The Good Soldier

by Ford Madox Ford

  ‘Of course I mean that you should stable the horse at Bramshaw until you have time to turn round or want to sell him and get a better.’

  Nancy went straight home and told all this to Leonora, who was lying down. She regarded it as a splendid instance of Edward’s quick consideration for the feelings and the circumstances of the distressed. She thought it would cheer Leonora up – because it ought to cheer any woman up to know that she had such a splendid husband. That was the last girlish thought she ever had. For Leonora, whose headache had left her collected but miserably weak, turned upon her bed and uttered words that were amazing to the girl:

  ‘I wish to God,’ she said, ‘that he was your husband, and not mine. We shall be ruined. We shall be ruined. Am I never to have a chance?’ And suddenly Leonora burst into a passion of tears. She pushed herself up from the pillows with one elbow and sat there – crying, crying, crying, with her face hidden in her hands and the tears falling through her fingers.

  The girl flushed, stammered and whimpered as if she had been personally insulted.

  ‘But if Uncle Edward…’ she began.

  ‘That man,’ said Leonora, with an extraordinary bitterness, ‘would give the shirt off his back and off mine – and off yours to any…’ She could not finish the sentence.

  At that moment she had been feeling an extraordinary hatred and contempt for her husband. All the morning and all the afternoon she had been lying there thinking that Edward and the girl were together – in the field and hacking it home at dusk. She had been digging her sharp nails into her palms.

  The house had been very silent in the drooping winter weather. And then, after an eternity of torture, there had invaded it the sound of opening doors, of the girl’s gay voice saying:

  ‘Well, it was only under the mistletoe.’… And there was Edward’s gruff undertone. Then Nancy had come in, with feet that had hastened up the stairs and that tiptoed as they approached the open door of Leonora’s room. Bramshaw had a great big hall with oak floors and tiger skins. Round this hall there ran a gallery upon which Leonora’s doorway gave. And even when she had the worst of her headaches she liked to have her door open – I suppose so that she might hear the approaching footsteps of ruin and disaster. At any rate she hated to be in a room with a shut door.

  At that moment Leonora hated Edward with a hatred that was like hell, and she would have liked to bring her riding-whip down across the girl’s face. What right had Nancy to be young and slender and dark, and gay at times, at times mournful? What right had she to be exactly the woman to make Leonora’s husband happy? For Leonora knew that Nancy would have made Edward happy.

  Yes, Leonora wished to bring her riding-whip down on Nancy’s young face. She imagined the pleasure she would feel when the lash fell across those queer features; the pleasure she would feel at drawing the handle at the same moment toward her, so as to cut deep into the flesh and to leave a lasting wheal.

  Well, she left a lasting wheal, and her words cut deeply into the girl’s mind…

  They neither of them spoke about that again. A fortnight went by – a fortnight of deep rains, of heavy fields, of bad scent. Leonora’s headaches seemed to have gone for good. She hunted once or twice, letting herself be piloted by Bayham, whilst Edward looked after the girl. Then, one evening, when those three were dining alone, Edward said, in the queer, deliberate, heavy tones that came out of him in those days (he was looking at the table):

  ‘I have been thinking that Nancy ought to do more for her father. He is getting an old man. I have written to Colonel Rufford, suggesting that she should go to him.’

  Leonora called out:

  ‘How dare you? How dare you?’

  The girl put her hand over her heart and cried out: ‘Oh, my sweet Saviour, help me!’ That was the queer way she thought within her mind, and the words forced themselves to her lips. Edward said nothing.

  And that night, by a merciless trick of the devil that pays attention to this sweltering hell of ours, Nancy RufFord had a letter from her mother. It came whilst Leonora was talking to Edward, or Leonora would have intercepted it as she had intercepted others. It was an amazing and a horrible letter…

  I don’t know what it contained. I just average out from its effects on Nancy that her mother, having eloped with some worthless sort of fellow, had done what is called ‘sinking lower and lower’. Whether she was actually on the streets I do not know, but I rather think that she eked out a small allowance that she had from her husband by that means of livelihood. And I think that she stated as much in her letter to Nancy and upbraided the girl with living in luxury whilst her mother starved. And it must have been horrible in tone, for Mrs Rufford was a cruel sort of woman at the best of times. It must have seemed to that poor girl, opening her letter, for distraction from another grief, up in her bedroom, like the laughter of a devil.

