Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (276 page)

Mrs. Milne said slowly —

“It is just possible. But is it, then, so very undesirable?”

Mr. Clarges fell back in his chair.

“Undesirable!” he said. “My dear woman: my dear child! Would you have this guest of yours with his vulgar hypnotism — or these Krakroffs with their music-hall sleight-of-hand — would you have them elevated to the rank of the Deity? Consider! You say it is just possible. But suppose now one of your friends came to you and said that — at Piccadilly Circus, for instance — she had run against a remarkable-looking man who had spoken to her, and by performing various wonders and by uttering what seemed to her new and high truths in a tone of conviction had established in her mind the belief that he was a prophet or a God. What would you say? What would you do?”

“I should say,” Frances Milne uttered in her slow tones, “that it was a just possible story. And if the truths that he uttered appeared from her report to be such as attracted me I should want to be introduced to him and to hear what he had to say.”

Mr. Clarges started to his feet.

“Then you declare war on me?” he said.

“I do not declare war on you,” Mrs. Milne said; “but it is you who have taught us to doubt. Can you wonder if we keep an open mind as to your own dogmas?”

CHAPTER I
I

IN a great room that resembled a baronial hall, so long that it appeared low, so dark in its wood-panelling that it was sombre in spite of many softened lights, with thick rugs on the parqueted floor and relieved by but a single painting of a diaphanous portrait by Romney of Lady Hamilton, looking backwards over her shoulder — relieved by that alone and by a single bookcase containing works of reference and a few of the latest novels that had come in for review, the
Daily Outlook
was edited in chief. And here, in the austere and wealthy twilight, seven people maintained attitudes of attention. Five of them were men in evening dress, and two were ladies of mature, opulent, and well-preserved charm, who sat, the one actually at the editorial desk in the centre of the room, the other beside it The men all stood, and all of them, maintaining a profound silence, kept their eyes upon the Marquis of Sandgate as with silent steps he moved across the heavy carpet He was a thin, tall, rather querulous-looking brown man, so fine in the lines that you might have thought him, but for his creased lips, hardened complexion, and thin throat, still a subaltern in a cavalry regiment Whilst he walked he appeared to meditate profoundly.

But, coming near the mantelpiece, he observed upon it, just beneath the portrait of Lady Hamilton, a box of Swedish matches. No one moved: they hardly breathed. He took the yellow-papered box, inserted a delicate and spatulate brown finger into one end, pushed out the contents of the box, and poured them into the palm of his hand. He lifted match after match, noticeably in the air, as if he were exhibiting them first to a little foreign man who stood in the room, and then moving it with a little circular motion as if for the eyes of the rest of the company. He replaced each match in the little box: there were seventeen, of which one was merely a fragment.

Still silent, Lord Aldington motioned to Arthur Bracondale to touch the tiny bell-push, labelled “Sub-editor,” in the wainscot beside the central door.

No one spoke: no one so much as breathed. The portrait of Lady Hamilton, peering downwards, seemed to smile seductively, for all the rest of the room, at the chief proprietor of the paper. To Lord Aldington himself, she appeared to look beyond him; but the peculiarity of the portrait having been pointed out to this remarkable man by his wife at home, his lordship — then only Mr. Caldross — had had the picture removed to his office as its sole adornment. It pleased his humorous vanity that Nelson’s seductress should appear thus to attempt to exercise her fascinations upon himself — a greater man than Nelson had ever been in the councils of the Empire — and Lord Aldington, large, florid, and extravagantly youthful, was careful at times of importance to stand on the exact square of the carpet where — so Lady Aldington, who had arranged his office for him, told him — the languishing glances of this Circe would appear to fall.

A man with a tired face and reddish hair opened the middle door and exclaimed, “Your Lordship! Madame Krakroff says: ‘Matchbox; seventeen matches, one imperfect.’”

A murmur, a buzz of relief from nervous tension let itself loose in the room. It was as if they all rejoiced, at once that they could let their tongues loose and that the experiment had so triumphantly succeeded.

The Marchioness of Sandgate — who, in her opulent beauty suggesting the state of a great rose in its finest prime and ready to fall to pieces at a touch, suggested more exactly than anything else that the fine lines of her husband’s figure concealed a full tale of years — Lady Sandgate said to Mrs. Lympere over the corner of the editor’s table —

“He’ll certainly do!”

