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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of Tales of the Long Bow, by G. K.
-Chesterton
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: Tales of the Long Bow
-
-Author: G. K. Chesterton
-
-Release Date: October 20, 2022 [eBook #69185]
-
-Language: English
-
-Produced by: Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed
-             Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was
-             produced from images made available by the HathiTrust
-             Digital Library.)
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF THE LONG BOW ***
-
-
-
-
-
-TALES OF THE LONG BOW
-
-
-
-
-  TALES OF THE
-  LONG BOW
-
-  BY
-  G. K. CHESTERTON
-
-  AUTHOR OF
-  “THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER
-  BROWN,” “HERETICS,” ETC.
-
-  [Illustration]
-
-  NEW YORK
-  DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
-  1925
-
-
-
-
-  COPYRIGHT, 1925
-  BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
-
-  PRINTED IN U. S. A.
-
-  THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS
-  BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
-  CHAPTER                                                       PAGE
-
-     I THE UNPRESENTABLE APPEARANCE OF COLONEL CRANE               3
-
-    II THE IMPROBABLE SUCCESS OF MR. OWEN HOOD                    39
-
-   III THE UNOBTRUSIVE TRAFFIC OF CAPTAIN PIERCE                  81
-
-    IV THE ELUSIVE COMPANION OF PARSON WHITE                     113
-
-     V THE EXCLUSIVE LUXURY OF ENOCH OATES                       147
-
-    VI THE UNTHINKABLE THEORY OF PROFESSOR GREEN                 177
-
-   VII THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR         211
-
-  VIII THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM OF THE LEAGUE OF THE LONG BOW      247
-
-
-
-
-I
-
-THE UNPRESENTABLE APPEARANCE OF COLONEL CRANE
-
-
-
-
-TALES OF THE LONG BOW
-
-
-
-
-I
-
-THE UNPRESENTABLE APPEARANCE OF COLONEL CRANE
-
-
-These tales concern the doing of things recognized as impossible to
-do; impossible to believe; and, as the weary reader may well cry
-aloud, impossible to read about. Did the narrator merely say that
-they happened, without saying how they happened, they could easily
-be classified with the cow who jumped over the moon and the more
-introspective individual who jumped down his own throat. In short,
-they are all tall stories; and though tall stories may also be true
-stories, there is something in the very phrase appropriate to such a
-topsy-turvydom; for the logician will presumably class a tall story
-with a corpulent epigram or a long-legged essay. It is only proper that
-such impossible incidents should begin in the most prim and prosaic of
-all places, at the most prim and prosaic of all times, and apparently
-with the most prim and prosaic of all human beings.
-
-The place was a straight suburban road of strictly-fenced suburban
-houses on the outskirts of a modern town. The time was about twenty
-minutes to eleven on Sunday morning, when a procession of suburban
-families in their Sunday clothes were passing decorously up the road
-to church. And the man was a very respectable retired military man
-named Colonel Crane, who was also going to church, as he had done
-every Sunday at the same hour for a long stretch of years. There was
-no obvious difference between him and his neighbours, except that he
-was a little less obvious. His house was only called White Lodge and
-was, therefore, less alluring to the romantic passer-by than Rowanmere
-on the one side or Heatherbrae on the other. He turned out spick and
-span for church as if for parade; but he was much too well dressed to
-be pointed out as a well-dressed man. He was quite handsome in a dry,
-sun-baked style; but his bleached blond hair was a colourless sort
-that could look either light brown or pale grey; and though his blue
-eyes were clear, they looked out a little heavily under lowered lids.
-Colonel Crane was something of a survival. He was not really old;
-indeed he was barely middle-aged; and had gained his last distinctions
-in the great war. But a variety of causes had kept him true to the
-traditional type of the old professional soldier, as it had existed
-before 1914; when a small parish would have only one colonel as it
-had only one curate. It would be quite unjust to call him a dug-out;
-indeed, it would be much truer to call him a dug-in. For he had
-remained in the traditions as firmly and patiently as he had remained
-in the trenches. He was simply a man who happened to have no taste for
-changing his habits, and had never worried about conventions enough to
-alter them. One of his excellent habits was to go to church at eleven
-o’clock, and he therefore went there; and did not know that there went
-with him something of an old-world air and a passage in the history of
-England.
