Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (268 page)

“You were gallant spirits,” a full voice came to his ears through the gloom; “that must be conceded to you as a merit But tell me: is Lucretius forgotten too?” Mr. Clarges had his back to the origin of this voice; he was lost in slightly bitter thoughts. He did not turn his head, but uttered —

“You might think we had never lived at all. I tell you it’s all coming back. There’s an irresistible desire in men to be humbugged. There are a few — like our young friend here — who yearn to humbug, and they have the faculty. But the rest of humanity, they tumble over themselves in a desire to get at the stuff that gulls them.”

“Some of us like to expose scandals too,” the Cockney teacher mocked him.

“Yes, my good fellow,” Mr. Clarges answered. “But it’s weary work. I’ve been exposing charlatans for forty years. As I said, we had swept away the priest and all his works. And here we are with Professor Edge and the psychical manifestation of Nelson!”

“The attitude of Science,” the young man from Norfolk said in his full, gentle, and precisive tones, “was beautifully expressed by Professor Rerike this spring. Professor Rerike is the doyen of all the professors and students of botany in this world. Nature, he says, is not the Godhead, nor does she act upon the Godhead. Nor is the Godhead nature, nor yet does he react upon nature. But the one and the other exist; the one following laws that we may discover, the other laws that we cannot even dimly discern.”

Mr. Clarges suddenly shouted out —

“Yes; there you have it — the old priestly doctrine: ‘God’s ways are not your ways, nor his thoughts your thoughts.”’

“Would you controvert that?” the voice came from behind him.

Mr. Clarges swung his chair round so sharply that its feet screamed on the stone of the little hearth.

“There
is
no God!” he cried out And he added, “Have you heard about the Archbishop of Canterbury?”

His eyes searched in the gloom for the stranger’s face, but he could make nothing of it.

“I don’t know who the devil you are!” he said. “Some parson, I dare say, from your voice. An Oxford High Church product Well, my dear sir, your cause is by no means a lost cause, though Oxford’s called the home of lost causes. You’ll come back. These people will bring you back....”

It had fallen almost dark, so that though Mr. Clarges indicated with his hand the silent figures of the scientists, it was as if he indicated all the inhabitants of the room. “They’ve reached psychic phenomena and ghosts, but they’ll get back to your temples and incense and mummery. I don’t know how far back you are, but they’ll get back to you. You’re a dark horse, whatever you are, and for the moment I don’t want to know. You’re a symbol of a power that lurks in darkness.”

An extraordinary and unusual anger seemed to pervade him at this man’s presence, invisible, and almost minatory in the liquid summer gloom. There was just the outline of a head, as it were, with the ears pricked up and attentive of some great cat outlined against a desert night sky.

“I don’t care
what
you are!” he said, the idea suggesting itself to him from the image that he had. “You may be as old as the hills or older. You may stand for Ra, the Cat God, or the Sun God of the Egyptians. But they’ll bring you back, these fellows.”

“You have spoken the words,” the voice came to him. It moved him to an insane fury: he stood upon his old legs and stamped.

“I had a dream one night,” he said. “The damnable way we are becoming retrograde has worried me so much that no wonder I dream. I dreamt I was in a desert with Huxley and Tyndall. And we saw a great globe of fire coming towards us. And it was the Godhead. And Tyndall fell down on his face and cried out, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy: Lord God Almighty.’ And Huxley said, ‘Mind! I never said there wasn’t a God, I only said I did not know.”’

“And
you?”
the voice came to him.

“I’m not one to boast,” the old man snarled at him, “even of my dreams.”

“You,” the stranger’s voice said, “you uttered these words: ‘Shall I have been denying God for forty years to eat my words now?’ And you took up a stone and cast it at the great light.”

Mr. Clarges fell back towards the mantelpiece.

“How did you know?” he said. “How the devil did you know?”

“Shall not I who sent the true or false dreams to the Delphic oracle...”

“What!” Mr. Clarges said. “A medium! You’re a medium! Or a psychic phenomenon. Good Lord, young men, look after your pockets. This gentleman will clear them. He’s a deuced clever fellow. I didn’t know I had told that dream to any one. But when one gets old one forgets. This gentleman must have heard whoever I told tell the story. But it was neatly done. Sir, I — congratulate you. You’ll be the talk of the town....”

