept Edward on such a tight rein with
regard to money. She thought she was on the right tack in letting
him—as she had done only with fear and irresolution—have again the
control of his income. He came even a step towards her and
acknowledged, spontaneously, that she had been right in husbanding,
for all those years, their resources. He said to her one day:

"You've done right, old girl. There's nothing I like so much as
to have a little to chuck away. And I can do it, thanks to
you."

That was really, she said, the happiest moment of her life. And
he, seeming to realize it, had ventured to pat her on the shoulder.
He had, ostensibly, come in to borrow a safety-pin of her. And the
occasion of her boxing Maisie's ears, had, after it was over,
riveted in her mind the idea that there was no intrigue between
Edward and Mrs Maidan. She imagined that, from henceforward, all
that she had to do was to keep him well supplied with money and his
mind amused with pretty girls. She was convinced that he was coming
back to her. For that month she no longer repelled his timid
advances that never went very far. For he certainly made timid
advances. He patted her on the shoulder; he whispered into her ear
little jokes about the odd figures that they saw up at the Casino.
It was not much to make a little joke—but the whispering of it was
a precious intimacy....

And then—smash—it all went. It went to pieces at the moment when
Florence laid her hand upon Edward's wrist, as it lay on the glass
sheltering the manuscript of the Protest, up in the high tower with
the shutters where the sunlight here and there streamed in. Or,
rather, it went when she noticed the look in Edward's eyes as he
gazed back into Florence's. She knew that look.

She had known—since the first moment of their meeting, since the
moment of our all sitting down to dinner together—that Florence was
making eyes at Edward. But she had seen so many women make eyes at
Edward—hundreds and hundreds of women, in railway trains, in
hotels, aboard liners, at street corners. And she had arrived at
thinking that Edward took little stock in women that made eyes at
him. She had formed what was, at that time, a fairly correct
estimate of the methods of, the reasons for, Edward's loves. She
was certain that hitherto they had consisted of the short passion
for the Dolciquita, the real sort of love for Mrs Basil, and what
she deemed the pretty courtship of Maisie Maidan. Besides she
despised Florence so haughtily that she could not imagine Edward's
being attracted by her. And she and Maisie were a sort of bulwark
round him. She wanted, besides, to keep her eyes on Florence—for
Florence knew that she had boxed Maisie's ears. And Leonora
desperately desired that her union with Edward should appear to be
flawless. But all that went....

With the answering gaze of Edward into Florence's blue and
uplifted eyes, she knew that it had all gone. She knew that that
gaze meant that those two had had long conversations of an intimate
kind—about their likes and dislikes, about their natures, about
their views of marriage. She knew what it meant that she, when we
all four walked out together, had always been with me ten yards
ahead of Florence and Edward. She did not imagine that it had gone
further than talks about their likes and dislikes, about their
natures or about marriage as an institution. But, having watched
Edward all her life, she knew that that laying on of hands, that
answering of gaze with gaze, meant that the thing was unavoidable.
Edward was such a serious person.

She knew that any attempt on her part to separate those two
would be to rivet on Edward an irrevocable passion; that, as I have
before told you, it was a trick of Edward's nature to believe that
the seducing of a woman gave her an irrevocable hold over him for
life. And that touching of hands, she knew, would give that woman
an irrevocable claim—to be seduced. And she so despised Florence
that she would have preferred it to be a parlour-maid. There are
very decent parlour-maids.

And, suddenly, there came into her mind the conviction that
Maisie Maidan had a real passion for Edward; that this would break
her heart—and that she, Leonora, would be responsible for that. She
went, for the moment, mad. She clutched me by the wrist; she
dragged me down those stairs and across that whispering Rittersaal
with the high painted pillars, the high painted chimney-piece. I
guess she did not go mad enough.

She ought to have said:

"Your wife is a harlot who is going to be my husband's
mistress.. ." That might have done the trick. But, even in her
madness, she was afraid to go as far as that. She was afraid that,
if she did, Edward and Florence would make a bolt of it, and that,
if they did that, she would lose forever all chance of getting him
back in the end. She acted very badly to me.