  I just cannot bear to think of my poor dear girl at that moment…

  And, at the same time, Leonora was lashing, like a cold fiend, into the unfortunate Edward. Or, perhaps, he was not so unfortunate; because he had done what he knew to be the right thing, he may be deemed happy. I leave it to you. At any rate, he was sitting in his deep chair, and Leonora came into his room – for the first time in nine years. She said:

  ‘This is the most atrocious thing you have done in your atrocious life.’ He never moved and he never looked at her. God knows what was in Leonora’s mind exactly.

  I like to think that, uppermost in it was concern and horror at the thought of the poor girl’s going back to a father whose voice made her shriek in the night. And, indeed, that motive was very strong with Leonora. But I think there was also present the thought that she wanted to go on torturing Edward with the girl’s presence. She was, at that time, capable of that.

  Edward was sunk in his chair; there were in the room two candles, hidden by green glass shades. The green shades were reflected in the glasses of the bookcases that contained not books but guns with gleaming brown barrels and fishing-rods in green baize over-covers. There was dimly to be seen, above a mantelpiece encumbered with spurs, hooves and bronze models of horses, a dark-brown picture of a white horse.

  ‘If you think,’ Leonora said, ‘that I do not know that you are in love with the girl…’ She began spiritedly, but she could not find any ending for the sentence. Edward did not stir; he never spoke. And then Leonora said:

  ‘If you want me to divorce you, I will. You can many her then. She’s in love with you.’

  He groaned at that, a little, Leonora said. Then she went away.

  Heaven knows what happened in Leonora after that. She certainly does not herself know. She probably said a good deal more to Edward than I have been able to report; but that is all that she has told me and I am not going to make up speeches. To follow her psychological development of that moment I think we must allow that she upbraided him for a great deal of their past life, whilst Edward sat absolutely silent. And, indeed, in speaking of it afterwards, she has said several times: ‘I said a great deal more to him than I wanted to, just because he was so silent. ’ She talked, in fact, in the endeavour to sting him into speech.

  She must have said so much that, with the expression of her grievance, her mood changed. She went back to her own room in the gallery, and sat there for a long time thinking. And she thought herself into a mood of absolute unselfishness, of absolute self-contempt, too. She said to herself that she was no good; that she had failed in all her efforts – in her efforts to get Edward back as in her efforts to make him curb his expenditure. She imagined herself to be exhausted; she imagined herself to be done. Then a great fear came over her.

  She thought that Edward, after what she had said to him, must have committed suicide. She went out on to the gallery and listened; there was no sound in all the house except the regular beat of the great clock in the hall. But, even in her debased condition, she was not the person to hang about. She acted. She went straight to Edward’s room, opened the door, and
looked in.

  He was oiling the breech action of a gun. It was an unusual thing for him to do, at that time of night, in his evening clothes. It never occurred to her, nevertheless, that he was going to shoot himself with that implement. She knew that he was doing it just for occupation – to keep himself from thinking. He looked up when she opened the door, his face illuminated by the light cast upwards from the round orifices in the green candle shades.

  She said:

  ‘I didn’t imagine that I should find Nancy here.’ She thought that she owed that to him. He answered then:

  ‘I don’t imagine that you did imagine it.’ Those were the only words he spoke that night. She went, like a lame duck, back through the long corridors; she stumbled over the familiar tiger skins in the dark hall. She could hardly drag one limb after the other. In the gallery she perceived that Nancy’s door was half open and that there was a light in the girl’s room. A sudden madness possessed her, a desire for action, a thirst for self-explanation.

