 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Good Soldier, A Tale of Passion by Ford Maddox Ford, Beati and Machilati. Part 1. 1. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnams for nine seasons of the town of Noheim with an extreme intimacy, or rather with an acquaintancehip as loose and easy and yet as close as a good gloves with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnam as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people, of whom till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and certainly I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows. I don't mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living as we perforce lived in Europe, and being as we perforce were, which is as much to say that we were un-American. We were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordecaire provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Noheim always received us from July to September. You will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is, a heart, and from the statement that my wife is dead, that she was the sufferer. Captain Ash Burnham also had a heart. But whereas a yearly month or so at Noheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for the rest of the twelve month, the two months or so were only just enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence's broken years was a storm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were doctors' orders. They said that even the short channel crossing might well kill the poor thing. When we all first met, Captain Ash Burnham, home on sick leave from an India to which he was never to return, was thirty-three. Mrs. Ash Burnham, Leonora, was thirty-one. I was thirty-six and poor Florence thirty. Thus today Florence would have been thirty-nine and Captain Ash Burnham forty-two, whereas I am forty-five and Leonora forty. You will perceive therefore that our friendship has been a young middle-aged affair, since we were all of us of quite quiet dispositions, the Ash Burnham's being more particularly what in England it is the custom to call, quite good people. They were descended, as you will probably expect, from the Ash Burnham who accompanied Charles I to the scaffold, and as you must also expect with this class of English people, you would never have noticed it. Mrs. Ash Burnham was a poise. Florence was a hurlbird of Stamford, Connecticut, whereas you know they are more old-fashioned than even the inhabitants of Cranford, England could have been. I myself am a dowel of Philadelphia PA, where it is historically true there are more old English families than you would find in any six English counties taken together. I carry about with me, indeed, as if it were the only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe, the title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut Streets. These title deeds are of Wampum, the grant of an Indian chief to the first dowel who left Farnham and Surrey in company with William Penn. Florence's people, as is so often the case with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from the neighborhood of Fordenbridge, where the Ashburnes Place is. From there at this moment I am actually writing. You may well ask why I write, and yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the fall into pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs, or of generations infinitely remote, or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads. Someone has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of our little four-square coterie was such another unthinkable event. Supposing that you should come upon us sitting together at one of the little tables in front of a clubhouse, let us say, at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching the miniature golf, you would have said that, as human affairs go, we were an extraordinarily safe castle. We were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, one of those things that seemed the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men to frame. Where better could one take refuge? Where better? Permanence? Stability? I can't believe it's gone. I can't believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks. Upon my word, yes, our intimacy was like a minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where to go, where to sit, which table we unanimously would choose, and we could rise and go all four together without a signal from any one of us, always to the music of the Kerr Orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or if it rained in discrete shelters. No, indeed, it can't be gone. You can't kill a minuet de la Cour. You may shut up the music book, close the harpsichord, in the cupboard and presses the rats may destroy the white satin favors, the mob-based sack of Versailles, the trianon must fall, but surely the minuet, the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must have stepped itself still. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn't there any nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that must have fallen into the dust of wormwood, but that yet had frail, tremulous and everlasting souls? No, by God, it's false. It wasn't the minuet that we stepped, it was a prison. A prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not out sound the rolling of our carriage-wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the taunus-walled. And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator it was true. It was true, sunshine, the true music, the true splash of the fountains from the mouth-stone dolphins, for if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires acting, or no, not acting, sitting here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months, less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple? So it may well be with Edward Ashburnam, with Leonora, his wife, and with poor dear Florence. And if you come to think of it, isn't it a little odd that the physical rottenness of at least two pillars of our four-square house never presented itself to my mind as a menace to its security? It doesn't so present itself now, though the two of them are actually dead. I don't know. I know nothing. Nothing in the world, the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone. Horribly alone. No hearth-stone will ever again witness for me friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be other than people with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke-rees. Yet in the name of God what should I know if I don't know the life of the hearth and of the smoking-room, since my whole life has been passed in those places? The warm hearth-side. Well there was Florence. I believe that for the twelve years her life lasted, after the storm that seemed irretrievably to have weakened her heart. I don't believe that for one minute she was out of my sight, except when she was safely tucked up in bed and I should be downstairs, talking to some good fellow or other some lounge or smoking-room or taking my final turn with a cigar before going to bed. I don't, you understand, blame Florence, but how could she have known what she knew? How could she have got to know it? To know it so fully? Heavens! There doesn't seem to have been the actual time. It must have been when I was taking my baths and my Swedish exercises being manicured, leading the life I did of this sedulest, strained nurse. I had to do something to keep myself fit. It must have been then. Yet even that can't have been enough time to get the tremendously long conversations full of worldly wisdom that Lenora has reported to me since their deaths. And is it possible to imagine that during our prescribed walks in Noheim and the neighbourhood she found time to carry on the protracted negotiations which she did carry on between Edward Ashburnham and his wife? And isn't it incredible that during all that time Edward and Lenora never spoke a word to each other in private? What is one to think of humanity? For I swear to you that they were a model couple. He was as devoted as it was possible to be without appearing fatuous. So well set up with such honest blue eyes, such a touch of stupidity, such a warm good-heartedness, and she so tall, so splendid in the saddle, so fair. Yes, Lenora was extraordinarily fair and so extraordinarily the real thing that she seemed too good to be true. You don't, I mean as a rule, get it also superlatively together. To be the country family, to look the country family, to be so appropriately and perfectly wealthy, to be so perfect in manner, even just to the saving touch of insolence that seems to be necessary, to have all that and to be all that. No, it was too good to be true. And yet only this afternoon, talking over the whole matter, she said to me, once I tried to have a lover but I was so sick at the heart so utterly worn out that I had to send him away. That struck me as the most amazing thing I'd ever heard. She said, I was actually in a man's arms, such a nice chap, such a dear fellow, and I was saying to myself fiercely, hissing it between my teeth, as they say in the novels, and really clenching them together. I was saying to myself, now I'm for it, and I'll really have a good time for once in my life, for once in my life. It was in the dark and a carriage coming back from a hunt-ball, eleven miles we had to drive, and then suddenly the bitterness of the endless poverty of the endless acting. It fell on me like a blight. It spoiled everything. Yes, I had to realize that I had been spoiled even for the good time when it came. And I burst out crying, and I cried, and I cried for the whole eleven miles. Just imagine me crying. And just imagine me making a fool of the poor chap like that. It certainly wasn't playing the game, was it now? I don't know, I don't know. Was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family, or not county family thinks at the bottom of her heart, or thinks all the time for the matter of that? Who knows? Yet if one doesn't know, at this hour, and this day, that this pitch of civilization to which we have attained after all the preachings of all the moralists, and all the teachings of all the mothers, to all the daughters, and