Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (270 page)

“Oh, that is... only... hypnotic... suggestion.... I’ve... seen... better turns... at... the... Em...”

A sudden cry came from the doorway —

“Oh, no more! No more! I can’t bear it,” Margery Snyde cried out in the darkness. “I shall die.”

The music ceased; the light died away in the sky; the candles flamed up again. Margery Snyde pushed her way into the room.

“It was wicked,” she said, and she gazed at the wonder-worker. “It is the work of devils. How can I have come to such a place as this?”

“Child,” the Godhead uttered, “you will not die, but you will live and be happy as simple people are happy. And assuredly you have committed no sin. When you tell it to your confessor he will smile and say you were overwrought.”

A certain emotion was communicated to that little circle, so that when Gertrude Welby, who was studying psychology for the London University degree, asked the young man from Norwich “what he thought of it,” she spoke in a whisper. The others were simply silent because no one had the courage to speak. There were there George Durant, who would have been a rising engineer had he not been too scrupulous to find employment, and Edward Wynn, who was a designer of advertisements, but found his serious interests in Esoteric Buddhism and psychical research. There were thus seven of them in the room, besides the stranger, and although they filled the room enough to feel themselves a crowd with a corporate spirit, there were not, they all felt, enough of them to make it worth a charlatan’s while to give a so elaborate display.

They approached the manifestations with a certain timidity; if they had occurred at a music-hall they would have laughed at them. But here, in this room with the dull wall-paper, the framed autotype of Watts’s “Hope,” sloppily clad, seated on a round ball and fingering a one-stringed harp, for the sole picture; with the cheap fumed-oak sideboard that served also as a bookshelf, the cheap table, the cheap serge hangings — what could be made out of that impecunious gathering in the bare room? There was not enough money in the whole of them to pay for an apparatus capable of producing that distant and brilliant illumination and that wail of unknown instruments; so that they felt at the moment — and they said it amongst themselves afterwards — that they might dismiss the idea of an apparatus.

For the moment Margery Snyde had been the most vocal, and the sobs from the passage to which she had retired, and where, invisible, she was softly robing herself to depart, her sobs at least bore witness to the fact that
she
fully believed. She believed that she had witnessed true sorcery, the work of the devil. She half believed that this being was Satan himself; she felt in herself the contamination that came from having been present at a satanic rite; and having in the dark pulled on her cotton gloves, she pulled them off again feverishly, as if by that action she were cleansing herself from pollution; and she let herself inaudibly out of the door because she did not wish Eugene to follow her at the moment.

The happiness that this being had promised her she regarded as a bribe to tempt her. It was almost the worst of all, for it was as if it separated her from Eugene Durham, and, as she went through the narrow, dark, and squalid streets that led to the straight and chilly vistas of South Kensington, she determined that it
should
separate her from Eugene, at least to the extent of making her never go to More’s Buildings again. If Eugene wanted her he must come to find her.

She had gone frequently to the Milnes’ because she liked them, and because the irreligious talk that at times she heard passed outside her sphere of consciousness. It was like the talk of brilliant children, and she was aware that she was winning some of them to her side, or at least that, by going there, she familiarised them with the idea of Rome, made them less intolerant, since she herself behaved with a tolerance that could only come with a deep faith.

But now, if it were coming to this — and of course it must come to this — she could never go there again. Of course it must come to this, for irreligious talk led to the worship, to the very presence, of the ministers of false gods.

A little, quivering figure, in a large hat and a clinging cloak, Margery Snyde pushed courageously enough through crowds of evil men that filled the street outside More’s Buildings. If they jeered at her she felt no fear, if they obstructed her path she avoided them, if they spoke to her as if she were one of the too many women of the town that there came home to roost, she turned a deaf ear. But false gods she feared, for she believed in the existence of false gods.

She did not, that is to say, believe that there was but one God and outside His Trinity an arid vacuum wherein there dwelt no supernatural beings. But Buddha existed for her: a fallen being, divine, but cast out of heaven, and Allah the god of the Saracens, and Dagon and Satan. Therefore she was ready to believe that this man she had seen was indeed an emissary of an evil power, since all that is outside the Church Catholic — all that is outside it and supernatural — is evil. Hurrying down the Brompton Road, she said a Hail Mary as she passed the Oratory and she calmed herself by telling her beads. She wondered that she had forgotten to make the sign of the cross or to pray in the Milnes’ room. It was thus that Satan took one, unawares, overcome by panic. And again she said to herself that she would never go to the Milnes’ again.

She passed the gaunt and ghostly Natural History Museum, reaching grotesque and spiky pinnacles dimly to the pale sky. (She walked home always because she did not wish to ask her father, who, poor learned dear, was not too well off, for an increase of pocket money.) Her heels beat on the long, straight pavements that run, so appallingly vacant in the night, towards Earl’s Court where they lived in a little house.

From far behind she heard the croak of a motor-horn, and because its tone reminded her of the horn of Durham’s motor, she said to herself again that, if Eugene were to have her, he must come to her now. And the flying vehicle drew softly up at her side. In its lighted interior she could see Eugene Durham and — and the emissary of Satan.

Eugene, large, debonair, and kind, opened the little door so that it almost touched her.

“Get in,” he said; “we will give you a lift.”

