Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1025
Our representatives are uncouth, unpleasant to the eye.... Heavens, if you could have lunched where the Patient New Yorker and I to-day lunched... and seen them come in one after the other to feed!
How could it be otherwise? We do not choose them for their intellect, their artistic intelligence, their altruism, the mellifluousness of their voices, their physical beauty, their abstract wisdom, their seasoned knowledge of the values of Life. We choose beings who hypnotically suggest that they and they only can fill our individual purses, our maws, our stores, our banking accounts with property that at the moment of their appeal for our suffrages belongs to the heathen stranger... or our fellow-countrymen.
We elect them because they assure us that they will help us to take the bread out of our brother’s orphan’s mouth and we get the rulers — and the double-crossing — that we deserve.
§
A riddle has puzzled me for more years than I care to compute. It is: What, then, became of the Golden Age on the Great Route? What occasioned their decadence, so that to-day our fates are in the hands of these creatures who at the “Globe” in the rue du Purgatoire are enabled by our toils to consume food much too good for them, and in the streets of Geneva endanger all our lives because their Diplomatic Impunity lets them in their beflagged automobiles disregard all the traffic regulations? Why should we be in their hands instead of in those of the grave and splendid Merchants from Cathay whose tabu protected them from all mischance, but whose fastest vehicle was a sled dragged over polished cobbles, just as to-day is the practice in the streets of Funchal?...
The Lake of Geneva, with its shadows and tortured waters, retains the hues it has had all day; but they are greyer and more faint as if they had sunk into blotting-paper. The gulls from the little breakwater are flying in a long trail off towards the sheltered greenswards in the mountains. Only the palimped Columbus on the flag-staff sticks to its great idea and remains on its egg-shaped point of vantage, so as, presumably, to catch the very earliest fera to-morrow morning — a dry-ish sort of a fish that not even the best sauce can render interesting.
(See how you can go astray when one is not en pays de comoissance. For, says my favourite gastronomic writer as to the fe’ra which I imagine is the char of the English Lakes:
“Poisson du genre corregone, voisin des saumons et TRES ESTIME par Us gourmets. La fera abonde dans le Lac de Génève.”)
At last, screaming protestingly, he too follows the common herd in the direction of the uplands, a prophet having no honour — though I should not have imagined that seagulls could be indigenous to Switzerland.
In any case dimness besets the visible world and one knows that it is growing late.... A faint, water-colour wash of last-minute sunset besets, like a deathbed message of the day, the opposite, too green shores. With that addition of reddishness, the watery autumn tints appear a little richly in squares round the estates attaching to villas and chalets.... I don’t know why, but that squared-out bluff with its faint greens, its faint, rich browns, its fading old-gold divisions irresistibly suggests to me a worn, painted blotting-paper case....
The Patient New Yorker, strolling whilst I sat and thought, has made the singular discovery that the name of the contractor who is carting off the excavated earth from the foundations of the new Palace of the Nations is BABEL.... At any rate, his lorries bear the inscription in enormous capitals: J. H. Babel. So, says that irreverent transatlantic, the new Palace of the League is literally the Tower of that name.
I say, desultorily, that the parallel is not exact. Jehovah won’t at least have to strike this place with a confusion of tongues.... And then it appears that that amiable refugee from Tsarism has no idea of the legend of what happened to the sons of Noah. I point out mildly that the deeds of Jehovah were rather those of a compatriot of my companion than of myself.