-
-As he came out of his front door, however, on that particular morning,
-he was twisting a scrap of paper in his fingers and frowning with
-somewhat unusual perplexity. Instead of walking straight to his garden
-gate he walked once or twice up and down his front garden, swinging his
-black walking-cane. The note had been handed in to him at breakfast,
-and it evidently involved some practical problem calling for immediate
-solution. He stood a few minutes with his eye riveted on a red daisy at
-the corner of the nearest flower-bed; and then a new expression began
-to work in the muscles of his bronzed face, giving a slightly grim hint
-of humour, of which few except his intimates were aware. Folding up
-the paper and putting it into his waistcoat pocket, he strolled round
-the house to the back garden, behind which was the kitchen-garden, in
-which an old servant, a sort of factotum or handyman, named Archer, was
-acting as kitchen-gardener.
-
-Archer also was a survival. Indeed, the two had survived together; had
-survived a number of things that had killed a good many other people.
-But though they had been together through the war that was also a
-revolution, and had a complete confidence in each other, the man Archer
-had never been able to lose the oppressive manners of a manservant. He
-performed the duties of a gardener with the air of a butler. He really
-performed the duties very well and enjoyed them very much; perhaps he
-enjoyed them all the more because he was a clever Cockney, to whom the
-country crafts were a new hobby. But somehow, whenever he said, “I have
-put in the seeds, sir,” it always sounded like, “I have put the sherry
-on the table, sir”; and he could not say, “Shall I pull the carrots?”
-without seeming to say, “Would you be requiring the claret?”
-
-“I hope you’re not working on Sunday,” said the Colonel, with a much
-more pleasant smile than most people got from him, though he was always
-polite to everybody. “You’re getting too fond of these rural pursuits.
-You’ve become a rustic yokel.”
-
-“I was venturing to examine the cabbages, sir,” replied the rustic
-yokel, with a painful precision of articulation. “Their condition
-yesterday evening did not strike me as satisfactory.”
-
-“Glad you didn’t sit up with them,” answered the Colonel. “But it’s
-lucky you’re interested in cabbages. I want to talk to you about
-cabbages.”
-
-“About cabbages, sir?” inquired the other respectfully.
-
-But the Colonel did not appear to pursue the topic, for he was gazing
-in sudden abstraction at another object in the vegetable plots in
-front of him. The Colonel’s garden, like the Colonel’s house, hat,
-coat and demeanour, was well-appointed in an unobtrusive fashion; and
-in the part of it devoted to flowers there dwelt something indefinable
-that seemed older than the suburbs. The hedges, even, in being as
-neat as Surbiton managed to look as mellow as Hampton Court, as if
-their very artificiality belonged rather to Queen Anne than Queen
-Victoria; and the stone-rimmed pond with a ring of irises somehow
-looked like a classic pool and not merely an artificial puddle. It is
-idle to analyse how a man’s soul and social type will somehow soak
-into his surroundings; anyhow, the soul of Mr. Archer had sunk into
-the kitchen-garden so as to give it a fine shade of difference. He
-was after all a practical man, and the practice of his new trade was
-much more of a real appetite with him than his words would suggest.
-Hence the kitchen-garden was not artificial, but autochthonous; it
-really looked like a corner of a farm in the country; and all sorts
-of practical devices were set up there. Strawberries were netted-in
-against the birds; strings were stretched across with feathers
-fluttering from them; and in the middle of the principal bed stood
-an ancient and authentic scarecrow. Perhaps the only incongruous
-intruder, capable of disputing with the scarecrow his rural reign, was
-the curious boundary-stone which marked the edge of his domain; and
-which was, in fact, a shapeless South Sea idol, planted there with no
-more appropriateness than a door-scraper. But Colonel Crane would not
-have been so complete a type of the old army man if he had not hidden
-somewhere a hobby connected with his travels. His hobby had at one time
-been savage folklore; and he had the relic of it on the edge of the
-kitchen-garden. At the moment, however, he was not looking at the idol,
-but at the scarecrow.
-
-“By the way, Archer,” he said, “don’t you think the scarecrow wants a
-new hat?”
-
-“I should hardly think it would be necessary, sir,” said the gardener
-gravely.
-
-“But look here,” said the Colonel, “you must consider the philosophy
-of scarecrows. In theory, that is supposed to convince some rather
-simple-minded bird that I am walking in my garden. That thing with
-the unmentionable hat is Me. A trifle sketchy, perhaps. Sort of
-impressionist portrait; but hardly likely to impress. Man with a hat
-like that would never be really firm with a sparrow. Conflict of wills,
-and all that, and I bet the sparrow would come out on top. By the way,
-what’s that stick tied on to it?”
-
-“I believe, sir,” said Archer, “that it is supposed to represent a gun.”
-
-“Held at a highly unconvincing angle,” observed Crane. “Man with a hat
-like that would be sure to miss.”
-
-“Would you desire me to procure another hat?” inquired the patient
-Archer.
