Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (275 page)

Alfred Milne felt, indeed, more concern than it had ever been usual for him to feel even when he had been passing his examinations. And, indeed, for the last few hours he had been very filled with emotions. It had surprised him to express himself with so much volubility upon the subject of marriage and the middle classes, for when he addressed social meetings his voice had, as a rule, been of a restraining note. He shivered a little now in the wind of their rushing through the lights of the street; he had been dizzy when they had walked along the street to catch the bus.

“Why, calm yourself if you can,” he heard his neighbour say. “If you fear to have forfeited my esteem you need have no fear, for I am very sure that your motives are such as I esteem.”

The bus seemed to stumble at a dent in the wood pavement; it threw itself upwards and then resumed its swift rush.

“Speak on and tell me your story,” Mr. Apollo said, and immediately Alfred Milne felt a desire to breathe deeply and to speak like a boy speaking to his schoolfellow.

“Why,” he said, “I don’t know quite where I was. It is a confused story; there are the missionary and Lord Aldington and young Bracondale. Bracondale came to me at my luncheon interval. He had just been, first to the police court to inquire if the police had heard of Mr. Todd, and then to Lord Aldington. You see, the magistrate had said that as no one could be suspected of having made away with Mr. Todd, and as there was no trace whatever of his having done more than go away voluntarily — Bracondale’s own idea was that the missionary was employed about the business of some distinguished person — the police could not very well move in the matter. He suggested that Bracondale should appeal to the Press for assistance; and, in the meanwhile, he should find the Prince.... The Prince is yourself,” Milne said. “You will find that all these people call you Prince Apollo.”

“It is as good a name as another,” his neighbour said.

“He should find the Prince and ascertain what he could from him. Then Bracondale went on to keep his appointment with Lord Aldington. Lord Aldington was anxious to know what else young Bracondale could do for the paper. Young Bracondale, naturally, was anxious to know what the
Daily Outlook
could do for Mrs. Todd. Lord Aldington at once said: ‘The very thing. Write a column on” How it Feels to Search for a Missing Relative.” But when he heard your name he at once became ten times more alive.”

They were bending round the sweep at the top of Victoria Station, and for a moment the jolting of the bus made it almost impossible for the young man to speak.

“I don’t know if you know,” he said, as they came to a halt for a moment in the shadows of Victoria Street, “I don’t know if you at all realise the sort of impression you make on people. It seems that Eugene Durham’s set — the people you saw at Afternoons and things — have talked enormously about you. They think you odd, I dare say, or wonderful, or whatever you like.”

“They would,” Mr. Apollo said.

“At any rate,” Alfred Milne continued, “even Lord Aldington was anxious to meet you. I heard as much from Bracondale. Lord Aldington, no doubt, was thinking of his headlines, ‘Mysterious Prince in London’; ‘Missionary’s Secret Mission’; ‘Royal Personage Investigating Life of Poor’ — you know the sort of thing. At any rate, Lord Aldington slapped Bracondale on the back again — Bracondale particularly related that — and said: ‘Why, that’s exactly what we want! Go and find this Prince! Tell him we’ve got a séance at this office to-night at ten: a thing that will interest him beyond everything. Find him — with my compliments, mind — and we’ll soon discover your missionary,’ he added.”

“So it is there that you are taking me,” Mr. Apollo said.

“Poor Bracondale was in such a terrible state,” Milne pleaded. “I’ve never seen a man so excited. You see, there was his anxiety about Mr. Todd; there was his chance with Lord Aldington; there was, too, the desire to see you again. So I gave him Eugene’s address, and off he went to discover you. But when I found you at home, at first it seemed altogether out of keeping to bring you into contact with the vulgarities of the
Daily Outlook.
And I give you my word that I had not the least idea, when I asked you to come to Mrs. Todd’s, of doing more than let you see how terrible her grief is, or that you might be softened in your resentment for her sake.”

“I had already considered it,” Mr. Apollo said.

“But when you said,” Milne continued, “that you would go with me wherever I wished, of course I remembered Bracondale and his disappointment.”

“You have acted very well,” Mr. Apollo commented. “And I am well content with you.” In the noise of the Strand it was difficult to talk, and their vehicle moved slowly.

