Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (273 page)

CHAPTER II
I

IT was frequently said by those students who went to More’s Buildings that Mrs. Milne was a most dangerous woman. And by that they meant not that she had any coquetry, but that she had none at all. She had in its place a singular tranquillity, a power of giving up her whole attention — and, as it were, of giving the whole of herself with her attention — so that it was as if indeed she gave very much more than she had any idea of giving. Thus some men — the worse sort — misunderstood her, and she seemed to them to lead them on. You could not, they imagined, be so seriously listened to by a woman unless she had an inclination to you. Another type of man grew to find her indispensable. The former type suffered very much after contact with her. It was said to have been because of her, for instance, that young Wilkinson took so lamentably to chloral; it is certain that, when she married Alfred Milne, Fletcher, who ought to have had an excellent career before him, accepted a minor post in the Secondary Schools of Nagpore. But those whose thoughts did not progress further than being as often with her as they could, they, upon the whole, had the better time. And one of these was certainly Mr. Clarges.

He had never before been so eager to expose a scandal, simply because never before had the exposure seemed to affect him so personally. It had seemed to him that, by bursting in upon her just before Alfred Milne came home, by exclaiming —

“You’ve heard of the Krakroffs?” and then —

“It’s the Pantalizzi code they use” — by this utter and overwhelming exposure of a pair of charlatans he would expose before her eyes all charlatans at once — all priests, all mediums, all the professors and all the scientists of the open mind. They would crumble away before her eyes — and more particularly this would be the case with the Mr. Apollo he had met at her house on the last Thursday.

It would be putting it too crudely to say that he was furiously jealous of the stranger as a man: it was as an influence that he detested him. He detested him more than he disliked Carver, the Cockney, or the young man from Norfolk, or any of the Socialists. He could always count upon himself to “smash” them. But this man, who appeared to represent that most detrimental of all things, Religious Belief — this man, Mr. Clarges was fully aware, had excited him to such a pitch of irritation that he had not been able even to think of any words. He had come off rather badly — and he had left Mrs. Milne, with her open mind, listening to the stranger. No, it was not jealousy, for Mr. Clarges had imagined that this creature would never come near the Milnes again. He too was a charlatan; a bird of prey, flying at large game. And, passing South Kensington Museum, Mr. Clarges had met Margery Snyde a few days ago, and had had from her lips a comparatively composed but still a vivid account of the miracles of Mr. Apollo, along with the information that that stranger himself had taken up his quarters with Eugene Durham and was paying a round of calls with him. It all suited, most admirably, Mr. Clarge’s book.

For he would be able to demonstrate that, like Mr. Krakroff, Mr. Apollo was a vulgar adventurer, battening on the rich till they could launch him on a career of extracting money and applause from the large public. That was exactly what the Krakroffs had done. The low assistants of a French conjurer, they had succeeded in taking in and pillaging some idle Russian aristocrats until they were ready to launch out upon the imbecile British public. Mr. Apollo, he hoped to be able to prove when he got his information bureau to work up his antecedents, would turn out to be the low assistant of some Levantine or American hypnotist.

He did not so much imagine himself talking to Mrs. Milne seriously for a quarter of an hour alone, before her husband’s return; he willed it, imperiously. It was to be so.

Thus there overwhelmed him when he stood in the kitchen doorway a sense of wild and of impotent fury. Here, actually in the kitchen, alone with her, there sat this charlatan, obdurately nonchalant, established, and as it were immovable. It was not — to do Mr. Clarges justice — with any idea of questioning her standard of manners that Mr. Clarges choked. He did not imagine that she was carrying on a clandestine flirtation, though actually it remotely chilled his slightly old-fashioned sense of the domestic decencies that she permitted him to see her cooking. It would have been better, he thought, if she had sat with him in the dining-room instead of pushing a fork into a jar of meat on a stove.

But he was aware that, since the stranger had come back, his own argument would be weakened, and he was desperately anxious that the fellow should take himself off. He had probably been there some time; he must know that the Milnes could not possibly afford to have guests at their slender meals. It seemed to him — and he was as jealous for their pockets as for their creed — an outrage. Thus it was almost a scream of rage that came from his lips when he realised, with a sense of the stranger’s utter immobility, his intolerable leisure, his air of having all the time in the world on his hands. And almost while he uttered the words that he had meant to be so triumphant (“Have you heard about the Krakroffs? It is the code of Pantalizzi that they use!” ) — almost while he uttered the words he felt that they were dismally ineffectual. And he added, with a jealous pang, what he felt to be the truth —

“But perhaps that does not interest you.”