-
-“No, no,” answered his master carelessly. “As the poor fellow’s got
-such a rotten hat, I’ll give him mine. Like the scene of St. Martin and
-the beggar.”
-
-“Give him yours,” repeated Archer respectfully, but faintly.
-
-The Colonel took off his burnished top-hat and gravely placed it on
-the head of the South Sea idol at his feet. It had a queer effect of
-bringing the grotesque lump of stone to life, as if a goblin in a
-top-hat was grinning at the garden.
-
-“You think the hat shouldn’t be quite new?” he inquired almost
-anxiously. “Not done among the best scarecrows, perhaps. Well, let’s
-see what we can do to mellow it a little.”
-
-He whirled up his walking-stick over his head and laid a smacking
-stroke across the silk hat, smashing it over the hollow eyes of the
-idol.
-
-“Softened with the touch of time now, I think,” he remarked, holding
-out the silken remnants to the gardener. “Put it on the scarecrow, my
-friend; I don’t want it. You can bear witness it’s no use to me.”
-
-Archer obeyed like an automaton, an automaton with rather round eyes.
-
-“We must hurry up,” said the Colonel cheerfully, “I was early for
-church, but I’m afraid I’m a bit late now.”
-
-“Did you propose to attend church without a hat, sir?” asked the other.
-
-“Certainly not. Most irreverent,” said the Colonel. “Nobody should
-neglect to remove his hat on entering church. Well, if I haven’t got a
-hat, I shall neglect to remove it. Where is your reasoning power this
-morning? No, no, just dig up one of your cabbages.”
-
-Once more the well-trained servant managed to repeat the word
-“Cabbages” with his own strict accent; but in its constriction there
-was a hint of strangulation.
-
-“Yes, go and pull up a cabbage, there’s a good fellow,” said the
-Colonel. “I must really be getting along; I believe I heard it strike
-eleven.”
-
-Mr. Archer moved heavily in the direction of the plot of cabbages,
-which swelled with monstrous contours and many colours; objects,
-perhaps, more worthy of the philosophic eye than is taken into account
-by the more flippant tongue. Vegetables are curious-looking things and
-less commonplace than they sound. If we called a cabbage a cactus, or
-some such queer name, we might see it as an equally queer thing.
-
-These philosophical truths did the Colonel reveal by anticipating the
-dubious Archer, and dragging a great, green cabbage with its trailing
-root out of the earth. He then picked up a sort of pruning-knife and
-cut short the long tail of the root; scooped out the inside leaves so
-as to make a sort of hollow, and gravely reversing it, placed it on
-his head. Napoleon and other military princes have crowned themselves;
-and he, like the Cæsars, wore a wreath that was, after all, made of
-green leaves or vegetation. Doubtless there are other comparisons that
-might occur to any philosophical historian who should look at it in the
-abstract.
-
-The people going to church certainly looked at it; but they did not
-look at it in the abstract. To them it appeared singularly concrete;
-and indeed incredibly solid. The inhabitants of Rowanmere and
-Heatherbrae followed the Colonel as he strode almost jauntily up the
-road, with feelings that no philosophy could for the moment meet.
-There seemed to be nothing to be said, except that one of the most
-respectable and respected of their neighbours, one who might even
-be called in a quiet way a pattern of good form if not a leader of
-fashion, was walking solemnly up to church with a cabbage on the top of
-his head.
-
-There was indeed no corporate action to meet the crisis. Their
-world was not one in which a crowd can collect to shout, and still
-less to jeer. No rotten eggs could be collected from their tidy
-breakfast-tables; and they were not of the sort to throw cabbage-stalks
-at the cabbage. Perhaps there was just that amount of truth in the
-pathetically picturesque names on their front gates, names suggestive
-of mountains and mighty lakes concealed somewhere on the premises. It
-was true that in one sense such a house was a hermitage. Each of these
-men lived alone and they could not be made into a mob. For miles around
-there was no public house and no public opinion.
-
-As the Colonel approached the church porch and prepared reverently
-to remove his vegetarian headgear, he was hailed in a tone a little
-more hearty than the humane civility that was the slender bond of that
-society. He returned the greeting without embarrassment, and paused a
-moment as the man who had spoken to him plunged into further speech. He
-was a young doctor named Horace Hunter, tall, handsomely dressed, and
-confident in manner; and though his features were rather plain and his
-hair rather red, he was considered to have a certain fascination.
-
-“Good morning, Colonel,” said the doctor in his resounding tones, “what
-a f---- what a fine day it is.”
-
-Stars turned from their courses like comets, so to speak, and the
-world swerved into wilder possibilities, at that crucial moment when
-Dr. Hunter corrected himself and said, “What a fine day!” instead of
-“What a funny hat!”
