Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (272 page)

But there was no doubt in her mind, as she stood looking down upon him, that the long monotony of the days that she supported had wearied and dispirited him. And, though she still stood and still looked, there came to her, tranquil as ever, the first pang of her life, the first quick and anguishing thought. She felt herself suddenly as it were his mother, and, again for the first time, there came into her head the idea of an appeal — for his sake — to some one, to something, that was greater and more potent than they two.

It was as if, whilst she had considered themselves as comrades, she relied simply on their efforts alone, but as soon as, in that flash, she felt that her function was to be, as well as his comrade, his paraclete, his comforter, there came to her, unformed, the idea of prayer. She wanted to make an appeal to some principle, to some person, outside, to restore to him his courage, his health, his morale.

And to whom could she appeal for this?

She sat down again at the table to her writing; she resisted an impulse to set her cheek against his brow. They were a couple very sparing of acts and even of words of endearment. They hardly ever said “Dear” the one to the other. But she felt the desire, and she resisted it because it might show him that she thought he was ill, discouraged, and weakening.

He was ill, discouraged, and weakening. But to whom could she appeal? They had their several wealthy and affectionate friends. These would give her money for him. Mr. Clarges, she knew, would give him enough to take a holiday — a long holiday, for two, for three, for four years. She knew he would do this, for she knew that deep down in the old, sharp heart was the feeling that he had ruined them, and he was ready to take their burdens upon him.

But it was not a holiday that was wanted; it was a holiday that would be worst of all, for would that not be a confession of failure? What was wanted was something that would restore to him a faith in himself. She held her pen and looked across the table at his form covered with the grey blanket that had a dull red stripe where it came up to his shoulders. He had closed his eyes; there was a weary constriction about his brows; he had, she knew, a touch of temperature.

No, a holiday would be worst of all. He required to have it shown to him that, still, he had the faculty to attract, to soothe, to influence. He had the faculty; she knew they had it between them. His pupils at the school “did well”; he showed a greater individual number of “passes” amongst his boys than did any other teacher; and more than that, which was not much, his boys, in offices, in other schools, or even across the waters of several seas, “did well,” wrote him letters, referred to “the old shop” with gratitude and affection. He might be fully conscious that, in his own way, he had an “influence.” And they kept their friends, they added to them. These things could be proved by mere numbers.

Only, what are mere numbers to a weary man? Life was a thing so gradual and so slow; it was like gliding down a stream. She was just strong enough to stand it; he not quite strong enough, unless, as it were, there came some sign from the bank of the stream. From outside; from some one with a totally different outlook. And who was there? To whom could she pray? There did not come into her view of the scheme of things a deity to whom she could look for a sign. A little before she would have considered it against her principles to look for a sign. Now, moved by this sudden pang, by the idea of her functions, of motherhood and of a comforter, she would have prayed. But to whom? What she most loved in the world was in danger — for need of the proof that he was lovable.

CHAPTER I
I

IT was then that she was most aware of the change that was coming over her. For she desired to pray — and she desired to pray, unknown to him, before his wearied face, his closed eyes, his relaxed brows. It was in a sense a division from him; it was in a sense — because it was a more perfect performance of her part in their union — a union more perfect. I have said that they would never have done anything to bring about a new meeting with their strange guest. They would never have done it; but to her the idea came — to do it: to write an appealing letter, explaining just what his coming again to them might mean to her husband; explaining how much his words had moved them; how much effort they could be trusted, poor people as they were, to give to spreading whatever his message might be. Let him constitute them, as it were, his preachers; they could influence many people....

The idea that this would be a proceeding behind her husband’s back had restrained her so far. But there could be little doubt that, by the Wednesday, if he were little worse, he was no better. He slept ill; he tossed in his sleep. It was difficult with drugs to keep down his temperature, and each day he must set to work again. And finally, standing above the herb-chopper, there had come at the moment the resolve to act. Interspersed with the idea of the geography for small children and the eightpenny dishes for gas-stove users there had come a sudden boldness, a sudden resolve. She was going to the telephone in the porters’ lodge; she was going to ask Eugene Durham if he had the address of their friend. She was going to write to him, carefully and deliberately.

