Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (280 page)

A heavy weariness had descended upon him.

“I dare say we could do a deal,” he said. “If it’s a fraud it’s clever enough to run a boom on, and we could give away afterwards that it was only guying; but I must go into it with my eyes open.”

PART V. “SIC ITUR...”
.

CHAPTER
I

MR. APOLLO and Alfred Milne walked along the Embankment homewards, for the sudden dizziness which had come upon him when he saw his friend carried from the large room by the newspaper proprietor vanished as suddenly at their return together into the room. Alfred Milne, indeed, had given himself credit for a twinge of jealousy: he could not account for it in any other way. It was as if he had feared that, even as Eugene Durham, the opulent and hospitable, so Lord Aldington, the notorious and the hugely resourceful, was carrying from under his eyes this beloved guest — and, at this sudden pang, he had sent Bracondale into the room behind the closed door to say that he was ill, and this, not so much because he hoped his friend could cure him as that he hoped, at his return, to assure himself that his guest was still willing to be his guest. And, sitting waiting, in the place at the editorial desk that Lady Sandgate resigned to him, he accepted, without much regret, what he considered to be this new-found trait in his own character. He had to think of himself as a jealous man!

It was a discovery as queerly sad as when, in the twilit gardens behind Mr. Todd’s house, he had had revealed to him the fact that he believed in the immortality of the soul. The other people — Lord Sandgate and his wife and Mrs. Lympere — were standing together beneath the central light. Lady Sandgate was pulling her light feather wrap on to her bare shoulders, Mrs. Lympere was talking eagerly — and Alfred Milne had a sense that the Marchioness, for all her amiable indifference, was, as it were, pulling together her skirts to fly from contact with disease. She had, indeed, offered the Prince’s equerry her vinaigrette and fan: but it was not a very decent thing for a man to be ill and show it.

Mrs. Lympere, on the other hand, talked with an immense swiftness of language, as if at once she were wrapped up in her subject and anxious to delay their departure.

“There is Mrs. Johns,” she said. “You’ve heard of her: it is not incredible. If a soul can change, something must change it. Then why not somebody? There must be a Will behind it....”

Mrs. Johns was a lady well known to them all — and to most of the world through the weekly papers — a lady, well “in,” who had been at the point of death. She had, indeed, died — or at least she had been given over. Her heart had stopped. Then she came to life again — and she had a new soul — a new nature, new views even. Her friends all noticed it: her husband himself. What did they make of that? Lady Sandgate said she was sure she could not tell.

“Why what could it be,” Mrs. Lympere asked, “but that another soul had entered into her body? In the instant she was dead. So that if souls can change...”

“Oh, come along, Cora,” the great lady said, “you know I made a resolve in Lent to be in bed every night by half-past twelve.” She had, indeed, determined thus to make her Lenten self-denial extend throughout the twelve months, but she was also not anxious to help Mrs. Lympere to throw herself at the head of this Prince. It was not her affair, but she could not, she thought, be expected to play gooseberry.

“Come along, Cora,” she said. “You can’t stay alone with these men”; she added, however, “unless you want to.”

“
But
,” Mrs. Lympere said in accents of anguish, “I haven’t even got the Prince’s address.”

“He’s living with me,” Alfred Milne said then, with a sudden violence, as if he were combating the idea that Lord Aldington had carried off his guest. The Marquis took down the name of More’s Buildings on a little slip of paper which he handed to Mrs. Lympere, and with the air of a new Eurydice sinking back into the shades, she was amiably but firmly towed from the room.

But after an agony in which, for Alfred Milne, time seemed to be suspended and the Marquis desultorily corrected proofs and touched, delicately, the hairs of his crown, at last the Prince came back, and, in a divine coolness, they walked along the Embankment. The white lights dropped flashes and little sparks through the darkness; the plane trees rustled freshly their foliage, vividly shown or mantled in shadow; the dark river was visible only as a thing of reflections and of eddies outlined in light; and brown and huddled humanity showed itself only as if it were the decorations for the pedestal of a statue to Poverty, a-sprawl, all the heads bowed forward, on seat after seat.

“Well,” Alfred Milne said, “and what did you think of the great man?”

The visit over, most of the romance that beforehand had attached itself, in his mind, to visiting the offices of an Organ of Opinion had vanished. The
Daily Outlook
appeared to him to be no more than an expression of the mind of its proprietor, and Lord Aldington had impressed him as being merely the expression of his paper. He did not, that is to say, find himself disliking the paper or its proprietor any less, but they appeared to him to be far less sinister. For you could not, he said to himself, really imagine that Lord Aldington represented the forces of Reaction — Alfred Milne himself standing for Progress, a sane Socialism, and a Progressive County Council. No, Lord Aldington did not stand for any philosophy of reaction; he stood simply for the paper, and the paper stood for him. They were a bi-une affair, you could not tell which led, whether the paper dragged Lord Aldington along or he it. But they were not, either of them, he was fully assured, of much more importance than an anemometer, a thing for registering the wind. They would not ever lead the Public, they were merely extraordinarily sympathetic to the Public’s breath. In fact, as they passed the ghostly spars and sides of the little ship of war anchored close to the stone parapet of the river, Alfred Milne had persuaded himself that, if a sensational discovery could be made, to set the Public agape in favour of Progress, a sane Socialism, and a Progressive Council, Lord Aldington, like a master of hounds, with his paper and his staff in full cry, representing the Hunt, would be very well in at the death. They simply did not count and, Mr. Apollo not having answered his query but seeming more engrossed in the appearance of the ship of war, Alfred Milne continued —

“Did you ever hear anything more childish than his pretence that the
Daily Outlook
was anxious not to mislead the Public? On the one hand he’s setting to work to boom jugglers with matchboxes, on the other he’s making that ridiculous pretension. You’d think he’d not consider it worth while.”

