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THE GOOD SOLDIER
THE GOOD SOLDIER 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; to be so perfect in
manner--even just to the saving touch of insolence that seems to be
necessary. To have all that and to be all that! No it was too good
to be true. And yet only this afternoon talking over the whole
matter she said to me: "Once I tried to have a lover but I was so
sick at the heart so utterly worn out that I had to send him away."
That struck me as the most amazing thing I had ever heard. She
said "I was actually in a man's arms. Such a nice chap! Such a
dear fellow! And I was saying to myself fiercely hissing it
between my teeth as they say in novels--and really clenching
them together: I was saying to myself: 'Now I'm in for it and I'll
really have a good time for once in my life--for once in my life!' It
was in the dark in a carriage coming back from a hunt ball.
Eleven miles we had to drive! And then suddenly the bitterness of
the endless poverty of the endless acting--it fell on me like a
blight it spoilt everything. Yes I had to realize that I had been
spoilt even for the good time when it came. And I burst out crying
and I cried and I cried for the whole eleven miles. Just imagine
me crying! And just imagine me making a fool of the poor dear
chap like that. It certainly wasn't playing the game was it now?"
I don't know; I don't know; was that last remark of hers the remark
of a harlot or is it what every decent woman county family or not
county family thinks at the bottom of her heart? Or thinks all the
time for the matter of that? Who knows?
Yet if one doesn't know that at this hour and day at this pitch of
civilization to which we have attained after all the preachings of
all the moralists and all the teachings of all the mothers to all the
daughters in saecula saeculorum . . . but perhaps that is what all
mothers teach all daughters not with lips but with the eyes or
with heart whispering to heart. And if one doesn't know as much
as that about the first thing in the world what does one know and
why is one here?
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Unpublished Work 