CHAPTER V
I

TO be in small alleys descried from Fleet Street, when the newspaper presses were at work, was already somewhat of a romance for Alfred Milne; when they passed basements of a steep ravine between houses of an obscure and suspect air, there came the vast roar of presses at work; huge carts laden with rolls, like the cylinders of mangles, each roll labelled, “
500 miles
of paper for the
Daily
—”; hurrying carters, chains and ropes, obscured the alley, lit up with flaring lights that gave to faces livid tints, and turned green the sickly crescent of an unearthly and remote moon. Men without hats, or with them, hurried with tablets from building to building, wearing aspects of pensiveness, of irritation, or of jocularity; leonine, well got up, merely imbecile or unshaven. To the romantic side of Alfred Milne’s mind these gentlemen represented Editors, Leaders of Opinion, or at least the powerful authors of leading articles. It pleased him to imagine this; and why, indeed, should he not indulge these imaginings? Subconsciously he was aware that these Great Ones would hardly be found in the streets, without hats or bearing note-books; and, when he desired to be more precise, he set them down as descriptive re porters, readers for the press, sporting journalists, or the mere reviewers of books. But, to be sure, he could not be certain that even these lesser lights would be found at night in the courts and alleys of a black and devious neighbourhood. Nevertheless, he was fairly certain that what was spun out of brains here, and reverberated into paper that night, would be all over England — all over the Empire and the world — on the morrow, and the lot of these men, with contented, assured, or even with merely hungry aspects, appeared to him supremely desirable. For it seemed to him as if they must wield power. It must be remembered that he was still young and inexperienced.

But, if it was romantic to him to be in these shadowy, noise-ridden, and man-filled byways alone — and he had only once before, and then by accident, penetrated this obscure fastness — by how much the more glamorous was it to him to descend a shadowy and obstructed street in the company of one who had the power to penetrate right into the very brainwork of a hugely circulating, if timorous, organ. They were going, in fact, into — right into — the offices of the
Daily Outlook!
They were descending, as swiftly as was practicable, down to the crown of daily thought itself.

Before a building of a comparative tranquillity, disclosing cloistral, but not very clean, stone staircases, shut in by glass doors and guarded by a half-visible man in a blue cap, Mr. Apollo halted.

“You told me,” he said, “that this newspaper we are to visit is the organ of the greatest vulgarity in the world. The epithet I take to mean that it appeals to the common people.”

“To the very commonest,” Milne said; “to the commonest in the sense that they have the worst appetites — the appetites for the most evil fare—”

“Again you speak as a partisan?” his companion asked him.

“Well, see for yourself,” Milne said. “Of course I speak as a partisan. I hate the thing and all its works. It is the worst sign of the times that you could see. I can’t speak of it with patience. I could not make myself comprehensible. There is not the time. What is the good of talking of snippets, and misleading news, and yellow journalism? It is not that; you could have all that together. It’s a disgusting, it’s a mean tone, and that is a thing that you can’t explain. You must witness it; you’ve got to let it make your gorge rise.”

“I will endeavour to judge for myself,” Mr. Apollo said, “since, very discreetly, you avoid the task. And, indeed—’’ A young man in a morning coat ran so precipitately down the steps at their side that he cannoned against Alfred Milne. He saved his equilibrium by clutching at the young man’s shoulders, and vanished upwards into the darkness.” And, indeed,” Mr. Apollo proceeded, “I perceive that this is not the place in which to hear or to utter disquisitions.”

They proceeded downwards, and the street became gloomier. A dim placard in a window proclaimed in huge capitals: “Convent Scandals! Step in and sign the petition to stop them,” ending in the words, in smaller letters, “Promoted by the Lutheran Truth Society.”

“I hope,” Alfred Milne said, with his eyes upon this patent, “that you don’t dislike my speaking as a partisan. Ordinarily I think I do not. But I feel that we’re on the verge of great things. I feel it in my bones; I can’t explain it.”

“I am very willing,” Mr. Apollo said, “that you should make partisan statements that coincide with your nature and your mood. For I can form my own judgment of facts, and desire most to hear how these facts affect you. And I am aware that, as you said lately, it takes all sorts to make a world.”

“Yet you pulled up Carver for doing the same thing,” Milne said.

