Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (266 page)

CHAPTER I
I

IT would not be too much to say, using the words metaphorically, that the Prince appeared to be adored by these young people — perhaps by the school teacher more than by the lovers. For they at least had their own wonder still with them; he had pursued a level and monotonous course for sufficiently long to make a chance contact with a man merely wonderful appear to him as indeed a gift from the gods.

This stranger stood before him as a mystery unravelled. The singular position in which he had first appeared to Alfred Milne — as a foreigner of distinction charged — and, as it had appeared, charged wrongfully — with an eccentric and aristocratic crime — this alone had made the stranger appear a sufficiently exciting figure, so that, going home to his wife to get a cup of tea before going round to Mr. Todd’s to plead again for Hieronymus, Alfred Milne had already found a topic — and you can have no idea how precious a thing is a topic, a thing to dilate upon, to speculate about, in a home where monotony is the rule of fatigued days. For these two young things — Alfred Milne and his wife — would sit silent for minutes at a time, longing to find things to say — longing each for the sake of the other. So that already this man, who stood making an impression of gaiety in that little group, had gladdened the lives of the school teachers.

Thus it was hardly unexpected by him that this stranger should prove to be a prince, a composer, a musician, an actor, and bear the name of a god. To bear the name of a god was indeed the least of it all, for it meant so little; the other attributes were all tangible enough.

Arthur Bracondale was teasing the Prince with questions as to how he did it. A certain feeling of delicacy kept him from inquiring as to how he had contrived to drink cream off the top of his tea — that seemed to be a matter too intimate. But the stranger’s amiability seemed so apparent that he had not any scruples at all about teasing him as to the piano-playing. He felt, indeed, a little like a small baby that confidently molests some mighty and tranquil dog, sure that the beast by a mere heaving of its flank could roll him in the dust, unharmed.

So he went at it.

“Oh, I’ll accept about the bay tree. But how about the pianola? You
could
not play it without touching it.”

“But since I did it?” the Prince asked.

“But,” Arthur Bracondale interjected, “a piano is played by the pressure either of fingers or of some other objects on the keys; the keys in their turn operate levers; the levers raise up little felt hammers that strike wires, giving notes of a certain number of vibrations.”

“That explains how the piano is played,” the Prince said.

“Therefore you must have caused a pressure on the keys of the piano,” the young man said.

“But since I obviously did not?” the Prince asked again.

“You
must
have.” Arthur Bracondale stuck to it.

“Oh, but Arthur...” Margaret, who clung to his arm, interrupted him.

“Child,” the Prince said, “you need not feel alarm for your friend. For, to a god, it is the spirit of an action that is pleasing or displeasing, as the case may be. One man may do a certain thing and disaster will repay him because of his ill-will, another will do the selfsame thing and his innocence will save him.”

“Well, I
do
hope I’ve not been boring you,” Arthur Bracondale said.

“You have not,” the Prince reassured him, “and I will explain why. If in contradicting me you had indeed set yourself up against me, that would have been an offence that I might have resented — and the manifestations of my resentment are very mighty. But since, in these contradictions, you have been seeking merely to arrive at the truth, so that, indeed, they are not contradictions...”

“But I say, you know,” Arthur Bracondale said. “I
can’t
believe you played the piano without touching it.”

“Oh,
Arthur
...” the girl, who had a true fear of the Prince’s powers.

Phoebus Apollo smiled a rare smile, and it was at this smile that Milne first loved him.

“Oh, friend,” he said, “when you say that you do not believe, in that very moment you believe fully. And when you say you do not believe, you act boldly and without fear. Therefore I love you. And, in the first place, it is the nature of me to show favour where I love. And in the second place, be assured that I love only where it is just for me to love. Nor do I love justly out of a love of justice, but because I read the hearts of men, and reading their hearts I know that I love them, for their motives find favour in my sight if their deeds be amiss.”

Arthur Bracondale said —

“Well, of course I know you
did
play the pianola without touching it.”

“And then?” the Prince said friendlily.

“Well, I suppose you did it by an effort of will. After all, you sort of chaps who come from the Far East or wherever it is you come from, you know a thing or two that is not dreamt of in our philosophy.”

