Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (267 page)

CHAPTER I
V

MR. CLARGES, who thus buttressed off Mrs. Milne from her young friends, had been almost directly the cause of her financial ruin. For the last flutter of Sir Alfred Milne had been an attempt to corner a government issue of bills — an attempt which, Mr. Clarges having nosed it out, he proceeded to attack in the organs that were open to him with such virulence that Sir Alfred Milne’s governmental friends had been forced to abandon him to his fate, though his political power in the Midlands had been considerable. On the other hand, having succeeded in ruining this opulent sept, Mr. Clarges had been as assiduous in trying to secure, for the poorer members of the family, such as the young Alfred Milne’s, a decent share of what remained of the enterprises. In this he was unsuccessful. For anything to have come to the poorer members a criminal prosecution of Sir Alfred would have been necessary. Mr. Clarges advocated this in letters to the Public Prosecutor,
The Times
,
The Standard
, and
The Freethinker.
Public opinion, however, was hopelessly against Mr. Clarges; the opinion too even of the impoverished members of the clan of Milne. The idea of dragging an honoured name through the dust was repulsive to right-minded people, and Sir Alfred and his nearest relations retained a considerable bulk of peculated money.

It was perhaps this fact that gave Mr. Clarges his protective attitude towards these young people. He had performed a public duty in ruining them. He had prevented a “job” — though it is true that another job had resulted, the underwriting having been given to a firm less conspicuous, but related by even closer ties to a Treasury official. He had prevented a “job” — but he had caused distress to these young people; and he hovered around them as a successful general might on the scene of a glorious victory — as Bismarck, in his gloomier moments, is said to have been morbidly regretful of the thousands that he had sent to death. Perhaps if these young people had not so ably picked themselves up he might have “done something for them,” for, although he dressed like a country attorney, he was very wealthy. As it was, he limited himself to affording them moral support.

He had been uttering a fierce diatribe against the new main sewer that the London County Council were then executing. If, he had said, you want a thing botched, entrust it to a municipal corporation. He had gone on to attack all systems of drainage — on the score of their antiindividualist nature, of their mal-sanitation, of their being necessarily executed by municipalities. He did this to annoy the two science teachers, who sat, a little silent, gazing at the empty grate.

One of them was a fairish, untidy-haired young man from Norfolk; the other a perky, small-boned, dark, Londoner who had been educated at the Lothbury Board School. Sanitation was, however, the “subject” of neither of these young men, and they were too well used to Mr. Clarges’ Individualist diatribes to attempt any Socialist utterances. He would have jumped round on them with a poor-law scandal from Mile End, a case of peculation by the town clerk of a south-western borough, and an instance of land-jobbing by the education board of a Yorkshire town. They were tired of saying that those special cases could not affect a general principle. He would have replied —

“What about East Ham, then?” or “Have you heard about the State Hall of Pennsylvania? Eight hundred thousand dollars spent upon sham bronze candelabra that were too heavy for the ceilings. There’s the corporate spirit! Hunc!”

Carew, the young science teacher from Norfolk, kicked at last one of his long, crossed legs desultorily towards the fireplace. He had been biting his clasped knuckles, but he raised his mouth to say —

“It is not my subject, of course; but the whole question of water-borne bacilli is a very delicate one.”

Mr. Clarges jerked his little pointed beard, as if upon a spring, round towards the young man, who spoke with a rounded, precise, and cultured tone.

“What about the case of the Cheltenham Hydro, then?” he spat out. “Have you heard about that? The precious corporation had to pay seven thousand five hundred pounds damages for the bacilli they’d supplied along with their precious water.”

The young man bit his large knuckles again contemplatively.

“You hardly expect a jury to keep an open mind?” he said mildly. “It proves nothing scientifically. If
Mrs. Beeton’s Cookery Book
calls rhubarb a fruit, that would hardly be a reason why Linnaeus — or, for the matter of that, you yourself — should set it down amongst the products of garden trees.”

Mr. Clarges shot the vivid beams of his spectacles up at the grey ceiling. He ejaculated —

“Pshaw! Hunc!” and laughed joyously. “What about Professor Jay Edge,” he said, “with the psychic phenomena? Have you heard about that?” And again he sprang his face towards the young man.

Carew said, “Psychic phenomena aren’t Professor Edge’s subject. But that does not prevent his being the greatest biologist in the world.”

And he continued, very little perturbed by the snorts and ejaculations of Mr. Clarges, in slow, academic, and precisely uttered language —

“With regard to bacteria, the whole subject is in the air. As in all other departments of science, we haven’t travelled very far, but we have travelled an immense distance in the respect that we’ve learned to keep an open mind. We investigate; we don’t set out to prove theories.”

“Well, but — have you heard about Professor Jay Edge’s latest manifestation?” Mr. Clarges uttered with a jocular and calm politeness. “Here is the greatest biologist in the world communicating with the spirit of Nelson and publishing his experiences in the ha’p’ny Press. But why Nelson? Why not Huxley? or Judas Iscariot? or the late Sir Henry Irving?”

Carew kept a placid silence; Mrs. Milne laughed gently; the little Cockney wriggled in his chair.

“There’s your modern scientist,” Mr. Clarges shot out triumphantly. “A professor with his liver all wrong mistakes a sheet in the dusk for Nelson. His own eyes shooting liver sparks, I suppose, to make the fire! And immediately: ‘Nelson!’ Good Lord!”

He flung himself back in his chair, then leaned forward as if he were about to stab the chimney-piece with the point of his grizzled beard.

