The Saddest Story

Introduction

Although Blast was the main medium of divulgation for the Vorticist movement, saying that “The Saddest Story” is a Vorticist story would not be quite accurate. Vorticism itself was too young a movement—an independent derivative of Cubism—that developed mainly in visual art and poetry. “The Saddest Story”, although not especially Vorticist, does fit well with the tone of the magazine. Both Blast and the story have constant insight into society’s values and how those values impact its actions, overall affecting the individual. Moreover, Blast and “The Saddest Story” have a pessimistic tone towards the English society.

An important difference between “The Saddest Story” and The Good Soldier (the novel that contains “The Saddest Story”) happens directly in the beginning. While the story starts with, “We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons,” the novel commences with, “This is “The Saddest Story” I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons.” Before Hueffer published The Good Solider, he had been discussing with his publisher what would be an appropriate title for it.“ The Saddest Story” might not have been a good idea because it sounded too depressing. Accordingly, they discussed whether “The Roaring Joke” would be a better tittle. It would make sense to assume that Hueffer wanted to have some reminiscence of his first publication in Blast, since he added the line “This is the saddest story I have ever heard” to begin the novel.

The story seems to present many aspects of Hueffer’s own life. Florence, Dowel’s wife, is a character probably inspired by Violet Hunt, Hueffer’s lover. Hueffer suffered severe agoraphobia, for which he had to go to Germany to be treated. Spas and baths were included as a part of the treatment. Similarly, within the story, the characters describe their time in Germany taking baths. This agoraphobic period took a large toll on Hueffer’s life; the imagery in his writing often illustrates safe, small spaces. In “The Saddest Story”, he says:

So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me […] From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out at the bright moon and say:--“Why it is nearly as bright as in Provence! ” And then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay.

This passage also shows another biographical side of the story, that is, the messy romantic life of Hueffer. He himself said of The Good Solider that it was a “serious analysis on the polygamous desires that underlie all men.” “The Saddest Story” already shows that aspect with its constant descriptions of the interactions of both matrimonies, critiques to the Dowell’s wife and his sexual attraction for other women.

Transcription

Beati Immaculati

I.

We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons, of the town of Nauheim, with an extreme intimacy-or rather, with an acquaintance-ship as loose and easy, and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people, of whom till to-day, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago, I had never been to England and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.

I don’t mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe; and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that were un-American-we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English.

Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September. You will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is, a “heart "; and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she, poor thing, was the sufferer.

Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But whereas a yearly month or so at Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for the rest of the twelve-month, the two months or so were only just enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to year, the reason for his heart was approximately polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence's broken years may have been in the first instance congenital, but the immediate occasion was a storm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were doctors’ orders. They said that even the short Channel crossing might well kill the poor thing.

When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave from India, to which he was never to return, was thirty-six and poor Florence thirty. Thus to-day, Florence would have been thirty-nine and Captain Ashburnham forty-two; whereas I am forty-five and Leonora thirty-seven. You will perceive therefore that our friendship has been a young middle-aged affair, more particularly since we were all of us of quiet dispositions, the Ashburnhams being more particularly what in England it is the custom to call quite good people.

They were descended, as you will probably expect, from the Ashburnham who accompanied Charles I to the scaffold, and, as you must also expect with this class of English people, you would never have noticed it. Mrs. Ashburnham was a Powys; Florence was a Hurlburl of Stamford, Connecticut, where, as you know, they are more old-fashioned than ever the inhabitants of Cranford, England, could have been. I myself am a Lowell, of Philadelphia, Pa., where, it is historically true, there are more old English families than you would find in any six English counties taken together. I carry about with me indeed-as if it were the only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe-the title deeds of my farm which once covered the blocks between Chestnut and Walnut Streets and Sixteen to Twenty-sixth. These title deeds are upon wampum, the grant of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who left Farnham in Surrey in company with William Penn. Florence's people as is often the case with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from the neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, where the Ashburn ham's place is. From there, at this moment, I am actually writing.

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many, For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people, to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please just to get the sight out of their heads.

Someone has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking-up of our little four-square coteric was such another unthinkable event. Supposing that you should come upon us, all four sitting together at one of the little tables in front of the club house, let us say at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching the miniature golf, you would have said, that as human affairs go we were an extraordinarily safe castle. We were, if you will, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest of all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men to frame. Where better could one take refuge? Where better?

Permanence? Stability! I can't believe it's gone. 1 can't believe that that long tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crushing days at the end of nine years and six weeks. Upon my word, yes, our intimacy was like a minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where to go, which table we unanimously should choose and we could rise and go, all four together, without a signal from any one oi us, always to the music of the Kur orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or if it rained, in discreet shelters. No indeed, it can't be gone. You can't kill a minuet de la cour. You may shut up the music-book; close the harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats may destroy the white satin favours.

The mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall, but surely the minuet—the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing-places must be stepping itself still. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies, prolong themselves? Isn't there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood, but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?

No, by God it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison—a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage-wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.

And yet, I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true music; the true plash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, with the same desires acting—or no not acting—sitting here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth? If for nine years 1 have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core, and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years 1 possessed a goodly apple?

So, it may well be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora, his wife, and with poor dear Florence. And, if you come to think of it, isn't it a little odd that the physical rottenness of at least two pillars of our four-square house never presented itself to my mind as a menace to its security? It doesn't so present itself now though the two of them are actually dead. I don't know.