sacula sacularum. But perhaps that is what all mothers teach all daughters. Not with lips, but with the eyes, or with heart whispering to heart. And if one doesn't know as much as that about the first thing in the world, what does one know? And why is one here? I asked Mrs. Ashburnham whether she had told Florence that, and what Florence had said, and she answered, Florence didn't offer any comment at all. What could she say? There wasn't anything to be said. With the grinding poverty we had to put up with to keep up appearances, and the way the poverty came about, you know what I mean. Any woman would have been justified in taking a lover, and presence, too. Florence once said about a very similar position, she was a little too well-bred to American to talk about mine, that it was a case of perfectly open writing, and the woman could just act on the spur of the moment. She said it in American, of course, but that was the sense of it. I think her actual words were that it was up to her to take it or leave it. I don't want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham down a brute. I don't believe he was. God knows perhaps all men are like that. For as I've said, what do I know, even in the smoking room? Fellows come in and tell the most extraordinarily grossed stories, so gross that they will positively give you a pain. And yet they'd be offended if you suggested that they weren't the sort of person you could trust your wife alone with. And very likely they'd be quite properly offended, that is, if you can trust anybody alone with anybody. But that sort of fellow obviously takes more delight in listening to or in telling gross stories, more delight than in anything else in the world. They'll hunt languidly, and dress languidly, and dine languidly, and work without enthusiasm, and find it a bore to carry on three minutes' conversation about anything whatever. And yet when the other sort of conversation begins, they'll laugh, and wake up, and throw themselves about in their chairs. Then if they sow delight in the narration, how is it possible that they can't be offended, and properly offended, at the suggestion that they might make attempts upon your wife's honor? Or again, Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap, an excellent magistrate, a first-rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they say, in Hampshire, England. To the poor and to the hopeless drunkards, as I myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian, and he never told a story that couldn't have gone into the columns of the field more than once or twice in all the nine years of my knowing him. He didn't even like hearing them. He would fidget and get up and go out to buy a cigar, or something of that sort. You would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine. And it was madness. And yet again you have me. If poor Edward was dangerous because of the chastity of his expressions, and they say that is always the hallmark of a libertine, what about myself? For I solemnly avow that not only have I never so much as hinted at an impropriety in my conversation in the whole of my days, and more than that, I will vouch for the cleanness of my thoughts and the absolute chastity of my life. At what then does it all work out? Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch, or is the proper man, the man with the right to existence, a raging stallion forever neighing at his neighbor's womankind? I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contexts, associations, and activities, or are we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness. This is the end of Part 1, 1 of The Good Soldier. Recording by Richard Grove. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Good Soldier. A Tale of Passion. By Ford Maddox Ford. Beati and Machilati. Part 1, 2. I don't know how it is best to put this thing down. Whether it would be better to try and tell the story from Leaning, as if it were a story, or whether to tell it from this distance of time as it reached me from the lips of Leonora, or from those of Edward himself. So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars. From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out at the great moon and say, why, it is nearly as bright as in Provence. And then we shall come back to the fireside with just the touch of a sigh, because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay. Consider the lamentable history of Pierre Vidal. Two years ago Florence and I motored from Biritz to Latour, which is in the Black Mountains. In the middle of a torturous valley there rises up an immense pinnacle, and on the pinnacle are four castles, Latour, the Towers. And the immense mistral blew down that valley, which was the way from France into Provence, so that the silver-gray olive leaves appeared like hair flying in the wind, and the tufts of rosemary crept into the iron rocks that they might not be torn up by the roots. It was, of course, poor dear Florence, who wanted to go to Latour. You are to imagine that, however much her bright personality came up from Stamford, Connecticut, she was yet a graduate of Poughkeepsie. I never could imagine how she did it. The queer, chattery person that she was, with the faraway look in her eyes, which wasn't, however, in the least romantic. I mean that she didn't look as if she were seeing poetic dreams or looking through you, for she hardly ever did look at you, holding up one hand as if she wished to silence any objection or any comment for the matter of that. She would talk. She would talk about William the Silent, about Gustave the Loquacious, about Paris frocks, about how the poor dressed in 1337, about Fantan Latour, about the Paris-Léon-Matteterrané train deluxe, about whether it would be worthwhile to get off at Terescon and go across the windswept suspension bridge over the Rhône to take another look at the Bocair. We never did take another look at the Bocair, of course. Beautiful Bocair. With the high, triangular white tower that looked as thin as a needle and as tall as the flat iron between fifth and Broadway. Bocair with the great walls and the top of the pinnacles surrounding an acre and a half of blue irises, beneath the tallness of the stone pines. What a beautiful thing the stone pine is. No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to Hamelin, not to Verona, not to Mont-Major, not so much as to Carcassonne itself. We talked of it, of course, but I guess Florence got all she wanted out of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye. I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I want to return. Towns with the blinding white sun upon them, stone pines against the blue of the sky, corners of gables all carved and painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crow-stepped gables with a little saint at the top, and gray and pink palazzi and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea on the Mediterranean between Leghorn and Naples. Not one of them did we see more than once, so that the whole world for me is like spots of color and an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren't so, I should have something to catch hold of now. Is all this digression or isn't it digression? Again, I don't know. You, the listener, sit opposite me, but you are so silent. You don't tell me anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of life it was I led with Florence and what Florence was like. Well, she was bright, and she danced. She seemed to dance over the floors of castles and over seas and over and over and over the salons of modests and over the plage of the Riviera like a gay tremulous beam reflected from water upon a ceiling. And my function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence, and it was almost as difficult as trying to catch and that dancing reflection and the task lasted four years. Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in Philadelphia. They'd never been to Philadelphia and they had a New England conscience. You see, the first thing they said to me when I called in on Florence in the little ancient colonial wooden house beneath the high thin-leaved elms, the first question they asked me was not how I did, but what did I do? And I did nothing. I suppose I ought to have done something, but I didn't see any call to do it. Why does one do things? I just drifted in and wanted Florence. First I had drifted in on Florence at a browning tea or something of the sort at 14th Street, which was then still residential. I don't know why I had gone to New York. I don't know why I had gone to the tea. I don't see why Florence should have gone to that sort of spelling bee. It wasn't the place at which even then you'd expect to find a Poughkeepsie graduate. I guess Florence wanted to raise the culture of the Stuyvesant crowd and did it as she might have gone in slumming. Intellectual slumming, that was what it was. She always wanted to leave the world a little more elevated than she found it. Poor dear thing. I've heard her lecture, Teddy Ash Burnham by the hour on the difference between the France halls and the Louvermans and why the pre-Mycenaean statues were cubical with knobs on the top. I wonder what he made of it. Perhaps he was thankful. I know I was. For do you understand my whole attentions? My whole endeavours were to keep poor dear Florence on to topics like the finds at Gnosis and the mental spirituality of Walter Pater. I had to keep her at it. You understand or she might die. For I was solemnly informed and excited over anything or if her emotions were really stirred her little heart might cease to beat. For twelve years I had to watch every word that any person uttered in any conversation and I had to head it off what the English call things, off love, poverty, crime, religion and the rest of it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she was carried off the ship at Havre assured me that this must be done. Good God! Are all these fellows monstrous idiots? Are there a free masonry between all of them from end to end of the earth? That's what makes me think of that fellow Pierre Vidal. Because, of course, his story is culture and I had to head her towards culture and at the same time