The Good Soldier (8 page)

The result you have heard. He was completely cured of
philandering amongst the lower classes. And that seemed a real
blessing to Leonora. It did not revolt her so much to be
connected—it is a sort of connection—with people like Mrs Maidan,
instead of with a little kitchenmaid.

In a dim sort of way, Leonora was almost contented when she
arrived at Nauheim, that evening....

She had got things nearly straight by the long years of scraping
in little stations in Chitral and Burma—stations where living is
cheap in comparison with the life of a county magnate, and where,
moreover, liaisons of one sort or another are normal and
inexpensive too. So that, when Mrs Maidan came along—and the Maidan
affair might have caused trouble out there because of the youth of
the husband—Leonora had just resigned herself to coming home. With
pushing and scraping and with letting Branshaw Teleragh, and with
selling a picture and a relic of Charles I or so, had got—and, poor
dear, she had never had a really decent dress to her back in all
those years and years—she had got, as she imagined, her poor dear
husband back into much the same financial position as had been his
before the mistress of the Grand Duke had happened along. And, of
course, Edward himself had helped her a little on the financial
side. He was a fellow that many men liked. He was so presentable
and quite ready to lend you his cigar puncher—that sort of thing.
So, every now and then some financier whom he met about would give
him a good, sound, profitable tip. And Leonora was never afraid of
a bit of a gamble—English Papists seldom are, I do not know
why.

So nearly all her investment turned up trumps, and Edward was
really in fit case to reopen Branshaw Manor and once more to assume
his position in the county. Thus Leonora had accepted Maisie Maidan
almost with resignation—almost with a sigh of relief. She really
liked the poor child—she had to like somebody. And, at any rate,
she felt she could trust Maisie—she could trust her not to rook
Edward for several thousands a week, for Maisie had refused to
accept so much as a trinket ring from him. It is true that Edward
gurgled and raved about the girl in a way that she had never yet
experienced. But that, too, was almost a relief. I think she would
really have welcomed it if he could have come across the love of
his life. It would have given her a rest.

And there could not have been anyone better than poor little Mrs
Maidan; she was so ill she could not want to be taken on expensive
jaunts.... It was Leonora herself who paid Maisie's expenses to
Nauheim. She handed over the money to the boy husband, for Maisie
would never have allowed it; but the husband was in agonies of
fear. Poor devil!

I fancy that, on the voyage from India, Leonora was as happy as
ever she had been in her life. Edward was wrapped up, completely,
in his girl—he was almost like a father with a child, trotting
about with rugs and physic and things, from deck to deck. He
behaved, however, with great circumspection, so that nothing leaked
through to the other passengers. And Leonora had almost attained to
the attitude of a mother towards Mrs Maidan. So it had looked very
well—the benevolent, wealthy couple of good people, acting as
saviours to the poor, dark-eyed, dying young thing. And that
attitude of Leonora's towards Mrs Maidan no doubt partly accounted
for the smack in the face. She was hitting a naughty child who had
been stealing chocolates at an inopportune moment. It was certainly
an inopportune moment. For, with the opening of that blackmailing
letter from that injured brother officer, all the old terrors had
redescended upon Leonora. Her road had again seemed to stretch out
endless; she imagined that there might be hundreds and hundreds of
such things that Edward was concealing from her—that they might
necessitate more mortgagings, more pawnings of bracelets, more and
always more horrors. She had spent an excruciating afternoon. The
matter was one of a divorce case, of course, and she wanted to
avoid publicity as much as Edward did, so that she saw the
necessity of continuing the payments. And she did not so much mind
that. They could find three hundred a year. But it was the horror
of there being more such obligations.

She had had no conversation with Edward for many years—none that
went beyond the mere arrangements for taking trains or engaging
servants. But that afternoon she had to let him have it. And he had
been just the same as ever. It was like opening a book after a
decade to find the words the same. He had the same motives. He had
not wished to tell her about the case because he had not wished her
to sully her mind with the idea that there was such a thing as a
brother officer who could be a blackmailer—and he had wanted to
protect the credit of his old light of love. That lady was
certainly not concerned with her husband. And he swore, and swore,
and swore, that there was nothing else in the world against him.
She did not believe him.

