The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford (best ereader for textbooks .txt) 📗

attack, at the earliest possible opportunity, on board the liner. Perhaps she was not so very much to be blamed. You must remember that she was a New Englander, and that New England had not yet come to loathe darkies as it does now. Whereas, if she had come from even so little south as Philadelphia, and had been an oldish family, she would have seen that for me to kick Julius was not so outrageous an act as for her cousin, Reggie Hurlbird, to say⁠—as I have heard him say to his English butler⁠—that for two cents he would bat him on the pants. Besides, the medicine-grip did not bulk as largely in her eyes as it did in mine, where it was the symbol of the existence of an adored wife of a day. To her it was just a useful lie.⁠ ⁠…

Well, there you have the position, as clear as I can make it⁠—the husband an ignorant fool, the wife a cold sensualist with imbecile fears⁠—for I was such a fool that I should never have known what she was or was not⁠—and the blackmailing lover. And then the other lover came along.⁠ ⁠…

Well, Edward Ashburnham was worth having. Have I conveyed to you the splendid fellow that he was⁠—the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character? I suppose I have not conveyed it to you. The truth is, that I never knew it until the poor girl came along⁠—the poor girl who was just as straight, as splendid and as upright as he. I swear she was. I suppose I ought to have known. I suppose that was, really, why I liked him so much⁠—so infinitely much. Come to think of it, I can remember a thousand little acts of kindliness, of thoughtfulness for his inferiors, even on the Continent. Look here, I know of two families of dirty, unpicturesque, Hessian paupers that that fellow, with an infinite patience, rooted up, got their police reports, set on their feet, or exported to my patient land. And he would do it quite inarticulately, set in motion by seeing a child crying in the street. He would wrestle with dictionaries, in that unfamiliar tongue.⁠ ⁠… Well, he could not bear to see a child cry. Perhaps he could not bear to see a woman and not give her the comfort of his physical attractions.

But, although I liked him so intensely, I was rather apt to take these things for granted. They made me feel comfortable with him, good towards him; they made me trust him. But I guess I thought it was part of the character of any English gentleman. Why, one day he got it into his head that the head waiter at the Excelsior had been crying⁠—the fellow with the grey face and grey whiskers. And then he spent the best part of a week, in correspondence and up at the British consul’s, in getting the fellow’s wife to come back from London and bring back his girl baby. She had bolted with a Swiss scullion. If she had not come inside the week he would have gone to London himself to fetch her. He was like that.

Edward Ashburnham was like that, and I thought it was only the duty of his rank and station. Perhaps that was all that it was⁠—but I pray God to make me discharge mine as well. And, but for the poor girl, I daresay that I should never have seen it, however much the feeling might have been over me. She had for him such enthusiasm that, although even now I do not understand the technicalities of English life, I can gather enough. She was with them during the whole of our last stay at Nauheim.

Nancy Rufford was her name; she was Leonora’s only friend’s only child, and Leonora was her guardian, if that is the correct term. She had lived with the Ashburnhams ever since she had been of the age of thirteen, when her mother was said to have committed suicide owing to the brutalities of her father. Yes, it is a cheerful story.⁠ ⁠…

Edward always called her “the girl,” and it was very pretty, the evident affection he had for her and she for him. And Leonora’s feet she would have kissed⁠—those two were for her the best man and the best woman on earth⁠—and in heaven. I think that she had not a thought of evil in her head⁠—the poor girl.⁠ ⁠…

Well, anyhow, she chanted Edward’s praises to me for the hour together, but, as I have said, I could not make much of it. It appeared that he had the D.S.O., and that his troop loved him beyond the love of men. You never saw such a troop as his. And he had the Royal Humane Society’s medal with a clasp. That meant, apparently, that he had twice jumped off the deck of a troopship to rescue what the girl called “Tommies,” who had fallen overboard in the Red Sea and such places. He had been twice recommended for the V.C., whatever that might mean, and, although owing to some technicalities he had never received that apparently coveted order, he had some special place about his sovereign at the coronation. Or perhaps it was some post in the Beefeaters’. She made him out like a cross between Lohengrin and the Chevalier Bayard. Perhaps he was.⁠ ⁠… But he was too silent a fellow to make that side of him really decorative. I remember going to him at about that time and asking him what the D.S.O. was, and he grunted out:

“It’s a sort of a thing they give grocers who’ve honourably supplied the troops with adulterated coffee in wartime”⁠—something of that sort. He did not quite carry conviction to me, so, in the end, I put it directly to Leonora. I asked her fully and squarely⁠—prefacing the question with some remarks, such as those that I