Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (265 page)
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Authors: Ford Madox Ford
ALFRED MILNE, serious, with bones not too well covered by flesh, with a brown moustache not too well tended, a subordinate master in the Kirkpatrick National Schools, came into the triangular garden with the high plane trees, seeking Mr. Todd. For it had happened that his brightest pupil — a boy called Hieronymus Hirschbaum — had been arrested for and convicted of picking pockets in Hyde Park, on the fringe of one of the crowds listening to an orator who denied, on a Sunday, the existence of God.
That Hieronymus Hirschbaum had taken a purse from the pocket of a Mrs. Jane Thacker could not be got away from. Alfred Milne had it from his own lips; the magistrate had had it; the missionary had had it. And Hieronymus had been put back for interviews with Mr. Todd. After these interviews Mr. Todd was to advise the magistrate what to do with the little, dark-eyed, over-intelligent child, that was in part the product of Notting Dale, in part of a semi-scientific, semi-Anarchist, and altogether undesirable father.
It would be saying too much to put it that Alfred Milne, the school teacher, poorly nourished and imperfectly supplied with blood, took a warm interest in this child. He had met, in the course of his six years of teaching, too many of these bright, precocious, beady-eyed citizens of a London of to-morrow. Or perhaps, had his vital powers been better upheld, he might have been more warmly interested. As it was, he felt the sort of interest that a shepherd will feel for a more than usually promising lamb, a thing half affection, half pity.
As he had put it in speaking to his wife: “It seemed a waste” to send — as Mr. Todd proposed to do — this Hirschbaum to a reformatory ship. It would be a sort of waste; for Hirschbaum had the makings of, let us say, an analytical chemist, whereas, on a ship as an A. B. or a cook, he would probably do no more than breed mutinies. It seemed a waste — but in the unnumbered bands of children in pinafores and knickerbockers, in the unnumbered bands of noise-makers that so perpetually dulled the edges of his life, he was accustomed to see so much waste of material that he was able to work himself up to no strenuous efforts on behalf of Hieronymus. Hieronymus was one of thousands and thousands. They died as infants; they slowly wilted into imbeciles; they went away into the workhouses when their parents died, lost their work. They moved into other quarters of the city, or they went into offices, on to the tails of vans; or, if they were girls, into service, into the carpet-sewing departments of great stores, some to that indescribable, gloomy, and adventurous limbo that is called “the bad.”
So that it was with little of the sanguine that, tall and loosely put together, he sought Mr. Todd over the black-soiled grass, beneath the black shade of the planes with their brindled and spotted barks. With the sinking of the sun behind the high houses the gardens had sunk into a deep, a liquid shadow, a delicate and tranquil coolness.
Mrs. Todd had told him that he would find her husband in the gardens, but in the shrouded light the gardens appeared to be immense and solitary. A pair of garden chairs, close together at the foot of one of the trees, contained shadowy but obvious lovers; at the foot of the wooden steps that descended from the leaded terrace to the ground a gentleman stood with his face towards the top of a bay tree, clipped and standing above a spindly stem, about the height of a man, in a green tub.
As Milne descended he was aware that this person was talking; half-way down the steps Milne thought he must be talking to himself; on the ground he had already decided that this must be one of the several actors who, Mr. Todd had told him, resided in the gardens and could be seen at times rehearsing their parts on the lawn. He heard the man say —
“Then how do you account for the metamorphosis that you have undergone?”
“It is mere hypnotism,” a slightly husky voice replied.
Partly from a sense of politeness, partly from a lack of curiosity, Milne did not turn his head as he walked across the path of blackened gravel.
“Then,” a clear voice pursued his silent steps across the turf, “it is not difficult to me to see how you come to be a man, as I have said, of so little faith.”
Alfred Milne considered that it was wonderful how these actors could send their voices out. He had not lost a single tone.
“For here,” the voice said, “I observe how you deny the evidence of your senses in order to explain along lines purely natural that which to a man of reason would appear a phenomenon purely divine. And yet you are a priest.”
As he walked farther and farther away, Alfred Milne speculated vaguely as to what kind of play it could be which could contain such a speech as this actor was rehearsing. It might be a melodrama of the most popular — such as his pupils would at times dilate upon — a melodrama in which, with supernatural effects, unbelief is brought to distress and destruction. Or it might be one of the modern plays — such as, at one time, before his marriage, he had been fond of attending — plays performed before little, odd audiences, in which every kind of problem, the problems of birth, of marriage, of over-population, of sweating, of the ethics of cannon-making and the nature of woman, bad been accustomed to be discussed in long speeches.
And Alfred Milne sighed a little at the recollection.
For before his marriage, a year and a half ago, he and his wife had been able to afford the little entrance prices or the little subscriptions, he paying for his ticket, she for hers. But since then....
And with another half-sigh — for a full passion of regret was beyond the strength of his faculties nowadays — he realised that it was better not to think of these things. It was like regretting a sacrifice that he and she had made with their eyes open, for he had her, she him, in exchange for those evenings of dusky pits half-lit by the glow of the footlights. And in the dusk he hummed a line—”
There never was a better bargain driven”
— of a ballad that they had sung in common together when he had been able to afford a hired piano.
