 I remember laughing at the phrase, except the situation, which she seemed to repeat with a gravity too intense. I said to her something like, It's hardly as much as that, I mean, that I must claim the liberty of a free American citizen to think what I please about your co-religionist. And I suppose that Florence must have liberty to think what she pleases and to say what politeness allows her to say. She had better, Leonore answered, not say one single word against my people or my faith. It struck me at the time that there was an unusual and almost threatening hardness in her voice. It was almost as if she were trying to convey to Florence through me that she would seriously harm my wife if Florence went to something that was an extreme. Yes, I remember thinking at the time that it was almost as if Leonore was saying through me to Florence, you may outrage me as you will. You may take all that I personally possess, but do not, you care to say one single thing in view of the situation that that will set up against the faith that makes me become the doormat for your feet. But obviously as I saw it, that could not be her meaning, good people. Be they ever so diverse and creed, do not threaten each other, so that I read Leonore's words to me just no more than that. It would be better if Florence said nothing at all against my co-religionist, because it is a point that I am touchy about. That was the hint, accordingly, I conveyed to Florence when shortly afterwards she and Edward came down from the tower. And I want you to understand that, from that moment until after Edward and the girl in Florence were all dead together, I had never the remotest glimpse, not a shadow of a suspicion, that there was anything wrong as the saying is, for five minutes then, I entertained the possibility that Leonore might be jealous, but there was never another flicker in that flame-like personality. How in the world should I get it? For all that time I was just a male-sick nurse, but what chance had I against those three hardened gamblers who were all in league to conceal their hands from me? What earthly chance? They were three to one, and they made me happy, oh God, they made me so happy, that I doubt if even paradise, that she'll smooth out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give me the like. And what could they have done better, or what could they have done that could have been worse? I don't know. I suppose that during all that time I was a deceived husband and that Leonore was pimping for Edward. That was the cross that she had to take up during her long calvary of a life. You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband? Just heavens I do not know. It feels just nothing at all. It is not hell, certainly it is not necessarily heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage. What do they call it? Limbo? No, I feel nothing at all about that. They are dead. They have gone before the judge who, I hope, will open to them the springs of his compassion. It is not my business to think about it. It is simply my business to say, as Leonore's people say, Requiem, Atronum, Dona, Is. Do mine at Hoax, Perpetua, Lucas, Is. In Memorial, Atina, Irrit. But what are they? The just, the unjust. God knows. I think that the pair of them were only poor wretches creeping over this earth in the shadow of an eternal wrath. It is very terrible. It is almost too terrible, the picture of that judgment, as it appears to me sometimes at nights. It is probably the suggestion of some picture that I have seen somewhere. But upon an immense plain, suspended in midair, I seem to see three figures, two of them clasped close in an intense embrace, and one intolerably solitary. It is in black and white my picture of that judgment, an etching, perhaps, only I cannot tell an etching from a photographic reproduction. And the immense plain is the hand of God, stretching out from miles and miles, with great spaces above it and below it. And they are in the sight of God, and it is Florence that is alone. And do you know, at the thought of that intense solitude I feel an overwhelming desire to rush forward and comfort her? You cannot, you see, have acted as nurse to a person for twelve years without wishing to go on nursing them, even though you hate them with the hatred of the adder. And even in the palm of God, but in the nights with that vision of judgment before me, I know that I hold myself back. For I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness. She did not have done what she did. She was an American, a New Englander. She had not the hot passions of these Europeans. She cut out that poor imbecile of an Edward, and I pray God that he is really at peace. Class close in the arms of that poor, poor girl. And, no doubt, Maisie Maiden will find her young husband again. And Leonor will burn, clear and serene. A northern light in one of the archangels of God. And me? Well, perhaps they will find me an elevator to run. But Florence, she should not have done it. She should not have done it. It was playing it too low down. She cut out poor dear Edward from sheer vanity. She meddled between him and Leonor from a sheer imbecile spirit of district visiting. Do you understand that, while she was Edward's mistress, she was perpetually trying to reunite him with his wife? She would gabble on to Leonor about forgiveness, treating the subject from the bright, American point of view. And Leonor would treat her like the whore she was, once she said to Florence in the early morning, You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my proper place. I know it. Thank you. But even that could not stop Florence. She went on saying that it was her ambition to leave this world a little brighter, by the passage of her brief life, and how thankfully she would leave Edward whom she thought she had brought to a right frame of mind if Leonor would only give him a chance. He needed, she said, tenderness beyond anything. And Leonor would answer for she put up with this outrage for years. Leonor, as I understand, would answer something like, Yes, you would give him up, and you would go on writing to each other in secret, and committing adultery in hired rooms. I know the pair of you, you know. No, I prefer the situation as it is. Half the time Florence would ignore Leonor's remarks. She would think they were not quite ladylike. The other half of the time she would try to persuade Leonora that her love for Edward was quite spiritual, on the account of her heart. Once she said, If you can believe that of Maisie Maiden and you say you do, why cannot you believe it of me? Leonora was, I understand, doing her hair at that time in front of the mirror in her bedroom. She looked around at Florence to whom she did not usually vouchsafe at glance. She looked around coolly and calmly and said, Never do you dare to mention Mrs. Maiden's name again. You murdered her. You and I murdered her between us. I am as much a scoundrel as you. I don't like to be reminded of it. Florence went off at once into a babble of how could she have heard a person whom she hardly knew, a person whom with the best intentions, in pursuance of her efforts to leave the world a little brighter. She had tried to save from Edward. That was how she figured it out to herself. She really thought that, so Leonora said patiently, Very well. Let's just put it that I killed her and that it's a painful subject. One does not like to think that one had killed someone. Naturally not. I ought never to have brought her from India. And that indeed is exactly how Leonora looked at it. It is stated a little badly, but Leonora was always a great one for bald statements. What had happened on the day of our jaunt to the ancient city of M. had been this, Leonora who had been, even then, filled with pity and contrition. For the poor child on returning to our hotel had gone straight to Mrs. Maiden's room. She had wanted just to pet her, and she had perceived, at first only, on the clear round table covered with red velvet, a letter addressed to her. It ran something like, O Mrs. Ashburnham, how could you have done it? I trusted you so. You never talked to me about me and Edward, but I trusted you. How could you buy me from my husband? I have just heard how you have. In the hall they were talking about it. Edward and the American lady. You paid the money for me to come here. How could you? How could you? I am going straight back to Bunny. Bunny was Mrs. Maiden's husband. And Leonora said that as she went on reading the letter, she had without looking round her a sense that the hotel room was cleared, that there were no papers on the table, that there were no clothes on the hooks, and that there was a strange silence. A silence, she said, as if there was something in the room that drank up such sounds as there were. She had to fight against that feeling. While she read the post-script of the letter, I did not know you wanted me for an adulteress. The post-script began, the poor child was hardly literate. It was surely not right of you and I never wanted to be one. And I heard Edward call me a poor little rat to the American lady. He always called me a little rat in private. And I did not mind, but if he called me it to her, I think he does not love me any more. Oh, Mrs. Ashburnham, you know the world, and I know nothing. I thought it would be all right if you thought it could, and I thought you would not have brought me if you did not, too. You should not have done it, and we, out of the same convent. Leonora said that she screamed when she read that. And then she saw that Macy's boxes were all packed, and she began a search for Mrs. Maiden herself, all over the hotel. The manager said that Mrs. Maiden had paid her bill, and had gone up to the station to ask the Rivers Parks Bureau to make her out a plan for her immediate return to Chitral. He imagined that he had seen her come back, but he was not quite certain. No one in the large hotel had bothered his head about the child. And she, wandering solitarily in the hall, had no doubt sat down beside a screen that had Edward and Florence on the other side. I never heard then or after what had passed between that precious couple. My fancy Florence was just about beginning her cutting out of poor dear Edward by addressing him to some words of friendly warning, as to the ravages he might be making in the girl's heart. That would be the sort of way she would begin. And Edward would have sentimentally assured her that there was nothing in it that Macy was just a poor little rat whose passage to Noheim his wife had paid out of her own pocket. That would have been enough to do the trick. For the trick was pretty efficiently done. Leonora, with panic growing and with contrition very large in her heart, visited every one of the public rooms