Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (499 page)

“Oh, tintinnabula ting porphyry fonts!

Fonts where Lo Sin has drunk and gazed!

Oh, lotus tree and shivering bulbul, glazed

By mists of verdigris! oh, amber ponts

Oh—”

“And that’s as far as I’ve got,” he exclaimed. He took a hasty sip from his cup, put it down on a chair, and folded up his manuscript, exclaiming: “I knew a man called Nuttall who had an awfully ugly mother. Now I must go to the Princess.” He ran out of the room.

Miss Macphail exclaimed:

“Here you, stop! You’re going to take me to the Princess’s with you,” just as Mr. Blood cried:

“Stop him! he’s the greatest gossip in London. He’s exactly the man we want.”

They made Mr. Macpherson return by dragging him back by the coat tails and he had to listen to the scheme for a new periodical that was to be edited by Mr. Mitchell and paid for by Mr. Fleight.

CHAPTER II
I

MR. CLUNY MACPHERSON and Miss Macphail walked side by side to the Pocahontas Club, for Mr. Macpherson, though he was quite a wealthy young man, thought that taxi-cabs were terribly extravagant, whilst Miss Macphail, since her arrival in London, had never so much as once contributed a coin to such a means of getting about. The Pocahontas Club was, moreover, only just round the corner, in Piccadilly.

Cluny had therefore no time to get out more than a bubbling string of ejaculations.

“God bless my soul! Isn’t it perfectly extraordinary! Isn’t it amazing!” he commented on the fact just revealed to him, that a new magazine, to be conducted by Charles Mitchell, was about to be launched, and that Miss Augusta was to be his assistant. “You’ve got your opportunity now. Do you suppose Charlie will publish any of my poems?” But then he supposed that Mitchell detested his poems. He asked next if it wasn’t an exciting world, and stated that he knew a man called Huxtep who went to Bogota, in the Republic of Costaguana, for the purpose of establishing the religion of Minerva instead of the Roman Church. “What an important person you are going to be, Augusta!” he exclaimed, so shrilly that the crossing sweeper at Little Grosvenor Street followed them for some minutes with his eyes. “You’re going to be assistant editor of the most important magazine the world has ever seen. That man Rothweil will pour money like blood or water, and Charlie Mitchell will assemble the most wonderful collection of cranks known to this earth. And, of course, it’s cranks that get a thing a reputation in the intellectual world!” He went on to say that he hadn’t thought it quite right to introduce Miss Macphail to the Princess before, but that now it was perfectly all right and that Augusta need not be in the least alarmed. She could go anywhere; he would take the responsibility of that. Miss Macphail did not offer any comments on Cluny’s speeches, but walked rather grimly beside him. She determined that whatever poetry the new magazine might print — and she did not give two pins for any poetry that was not by Goethe or at least by Freiligrath — no single verse by Cluny Macpherson should ever appear in its pages.

The Pocahontas Club, an immense building which had been erected for the residence of the late Duke of Granville, was mainly visited by women who wrote and upon the whole it despised the frivolous or the merely clubbable. It contained, however, many residential suites. One of these was inhabited by the Princess Odintsov, who had as a companion the Countess Paramatti. The Princess had some grievance against the Russian Government and she was understood to hope that the British Foreign Office would interest itself in her case, which, since she was a Russian subject, proved a slow process. The Countess Paramatti had once been very rich, but she had a grievance against the Republic of Brazil, or she was fomenting a revolution. These ladies, in spite of their distinguished origins, were exceedingly impoverished, so that it was understood that Mr. Macpherson, who was the soul of goodness, paid for his tea. He also discharged their bills whenever he had read his poems to them, though he did this unobtrusively when, on his way out, he passed the porter in his glass case beside the club door.

They were seated in one corner of a room whose main characteristics were its vastness and the fact that the electric light was very tiring to the eyes. Several groups were not far from them, because there was a certain exhilaration to be derived from sitting at a table next, or next but one, to a real princess, with a countess thrown in. Mr. Macpherson appeared. He was walking behind Augusta Macphail, who, in turn, walked behind a boy in buttons. The greater number of the members rose from their tables and went to others further off.