He began to think of changes — the changes that years overfull of toil had made in his own nature. Mr. Todd was not visible in what of the long triangle was to be seen, but at the extreme wedge there was a little court, a little sooty annexe, to which the missionary might have walked. Milne sauntered in that direction. The words of the actor had given his mind a certain cant towards the consideration of the nature of the divine.
And having as a rule so little time to think, to realise himself to himself, it came to him as a mild shock of surprise to discover that he could no longer call himself an atheist. He had been aware that for some time his wife had ceased to disbelieve in the immortality of the soul. As a young girl, going through the educational courses to fit her for the post of teacher in an elementary school, she had, in common with most young people — in common with himself — passed through a phase in which, had any one seriously maintained that an individual soul was capable of immortality, she would have derided the idea with a militant fierceness.
But after they had been married a few months — after she had sacrificed her “career” to their ideal of union — she had revealed to him that she could not — she dare not — any longer believe that when we died we went into nothingness. For, she said, if — which was not possible — they should have a child, she could not bear to think that, when it died, the separation would be eternal.
Milne had accepted this revelation as a part of her tender arid self-sacrificing, her always patient, personality. It had seemed to him perfectly fitting that she should have come round again to an old and tender belief. But he had not been aware that be himself had been shaken. He had imagined that still — as when he was a young and thoughtful boy — he accepted the fact that Darwin and Huxley and the free-thinkers of the last century had blown the Deity to rags. He had, for instance, read the
Riddle of the Universe
, by Professor Haeckel, and had applauded it. Haeckel’s contemptuous dismissal of the Christian’s Deity as a “gaseous vertebrate” had filled him with delight and enthusiasm. He had not thought of Haeckel for many years. Now that they had recurred to his thoughts, suddenly, he found himself thinking of them all — Haeckel and Huxley and the atheists — as old-fashioned and arid.
The speech of the actor came again into his mind:—”
For here I observe how you deny the evidence of very wonderful things that your senses have revealed to you in order to explain along lines purely natural that which to a man of reason would appear phenomena purely divine
.” That, at least, was how the speech from the play came back to him, and he considered it passively and with an open mind. No; there were now, certainly, phenomena in the world as he saw it that he could not explain along lines purely natural: the immense wastage of the children that he saw daily; the pressure, the vicissitudes of his close-packed life. Certainly, by degrees, by little and little, in face of the mere infinite number of things that there were in the world, he had receded from the position of a militant, a harshly full-blooded atheist to that of a weary and gentle agnostic. He was not startled; he was not regretful; he accepted the change as he accepted the diminution of his youthful ideals. It was a part of the unseen process that slowly and insensibly moulded his microscopic destiny.
But upon the precise manner in which this change had come about he was still meditating when he reached the wedge of the triangle and discovered that Mr. Todd was not in the small and sooty cavity. He had then no resource but to intrude upon the lovers, whom, in passing close to their chairs, he had recognised as the missionary’s daughter and Arthur Bracondale. His sentiments led him to dislike disturbing their twilight mysteries; but the importance of Hieronymus Hirschbaum’s beady-eyed little Fate told him to do violence to his own feelings.
He approached them over the silent turf.
“I say,” he addressed the young man, “have you seen Mr. Todd?”
Arthur Bracondale came up from a deep gaze into Margaret’s eyes.
“He’s over there — with the Prince,” he said. But, creaking round in his chair, he saw that the Prince stood alone. He sprang swiftly on to his white-shod feet with an “I’ll go and ask him.”
An irresistible curiosity propelled him; the attraction of the Prince’s personality was as strong as the attraction of Margaret’s gaze. It was stronger; it drove him, through the twilight, away from the engrossed, rapt eyes themselves.
Alfred Milne stood before the girl’s relaxed figure in the chair, feeling a warmth of indulgent goodwill.
“So that is a prince,” he said. “I thought he was an actor.”
The girl kept her head turned away, her eyes on her lover’s figure.
“He’s a wonderful man,” she uttered in engrossed tones; “a prince, a composer, a musician. I dare say he’s an actor too. Arthur says...”
“But what’s his name?” Milne asked.
The girl still kept her eyes gazing into the distance.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Or yes; father says he calls himself Prince Phoebus Apollo. He came home from the court with father. He says we are to call him Mr. Apollo to save discussions.”
“From the court!” Alfred Milne said. “Why, he is the man who was tried when the policeman died.”
Alfred Milne had attended to give evidence as to the character of Hieronymus.
“Phoebus Apollo!” he said. “Phoebus Apollo was a god.”
Margaret Todd did not answer him; she was gazing at her lover and the Prince, who were approaching them side by side.
“Oh well, your Highness...” They heard Arthur Bracondale’s laugh. “If your Highness says so. But I suppose he will be back in a day or two.”
“He will never come back,” the Prince said.
“Oh, I say!” Bracondale laughed. “But how will Mrs. Todd live?”
“She will live far more happily than she ever lived before. And you; and your love. That is the reward that I have thought out for you all.”
“But she must have an income, you know,” Bracondale said. “She’s nothing but Mr. Todd’s stipend from the court.”
He imagined himself, in his unusual high spirits, playing up to a mystification of this eminent and glamorous stranger, who had sent his troublesome father-in-law upon some errand.
“Miss Todd’s paintings will attain to such a desirability in human eyes that much gold will come to her. You and she will live together in great felicity, and you will much honour this mother who is so beloved of the gods.”