in the hotel, the dining room, the lounge, the shirts and dimmer, the winter garden. God knows what they wanted with the winter garden in a hotel that was only open from May till October. But there it was, and then Leonora ran. Yes, she ran up the stairs to see if Macy had not returned to her rooms. She had determined to take that child right away from that hideous place. It seemed to her to be all unspeakable. I did not mean to say that she was not quite cool about it. Leonora was always Leonora, but the cold justice of the thing demanded that she should play the part of Mother to this child who had come from the same convent. She figured it out to amount to that. She would leave Edward to Florence and to me, and she would devote all her time to providing that child with an atmosphere of love until she could be returned to her poor young husband. It was naturally too late. Macy had not cared to look round Macy's room at first. Now as soon as she came in she perceived sticking out beyond the bed, a small pair of feet in high heeled shoes. Macy had died in the effort to strap up a great portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely that her little body had fallen forward into the trunk, and it had closed upon her like the jaws of a gigantic alligator. The key was in her hand. Her dark hair, like the hair of a Japanese, had come down and covered her body in her face. Leonora lifted her up. She was the nearest featherweight, and laid her on the bed with her hair about her. She was smiling, as if she had just scored a goal in a hockey match. You understand, she had not committed suicide. Her heart had just stopped. I saw her with the long lashes on the cheeks, with a smile about the lips, with the flowers all about her. The stem of a white lily rested in her hand, so that the spike of flowers was upon her shoulder. She looked like a bride in the sunlight of the mortuary candles, that were all about her, and the white coiff of the two nuns, that knelt at her feet, with their faces hidden, might have been two swans that were to bear her away to kissing kindness land, or whatever it is. Leonora showed her to me. She would not let either of the others see her. She wanted, you know, to spare poor dear Edward's feelings. He never could bear the sight of a corpse, and since she never gave him an idea that Macy had written to her, he imagined that the death had been the most natural thing in the world. He soon got over it. Indeed, it was the one affair of his about which he never felt much remorse. THE GOOD SOLDIER A TAYL OF PASSION PART 2 SECTION 1 The death of Mrs. Maiden occurred on the 4th of August 1904, and then nothing happened until the 4th of August 1913. There is the curious coincidence of dates, but I do not know whether that is one of those sinister, as if half-jocular and altogether merciless proceedings on the part of a cruel providence that we call a coincidence, because it may just as well have been the superstitious mind of Florence that forced her to certain acts as if she had been hypnotized. It is, however, certain that the 4th of August always proved a significant date for her. To begin with, she was born on the 4th of August. Then on that date, in the year 1899, she set out with her uncle for the tour around the world in company with a young man called Jimmy, but that was not merely a coincidence. Her kindly old uncle, with the supposedly damaged heart, was in his delicate way, offering her, in this trip, a birthday present to celebrate her coming of age. Then on the 4th of August 1900 she yielded to an action that certainly colored her whole life, as well as mine. She had no luck. She was probably offering herself a birthday present that morning. On the 4th of August 1901 she married me, and set sail for Europe in a great gale of wind. The gale that affected her heart, and no doubt there, again, she was offering herself a birthday gift, the birthday gift of my miserable life. It occurs to me that I have never told you anything about my marriage. That was like this. I have told you, as I think, that I first met Florence at the Stuyavance in 14th Street, and from that moment I determined with all the obstinacy of a possibly weak nature, if not to make her mine, at least to marry her. I had no occupation. I had no business affairs. I simply camped down there in Stamford in a vile hotel, and just passed my days in the house, or on the veranda of the Mrs. Hurlbird. The Mrs. Hurlbird, in an odd, obstinate way, did not like my presents. But they were hampered by the national manners of these occasions. Florence had her own sitting-room. She could ask to it whom she liked, and I simply walked into that apartment. I was as timid as you will, but in that matter I was like a chicken that is determined to get across the road in front of an automobile. I would walk into Florence's pretty, little, old-fashioned room, take off my hat, and sit down. Florence had, of course, several other fellows, too, strapping young New Englanders, who worked during the day in New York, and spent only the evenings in the village of their birth, and, in the evenings, they would march in on Florence with almost as much determination as myself showed, and I am bound to say that they were received with as much disfavor as was my portion from the Mrs. Hurlbird. They were curious old creatures, those two. It was almost as if they were members of an ancient family under some curse. They were so gentle-womanly, so proper, and they sighed so. Because I would see tears in their eyes. I did not know that my courtship of Florence made much progress at first. Perhaps that was because it took place almost entirely during the daytime, on hot afternoons, when the clouds of dust hung like fog, right up as high as the tops of the thin-leaved elms. The night, I believe, is the proper season for the gentle feats of love. Not a Connecticut July afternoon, when any sort of proximity is an almost appalling thought. But, if I never so much as kissed Florence, she let me discover very easily, in the course of a fortnight, her simple wants, and I could supply those wants. She wanted to marry a gentleman of leisure. She wanted a European establishment. She wanted her husband to have an English accent, an income of fifty thousand dollars a year from real estate, and no ambitions to increase that income. And, she faintly hinted, she did not want much physical passion in the affair. Americans, you know, can envision such unions without blinking. She gave cut this information in floods of bright talk. She would pop a little bit of it into comments over a view of the Rialto, Venice, and while she was brightly describing Balmoral Castle, she would say that her ideal husband would be one who could get her received at the British Court. She had spent, it seemed, two months in Great Britain, seven weeks entouring from Stratford to Strathpefer, and one as a paying guest in an old English family near Leadbury, and impoverished, but still stately family called Bagshaw. They were to have spent two months more in that tranquil bosom, but inopportune events, apparently in her uncle's business, had caused their rather hurried return to Stamford. The young man called Jimmy had remained in Europe to perfect his knowledge of that continent. He certainly did. He was most useful to us afterwards. But the point that came out, that there was no mistaking, was that Florence was coldly and calmly determined to take no look at any man who could not give her a European settlement. Her glimpse of English home life had affected this. She meant, on her marriage, to have a year in Paris, and then to have her husband buy some real estate in the neighborhood of Fordingbridge, from which place the Hurlbirds had come in the year 1688. On the strength of that she was going to take her place in the ranks of English county society. That was fixed. I used to feel mightily elevated when I considered these details, for I could not figure out that amongst her acquaintances in Stamford there was any fellow that would fill the bill. The most of them were not as wealthy as I, and those that were were not the type to give up the fascinations of Wall Street, even for the protracted companionship of Florence. But nothing really happened during the month of July. On the first of August Florence apparently told her aunts that she intended to marry me. She had not told me so. But there was no doubt about the aunts, for on that afternoon Miss Florence Hurlbird, Sr., stopped me on my way to Florence's sitting-room, and took me, agitatedly, into the parlour. It was a singular interview. In that old-fashioned colonial room, with the spindle-legged furniture, the silhouettes, the miniatures, the portrait of General Braddock, and the smell of lavender, you see the two poor maiden ladies were in agonies, and they could not say one single thing direct. They would almost bring their hands and ask if I had considered such a thing as different temperaments. I assure you they were almost affectionate, concerned for me even, as if Florence were too bright for my solid and serious virtues. For they had discovered in me solid and serious virtues. That might have been because I had once dropped the remark that I preferred General Braddock to General Washington, for the Hurlbirds had backed the losing side in the War of Independence, and had been seriously impoverished and quite efficiently oppressed for that reason. The Mrs. Hurlbird could never forget it. Nevertheless they shuddered at the thought of a European career for myself and Florence. Each of them really wailed when they heard that that was what I hoped to give their niece. That may have been partly because they regarded Europe as a sink of iniquity, where strange laxities prevailed. They thought the mother country as a rastry and as any other, and they carried their protest to extraordinary lengths, for them. They even, almost, said that marriage was a sacrament, but neither Miss Florence nor Miss Emily could quite bring herself to utter the word. And they almost brought themselves to say that Florence's early life had been characterized by flirtations, something of that sort. I know I ended the interview by saying, I don't care. If Florence has robbed a bank, I am going to marry her and take her to Europe. And at that, Miss Emily wailed and fainted. But Miss Florence, in spite of the state of her sister, threw herself on my neck and cried out, Don't do it, John. Don't do it. You're a good young man. And she added, whilst I was getting out of the room, to send Florence to her aunt's rescue. We ought to tell you more. But she's our dear sister's child. Florence, I remember, received me with a chalk pale face and the exclamation, Have those old cats been saying anything against me? But I assured her that they had not, and