Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 239
“But to be useless, to be speechless, to be a log in one’s wife’s hands!” the man said.
“Sir,” — the words came to him—”this is a thing that will be very precious to the wife of the man. For you will observe that if this man had uttered one word of selflessness out of ten at this grave moment of his life that would have been an indication that there was hope; or if there had been one word of praise to God. But since there has been no such word, it is evident that, in this priest without faith, in this man without sweetness, there is no hope at all of amendment.”
“But,” Lord Aldington said, “you mean to say that he is doomed?”
“Ho is doomed,” he got his answer.
Lord Aldington stepped suddenly to the light-switch by the door.
“This glare’s too much for my eyes,” he said, and suddenly shadow descended from above their heads, so that there remained beneath a deep green shade of the light on the typewriter’s table only one globe that illuminated brightly the machine, with its pillars like the tiny pipes of an organ, and the mouth of the telephone receiver that seemed to open and to await the lips of a speaker.
“You know,” Lord Aldington said, “this thing can be tested.” And he added sharply to Bracondale —
“Here, you!...” But he stopped and then brought out —
“No; I’ll do it myself. What’s their number?” But then again he added, “No; I’ll do it myself. You might put me on to a confederate.”
He crossed to the telephone, pushing Bracondale out of the way.
“Here, you!” he shouted into the receiver; “find me Todd the missionary’s number, and get me on to it — like lightning. I’m the Chief!”
He sat on a little stool, silent, listening, leaning his head to one side, the light strong upon him. Then he turned it away so that it shone upon the wall. The silence seemed endless, and he drummed his thick finger-ends unceasingly on the table, the beat of them growing faster and faster, dying down and then growing faster again. In the reflected light his face had a set ferocity of enraged hope. Suddenly he cried out —
“Who are you?” — and a look of cunning came into his eyes.
He heard a girl’s tones, thin and distant, say “I’m Margaret Todd. Who are you?” and he answered into the black mouthpiece —
“I’m Arthur... Arthur Bracondale.... Has he come back?...”
The thin and ghostly sound thrilled to him with agitation and horror that he thought he could gauge as genuine —
“He’s come back; he fell suddenly into the room. Oh, Arthur: he’s senseless; he’s like a log; only his fingers move....”
Aldington set the ear-piece on the table, as if he had had enough; then as suddenly he put it to his ear again.
“Give me all the details,” they heard him cry; and then again, “What did he say?” and again, “Nothing more?” Then he hung the ear-piece on to its hook.
He stood up and, leaning against the table, drew a huge breath.
“What do you claim to be?” he said.
“I am Phoebus Apollo, the son of Maia,” came to his ears from the shadows of the room.
“But what sort of a man do you claim to be?” he said. “What sort of an advertisement do you want us to give you? Are you behind the Krakroffs, or what is it?”
A heavy weariness had descended upon him.
“I dare say we could do a deal,” he said. “If it’s a fraud it’s clever enough to run a boom on, and we could give away afterwards that it was only guying; but I must go into it with my eyes open.”
PART V. “SIC ITUR...”.
CHAPTER I
MR. APOLLO and Alfred Milne walked along the Embankment homewards, for the sudden dizziness which had come upon him when he saw his friend carried from the large room by the newspaper proprietor vanished as suddenly at their return together into the room. Alfred Milne, indeed, had given himself credit for a twinge of jealousy: he could not account for it in any other way. It was as if he had feared that, even as Eugene Durham, the opulent and hospitable, so Lord Aldington, the notorious and the hugely resourceful, was carrying from under his eyes this beloved guest — and, at this sudden pang, he had sent Bracondale into the room behind the closed door to say that he was ill, and this, not so much because he hoped his friend could cure him as that he hoped, at his return, to assure himself that his guest was still willing to be his guest. And, sitting waiting, in the place at the editorial desk that Lady Sandgate resigned to him, he accepted, without much regret, what he considered to be this new-found trait in his own character. He had to think of himself as a jealous man!
It was a discovery as queerly sad as when, in the twilit gardens behind Mr. Todd’s house, he had had revealed to him the fact that he believed in the immortality of the soul. The other people — Lord Sandgate and his wife and Mrs. Lympere — were standing together beneath the central light. Lady Sandgate was pulling her light feather wrap on to her bare shoulders, Mrs. Lympere was talking eagerly — and Alfred Milne had a sense that the Marchioness, for all her amiable indifference, was, as it were, pulling together her skirts to fly from contact with disease. She had, indeed, offered the Prince’s equerry her vinaigrette and fan: but it was not a very decent thing for a man to be ill and show it.
Mrs. Lympere, on the other hand, talked with an immense swiftness of language, as if at once she were wrapped up in her subject and anxious to delay their departure.
