 Section 15 of The Good Soldier, A Tale of Passion. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Floyd Wilde. The Good Soldier, A Tale of Passion. By Ford Maddox Ford. Part 4, Section 1. I have, I am aware, told the story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes. And when one discusses an affair, a long, sad affair, one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten, and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places, and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real. At any rate, I think I have brought my story up to the date of Maisie Maiden's death. I mean that I have explained everything that went before it from the several points of view that were necessary, from Leonora's, from Edward's, and, to some extent, from my own. You have the facts for the trouble of finding them. You have the points of view as far as I could ascertain or put them. Let me imagine myself back then, at the day of Maisie's death, or rather, at the moment of Florence's dissertation on the protest. Up in the old castle of the town of M. Let us consider Leonora's point of view with regard to Florence. Edwards, of course, I cannot give you. For Edward naturally never spoke of his affair with my wife. I may, in what follows, be a little hard on Florence. But you must remember that I have been writing away at this story, now, for six months and reflecting longer and longer upon these affairs. And the longer I think about them, the more certain I become that Florence was a contaminating influence. She depressed and deteriorated, poor Edward. She deteriorated, hopelessly, the miserable Leonora. There is no doubt that she caused Leonora's character to deteriorate. If there was a fine point about Leonora, it was that she was proud and that she was silent. But that pride and that silence broke when she made that extraordinary outburst in the shadowy room that contained the protest and in the little terrace looking over the river. I don't mean to say that she was doing a wrong thing. She was certainly doing right in trying to warn me that Florence was making eyes at her husband. But if she did the right thing, she was doing it in the wrong way. Perhaps she should have reflected longer. She should have spoken, if she wanted to speak, only after reflection. Or it would have been better if she had acted, if, for instance, she had so chaperone Florence that private communication between her and Edward became impossible. She should have gone eavesdropping. She should have washed outside bedroom doors. It is odious, but that is the way the job is done. She should have taken Edward away the moment Maisie was dead. No, she acted wrongly. And yet, poor thing, is it for me to condemn her? And what did it matter in the end? If it had not been Florence, it would have been some other. Still, it might have been a better woman than my wife. For Florence was vulgar. Florence was a common flirt who would not, at the last, latch her price. And Florence was an unstoppable talker. You could not stop her. Nothing would stop her. Edward and Leonora were at least proud and reserved people. Pride and reserve are not the only things in life. Sometimes they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues, you will go all to pieces if you let them go. And Leonora let them go. She let them go before poor Edward did even. Consider her position when she burst out over the Luther protest. Consider her agonies. You are to remember that the main passion of her life was to get Edward back. She had never, till that moment, disparate of getting him back. That may seem ignoble, but you have also to remember that her getting him back represented to her not only a victory for herself, it would, as it appeared to her, have been a victory for all wives and a victory for her church. That was how it presented itself to her. These things are a little inscrutable. I don't know why the getting back of Edward should have represented to her a victory for all wives, for society, and for her church. Or maybe I have a glimmering of it. She saw life as a perpetual sex baffle between husbands who desire to be unfaithful to their wives and wives who desire to recapture their husbands in the end. That was her sad and modest view of matrimony. Man, for her, was a sort of brute who must have his deviations, his moments of excess, his nights out, his, let us say, running seasons. She had read few novels, so that the idea of a pure and constant love succeeding the sound of wedding bells had never been very much presented to her. She went numbed and terrified to the mother superior of her childhood's convent with the tale of Edward's infidelities with the Spanish dancer, and all that the old nun who appeared to her to be infinitely wise, mystic and reverend, had done had been to shake her head, sadly, and to say, Men are like that. By the blessing of God it will all come right in the end. That was what was put before her by her spiritual advisers as her program in life. Or at any rate, that was how their teachings came through to her. That was the lesson she told me she had learned of them. I don't know exactly what they taught her. The lot of women was patience and patience and again patience, ad mejoram dia glorium, until upon the appointed day, if God saw fit, she should have her reward. Since then, in the end, she should have succeeded in getting Edward back, she would have kept her man within the limits that are all that wifehood has to expect. She was even taught that such excesses in men are natural, excusable, as if they had been children. And the great thing was that there should be no scandal before the congregation. So she had clung to the idea of getting Edward back with a fierce passion that was like an agony. She had looked the other way, she had occupied herself solely with one idea. That was the idea of having Edward appear when she did get him back, wealthy, glorious as it were, on accounts of his lands, and upright. She would show, in fact, that in an unfaithful world one Catholic woman had succeeded in retaining the fidelity of her husband, and she thought she had come near her desires. Her plan with regard to Maisie had appeared to be working admirably. Edward had seemed to be cooling off towards the girl. He did not hunger to pass every minute of the time at Nowheim, beside the child's recumbent form. He went out to polo matches. He played auction bridge in the evenings. He was cheerful and bright. She was certain that he was not trying to seduce that poor child. She was beginning to think that he had never tried to do so. He seemed, in fact, to be dropping back into what he had been for Maisie in the beginning, a kind, attentive, superior officer in the regiment, paying gallant attentions to a bride. They were as open in their little flirtations as the day spring from on high, and Maisie had not appeared to fret when he went off on excursions with us. She had to lie down for so many hours on her bed every afternoon, and she had not appeared to crave for the attentions of Edward at those times. And Edward was beginning to make little advances to Leonora, once or twice in private, for he often did it before people. She had said, How nice you look, or what a pretty dress. She had gone with Florence to Frankfurt, or they dressed as well as in Paris, and had got herself a gown or two. She could afford it, and Florence was an excellent advisor as to dress. She seemed to have got hold of the clue to the riddle. Yes, Leonora seemed to have got hold of the clue to the riddle. She imagined herself to have been in the wrong to some extent in the past. She should not have kept Edward on such tight rein with regard to money. She thought she was on the right track in letting him, as she had done only with fear and irresolution, have again the control of his income. He came even a step towards her and acknowledged spontaneously that she had been right in husbanding for all those years, their resources. He said to her one day, You've done right, old girl. There's nothing I like so much as to have a little to chuck away, and I can do it thanks to you. That was really, she said, the happiest moment of her life. And he, seeming to realize it, had ventured to pat her on the shoulder. He had ostensibly come in to borrow a safety pin of her, and the occasion of her boxing Maisie's ears, had after it was over riveted in her mind the idea that there was no intrigue between Edward and Mrs. Maiden. She imagined that, from hence forward all that she had to do was to keep him well supplied with money, and his mind amused with pretty girls. She was convinced that he was coming back to her. For that month she no longer repelled his timid advances that never went very far, for he certainly made timid advances. He patted her on the shoulder, he whispered into her ear, little jokes about the odd figures that they saw up at the casino. It was not much to make a little joke, but the whispering of it was a precious intimacy. And then, smash, it all went. It went to pieces at the moment when Florence laid her hand upon Edward's wrist. As it lay on the glass sheltering the manuscript of the protest, up in the high tower with the shutters, where the sunlight here and there streamed in, or rather it went, when she noticed the look in Edward's eyes as he gazed back into Florence's, she knew that look. She had known since the first moment of their meeting, since the moment of our all sitting down to dinner together, that Florence was making eyes at Edward. But she had seen so many women make eyes at Edward, hundreds and hundreds of women, in railway trains, in hotels, aboard liners, at street corners. And she had arrived at thinking that Edward took a little stock in women that made eyes at him. She had formed what was, at the time, a fairly correct estimate of the methods of, the reasons for, Edward's loves. She was certain that hitherto they had consisted of the short passion for the dulci quita, the real sort of love for Mrs. Basil, and what she deemed the pretty courtship of Maisie Maiden. Since she despised Florence so heartily, that she could not imagine Edward's being attracted by her, and she and Maisie were a sort of bulwark round him. She wanted, besides, to keep her eyes on Florence, for Florence knew that she had boxed Maisie's ears, and Leonora desperately desired that her union with Edward should appear to be flawless. But all that went. With the answering gaze of Edwards into Florence's blue and uplifted eyes, she knew that it had all gone. She knew that the gaze meant that these two had had long conversations of an intimate kind, about their likes and dislikes, about their natures, about their views of marriage. She knew what it meant that she, when we all four walked out together, had always been with me, ten yards ahead of Florence and Edward. She did not imagine that it had gone further than talks about their likes and dislikes, about their natures or about marriage as an institution. But having watched Edward all her life, she knew that that laying on of hands, that answering of gaze with gaze meant that the thing was unavoidable. Edward was such a serious person. She knew that any attempt on her part to separate those two would be to rivet on Edward an irrevocable passion, that, as I have before told you, it was a trick of Edward's nature to believe that the seducing of a woman gave her an irrevocable hold over him for life. In that touching of hands, she knew would give that woman an irrevocable claim to be seduced, and she so despised Florence that she would have preferred it to be a parlor maid. There are very decent parlor maids. And suddenly there came into her mind the conviction that Maisie Maiden had a real passion for Edward, that this would break her heart and that she, Leonora, would