hurried her into the room of her strangely afflicted relatives. I had really forgotten all about that exclamation of Florence's until this moment. She treated me so very well, with such tact, that, if I ever thought of it afterwards, I put it down to her deep affection for me. And that evening, when I went to fetch her for a buggy ride, she had disappeared. I did not lose any time. I went into New York and engaged Burse on the Pocahontas. That was to sail on the evening of the fourth of the month. And then, returning to Stamford, I tracked out, in the course of the day, that Florence had been driven to Rye Station. And there I found that she had taken the cars to Waterbury. She had, of course, gone to her uncles. The old man received me with a stony, husky face. I was not to see Florence. She was ill. She was keeping her room. And, from something that he let drop, an odd biblical phrase that I have forgotten, I gathered that all that family simply did not intend her to marry ever in her life. I procured at once the name of the nearest minister and a rope ladder. You have no idea how primitively these matters were arranged in those days in the United States. I daresay they may be so still. And at one o'clock in the morning, on the fourth of August, I was standing in Florence's bedroom. I was so one-minded in my purpose that it never struck me there was anything improper in being, at one o'clock in the morning, in Florence's bedroom. I just wanted to wake her up. She was not, however, asleep. She expected me, and her relatives had only just left her. She received me with an embrace of a warmth. Well, it was the first time I had ever been embraced by a woman. And it was the last when a woman's embrace has had in it any warmth for me. I suppose it was my own fault, what followed. At any rate, I was in such a hurry to get the wedding over, and was so afraid of her relatives finding me there, that I must have received her advances with a certain amount of absence of mind. I was out of that room and down the ladder in under half a minute. She kept me waiting at the foot in an unconsciousful time. It was certainly three in the morning before we knocked up that minister. And I think that weight was the only sign Florence ever showed of having a conscience, as far as I was concerned, unless her lying for some moments in my arms was also a sign of conscience. I fancy that, if I had shown warmth then, she would have acted the proper wife to me, or would have put me back again. But, because I acted like a Philadelphia gentleman, she made me, I suppose, go through with the part of a male nurse. Perhaps she thought that I should not mind. After that, as I gather, she had not any more remorse. She was only anxious to carry out her plans. For just before she came down the ladder, she called me to the top of that grotesque implement that I went up and down like a tranquil jumping jack. I was perfectly collected. She said to me with a certain fierceness, It is determined that we will sail at four this afternoon. You're not lying about having taken birth. I understood that she would naturally be anxious to get away from the neighborhood of her apparently insane relatives, so that I readily excused her for thinking that I should be capable of lying about such a thing. I made it, therefore, plain to her that it was my fixed determination to sail by the Pocahontas. She said then, It was a moonlit morning, and she was whispering in my ear, while I stood on the ladder. The hills that surrounded Waterbury showed extraordinarily tranquil around the villa. She said, almost coldly. I wanted to know so as to pack my trunks. And she added, I may be ill, you know, I guess my heart is a little like Uncle Hurlbirds. It runs in families. I whispered that the Pocahontas was an extraordinarily steady boat. Now I wonder what had passed through Florence's mind during the two hours that she had kept me waiting at the foot of the ladder. I would give not a little to know. Till then, I fancy she had had no settled plan in her mind. She certainly never mentioned her heart till that time. Perhaps the renewed sight of her Uncle Hurlbird had given her the idea. Certainly her Aunt Emily, who had come over with her to Waterbury, would have rubbed into her for hours and hours, the idea that any accentuated discussions would kill the old gentleman. That would recall to her mind all the safeguards against excitement with which the poor, silly old gentleman had been hedged in during their trip round the world. That, perhaps, put it into her head. Still, I believe there was some remorse on my account, too. Lenora told me that Florence said there was, for Lenora knew all about it, and once went so far as to ask her how she could do a thing so infamous. She excused herself on the score of an overmastering passion. Well, I always say that an overmastering passion is a good excuse for feelings. You cannot help them. And it is a good excuse for straight actions. She might have bolted with the fellow before or after she married me. And, if they had not enough money to get along with, they might have cut their throats, or sponged on her family. Though, of course, Florence wanted such a lot, that it would have suited her very badly to have for a husband a clerk in a dry good store, which is what old Hurlbird would have made of that fellow. He hated him. No, I do not think that there is much excuse for Florence. God knows. She was a frightened fool, and she was fantastic. And I suppose that, at that time, she really cared for that imbecile. He certainly didn't care for her, poor thing. At any rate, after I had assured her that the Pocahontas was a steady ship, she just said, You'll have to look after me in certain ways, like Uncle Hurlbird has looked after. I will tell you how to do it. And then she stepped over the sill as if she were stepping on board a boat. I suppose she had burnt hers. I had, no doubt, I owe winners enough. When we re-entered the Hurlbird mansion at eight o'clock, the Hurlbirds were just exhausted. Florence had a hard, triumphant air. We had got married about four in the morning, and had sat about in the woods above the town till then. Listening to a mockingbird imitate an old tomcat. So I guess Florence had not found getting married to me a very stimulating process. I had not found anything much more inspiring to say than how glad I was with variations. I think I was two days. Well, the Hurlbirds were two days to say much. We had breakfast together, and then Florence went to pack her grips and things. Old Hurlbird took the opportunity to read me a full-blooded lecture in the style of an American oration as to the perils for young American girlhood lurking in the European jungle. He said that Paris was full of snakes in the grass of which he had had bitter experience. He concluded, as they always do, poor, dear old things, with the aspiration that all American women should one day be sexless, though that is not the way they put it. Well, we made the ship all right by one thirty, and there was a tempest blowing. That helped Florence a good deal, for we were not ten minutes out from Sandy Hook before Florence went down into her cabin, and her heart took her. An agitated stewardess came running up to me, and I went running down. I got my directions how to behave to my wife. Most of them came from her, though it was the ship doctor who discreetly suggested to me that I had better refrain from manifestations of affection. I was ready enough. I was, of course, full of remorse. It occurred to me that her heart was the reason for the Hurlbirds' mysterious desire to keep their youngest and dearest unmarried. Of course, they would be too refined to put the motive into words. They were old stock New Englanders. They would not want to have to suggest that a husband must not kiss the back of his wife's neck. They would not like to suggest that he might, for the matter of that. I wondered, though, how Florence got the doctor to enter the conspiracy. The several doctors. Of course, her heart squeaked a bit. She had the same configuration of the lungs as her Uncle Hurlbird, and, in his company, she must have heard a great deal of heart talk from specialists. Anyhow, she and they tied me pretty well down. And Jimmy, of course, that dreary boy. What in the world did she see in him? He was legubrious, silent, morose. He had no talent as a painter. He was very shallow and dark, and he never shaved sufficiently. He met us at Harve, and he proceeded to make himself useful for the next two years, during which he lived in our flat in Paris, whether we were there or not. He studied painting at Julien's, or some such place. That fellow had his hands always in the pocket of his odious, square-shouldered, broad hipped, American coats, and his dark eyes were always full of ominous appearances. He was, besides, too fat. Why, I was much the better man. And I dare say Florence would have given me the better. She showed signs of it. I think, perhaps, the enigmatic smile with which she used to look back at me over her shoulder when she went into the bathing place was a sort of invitation. I have mentioned that. It was as if she were saying, I am going in here. I am going to stand so stripped and white and straight, and you are a man. Perhaps it was that. No, she could not have liked that fellow long. He looked like Salo Putty. I understand that he had been slim and dark and very graceful at the time of her first disgrace. But loafing about in Paris, on her pocket money, and on the allowance that old Hurlbird made him to keep out of the United States, had given him a stomach like a man of forty, and dispeptic irritation on top of it. God, how they worked me. It was those two between them who really elaborated the rules. I have told you something about them, how I had to head conversations for all those eleven years off such topics as love, poverty, crime, and so on. But looking over what I have written, I see that I have unintentionally misled you when I said that Florence was never out of my sight. Yet that was the impression that I really had until just now. When I come to think of it, she was out of my sight most of the time. You see, that fellow impressed upon me that what Florence needed most of all were sleep and privacy. I must never enter her room without knocking, or her poor little heart might flutter away to its doom. He said these things with his lugubrious croak, and his black eyes like a crow's, so that I seemed to see poor Florence die ten times a day. A little pale, frail corpse. Why, I would as soon have thought of entering her room without her permission as of burglaring a church. I would sooner have committed that crime. I would certainly have done it if I had thought the state of her heart demanded the sacrilege. So at ten o'clock