“But don’t you know,” I find myself interrupted, “that no god has any honour in his own country?... Besides, it’s time we went to the station.” And I am patiently but firmly conducted under the white portal crowned by the bas-relief of the Rape of Europa into that grey vista of descent towards the South that is never far from my thoughts. In the dimnesses of a torpedo-grey, iron-built Swiss train we debate on whether, in the Septentrional weather, we shall get off at Grenoble and for eleven francs eat hot pâté de lièvre with crayfish-tail sauce and gratiné dauphinois, or whether, courage failing before the chilly night, we shall go down the gradually broadening, misty valley of the Rhone to where, on the morrow, we may with some confidence expect to bask in the suns of Avignon beneath the towers of the Castle of the Popes.... The hotel-keepers of Grenoble are relatively archaic, and thus nearer the traditions of the Golden Age. They are kindly, considerate, and as ungrasping as it is possible for hotel-keepers to be. The hotel-keepers of the city of the Popes are as up-to-date as they make them. Having all been trained in the lesser caravanserais of Manhattan they are skilled in the preparation of the more nauseous breakfast cereals. They show neither wonder nor consideration, nor yet any faint pretence of hospitality to the transatlantic tourist, however amiable or patient.... So that one should visit Avignon as often as one can, but never sleep there. But one always does sleep there in the hope of waking in the morning sunlight which there has a quality of newness and gaiety unknown in any other city....
I am aware that that paragraph has grown a little incoherent.... That is done on purpose to indicate that whilst we discussed those alternatives and descended in the misty moonlight, under the high crags and past the ghost of Lac Bourget, and down the Alpine valleys with their chalet-suggesting architectures and continuous uplifting of dark poplar-spires, and past, eventually, Grenoble, so that in the end, towards midnight, we reached Avignon and ate a really horrible assiette anglaise that might have been concocted by the foremost hotel of either Broadway or the Strand, and slept in horribly exiguous rooms, for which we paid two-and-a-half times what they were worth. And in the morning we got drenched to the skin in going the few yards from the hotel to the station.... For we, too, like Ethiopia and the tropics in general, have our rainy season, and very necessary it is.... And don’t believe that we shall ever love Avignon less, for that can never be....
In short, from that apparently aimless discussion suggested by the name on a contractor’s trolley on the shores of Lac Léman, I had derived an idea.... And that idea so occupied my mind that I hardly paid attention to the discussion, or the valley, or the mists or the dim lake, or even the assiette anglaise — which I didn’t personally eat because the very sight of it suggested a certain expensive place of refection on Lower Fifth Avenue — or even to the drenched walk from hotel to station.... No, I had hardly paid more than half attention to these things because I was thinking of that disaster to the sons of Noah.
VI. INTERLUDE — II
VESTIGES OF CIVILIZATION
There remain to us, even in our abysmally fallen state, sufficient vestiges of the Golden Age and the Great Trade Route... sufficient to let us deduce that ancient civilization as accurately as scientists have deduced whole ages of our planet from the eyelash of a pterodactyl.... In the swift atrophying of our morals, physique, and intellect we are still distinguished by some hypocrisies, the simulacra of virtues that prevailed shortly after the Deluge. Very highly distinguished members of our oval body politic can still dimly discern the nearly forgotten truism of Poor Richard to the effect that honesty is the best policy. That itself is a late development from the time when a simple oval world of Small Producers had not conceived the idea of breaking the rules of barter.
On the great tabu-grounds of the Route where that bartering took place fairs are still carried on by itinerant vendors. Their visits are regarded as seasons of rejoicings and as a rule their trade is distinguished by greater honesty of transactions than are to be found in Detroit or Barcelona. You will find such fairs still going on seasonally at Samarkand and Nijni Novgorod; at Beaucaire and Horncastle; at the Saintes Maries, Vienna, Salamanca, and many other places. At most of them the vendors give a year’s credit to the purchasers and default happens very seldom.
Let us consider the romanichels who are the chief purveyors of these yearly festivals. You perceive a gaily dressed people reputed to come from a mysterious East. They are always given the names, that is to say, of cities to the East of whoever names them. West of Egypt they are called Egyptians; west of Rome, Egyptians or Romany chals; west of Prague, Egyptians, romanichels, or Bohemians. Their language contains many vestiges of Hindu, many of Latin. They will be found by roadsides all the way from the Pamirs to the Andes; they will be squatting over open-air anvils, telling dukkerin, charming spavins from your worst horses with bits of stick by day; by night they will whisper your best stallions from your fields. They descend with an aura of romance and dread out of the mists of time. We know their habits to have been much the same in the days of Herodotus, Marco Polo, or Colonel Lindberg. Even to-day they are more believed in than scientists. You say: “Oo-er” when you hear of the latest development of the radio; but when you pass the Egyptians by the hedgerow you think. You still accord to them the vestiges of a tabu-priesthood, the gift of divination, the right to trespass with only more or less of persecution by alarmed landlords; the prescriptive right to fire-wood, water, the wind on the heath, scrap metal, odds and ends of poultry yards.