I know nothing—nothing in the the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone—-horribly alone. No hearthstones will ever again witness, for me, friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be other than peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke-wreathes. Yet, in the name of God, what should I know if I don't know the life of the hearth and of the smoking-room, since my whole life has been passed in those places? The warm hearthside! —Well, there was Florence: I believe that for the twelve years her life lasted after the storm that irretrievably weakened her heart—I don't believe that for one minute she was out of my sight, except when she was safely tucked up in bed and I should be downstairs, talking to some good fellow or other in some lounge or smoking-room, or taking my final turn with a cigar before going to bed. I don't, you understand, blame Florence, but how can she have known what she knew all the time? How could she have got to know it? To know it so fully. Heavens! There doesn't seem to have been the actual time. It must have been when I was taking my baths, and my Swedish exercises, being manicured.

Leading the life I did, of the sedulous, strained nurse, I had to do something to keep myself fit. It must have been then! Yet even that can't have been enough time to get the tremendously long conversations full of worldly wisdom that Leonora has reported to me since their deaths. And is it possible to imagine that during our prescribed walks in Nauheim and the neighbourhood she found time to carry on the protracted negotiations which she did carry on between Edward Ashburnham and his wife? And isn't it incredible that during all that -time Edward and Leonora never spoke a word to each other in private. What is one to think of humanity?

For I swear to you that they were the model couple. He was as devoted as it was possible to be without appearing fatuous. So well set up, with such honest blue eyes, such a touch of stupidity, such a warm good-heartedness! And she—so tall, so splendid in the saddle, so fair! Yes, Leonora was extraordinarily fair, and so extraordinarily the real thing that she seemed too good to be true. You don't, I mean, as a rule, get it all so superlatively together. To be the county family, to look the county family, to be so appropriately and perfectly wealthy; to be so perfect in manner—even just to the saving touch of insolence that seems to be necessary. To have all that and to be all that! No, it was too good to be true. And yet, only this afternoon, talking over the whole matter she said to me Once I tried to have a lover, but I was so sick at the heart, so utterly worn out that I had to send him away."

That struck me as the most amazing thing I had ever heard. She said “I was actually in a man's arms. Such a nice chap! Such a dear fellow! And I was saying to myself, fiercely, hissing it between my teeth as they say in novels—and really clenching them together: I was saying to myself; 'Now I'm in for it, and I'll really have a good time for once in my life; for once in my life!' It was in the dark, in a carriage, coming back from a hunt ball. Eleven miles we had to drive! And then suddenly the bitterness of the endless poverty, of the endless acting—it fell on me like a blight, it spoilt everything. Yes, I had to realise that I had been spoilt even for the good time when it came, And I burst out crying, and I cried, and I cried for the whole eleven miles. Just imagine ME crying! And just imagine me making a fool of the poor dear chap like that. It certainly wasn't playing the game, was it now?"

I don't know; I don't know; was that last remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not county family, thinks at the bottom of her heart? Or thinks all the time for the matter of that? Who knows?

Yet, if one doesn't know that at this hour and day, at this pitch oi civilisation to which we have attained, after all the preachings of all the moralists, and all the teachings of all the mothers to all the daughters in saeculum saeculorum… but perhaps that is what all mothers teach all daughters, not with lips, but with the eyes, or with heart whispering to heart. And, if one doesn't know as much as that about the first thing in the world, what does one know and why is one here?

I asked Mrs. Ashburnham whether she had told Florence that and what Florence had said, and she answered

Florence didn't offer any comment at all. What could she say? There wasn't anything to be said. With the grinding poverty we had to put up with to keep up appearances, and the way the poverty came about—YOU know what I mean— any woman would have been justified in taking a lover and presents, too. Florence once said about a very similar position—she was a little too well*bred, too American, to talk about mine—that it was a case oi perfectly open riding, and the woman could just act on the spur of the moment. She said it in American, of course, but that was the sense of it. I think her actual words were: - “That it was up to her to take it or leave it…”

I don't want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham down a brute. I don't believe he was. God knows, perhaps all men are like that. For as I've said, what do I know even of the smoking-room? Fellows come ta and tell most extraordinarily gross stories—so gross that they will positively give you a pain. And yet they'd be offended if you suggested that they weren't the sort of person you would trust you wife alone with. And very likely they'd be quite properly offended—that is, if you can trust anybody alone with anybody. But that sort of fellow obviously takes more delight in listening to or in telling gross stories—more delight than in anything else in the world.

They'll hunt languidly and dress languidly and dine languidly, and work without enthusiasm, and find it a bore to carry on three minutes conversation about anything whatever, and yet, when the other sort of conversation begins they'll laugh, and wake up and throw themselves about in their chairs. Then, if they so delight in the narration, how is it possible that they can be offended-—and properly offended at the suggestion that they might make attempts upon your wife's honour? Or again: Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap; an excellent magistrate, a first-rate soldier, one oi the best landlords, so they said in Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And he never told a story that couldn't have gone into the columns of the “Field,” more than once or twice in all the nine years of my knowing him. He didn't even like hearing them, he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a cigar or something of that sort. You would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine, and it was madness.

And yet again you have me. If poor Edward was dangerous because of the chastity of his expressions—and they say that that is always the hall-mark of a libertine—what about myself? For I solemnly avow that not only have I never so much as hinted at an impropriety in my conversation in the whole course of my life, and more than that, I will vouch for the cleanness of my thoughts and the absolute chastity of my life.

At what then does it all work out? Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch, or the proper man—the man with the right to existence—-a raging stallion forever, neighing after his neighbour's womenkind?

I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us and everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us for the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone? it is all a darkness.

 

II.

 

I don't know how it is best to put this thing down. — whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story, or whether to tell it from the distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora, or from those of Edward himself.

So, I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance, and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars. From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out at the bright moon and say: -“Why it is nearly as bright as in Provence!” And then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay.

Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal, two years ago Florence and I motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the Black Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up a pinnacle, and on the pinnacle are four castles-Las Tours, the Towers, And the immense mistral blew down that valley which was the way from France into Provence so that the silver grey olive leaves appeared like hair flying in the wind, and the tufts of rosemary crept into the iron rocks that they might not be torn up by the roots.

It was, of course, poor dear Florence who wanted to go to Las Tours. You are to imagine that, however, much her bright personality came from Stamford Connecticut, she was yet a graduate of Poughkeepsie. I never could imagine how she did it-the queer, chattery person that she was, With the faraway look in her eyes-which wasn’t, however, in the least romantic-I mean that she didn’t look as if she were seeing poetic dreams, or looking through you, for she hardly ever did look at you !-holding up one hand as if she wished to silence any objection-or any comment for the matter of that-she would talk, She would talk about William the Silent, about Gustave the Loquacious, about Paris frocks, about how the poor dressed in 1337, about Fantin Latour, about the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranee train-de-luxe, about whether it would be worthwhile to get off at Tarascon and go across the windswept suspension-bridge, over the Rhone, to take another look at Beaucaire.

We never did take another look at Beaucaire, of course-beautiful Beaucaire with the high, triangular white tower, that looked as thin as a needle and as tall as the Flatiron between Fifth and Broadway-Beaucaire with the grey walls on the top of the pinnacle surrounding an acre and a half of blue irises, beneath the tallness of the stone pines. What a beautiful thing the stone pine is...

No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to Hamblin, not to Verona, not to Mount Magnus—no so much as to Carassone itself. We talked of It, of course, but I guess Florence got all she wanted out of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye.

I haven’t, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I want to return-towns with the white sun upon them: stone pines against the blinking blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and painted with stags and scarlet flowers, and crowstepped gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and pink pallazzi and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples. Not one of them did we see more than once, so that the whole world for me is like spots of colourin an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren’t so I should have something to catch hold of now.

Is all this digession or isn’t it digression? Again, I don’t know. You, the listener, sit opposite me, but you are so silent. You don’t tell me anything. I am at any rate trying to get you to see what sort of life it was I led with Florence, and what Florence was like.

Well, she was bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance over the floors of castles and overseas, and over the salons of modistes, and over the plages of the Riviera-like a gay tremulous beam, reflected from water upon a ceiling. And my function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it was almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that dancing reflection, and the task lasted for years.

Florence’s aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in Philadelphia. They had never been to Philadelphia and they had the New England conscience. You see, the first thing they said to me when I called in on Florence in the little ancient, colonial, wooden house beneath the high thin leaved elms-the first question they asked me was, not how did, but what did I do. I suppose I ought to have done something, but I didn’t see any call to do it. I just drifted in and wanted Florence. First, I had drifted in on Florence at a Browning tea, or something of the sort in Fourteenth Street, which was then still residential. I don’t know why I had gone to New York; I don’t know why I had gone to the tea, I don’t see why Florence should have gone to that sort of spelling bee. It wasn’t the place at which, even then, you expected to find a Poughkeepsie graduate. I guess Florence wanted to raise the culture of the Stuyesant crowd and did it as she might have gone in slumming. Intellectual slumming, that was what it was. She always wanted to leave the world a little more elevated than she found it. Poor dear thing, I have heard her lecture Teddy Ashburnham by the hour on the difference between a Franz Hals and a Wouvermans, and why the Pre-Mycenaie statues were cubical with knobs on the top. I wonder what he made of it? Perhaps he was thankful.

I know I was. For do you understand my whole attentions, my whole endeavours were to keep poor dear Florence on to the topics like the finds at Gnossos and the mental spirituality of Walter Pater, I had to keep her at it you understand, or she might die. For I was solemnly informed that if she became excited over anything, or if her emotions were really stirred, her little heart might cease to beat. For twelve years I had to watch every word that any person uttered in any conversation, and I had to bead it off what the English call “things” of, love, poverty, crime, religion, and the rest of it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she was carried off the ship at Havre assured me that this must be done. Good God, are all these fellows monstrous idiots, or is there a free-masonry between all of them from end to end of the earth? ... That is what makes me think of that fellow Peire Vidal.

Because, of course, his story is culture, and I had to head her towards culture, and at the same time it’s so funny and she hadn’t got to laugh, and it’s so full of love and she wasn’t to think of love. Last ours of the Four Castles had for chatelaine Blanche Somebody-or-other who was called as a term of commendation, La Louve-the She-Wolf. And Peire Vidal, the Troubadour, paid his court to La Louve. And she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. So, out of compliment to her-the things people do when they’re in love! -he dressed himself up in wolf-skins and went up into the Black Mountains. And the shepherds of the Montagne Noire and their dogs mistook him for a wolf, and he was torn with the fangs and beaten with clubs. So, they carried him back to Las Tours and La Louve wasn’t at all impressed. They polished him up, and her husband remonstrated seriously with her. Vidal was, you see, a great poet, and it was not proper to treat a great poet with indifference. Do you know the story?

So Peire Vidal declared himself Emperor of Jerusalem or somewhere, and the husband had to kneel down and kiss his feet though La Louve wouldn’t. And Peire set sail in a rowing boat with four companions to redeem the Holy Sepulchre. And they struck on a rock somewhere, and, at great expense, the husband had to fit out an expedition to fetch him back, And Peire Vidal fell all over the lady’s bed, while the husband, who was a most ferocious warrior, remonstrated some more about the courtesy that is due to great poets. But I suppose La Louve was the more ferocious of the two. Anyhow that is all that came of it. Isn’t that a story?

You haven’t an idea of the queer old fashionedness of Florence’s aunts-the Misses Hurl bird, nor yet of her uncle. An extraordinarily lovable man, that Uncle John. Thin, gentle, and with a “heart” that made his life very much what Florence’s afterwards became.

