 Section 20 of The Good Soldier, A Tale of Passion. My coming on the scene certainly calmed things down. For the whole fortnight that intervened between my arrival and the girl's departure. I don't mean to say that endless talking did not go on at night, or that Leonora did not send me out with the girl, and in the interval give Edward a hell of a time. Having discovered that he wanted, that the girl should go five thousand miles away and love him stud-fastly as people do in sentimental novels, she was determined to smash that aspiration, and she repeated to Edward in every possible tone that the girl did not love him, that the girl detested him for his brutality, his overbearingness, his drinking habits. She pointed out that Edward in the girl's eyes was already pledged three or four deep. He was pledged to Leonora herself, to Mrs. Basil, and to memories of Maisie Maiden and to Florence. Edward never said anything. Did the girl love Edward, or didn't she? I don't know. At that time I dare say she didn't, though she certainly had done so before Leonora had got to work upon his reputation. She certainly had loved him for what I will call the public side of his record, for his good soldiering, for his saving lives at sea, for the excellent landlord that he was and the good sportsman. But it is quite possible that all those sayings came to appear as nothing in her eyes when she discovered that he wasn't a good husband. For the woman as I see them have little or no feeling of responsibility towards a county, or country, or career, although they may be entirely lacking in any kind of communal solidarity, they have an immense and automatically working instinct that attaches them to the interest of womanhood. It is of course possible for any woman to cut out and to carry off another woman's husband or lover, but I rather think that a woman will only do this if she has reason to believe that the other woman has given her husband a bad time. I'm certain that if she thinks the man has been a brute to his wife she will with her instinctive feeling for suffering femininity put him back, as the saying is. I don't attach any particular importance to these generalizations of mine. They may be right, they may be wrong. I'm only an aging American with very little knowledge of life. You may take my generalizations or leave them, but I am pretty certain that I am right in the case of Nancy Ruford, that she had loved Edward Ashburn very deeply and tenderly. It is nothing to the point that she let him have it good and strong as soon as she discovered that he had been unfaithful to Leonora and that his public services had cost more than Leonora thought they ought to have cost. Nancy would be bound to let him have it good and strong then. She would owe that to feminine public opinion. She would be driven to it by the instinct for self-preservation, since she might well imagine that if Edward had been unfaithful to Leonora, to Mrs. Basil, and to the memories of the other two, he might be unfaithful to herself. And no doubt she had her share of the sex instinct that makes women be intolerably cruel to the beloved person. Anyhow, I don't know whether at this point Nancy Ruford loved Edward Ashburnam. I don't know whether she even loved him on getting at Aidan the news of his suicide she went mad, because that may just as well have been for the sake of Leonora as for the sake of Edward. Or it may have been for the sake of both of them. I don't know. I know nothing. I am very tired. Leonora held passionately the doctrine that the girl didn't love Edward. She wanted desperately to believe that. It was a doctrine as necessary to her existence as a belief in the personal immortality of the soul. She said that it was impossible that Nancy could have loved Edward after she had given the girl her view of Edward's career and character. Edward on the other hand believed, wanderingly, that some essential attractiveness in himself must have made the girl continue to go on loving him. To go on loving him as it were and underneath her official aspect of hatred. He thought she only pretended to hate him in order to save her face, and he thought that her quite atrocious telegram from Brindisi was only another attempt to do that, to prove that she had feelings credible to a member of the feminine common wheel. I don't know. I'd leave it to you. There is another point that worries me a good deal on the aspects of this sad affair. Leonore says that in desiring that the girl should go five thousand miles away and yet continue to love him, Edward was a monster of selfishness. He was desiring the ruin of a young life. Edward on the other hand put it to me that, supposing that the girl's love was a necessity to his existence, and if he did nothing by order by action to keep Nancy's love alive, he couldn't be called selfish. Leonore applied that showed he had an abominably selfish nature, even though his actions might be perfectly correct. I can't make out which of them was right. I leave it to you. It is at any rate certain that Edward's actions were perfectly, were monstrously, were cruelly correct. He set still and let Leonore take away his character, and let Leonore damn him to a deepest hell without stirring a finger. I daresay he was a fool. I don't see what object there was in letting the girl think worse of him than was necessary. Still there it is. And there it is also that all those three presented