Frances Milne said slowly —

“No; I am afraid I am not interested in the Krakroffs. It appears to be something fictitious that has been got up by the papers.”

Mr. Apollo slowly turned his head upon the old man clutching his umbrella in the doorway.

“Later,” he said, “if you will, you shall explain to me the methods of the Krakroffs and their code. At the moment I was explaining to this woman upon what terms I am willing to remain a guest beneath her roof.”

Mr. Clarges opened his little eyes behind their gleaming glasses; his lips moved; he swallowed in his throat.

“Then no doubt,” he said at last, “I’m in the way. I’d better go. I’m not wanted.”

“Zeus forbid,” the stranger said, “that you should be unhonoured in this house, for I think you have befriended these kindly people, and do you think that I would aid them to ingratitude?”

“They never had a penny piece of mine,” the old man said. “They never asked it.”

“Old man,” he got his answer, “what have I had to do with gold or pence that I should not know that benevolence is not measured out in coins? But I am aware that, after your fashion, you have sought to teach them the things that are truth.”

The old man heard Alfred Milne’s feet upon the stairs and his heavy breathing when he stood in the doorway. His eyes were bright and shining, his cheeks flushed.

“Mr. Clarges!” he uttered friendlily, and then “
You.”
For his eyes had fallen on his guest.

He had run up the great number of stairs very rapidly, and, as sometimes happened, this caused him to lose his breathing, and his head swam.

“I thought...” he gasped, “that you had gone off with Eugene Durham.”

“I went off with him,” Mr. Apollo answered, “but I have returned to you.” He moved his head slowly round to Mrs. Milne. “I think,” he said, “that since you have a new guest we should eat in your guest-chamber: it is fitting that you should honour him.”

“Was my wife going to let you eat here?” Alfred Milne asked.

“I have spoken of many things with your wife,” the answer came to him, “for I think that whilst I stay here I shall remain with you.”

“But—” Alfred Milne began.

“If you have hearts willing for my entertainment, that is enough,” he heard.

His head still swam a little with his hastening up the stairs. And, indeed, his hastening itself had been attended with a new quickening of the pulse. He had been saddened during the day by a visit from Arthur Bracondale, and the sadness had not left him during the school day or during his walk home.

For Arthur Bracondale had come to ask him if he knew where the Prince lived. And he had had to answer that he did not — that the Prince had gone away with Eugene Durham. It wasn’t likely that he would keep in touch with such poor people. And a heavy weariness had settled down upon him.

But as he had opened the heavy, red outer door far below, whilst still his hand was upon the inner handle, he had heard a sound coming down the whispering stones of the damp staircase. He had run upstairs. And now he knew that there, far down below, the sound that he had heard had been the voice of the Prince, speaking levelly, as he had first heard it, in the dusty air of the police court and in the cool twilight of the gardens.

“But how long will you stay with us?” he asked. “For a day? For a week? What sort of time?”

“For how long would you have me stay?” he heard, asked him as if with a mocking tenderness. He could not bring himself to say “For good,” because of a certain shyness, a restraint that always kept him from uttering such superlatives as he had in his heart. He had never even called his wife “dearest.”

He looked into her eyes; she was still standing above the little crock on the gas stove, and he brought out words that seemed to him to be ludicrous.

“Oh, stay as long as ever you can. For three weeks.”

“I accept the omen,” Mr. Apollo said. “I will stay for three weeks.”

Mr. Clarges moved his umbrella off the floor and set it down again, as if he were casting up his hands.

CHAPTER I
V

IN the little dining-room with the bluish-grey paper, the dim light obscured by the smoke from the chimneys of Victoria Mansions, just on a level with the window — the Milnes’ flat was cheap enough for them just because this smoke was so troublesome that few tenants could be found to take rooms on that floor — pacing up and down the room, still grasping his umbrella, whilst Mr. Apollo leaned back in his chair, Mr. Clarges asked with a trembling voice —

“Is it really your intention to stay three weeks with these young people?”

The Alfred Milnes were moving plates to warm in the kitchen.

“It is really my intention to stay for that period,” the voice came level and remorseless to Mr. Clarges. “And I will tell you why I accepted that omen. To me all time is as nothing. What is it to me if I am here or elsewhere? As it is for you, all eternity is before me. Only I do not measure time as you do.”

Mr. Clarges threw back his head and snorted at the dim ceiling.

“You are a mere loafer, then,” he said.

“I am a mere loafer,” his opponent answered him. “And since I am a mere loafer, I do not measure the time of my stay here or there. I am here to experience certain things; these I can experience when and how I will. It is as if I were you and there stood before me a glass of wine; I can drink it now, in five minutes, or when I will. Therefore, if it pleases my caprice to set to my stay the limit that my host by a certain impulse sets to it, so I will do it For, as I have said, it is the privilege of those who are above reason to act by caprice.”