He didn’t reside at Stamford; his home was in Waterbury, where the watches come from. He had a factory there which, in our queer American way, would change its functions almost from year to year. For nine months or so it would manufacture buttons out of bone, then it would suddenly produce brass buttons for coachman’s Iiveries. Then it would take a turn at embossed tin lids for candy boxes. The fact is that the poor old gentleman, with his weak and fluttering heart didn’t want his factory to manufacture anything at all. He wanted to retire. And he did retire when he was seventy. But he was so worried at having all the street boys in the town point after him and exclaim: “There goes the laziest man in Waterbury!” that he tried taking a tour round the world. And Florence and a young man called Jimmy went with him. It appears from what Florence told me that Jimmy’s function with Mr. Hurlbird was to avoid exciting topics for him. He had to keep him, for instance, out of political discussions. For the poor old man was a violent Democrat in days when you might travel the world over without finding anything but a Republican, anyhow they went around the world.

I think an anecdote is about the best way to give you an idea of what the old gentleman was like. For it is perhaps important that you should know what the old gentleman was since, of course, he had a great deal of influence in forming the character of my poor dear wife.

Just before they set out from San Francisco for the South Seas old Mr. Hulbird said he must take something with him to make little presents to people he met on the voyage. And it struck him that the things to take for that purpose were oranges-because California is the orange country- and comfortable folding chairs. So, he bought I don’t know how many cases of oranges-the great cool Californian oranges and half-a-dozen folding chairs in a special case that he always kept in his cabin, there must have been half a cargo of fruit.

For, to every person on board the several steamers that they employed-to every person with whom he had so much as a nodding acquaintance, he gave an orange every morning, and they lasted him right round the girdle of this mighty globe of ours. When they were at North Cape, even, he saw on the horizon, poor dear thin man that he was, a lighthouse. "Hallo,” he says, to himself, “these poor fellows must be very lonely. Let’s take them some oranges.” So, he had a boatload of his fruit out and had himself rowed to the lighthouse on the horizon. The folding chair she lent to any lady that he came across and liked, or who seemed tired and invalidish on the ship. And so, guarded against his heart and, having his niece with him, he went around the world…

He wasn’t obtrusive about his heart. You wouldn’t have known he had one. He only left it to the physical laboratory at Waterbury for the benefit of science, since he considered it to be quite an extraordinary kind of heart. And the joke of the matter was that, when at the age of eighty-four, just five days after poor Florence he died of bronchitis, there was found to be absolutely nothing the matter with that organ. It had certainly jumped or squeaked or something, just sufficiently to take in the doctors, but it appears that was because of an odd formation of the lungs. I don’t much understand about these matters.

I inherited his money because Florence died five days before him. I wish I hadn’t. It was a great worry. I had to go out to Waterbury just after Florence’s death, because the poor dear old fellow had left a good many charitable bequests and I had to appoint trustees. I didn’t like the idea of their not being properly handled.

Yes, it was a great worry. And just as I had hot things roughly settled I received the extraordinary cable from Ashburnham begging me to come back and have a talk with him, and immediately afterwards came one Leorona saying, “yes, please do come. You could be so helpful.” It was as if he had sent the cable without consulting her and had afterwards told her. Indeed, that was pretty much what had happened, except that he had told the girl, and the girl told the wife. I arrived, however, too late to be of any good, if I could have been of any good. And then I had my first taste of English life. It was amazing. It was overwhelming. I never shall forget the polished cob that Edward, beside me, drove, the animal´s action, its high-stepping, its skin that was like satin. And the peace! And the red cheeks! And the beautiful old house.

Just near Branshaw Teleragh it was, and we descended on it form the high clear, windswept waste of the New Forest. I tell you it was amazing to arrive there from Waterbury. An it came into my head-for teddy Ashburnham, you remember had cabled to me to “come and have a talk” with him- that it was unbelievable that anything essentially calamitous could happen to that place and those people. I tell you it was the very spirit of peace. And Leonora, beautiful and smiling, with her coils of yellow hair stood on the top doorstep, with a butler and footman and a maid or so behind her. And she just said: “so glad you´ve come,” as if I´d run down to lunch from a town ten miles away, instead of having come half the world over at the call of two urgent telegrams.

The girl was out with the hounds I think.

And that poor devil beside me was in an agony. Absolute, hopeless, dumb agony such as passes the mind of man to imagine.

 

III.

 

It was a very hot summer, in August, 1904, and Florence had already been taking the baths for a month. I don’t know how it feels to be a patient at one of those places. I never was a patient anywhere I daresay the patients get a home feeling and some sort of anchorage in the spot. They seem to like the bath attendants, with their cheerful faces. Their air of authority, their white linen. But, for myself, to be at Nauheim gave me a sense-what shall I say? -a sense almost of nakedness-the nakedness that one feels on the sea-shore or in any great open space. I had no attachments, no accumulations. In one’s own home it is as if little, innate sympathies draw one to particular chairs that seem to enfold one in an embrace or take one along particular streets that seem friendly when others may be hostile. And, believe me, that feeling is a very important part of life. I know it well, that have been for so long a wanderer upon the face of public resorts.

And one is too polished up. Heaven knows I was never an untidy man. But the feeling that I had when, whilst poor Florence was taking her morning bath, I stood upon the carefully swept steps of the Englisher Hof, looking at the carefully arranged trees in tubs upon the carefully arranged gravel, whilst carefully arranged people walked past in carefully calculated gaiety, at the carefully calculated hour; the reddish stone of the baths -or were they white half-timber chalets? Upon my word I have forgotten, I who was there so often. That will give you the measure of how much I was in the landscape. I could find my way blind-folded to the hot rooms, to the douche rooms, to the fountain in the centre of the quadrangle where rusty wear gushes out. Yes, I could find my way blind-fold. I know the exact distances. From the Hotel Regina you took one hundred and eighty-seven paces, then, turning sharp, left-handed, four hundred and twenty took you straight down to the fountain. From the Englisher Hof, starting on the side walk, it was ninety-seven paces, and the same four hundred and twenty, but turning left-handed this time.