at night the door closed upon Florence, who had gently, and, as if reluctantly, backed up that fellow's recommendations. And she would wish me good night as if she were a Cinquinto Italian lady, saying goodbye to her lover. And at ten o'clock of the next morning there she would come out of the door of her room, as fresh as Venus rising from any of the couches that are mentioned in Greek legends. Her room door was locked because she was nervous about thieves, but an electric contrivance on a cord was understood to be attached to her little wrist. She had only to press a bulb to raise the house. And I was provided with an axe, an axe, great gods, with which to break down her door in case she ever failed to answer my knock, after I knocked really loud several times. It was pretty well thought out, you see. What wasn't so well thought out were the ultimate consequences, our being tied to Europe. For that young man rubbed it so well into me that Florence would die if she crossed the channel. He impressed it so fully on my mind that, when later Florence wanted to go to Fordingbridge, I cut the proposal short. Absolutely short, with a curt no. It fixed her and it frightened her. I was even backed up by all the doctors. I seemed to have had endless interviews with doctor after doctor. Cool, quiet men who would ask, in reasonable tones, whether there was any reason for her going to England, any special reason. And since I could not see any special reason, they would give the verdict, better not than. I daresay they were honest enough as things go. They probably imagined that the mere associations of the steamer might have effects on Florence's nerves. That would be enough, that in the conscientious desire to keep our money on the continent. It must have rattled poor Florence pretty considerably. For you see, the main idea, the only main idea of her heart, that was otherwise cold, was to get to Fordingbridge and be a county lady in the home of her ancestors. But Jimmy got her there. He shut on her the door of the channel. Even on the fairest day of blue sky, with the cliffs of England shining like mother of pearl and full view of Calais, I would not have let her cross the steamer gangway to save her life. I tell you, it fixed her. It fixed her beautifully, because she could not announce herself as cured, since that would have put an end to the locked bedroom arrangements. And by the time she was sick of Jimmy, which happened in the year 1903, she had taken on Edward Ash Burnham. Yes, it was a bad fix for her, because Edward could have taken her to Fordingbridge, and though he could not give her a brand-shaw manner, that home of her ancestors being settled on his wife, she could at least have pretty considerably queened it there, or thereabouts, what with our money and the support of the Ash Burnham's. Her uncle, as soon as he considered that she had really settled down with me, and I sent him only the most glowing accounts of her virtue and constancy, made over to her a very considerable part of his fortune, for which he had no use. I suppose that we had, between us, fifteen thousand a year in English money, though I never quite knew how much of hers went to Jimmy. At any rate, we could have shown in Fordingbridge. I never quite knew, either, how she and Edward got rid of Jimmy. I fancy that fat and disreputable raven must have had his six golden front teeth knocked down as throat by Edward one morning, willest I had gone out to buy some flowers in the Rue de la Paix, leaving Florence in the flat in charge of those two. And serve him very right, is all that I can say. He was a bad sort of blackmailer. I hope Florence does not have his company in the next world. As God is my judge, I do not believe that I would have separated those two if I had known that they really and passionately loved each other. I did not know where the public morality of the case comes in. And, of course, no man really knows what he would have done in any given case. But I truly believe that I would have united them, observing ways and means as decent as I could. I believe that I should have given them money to live upon and that I should have consoled myself somehow. At that date I might have found some young thing, like Massey Maiden, or the poor girl, and I might have had some peace. For peace I never had with Florence, and hardly believe that I cared for her in the way of love after a year or two of it. She became for me a rare and fragile object, something burdensome, but very frail. Why, it was as if I had been given a thin-shelled pullet's egg to carry on my palm from Equatorial Africa to Hoboken. Yes, she became for me, as it were, the subject of a bet, the trophy of an athlete's achievement, a parsley crown that is the symbol of his chastity, his soberness, his abstentations, and of his inflexible will. Of intrinsic value, as a wife, I think she had none at all for me. I fancy I was not even proud of the way she dressed. But her passion for Jimmy was not even a passion. And, mad as the suggestion may appear, she was frightened for her life. Yes, she was afraid of me. I will tell you how that happened. I had in the old days a darky servant called Julius, who veleted me and waited on me and loved me like the crown of his head. Now, when we left Waterbury to go to the Pocahontas, Florence entrusted to me one very special and very precious leather grip. She told me that her life might depend on that grip, which contained her drugs against heart attacks. And since I was never much of a hand at carrying things, I entrusted this, in turn, to Julius. It was a gray-haired chap of sixty or so, and very picturesque at that. He made so much impression on Florence that she regarded him as a sort of father, and absolutely refused to let me take him to Paris. He would have inconvenienced her. Well, Julius was so overcome with grief at being left behind that he must needs go and drop the precious grip. I saw red. I saw purple. I flew at Julius. On the ferry it was. I filled up one of his eyes. I threatened to strangle him. And since an unresisting negro could make a deplorable noise and a deplorable spectacle, and since that was Florence's first adventure in the married state, she got a pretty idea of my character. It affirmed in her the desperate resolve to conceal from me the fact that she was not what she would have called a pure woman. For that was really the mainspring of her fantastic actions. She was afraid that I should murder her. So she got up the heart attack at the earliest possible opportunity, on board the liner. Perhaps she was not so very much to be blamed. You must remember that she was a New Englander, and that New England had not yet come to loathe Darkies as it does now, whereas if she had come from even so little south as Philadelphia, and had been an oldish family, she would have seen that for me to kick at Julius was not so outrageous an act as for her cousin, Reggie Hurlberg, to say, as I have heard him say to his English butler, that for two cents he would bat him on the pants. Besides, the medicine grip did not bulk as largely in her eyes as it did in mine, where it was the symbol of the existence of an adored wife of a day. To her it was just a useful eye. Well, there you have the position, as clear as I can make it, the husband an ignorant fool, the wife a cold sensualist with imbecile fears, for I was such a fool that I should never have known that she was, or was not, and the blackmailing lover, and then the other lover came along. Well, Edward Ashburner was worth having. Have I conveyed to you the splendid fellow that he was, the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful, and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair dealing, fair thinking, public character? I suppose I have not conveyed it to you. The truth is, that I never knew it until the poor girl came along. The poor girl who was just as straight as blended and as upright as he. I swear she was. I suppose I ought to have known. I suppose that was, really, why I liked him so much, so infinitely much. Come to think of it, I can remember a thousand little acts of kindness, of thoughtfulness for his inferiors, even on the continent. Look here, I know of two families of dirty, unpicturesque, hessian poppers, that that fellow, with an infinite patience, rooted up, got their police reports, set on their feet, or exported to my patient land. And he would do it quite inarticulately, set in motion by seeing a child crying in the street. He would wrestle with dictionaries in that unfamiliar tongue. Well, he could not bear to see a child cry. Perhaps he could not bear to see a woman and not give her the comfort of his physical attractions. But, although I liked him so intensely, I was rather apt to take these things for granted. They made me feel comfortable with him, good towards him. They made me trust him. But I guess I thought it was part of the character of any English gentleman. Why, one day he got it into his head that the head waiter at the Excelsior had been crying. That fellow with the gray face and gray whiskers. And then he spent the best part of a week, in correspondence, and up at the British Consoles, in getting the fellow's wife to come back from London and bring back his girl baby. She had bolted with a Swiss galleon. If she had not come inside the week, he would have gone to London himself to fetch her. He was like that. Edward Ashburnham was like that. And I thought it was only the duty of his rank in station. Perhaps that was all that it was. But I pray God to make me discharge mine as well. And, but for the poor girl, I dare say that I should never have seen it. However much the feeling might have been over me. She had for him such enthusiasm that, although even now I do not understand the technicalities of English life, I can gather enough. She was with them during the whole of our last day at Nallheim. Nancy Rufford was her name. She was Leonora's only friend's only child. And Leonora was her guardian, if that is the correct term. She had lived with the Ashburnhams ever since she had been of the age of thirteen, when her mother was said to have committed suicide owing to the brutalities of her father. Yes, it is a cheerful story. Edward always called her the girl, and it was very pretty the evident affection he had for her and she for him. And Leonora's feet she would have kissed. Those two were, for her, the best man and the best woman on earth, and in heaven. I think that she had not a thought of evil in her head, the poor girl. Well, anyhow, she chanted Edward's praises to me for the hour together. But, as I have said, I cannot make much of it. It appeared that he had the DSO, and that his troop loved him beyond the love of men. He never saw such a troop as his, and he had the royal humane society's