The Good Soldier | Page 4

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