And now you understand that, having nothing in the world to do-but nothing whatever! I fell into the habit of counting my footsteps, I would walk with Florence to the baths. And, of course, she entertained me with her conversation. It was, as I have said, wonderful what she could make conversation out of.

She walked very lightly, and her hair was very nicely done, and she dressed beautifully and very costily. Of course, she had money of her own, but I shouldn’t have minded. yet you know I can’t remember a single one of her dresses. Or I can remember just one, a very simple one of blue figured silk-a Chinese pattern-very full in the skirts and broadening out over the shoulders. And her hair was copper coloured, and the heels of her shoes were exceedingly high, so that she tripped upon the points of her toes. And when she came to the door of the bathing place and, when it opened to receive her, she would look back at me with a little coquettish smile, so that her cheek appeared to be caressing her shoulder.

I seem to remember that, with that dress, she wore an immensely broad Leghorn hat-like the Chapeau de Paille of Rubens, only very white. The hat would be tied with a lightly knotted scarf of the same stuff as her dress. She knew how to give value to her blue eyes. And round her neck would be some simple pink, coral beads. And her complexion had a perfect clearness, a perfect smoothness…

And, what the devil! For whose benefit did she do it? For that of the bath attendant? of the passers-by? I don’t know. Anyhow it can’t have been for me, for never, in all the years of her life, never on any possible occasion, or in any other place did she so smile tome, mockingly, invitingly, she was a riddle; but then, all other women are riddles. And it occurs to me that some way back I began a sentence that I have never finished ... It was about the feeling that I had when I stood on the steps of my hotel every morning before starting out to fetch Florence back from the bath, Natty, precise, well brushed, conscious of being rather small amongst the long English, the lank Americans, the rotund Germans, and the obese Russian Jewesses. I should stand there tapping a cigarette on the outside of my case, surveying for a moment the world in the sunlight. But a day was to come when I was never to do it again alone. You can imagine, therefore, what the coming of the Ashburnhams meant for me.

I have forgotten the aspect of many things, but I shall never forget the aspect of the dining-room of the Hotel Excelsion on that evening-and on so many other evenings. Whole castles have vanished from my memory, whole cities that I have never visited again, but that white room, festooned with paper-mache fruits and flowers; the fall windows; the many tables; the black screen round the door with three golden cranes flying upward on each panel; the palm-tree in the centre of the room; the swish of the waiter’s feet; the cold expensive elegance; the mien of the diners as they came in every evening-their air of earnestness as if they must go through a meal prescribed by the Kur authorities, and their air of sobriety as if they must seek not by any means to enjoy their meals-those things I shall not easily forget.

And then, one evening, in the twilight, I saw Edward Ashburnham lounge round the screen into the room. The head waiter, a man with a face all grey-in what subterranean nooks or corners do people cultivate those absolutely grey complexions? -went with the timorous deference of these creatures towards him and held out a grey ear to be whispered into. It was generally a disagreeable ordeal for newcomers, but Edward Ashburnham bore it like an Englishman and a gentleman. I could see his lips farm a word of three syIlabIes-remember I had nothing in the world to do but to notice these niceties-and immediately I knew that he must be Edward Ashburnham, Captain, Fourteenth Hussars, of Branshaw House, Branshaw Teleragh. I knew it because every evening just before dinner, whilst I waited in the hall I used by the courtesy of Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor, to inspect the little police reports that each guest was expected to sign upon taking a room.

The head waiter piloted him immediately to a vacant table, three away from my own-the table that the Grenfalls of Falls River N. J. had just vacated. It struck me that that was not a very nice table for the newcomers, since the sunlight, low though it was, shone straight down upon it, and the same idea seemed to come at the same moment into Captain Ashburnham’s head. His face hitherto had in the wonderful English fashion, expressed nothing whatever. Nothing. There was in it neither joy nor despair; neither hope nor fear; neither boredom nor satisfaction. He seemed to perceive no soul in that crowded room; he might have been walking in a jungle. I never came across such a perfect expression before, and I never shall again. It was insolence and not insolence; it was modesty and not modesty. His hair was fair, extraordinarily, ordered in a wave, running from the left temple to the right; his face was a light brick red, perfectly uniform in tint, his yellow moustache was as stiff as a tooth brush, and I verily believe that he had had his black smoking jacket thickened a little over the shoulder-blades so as to give himself the air of the slightest possible stoop. It would be like him to do that; that was the sort of thing he thought about. Martingales, Chiffney bits, boots; where you got the best soap, the best brandy, the name of the chap who rode a plater down the Khyber cliffs; the spreading power of number three shot before a charge of number four powder ... by heavens, I never heard him talk of anything else. Not in all the years that I knew him did I hear him talk of anything but these subjects. Oh yes, once he told me that I could buy my special shade of blue ties cheaper from a firm in Burlington Arcade than from my own people in New York. And I have brought my ties from that firm ever since. Otherwise I should not remember the name of the Burlington Arcade. I wonder what it looks like I have never seen it. I imagine it to be two immense rows of pillars, like those of the Forumat Rome, with Edward Ashburnham striding down between them. But it probably isn’t in the least like that, Once also he advised me to buy Caledonian Deferred, since they were due to rise. And I did buy them and they did rise. But of how he got the knowledge I haven’t the faintest idea. It seemed to drop out of the blue sky.

