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CHAPTER SIX
- from The Inheritors
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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- 31 December 1999, pp 41-50
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IT was Saturday and, as was his custom during the session, the Foreign Secretary had gone for privacy and rest till Monday to a small country house he had within easy reach of town. I went down with a letter from Fox in my pocket, and early in the afternoon found myself talking without any kind of inward disturbance to the Minister's aunt, a lean, elderly lady, with a keen eye, and credited with a profound knowledge of European politics. She had a rather abrupt manner and a business-like, brown scheme of coloration. She looked people very straight in the face, bringing to bear all the penetration which, as rumour said, enabled her to take a hidden, but very real part in the shaping of our foreign policy. She seemed to catalogue me, label me, and lay me on the shelf, before I had given my first answer to her first question.
“You ought to know this part of the country well,” she said. I think she was considering me as a possible canvasser—an infinitesimal thing, but of a kind possibly worth remembrance at the next General Election.
“No,” I said, “I've never been here before.”
“Etchingham is only three miles away.”
It was new to me to be looked upon as worth consideration for my place-name. I realised that Miss Churchill accorded me toleration on its account, that I was regarded as one of the Grangers of Etchingham, who had taken to literature.
“I met your aunt yesterday,” Miss Churchill continued. She had met everybody yesterday.
“Yes,” I said, non-committally. I wondered what had happened at that meeting. My aunt and I had never been upon terms. She was a great personage in her part of the world, a great dowager land-owner, as poor as a mouse, and as respectable as a hen. She was, moreover, a keen politician on the side of Miss Churchill. I, who am neither landowner, nor respectable, nor politician, had never been acknowledged—but I knew that, for the sake of the race, she would have refrained from enlarging on my shortcomings.
Contents
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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CHAPTER SEVEN
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- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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I SUCCEEDED in giving Fox what his journal wanted; I got the atmosphere of Churchill and his house, in a way that satisfied the people for whom it was meant. His house was a pleasant enough place, of the sort where they do you well, but not nauseously well. It stood in a tranquil countryside, and stood there modestly. Architecturally speaking, it was gently commonplace; one got used to it and liked it. And Churchill himself, when one had become accustomed to his manner, one liked very well— very well indeed. He had a dainty, dilettante mind, delicately balanced, with strong limitations, a fantastic temperament for a person in his walk of life—but sane, mind you, persistent. After a time, I amused myself with a theory that his heart was not in his work, that circumstance had driven him into the career of politics and ironical fate set him at its head. For myself, I had an intense contempt for the political mind, and it struck me that he had some of the same feeling. He had little personal quaintnesses, too, a deference, a modesty, an open-mindedness.
I was with him for the greater part of his weekend holiday; hung, perforce, about him whenever he had any leisure. I suppose he found me tiresome—but one has to do these things. He talked, and I talked; heavens, how we talked! He was almost always deferential, I almost always dogmatic; perhaps because the conversation kept on my own ground. Politics we never touched. I seemed to feel that if I broached them, I should be checked— politely, but very definitely. Perhaps he actually contrived to convey as much to me; perhaps I evolved the idea that if I were to say:
“What do you think about the ‘Greenland System’ ”—he would answer:
“I try not to think about it,” or whatever gently closuring phrase his mind conceived. But I never did so; there were so many other topics.
He was then writing his Life of Cromwell and his mind was very full of his subject. Once he opened his heart, after delicately sounding me for signs of boredom.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
- from The Inheritors
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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WE reached London somewhat late in the evening—in the twilight of a summer day. There was the hurry and bustle of arrival, a hurry and bustle that changed the tenor of my thoughts and broke their train. As I stood reflecting before the door of the carriage, I felt a friendly pressure of a hand on my shoulder.
“You'll see to that,” Churchill's voice said in my ear. “You'll set the copyists to work.”
“I'll go the Museum to-morrow,” I said. There were certain extracts to be made for the “Life of Cromwell”—extracts from pamphlets that we had not conveniently at disposal. He nodded, walked swiftly toward his brougham, opened the door and entered.