  Their rooms all gave on to the gallery; Leonora’s to the east, the girl’s next, then Edward’s. The sight of those three open doors, side by side, gaping to receive whom the chances of the black night might bring, made Leonora shudder all over her body. She went into Nancy’s room.

  The girl was sitting perfectly still in an armchair, very upright, as she had been taught to sit at the convent. She appeared to be as calm as a church; her hair fell, black and like a pall, down over both her shoulders. The fire beside her was burning brightly; she must have just put coals on. She was in a white silk kimono that covered her to the feet. The clothes that she had taken off were exactly folded upon the proper seats. Her long hands were one upon each arm of the chair that had a pink and white chintz back.

  Leonora told me these things. She seemed to think it extraordinary that the girl could have done such orderly things as fold up the clothes she had taken off upon such a night – when Edward had announced that he was going to send her to her father, and when, from her mother, she had received that letter. The letter, in its envelope, was in her right hand.

  Leonora did not at first perceive it. She said:

  ‘What are you doing so late?’

  The girl answered: ‘Just thinking.’

  They seemed to think in whispers and to speak below their breaths. Then Leonora’s eyes fell on the envelope, and she recognized Mrs Rufford’s handwriting.

  It was one of those moments when thinking was impossible, Leonora said. It was as if stones were being thrown at her from every direction and she could only run. She heard herself exclaim:

  ‘Edward’s dying – because of you. He’s dying. He’s worth more than either of us…’

  The girl looked past her at the panels of the half-closed door.

  ‘My poor father,’ she said, ‘my poor father.’

  ‘You must stay here,’ Leonora answered fiercely. ‘You must stay here. I tell you you must stay here.’

  ‘I am going to Glasgow,’ Nancy answered. ‘I shall go to Glasgow tomorrow morning. My mother is in Glasgow.’

  It appears that it was in Glasgow that Mrs Rufford pursued her disorderly life. She had selected that city, not because it was more profitable but because it was the natal home of her husband to whom she desired to cause as much pain as possible.

  ‘You must stay here,’ Leonora began, ‘to save Edward. He’s dying for love of you.’

  The girl turned her calm eyes upon Leonora.

  ‘I know it,’ she said. ‘And I am dying for love of him.’

  Leonora uttered an ‘Ah,’ that, in spite of herself, was an ‘Ah’ of horror and of grief.

  ‘That is why,’ the girl continued, ‘I am going to Glasgow – to take my mother away from there.’ She added, ‘To the ends of the earth,’ for, if the last months had made her nature that of a woman, her phrases were still romantically those of a schoolgirl. It was as if she had grown up so quickly that there had not been time to put her hair up. But she added: ‘We’re no good – my mother and I.’

  Leonora said, with her fierce calmness:

  ‘No. No. You’re not no good. It’s I that am no good. You can’t let that man go on to ruin for want of you. You must belong to him.’

  The girl, she said, smiled at her with a queer, far-away smile – as if she were a thousand years old, as if Leonora were a tiny child.

  ‘I knew you would come to that,’ she said, very slowly. ‘But we are not worth it – Edward and I.’

  III

  Nancy had, in fact, been thinking ever since Leonora had made that comment over the giving of the horse to young Selmes. She had been thinking and thinking, because she had had to sit for many days silent beside her aunt’s bed. (She had always thought of Leonora as her aunt.) And she had had to sit thinking during many silent meals with Edward. And then, at times, with his bloodshot eyes and creased, heavy mouth, he would smile at her. And gradually the knowledge had come to her that Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Several things contributed to form and to harden this conviction.

  She was allowed to read the papers in those days – or, rather, since Leonora was always on her bed and Edward breakfasted alone and went out early, over the estate, she was left alone with the papers. One day, in the papers, she saw the portrait of a woman she knew very well. Beneath it she read the words: ‘The Hon. Mrs Brand, plaintiff in the remarkable divorce case reported on p. 8.’ Nancy hardly knew what a divorce case was. She had been so remarkably well brought up, and Roman Catholics do not practise divorce. I don’t know how Leonora had done it exactly. I suppose she had always impressed it on Nancy’s mind that nice women did not read these things, and that would have been enough to make Nancy skip those pages.