it's so funny and she hadn't got to laugh and it's so full of love and she wasn't to think of love. Do you know the story? Latour of the four castles had for charlatagne blanched somebody or other called as a term of commendation la louvre, the she-wolf and Pierre Vidal, the troubadour paid his consort to la louvre and she wouldn't have anything to do with him. So out of compliment to her the things people do when they're in love he dressed himself up in wolfskins and went up into the black mountains and the shepherds of the Montanois and their dogs mistook him for a wolf and he was torn with fangs and beaten with clubs so they carried him back up to Latour and la louvre wasn't all impressed. They polished him up and her husband remonstrated seriously with her. Vidal was, you see, a great poet and it was not proper to treat a great poet with indifference. So Pierre Vidal declared himself Emperor of Jerusalem or somewhere and the husband had to kneel down and kiss his feet, though la louvre wouldn't and Pierre set sail in a rowing boat with four companions to redeem the Holy Sepulcher and they struck on a rock somewhere and at great expense the husband had to fit out an expedition to fetch him back and Pierre Vidal fell all over the lady's bed while the husband who was a most ferocious warrior remonstrated some more about the courtesy that is due to great poets but I suppose la louvre was the more ferocious of the two. Anyhow, that's all that came of it. Isn't that the story? You haven't an idea the queer old fashionedness of Florence's aunts. The Mrs. Hurlbird. Nor yet of her uncle. An extraordinarily lovable man, that Uncle John. Thin, gentle and with a heart that made his life very much what Florence afterwards became. He didn't reside at Stanford. His home was in Waterbury where the watches come from. He had a factory there which in our queer American way would change its functions almost year to year. For nine months or so it would manufacture buttons out of bone and it would suddenly produce brass buttons for coachmen's liveries. Then it would take a turn to emboss tin lids for candy boxes. The fact is that the poor old gentleman with his weak and fluttering heart didn't want his factory to manufacture anything at all. He wanted to retire. And he did retire when he was seventy. But he was so worried at having all the street boys in the town point after him and exclaim, there goes the laziest man in Waterbury that he tried taking a tour around the world. And Florence and a young man called Jimmy went with him. It appears from what Florence told me that Jimmy's functions with Mr. Hurlbird was to avoid exciting topics for him. We had to keep him for instance out of political discussions. For the poor man was a violent Democrat in days when you might travel the world over without finding anything but a Republican. Anyhow, they went around the world. I think an anecdote is about the best way to give you an idea of what the old gentleman was like. For it is perhaps important that you should know what the old gentleman was. He had a great deal of influence in forming the character of my poor dear wife. Just before they set out from San Francisco for the South Seas, old Mr. Hurlbird said he must take something with him to make a little presence to people he met on the voyage. And it struck him that the things to take for that purpose were oranges, because California is the orange country and comfortable folding chairs. So he bought, I don't know how many cases of oranges, the great cool California oranges, and half a dozen folding chairs in a special case that he always kept in his cabin. There must have been half a cargo of fruit. For to every person on board, the several steamers that they employed, to every person with whom he had so much as a nodding acquaintance, he gave an orange every morning. And they lasted him right around the girdle of this mighty globe of ours. When they were at North Cape even, he saw on the horizon, poor dear thin man that he was, a lighthouse. Still low, he says to himself, these fellows must be very lonely. Let's take them some oranges. So he had a boatload of his fruit out and had himself rode to the lighthouse on the horizon. The folding chairs he lent to any lady that he came across and liked, or who seemed tired and invalidish on the ship. And so guarded against his heart and having his niece with him, he went round the world. He wasn't obstrucive about his heart. He wouldn't have known he had one. He sent it to the physical laboratory at Waterbury for the benefit of science, since he considered it to be quite an extraordinary kind of heart. And the joke of the matter was that when at the age of 84, just five days before poor Florence, he died of bronchitis and was found to be absolutely nothing the matter with that organ. It had certainly jumped or squeaked or something just sufficiently to take in the doctors. But it appears that that was because of an odd formation of the lungs. I don't much understand about these matters. I inherited his money because Florence died five days after him. I wish I hadn't. It was a great worry. I had to go out to Waterbury just after Florence's death because the poor dear fellow had left a good many charitable requests and I had to appoint trustees. I didn't like the idea of their not being properly handled. Yes, it was a great worry. And just as I had got things roughly settled on the table from Ash Burnham begging me to come back and have a talk with him. And immediately afterwards came one from Leonora saying, yes, please do come. You could be so helpful. It was as if he had sent the cable without consulting her and had afterwards told her. Indeed, that was pretty much what had happened except that he had told the girl and the girl told the wife. I arrived, however, too late to be of any good if I could have been of any good. And then I had my first taste of English life. It was amazing. It was overwhelming. I shall never forget the polished cob that Edward beside me drove. The animal's action, its high stepping, its skin that was like satin, and the peace and the red cheeks and the beautiful, beautiful old house. Just near Branshall Telleraw it was and we descended on it from the high, clear, windswept waste of the new forest. I tell you it was amazing to arrive there from Waterbury. And it came into my head for Teddy Ash Burnham, you remember, had cabled me to come and have a talk with him that it was unbelievable that anything essentially calamitous could happen to that place and those people. I tell you it was the very spirit of peace and Leonora, beautiful and smiling with her coils of yellow hair stood on the top doorstep with a butler and footman and a maid or so behind her and she just said so glad you've come. As if I'd run down to lunch from a town ten miles away instead of having come half the world over at the call of two urgent telegrams. The girl was out with the hounds, I think. And that poor devil beside me was in an agony. Absolute, hopeless, dumb agony such as passes the mind of man to imagine. Part one, two of The Good Soldier Recording by Richard Grove This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Good Soldier A Tale of Passion by Ford Maddox Ford Beate Immaculati Part one, three It was a very hot summer in August 1904 and Florence had already been taking the baths for a month. I don't know how it feels to be a patient at one of those places. I never was a patient anywhere. I daresay the patients get a home feeling and some sort of anchorage in the spot. They seem to like the bath attendants with their cheerful faces, their air of authority, their white linen. But for myself to be at Norheim gave me a sense, what shall I say, a sense almost of nakedness. The nakedness that one feels on the seashore or in any great open space. I had no attachments, no accumulations. In one's own home it is as if little innate sympathies draw one to particular chairs that seem to enfold one in an embrace or take one along particular streets that seem friendly when others may be hostile. And believe me, that feeling is a very important part of life. I know it well that had been so long a wanderer upon the face of public resorts. And one is too polished up. Heaven knows I was never an untidy man. But the feeling that I had when, whilst poor Florence was taking her morning bath, I stood upon the carefully swept steps of the English or Hough looking at the carefully arranged trees and tubs upon the carefully arranged gravel, whilst carefully arranged people walk past and carefully calculated gaiety at the carefully calculated hour, the tall trees of public gardens going up to the right, the reddish stones of the baths, the white half timber chalets. Upon my word I have forgotten. I who was there so often. That will give you the measure of how much I was in the landscape. I could find my way blindfold to the hot rooms, to the douche-rooms, to the fountain in the center of the quadrangle where the rusty water gushes out. Yes, I could find my way blindfolded. I know the exact distances. From the Hotel Regina you took 187 paces. Then turning sharp, left-handed, 420 took you straight down to the fountain. From the English or Hough starting on the sidewalk it was 97 paces in the same 420. And now you understand that having nothing in the world to do, but nothing whatever. I fell into the habit of counting my footsteps. I would walk with Florence to the baths. And, of course, she entertained me with her conversation. It was, as I have said, wonderful what she could make conversation out of. She walked very lightly and her hair very nicely done. She dressed beautifully and very expensive. Of course she had money of her own, but I shouldn't have done that. And yet, you know, I can't remember a single one of her dresses. Or I can remember just one. A very simple one of blue-figured silk. A Chinese pattern, very full in the skirts and broadened out over the shoulders. And her hair was copper-colored and the heels of her shoes were exceedingly high so that she tripped upon the points of her shoes. And when she came to the door of the room, she would look back at me with a little coquettish smile so that her cheeks appeared to be caressing her