And that was absolutely all that I knew of him until a month ago-that and the profusion of his cases, all of pigskin and stamped with his initials E. F, A, There were gun cases, and collar cases, and shirt cases, and letter cases, and cases each containing four bottles of medicine; and hat cases and helmet cases. It must have needed a whole herd of the Gadrene Swine to make up his outfit. And, if I ever penetrated into his private room it would be to see him standing with his coat and waistcoat off and the immensely long line of his perfectly elegant trousers from waist to boot heel. And he would have a slightly reflective air, and he would be just opening one kind of case and just closing another.

Good God, what did they all see in him; for what there was of him, inside and outside; though they said he was a good soldier. Yet Leonora adored him with a passion that was like an agony and hated him with an agony that was as bitter as the sea. How could he rouse anything like a sentiment, in anybody?

What did he even talk to them about-when they were under four eyes? -Ah, well, suddenly, as if by a flash of Inspiration, I know. For all good soldiers are sentimentalists-all good soldiers of that type. Their profession for one thing is full of the big words, courage, loyalty, honour, constancy. And I have given a wrong impression of Edward Ashburnham if I have made you think that literally never in the course of our nine years of intimacy did he discuss what he would have called “the graver things.”

Even before his final outburst to me, at times, very late at night, say, he has blurted out something that gave an insight into the sentimental view of the cosmos that was his. He would say how much the society of a good woman could do towards redeeming you, and he would say that constancy was the finest of the virtues. He said it very shily, of course, but still as if the statement admitted of no doubt.

Constancy! Isn’t that the queer thought? And yet, I must add that poor dear Edward was a great reader-he would pass hours lost in novels of a sentimental type-novels in which typewriter girls married Marquises, and governesses, Earls. And in his books, as a rule, the course of true love ran as smooth as buttered honey. And he was fond of poetry, of a certain type-and he could even read a hopelessly sad love story. I have seen his eyes filled with tears at reading of a hopeless parting. And he loved, with a sentimental yearning, all children, puppies, and the feeble generally.

So, you see, he would have plenty to gurgle about to a woman-with that and his sound common-sense about martingales and his-still sentimental-experiences as a county magistrate, and with his intense, optimistic belief that the woman he was making love to at the moment was the one he was destined, at last, to be internally constant to ... Well, I fancy he could put up a pretty good deal of talk when there was no man around to make him feel shy.

And I was quite astonished, during his final burst out tome-at the very end of things, when the poor girl was on her way to that fatal Brindisi, and he was trying to persuade himself and me that he had never really cared for her-I was quite astonished to observe how literary and how just his espressions were. He talked like quite a good books-a book not in the least cheaply sentimental. You see, I suppose here garded me not so much as a man. I had to be regarded as a woman or a solicitor. Anyhow, it burst out of him on that horrible night. And then, next morning he took me over to the Assizes and I saw how, in a perfectly calm and business-like way he set to work to secure a verdict of not guilty for a poor girl, the daughter of one of his tenants, who had been accused of murdering her baby, He spent two hundred pounds on her defense ... Well, that was Edward Ashburnham.

I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a certain type of box of matches. When you looked at them carefully you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly straight-forward, perfectly, perfectly stupid. But the brick pink of his complexion, running perfectly level to the brick pink of his inner eye-lids gave them a curious, sinister expression-like a mosaic of blue porcelain set in pink china. And that chap, coming into a room snapped up the gaze of every woman in it, as dexterously as a conjuror pockets billiard balls. It was most amazing.

You know the man on the stage who throws up sixteen balls at once and they all drop into pockets all over his person, on his shoulders, on his heels, on the inner side of his sleeves; and he stands perfectly still and does nothing. Well it was like that. He had rather a rough, hoarse voice.

And, there he was, standing by the table. I was looking at him, with my back to the screen. And, suddenly, I saw two distinct expressions flicker across his immobile eyes. How the deuce did they do it, those unflinching blue eyes with the direct gaze? For the eyes themselves never moved, gazing over my shoulder towards the screen. And the gaze was perfectly level and perfectly direct, and perfectly unchanging. I suppose that the lids really must have rounded themselves a little, and perhaps the lips moved a little too, as if he should be saying: -“There you are my dear.” At any rate the expression was that of pride, the satisfaction of the possessor. I saw him once afterwards, for a moment, gaze upon the sunny fields of Bradshaw and say: -“All this is my land!”

And then again, the gaze was perhaps more direct, harder if possible-hardy, too. It was a measuring look; a challenging look. Once when we were at Wiesbaden watching him play in a polo match against the Bonner Hussaren, I saw the same look come into his eyes, balancing the possibilities, looking over the ground.

The German Captain, Count Idigon von Leloffel was right up by their goal posts, coming with the ball in an easy cantering that tricky German fashion. The rest of the field were just anywhere. It was only a scratch sort of affair. Ashburnham quite close to the rails, not five yards from us, and I heard him saying to himself: “Might just be done!’’

And he did it. Goodness! he swung that pony round with all its four legs spread out, like a cat dropping off a roof ...

Well, it was just that look that I noticed in his eyes: “It might,” I seem even now to hear him muttering to himself, “just be done.”

I looked round over my shoulder, and saw tall, smiling brilliantly and buoyant-Leonora. And, little and fair, and as radiant as the track of sunlight along the sea-my wife.

That poor wretch! to think that he was at that moment In a perfect devil of a fix, and there he was, saying at the back of his mind: “It might just be done.” It was like a chap In the middle of the eruption of a volcano, saying that he might just manage to bolt into the tumult and set fire to a haystack. Madness? Predestination? Who the devil knows?

