



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 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