Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (262 page)

“I have no incognito to respect,” he said. “I am Phoebus Apollo, the son of Maia. I accept your services as guide, since you say that your knowledge is greater than that of other men. And in so far as your services to me arise from affection rather than self-interest, so they shall be rewarded. For it is a natural law that no man may entertain a divinity and be as he was before, as also it is a natural law that no man for an evil purpose may search with his eyes the faces of the divine and live. That you have seen verified.”

The missionary laughed joyously if noncomprehendingly.

“Very humorous,” he said. No idea of doubting the stranger’s sanity came to him. At the same time, in deference to the public feeling of the place, he felt a desire that this so desirable acquaintance would curtail the length of his speeches.

“I am Phoebus Apollo,” the stranger said again passionlessly. “It will be well for you if you consider that fact and so comport yourself, for according to your behaviour so will the change in your condition shape itself, since it was fated that you should come near me. If you desire to take the road I will follow you. As regards these men who are anxious for my departure, it is not fitting that I should adapt myself to my environment, but that it should take shape from me. That must be apparent to you.”

The missionary was conscious of attending very perfunctorily to this so royal speech. It was appropriate to the descendant of Johannes Paleologos; it enhanced the missionary’s idea of his friend’s importance. For if the truly great are considerate of their subordinates’ feelings, how much more truly and surely great must a personage be who could afford to disregard them....

On the steps of the court the stranger remarked —

“My personality or the establishment of it are of no interest to me. I have told you what I have told you as a favour which it pleases me to show. For in the first place, it is the privilege for those who are above reason to act with caprice; and it is pleasing to the divine to meet with simple faith. In accepting with tittle grounds the idea of my surpassing the common you have exhibited a faith of the most simple. In warning you of my nature I have accorded you a favour. If you work well your rewards may prove beyond your expectations.” The missionary made what he considered a successful and courtly bow. He mused upon the singularity of princely and Oriental allegory, and it occurred to him that, had he been born in whatsoever kind of purple, he would have found it difficult so to maintain a grave pretence — a pretence the grave maintenance of which enhanced still further his belief in the stranger’s pretensions. For who but one very royal indeed could so gravely play the fool?

CHAPTER I
V

THE street which conducted them towards the missionary’s house — which led in fact towards the Apollo Music-Hall — was so crowded with motor omnibuses that any aspect of it at all was impossible. The traffic hid the opposite shop-fronts; the crowd on the pavement, packed and slow-moving, so that it appeared to have gathered to await the passing of this endless procession of wheeled things, the crowd, gentle, jostling, silent, prevented the possibility of any glances at the shop-fronts on the near side. A big man, moving with difficulty amidst all these soft contacts, the missionary was filled with satisfaction.

“The biggest city the world has ever seen,” he ejaculated at intervals when, accidentally struggling near to his companion, he could hope to catch his ear. It filled him, this bigness, with a personal pride; this crowd belonged to
him
— not to the stranger. And in a rush of excited appreciation he tried to explain innumerable everyday objects, which somehow became typical, valuable, and even affecting. At the corner of a side-street he bade the Prince observe how, grim, dusty, blackish, a vista of brick boxes contained the homes of the working classes.

He had started out with the intention of taking the Prince — he could not help calling him to himself “the Prince” — through the poorest quarters of the great region of grim slums that these plate-glass windows seemed tenuously to hold back. He had intended to exhibit the poor as a background to himself — himself as a personality. He had meant to talk with his cheerful air of aloof equality to ragged women who had sunk beneath the pressure of life; to clean, industrious women that had the flinty hardness to resist; to besodden men who might be trusted to say that “Parson Todd had helped ‘em a lot.” He would pat the bleached heads of children with bleached faces, and by thus selecting a score or so of houses where he was known, he had intended to suggest to the Prince that he knew and was beneficent to thousands.

But at the corner of the next by-street, where there were five feet or six of unoccupied pavement, the Prince halted to ask in his clear and passionless voice the unreasonable questions: What were the aspirations of all these people? And what became of them and their aspirations?

And, at these odd queries, the shadow of a sense of weariness fell upon the missionary.

“They — they fill graveyards,” he said.

