Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (278 page)

CHAPTER I
V

AND no sooner were the manager and his turn hustled out of the room than Lord Aldington, jovial and triumphant, turned upon the Prince with the monosyllable —

“Well!” and the eyes of the others followed his.

“You wish,” the answer came to him, “for my judgment of this difficult feat? I have already given it when I said that it would attract — and very greatly — the attention of the people you wish to interest.”

“Ah, but the explanation!” Lord Aldington said, and Mrs. Lympere echoed —

“The explanation!”

“How can I explain that which is?” the Prince asked. “And why should I trouble myself to explain that which is brought about? On the one hand there is the exhibition of this man’s will-power; on the other you have the reporting by the woman. The one is inexplicable to humanity: it is a thing that is; it is will. It is like myself, or the sun, or the heat that the sun gives out. How could I explain to you, in terms that you would understand, myself, or the sun, or its cloak of flame? No more can I explain, for it is not in my will nor in the fitness of things that I should, the mystery of this man’s willing the others....”

“Oh,
that’s
not a mystery!” Lord Aldington said. “We could not use that in the paper. It’s done every day. There was a man called Podmore’s brother who had the most extraordinary will-power. We want something fresh.”

“My friend,” the Prince said, “that is why I have recommended you to use these persons for your purposes. For I am well aware that such miracles as the existence of a God or the beat of the sun would little occupy the attention of those who read your sheets.”

“We might have an article about the sun,” Lord Sandgate said, “but we couldn’t use it for a month’s boom, if that’s what you want.”

“Zeus forbid,” the Prince said, “that I should want anything of you.”

“I didn’t think you did,” the Marquis uttered — though actually he had gathered that the Prince was suggesting a series of scientific essays and had hastened to negative his advice. But Lord Aldington hastened breezily into the breach.

“But where do we stand?” he said. “It’s got to be settled.”

“Oh,
do
let’s have them!” Mrs. Lympere said plaintively. “It’s
so
exciting, and we do need something to take us out of ourselves.” She was appealing to the Prince, and he in turn looked at Lord Aldington, who, rosy and voluminous, received on his brow the full beams of a cluster of electric lights.

“Do you not hear in that speech,” the Prince said, “the voice of all those who read your sheets?”

“Oh yes I” Lord Aldington said. “But you have to consider what the Paper is. It is a great duty; a great responsibility. We haven’t only to appeal: we have to be an influence: we’ve got to educate. If you say this man is a charlatan...’

“Zeus forbid,’’ the Prince said,” that I should style any man a charlatan who in this world, so beset with ravening men of his own kind and the bitter wolves of destiny and circumstance, runs between the dark and eternal forests that are the future and the past. I am not here to play the part of an evil fate to a man that is brave enough to set himself before the scrutiny of millions of his fellows with such slender resources as he, or you, or all men possess. Why, in the name of the Great God, I ask you, should I blast the life of him, or of you, or of any man that does not evil to me?”

Having listened to him with great attention, Lord Aldington said —

“I think we’ll put off the decision. I don’t want to rush the thing.”

“But if the other papers get hold of it,” Lord Sandgate said, eager still to counter whatever he could think to be the advice of the Circassian.

“If the other papers think we’ve tested it and aren’t going to take it up,” his partner said assuredly, “they won’t try it on. You can bet your hat on that, Sandgate. But I’m not going to be precipitate. The scoop is not good enough.”

And indeed, the idea of another scoop had come into his mind. He pressed the bell labelled “Editor,” and commanded swiftly to the little boy —

“Tell Mr. Opp the paper can go on. The Wiesbaden article for the middle, not Krakroff. Tell Mr. Krakroff and Mr. Putz we shan’t need them again. And send up the grill and the wine and my barley-water.”

Then he bore swiftly down upon the Prince.

“Let me have just one word with you,” he said, “whilst the supper’s coming up,” and he added, as they came near the further door, “It’s about that court missionary.”

CHAPTER
V

IN the room that was so much too tall for its breadth Mrs. Todd was tearfully, but for the hundredth time that week, discussing with her daughter her husband’s absence. Margaret sat hunched up over a drawing-board on her knees, answering patiently enough, if a little absently, each of her mother’s queries. She was very tentatively sketching the figure of a lady with a very long waist raking backwards, a bat from which feathers depended to her shoulders, a pleasing smile, and a huge parasol. She regarded her own work with a pleased air of polite disdain. The editor of the
Gem
, to whom she had sent in a sketch called “In the Park,” had, whilst accepting her effort, told her that if she could send him in any more of the same sort of stuff he would be only too glad to consider it. So that, heart-rending as she knew she ought to consider her father’s disappearance to be, she could not keep her fingers from her drawing-board. She had a feeling that she ought to work, as you might say, in mourning for the sake of her mother’s feelings; she had not, indeed, been to the institution called the Slade since the Monday. Mr. Todd having gone out on the Thursday, she had stayed at home with her mother; she had even gone with Mrs. Todd to the chapel on the Sunday; on the Monday she had set her lover energetically to work to find her father; but it could not any longer, she felt, be expected of her that she should abstain from work. After all it was — this acceptance of her drawing — a miraculous beginning of life for her. And if her father really
had
been run over, they would not be able to afford to miss any chances. He had not, as far as they knew, saved as much as a hundred pounds; his life, they both thought, was not insured, though once he had let drop that he had insured himself against illness. He never told them anything; they could only guess; they didn’t even know the name of his solicitor, if he had one.