I remember so well that last sight of him—of his long, slim figure bending down for the entrance, woefully solitary, woefully weighted; remember so well the gleam of the carriage panels reflecting the murky light of the bare London terminus, the attitude of the coachman stiffly reining back the horse; the thin hand that reached out, a gleam of white, to turn the gleaming handle. There was something intimately suggestive of the man in the motion of that hand, in its tentative outstretching, its gentle, half-persuasive—almost theoretic—grasp of the handle. The pleasure of its friendly pressure on my shoulder carried me over some minutes of solitude; its weight on my body removing another from my mind. I had feared that my ineffective disclosure had chilled what of regard he had for me. He had said nothing, his manner had said nothing, but I had feared. In the railway carriage he had sat remote from me, buried in papers. But that touch on my shoulder was enough to set me well with myself again, if not to afford scope for pleasant improvisation. It at least showed me that he bore me no ill-will, otherwise he would hardly have touched me. Perhaps, even, he was grateful to me, not for service, but for ineffectual good-will. Whatever I read into it, that was the last time he spoke to me, and the last time he touched me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
- from The Inheritors
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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AFTER that I began to live, as one lives; and for forty-nine weeks. I know it was forty-nine, because I got fifty-two atmospheres in all ; Callan's and Churchill's, and those forty-nine and the last one that finished the job and the year of it. It was amusing work in its way; people mostly preferred to have their atmospheres taken at their country houses—it showed that they had them, I suppose. Thus I spent a couple of days out of every week in agreeable resorts, and people were very nice to me—it was part of the game.
So I had a pretty good time for a year and enjoyed it, probably because I had had a pretty bad one for several years. I filled in the rest of my weeks by helping Fox and collaborating with Mr. Churchill and adoring Mrs. Hartly at odd moments. I used to hang about the office of the Hour on the chance of snapping up a blank three lines fit for a subtle puff of her. Sometimes they were too hurried to be subtle, and then Mrs. Hartly was really pleased.
I never understood her in the least, and I very much doubt whether she ever understood a word I said. I imagine that I must have talked to her about her art or her mission—things obviously as strange to her as to the excellent Hartly himself. I suppose she hadn't any art; I am certain she hadn't any mission, except to be adored. She walked about the stage and one adored her, just as she sat about her flat and was adored, and there the matter ended.
As for Fox, I seemed to suit him—I don't in the least know why. No doubt he knew me better than I knew myself. He used to get hold of me whilst I was hanging about the office on the chance of engaging space for Mrs. Hartly, and he used to utilise me for the ignoblest things. I saw men for him, scribbled notes for him, abused people through the telephone, and wrote articles. Of course, they were the pickings.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
- from The Inheritors
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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I HAD a sense of walking very fast—almost of taking flight— down a long dim corridor, and of a door that opened into an immense room. All that I remember of it, as I saw it then, was a number of pastel portraits of weak, vacuous individuals, in dulled, gilt, oval frames. The heads stood out from the panelling and stared at me from between ringlets, from under powdered hair, simpering, or contemptuous with the expression that must have prevailed in the monde of the time before the Revolution. At a great distance, bent over account-books and pink cheques on the flap of an escritoire, sat my aunt, very small, very grey, very intent on her work.
The people who built these rooms must have had some property of the presence to make them bulk large—if they ever really did so—in the eyes of dependents, of lackeys. Perhaps it was their sense of ownership that gave them the necessary prestige. My aunt, who was only a temporary occupant, certainly had none of it. Bent intently over her accounts, peering through her spectacles at columns of figures, she was nothing but a little old woman alone in an immense room. It seemed impossible that she could really have any family pride, any pride of any sort. She looked round at me over her spectacles, across her shoulder.
“Ah … Etchingham,” she said. She seemed to be trying to carry herself back to England, to the England of her land-agent and her select visiting list. Here she was no more superior than if we had been on a desert island. I wanted to enlighten her as to the woman she was sheltering—wanted to very badly; but a necessity for introducing the matter seemed to arise as she gradually stiffened into assertiveness.
“My dear aunt,” I said, “the woman …” The alien nature of the theme grew suddenly formidable. She looked at me arousedly.