And this answer was so foreign to him that he had a pause in which to recover his breezy and comforting common sense. How could he have answered with such an extraordinary — with such an obviously improper phrase? “Well,” he thought to himself, “it was the odd questions which called for odd answers.” If he had asked — as he ought to have — what was the population of the city; what proportion of that population were of the criminal class; how many belonged to the Established Church; what were the rents of the shops; or what even was the average income of the inhabitants of this parish of the middling poor? But their aspirations! And what became of them! The questions were disagreeable almost; they were certainly quite disagreeable. For it was as unpleasant a subject to contemplate as was, say, infinity of space, endless distance, punctuated with minute planets, like the beams and motes of the air.

They were almost, as it were, contemptuous — these questions. It was as if this stranger, this mere foreigner — for after all he wa
s
a foreigner — had suggested that this city did not justify its existence. It was like a sneer at the largest city the world had ever seen.

What were their aspirations? And what became of them and their aspirations? All these people....

With a hot impulse the missionary abandoned his intention of showing this stranger the poorest slums of the city, he abandoned the idea of exhibiting his own figure on a background. The corporate feeling inspired him instead. He stuck to the straight highway. He was intent on showing how never-ending this crowd was; how great its resources; how boundless its wealth. There were, he tried to explain in gasps, stalls for the sale of oranges; their West Indian possessions sent them bananas and plantains; there were stalls for the sale of cheap books, of cheap meat, of cheap music, of cheap ices, of cheap peppermint drops. At the shops alongside Were to be found all these things — oranges, bananas, plantains, meat, music, ices, peppermint drops — a little more expensive. Farther on they would find shops still dearer. In this city there were emporiums to suit every purse. He told, still in gasps, how the motor buses, the horse buses, the horse cabs, and the motor cabs carried people above ground; below ground a convenient tube carried them still more swiftly to greater distances, north and south other railways carried them east and west, and north-east and north-west. And before this array of ideas of quantity — of infinite and incomputable quantities — the missionary recovered his equanimity, intuitively; he felt that this intelligent stranger must be driven from his impracticable point of view.

Girls slapped young men hard blows on the back, and screamed half, half laughed; men burdened with babies melancholily pushed perambulators against their hips; women bore before them distended string bags; small boys pushing in and out between the legs, calling to each other in games, made manifest an underworld that, since they could not now see the pavements, they had a danger of forgetting. But where a canal beneath a bridge ran across this high road, the crowd, the shops, and the stalls came alike to an end; and standing on a pavement almost vacant, the stranger awaited the missionary, who, being more corpulent, had made less progress.

“But on this side of the grave?” the stranger asked. The missionary had forgotten the context of the question, and again the stranger asked, “What are their aspirations on this side of Elysium?”

Mr. Todd had an impulse to say —

“How could I answer for so many?” But he remembered that he had offered himself as a guide stopping not far short of omniscience.

“Sir,” he said, “you do not perhaps know that I am a clergyman.”

“I did not,” the stranger said, “but I welcome the knowledge. For it is the province of a priest...”

“Sir,” Mr. Todd said, “Heaven forbid that I should allow myself to be called a priest I am a minister of God.”

“Later you shall explain the difference,” the stranger said.

“Three words will do it now,” Mr. Todd said; “the three words: No priestly functions. The ministers of my persuasion arrogate to themselves no priestly functions.” The stranger looked at him from his heavy boots to his shining hat.

“Perhaps it is as well,” he said slowly. “The priests of a god should be comely and venerable.”

The long canal stretched away into the distance a slate-grey surface with little patches of thin vapour arising beneath the translucent haze, between slate-grey and undistinguished houses and spindly trees whose foliage had no shimmer because of the film of soot that covered each leaf.

“Sir,” Mr. Todd said, “that is a matter in which we shall always differ from you Romanists. Or perhaps you are of the Greek Orthodox Church, which, I believe, prescribes long, curled, and oiled beards upon its clergy. But I was going to say that the attention of a minister — of the clergy in general — is directed rather to the aims of humanity beyond the grave, since we all inherit the heritage of immortality.”

“That is a matter upon which you can teach me nothing,” the stranger said.