-
-As to why he corrected himself, a true picture of what passed through
-his mind might sound rather fanciful in itself. It would be less than
-explicit to say he did so because of a long grey car waiting outside
-the White Lodge. It might not be a complete explanation to say it was
-due to a lady walking on stilts at a garden party. Some obscurity might
-remain, even if we said that it had something to do with a soft shirt
-and a nickname; nevertheless all these things mingled in the medical
-gentleman’s mind when he made his hurried decision. Above all, it might
-or might not be sufficient explanation to say that Horace Hunter was a
-very ambitious young man, that the ring in his voice and the confidence
-in his manner came from a very simple resolution to rise in the world,
-and that the world in question was rather worldly.
-
-He liked to be seen talking so confidently to Colonel Crane on that
-Sunday parade. Crane was comparatively poor, but he knew People. And
-people who knew People knew what People were doing now; whereas people
-who didn’t know People could only wonder what in the world People
-would do next. A lady who came with the Duchess when she opened the
-Bazaar had nodded to Crane and said, “Hullo, Stork,” and the doctor
-had deduced that it was a sort of family joke and not a momentary
-ornithological confusion. And it was the Duchess who had started all
-that racing on stilts, which the Vernon-Smiths had introduced at
-Heatherbrae. But it would have been devilish awkward not to have known
-what Mrs. Vernon-Smith meant when she said, “Of course you stilt.” You
-never knew what they would start next. He remembered how he himself
-had thought the first man in a soft shirtfront was some funny fellow
-from nowhere; and then he had begun to see others here and there, and
-had found that it was not a _faux pas_, but a fashion. It was odd to
-imagine he would ever begin to see vegetable hats here and there, but
-you never could tell; and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake
-again. His first medical impulse had been to add to the Colonel’s fancy
-costume with a strait-waistcoat. But Crane did not look like a lunatic,
-and certainly did not look like a man playing a practical joke. He had
-not the stiff and self-conscious solemnity of the joker. He took it
-quite naturally. And one thing was certain: if it really was the latest
-thing, the doctor must take it as naturally as the Colonel did. So he
-said it was a fine day, and was gratified to learn that there was no
-disagreement on that question.
-
-The doctor’s dilemma, if we may apply the phrase, had been the whole
-neighbourhood’s dilemma. The doctor’s decision was also the whole
-neighbourhood’s decision. It was not so much that most of the good
-people there shared in Hunter’s serious social ambitions, but rather
-that they were naturally prone to negative and cautious decisions. They
-lived in a delicate dread of being interfered with; and they were just
-enough to apply the principle by not interfering with other people.
-They had also a subconscious sense that the mild and respectable
-military gentleman would not be altogether an easy person to interfere
-with. The consequence was that the Colonel carried his monstrous green
-headgear about the streets of that suburb for nearly a week, and nobody
-ever mentioned the subject to him. It was about the end of that time
-(while the doctor had been scanning the horizon for aristocrats crowned
-with cabbage, and, not seeing any, was summoning his natural impudence
-to speak) that the final interruption came; and with the interruption
-the explanation.
-
-The Colonel had every appearance of having forgotten all about the hat.
-He took it off and on like any other hat; he hung it on the hat-peg
-in his narrow front hall where there was nothing else but his sword
-hung on two hooks and an old brown map of the seventeenth century. He
-handed it to Archer when that correct character seemed to insist on his
-official right to hold it; he did not insist on his official right to
-brush it, for fear it should fall to pieces; but he occasionally gave
-it a cautious shake, accompanied with a look of restrained distaste.
-But the Colonel himself never had any appearance of either liking
-or disliking it. The unconventional thing had already become one of
-his conventions--the conventions which he never considered enough to
-violate. It is probable, therefore, that what ultimately took place was
-as much of a surprise to him as to anybody. Anyhow, the explanation, or
-explosion, came in the following fashion.
-
-Mr. Vernon-Smith, the mountaineer whose foot was on his native heath
-at Heatherbrae, was a small, dapper gentleman with a big-bridged nose,
-dark moustache, and dark eyes with a settled expression of anxiety,
-though nobody knew what there was to be anxious about in his very
-solid social existence. He was a friend of Dr. Hunter; one might
-almost say a humble friend. For he had the negative snobbishness that
-could only admire the positive and progressive snobbishness of that
-soaring and social figure. A man like Dr. Hunter likes to have a
-man like Mr. Smith, before whom he can pose as a perfect man of the
-world. What appears more extraordinary, a man like Mr. Smith really
-likes to have a man like Dr. Hunter to pose at him and swagger over
-him and snub him. Anyhow, Vernon-Smith had ventured to hint that the
-new hat of his neighbour Crane was not of a pattern familiar in every
-fashion-plate. And Dr. Hunter, bursting with the secret of his own
-original diplomacy, had snubbed the suggestion and snowed it under
-with frosty scorn. With shrewd, resolute gestures, with large allusive
-phrases, he had left on his friend’s mind the impression that the whole
-social world would dissolve if a word were said on so delicate a topic.
