The Good Soldier

And then Leonora completely broke down—­on the day that they returned to Branshaw Teleragh.  It is the infliction of our miserable minds—­it is the scourge of atrocious but probably just destiny that no grief comes by itself.  No, any great grief, though the grief itself may have gone, leaves in its place a train of horrors, of misery, and despair.  For Leonora was, in herself, relieved.  She felt that she could trust Edward with the girl and she knew that Nancy could be absolutely trusted.  And then, with the slackening of her vigilance, came the slackening of her entire mind.  This is perhaps the most miserable part of the entire story.  For it is miserable to see a clean intelligence waver; and Leonora wavered.

You are to understand that Leonora loved Edward with a passion that was yet like an agony of hatred.  And she had lived with him for years and years without addressing to him one word of tenderness.  I don’t know how she could do it.  At the beginning of that relationship she had been just married off to him.  She had been one of seven daughters in a bare, untidy Irish manor-house to which she had returned from the convent I have so often spoken of.  She had left it just a year and she was just nineteen.  It is impossible to imagine such inexperience as was hers.  You might almost say that she had never spoken to a man except a priest.  Coming straight from the convent, she had gone in behind the high walls of the manor-house that was almost more cloistral than any convent could have been.  There were the seven girls, there was the strained mother, there was the worried father at whom, three times in the course of that year, the tenants took pot-shots from behind a hedge.  The women-folk, upon the whole, the tenants respected.  Once a week each of the girls, since there were seven of them, took a drive with the mother in the old basketwork chaise drawn by a very fat, very lumbering pony.  They paid occasionally a call, but even these were so rare that, Leonora has assured me, only three times in the year that succeeded her coming home from the convent did she enter another person’s house.  For the rest of the time the seven sisters ran about in the neglected gardens between the unpruned espaliers.  Or they played lawn-tennis or fives in an angle of a great wall that surrounded the garden—­an angle from which the fruit trees had long died away.  They painted in water-colour; they embroidered; they copied verses into albums.  Once a week they went to Mass; once a week to the confessional, accompanied by an old nurse.  They were happy since they had known no other life.

It appeared to them a singular extravagance when, one day, a photographer was brought over from the county town and photographed them standing, all seven, in the shadow of an old apple tree with the grey lichen on the raddled trunk.  But it wasn’t an extravagance.

Three weeks before Colonel Powys had written to Colonel Ashburnham: 

“I say, Harry, couldn’t your Edward marry one of my girls?  It would be a god-send to me, for I’m at the end of my tether and, once one girl begins to go off, the rest of them will follow.”  He went on to say that all his daughters were tall, upstanding, clean-limbed and absolutely pure, and he reminded Colonel Ashburnham that, they having been married on the same day, though in different churches, since the one was a Catholic and the other an Anglican—­they had said to each other, the night before, that, when the time came, one of their sons should marry one of their daughters.  Mrs Ashburnham had been a Powys and remained Mrs Powys’ dearest friend.  They had drifted about the world as English soldiers do, seldom meeting, but their women always in correspondence one with another.  They wrote about minute things such as the teething of Edward and of the earlier daughters or the best way to repair a Jacob’s ladder in a stocking.  And, if they met seldom, yet it was often enough to keep each other’s personalities fresh in their minds, gradually growing a little stiff in the joints, but always with enough to talk about and with a store of reminiscences.  Then, as his girls began to come of age when they must leave the convent in which they were regularly interned during his years of active service, Colonel Powys retired from the army with the necessity of making a home for them.  It happened that the Ashburnhams had never seen any of the Powys girls, though, whenever the four parents met in London, Edward Ashburnham was always of the party.  He was at that time twenty-two and, I believe, almost as pure in mind as Leonora herself.  It is odd how a boy can have his virgin intelligence untouched in this world.

That was partly due to the careful handling of his mother, partly to the fact that the house to which he went at Winchester had a particularly pure tone and partly to Edward’s own peculiar aversion from anything like coarse language or gross stories.  At Sandhurst he had just kept out of the way of that sort of thing.  He was keen on soldiering, keen on mathematics, on land-surveying, on politics and, by a queer warp of his mind, on literature.  Even when he was twenty-two he would pass hours reading one of Scott’s novels or the Chronicles of Froissart.  Mrs Ashburnham considered that she was to be congratulated, and almost every week she wrote to Mrs Powys, dilating upon her satisfaction.