“Not so,” he got his answer. “The distinction should be obvious to you. Carver was harassing himself by talking odiously to people whom he would convince. And for that I did him a service. You are revealing your own thoughts to one whom you cannot hope to convince, and whom you do not think of convincing. If you were talking to an ignorant person, or a weak one, I think you would be more circumspect in your speeches. But to me you talk loosely, well knowing that I shall understand you. And I may tell you this, that when you talk to me you will talk always in a manner visionary and wild, and one that is not natural to you, but more than natural to you. For you cannot put a new wine into an old flask unless it works and sweats at the joints and the apertures.”

They had arrived at a region more staid and more gloomy at the bottom of the street. Here there were broader roads and huge and ponderous masses of buildings.

“I certainly do talk prodigiously to you,” Alfred Milne said; “nobody could deny that.”

They came to where, in the comer of a block, a gaily-lit door, set transversely, sent gleams down marble steps. Innumerable young men passed in and out, and many young women, pulling on and off their long gloves as they entered or left. A benevolent commissionaire, with an aspect that was almost more motherly than fatherly, so kind and serviceable was he, took their names, conducted them with little pats on the shoulder into a waiting-room that, behind a gilt and trellised lift, had the air of being a cupboard beneath stairs. Nevertheless, it was furnished with oak and green leather; it was lit by a gilded chandelier with pink shades, and alone, solitary, and startling, on the heavy carved table, with its name in white letters on a red ground, decorated with the smiling portrait of an actress in an opera hood, there lay a single copy of
Cosy Notes,
“Wouldn’t you say,” Alfred Milne laughed, “that the last word, the final message of this huge building, of these streams of people running about, and of all the millions of us men that they write for and bamboozle and lead by the nose — the last word of it all is — that?”

Mr. Apollo took up the flimsy pamphlet; he glanced at a smuttily-printed portrait of a marchioness; at infinitesimal paragraphs of two lines each, divided by a black border leaf; at the badly-printed lines and dots of a diagram with the subscription: “A New Cape.”

“It has all the air of being as you say,” he uttered, “if this be, as I understand you to imply, one of the products of this palace.” He looked up at Milne.

“But why not?” he asked.

PART IV. HE MEETS THE PUBLIC
.

CHAPTER
I

MR. CLARGES, in the dim sitting-room, pulled two books, one from each side pocket of his round coat.

“I wish you’d read these,” he said, “and let us have some light. I must write my letters to the Press, exposing those creatures.”

He lit the two candles, placed the two books in Mrs. Milne’s hand, and began to draw note-books, manuscripts tied up with pink tape, and writing implements from various odd stores in inner pockets. He had a singular nicety and precision of the hands.

“Just read them,” he said to Mrs. Milne, “while I write. They won’t leave many of those sentimental adverbs in your mind if you read them for ten minutes.”

He dived deeper and deeper into his inner pockets, felt in his side ones, examined all his letters, his note-books, and his bundles of papers.

“Tut, tut!” he said; “I have mislaid the tablets the telegraph fellow wrote me.” He reflected for a moment: “I certainly did not leave them with the conjurer fellow, for. I remember thinking I should need them for my letters.”

He once more examined his papers, exclaimed “Tut, tut!” and then he said —

“Well, anyhow, read these books. Thank God, I’ve a memory I can rely on.”

Mr. Clarges sat himself down at the table; he disposed his little packets of papers around him as if he were laying a game of Patience, uncapped his fountain pen, shook it, and began to write. As he was very myopic, in spite of the brightness of his eyes, he held his head close to his small sheet of note-paper.

And to Frances Milne, sitting large-limbed and tranquil, the two books upon her lap, in the dim corner of the room, this little wasp-like and vigorous man, in the light of the two candles, presented an aspect at once gruesome and pathetic. In the shadows that surrounded him he appeared to be buried, as if he were enclosed by a cavern deep within the recesses of the earth. It was, indeed, as if he were so obsolete as to appear legendary — as legendary as the Nibelungen, as fabulous and as dead. And the two volumes upon her lap — a pamphlet by the late Professor Huxley containing his controversy with the late Mr. Gladstone, and a small book by the late Monsieur P. J. Crochat effectively disposing of the legends of St Helena and the Invention of the Cross — these books and their writers were so dead — these answers of the late Mr. That to the late Professor This! — that it was as if these were the cabalistic work by whose aid she had summoned up this vision of a gnome working in the caverns of the earth. His powerful and polished spectacles gleamed in the light of the candles from time to time, and then they appeared to be lenses, as if he were a watchmaker gnome meticulously examining into the works of a timepiece, in the bowels of the earth, intent on proving that up above him there was no sunlight wherewith on a sundial to measure the time of day. For to her it had come as far as that All around them the air appeared to be full of signs and portents, or at least of whispers and suggestions of mystery. And this poor little old man laboured, in a dead cause, to prove that by no manner of means could mystery exist And he thought to prove it by demolishing two charlatans — at a Music Hall!

