The Good Soldier | Page 3

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The Good Soldier
by 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,