The Good Soldier

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The Good Soldier

by Ford Madox Ford

PART I

I

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. . . .'"

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 in and tell the 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 could trust your 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 of 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 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 of my days; 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 is the proper man--the man with the right to
existence--a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour's
womankind?

I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is
so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex,
what is there to guide us in 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 this 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 great 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
an immense 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 far-away 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-Mediterranée train-deluxe, about whether it
would be worth while 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
Hamelin, not to Verona, not to Mont Majour--not so much as to
Carcassonne 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 blinding white sun upon them;
stone pines against the 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 palazzi
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 colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren't so I should
have something to catch hold of now.

Is all this digression 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 over seas and over and over 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 I did but what did I do. And I
did nothing. I suppose I ought to have done something, but I didn't
see any call to do it. Why does one do things? 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 Stuyvesant 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-Mycenaean
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 topics
like the finds at Cnossos 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 head it off what the
English call "things"--off 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 freemasonry
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.
Do you know the story? Las Tours 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
wolfskins 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.

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 Hurlbird, 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 coachmen's liveries. 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 round the world.

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