Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 224
“But for that,” he said, “you may be sure that my small income would not let me live in such great rooms as you will see.”
It was at this point that there came into his head the idea of magnifying his poverty in the Prince’s eyes. For surely, the Prince, who had been so prodigal to the little newsboy, would at least use his influence towards Mr. Todd’s promotion. Not, indeed, that Mr. Todd desired promotion for the sake of the increase of salary, but so that he would the more easily be able to impose himself on that part of the world that ignored his influence.
The stone steps of the staircase that they climbed as if it were an Alpine ascent reverberated and echoed coldly to their footsteps. They appeared to aspire to eternal heights; the immensely high and blank walls were a flat and glooming surface of shiny, dark wall-paper, enormously tall at the turns and landings.
They stopped, however, at the first floor. In a room uncomfortably too tall for its breadth — a room so tall that a little old woman beside a tea equipage had an aspect of toys set out for the play of a giant’s child, and the pictures on the walls were so near the floor that it appeared that there could not have been in the house a ladder up which to climb and hang them — the light from the north was dim and chilly even on that July afternoon. Immensely high windows occupied the whole of one narrow wall, and through them, as if at a weary distance, the sun made a haze of light upon the foliage of the spindly plane trees with their black and piebald barks. The whole room — the whole house — had the air of having been built for tall, cold-blooded, and spindly creatures; like the plane trees themselves, that in the triangular gardens were “drawn up” towards the light and air, so that the little old woman seemed not so much to sit on the floor of a room as to be encamped at the bottom of a well.
Light-blue-eyed, thin-haired, with thin delicate and bony mittened wrists, she sat, her hands folded on her apron of black taifeta, a little lace cap like a doyley on her hair, that was the colour of melting snow, and watched the steam coming from the tripod silver kettle on the bamboo table before her. She was filled with two anxieties — the one that her husband had “been run over”; the other, that he should have been kept late by some worrying “case” in the court. If he were run over it would be a catastrophe terrible because it was so unknown; if he were worried by a “case” it would be a catastrophe terrible enough because it was so well known. He would arrive tired, needing his tea; he would quarrel with young Bracondale, who was courting Margaret. There would be a scene. (She could not understand how young Bracondale, who was such a dear boy, could so stand up to the husband she found so overwhelming. But for the matter of that, Margaret herself “stood up to” her father — and she was such a good girl. But there were so many things that Mrs. Todd could not understand in the relationships of these beings whom she loved, dreaded, and intervened between with little flutters of her mittened hands and little inaudible ejaculations.) Only, if there were a troublesome “case” at the court: a rough who back-talked at Todd; a servant-girl gone wrong who refused to give the young man up (And the magistrate, incomprehensibly deaf to Todd’s arguments against early and improvident marriages — or incredibly, sentimentally good-humoured and good-natured with “poor girls.”
“in trouble,” would inevitably try to marry the girl to the youth.) — if such a “case” were at the court, and the inevitable “scene” with young Bracondale occurred, it would mean a sleepless night for her at the shouting missionary’s side. And the sleepless night would mean a new scene with Margaret in the morning, a night after that only less sleepless and so down a descending vista of days agonised by waiting to see in what humour Todd would return from work, and nights punctuated by her patient “Yes, dears,” and “Of course, Todds.” Until that storm would subside as, gradually, Todd, by sleeping a little later, made up for the lost hours of slumber and recovered his equanimity by meeting with a succession of submissive, broken-spirited or merely hypocritical criminals. She knew — Mrs. Todd — that she was not clever. And, at times, between the cleverness of her daughter who insisted — against frenzied clamour — on studying “Art” at a place called “the Slade,” and her husband who appeared to her to be portentously — to be hierarchically — gifted, and what with young Bracondale who occupied an unsatisfactory place at the bank because he was “so clever” with his pencil, and her husband’s friends who talked about innumerable incomprehensible things from Etruscan vases to the Higher Criticism, she wondered — she did not repine — at the marvellous dispensation of Providence that sent her — who was only clever at crochet work — into contact with the affairs of so many gifted creatures.