medal with a clasp. That meant, apparently, that he had twice jumped off the deck of a troop ship to rescue what the girl called Tommy's, who had fallen overboard in the Red Sea in such places. He had been twice recommended for the VC, whatever that might mean, and, although owing to some technicalities, he had never received that apparently coveted order. He had some special place about his sovereign, at the coronation, or perhaps it was some post in the beef-eaters. She made him out like a cross between Longren and the Cheval Bayard. Perhaps he was, but he was too silent a fellow to make that sight of him really decorative. I remember going to him at about that time and asking him what the DSO was, and he grunted out. It's a sort of thing they give grocers who've honorably supplied the troops with adulterated coffee and wartime. Something of that sort. He did not quite carry conviction to me, so in the end I put it directly to Lenora. I asked her fully and squarely, for facing the question with some remarks, such as those I have already given you, as to the difficulty one has in really getting to know people when one's intimacy is conducted as an English acquaintance. I asked her whether her husband was not really a splendid fellow, along at least the lines of his public functions. She looked at me with a slightly awakened air, with an air that would have been almost startled if Lenora could ever have been startled. Didn't you know, she asked, if I come to think of it, there is not a more splendid fellow in any three counties. Pick them where you will, along those lines. And she added after she had looked at me reflectively for what seemed a long time. To do my husband justice, there could not be a better man on the earth. There would not be room for it, along those lines. Well, I said, then he must really be a long-run and the Sid in one body, for there are not any other lines that count. Again, she looked at me for a long time. It's your opinion that there are no other lines that count? She asked slowly. Well, I answered gaily. You're not going to accuse him of not being a good husband, or of not being a good guardian to your ward. She spoke then, slowly, like a person who is listening to the sounds in a seashell held to her ear. And would you believe it? She told me afterwards that, at that speech of mine, for the first time, she had a vague inkling of the tragedy that was to follow so soon, although the girl had lived with them for eight years or so. Oh, I'm not thinking of saying that he is not the best of husbands, or that he is not very fond of the girl. And then I said something like, Well, Leonora, a man sees more of these things than even a wife. And let me tell you, that in all the years I've known Edward, he has never, in your absence, paid a moment's attention to any other woman, not by the quivering of an eyelash. I should have noticed. And he talks of you as if you were one of the angels of God. Oh, she came up to the scratch. As you could be sure, Leonora would always come up to the scratch. I am perfectly sure that he always speaks nicely of me. I dare say she had practice in that sort of scene. People must have been always complimenting her on her husband's fidelity and adoration. For half the world, the whole of the world that knew Edward and Leonora believed that his conviction in the kill site affair had been a miscarriage of justice, a conspiracy of false evidence, got together by non-conformist adversaries, but think of the fool that I was. End of part two, section one. Section eight 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 two, section two. Let me think where we were. Oh yes, that conversation took place on the 4th of August, 1913. I remember saying to her that, on that day exactly nine years before, I had made their acquaintance so that it had seemed quite appropriate and like a birthday speech to utter my little testimonial to my friend Edward. I could quite confidently say that, though we four had been about together in all sorts of places, for all that length of time I had not, for my part, one single complaint to make of either of them, and I added that that was an unusual record for people who had been so much together. You are not to imagine that it was only at Nahime that we met that would not have suited Florence. I find, on looking at my diaries, that on the 4th of September, 1904, Edward accompanied Florence and myself to Paris, where we put him up till the 21st of that month. He made another short visit to us in December of that year, the first year of our acquaintance. It must have been during this visit that he knocked Mr. Jimmy's teeth down his throat. I daresay Florence had asked him to come over for that purpose. In 1905 he was in Paris three times, once with Leonora, who wanted some frocks. In 1906 we spent the best part of six weeks together at Mentone, and Edward stayed with us in Paris on his way back to London. That was how it went. The fact was that in Florence the poor wretch had got hold of a tartar, compared with whom Leonora was a sucking kid. He must have had a hell of a time. Leonora wanted to keep him for, what shall I say, for the good of her church, as it were, to show that Catholic women do not lose their men. Let it go at that for the moment. I will write more about her motives later, perhaps. But Florence was sticking on to the proprietor of the home of her ancestors. No doubt he was also a very passionate lover. But I am convinced that he was sick of Florence within three years of even interrupted companionship, and the life that she led him. If ever Leonora so much as mentioned in a letter that they had had a woman staying with him, or if she so much as mentioned a woman's name in a letter to me, off would go a desperate cable and cipher to that poor wretch at Branshaw, commanding him on pain of an instant and horrible disclosure to come over and assure her of his fidelity. I dare say he would have faced it out. I dare say he would have thrown over Florence and taken the risk of exposure. But there he had Leonora to deal with, and Leonora assured him that, if the minutest fragment of the real situation ever got through to my senses, she would wreck upon him the most terrible vengeance that she could think of. And he did not have a very easy job. Florence called for more and more attention from him, as the time went on. She would make him kiss her at any moment of the day, and it was only by his making it plain that a divorced lady could never assume position in the county of Hampshire that he could prevent her from making a bolt of it with him in her train. Oh, yes, it was a difficult job for him. For Florence, if you please, gaining in time a more composed view of nature, and overcome by her habits of garrulity, arrived at a frame of mind in which she found it almost necessary to tell me all about it, nothing less than that. She said that her situation was too unbearable with regard to me. She proposed to tell me all, secure a divorce for me, and go with Edward and settle in California. I do not suppose that she was really serious in this. It would have meant the extinction of all hopes of branch-shop manner for her. Besides, she had got it into her head that Leonora, who was as sound as a roach, was consumptive. She was always begging Leonora before me to go and see a doctor. But, nonetheless, poor Edward seems to have believed in her determination to carry him off. He would not have gone. He cared for his wife too much. But if Florence had put him at it, that would have meant my getting to know of it, and his incurring Leonora's vengeance. And she could have made it pretty hot for him, in ten or a dozen different ways. And she assured me that she would have used every one of them. She was determined to spare my feelings. And she was quite aware that, at that date, the hottest she could have made it for him would have been to refuse herself ever to see him again. While I think I had made it pretty clear, let me come to the Fourth of August, 1913, the last day of my absolute ignorance, and I assure you of my perfect happiness, for the coming of that dear girl only added to it all. On that Fourth of August I was sitting in the lounge with a rather odious Englishman called Bagshaw, who had arrived that night too late for dinner. Leonora had just come to bed and I was waiting for Florence and Edward and the girl to come back from a concert at the casino. They had not gone, they are all together. Florence, I remember, had said at first that she would remain with Leonora and me, and Edward and the girl had gone off alone. And then Leonora had said to Florence with perfect calmness, I wish she would go with those two. I think the girl ought to have the appearance of being chaperoned with Edward in these places. I think the time has come. So Florence, with her light step, had slipped out after them. She was all in black for some cousin or other. Americans are particular in those matters. We had gone on sitting in the lounge till towards 10 when Leonora had gone up to bed. It had been a very hot day, but there it was cool. The man called Bagshaw had been reading the Times on the other side of the room, but then he moved over to me with some trifling question as a prelude to suggesting an acquaintance. I fancy he asked me something about the poll tax on Kerr guests, and whether it could not be sneaked out of. He was that sort of person. Well, he was an unmistakable man, with a military figure, rather exaggerated with bulbous eyes that avoided your own, and a pallid complexion that suggested vices practiced in secret along with an uneasy desire for making acquaintance at whatever cost. The filthy toad. He began by telling me that he came from Ludlow Manor near Leadbury. The name had a slightly familiar sound, though I could not fix it in my mind. Then he began to talk about a duty on hops, about Californian hops, about Los Angeles, where he had been, he fencing for a topic with which he might gain my affection. And then, quite suddenly, in the bright light of the street, I saw Florence running. It was like that. I saw Florence running with a face wider than paper, and her hand on the black stuff over her heart. I tell you, my own heart stood still. I tell you, I could not move. She rushed in at the swing doors. She looked round at that place of rush chairs, cane tables and newspapers. She saw me and opened her lips. She saw the man who was talking to me. She stuck her hands over her face as if she wished to push her eyes out. And she was not there any more. I could not move. I could not stir a finger. And then the man said, by Joe Flory Hurlbird. He turned upon me with an oily and uneasy sound meant for a laugh. He was really going to ingratiate himself with me. Do you know who that is? He asked. The last time I