Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (399 page)

She looked at him with a keen, hard glance.

“You come from Cyprus,” she said in French. And her words seemed to him the more intelligible because she must speak in a high voice to be heard over the clinking of old chain harness, the jangling of swords, and the brushing sounds of the buskins of her men as they marched over the turf.

“No, I come from New York,” Mr. Sorrell said as loud as he could.

“You come from Palestine,” the lady exclaimed.

“I’ve
been
to Palestine,” Mr. Sorrell conceded. “I’ve been a little all over the world. I have travelled a great deal.”

“You were born in the East,” the lady exclaimed.

“I was born in Wimbledon,” Mr. Sorrell answered; “that is not the East End. It’s Wimbledon S.W. now, though when I was born it was right in the country.”

“I do not understand you very well,” the Lady Blanche said, “but you are a very holy man, are you not?”

“I say!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed in English,” have we got to go on playing this old pageant all the time? Can’t we let it up just a minute? I should just like to know about the trains from here.”

The Lady Blanche looked at him with the dull eyes of a person who does not understand. She called to her the old man who had the flail with the iron balls hanging from it.

“Thou wast” — and now to Mr. Sorrell she seemed to be speaking a sort of German platt such as you may hear in Hessen-Darmstadt— “Thou wast in the Holy Land. Speak with this man if you may.”

The old man had lost an eye; his face was very brown and clean, though his jerkin was stained, weatherbeaten, and very ragged. He addressed Mr. Sorrell in a dialect that Mr. Sorrell could not catch hold of at all. The words seemed to flow by him.

“Oh! I can’t get the hang of him!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed to the Lady Blanche. “He seems to be talking of Ragussa and Cyprus and Byzantium and Jaffa. What is he acting? A Crusader? The Crusaders did not go to those places, did they? I should have thought they’d have sailed straight to somewhere near St. Jean d’Acre. They wouldn’t want to go fooling up in the Adriatic.”

Still the Lady Blanche appeared to understand none of his words.

“I speak no Greek,” she exclaimed; “but you were born in Byzantium?”

“Well, it’s a funny thing,” Mr. Sorrell commented, “my father’s villa at Wimbledon was called ‘Constantinople,’ because he built it during the Crimean War —

Yes, oui—”

And as she still looked at him with questioning eyes, he added:

“C’est vrai, je suis de Byzance.”

These words appeared to afford her much satisfaction, for her brow cleared, and she asked him if he had not been a slave of Mahomed, rescued and baptized by the good Knight Egerton of Tamworth.

Mr. Sorrell was tired to the point of silliness.

“Oh, hang it all!” he said to himself, “if they’re going to carry on this pageant racket with this deadly seriousness I guess I’ve just got to give in. It beats me. They’re too persistent.” And he added aloud: “Oui, je suis venu à pied de Sandwich tout seul.”

The satisfaction upon the Lady Blanche’s face continued to grow. She said that without doubt he had been protected by the angels of God and by a mother’s gratitude, for the roads were covered by robbers. Mr. Sorrell remarked that he supposed that that was the case, though he did not see where the mother’s gratitude came in. The lady replied that the mother of the knight had been living until a few months ago, and that the knight had sent several messengers home from the Holy Land and whilst he was returning. These messengers had reported how the slave had watched over his master out of gratitude for having rescued him from the hands of the Saracens. And Mr. Sorrell learnt how his prototype had in open battle twice saved his master’s life when his horse was killed; how he had extinguished the Greek fire that the Saracens had cast upon the knight’s helmet; and how when his master had been wounded by a poisoned arrow of the barbarous Ruthenians the faithful slave had sucked the poison from the wound. Moreover, when the knight had slept in the desert the slave had watched over him, and had driven away venomous serpents, or had awakened the knight in time to confront the huge dragons with which the desert abounded. And all these things being reported to the knight’s mother had filled her with very great gratitude to the slave, so that she had passed whole days upon her knees beseeching favour and protection from heaven alike upon the one as the other.

“It seems to me,” Mr. Sorrell thought to himself, “that I run against maternal gratitude all the time. It was only just the other day that Mrs. Lee-Egerton was thanking me for saving the last of the line of Egerton from prison, and calling down the blessings of heaven upon my head. I suppose that wretched little bad hat would be the descendant of this old knight who went walloping dragons round Cairo way.”

And he remembered how Mrs. Lee-Egerton had said that the blessings of heaven would be poured down upon his head if ever he was in a tight place.

“Therefore,” the Lady Blanche said, “because of the gratitude of this mother who was my mother’s sister, you shall be very greatly honoured and feasted at my castle. Baths shall be made ready for you and wine and great feasts, so that you shall eat till your skin cracks.”

“Oh! I have to think of my liver,” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed, “but I could certainly do with a bit!”

“Without doubt,” the Lady Blanche continued, “you are a very holy man, for you have faithfully served your master and travelled in many lands, having been without doubt in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Rome, and in the town of St. Jago of Compostella, and no doubt at Canterbury too.”

“Why!” Mr. Sorrell exclaimed, “yes, I have been in all these places, now you come to mention it. J’ai roulé ma bosse un peu partout.”

It was the look of returning non-comprehension in the lady’s eyes that really puzzled Mr. Sorrell. For the slang of his French, if it were slang, was yet so old-fashioned that
any
one ought to have been able to understand it.