She figured Providence, indeed, as having much the nature of her husband — as expecting improbable things of her. For Mr. Todd allotted to her as a duty the regulating of the love affairs of Margaret and young Bracondale. To her!
“My dear,” she would say to her daughter Margaret in the morning, “I know I am not clever. But don’t you think, don’t you think” — and here she would appeal longingly with her faded blue eyes—” that it would be better not to wait for Arthur quite so near the bank door?”
She would indeed confide her sorrows almost more willingly to the little maid who, behind an always smutty face, hid an intelligence as bird-like, as limpid, and as affectionate as that of her mistress. She would say she did wish Miss Margaret would do her hair differently, wear gowns sometimes a little different from that blue thing with the embroidery on the yoke, and not make herself quite so cheap to Mr. Arthur, though he was a dear boy; at least they would have called it making herself cheap in her young days. But things were so different now, and Miss Margaret was so clever.
Her pale blue eyes looked up with an expression of timid dread to the figure of the guest that her husband brought. It would be saying too much — if we set down that her first emotion was an expression of thankfulness to Providence that this was not a clever person — it would be saying too much to say that she lived under a continual obsession that was a dread of those who were clever. She was indeed thankful and proud that her husband should attract the eminent, even if the eminent were apt to be hard, cold, and self-centred. But to her lonely soul the sight of this stranger, who was so good to look upon, was like a warmth in that chilly room, a companion in her loneliness, relieved as it was only by the companionship of little Milly with the smutty face.
For the merest shadow of a pause the face of the stranger expressed dissatisfaction — a sort of aloof dismay as if at the chilliness of the room — and she felt her mind uttering the words —
“Poor dear; it is evident a person used to his surroundings will find these horribly dismal.”
For it was evident that, to her, this stranger came from a home where things were all fine, and incontinently she remembered heather and uplands and blue sky — the land she belonged to. She had not thought of them for many days.
But his hesitation appeared to be the merest pause, the hesitation for a word. The sunlight, striking on a window-pane across the gardens, was reflected all over his figure, and as suddenly he appeared natural and to be where he should be.
Her husband was approaching her with an empressement, with an agitated deference and an air of whispering that she felt denoted an altogether unusual eventuality.
“I shall go and get some of the best tea,” he said. “This is his.. He hesitated between saying” His Highness” and “His Royal Highness.”
“You shall call me Mr. Apollo.” The voice came from the stranger.
And immediately it seemed to this faded little old woman that her husband’s strange, agitated air, his minatory spectacles, his waterfall of beard that seemed to say, “You fool! Mind you don’t commit a faux pas” — all these things that at other times would have made her tremble with nervous apprehension, because she never could seem to say or do the right thing for his clever people — all these things faded a little. It was as if she were certain that in running to get the best tea — when they were alone or there was no other guest than young Bracondale they always drank “kitchen tea” — in hastening with a lightness and nimbleness that she had forgotten so that they seemed new again to her, she would be doing the exactly right thing. For this stranger would accept the tea and jam as symbols of a desire to serve. And, indeed, he smiled....
On the stairs the missionary, who had excused himself to his guest, ran out after her to whisper the query, “Had she any cakes? Why hadn’t she any cakes? She ought to have cakes always in the house, and he must run himself to fetch them from the baker’s at the corner. And didn’t she know that this was a prince — a real prince whom he was trying to be of use to?”
He spoke in tones hoarse with emotion and hurried with the desire to fetch cakes very swiftly. And hurriedly and tyrannously he extracted from her the two shillings that was to pay for them — for that came out of the housekeeping money.
But to herself she said that the stranger was not a prince — or if he were a prince, he was very much more. She felt like a girl with her first lover.