That he considered he had done it effectively was proved by the jerky manner in which at last he threw down his pen, and with swift and nervous fingers, covered with long hairs so that they resembled the claws of an ape, gathered together his little sheaf of papers.

“Exit
Krakroff!” he ejaculated. “Now, I will be back in a minute, and then we will talk!” And he trotted out of the room and down the stairs.

“Ah, my little foreign friends,” he ejaculated at his return, “you little thought, when you came up against Joseph Clarges, what sort of a man you were dealing with!”

“Where have you been?” Mrs. Milne asked.

“To the messenger’s office at the corner, to send my letter to the Press Agency. It will be in every paper to-morrow,” he said. He was gathering together his papers.

“If you want a miracle,” he said, “could you have a better one than in me — a man of seventy-two — who can do all this detective work and run downstairs — all these stairs — and up again, and not even be out of breath! Yet what’s the explanation of it?”

“Are you seventy-two?” Frances Milne asked, with a greater pity and a greater wonder.

He turned triumphant eyes upon her.

“I can’t see why you should not know it now,” he said, with an innocent vanity, for he considered that his age enhanced so greatly the credit of his feats that he could afford to let a cherished secret go by the board at last. “But what is the explanation? I’ll tell you. It’s clear thinking. Simply clear thinking.”

He was examining his papers again, preparatory to reinserting them in their appointed pockets.

“A clear head!” he repeated; “that’s what keeps a man alive. It is the wastage of brain tissues caused by doubtings — by the open mind — it’s that that ages a man. In all my seventy-two years I have never been mistaken once I had made up my mind. You could not point to a soul that has tricked me!”

Suddenly, from a packet that had been enclosed by a red rubber band, he drew a card.

“What’s
this?”
he said; and then he threw up his head towards the ceiling and laughed boisterously. “There, now,” he said, with an almost demoniacal conviction; “doesn’t that
prove
to you the sort of swindling hucksters these people are?”

He thrust the card into Frances Milne’s hand.

“Monsieur,” she read in type-written letters, “you are tricked. You have fallen into my trap. I was aware that, surely, some simple gentleman would come with the Pantalizzi system in his head. But it is not thus that I and my soul-spouse communicate.” At the bottom of the pale letters resembling print was the bold signature —
Krakroff.

Frances Milne said —

“Well, but...”

Mr. Clarges, however, continued his triumphant paean.

“Don’t you understand?” he cried. “Don’t you see? The fellow palmed it on me by a vulgar card trick. Doesn’t it
prove
what I suspected — that he was the assistant of Petit, the French prestidigitateur? I only wanted this to make me certain. It’s the vulgarest trick, like taking a half-crown from a boy’s ear. It is just the same method.”

“But...” Mrs. Milne said slowly.

He came and sat beside her and patted her hand.

“
That’s
settled,” he said.

And she had not the desire to talk about the matter any more. He might be right; if he were not she was sorry for him, but the Krakroffs and their methods had not the shadow of an interest for her. He was snorting and chuckling, leaning back in his chair and carrying his head with a proud attitude, as if his little beard were a triumphant lance that he had set in rest against a vanquished deceit.

“The very vulgarest sort of sleight-of-hand,” he said.

Suddenly he stilled himself and as suddenly he touched the hand that lay in her lap.

“Don’t you see,” he said, “how exactly it’s all on a par with all the other miracles? They’re all the same — right back to the miraculous oracles of Delphi: the images of saints that shed tears; the blood of St. Januarius that liquefies; the miraculous draughts of fishes; the miraculous healings of the blind and the halt; fire from heaven and rods that became serpents. They’re all the same, sleight-of-hand and vulgar charlatanism. Any single one of them or all together could be performed by the meanest conjurer that lives, on the music-hall stage to-day. Only to-day, thank heaven, we’ve men with clear minds to see through these things. But for that these Krakroffs would become legendary saints in a generation and, no doubt, saviours of mankind in a century. It’s almost degrading to talk about these things to a person of intelligence; they’re the child’s ABC.”