“Mr. Clarges will be saying soon,” the Cockney teacher’s voice mocked him—”he’ll be saying to everybody he meets, ‘Have you heard of the scandal in More’s Buildings? ‘“ Mr. Clarges, invisible himself by now, turned his voice towards the invisible Cockney.

“You won’t ever make a priest,” he said; “you’re too much like a sparrow. But you, Milne — or you, Cleaver — you’ll do it, you credulous, maundering, gentle creatures. You’ll humbug yourselves and you’ll humbug others. Then what did we live for? What the devil did we live for? You’d think we never had lived before. By God in heaven, if it’s all coming back...”

Suddenly he pushed his way, right and left, through the little crowd — for the marble-players had come out of the study — into the hall. When his hand brushed the shoulder of the invisible being in the chair he snorted as if he had touched a loathsome reptile. From the hall he was audible, snorting and stamping; then his feet were heard on the stone stairs, that repeated, confusedly and whispering, each stroke of his metalled heels, as though he were descending a well. Then all the sound vanished with the thunderous bang of a heavy closing door far below.

There was an old snatch of folk-song that they were fond of singing in chorus. It told in a simple, solemn, and lamenting minor the sorrow of an ancient charger, worn out and standing, up to its fetlocks in nettles, against an old wall.

“My shoulders once were sturdy” — it ran—”were glossy, smooth, and round, But now, alas, they’re rotten, I’m not accounted sound. As I have grown so aged, my teeth gone to decay....”

to a pitiful and solemn tune ending in a chorus of three notes repeated —

“Poor old horse: Let him die!”

In the darkness, one of them with an ecclesiastical intonation brought out softly —

“Poor — old — horse: — Let — him — die!”

and with a sudden volume of sound it rose up from them all —

“
Poor — old — horse Let — him —— die.”

CHAPTER
V

“SHUT his jaw,” the Cockney teacher said. Mrs.

Milne was lighting two candles on the painted iron ledge above the fireplace. “Makes my eyes blink,” he added, as the illumination spread over the room. He pronounced the words so that they suggested slightly “shet” and “mikes.”

“It would!” the voice came from behind his back. “The light would make your eyes blink.”

“Well, wouldn’t it yours?” the teacher asked, with a good-natured perkiness. He had hardly looked round before the voice answered definitively —

“No!”

“Oh well, Mr. — What’s your name?”

“I am Phoebus Apollo,” the stranger said. “No light can make my eyes blink.”

“More alien immigration!” the Cockney ejaculated, with an imitated ruefulness. “How is the pore British working man to live?...”

He ran his eyes swiftly over the stranger’s form as he sat, from his head to his feet. His eyes rested on the rounded and speckless toes of the boots, which he appeared to address. Behind them, in the little room, the five others, standing up, had the aspect of a crowd surrounding a street accident.

“Oh well, Mr. Apollo,” the Cockney said, “nobody’s denying your name or the strength of your eyes. Only, if you think I was too hard on poor old Clarges — who’s what you might call a fossil from a secondary formation — if I was hard on him, and you didn’t like it, what price you? You said a thing or two, if you remember.”

A little remonstratory buzz went up from the circle.

“Well, he
did
say a thing or two,” the Cockney said. “I appeal to you all if he didn’t.” His small eyes were dark and sharp and alert, but a little unhappy for the moment, as if, with his gregarious soul of the streets and pavements, it was disagreeable to him to be alone — to be separated from his companions, if only in opinion.... “I don’t want to give offence. This gentleman, Mr. Apollo, is a stranger. Well,
you
think, and
I
think, that we ought to treat the stranger in our midst with courtesy. That’s evident! That’s playing the game!”

The young man at the back of the room made himself heard with —

“Well, but, Carver...”

“Now let
me,
Deverell,” Carver said. “You’ll have your turn later: at present it’s
me....”
He addressed himself to the stranger’s boot-tips.

“I didn’t want to give offence,” he said. “But you let me have it from the shoulder because I’d let old Clarges have it in the same way. Well, I let you have it back; gently, if you will. But I did. I guess if you’re a man you won’t take offence. I said what was true. You said a thing or two to old Clarges. It was you that wound him up, not I. Wasn’t it now? He wouldn’t have burst out into lamentations over his lost youth for
me.
Would he now?”

“You have caused me no offence,” the stranger said, “for I recognise that there is in you a sense of hospitality, if little of reverence.”

