Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (281 page)

“And wherefore should I not be the friend of this man?” Mr. Apollo said. “I will tell you this: this man with the child’s heart has two passions — the one for his journal, the other for his health. And touching the one I said to him these words: ‘You ask me of faith-healing and tell me that the doctors have given you up. Then I will tell you this: I am Apollo, the son of Maia!’ “

“Son of a gun!” came from the rags sleepily. “Give us the price of a pint!”...

A figure with hunching shoulders and pocketed hands drifted desultorily past them, followed by the form, tall and slender, of an attentive policeman. The policeman halted for a moment in front of the woman’s figure.

“Mustn’t sleep here, mother!” he said.

The inert form suddenly sprang into virulent life.

“Oo’s a-sleepin’?” she answered. “Oo’s a-sleepin’? Mayn’t a lidy converse with her partner on the stairs? Sittin’ out this danse! No, I won’t have an ice, thank you, but you may fan me. No, it’s
not
your turn next, I
don’t
think. Move on, Peter Parker.” The policeman looked at the form of Mr. Apollo on the seat and at Alfred Milne who stood before him.

“I wouldn’t sit here, gentlemen,” he said. “It’s cool, I know, but there’s the disadvantages.” And, lifting his feet well off the pavement, he followed slowly the retreating loafer.

“Gawd curse him!” the woman said. “An’ me a-dreamin’ I was at the opera. How do I know I’m goin’ to dream it again? It’ll be pink lizards next time.”

“I said these words to that man,” Mr. Apollo said: “‘I am Apollo, the son of Maia! If you had prayed me to make you whole I would have made you whole. But, if you ask me as to faith-healing, you must know of many cases in which faith has made men whole; and if you strive after faith, which is not easy — or if you have faith, which is a gift from the Gods — without doubt at the eleventh hour your illness may leave you.’”

“Oh, I don’t care about the man’s health,” Alfred Milne said; “I want to hear about the article. You
ought
not to do it.”

“Tell me why I ought not to do it?” his interlocutor asked.

“Because it is encouraging vulgarity,” Alfred Milne said.

“Now this is a thing that I do not understand,” Mr.

Apollo said; “for, on the one hand, you condemn this man for publishing that which is not true, and, on the other hand, you condemn me for aiding him to publish that which is true.”

Alfred Milne looked down at his feet.

“Is it not,” Mr. Apollo asked, “that you pursue this man with a hatred so violent that you do not desire to see him save his soul?”

The woman beside him sidled a little closer.

“Is it the Salvation Army?” she said. “Glory hallelujah!”

“But are you really going to write an article for Lord Aldington?” Alfred Milne asked.

“Why, it is done!” Mr. Apollo said. “To-morrow every poster in London and what Lord Aldington calls the great cities of the North will bear the announcement: ‘A God in London.’ And, so Lord Aldington tells me, there will be no other words upon this announcement of a truth.”

“But...” Alfred Milne said. His mouth fell open: the light above his head began gradually to be reflected on his pallid brow in little and sparkling beads of sweat; his hands shivered.

“Is not this a great wickedness you are doing?” he said.

“How so?” his interlocutor asked.

Alfred Milne’s eyes glanced, as if with anguish, at the perpetual motion of the plant leaves, at the dark gardens beyond the road, at the dark buildings beyond them that lifted upwards dim pinnacles to the pale sky. Behind him the river flowed noiselessly, and the sky-signs winked and went out like portents.

“It is surely wicked,” he said.

“I kin danst the cake-walk!” the woman said. “Like to see me? If it wasn’t for the drink! I’ve come down, I have.”

“Are you sure that you consider this thing to be wicked?” Mr. Apollo said. “Take a time to consider upon it. Or are you sure that you consider yourself so clean-handed?”

“I’ve always tried to be,” Alfred Milne said.

“Friend,” Mr. Apollo addressed him mildly, “search your mind well, and then ask yourself whether I should be acting justly if I condemned wholly this man and came into your camp?”

“I believe you would,” Alfred Milne said. “I believe this man to be utterly unscrupulous. It was enough to hear him talking, before the Krakroffs, of his conscience and of his determination not to mislead people. Wasn’t that the merest lying in order to gain prestige?”

“My friend,” Mr. Apollo said, “have you never lied in order to gain prestige? Have you never misled simple people?”

“I think I never have,” Alfred Milne answered earnestly. “Never in my life. I have never consciously spoken an untruth.”

“Friend,” Mr. Apollo answered, “does a day pass in which you do not teach to your children things in which you disbelieve?”

Alfred Milne said —

“I know one
has
to teach children certain falsehoods, but it is part of a sincere process. Certain things must be put figuratively; you could not let a child know all the facts of life.”

