The Good Soldier Read Free Page A

suppose I ought to have done something, but I didn't see
any call to do it. Why does one do things? I just drifted in and
wanted Florence. First I had drifted in on Florence at a Browning
tea, or something of the sort in Fourteenth Street, which was then
still residential. I don't know why I had gone to New York; I don't
know why I had gone to the tea. I don't see why Florence should
have gone to that sort of spelling bee. It wasn't the place at
which, even then, you expected to find a Poughkeepsie graduate. I
guess Florence wanted to raise the culture of the Stuyvesant crowd
and did it as she might have gone in slumming. Intellectual
slumming, that was what it was. She always wanted to leave the
world a little more elevated than she found it. Poor dear thing, I
have heard her lecture Teddy Ashburnham by the hour on the
difference between a Franz Hals and a Wouvermans and why the
Pre-Mycenaean statues were cubical with knobs on the top. I wonder
what he made of it? Perhaps he was thankful.
    I know I was. For do you understand my whole attentions, my
whole endeavours were to keep poor dear Florence on to topics like
the finds at Cnossos and the mental spirituality of Walter Pater. I
had to keep her at it, you understand, or she might die. For I was
solemnly informed that if she became excited over anything or if
her emotions were really stirred her little heart might cease to
beat. For twelve years I had to watch every word that any person
uttered in any conversation and I had to head it off what the
English call "things"—off love, poverty, crime, religion and the
rest of it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she was carried
off the ship at Havre assured me that this must be done. Good God,
are all these fellows monstrous idiots, or is there a freemasonry
between all of them from end to end of the earth?... That is what
makes me think of that fellow Peire Vidal.
    Because, of course, his story is culture and I had to head her
towards culture and at the same time it's so funny and she hadn't
got to laugh, and it's so full of love and she wasn't to think of
love. Do you know the story? Las Tours of the Four Castles had for
chatelaine Blanche Somebody-or-other who was called as a term of
commendation, La Louve—the She-Wolf. And Peire Vidal the Troubadour
paid his court to La Louve. And she wouldn't have anything to do
with him. So, out of compliment to her—the things people do when
they're in love!—he dressed himself up in wolfskins and went up
into the Black Mountains. And the shepherds of the Montagne Noire
and their dogs mistook him for a wolf and he was torn with the
fangs and beaten with clubs. So they carried him back to Las Tours
and La Louve wasn't at all impressed. They polished him up and her
husband remonstrated seriously with her. Vidal was, you see, a
great poet and it was not proper to treat a great poet with
indifference.
    So Peire Vidal declared himself Emperor of Jerusalem or
somewhere and the husband had to kneel down and kiss his feet
though La Louve wouldn't. And Peire set sail in a rowing boat with
four companions to redeem the Holy Sepulchre. And they struck on a
rock somewhere, and, at great expense, the husband had to fit out
an expedition to fetch him back. And Peire Vidal fell all over the
Lady's bed while the husband, who was a most ferocious warrior,
remonstrated some more about the courtesy that is due to great
poets. But I suppose La Louve was the more ferocious of the two.
Anyhow, that is all that came of it. Isn't that a story?
    You haven't an idea of the queer old-fashionedness of Florence's
aunts—the Misses Hurlbird, nor yet of her uncle. An extraordinarily
lovable man, that Uncle John. Thin, gentle, and with a "heart" that
made his life very much what Florence's afterwards became. He
didn't reside at Stamford; his home was in Waterbury where the
watches come from. He had a factory there which, in our queer
American way, would change its functions almost from year to year.
For nine