The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [34]
And, there he was, standing by the table. I was looking at him, with my back to the screen. And suddenly, I saw two distinct expressions flicker across his immobile eyes. How the deuce did they do it, those unflinching blue eyes with the direct gaze? For the eyes themselves never moved, gazing over my shoulder towards the screen. And the gaze was perfectly level and perfectly direct and perfectly unchanging. I suppose that the lids really must have rounded themselves a little and perhaps the lips moved a little too, as if he should be saying: ‘There you are, my dear.’ At any rate, the expression was that of pride, of satisfaction, of the possessor. I saw him once afterwards, for a moment, gaze upon the sunny fields of Bramshaw and say: ‘All this is my land!’
And then again, the gaze was perhaps more direct, harder if possible – hardy too. It was a measuring look; a challenging look. Once when we were at Wiesbaden watching him play in a polo match against the Bonner Hussaren451 saw the same look come into his eyes, balancing the possibilities, looking over the ground. The German Captain, Count Baron Idigon von Lelöffel46 was right up by their goal posts, coming with the ball in an easy canter in that tricky German fashion. The rest of the field were just anywhere. It was only a scratch sort of affair. Ashburnham was quite close to the rails not five yards from us and I heard him saying to himself: ‘Might just be done!’ And he did it. Goodness! he swung that pony round with all its four legs spread out, like a cat dropping off a roof…
Well, it was just that look that I noticed in his eyes: ‘It might,’ I seem even now to hear him muttering to himself, ‘just be done.’
I looked round over my shoulder and saw, tall, smiling brilliantly and buoyant – Leonora. And, little and fair, and as radiant as the track of sunlight along the sea – my wife.
That poor wretch! to think that he was at that moment in a perfect devil of a fix, and there he was, saying at the back of his mind: ‘It might just be done.’ It was like a chap in the middle of the eruption of a volcano, saying that he might just manage to bolt into the tumult and set fire to a haystack. Madness? Predestination? Who the devil knows?
Mrs Ashburnham exhibited at that moment more gaiety than I have ever since known her to show. There are certain classes of English people – the nicer ones when they have been to many spas, who seem to make a point of becoming much more than usually animated when they are introduced to my compatriots. I have noticed this often. Of course, they must first have accepted the Americans. But that once done, they seem to say to themselves: ‘Hallo, these women are so bright. We aren’t going to be outdone in brightness.’ And for the time being they certainly aren’t. But it wears off. So it was with Leonora – at least until she noticed me. She began, Leonora did – and perhaps it was that that gave me the idea of a touch of insolence in her character, for she never afterwards did any one single thing like it – she began by saying in quite a loud voice and from quite a distance:
‘Don’t stop over by that stuffy old table, Teddy. Come and sit by these nice people!’
And that was an extraordinary thing to say. Quite extraordinary. I couldn’t for the life of me refer to total strangers as nice people. But, of course, she was taking a line of her own in which I at any rate – and no one else in the room, for she too had taken the trouble to read through the list of guests – counted any more than so many clean, bull terriers. And she sat down rather brilliantly at a vacant table, beside ours – one that was reserved for the Guggenheimers. And she just sat absolutely deaf to the remonstrances of the head waiter with his face like a grey ram’s. That poor chap was doing his steadfast duty too. He knew that the Guggenheimers of Chicago, after they had stayed there a month and had worried the poor life out of