And the idea that he would come, that he must come, was so strong that when upon the kitchen threshold she felt the unmistakable presence with the unknown features — for she had never been able to remember how he looked — she had only a sense that the inevitable had come true.

She said, after she had said that they were such poor people —

“I left the front door on the latch because when Alfred is tired it does not keep him waiting so long.”

And he answered —

“It is well at times to leave your door upon the latch, that a desired visitant may not pass by to other doors than yours.”

“I was upon the point of begging you to come,” she said.

“So I came,” he answered. “And what would you have said in your prayers?”

He came in and sat beside the little table, his elbow beside the chopping-board against the clock.

“You cannot sit here,” she said.

He gazed round him: at the gas stove that was between the table and the window; at the cistern above the sink; at the bath that was covered by a draining-board; at the rack that held plates and dishes.

“I think you have very squalid appointments,” he said. “They were more gracious in the last house that knew me as an honoured guest.”

“My cousin Eugene is so far wealthier,” she said.

“In your cousin Eugene’s house I was a guest, yet not very honoured. It was in an older house that I think you have never heard of.”

“We have not travelled much,” Frances said.

“You might travel the world over and find no trace of that house,” he answered; “not one reed of the roof remains, nor one stone upon another, and beneath where the hearthstone was a fox has its burrow.”

“But still you cannot sit here,” Frances Milne said.

Nevertheless, when Mr. Clarges pushed his way in at the still open door, the stranger sat still at the table, his elbow beside the chopping-board; and at the sight of him Mr. Clarges frowned. Mrs. Milne was standing over the jar which contained the rabbit; the gas stove was alight, and the smell of the meat filled the air.

“Where is Alfred?” Mr. Clarges asked, and in his sturdy and bristling personality, holding an umbrella that he carried as if in protest against the summer weather, there was a moody and furious jealousy.

When he heard that Alfred Milne had not yet returned from work he uttered an “Ah!” in which his emotions were fully voiced.

Mrs. Milne looked as if deprecatingly at her new guest — as if indeed she dreaded an outburst of anger from one or the other of them. But his eyes were settled mildly upon the draining-board that descended above the bath.

And suddenly, with a cracked and violent laugh, Mr. Clarges burst out —

“Have you heard about the Krakroffs?” He paused, and then cried out —

“What about them? You’ve heard of them, I suppose?

Well then” — and his voice was full of triumph —

“I’ve discovered the code they use. It’s the old one of Pantalizzi. They’re just vulgar conjurers. I knew it...”

The Krakroffs were a pair of thought-readers who, having come — with rumours of disgrace, undue influence, and alluring mystery — from the Russian Imperial Court, were attracting large and bewildered audiences twice a day to the Esmeralda Music-Hall. They were said on the one hand to be brother and sister, on the other to be husband and wife, or in the alternative to be merely twin souls, mutually interpretative and attracted to each other irresistibly across space as, by radio-telegraphy, at great distances, needle vibrates to needle. This last, at least, had been the account of their nature afforded by their advance agent, circulated to the Press, and adopted eloquently by the manager of the Esmeralda.

And for the week that had ensued since his precipitate flight from More’s Buildings, Mr. Clarges had engaged himself in unmasking what he considered to be this new scandal. It was a task all the more congenial to him in that he had been so deeply wounded by the attitude of Mrs. Milne towards the man whom he took to be a new and more dangerous impostor of the Krakroff kidney. So that, with a new fancy that seemed to rejuvenate him, he had first foraged and ferreted in the library of the British Museum a great number of secret codes that had been used by thought-readers of all the ages, and having codified these, he had spent all his afternoons and evenings at the Esmeralda, sitting in different parts of the house and testing code after code. He had even — welcomed by the manager as a Press investigator — penetrated beneath the stage whilst the séances were proceeding, to make sure that there were no secret wires, no speaking-tubes, through which Krakroff, standing in the middle of the stalls, could communicate with his affinity, who was seated blindfolded and with her back to the audience.