“Now look here,” he said. “When I was a boy in Staffordshire we used to have a Workman’s Polytechnic in the town. And there used to be a chemical lecturer who came there and gave courses in the cockpit. Well, he made stinks, and turned green things yellow and yellow gases purple. But he knew what he was talking about. An element was an element; a gas was a gas; a metal was a metal. But your modern fellows. What do you know? Nothing. Anything may be anything. You say one element may change into another. What’s that but alchemy? You say a metal is probably nothing but minute particles of matter in violent motion. You don’t know; but it may be so. Probably it’s electrical. You keep an open mind; you don’t know.”

The small scientist uttered the one word —

“Science...” explosively, pronouncing it rather as if it were spelt “saïence.”

“Saïence,” Mr. Clarges mimicked him. “Oh yes! You fellows are to be the priests of to-morrow. I can hear you say it when you bring out your shibboleth. You’re to be our dictators. You’re to dictate to us what we shall eat, what we shall wear, where we are to live, whether we’re to cross our legs or not. Pretty soon you will be dictating to us what we are to believe.”

He paused to take in breath in a series of splutters and pshaws.

“Extraordinary thing the lay mind,” the dark science tutor said. He pronounced the words with a shade the pronunciation of “eggstaordinery” and “lie-maind,” but he spoke with an aggressive insolence. “All you old-fashioned people have that out of the common looseness of language. It comes, of course, from your old-fashioned, classical educations. You are always hiding your heads in dust, like ostriches. You read things like Bacon’s
Novum Organum
and the other cheap classics. And you want to kn
ow.
Empiricism — that’s what it is. Sheer empiricism. What do you know? I should like to hear.”

Mr. Clarges leaned over to touch Mrs. Milne’s knee with a nervous finger.

“He wants to know,” he said, with unholy glee. “Don’t you hear him?
Isn’t
it as I’ve said? There’s the priest speaking. These incompetent muddlers. They’ve destroyed knowledge; they’ve substituted the open mind. The open mind! That’s how you get Professor Edge talking to Nelson. You see all the old stuff of the dark ages cropping up again. They’ve begun with destroying knowledge; they’re going on to recreate mysteries and ghosts. It’s all coming over again. Priestcraft! Priestcraft! Ugh! what gull-like fools Englishmen are. I thought we’d destroyed that, last century. But here it is cropping up again.”

“Oh, we know you’ve a fine nose for scandals, Mr. Clarges” — the little Cockney spoke derisively. “But
your
day is done. We are getting on now the lumber’s cleared out of the way....”

“But surely,” Mrs. Milne appealed, with a deliberate and deep-toned woman’s voice, to Mr. Clarges, “if, as you say, you destroyed revealed religion in the last century, you left the field open to doubts and speculations.”

Her face was her husband’s face, but regularised and softened. Ample-limbed, brown-haired, dressed in a very unnoticeable but generally loose gown of black, her eyes were large, slow-moving, and what the Greek writers called “bovine.” They rested meditatively upon your face, and always appealingly, as if they asked you to be genuine, to speak the truth to her, so that she might have an aspect of you in which she could believe and trust. She leaned back with a powerful restfulness in her hard chair, a restfulness complete, flowing in its lines, beautifully and largely feminine.

Mr. Clarges turned upon her with a softened snap — as if he had put a brake upon his spring.

“No, my dear madam,” he said; then he snapped round upon the young men with the full power of his spring, so that he resembled a bearded and diminutive Perseus protecting a beautiful Andromeda from heresies; “that’s precisely what we did
not
do.”

The little dark Cockney snickered, moving his jaws like a London sparrow engaged with a crocus leaf.

“We did not destroy without building. We uprooted; we had backbones.”

The little Cockney ejaculated “Tee-hee!” but keeping his luminous eyes upon him, Mr. Clarges fulminated.

“When we said that there was no God, we said that there was
no
God.”

During the last few moments of this discussion there had been audible, through the voices of the disputants and the noises from the marble-players in the little study, a click of a latchkey in the door, the whine of an uneasy lock. Alfred Milne was quietly in the room with a stranger, who looked behind him a little shadowy in the dusk.

Discussion, however, was the most precious thing in life in that circle, and except that Mrs. Milne’s eyes rested upon them, the party made no sign of having observed an addition to their number. Mr. Clarges only raised his voice, so that it had an extraordinary ring of treble —

“When we said that there was no God we said there was
no
God. We did not say only that there was no Jahwe. We said that there was no Brahma, no Vishnu, no Mithras, no God of the Sun, whatever his name was.”

Alfred Milne and the stranger came a little closer to the back of the ring. Mrs. Milne observed that the stranger — he was still indistinct — appeared to listen with an erect-headed and authoritative attention.

“No; there was no doubting in
our
minds,” Mr. Clarges said, with an extraordinary fury of splutterings. “We denied it all; we denied the divine principle. We did not have a vague, floating, pantheistic deity at the back of our heads. We said there was no Hades, no Elysium.”

(“The fool hath said in his heart there is no God!” the little Cockney uttered.)

“We said that there was no immortal principle; we said that evolution accounted for all things upon a natural basis,” Mr. Clarges almost shouted. “We were definite; we knew. We said that an element
was
an element; that by no process natural or divine could the clay of the earth become man. We denied all metamorphoses from those of the Scriptures to those of Ovid or the
Arabian Nights.
We
knew..
.. But these fellows...” Mr. Clarges fell back in his chair with an exhausted air.