shoulder. I seem to remember that with that dress she wore an immensely long leghorn hat like the chapeau de paille of Rubens, only very white. The hat would be tied with a lightly knotted scarf of the same stuff as her dress. She knew how to give value to her blue eyes. The silk would be some simple pink coral beads. And her complexion had a perfect clearness, a perfect smoothness. Yes, that is how I most exactly remember her in that dress, in that hat. Looking over her shoulder at me so that the eyes flashed very blue, dark, pebble blue. And what the devil for whose benefit did she do it? Of the bath attendant? Of the passer's buy? I don't know. Anyhow it can't have been for me for never in all the years of her life never on any possible occasion or in any other place did she so smile to me, mockingly, invitingly. She was a riddle. But then all other women are riddles. And it occurs to me that some way back I began a sentence that I had never finished. It was about the feeling that I had when I stood on the steps of my hotel every morning before starting out to fetch Florence back from the bath. Natty, precise, well-brushed, conscious of being rather small amongst the long English, the Lank-Americans, the rotund Germans, and the obese Jewesses. I should stand there, tapping a cigarette on the outside of my case, surveying for a moment the world in the sunlight. But today was to come when I was never to do it again alone. You can imagine therefore what the coming of the Ashburnums meant to me. I have forgotten the aspect of many things but I shall never forget the aspect of the dining-room of the Hotel Excelsior on that evening and on so many other evenings. Whole castles have vanished from my memory. Whole cities that I had never visited but that white room festooned with paper mache fruits and flowers, the tall windows, the many tables, the black screen round the door with three golden cranes flying upward on each panel, the palm tree in the center of the room, the swish of the waiter's feet, the cold, expensive elegance, the mien of the diners as they came in every evening, their air of earnestness as if they must meal prescribed by the cur authorities and their air of sobriety as if they must seek not by any means to enjoy their meals. Those things I shall not easily forget. And then one evening in the twilight I saw Edward Ashburnum lounge round the screen into the room, the head waiter, a man with a face all gray, in what subterranean nooks or corners do people cultivate those absolutely gray complexions, went with the timorous patronage of these creatures towards him and held out a gray ear to be whispered into. It was generally a disagreeable ordeal for newcomers, but Edward Ashburnum bore it like an Englishman and a gentleman. I could see his lips form a word of three syllables. Remember I had nothing in the world to do but to notice these niceties and immediately I knew that he must be Edward Ashburnum, captain, 14th Hussars of Branshaw House, Branshaw Telleraw. I knew it because every evening just before dinner, whilst I waited in the hall, I used, by the courtesy of Montseur Chance, the proprietor, to inspect the little police reports that each guest was expected to sign upon taking a room. The head waiter piloted him immediately to a vacant table three away from my own. The table that the Grenfels of Falls River, New Jersey had just vacated. It struck me that that was not a very nice table for the newcomers, since the sunlight, although it was, shone straight down upon it, and the same idea seemed to come at the same moment into Captain Ashburnum's head. His face hitherto had, in the wonderful English fashion, expressed nothing whatever. Nothing. There was in it neither joy nor despair, neither hope nor fear, neither boredom nor satisfaction. He seemed to perceive no soul in that crowded room. He might have been walking in a jungle. I never came across such a perfect expression before, and I never shall again. It was insolence and not insolence. It was modesty and not modesty. His hair was fair. Extraordinarily ordered in a wave running from the left temple to the right. His face was a light brick red, and tint up to the roots of the hair itself. His yellow moustache was as stiff as a toothbrush, and I verily believe that he had his black smoking-jacket thickened a little over the shoulder blades, so as to give himself the air of the slightest possible stoop it would be like him to do that. That was the sort of thing he thought about. Martingales, Chiffney bits, boots, where you got the best soap, the best brandy, and the kybercliffs, the spreading power of number three shot before a charge of number four powder by heavens. I hardly ever heard him talk of anything else. Not in all the years that I knew him did I hear him talk of anything but these subjects. Oh yes, once he told me that I could buy my special shade of blue ties cheaper from a firm in Burlington arcade than from my own people in New York, and I have bought my ties from that firm ever since. Otherwise I should not remember the Burlington arcade. I wonder what it looks like. I've never seen it. I imagine it to be two immense rows of pillars like those of the Forum at Rome with Edward Ash Burnham striding down between them, but it probably isn't the least like that. Once also he advised me to buy Caledonian deferred since they were due to rise, and I did buy them and they did rise. But of how he got the knowledge I haven't the faintest idea seemed to drop out of the blue sky. And that was absolutely all I knew of him until a month ago. That and the profusion of his cases. All a pigskin and stamped with his initials E F A. There were gun cases and collar cases and shirt cases and letter cases and cases each containing four bottles of medicine and hat cases and helmet cases. It must have needed a whole herd of the Gadarene swine to make up his outfit. And if I ever penetrated into his private room it would be to see him standing with his coat and waistcoat off and the immensely long line of his perfectly elegant trousers from waist to boot heel. And he would have a slightly reflective air and he would be just opening one kind of case and just closing another. Good God, what did they see in him? For I swear there was all there was of him inside and out, though they said he was a good soldier. Yet Leonora adored him of the passion that was like an agony and hated him with an agony that was as bitter as the sea. How could he arouse anything like a sentiment in anybody? What did he even talk to them about when they were under four eyes? Ah, well, suddenly as if by a flash of inspiration I know. For all good soldiers are sentimentalists. All good soldiers of that type. Their profession, for one thing, is full of the big words, courage, loyalty, honor, constancy. And I have given the wrong impression of Edward Ashburnham if I have made you think that literally never in the course of our nine years of intimacy did he discuss what he would have called the graver things. Even before his final outburst in me at times, very late at night, say, he has blurted out something that gave an insight into the sentimental view of the cosmos that was his. He would say how much the society of a good woman could do towards redeeming you, and he would say that constancy was the finest of the virtues. He said it very stiffly, of course, but still as if the sentiment admitted of no doubt. Constancy. Isn't that the queer thought? And yet I must add that poor dear Edward was a great reader. He would pass hours lost in novels of a sentimental type. Novels in which typewriter girls married marqueses and governesses earls. And in his books, as a rule, the course of true love ran as smooth as buttered honey. And he was fond of poetry of a certain type, and he could even read a perfectly sad love story. I have seen his eyes filled with tears at reading of a hopeless parting, and he loved with a sentimental yearning all children puppies and the feeble generally. 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 that 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 what the women's 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 Assises and I saw how in a perfectly calm and business-like way the 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. In that chap, coming into a room, snapped up the gaze of every woman in it as dexterously as the conjurer pocket's billiard balls. It was almost 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 a rather rough horse 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 reduced did they do it flinching 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 branch on 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 Wiespaten watching him play in a polo match against the Bonner Husserin, I saw the same look come into his eyes balancing the possibilities, looking over the ground. The captain, Count Baron Edigan von Le Loffel, was right up by their goal post coming with the ball in an easy canter in that tricky German fashion. The rest of the field was just anywhere. It was only a scratch sort of affair. Ash Burnham 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 just in his eyes. It might, I seem even now to hear in muttering to himself, just be done. I looked round 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 in 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 managed to bolt into the tumult and set fire to a haystack. Madness? Predestination? Who the devil knows. Mrs. Ash Burnham 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, Hello? 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-titty, 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 lists of guests, counted any more than so many clean, bold 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 gray rams. 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 in 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 plastrone. 