Well, she was a tortured soul who put her Church before the
interests of a Philadelphia Quaker. That is all right—I daresay the
Church of Rome is the more important of the two.

A week after Maisie Maidan's death she was aware that Florence
had become Edward's mistress. She waited outside Florence's door
and met Edward as he came away. She said nothing and he only
grunted. But I guess he had a bad time.

Yes, the mental deterioration that Florence worked in Leonora
was extraordinary; it smashed up her whole life and all her
chances. It made her, in the first place, hopeless—for she could
not see how, after that, Edward could return to her—after a vulgar
intrigue with a vulgar woman. His affair with Mrs Basil, which was
now all that she had to bring, in her heart, against him, she could
not find it in her to call an intrigue. It was a love affair—a pure
enough thing in its way. But this seemed to her to be a horror—a
wantonness, all the more detestable to her, because she so detested
Florence. And Florence talked....

That was what was terrible, because Florence forced Leonora
herself to abandon her high reserve—Florence and the situation. It
appears that Florence was in two minds whether to confess to me or
to Leonora. Confess she had to. And she pitched at last on Leonora,
because if it had been me she would have had to confess a great
deal more. Or, at least, I might have guessed a great deal more,
about her "heart", and about Jimmy. So she went to Leonora one day
and began hinting and hinting. And she enraged Leonora to such an
extent that at last Leonora said:

"You want to tell me that you are Edward's mistress. You can be.
I have no use for him." That was really a calamity for Leonora,
because, once started, there was no stopping the talking. She tried
to stop—but it was not to be done. She found it necessary to send
Edward messages through Florence; for she would not speak to him.
She had to give him, for instance, to understand that if I ever
came to know of his intrigue she would ruin him beyond repair. And
it complicated matters a good deal that Edward, at about this time,
was really a little in love with her. He thought that he had
treated her so badly; that she was so fine. She was so mournful
that he longed to comfort her, and he thought himself such a
blackguard that there was nothing he would not have done to make
amends. And Florence communicated these items of information to
Leonora.

I don't in the least blame Leonora for her coarseness to
Florence; it must have done Florence a world of good. But I do
blame her for giving way to what was in the end a desire for
communicativeness. You see that business cut her off from her
Church. She did not want to confess what she was doing because she
was afraid that her spiritual advisers would blame her for
deceiving me. I rather imagine that she would have preferred
damnation to breaking my heart. That is what it works out at. She
need not have troubled.

But, having no priests to talk to, she had to talk to someone,
and as Florence insisted on talking to her, she talked back, in
short, explosive sentences, like one of the damned. Precisely like
one of the damned. Well, if a pretty period in hell on this earth
can spare her any period of pain in Eternity—where there are not
any periods—I guess Leonora will escape hell fire.

Her conversations with Florence would be like this. Florence
would happen in on her, whilst she was doing her wonderful hair,
with a proposition from Edward, who seems about that time to have
conceived the naïve idea that he might become a polygamist. I
daresay it was Florence who put it into his head. Anyhow, I am not
responsible for the oddities of the human psychology. But it
certainly appears that at about that date Edward cared more for
Leonora than he had ever done before—or, at any rate, for a long
time. And, if Leonora had been a person to play cards and if she
had played her cards well, and if she had had no sense of shame and
so on, she might then have shared Edward with Florence until the
time came for jerking that poor cuckoo out of the nest. Well,
Florence would come to Leonora with some such proposition. I do not
mean to say that she put it baldly, like that. She stood out that
she was not Edward's mistress until Leonora said that she had seen
Edward coming out of her room at an advanced hour of the night.
That checked Florence a bit; but she fell back upon her "heart" and
stuck out that she had merely been conversing with Edward in order
to bring him to a better frame of mind. Florence had, of course, to
stick to that story; for even Florence would not have had the face
to implore Leonora to grant her favours to Edward if she had
admitted that she was Edward's mistress. That could not be done. At
the same time Florence had such a pressing desire to talk about
something. There would have been nothing else to talk about but a
rapprochement between that estranged pair. So Florence would go on
babbling and Leonora would go on brushing her hair. And then
Leonora would say suddenly something like:

"I should think myself defiled if Edward touched me now that he
has touched you."

