The Good Soldier
by
Ford Maddox Ford
PART I
PART IPART II
PART III
PART IV
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[2] PART I
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6] I
[7]
[8]
[9] THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the
[10] Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an
[11] extreme intimacy--or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose
[12] and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My
[13] wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was
[14] possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew
[15] nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only
[16] possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down
[17] to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing
[18] whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and,
[19] certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I
[20] had known the shallows.
[21]
[22] I don't mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English
[23] people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we
[24] perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that
[25] we were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society
[26] of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere
[27] between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for
[28] us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September. You
[29] will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is,
[30] a "heart", and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she
[31] was the sufferer.
[32]
[33] Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But, whereas a yearly
[34] month or so at Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for
[35] the rest of the twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just
[36] enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason
[37] for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard
[38] sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence's broken
[39] years was a storm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the
[40] immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were
[41] doctor's orders. They said that even the short Channel crossing
[42] might well kill the poor thing.
[43]
[44] When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave
[45] from an India to which he was never to return, was thirty-three;
[46] Mrs Ashburnham Leonora --was thirty-one. I was thirty-six and
[47] poor Florence thirty. Thus today Florence would have been
[48] thirty-nine and Captain Ashburnham forty-two; whereas I am
[49] forty-five and Leonora forty. You will perceive, therefore, that our
[50] friendship has been a young-middle-aged affair, since we were all
[51] of us of quite quiet dispositions, the Ashburnhams being more
[52] particularly what in England it is the custom to call "quite good
[53] people".
[54]
[55] They were descended, as you will probably expect, from the
[56] Ashburnham who accompanied Charles I to the scaffold, and, as
[57] you must also expect with this class of English people, you would
[58] never have noticed it. Mrs Ashburnham was a Powys; Florence
[59] was a Hurlbird of Stamford, Connecticut, where, as you know,
[60] they are more old-fashioned than even the inhabitants of Cranford,
[61] England, could have been. I myself am a Dowell of Philadelphia,
[62] Pa., where, it is historically true, there are more old English
[63] families than you would find in any six English counties taken
[64] together. I carry about with me, indeed--as if it were the only thing
[65] that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe--the title
[66] deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between
[67] Chestnut and Walnut Streets. These title deeds are of wampum,
[68] the grant of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who left Farnham
[69] in Surrey in company with William Penn. Florence's people, as is
[70] so often the case with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from
[71] the neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, where the Ashburnhams'
[72] place is. From there, at this moment, I am actually writing.
[73]
[74] You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many.
[75] For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack
[76] of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down
[77] what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of
[78] generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight
[79] out of their heads.
[80]
[81] Some one has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the
[82] whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the
[83] breaking up of our little four-square coterie was such another
[84] unthinkable event. Supposing that you should come upon us
[85] sitting together at one of the little tables in front of the club house,
[86] let us say, at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching
[87] the miniature golf, you would have said that, as human affairs go,
[88] we were an extraordinarily safe castle. We were, if you will, one of
[89] those tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, one of those
[90] things that seem the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful
[91] and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men to frame.
[92] Where better could one take refuge? Where better?
[93]
[94] Permanence? Stability? I can't believe it's gone. I can't believe that
[95] that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished
[96] in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks. Upon
[97] my word, yes, our intimacy was like a minuet, simply because on
[98] every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we
[99] knew where to go, where to sit, which table we unanimously
[100] should choose; and we could rise and go, all four together,
[101] without a signal from any one of us, always to the music of the Kur
[102] orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or, if it rained, in
[103] discreet shelters. No, indeed, it can't be gone. You can't kill a
[104] minuet de la cour. You may shut up the music-book, close the
[105] harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats may destroy the
[106] white satin favours. The mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon
[107] may fall, but surely the minuet--the minuet itself is dancing itself
[108] away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian
[109] bathing places must be stepping itself still. Isn't there any heaven
[110] where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong
[111] themselves? Isn't there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling
[112] of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that
[113] yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?
[114]
[115] No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a
[116] prison--a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they
[117] might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went
[118] along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.
[119]
[120] And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true.
[121] It was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the
[122] fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we
[123] were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires,
[124] acting--or, no, not acting--sitting here and there unanimously, isn't
[125] that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple
[126] that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine
[127] years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine
[128] years I possessed a goodly apple? So it may well be with Edward
[129] Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife and with poor dear Florence.
[130] And, if you come to think of it, isn't it a little odd that the physical
[131] rottenness of at least two pillars of our four-square house never
[132] presented itself to my mind as a menace to its security? It doesn't
[133] so present itself now though the two of them are actually dead. I
[134] don't know. . . .