In the room that was too tall for him, illumined by the reflection from the window in a flood of light dappled by the leaves of the plane trees, the stranger very leisurely ran his eyes over each wall, over the nicknacks on the mantelpiece, the pale blue and pink embroideries of bead-work, the brass fire-screen in the form of a swallow-tailed banner that was screwed to the chilly marble of the mantelpiece. His motions were very slow — precisely as if he were a creature who never acted, but moved always in a rhythm that should not interrupt his thoughts; his features had no expression, as if the odd, bizarre, and useless objects that his eyes rested on were neither pleasing nor distasteful. At the window he paused to look at the backs of a young girl with fair hair plaited and coiled round her neck who leant over the balustrade elbow to elbow with a young man wearing a straw hat and white tennis shoes. They were talking with a rapt intensity — about whether you could express the psychic emotions of Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Vase” in terms of paint.
The young man was tall and dark, with a very slight moustache. The girl was low-shouldered and very fair. They kept their heads very close together, and spoke to each other with a serious politeness that had about it something very formal, as if each accorded to the other’s opinion a great weight — as if, indeed, they were solving that particular tiny clause of the riddle of the universe.
The young man would say —
“No; if the functions of paint are properly observed, you could not say that the matter of a poem could be expressed by them.”
And she —
“Yes; but don’t you think that by arranging your colours in a certain pattern you might induce just such an emotion in the observer as he would feel in reading the poem?”
From time to time he would touch gently the point of her little linger nail.
Suddenly he ejaculated —
“Who’s playing the pianolo? Your father’s not back?”
The blatant tones of the pianolo, playing a waltz, whirled over their heads, and they turned in unison, advancing side by side to peer in through the glass. They saw, dimly, a stranger sitting before the instrument. It played, but they could not observe that he went through any of the rolling and snorting motions usual to the player of mechanical players. The waltz pealed out — the Turkish Tinkle Waltz....
“I say,” Arthur Bracondale ejaculated, “that’s not the Turkish Tinkle!”
They listened with their heads, each in unison, a little on one side. Sound came from the piano in rhythm, in masses, in huge and triumphal chords; they died low; they swelled out again.
CHAPTER VI
ARTHUR BRACONDALE pushed the French window inwards, after a moment’s colloquy with Margaret. Going unheard in his tennis shoes over the carpet, he stood at the stranger’s side.
“I say!” he said. “Is that a little thing of your own?”
It was part of the pleasant affectation of these young people to show no reverence for any one; and Margaret, standing still in the window, admired him very much, for he was keeping to this compact of theirs. (“Reverence is all bosh,” was one of the laws that they had laid down. “If our elders have the better of us in the number of their experiences, we have the advantage of them in not having expended so much vital power.”) But Margaret was subconsciously aware that she could not thus have addressed an entire stranger. She had never so much admired her lover.
The stranger looked up mildly at his interlocutor.
“A little thing of my own,” he said.
“But I say...” Bracondale ejaculated. “You aren’t...”
The sound of the music had died down a little as if to let him speak; the stranger was sitting perfectly still, looking up at the young man.
“You aren’t doing anything!” Bracondale said. “It’s playing — but you aren’t doing anything.”
The stranger’s hand just rested on the needle that regulated the tempo.
“No, I am not doing anything to the machine,” he said.
Bracondale fell back half a pace.
“I say, Margaret!” he said. “The thing’s playing and he is not doing anything.” A sudden tone of compunction came into his voice —
“That is, if you would not mind Margaret coming to look...” and he added, “sir.”
For it is evident that if we do not reverence our elders for the number of their experiences, we must be deferential to a man who can play a mechanical piano without touching it.