“Ah,” the Prince said....

Through the dusky, grey, and friendly twilight there came, beneath the shadows of the great trees whose tops still held the light, a faint and plaintive cry.

“Mother’s calling us,” Margaret said.

Mrs. Todd, indeed, was in the habit of thinking that it was not “quite nice” for Margaret to be out there in the dark with Arthur Bracondale, or even with two or three young men. As a rule she called without much hope of being heeded. But the Prince’s saying of “this is a woman beloved of the gods” made them both hear the faint sound with a new feeling. They remembered her patience, her gentleness, her continual efforts to smooth the course of their loves; her desires seemed to them to have in them a newly revealed spirit of wisdom and seemliness. They realised that she too had loved greatly, and therefore might well be able to teach them how best great love may be carried forward.

“Well, we must go,” Arthur Bracondale said to the Prince. “But I wish you could stay with us.”

“I shall not be very far away,” the Prince said.

The two young creatures turned and ran side by side to the house. They were very gay, and teased each other as they ran. At the foot of the wooden steps the young man halted suddenly.

“Why, there
are
eight bay trees,” he said. “And yet you know there have always been only seven.”

Indeed, in their more high-spirited moods they had been accustomed to call it “the house with the seven bay trees.” These bay trees were sold in tubs, and the landlord having purchased them at an auction where thirteen were sold as a dozen, had arranged six on one side of the triangle in one row and seven on the other.

“What is it about bay trees?” Margaret said.

“Well, you know,” Arthur answered, “the bay tree is the favoured vegetable of the god Apollo. Besides — it is my little secret with the Prince.”

“I’m sure he did not tell you to keep it a secret.” Margaret made a little grimace at him. “He wouldn’t have a secret with a thing like you.”

Arthur flicked at her nose.

“Well then, it is
my
secret, saucebox,” he said. In their gay moods, though the one was twenty-four and the other twenty-three, this couple allowed themselves such relapses from their serious consideration of the Universe and its laws.

***

“I suppose,” Alfred Milne said, and he looked at the ground, standing in the half-darkness before the dusky figure of this prince, composer, musician, and moralist — for so now the former prisoner appeared to him to be—”that, if we allow of the existence of a God, it is as a reader of hearts and a weigher of motives that we must first consider him.”

“It is not easy to put into words the nature of a Godhead,” the Prince said, “and since all his attributes are necessarily to be considered at the one time it is not easy — it is not even possible — to say which of his attributes you should consider as the most important Lacking immortality, omnipotence, harmony with all things, prevision, insight, or wisdom, a God would cease to be a Godhead, just as, lacking mortality, passions, lungs to breathe with, a mind with which to conceive or the food with which to nourish you, you would cease to be a man. But will you say that food or mortality in the one case, or immortality or wisdom in the other, are the first to be considered, where each is essential?”

Alfred Milne pondered for a long while.

“Then are we to grow weary and recoil, or are we for ever to refrain from considering the nature of a Godhead?”

“Not so,” the other answered; “but you will be wise if ceaselessly you ponder, whilst you fulfil your allotted task, on this subject that you may never exhaust. So you shall have with you throughout your life a continual companion and a very comforting one in your thoughts. And having considered with goodwill and care how best you may please him who is your God, you may very confidently die and surrender yourself into his hands.”

CHAPTER II
I

THERE were seven young people in Alfred Milne’s little flat and one elderly man. Of these seven, four were in a little room that had books all round it, a truckle-bed covered with a rug and many journals in piles, a table with pieces of manuscript, an inkpot and paper-fasteners, bits of sealing-wax and the ends of stamp-papers in little lacquered trays, and a typewriter in a yellow cover, thrust to one side so as to make room for a noisy game of blowing a marble across the table-cloth. The laughter and the cries of these players could be heard down the grim and gaol-like stone stairs of the huge building.