“I seem,” Mr. Apollo said, “to hear your enemy speaking these very words. ‘One has,’ he would say, ‘to tell the public certain falsehoods; but it is part of a sincere process. You could not let the public know all the facts.’ “

“He would not believe it if he said it,” Alfred Milne uttered doggedly.

“Friend,” Mr. Apollo said, “one man believes what he says just as much as another, and neither more nor less. For him, his paper is the most important thing in life, and he will forget the lies he has told, because they have served to keep that in life. And for you....”

“But you
couldn’t
write for him,” Alfred Milne said suddenly; “you couldn’t take sides with him.”

“Why not with him if with you?” his friend asked. “When your wife asked me to be your guest, she gave as an inducement this offer — that you were a man with a great influence over the hearts of men, and that you could spread my ideas. When this man asked me to write an article for his paper he uttered the same words.”

“But,” Alfred Milne said, and a profound sadness was descending on him, “you do not seem to understand the difference. This man
can
only spread your ideas with the help of lies and sensationalism. The very poster that you say he will use proves that.”

“How so?” he got his answer.

“Isn’t it a lie to say that there is a God in London?”

“Yes; it’s a bloomin’ lie,” the woman said suddenly. “If Gaud was in London town, wouldn’t he want to see me danst the cake-walk? Ever see Billy Gee of the old Friv.? That’s me.”

“My friend,” Mr. Apollo said, “I have said in this article which I gave to this man: ‘I am the God Apollo’ I am God! I am immortal! I am omniscient! I am omnipotent! I was, and I shall be! I am God! ‘“

“Lord Aldington would be mad to print it,” Alfred Milne said.

“I wait to see,” Mr. Apollo answered; “for I know well that he will think that if he prints it he will ruin his paper, but save his life by faith. And I know well that he believes me a man wonderful enough to be a God.”

Alfred Milne leaned suddenly forward.

“That is one thing,” he said; “it is another to say that you are a God. You are a man with wonderful gifts. But I will be no party to lying.”

“I am Phœbus Apollo,” he got his answer — and it seemed to Alfred Milne to come up from deep and distant shades. The pain of his position overwhelmed him suddenly.

“Don’t say that!” he said sharply; and then he pleaded: “Don’t ask me to believe it. You can’t do such a thing. It is unthinkable.”

“Friend,” the voice came to him, “to me it is immaterial if you believe or disbelieve. To you it is all the world. It is with you as with this other man that you hate.”

“Oh, countermand the article,” Alfred Milne pleaded. “Do not deceive all these people. Do you not understand? How could you ask me to be a party to this?”

He passed his hand down his face with a shuddering movement “Your friend subject to fits?” the woman asked of Mr. Apollo. “Pickin’ the little spiders fm ‘is dial? I knows’ em.”

“Isn’t it too wicked?” Alfred Milne said. “I liked you so much,” and he attempted to get beyond his reserve with, “I have never met a man I liked so much and suddenly...”

“I do
wish
you’d seen me danst the skirt-dance,” the woman said to Mr. Apollo. “See me dance it, darlin’!”

“Suddenly...” Alfred Milne said. Then he turned his face again. “You can’t be serious,” he uttered.

And then he mustered all that be could of matter-of-fact tones. “It’s ridiculous to ask me to believe either that you are a God or that you have written these articles.”

“I am a God and I have written these articles,” the answer came to him.

Alfred Milne groaned suddenly.

“I always thought, he said,” that you were speaking figuratively. Every man is entitled to say that he has a share of the divine in him...”

Mr. Apollo maintained a long silence.

“I can’t do it,” Alfred Milne said harshly. “I can’t aid these impostures. It’s as Mr. Clarges said, I must regard you as a foreign adventurer. There’s no other way out. I will not help you.”

Mr. Apollo appeared to have fallen back into gloom, and the leaves above him rustled tenebrous or in bright light.

“God help me!” Alfred Milne said. “Have you not a little pity?”... and then he added drily, “I can’t have you in my house.”

When, without knowing how, he had got to a great distance away, he looked back. In the circle of illumination that fell from high above the woman was dancing upon the pavement. Below her skirts there showed the white of her cotton-stockinged legs. The God leaned forward watching her attentively, and dark against the light.

It appeared to Alfred Milne that he was cast out from a charmed circle, and when again he reached, in returning, the seat before which he had stood, the God and the woman had alike gone away.

CHAPTER I
I

THE doctor, before letting himself out of the door, paused to speak again to Mrs. Milne: he was very young, and he wore glasses of a singular opacity.

