The Good Soldier

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
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Title: The Good Soldier
Author: Ford Madox Ford
Release Date: December 14, 2008 [EBook #2775]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOOD SOLDIER ***
Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger

THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the
Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme
intimacy—or, rather with an acquaintanceship 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 today, 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 we 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 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 twelvemonth, 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 was a storm
at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons
for our imprisonment in that continent were doctor's 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 an India to which he was never to return, was thirty-three;
Mrs Ashburnham Leonora—was thirty-one. I was thirty-six and poor
Florence thirty. Thus today Florence would have been thirty-nine
and Captain Ashburnham forty-two; whereas I am forty-five and
Leonora forty. You will perceive, therefore, that our friendship
has been a young-middle-aged affair, since we were all of us of
quite 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
Hurlbird of Stamford, Connecticut, where, as you know, they are
more old-fashioned than even the inhabitants of Cranford, England,
could have been. I myself am a Dowell 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 several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut
Streets. These title deeds are of 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 so often the case with
the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from the neighbourhood of
Fordingbridge, where the Ashburnhams' 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.

Some one 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 coterie was such another
unthinkable event. Supposing that you should come upon us 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 tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, 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. I can't
believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a
minuet, vanished in four crashing 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, where to sit, which table we
unanimously should choose; and we could rise and go, all four
together, without a signal from any one of 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 splash 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 I 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 I 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 world—of the hearts of men. I only
know that I am alone—horribly alone. No hearthstone will ever again
witness, for me, friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be
other than peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke
wreaths. 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 seemed irretrievably to have 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? 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 goodheartedness! 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 realize 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 of civilization 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 saecula 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 of 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....'"