This was done partly out of respect, since many of the more humble members regarded Mr. Macpherson as being, in a sort of a way, the prime minister, or at the least the court jester, of a royal lady. Many of the members, too, detested hearing Mr. Macpherson read his own poems.

The Princess, a tall and extraordinarily beautiful, dark lady, spoke practically no English. But she was able to assure Mr. Macpherson, in French, that she adored his poems for their rhythm. The higher notes of his voice reminded her, she told him, of the chants of the Cossacks of the Don. The Countess Paramatti, a short, squat figure with a remarkable moustache and dresses of great richness, was smoking a short, fat cigar. She practically never spoke.

Of all those who had surrounded them there remained only old Miss Eno, whose pen name was Enoch Arden, and who wrote Society paragraphs for the
Police News.
Miss Eno didn’t, poor thing, make more than seven and sixpence a week, and she was said to live by walking up to the members’ tables in the lunch room and furtively extracting a roll whilst she enquired after the healths of their children, their pet dogs, or their servants. She remained firmly seated within three feet of the Princess, for she was determined to hear what was said in that group. Indeed, by paragraphs descriptive of the Princess and her friends, she had in the last three weeks made more than two pounds ten extra, so that she was thinking of buying some new corsets, a shirt waist, and a pair of shoes that would not hurt her poor feet.

Mr. Macpherson made his bows to the two ladies, and then he returned to the middle of the room. He beckoned to the departing groups and exclaimed in his enormously high voice:

“Hi! all of you, don’t run away, group yourselves around me.” He assured them that he was not going to read any of his poems, but that he had an enormously important announcement to make. “We’re going to have tremendous times!” he chanted. “Come along, Mrs. Dubarry, come along, Mrs. Wilsford! Just you come and listen to me!”

No one took Mr. Macpherson very seriously, so that most of them continued to move away, and only one or two remained.

He told them to keep quite still, and then he called out: “There’s a millionaire — a terrific millionaire — who is going to make all our fortunes!”

Several people stayed still at this announcement, that was uttered in a voice so high and so loudly that it reached every corner of the room. He continued as loudly:

“Mr. Aaron Rothweil is going to start a magazine!” A great stir, like a gust of wind in corn, went through the whole company. There was no single person there who did not desire to contribute to a new magazine.

They crowded round Cluny; they made a ring for him, and for five minutes he was like an Emperor dominating his subjects.

“This chap, Rothweil,” he went on, “he’s a tremendous chap. You all know
his
name. And why? We’re all of us clean because we use Rothweil’s Soap. And now he’s going to start a magazine.” Mr. Rothweil was going to start a daily paper later on. But just now it was a magazine. None of them, Mr. Macpherson said, knew anything about Rothweil, so they had all better be quiet and listen. Rothweil had used to call himself Fleight — which was a silly thing to do because no one had ever heard that name, and everyone knew that of Rothweil. It was respected throughout the world. It was as respected as Rothschild, or Birnbaum, or Oppenheim, or even Macpherson.

“So now you know all about him,” Mr. Macpherson continued. “And now I’ll tell you all about the magazine.”

It was only going to print the best and most unsaleable writing. Mr. Rothweil was going to carry it on even if it cost him five thousand a year — for three years. Think of that! It meant five thousand a year thrown complete into the laps of those present. It might mean anything from a hundred and fifty a year for every one of them.

They were just to think of that! Miss Denman, there present, would be able to write about Shakespeare’s being Bacon until the name of Shakespeare would stink in all their nostrils. Miss Watchett would be able to advocate unceasingly laws making all babies up to eighteen months of age be carried about in spinal carriages. Miss Shoesmith would be able to propound her favourite plan of feeding the poor with cuttle fish from the Dogger Bank. There wouldn’t, as he expressed it, be any crank of them all who would not be able to make her voice heard.