Mr. Clarges had tested the Nourse code, which consisted of an arrangement of the initial letters of each word used in the audience; the Jamrach code, which is managed by gestures of the hand reflected into a tiny mirror concealed under the bandage of the thought-reader; the famous code of Tchehuza, the Croatian; and that of Juradani, a Roman gipsy of the eighteenth century who had signalled to his confederate by means of extremely small inflections of the voice, as described by the French traveller Dubois in his
Voyage à Rome
in 1762. Mr. Clarges had in fact given the Krakroffs the credit of having studied their subject sufficiently to have adopted a code of an ancient or an erudite kind. The Pantalizzi code, on the other hand, was of so childish a description — a merely vocal adaptation of the Morse telegraphic system — that Mr. Clarges had hardly thought of considering it at all. It had in fact been invented — as a game for drawing-rooms — by a Signor Pantalizzi, a humble assistant of the inventor of wireless telegraphy, and, published in the frivolous columns of the M
ondo,
had been desultorily adopted as a pastime by Roman society some nine months before when Mr. Clarges had happened to be in Rome. But the Romans, though they were then at the height of their enthusiasm for Signor Marconi’s installation, had been too lazy to progress beyond a mild interest in Mr. Pantalizzi’s game.

But sitting, for the moment baffled, in his box the night before, Mr. Clarges had been overwhelmed by the conviction that this
must
be the Pantalizzi code. Krakroff, standing up in the stalls, with a huge volubility, in a broken English, arbitrarily pronounced, had to every objector and before every demonstration so stuttered, commenced sentences, recommenced them, uttered them at first in a language presumably Russian, translating them on the moment, as if confusedly, into French, and then retranslating them quickly into English. This had gained for him the sympathies of his audience, who perceived in him an eager and gifted genius struggling with the intricacies of tongues. So that when, after one of these painful displays, he stepped across the gangway and took from a blushing lady a small object which he held aloft, they restrained their breathing whilst the shrouded figure on the stage exclaimed clearly and without hesitation —

“A large gold coin. On the obverse a king on horseback, on the reverse a rose.”

The audience cheered themselves hoarse.

But Mr. Clarges, grim and rejoicing, had gone straight away to the house of a friend of his who was an undersecretary to the Post Office. And that same afternoon, with a gratified telegraphist beside him, Mr. Clarges had occupied a stall just behind the eloquent thought-transferrer. And then it came: amidst the delighted snorts and chuckles of Mr. Clarges the telegraphist dotted down on his tablet: —

“Gentlemen” was dash, dot, dot.

“Lady M - dot, dash.

“Ami” = dash, dot.

“Antipathie” = dash, dot, dot, dash.

It was possible to hear Krakroff say — to watch it coming out on the telegraphist’s tablet underneath the patter of the charlatan: —

“H. (meaning
Homme
),
fav. rou,
(meaning
favoris rouges
),
mont, or (montre d’or),
Gen. 12796
(Geneva
12796).”

And as Krakroff closed the watch, the voice of his affinity on the stage said dully —

“A gentleman with chestnut whiskers offers a watch manufactured at Geneva. Its number is
12796.”

Pushing imperiously and irresistibly forward, the old gentleman thrust the telegraphist’s paper into Krakroff’s hand.

“Tell her to say what that is,” he hissed. He hissed because he was so excited, and at the same time he did not wish to shout, for the exposure of these charlatans was not to be then. It was to take place before a larger audience.

Krakroff, a blue-shaven, dark, obscure-looking little man, glanced down at the tablet. He started in the least and smiled immediately with unction.

“What is it that Monsieur wishes?” he said. “That my sister, my spouse of the mind, this shall read? Monsieur is perhaps not aware that, as I very often have told the audience, I cannot transfer to my soul-spouse more than I myself understand. I see an object Very well. I
‘
describe it very well... But,
puisque je vous dis,
M’sieur
...” And he looked into Mr. Clarge’s eyes with an unctuous and impertinent grin.

“If you think, M’sieur,” he said in a low voice, “that this is the explanation...” He spread his hands abroad like the host of a small inn and shrugged his shoulders.

Mr. Clarges shrugged his own shoulders, spun round on his heels, and walked up the aisle. From the stage there came in monotonous tones the words, “A little, clever, old gentleman offers my spouse a tablet on which is written some signs my spouse not understand, and the words, ‘
H. fav. rou. mont
.
or Gen.
12796.’
”

Mr. Clarges shrugged his shoulders, rubbed his hands, snorted, chuckled with delight, and having got out of the theatre, pushed the telegraphist into one cab and took another to More’s Buildings.