And Lord Aldington, brushing back with a characteristic motion a lock of hair that fell over his bulging forehead, echoed the words of his noble friend and coproprietor’s wife.

“I think,” he said to the minutely triumphant Krakroff, who still stood beneath the chandelier, “that you’ll certainly do.”

“It’s really a singular performance,” the Marquis uttered to the carpet rather more than to Arthur Bracondale, who stood beside him. “If you could get it into the paper now — exactly like that?”

He touched the ends of his clipped moustache with delicate fingers and regarded the young man circumspectly. And Arthur Bracondale had been so suddenly and so swiftly plunged into this bewildering experience — he had been in a box at the Esmeralda with Lord Aldington and the two ladies all the evening — that he had not yet had time to acquire a feeling of diffidence. He uttered the words —

“I’ll do my best: I think I can if the paper decides to take the matter up....”

The Marquis looked at him and said, “Hum!” He was always suspicious of his notorious colleague’s sudden passions that blazed up like fires of straw every month or so. It could not indeed be alleged that Lord Aldington had ever made a mistake. He seemed to take a stable-boy at random, out of the streets; to develop one of these tremendous furores for him; to set him to describe the singing of a prima-donna, the effects of a revival meeting, or a new watering-place in the Riviera — without the least rhyme or reason in the choice. And the things got done. There could not be any doubt of that. The stable-boy described the top notes of the diva as “each an electric pin-prick.” And the public tumbled over itself to read the middle pages of the paper. Yet, into the face of each new passion, the Marquis, who took the paper with an extreme seriousness, uttered his dubious “Hum!”

It was Mrs. Lympere, however, who brought the outside note, the note of passion and mystery, into the sitting. Krakroff, dark, and with the indescribable air of a French waiter giving rise, quite unjustly, to the faint suspicion that he had been too long without a shave, looked sufficiently triumphantly from one face to another. And in his glance there was a faint — the very faintest, the most imperceptible — suspicion of insolent contempt. Mr. Putz, the manager of the Esmeralda Theatre of Varieties and of twenty others, gazed anxiously into the face of Lord Aldington, who appeared to be collecting votes from the glances of his companions. But Mrs. Lympere, a dark, thin, and tall lady, with a suggestion of softness that beautifully contrasted with the blonde opulence of Lady Sandgate — Mrs. Lympere stretched out her white-gloved hands in the least towards the great man.

“Oh, please, please, Lord Aldington,” she said, with a rounded and passion-torn organ, “publish these wonderful results! They should be inquired into! They ought to be investigated! For the sake of so many who suffer....”

And Lord Aldington, permitting his thoughts for the moment to digress into the pleased and boyish reflection that, even when it came to such a detail as choosing the women he took about with him, he did it well. You could not — Etty or Romney could not — have brought into being a better group than these two women, at the corner of a dark table, in a soft, sumptuous, and dim room, where the lights fell down upon their rival beauties — upon their light dresses, their white shoulders, their fine jewels, and the union of their lines. And Mrs. Lympere continued—”It’s a marvellous glimpse into the beyond. Can’t we imagine that it is in this way we shall communicate when we have passed into eternity?”

Lady Sandgate smiled, because she imagined that Mrs. Lympere was thinking of Charlie Brabazon. And indeed Mrs. Lympere was thinking of Charlie Brabazon. The wife of Mr. Lympere, K.C., one of the most voluble and savage advocates in the courts, she led, except for that young man, a life of the most intense dullness, for Mr. Lympere, apparently exerting the whole of his energies in court, where he was the terror of judges, witnesses, litigants, or prisoners who were unfortunate enough to come before him, was at home an absolutely inert, if disagreeable figure. He resembled, in fact, nothing so much as a lowering cloud, black, but discharging no rain; and at times he would not speak to his wife for so much as three weeks on end. As to whether he was aware of “what went on” at home, no one, least of all Mrs. Lympere, could fathom. Perhaps he knew that nothing really “went on” that could be called “goings”; perhaps he was entirely callous, for it was said that he sought diversion in circles “beneath him.” In any case, he hypnotised Mrs. Lympere, who passed her time between a dull misery and spasms of acute and appalling passion that was all the more unbearable because it was so very mute. It was true that Charlie — Lord Brabazon, cousin alike to herself and Eugene Durham—”spoke” often and earnestly. But she could never bring herself to respond to him — not even in the recesses of a taxi-cab coming home with him from Hurlingham, as that afternoon she had done, and not even though she had prayed to become unvirtuous with as much agony as other women have prayed to have a lost virtue restored to them. She could not, she could not ever, respond. And that night one of her crises was at its very worst, and her eyes were large, luminous, and quivering with pain. And Lady Sandgate, benign, fair, and bountiful, the as yet undropped rose, beside her was tranquilly aware at least of the depths of her nervous crisis. She had seen Mrs. Lympere suddenly break with her fingers the stem of a wine-glass she had been toying with at dinner — quite suddenly, at the mention of Olive Caerlyon, the Theatrical Milkmaid, with whom — though he was the most devoted of men — Charlie was said to be consoling himself in intervals of pleading.