“I’m
sure
he must have been run over,” Mrs. Todd said for more than the hundredth time: she had had that fear all her life; it had increased a thousandfold since the invention of automobiles and the coming of the motor-bus.

“But, mother,” Margaret looked up from her drawing-board to say, with her clear pronunciation, “you know it
can’t
be so. The police have ascertained the name of every person in London who has bad an accident in the last few days. Except the four that Arthur spent all Tuesday in going to see, every one of them has been named and identified, and not one of the other four was father.”

“But it may have been in the country, or abroad!” Mrs.

Todd said. “Who knows where the Prince may not have sent him?”

Margaret’s eyes rested on the bay tree that she and Arthur that day, without the landlord’s permission, had laboriously carried up the wooden steps and placed inside the room, a little back, so that the French windows would open, but still between the lace curtains.

“I imagine,” Margaret said, “that father is safe enough somewhere.”

“Then why,” Mrs. Todd said, “did he go without his bat? And why hasn’t he let the supervisors of the chapel know, or the court authorities? I am not so much astonished that he has not written to
me;
but you’d have thought he’d have let them know at the court.”

“But, mother,” Margaret repeated in her patient and bell-like tones, “cannot you see that it is just the very court authorities that he would not want to know? — if, as Arthur thinks, the Prince has sent him on a secret mission. He would not want to write; he’d know that the police could tell his whereabouts from the postmark.”

“But, oh!” Mrs. Todd said, “why didn’t he ask for leave of absence beforehand? I know I am not a clever woman, and I cannot understand these things. It is all so difficult. I am sure he is run over. If I only had a sign; if I only had the least sign. But not to know — not even to know that he has a clean nightshirt....”

“Mother,” Margaret said, “we shall know to-night. Arthur will find the Prince; the Prince will surely tell him what he has done. You know we aren’t entirely without clues; we can be pretty certain that he is safe.”

And again, for she had related her theory several times a day since the Sunday morning; she went over the few facts that they knew; some of them she told her mother, some she withheld. Arthur Bracondale had told her that the Prince had said he had turned Mr. Todd into a bay tree because he was overbearing, inhospitable, a man who oppressed the weak, and a priest without faith. These facts she had suppressed to her mother. She gave her only Arthur’s interpretation.

For Arthur was convinced — indeed, Mr. Todd himself had told her mother upon the stairs — that the Prince was in very truth a Pretender to the Throne, if not of Turkey, at least of one of the Balkan States. And Arthur was convinced, too, that the Prince had sent Mr. Todd upon some mission connected with the regaining of his throne. It was an extraordinary idea; but after all, was not one thing as extraordinary as another? It was extraordinary that Mr. Todd had come home on the arm of the Prince to begin with; but he had done so. The charge sergeant at the police court had said that he was certain that their prisoner had been at least a Russian grand duke; the clerk of the court had shared that idea; even the magistrate himself had distinctly let them know, during the hearing of the charge against the prisoner, that he considered the prisoner more familiar with high places than the streets of London. And certainly the sergeant recorded that immediately after the trial Mr. Todd and the Prince had conversed very long and very earnestly; they had even kept the sergeant from his tea. And what in the world could Mr. Todd and the Prince have to talk about at such length and with such earnestness?

It might even be connected with an attack on the reigning family in Russia. Anything was possible in these days. They knew Mr. Todd had been in correspondence with the Metropolitan or some Church dignitary in St. Petersburg. They had heard him say so himself, in his evidence, to three Ministers, standing in the middle of the room, at one of his At Homes. It is true that he had said that the subject of the correspondence bad been a possible rapprochement between their denomination and the Greek Orthodox Church. But might not it be all bound up together? They could not tell.

They would never even have known that Mr. Todd had had anything to do with Russia at all if the Ministers had not chanced to be there. For he treated his family with a glooming and obstinate silence as to his affairs. He seemed to be anxious to show them that he considered them to be ignoramuses whom he ignored: they heard things sometimes when he talked to his friends; from himself they never had a word. He was as much a stranger to them — a gloomy and thunderous stranger — as any lodger could have been: he was more a stranger than even, say, the Prime Minister — except when things at the court went wrong, when they “heard of it.”

They never by any chance heard of his plans or of his activities — and this connection with a Prince was certainly a plan or an activity. And (Arthur Bracondale said it to Margaret, but Margaret did not repeat it to Mrs. Todd), would not it be exactly the thing that a Prince in exile, wishing to send a man on a mission, would say — that he had turned him into a bay tree!