be responsible for that. She went for the moment mad. She clutched me by the wrist. She dragged me down those stairs and across that whispering ridder-cell with the high-painted pillars, the high-painted chimney-piece. I guess she did not go mad enough. She ought to have said, Your wife is a harlot who is going to be my husband's mistress. That might have done the trick. But even in her madness she was afraid to go as far as that. She was afraid that, if she did, Edward and Florence would make a bolt of it, and that if they did that she would lose forever all chance of getting him back in the end. She acted very badly to me. Well she was a tortured soul who put her church before the interests of a Philadelphia Quaker. That is all right. I daresay the Church of Rome is the more important of the two. A week after Maisie Maiden's death she was aware that Florence had become Edward's mistress. She waited outside Florence's door and met Edward as he came away. She said nothing and he only grunted. But I guess he had had a bad time. Yes the mental deterioration that Florence worked in Leonora was extraordinary. It smashed up her whole life and all her chances. It made her in the first place hopeless. For she could not see how after that Edward could return to her after a vulgar intrigue with a vulgar woman. His affair with Mrs. Basil, which was now all that she had to bring in her heart against him, she could not find it in her to call an intrigue. It was a love affair, a pure enough thing in its way. But this seemed to her to be a horror, a wantonness. All the more detestable to her because she so detested Florence. And Florence talked. That was what was terrible. Because Florence forced Leonora herself to abandon her high reserve, Florence and the situation, it appears that Florence was in two minds whether to confess to me or to Leonora, confess she had to, and she pitched at last on Leonora. Because if it had been me, she would have had to confess a great deal more, or at least I might have guessed a great deal more about her heart and about Jimmy. So she went to Leonora one day and began hinting and hinting. And she enraged Leonora to such an extent that at last Leonora said, You want to tell me that you are Edward's mistress? You can be. I have no use for him. That was really a calamity for Leonora because once started there was no stopping the talking. She tried to stop, but it was not to be done. She found it necessary to send Edward's messages through Florence, for she would not speak to him. She had to give him, for instance, to understand that if I ever came to know of his intrigue, she would ruin him beyond repair. And it complicated matters a good deal that Edward, at about this time, was really a little in love with her. He thought that he had treated her so badly, that she was so fine. She was so mournful that he longed to comfort her. And he thought himself such a black guard that there was nothing he would not have done to make amends. And Florence communicated these items of information to Leonora. I don't in the least blame Leonora for her coarseness to Florence. It must have done Florence a world of good, but I do blame her for giving way to what was in the end a desire for communicativeness. You see that business cut her off from her church. She did not want to confess what she was doing because she was afraid that her spiritual advisors would blame her for deceiving me. I rather imagine that she would have preferred damnation to breaking my heart. That is what it works out at. She need not have troubled. But having no priests to talk to, she had to talk to someone, and as Florence insisted on talking to her, she talked back. In short, explosive sentences, like one of the damned, precisely like one of the damned. Well, if a pretty period in hell on this earth can spare her any period of pain and eternity, where there are not any periods, I guess Leonora will escape hellfire. Her conversations with Florence would be like this. Florence would happen in on her, unless she was doing her wonderful hair, with a proposition from Edward, who seems about that time to have conceived the naive idea that he might become a polygamist. I dare say it was Florence who put it into his head. Anyhow, I am not responsible for the oddities of the human psychology. But it certainly appears that, at about that date, Edward cared more for Leonora than he had ever done before, or at any rate for a long time. And if Leonora had been a person to play cards, and if she had played her cards well, and if she had had no sense of shame and so on, she might then have shared Edward with Florence, until the time came for drinking that poor cuckoo out of the nest. While Florence would come to Leonora with some such proposition, I do not mean to say that she had put it badly like that. She stood out that she was not Edward's mistress until Leonora said that she had seen Edward coming out of her room at an advanced hour of the night. That checked Florence a bit. But she fell back upon her heart, and stuck out that she had merely been conversing with Edward in order to bring him to a better frame of mind. Florence had, of course, to stick to that story. For even Florence would not have had the face to implore Leonora to grant her favors to Edward if she had admitted that she was Edward's mistress. That could not be done. At the same time Florence had such a pressing desire to talk about something, there would have been nothing else to talk about but a rapprochement between the estranged pair. So Florence would go on babbling, and Leonora would go on brushing her hair, and then Leonora would say suddenly something like, I should think myself defiled if Edward touched me now, that he has touched you. That would discourage Florence a bit, but after a week or so, on another morning, she would have another try. And even in other things, Leonora deteriorated. She had promised Edward to leave the spending of his own income in his own hands, and she had fully meant to do that. I daresay she would have done it too, though no doubt she would have spied upon his banking account in secret. She was not a Roman Catholic for nothing, but she took so serious a view of Edward's unfaithfulness to the memory of poor little Maisie that she could not trust him any more at all. So when she got back to Branshaw, she started, after less than a month, to worry him about the minute items of his expenditure. She allowed him to draw his own checks, but there was hardly a check that she did not scrutinize, except for a private account of about five hundred a year, which, tacitly, she allowed him to keep for expenditure on his mistress or mistresses. He had to have his jaunts to Paris. He had to send expensive cables and cipher to Florence about twice a week. But she worried him about his expenditure on wines, on fruit trees, on harness, on gates, on the account at his blacksmiths for work done to a new patent army stirrup that he was trying to invent. She could not see why he should bother to invent the new army stirrup, and she was really enraged when, after the invention was mature, he made a present to the war office of the designs and the patent rights. It was a remarkably good stirrup. I have told you, I think, that Edward spent a great deal of time, and about two hundred pounds, for lofties, on getting a poor girl, the daughter of one of his gardeners acquitted of a charge of murdering her baby. That was positively the last act of Edward's life. It came at a time when Nancy Rufford was on her way to India, when the most horrible gloom was over the household, when Edward himself was in an agony, and behaving as prettily as he knew how. Yet even then Leonora made him a terrible scene about this expenditure of time and trouble. She sort of had the vague idea that what had passed with the girl, and the rest of it, ought to have taught Edward a lesson, the lesson of economy. She threatened to take his banking account away from him again. I guess that made him cut his throat. He might have stuck it out otherwise, but the thought that he had lost Nancy in that, in addition, there was nothing left for him but a dreary, dreary succession of days in which he could be of no public service, while it finished him. It was during those years that Leonora tried to get up a love affair of her own with a fellow called Bayhem, a decent sort of fellow, a really nice man, but the affair was no sort of success. I have told you about it already. End of Part 4, Section 1 Section 16 of The Good Soldier A Tale of Passion This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer. Please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mike Venditti. The Good Soldier. A Tale of Passion by Ford Maddox Ford. Part 4, Chapter 2 Well, that about brings me up to date of my resaving in Waterbury the iconic cable from Edward to the effect that he wanted me to go to Branshaw and have a chat. I was pretty busy at the time, and I was half-minded to send him a reply cable to the effect that I would start in a fortnight. But I was having a long interview with old Mr. Hurlbirds attorneys, and immediately afterwards I had to have a long interview with the Mrs. Hurlbird. So I delayed cabling. I had expected to find the Mrs. Hurlbird, excessively old. In the nineties or thereabouts. The time passed so slowly that I had the impression that it must have been thirty years since I had been in the United States. It was only twelve years. Actually, Miss Hurlbird was just sixty-one, and Miss Florence Hurlbird, fifty-nine, and they were both mentally and physically as vigorous as could be desired. They were indeed more vigorous mentally than suited my purpose, which was to get away from the United States as quickly as I could. The Hurlbirds were an exceedingly united family, exceedingly united except. On one set of points, each of the three of them had a separate doctor whom they trusted implicitly, and each a separate attorney, and each of them distrusted the other's doctor and the other's attorney. And naturally the doctors and the attorneys warned one all the time against each other. You cannot imagine how complicated it all became for me. Of course I had an attorney of my own recommended to me by young Carter, my Philadelphia nephew. I do not mean to say that there was any unpleasantness of a grasping kind. The problem was quite another one, a moral dilemma. You see, old Mr. Hurlbird had left all his property to Florence with the mere request that she would have erected to him in the city of Waterbury, Illinois, a memorial that should take the form of some sort of institution for the relief of sufferers from the heart. Florence's money had all come to me, and with it, old Mr. Hurlbird's. He had died just five days before Florence. Well, I was quite ready to spend a round million dollars on the relief of sufferers from the heart. The old gentleman had left about a million and a half. Florence had been worth about eight hundred thousand, and as I figured it out I should cut up about a million myself. Anyhow, there was ample money, but I naturally wanted to consult the wishes of his surviving relatives, and then the trouble really began. You see, it had been discovered that Mr. Hurlbird had nothing whatever the matter with his heart. His lungs had been a little affected all through his life, and he had died of bronchitis. It struck Miss Florence Hurlbird that since her brother had died of lungs, and not the hardest money ought to go to lung patients, that she considered was what her brother would have wished. On the other hand, by a kink that I could not at the time understand, Miss Hurlbird insisted that I ought to keep the money all to myself. She said that she did not wish for any monuments to the Hurlbird family. At the time I thought that was