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 if 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 marbled bust mite out of a black wedgewood vase. I love 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'm 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 I should press my lips upon them they would be slightly cold. Not icily. Not without a touch of human heart. But as they said, baths with a 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 give your eyes to their necks, their eyelashes, their lips, their breasts. But Leonora seemed to conduct her gaze always to her wrist. And the wrist was at its best in a black or 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 her heart up 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. 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. Her eyes asked, and the eyes answered with all the simpleness of a woman who was a good hand at taking in qualities of a horse, as indeed she was. Stanswell 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 very likely to play the lover? Is he likely to let his woman be troublesome? Is he, above all, likely to babble about my affairs? After 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, or 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, any kind woman may look at a poor chap in a bath-chair. And yes, from that day forward she always treated me as if I were an 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 Ashburn and Gurgled slightly in his throat, but Leonora shivered a little as the goose had walked over her grave, and I was passing her the nickel-silver basket of rolls. Avanti. End of Part 1-3 of The Good Soldier Recording by Richard Grove This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Good Soldier A Tale of Passion by Ford Maddox Ford Beati Immaculati Part 1-4 So began those nine years of uninterrupted tranquility. They were characterised by an extraordinary want of any communicativeness on the part of the Ashburnums to which we on our part replied by leaving out quite as extraordinarily and nearly as completely personal note. Indeed, you may take it that what characterised our relationship was an atmosphere of taking everything for granted. The given proposition was that we were all good people. We took it 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 rind wine, qualified with fashion gin water, that sort of thing. It was taken for granted that we were both sufficiently well off to afford anything that we could reasonably want in way of amusements fitting to our station. That we could take motorcars 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 telegraphs enter 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 then we discovered that the Ashburnham's 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 18 families of regular Kerr guests. In return he would give a dinner of all the 18 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 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 bon-bâche 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 benignedly interested in the amount of money we had put on Le Lothel's Hunter for the Frankfort-Wilter steaks. 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 achieve nine years and have nothing whatever to show for it? Nothing whatever, you understand. Not so much as a bone pen-holder carved to resemble a chessman and with a hole in the top through which you could see four views of Noheim. And as for experience, as for knowledge of one's fellow-beings, nothing either. Upon my word I couldn't tell you off-hand whether the lady who sold the so expensive violets at the bottom of the road that leads to the station was cheating on me or no. I can't say whether the porter, trapped 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 45 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. I think the modern civilized habit, the modern English habit of taking every one for granted is a good deal to blame for this. I have observed this matter long enough to know the queer, subtle thing that it is. To know how the faculty, for what it is worth, never lets you down. Mind, I'm not saying that this is not the most desirable type of life in the world, that it is not an almost unreasonably high standard. For it is really nauseating when you detest it to have to eat every day several slices of thin, tepid, pink India rubber. And it is disagreeable to have to drink brandy when you would prefer to be cheered up by warm, sweet comal. And it is nasty to have to take a cold bath in the morning when what you want is a really hot one at night. And it stirs a little of the faith of your fathers that is deep down within you to have it taken for granted that you are an Episcopalian when really you're an old-fashioned Philadelphia Quaker. But these things have to be done. It is the cock that the whole of this society owes to Escalopias. And the odd queer thing is that the whole collection of rules applies to anybody. To the anybodies that you meet in hotels, in railway trains, to a less degree, perhaps in steamers, but even in the end, upon steamers. You meet a man or a woman and from tiny and intimate sounds from the slightest of movements you know at once whether you are concerned with good people or with those who won't do. You know, this is to say, whether they will go rigidly through the whole program from the underdone beef to the Anglicanism. It won't matter whether they be short or tall, whether the voice squeak like a marionette or rumble like a town bulls. It won't matter whether they are Germans, Austrians, French, Spanish or even Brazilians. They will be the Germans or Brazilians who take a cold bath every morning and who move, roughly speaking, in diplomatic circles. But the inconvenient – well, hang it all, I will say it – the damnable nuisance of the whole thing is that with all the taking for granted you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued. I can give you a rather extraordinary instance of this. I can't remember whether it was in our first year – the first year of us four at Noaheim, because of course the first year of Florence and myself but it must have been in the first of the second year. And that gives the measure at once of the extraordinaryness of our discussion and of the swiftness with which intimacy had grown up between us. On the one hand we seem to start out on the expedition so naturally and with so little preparation that it was as if we must have made many such excursions before and our intimacy seemed so deep. Yet the place to which we went was obviously one to which Florence at least would have wanted to take us quite early so that you would almost think we should have gone there together at the beginning of our intimacy. Florence was singularly expert as a guide to archaeological expeditions and there was nothing she liked so much as taking people round ruins and showing you the window from which one looked down upon the murder of someone else. She only did it once but she did it quite magnificently. She could find her way with the sole help of a Baedeker as easily about any old monument as she could about any American city where the blocks are all square and the streets are all numbered so that you can go perfectly easily from 24th to 30th. Now it happens that 50 minutes away from Nohain, by a good train is the ancient city of M. Upon a great pinnacle of basalt a triple road running sideways up its shoulder like a scarf and at the top there is a castle not a square castle like Windsor but a castle all slate gables and high peaks with guilt weathercocks flashing bravely a castle of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary it has the disadvantage of being in Prussia and it is always disagreeable to go into that country but it is very old and there are many double-spired churches and it stands up like a pyramid in the Green Valley of the Lawn I don't suppose the Ashburnums wanted especially to go there and I didn't especially want to go there myself but you understand there was no objection it was part of the cure to make an excursion three or four times a week so that we were all quite unanimous in being grateful to Florence for providing the motive power Florence of course had a motive of her own she was at the time engaged in educating Captain Ashburnum oh of course quite pour les bons motifs she used to say to Leonora I simply can't understand how you can let him live by your side and be so ignorant Leonora herself always struck me as being remarkably well educated at any rate she knew beforehand all that Florence had to tell her perhaps she got it up out of the baby care before Florence was up in the morning I don't mean to say that you would ever have known that Leonora knew anything she told us how Ludwig the Courageous wanted to have three wives at once in which he differed from Henry the Eighth who wanted them one after the other and this caused a good deal of trouble if Florence started to tell us this Leonora would just nod her head in a way that quite pleasantly rattled my poor wife she used to exclaim well if you knew it why haven't you told it all already to Captain Ashburnum I'm sure he finds it interesting and Leonora would look reflectively at her husband and say I have an idea that it might injure his hand the hand you know used in connection with horses mouths and poor Ashburnum would blush and mutter and would say that's all right don't you bother about me I fancy his wife's irony did quite alarm poor Teddy because one evening he asked me seriously in the smoking room if I thought that having too much in one's head was one's quickness and polo it struck him he said that brainy Johnny's generally were rather muffs when they got on to four legs I reassured him as best I could I told him that he wasn't likely to be taken in enough to upset his balance at that time the captain was quite evidently enjoying being educated by Florence he used to do it about three or four times a week under the approving eyes of Leonora and myself it wasn't you understand systematic it came in bursts it was Florence clearing up one of the dark places of the earth leaving the world a little lighter than she had founded she would tell him the story of Hamlet explain the form of a symphony humming the first and second subjects to him and so on she would explain to him the difference between Arminians and Erastians or she would give him a short lecture on the early history of the United States and it was done in a way well calculated to arrest a