Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (271 page)

“I do not know that I am going anywhere in particular,” Mr. Apollo said.

“Oh well, come and have a drink at my rooms,” Eugene Durham postulated. “This is a teetotal shop, you know.”

And indeed there were neither spirits nor syphons to be found in the Milnes’ rooms.

“I will willingly enjoy your hospitality,” Mr. Apollo answered, “and the more willingly in that I am well aware that our friends here desire to discuss in my absence the events that they have witnessed.”

And none of the “Oh don’t go’s” of the young people sounded more than conventional. They were burning to discuss — and they could not bring themselves to do it in that presence; since, quite apart from feelings of politeness, which ostensibly they would have disregarded, they felt it was for the stranger, and not for them, to utter opinions. At the same time they had, for the moment at least, bitten off as much as they could chew for some hours to come.

Before the gloomy archway where Eugene Durham’s car stayed with its impassive chauffeur there was an iron portcullis, barring off the Buildings from the street And against the bars of this defence there were pressed the faces of several idle men, slatternly woman, and pale children. The strong head-light of the car gave to these faces a pallid and an odious distinctness. They called obscene remarks through to the chauffeur, who sat immobile, in the attitude of driving, gazing at the faces as if he were indulging in dreams of an absolute remoteness.

Opposite More’s Buildings there were some model dwellings, not so high, but infinitely more grimy, squalid, and tenebrous, of a brown-coloured brick covered with soot. The pulling down of a rookery a little further to the south had filled these already old tenements with a squalid and ferocious population, so that in that south-western quarter of the city, amongst policemen, postmen, milkmen, or detectives, Victoria Mansions was a synonym for hell. It was hell, that is to say, not for the inmates, who might be accounted as enjoying their surroundings and society, but it was a terror to supervise or to visit, for — even if you were a detective, let alone a milkman — there was no knowing what physical danger, trouble, or blackmailing plot you might not be let in for before you got in and out of that grimy half-acre called Victoria Mansions in the year 1887. Formerly it had been known as Palmer’s Flats, but a peculiarly horrible murder had in that year of jubilee made the proprietor see the appropriateness of paying, with exchange of name, a delicate compliment to his sovereign.

The proximity of Victoria Mansions had indeed rendered More’s Buildings impossible for the purpose to which a benevolent society had intended to put them. For, huge, rather bare, built in a triangle round a central block, where at night glimmering square windows seemed to aspire to black heavens infinitely above the pallid public lamps, More’s Buildings had been intended as a retreat for indigent single ladies of the middle classes. But More’s Buildings had failed in that capacity: the few maiden ladies who came found it impossible to return at night, or even in the winter dusk, from their music lessons, their poker-work classes, or their social calls, without running the gauntlet of a horde of ironical and coarse-mouthed Victorians. And to the inhabitants of the Mansions those of the Buildings were a standing joke. If to the outside world Victoria Mansions were hell, to Victoria Mansions More’s Buildings — so called in pious memory, no one knew why, of Sir Thomas More — More’s Buildings was the Perrit (meaning Parrot) House. So that More’s Buildings contained at the present day in its population of a couple of thousand only three of the original old maids, and these in more or less degrees of imbecility. It contained, in revenge, many who were not old and not even virtuous; it contained ladies with very small parts at respectable theatres; impecunious officers from native regiments home on leave; non-commissioned officers with their wives; misanthropic civil servants existing on minute pensions — a whole rabbit warren of isolated and normally hostile beings whose little red doors closed with vicious and mysterious snaps on the damp and weeping cement-work of the high staircases. And amongst the population there was a sufficiency of odd creatures, fiddlers, inventors, and the like, to keep up in the minds of Victoria Mansions the fiction that More’s Buildings was indeed a perrit ‘ouse. So that the letting down of the portcullis, nightly, across the dim archway was a real precaution.

The advent of a motor-car, with its huge head-light, in itself a sort of advertisement and a defiance, was, on the Alfred Milne’s Thursdays, an almost weekly episode of hilarity, and Eugene Durham came, as a rule, in his car. For, if the truth must be told, he disliked — far more than any other of the Milnes’ visitors — the comments from the windows over the way.

“I wish,” he said to his new friend, as, lit up by the side-lights of the car, he stood on the doorstep under the arch, amidst a volley of cries calling him the Dook, the Torf, ‘is Rile’ I’ness, and inviting him to have a ‘aporth of end and a’ aporth of trotters, “I wish my cousins had not chosen this
beastly
place to live in.”

He could, in fact, smile debonairly upon almost any proposition in the world, but this manifestation of indigence, class hatred, and odium always made him feel ill. The real poor he could stand if he had a little scent on his handkerchief, but these creatures — they lived by blackmail: it made him shudder to think what might happen through contact with them.