  She read, at any rate, the account of the Brand divorce case – principally because she wanted to tell Leonora about it. She imagined that Leonora, when her headache left her, would like to know what was happening to Mrs Brand, who lived at Christchurch151 and whom they both liked very well. The case occupied three days, and the report that Nancy first came upon was that of the third day. Edward, however, kept the papers of the week, after his methodical fashion, in a rack in his gunroom, and when she had finished her breakfast Nancy went to that quiet apartment and had what she would have called a good read. It seemed to her to be a queer affair. She could not understand why one counsel should be so anxious to know all about the movements of Mr Brand upon a certain day; she could not understand why a chart of the bedroom accommodation at Christchurch Old Hall should be produced in court. She did not even see why they should want to know that, upon a certain occasion, the drawing-room door was locked. It made her laugh; it appeared to be all so senseless that grown people should occupy themselves with such matters. It struck her, nevertheless, as odd that one of the counsel should cross-question Mr Brand so insistently and so impertinently as to his feelings for Miss Lupton. Nancy knew Miss Lupton of Ringwood152 very well – a jolly girl, who rode a horse with two white fetlocks. Mr Brand persisted that he did not love Miss Lupton… Well, of course he did not love Miss Lupton; he was a married man. You might as well think of Uncle Edward loving… loving anybody but Leonora. When people were married there was an end of loving. There were, no doubt, people who misbehaved – but they were poor people – or people not like those she knew.

  So these matters presented themselves to Nancy’s mind.

  But later on in the case she found that Mr Brand had to confess to a ‘guilty intimacy’ with some one or other. Nancy imagined that he must have been telling some one his wife’s secrets; she could not understand why that was a serious offence. Of course it was not very gentlemanly – it lessened her opinion of Mr Brand. But since she found that Mrs Brand had condoned that offence, she imagined that they could not have been very serious secrets that Mr Brand had told. And then, suddenly, it was forced on her conviction that Mr Brand – the mild Mr Brand that she had seen a month or two before their departure to Nauheim, playing ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ wit
h his children and kissing his wife when he caught her – Mr Brand and Mrs Brand had been on the worst possible terms. That was incredible.

  Yet there it was – in black and white. Mr Brand drank; Mr Brand had struck Mrs Brand to the ground when he was drunk. Mr Brand was adjudged, in two or three abrupt words, at the end of columns and columns of paper, to have been guilty of cruelty to his wife and to have committed adultery with Miss Lupton. The last words conveyed nothing to Nancy – nothing real, that is to say. She knew that one was commanded not to commit adultery – but why, she thought, should one? It was probably something like catching salmon out of season – a thing one did not do. She gathered it had something to do with kissing, or holding someone in your arms….

  And yet the whole effect of that reading upon Nancy was mysterious, terrifying and evil. She felt a sickness – a sickness that grew as she read. Her heart beat painfully; she began to cry. She asked God how He could permit such things to be. And she was more certain that Edward did not love Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Perhaps, then, Edward loved someone else. It was unthinkable.

  If he could love someone else than Leonora, her fierce unknown heart suddenly spoke in her side, why could it not be herself? And he did not love her… This had occurred about a month before she got the letter from her mother. She let the matter rest until the sick feeling went off; it did that in a day or two. Then, finding that Leonora’s headaches had gone, she suddenly told Leonora that Mrs Brand had divorced her husband. She asked what, exactly, it all meant.

  Leonora was lying on the sofa in the hall; she was feeling so weak that she could hardly find the words. She answered just:

  ‘It means that Mr Brand will be able to marry again.’

  Nancy said:

  ‘But… but…’ and then: ‘He will be able to marry Miss Lupton.’ Leonora just moved a hand in assent. Her eyes were shut.