For the Prince was very high, very aloof — as much above Arthur in station and manner as a grown-up man would be above a child. And obviously if Mr. Todd had gone upon a mission to recover a throne — (and Mr. Todd would be exactly the man to send, for who in the world would suspect him? The very ludicrousness of the idea rendered it the more probable) — the Prince would want to kill all questioning whatever. What better could he do than to utter those words with his high and elusive smile? You could not put another question after them: it would not be polite, since they meant: “That’s enough, young man.”

It is true that the Prince had said Mr. Todd would never return. But did not that make it almost certain? For Margaret’; father was not the man to help in a revolution for the love of God, or even for the sake of a suffering people. He would want his own pickings, and substantial ones at that. He would probably insist that the Prince should make him Metropolitan of Moscow or Archimandrite of Sofia. Minute differences of creed would not trouble
him.
And, if Mr. Todd was destined to fill these high offices, it was obvious that they would keep him pretty busy for quite long enough to justify the Prince in saying colloquially that he would never return. Perhaps he would not until he could pay a flying visit of state when he was eighty or ninety. No doubt the mother would be exported to him: the young people certainly would not.

It was along lines of this sort that Margaret explained her father’s disappearance to Mrs. Todd. The explanation fully sufficed to satisfy Arthur Bracondale, perhaps because he was rather indifferent to the fate of his disagreeable, bearish, and gloomy antagonist. Or, perhaps, it appealed to him as a solution because it was one singularly in sympathy with a prevailing school of fiction in which motor-cars, exiled princes, revolutions in German Grand Duchies, and Bosnian Palace conspiracies played the chief part. It was a solution, in fact, akin to a certain sort of Spirit of the Age. And although Arthur Bracondale would have been the first to profess a contempt for that spirit or for that style of fiction, it might be that the secret — if there were no other secret — of Arthur Bracondale’s so sudden appeal to the proprietor of the
Daily Outlook
was just that fact — of which he himself was so little aware — that his own writing had the touch, the flavour, and the facile appeal of these romances of motor-petrol and blue diamonds. For, if Lord Aldington had a distinguishing feature, it was that of being able to sift out from thousands of men who offered themselves to him the one or two who could touch just
that
spot.

And it was perhaps just because Margaret Todd was aware, subconsciously, of that strain in her lover’s writings (though she disliked it, and considered that his true faculties were revealed in his remarks on the expression of the “Ode to a Grecian Vase” in terms of paint), or perhaps because she never read any of the romances, and in consequence had no familiarity with the ideas of easily machined revolutions; and it may have been because, too, she could not accept so lightly the idea of her father’s disappearance, for, though to her he had been almost more of an onerous brute than to Arthur, it was impossible to her to consider with indifference the extinction of an old familiar and formidable rival — for all these reasons combined she could not resist the idea that something dreadful
had
happened to her father.

She maintained a studious tranquillity; she kept the drawing-board on her knees. Her sharply-cut, cameo-like, and blonde features showed no emotion but a kind of young didacticism; her clear voice retained its bell-like quality; she made no motion to caress or comfort her mother. All these things were efforts. She explained and explained, but it was because she was so anxious not to betray alarm that she did not fetch her mother a footstool, sit at her knees, stroke her thin hands, or make use of any of those little actions of tenderness by which soul to tender soul best makes known in this world of isolations its compassion or commiseration. But in her heart — and with the silence and the absence of Arthur Bracondale — the conviction grew upon her that something terrible, something unheard-of and awful, had happened to her father. She even attempted a little joke; for beneath a placid and an ever keenly restrained aspect, which no doubt was a paternal inheritance, she had — and no doubt that was an inheritance from her mother — a keen, and in this case an almost heroic, desire to be of service to the afflicted. In spite of her sense of conviction that her father would never return, she looked up over her drawing-board to say —

“Why, mother, you’ll be a female archbishop yet, and we shall see you marching in procession with a tiara and a chasuble and sixteen little boys swinging censers in front of you.”

And she attempted a smile at this image. But no doubt there was a quaver either in the voice or in the lines of the mouth, for the little old woman leaned forward in her arm-chair and dropped her crochet-work suddenly. And the suddenness of the action caused Margaret’s stretched nerves to shrink; for the shadow of a minute her face fell.

Poor Mrs. Todd, if she was not a clever woman, if the significance of words and actions at times escaped her, had in recompense — as the blind, in recompense for their affliction, have granted to them a keenness of hearing and touch — an intuitive power of reading the moods of those she loved. And suddenly she stretched out her mittened hands to her daughter.

“You know you are deceiving me,” she said piteously; “you know that you do not believe one word of this story. Arthur believes it — but not you.”

“Mother...” Margaret said.

“I know,” Mrs. Todd said, “that if that man has done anything to your father, it is for his harming, not for his good. I could feel it at the time, and you could feel it too. It was dislike he felt for your father, not goodwill.”