because of a New England dislike for necrological ostentation. But I can figure out now, when I remember certain insistent and continued questions that she put to me about Edward Ashburnham, that there was another idea in her mind. And Leonora has told me that, on Florence's dressing table beside her dead body, there had lain a letter to Miss Hurlbird, a letter which Leonora posted without telling me. I don't know how Florence had time to write to her aunt, but I can quite understand that she would not like to go out of the world without making some comments. So I guess Florence had told Miss Hurlbird a good bit about Edward Ashburnham in a few scrawled words, and that that was why the old lady did not wish the name of Hurlbird perpetuated. Perhaps also she thought that I had earned the Hurlbird money. It meant a pretty tiny lot of discussing. What with the doctors warning each other about the bad effects of discussions on the health of the old ladies, and warning me covertly against each other, and saying that old Mr. Hurlbird might have died apart after all, in spite of the diagnosis of his doctor. And the solicitors all had separate methods of arranging about how the money should be invested and entrusted and bound. Personally I wanted to invest the money so that the interest could be used for the relief of sufferers from the heart. If old Mr. Hurlbird had not died of any defects in that organ, he had considered that it was defective. Moreover, Florence had certainly died of her heart, as I saw it. And when Miss Florence Hurlbird stood out that the money ought to go to chest sufferers, I was brought to thinking that there ought to be a chest institution too, and I advanced to something that I was ready to provide to a million and a half of dollars. That would have given seven hundred and fifty thousand to each class of invalid. I did not want money at all badly. All I wanted it for was to be able to give Nancy Ruford a good time. I did not know much about housekeeping expenses in England where I presumed she would wish to live. I knew that her needs at that time were limited to good chocolates, and a good horse or two, and simple pretty frocks. Probably she would want more than that later on, but even if I gave a million and a half dollars to those institutions, I should still have the equivalent of about twenty thousand a year English. And I considered that Nancy could have a pretty good time on that or less. Anyhow, we had a stiff set of arguments up at the Hurlbird mansion, which stands on a bluff over the town. It may strike you, silent listener, as being funny if you happen to be European, but moral problems of that description and the giving of millions to institutions are immensely serious matters in my country. Indeed, they are the staple topics for consideration amongst the wealthy classes. We haven't got peerage and social climbing to occupy as much, and decent people do not take interest in politics or elderly people in sport. So that there were real tears shed by Miss Hurlbird and Miss Florence before I left that city. I left it quite abruptly, four hours after Edward's telegram came another from Leonora, saying, Yes, do come. You could be so helpful. I simply told my attorney that there was the million and a half that he could invest it as you like, and that the purposes must be decided by the Mrs. Hurlbird. I was anyhow pretty well worn out by all the discussions, and, as I have never heard yet from the Mrs. Hurlbird, I rather think that Miss Hurlbird, either by revelations or by moral force, has persuaded Miss Florence that no memorial to their names shall be erected in the city of Waterbury, Connecticut. Miss Hurlbird wept dreadfully when she heard that I was going to stay with the Ashburnhams. But she did not make any comments. I was aware, at that date, that her niece had been seduced by that fellow Jimmy, before I had married her. But I can drive to produce on her the impression that I thought Florence had been a model wife. Why, at that date, I still believed that Florence had been perfectly virtuous after her marriage to me. I had not figured it out that she could have played it so low down as to continue her intrigue with that fellow under my roof. Well, I was a fool. But I did not think much about Florence at that date. My mind was occupied with what was happening at Branshaw. I had got it into my head that the telegrams had something to do with Nancy. It struck me that she might have shown signs of forming an attachment for some undesirable fellow. And that Leonore wanted me to come back and marry her, out of harm's way. That was what was pretty firmly in my mind. And it remained in my mind for nearly ten days after my arrival at that beautiful whole place. Neither Edward or Leonore made any motion to talk to me about anything other than the weather and the crops. Yet, although there were several young fellows about, I could not see that anyone in particular was distinguished by the girl's preference. She certainly appeared illish and nervous except when she woke up to talk gay nonsense to me. Oh, the pretty thing that she was. I imagined that what must have happened was that the undesirable young man had been forbidden to place and that Nancy was fretting a little. What had happened was just hell. Leonore had spoken to Nancy. Nancy had spoken to Edward. Edward had spoken to the Green Lenora. And they had talked and talked and talked. You have to imagine horrible pictures of gloom and half-lights and emotions running through silent nights, through whole nights. You have to imagine my beautiful Nancy appearing suddenly to Edward, rising up at the foot of his bed, with her long hair falling like a split cone of shadow in the glimmer of a nightlight that burned beside him. You have to imagine her as silent, a no-dark agonized figure like a specter suddenly offering herself to him to save his reason. And you have to imagine his frantic refusal and talk and talk. My God! And yet to me living in the house enveloped with the charm of the quiet and ordered living with the silent skilled servants who were laying out mind-dressed clothes was like a caress. To me who was hourly with them, they appeared like tender, ordered and devoted people, smiling, absenting themselves at the proper intervals, driving me to meets just good people. How the devil, how the devil do they do it? At dinner one evening Lenora said she had just opened a telegram. Nancy will be going to India tomorrow to be with her father. No one spoke. Nancy looked at her plate. Edward went on eating his pheasant. I felt very bad. I imagined that it would be up to me to propose to Nancy that evening. It appeared to me to be queer that they had not given me any warning of Nancy's departure. But I thought that that was only English manners, some sort of delicacy, that I had not got the hang of. You must remember that at that moment I trusted in Edward and Lenora and in Nancy Rufford and in the tranquility of ancient haunts of peace, as I had trusted in my mother's love. And that evening Edward spoke to me. What in the interval had happened had been this. Upon her return from Nallheim, Lenora had completely broken down. Because she knew she could trust Edward. That seems odd, but if you know anything about breakdowns, you will know that by the ingenious torments that fate prepares for us. These things come as soon as a strain having relaxed. There is nothing more to be done. It is after a husband's long illness and death that a widow goes to pieces. It is at the end of a long rowing contest that a crew collapses and lies forward upon its oars. And that was what happened to Lenora. From certain tones in Edward's voice, from the long steady stare that he had given her from his bloodshot eyes on rising from dinner table, in the Nallheim Hotel, she knew that in the affair of the poor girl, this was a case in which Edward's moral scruples or his social code or his idea that it would be playing it too low down, rendered Nancy perfectly safe. The girl, she felt sure, was in no danger at all from Edward. And in that she was perfectly right. The smash was to come from herself. She relaxed. She broke. She drifted. At first quickly, then with an increasing momentum, down the stream of destiny. You may put it that having been cut off from the restraints of her religion for the first time in her life, she acted along the lines of her instinctive desires. I do not know whether to think that in that she was no longer herself at having let loose the bonds for her standards, her conventions, and her traditions. She was being for the first time her own natural self. She was torn between her intense maternal love for the girl and an intense jealousy of the woman who realizes that the man she loves has met what appears to be the final passion of his life. She was divided between an intense disgust for Edward's weakness in conceiving this passion, an intense pity for the miseries that he was enduring, and a feeling equally intense, but one that she hid from herself, a feeling of respect for Edward's determination to keep himself in this particular affair unspotted. And the human heart is a very mysterious thing. It is impossible to say that Leon Nora, in acting as she did, was not filled with a sort of hatred of Edward's final virtue. She wanted, I think, to despise him. He was, she realized, gone from her for good. Then let him suffer, let him agonize, let him, if possible, break and go to that hell that is the abode of broken resolves. She might have taken a different line, it would have been so easy to send the girl away, to stay with some friends, to have taken her away herself upon some pretext or other. That would not have cured things, but it would have been the decent line. But at that date, poor Leon Nora was incapable of taking any line, whatever. She pitied Edward frightfully at one time, and then she acted along the lines of pity. She loathed him at another, and then she acted as her loathing dictated. She gasped as a person dying of tuberculosis gasps for air. She craved madly for communication with some other human soul. And the human soul that she selected was that of the girl. Perhaps Nancy was the only person that she could have talked to. With her necessity for reticences, with her coldness of manner, Leon Nora had singularly few intimates. She had none at all, with the exception of the Mrs. Colonel Weyland, who had advised her about the affair with La Dolce Quinta, and the one or two religious who had guided her through life. The Colonel's wife was at that time in Medaria. The religious, she now avoided. Her visitor's book had seven hundred names in it. There was not a soul that she could speak to. She was Mrs. Ashbraham of Branchon Telegraph. She was the great Mrs. Ashbraham of Branchon. And she lay all day upon her bed in her marvellous, light, airy bedroom, with the chintzes and the chippendeele, and the portraits of deceased Ashbraham's, by Sulfany and Zooker Hero. When there was a meet, she would struggle up, supposing it were within driving distance, and let Edward drive her and the girl to the crossroads, or the country house. She would drive herself back alone, Edward dried off with the girl. Ride, Leonora could not, that season. Her head was too bad. Each pace of her mare was an anguish. But she drove with efficiency and precision. She smiled at the gimmers and the folk-offs, and the headly sitans she threw with exactitude, pennies to the boys who opened gate for her. She sat upright on the seat of the high dog cart. She waved her hands to Edward and Nancy as they rode off with the hounds. And everyone could hear a clear high voice in the chilly weather, saying, Have a good time. Poor forlorn woman. There was, however, one spark of consolation. Cambered the fact that Rodney