[135]
[136] I know nothing--nothing in the world--of the hearts of men. I only
[137] know that I am alone--horribly alone. No hearthstone will ever
[138] again witness, for me, friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will
[139] ever be other than peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst
[140] smoke wreaths. Yet, in the name of God, what should I know if I
[141] don't know the life of the hearth and of the smoking-room, since
[142] my whole life has been passed in those places? The warm
[143] hearthside! --Well, there was Florence: I believe that for the twelve
[144] years her life lasted, after the storm that seemed irretrievably to
[145] have weakened her heart--I don't believe that for one minute she
[146] was out of my sight, except when she was safely tucked up in bed
[147] and I should be downstairs, talking to some good fellow or other
[148] in some lounge or smoking-room or taking my final turn with a
[149] cigar before going to bed. I don't, you understand, blame Florence.
[150] But how can she have known what she knew? How could she have
[151] got to know it? To know it so fully. Heavens! There doesn't seem
[152] to have been the actual time. It must have been when I was taking
[153] my baths, and my Swedish exercises, being manicured. Leading
[154] the life I did, of the sedulous, strained nurse, I had to do
[155] something to keep myself fit. It must have been then! Yet even
[156] that can't have been enough time to get the tremendously long
[157] conversations full of worldly wisdom that Leonora has reported to
[158] me since their deaths. And is it possible to imagine that during our
[159] prescribed walks in Nauheim and the neighbourhood she found
[160] time to carry on the protracted negotiations which she did carry on
[161] between Edward Ashburnham and his wife? And isn't it incredible
[162] that during all that time Edward and Leonora never spoke a word
[163] to each other in private? What is one to think of humanity?
[164]
[165] For I swear to you that they were the model couple. He was as
[166] devoted as it was possible to be without appearing fatuous. So
[167] well set up, with such honest blue eyes, such a touch of stupidity,
[168] such a warm goodheartedness! And she--so tall, so splendid in the
[169] saddle, so fair! Yes, Leonora was extraordinarily fair and so
[170] extraordinarily the real thing that she seemed too good to be true.
[171] You don't, I mean, as a rule, get it all so superlatively together. To
[172] be the county family, to look the county family, to be so
[173] appropriately and perfectly wealthy; to be so perfect in
[174] manner--even just to the saving touch of insolence that seems to be
[175] necessary. To have all that and to be all that! No, it was too good
[176] to be true. And yet, only this afternoon, talking over the whole
[177] matter she said to me: "Once I tried to have a lover but I was so
[178] sick at the heart, so utterly worn out that I had to send him away."
[179] That struck me as the most amazing thing I had ever heard. She
[180] said "I was actually in a man's arms. Such a nice chap! Such a
[181] dear fellow! And I was saying to myself, fiercely, hissing it
[182] between my teeth, as they say in novels--and really clenching
[183] them together: I was saying to myself: 'Now, I'm in for it and I'll
[184] really have a good time for once in my life--for once in my life!' It
[185] was in the dark, in a carriage, coming back from a hunt ball.
[186] Eleven miles we had to drive! And then suddenly the bitterness of
[187] the endless poverty, of the endless acting--it fell on me like a
[188] blight, it spoilt everything. Yes, I had to realize that I had been
[189] spoilt even for the good time when it came. And I burst out crying
[190] and I cried and I cried for the whole eleven miles. Just imagine
[191] me crying! And just imagine me making a fool of the poor dear
[192] chap like that. It certainly wasn't playing the game, was it now?"
[193]
[194] I don't know; I don't know; was that last remark of hers the remark
[195] of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not
[196] county family, thinks at the bottom of her heart? Or thinks all the
[197] time for the matter of that? Who knows?
[198]
[199] Yet, if one doesn't know that at this hour and day, at this pitch of
[200] civilization to which we have attained, after all the preachings of
[201] all the moralists, and all the teachings of all the mothers to all the
[202] daughters in saecula saeculorum . . . but perhaps that is what all
[203] mothers teach all daughters, not with lips but with the eyes, or
[204] with heart whispering to heart. And, if one doesn't know as much
[205] as that about the first thing in the world, what does one know and
[206] why is one here?
[207]
[208] I asked Mrs Ashburnham whether she had told Florence that and
[209] what Florence had said and she answered:--"Florence didn't offer
[210] any comment at all. What could she say? There wasn't anything to
[211] be said. With the grinding poverty we had to put up with to keep
[212] up appearances, and the way the poverty came about--you know
[213] what I mean--any woman would have been justified in taking a
[214] lover and presents too. Florence once said about a very similar
[215] position--she was a little too well-bred, too American, to talk about
[216] mine--that it was a case of perfectly open riding and the woman
[217] could just act on the spur of the moment. She said it in American
[218] of course, but that was the sense of it. I think her actual words
[219] were: 'That it was up to her to take it or leave it. . . .'"
