Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 232
“I think you have very squalid appointments,” he said. “They were more gracious in the last house that knew me as an honoured guest.”
“My cousin Eugene is so far wealthier,” she said.
“In your cousin Eugene’s house I was a guest, yet not very honoured. It was in an older house that I think you have never heard of.”
“We have not travelled much,” Frances said.
“You might travel the world over and find no trace of that house,” he answered; “not one reed of the roof remains, nor one stone upon another, and beneath where the hearthstone was a fox has its burrow.”
“But still you cannot sit here,” Frances Milne said.
Nevertheless, when Mr. Clarges pushed his way in at the still open door, the stranger sat still at the table, his elbow beside the chopping-board; and at the sight of him Mr. Clarges frowned. Mrs. Milne was standing over the jar which contained the rabbit; the gas stove was alight, and the smell of the meat filled the air.
“Where is Alfred?” Mr. Clarges asked, and in his sturdy and bristling personality, holding an umbrella that he carried as if in protest against the summer weather, there was a moody and furious jealousy.
When he heard that Alfred Milne had not yet returned from work he uttered an “Ah!” in which his emotions were fully voiced.
Mrs. Milne looked as if deprecatingly at her new guest — as if indeed she dreaded an outburst of anger from one or the other of them. But his eyes were settled mildly upon the draining-board that descended above the bath.
And suddenly, with a cracked and violent laugh, Mr. Clarges burst out —
“Have you heard about the Krakroffs?” He paused, and then cried out —
“What about them? You’ve heard of them, I suppose?
Well then” — and his voice was full of triumph —
“I’ve discovered the code they use. It’s the old one of Pantalizzi. They’re just vulgar conjurers. I knew it...”
The Krakroffs were a pair of thought-readers who, having come — with rumours of disgrace, undue influence, and alluring mystery — from the Russian Imperial Court, were attracting large and bewildered audiences twice a day to the Esmeralda Music-Hall. They were said on the one hand to be brother and sister, on the other to be husband and wife, or in the alternative to be merely twin souls, mutually interpretative and attracted to each other irresistibly across space as, by radio-telegraphy, at great distances, needle vibrates to needle. This last, at least, had been the account of their nature afforded by their advance agent, circulated to the Press, and adopted eloquently by the manager of the Esmeralda.
And for the week that had ensued since his precipitate flight from More’s Buildings, Mr. Clarges had engaged himself in unmasking what he considered to be this new scandal. It was a task all the more congenial to him in that he had been so deeply wounded by the attitude of Mrs. Milne towards the man whom he took to be a new and more dangerous impostor of the Krakroff kidney. So that, with a new fancy that seemed to rejuvenate him, he had first foraged and ferreted in the library of the British Museum a great number of secret codes that had been used by thought-readers of all the ages, and having codified these, he had spent all his afternoons and evenings at the Esmeralda, sitting in different parts of the house and testing code after code. He had even — welcomed by the manager as a Press investigator — penetrated beneath the stage whilst the séances were proceeding, to make sure that there were no secret wires, no speaking-tubes, through which Krakroff, standing in the middle of the stalls, could communicate with his affinity, who was seated blindfolded and with her back to the audience.
Mr. Clarges had tested the Nourse code, which consisted of an arrangement of the initial letters of each word used in the audience; the Jamrach code, which is managed by gestures of the hand reflected into a tiny mirror concealed under the bandage of the thought-reader; the famous code of Tchehuza, the Croatian; and that of Juradani, a Roman gipsy of the eighteenth century who had signalled to his confederate by means of extremely small inflections of the voice, as described by the French traveller Dubois in his Voyage à Rome in 1762. Mr. Clarges had in fact given the Krakroffs the credit of having studied their subject sufficiently to have adopted a code of an ancient or an erudite kind. The Pantalizzi code, on the other hand, was of so childish a description — a merely vocal adaptation of the Morse telegraphic system — that Mr. Clarges had hardly thought of considering it at all. It had in fact been invented — as a game for drawing-rooms — by a Signor Pantalizzi, a humble assistant of the inventor of wireless telegraphy, and, published in the frivolous columns of the Mondo, had been desultorily adopted as a pastime by Roman society some nine months before when Mr. Clarges had happened to be in Rome. But the Romans, though they were then at the height of their enthusiasm for Signor Marconi’s installation, had been too lazy to progress beyond a mild interest in Mr. Pantalizzi’s game.