In the little living-room, square, mechanically built, papered with a dull, sage-green, and uniform patent wallcovering, there were the two young people who sat with Mrs. Milne almost every evening, and an elderly, diminutive, grey-bearded, bright-spectacled man, with a coppery face, sharp features, and an air of perpetual, slightly ironical, and savage discovery of frauds who came regularly on a Sunday and, not so often, on a Thursday.

The exiguous nature of the furnishings, the grim and prison-like squareness of the building itself, the absence of any trace of refreshments, all these things proved that these people did not visit the Milnes for what they could get, but because of what attraction their personalities afforded. They came in very often, and very often they came when Alfred Milne, and his wife out of sympathy with him, were wearied with the day’s work. They came mostly on a Thursday because, by accident, two young science teachers who were much liked were free of work on that evening and had adopted the habit of passing the time with the Milnes. These two and the elderly Mr. Clarges were constant visitors; the others came intermittently. Altogether there were from forty to fifty young people who were, in greater or less degree, in the habit of saying, “Are you going to More’s Buildings to-night?”

They came and they talked of Hygiene, of Æsthetics, a little of Music, a great deal of Socialism, hardly at all of Religion, but then with a frenzied animation, for several were Roman Catholics, and charged the deniers of Romish miracles with lack of perception, of logic, and the historic sense. Nearly all these young people were connected, either as teachers or students, with one or other of the state or municipal educational institutions, but others were extremely wealthy and came because they took idle or real interests in social questions, or because they were in love with one or two of the women students from South Kensington. Mr. Clarges himself was an extremely wealthy bachelor who occupied — for his appearance of alert and hawk-like suspicion did not belie his character — the greater part of his time in writing to the newspapers virulent, but usually accurate, attacks on the political or legal jobs perpetrated by whatever government happened to be in power. He was industrious in the search for statistics, disliked legal members of Parliament, and had employed some of his wealth in exposing bogus companies or ancient institutions that had fallen into evil hands. He was an Individualist of a singularly virulent type, and whilst he sat always, leaning back in a rush-bottomed arm-chair, between Mrs. Milne and the rest of the company as if he were a bulwark between her and them, he perpetually threw back his head with little whistles and snorts of impatience whilst the young people talked. He was particularly snappish towards the three or four wealthy young men who would drive up to the Buildings in hansoms or in motor-cars, and come into the room panting a little and grumbling good-humouredly at the stairs.

The Milnes had these wealthy friends because they came of a Midland, Unitarian stock, the name of which, in the sixties and seventies, had for several counties stood for the very name of money itself. But the close union of this family and sect which in the earlier generations had made them such an efficient corporation for extracting gold from the rest of the kingdom had, towards the closing years of the last century, proved the very efficient means of their ruin. They hung all together, those of them who still manufactured manufacturing, those who still were bankers banking in the Midlands, those who lived on their investments having all their investments in the great firms of Milne and Son, George Milne, Limited, the Sir Joseph Milne Incorporated Works, the Sir Alfred Milne Banking Company. They were a Whig, advanced Unitarian, solid, sober, well-backboned group of cousins, second cousins, of retired servants with investments, of solicitors of a like turn of mind who had brought in similarly minded clients. And little by little all this group of people had come, as it were, to depend on Sir Alfred Milne, the second of that name to be the head of the Sir Alfred Milne Banking Company.

And, as so often happens, Sir Alfred Milne, the great-grandson of the first manufacturer, had, beneath a cloak of reserve, trustworthiness, and pride, hidden an inclination to the wildest speculations. It was discovered at his death that, even so early as the Franco-Prussian War, he had begun a series of speculations that ended in the hugest of embezzlements. Ruin had preceded his death, and with his ruin went the wealth of more than half the Milnes, their dependents and their clients.

Alfred Milne’s father had been a moderately wealthy younger son; Frances Milne’s father had been another; and although their names had been the same, their relationship was very distant. They might have been cousins ten times removed, yet in fortunes, vicissitudes, dispositions, and accomplishments they were singularly alike, and they were born on consecutive days in the same year. Alfred Milne had gone to school at Winchester; Frances Milne at Cheltenham. Alfred Milne had been destined for Trinity College, Cambridge; Frances for Newnham. Alfred Milne’s father had still been alive in those days, but Frances was an orphan with her property in the hands of trustees. They had both been at Cambridge just one month when, on the same day, they had learned that each was utterly ruined. All their parents’ friends, all their relatives, were ruined too; there was no jogging along for them.