“There is Mrs. Johns,” she said. “You’ve heard of her: it is not incredible. If a soul can change, something must change it. Then why not somebody? There must be a Will behind it....”
Mrs. Johns was a lady well known to them all — and to most of the world through the weekly papers — a lady, well “in,” who had been at the point of death. She had, indeed, died — or at least she had been given over. Her heart had stopped. Then she came to life again — and she had a new soul — a new nature, new views even. Her friends all noticed it: her husband himself. What did they make of that? Lady Sandgate said she was sure she could not tell.
“Why what could it be,” Mrs. Lympere asked, “but that another soul had entered into her body? In the instant she was dead. So that if souls can change...”
“Oh, come along, Cora,” the great lady said, “you know I made a resolve in Lent to be in bed every night by half-past twelve.” She had, indeed, determined thus to make her Lenten self-denial extend throughout the twelve months, but she was also not anxious to help Mrs. Lympere to throw herself at the head of this Prince. It was not her affair, but she could not, she thought, be expected to play gooseberry.
“Come along, Cora,” she said. “You can’t stay alone with these men”; she added, however, “unless you want to.”
“But,” Mrs. Lympere said in accents of anguish, “I haven’t even got the Prince’s address.”
“He’s living with me,” Alfred Milne said then, with a sudden violence, as if he were combating the idea that Lord Aldington had carried off his guest. The Marquis took down the name of More’s Buildings on a little slip of paper which he handed to Mrs. Lympere, and with the air of a new Eurydice sinking back into the shades, she was amiably but firmly towed from the room.
But after an agony in which, for Alfred Milne, time seemed to be suspended and the Marquis desultorily corrected proofs and touched, delicately, the hairs of his crown, at last the Prince came back, and, in a divine coolness, they walked along the Embankment. The white lights dropped flashes and little sparks through the darkness; the plane trees rustled freshly their foliage, vividly shown or mantled in shadow; the dark river was visible only as a thing of reflections and of eddies outlined in light; and brown and huddled humanity showed itself only as if it were the decorations for the pedestal of a statue to Poverty, a-sprawl, all the heads bowed forward, on seat after seat.
“Well,” Alfred Milne said, “and what did you think of the great man?”
The visit over, most of the romance that beforehand had attached itself, in his mind, to visiting the offices of an Organ of Opinion had vanished. The Daily Outlook appeared to him to be no more than an expression of the mind of its proprietor, and Lord Aldington had impressed him as being merely the expression of his paper. He did not, that is to say, find himself disliking the paper or its proprietor any less, but they appeared to him to be far less sinister. For you could not, he said to himself, really imagine that Lord Aldington represented the forces of Reaction — Alfred Milne himself standing for Progress, a sane Socialism, and a Progressive County Council. No, Lord Aldington did not stand for any philosophy of reaction; he stood simply for the paper, and the paper stood for him. They were a bi-une affair, you could not tell which led, whether the paper dragged Lord Aldington along or he it. But they were not, either of them, he was fully assured, of much more importance than an anemometer, a thing for registering the wind. They would not ever lead the Public, they were merely extraordinarily sympathetic to the Public’s breath. In fact, as they passed the ghostly spars and sides of the little ship of war anchored close to the stone parapet of the river, Alfred Milne had persuaded himself that, if a sensational discovery could be made, to set the Public agape in favour of Progress, a sane Socialism, and a Progressive Council, Lord Aldington, like a master of hounds, with his paper and his staff in full cry, representing the Hunt, would be very well in at the death. They simply did not count and, Mr. Apollo not having answered his query but seeming more engrossed in the appearance of the ship of war, Alfred Milne continued —
“Did you ever hear anything more childish than his pretence that the Daily Outlook was anxious not to mislead the Public? On the one hand he’s setting to work to boom jugglers with matchboxes, on the other he’s making that ridiculous pretension. You’d think he’d not consider it worth while.”
“Friend,” Mr. Apollo said, “I have never seen anything more childish. But this man has the heart and the brains of a child or of a young boy. How, then, shall we condemn him?”
“But...” Alfred Milne said.
“For it appears to me,” Mr. Apollo said, “that the functions of what you call a newspaper consist in tickling the ears of your people, and to me your people appear to have the heart and the brains of children and young boys avid after those things which are futile, temporary, innocent, and fugitive.”
“But is it right,” Alfred Milne said, “of this man to encourage them in this?”
“Would it be wrong in a God,” Mr. Apollo said, “seeing children who were avid of running after straws in a wind, if he gave those children straws and the wind to run in?”
