THE GOOD SOLDIER

Man hat Ford bis heute nicht Gerechtigkeit widerfahren lassen", sagte Ezra Pound. Das gilt auch heute noch, zumindest, was Die allertraurigste Geschichte, Fords Meisterwerk, betrifft. Es ist die Geschichte eines Liebesverrats. Sie spielt vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg und in den "besten Kreisen", aber sie spielt auch in der Hölle.
Nicht nur ist der Erzähler ein ahnungsloser Ehemann, der neun Jahre lang kaltblütig betrogen wird; nicht nur erweist sich sein Freund, der scheinbar grundsolide Gentleman, als brutaler Schürzenjäger und seine Frau als gierige Hure. Die diabolische Ironie der Erzählung besteht vielmehr darin, dass der Getäuschte selbst ein emotionaler Krüppel ist, dessen zwanghafte Vernünftigkeit ihn irrereden lässt, so dass er sich immer tiefer in einem Spiegelkabinett aus Täuschung und Selbsttäuschung verliert. Unter der kultivierten Oberfläche tut sich ein Abgrund von Angst, Sex und Wahnsinn auf. Selten sind Idylle, Tragikomödie und Melodram eine so erstaunliche Liaison eingegangen wie in diesem Roman.

Excerpt

I

HIS is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams fornine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy?or, rather with anacquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with yourhand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possibleto 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 knewnothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, Ihad 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 werethrown very much into the society of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was ourhome. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters forus, and Nauheim always received us from July to September. You will gather fromthis 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 atNauheim 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 yearto year. The reason for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hardsportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence's broken years was astorm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons forour imprisonment in that continent were doctor's orders. They said that even theshort Channel crossing might well kill the poor thing.

When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave from an India towhich he was never to return, was thirty-three; Mrs Ashburnham?Leonora?wasthirty-one. I was thirty-six and poor Florence thirty. Thus today Florence wouldhave been thirty-nine and Captain Ashburnham forty-two; whereas I am forty-fiveand Leonora forty. You will perceive, therefore, that our friendship has been ayoung-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 whoaccompanied Charles I to the scaffold, and, as you must also expect with thisclass of English people, you would never have noticed it. Mrs Ashburnham was aPowys; 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 ishistorically true, there are more old English families than you would find inany six English counties taken together. I carry about with me, indeed?as if itwere the only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe?thetitle deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between Chestnut andWalnut Streets. These title deeds are of wampum, the grant of an Indian chief tothe 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 notunusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling topieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for thebenefit 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 ofRome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of our littlefour-square coterie was such another unthinkable event. Supposing that youshould come upon us sitting together at one of the little tables in front of theclub house, let us say, at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching theminiature golf, you would have said that, as human affairs go, we were anextraordinarily safe castle. We were, if you will, one of those tall ships withthe white sails upon a blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest andthe safest of all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mindof 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 thatlong, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crashingdays at the end of nine years and six weeks. Upon my word, yes, our intimacy waslike a minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every possiblecircumstance we knew where to go, where to sit, which table we unanimouslyshould choose; and we could rise and go, all four together, without a signalfrom any one of us, always to the music of the Kur orchestra, always in thetemperate sunshine, or, if it rained, in discreet shelters. No, indeed, it can'tbe 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 thewhite satin favours. The mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall, butsurely the minuet?the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furtheststars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itselfstill. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautifulintimacies prolong themselves? Isn't there any Nirvana pervaded by the faintthrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yethad frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?

No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison?aprison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsoundthe rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of theTaunus Wald.

And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was truesunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth ofstone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the same tastes, withthe same desires, acting?or, no, not acting?sitting here and thereunanimously, isn't that the truth? If for nine years I have possessed a goodlyapple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine yearsand six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years Ipossessed a goodly apple? So it may well be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonorahis wife and with poor dear Florence. And, if you come to think of it, isn't ita little odd that the physical rottenness of at least two pillars of ourfour-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. Idon't know. . . .

I know nothing?nothing in the world?of the hearts of men. I only know that Iam alone?horribly alone. No hearthstone will ever again witness, for me,friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be other than peopled withincalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths. Yet, in the name of God, whatshould 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'tbelieve that for one minute she was out of my sight, except when she was safelytucked up in bed and I should be downstairs, talking to some good fellow orother in some...