“Oh, if only it could be so!” Mrs. Lympere was saying, and she fell back into picturing the hereafter as a space in which she would float for ever, expressing, by thought transference, to the spirit of Charlie Brabazon, dead too, the endearments and the longing that she would never utter in the flesh.

Mr. Putz, the manager of the Esmeralda and of twenty other Theatres of Varieties, a man in his own way esteemed as wonderful as Lord Aldington, huge, dark, obese, hook-nosed, and with such a baldness, encircled by such a haze of bushy, dark and curly hair that he resembled a Semitic and garlanded Silenus — Mr. Putz was clearing his throat in preparation for a speech. He had, indeed, in a husky voice that would afterwards grow clear, got as far as saying —

“The marvellous phenomena which we have observed...”

But at the far end of the long room appeared a little boy with extravagantly rosy cheeks, extravagantly large Eton collar, and extravagantly well-fitting Eton jacket — appeared and halted against the outer light of the open door. And Lord Aldington, aware that they would not be interrupted without sufficient reason, as well as desirous to interrupt the flood-tide of Mr. Putz’s thoughts until he should have finished his own excogitations, exclaimed in a loud and benevolent voice — he was good-humoured to every soul that he met, down to the little office-boys —

“Well, Peter! What is it?”

And there came from the far end of the room the piping words —

“Prince Phœbus Apollo and Mr. Milne desire to speak with Mr. Arthur Bracondale.”

Mrs. Lympere exclaimed —

“Oh! The wonderful man! He is said to change men’s hearts! How glad I am!” for, having seen the Prince at one of Lady Durham’s “At Homes” three days before — having been introduced, indeed, to him, and watched him from a settee, as it were, through a haze of feathers and laces, she desired to be able really to see him clearly — to come, as it were, really in contact with him. For she had heard from her cousin Eugene that this mysterious but yet almost divinely presentable person had principally the power to change human hearts. And, from a little person called Snyde — she did not know how she came to be at Aunt Durham’s, but she herself was feeling a reaction and a loneliness, Charlie Brabazon having to be on duty that afternoon — from a little person called Margery Snyde, who appeared quite out of it, she had heard — though Margery Snyde was a little dull and reserved — that she (Margery Snyde) had seen Mr. Apollo perform what she called sorceries and incantations. And, indeed, Margery Snyde had to admit that she had seen this strange man perform the undoubted marvel of changing a man’s heart. It did not matter that Margery Snyde did not like him: she would not.

But amongst themselves he passed: Eugene Durham said, indeed, that he had the Balliol manner. But several ladies who had got much closer to him than Mrs. Lympere had been able to do — Mrs. Lympere had happened to be wearing a stole of lace that had belonged to her mother, and was feeling besides too dispirited to push her way in — several ladies had told her that there was not anything at all about him that was so disagreeable. Indeed, he was said to be — a slight but obvious foreignness aiding him to the very utmost — by nature one of themselves. And what made him all the more charming was that, though distinctly you felt he was one of them by nature, actually he appeared of a spotless ignorance. You could tell him
anything
, and he listened with attention and with interest. At times he said the oddest things — but it was the right sort of oddness, not the wrong. If he were at times incomprehensible — though he was said to be as learned as the queer Dr. Somebody who lectured on Pluto — or was it Plato? — he was never revolutionary or disturbing; he never talked of “serious” subjects, like the Poor or Religion. He did not even mention International Politics, and there was nothing earnest about his remarks on the relation of the sexes. It was even pretty certain that he had picked up with Mrs. Courtneidge Roberts — and could he have picked up with any one more exactly right than that little, quivering, millionaire’s grass widow?