The Good Soldier (27 page)

I am writing this, now, I should say, a full eighteen months
after the words that end my last chapter. Since writing the words
"until my arrival", which I see end that paragraph, I have seen
again for a glimpse, from a swift train, Beaucaire with the
beautiful white tower, Tarascon with the square castle, the great
Rhone, the immense stretches of the Crau. I have rushed through all
Provence—and all Provence no longer matters. It is no longer in the
olive hills that I shall find my Heaven; because there is only
Hell... .

Edward is dead; the girl is gone—oh, utterly gone; Leonora is
having a good time with Rodney Bayham, and I sit alone in Branshaw
Teleragh. I have been through Provence; I have seen Africa; I have
visited Asia to see, in Ceylon, in a darkened room, my poor girl,
sitting motionless, with her wonderful hair about her, looking at
me with eyes that did not see me, and saying distinctly: "Credo in
unum Deum omnipotentem.... Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem." Those
are the only reasonable words she uttered; those are the only
words, it appears, that she ever will utter. I suppose that they
are reasonable words; it must be extraordinarily reasonable for
her, if she can say that she believes in an Omnipotent Deity. Well,
there it is. I am very tired of it all....

For, I daresay, all this may sound romantic, but it is tiring,
tiring, tiring to have been in the midst of it; to have taken the
tickets; to have caught the trains; to have chosen the cabins; to
have consulted the purser and the stewards as to diet for the
quiescent patient who did nothing but announce her belief in an
Omnipotent Deity. That may sound romantic—but it is just a record
of fatigue.

I don't know why I should always be selected to be serviceable.
I don't resent it—but I have never been the least good. Florence
selected me for her own purposes, and I was no good to her; Edward
called me to come and have a chat with him, and I couldn't stop him
cutting his throat.

And then, one day eighteen months ago, I was quietly writing in
my room at Branshaw when Leonora came to me with a letter. It was a
very pathetic letter from Colonel Rufford about Nancy. Colonel
Rufford had left the army and had taken up an appointment at a
tea-planting estate in Ceylon. His letter was pathetic because it
was so brief, so inarticulate, and so business-like. He had gone
down to the boat to meet his daughter, and had found his daughter
quite mad. It appears that at Aden Nancy had seen in a local paper
the news of Edward's suicide. In the Red Sea she had gone mad. She
had remarked to Mrs Colonel Luton, who was chaperoning her, that
she believed in an Omnipotent Deity. She hadn't made any fuss; her
eyes were quite dry and glassy. Even when she was mad Nancy could
behave herself.

Colonel Rufford said the doctor did not anticipate that there
was any chance of his child's recovery. It was, nevertheless,
possible that if she could see someone from Branshaw it might
soothe her and it might have a good effect. And he just simply
wrote to Leonora: "Please come and see if you can do it."

I seem to have lost all sense of the pathetic; but still, that
simple, enormous request of the old colonel strikes me as pathetic.
He was cursed by his atrocious temper; he had been cursed by a
half-mad wife, who drank and went on the streets. His daughter was
totally mad—and yet he believed in the goodness of human nature. He
believed that Leonora would take the trouble to go all the way to
Ceylon in order to soothe his daughter. Leonora wouldn't. Leonora
didn't ever want to see Nancy again. I daresay that that, in the
circumstances, was natural enough. At the same time she agreed, as
it were, on public grounds, that someone soothing ought to go from
Branshaw to Ceylon. She sent me and her old nurse, who had looked
after Nancy from the time when the girl, a child of thirteen, had
first come to Branshaw. So off I go, rushing through Provence, to
catch the steamer at Marseilles. And I wasn't the least good when I
got to Ceylon; and the nurse wasn't the least good. Nothing has
been the least good. The doctors said, at Kandy, that if Nancy
could be brought to England, the sea air, the change of climate,
the voyage, and all the usual sort of things, might restore her
reason. Of course, they haven't restored her reason. She is, I am
aware, sitting in the hall, forty paces from where I am now
writing. I don't want to be in the least romantic about it. She is
very well dressed; she is quite quiet; she is very beautiful. The
old nurse looks after her very efficiently.

Of course you have the makings of a situation here, but it is
all very humdrum, as far as I am concerned. I should marry Nancy if
her reason were ever sufficiently restored to let her appreciate
the meaning of the Anglican marriage service. But it is probable
that her reason will never be sufficiently restored to let her
appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service. Therefore
I cannot marry her, according to the law of the land.

So here I am very much where I started thirteen years ago. I am
the attendant, not the husband, of a beautiful girl, who pays no
attention to me. I am estranged from Leonora, who married Rodney
Bayham in my absence and went to live at Bayham. Leonora rather
dislikes me, because she has got it into her head that I disapprove
of her marriage with Rodney Bayham. Well, I disapprove of her
marriage. Possibly I am jealous. Yes, no doubt I am jealous. In my
fainter sort of way I seem to perceive myself following the lines
of Edward Ashburnham. I suppose that I should really like to be a
polygamist; with Nancy, and with Leonora, and with Maisie Maidan
and possibly even with Florence. I am no doubt like every other
man; only, probably because of my American origin I am fainter. At
the same time I am able to assure you that I am a strictly
respectable person. I have never done anything that the most
anxious mother of a daughter or the most careful dean of a
cathedral would object to. I have only followed, faintly, and in my
unconscious desires, Edward Ashburnham. Well, it is all over. Not
one of us has got what he really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and
she has got Rodney Bayham, a pleasant enough sort of sheep.
Florence wanted Branshaw, and it is I who have bought it from
Leonora. I didn't really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease
being a nurse-attendant. Well, I am a nurse-attendant. Edward
wanted Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a
queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want?
The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has
the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is
beyond me.