young attention did you ever read Mrs. Markham? well it was like that but our excursion to M was a much larger and much more full dress affair you see in the archives of the Schloss in that city there was a document which Florence thought would finally give her the chance to educate the whole lot of us all together it really worried poor Florence that she couldn't in matters of culture ever get the better of Leonora I don't know what Leonora knew or what she didn't know but certainly she was always there whenever Florence brought out any information and she gave somehow the impression of really knowing what poor Florence gave the impression of having only picked up I can't exactly define it it was almost something physical have you ever seen a retriever dashing in play after a greyhound? you see the two running over a green field almost side by side and suddenly the retriever makes a friendly snap at the other and the greyhound simply isn't there you haven't observed it quick in its speed or strain a limb but there it is just two yards in front of the retriever's outstretched muzzle so it was with Florence and Leonora in matters of culture but on this occasion I knew that something was up I found Florence some days before reading books like Rank's History of the Popes Simmons Renaissance Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic and Luther's Table Talk I must say that until the astonishment came I got nothing but pleasure for the little expedition I like catching the 240 I like the slow smooth roll of the great big trains and they are the best trains in the world I like being drawn through the green country and looking at it through the clear glass of the great windows though of course the country isn't really green the sun shines the earth is blood red and purple and red and green and red and the oxen in the plowlands are bright brown and black and blackish purple and the peasants are dressed up in black and white of magpies and there are great rocks of magpies too on the peasants dresses in another field there are little mounds of hay that will be gray green on the sunny side and purple in the shadows the peasants dresses are vermilion with emerald green ribbons and purple skirts and white skirts and black velvet stomachers still the impression is that you are drawn through the green meadows that run away on each side to the dark purple fir woods the basalt pinnacles the immense forests and there is meadow-sweet at the edge of the streams and cattle why I remember on that afternoon I saw a brown cow hitch its horns under the stomach of a black and white animal and the black and white one was thrown right into the middle of a narrow stream I burst out laughing but Florence was imparting information so hard and Leonora was listening so intently that no one noticed me as for me I was pleased to be off duty I was pleased to think that Florence for the moment was indubitably out of mischief because she was talking about Ludwig the Courageous I think it was Ludwig the Courageous but I'm not a historian about Ludwig the Courageous of Hesson who wanted to have three wives at once and patronized Luther something like that I was so relieved to be off duty I couldn't possibly be doing anything to excite herself or set her poor heart a flutter that the incident of the cow was a real joy to me I chuckled over it from time to time for the whole rest of the day because it does look very funny, you know to see a black and white cow land on its back in the middle of a stream it's just so exactly what one doesn't expect of a cow I suppose I ought to have pityed the poor animal but I just didn't I was out for enjoyment and enjoyed myself it is so pleasant to be drawn along in front of the spectacular towns with the peaked castles and the many double spires in the sunlight gleams come from the city gleams from the glass of windows from the gilt signs of apothecaries from the ensigns of the student corps high up in the mountains from the helmets of the funny little soldiers moving their stiff little legs in white linen trousers and it was pleasant to get out in the great big spectacular Prussian station with the hammered bronze ornaments and the paintings of peasants and flowers and cows and to hear Florence bargain energetically with the driver of an ancient droshka drawn by two lean horses of course I spoke German much more correctly than Florence though I never could rid myself of the accent of the Pennsylvania dutch of my childhood anyhow we were drawn in a sort of triumph for five marks without any trinket right up to the castle and we were taken through the museum and saw the firebacks the old glass the old swords and the antique contraptions and we went up winding corkscrew staircases and through the Rittersall the great painted hall where the reformer and his friends met for the first time under the protection of the gentleman that had three wives at once and formed an alliance with the gentleman that had six wives one after the other I'm not really interested in these facts but they have a bearing on my story and we went through chapels and music rooms right up immensely high in the air to a large old chamber full of presses with heavily shuttered windows all around and Florence became positively electric she told the tired board custodian what shutters to open so that the bright sunlight streamed and palpable shafts into the dim old chamber she explained that this was Luther's bedroom and that just where the sunlight fell had stood his bed as a matter of fact I believe that she was wrong and that Luther only stopped as it were for lunch in order to evade pursuit but no doubt it would have been his bedroom if he could have been persuaded to stop the night and then in spite of the protest of the custodian she threw open another shutter and came tripping back to a large glass case and there she exclaimed with an accent of gaiety of triumph and of audacity she was pointing at a piece of paper like the half sheet of a letter with some faint pencil scrolls that might have been the jotting of the amounts we were spending during the day and I was extremely happy at her gaiety and her triumph in her audacity Captain Ash Burnham had his hands upon the glass case there it is the protest and then as we all properly stage managed our bewilderment she continued don't you know that is why we were all called Protestants that is the pencil draft of the protest they drew up you can see the signatures of Martin Luther and Martin Busser and Zwingli and Ludwig the courageous I may have gotten some of the names wrong but I know that Luther and Busser were there and her animation continued and I was glad she was better and she was out of mischief she continued looking up into Captain Ash Burnham's eyes it's because of that piece of paper that you're honest, sober industrious, provident and clean lived if it weren't for that piece of paper you'd be like the Irish or the Italians or the Poles but particularly the Irish and she laid one finger upon Captain Ash Burnham's wrist I was aware of something treacherous something frightful something evil in the day and I can't define it I can't find a simile for it it wasn't as if a snake had looked out of a hole no it was as if my heart had missed a beat it was as if we were going to run and cry out all four of us in separate directions averting our heads in Ash Burnham's face I know there was absolute panic I was horribly frightened and then I discovered that the pain in my left wrist was caused by Leonora's clutching it I can't stand this she said with the most extraordinary passion I must get out of this I was horribly frightened it came to me for a moment though I hadn't time to think that she must be a madly jealous woman jealous of Florence and Captain Ash Burnham of all the people in the world and it was a panic in which we fled we went right down the winding stairs across the immense Ritter-Soll to a little terrace that overlooked the lawn the broad valley and the immense plain into which it opens out don't you see, she said don't you see what's going on? the panic again stopped my heart I muttered, I stuttered I don't know how I got the words out no what's the matter? whatever's the matter she looked me straight in the eyes and for a moment I had the feeling that those two blue discs were immense were overwhelming were like a wall of blue that shut me off from the rest of the world I know it sounds absurd but that is what it did feel like don't you see, she said with a really horrible bitterness with a really horrible lamentation in her voice don't you see that that's the cause of the whole miserable affair of the whole sorrow of the world and of the eternal damnation of you and me and then I don't remember how she went on I was too frightened I was too amazed I think I was thinking of running to fetch assistance a doctor perhaps or Captain Ash Burnham or possibly she needed Florence's tender care though of course it would have been very bad for Florence's heart but I know that when I came out of it she was saying oh where are all the bright happy innocent beings in the world, where's happiness one reads of it in books she ran her hand with a singular clawing upwards over her forehead her eyes were enormously distended her face was exactly that of a person looking into a pit of hell and seeing horrors there and then suddenly she stopped she was most amazingly just Mrs. Ash Burnham again her face was perfectly clear sharp and defined her hair was glorious and its golden coils her nostrils twitched with a sort of content she appeared to look with an interest a caravan that was coming over a little bridge far below us don't you know, she said in her clear hard voice don't you know that I'm an Irish Catholic end of part one four recording by Richard Grove this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer LibriVox.org The Good Soldier A Tale of Passion by Ford Maddox Ford Viatti and Machilati part one five those words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had in my life they told me I think almost more than I have ever gathered at any one moment about myself I don't think that before that day I had ever wanted anything very much except Florence I have, of course, had