Mr. Clarges said —

“It is certainly above all reason and all decency that you should stay three weeks with these people. Are you aware what a struggle their life is?”

“I am very aware what a struggle their life is,” Mr. Apollo answered, “and it is for that reason that I am come to them.”

“Are you above pity too?” Mr. Clarges sneered. “I should have thought Durham’s set would have suited you better. You’d get more out of them.”

“Man!” Mr. Apollo said. “You are very well aware that I am not here to get things from people. Are you not afraid to speak injustice to one whom you know to be powerful?”

“I am not afraid to strike where I dislike,” Mr. Clarges said defiantly.

“Your dream was a very true one when you said it was you who cast a stone at the light you knew to be God,” Mr. Apollo said softly. “But still it is better to avoid injustice, and you are an old man who should have learned that it is very befitting to the gravity of age to accept the dictates of destiny.”

“I am old enough to know,” Mr. Clarges said, “that I’m the sort of man to fight to the last What do I care if your destiny overwhelms me? I shan’t have shown the white feather.”

“Then if you lack dignity,” Mr. Apollo said, “you atone by courage, and that perhaps is the nobler part in the defeated.”

Mr. Clarges put his umbrella behind him.

“Upon my soul,” he said, “you are the most conceited puppy I have ever met.”

“And that is, is it not, what you would say to God?” he heard in ironic tones. He choked in his throat, for the Milnes came into the room bearing dishes, and set about laying the cloth with table implements from the creaking drawers of the cheap sideboard that quivered when it was touched.

Whilst they were preparing the meal Mr. Clarges was perpetually in their way, moving up and down in their courses between sideboard and table. They bore his presence with equanimity, for they were patient people and loved him. Whilst they were eating their meal he would not sit down; he said that they had not enough for themselves, that he had no appetite, and he moved incessantly from wall to wall.

“What about the Krakroffs?” he tried to say again, but for the moment he thought it would be unavailing. Then he considered that he had a better way of attacking their guest, and what he ought before to have said came into his head. He fixed his spectacles upon Mr. Apollo and came to a halt with his hands upon the head of his umbrella.

“I should have thought,” he said, “that you would have been more at home with Durham’s set than here; because you have said that you are an idler; they’re idle enough.”

“But consider, since you are a man of perspicacity,” the slow tones came to him, “the purpose of my stay. If you desire to experience new things, do you go amongst scenes and persons similar to those you have usually around you? Not so; but you go to a theatre and study the methods of thought-readers. And this Durham and his friends are like Gods.”

“Like Gods!” Mr. Clarges said, with an ironic cackle.

“Why, you have said that a God was idle, conceited, and ineffable,” Mr. Apollo said. “And I have told you that. And so you must needs think of a God, for that is your nature, and no God will concern himself to change your nature. But consider how, in all things material, these people resemble Gods, and how there is only one thing in which they differ. What distinguishes a man from a God more than that the one toils and the other makes no effort? And these people make no effort. Time also is with them of no value, nor space; moreover, they fulfil no functions in the human republic; but they exist. They are borne backwards and forwards without effort; they are fed from unseen sources; their means of life are assured, and by no effort of their own; they are without fears and without doubts.”

“And they are decadent and rotten branches,” said Mr. Clarges.

“In saying that,” Mr. Apollo said, “you mention the one difference that exists between these peoples and the Gods. For the Gods do not decay. But these peoples decay incessantly. And I would have you to perceive that this resemblance of these peoples to Gods is more apparent to Gods than to themselves. For, being mortal, they are susceptible of fatigue, hopes, fears, and passions. Only their fatigues, their hopes, their fears, and their passions are alike caprices, since they have already all that man can possess.”

“Everything but brains and backbones,” Mr. Clarges said.

“And that is implied when we have agreed that these peoples are susceptible of decay. For, in a man, the lack of a need for effort brings about the lack of a stability of passions. A man who has everything that he needs will set his heart upon things of little purpose. He will exhaust his passions of hope and despair upon such a subject as that birds will settle upon his roof or his windows. He will lose his faith, because, having’ no need to pray to Gods, he will forget that Gods there are; and he will cease to wonder what comes after life, because life so engrosses him.”

“I’m glad at least,” Mr. Clarges said, “that you’re so sound upon social questions.”

“Zeus forbid,’’ he got his answer,” that I should speak of your social questions, which in no wise concern me or occupy my thoughts. For these are things that concern man alone. And if I think of those people at all, it is to consider of them as being very deserving of pity, since destiny has cast their lot into such unfortunate ways.”

