The Good Soldier (4 page)

So, you see, he would have plenty to gurgle about to a
woman—with that and his sound common sense about martingales and
his—still sentimental—experiences as a county magistrate; and with
his intense, optimistic belief that the woman he was making love to
at the moment was the one he was destined, at last, to be eternally
constant to.... Well, I fancy he could put up a pretty good deal of
talk when there was no man around to make him feel shy. And I was
quite astonished, during his final burst out to me—at the very end
of things, when the poor girl was on her way to that fatal Brindisi
and he was trying to persuade himself and me that he had never
really cared for her—I was quite astonished to observe how literary
and how just his expressions were. He talked like quite a good
book—a book not in the least cheaply sentimental. You see, I
suppose he regarded me not so much as a man. I had to be regarded
as a woman or a solicitor. Anyhow, it burst out of him on that
horrible night. And then, next morning, he took me over to the
Assizes and I saw how, in a perfectly calm and business-like way,
he set to work to secure a verdict of not guilty for a poor girl,
the daughter of one of his tenants, who had been accused of
murdering her baby. He spent two hundred pounds on her defence...
Well, that was Edward Ashburnham.

I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides
of a certain type of box of matches. When you looked at them
carefully you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly
straightforward, perfectly, perfectly stupid. But the brick pink of
his complexion, running perfectly level to the brick pink of his
inner eyelids, gave them a curious, sinister expression—like a
mosaic of blue porcelain set in pink china. And that chap, coming
into a room, snapped up the gaze of every woman in it, as
dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls. It was most
amazing. You know the man on the stage who throws up sixteen balls
at once and they all drop into pockets all over his person, on his
shoulders, on his heels, on the inner side of his sleeves; and he
stands perfectly still and does nothing. Well, it was like that. He
had rather a rough, hoarse voice.

And, there he was, standing by the table. I was looking at him,
with my back to the screen. And suddenly, I saw two distinct
expressions flicker across his immobile eyes. How the deuce did
they do it, those unflinching blue eyes with the direct gaze? For
the eyes themselves never moved, gazing over my shoulder towards
the screen. And the gaze was perfectly level and perfectly direct
and perfectly unchanging. I suppose that the lids really must have
rounded themselves a little and perhaps the lips moved a little
too, as if he should be saying: "There you are, my dear." At any
rate, the expression was that of pride, of satisfaction, of the
possessor. I saw him once afterwards, for a moment, gaze upon the
sunny fields of Branshaw and say: "All this is my land!"

And then again, the gaze was perhaps more direct, harder if
possible—hardy too. It was a measuring look; a challenging look.
Once when we were at Wiesbaden watching him play in a polo match
against the Bonner Hussaren I saw the same look come into his eyes,
balancing the possibilities, looking over the ground. The German
Captain, Count Baron Idigon von Lelöffel, was right up by their
goal posts, coming with the ball in an easy canter in that tricky
German fashion. The rest of the field were just anywhere. It was
only a scratch sort of affair. Ashburnham was quite close to the
rails not five yards from us and I heard him saying to himself:
"Might just be done!" And he did it. Goodness! he swung that pony
round with all its four legs spread out, like a cat dropping off a
roof....

Well, it was just that look that I noticed in his eyes: "It
might," I seem even now to hear him muttering to himself, "just be
done."

I looked round over my shoulder and saw, tall, smiling
brilliantly and buoyant—Leonora. And, little and fair, and as
radiant as the track of sunlight along the sea—my wife.

That poor wretch! to think that he was at that moment in a
perfect devil of a fix, and there he was, saying at the back of his
mind: "It might just be done." It was like a chap in the middle of
the eruption of a volcano, saying that he might just manage to bolt
into the tumult and set fire to a haystack. Madness?
Predestination? Who the devil knows?

Mrs Ashburnham exhibited at that moment more gaiety than I have
ever since known her to show. There are certain classes of English
people—the nicer ones when they have been to many spas, who seem to
make a point of becoming much more than usually animated when they
are introduced to my compatriots. I have noticed this often. Of
course, they must first have accepted the Americans. But that once
done, they seem to say to themselves: "Hallo, these women are so
bright. We aren't going to be outdone in brightness." And for the
time being they certainly aren't. But it wears off. So it was with
Leonora—at least until she noticed me. She began, Leonora did—and
perhaps it was that that gave me the idea of a touch of insolence
in her character, for she never afterwards did any one single thing
like it—she began by saying in quite a loud voice and from quite a
distance:

"Don't stop over by that stuffy old table, Teddy. Come and sit
by these nice people!"

And that was an extraordinary thing to say. Quite extraordinary.
I couldn't for the life of me refer to total strangers as nice
people. But, of course, she was taking a line of her own in which I
at any rate—and no one else in the room, for she too had taken the
trouble to read through the list of guests—counted any more than so
many clean, bull terriers. And she sat down rather brilliantly at a
vacant table, beside ours—one that was reserved for the
Guggenheimers. And she just sat absolutely deaf to the
remonstrances of the head waiter with his face like a grey ram's.
That poor chap was doing his steadfast duty too. He knew that the
Guggenheimers of Chicago, after they had stayed there a month and
had worried the poor life out of him, would give him two dollars
fifty and grumble at the tipping system. And he knew that Teddy
Ashburnham and his wife would give him no trouble whatever except
what the smiles of Leonora might cause in his apparently
unimpressionable bosom—though you never can tell what may go on
behind even a not quite spotless plastron!—And every week Edward
Ashburnham would give him a solid, sound, golden English sovereign.
Yet this stout fellow was intent on saving that table for the
Guggenheimers of Chicago. It ended in Florence saying:

"Why shouldn't we all eat out of the same trough?—that's a nasty
New York saying. But I'm sure we're all nice quiet people and there
can be four seats at our table. It's round."

Then came, as it were, an appreciative gurgle from the Captain
and I was perfectly aware of a slight hesitation—a quick sharp
motion in Mrs Ashburnham, as if her horse had checked. But she put
it at the fence all right, rising from the seat she had taken and
sitting down opposite me, as it were, all in one motion. I never
thought that Leonora looked her best in evening dress. She seemed
to get it too clearly cut, there was no ruffling. She always
affected black and her shoulders were too classical. She seemed to
stand out of her corsage as a white marble bust might out of a
black Wedgwood vase. I don't know.

I loved Leonora always and, today, I would very cheerfully lay
down my life, what is left of it, in her service. But I am sure I
never had the beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex
instinct towards her. And I suppose—no I am certain that she never
had it towards me. As far as I am concerned I think it was those
white shoulders that did it. I seemed to feel when I looked at them
that, if ever I should press my lips upon them that they would be
slightly cold—not icily, not without a touch of human heat, but, as
they say of baths, with the chill off. I seemed to feel chilled at
the end of my lips when I looked at her...

No, Leonora always appeared to me at her best in a blue
tailor-made. Then her glorious hair wasn't deadened by her white
shoulders. Certain women's lines guide your eyes to their necks,
their eyelashes, their lips, their breasts. But Leonora's seemed to
conduct your gaze always to her wrist. And the wrist was at its
best in a black or a dog-skin glove and there was always a gold
circlet with a little chain supporting a very small golden key to a
dispatch box. Perhaps it was that in which she locked up her heart
and her feelings.

Anyhow, she sat down opposite me and then, for the first time,
she paid any attention to my existence. She gave me, suddenly, yet
deliberately, one long stare. Her eyes too were blue and dark and
the eyelids were so arched that they gave you the whole round of
the irises. And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as
if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me. I seemed to perceive
the swift questions chasing each other through the brain that was
behind them. I seemed to hear the brain ask and the eyes answer
with all the simpleness of a woman who was a good hand at taking in
qualities of a horse—as indeed she was. "Stands well; has plenty of
room for his oats behind the girth. Not so much in the way of
shoulders," and so on. And so her eyes asked: "Is this man
trustworthy in money matters; is he likely to try to play the
lover; is he likely to let his women be troublesome? Is he, above
all, likely to babble about my affairs?"