Except in the Great Fair-grounds you never know where you will next meet them. You may go two years without seeing a gipsy; then they will be there in caravan after caravan. I had my car blocked years ago by a dozen gipsy caravans with dancing bears, broken-winded horses, and clothes-peg sellers, all across an elbow of the road outside Stanton, Va. A few months ago we were in a jam caused by gipsy caravans with dancing bears, broken-winded horses, and clothes-peg sellers. I would have sworn that they were the same caravans, bears, nags, and swarthy women, and that the same dark-eyed children peeped out from between the same lace curtains in the little windows. But that time they were being held up at the frontier station between Italy and France... on their way to their great racial festival at the Saintes-Maries.... On the Great Trade Route between Marseilles and Barcelona.
That happens once a year on the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin when the wild bulls of the Camargue are blessed for the mises à mort. The Saintes-Maries is a village on the shingle edge of the great swampy plain. Gipsies at that season come from all the world over — yes, from all the world over. From the Pamirs as from the Pampas, from Kirk-
Yetholm and Grenada as from Poughkeepsie and Whitechapel, they come to maintain by marriage a little of their racial purity... and to be blessed, all without religion as they are, by such a convocation of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and choristers as will hardly be found at any other yearly ceremony of the Church of Rome.
It is a singular homage, paid by a usually exclusive cult, to a practice long since cast down and with its ministrants debased and discredited. I am not asking the reader to attach to the romanichel the sort of green-sickness of sentimentality that was thrown over him by Borrow and his imitators. The gipsy is a hard business man with the habits of theft that distinguish all men of business — no more and no less. He makes a lot of money disposing of spavined horses with just the aplomb of the canning company that every month is fined $50 in a North Western state for selling cans of putrid salmon to all the races of mankind. But he is as near as we can come to-day to survival from the original merchants who were tabu. And the truths and legends of the Saintes-Maries are worth the attention of the serious who desire to know some truth as to what this oval world of ours once was... and might be again.
The village of the Saintes-Maries on the Camargues exists because it was there that the female relatives and domestics of the Redeemer took refuge, landing after the Crucifixion. You are to imagine the connections of an executed felon leaving a land where they had met with as little honour as had been bestowed on their God.
According to the legend that you can still hear in that hinterland of the Mediterranean shores the Holy Women were stoned to the water’s-edge of the port of Jaffa and there, by kindly rescuers, incontinently bundled into the boat that you may see in the fortress-shaped church in the village of the Holy Maries. Jumping ashore in that place those Ladies came upon the gipsies who, with their moving houses, were going as they still go, from fair to fair on the way to Spain. One legend even has it that those gipsies had in the old time sold to Our Lady an ass. And that ass bore Her in Her flight and came to have, one day, palms before its feet, in Jerusalem. So St. Mary the Virgin and St. Mary the Magdalene and St. Martha became friends with the déambulant merchants, though it was natural that those descendants of holy traders, being already come into contempt, should be thicker with St. Martha the servant than with her holy mistresses. And the gipsies built cabins for the saints on the sea-shore and gave them wine and honey and hens and calves and such things as Egyptians pilfer along the hedgerows. And St. Martha became the lady and patron of those wandering tribes — as she so remains to this day.
Because came the day when Our Lady was assumed into Heaven and St. Martha was laid to rest in Tarascon church, where you may still see her tomb. Then among their pots and pans and tinkering and anvils the gipsies said that, having now friends in high places, they might well enter among the blessed. And a great meiné accompanied St. Martha to paradise doors. But St. Peter went among them where they clamoured for entry and sought to drive them away with blows. They persisted and the door-keeper sent for the Son of the House. Our Lord gave sorrowfully His verdict that since they were unshriven they could not enter in.