[220]
[221] I don't want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham
[222] down a brute. I don't believe he was. God knows, perhaps all men
[223] are like that. For as I've said what do I know even of the
[224] smoking-room? Fellows come in and tell the most extraordinarily
[225] gross stories--so gross that they will positively give you a pain.
[226] And yet they'd be offended if you suggested that they weren't the
[227] sort of person you could trust your wife alone with. And very
[228] likely they'd be quite properly offended--that is if you can trust
[229] anybody alone with anybody. But that sort of fellow obviously
[230] takes more delight in listening to or in telling gross stories--more
[231] delight than in anything else in the world. They'll hunt languidly
[232] and dress languidly and dine languidly and work without
[233] enthusiasm and find it a bore to carry on three minutes'
[234] conversation about anything whatever and yet, when the other sort
[235] of conversation begins, they'll laugh. and wake up and throw
[236] themselves about in their chairs. Then, if they so delight in the
[237] narration, how is it possible that they can be offended--and
[238] properly offended--at the suggestion that they might make
[239] attempts upon your wife's honour? Or again: Edward Ashburnham
[240] was the cleanest looking sort of chap;--an excellent magistrate, a
[241] first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in
[242] Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I
[243] myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And
[244] he never told a story that couldn't have gone into the columns of
[245] the Field more than once or twice in all the nine years of my
[246] knowing him. He didn't even like hearing them; he would fidget
[247] and get up and go out to buy a cigar or something of that sort. You
[248] would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you
[249] could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine and it was
[250] madness. And yet again you have me. If poor Edward was
[251] dangerous because of the chastity of his expressions--and they say
[252] that is always the hall-mark of a libertine--what about myself? For
[253] I solemnly avow that not only have I never so much as hinted at
[254] an impropriety in my conversation in the whole of my days; and
[255] more than that, I will vouch for the cleanness of my thoughts and
[256] the absolute chastity of my life. At what, then, does it all work out?
[257] Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a
[258] eunuch or is the proper man--the man with the right to
[259] existence--a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour's
[260] womankind?
[261]
[262] I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is
[263] so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex,
[264] what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other
[265] personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to
[266] act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness.
[267]
[268] II
[269]
[270] I DON'T know how it is best to put this thing down--whether it
[271] would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it
[272] were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it
[273] reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward
[274] himself.
[275]
[276] So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of
[277] the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul
[278] opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the
[279] sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of
[280] wind polishes the bright stars. From time to time we shall get up
[281] and go to the door and look out at the great moon and say: "Why,
[282] it is nearly as bright as in Provence!" And then we shall come
[283] back to the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are
[284] not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay.
[285] Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago
[286] Florence and I motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the
[287] Black Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up
[288] an immense pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles--Las
[289] Tours, the Towers. And the immense mistral blew down that
[290] valley which was the way from France into Provence so that the
[291] silver grey olive leaves appeared like hair flying in the wind, and
[292] the tufts of rosemary crept into the iron rocks that they might not
[293] be torn up by the roots.
[294]
[295] It was, of course, poor dear Florence who wanted to go to Las
[296] Tours. You are to imagine that, however much her bright
[297] personality came from Stamford, Connecticut, she was yet a
[298] graduate of Poughkeepsie. I never could imagine how she did
[299] it--the queer, chattery person that she was. With the far-away look
[300] in her eyes--which wasn't, however, in the least romantic--I mean
[301] that she didn't look as if she were seeing poetic dreams, or looking
[302] through you, for she hardly ever did look at you!--holding up one
[303] hand as if she wished to silence any objection--or any comment
[304] for the matter of that--she would talk. She would talk about
[305] William the Silent, about Gustave the Loquacious, about Paris
[306] frocks, about how the poor dressed in 1337, about Fantin-Latour,
[307] about the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranée train-deluxe, about whether it
[308] would be worth while to get off at Tarascon and go across the
[309] windswept suspension-bridge, over the Rhone to take another look
[310] at Beaucaire.
[311]
[312] We never did take another look at Beaucaire, of course--beautiful
[313] Beaucaire, with the high, triangular white tower, that looked as
[314] thin as a needle and as tall as the Flatiron, between Fifth and
[315] Broadway--Beaucaire with the grey walls on the top of the
[316] pinnacle surrounding an acre and a half of blue irises, beneath the
[317] tallness of the stone pines, What a beautiful thing the stone pine
[318] is! . . .
[319]
[320] No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to
[321] Hamelin, not to Verona, not to Mont Majour--not so much as to
[322] Carcassonne itself. We talked of it, of course, but I guess Florence
[323] got all she wanted out of one look at a place. She had the seeing
[324] eye.
[325]
[326] I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which
[327] I want to return--towns with the blinding white sun upon them;
[328] stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all
[329] carved and painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped
[330] gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi
[331] and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the
[332] Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples. Not one of them did
[333] we see more than once, so that the whole world for me is like spots
[334] of colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren't so I should
[335] have something to catch hold of now.