Then, one day, taking a walk down Bond Street with her son, after having been at Lord’s, she noticed Edward suddenly turn his head round to take a second look at a well-dressed girl who had passed them.  She wrote about that, too, to Mrs Powys, and expressed some alarm.  It had been, on Edward’s part, the merest reflex action.  He was so very abstracted at that time owing to the pressure his crammer was putting upon him that he certainly hadn’t known what he was doing.

It was this letter of Mrs Ashburnham’s to Mrs Powys that had caused the letter from Colonel Powys to Colonel Ashburnham—­a letter that was half-humorous, half longing.  Mrs Ashburnham caused her husband to reply, with a letter a little more jocular—­something to the effect that Colonel Powys ought to give them some idea of the goods that he was marketing.  That was the cause of the photograph.  I have seen it, the seven girls, all in white dresses, all very much alike in feature—­all, except Leonora, a little heavy about the chins and a little stupid about the eyes.  I dare say it would have made Leonora, too, look a little heavy and a little stupid, for it was not a good photograph.  But the black shadow from one of the branches of the apple tree cut right across her face, which is all but invisible.  There followed an extremely harassing time for Colonel and Mrs Powys.  Mrs Ashburnham had written to say that, quite sincerely, nothing would give greater ease to her maternal anxieties than to have her son marry one of Mrs Powys’ daughters if only he showed some inclination to do so.  For, she added, nothing but a love-match was to be thought of in her Edward’s case.  But the poor Powys couple had to run things so very fine that even the bringing together of the young people was a desperate hazard.

The mere expenditure upon sending one of the girls over from Ireland to Branshaw was terrifying to them; and whichever girl they selected might not be the one to ring Edward’s bell.  On the other hand, the expenditure upon mere food and extra sheets for a visit from the Ashburnhams to them was terrifying, too.  It would mean, mathematically, going short in so many meals themselves, afterwards.  Nevertheless, they chanced it, and all the three Ashburnhams came on a visit to the lonely manor-house.  They could give Edward some rough shooting, some rough fishing and a whirl of femininity; but I should say the girls made really more impression upon Mrs Ashburnham than upon Edward himself.  They appeared to her to be so clean run and so safe.  They were indeed so clean run that, in a faint sort of way, Edward seems to have regarded them rather as boys than as girls.  And then, one evening, Mrs Ashburnham had with her boy one of those conversations that English mothers have with English sons.  It seems to have been a criminal sort of proceeding, though I don’t know what took place at it.  Anyhow, next morning Colonel Ashburnham asked on behalf of his son for the hand of Leonora.  This caused some consternation to the Powys couple, since Leonora was the third daughter and Edward ought to have married the eldest.  Mrs Powys, with her rigid sense of the proprieties, almost wished to reject the proposal.  But the Colonel, her husband, pointed out that the visit would have cost them sixty pounds, what with the hire of an extra servant, of a horse and car, and with the purchase of beds and bedding and extra tablecloths.  There was nothing else for it but the marriage.  In that way Edward and Leonora became man and wife.

I don’t know that a very minute study of their progress towards complete disunion is necessary.  Perhaps it is.  But there are many things that I cannot well make out, about which I cannot well question Leonora, or about which Edward did not tell me.  I do not know that there was ever any question of love from Edward to her.  He regarded her, certainly, as desirable amongst her sisters.  He was obstinate to the extent of saying that if he could not have her he would not have any of them.  And, no doubt, before the marriage, he made her pretty speeches out of books that he had read.  But, as far as he could describe his feelings at all, later, it seems that, calmly and without any quickening of the pulse, he just carried the girl off, there being no opposition .  It had, however, been all so long ago that it seemed to him, at the end of his poor life, a dim and misty affair.  He had the greatest admiration for Leonora.

He had the very greatest admiration.  He admired her for her truthfulness, for her cleanness of mind, and the clean-run-ness of her limbs, for her efficiency, for the fairness of her skin, for the gold of her hair, for her religion, for her sense of duty.  It was a satisfaction to take her about with him.

But she had not for him a touch of magnetism.  I suppose, really, he did not love her because she was never mournful; what really made him feel good in life was to comfort somebody who would be darkly and mysteriously mournful.  That he had never had to do for Leonora.  Perhaps, also, she was at first too obedient.  I do not mean to say that she was submissive—­ that she deferred, in her j udgements, to his.  She did not.  But she had been handed over to him, like some patient medieval virgin; she had been taught all her life that the first duty of a woman is to obey.  And there she was.