But sitting, for the moment baffled, in his box the night before, Mr. Clarges had been overwhelmed by the conviction that this must be the Pantalizzi code. Krakroff, standing up in the stalls, with a huge volubility, in a broken English, arbitrarily pronounced, had to every objector and before every demonstration so stuttered, commenced sentences, recommenced them, uttered them at first in a language presumably Russian, translating them on the moment, as if confusedly, into French, and then retranslating them quickly into English. This had gained for him the sympathies of his audience, who perceived in him an eager and gifted genius struggling with the intricacies of tongues. So that when, after one of these painful displays, he stepped across the gangway and took from a blushing lady a small object which he held aloft, they restrained their breathing whilst the shrouded figure on the stage exclaimed clearly and without hesitation —
“A large gold coin. On the obverse a king on horseback, on the reverse a rose.”
The audience cheered themselves hoarse.
But Mr. Clarges, grim and rejoicing, had gone straight away to the house of a friend of his who was an undersecretary to the Post Office. And that same afternoon, with a gratified telegraphist beside him, Mr. Clarges had occupied a stall just behind the eloquent thought-transferrer. And then it came: amidst the delighted snorts and chuckles of Mr. Clarges the telegraphist dotted down on his tablet: —
“Gentlemen” was dash, dot, dot.
“Lady M - dot, dash.
“Ami” = dash, dot.
“Antipathie” = dash, dot, dot, dash.
It was possible to hear Krakroff say — to watch it coming out on the telegraphist’s tablet underneath the patter of the charlatan: —
“H. (meaning Homme), fav. rou, (meaning favoris rouges), mont, or (montre d’or), Gen. 12796 (Geneva 12796).”
And as Krakroff closed the watch, the voice of his affinity on the stage said dully —
“A gentleman with chestnut whiskers offers a watch manufactured at Geneva. Its number is 12796.”
Pushing imperiously and irresistibly forward, the old gentleman thrust the telegraphist’s paper into Krakroff’s hand.
“Tell her to say what that is,” he hissed. He hissed because he was so excited, and at the same time he did not wish to shout, for the exposure of these charlatans was not to be then. It was to take place before a larger audience.
Krakroff, a blue-shaven, dark, obscure-looking little man, glanced down at the tablet. He started in the least and smiled immediately with unction.
“What is it that Monsieur wishes?” he said. “That my sister, my spouse of the mind, this shall read? Monsieur is perhaps not aware that, as I very often have told the audience, I cannot transfer to my soul-spouse more than I myself understand. I see an object Very well. I ‘describe it very well... But, puisque je vous dis, M’sieur...” And he looked into Mr. Clarge’s eyes with an unctuous and impertinent grin.
“If you think, M’sieur,” he said in a low voice, “that this is the explanation...” He spread his hands abroad like the host of a small inn and shrugged his shoulders.
Mr. Clarges shrugged his own shoulders, spun round on his heels, and walked up the aisle. From the stage there came in monotonous tones the words, “A little, clever, old gentleman offers my spouse a tablet on which is written some signs my spouse not understand, and the words, ‘H. fav. rou. mont. or Gen. 12796.’”
Mr. Clarges shrugged his shoulders, rubbed his hands, snorted, chuckled with delight, and having got out of the theatre, pushed the telegraphist into one cab and took another to More’s Buildings.