The girl shrank together.

“No!” she said.

“Oh come!” he expostulated.

“No!” she answered again.

And a voice from inside the lighted car —

“I will get out. You shall ride with this man alone,” and, sinuously, the emissary of Satan stood beside her.

She shrank back against the railings of a great stucco house; she crossed herself swiftly.

“Oh, child,” the voice said — the face she could not see, for he stood before the brilliant light of the car and was a mere silhouette, “since I do not sink into the ground at that sign, take heart and ride whilst we go home afoot. For your feet are weary, and your mind.”

She said —

“If God in His mercy lets you live in face of that sign...”

“Child,” he said, “God in His mercy is other than you take Him to be. The universe is very wide, and in it there is space for many gods.”

“I will not hear you,” she cried out.

“And you do very well,” he answered; “for I tell you this: that though your doings be indifferent to God, who, being God, is awfully needless of prayers and help, yet, in so far as you are true to your God, you help yourself.

And I who am what you acknowledge me to be wish you well.”

“I do not ask for your goodwill,” she said. “I must pray. Eugene, I will pray for you. If ever you needed it, you need it now.”

Eugene Durham, with the light on his face, was smiling amiably, but with an entire and a lofty non-comprehension.

“Well, let me see you home,” he said.

She answered —

“No! I’ve walked by myself often enough.”

And indeed it was owing to his knowledge of her habits and her route that Eugene Durham had been able thus to overtake her.

Left to himself in the little room at More’s Buildings, Eugene Durham had had to undergo what he considered to be the agreeable persiflage of an aristocratic illusionist, before he discovered that Margery Snyde had disappeared.

Standing smiling, round-browed, and so much taller than any one in the room that he appeared to swim, like an anchored balloon, above the dead level, so bounteously clothed with flesh that he seemed to be wearing several overcoats, so benignantly bland that he had the air of indeed belonging to a species other than that of all these workers, he heard the stranger say to Alfred Milne —

“You observe the effect of these miracles upon your friend!”

Alfred Milne said —

“But would the effect upon Carver have been the same?”

“Assuredly,” the stranger answered; “and how much the more pronounced. For consider the nature of our friend here: he is unobservant where our friend Carver is observant; he is unsuspicious where Carver is full of suspicion; he is superior for reasons that I take to be purely material, because maybe of wealth, of old descent, or for whatever attributes to-day are prized by humanity. Carver, on the other hand, is superior, is even scornful in his superiority, because of gifts of the mind, of the tongue, of the observation. Therefore for all the reasons that would teach each of them to distrust the evidence of his senses Carver is the more likely to mistrust a wonder that is merely exterior to him. But in the matter of a change of his heart he is far the more likely to be oppressed by wonder, since he is a person who has schooled and disciplined himself, obviously, in a long struggle with fates very unpropitious.”

“What you say appears to be true,” Mrs. Milne answered for her husband.

“On the other hand,” Mr. Apollo said, “I may work a change in the heart of our friend here, and so little has he ever exerted his own will that it will pass unobserved by him.”

Eugene Durham said —

“Eh?” It tickled and pleased him to have attention called to himself.

“If, in short,” Mr. Apollo said, “I desired to impress upon our friend a sense of my miraculous powers, I must do it with something less divine than the rays of the sun or the harmonies of the spheres, and with something more vulgar than a change of his heart. His heart I have indeed changed to-night, and of that change he is comfortably unaware. But did I desire to impress him with a sense of my powers, I should tell him of a secret that he whispered to a courtesan, or I should predict to him the name of a winner in the next chariot race — if indeed you still have courtesans and races in this world.”

“I never bet, you know,” Eugene Durham said mildly, “and I have not owned a racehorse for four years.”

“You observe,” Mr. Apollo said, “how the mind of this man performs its functions — of how little it is able to select from a speech its main spirit and settles upon minute matters.”

“Well, but I
don’t
bet,” Eugene Durham said. “So you could not convince me by giving me a tip for the Oaks.” He still smiled with a conscious superiority, convinced that in this argument he was keeping his end up very well indeed. He thought that his parliamentary training stood him in good stead. But at that moment, glancing towards the doorway, he missed the form of Margery Snyde. He pushed therefore sideways through the little crowd and reached the dark entrance.

Is Margery Snyde gone?” he asked of young Wynn, the poster-designer and theosophist. He had to wait for a minute for an answer, because Wynn was lost in dazed speculations as to the light he had seen and the music he had heard.

“Oh yes! Yes! I suppose so,” he uttered hurriedly. Durham said, “Oh!” and his tone expressed alike a disappointment and chagrin that were seldom manifested in his amiable tones. He pulled himself, however, together, and making — for it wasn’t pushing, since there was no resistance to motion in these amiable, if cramped young people — making his way back into the room, he said to Mr. Apollo the words —

“I don’t know where you are going; but I’d give you a lift anywhere.”

His emotions were not vivid at any time, but at the moment he did not feel that he much desired to remain there; at the same time he did not much desire to be alone. It would, in fact, suit him exactly to take a short run in his car, to smoke a cigarette, and to compare social notes with this man, whom — on account of his voice and his tranquillity — he imagined to have been at Balliol. He thought he could tell a Balliol man wherever he met him.