Alfred Milne, who considered himself to be on safer ground when anything approaching educational science was mooted, launched out into —
“Well, I don’t know, you see; we do not discourage children in their games, but we do believe in directing their energies at such times with a view to their future developments.”
“Of that, or of the wisdom of that, I have no opinion,” his friend said, “for of it I have no knowledge and no desire for knowledge.”
“And what I contend,” Alfred Milne said, “is that, if the Daily Outlook is a machine for giving children straws to be amused with, it betrays its trust and is a danger. For it and its proprietor ought surely to regard themselves as schoolmaster and school; they ought to direct the public play with a view to a development of tastes and of morality. But you can’t observe a trace of that about either this man or his paper.”
A fresh breeze came from the river; the letters of fire against the darkness, on the further shore, winked, blazed, and went out, in silent indefatigability, like portents uttering celestial warnings or appeals. Mr. Apollo sat down upon a bench that had at one end of it a woman huddled up beneath a mat of brown rags; he gazed at the sky-signs with interest and attention.
“My friend,” he said, “it is true that I cannot observe a trace of these things about either this man or his paper. But you yourself have observed that this is a very great and a very mighty Republic, and that in it there are a multitude of things. And you yourself have observed that it takes all sorts to make a world.”
The bundle of rags at the end of the seat observed suddenly —
“Wod yer torkin’ abaht?” and relapsed into slumber.
“But when you ask me,” Mr. Apollo said, “to condemn this man for having the heart and the brains of a child, you ask me to condemn yourself also. For consider how you must appear, each of you, in the sight of an ancient omniscience. You ask me to applaud you because you seek to direct your children in their games. But where is Sparta, whose law-givers upheld these ideas? Or where again is Athens, that by its stage-plays sought to develop its grown men? And how can I consider you to be a more grown man than this other man? For can what you consider to be permanent things be considered by me to be less futile than the feats of the conjurer? How should the theory of cities and their governments appear to me to be more valuable than the will-power that that conjurer exercised over you to make you open a little box and examine into its contents? Or should I not rather commend this conjurer, who exercised a power more nearly divine than you, who are concerned mostly with the ebb and flow of gold coins from one pocket to another? If you consider of animals, do you condemn the magpie because it takes pleasure in objects that glitter, or commend the sheep that patiently nibbles the herbage? Not so. But you will say that the magpie is the magpie and the sheep the sheep. And for what then am I here?”
Again the figure at the end of the seat ejaculated —
“Wod yer torkin’ abaht?”
“I was talking of what brings me here?”
“Well, what does?” the figure said. “The bloomin’ soup-kitchen’s shut up.”
“I am here,” Mr. Apollo said, “as you might take a walk in the fields and woods, to consider...”
“‘Oppin’! I’m a-goin”oppin’,” the figure said. “Dahn wiv forrin ‘ops.”
“To consider,” Mr. Apollo said, “of the distinction that is between wild flower and wild flower, and between bird and bird. Shall I then condemn one man because he is as it were a crow, or exalt another because I liken him to the mandrake? Assuredly not. But I shall say, so this man is and so this.”
“But surely,” Alfred Milne said, “you would differentiate. Supposing Lord Aldington asked you to do a thing... I mean...”
“No, assuredly I will not differentiate between man and man, their prayers to me being of equal earnestness,” Mr. Apollo said.
“Give us me fare ter Paddock Wood, darlin,” the woman said. “Tain’t ‘oppin’ time yet, but I’ll go fruit-pickin’! Straight I will, darlin’. Give us me fare ter Paddock Wood!” A face looked out, bleared, muzzy, and pale in the rays of the electric light, so that beneath its battered and broken man’s straw hat it appeared to have the air of a turtle’s head, lethargic in its movements and dull in the eyes. And indeed, so slowly did it move round, that before the eyes could fall upon Mr. Apollo the head fell forward in sleep.
“And here,” Mr. Apollo said, “you might very well have an instance of what I say. For this old woman asks a boon of me so listlessly that she falls asleep before I can fulfil it. But it is the earnestness of a prayer that ensures its fulfilment. Therefore I might very well leave her pockets empty. But, on the other hand, it is unfitting that a man should be visited by a deity and go unrewarded.” And he placed his hand in his pocket and drew out a coin.
“But did Lord Aldington ask you for anything?” Alfred Milne said.
“Friend,” Mr. Apollo answered, “with all the force of his being this man asked two things of me: the one to tell him if I could heal by faith, and the other if I would write about myself for his paper.”
“But...” Alfred Milne ejaculated, “you seemed quite friendly when you came from the little room.” And amazement overcame him, for he imagined that upon being asked to write — for the Daily Outlook! — his friend would at least have knocked the impertinent down.
“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.”