He touched her hand again as if he were apologising to her for talking of childish things.

“You understand what I mean,” he said. “Consider what the world looked like, ages ago, before we had solved all the problems of life and evolution and death, as we have. Think of simple and mystified people — without any clue at all to the riddles of things. There comes such a wonder-worker before them — a man half thinker, half conjurer, perhaps not knowing even where the conjurer in him ended and the thinker began, or perhaps anxious to demonstrate the truth of his thoughts by the simulated wonders that he worked. And then you must consider how, amongst simple, credulous, and oppressed peoples, the rumour of his gifts and of his sayings would run like wildfire. And it would be all the more dangerous if the man himself were simple, mystical, earnest, not at all self-seeking but convinced that he himself was a God or united to God. How the rumour would grow, the wonder multiply itself, and then suddenly, before a great crowd, hey presto! one, two, three, seven, forty fishes where only one was before! And so, down the ages, in the hearts of simple and credulous people, particularly amongst the oppressed and the weary, the rumour would spread — until you have a God.”

He turned his eager face and his gleaming spectacles upon Mrs. Milne.

“You think I’m only tilting at windmills,” he said, “when I attack people like these Krakroffs. But it is not so. They handicap themselves, of course, by performing for money, but a time might come when they were so rich that they could afford to do it for power or fame. And you think that the people are more educated, less credulous than they were a thousand years ago. I tell you it is not so. We’re much in the position of ancient Rome in the first centuries of the Christian era. You don’t suppose, do you, that then Caesar or Pompey, or the Pontifex Maximus or the consuls or the priests believed in the least in the Greek or Latin Deities? They didn’t; they were utterly indifferent, agnostic, sneering at the rites that they observed. But they were the ruling classes; they defended the Established Church because it was expedient, decent, and kept the common people in check. And how many of our ruling classes to-day have any religious belief? Isn’t there an utter and cynical indifference? How many members of Parliament, how many peers, how many generals — or even how many bishops could lay their bands on their breasts and say that they believe one tittle of what they teach or uphold? Why, there is a Biblical Encyclopaedia edited by one of the high dignitaries of the Church that simply denies the Virgin birth, the personal Divinity, and the miracles of Christ. And are these clergymen who promulgate these doctrines excommunicated or put on trial for heresy? Certainly not. No more was Publius Decius, the priest of Jupiter Capitolinus when he denied the omens found in the entrails of steers. No: as the Romans did, we retain, we encourage religious belief, not because we believe but for the sake of the decencies, of the subservience in which it enables us to keep the lower classes, for fear of revolution — or because we believe that if religion were swept away the percentage of illegitimate children would increase. Isn’t it so? Isn’t it so?”

Mrs. Milne answered slowly —

“Perhaps it is. But why do you put it to me?”

“And then,” Mr. Clarges continued without heeding her: “consider how all the other circumstances of the parallel are emphasised. For, for their simple, credulous, impoverished, and oppressed populace we have to show a public as simple, as impoverished and as oppressed as ever were the Roman plebeians — and a populace even more credulous and even more craving for excitement. The Roman ruling classes gave the plebeians bread and circuses. What do we give ours? A Press!”

He paused to collect words, and then went at it again.

“How vile, how sensation-mongering, how pandering to the lowest instincts our Press is you know as well as I do. If Rome had its gladiator shows, consider how our papers with their details of murder and disaster pander to our taste for blood. Isn’t it Roman, isn’t it the Roman many-tongued Rumour reduced to its most vile and most pandering aspect? And consider the attitude of this Press when it comes to supernatural matters. Don’t they discover, every day, with huge headlines, ‘The Secret of Life,’ or ‘Noah’s Ark found on Mt. Ararat ‘? Won’t they print and scatter all over the streets, in millions, the most imbecile false phenomena, table rappings or mediumistic utterances of pseudo-scientists? Don’t you see that, if there were not a few men like me left, the wonders of people like the Krakroffs, or your mediumistic friend here, would be posted on every hoarding, for the sake of a few ha’pence, as divine phenomena? Shouldn’t we have new religions established — they’re established every day; but wouldn’t it be, here as in Rome, the turn of some new faith, coming perhaps from heaven knows what conquered province — as then it came from Judaea — would it not be the turn of some such attractive imposture to appeal to all the simple, the weary, and the oppressed of our world?”