“You got my note then,” she said. “But I don't think a woman can have brought it. I have given strict orders.
CHAPTER ONE
- from The Inheritors
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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“IDEAS,” she said. “Oh, as for ideas—”
“Well? ” I hazarded, “as for ideas—? ”
We went through the old gateway and I cast a glance over my shoulder. The noon sun was shining over the masonry, over the little saints’ effigies, over the little fretted canopies, the grime and the white streaks of bird-dropping.
“There,” I said, pointing toward it, “doesn't that suggest something to you? ”
She made a motion with her head—half negative, half contemptuous.
“But,” I stuttered, “the associations—the ideas—the historical ideas—”
She said nothing.
“You Americans,” I began, but her smile stopped me. It was as if she were amused at the utterances of an old lady shocked by the habits of the daughters of the day. It was the smile of a person who is confident of superseding one fatally.
In conversations of any length one of the parties assumes the superiority—superiority of rank, intellectual or social. In this conversation she, if she did not attain to tacitly acknowledged temperamental superiority, seemed at least to claim it, to have no doubt as to its ultimate according. I was unused to this. I was a talker, proud of my conversational powers.
I had looked at her before; now I cast a sideways, critical glance at her. I came out of my moodiness to wonder what type this was. She had good hair, good eyes, and some charm. Yes. And something besides—a something—a something that was not an attribute of her beauty. The modelling of her face was so perfect and so delicate as to produce an effect of transparency, yet there was no suggestion of frailness; her glance had an extraordinary strength of life. Her hair was fair and gleaming, her cheeks coloured as if a warm light had fallen on them from somewhere. She was familiar till it occurred to you that she was strange.
“Which way are you going? ” she asked.
“I am going to walk to Dover,” I answered.
“And I may come with you? ”
I looked at her—intent on divining her in that one glance.
Reviews of The Inheritors
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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The Scotsman 4 July 1901.
Mr. Conrad's reputation as a novelist is mainly founded on his studies of life in the East Indies and on the high seas. In The Inheritors he has deserted the scene that he has made so familiar to his readers and dealt with modern political and financial intrigue. Yet though he has changed the scene of interest and taken to himself a collaborator, The Inheritors has all the characteristic features of his work, and notably a certain curious obscurity. His characters never seem quite to understand what they want to say or have a singular difficulty in expressing themselves summarises the plot. How the ropes are pulled, how one politician is ruined and another makes his name, it must be left to the reader to discover for himself. It is a very able piece of work and a capital story, though it must be admitted it is considerably weighted by a notion which is calculated only to annoy, and adds nothing to the interest.
The Manchester Guardian 10 July 1901.
It is difficult in limited space to give an idea of this curious and entertaining book, which seems to begin lightly enough but concentrates into an oppression and leaves us with some doubts of our sanity and more of our effectiveness describes the inhabitants of the Fourth Dimension. Before these superhuman beings we have no more chance than with the Martians of Mr. Wells. The authors are exceedingly adroit in their half-revelations, in writing round the thing, and they carry us over some thin places with suggestions that stop short of committal. We see the world as a huge imposture with a front for show and a backstairs life of politics, journalism, and finance—the last stand of a decent humanity against the ‘boom.’ It is suggested that our particular morality is a false start, but it appears to us that there is a central weakness in that the so-called virtues and probities used for the purposes of the story are not the real thing. And though there is an expression of sound sense from a country grocer that helps us, democracy plays no part in the struggle…
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
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- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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AT noon of the next day I gave Fox his look in at his own flat. He was stretched upon a sofa—it was evident that I was to take such of his duties as were takeable. He greeted me with words to that effect.
“Don't go filling the paper with your unbreeched geniuses,” he said, genially, “and don't overwork yourself. There's really nothing to do, but you're being there will keep that little beast Evans from getting too cock-a-hoop. He'd like to jerk me out altogether; thinks they'd get on just as well without me.”
I expressed in my manner general contempt for Evans, and was taking my leave.
“Oh, and—” Fox called after me. I turned back. “The Greenland mail ought to be in to-day. If Callan's contrived to get his flood-gates open, run his stuff in, there's a good chap. It's a feature and all that, you know.”