“Oh! you won’t get much reverence in London town, Mr. Apollo,” the Cockney said, “not if you want it for being a stranger. I’ll treat you with gentleness if you ask it because, say, you are a Russian Jew escaped from a massacre — what do they call it? — a pogrom. Or I’ll respect you if you knock me down, because you’d have to be considerable of a slogger to do that, metaphorically speaking. But you can’t have it both ways. That’s not cricket, you know.”

“Your contention is just,” the stranger said. “I will see if later I cannot gain your respect by my achievements. And I would have you understand that if by my achievements I gain your respect, it will not be because I desire either your respect or your worship, but because I am making inquiries into the nature of mortal man, so that I may know at what point respect shall be awakened in one to whom respect is so alien. For it must be obvious to you that a god, though by his nature he is omniscient, yet he must have in him the capacity for experience. All knowledge is contained in him, yet the vicissitudes of fate and of mortality are, for him, as for you, inexhaustible.”

“Mr. Apollo,” a girl’s voice said, “means what
we
mean when we say of the Church that her doctrine is like a rose.”

“I will willingly hear what image you have in your mind,” Mr. Apollo said, and he looked towards the door, “when you say that the doctrine of your Church is like a rose.”

A girl in a blue serge gown, with dark features and dark hair that fell down to her ears, was craning her head from behind the door, that opened inwards. Round her neck was a chaplet of beads carved out of dark wood, and from her breast came the tinkle of little coins bearing the images of saints, the Madonna, and the Pope of Rome.

She put her hand to her long throat and chanted ecstatically, with her upper lids half closed —

“When we say that the doctrine of the Church is like a rose we signify that, even as a rose...”

“Oh I drop it, Margery,” the Cockney said. “You’ll take all night with that sing-song; you won’t impose on Mr. Apollo, and we’re all sick and tired of hearing you say it. We’ve had it
ad nauseam
, as they say.”

He turned his eyes again upon Mr. Apollo’s boots —

“I’m not treating her with discourtesy,” he said. “Don’t think that. She doesn’t. It’s our way. And she
will
take all night. I don’t mind you spreading the King’s English all over the carpet, because for one thing you’re a stranger and you may have something new to say. I believe you have. But when it comes to Margery. Well, I can’t wait all night. I ought to be gone now. I’ve got some sections to prepare.”

“But shall I lose the explanation of this simile for the sake of your sections?”

“No you shan’t,” the Cockney said. “What she means is that her blooming old Church’s doctrine is like a rose because, although it doesn’t look like it on the outside, it contains any number of petals in the bud. So, whenever the Church puts out a new doctrine, that is a new petal. If they say the Pope’s infallible to-day, which they didn’t yesterday, that is one new petal. If they say he isn’t again in fifty years, that would be another. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception’s another. And so on. All petals. It’s petals, petals, petals all the way.’’

“The simile is a just one,” Mr. Apollo said. “So I would explain the awakening knowledge of an omniscient Godhead.”

“I don’t know about that last,” Carver said. “It seems all right. But when it comes to their Church it’s simply a lie.”

“How a lie?” Mr. Apollo said. “You do not speak what you mean.”

“Yes I do,” the Cockney said. “Half of it.”

“I will give you this favour,” Mr. Apollo uttered: “that I will command you to speak in a manner more worthy of your thoughts and — in so far as your language will permit of it — to express all your thoughts and not the half of them.”

Carver said —

“Well!
Now!
”

The proposition came to him as a command rather than a request, and subconsciously he felt all his democratic, small and vigorous being rebel against it.

“That’s according.. he uttered.

He was singularly aware that he was a free man: as singularly aware of it as any American citizen could be. Perhaps he was the more singularly aware of it because he had so often seen his father, who was a jobbing gardener in an aristocratic neighbourhood, touch his hat to patrons who appeared to be as far above him as any god. But this Carver, the son, was a free man. He touched his cap to no one; he could not imagine a being to whom he would touch it. He had no superiors; and he had rights.