In her, at least, admiration for his qualities very soon became love of the deepest description.  If his pulses never quickened she, so I have been told, became what is called an altered being when he approached her from the other side of a dancing-floor.  Her eyes followed him about full of trustfulness, of admiration, of gratitude, and of love.  He was also, in a great sense, her pastor and guide—­and he guided her into what, for a girl straight out of a convent, was almost heaven.  I have not the least idea of what an English officer’s wife’s existence may be like.  At any rate, there were feasts, and chatterings, and nice men who gave her the right sort of admiration, and nice women who treated her as if she had been a baby.  And her confessor approved of her life, and Edward let her give little treats to the girls of the convent she had left, and the Reverend Mother approved of him.  There could not have been a happier girl for five or six years.  For it was only at the end of that time that clouds began, as the saying is, to arise.  She was then about twenty-three, and her purposeful efficiency made her perhaps have a desire for mastery.  She began to perceive that Edward was extravagant in his largesses.  His parents died just about that time, and Edward, though they both decided that he should continue his soldiering, gave a great deal of attention to the management of Branshaw through a steward.  Aldershot was not very far away, and they spent all his leaves there.

And, suddenly, she seemed to begin to perceive that his generosities were almost fantastic.  He subscribed much too much to things connected with his mess, he pensioned off his father’s servants, old or new, much too generously.  They had a large income, but every now and then they would find themselves hard up.  He began to talk of mortgaging a farm or two, though it never actually came to that.

She made tentative efforts at remonstrating with him.  Her father, whom she saw now and then, said that Edward was much too generous to his tenants; the wives of his brother officers remonstrated with her in private; his large subscriptions made it difficult for their husbands to keep up with them.  Ironically enough, the first real trouble between them came from his desire to build a Roman Catholic chapel at Branshaw.  He wanted to do it to honour Leonora, and he proposed to do it very expensively.  Leonora did not want it; she could perfectly well drive from Branshaw to the nearest Catholic Church as often as she liked.  There were no Roman Catholic tenants and no Roman Catholic servants except her old nurse who could always drive with her.  She had as many priests to stay with her as could be needed—­and even the priests did not want a gorgeous chapel in that place where it would have merely seemed an invidious instance of ostentation.  They were perfectly ready to celebrate Mass for Leonora and her nurse, when they stayed at Branshaw, in a cleaned-up outhouse.  But Edward was as obstinate as a hog about it.  He was truly grieved at his wife’s want of sentiment—­at her refusal to receive that amount of public homage from him.  She appeared to him to be wanting in imagination—­to be cold and hard.  I don’t exactly know what part her priests played in the tragedy that it all became; I dare say they behaved quite creditably but mistakenly.  But then, who would not have been mistaken with Edward?  I believe he was even hurt that Leonora’s confessor did not make strenuous efforts to convert him.  There was a period when he was quite ready to become an emotional Catholic.

I don’t know why they did not take him on the hop; but they have queer sorts of wisdoms, those people, and queer sorts of tact.  Perhaps they thought that Edward’s too early conversion would frighten off other Protestant desirables from marrying Catholic girls.  Perhaps they saw deeper into Edward than he saw himself and thought that he would make a not very creditable convert.  At any rate they—­and Leonora—­left him very much alone.  It mortified him very considerably.  He has told me that if Leonora had then taken his aspirations seriously everything would have been different.  But I dare say that was nonsense.  At any rate, it was over the question of the chapel that they had their first and really disastrous quarrel.  Edward at that time was not well; he supposed himself to be overworked with his regimental affairs—­he was managing the mess at the time.  And Leonora was not well—­she was beginning to fear that their union might be sterile.  And then her father came over from Glasmoyle to stay with them.

Those were troublesome times in Ireland, I understand.  At any rate, Colonel Powys had tenants on the brain—­his own tenants having shot at him with shot-guns.  And, in conversation with Edward’s land-steward, he got it into his head that Edward managed his estates with a mad generosity towards his tenants.  I understand, also, that those years—­the ’nineties—­were very bad for farming.  Wheat was fetching only a few shillings the hundred; the price of meat was so low that cattle hardly paid for raising; whole English counties were ruined.  And Edward allowed his tenants very high rebates.

To do both justice Leonora has since acknowledged that she was in the wrong at that time and that Edward was following out a more far-seeing policy in nursing his really very good tenants over a bad period.  It was not as if the whole of his money came from the land; a good deal of it was in rails.  But old Colonel Powys had that bee in his bonnet and, if he never directly approached Edward himself on the subject, he preached unceasingly, whenever he had the opportunity, to Leonora.  His pet idea was that Edward ought to sack all his own tenants and import a set of farmers from Scotland.  That was what they were doing in Essex.  He was of opinion that Edward was riding hotfoot to ruin.