Is there any terrestial paradise where, amidst the whispering of
the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what
they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are
all men's lives like the lives of us good people—like the lives of
the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords—broken,
tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives, periods punctuated by
screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil
knows?

For there was a great deal of imbecility about the closing
scenes of the Ashburnham tragedy. Neither of those two women knew
what they wanted. It was only Edward who took a perfectly clear
line, and he was drunk most of the time. But, drunk or sober, he
stuck to what was demanded by convention and by the traditions of
his house. Nancy Rufford had to be exported to India, and Nancy
Rufford hadn't to hear a word of love from him. She was exported to
India and she never heard a word from Edward Ashburnham.

It was the conventional line; it was in tune with the tradition
of Edward's house. I daresay it worked out for the greatest good of
the body politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose, work
blindly but surely for the preservation of the normal type; for the
extinction of proud, resolute and unusual individuals.

Edward was the normal man, but there was too much of the
sentimentalist about him; and society does not need too many
sentimentalists. Nancy was a splendid creature, but she had about
her a touch of madness. Society does not need individuals with
touches of madness about them. So Edward and Nancy found themselves
steamrolled out and Leonora survives, the perfectly normal type,
married to a man who is rather like a rabbit. For Rodney Bayham is
rather like a rabbit, and I hear that Leonora is expected to have a
baby in three months' time.

So those splendid and tumultuous creatures with their magnetism
and their passions—those two that I really loved—have gone from
this earth. It is no doubt best for them. What would Nancy have
made of Edward if she had succeeded in living with him; what would
Edward have made of her? For there was about Nancy a touch of
cruelty—a touch of definite actual cruelty that made her desire to
see people suffer. Yes, she desired to see Edward suffer. And, by
God, she gave him hell.

She gave him an unimaginable hell. Those two women pursued that
poor devil and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it with
whips. I tell you his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see him
stand, naked to the waist, his forearms shielding his eyes, and
flesh hanging from him in rags. I tell you that is no exaggeration
of what I feel. It was as if Leonora and Nancy banded themselves
together to do execution, for the sake of humanity, upon the body
of a man who was at their disposal. They were like a couple of
Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a
stake. I tell you there was no end to the tortures they inflicted
upon him.

Night after night he would hear them talking; talking; maddened,
sweating, seeking oblivion in drink, he would lie there and hear
the voices going on and on. And day after day Leonora would come to
him and would announce the results of their deliberations.

They were like judges debating over the sentence upon a
criminal; they were like ghouls with an immobile corpse in a tomb
beside them. I don't think that Leonora was any more to blame than
the girl—though Leonora was the more active of the two. Leonora, as
I have said, was the perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in
normal circumstances her desires were those of the woman who is
needed by society. She desired children, decorum, an establishment;
she desired to avoid waste, she desired to keep up appearances. She
was utterly and entirely normal even in her utterly undeniable
beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted perfectly normally
in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the world was mad around
her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad
woman; of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. What
would you have? Steel is a normal, hard, polished substance. But,
if you put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be
handled. If you put it in a fire still more hot it will drip away.
It was like that with Leonora. She was made for normal
circumstances—for Mr Rodney Bayham, who will keep a separate
establishment, secretly, in Portsmouth, and make occasional trips
to Paris and to Budapest.

In the case of Edward and the girl, Leonora broke and simply
went all over the place. She adopted unfamiliar and therefore
extraordinary and ungraceful attitudes of mind. At one moment she
was all for revenge. After haranguing the girl for hours through
the night she harangued for hours of the day the silent Edward. And
Edward just once tripped up, and that was his undoing. Perhaps he
had had too much whisky that afternoon. She asked him perpetually
what he wanted. What did he want? What did he want? And all he ever
answered was: "I have told you". He meant that he wanted the girl
to go to her father in India as soon as her father should cable
that he was ready to receive her. But just once he tripped up. To
Leonora's eternal question he answered that all he desired in life
was that—that he could pick himself together again and go on with
his daily occupations if—the girl, being five thousand miles away,
would continue to love him. He wanted nothing more, He prayed his
God for nothing more. Well, he was a sentimentalist.

And the moment that she heard that, Leonora determined that the
girl should not go five thousand miles away and that she should not
continue to love Edward. The way she worked it was this:

She continued to tell the girl that she must belong to Edward;
she was going to get a divorce; she was going to get a dissolution
of marriage from Rome. But she considered it to be her duty to warn
the girl of the sort of monster that Edward was. She told the girl
of La Dolciquita, of Mrs Basil, of Maisie Maidan, of Florence. She
spoke of the agonies that she had endured during her life with the
man, who was violent, overbearing, vain, drunken, arrogant, and
monstrously a prey to his sexual necessities. And, at hearing of
the miseries her aunt had suffered—for Leonora once more had the
aspect of an aunt to the girl—with the swift cruelty of youth and,
with the swift solidarity that attaches woman to woman, the girl
made her resolves. Her aunt said incessantly: "You must save
Edward's life; you must save his life. All that he needs is a
little period of satisfaction from you. Then he will tire of you as
he has of the others. But you must save his life."

And, all the while, that wretched fellow knew—by a curious
instinct that runs between human beings living together—exactly
what was going on. And he remained dumb; he stretched out no finger
to help himself. All that he required to keep himself a decent
member of society was, that the girl, five thousand miles away,
should continue to love him. They were putting a stopper upon
that.

I have told you that the girl came one night to his room. And
that was the real hell for him. That was the picture that never
left his imagination—the girl, in the dim light, rising up at the
foot of his bed. He said that it seemed to have a greenish sort of
effect as if there were a greenish tinge in the shadows of the tall
bedposts that framed her body. And she looked at him with her
straight eyes of an unflinching cruelty and she said: "I am ready
to belong to you—to save your life."