He went to speak a word to his chauffeur, who, immobile and impassive, raised a gauntleted hand to his peaked cap and faced the music of cries.

At the appearance of Mr. Apollo on the doorstep the music of cries grew to a storm. If Eugene Durham was the Toff, Mr. Apollo, standing, tall-hatted and erect, absolutely unmoved and more immobile than the chauffeur, on the top step of the little flight, Mr. Apollo was the Top Toff of all. They screamed it out at his stony indifference: it was as if they recognised in him such an aloof immobility that, if they could not stir him, they would soar to almost superhuman heights of obscenity in the attempt, as men might do who desired to hurt the feelings of balloonists high overhead. A man called to his bull-terrier that was indifferently nosing garbage beneath a street lamp over the way, and a woman to a mongrel collie that was envying the bulldog its occupation: —

“‘Ere: good dorg! Sik’ im! Sik ‘im!” and man and woman pointed, the one emulous of the other, in virulent and good-humoured contention, through the portcullis bars. The collie sprang, the bull-terrier rolled its shoulders towards the grille, and the voices, high and gleeful the one, deep and saturnine the other, mingled under the archway, that reverberated like a whispering gallery. To this chorus of cries and howls, frowning, Mr. Apollo entered the soft and lighted interior of the
coupé!

The porter pulled up the portcullis; the chauffeur sounded his horn as if resolutely ignoring the people before him who saw his oncoming. They made way reluctantly, bending forward to scream against the glass of the closed windows into the lighted interior. The automobile moved, softly and without a jar, as if those two, in their warm space, were cushioned on air through which, intangibly protected by invisible barriers, they glided like gods bent upon divine amours.

It was not, however, until they had turned, slowed, and glided, turned, slowed, and glided forward again, that Eugene Durham recovered his equanimity sufficiently to ask of his companion the permission to make a slight detour.

“It won’t take ten minutes with this car,” he said, “and it’s still early.”

At the nod of his companion he put his mouth to the speaking-tube.

“Go down the Brompton Road,” he said, “and slow up if you see Miss Snyde.”

He looked at Mr. Apollo as if for a comment.

“I certainly applaud,” it came.

“It’s such a long road,” he said.

“But she’s near the end,” he got his answer. Eugene Durham leant against the back cushions.

“Now how do you think the Church of Rome would suit a man like me?” he said. “I heard you defending it. And I don’t think it’s really an obstacle in Parliament any more. You see, when you put up for election you generally know something to the discredit of the fellow opposing you, and so you post it. He agrees not to mention Rome if you won’t run the other cry.” In the course of this speech he was perpetually looking at the sidewalks at each person they passed, dimly seen.

“I want,” he said, “to marry a young lady who says she will only take a Catholic.”

It was characteristic of Eugene’s new heart that he was glad that Mr. Apollo — a so respectable and earnest debater — was with him, as it were, to chaperon him and Margery when he picked her up. The day before the idea would not have entered his head.

As for Margery Snyde, though Eugene Durham, on the pavement, could quite conscientiously assure her that Mr. Apollo had recommended him to become a Romanist, she refused either to get into the car or to listen to him. But when on the morrow her confessor, having heard her tale, recommended her to get her doctor to give her a dose of bromide because she was obviously overwrought, when indeed her confessor, who was an old and smiling secular, patted her on the shoulder and pointed out that morbidity and too rigid fastings and too harrowing introspections, if praiseworthy in the abstract, were in certain circumstances unfitted to the individual, she went home and, abandoning a vague resolution to enter the Society of Poor Clares, wrote to Eugene — who had already been refused admittance that morning — a note in which, if she didn’t ask for pardon, she at least held out hopes that she would pardon him. And she asked him to come round and discuss certain points of doctrine when he had time to spare from his duties.

PART III. A JUST POSSIBLE STORY
.

CHAPTER
I

FRANCES MILNE was preparing for supper a rabbit which she had bought from a barrow in the Pimlico Road. She had cut the pink carcase into four pieces, had rubbed them with salt, sprinkled them with chopped bay leaves and the fine shreds of onion cut into little squares, and was preparing to place them, one by one, in a brown earthenware jar that contained already a little margarine, some carrots chopped into small orange dice, some chopped parsley, and a chive. She was meditating, at one and the same time, as to what she could add, without noticeable cost, to the ingredients of this ragout, and on the teaching of geography to children of nine and less. For, on the one hand, the series of papers that she was writing for a Parents’ Home Teaching Association journal was coming to an end; on the other, she was trying to persuade the proprietors of
Home Whispers
to let her contribute to its columns a series of recipes called: “Eightpenny Dishes for Gas-stove Users.”

She stood in the tiny kitchen that was also a bathroom, tall and unhurried, wiping the fragments of chopped herbs from the steel blade of the chopper. Against the light of the frosted window she had the air of a Madonna of domesticity; a tin clock ticked on the wooden table at her side; she glanced at it, and observed that in five minutes she must set the rabbit upon the gas stove.