saw that girl, she was coming out of the bedroom of a young man called Jimmy at five o'clock in the morning, in my house at Leadbury. You saw her recognize me. He was standing on his feet looking down at me. I don't know what I looked like. At any rate, he gave a sort of gurgle and then stuttered. Oh, I say, those were the last words I ever heard of Mr. Bagshaw's. A long time afterwards I pulled myself out of the lounge and went up to Florence's room. She had not locked the door for the first time of our married life. She was lying quite respectably arranged, unlike Miss Maiden on her bed. She had a little file that rightly should have contained Nitrit of Amel in her right hand. That was on the 4th of August, 1913. End of Part Two, Section Two. Section Nine 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 Denise Lacey. The Good Soldier, A Tale of Passion by Ford Maddox Ford. Part Three, Section One. The odd thing is that what sticks out in my recollection of the rest of that evening was Lenora's saying, of course you might marry her and when I asked whom she answered, the girl. Now that is to me a very amazing thing, amazing for the light of possibilities that it cast into the human heart. For I had never had the slightest conscious idea of marrying the girl. I never had the slightest idea even of caring for her. I must have talked in an odd way, as people do who are recovering from an anesthetic. It is as if one had a dual personality, the one eye being entirely unconscious of the other. I had thought nothing. I had said such an extraordinary thing. I don't know that analysis of my own psychology matters at all to this story. I should say that it didn't or at any rate that I had given enough of it. But that odd remark of mine had a strong influence upon what came after. I mean that Lenora probably never would have spoken to me at all about Florence's relations with Edward if I hadn't said two hours after my wife's death. Now I can marry the girl. She had then taken it for granted that I had been suffering all that she had been suffering, or at least that I had permitted all that she had permitted. So that a month ago, about a week after the funeral of poor Edward, she could say to me in the most natural way in the world, I had been talking about the duration of my stay at Branshaw. She said with her clear, reflective intonation. Oh, stop here forever and ever if you can. And then she added, you couldn't be more of a brother to me or more of a counselor or more of a support. You are all the consolation I have in the world. And isn't it odd to think that if your wife hadn't been my husband's mistress, you would probably never have been here at all. That was how I got the news, full in the face like that. I didn't say anything. And I don't suppose I felt anything, unless maybe it was with that mysterious and unconscious self that underlies most people. Perhaps one day when I am unconscious or walking in my sleep, I may go and spit upon poor Edward's grave. It seems about the most unlikely thing I could do, but there it is. No, I remember no emotion of any sort, but just the clear feeling that one has from time to time. When one hears that some Mrs. So-and-so is all new with a certain gentleman, it made things plainer suddenly to my curiosity. It was as if I thought at that moment of a windy November evening that when I came to think it over afterwards, a dozen unexplained things would fit themselves into place. But I wasn't thinking things over then. I remember that distinctly. I was just sitting back rather stiffly in a deep arm chair. That is what I remember. It was twilight. Branshaw Manor lies in a little hollow with lawns across it and pine woods on the fringe of the dip. The immense wind coming from across the forest roared overhead. But the view from the window was perfectly quiet and gray. Not a thing stirred, except a couple of rabbits on the extreme edge of the lawn. It was Lenora's own little study that we were in, and we were waiting for the tea to be brought. I, as I said, was sitting in the deep chair. Lenora was standing in the window twirling the wooden acorn at the end of the window-blind cord, desulterally round and round. She looked across the lawn and said, as far as I can remember, Edward has been dead only ten days, and yet there are rabbits on the lawn. I understand that rabbits do a great deal of harm to the short grass in England. And then she turned round to me and said without any adornment at all, for I remember her exact words. I think it was stupid of Florence to commit suicide. I cannot tell you the extraordinary sense of leisure that we too seem to have at that moment. It wasn't as if we were waiting for a train. It wasn't as if we were waiting for a meal. It was just that there was nothing to wait for. Nothing. There was an extreme stillness with the remote and intermittent sound of the wind. There was the gray light in that brown small room. And there appeared to be nothing else in the world. I knew then that Lenora was about to let me into her full confidence. It was as if, or no, it was the actual fact that Lenora, with an odd English sense of decency, had determined to wait until Edward had been in his grave for a full week before she spoke. And with some vague motive of giving her an idea of the extent to which she must permit herself to make confidences, I said slowly, and these words too I remember with exactitude. Did Florence commit suicide? I didn't know. I was just, you understand, trying to let her know that if she were going to speak, she would have to talk about a much wider range of things than she had before thought necessary. So that was the first knowledge I had that Florence had committed suicide. It had never entered my head. You may think that I had been singularly lacking in suspiciousness. You may consider me even to have been an imbecile. But consider the position. In such circumstances of clamor, of outcry, of the crash of many people running together, of the professional reticence of such people as hotel keepers, the traditional reticence of such good people as the Ashburnums, in such circumstances, it is some little material object always that catches the eye and that appeals to the imagination. I had no possible guide to the idea of suicide and the sight of the little flask of Nitrate of Amel in Florence's hand suggested instantly to my mind the idea of the failure of her heart. Nitrate of Amel, you understand, is the drug that is given to relieve sufferers from angina picturis. Seeing Florence as I had seen her, running with a white face and with one hand held over her heart, and seeing her as I immediately afterward saw her, lying upon her bed with the so familiar little brown flask clenched in her fingers, it was natural enough for my mind to frame the idea. As happened now and again, I thought, she had gone out without her remedy and having felt an attack coming on, whilst she was in the gardens, she had run in to get the Nitrate in order as quickly as possible to obtain relief. And it was equally inevitable my mind should frame the thought that her heart, unable to stand the strain of the running, should have broken in her side. How could I have known that, during all the years of our married life, that little brown flask had contained not Nitrate of Amel, but Prusik Acid? It was inconceivable. Why, not even Edward Ashburnam, who was, after all, more intimate with her than I was, had an inkling of the truth. He just thought that she had dropped dead of heart disease. Indeed, I fancy that the only people who ever knew that Florence had committed suicide were Lenora, the Grand Duke, the head of the police, and the hotel keeper. I mention these last three because my recollection of that night is only the sort of pinkish effulgence from the electric lamps in the hotel lounge. There seemed to bob into my consciousness, like floating globes, the faces of those three. Now it would be the bearded, monarchical, benevolent head of the Grand Duke. Then the sharp-featured brown, cavalry mustached feature of the chief of police. Then the globular polished and high-collared vacuousness that represented Monsieur Chaunce, the proprietor of the hotel. At times one head would be there alone. At another, the spiked helmet of the official would be close to the healthy baldness of the prince. Then Monsieur Chaunce's oil blocks would push in between the two. The sovereign's soft, exquisitely trained voice would say, Ya, ya, ya, each word dropping out like so many soft pellets of suet. The subdued rasp of the official would come. Sumbephel d'Orclat, like five revolver shots. The voice of Monsieur Chaunce would go on and on under its breath, like that of an unclean priest reciting from his breviary in the corner of a railway carriage. That was how it presented itself to me. They seemed to take no notice of me. I don't suppose that I was even addressed by one of them. But as long as one or the other or all three of them were there, they stood between me as if I, being the titular possessor of the corpse, had a right to be present at their conferences. Then they all went away and I was left alone for a long time. And I thought nothing, absolutely nothing. I had no ideas. I had no strength. I felt no sorrow, no desire for action, no inclination to go upstairs and fall upon the body of my wife. I just saw the pink effulgence at the cane tables, the palms, the globular match holders, the indented ash trays. And then Lenora came to me, and it appears that I addressed to her that singular remark. Now I can marry the girl. But I have given you absolutely the whole of my recollection of that evening, as it is the whole of my recollection of the succeeding three or four days. I was in a state just simply cataleptic. They put me to bed and I stayed there. They brought me my clothes and I dressed. They led me to an open grave and I stood beside it. If they had taken me to the edge of a river, or if they had flung me beneath a railway train, I should have been drowned or mangled in the same spirit. I was the walking dead. Well, those are my impressions. What actually had happened had been this. I pieced it together afterwards. You will remember I said that Edward Ashburnham and the girl had gone off that night to a concert at the casino and that Lenora had asked Florence almost immediately after their departure to follow them and to perform the Office of Chaperone. Florence, you may also remember, was all in black being the morning that she wore for a deceased cousin, Jean Hurlberg. It was a very black night and the girl was dressed in cream colored muslin that must have glimmered under the tall trees of the dark park like a phosphorescent fish in a cupboard. You couldn't have had a better beacon. And it appears that Edward Ashburnham led the girl