Mrs. Ashburnham exhibited at that moment more gaiety than I have ever since known her to show. There are certain classes of English people-the nicer ones when they have been to many spas who seem to make a point of becoming much more than usually animated when they are introduced to my compatriots. I have noticed this after. Of course, they must first hate accepted the Americans. But, that once done they seem to say to themselves: “Hallo, these women are so bright We aren’t going to be outdone in brightness.” And for the time being they certainly aren’t. But it wears off. So, it was with Leonora-at least, until she noticed me. She began, Leonora did-and perhaps it was that that gave me the idea of a touch of insolence in her character, for she never afterwards did any one single thing like it-she began by saying in quite a loud voice and from quite a distance:

“Don’t stop over by that stuffy old table, Teddy. Come and sit by these nice people!”

And that was an extraordinary thing to say. Quite extraordinary. I couldn’t for the life of me refer to total strangers as nice people. But, of course, she was taking a line of her own in which I at any rate-and no one else in the room, for she too had taken the trouble to read through the list of guests-counted any more than so many clean, bull terriers. And she sat down rather brilliantly at a vacant table, beside ours-one that was reserved for the Guggenheimers. And she just sat absolutely deaf to the remonstrances of the head waiter with his face Iike a grey ram’s. That poor chap was doing his steadfast duty too. He knew that the Guggenheimers of Chicago after they had stayed there a month and had worried the poor life out of him would give him two dollars fifty and grumble at the tipping system. And he knew that Teddy Ashburnham and his wife would give him no trouble whatever, except what the smiles of Leonora might cause in his apparently unimpressionable bosom-though you never can tell what may go on behind even a not quite spotless plastron I-And every week Edward Ashburnham would give him a solid, sound, golden English sovereign. fellow was intent on saving that table for the Guggenheimers, of Chicago. It ended in Florence saying:

“Why shouldn’t we all eat out of the same trough-that’s a nasty New York saying. But I’m sure we’re ail nice quiet people, and there can be four seats at our table. It’s round.”

Then came as it were an appreciative gurgle from the Captain, and I was perfectly aware of a slight hesitation-a quick sharp motion in Mrs. Ashburnham, as if her horse had checked. But she put it at the fence all right, rising from the seat she had taken and sitting down opposite me, as it were, all in one motion.

I never thought that Leonora looked her best in evening dress. She seemed to get it too clearly cut, there was no ruffling. She always affected black and her shoulders were too classical. She seemed to stand out of her corsage as a white marble bust might out of black Wedgwood vase. I don’t know.

I loved Leonora always and, to-day, I would very cheerfully lay down my life, what is left of it, in her service. But I am sure I never had the beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex instinct towards her.

And I suppose-no I am certain that she never had it towards me. As far as I am concerned I think it was those white shoulders that did it. I seemed to feel when I looked at them that, if ever I should press my lips upon them, they would be slightly cold-not icily, not without a touch of human heat, but, as they say of baths, with the chill off. I seemed to feel chilled at the end of my lips when I looked at her…

No, Leonora always appeared to me at her best in a blue tailor-made, Then her glorious hair wasn’t deadened by anything in the world. Certain women’s lines guide your eyes to their necks, their eyelashes, their lips, their breasts. But Leonora’s seemed to conduct your gaze always to her wrist, And the wrist was at its best in a black or a dogskin glove, and there was always a gold circlet with a little chain supporting a very small golden key to a dispatch box. Perhaps it was that in which she locked up her heart and her feelings.

Anyhow, she sat down opposite me and then, for the first time, she paid any attention to my existence. She gave me, suddenly, yet deliberately, one long stare. Her eyes, too, were blue and dark, and the eyelids were so arched that they gave you the whole round of the irises. And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me. I seemed to perceive the swift questions chasing each other through the brain that was behind them. I seemed to hear the brain ask and the eyes answer with all the simpleness of a woman who was a good hand at taking in qualities of a horse-as indeed she was. “Stands well, has plenty of room for his oats behind the girth. Not so much in the way of shoulders,” and so on. And so, her eyes asked: “Is this man trustworthy in money matters; is he likely to try to play the lover; is he likely to let his women be troublesome? Is he above all likely to babble about my affairs?”

And suddenly, into those cold, slightly defiant, almost defensive china blue orbs, there came a warmth, a tenderness, a friendly recognition ... Oh, it was very charming and very touching-and quite mortifying. It was the look of a mother to her son, of a sister to her brother. It implied trust; it implied the want of any necessity for barriers. By God, she looked at me as if I were an invalid-as any kind woman may look at a poor chap in a bath chair. And, yes, from that day forward she always treated me and not FIorence as if I were the invalid. Why, she would run after me with a rug upon chilly days. I suppose therefore that her eyes had made a favourable answer. Or perhaps it wasn’t a favourable answer. And then Florence said: “And so the whole round table is begun.” Again, Edward Ashburnham gurled slightly in his throat; but Leonora shivered a little, as if a goose had walked over her grave. And I was passing her the nickel-silver basket of rolls. Avanti! ...

So, began those nine years of uninterrupted tranquility. They were characterised by an extraordinary want of any communicativeness on the part of the Ashburnhams, to which we on our part replied by leaving out quite as extraordinarily, and nearly as completely, the personal note. Indeed, you may take it that what characterised our relationships more than anything else was an atmosphere of taking everything for granted. The given proposition was, that we were all “good people.”) We took for granted that we all liked beef underdone, but not too underdone; that both men preferred a good liqueur brandy after lunch; that both women drank a very light Rhine wine qualified with Fachingen water-that sort of thing.