to the world the spectacle of being the best of good people. I assure you that during my stay for that fortnight in that final house, I never so much as noticed a single thing that could have affected that good opinion. And even when I look back, knowing the circumstances, I can't remember a single thing that any of them said that could have betrayed them. I can't remember right up to the dinner when Leonore read out that telegram. Not the trim-riven eyelash, not the shaking of a hand. It was just a pleasant country house party. And Leonore kept it up jolly well, for even longer than that. She kept it up as far as I was concerned until eight days after Edward's funeral. Immediately after that particular dinner, the dinner at which I received the announcement that Nancy was going to leave for India on the following day, I asked Leonore to let me have a word with her. She took me into her little setting room, and I then said, I spare you the record of my emotions, that she was aware that I wished to marry Nancy, that she had seemed to favor my suit, and that it appeared to be rather a waste of money upon tickets, and rather a waste of time upon travel to let the girl go to India if Leonore thought that there was any chance of her marrying me. In Leonore, I assure you was the absolutely perfect British matron. She said that she quite favored my suit, that she could not desire for the girl a better husband, but that she considered that the girl ought to see a little more of life before taking such an important step. Yes, Leonore used the words, taking such an important step. She was perfect. Actually, I think she would have liked the girl to marry me enough. My program included the buying of the Kershaw's house about a mile away from the Fortingbridge Road, and settling down there with the girl. That didn't at all suit Leonore. She didn't want to have the girl in a mile and a half of Edward for the rest of their lives. Still I think she might have managed to let me know, in some paraphrasis or other, that I might have the girl if I would take her to Philadelphia or Timbuktu. I loved Nancy very much, and Leonore knew it. However, I left it at that. I left it with the understanding that Nancy was going away to India on probation. It seemed to me a perfectly reasonable arrangement, and I am a reasonable sort of man. I simply said that I should follow Nancy out to India after six months' time or so, or perhaps after a year. Well, you see, I did follow Nancy out to India after a year. I must confess to having felt a little angry with Leonore for not having warned me earlier that the girl would be going. I took it as one of the queer, not very straight methods that Roman Catholics seem to adopt in dealing with matters of this world. I took it that Leonore had been afraid I should propose to the girl, or at any rate have made considerably greater advances to her than I did, if I had known earlier that she was going away so soon. Perhaps Leonore was right. Perhaps Roman Catholics, with their queer, shifty ways, are always right. They are dealing with the queer, shifty thing that is human nature. For it is quite possible that if I had known Nancy was going away so soon, I would have tried making love to her, and that would have produced another complication. It may have been just as well. It is queer the fantastic things that quite good people do in order to keep up appearances of calm, po-co-currentism. For Edward-esh Burnham and his wife called me half the roll over in order to sit on the back seat of a dog cart, whilst Edward drove the girl to the railway station from which she was to take her departure to India. They wanted, I suppose, to have a witness of the calmness of that function. The girl's luggage had been already packed and sent off before. Her birth on the steamer had been taken. They had timed it also exactly that it went like clockwork. They had known the date upon which Colonel Ruford would get Edward's letter, and they had known almost exactly the hour at which they would receive his telegram asking his daughter to come to him. It had all been quite beautifully and quite mercilessly arranged by Edward himself. They gave Colonel Ruford as a reason for telegraphing, the fact that Mrs. Colonel somebody or rather would be traveling by that ship, and that she would serve as an efficient chaperone for the girl. It was the most amazing business, and I think it would have been better in the eyes of God if they had all attempted to gouge out each other's eyes with carving knives, but they were good people. After my interview with Leonora, I went to sultorily into Edward's gun room. I didn't know where the girl was, and I thought I might find her there. I suppose I had a vague idea of proposing to her in spite of Leonora. So I presume. I don't come of quite such good people as the Ashburnums. Edward was lounging in his chair, smoking a cigar, and he said nothing for quite five minutes. The candles glowed in the green shades, the reflections were green in the glasses of the bookcases that held guns and fishing rods. Over the mantelpiece was the brownish picture of the white horse. Those were the quietest moments that I have ever known. Then suddenly Edward looked me straight in the eyes and said, Look, here old man, I wish you would drive with Nancy and me to the station tomorrow. I said of course I would, I would drive with him and Nancy to the station on the