appetites, impatiences why sometimes at a table d'hote when there would be, say, caviar handed round I have been absolutely full of impatience for the fear that when the dish came to me there should not be a satisfying portion left over by the other guests I have been exceeding the impatient at missing trains the Belgian state railway has a trick of letting the French trains miss their connections to their muscles that has always infuriated me I have written about it letters to the Times that the Times never printed those that I wrote to the Paris edition of the New York Herald were always printed but they never seemed to satisfy me when I saw them well, that was a sort of frenzy with me it was a frenzy that now I can hardly realize I can understand it intellectually you see in those days I was interested in people with hearts there was Florence there was Edward Ashburnam or perhaps it was Leonora that I was more interested in I don't mean in the way of love but you see we were both of the same profession at any rate as I saw it and the profession was that of keeping heart patients alive you have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become just as the blacksmith says by hammer and hand all art doth stand just as the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves around his morning delivery of rolls as the postmaster general believes that he alone is the preserver of society and surely surely these delusions are necessary to keep us going so did I and as I believed Leonora imagine that the whole world ought to be arranged so as to ensure the keeping alive of heart patients you have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become how imbecile in view of that engrossment appear the ways of princes of republics of municipalities a rough bit of road beneath the motor-tires a couple of succeeding thanky-marms with their quick jolts would be enough to set me grumbling to Leonora against the prince or the grand duke or the free city through whose territory we might be passing I would grumble like a stockbroker whose conversations over the telephone are incommoded by the ringing of bells from a city church I would talk about medieval survivals about the taxes being surely high enough the point by the way about the missing of the connections of the Kalei boat trains at Brussels was that the shortest possible sea journey is frequently of great importance to sufferers from the heart now on the continent there are two special heart cure places Nahime and Spa and to reach both of these baths from England if in order to ensure a short sea passage you come by Kalei you have to make a connection at Brussels and the Belgian train never waits by so much a shade of a second for the one coming from Kalei or from Paris and even if the French trains are just on time you have to run a heart patient running along the unfamiliar ways of the Brussels station and to scramble up the high steps of the moving train or if you miss the connection you have to wait five or six hours I used to keep awake whole nights cursing that abuse my wife used to run she never in whatever else she may have misled me tried to give me the impression that she was not a gallant soul but once in the German express with one hand to her side and her eyes closed well she was a good actress and I would be in hell in hell I tell you for in Florence I had at once a wife and an unattained mistress that is what it comes to and in the retaining of her in this world I had my occupation my career my ambition it is not often that these things are united in one body Leonora was a good actress too by Joe she was good I tell you she would listen to me by the hour evolving my plans for a shockproof world it is true that at times I used to notice about her face and air of inattention as if she were listening a mother to the child at her knee or as if precisely I were myself the patient you understand that there was nothing the matter with Edward Ashburnham's heart that he had thrown up his commission and had left India from half the world over in order to follow a woman who had really had a heart to know him that was the sort of sentimental ass he was for you understand too that they needed to live in India to economize to let the house at Brandshaw tell her off of course at that date I had never heard of the kill site case Ashburnham had you know kissed a servant girl in a railway train and it was only the grace of God understanding of the communication cord and the ready sympathy of what I believe you call the Hampshire bench that kept the poor devil out of Winchester jail for years and years I had never heard of that case until the final stages of Leonora's revelations but just think of that poor wretch I who have surely the right beg you to think of that poor wretch is it possible that such a luckless devil should be so tormented by blind inscrutable destiny for there is no other way to think of it none I have the right to say it since for years he was my wife's lover since he killed her since he broke up all the pleasantness that there was in my life there is no priest that has the right to tell me that I must not ask pity for him from you silent listener beyond the heart stone from the world or from the God who created him in those desires those madnesses of course I should not hear of that kill-sight case I knew none of their friends they were for me just good people fortunate people with broad and sunny acres in a southern country just good people by heavens I sometimes think that it would have been better for him poor dear if the case had been such as one that I must needs have heard of it such a one is maids and couriers and other cur guests whisper about for years after until gradually it dies away in the pity that there is knocking about here and there in the world supposing he had spent his seven years in Winchester jail or whatever it is that inscrutable and blind justice allots to you for following your natural but ill-timed inclinations there would have arrived a stage when nodding gossip on that cursal terrace would have said poor fellow thinking of his ruined career he would have been the fine soldier with his back now bent better for him poor devil if his back had been prematurely bent why it would have been a thousand times better for of course the kill site case which came at the very beginning of his finding Leonora cold and unsympathetic gave him a nasty jar he left servants alone after that it turned him naturally all the more loose amongst women of his own class while Leonora told me that Mrs. Maiden the woman he followed from Bermont and Nohime assured her he awakened her attention by swearing that when he kissed the servant in the train he was driven to it I dare say he was driven to it by the mad passion to find an ultimately satisfying woman I dare say he was sincere enough heaven help me I dare say he was sincere enough in his love for Mrs. Maiden she was a nice little thing a dear little dark woman with long lashes of whom Florence grew quite fond she had a lisp and a happy smile we saw plenty of her for the first month of our acquaintance then she died quite quietly of heart trouble but you know poor little Miss Maiden she was so gentle so young she cannot have been more than 23 and she had a boy husband out in Chittrol not more than 24 I believe such young things ought to have been left alone of course I wish Burnham could not leave her alone I do not believe that he could why even I at this distance of time am aware that I am a little in love with her memory I can't help smiling when I think suddenly of her as if you might at the thought of something wrapped carefully in lavender and some drawer and some old house that you had long left she was so so submissive why even to me she had the air of being submissive to me that not the youngest child will ever pay heed to yes this is the saddest story no I cannot help wishing that Florence had left her alone with her playing with adultery I suppose it was though she was such a child that one has the impression that she would hardly have known how to spell such a word no it was just submissiveness to the importunities to the tempestuous forces that pushed that miserable fellow on to ruin and I do not suppose that Florence really made much difference if it had not been for her that Ashburnham left his allegiance for Mrs. Maiden then it would have been some other woman but still I do not know perhaps the poor young thing would have died she was bound to die anyway quite soon but she would have died without having to soak her noonday pillow with tears florets below the window talked to Captain Ashburnham about the Constitution of the United States yes it would have left a better taste in the mouth if Florence had let her die in peace Leonora behaved better in a sense she just boxed Miss Maiden's ears yes she hit her in an uncontrollable access of rage a hard blow on the side of the cheek in the corridor of the hotel outside Edward's room it was that you know that accounted for the sudden odd intimacy that sprang up between Florence and Mrs. Ashburnham because it was of course an odd intimacy if you look at it from the outside nothing could have been more unlikely than that Leonora who is the proudest creature on God's earth would have struck up an acquaintance with two casual Yankees whom she could not have really regarded as being much more than a carpet beneath her feet to ask what she had to be proud of well she was a poise married to an Ashburnham I suppose that gave her the right to despise casual Americans as long as she did it unauthenticiously I don't know what anyone has to be proud of she might have taken pride in her patience in her keeping her husband out of the bankruptcy court perhaps she did at any rate that was how Florence got to know her she came round a screen at the corner of the hotel corridor and found Leonora with the gold key that hung from her wrist caught in Miss Maiden's hair just before dinner there was not a single word spoken little Miss Maiden was very pale with a red mark down her left cheek and the key would not come out of her black hair it was Florence who had to disentangle it for Leonora was in such a state that she could not have