CHAPTER III
IT was frequently said by those students who went to More’s Buildings that Mrs. Milne was a most dangerous woman. And by that they meant not that she had any coquetry, but that she had none at all. She had in its place a singular tranquillity, a power of giving up her whole attention — and, as it were, of giving the whole of herself with her attention — so that it was as if indeed she gave very much more than she had any idea of giving. Thus some men — the worse sort — misunderstood her, and she seemed to them to lead them on. You could not, they imagined, be so seriously listened to by a woman unless she had an inclination to you. Another type of man grew to find her indispensable. The former type suffered very much after contact with her. It was said to have been because of her, for instance, that young Wilkinson took so lamentably to chloral; it is certain that, when she married Alfred Milne, Fletcher, who ought to have had an excellent career before him, accepted a minor post in the Secondary Schools of Nagpore. But those whose thoughts did not progress further than being as often with her as they could, they, upon the whole, had the better time. And one of these was certainly Mr. Clarges.
He had never before been so eager to expose a scandal, simply because never before had the exposure seemed to affect him so personally. It had seemed to him that, by bursting in upon her just before Alfred Milne came home, by exclaiming —
“You’ve heard of the Krakroffs?” and then —
“It’s the Pantalizzi code they use” — by this utter and overwhelming exposure of a pair of charlatans he would expose before her eyes all charlatans at once — all priests, all mediums, all the professors and all the scientists of the open mind. They would crumble away before her eyes — and more particularly this would be the case with the Mr. Apollo he had met at her house on the last Thursday.
It would be putting it too crudely to say that he was furiously jealous of the stranger as a man: it was as an influence that he detested him. He detested him more than he disliked Carver, the Cockney, or the young man from Norfolk, or any of the Socialists. He could always count upon himself to “smash” them. But this man, who appeared to represent that most detrimental of all things, Religious Belief — this man, Mr. Clarges was fully aware, had excited him to such a pitch of irritation that he had not been able even to think of any words. He had come off rather badly — and he had left Mrs. Milne, with her open mind, listening to the stranger. No, it was not jealousy, for Mr. Clarges had imagined that this creature would never come near the Milnes again. He too was a charlatan; a bird of prey, flying at large game. And, passing South Kensington Museum, Mr. Clarges had met Margery Snyde a few days ago, and had had from her lips a comparatively composed but still a vivid account of the miracles of Mr. Apollo, along with the information that that stranger himself had taken up his quarters with Eugene Durham and was paying a round of calls with him. It all suited, most admirably, Mr. Clarge’s book.
For he would be able to demonstrate that, like Mr. Krakroff, Mr. Apollo was a vulgar adventurer, battening on the rich till they could launch him on a career of extracting money and applause from the large public. That was exactly what the Krakroffs had done. The low assistants of a French conjurer, they had succeeded in taking in and pillaging some idle Russian aristocrats until they were ready to launch out upon the imbecile British public. Mr. Apollo, he hoped to be able to prove when he got his information bureau to work up his antecedents, would turn out to be the low assistant of some Levantine or American hypnotist.
He did not so much imagine himself talking to Mrs. Milne seriously for a quarter of an hour alone, before her husband’s return; he willed it, imperiously. It was to be so.
Thus there overwhelmed him when he stood in the kitchen doorway a sense of wild and of impotent fury. Here, actually in the kitchen, alone with her, there sat this charlatan, obdurately nonchalant, established, and as it were immovable. It was not — to do Mr. Clarges justice — with any idea of questioning her standard of manners that Mr. Clarges choked. He did not imagine that she was carrying on a clandestine flirtation, though actually it remotely chilled his slightly old-fashioned sense of the domestic decencies that she permitted him to see her cooking. It would have been better, he thought, if she had sat with him in the dining-room instead of pushing a fork into a jar of meat on a stove.