[336]
[337] Is all this digression or isn't it digression? Again I don't know. You,
[338] the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don't tell
[339] me anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of
[340] life it was I led with Florence and what Florence was like. Well,
[341] she was bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance over the
[342] floors of castles and over seas and over and over and over the
[343] salons of modistes and over the plages of the Riviera--like a gay
[344] tremulous beam, reflected from water upon a ceiling. And my
[345] function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it
[346] was almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that
[347] dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years.
[348]
[349] Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in
[350] Philadelphia. They had never been to Philadelphia and they had
[351] the New England conscience. You see, the first thing they said to
[352] me when I called in on Florence in the little ancient, colonial,
[353] wooden house beneath the high, thin-leaved elms--the first
[354] question they asked me was not how I did but what did I do. And I
[355] did nothing. I suppose I ought to have done something, but I didn't
[356] see any call to do it. Why does one do things? I just drifted in and
[357] wanted Florence. First I had drifted in on Florence at a Browning
[358] tea, or something of the sort in Fourteenth Street, which was then
[359] still residential. I don't know why I had gone to New York; I don't
[360] know why I had gone to the tea. I don't see why Florence should
[361] have gone to that sort of spelling bee. It wasn't the place at which,
[362] even then, you expected to find a Poughkeepsie graduate. I guess
[363] Florence wanted to raise the culture of the Stuyvesant crowd and
[364] did it as she might have gone in slumming. Intellectual slumming,
[365] that was what it was. She always wanted to leave the world a little
[366] more elevated than she found it. Poor dear thing, I have heard her
[367] lecture Teddy Ashburnham by the hour on the difference between
[368] a Franz Hals and a Wouvermans and why the Pre-Mycenaean
[369] statues were cubical with knobs on the top. I wonder what he
[370] made of it? Perhaps he was thankful.
[371]
[372] I know I was. For do you understand my whole attentions, my
[373] whole endeavours were to keep poor dear Florence on to topics
[374] like the finds at Cnossos and the mental spirituality of Walter
[375] Pater. I had to keep her at it, you understand, or she might die. For
[376] I was solemnly informed that if she became excited over anything
[377] or if her emotions were really stirred her little heart might cease to
[378] beat. For twelve years I had to watch every word that any person
[379] uttered in any conversation and I had to head it off what the
[380] English call "things"--off love, poverty, crime, religion and the rest
[381] of it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she was carried off
[382] the ship at Havre assured me that this must be done. Good God,
[383] are all these fellows monstrous idiots, or is there a freemasonry
[384] between all of them from end to end of the earth? . . . That is what
[385] makes me think of that fellow Peire Vidal.
[386]
[387] Because, of course, his story is culture and I had to head her
[388] towards culture and at the same time it's so funny and she hadn't
[389] got to laugh, and it's so full of love and she wasn't to think of love.
[390] Do you know the story? Las Tours of the Four Castles had for
[391] chatelaine Blanche Somebody-or-other who was called as a term
[392] of commendation, La Louve--the She-Wolf. And Peire Vidal the
[393] Troubadour paid his court to La Louve. And she wouldn't have
[394] anything to do with him. So, out of compliment to her--the things
[395] people do when they're in love!--he dressed himself up in
[396] wolfskins and went up into the Black Mountains. And the
[397] shepherds of the Montagne Noire and their dogs mistook him for
[398] a wolf and he was torn with the fangs and beaten with clubs. So
[399] they carried him back to Las Tours and La Louve wasn't at all
[400] impressed. They polished him up and her husband remonstrated
[401] seriously with her. Vidal was, you see, a great poet and it was not
[402] proper to treat a great poet with indifference.
[403]
[404] So Peire Vidal declared himself Emperor of Jerusalem or
[405] somewhere and the husband had to kneel down and kiss his feet
[406] though La Louve wouldn't. And Peire set sail in a rowing boat
[407] with four companions to redeem the Holy Sepulchre. And they
[408] struck on a rock somewhere, and, at great expense, the husband
[409] had to fit out an expedition to fetch him back. And Peire Vidal fell
[410] all over the Lady's bed while the husband, who was a most
[411] ferocious warrior, remonstrated some more about the courtesy
[412] that is due to great poets. But I suppose La Louve was the more
[413] ferocious of the two. Anyhow, that is all that came of it. Isn't that
[414] a story?
[415]
[416] You haven't an idea of the queer old-fashionedness of Florence's
[417] aunts--the Misses Hurlbird, nor yet of her uncle. An
[418] extraordinarily lovable man, that Uncle John. Thin, gentle, and
[419] with a "heart" that made his life very much what Florence's
[420] afterwards became. He didn't reside at Stamford; his home was in
[421] Waterbury where the watches come from. He had a factory there
[422] which, in our queer American way, would change its functions
[423] almost from year to year. For nine