brought herself to touch Miss Maiden without growing sick and there was not a word spoken you see under those four eyes her own in Miss Maiden's Leonora could just let herself go as far as to box Miss Maiden's ear but the moment a stranger came along she pulled herself wonderfully up she was at first silent and then the moment the key was disengaged by Florence she was in a state to say so awkward of me I was just trying to put the comb straight in Miss Maiden's hair Miss Maiden however was not a poise married to an Ash Burnham she was a poor little O'Flarity whose husband was a boy of country personage 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 Ash Burnham'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 so important to me 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 Maiden 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 Miss Maiden 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 missing Miss Maiden's ears Leonora was just striking in 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 her 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 Kerr authorities she had opened a letter that she took to come from a Colonel Harvey they were going to stay with him in Lynlithkashir for the month of September and she did not know whether the date fixed would be the 11th or the 18th the address on this letter was in handwriting as like Colonel Harvey'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 300 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 extracted a 20,000 pound pearl tiara from him as the price of her favors for a weaker soul 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 20,000 and the not slight charges of a weak at a hotel with a fair creature he must have been worth at that date $500,000 and a little over well he must needs go to the tables and lose 40,000 pounds 40,000 solid pounds borrowed from sharks and even after that he must it was an imperative passion enjoy the favors of the lady he got them of course it was a matter of solid bargaining for far less than 20,000 as he might no doubt have done from the first I dare say $10,000 covered the bill anyhow there was a pretty solid hole in a fortune of 100,000 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 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 Anteb to which place they had retired he got sick of the lady quite quickly but not before Leonora 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 Troc who for keeping the Prussians out of Paris in 1870 it was as about as effectual at first or so it seems 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 but 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 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 what 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 would know that the sort of thing that he did existed in the world so he would stick out in an agitated way against the accusations 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 quarreled yes they quarreled bitterly that seems rather extravagant you might have thought that Leonora would be positively loathing and he lacra mostly contrite but that was not it a bit along with Edward's passion 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 kill-side case I think that when he kissed her he had desired rather to comfort her and if she had succeeded to his blandishments I dare say he would have set her up in a little house in Portsmouth or Winchester would have been faithful to her for four or five years he was quite capable of that now 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 quite a 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 quite a nasty husband with letters and things went on blackmailing poor Edward to the name of three or four hundred a year with threats of the divorce court and after this lady came Maisie Maiden 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 although 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 generosity 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 dare say she exaggerated that the figure seemed 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 anti-vivisection societies well Leonora saw to it that most of these things were not continued they could not possibly keep up branch all manner 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 until the age of apprenticeship or domestic service you see she was childless herself and she considered herself to be to blame she had come of a penniless branch of the Poeus 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 and spite of Leonora the feeling of shuddering at the scarlet woman that filtered in upon me in the tranquility of a friend's 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 who 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 naively imagined that the church of Rome disapproves of divorce she quite seriously and naively believed that her church would be such a monstrous and imbecile institution as to expect her to take on the impossible job of making Edward Ashburnum a faithful husband she had as the English would say the non-conformist temperament in the United States of North America we call it the New England conscience for of course that frame of mine had been driven in on the English Catholics the centuries that they had gone through centuries of blind and malignant oppression of ostracism from public employment of being as it were a small beleaguered guest as it were a small beleaguered 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 were even technically non-conformists 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 he would have been so grateful 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 I am right in this I know it because of the kill-site 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 the 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 the result you have heard he was completely cured of the landering 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. Maiden instead of with a little kitchen maid in a dim sort of way Leonora was almost contented when she arrived at Noaheim that evening she had got things nearly straight by the long years of scraping in little stations like Chitrol and Burma stations where living is cheap in comparison with the life of a county magistrate and where moreover liaisons of one sort of another are normal and inexpensive too so that when Miss Maiden came along and the Maiden 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 branch all telleraw and with selling a picture and a relic of Charles I or so she had got and poor dear she had never really had a 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 some good sound profitable tip and Leonora was never afraid of a bit of gamble English papists sell them are and I do not know why so nearly all her investments turned up trumps and Edward was really in fit case to reopen branch all manner and once more to assume his position in the county thus Leonora had accepted Maisie Maiden 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 thousand a week for Maisie had refused to accept so much as a trinket ring from him it is true that Edward gurgled and waved about the girl in a way that she had never quite experienced but that too was almost a relief I think she would have really 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. Maiden she was so ill she could not want to be taken on expensive jots it was Leonora herself who paid Maisie's expenses to Nohine 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 physics 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 the mother toward Mrs. Maiden 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 toward Mrs. Maiden 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 black-mailing 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 mortgaging more ponnings 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 all 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 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 encoding 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 old Leonore to be bolly-ragged anymore that was really the last of his outstanding accounts and he was ready to take his personal chance at the divorce court at the blackmailer turned nasty he would face it out the publicity, the papers, the whole ballet show those were his simple words he had made however the mistake of not telling Leonore where he was going so that having seen him go into his room to fetch the code for the telegram and seeing two hours later Maisie Maiden come out of his room Leonore imagined that the two hours she had spent in silent agony Edward had spent with Maisie Maiden 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 errand 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 15 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 Leonore 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 Ashburnums were not just good people with nothing to their tales 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 that was 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 Miss Miden's room to beg her pardon and to beg her also to let Edward to take her very markedly out into the gardens that night she said herself when Miss Miden came rather wistfully down into the lounge when we were all sitting now, Edward, get up and take Miss Maisie to the casino I want Mrs. Dowell to tell me that she was in Connecticut who came from Fordenbridge for it had been discovered that Florence came of a line that had actually owned Branch Altelera for two centuries before the Ashburnums 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 Miss Miden 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 apologised out of existence and that I appeared to fix up in two minutes or so it 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 really be 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 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 pelatory out of the breast-high wall in front of us she chafed it for a long minute between her finger and thumb and she threw it over the coping oh I accept the situation she said at last if you can and part one five of the Good Soldier recording by Richard Grove Richard Grove