He was free, as a private entity; he had his rights as a servant of the State. He having passed certain examinations — and very creditably — the State had been bound to find him a position as science teacher. The State” had been bound to do it by law.” And as long as he taught certain things efficiently and well — and he knew that he taught these things efficiently and well — the State was bound — bound by law — to maintain him, to promote him, to pension him. Thus it was that, militantly anxious to demonstrate his freedom, he was accustomed in speaking — particularly when he spoke to people of gentle breeding — to use an aggressive Cockney dialect that he did not use in expressing his thoughts to himself. It was not, that is to say, his own language, for in acquiring his educational abilities and his instruction he had acquired a language, dry, precise, and clear, that was quite different from any that he heard about him except in his own classes. He had too — and particularly amongst people of gentle breeding — an aggressive and jaunty manner that he meant should express his emancipation and the fact that the future belonged to those who had enjoyed a Board School education.
He
touched his cap to no man, he seemed to be saying perpetually. Actually, however, this aggressiveness did not shadow his own personality, which, along with a brave and gentle cheerfulness, contained a real humility when he came into contact with any man whom he imagined to have come nearer expressing the truths of science or of life, or who exhibited fortitude, bravery, endurance, or strength.

At the same time this Mr. Apollo, if by his weighty tone and placid, oxlike manner he claimed, or appeared to claim, strength and a knowledge of life — this Mr. Apollo had given no proof of possessing either.

And Carver’s “Well!
Now!
” had expressed, if not disbelief in the stranger’s right to command him, at least a hesitation before he obeyed. But suddenly he found himself speaking — even whilst he hesitated — just as when, patiently and clearly, he tried to explain a not very evident proposition to one of his pupils.

“Let me make myself clear,” he heard himself say. “Of course, in the remote sense, Margery’s Church and Margery are sincere when they make the claim that their doctrine is like a mystical rose that unfolds itself. For they claim to represent the Truth and the Truth alone, and, of course, the Truth contains in itself all minor truths, just as any scientific doctrine that is true can accept every new fact that is revealed and can classify it. But that is only in the remote sense.”

Carver heard himself speak thus as if, in one way, he were speaking against his will, for it would, in ordinary circumstances, have been extremely disagreeable to him to concede any measure of commendability to the Church of Rome or to any other Church established and claiming authority. At the same time, he felt a singular desire to express exactly what he
did
mean — a desire that carried away any reservations that otherwise he would have made.

“So,” he found himself continuing, “when the Pope claims infallibility after centuries when no claim to infallibility has been made, the claim — if we believed, as they believe, that Jesus conferred on Peter and his successors eternal authority over humanity and its beliefs — the claim must appear indisputable, though it was not made by any former Pontiff or Council. For it is obvious that the conferring of a divine authority must carry with it infallibility, and if the earlier Popes and Councils did not see this fact it is only because their human reasons had not made them aware of its existence. I am not, of course, conceding the fact that Jesus Christ
did
give to Peter and his successors the control of the Church, but I am merely stating what would be, in logic, the corollary.”

“I do not ask that you should concede the fact or any fact of which you do not feel assured either by your limited experience or your more extended intuitions,” he heard Mr. Apollo say. (He himself continued to look at Mr. Apollo’s boots.) “But it was not to that you referred when you said that this maiden lied in claiming that the doctrine of the Church was and always had been like an unclosing rose.”

“When I said that she lied, I meant that she — or rather those who taught her to say those things — lied when she said that this had been always the doctrine of her Church. If we look back, perhaps we see that that, in principle, is the way the practice of her Church has worked out. She may — she does, I believe — acknowledge to-day that Evolution is a principle in consonance with the teaching of the Church. She will tell you that the seven days of creation are not seven days of twenty-four hours each, but seven days each of which was an age. If her Church does not teach that
to-day
— and I am not certain how the matter stands at this moment, for I have not studied the late Papal Encyclical — but if her Church does not teach that to-day, assuredly she will teach it tomorrow, for in that sense the doctrine of the Church is undoubtedly like an unclosing rose. But it is untrue — vulgarly speaking, it is a lie — to say that Pius IX, if that was the Pope during whose reign Darwin and Wallace promulgated the doctrine that, roughly speaking, we call Evolution — it is untrue to say that Pius IX and his Council accepted the theory of Evolution, just as it is untrue to say that whoever was the Pope in the time of Galileo accepted the doctrine that the earth moved round the sun. To-day, no Pope and no priest would deny that axiom; to-morrow, neither Pope nor priest will be found to deny the doctrine of Evolution. A little later, no doubt, the Church will accept the theory of Socialism. She has already coquetted with it; later, possibly, she will sanction philosophic Anarchism. There is no knowing how far she will not progress. But to say that the present Pope is a potential Anarchist because to-morrow the Church may sanction Anarchism — that would be untrue. That is what I meant when I said the doctrine was a lie.”