Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (264 page)

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 V
I

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....”

And he proceeded to pour out as much as he could of Lemprière’s information. Apollo was the son of Maia and Jupiter; he was the god of music, of the arts, of the sun.

He had, for a time, been turned out of heaven, and sojourned as a shepherd, tending the sheep of King Admetus. And Mr. Todd gave them the story of Philemon and Baucis, the old couple with whom Apollo had stayed the night and so richly rewarded for their hospitality.... It was at this point that Arthur Bracondale observed that the stranger’s tea was of a strange, a golden straw colour.

“I say,” he ejaculated, “the mater” (he always called Mrs. Todd “the mater,” since he was an orphan) “has given you it dreadfully weak — and you have no milk.”

He rose, with an impulsive eagerness of service, and poured cream from a little jug into the Prince’s cup. As he did so, he was aware that the Prince was scented in an extraordinary degree. It was a scent, faint yet pervasive, like the odour of bean-flowers at a great distance, the odour of lavender and of thyme above which the bees hum blown to you by a soft and sunny wind. The cream spread itself in a slow and viscous film over the Prince’s tea.

It came into Arthur Bracondale’s head that he had always thought fellows who used scent were effeminate. But if the Prince did it... then there must be something to be said for the practice! And this was a quite genuine tribute to the personality — a tribute different altogether in kind from the desire to do homage to a prince under the name of a composer.

He drank in the odour with a full and pervasive pleasure. It seemed to warm the channels of his breathing, to set a glowing strength into his tiny fibrous nerves.

“By Jove,” he said to himself, “if I knew the name of his scent I’d get some myself.” It seemed to render the tall room sunnier, warmer, and desirable.

But suddenly he stiffened in his chair.

“By Jove,” he said — and this time he said it aloud—”you’ve.. drunk... all that cream! Alone! Off the top!”

For, sitting where he was, a little behind the Prince’s chair, he could see the liquid in the broad, delicate, old-fashioned white cup. And there within the circle of the brim, when it left the Prince’s mouth, was again the golden, tenuous, limpid fluid. And at that moment he remembered — he remembered distinctly — that before, when he had first handed the Prince his cup, he had poured into it cream from the little jug. He remembered doing it!

The Prince looked round at him with his leisurely pleasure.

“It is good,” he said, “that you use the name of the Great God.”

He paused and said, like one who demonstrates a high lesson —

“Thus you perceive exemplified what I said to this woman, who should be beloved of the gods, that drink and food that are offered in a spirit of service and hospitality — though they be those of the veriest hinds — become to me, when they touch my lips, in simple truth, nectar and ambrosia.”

“It is very kind of you to say so,” Arthur Bracondale managed to bring out.

“Because the mother of your love offered me service with a glad heart, and because you too poured out for me the cream of milk in a desire for service) I was willing to be kind to each of you,” the Prince said.

Arthur Bracondale sank back into his chair.

“What things the fellow says!” he uttered to himself in a mood of effaced worship. “And how grand and true! It is like a Fabian tract! But how the deuce did be manage to get the cream off the top of the tea?”

It came into his head that the Prince liked to drink cream alone. But he could not find the courage to rise and pour out another libation.

The tears were in little, old Mrs. Todd’s eyes and a glad humming was in her ears. To her the scent was like the odour of heather moors, and at his praise there came over her the mood that had been hers when, in a small, whitewashed chapel, lit up by the sunlight from the windows, years ago, she had married Todd — an immense joy, an immense thankfulness, an immense love, an immense craving to kneel and worship the beloved one, an immense desire at once to serve for a life long and to whisper a
nunc dimittis.

“Assuredly,” she heard this godhead say, “such a spirit of service shall meet with its reward. I will consider of how I may reward you best.”

Mr. Todd nearly fell forward off his chair, huge, hirsute, and beaming with protestations of thanks.

“I have spoken of rewarding your wife,” the Prince uttered coldly.

“But surely,” Mr. Todd brought out, “man and wife are one.”

“I am not so sure of that,” his guest answered.

Mr. Todd tittered, and to assure his ascendancy in the eyes of his daughter — he was quite sure of his wife — he brought out the words —

“Very pleasant! Your Highness is pleased to be very pleasant.”

He seemed to remember some such speech in some novel, and he desired, with a courtly phraseology, to show how much
he
was anxious to do honour to this stranger, who, he was uneasily aware, had somehow failed to be pleasantly impressed. But he felt that, anyhow, the Prince could hardly reward his wife without himself taking a large share. Indeed, he could not see how she could be rewarded at all, except by advancing him. That the Prince had great powers of advancement he could not doubt