And yet she was hardly a Madonna of domesticity any more than her husband was an inspired teacher. It was what came to her hand. If making the bed, sweeping the floors, shaking the rugs out on the roof, washing the plates, and executing the cookery took, as a rule, three hours of her day; if meditating a great deal upon how it was really best — as distinguished from the educational fashion of the day — to teach small children the rudiments of knowledge so that, in after life, with awakened intelligences they might assimilate these knowledges — if these actions and meditations occupied the greater part of her day, she would have preferred to be able to meditate upon other things.

But with a conscience that would have been almost grim had her personality been more angular or swift in its motions, during the whole day she would consider whether a plasticine model of a watershed was really the best method of teaching a child to appreciate the functions of mountains. She would run over in her mind the several hundreds of children whose utterances on these subjects she remembered; she would compare those utterances with what she could remember of her impressions as a child. (She considered, for instance, that the use of the word watershed, which the manuals compelled her to employ, might possibly be detrimental, because, when she had been at home as a child, her father had had a shed which contained a large tank, and was called “the water-shed.” This for many years had caused her to think of the origins of all springs and rivers as black, tarred structures, with corrugated iron roofs, into which water was pumped by an old, blind horse, walking round and round with a bar behind him.) And these annotations, negative and subjective, of children’s thoughts she would endeavour, after reading passages on the same subjects in the work of Froebel and the educators, to condense into a paragraph of a few lines, writing slowly and with much conscientious difficulty in the desire to express herself exactly. So that when, perhaps half an hour before Alfred’s return, she would take the typewriter from the little room where she wrote into the kitchen, where she typewrote with an eye to the supper upon the stove, she had seldom more than a page and a half of a large handwriting to show for a day of restraint and of effort And, though it was all in the day’s work, it is not to be thought that she did not sometimes remember a long poem on the history of a wood that, in a drawer of the sideboard in the dining-room, had a line added to it day by day, sometimes at intervals of many weeks.

It allured her, this History of a Wood of hers, though she was never concerned to think whether it would allure any other soul in the universe. It allured her because, when she could write long lines, and still more, when she could think the big thoughts, she seemed to be turning in, off a lane, in between the boles of huge and tranquil trees into thick, peopled, and historic undergrowths. It brought her thoughts of the scampering tails of rabbits, of the harsh cries of jays, of pheasants that ran furtive and noiseless before the footstep. It gave her inklings of the thoughts that the trees would have, reaching up, as if asleep and dreaming, to the stars of winter nights. It gave her thoughts of the woodcutters, of the hurdlers shaving spiles, of the cottages hidden between coppices; of the gods these men had created, the dryads, the nymphs, the fauns, of the little people and of the gods that had created these men, these trees, and the little wood-flowers that, for years and years, slept beneath fallen leaves until, the woodcutters letting in the light, frail and crowded blossoms for a time looked again out at the skies and heard the night-cry of the foxes. And so for years they would go to sleep again, the flowers; the unnumbered leaves would fall, the unconsidered men would die.

All these things she sought to register in her long and slow poem that was meant for the eye of no man. But since the Thursday — and it was then Wednesday evening — it had troubled her by being more present to her. On the Sunday she had written no less than thirty lines of the history of Daphne. It was, of course, the name of her guest that had brought into her mind the history of the maiden loved by a god who became at his pursuit a tree of poet’s bay.

And as her chopper had crushed the leaves of bay that she was to rub over the dismembered rabbit, the History of a Wood came into her head. There ran through her head thoughts that were very disturbing.

“Imagine then’ — she said to herself—” a corner of my wood,

Down in a sheltered nook too steep for cartage,

So that the cutters seldom there set foot.

And here a pie, supping on bay berries,

From a garden near, comes here and drops a seed.

And so a bay tree. And in years and years

More bay trees, till as years and years moved by

There came a thicket, odorous and green,

With the dark leafage of the poet’s tree,

A darkling thicket in a hidden nook,

‘Neath the high woods....”

And whilst she stood, motionless, looking down on the chopper and the cloth with which she had been wiping it, there came into her mind the swift thought of a girl, glimpsing like a lapwing, through her wood, avoiding the eyes of a too hot pursuer, all glorious in his youth. And the girl, running downwards through the hanging woods, drops suddenly and noiselessly to ground disappearing in the odorous, dark trees of the thicket.... And so the legend of the bay tree.

A passion of verse, loose in texture, but big in sound, came into her mind. She could not resist it; she looked down still, but she felt her eyes dilate. Then she knew that the claimant to Godhead was standing in the doorway.

“You have come back,” she said. “I thought you would never come back from that pleasanter world.”