That would discourage Florence a bit; but after a week or so, on
another morning she would have another try.

And even in other things Leonora deteriorated. She had promised
Edward to leave the spending of his own income in his own hands.
And she had fully meant to do that. I daresay she would have done
it too; though, no doubt, she would have spied upon his banking
account in secret. She was not a Roman Catholic for nothing. But
she took so serious a view of Edward's unfaithfulness to the memory
of poor little Maisie that she could not trust him any more at
all.

So when she got back to Branshaw she started, after less than a
month, to worry him about the minutest items of his expenditure.
She allowed him to draw his own cheques, but there was hardly a
cheque that she did not scrutinize—except for a private account of
about five hundred a year which, tacitly, she allowed him to keep
for expenditure on his mistress or mistresses. He had to have his
jaunts to Paris; he had to send expensive cables in cipher to
Florence about twice a week. But she worried him about his
expenditure on wines, on fruit trees, on harness, on gates, on the
account at his blacksmith's for work done to a new patent Army
stirrup that he was trying to invent. She could not see why he
should bother to invent a new Army stirrup, and she was really
enraged when, after the invention was mature, he made a present to
the War Office of the designs and the patent rights. It was a
remarkably good stirrup.

I have told you, I think, that Edward spent a great deal of
time, and about two hundred pounds for law fees on getting a poor
girl, the daughter of one of his gardeners, acquitted of a charge
of murdering her baby. That was positively the last act of Edward's
life. It came at a time when Nancy Rufford was on her way to India;
when the most horrible gloom was over the household; when Edward
himself was in an agony and behaving as prettily as he knew how.
Yet even then Leonora made him a terrible scene about this
expenditure of time and trouble. She sort of had the vague idea
that what had passed with the girl and the rest of it ought to have
taught Edward a lesson—the lesson of economy. She threatened to
take his banking account away from him again. I guess that made him
cut his throat. He might have stuck it out otherwise—but the
thought that he had lost Nancy and that, in addition, there was
nothing left for him but a dreary, dreary succession of days in
which he could be of no public service... Well, it finished
him.

It was during those years that Leonora tried to get up a love
affair of her own with a fellow called Bayham—a decent sort of
fellow. A really nice man. But the affair was no sort of success. I
have told you about it already... .

WELL, that about brings me up to the date of my receiving, in
Waterbury, the laconic cable from Edward to the effect that he
wanted me to go to Branshaw and have a chat. I was pretty busy at
the time and I was half minded to send him a reply cable to the
effect that I would start in a fortnight. But I was having a long
interview with old Mr Hurlbird's attorneys and immediately
afterwards I had to have a long interview with the Misses Hurlbird,
so I delayed cabling.

I had expected to find the Misses Hurlbird excessively old—in
the nineties or thereabouts. The time had passed so slowly that I
had the impression that it must have been thirty years since I had
been in the United States. It was only twelve years. Actually Miss
Hurlbird was just sixty-one and Miss Florence Hurlbird fifty-nine,
and they were both, mentally and physically, as vigorous as could
be desired. They were, indeed, more vigorous, mentally, than suited
my purpose, which was to get away from the United States as quickly
as I could. The Hurlbirds were an exceedingly united
family—exceedingly united except on one set of points. Each of the
three of them had a separate doctor, whom they trusted
implicitly—and each had a separate attorney. And each of them
distrusted the other's doctor and the other's attorney. And,
naturally, the doctors and the attorneys warned one all the
time—against each other. You cannot imagine how complicated it all
became for me. Of course I had an attorney of my own—recommended to
me by young Carter, my Philadelphia nephew.