“Isn’t it glorious?” he began his peroration; “isn’t it fun? Don’t we live in exciting times? So you’d all better raise your tea-cups and drink the health of the man Rothweil. I knew a nasty fellow called Doe whose aunt always toasted the late Queen in China tea, and she had a sister who bred Newfoundlands,” — at least, Mr. Macpherson went on, he thought they were Newfoundlands. At any rate, she bred something, or perhaps it was that she took an interest in the Home for Abandoned Girls. Yes, that was it; because Mr. Macpherson knew she used to give the most extraordinary parties, and some one had once tried to blackmail Mr. Macpherson there. But he had said: “What’s the use of trying to blackmail a chap who wears a flannel shirt.” They had better go and try it on with that fellow Morgan. And so they had. And it had cost Morgan a pretty penny. Or, perhaps it was only seven pounds. Or, perhaps it was only that he got them into the hospital. Anyhow, it was a great nuisance and Mr. Macpherson was very glad because Morgan was a nasty fellow.

It was at this point that some one asked whether Mr. Macpherson was going to be the editor of the new magazine, and Miss Macphail commented:

“Of course not! Who’d be such an idiot as to employ Cluny?”

Mr. Macpherson’s happy face fell for a moment.

“Of course I’m not going to be the editor,” he recovered himself. “I’m a poet. That’s not my job. But Charlie Mitchell is going to edit it, and old Blood is going to look after him, and I can make them do whatever I like.”

“I’ll cholly well take care you
don’d
do anything of the sort,” Miss Macphail commented.

“Oh, you’re only the assistant editor,” Mr. Macpherson said with good-natured contempt. “You only get the job because Blood is sweet on your sister Wilhelmina. We all know that, so don’t you talk.”

“At any rate, I’m the assistant editor,” Miss Macphail said grimly, and she moved slowly towards the door.

“You aren’t going to have to do with selecting the manuscripts. You’re only going to be called that,” Mr. Macpherson brought out, “so that you can trot about and boom the magazine with the Smart Set.” Miss Macphail, he said, was going to pretend to get everybody’s articles put in and then she was going to be very sorry because the real editor threw them out for lack of space. That’s what Augusta was, and a good job too, because Cluny did not like her at all. She had been very rude to him, and if anybody thought they could be very rude to him without his hitting back they were very much mistaken. There was a fellow called White who had a sister. Her name was Marjorie, or it may have been Campaspe, or Susan, or something like that. And one day White said that Cluny could not play tennis. So Cluny had gone to Lady Mallett’s ball and told everybody that Campaspe — no, her real name was Elizabeth — Elizabeth did not look at all well in peach green. And since that was the fashionable colour that year, she lost her chance with the Hon. Rupert Tree and that broke her heart. So that was how Mr. Macpherson had scored Mr. White off. “But, of course, afterwards,” Mr. Macpherson was finishing, “I introduced her to Lady Costorfine, of Pittlochrie, and she married her son, and she is now—”

His voice gradually died away. He was standing alone in the centre of the room. All the rest of the company had followed Miss Macphail downstairs.

Cluny went contentedly to the Princess and the Countess Paramatti.

“I excited some of those people, didn’t I?” he said. “Now I’m going to read you my poems.
Je vais vous lire des vers, Princesse
.” The ladies received this announcement with contentment, since it meant that he would pay their bills, and they were not displeased when he announced that, afterwards, he was going to take them to the dinner of the Enamel Club, where they would hear him open a discussion as to whether life were worth living unwashed. And that, he said, would be a good job, too, because he would be able to bring in about Rothweil and his soap and the new magazine before Augusta Macphail could get her oar in. He was accustomed to pretend to his friends that he was engaged to Augusta Macphail, because she was a poor devil and it did her good to have it thought that she was engaged to a rich man. But he would jolly well call that off. “I’m the man for these jobs,” he concluded. “You won’t have to dress because we all have to pretend that we’re coming to the club dirty. That’s very amusing, that is, very amusing! And then we have a cake of soap beside the plates and we wash in the finger bowls. That’s my idea; it’s sort of mediaeval. You can read about it in the ‘Jackdaw of Rheims’—’
La Pie Parlante de Rheims, Princesse,’
or — no! the French for jackdaw isn’t
pie.
I don’t know what it is. But there’s a jolly good story by a Frenchman, whose name I’ve forgotten, about a magpie who got drunk and knocked over a paraffin lamp and was burnt to death. And a jolly good thing too, because I hate magpies!”