The gipsies continued to clamour saying that they had friends in high places. And St. Peter went away to seek the Master, leaving the Son of the House to keep the lodge. Then St. Martha ran quickly to Her Lady that was walking on the battlements. She showed Her the gipsies crying out below and said it was great pity that those people should be forbidden entry into paradise. Aforetime they had sold Our Lady so fine an ass that every ass since that day has borne a cross above his withers. Yet, those very people had built them cabins on their coming into the Narbonnais from the sea and given them wine and honey and hens and calves and such things as the Egyptians pilfer along the hedgerows....
So those saints stood on the battlements of heaven knowing full well that their menfolk after their kind would insist to abide by the laws and would forbid the entry in of those gipsies. So then Our Lady, like Rapunzel of whom another story tells, undid her snood and let her long plaits fall down over the battlements and let those gipsies climb Her plaits until they stood in the streets of Heaven.
And those saints prayed so long of our Heavenly Father that it was decreed that one day in the year — to wit, on the feast of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin — the gipsies should be blessed by Holy Church at the village of the Saintes-Maries where it stands on the verge of the tideless sea and so should earn the joys of Heaven for them and their seed in perpetuity.
§
It is a good legend. Just as impressionist art tells things more truly than photographs, so its story reveals the true history of the earth far more truly than it can ever be revealed by the scientific historian. For nothing is more invariable in the course of history than that when new faiths seep into and overrun countries the priests of the old faiths fall into poverty and disrepute. But the ancient tenets remain strongly in the memory of the peoples; almost to the end of time, traces of the earlier religion remain inextricably mixed in with the faiths that have become fashionable. And the priests of the older faith are reputed to retain mysterious gifts that have never descended to the clergy who have succeeded them in their cures. In rural England if the country people have occasion to have a ghost laid they will call in thirteen Anglican clergymen to pronounce exorcisms. But if that fails they call in a Roman priest, and at the first shower of his holy water they will tell you the unhappy spirit is laid at rest for ever. Or in Latin Catholic countries if the holy water of the priest fails to keep the murrain from flocks they will first have the shepherds — who from their continually remaining solitary with their sheep are acquainted with the old dispossessed Gods that still haunt mistletoed oak groves — will first have the shepherds perform incantations that the Church forbids. Then they will have the gipsies do things with twisted twigs of hazel called patterans. After that, so they say, the murrain will certainly leave their beasts.... And have we not all lately seen how the Germans first extirpated the Jews because they slew the Saviour of Humanity, and then, finding that their financial credit was not thus to be established, fell upon the priests and re-established the cult of Wodin and Thor, who they say flourished in and produced the Heroic-Blood-splashed Age from the Lueneberger Heide to the Teutoburger Wald.
It is thus always, in the minds of the people, that Old Gods presided over fortunate and vanished times, the “our day” of succeeding generations growing steadily more and more hard. King Arthur and his knights sleep in one cave awaiting the call; Charlemagne and his paladins sit in another, their beards growing through the table beneath them; I have heard peasants in Germany say that nothing will be well till der Alte comes again, only der Alte is so fast asleep — the Old One being Bismarck whom I remember to have seen walking along the Poppelsdorfer Allée, after his fall, his head dejected and his great hound dejected also, following him, his immense dewlaps almost touching his master’s heel.... Thus in one life-time of a man a solar myth of an age of gold has developed itself.... In a country that has surely been sorely tried.
I have had a most curious confirmation of what I have above just written. My landlord and his wife, a lady of primitive type and great volubility, motored down this evening from the Savoy Alps, having done the journey with unusual speed and prosperity — doing, in fact, in nine hours what as a rule they have needed two days to do. It is true they had a new car! The lady threw herself into one of our armchairs and exclaimed to her triumphant husband and the bewildered Biala, who was suddenly thus wrapt from the contemplation of the city of Washington that she was putting on paper:
