The Good Soldier (7 page)

Mrs Maidan, however, was not a Powys married to an Ashburnham;
she was a poor little O'Flaherty whose husband was a boy of country
parsonage origin. So there was no mistaking the sob she let go as
she went desolately away along the corridor. But Leonora was still
going to play up. She opened the door of Ashburnham's room quite
ostentatiously, so that Florence should hear her address Edward in
terms of intimacy and liking. "Edward," she called. But there was
no Edward there.

You understand that there was no Edward there. It was then, for
the only time of her career, that Leonora really compromised
herself—She exclaimed.... "How frightful!... Poor little
Maisie!..."

She caught herself up at that, but of course it was too late. It
was a queer sort of affair....

I want to do Leonora every justice. I love her very dearly for
one thing and in this matter, which was certainly the ruin of my
small household cockle-shell, she certainly tripped up. I do not
believe—and Leonora herself does not believe—that poor little
Maisie Maidan was ever Edward's mistress. Her heart was really so
bad that she would have succumbed to anything like an impassioned
embrace. That is the plain English of it, and I suppose plain
English is best. She was really what the other two, for reasons of
their own, just pretended to be. Queer, isn't it? Like one of those
sinister jokes that Providence plays upon one. Add to this that I
do not suppose that Leonora would much have minded, at any other
moment, if Mrs Maidan had been her husband's mistress. It might
have been a relief from Edward's sentimental gurglings over the
lady and from the lady's submissive acceptance of those sounds. No,
she would not have minded.

But, in boxing Mrs Maidan's ears, Leonora was just striking the
face of an intolerable universe. For, that afternoon she had had a
frightfully painful scene with Edward.

As far as his letters went, she claimed the right to open them
when she chose. She arrogated to herself the right because Edward's
affairs were in such a frightful state and he lied so about them
that she claimed the privilege of having his secrets at her
disposal. There was not, indeed, any other way, for the poor fool
was too ashamed of his lapses ever to make a clean breast of
anything. She had to drag these things out of him.

It must have been a pretty elevating job for her. But that
afternoon, Edward being on his bed for the hour and a half
prescribed by the Kur authorities, she had opened a letter that she
took to come from a Colonel Hervey. They were going to stay with
him in Linlithgowshire for the month of September and she did not
know whether the date fixed would be the eleventh or the
eighteenth. The address on this letter was, in handwriting, as like
Colonel Hervey's as one blade of corn is like another. So she had
at the moment no idea of spying on him.

But she certainly was. For she discovered that Edward Ashburnham
was paying a blackmailer of whom she had never heard something like
three hundred pounds a year... It was a devil of a blow; it was
like death; for she imagined that by that time she had really got
to the bottom of her husband's liabilities. You see, they were
pretty heavy. What had really smashed them up had been a perfectly
common-place affair at Monte Carlo—an affair with a cosmopolitan
harpy who passed for the mistress of a Russian Grand Duke. She
exacted a twenty thousand pound pearl tiara from him as the price
of her favours for a week or so. It would have pipped him a good
deal to have found so much, and he was not in the ordinary way a
gambler. He might, indeed, just have found the twenty thousand and
the not slight charges of a week at an hotel with the fair
creature. He must have been worth at that date five hundred
thousand dollars and a little over. Well, he must needs go to the
tables and lose forty thousand pounds.... Forty thousand solid
pounds, borrowed from sharks! And even after that he must—it was an
imperative passion—enjoy the favours of the lady. He got them, of
course, when it was a matter of solid bargaining, for far less than
twenty thousand, as he might, no doubt, have done from the first. I
daresay ten thousand dollars covered the bill. Anyhow, there was a
pretty solid hole in a fortune of a hundred thousand pounds or so.
And Leonora had to fix things up; he would have run from
money-lender to money-lender. And that was quite in the early days
of her discovery of his infidelities—if you like to call them
infidelities. And she discovered that one from public sources. God
knows what would have happened if she had not discovered it from
public sources. I suppose he would have concealed it from her until
they were penniless. But she was able, by the grace of God, to get
hold of the actual lenders of the money, to learn the exact sums
that were needed. And she went off to England.

Yes, she went right off to England to her attorney and his while
he was still in the arms of his Circe—at Antibes, to which place
they had retired. He got sick of the lady quite quickly, but not
before Leonora had had such lessons in the art of business from her
attorney that she had her plan as clearly drawn up as was ever that
of General Trochu for keeping the Prussians out of Paris in 1870.
It was about as effectual at first, or it seemed so.

That would have been, you know, in 1895, about nine years before
the date of which I am talking—the date of Florence's getting her
hold over Leonora; for that was what it amounted to.... Well, Mrs
Ashburnham had simply forced Edward to settle all his property upon
her. She could force him to do anything; in his clumsy,
good-natured, inarticulate way he was as frightened of her as of
the devil. And he admired her enormously, and he was as fond of her
as any man could be of any woman. She took advantage of it to treat
him as if he had been a person whose estates are being managed by
the Court of Bankruptcy. I suppose it was the best thing for
him.

Anyhow, she had no end of a job for the first three years or so.
Unexpected liabilities kept on cropping up—and that afflicted fool
did not make it any easier. You see, along with the passion of the
chase went a frame of mind that made him be extraordinarily ashamed
of himself. You may not believe it, but he really had such a sort
of respect for the chastity of Leonora's imagination that he
hated—he was positively revolted at the thought that she should
know that the sort of thing that he did existed in the world. So he
would stick out in an agitated way against the accusation of ever
having done anything. He wanted to preserve the virginity of his
wife's thoughts. He told me that himself during the long walks we
had at the last—while the girl was on the way to Brindisi.

So, of course, for those three years or so, Leonora had many
agitations. And it was then that they really quarrelled.

Yes, they quarrelled bitterly. That seems rather extravagant.
You might have thought that Leonora would be just calmly loathing
and he lachrymosely contrite. But that was not it a bit... Along
with Edward's passions and his shame for them went the violent
conviction of the duties of his station—a conviction that was quite
unreasonably expensive. I trust I have not, in talking of his
liabilities, given the impression that poor Edward was a
promiscuous libertine. He was not; he was a sentimentalist. The
servant girl in the Kilsyte case had been pretty, but mournful of
appearance. I think that, when he had kissed her, he had desired
rather to comfort her. And, if she had succumbed to his
blandishments I daresay he would have set her up in a little house
in Portsmouth or Winchester and would have been faithful to her for
four or five years. He was quite capable of that.

No, the only two of his affairs of the heart that cost him money
were that of the Grand Duke's mistress and that which was the
subject of the blackmailing letter that Leonora opened. That had
been a quite passionate affair with quite a nice woman. It had
succeeded the one with the Grand Ducal lady. The lady was the wife
of a brother officer and Leonora had known all about the passion,
which had been quite a real passion and had lasted for several
years. You see, poor Edward's passions were quite logical in their
progression upwards. They began with a servant, went on to a
courtesan and then to a quite nice woman, very unsuitably mated.
For she had a quite nasty husband who, by means of letters and
things, went on blackmailing poor Edward to the tune of three or
four hundred a year—with threats of the Divorce Court. And after
this lady came Maisie Maidan, and after poor Maisie only one more
affair and then—the real passion of his life. His marriage with
Leonora had been arranged by his parents and, though he always
admired her immensely, he had hardly ever pretended to be much more
than tender to her, though he desperately needed her moral support,
too....

But his really trying liabilities were mostly in the nature of
generosities proper to his station. He was, according to Leonora,
always remitting his tenants' rents and giving the tenants to
understand that the reduction would be permanent; he was always
redeeming drunkards who came before his magisterial bench; he was
always trying to put prostitutes into respectable places—and he was
a perfect maniac about children. I don't know how many ill-used
people he did not pick up and provide with careers—Leonora has told
me, but I daresay she exaggerated and the figure seems so
preposterous that I will not put it down. All these things, and the
continuance of them seemed to him to be his duty—along with
impossible subscriptions to hospitals and Boy Scouts and to provide
prizes at cattle shows and antivivisection societies....

Well, Leonora saw to it that most of these things were not
continued. They could not possibly keep up Branshaw Manor at that
rate after the money had gone to the Grand Duke's mistress. She put
the rents back at their old figures; discharged the drunkards from
their homes, and sent all the societies notice that they were to
expect no more subscriptions. To the children, she was more tender;
nearly all of them she supported till the age of apprenticeship or
domestic service. You see, she was childless herself.

She was childless herself, and she considered herself to be to
blame. She had come of a penniless branch of the Powys family, and
they had forced upon her poor dear Edward without making the
stipulation that the children should be brought up as Catholics.
And that, of course, was spiritual death to Leonora. I have given
you a wrong impression if I have not made you see that Leonora was
a woman of a strong, cold conscience, like all English Catholics.
(I cannot, myself, help disliking this religion; there is always,
at the bottom of my mind, in spite of Leonora, the feeling of
shuddering at the Scarlet Woman, that filtered in upon me in the
tranquility of the little old Friends' Meeting House in Arch
Street, Philadelphia.) So I do set down a good deal of Leonora's
mismanagement of poor dear Edward's case to the peculiarly English
form of her religion. Because, of course, the only thing to have
done for Edward would have been to let him sink down until he
became a tramp of gentlemanly address, having, maybe, chance love
affairs upon the highways. He would have done so much less harm; he
would have been much less agonized too. At any rate, he would have
had fewer chances of ruining and of remorse. For Edward was great
at remorse. But Leonora's English Catholic conscience, her rigid
principles, her coldness, even her very patience, were, I cannot
help thinking, all wrong in this special case. She quite seriously
and naïvely imagined that the Church of Rome disapproves of
divorce; she quite seriously and naïvely believed that her church
could be such a monstrous and imbecile institution as to expect her
to take on the impossible job of making Edward Ashburnham a
faithful husband. She had, as the English would say, the
Nonconformist temperament. In the United States of North America we
call it the New England conscience. For, of course, that frame of
mind has been driven in on the English Catholics. The centuries
that they have gone through—centuries of blind and malignant
oppression, of ostracism from public employment, of being, as it
were, a small beleagured garrison in a hostile country, and
therefore having to act with great formality—all these things have
combined to perform that conjuring trick. And I suppose that
Papists in England are even technically Nonconformists.

Continental Papists are a dirty, jovial and unscrupulous crew.
But that, at least, lets them be opportunists. They would have
fixed poor dear Edward up all right. (Forgive my writing of these
monstrous things in this frivolous manner. If I did not I should
break down and cry.) In Milan, say, or in Paris, Leonora would have
had her marriage dissolved in six months for two hundred dollars
paid in the right quarter. And Edward would have drifted about
until he became a tramp of the kind I have suggested. Or he would
have married a barmaid who would have made him such frightful
scenes in public places and would so have torn out his moustache
and left visible signs upon his face that he would have been
faithful to her for the rest of his days. That was what he wanted
to redeem him....

For, along with his passions and his shames there went the dread
of scenes in public places, of outcry, of excited physical
violence; of publicity, in short. Yes, the barmaid would have cured
him. And it would have been all the better if she drank; he would
have been kept busy looking after her.

I know that I am right in this. I know it because of the Kilsyte
case. You see, the servant girl that he then kissed was nurse in
the family of the Nonconformist head of the county—whatever that
post may be called. And that gentleman was so determined to ruin
Edward, who was the chairman of the Tory caucus, or whatever it
is—that the poor dear sufferer had the very devil of a time. They
asked questions about it in the House of Commons; they tried to get
the Hampshire magistrates degraded; they suggested to the War
Ministry that Edward was not the proper person to hold the King's
commission. Yes, he got it hot and strong.