It was also taken for granted that we were both sufficiently well off to afford anything that we could reasonably want in the way of amusements fitting to our station-that we could take motor cars and carriages by the day; that we could give each other dinners and dine our friends, and we could indulge if we liked in economy. Thus, Florence was in the habit of having the ‘’ Daily Telegraph “sent to her every day from London. She was always an Anglo-maniac, was Florence; the Paris edition of the “New York Herald “was always good enough for me. But when we discovered that the Ashburnham’s copy of that London paper followed them from England, Leonora and Florence decided between them to suppress one subscription one year and the other the next. Similarly, it was the habit of the Grand Duke of Nassau Schwerin, who came yearly to the baths to dine once with about eighteen families of regular Kur guests. In return he would give a dinner to all the eighteen at once. And, since these dinners were rather expensive-you had to take the Grand Duke and a good many of his suite, and any members of the diplomatic bodies that might be there-Florence and Leonora, putting their heads together, didn’t see why we shouldn’t give the Grand Duke his dinner together. And so, we did. I don’t suppose the Serenity minded that economy, or even noticed it. At any rate our joint dinner to the Royal Personage gradually assumed the aspect of a yearly function. Indeed, it grew larger and larger, until it became a sort of closing function for the season, at any rate as far as we were concerned.

I don’t in the least mean to say that we were the sort of persons who aspired to “mix “with royalty.” We didn’t; we hadn’t any claims; we were just ‘‘good people.” But the Grand Duke was a pleasant, affable sort of royalty, like the late King Edward VII, and it was pleasant to hear him talk about the races arid, very occasionally, as a bonne bouche, about his nephew, the Emperor; or to have him pause for a moment in his walk to ask after the progress of our cures, or to be benignantly interested in the amount of money we had put or Leloffel’s hunter for the Frankfurt Welter Stakes.

But upon my word, I don’t know how we put in our time, How does one put in one’s time? How is it possible to have achieved nine years and to have nothing whatever to show for it? Nothing whatever you understand. Not so much as a bone penholder, carved to resemble a chessman, with a hole in the top through which you could see four views of Nauheim. And, as for experience, as for knowledge of one’s fellow beings-nothing either. Upon my word I couldn’t tell you offhand whether the lady who sold the so expensive violets at the bottom of the road that leads to the station was cheating me or no; I can’t tell whether the porter who carried our traps across the station at Leghorn was a thief or no when he said that the regular tariff was a lire a parcel. The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. One ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow beings. But one doesn’t.

I think the modern civilised habit-the modern English habit of taking everyone for granted is a good deal to blame for this. I have observed this matter long enough to know the queer, subtle, thing that it is; to know how the faculty, for what it is worth, never lets you down.

Mind, I am not saying that this is not the most desirable type of life in the world; that it is not an almost unreasonably high standard. For it is really nauseating, when you detest it, to have to eat every day several slices of thin, tepid pink india-rubber and it is disagreeable to have to drink brandy when you would prefer to be cheered up by warm, sweet Kummel, And it is nasty to have to take a cold bath in the morning when what you want is really a hot one at night, And it stirs a little of the faith of your fathers that is deep down within you to have to have it taken for granted that you are an Episcopalian, when really you are an old-fashioned Philadelphia Quaker.

But these things have to be done; it is the cock that the whole of this society owes to Aesculapius.

And the odd, queer thing is that the whole collection of rules applies to anybody-to the anybodies that you meet in hotels, in railway trains, to a less degree perhaps in steamers, but even, in the end, upon steamers.

You meet a man or a woman and, from tiny and intimate sounds, from the slightest of movements, you know at once whether you are concerned with good people or with those who won’t do. YOU know, that is to say, whether they will go rigidly through with the whole programme, from the underdone beef to the Anglicanism. It won’t matter whether they be short or tall; whether the voice squeak like a marionette or rumbles like a town bull’s; it won’t, for the matter of that, matter whether they are Germans, Austrians, French, Spanish, or even Brazilians-they will be the Germans or Brazilians who take a cold bath every morning and who move, roughly speaking, in diplomatic circles.

But the inconvenient-well, hang it all, I will say it-the damnable nuisance of the whole thing is, that with all the taking for granted, you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued.

I can give you a rather extraordinary instance of this. I can’t remember whether it was in our first year-the first year of us four at Nauheim, because, of course, it would have been the fourth year of Florence and myself-but it must have been in the first or second year. And that gives the measure at once of the extraordinariness of oar discussion and of the swiftness with which intimacy had grown up between us, On the one hand we seemed to start out on the expedition so naturally and with so little preparation, that it was as if we must have made many such excursions before; and our intimacy seemed so deep...

Yet the place to which we went was obviously one to which Florence at least would have wanted to take us quite early, so that you would almost think we should have gone there together at the beginning of our intimacy. Florence was singularly expert as a guide to archeological exceptions, and there was nothing she liked so much as taking people round ruins and showing you the window from which someone looked down upon the murder of someone else. She only did it once; but she did it quite magnificently. She could find her way, with the sole help of Baedeker, as easily about any old monument as she could about any American city where the blocks were all square and the streets all numbered, so that you can go perfectly easily from Twenty-Fourth to Thirtieth.

Now it happens that fifty minutes away from Nauheim, by a good train, is the ancient city of M------, upon a great pinnacle of basalt, girt with a triple road running sideways up its shoulder like a scarf. And at the top there is a castle -not a square castle like Windsor-but a castle all slate gables and high peaks, with gilt weathercocks flashing bravely-the castle of St' Elizabeth of Hungary. It has the disadvantage of being in Prussia; and it is always disagreeable to go into that country; but it is very old, and there are many double-spired churches, and it stands up like a pyramid out of the green valley of the Lahn. I don’t suppose the Ashburnhams wanted especially to go there, and I didn’t especially want to go there myself. But, you understand, there was no objection.

(To be continued.)