With a common impulse — it was astonishing to them afterwards to discover how exactly their thoughts had proceeded along the same lines — they had, each for himself and for herself, arrived at the conclusion that teaching was the profession for which they were best suited. They had been fairly studious at school; they had quite good enough certificates from the local examining boards of the University to enable them, with little extra training, to qualify at once for teachers in elementary schools; they were both of them fond of children, and both were dimly aware that they had what they each called “influence.” Children obeyed them readily, and the infants’ classes in their Unitarian Sunday Schools, at which each of their parents had considered it was their duty to teach — their infants’ classes had been always amongst the most proficient, the most orderly, and the most tranquil that the congregation could show. This was without doubt due to the attractive quality — whatever it were — that caused their student friends to say, “Are you going to More’s Buildings to-night?”

They were patient, slow in their judgments, restful in their tranquillity, they reflected, as a rule, always a little before they spoke, they listened to their interlocutor’s arguments — except on matters of religion — always with a careful attention. Each of them at that time was twenty-five, and their thoughts ran so much upon the same lines that, after an interval of silence, it was the commonest of things for each to utter at the same moment almost the same words. Perhaps this air of complete and tranquil union was one of the causes of their attraction to busy young people, for such a phenomenon is both unusual and attractive. They had, indeed, come little in contact one with another until after they had been full-fledged teachers in national schools for several years. And it was because a common friend — the wife of a head teacher in a Wiltshire village — had noticed their singular likeness one to another, that they had been thrown together at all. This lady had said that they really should meet, and after her husband had been made head master of the ancient foundation at Budock St. Mary, she had asked the pair of them to spend a week of the summer holidays with her, for she had a large old house, set in the centre of the school buildings, and facing a high spur of downs that was decorated with a huge white house chased out of the turf.

This place had remained the ideal of the Milnes. The large master’s house, the school-buildings stretching out on either side — (Budock St. Mary had at one time been a large and well-populated centre of the cloth trade) — girls to the right, boys to the left, the ample salary, the open downs, the Wiltshire air, rendered clear, and metallic by the always present dust of chalk, the stillness of the sunlight — all these things, together with their immediate discovery of a kinship of spirit, rendered their memory of the place a white and shining patch of their past and an ultimate bourne to which to aspire.

They had intended to marry at the end of three years. Each had a minute salary that just kept them and hours of work sufficiently short to let them be much together: they spent the summer evenings in museums and picture galleries; they attended meetings of Ethical societies and Socialist groups; they went occasionally to the more intellectual plays and occasionally to music-halls and to the open-air exhibitions. They spent very little money on these pleasures, choosing cheap nights and the cheapest seats; but they had agreed that some such relaxations they must afford themselves, as for the three years they had sacrificed their summer holidays in order to save a little nest-egg for their marriage. A little before the term-end when they had decided that their wedding should be, the Educational Authority that they both served decided to forbid the marriage of their female teachers. This was a severe blow to the Milnes, since it meant the losing of at least a third of what they had expected would be their joint income. Nevertheless they agreed that they would marry. They must sacrifice some of the pleasures to which they had looked forward, they must avoid the chance of children. Frances must attempt to make a little money by writing articles for the educational journals, to which she had already contributed a little. And as they had agreed so they acted. They had been married now for eighteen months, and in all that time they had never consciously been unhappy, though actually the long monotony, the poor light, and the indifferent food to which they had accustomed themselves had begun to tell upon their physique. Alfred Milne might reasonably expect an increase of salary within a year or so; but on the other hand, with the changes of government and the constant readjustments of conflicting enactments as to education, their lives had grown precarious and uncertain. It was already a little doubtful if the department in which at that time Alfred Milne found himself — the Fitzallan National Schools in Paddington was where he taught — would still serve as a stepping-stone to such old establishments as that of Budock St. Mary. It was as if that vision had a little faded.