“Unfortunate ways!” Mr. Clarges said. “Haven’t they the fat of the land to live on? Let them rot.”

“Ah, my friend,” Mr. Apollo said, “it is because they will rot that a God will pity them. For they rot because seldom or never do you find a God sojourning with them. And that, assuredly, is caused by a destiny to them remorseless; for destiny has put them into such a case that they lose their faiths and their reason, and their desires to toil and their hope to beget a healthful and a numerous progeny.”

“So that at least you advocate...” Mr. Clarges began.

“Make no mistake,” Mr. Apollo interrupted him; “I advocate nothing.”

“At any rate,” Mr. Clarges battled bravely, “you state that to live like a God is to end as a beast.”

“To live in material things like a God, without toil or hope, is to run the danger of ending like a beast,” Mr. Apollo said. “But to think as nearly as may be like a God, and to live as nearly as may be like a man beset by the hazards of life: the man to whom destiny has allotted this portion may be called fortunate in his day. For it is in the things of faith and of truth that a God functions, and it is in matters of destiny and of chance that a God thinks. And I say again that so to live as to be ready to receive the visit of a God is to be fortunate.”

Mr. Clarges dropped himself into the vacant chair beside the hearth; he leaned his umbrella against the mantel.

“I don’t know what your especial brand of devil worship may be,” he said, “and I don’t follow your argument. What’s it all about? What is a man’s God? How, for instance, would you have
me
to live so as to be ready to receive the visit of a God?” He had folded his hands and snickered with a fine irony.

“You should live very much as you now live.”

“But I am a rich man,” Mr. Clarges said. “I could buy Eugene Durham twice over. And if a God came to me...”

“If your God came to you, you would be ready to receive him, if it were only to wrestle with him,” the voice came to him; “for fighting men have fighting Gods. And though all your life you have denied the existence of a God, in your heart very well you know that you have a God. For in denying the existence of a certain God you have denied only the existence of one God in particular — or of two or three. You have denied, that is to say, the existence of the Gods of other men. For other men have found attuned to them Gods with six arms, Gods with the semblance of cats, Gods that revelled in the smell of blood, or Gods born of women. These gods — and one God in especial that was the Lord God of the people of Israel — you and your friends have unceasingly fought against, and so unceasingly have you fought that you have taken no time to consider what God it is that is attuned to you. You have cast stones, asleep and awake, at Jahwe, as you have laughed at Phoebus Apollo. But the universe is very great — being infinite — and in it there is room for a multitude of Gods — even for an infinite number. There is room for a multitude of Gods: for so many, that though the God of each man were a different God, yet for each man there would be a God attuned to him.”

Mr. Clarges, sitting back in his chair, proudly snorted at the ceiling.

“I should like to see the God that is my God,” he said. “I haven’t the ghost of one.”

“How is it then that you are frugal, courageous, undaunted, industrious in the pursuit of truth, and jealous to shield your fellow-men from error?” Mr. Apollo asked.

They had eaten the rabbit and the vegetables; they were eating cheese and some dried plums. It was already growing a little dark in the dusky room, and the roaring noise of the motor-cars in the highway close at hand became more audible as the evening fell. From the Victoria Mansions opposite there came the shriek of a woman, and the barking of dogs far below.

Mr. Clarges was silent, and at last, at the same moment, Frances and Alfred Milne spoke together.

“We have often thought.. they both said, but it was Mrs. Milne, in her calmness, who continued. Alfred was still, he was aware, too heated — he had a little touch of fever, and because he disliked uttering inexactitudes, he was accustomed to be rather silent when he felt excited.

“I have often thought,” Mrs. Milne continued to her guest, “when Mr. Clarges said there was no God, that, just as you have said, in his heart he must have been aware that there was a divine principle that inspired him. For he could not have been the good man he always has been unless he had an inward belief in the fitness of things.”

Mr. Clarges sprang to his feet.

“Oh, if you are going to say that God is the fitness of things...” he began.

But the Milnes had been silent for as long as seemed suitable to them, and it appeared that Mr. Apollo was not at that time minded to speak. It was, however, Alfred Milne who spoke, rather more quickly than was his wont.

“I should define God as the principle with which we act in harmony. And we’ve always seen that you, Mr. Clarges, acted in harmony with some unseen ideal. If you’ve any ideal you have a God....”

Mr. Clarges started to his feet.

“Good God!” he said. “Have I got to listen to this stale sentimentalism? The sort of stuff the bishops talked of as evidences of creation. It’s worse than Paley; it’s worse than a Young Men’s Christian Association. Get a magic-lantern and give us some views of Palestine, young man.”