Bayham of Bayham followed her always with his eyes. It had been three years since she had tried to reportive love of her with him. Yet still, on the winter mornings he would ride up to her shafts, and just say, Good day. And look at her with eyes that were not imploring. But seem to say, You see, I am still, as the Germans say, A-D at disposition. It was a great consolation, not because she proposed ever to take him up again, but because it showed her that there was in the world one faithful soul in riding breeches. And it showed her that she was not losing her looks. And indeed, she was not losing her looks. She was forty. But she was as clean run as the day she had left the convent. As clear and outline, as clear-colored in the hair, as dark blue in the eyes. She thought that her looking-glass told her this. But there are always the doubts. Rodney Bayham's eyes took them away. It is very singular that Leonora should not have aged at all. I suppose that there are some types of beauty, and even of youth made for the embellishments that come with enduring sorrow. That is too elaborately put. I mean that Leonora, if everything had prospered, might have become too hard and maybe overbearing. As it was, she was tuned down to appearing efficient. And yet sympathetic. That is the rarest of all blends. And yet I swear that Leonora, in her restrained way, gave the impression of being intensely sympathetic. When she listened to you, she appeared also to be listening to some sound that was going on in a distance. But still, she listened to you and took in what you said. Which, since the record of humanity is a record of sorrows, was, as a rule, something sad. I think that she must have taken Nancy through many terrors of the night and many bad places of the day. And that would account for the girl's passionate love for the elder woman. For Nancy's love for Leonora was an admiration that is awakened in Catholics, by their feeling for the Virgin Mary and for various of the saints. It is too little say that the girl would have laid her life at Leonora's feet. Well, she laid there the offer of her virtue and her reason. Those were sufficient installments of her life. It would, to-day, be much better from Nancy Rufford if she were dead. Perhaps all these reflections are nuisance. But they crowd on me. I will try to tell the story. You see, when she came back from Newham, Leonora began to have her headaches, headaches lasting through whole days, during which she could speak no word and could bear to hear no sound. And day after day, Nancy would sit with her, silent and motionless for hours, steeping hackerships and vinegar and water, and thinking her own thoughts. It must have been very bad for her and her meals alone with Edward must have been bad for her, too. Beastly bad for Edward. Edward, of course, wavered in his demeanor. What else could he do? At times he would sit silent and dejected over his untouched food. He would utter nothing but monosyllables. When Nancy spoke to him, then he was simply afraid of the girl falling in love with him. At other times he would take a little wine, pull himself together, attempt to shaft Nancy about a stick and find her hedge that her mare had checked at, or talk about the habits of the Chetrolis. That was when he was thinking that it was rough on the poor girl that he should have become a dull companion. He realized that his talking to her in the park at Neyheim had done her no harm. But all that was doing a great deal of harm to Nancy. It gradually opened her eyes to the fact that Edward was a man with his ups and downs, and not an invariably gay uncle like a nice dog, a trustworthy horse or a girlfriend. She would find him in attitudes of frightful dejection, sunk into his armchair in the study that was half a gun room. She would notice through the open door that his face was the face of an old, dead man, when he had no one to talk to. Gradually it forced itself upon her attention that there were profound differences between the pair that she regarded as her uncle and her aunt. It was a conviction that came very slowly. It began with Edwards giving an oldish horse to a young fellow called Selms. Selma's father had been ruined by a fraudulent solicitor, and the Selms family had to sell their hunters. It was a case that had excited a good deal of sympathy in that part of the county. And Edward, meeting the young man one day, unmounted, and seeing him to be very unhappy, had offered to give him an old Irish cob upon which he was riding. It was a silly sort of thing to do really. The horse was worth from thirty to forty pounds, and Edward might have known that the gift would upset his wife. But Edward just had to comfort that unhappy young man, whose father he had known all his life. And it made it all the worse that young Selms could not afford to keep the horse even. Edward recollected this immediately after he had made the offer, and said quickly, Of course, I mean that you should stable the horse at Barnshaw until you have time to turn round or want to sell him and get it better. Nancy went straight home and told all this to Leonora, who was lying down. She regarded it as a splendid instance of Edward's quick consideration for the feelings and the circumstances of the distressed. She thought it would cheer Leonora up, because it ought to cheer any woman up to know that she had such a splendid husband. That was the last girlish thought she ever had. For Leonora, whose headache had left her collected but miserably weak, turned upon her bed and uttered words that were amazing to the girl. I wished to God, she said, that he was your husband, and not mine. We shall be ruined. We shall be ruined. I am I never to have a chance. And suddenly Leonora burst into a passion of tears. She pushed herself up from the pillows with an elbow, and sat there, crying, crying, crying, with her face hidden in her hands and the tears falling through her fingers. The girl flushed, stammered, and whimpered, as if she had been personally insulted. But if Uncle Edward, she began, that man, said Leonora, with an extraordinary bitterness, would give the shirt off his back and off mine and off yours to any. She could not finish the sentence. At that moment she had been feeling an extraordinary hatred and contempt for her husband. All the morning and all the afternoon, she had been lying there thinking that Edward and the girl were together, in the field and hacking at home at dusk. She had been digging her sharp nails into her palms. The house had been very silent in the drooping winter weather. Then, after an eternity of torture, there had invaded it the sound of opening doors. The girls gave voice, saying, well, it was only under the mistletoe. And there was Edward's gruff undertone, then Nancy had come in, with feet that had hastened up the stairs and had that tiptoed, as they approached the open door of Leonora's room. Brancha had a great big hall with oak floors and tiger skins. Round this hall there ran a gallery, upon which Leonora's doorway gave. And even when she had the worst of her headaches, she liked to have her door open. I suppose so that she might hear the approaching footsteps of ruin and disaster. At any rate, she hated to be in a room with a shut door. At that moment, Leonora hated Edward with a hatred that was like hell. And she would have liked to bring her running whip down across the girl's face. What right had Nancy to be young and slender and dark, gay at times, at times mournful? What right had she to be exactly the woman to make Leonora's husband happy? For Leonora knew that Nancy would have made Edward happy. Yes, Leonora wished to bring her running whip down on Nancy's young face. She imagined a pleasure she would feel when the lash fell across those queer features, the plea she would feel at drawing the handle at the same moment toward her, so as to cut deep into the flesh to leave a lasting will. Well, she left a lasting will. And her words cut deeply into the girl's mind. They neither of them spoke about that again. A fortnight went by, a fortnight of deep rains, of heavy fields, of bad scent. Leonora's headaches seemed to have gone for good. She hunted once or twice, letting herself be piloted by Byram whilst Edward looked after the girl. Then one evening, when those three were dining alone, Edward said in the queer deliberate heavy tones that came out of him in those days, he was looking at the table. I have been thinking that Nancy ought to do more for her father. He is getting an old man, I've written to Colonel Rufford, suggesting that she should go to him. Leonora called out, How dare you! How dare you! The girl put her hand over her heart and cried out, Oh, my sweet savior, help me! That was the queer way she thought within her mind, and the words forced themselves to her lips. Edward said nothing, and that night by a merciless trick of the devil that pays attention to this sweltering hell of ours. Nancy Rufford had a letter from her mother. It came whilst Leonora was talking to Edward, Leonora would have intercepted as she had intercepted others. It was an amazing and horrible letter. I don't know what it contained, I just average out from its effects on Nancy that her mother, having a looked with some worthless sort of fellow, had done what is called sinking lower and lower. Whether she was actually on the street side, I do not know, but I rather think that she eked out a small allowance that she had from her husband by the means of livelihood. And I think that she stated as much in her letter to Nancy and upgraded the girl for living in luxury while her mother starved. And it must have been horrible and tone for Mrs. Rufford. It was a cruel sort of woman, at the best of times. It must have seemed to that poor girl opening her letter for distraction from another grief by in her bedroom, like the laughter of a devil. I just cannot bear to think of my poor, dear girl of that moment. And at the same time Leonora was lashing like a cold fiend into the unfortunate Edward, or perhaps he was not so unfortunate because he had done what he knew to be the right thing. He may be deemed happy. I leave it to you. At any rate he was sitting in his deep chair and Leonora came into his room for the first time in nine years. She said, This is the most atrocious thing you have done in your atrocious life. He never moved and he never looked at her. God knows what was in Leonora's mind exactly. I like to think that uppermost in it was concern and horror at the thought of the poor girls going back to a father whose voice made her shriek in the night. And indeed that motive was very strong with Leonora. But I think there was also present the thought that she wanted to go on torturing Edward with the girl's presence. She was, at the time, capable of that. Edward was sunk in his chair. There were in the room two candles, hidden by green glass shades. The green shades were reflected in the glasses of the bookcase. They contained not books, but guns, with gleaming brown barrels and fishing rods and green bays over covers. There was dimly to be seen above the metal place, encumbered with spurs, hooves, and bronze models of horses, a dark brown picture of a white horse. If you think, Leonora said, that I do not know that you are in love with the girl. She began spiritedly, but she could not find any ending for the sentence. Edward did not stir. He never spoke. And then Leonora said, if you want me to divorce you, I will. You can marry her. She is in love with you. He groaned at that a little. Leonora said. Then she went away. Heaven knows what happened in Leonora after that. She certainly does not herself know. She probably has said a good deal more to Edward than I have been able to report. But that is all that she has told me and I am not going to