The Good Soldier | Page 8

to me when
I called in on Florence in the little ancient, colonial, wooden house
beneath the high, thin-leaved elms--the first question they asked me
was not how I did but what did I do. And I did nothing. I 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 months
or so it would manufacture buttons out of bone. Then it would suddenly
produce brass buttons for