“I suppose Soane's to have a look at it,” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” he answered; “but tell him to keep strictly to old Cal's lines—rub that into him. If he were to get drunk and run in some of his own tips it'd be awkward. People are expecting Cal's stuff. Tell you what: you take him out to lunch, eh? Keep an eye on the supplies, and ram it into him that he's got to stick to Cal's line of argument.”
“Soane's as bad as ever, then? ” I asked.
“Oh,” Fox answered, “he'll be all right for the stuff if you get that one idea into him.” A prolonged and acute fit of pain seized him. I fetched his man and left him to his rest.
At the office of the Hour I was greeted by the handing to me of a proof of Callan's manuscript. Evans, the man across the screen, was the immediate agent.
“I suppose it's got to go in, so I had it set up,” he said. “Oh, of course it's got to go in,” I answered. “It's to go to Soane first, though.”
The Inheritors
- An Extravagant Story
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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This novel, one of two collaborations between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, is one of the earliest to be concerned with modern, mechanical culture, and as such foreshadowed other writers such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Symbolising the collapse of old treasured political values at the turn of the century and underlining the urgency of renovation, the novel involves the unrequited love for a young women of Arthur Granger, an aristocratic and unsuccessful novelist. Granger betrays the ideals on which he prides himself for this woman, a nameless, ethereal and goddess-like agent from a strange world. The collaboration between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford influenced their own independent work and, in the words of Ezra Pound, ‘What Flaubert had done to change French prose, Conrad and Ford did to transform English prose.’
CHAPTER NINE
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- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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I HAD a pretty bad night after that, and was not much in the mood for Fox on the morrow. The sight of her had dwarfed everything; the thought of her disgusted me with everything, made me out of conceit with the world—with that part of the world that had become my world. I wanted to get up into hers— and I could not see any way. The room in which Fox sat seemed to be hopelessly off the road—to be hopelessly off any road to any place; to be the end of a blind alley. One day I might hope to occupy such a room—in my shirt-sleeves, like Fox. But that was not the end of my career—not the end that I desired. She had upset me.
“You've just missed Polehampton,” Fox said; “wanted to get hold of your ‘Atmospheres.’ ”
“Oh, damn Polehampton,” I said, “and particularly damn the ‘Atmospheres.’ ”
“Willingly,” Fox said, “but I told Mr. P. that you were willing if …”
“I don't want to know,” I repeated. “I tell you I'm sick of the things.”
“What a change,” he asserted, sympathetically, “I thought you would.”
It struck me as disgusting that a person like Fox should think about me at all. “Oh, I'll see it through,” I said. “Who's the next? ”
“We've got to have the Duc de Mersch now,” he answered, “De Mersch as State Founder—written as large as you can—all across the page. The moment's come and we've got to rope it in, that's all. I've been middling good to you … You understand …”
He began to explain in his dark sentences. The time had come for an energetically engineered boom in de Mersch—a boom all along the line. And I was to commence the campaign. Fox had been good to me and I was to repay him. I listened in a sort of apathetic indifference.
“Oh, very well,” I said.
The Ford-Conrad Collaboration
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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Conrad's function in The Inheritors as it to-day stands was to give to each scene a final tap; these, in a great many cases, brought the whole meaning of the scene to the reader's mind. Looking through the book the writer comes upon instance after instance of these completions of scenes by a speech of Conrad's. Here you have the—quite unbearably vague—hero talking to the royal financier about the supernatural-adventuress heroine. Originally the speeches ran:
“You don't understand…. She…. She will….”
He said: “Ah! Ah!” in an intolerable tone of royal badinage.
I said again “You don't understand…. Even for your own sake….”
He swayed a little on his feet and said: “Bravo…. Bravissimo…. You propose to frighten….”
I looked at his great bulk of a body…. People began to pass, muffled up, on their way out of the place.
The scene died away in that tone. In the book as it stands it runs, with Conrad's addition italicised:
“If you do not” [cease persecuting her had been implied several speeches before], I said, “I shall forbid you to see her. And I shall….”