make up speeches. To follow her psychological development of that moment, I think we must allow that she upgraded him for a great deal of their past life, whilst Edward said absolutely silent. And indeed, in speaking of it afterwards, she has said several times, I said a great deal more to him than I wanted to, just because he was so silent. She talked, in fact, in the endeavor to sting him into speech. She must have said so much that, with the expression of her grievance, her mood changed. She went back to her own room, in the gallery, and sat there for a long time thinking. And she thought herself into a mood of absolute unselfishness, of absolute self-contempt too. She said to herself that she was no good, that she had failed in all her efforts, and her efforts to get Edward back as in her efforts to make him curve his expenditure. She imagined herself to be exhausted. She imagined herself to be done. Then a great fear came over. She thought that Edward, after what she had said to him, must have committed suicide. She went out onto the gallery and listened. There was no sound in the house except the regular beat of the great clock in the hall. But even in her debased condition she was not the person to hang about. She acted. She went straight to Edward's room, opened the door, and looked in. He was oiling the breech action of a gun. It was an unusual thing for him to do. At that time of night, in his evening clothes, it never occurred to her, nevertheless, that he was going to shoot himself with the implement. She knew that he was doing it just for occupation, to keep himself from thinking. He looked up when she opened the door, his face illuminated by the light cast upwards from the round orifice in the green candle shades. She said, I don't imagine that I should find Nancy here. She thought that she owed that to him. He answered then, I don't imagine that you did imagine it. Those were the only words he spoke that night. She went like a lame duck back through the long corridors. She stumbled over the familiar tiger skins in the dark hall. She could hardly drag one limb after the other. In the gallery she perceived that Nancy's door was half open, and that there was light in the girl's room, a sudden madness possessed her, a desire for action, a thirst for self-explanation. The rooms all gave on to the gallery, Leonora's to the east, the girl's next, then Edward's, the sight of those three open doors side by side, gaping to receive whom the chances of the Black Knight might ring. Maid Leonora shut her all over her body. She went into Nancy's room. The girl was sitting perfectly still, in an armchair, very upright, as she had been taught to sit at the convent. She appeared to be as calm as a church. Her hair felt black and like a ball. Down over both her shoulders, the fire beside her was burning brightly. She must have just put the coals on. She was in a white silk kimono that covered her to her feet. The clothes that she had taken off were exactly folded upon the proper seats. Her long hands were one upon each arm, the chair, that had a pink and white chins back. Leonora told me these things. She seemed to think it extraordinary that the girl could have done such orderly things as fold up the clothes she had taken off upon such a night, when Edward had announced that he was going to send her to her father, and when, from her mother, she had received that letter. The letter and its envelope was in her right hand. Leonora did not at first perceive it. She said, What are you doing so late? The girl answered, just thinking. They seemed to think in whispers and speak below the breath. Then Leonora's eyes fell on the envelope and she recognized Mrs. Rufford's handwriting. It was one of those moments when thinking was impossible, Leonora said. It was as if stones were being thrown at her from every direction, and she could only run. She heard herself explain, Edward's dying because of you. He's dying. He's worth more than either of us. The girl looked past her at the panels of the half-closed door. I'm poor father, she said. My poor father. You must stay here, Leonora answered fiercely. You must stay here. I tell you, you must stay here. Going to Glasgow, Nancy answered. I shall go to Glasgow tomorrow morning. My mother is in Glasgow. It appears that it was in Glasgow that Mrs. Rufford pursued her disordering life. She had selected that city, not because it was more profitable, but because it was the natal home of her husband, to whom she desired to cause as much pain as possible. You must stay here, Leonora began, to say, Edward, he's dying for love of you. The girl turned her calm eyes upon Leonora. I know what she said, and I am dying for love of him. Leonora uttered an ah, that in spite of herself, was an ah of horror and of grief. That is why the girl continued, I am going to Glasgow to take my mother away from there. She added to the ends of the earth, for if the last month had made her nature that of a woman, her phrases were still romantically those of a school girl. It was as if she had grown up so quickly, that there had not been time to put her hair up. But she added, we're no good, my mother and I. Leonora said with her fierce calmness, no, no, you're not no good. It's that I'm no good. You can't let that man go on to ruin for one of you. You must belong to him. The girl, she said, smiled at her with a queer, faraway smile, as if she were a thousand years old, as if Leonora were a tiny child. I knew you would come to that, she said very slowly. But we are not worth it. Edward and I. End of Part 4, Chapter 2. Section 17 of The Good Soldier. A Tale of Passion. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by James O'Connor. The Good Soldier. A Tale of Passion. By Ford Maddox Ford. Part 4, Chapter 3. Nancy had, in fact, been thinking ever since Leonora had made that comment over the giving of the horse to young Selms. She had been thinking and thinking, because she had had to sit for many days silent beside her aunt's bed. She had always thought of Leonora as her aunt, and she had had to sit thinking during many silent meals with Edward. And then, at times, with his bloodshot eyes increased heavy mouth, he would smile at her. And gradually the knowledge had come to her that Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Several things contributed to form and to harden this conviction. She was allowed to read the papers in those days. Or rather, since Leonora was always on her bed and Edward breakfasted alone and went out early over the estate, she was left alone with the papers. One day, in the papers, she saw the portrait of a woman she knew very well. Beneath it, she read the words, The Honorable Mrs. Brand, plaintiff in the Remarkable Divorce Case, reported on page 8. Nancy hardly knew what a divorce case was. She had been so remarkably well brought up, and Roman Catholics do not practice divorce. I don't know how Leonora had done it exactly. I suppose she had always impressed it on Nancy's mind that nice women did not read these things. That would have been enough to make Nancy skip those pages. She readily rate the account of the brand divorce case, principally because she wanted to tell Leonora about it. She imagined that Leonora, when her headache left her, would like to know what was happening to Mrs. Brand, who lived at Christchurch and whom they both liked very well. The case occupied three days, and the report that Nancy first came upon was that of the third day. Edward, however, kept the papers of the week, after his methodical fashion, in a rack in his gun wound, and when she had finished her breakfast, Nancy went to that quiet apartment and had what she would have called a good read. It seemed to her to be a queer affair. She could not understand why one council should be so anxious to know all about the movements of Mr. Brand upon a certain day. She could not understand why a child of the bedroom accommodation at Christchurch old hall should be produced in court. She did not even see why they should want to know that upon a certain occasion the drawing-room door was locked. It made her laugh. It appeared to be all so senseless that grown people should occupy themselves with such matters. It struck her, nevertheless, as odd that one of the councils should cross-question Mr. Brand so insistently and so impertently as to his feelings for Ms. Lupton. Nancy knew Ms. Lupton of Ringwood very well, a jolly girl, who rode a horse with two white vetlocks. Mr. Brand persisted that he did not love Ms. Lupton. Well, of course he did not love Ms. Lupton. He was a married man. You might as well think of Uncle Edward Loving, loving anybody but Lenora. When people were married there was an end of loving. There were, no doubt, people who misbehaved. But they were poor people, for people not like those she knew. So these matters presented themselves to Nancy's mind. But later on, in the case, she found that Mr. Brand had to confess to a guilty intimacy with someone or another. Nancy imagined that he must have been telling someone his wife's secrets. She could not understand why that was a serious offense. Of course it was not very gentlemanly. It lessened her opinion of Mrs. Brand. But since she found that Mrs. Brand had condoned that offense, she imagined that they could not have been very serious secrets that Mr. Brand had told. And then suddenly it was forced on her conviction that Mr. Brand, the mild Mr. Brand that she had seen a month or two before their departure to Nauheim, playing blind man's bluff with his children, and kissing his wife when he caught her, Mr. Brand and Mrs. Brand had been on the worst possible terms. That was incredible. Yet there it was in black and white. Mr. Brand drank. Mr. Brand had struck Mrs. Brand to the ground when he was drunk. Mr. Brand was adjudged in two or three abrupt words at the end of columns and columns of paper to have been guilty of cruelty to his wife and to have committed adultery with Miss Lupton. The last words conveyed nothing to Nancy, nothing real, that is to say. She knew that one was commanded not to commit adultery, but why she thought should one? It was probably something like catching salmon out of season, a thing one did not do. She gathered it had something to do with kissing or holding someone in your arms. And yet the whole effect of that reading upon Nancy was mysterious, terrifying, and evil. She felt a sickness, a sickness that grew as she read. Her heart beat painfully. She began to cry. She asked God how he could permit such things to be. And she was more certain that Edward did not love Lenora, and that Lenora hated Edward. Perhaps then Edward loved someone else. It was unthinkable. If he could love someone else than Lenora, her fierce unknown heart suddenly spoke in her side. Why could it not be herself? And he did not love her. This had occurred about a month before she got the letter from her mother. She let the matter rest until the sick feeling went off. It did that in a day or two. Then, finding that Lenora's headaches had gone, she suddenly told Lenora that Mrs. Brand had divorced her husband. She asked what exactly it all meant. Lenora was lying on the sofa in the hall. She was feeling so weak that she could hardly find the words. She answered, just. It means that Mr. Brand will be able to marry again. Nancy said, but, but, and then he will be able to marry Miss Lupton. Lenora just moved a hand in a scent. Her eyes were shut. Then Nancy began. Her blue eyes were full of horror. Her brows were tight above them. The lines of pain about her mouth were very distinct. In her eyes, the whole of that familiar great hall had a changed aspect. The end irons with the brass flowers at the ends appeared unreal. The burning logs were just logs that were burning, and not the comfortable