not up the straight alley that leads to the casino but in under the dark trees of the park. Edward Ashburnham told me all this in his final outburst. I have told you that upon occasion he became ducidly vocal. I didn't pump him. I hadn't any motive. At that time I didn't in the least connect him with my wife. But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist or like a very good novelist for the matter of that if it's the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly. And I tell you that I see that thing as clearly as if it were a dream that never left me. It appears that not very far from the casino he and the girl sat down in the darkness upon a public bench. The lights from that place of entertainment must have reached them through the tree trunks. Since Edward said he could quite plainly see the girl's face, that beloved face with the high forehead, the queer mouth, the tortured eyebrows and the direct eyes. And to Florence creeping up behind them they must have presented the appearance of silhouettes. For I take it that Florence came creeping up behind them over the short grass to a tree that I quite well remember was immediately behind that public seat. It was not a very difficult feat for a woman instinct with jealousy. The casino orchestra was, as Edward remembered to tell me, playing the raccoonsy march. And although it was not loud enough at that distance to drown the voice of Edward Ashburnham, it was certainly sufficiently audible to a face amongst the noises of the night, the slight brushings and rustlings that might have been made by the feet of Florence or by her gown in coming over the short grass. And that miserable woman must have got it in the face, good and strong. It must have been horrible for her. Horrible. Well, I suppose she deserved all that she got. Anyhow, there you have the picture, the immensely tall trees, elms most of them, towering and feathering away up into the black mistiness that trees seem to gather about them at night. The silhouettes of those two upon the seat, the beams of light coming from the casino, the woman all in black peeping with fear behind the tree trunk. It is melodrama, but I can't help it. And then it appears something happened to Edward Ashburnham. He assured me, and I see no reason for disbelieving him, that until that moment he had had no idea whatever of caring for the girl. He said that he had regarded her exactly as he would have regarded a daughter. He certainly loved her, but with a very deep, very tender and very tranquil love. He had missed her when she went away to her convent school. He had been glad when she had returned. But of more than that he had been totally unconscious. Had he been conscious of it, he assured me he would have fled from it as from a thing accursed. He realized that it was the last outrage upon Lenora. But the real point was his entire unconsciousness. He had gone with her into that dark park, with no quickening of the pulse, with no desire for the intimacy of solitude. He had gone, intending to talk about polo ponies and tennis rackets, about the temperament of the reverend mother at the convent she had left, and about whether her frock for a party when they got home should be white or blue. It hadn't come into his head that they would talk about a single thing that they hadn't always talked about. It had not even come into his head that the taboo which extended around her was not inviolable. And then suddenly that, he was very careful to assure me that at that time there was no physical motive about his declaration. It did not appear to him to be a matter of a dark night and a propinquity and so on. No, it was simply of her effect on the moral side of his life that he appears to have talked. He said that he never had the slightest notion to enfold her in his arms or so much as to touch her hand. He swore that he did not touch her hand. He said that they sat. She had one end of the bench, he at the other. He leaning slightly towards her and she looking straight towards the light of the casino, her face illuminated by the lamps. The expression upon her face he could only describe as queer. At another time indeed he made it appear that he thought she was glad. It is easy to imagine that she was glad since at that time she could have no idea of what was really happening. Frankly, she adored Edward Ashburnam. He was for her in everything that she said at that time, the model of humanity, the hero, the athlete, the father of his country, the law-giver. So that for her to be suddenly, intimately, and overwhelmingly praised must have been a matter for mere gladness, however overwhelming it were. It must have been as if a god had approved her handiwork or a king her loyalty. She just sat still and listened smiling and it seemed to her that all the bitterness of her childhood, the terrors of her tempestuous father, the bewailings of her cool-tongued mother were suddenly atoned for. She had her recompense at last. Because, of course, if you come to figure it out, a sudden pouring forth of passion by a man whom you regard as a cross between a pastor and a father might, to a woman, have the aspect of mere praise for good conduct. It wouldn't, I mean, appear at all in the light of an attempt to gain possession. The girl at least regarded him as spermly anchored to his Lenora. She had not the slightest inkling of any infidelities. He had always spoken to her of his wife in terms of reverence and deep affection. He had given her the idea that he regarded Lenora as absolutely impeccable and is absolutely satisfying. Their union had appeared to her to be one of those blessed things that are spoken of and contemplated with reverence by her church. He naturally thought that he meant to accept Leonora, and she was just glad. It was like a father saying that he approved of a marriageable daughter. And Edward, when he realized what he was doing, curbed his tongue at once. She was just glad, and she went on being just glad. I suppose that was the most monstrously wicked thing that Ashburnham ever did in his life. And yet I am so near to all these people that I cannot think any of them wicked. It is impossible for me to think of Edward Ashburnham as anything but straight, upright, and honourable. That, I mean, is in spite of everything my permanent view of him. I try at times by dwelling on some of the things that he did to push that image of him away, as you might try to push aside a large pendulum. But it always comes back. The memory of his innumerable acts of kindness, of his efficiency, of his unspiteful tongue. He was such a fine fellow. So I feel myself forced to attempt to excuse him in this as in so many other things. It is, I have no doubt, a most monstrous thing to attempt to corrupt a young girl just out of a convent. But I think Edward had no idea at all of corrupting her. I believe that he simply loved her. He said that that was the way of it, and I at least believe him, and I believe too that she was the only woman he ever really loved. He said that that was so, and he did enough to prove it. And Leonora said that it was so, and Leonora knew him to the bottom of his heart. I have come to be very much of a cynic in these matters. I mean that it is impossible to believe in the permanence of man's or woman's love, or at any rate it is impossible to believe in the permanence of any early passion. As I see it, at least with regard to man, a love affair, a love for any definite woman, is something in the nature of a widening of the experience with each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory. A turn of the eyebrow, tone of the voice, queer characteristic gesture, all these things, and it is these things that cause to arise the passion of love. All these things are like so many objects on the horizon of the landscape. The tempt a man to walk beyond the horizon to explore. He wants to get, as it were, behind those eyebrows with the peculiar turn, as if he desired to see the world with the eyes that they overshadow. He wants to hear that voice applying itself to every possible proposition, every possible topic. He wants to see those characteristic gestures against every possible background. Of the question of the sex instinct, I know very little, and I do not think that it counts for very much in a really great passion. It can be aroused by such nothings, by an untied shoelace, by a glance of the eye, and passing. But I think it might be left out of the calculation. I don't mean to say that any great passion can exist without a desire for consummation. It seems to me to be a commonplace and to be therefore a matter of needing no comment at all. It is a thing which, all its accidents, that must be taken for granted, as in a novel or a biography. You take it for granted that the characters have their meals with some regularity, but the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of passion, long continued in withering up the soul of a man, is the craving for identity, with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone. We also need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion comes to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away. Inevitably, they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar. The beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story. And yet I do believe that for every man, there comes that last woman or know that is the wrong way of formulating it. For every man there comes at last a time of his life. When the woman who then sets her seal upon his imagination has set her seal for good, he will travel over no more horizons. He will never again set the knapsack over his shoulders. He will retire from those scenes. He will have gone out of the business. That, at any rate, was the case with Edward and the poor girl. It was quite literally the case. It was quite literally the case that his passions, for the mistress of the Grand Duke, for Mrs. Basil, for Little Miss Maiden, for Florence, for whom you will, these passions were merely preliminary cantors compared to his final race with death for her. I am certain of that. I am not going to be so American as to say that all true love demands some sacrifice. Doesn't. But I think that love will be truer and more permanent, in which self-sacrifice has been exacted. And in the case of the other women, Edward just cut in and cut them out as he did with the polo-ball from under the nose of Count Baron von Loffel. I don't mean to say he didn't wear himself as thin as a lath in the endeavour to capture the other women, but over her he wore himself to rags and tatters and death, in the effort to leave her alone, and in speaking to her on that night. He wasn't, I am convinced, committing a baseness. It was as if his passion for her hadn't existed, as if the very words that