And then, with the slightest queer start, Mr. Sorrell found that he was not any more thinking of these people as taking part in a pageant. They were too much in earnest. And anyhow, they must have been playing the pageant for twenty years at the very least. Their lances were old and rusty; their pikes notched in the blade and greasy in the stave from long handling. Their clothes were practically all very much worn and old. No, he could not get away from the feeling that they were just living their normal lives.

And for a moment he felt like Rip Van Winkle. Supposing that his railway accident had really made him see something queer? Supposing that all these people were really just ghosts? He did not believe in ghosts. But, on the other hand, he was modern enough to know that in these days anything might happen, and suddenly he found himself saying to himself, that though he could not for the life of him say what he believed, he would not equally for the life of him say that he disbelieved any single thing.

Such queer things did happen, that you would have said would have been impossible about the time when he had been born in Constantinople Villa, Wimbledon. What a right down practical modern man like himself had to do before all things was just to keep an open mind. Twenty years ago people would have laughed at the idea of flying as the dream of a visionary. Nowadays, people were flying about just as they liked, so that it was as easy to fly from Putney to the Welsh Harp as it was to go by bus. And it was not only in merely mechanical things that advances had been made, there were all sorts of other queer things. There were new odd religions, which might or might not do what they professed to do. At his club there was old General Lathrop, who had one evening bored him to death by insisting on making him look at portfolio after portfolio of drawings which the General had said had been executed by spirits in his own house.

Mr. Sorrell had never taken much interest in spiritualism and that sort of thing. He had always been too busy. But you could not help knocking against it. There was the drawing-room of his aunt, old Lady Wells, to which he went occasionally, out of a sense of duty, on a Sunday afternoon, and it was always full of estimable people, who told him the most extraordinary things that you could not in the ordinary way believe in. He had heard of the dead speaking from a distance, just as he heard of the stone-blind being cured by Christian science, the new Homoeopathy or by mere psychic force. There was nobody dead with whom he had ever wanted in the least to communicate; he had never been stone-blind. Indeed, he had never had any illness that, in his active life, he had not been able to counteract with a pill or two at the right moment. But he had always held that if he ever came to suffer from nerves, as the result of overwork, it would be a quite rational thing to put himself into the hands of Christian Scientists, or any other healers that claim supernatural gifts. He had never been anything but a perfectly normal, tolerant, open-minded man, without any creed in particular other than that the world was a very large place in which a number of odd things might happen.

And suddenly he asked the lady at his side:

“What year do you call this?”

The lady looked at him with large eyes that were rather mysterious, now that her temper had subsided.

“Have you travelled so far holy man?” she said. “It is the year of our Lord,
1326.”

Mr. Sorrell said:

“The deuce it is! 1326! What happened then?”

And very rapidly in his mind he ran through the dates of the Kings of England from the Conquest upwards. He could not get beyond Henry III, 1216. He positively could not remember a single date between that and the Battle of Agincourt, which he remembered was in the year 1415, because it was just 400 years before Waterloo. Neither of these dates helped him to the year 1326. The Battle of Bannockburn, which he knew happened in the reign of Edward II, must have been somewhere between 1216 and 1326.

For the moment he felt rather ashamed of his ignorance. It was perfectly true that no modern business man need bother his head about history. He would not mind betting that his friend Spicer and Wells, who was, next himself, the smartest man in the book publishing business — he would not mind betting that Spicer would not be able to get as far as Henry III. But the lady beside him was probably chock full of historical knowledge. After all, there was no reason why a woman should not be, for women had nothing else in particular to do, and could monkey with that sort of nonsense. At the same time, though it was nonsense, he did not care to confess himself ignorant even in parlour tricks. The lady would probably look down upon him, for she would not know much of his other varied and splendid attainments. So that he did not pursue his historical investigations any further. On the other hand, because it had struck him as odd that amongst her retainers there was not one in the prime of life, he asked her, in order to make conversation — that would be in the picture — for he was sure that she would not talk about anything modern — he asked her:

“Why is it that the youngest of your men appears to be sixty, and very tender on his feet? The eldest of your boys is that one carrying the large sword, and with golden curls. He can’t be more than fourteen.”

“Holy man,” the Lady Blanche answered, “can you be so ignorant of what is happening to-day as not to know that my husband is away at the wars in Scotland?”

“Oh, I didn’t know,” Mr. Sorrell said. To himself he thought: “Then I suppose that this
is
about the time of the battle of Bannockburn.” He continued aloud:

“I don’t see why that should leave you with such a singular collection of armed soldiers.”

“Holy man,” the lady said, “are you so ignorant as not to know that my husband will have taken with him all the able-bodied men to fight in the battle of our lord the King? So that in all the countryside there is no man so proper, so fearless, or so erect as yourself.”

“Well, it’s very kind of you to say that,” Mr. Sorrell said, “but I should have thought a husband would have wanted to leave a wife better protected.”

The lady’s eyes hardened; her chest heaved very high and swiftly under her green dress, and she began to speak so fast that Mr. Sorrell had the greatest difficulty in following her.

“There you speak the very truth of God,” she said; “this is what the lords of to-day are. There you have my lord and master gone away. A thousand or two thousand pounds he will squander, and what will he bring back of booty? Not one penny’s-worth. What honours? None at all, for he is embroiled with the Queen Mother past mending. Holy man, you do not know what a fool my lord and master is.”