symbols of an indestructible mode of life. The flame flooded before the high fireback. The Saint Bernard sighed in his sleep. Outside the winter rain fell and fell. And suddenly she thought that Edwin might marry someone else, and she nearly screamed. Lenora opened her eyes. Lying sideways with her face upon the black and gold pillow of the sofa that was drawn half across the great fireplace. I thought, Nancy said, I never imagined. Aren't marriages sacraments? Aren't they indissoluble? I thought you were married, and she was sobbing. I thought you were married or not married as you are alive or dead. That, Lenora said, is the law of the Church. It is not the law of the land. Oh yes, Nancy said, the brands of Protestants. She felt a sudden safeness to send upon her, and for an hour or so her mind was at rest. It seemed to her idiotic not to have remembered Henry VIII and the basis upon which Protestantism rests. She almost laughed at herself. The long afternoon wore on. The flame still flooded when the maid made up the fire. The Saint Bernard awoke and lobbed away towards the kitchen. And then Lenora opened her eyes and said almost coldly, And you? Don't you think you will get married? It was so unlike Lenora that for the moment the girl was frightened in the dusk. But then again it seemed a perfectly reasonable question. I don't know, she answered. I don't know that anyone wants to marry me. Several people want to marry you, Lenora said. But I don't want to marry, Nancy answered. I should like to go on living with you and Edward. I don't think I am in the way, or that I am really an expense. If I went you would have to have a companion, or perhaps I ought to earn my living. I wasn't thinking of that, Lenora answered in the same dull tone. You will have money enough from your father. But most people want to be married. I believe that she then asked the girl if she would not like to marry me. And that Nancy answered that she would marry me if she were told to. But that she wanted to go on living there. She added, If I married anyone, I should want him to be like Edward. She was frightened out of her life. Lenora writhed on her couch and called out, Oh God! Nancy ran for the maid, for tablets of aspirin, for wet handkerchiefs. It never occurred to her that Lenora's expression of agony was for anything else than physical pain. You ought to remember that all this happened a month before Lenora went into the girl's room at night. I have been casting back again, but I cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these people going. I tell you about Lenora and bring her up to date, then about Edward who has fallen behind. And then the girl gets hopelessly left behind. I wish I could put it down in diary form. Thus on the first of September they returned from Nauheim. Lenora at once took to her bed. By the first of October they were all going to meet together. Nancy had already observed very fully that Edward was strange in his manner. About the sixth of that month Edward gave the horse to young Selms. And Nancy had caused to believe that her aunt did not love her uncle. On the 20th she read the account of the divorce case, which is reported in the papers of the 18th and the two following days. On the 23rd she had the conversation with her aunt in the hall about marriage in general and about her own possible marriage. Her aunts coming to her bedroom did not occur until the 12th of November. Thus she had three weeks for introspection, but introspection beneath gloomy skies in that old house, rinded darker by the fact that it lay in a hollow crown by fir trees with their black shadows. It was not a good situation for a girl. She began thinking about love. She who had never before considered it as anything other than a rather humorous, rather nonsensical matter. She remembered chanced passages in chanced books, things that had not really affected her at all at the time. She remembered someone's love for the Princess Badrubador. She remembered to have heard that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering up of the vitals, though she did not know what the vitals were. She had a vague recollection that love was said to render a hopeless lover's eyes hopeless. She remembered a character in a book who was said to have taken to drink through love. She remembered that lover's existences were said to be punctuated with heavy size. Once she went to the little cottage piano that was in the corner of the hall and began to play. It was a tinkly, reedy instrument, but none of that household had any turn for music. Nancy herself could play a few simple songs, and she found herself playing. She had been sitting on the window seat looking out on the fading day. Lenora had gone to pay some calls. Edward was looking after some planting up in the new spiny. Thus she found herself playing on the old piano. She did not know how she came to be doing it. A silly, lilting, wavering tune came from before her in the dusk, a tune in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and melted into minor sounds as beneath a bridge. The highlights on dark water's melt and waver and disappear into black depths. Well, it was a silly old tune. It goes with the words, they are about a willow tree, I think. Thou art to all loss loves the best, the only true plant found. That sort of thing, it is Herrick, I believe, and the music with the reedy, irregular, lilting sound that goes with Herrick. And it was dusk. The heavy, hewn, dark pillars that supported the gallery were like morning presences. The fire had sunk to nothing, a mere glow amongst white ashes. It was a sentimental sort of place and light and hour. And suddenly Nancy found that she was crying. She was crying quietly. She went on to cry with long convulsive sobs. It seemed to her that everything gay, everything charming, all light, all sweetness had gone out of life. Unhappiness, unhappiness, unhappiness was all around her. She seemed to know no happy being, and she herself was agonizing. She remembered that Edward's eyes were hopeless. She was certain that he was drinking too much. At times he sighed deeply. He appeared as a man who was burning with inward flame, drying up the soul with thirst, withering up in the vitals. Then the torturing conviction came to her, the conviction that had visited her again and again, that Edward must love someone other than Lenora. With her little pedagogic sectarianism she remembered that Catholics do not do this thing. But Edward was a Protestant. Then Edward loved somebody. And after that thought her eyes grew hopeless. She sighed as the old Saint Bernard Beside did. At meal she would feel an intolerable desire to drink a glass of wine, and then another, and then a third. Then she would find herself grow gay. But in half an hour the gayity went. She felt like a person who was burning up with an inward flame, desiccating at the soul with thirst, withering up in the vitals. One evening she went into Edward's gun-room. He had gone to a meeting of the National Reserve Committee. On the table beside his chair was a decanter of whiskey. She poured out a wine glass full and drank it off. Flame then really seemed to fill her body. Her legs swelled. Her face grew feverish. She dragged her tall height up to her room and lay in the dark. The bed reeled beneath her. She gave way to the thought that she was in Edward's arms, that he was kissing her on her face that burned, on her shoulders that burned, and on her neck that was on fire. She never touched alcohol again. Not once after that did she have such thoughts. They died out of her mind. They left only a feeling of shame so insupportable that her brain could not take it in, and they vanished. She imagined that her anguish at the thought of Edward's love for another person was solely sympathy for Lenora. She determined that the rest of her life must be spent in acting as Lenora's handmaiden. Sweeping, tending, embroidering, like some Deborah, some medieval saint. I am not, unfortunately, up in the Catholic hagiology, but I know that she pictured herself as some personage with a depressed, earnest face and tightly closed lips in a clear white room, watering flowers or tending an embroidery frame. Or she desired to go with Edward to Africa and to throw herself in the path of a charging lion so that Edward might be saved for Lenora at the cost of her life. Well, along with her sad thoughts, she had her childish ones. She knew nothing, nothing of life, except that one must live sadly. That she now knew. What happened to her on the night when she received at once the blow that Edward wished her to go to her father in India, and the blow of the letter from her mother was this. She called first upon her sweet savior, and she thought of our Lord as her sweet savior, that he might make it impossible that she should go to India. Then she realized from Edward's demeanor that he was determined that she should go to India. It must then be right that she should go. Edward was always right in his determinations. He was the Sid. He was the Lowengrind. He was the Chevalier Bayard. Nevertheless, her mind mutinied and revolted. She could not leave that house. She imagined that he wished her gone that she might not witness his amours with another girl. Well, she was prepared to tell him that she was ready to witness his amours with another young girl. She would stay there to comfort Lenora. Then came the desperate shock of the letter from her mother. Her mother said, I believe, something like, You have no right to go on living your life of prosperity and respect. You ought to be on the streets with me. How do you know that you are even Colonel Rutherford's daughter? She did not know what these words meant. She thought of her mother as sleeping beneath the arches whilst the snow fell. That was the impression conveyed to her mind by the words on the streets. A platonic sense of duty gave her the idea that she ought to go to comfort her mother, the mother that bore her, though she hardly knew what the words meant. At the same time she knew that her mother had left her father with another man. Therefore she pitied her father and thought it terrible in herself that she trembled at the sound of her father's voice. If her mother was that sort of woman, it was natural that her father should have had accesses of madness in which he had struck herself to the ground. And the voice of her conscience said to her that her first duty was to her parents. It was in accord with this awakened sense of duty that she undressed with great care and meticulously folded the clothes that she took off. Sometimes, but not very often, she threw them helter-skelter about the room. And that sense of duty was her prevailing mood when Lenora, tall, clean-run, golden-haired, all in black, appeared in a doorway and told her that Edward was dying of love for her. She knew then with her conscious mind what she had known within herself for months that Edward was dying, actually and physically dying of love for her. It seemed to her that for one shot moment her spirit could say, NOMINATE NUMT DEMETIS, Lord, now let us thou thy servant depart in peace. She imagined that she could cheerfully go away to Glasgow and rescue her fallen mother. End of Part 4 Chapter 3 Recording by James O'Connor Randolph, Massachusetts November 2009 Section 18 of The Good Soldier A Tale of Passion This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by James O'Connor The Good Soldier A Tale of Passion by Ford Maddox Ford Part 4 Chapter 4 And it seemed to her to be in tune with the mood, with the hour and with the woman in front of her, to say that she knew Edward was dying of love for her, and that she was dying of love for Edward. For that fact had suddenly slipped into place and become real for her as the niched