“Oh, oh! ” he interjected with the intonation of a reveller at a farce. “We are at that—we are the excellent brother—” He paused and then added: “Well, go to the devil, you and your forbidding.” He spoke with the greatest good humour.
“I am in earnest,” I said, “very much in earnest. The thing has gone too far. And even for your own sake you had better….”
He said: “Ah, ah! ” in the tone of his “Oh, oh! ”
“She is no friend to you,” I struggled on, “she is playing with you for her own purposes; you will….”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
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- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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THAT afternoon we had a scene, and late that night another. The memory of the former is a little blotted out. Things began to move so quickly that, try as I will to arrange their sequence in my mind, I cannot. I cannot even very distinctly remember what she told me at that first explanation. I must have attacked her fiercely—on the score of de Mersch, in the old vein; must have told her that I would not in the interest of the name allow her to see the man again. She told me things, too, rather abominable things, about the way in which she had got Halderschrodt into her power and was pressing him down. Halderschrodt was de Mersch's banker-in-chief; his fall would mean de Mersch's, and so on. The “so on” in this case meant a great deal more. Halderschrodt, apparently, was the “somebody who was up to something” of the American paper—that is to say the allied firms that Halderschrodt represented. I can't remember the details. They were too huge and too unfamiliar, and I was too agitated by my own share in the humanity of it. But, in sum, it seemed that the fall of Halderschrodt would mean a sort of incredibly vast Black Monday—a frightful thing in the existing state of public confidence, but one which did not mean much to me. I forget how she said she had been able to put the screw on him. Halderschrodt, as you must remember, was the third of his colossal name, a man without much genius and conscious of the lack, obsessed with the idea of operating some enormous coup, like the founder of his dynasty, something in which foresight in international occurrence played a chief part. That idea was his weakness, the defect of his mind, and she had played on that weakness. I forget, I say, the details, if I ever heard them; they concerned themselves with a dynastic revolution somewhere, a revolution that was to cause a slump all over the world, and that had been engineered in our Salon.
CHAPTER TWO
- from The Inheritors
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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HER figure faded into the darkness, as pale things waver down into deep water, and as soon as she disappeared my sense of humour returned. The episode appeared more clearly, as a flirtation with an enigmatic, but decidedly charming, chance travelling companion. The girl was a riddle, and a riddle once guessed is a very trivial thing. She, too, would be a very trivial thing when I had found a solution. It occurred to me that she wished me to regard her as a symbol, perhaps, of the future— as a type of those who are to inherit the earth, in fact. She had been playing the fool with me, in her insolent modernity. She had wished me to understand that I was old-fashioned; that the frame of mind of which I and my fellows were the inheritors was over and done with. We were to be compulsorily retired; to stand aside superannuated. It was obvious that she was better equipped for the swiftness of life. She had a something—not only quickness of wit, not only ruthless determination, but a something quite different and quite indefinably more impressive. Perhaps it was only the confidence of the superseder, the essential quality that makes for the empire of the Occidental. But I was not a negro— not even relatively a Hindoo. I was somebody, confound it, I was somebody.
As an author, I had been so uniformly unsuccessful, so absolutely unrecognised, that I had got into the way of regarding myself as ahead of my time, as a worker for posterity. It was a habit of mind—the only revenge that I could take upon despiteful Fate. This girl came to confound me with the common herd—she declared herself to be that very posterity for which I worked.
She was probably a member of some clique that called themselves Fourth Dimensionists—just as there had been pre- Raphaelites. It was a matter of cant allegory. I began to wonder how it was that I had never heard of them. And how on earth had they come to hear of me!
“She must have read something of mine,” I found myself musing: “the Jenkins story perhaps. It must have been the Jenkins story; they gave it a good place in their rotten magazine.