morrow. He lay there for a long time, looking along the line of his knees at the fluttering fire. And then suddenly, in a perfectly calm voice, without lifting his eyes, he said, I am so desperately in love with Nancy Rufford that I am dying of it. Poor devil. He hadn't meant to speak of it. But I guess he just had to speak to somebody, and I appeared to be like a woman or a solicitor. He talked all night. Well he carried out the program through the last breath. It was a very clear winter morning with a good deal of frost in it. The sun was quite bright. The winding road between the heather and the bracken was very hard. I said on the backseat of the dog cart, Nancy was beside Edward. They talked about the way the cob went. Edward pointed out with a whip, a cluster of deer upon a comb three quarters of a mile away. We passed the hounds in the level bit of road beside the high trees going into Forting Bridge. And Edward pulled up the dog cart so that Nancy might say goodbye to the huntsman and cap him a last sovereign. She had ridden with those hounds ever since she had been thirteen. The train was five minutes late, and they imagined that that was because it was Market Day at Swindon, or wherever the train came from. That was the sort of thing they talked about. The train came in, Edward found her a first class carriage with an elderly woman in it. The girl entered the carriage, Edward closed the door, and then she put out her hand to shake mine. There was upon those people's faces no expression of any kind whatever. The signal for the train's departure was a very bright red. That is about as passionate a statement as I can get into that scene. She was not looking her best. She had on a cap of brown fur that did not very well match her hair. She said, so long to Edward, Edward answered so long. He swung around on his heel, enlarged slouching and walking with a heavy deliberate pace. He went out of the station. I followed him and got up beside him in the high dog cart. It was the most horrible performance I have ever seen. And after that, a holy peace, like the peace of God which passes all understanding descended upon Branshaw Tellaraw. Leonora went about her daily duties with a sort of triumphant smile. A very faint smile, but quite triumphant. I guess she had so long since given up any idea of getting her man back that it was enough for her to have that girl out of the house and well cured of her infatuation. Once in the hall when Leonora was going out, Edward said beneath his breast that I just cut the words. Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean. It was like his sentimentality to quote Swinburne. But he was perfectly quiet and he'd given up drinking. The only thing that he ever said to me after that drive to the station was, It is very odd, I thank God to tell you, Thou, that I haven't any feelings at all about the girl. Now it's all over. Don't you worry about me. I'm alright. A long time afterwards he said, I guess it was only a flash in the pan. He began to look after the estates again. He took all that trouble over getting off the gardener's daughter who had murdered her baby. He shook hands smilingly with every farmer in the marketplace. He addressed two political meetings. He hunted twice. Leonora made a frightful scene about spending two hundred pounds on getting the gardener's daughter acquitted. Everything went on as if the girl had never existed. It was very still weather. Well that is the end of the story and when I come to look at it I see that it is a happy ending with wedding bells and all. The villains, for obviously Edward and the girl were villains, have been punished by suicide and madness. Their heroine, the perfectly normal, virtuous, and slightly deceitful heroine, has become the happy wife of a perfectly normal, virtuous, and slightly deceitful husband. She will shortly become a mother of a perfectly normal, virtuous, slightly deceitful son or daughter, a happy ending. That is what it works out at. I cannot conceal for myself the fact that I now dislike Leonora. Without doubt I am jealous of Rodney Bayum, but I don't know whether it is merely a jealousy arising from the fact that I desired myself to possess Leonora or whether it is because to her were sacrificed the only two persons that I have ever really loved, Edward Ashburnham and Nancy Ruford. In order to set her up in a modern mansion replete with every convenience and dominated by a quite respectable and eminently economical master of the house it was necessary that Edward and Nancy Ruford should become, for me at least, no more than tragic shades. I seem to see poor Edward naked in reclining in this darkness upon cold rocks like one of the ancient Greek dam in Tartarus or whoever it was. As for Nancy, well yesterday at lunch she said suddenly, shuttlecocks. And she repeated the word shuttlecocks three times. I know what was passing in her mind, if she can be said to have a mind, for Leonora has told me that once the poor girl said she felt like a shuttlecock being tossed backwards and forwards between the violent personalities of Edward and his wife. Leonora she said was always trying to deliver her over to Edward and Edward tacitly and silently forced her back again. And the odd thing was that Edward himself considered that these two women used him like a shuttlecock, whether he said that they sent him backwards and forwards like a blooming parcel that