he spoke without knowing that he spoke them created the passion as they went along, before he spoke. There was nothing afterwards that was the integral fact of his life. Well, I must be good back to my story. And my story was concerning itself with Florence. With Florence, who heard those words from behind the tree. That, of course, is only conjecture, but I think the conjecture is pretty well justified. You have the fact that those two went out. That she followed them almost immediately afterwards through the darkness, and a little later she came running back to the hotel with that pallet face in the hand clutching her dress over her heart. It can't have only been Bagshaw. Her face was contorted with agony before ever her eyes fell upon me or upon him beside me. But I daresay Bagshaw may have been the determining influence in her suicide. Leonora says that she had that flask, apparently, of nitrate of amyl, but actually of puracic acid for many years and that she was determined to use it if ever. I discovered the nature of her relationship with that fellow Jimmy. You see, the mainspring of her nature must have been vanity. There is no reason why it shouldn't have been, I guess it is vanity, that makes most of us keep straight, if we do keep straight, in this world. If it had been merely a matter of Edward's relations with the girl, daresay Florence would have faced it out. She would, no doubt, have made him scenes, have threatened him, have appealed to his sense of humor, to his promises. But Mr. Bagshaw, and the fact that the date was the fourth of August, must have been too much for her superstitious mind. You see, she had two things that she wanted. She wanted to be a great lady, installed in Branchaw Telegraph. She wanted also to retain my respect. She wanted, that is, to say, to retain my respect for as long as she lived with me. Suppose, if she had persuaded Edward, Aishpaham, to bolt with her, she would have let the whole thing go with a run. Or perhaps she would have tried to exact from me a new respect for the greatness of her passion on the lines of all love in the world well lost. That would be just like Florence. In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor. A desire to deceive the person with whom one lives, as to some weak spot in one's character or in one's career. For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one's small meannesses. It is really death to do so. That is why so many marriages turn out unhappily. I, for instance, am a rather greedy man. I have a taste for good cookery, and a watering tooth at the mere sound of the names of certain commestibles. If Florence had discovered this secret of mine, I should have found her knowledge of it so unbearable that I never could have supported all the other privations of the regime that she extracted from me. I am bound to say that Florence never discovered this secret. Certainly she never alluded to it, I dare say, she never took sufficient interest in me. And the secret weakness of Florence, the weakness that she could not bear to have me discover, was just that early escapade with the fellow called Jimmy. Let me, as this is in all probability, the last time I shall mention Florence's name, dwell a little upon the change that had taken place in her psychology. She would not, I mean, have minded if I had discovered that she was the mistress of Edward Ashburnham. She would rather have liked it. Indeed, the chief trouble of poor Leonora, in those days, was to keep Florence from making, before me, theatrical displays on the one line or another. Of the very fact, she wanted in one mood to come rushing to me to cast herself on her knees at my feet and to declaim a carefully arranged, frightfully emotional outpouring as to her passion. That was to show that she was like one of the great erotic women of whom history tells us. In another mood she would desire to come to me disdainfully, and to tell me that I was considerably less than a man, and that what had happened was what must happen when a real male came along. She wanted to say that in cool, balanced and sarcastic sentences. That was when she wished to appear like a heroine of a French comedy, because, of course, she was always play-acting. But what she didn't want me to know was the fact of her first escapade with the fellow called Jimmy. She had arrived at figuring out the sort of low-down, bowery tough that that fellow was. Do you know what it is to shudder in later life for some small stupid action? Usually for some small, quite genuine piece of emotionalism. Of your early life. Well, it was that sort of shuddering that came over Florence at the thought that she had surrendered to such a low fellow. I don't know that she needed to have shuddered. It was her footling old uncle's work. He ought never to have taken those two round the world together, and shut himself up in his cabin for the greater part of the time. Anyhow, I am convinced that the sight of Mr. Bagshaw, and the thought that Mr. Bagshaw, or she knew that unpleasant and toad-like personality, the thought that Mr. Bagshaw would almost certainly reveal to me that he had caught her coming out of Jimmy's bedroom at five o'clock in the morning on the Fourth of August, 1900. That was the determining influence in her suicide. And no doubt the effect of the date was too much for her superstitious personality. She had been born on the Fourth of August. She had started to go round the world on the Fourth of August. She had become a low fellow's mistress on the Fourth of August. On the same day of the year she had married me. On that Fourth she had lost Edward's love. And Bagshaw had appeared like a sinister omen. Like a grin on the face of fate. It was the last straw. She ran upstairs, arranged herself decoratively upon her bed. She was a sweetly pretty woman with smooth pink and white cheeks, long hair, the eyelashes falling like a tiny curtain on her cheeks. She drank a little file of puracic acid, and there she lay. Oh, extremely charming and clear cut. Looking with a puzzled expression at the electric light bulb that hung from the ceiling, or perhaps through it, to the stars above, who knows. Anyhow, there was an end of Florence. You have no idea how quite extraordinarily for me. That was the end of Florence. From that day to this I have never given her another thought. I have not bestowed upon her so much as a sign. Of course, when it has been necessary to talk about her to Leonora or when, for the purpose of these writings, I have tried to figure her out. I have thought about her as I might do about a problem in algebra. But it has always been as a matter for study, not for remembrance. She just went completely out of existence, like yesterday's paper. I was so deadly tired, and I dare say, that my week or ten days of facement of what was practically catalepsy, was just the repose that my exhausted nature claimed after twelve years of the repression of my instincts, after twelve years of playing the trained poodle. For that was all that I had been. I suppose that it was the shock that did it. Several shocks. But I am unwilling to attribute my feelings at that time to anything so concrete as a shock. It was a feeling so tranquil. It was as if an immensely heavy, and unbearably heavy, knapsank, supported upon my shoulder by straps, had fallen off and left my shoulders themselves, that the straps had cut into, numb, and without sensation of life. I tell you, I had no regret. What had I to forget? I suppose that my inner soul, my dual personality, had realized long before that Florence was a personality of paper. That she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies, and with emotions only as a banknote represents a certain quantity of gold. I know that sort of feeling came to the surface in me the moment the man, Bagshaw, told me that he had seen her coming out of that fellow's bedroom. I thought suddenly that she wasn't real. That she was just a massive talk out of guidebooks, drawings out of fashion plates. It is even possible that if that feeling had not possessed me, I should have run up sooner to her room and might have prevented her drinking the uracic acid. But I just couldn't do it. It would have been like chasing a scrap of paper. An occupation ennobled for a grown man. And so as it began, so the matter has remained. I didn't care whether she had come out of that bedroom or whether she hadn't. Simply didn't interest me. Florence didn't matter. I suppose you will retort that I was in love with Nancy Ruford. And that my indifference was therefore indiscretible. Well, I am not seeking to avoid discredit. I was in love with Nancy Ruford. As I am in love with the poor child's memory, quietly and quite tenderly in my American sort of way, I had never thought about it until I heard Leonora state that I might now marry her. But from that moment until her worse than death, I do not suppose that I much thought about anything else. I don't mean to say that I sighed about her groan. I just wanted to marry her. Just as some people want to go to Carcassonne. Do you understand the feeling? The sort of feeling that you must get certain matters out of the way. Smooth out certain fairly negligible complications before you can go to a place that has during all your life. Been a sort of dream city? I didn't attach much importance to my superior years. I was forty-five, and she poor thing, was only just rising twenty-two. But she was older than her years and quieter. She seemed to have an odd quality of sainthood, as if she must inevitably end in a convent with a white coiff framing her face. But she had frequently told me that she had no vocation. It just simply wasn't there. The desire to become a nun. Well, I guess that I was a sort of convent myself. Seemed fairly proper that she should make her vows to me. No, I didn't see any impediment on the score of age. I dare say no man does, and I was pretty confident that with a little preparation I could make a young girl happy. I could spoil her, as few young girls have ever been spoiled. And I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive no man can, or if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him. But as soon as I came out of my catalopsy, I seemed to perceive that my problem, that what I had to do to prepare myself for getting into contact with her, was just to get back into contact with life. I had been kept for twelve years in a rarefied atmosphere. What I then had to do was a little fighting with real life, some wrestling with men of business, some traveling amongst larger cities, something harsh, something masculine. I didn't want to present myself to Nancy Rooford as a sort of an old maid. That is why, just a fortnight after Florence's suicide, I set off for the United States. End of part three, section one.