The Inheritors
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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Introduction
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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The Inheritors (1901) was the first fruit of a collaboration between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. It has suffered the fate of more or less complete neglect in histories of science fiction and of the novel in general. Even when it is mentioned within the context of either writer's career it is described as a curiosity difficult to classify and largely of historical interest. One reason for the neglect and critical suspicion of the novel lies in its use of nonrealistic characters from the fourth dimension. The narrative describes the experiences of a would-be novelist Arthur Granger who meets a visitor from a future era. She instructs him in the lessons of social change but decides to give evolution a helping hand by engineering a public revelation of the atrocities which are being committed in the name of philanthropy in a scheme to open up darkest Greenland—a thinly disguised version of the Belgian Congo. The exposure compromises British government plans to invest in the scheme; a crisis follows and the minister representing the past (Churchill) is sacrificed to the new man Gurnard. This public action is shadowed by Granger's prospering career as a writer of literary journalism which brings him into contact with the main actors on the political scene and one of the main purposes of the novel, as we shall see, is to explore anxieties about change, particularly turn-of-the-century anxieties about the ending of an era. The figures from the fourth dimension signal this theme startlingly to Granger and the reader alike. They are a unique device in Conrad's career since he was never again to use anything outside realism, and they are virtually unique in Ford's oeuvre. The only other excursion he made into fantasy was his 1908 novel Mr. Apollo, an account of a visit to Earth by a divinity inspired by H. G. Wells's The Sea Lady.
Conrad and Ford first met in 1898. The elder of the two was already established as a successful novelist while Ford had to date only produced one novel, a biography of the painter Ford Madox Brown, and a number of poems and essays on the Pre-Raphaelites.
CHAPTER THREE
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- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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TO encourage me, I suppose, Callan gave me the proofsheets of his next to read in bed. The thing was so bad that it nearly sickened me of him and his jobs. I tried to read the stuff; to read it conscientiously, to read myself to sleep with it. I was under obligations to old Cal and I wanted to do him justice, but the thing was impossible. I fathomed a sort of a plot. It dealt in fratricide with a touch of adultery; a Great Moral Purpose loomed in the background. It would have been a dully readable novel but for that; as it was, it was intolerable. It was amazing that Cal himself could put out such stuff; that he should have the impudence. He was not a fool, not by any means a fool. It revolted me more than a little.
I came to it out of a different plane of thought. I may not have been able to write then—or I may; but I did know enough to recognise the flagrantly, the indecently bad, and, upon my soul, the idea that I, too, must cynically offer this sort of stuff if I was ever to sell my tens of thousands very nearly sent me back to my solitude. Callan had begun very much as I was beginning now; he had even, I believe, had ideals in his youth and had starved a little. It was rather trying to think that perhaps I was really no more than another Callan, that, when at last I came to review my life, I should have much such a record to look back upon. It disgusted me a little, and when I put out the light the horrors settled down upon me.
I woke in a shivering frame of mind, ashamed to meet Callan's eye. It was as if he must be aware of my over-night thoughts, as if he must think me a fool who quarrelled with my victuals. He gave no signs of any such knowledge—was dignified, cordial; discussed his breakfast with gusto, opened his letters, and so on. An anæmic amanuensis was taking notes for appropriate replies.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
- from The Inheritors
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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- The Inheritors
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 28 July 2017
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- 31 December 1999, pp 141-150
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I WALKED along, got to my club and upstairs into my room peaceably. A feeling of entire tranquillity had come over me. I rested after a strife which had issued in a victory whose meaning was too great to comprehend and enjoy at once. I only knew that it was great because there seemed nothing more left to do. Everything reposed within me—even conscience, even memory, reposed as in death. I had risen above them, and my thoughts moved serenely as in a new light, as men move in sunshine above the graves of the forgotten dead. I felt like a man at the beginning of a long holiday—an indefinite space of idleness with some great felicity—a felicity too great for words, too great for joy—at the end. Everything was delicious and vague; there were no shapes, no persons. Names flitted through my mind—Fox, Churchill, my aunt; but they were living people seen from above, flitting in the dusk, without individuality; things that moved below me in a valley from which I had emerged. I must have been dreaming of them.