marker on a whisk-tablet slips round with the pressure of your thumb. That rubber at least was made. And suddenly Lenora seemed to have become different, and she seemed to have become different in her attitude towards Lenora. It was as if she, in her frail, white, silken kimono, sat beside her fire, but upon a throne. It was as if Lenora, in her close dress of black lace, with the gleaming white shoulders, and the coiled yellow hair that the girl had always considered the most beautiful thing in the world. It was as if Lenora had become pinched, shriveled, blue with cold, shivering, supplyant. Yet Lenora was commanding her. It was no good commanding her. She was going on the morrow to her mother, who was in Glasgow. Lenora went on saying that she must stay there to save Edward, who was dying of love for her, and, proud and happy in the thought that Edward loved her, and that she loved him, she did not even listen to what Lenora said. It appeared to her that it was Lenora's business to save her husband's body. She, Nancy, possessed his soul. A precious thing that she would shield and bear away up in her arms, as if Lenora were a hungry dog, trying to spring up at a lamb that she was carrying. Yes, she felt as if Edward's love were a precious lamb, that she were bearing away from a cruel and predatory beast. For at that time Lenora appeared to her as a cruel and predatory beast. Lenora, Lenora with her hunger, with her cruelty, had driven Edward to madness. He must be sheltered by his love for her, and by her love. Her love from a great distance and unspoken, enveloping him, surrounding him, upholding him, by her voice speaking from Glasgow, saying that she loved, that she adored, that she passed no moment without longing, loving, quivering at the thought of him. Lenora said loudly, insistently, with a bitterly imperative tone, You must stay here. You must belong to Edward. I will divorce him. The girl answered, The church does not allow divorce. I cannot belong to your husband. I am going to Glasgow to rescue my mother. The half-open door opened noiselessly to the full. Edward was there. His devouring doomed eyes were fixed on the girl's face. His shoulders slouched forward. He was undoubtedly half-drunk, and he had the whiskey to canter in one hand, a slanting candlestick in the other. He said with a heavy ferocity to Nancy. I forbid you to talk about these things. You ought to stay here until I hear from your father. Then you will go to your father. The two women looking at each other, like beasts about to spring, hardly gave a glance to him. He leaned against the doorpost. He said again, Nancy, I forbid you to talk about these things. I am the master of this house. And at the sound of his voice, heavy mail coming from a deep chest, in the night with the blackness behind him, Nancy felt as if her spirit bowed before him with folded hands. She felt that she would go to India, and that she desired never again to talk of these things. Lenora said, You see that it is your duty to belong to him. He must not be allowed to go on drinking. Nancy did not answer. Edward was gone. They heard him slipping and shambling on the polished oak of the stairs. Nancy screamed when they came the sound of a heavy ball. Lenora said again, You see. The sounds went on from the hall below. The light of the candle Edward held flickered up between the handrails of the gallery. Then they heard his voice. Give me Glasgow. Glasgow in Scotland. I want the number of a man called White of Simrock Park, Glasgow. Edward White, Simrock Park, Glasgow. Ten minutes at this time of night. His voice was quite level, normal and patient. Alcohol took him in the legs, not the speech. I can wait. His voice came again. Yes, I know they have a number. I have been in communication with them before. He is going to telephone to your mother, Lenora said. He will make it all right for her. She got up and closed the door. She came back to the fire and added bitterly. He can always make it all right for everybody except me, accepting me. The girl said nothing. She sat there in a blissful dream. She seemed to see her lover sitting as he always sat in a round back chair in the dock hall, sitting low with the receiver at his ear, talking in a gentle, slow voice that he reserved for the telephone, and saving the world and her in the black darkness. She moved her hand over the bareness of the base of her throat to have the warmth of flesh upon it and upon her bosom. She said nothing. Lenora went on talking. God knows what Lenora said. She repeated that the girl must belong to her husband. She said that she used that phrase because, though she might have a divorce, or even a dissolution of the marriage by the church, it would still be adultery that the girl and Edward would be committing. But she said that that was necessary. It was the price that the girl must pay for the sin of having made Edward love her, for the sin of loving her husband. She talked on and on beside the fire. The girl must become an adulteress. She had wronged Edward by being so beautiful, so gracious, so good. It was sinful to be so good. She must pay the price so as to save the man she had wronged. In between her pauses the girl could hear the voice of Edward, droning on indistinguishably, with jerky pauses for replies. It made her glow with pride. The man she loved was working for her. He, at least, was resolved, was malely determined, knew the right thing. Lenora talked on with her eyes boring into Nancy's. The girl hardly looked at her and hardly heard her. After a long time Nancy said, after hours and hours, I shall go to India as soon as Edward hears from my father. I cannot talk about these things, because Edward does not wish it. At that Lenora screamed out and wavered swiftly towards the closed door. And Nancy found that she was springing out of her chair with her white arms stretched wide. She was clasping the other woman to her breast. She was saying, Oh, my poor dear! Oh, my poor dear! And they sat crouching together in each other's arms, and crying and crying. And they lay down in the same bed, talking and talking, all through the night. And all through the night Edward could hear their voices through the wall. That was how it went. Next morning they were all three as if nothing had happened. Towards eleven Edward came to Nancy, who was arranging some Christmas roses in a silver bowl. He put a telegram beside her on the table. You can uncode it for yourself, he said. Then, as he went out of the door, he said, You can tell your aunt I have cabled to Mr. Dowell to come over. He will make things easy until you leave. The telegram, when it was uncoded, read as far as I can remember. We'll take Mrs. Rutherford to Italy, undertake to do this for certain, and devotedly attach to Mrs. Rutherford. Have no need of financial assistance. Did not know there was a daughter. And am much obliged to you for pointing out my duty. White. It was something like that. Then the household resumed its wanted course of days until my arrival. End of Part 4, Chapter 4, Recording by James O'Connor, Randolph, Massachusetts, November 2009. Section 19 of The Good Soldier, A Tale of Passion This is a LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Greg Higgins, The Good Soldier, A Tale of Passion by Ford Maddox Ford, Part 4, Section 5. It is this part of the story that makes me saddest of all. For I ask myself unceasingly, my mind going round and round in a worried, baffled space of pain. What should these people have done? What in the name of God should they have done? The end was perfectly plain to each of them. It was perfectly manifest at that stage that the girl did not, in Lenora's phrase, belong to Edward. Edward must die. The girl must lose her reason because Edward died, and that after a time, Leonora, who is the coldest and the strongest of its three, would console herself by marrying Rodney Bayhem and have a quiet, comfortable good time. That end, on that night, whilst Lenora sat in the girl's bedroom and Edward telephoned down below, that end was plainly manifest. The girl plainly was half mad already. Edward was half dead. Only Leonora, active, persistent, instinct with her cold passion of energy was doing things. What then should they have done? It worked out in the extinction of two very splendid personalities. For Edward and the girl were splendid personalities. In order that a third personality, more normals should have, after a long period of trouble, a quiet, comfortable good time. I am writing this now, I should say, a full eighteen months after the words that end my last chapter. Since writing the words until my arrival, which I see in that paragraph, I have seen again for a glimpse from a swift train, bokehre with the beautiful white tower, terra stone with a white square castle, the great Rhon, the immense stretches of the crowd. I have rushed through all Provence, and all Provence no longer matters. It is no longer in the olive hills that I shall find my heaven, because there is only hell. Edward is dead. The girl is gone. Oh, utterly gone. Leonora is having her good time with Rodney Bayam, and I sit alone in Branshaw Telleraw. I have been through Provence. I have seen Africa. I have visited Asia to see, and Ceylon, in a darkened room, my poor girl sitting motionless, with her wonderful hair about her, looking at me with eyes that did not see and sang distinctly. Credo in unum deum omni puntintum. Credo in unum deum omni puntintum. Those are the only reasonable words she uttered. Those are the only words that appears that she ever will utter. I suppose they are reasonable words, and must be extra ordinarily reasonable for her, if she can say that she believes in an omnipotent deity. Well, there it is. I am very tired of it all. For I dare say, all this may sound romantic, but it is tiring, tiring, tiring to have been in the midst of it, to have taken the tickets, to have caught the trains, to have chosen the cabins, to have consulted the purser and the stewards as to die for the quiescent patient who did nothing but announce her belief in an omnipotent deity. That may sound romantic, but it is just a record of fatigue. I don't know why I should always be selected to be serviceable. I don't resent it. But I've never been the least good. Florence selected me for her own purposes, and I was no good to her. Edward called me to come and have a chat with him, and I couldn't stop him cutting his throat. Then one day, eighteen months ago, I was quietly writing in my room at Branshaw, when Leonora came to me with a letter. It was a very pathetic letter from Colonel Ruford about Nancy. Colonel Ruford had left the army, and had taken up an appointment at a tea planting estate in Ceylon. His letter was pathetic because it was so brief, so inarticulate, and so businesslike. He had gone down to the boat to meet his daughter, and had found his daughter quite mad. It appears that at Aden Nancy had seen in a local paper the news of Edward's suicide. In the Red Sea she had gone mad. She had remarked to Mrs. Colonel Luton, who was chaperoning her, that she believed in an omnipotent deity. She hadn't made any fuss. Her eyes were quite dry and glassy. Even when she was mad, Nancy could behave herself. Colonel Ruford said the doctor did not anticipate that there was any chance of his child's recovery. It was nevertheless possible that if she could meet someone from Branshaw, it might soothe her, and it might have a good effect. And he just simply wrote to Leonora, please come and see if you can do it. I assumed to have lost all sense of the pathetic, but still that simple, enormous request of the old Colonel strikes me as pathetic. He was cursed by his atrocious temper. He had been cursed by a half-mad wife who drank and went on the streets. His daughter was