That worried Leonora very much—­it worried her dreadfully; she lay awake nights; she had an anxious line round her mouth.  And that, again, worried Edward.  I do not mean to say that Leonora actually spoke to Edward about his tenants—­but he got to know that some one, probably her father, had been talking to her about the matter.  He got to know it because it was the habit of his steward to look in on them every morning about breakfast-time to report any little happenings.  And there was a farmer called Mumford who had only paid half his rent for the last three years.  One morning the land-steward reported that Mumford would be unable to pay his rent at all that year.  Edward reflected for a moment and then he said something like: 

“Oh well, he’s an old fellow and his family have been our tenants for over two hundred years.  Let him off altogether.”

And then Leonora—­you must remember that she had reason for being very nervous and unhappy at that time—­let out a sound that was very like a groan.  It startled Edward, who more than suspected what was passing in her mind—­it startled him into a state of anger.  He said sharply: 

“You wouldn’t have me turn out people who’ve been earning money for us for centuries—­people to whom we have responsibilities—­and let in a pack of Scotch farmers?”

He looked at her, Leonora said, with what was practically a glance of hatred and then, precipitately, he left the breakfast-table.  Leonora knew that it probably made it all the worse that he had been betrayed into a manifestation of anger before a third party.  It was the first and last time that he ever was betrayed into such a manifestation of anger.  The land-steward, a moderate and well-balanced man whose family also had been with the Ashburnhams for over a century, took it upon himself to explain that he considered Edward was pursuing a perfectly proper course with his tenants.  He erred perhaps a little on the side of generosity, but hard times were hard times, and every one had to feel the pinch, landlord as well as tenants.  The great thing was not to let the land get into a poor state of cultivation.  Scotch farmers just skinned your fields and let them go down and down.  But Edward had a very good set of tenants who did their best for him and for themselves.  These arguments at that time carried very little conviction to Leonora.  She was, nevertheless, much concerned by Edward’s outburst of anger.  The fact is that Leonora had been practising economies in her department.  Two of the under-housemaids had gone and she had not replaced them; she had spent much less that year upon dress.  The fare she had provided at the dinners they gave had been much less bountiful and not nearly so costly as had been the case in preceding years, and Edward began to perceive a hardness and determination in his wife’s character.  He seemed to see a net closing round him—­a net in which they would be forced to live like one of the comparatively poor county families of the neighbourhood.  And, in the mysterious way in which two people, living together, get to know each other’s thoughts without a word spoken, he had known, even before his outbreak, that Leonora was worrying about his managing of the estates.  This appeared to him to be intolerable.  He had, too, a great feeling of self-contempt because he had been betrayed into speaking harshly to Leonora before that land-steward.  She imagined that his nerve must be deserting him, and there can have been few men more miserable than Edward was at that period.  You see, he was really a very simple soul—­very simple.  He imagined that no man can satisfactorily accomplish his life’s work without loyal and whole-hearted cooperation of the woman he lives with.  And he was beginning to perceive dimly that, whereas his own traditions were entirely collective, his wife was a sheer individualist.  His own theory—­the feudal theory of an over-lord doing his best by his dependents, the dependents meanwhile doing their best for the over-lord—­this theory was entirely foreign to Leonora’s nature.  She came of a family of small Irish landlords—­that hostile garrison in a plundered country.  And she was thinking unceasingly of the children she wished to have.  I don’t know why they never had any children—­not that I really believe that children would have made any difference.  The dissimilarity of Edward and Leonora was too profound.  It will give you some idea of the extraordinary naïveté of Edward Ashburnham that, at the time of his marriage and for perhaps a couple of years after, he did not really know how children are produced.  Neither did Leonora.  I don’t mean to say that this state of things continued, but there it was.  I dare say it had a good deal of influence on their mentalities.  At any rate, they never had a child.  It was the Will of God.