“Friend,” Mr. Apollo said, “I have never seen anything more childish. But this man has the heart and the brains of a child or of a young boy. How, then, shall we condemn him?”

“But...” Alfred Milne said.

“For it appears to me,” Mr. Apollo said, “that the functions of what you call a newspaper consist in tickling the ears of your people, and to me your people appear to have the heart and the brains of children and young boys avid after those things which are futile, temporary, innocent, and fugitive.”

“But is it right,” Alfred Milne said, “of this man to encourage them in this?”

“Would it be wrong in a God,” Mr. Apollo said, “seeing children who were avid of running after straws in a wind, if he gave those children straws and the wind to run in?”

Alfred Milne, who considered himself to be on safer ground when anything approaching educational science was mooted, launched out into —

“Well, I don’t know, you see; we do not discourage children in their games, but we
do
believe in directing their energies at such times with a view to their future developments.”

“Of that, or of the wisdom of that, I have no opinion,” his friend said, “for of it I have no knowledge and no desire for knowledge.”

“And what I contend,” Alfred Milne said, “is that, if the
Daily Outlook
is a machine for giving children straws to be amused with, it betrays its trust and is a danger. For it and its proprietor ought surely to regard themselves as schoolmaster and school; they ought to direct the public play with a view to a development of tastes and of morality. But you can’t observe a trace of that about either this man or his paper.”

A fresh breeze came from the river; the letters of fire against the darkness, on the further shore, winked, blazed, and went out, in silent indefatigability, like portents uttering celestial warnings or appeals. Mr. Apollo sat down upon a bench that had at one end of it a woman huddled up beneath a mat of brown rags; he gazed at the sky-signs with interest and attention.

“My friend,” he said, “it is true that I cannot observe a trace of these things about either this man or his paper. But you yourself have observed that this is a very great and a very mighty Republic, and that in it there are a multitude of things. And you yourself have observed that it takes all sorts to make a world.”

The bundle of rags at the end of the seat observed suddenly —

“Wod yer torkin’ abaht?” and relapsed into slumber.

“But when you ask me,” Mr. Apollo said, “to condemn this man for having the heart and the brains of a child, you ask me to condemn yourself also. For consider how you must appear, each of you, in the sight of an ancient omniscience. You ask me to applaud you because you seek to direct your children in their games. But where is Sparta, whose law-givers upheld these ideas? Or where again is Athens, that by its stage-plays sought to develop its grown men? And how can I consider you to be a more grown man than this other man? For can what you consider to be permanent things be considered by me to be less futile than the feats of the conjurer? How should the theory of cities and their governments appear to me to be more valuable than the will-power that that conjurer exercised over you to make you open a little box and examine into its contents? Or should I not rather commend this conjurer, who exercised a power more nearly divine than you, who are concerned mostly with the ebb and flow of gold coins from one pocket to another? If you consider of animals, do you condemn the magpie because it takes pleasure in objects that glitter, or commend the sheep that patiently nibbles the herbage? Not so. But you will say that the magpie is the magpie and the sheep the sheep. And for what then am I here?”

Again the figure at the end of the seat ejaculated —

“Wod yer torkin’ abaht?”

“I was talking of what brings me here?”

“Well, what
does?”
the figure said. “The bloomin’ soup-kitchen’s shut up.”

“I am here,” Mr. Apollo said, “as you might take a walk in the fields and woods, to consider...”

“‘Oppin’! I’m a-goin”oppin’,” the figure said. “Dahn wiv forrin ‘ops.”

“To consider,” Mr. Apollo said, “of the distinction that is between wild flower and wild flower, and between bird and bird. Shall I then condemn one man because he is as it were a crow, or exalt another because I liken him to the mandrake? Assuredly not. But I shall say, so this man is and so this.”

“But surely,” Alfred Milne said, “you would differentiate. Supposing Lord Aldington asked you to do a thing... I mean...”

“No, assuredly I will not differentiate between man and man, their prayers to me being of equal earnestness,” Mr. Apollo said.

“Give us me fare ter Paddock Wood, darlin,” the woman said. “Tain’t ‘oppin’ time yet, but I’ll go fruit-pickin’! Straight I will, darlin’. Give us me fare ter Paddock Wood!” A face looked out, bleared, muzzy, and pale in the rays of the electric light, so that beneath its battered and broken man’s straw hat it appeared to have the air of a turtle’s head, lethargic in its movements and dull in the eyes. And indeed, so slowly did it move round, that before the eyes could fall upon Mr. Apollo the head fell forward in sleep.

“And here,” Mr. Apollo said, “you might very well have an instance of what I say. For this old woman asks a boon of me so listlessly that she falls asleep before I can fulfil it. But it is the earnestness of a prayer that ensures its fulfilment. Therefore I might very well leave her pockets empty. But, on the other hand, it is unfitting that a man should be visited by a deity and go unrewarded.” And he placed his hand in his pocket and drew out a coin.

“But
did
Lord Aldington ask you for anything?” Alfred Milne said.

“Friend,” Mr. Apollo answered, “with all the force of his being this man asked two things of me: the one to tell him if I could heal by faith, and the other if I would write about myself for his paper.”

“But...” Alfred Milne ejaculated, “you seemed quite friendly when you came from the little room.” And amazement overcame him, for he imagined that upon being asked to write — for the
Daily Outlook!
— his friend would at least have knocked the impertinent down.