And the hurriedly uttered “Your Highness” of Mr. Todd as he re-entered the room gave both the young people fresh cause for excited speculation. They had not — not ever — discussed how they would behave to an elder who could play the pianola without touching it and one who appeared to be a prince. They had not, in fact, considered the problem at all. For it was the problem of behaviour to a wonderful man. This stranger was certainly wonderful, And it must be remembered that they had never expected to meet any one wonderful enough to give them emotions. For after all, didn’t they feel — if they had never expressed it in words — that they were the most wonderful creatures in the world?
It was therefore with some of the rapt admiration he imagined that he reserved for Margaret alone that the young man watched the stranger during the duration of the perfunctory meal. None of his actions, none of his most minute motions escaped attention.
The meal was so simple because Mr. Todd had not after all purchased the cakes. Half-way to the confectioner’s at the corner it occurred to him that if he wished to impress the Prince with a sense of his poverty as well as his merit, an absolute frugality would accomplish this end better than, in his pet phrase, the stalled oxen of a German baker. And he acquired an additional satisfaction from the thought that he had extracted from his wife’s housekeeping money two shillings that he had not spent and would omit to return.
To Mrs. Todd’s apologies the stranger returned the answer that the fascination of food that was a gift came from the spirit of hospitality in which it was done. The gods, he added seriously, considered hospitality the highest of the virtues that was humanly attainable — the lack of it was the most serious of crimes.
“You will remember,” he said, “when Philemon and Baucis arose in the morning they saw at their feet a lake covering the inhospitable city that had refused shelter to a godhead. I say ‘you will remember’ — but it may be that that once most famous of all my acts has not reached your ears.”
Whilst Mrs. Todd was humbly saying that indeed she had not heard the story, and concluding with the words that she knew she was not a clever woman, Arthur Bracondale noted swiftly the names Philemon and Baucis. And because of the Prince’s proficiency with the pianola, and because also he remembered to have heard of an opera called by these two names, it came swiftly into his head that the Prince was a composer. He had heard of princes who were composers. And he decided to tell Margaret that they could make up their minds really to admire this prince. Normally — as good Socialists, as members of the Fabian Society — the pleasures of admiring a prince were forbidden to them. But — a composer... A singular phenomenon attracted his meticulous and awakened attention.
Mr. Todd, who had used the time he had not spent on purchasing cakes in running hurriedly through the article that Lemprière’s Dictionary devoted to the God Apollo — >Mr. Todd battled against a sudden and unusual sinking that had come into the pit of his stomach at the Prince’s lecture on hospitality. (The fact that he had refrained from purchasing the cakes had become most unreasonably and blackly terrifying to his conscience.) Mr. Todd battled against this feeling by bravely, but with nervous loquacity, launching into a lecture on the state of classical learning in England.
“Your Highness is not to think,” he said, “that we are all Goths and Barbarians. If our more modem foundations devote the major part of their energies to studies more in accord with the spirit of the time and more profitable, I can assure you that in our ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, of which your Highness will doubtless have heard...”
“I have never heard of them,” the Prince said.
The missionary bowed his head deferentially in sign that the fact that the fame of these institutions had never reached the august remotenesses in which the Prince, in his estimation, must dwell — this fact was eminently fitting. For, coming from the University of Cupar, Mr. Todd had little estimation for the southern institutions. Nevertheless he continued —
“These universities are of an extreme age, dating, I believe, back to the time of Alfred, the King who — who burned the cakes” — Mr. Todd paused—”or I should say the King who first translated the Bible into our tongue. And, indeed, these universities carry the study of the dead languages almost to extreme lengths.”
Mr. Todd paused to regain his breath.
“Moreover,” he continued, “I would have you think that a moderate — not in any way a specialist’s — knowledge of the classics is considered to be essential to every man of any position or education. For instance, I myself studied Latin as a boy at school, and if I have a little forgotten some of the details... well... Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis,” he quoted, being accustomed to see this phrase at least twice a year in a religious paper. “Nevertheless, for instance, as regards the heathen deity from whom your Highness was good enough just now to claim descent, I may tell you what remains floating in my memory....”