He had done it once too often—and she was wrong for the first
time, so that he acted a rather creditable part in the matter. For
he went right straight out to the post-office and spent several
hours in coding a telegram to his solicitor, bidding that
hard-headed man to threaten to take out at once a warrant against
the fellow who was on his track. He said afterwards that it was a
bit too thick on poor old Leonora to be ballyragged any more. That
was really the last of his outstanding accounts, and he was ready
to take his personal chance of the Divorce Court if the blackmailer
turned nasty. He would face it out—the publicity, the papers, the
whole bally show. Those were his simple words....

He had made, however, the mistake of not telling Leonora where
he was going, so that, having seen him go to his room to fetch the
code for the telegram, and seeing, two hours later, Maisie Maidan
come out of his room, Leonora imagined that the two hours she had
spent in silent agony Edward had spent with Maisie Maidan in his
arms. That seemed to her to be too much. As a matter of fact,
Maisie's being in Edward's room had been the result, partly of
poverty, partly of pride, partly of sheer innocence. She could not,
in the first place, afford a maid; she refrained as much as
possible from sending the hotel servants on errands, since every
penny was of importance to her, and she feared to have to pay high
tips at the end of her stay. Edward had lent her one of his
fascinating cases containing fifteen different sizes of scissors,
and, having seen from her window, his departure for the
post-office, she had taken the opportunity of returning the case.
She could not see why she should not, though she felt a certain
remorse at the thought that she had kissed the pillows of his bed.
That was the way it took her.

But Leonora could see that, without the shadow of a doubt, the
incident gave Florence a hold over her. It let Florence into things
and Florence was the only created being who had any idea that the
Ashburnhams were not just good people with nothing to their tails.
She determined at once, not so much to give Florence the privilege
of her intimacy—which would have been the payment of a kind of
blackmail—as to keep Florence under observation until she could
have demonstrated to Florence that she was not in the least jealous
of poor Maisie. So that was why she had entered the dining-room arm
in arm with my wife, and why she had so markedly planted herself at
our table. She never left us, indeed, for a minute that night,
except just to run up to Mrs Maidan's room to beg her pardon and to
beg her also to let Edward take her very markedly out into the
gardens that night. She said herself, when Mrs Maidan came rather
wistfully down into the lounge where we were all sitting: "Now,
Edward, get up and take Maisie to the Casino. I want Mrs Dowell to
tell me all about the families in Connecticut who came from
Fordingbridge." For it had been discovered that Florence came of a
line that had actually owned Branshaw Teleragh for two centuries
before the Ashburnhams came there. And there she sat with me in
that hall, long after Florence had gone to bed, so that I might
witness her gay reception of that pair. She could play up.

And that enables me to fix exactly the day of our going to the
town of M——. For it was the very day poor Mrs Maidan died. We found
her dead when we got back—pretty awful, that, when you come to
figure out what it all means....

At any rate the measure of my relief when Leonora said that she
was an Irish Catholic gives you the measure of my affection for
that couple. It was an affection so intense that even to this day I
cannot think of Edward without sighing. I do not believe that I
could have gone on any more with them. I was getting too tired. And
I verily believe, too, if my suspicion that Leonora was jealous of
Florence had been the reason she gave for her outburst I should
have turned upon Florence with the maddest kind of rage. Jealousy
would have been incurable. But Florence's mere silly jibes at the
Irish and at the Catholics could be apologized out of existence.
And that I appeared to fix up in two minutes or so.

She looked at me for a long time rather fixedly and queerly
while I was doing it. And at last I worked myself up to saying:

"Do accept the situation. I confess that I do not like your
religion. But I like you so intensely. I don't mind saying that I
have never had anyone to be really fond of, and I do not believe
that anyone has ever been fond of me, as I believe you really to
be."

"Oh, I'm fond enough of you," she said. "Fond enough to say that
I wish every man was like you. But there are others to be
considered." She was thinking, as a matter of fact, of poor Maisie.
She picked a little piece of pellitory out of the breast-high wall
in front of us. She chafed it for a long minute between her finger
and thumb, then she threw it over the coping.

"Oh, I accept the situation," she said at last, "if you
can."

VI I REMEMBER laughing at the phrase, "accept the situation",
which she seemed to repeat with a gravity too intense. I said to
her something like:

"It's hardly as much as that. I mean, that I must claim the
liberty of a free American citizen to think what I please about
your co-religionists. And I suppose that Florence must have liberty
to think what she pleases and to say what politeness allows her to
say."

"She had better," Leonora answered, "not say one single word
against my people or my faith." It struck me at the time, that
there was an unusual, an almost threatening, hardness in her voice.
It was almost as if she were trying to convey to Florence, through
me, that she would seriously harm my wife if Florence went to
something that was an extreme. Yes, I remember thinking at the time
that it was almost as if Leonora were saying, through me to
Florence:

"You may outrage me as you will; you may take all that I
personally possess, but do not you care to say one single thing in
view of the situation that that will set up—against the faith that
makes me become the doormat for your feet."

But obviously, as I saw it, that could not be her meaning. Good
people, be they ever so diverse in creed, do not threaten each
other. So that I read Leonora's words to mean just no more than:
"It would be better if Florence said nothing at all against my
co-religionists, because it is a point that I am touchy about."

That was the hint that, accordingly, I conveyed to Florence
when, shortly afterwards, she and Edward came down from the tower.
And I want you to understand that, from that moment until after
Edward and the girl and Florence were all dead together, I had
never the remotest glimpse, not the shadow of a suspicion, that
there was anything wrong, as the saying is. For five minutes, then,
I entertained the possibility that Leonora might be jealous; but
there was never another flicker in that flame-like personality. How
in the world should I get it?

For, all that time, I was just a male sick nurse. And what
chance had I against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in
league to conceal their hands from me? What earthly chance? They
were three to one—and they made me happy. Oh God, they made me so
happy that I doubt if even paradise, that shall smooth out all
temporal wrongs, shall ever give me the like. And what could they
have done better, or what could they have done that could have been
worse? I don't know....

I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband
and that Leonora was pimping for Edward. That was the cross that
she had to take up during her long Calvary of a life....

You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I
do not know. It feels just nothing at all. It is not Hell,
certainly it is not necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the
intermediate stage. What do they call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing
at all about that. They are dead; they have gone before their Judge
who, I hope, will open to them the springs of His compassion. It is
not my business to think about it. It is simply my business to say,
as Leonora's people say: "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Do mine, et
lux perpetua luceat eis. In memoria aeterna erit...." But what were
they? The just? The unjust? God knows! I think that the pair of
them were only poor wretches, creeping over this earth in the
shadow of an eternal wrath. It is very terrible....

It is almost too terrible, the picture of that judgement, as it
appears to me sometimes, at nights. It is probably the suggestion
of some picture that I have seen somewhere. But upon an immense
plain, suspended in mid-air, I seem to see three figures, two of
them clasped close in an intense embrace, and one intolerably
solitary. It is in black and white, my picture of that judgement,
an etching, perhaps; only I cannot tell an etching from a
photographic reproduction. And the immense plain is the hand of
God, stretching out for miles and miles, with great spaces above it
and below it. And they are in the sight of God, and it is Florence
that is alone.... And, do you know, at the thought of that intense
solitude I feel an overwhelming desire to rush forward and comfort
her. You cannot, you see, have acted as nurse to a person for
twelve years without wishing to go on nursing them, even though you
hate them with the hatred of the adder, and even in the palm of
God. But, in the nights, with that vision of judgement before me, I
know that I hold myself back. For I hate Florence. I hate Florence
with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of
loneliness. She need not have done what she did. She was an
American, a New Englander. She had not the hot passions of these
Europeans. She cut out that poor imbecile of an Edward—and I pray
God that he is really at peace, clasped close in the arms of that
poor, poor girl! And, no doubt, Maisie Maidan will find her young
husband again, and Leonora will burn, clear and serene, a northern
light and one of the archangels of God. And me.... Well, perhaps,
they will find me an elevator to run.... But Florence... .