“Child,” he said, “they are too like gods. I could experience nothing from them.”

“Then what do you want of us?” she answered. “We are such poor people.”

“And what,” he said, “do you suppose that I should desire of you?”

It could not be said that Frances Milne had expected that he would come back: it could not indeed be said that she had ever expected to see him again. Only she had had that frame of mind in which one says, “It
can’t
be that we shall never see so and so again!”

She had discussed the matter with her husband: they had viewed it in various planes. If you considered it from the merely material standpoint of social contacts there had not been much hope. He was a stranger — a wonderful man even. He had made the chance acquaintance of Alfred Milne during a chance visit to a chance friend. He had come in to pay an evening call: he had paid it and had gone, leaving several new ideas awakened in their minds. But he had simply gone, taking a chance lift in a chance motor-car. And they weren’t — either she or Alfred — the persons to follow up a chance visitor. They couldn’t imagine themselves — it never, indeed, entered their heads — inquiring of Eugene Durham if he had found out where this gentleman lived or who were his friends, so that they might arrange casual meetings. He had simply gone.

And they had nothing to offer for his return: they were such poor people, with such simple ideals. You could not imagine a wonderful man, and a man obviously wealthy and likely to be beloved by many people — you could not imagine him seeking out, of his own volition, two poor school teachers whose uttermost visions were bounded by an already fading white dream of a school-house in Wiltshire.

They had nothing to offer him. And it must be remembered that neither Alfred nor Frances Milne had any touch, either by birth, tradition, or upbringing, of that romantic strain that makes many of us believe in a special providence — a special providence who will cause an indefinable “something” to “turn up.” Nothing that would turn up entered into their scale of ideas: they calculated solely upon their own efforts. Life for them was cause and effect: what they did to-day would earn for them what they would enjoy or suffer from to-morrow. They hadn’t either of them, as children or young people, read novels enough to imagine — as so many of us will imagine — that their lives would be rounded up, connected, or helped, by a benevolent fate, over stiles. If they went lame they would have to bear it.

It was, however, at this point that the first divergence from her attitude began to manifest itself to Frances in her husband. He took it more lying down than she. For him this Mr. Apollo was just gone: there was nothing, nothing at all, to bring him back. For her, there was just one thing: their admiration, their feeling, their love for the stranger.

Alfred said — and the weariness of his tone first gave her the idea that he was going to be ill —

“Yes; we admire him. But what does that do? We admired G. F. Watts, but that didn’t bring him to us. It’s a case in which admiration does not help us.”

“But still,” she had pleaded with him, “if he had known, if we could have let him know, how fervently we admired, how entirely we felt his ideas were our ideas, might not we have got some sign from him?”

It was on the Sunday: Alfred Milne was very tired: the day before he had taken his boys to play in Regent’s Park a cricket match against some boys from a Peckham school. It had rained: he had already the beginnings of a feverish cold. To please his boys, he had let them play on through a heavy shower, he himself standing at the wicket and umpiring the cricket match, but the match, though he had attended it voluntarily, had stopped his and Frances’s attending at a Social Political meeting that had turned out to be more than usually interesting. For though it was no more than a meeting of the Chelsea Branch, it had happened that Mr. John Ball, the brilliant Mr. John Ball, had attended it, brought by a young enthusiast, more especially to make the acquaintance of the Alfred Milnes. And, because Alfred and Frances had not been there, they were told by young Jepson, Mr. Ball had formed a very poor idea of the Chelsea Branch. It had been a poor meeting: Mr. Ball was not likely to come again. They would never meet him. It was a missed opportunity.

“No,” Alfred Milne had said — and it was the renewed weariness in his voice that again gave Frances Milne the idea that he was going to be ill—”we’re like subordinates going through a corridor full of closed doors. We can’t expect the great people to come out of them and invite us in. They get all the admiration and all the sympathy they want from the people inside. They do not need ours.”

“Oh yes,” she answered, “I have thought that too. Exactly the same idea occurred to me. But still....”

She had been sitting at the table writing her verses when they had begun to talk. It was in the little room with the truckle-bed, the books, and the typewriter. He was lying on the bed, covered with a grey rug, for he had felt chilly. She rose, large-limbed and slow, to fetch a pillow from the bedroom.

“You will feel better if your head’s higher,” she said when she came back. Having placed it beneath his head, she stood looking down at him. And suddenly she felt herself to be the more robust, the larger-limbed, the broader-chested of the two. She, it came to her with a sudden conviction, could support the life they led better than he. It wasn’t that she did not work, as long and at work as uncongenial. It was that he could not so well stand the strain of the going backwards and forwards and out and in on the asphalt and the paving-stones that were always their ground to walk on. Perhaps it was because she was a woman and more tranquil; perhaps it was because she was in truth more broad in the chest and longer in the limb....