And, suddenly, into those cold, slightly defiant, almost
defensive china blue orbs, there came a warmth, a tenderness, a
friendly recognition... oh, it was very charming and very
touching—and quite mortifying. It was the look of a mother to her
son, of a sister to her brother. It implied trust; it implied the
want of any necessity for barriers. By God, she looked at me as if
I were an invalid—as any kind woman may look at a poor chap in a
bath chair. And, yes, from that day forward she always treated me
and not Florence as if I were the invalid. Why, she would run after
me with a rug upon chilly days. I suppose, therefore, that her eyes
had made a favourable answer. Or, perhaps, it wasn't a favourable
answer. And then Florence said: "And so the whole round table is
begun." Again Edward Ashburnham gurgled slightly in his throat; but
Leonora shivered a little, as if a goose had walked over her grave.
And I was passing her the nickel-silver basket of rolls.
Avanti!...

So began those nine years of uninterrupted tranquillity. They
were characterized by an extraordinary want of any
communicativeness on the part of the Ashburnhams to which we, on
our part, replied by leaving out quite as extraordinarily, and
nearly as completely, the personal note. Indeed, you may take it
that what characterized our relationship was an atmosphere of
taking everything for granted. The given proposition was, that we
were all "good people." We took for granted that we all liked beef
underdone but not too underdone; that both men preferred a good
liqueur brandy after lunch; that both women drank a very light
Rhine wine qualified with Fachingen water—that sort of thing. It
was also taken for granted that we were both sufficiently well off
to afford anything that we could reasonably want in the way of
amusements fitting to our station—that we could take motor cars and
carriages by the day; that we could give each other dinners and
dine our friends and we could indulge if we liked in economy. Thus,
Florence was in the habit of having the Daily Telegraph sent to her
every day from London. She was always an Anglo-maniac, was
Florence; the Paris edition of the New York Herald was always good
enough for me. But when we discovered that the Ashburnhams' copy of
the London paper followed them from England, Leonora and Florence
decided between them to suppress one subscription one year and the
other the next. Similarly it was the habit of the Grand Duke of
Nassau Schwerin, who came yearly to the baths, to dine once with
about eighteen families of regular Kur guests. In return he would
give a dinner of all the eighteen at once. And, since these dinners
were rather expensive (you had to take the Grand Duke and a good
many of his suite and any members of the diplomatic bodies that
might be there)—Florence and Leonora, putting their heads together,
didn't see why we shouldn't give the Grand Duke his dinner
together. And so we did. I don't suppose the Serenity minded that
economy, or even noticed it. At any rate, our joint dinner to the
Royal Personage gradually assumed the aspect of a yearly function.
Indeed, it grew larger and larger, until it became a sort of
closing function for the season, at any rate as far as we were
concerned. I don't in the least mean to say that we were the sort
of persons who aspired to mix "with royalty." We didn't; we hadn't
any claims; we were just "good people." But the Grand Duke was a
pleasant, affable sort of royalty, like the late King Edward VII,
and it was pleasant to hear him talk about the races and, very
occasionally, as a bonne bouche, about his nephew, the Emperor; or
to have him pause for a moment in his walk to ask after the
progress of our cures or to be benignantly interested in the amount
of money we had put on Lelöffel's hunter for the Frankfurt Welter
Stakes.

But upon my word, I don't know how we put in our time. How does
one put in one's time? How is it possible to have achieved nine
years and to have nothing whatever to show for it? Nothing
whatever, you understand. Not so much as a bone penholder, carved
to resemble a chessman and with a hole in the top through which you
could see four views of Nauheim. And, as for experience, as for
knowledge of one's fellow beings—nothing either. Upon my word, I
couldn't tell you offhand whether the lady who sold the so
expensive violets at the bottom of the road that leads to the
station, was cheating me or no; I can't say whether the porter who
carried our traps across the station at Leghorn was a thief or no
when he said that the regular tariff was a lira a parcel. The
instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just
as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years
of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of
being able to know something about one's fellow beings. But one
doesn't.