“Heaven forbid,” the missionary answered, “that your Highness should suspect me of aiming at proselytism. I am the most tolerant of men.”

“Then you betray your office,” the Prince answered.

Mr. Todd did not wish to answer this accusation, for be was aware that in stating he had no desire to proselytise he had done himself an injustice. Nothing would have pleased him better than the conversion at his hands of foreign princes. He eluded the matter with the words —

“Of course I agree with your Highness that in order to bring men to a state of spiritual efficiency it is necessary to have a care for their actions in this world. I am not, I assure you, a member of the namby-pamby school that thinks a man’s eyes should be for ever on the great hereafter. A small good action will outweigh many long prayers. But the aspirations of this nation are summed up in the what, you must be aware, is our national proverb.”

“I should be glad to hear your national proverb,” the stranger said. “And it would commend itself to me if you would confine yourself for the moment to the subjects which I am sure you best understand, so that our converse may be conducted in a seemly and orderly series.”

“Obviously,” the missionary assented. He cleared his throat.

“Our national proverb,” he said, “is expressed in the words, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty.’”

The stranger, standing on the peak of the bridge, looked back at the crowd that, serried and jostling, in the narrow space between the traffic and the house-fronts, appeared like a section of dark and troubled fluid in a test tube, so sharply did the peopling end and the solitude begin.

“So is Egathistotheopompus confuted,” the stranger said.

“I do not quite take you,” the missionary said.

“Surely you are acquainted with the writings of that philosopher to whom the Hyrcanians gave the name of the Crown, holding that each of his writings was a leaf on the laurel crown of philosophy.”

“Why no!” the missionary answered.

“Truly,” the stranger said, “we say well when we say that short is the memory of mortal men!”

“Now Herbert Spencer...” the missionary interrupted.

“Egathistotheopompus forgotten!” the stranger said. “Sir, it is true that with the oncoming of the worship accorded to the Jewish Messiah, the cult of the Hellenic deities retreated into remote regions; and did not the gods themselves retire from high Olympus to regions infinitely more remote? But Egathistotheopompus forgotten! You spoke truly when you said that the destination of humanity and its aspirations is the grave!” He surveyed again the crowd, interrupted in his meditations by a little boy holding a pinkish sheet who, seeing them standing still, darted beneath the nose of a cab-horse, evaded a taxi-cab as if, like a bird, by no known sense, and arriving almost on their feet screamed —

“E — e — e — pie — er! ‘Ere y’ar, sir! All the winners!” He held out a pinkish and flimsy sheet with the attitude of one soliciting alms.

The stranger looked down upon the little, gnome-like, eager face, dusky with neglect of ablutions, and with white teeth gleaming in the protruded lower jaw, at about the level of his own thigh.

“Now, what aspired-to duty does this little microcosm of your so ideal republic fulfil?” he asked indulgently, “for never have I seen messenger so eager, or that more deserved recompense.”

“All
the winners I” came shrilly from the tiny jaws.

“That”
Mr. Todd said, “is a social evil.”

The stranger inserted his delicate fingers into his waistcoat pocket.

“I do not know,” he said, “what that may imply. But I — am certain that not Sparta herself bred urchins so hardy, and I am satisfied that this boy’s feat in crossing between those carriages is that thing that most has satisfied my senses since I came to this city.”

He produced from his pocket two sovereigns which he fingered between index and thumb. “Little boy,” he said, “I do not know if this is great wealth or little, or how long it shall avail you. But this I know, that the gold of man lasteth but a very little time. Take, however, these two coins from one to whom you have given pleasure.”

The missionary regarded him with spectacles in which there shone at once, as it were, an official horror and an inward satisfaction. It was due to his position to express horror at reckless and prodigal almsgiving — but this princely alms confirmed his views as to the princely nature of his companion.

The little boy held out his hand with a quick gesture towards the coins — but seeing that they were gold, he withdrew it as quickly.

“And considering,” the stranger said, “how short shall be the pleasure this gold shall bring you — since you have given me pleasure I will wish you a gift more lasting. I will wish you a voice that shall not repel and such a face as shall attract your patrons. Utter again your cry!”