“I don’t mind saying it to you,” he said, “but we know nothing: absolutely nothing.” He looked down the stairs as if after the figure of the Specialist who had descended ten minutes before. “He knows nothing either. He’s a thousand instances in his head: he’s ten thousand. If Alfred’s illness coincided exactly with one of these instances, he might be able to make a prognosis of a sort: if it coincided with ten or twenty, he might be fairly certain. But he doesn’t
know.
I don’t know: no one does.”

Frances Milne, with her face in which the emotions were set so deep that she appeared to be always tranquil, had the front door ajar.

“What can we do?” the young doctor said. “We’ve got beyond the stage of bamboozling patients’ friends: we’re no nearer anything else, though. And in a case like this there’s fever, weakness, delirium at times; there’s nervous reaction.... But we’ve got even beyond believing in drugs. Give him light and air, we say.”

Frances Milne smiled wanly.

“And we can’t even open a window because of the smoke from the buildings opposite.”

“And keep him quiet,” the doctor said.

“You know we can’t keep him quiet,” Frances answered. “You have seen for yourself.”

“Well, certainly there are too many people continually coming to the door,” the doctor said — he was one of the young people who came regularly to More’s Buildings on a Thursday.

“There have been three sets of people calling while you were in the room with Alfred,” Mrs. Milne said. “I keep them out, but I have to go to the door.”

The young man fingered a leathern button on his blue waistcoat; he fanned himself with his Panama hat “If he can’t have light and air and quiet,” he said — and he spoke as if he were muttering something that was a little unmentionable. “You must find this friend of his. We do at least know that a breakdown caused by a quarrel can be cured by a reconciliation. It’s
too
hot here. You ought to be able to open a window.”

Frances Milne turned back into the empty sitting-room; the young doctor went slowly down the stairs, and Mrs. Milne put her ear to the bedroom door. She heard no sound; and the young doctor having told her that unless she heard her husband call she was not to go in to him, she moved to the window and opened it. There blew in from the chimneys just level with her a cloud of smoke, evil-smelling and laden with small particles of coal. She dropped her hands mutely apart. From the street below there went up a number of cries, the barking of dogs, and a scream or two; and as she closed the window on these usual phenomena, she saw a flower-pot fall from a window-sill just below her level on the opposite building. With the closing of the window there fell upon the room a dead silence and a deadly heat. Looking across the chimney-pots, she saw the tops of deadened brown foliage, a grey haze, and the sullen reek that, in the dead sultriness, beset all London.

“Light and air!” she said listlessly.

And, behind the closed door, Alfred Milne was dying. The doctors had given him a composing draught; he was asleep; but he would awaken again. She had no illusions.

She leaned her forehead against the grey cross-bar of the grey window. Where was the vision of the white schoolhouse in Wiltshire now? And her lips moved.

For all these three weeks she had seen her husband sicken. He lay in bed; he was in one fever and another; when she had had to make the bed for him he could not stand. He would lie for long periods with his eyes open, gazing at the dead sage-green of the wall-paper. And there was the dead simmering heat and the smoke that was always a taste in the mouth. And perpetually there were the callers. They came each day to ask for Prince Apollo. They sent up footmen with cards; they climbed themselves the steep steps. And each time Alfred Milne knew....

It was so much the worst of it all that he knew. Lord Aldington, indeed, huge and out of breath, had come right in upon her, and Alfred Milne had heard his voice.

He had insisted on her retaining in her mind a message for the Prince. She was to say that it was not because he did not believe that he had not published the article, but because that was not the time or the method. She was to give the Prince exactly that message, and, standing before her panting, he had said that she was to add that the ground wanted preparing. They would have to do it gradually: people’s minds must be brought round to it. To publish it boldly would be to lose the paper millions of readers.

She had answered that the Prince was not with them.

“Oh, I know,” Lord Aldington had said, “that he’s here, and that he won’t see me.”

And when Frances Milne had repeated that indeed Mr. Apollo had never returned to that flat, Lord Aldington had added —

“My dear girl, he told three people yesterday that this was his home. It’s no good trying to hearten me up. He’s angry with me because we’ve not put in his article and
have
taken up the Krakroffs.”

He paused, and surveyed her with eyes large, blue, and frightened.

“But put it to him,” he said, “please put it to him — for I know you’re the people he has chosen to communicate through — that the Krakroffs is only a preparing of the way. We must familiarise people with the idea of the Unseen, and then...”

Frances Milne had not answered him, for her sole desire had been to get him away. And suddenly he had burst out—”Tell him that if an offering — of half a
million!
— would appease him, he can have it. You can have it: you can build temples with it. You can have any money you like from my private purse. I believe in him. But I can’t damage the circulation of the paper. He could see for himself that that would not do good to any cause. Come to me when you like! the cheque will be there.”

Obscure and greasy people had come, all with the tale that a prince, or a thorough sportsman, or a theatre-manager — a woman in particular was sure that he was a theatre-manager — lived with them there and was called Mr. Apollo.