It certainly presented itself to Leonora as being the Will of God—­as being a mysterious and awful chastisement of the Almighty.  For she had discovered shortly before this period that her parents had not exacted from Edward’s family the promise that any children she should bear should be brought up as Catholics.  She herself had never talked of the matter with either her father, her mother, or her husband.  When at last her father had let drop some words leading her to believe that that was the fact, she tried desperately to extort the promise from Edward.  She encountered an unexpected obstinacy.  Edward was perfectly willing that the girls should be Catholic; the boys must be Anglican.  I don’t understand the bearing of these things in English society.  Indeed, Englishmen seem to me to be a little mad in matters of politics or of religion.  In Edward it was particularly queer because he himself was perfectly ready to become a Romanist.  He seemed, however, to contemplate going over to Rome himself and yet letting his boys be educated in the religion of their immediate ancestors.  This may appear illogical, but I dare say it is not so illogical as it looks.  Edward, that is to say, regarded himself as having his own body and soul at his own disposal.  But his loyalty to the traditions of his family would not permit him to bind any future inheritors of his name or beneficiaries by the death of his ancestors.  About the girls it did not so much matter.  They would know other homes and other circumstances.  Besides, it was the usual thing.  But the boys must be given the opportunity of choosing—­and they must have first of all the Anglican teaching.  He was perfectly unshakable about this.

Leonora was in an agony during all this time.  You will have to remember she seriously believed that children who might be born to her went in danger, if not absolutely of damnation, at any rate of receiving false doctrine.  It was an agony more terrible than she could describe.  She didn’t indeed attempt to describe it, but I could tell from her voice when she said, almost negligently, “I used to lie awake whole nights.  It was no good my spiritual advisers trying to console me.”  I knew from her voice how terrible and how long those nights must have seemed and of how little avail were the consolations of her spiritual advisers.  Her spiritual advisers seemed to have taken the matter a little more calmly.  They certainly told her that she must not consider herself in any way to have sinned.  Nay, they seem even to have extorted, to have threatened her, with a view to getting her out of what they considered to be a morbid frame of mind.  She would just have to make the best of things, to influence the children when they came, not by propaganda, but by personality.  And they warned her that she would be committing a sin if she continued to think that she had sinned.  Nevertheless, she continued to think that she had sinned.

Leonora could not be aware that the man whom she loved passionately and whom, nevertheless, she was beginning to try to rule with a rod of iron—­that this man was becoming more and more estranged from her.  He seemed to regard her as being not only physically and mentally cold, but even as being actually wicked and mean.  There were times when he would almost shudder if she spoke to him.  And she could not understand how he could consider her wicked or mean.  It only seemed to her a sort of madness in him that he should try to take upon his own shoulders the burden of his troop, of his regiment, of his estate and of half of his country.  She could not see that in trying to curb what she regarded as megalomania she was doing anything wicked.  She was just trying to keep things together for the sake of the children who did not come.  And, little by little, the whole of their intercourse became simply one of agonized discussion as to whether Edward should subscribe to this or that institution or should try to reclaim this or that drunkard.  She simply could not see it.

Into this really terrible position of strain, from which there appeared to be no issue, the Kilsyte case came almost as a relief.  It is part of the peculiar irony of things that Edward would certainly never have kissed that nurse-maid if he had not been trying to please Leonora.  Nurse-maids do not travel first-class, and, that day, Edward travelled in a third-class carriage in order to prove to Leonora that he was capable of economies.  I have said that the Kilsyte case came almost as a relief to the strained situation that then existed between them.  It gave Leonora an opportunity of backing him up in a whole-hearted and absolutely loyal manner.  It gave her the opportunity of behaving to him as he considered a wife should behave to her husband.

You see, Edward found himself in a railway carriage with a quite pretty girl of about nineteen.  And the quite pretty girl of about nineteen, with dark hair and red cheeks and blue eyes, was quietly weeping.  Edward had been sitting in his corner thinking about nothing at all.  He had chanced to look at the nurse-maid; two large, pretty tears came out of her eyes and dropped into her lap.  He immediately felt that he had got to do something to comfort her.  That was his job in life.  He was desperately unhappy himself and it seemed to him the most natural thing in the world that they should pool their sorrows.  He was quite democratic; the idea of the difference in their station never seems to have occurred to him.  He began to talk to her.  He discovered that her young man had been seen walking out with Annie of Number 54.  He moved over to her side of the carriage.  He told her that the report probably wasn’t true; that, after all, a young man might take a walk with Annie from Number 54 without its denoting anything very serious.  And he assured me that he felt at least quite half-fatherly when he put his arm around her waist and kissed her.  The girl, however, had not forgotten the difference of her station.

All her life, by her mother, by other girls, by schoolteachers, by the whole tradition of her class she had been warned against gentlemen.  She was being kissed by a gentleman.  She screamed, tore herself away; sprang up and pulled a communication cord.

Edward came fairly well out of the affair in the public estimation; but it did him, mentally, a good deal of harm.