I know I dreamed of her. She alone was distinct among these shapes. She appeared dazzling; resplendent with a splendid calmness, and I braced myself to the shock of love, the love I had known, that all men had known; but greater, transcendental, almost terrible, a fit reward for the sacrifice of a whole past. Suddenly she spoke. I heard a sound like the rustling of a wind through trees, and I felt the shock of an unknown emotion made up of fear and of enthusiasm, as though she had been not a woman but only a voice crying strange, unknown words in inspiring tones, promising and cruel, without any passion of love or hate. I listened. It was like the wind in the trees of a little wood. No hate … no love. No love. There was a crash as of a falling temple. I was borne to the earth, overwhelmed, crushed by an immensity of ruin and of sorrow. I opened my eyes and saw the sun shining through the window-blinds.
CHAPTER FOUR
- from The Inheritors
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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- The Inheritors
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 28 July 2017
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- 31 December 1999, pp 27-34
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I WENT up to town bearing the Callan article, and a letter of warm commendation from Callan to Fox. I had been very docile; had accepted emendations; had lavished praise, had been unctuous and yet had contrived to retain the dignified savour of the editorial “we.” Callan himself asked no more.
I was directed to seek Fox out—to find him immediately. The matter was growing urgent. Fox was not at the office—the brand new office that I afterward saw pass through the succeeding stages of business-like comfort and dusty neglect. I was directed to ask for him at the stage door of the Buckingham.
I waited in the doorkeeper's glass box at the Buckingham. I was eyed by the suspicious commissionaire with the contempt reserved for resting actors. Resting actors are hungry suppliants as a rule. Call-boys sought Mr. Fox. “Anybody seen Mr. Fox? He's gone to lunch.”
“Mr. Fox is out,” said the commissionaire.
I explained that the matter was urgent. More call-boys disappeared through the folding doors. Unenticing personages passed the glass box, casting hostile glances askance at me on my high stool. A message came back.
“If it's Mr. Etchingham Granger, he's to follow Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly's at once.”
I followed Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly's—to a little flat in a neighbourhood that I need not specify. The eminent journalist was lunching with the eminent actress. A husband was in attendance—a nonentity with a heavy yellow moustache, who hummed and hawed over his watch.
Mr. Fox was full-faced, with a persuasive, peremptory manner.
Mrs. Hartly was—well, she was just Mrs. Hartly. You remember how we all fell in love with her figure and her manner, and her voice, and the way she used her hands. She broke her bread with those very hands; spoke to her husband with that very voice, and rose from table with that same graceful management of her limp skirts. She made eyes at me; at her husband; at little Fox, at the man who handed the asparagus—great round grey eyes.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
- from The Inheritors
- Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford
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- Book:
- The Inheritors
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 28 July 2017
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- 31 December 1999, pp 151-154
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I WANTED to see her, to finish it one way or another, and, at my aunt's house, I found her standing in an immense white room; waiting for me. There was a profusion of light. It left her absolutely shadowless, like a white statue in a gallery; inscrutable.
“I have come,” I said. I had it in my mind to say: “Because there is nothing for me to do on earth.” But I did not, I looked at her instead.
“You have come,” she repeated. She had no expression in her voice, in her eyes. It was as if I were nothing to her; as if I were the picture of a man. Well, that was it ; I was a picture, she a statue. “I did it,” I said at last.
“And you want? ” she asked.
“You know,” I answered, “I want my …” I could not think of the word. It was either a reward or a just due. She looked at me, quite suddenly. It made an effect as if the Venus of Milo had turned his head toward me. She began to speak, as if the statue were speaking, as if a passing bell were speaking; recording a passing passionlessly.
“You have done nothing at all,” she said. “Nothing.”
“And yet,” I said, “I was at the heart of it all.”
“Nothing at all,” she repeated. “You were at the heart, yes; but at the heart of a machine.” Her words carried a sort of strong conviction. I seemed suddenly to see an immense machine— unconcerned, soulless, but all its parts made up of bodies of men: a great mill grinding out the dust of centuries; a great wine-press. She was continuing her speech.
“As for you—you are only a detail, like all the others; you were set in a place because you would act as you did. It was in your character. We inherit the earth and you, your day is over … You remember that day, when I found you—the first day? ”
I remembered that day. It was on the downland, under the immense sky, amid the sound of larks.