And she knew that her husband regarded all this as a purgatorial visitation. All these people were sent to remind him, to torture him, to tantalise him. He heard their feet on the stairs, their voices mumbling at the door. And each sound was, as it were, for him a whispered intimation from an offended being, who said perpetually, “This might have been.” And, in his fever, Alfred Milne would start out of his sleep and cry, “I believe! I believe!”

He dreamt perpetually of his guest: he saw him in strange rooms, in theatres, in churches. He saw him in brothels, and once he saw him, with the sunlight on him, in the grand stand at Goodwood.

When Mrs. Lympere came, there was no keeping her out “Tell the Prince,” she said to Frances, “that I hadn’t anything to do with his quarrel with Aldington. I hadn’t; indeed I hadn’t.”

And Mrs. Lympere had said that she too knew that the Milnes were the Prince’s representatives. He had told several friends of hers only the day before.

A heavy weariness had beset Frances Milne; she had no sleep; she was always at her husband’s side, or going to the door and hearing the same story. She could not think — she could do no more than observe; and her brain seemed no longer to record the events of the day.

When the young doctor was gone she fell into a dull musing, looking out of the window. She was so tired that it seemed to her the house-fronts opposite leaned forward. And suddenly she felt the passionate conviction: Alfred was dying; he would die in his sleep. And not knowing what it meant she cried out —

“Oh God!”

Then she said to herself dully —

“If he does not come now it will be too late.”

She closed her eyes and rested her brow on the window-pane; she thought she felt a dull thud, a quiver of the earth. Her lips moved, and she heard herself say —

“It will be too late! It will be too late!” She imagined that she was dozing, for she heard a voice say —

“Now you may open wide your windows.” Then she felt the sunlight on her forehead.

She saw before her an unfamiliar square: the masses of heavy and metallic London trees, beyond them distant buildings, a high sky in which the clouds, breaking apart, towered dove-coloured and voluminous, letting through a shaft of sunlight A cloud of white and chalky dust raised itself lazily in the air and fell like soft snow against the windows. The sills grew white, and there was the loud clanging of a bell.

“Oh God!” she said suddenly, “the houses have fallen down.”

“And is it not justice?” the voice of Mr. Apollo said behind her. “For those people were inhospitable, and uttered foul cries against wayfarers.”

“But there must be many people killed?” Frances Milne asked.

“A great many,” came to her. “Do you not hear the cries?”

And indeed, faint and from far below, there came the shrilling of screams and of many voices.

“This I have done to give you the light of the sun and the wind unpolluted,” she heard.

She looked down at the ground.

“You have done this!” she said.

“Because I am God,” was answered to her.

“But to kill so many people!” she said. “For us! Death is so very terrible.”

“No, assuredly death is a very little thing,” the Godhead answered her.

She raised her eyes upon him; the sunlight fell upon his face and his eyes were expressionless.

“Then Alfred will die!” she said.

“Will that for him be very terrible?” be asked.

She let her hands fall to her sides.

“I do not know,” she said. “It is you who must tell that, and whether you will inflict pain upon me or not. I do not think you will let him die, but I cannot tell.”

“You are wise,” he said, and the expressionless eyes dwelt upon her.

“Now I go,” he said. “For three weeks I have dwelt with you.”

“Yes,” she said; “it is true that for three weeks you have dwelt with us. I have known it.”

“Then ask what blessing you will have of me,” he said. “For you may not entertain a Godhead and be as you were.”

She folded her hands before her.

“There is only one thing I can ask,” she said, “and that is too great a thing.”

“Child,” he said, “is there anything too great for God?”

She stretched out both her arms towards him and, in her black gown, cast back her head.

“It is,” she said, “that you will stay with us for ever, and that we may be your servants till we die.”

“You are a very wise woman,” he said, “for you have asked that which it is best and easiest for you to have. For if you will have God with you, you must serve God; and if you serve God, God will be always with you. And that is why I have said to many men that you were my mouthpieces and that I dwelt here. For you have been willing to serve me, and I have been with you unseen.”

“We shall be your priests?” she asked.

“You will be my priests,” he said. “And having me more with you than most men have, such men as would worship me will do you honour. You shall set up to me such a temple as you may; you shall pass your time in communing upon my words. And I give you this boon, that when the one of you dies the other shall die also, for that is a very fitting thing. And what in these things are mysteries to you you shall expound to yourself and to others as best you may. And of this thing be certain — that to a God it is nothing if his worshippers be few or many or none at all, since it is not from the fumes of altars that the Gods grow fat nor through the beliefs of worshippers that Gods exist. But it is by the worshipping of Gods that men attain to happiness.”