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.