someone didn't want to pay the postage on. And Leonora also imagined that Edward and Nancy picked her up and threw her down as soon as they're purely vagrant moods. So there you have the pretty picture. Mind I'm not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I'm not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous and slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness. But I guess that I myself in my fainter way come into the category of the passionate, of the headstrong and the too truthful, for I can't conceal for myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham, and I love him because he was just myself. If I'd had the courage and the virility, and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham, I should I fancy have done much what he did. He seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on several excursions, and did many dashing things while I just watched him robbing the orchard from a distance, and you see, I'm just as much of a sentimentalist as he was. Yes, society must go on, it must breed like rabbits, that is what we are here for, but then I don't like society much. I'm that absurd figure, an American millionaire who is about one of the ancient haunts of English peace. I sit here in Edward's gun room all day and all night in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits me, for I visit no one. No one has interested me, for I have no interest. In twenty minutes or so I shall walk down to the village beneath my own oaks, alongside my own clumps of gorse to get the American male. My tenants, the village boys, and the tradesmen's will touch their hats to me. So life peters out. I shall return to dine, and Nancy will sit opposite me with the old nurse standing behind her. Enigmatic, silent, utterly well behaved as far as her knife and fork go, Nancy will stare in front of her with the blue eyes that have over them strained stretch brows. Once perhaps twice during the male her knife and fork will be suspended in midair as if she were trying to think of something else that she had forgotten. Then she will say that she believes in an omnipotent deity, or she will utter the one word shuttlecocks, perhaps. It is very extraordinary to see the perfect flesh of health on her cheeks, to see the luster of her coiled black hair, the poise of the head up on the neck, the grace of the white hands, and to think that it all means nothing. That is a picture without a meeting. Yes it is queer. But at any rate there is always Leonora to cheer you up. I don't want to sadden you. Her husband is quite an economical person of so normal a figure that he can get quite a large proportion of his clothes ready made. That is the great desideratum of life, and that is the end of my story. The child is to be brought up as a Romanist. It suddenly occurs to me that I forgot to say how Edward met his death. You remember that piece that descended upon the house, that Leonora was quietly triumphant, and that Edward said his love for the girl had been merely a passing phase. But one afternoon we were in the stables together, looking at a new kind of flooring that Edward was trying in a loose box. Edward was talking with a good deal of animation about the necessity of getting the numbers of the Hampshire Territorials up to the proper standard. He was quite sober, quite quiet, his skin was clear-colored, his hair was golden and perfectly brushed. The level brick-dust red of his complexion would clean up to the rims of his eyelids. His eyes were porcelain blue, and they regarded me frankly and directly. His face was perfectly expressionless, his voice deep and rough. He stood wool back upon his legs and said, We're up to get them up to two thousand three hundred and fifty. A stable boy brought him a telegram and went away. He opened it negligently, regarded it without a motion, and in complete silence handed it to me. On the pinkish paper and a sprawling handwriting I read, safe Brindisi having rathling good time Nancy. Well Edward was the English gentleman, but he was also the last sentimentalist, whose mind was compounded of indifferent poems and novels. He just looked up to the roof of the stable as if he were looking to heaven and whispered something that I did not catch. Then he put two fingers into a waistcoat pocket of his grey-free suit. They came out with a little neat pen knife, quite a small pen knife. He said to me, You might just take that wire to Leonora. And he looked at me with a direct, challenging, brow-beating glare. I guess he could see in my eyes that I didn't intend to hinder him. Why should I hinder him? I didn't think he was wanted in the world, let his confounded tenets, his rifle associations, his drunkards, reclaimed and unreclaimed, get on as they liked. Not all the hundreds and hundreds of them deserved that that poor devil should go on suffering for their sakes. When he saw that I did not intend to interfere with him, his eyes became soft and almost affectionate, he remarked. So long, old man, I must have a bit of rest, you know. I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say, God bless you, or I'm also a sentimentalist. But I thought that perhaps that would not be quite English good form. So I trotted off with a telegram to Leonora. She was quite pleased with it. End of part four, section six. End of The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford. Recording by Greg Higgins.