totally mad, and yet he believed in the goodness of human nature. He believed that Leonora would take the trouble to go all the way to Salon in order to soothe his daughter. Leonora wouldn't. Leonora didn't ever want to see Nancy again. I daresay that in the circumstances was natural enough. At the same time she agreed, as it were on public grounds, that someone soothing ought to go from Branshaw to Salon. She sent me and her old nurse, who had looked after Nancy from the time when the girl of Child of Thirteen had first come to Branshaw. So off I go, rushing through Provence to catch the steamer at Marseille, and I wasn't the least good when I got to Salon, and the nurse wasn't the least good. Nothing has been the least good. The doctors said at Candy that if Nancy could be brought to England, the sea air, the change of climate, the voyage, and all the usual sort of things might restore her reason. Of course they haven't restored her reason. She is, I am aware, sitting in the hall, 40 paces where I'm now writing. I don't want to be in the least romantic about it. She is very well dressed. She is quite quiet, and she is very beautiful. The old nurse looks after her very efficiently. Of course you have the makings of a situation here, but it is all very humdrum as far as I am concerned. I should marry Nancy if a reason were ever sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service, but it is probable that her reason will never be sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service. Therefore I cannot marry her, according to the law of the land. So here I am very much where I started 13 years ago. I am the attendant, not the husband of a beautiful girl who pays no attention to me. I am estranged from Leonora, who married Rodney Bayhem in my absence and went to live at Bayhem. Leonora rather dislikes me because she has got it into her head that I disapprove of her marriage with Rodney Bayhem. While I disapprove of her marriage, possibly I'm jealous. Yes, no doubt I am jealous. In my fainter sort of way I seem to perceive myself following the lines of Edward Ashburnham. I suppose I should really like to be a polygamist, with Nancy, and with Leonora, and with Maisie Maiden, and possibly even Florence. I am no doubt like every other man, only probably because of my American origin, I am fainter. At the same time I am able to assure you that I am a strictly respectable person. I have never done anything that the most anxious mother of a daughter, or the most careful dean of a cathedral would object to. I have only followed faintly and in my unconscious desires, Edward Ashburnham, guiled his all over. Not one of us has got what he really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she got Rodney Bayhem. A pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted Branshaw, and a desire who had bought it from Leonora. I didn't really want it. What I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse attendant. Well, I am a nurse attendant. Edward wanted Nancy Ruford, and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody, yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it. It is beyond me. Is there any terrestrial paradise where amidst the whispering of the olive leaves, people can be with whom they like, and have what they like, and take their ease and shadows and coolness? Or are all men's lies like the lies of us good people, like the lies of the Ashburnhams, of the dowels of the Rufords, broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lies, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies. Who the devil knows. For there was a great deal of imbecility about the closing scenes of the Ashburnham tragedy. Neither of those two women knew what they wanted. It was only Edward who took a perfectly clear line, and he was drunk most of the time. But drunk or sober, he stuck to what was demanded by convention and by the traditions of his house. Nancy Ruford had to be exported to India, and Nancy Ruford hadn't to hear a word of love from him. She was exported to India, and she never heard a word from Edward Ashburnham. It was a conventional line. It was in tune with the tradition of Edward's house. I daresay it worked out for the greatest good of the body politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose, worked blindly, but surely for the preservation of the normal type, for the extinction of proud resolute and unusual individuals. Edward was the normal man, but there was too much of the sentimentalist about him, and society does not need too many sentimentalists. Nancy was a splendid creature, but she had about her a touch of madness. Society does not need individuals with touches of madness about them. So Edward and Nancy found themselves steam-rolled out, and Leonora survived the perfectly normal type, married to a man who is rather like a rabbit. For Rodney Bayhem is rather like a rabbit, and I hear that Leonora is expected to have a baby in three months' time. So those splendid and tumultuous creatures with their magnetism and their passions, those two that I really love, have gone from this earth. It is no doubt best for them. What would Nancy have made of Edward if she had succeeded in living with him? What would Edward have made of her? For there was about Nancy a touch of cruelty, a touch of definite actual cruelty, that made her desire to see people suffer. Yes, she desired to see Edward suffer, and by God she gave him hell. She gave him an imaginable hell. Those two women pursued that poor devil and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it with whips. I tell you his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see him stand naked to the waist, his forearm shielding his eyes and flesh hanging from him in rags. I tell you that is no exaggeration of what I feel. It was as if Leonora and Nancy bended themselves together to do execution for the sake of humanity upon the body of a man who was at their disposal. They were like a couple of Sue who had got a hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a stake. I tell you there was no end to the tortures they inflicted upon him. Night after night he would hear them talking, talking, maddened, sweating, seeking oblivion and drink. He would lie there and hear the voices going on and on, and day after day Leonora would come to him and would announce the result of their deliberations. They were like judges debating over the sentence upon a criminal. They were like ghouls with an immobile corpse and a tomb beside them. I don't think that Leonora was any more to blame than the girl, although Leonora was the more active of the two. Leonora, as I have said, was a perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in normal circumstances her desires were those of the woman who is needed by society. She desired children, decorum, and establishment. She desired to devoid waste. She desired to keep up appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal, even in her utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted perfectly normally in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the world was mad around her, and she herself agonized, took on the complexion of a madwoman, of a woman very wicked, of the villain of the peace. What would you have? Steel is a normal hard polished substance, but if you put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft and not to be handled. If you put it in a fire still more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora. She was made for normal circumstances, for Mr. Rodney Bayum, who will keep a separate establishment secretly in Portsmouth, and make occasional trips to Paris and to Budapest. In the case of Edward and the girl, Leonora broke and simply went all over the place. She adopted unfamiliar and therefore extraordinary and ungraceful attitudes of mine. At one moment she was all for revenge. After haranguing the girl for hours through the night, she harangued for hours of the day the silent Edward. And Edward just once tripped up, and that was his undoing. Perhaps he had had too much whiskey that afternoon. She asked him perpetually what he wanted. What did he want? What did he want? All he ever answered was, I've told you. He meant that he wanted the girl to go to her father in India as soon as her father should cable that he was ready to receive her. But just once he tripped up, till Leonora's eternal question he answered that all he desired in life was that he could pick himself together again and go on with his daily occupations if the girl being five thousand miles away would continue to love him. He wanted nothing more. He prayed his God for nothing more while he was a sentimentalist. And the moment that she heard that, Leonora determined that the girl should not go five thousand miles away and that she should not continue to love Edward the way she worked it was this. She continued to tell the girl that she must belong to Edward. She was going to get a divorce. She was going to get a dissolution of marriage from Rome. But she considered her duty to warn the girl of the sort of monster that Edward was. She told the girl of Ladolcichita, of Mrs. Basil, of Maisie Maiden, of Florence. She spoke of the agony she had endured her life with the man who was violent, overbearing, vain, drunken, arrogant, and monstrously appraised with his sexual necessities. An adhering of the miseries Heran had suffered, for Leonora once more had the aspect of an aunt to the girl. With the swift cruelty of youth, with the swift solidarity that attaches woman to woman, the girl made her resolve. Her aunt said insistently, You must save Edward's life. You must save his life. All that he needs is a little period of satisfaction from you. Then he will tire of you as he has of the others, but you must save his life. And all the while that wretched fellow knew, by a curious instinct that runs between human beings living together, exactly what was going on. And he remained dumb. He stretched out no finger to help himself. All that he required to keep himself a decent member of society was that the girl, five thousand miles away, should continue to love him. They were putting a stopper upon that. I've told you that the girl came one night to his room. And that was the real hell for him. That was the picture that never left his imagination. The girl in the dim light rising up at the foot of his bed. He said that it seemed to have a greenish sort of effect, as if there were a greenish tinge in the shadows of the tall bedposts that framed her body. And she looked at him with her straight eyes and a flinching cruelty, and she said, I am ready to belong to you. I am ready to belong to you, to save your life. He answered, I don't want it. I don't want it. I don't want it. And he says that he didn't want it. That he should have hated himself, that it was unthinkable. And all the while he had the immense temptation to do the unthinkable thing, not from the physical desire, but because of a mental certitude. He was certain that if she had once submitted to him, she would remain his forever. He knew that. She was thinking that her aunt had said that he desired her to love him from a distance of 5,000 miles. She said, I can never love you now. I know the kind of man you are. I will belong to you to save your life, but I can never love you. It was a fantastic display of cruelty. She didn't, in the least, know what it meant to belong to a man. But at that, Edward pulled himself together. He spoke in his normal tones, gruff, husky, overbearing, as he would have done to a servant or to a horse. Go back to your room. Go back to your room and go to sleep. This is all nonsense. They were baffled, those two women. And then I came on the scene. End of part four, section five, recording by Greg Higgins.