But he was aware that, since the stranger had come back, his own argument would be weakened, and he was desperately anxious that the fellow should take himself off. He had probably been there some time; he must know that the Milnes could not possibly afford to have guests at their slender meals. It seemed to him — and he was as jealous for their pockets as for their creed — an outrage. Thus it was almost a scream of rage that came from his lips when he realised, with a sense of the stranger’s utter immobility, his intolerable leisure, his air of having all the time in the world on his hands. And almost while he uttered the words that he had meant to be so triumphant (“Have you heard about the Krakroffs? It is the code of Pantalizzi that they use!” ) — almost while he uttered the words he felt that they were dismally ineffectual. And he added, with a jealous pang, what he felt to be the truth —
“But perhaps that does not interest you.”
Frances Milne said slowly —
“No; I am afraid I am not interested in the Krakroffs. It appears to be something fictitious that has been got up by the papers.”
Mr. Apollo slowly turned his head upon the old man clutching his umbrella in the doorway.
“Later,” he said, “if you will, you shall explain to me the methods of the Krakroffs and their code. At the moment I was explaining to this woman upon what terms I am willing to remain a guest beneath her roof.”
Mr. Clarges opened his little eyes behind their gleaming glasses; his lips moved; he swallowed in his throat.
“Then no doubt,” he said at last, “I’m in the way. I’d better go. I’m not wanted.”
“Zeus forbid,” the stranger said, “that you should be unhonoured in this house, for I think you have befriended these kindly people, and do you think that I would aid them to ingratitude?”
“They never had a penny piece of mine,” the old man said. “They never asked it.”
“Old man,” he got his answer, “what have I had to do with gold or pence that I should not know that benevolence is not measured out in coins? But I am aware that, after your fashion, you have sought to teach them the things that are truth.”
The old man heard Alfred Milne’s feet upon the stairs and his heavy breathing when he stood in the doorway. His eyes were bright and shining, his cheeks flushed.
“Mr. Clarges!” he uttered friendlily, and then “You.” For his eyes had fallen on his guest.
He had run up the great number of stairs very rapidly, and, as sometimes happened, this caused him to lose his breathing, and his head swam.
“I thought...” he gasped, “that you had gone off with Eugene Durham.”
“I went off with him,” Mr. Apollo answered, “but I have returned to you.” He moved his head slowly round to Mrs. Milne. “I think,” he said, “that since you have a new guest we should eat in your guest-chamber: it is fitting that you should honour him.”
“Was my wife going to let you eat here?” Alfred Milne asked.
“I have spoken of many things with your wife,” the answer came to him, “for I think that whilst I stay here I shall remain with you.”
“But—” Alfred Milne began.
“If you have hearts willing for my entertainment, that is enough,” he heard.
His head still swam a little with his hastening up the stairs. And, indeed, his hastening itself had been attended with a new quickening of the pulse. He had been saddened during the day by a visit from Arthur Bracondale, and the sadness had not left him during the school day or during his walk home.
For Arthur Bracondale had come to ask him if he knew where the Prince lived. And he had had to answer that he did not — that the Prince had gone away with Eugene Durham. It wasn’t likely that he would keep in touch with such poor people. And a heavy weariness had settled down upon him.
But as he had opened the heavy, red outer door far below, whilst still his hand was upon the inner handle, he had heard a sound coming down the whispering stones of the damp staircase. He had run upstairs. And now he knew that there, far down below, the sound that he had heard had been the voice of the Prince, speaking levelly, as he had first heard it, in the dusty air of the police court and in the cool twilight of the gardens.
“But how long will you stay with us?” he asked. “For a day? For a week? What sort of time?”
“For how long would you have me stay?” he heard, asked him as if with a mocking tenderness. He could not bring himself to say “For good,” because of a certain shyness, a restraint that always kept him from uttering such superlatives as he had in his heart. He had never even called his wife “dearest.”
He looked into her eyes; she was still standing above the little crock on the gas stove, and he brought out words that seemed to him to be ludicrous.
“Oh, stay as long as ever you can. For three weeks.”
“I accept the omen,” Mr. Apollo said. “I will stay for three weeks.”
Mr. Clarges moved his umbrella off the floor and set it down again, as if he were casting up his hands.
