



Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





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