-Mr. Vernon-Smith formed a general idea that the Colonel would explode
-with a loud bang at the very vaguest allusion to vegetables, or the
-most harmless adumbration or verbal shadow of a hat. As usually happens
-in such cases, the words he was forbidden to say repeated themselves
-perpetually in his mind with the rhythmic pressure of a pulse. It was
-his temptation at the moment to call all houses hats and all visitors
-vegetables.
-
-When Crane came out of his front gate that morning he found his
-neighbour Vernon-Smith standing outside, between the spreading laburnum
-and the lamp-post, talking to a young lady, a distant cousin of his
-family. This girl was an art student on her own--a little too much on
-her own for the standards of Heatherbrae, and, therefore (some would
-infer), yet further beyond those of White Lodge. Her brown hair was
-bobbed, and the Colonel did not admire bobbed hair. On the other hand,
-she had a rather attractive face, with honest brown eyes a little too
-wide apart, which diminished the impression of beauty but increased the
-impression of honesty. She also had a very fresh and unaffected voice,
-and the Colonel had often heard it calling out scores at tennis on the
-other side of the garden wall. In some vague sort of way it made him
-feel old; at least, he was not sure whether he felt older than he was,
-or younger than he ought to be. It was not until they met under the
-lamp-post that he knew her name was Audrey Smith; and he was faintly
-thankful for the single monosyllable. Mr. Vernon-Smith presented her,
-and very nearly said: “May I introduce my cabbage?” instead of “my
-cousin.”
-
-The Colonel, with unaffected dullness, said it was a fine day; and his
-neighbour, rallying from his last narrow escape, continued the talk
-with animation. His manner, as when he poked his big nose and beady
-black eyes into local meetings and committees, was at once hesitating
-and emphatic.
-
-“This young lady is going in for Art,” he said; “a poor look-out, isn’t
-it? I expect we shall see her drawing in chalk on the paving-stones and
-expecting us to throw a penny into the--into a tray, or something.”
-Here he dodged another danger. “But, of course, she thinks she is going
-to be an R.A.”
-
-“I hope not,” said the young woman hotly. “Pavement artists are much
-more honest than most of the R.A.’s.”
-
-“I wish those friends of yours didn’t give you such revolutionary
-ideas,” said Mr. Vernon-Smith. “My cousin knows the most dreadful
-cranks, vegetarians and--and Socialists.” He chanced it, feeling that
-vegetarians were not quite the same as vegetables; and he felt sure
-the Colonel would share his horror of Socialists. “People who want us
-to be equal, and all that. What I say is--we’re not equal and we never
-can be. As I always say to Audrey--if all the property were divided
-to-morrow, it would go back into the same hands. It’s a law of nature,
-and if a man thinks he can get round a law of nature, why, he’s talking
-through his--I mean, he’s as mad as a----”
-
-Recoiling from the omnipresent image, he groped madly in his mind for
-the alternative of a March hare. But before he could find it, the girl
-had cut in and completed his sentence. She smiled serenely, and said in
-her clear and ringing tones:
-
-“As mad as Colonel Crane’s hatter.”
-
-It is not unjust to Mr. Vernon-Smith to say that he fled as from a
-dynamite explosion. It would be unjust to say that he deserted a lady
-in distress, for she did not look in the least like a distressed lady,
-and he himself was a very distressed gentleman. He attempted to wave
-her indoors with some wild pretext, and eventually vanished there
-himself with an equally random apology. But the other two took no
-notice of him; they continued to confront each other, and both were
-smiling.
-
-“I think you must be the bravest man in England,” she said. “I don’t
-mean anything about the war, or the D.S.O. and all that; I mean about
-this. Oh, yes, I do know a little about you, but there’s one thing I
-don’t know. Why do you do it?”
-
-“I think it is you who are the bravest woman in England,” he answered,
-“or, at any rate, the bravest person in these parts. I’ve walked about
-this town for a week, feeling like the last fool in creation, and
-expecting somebody to say something. And not a soul has said a word.
-They seem all to be afraid of saying the wrong thing.”
-
-“I think they’re deadly,” observed Miss Smith. “And if they don’t have
-cabbages for hats, it’s only because they have turnips for heads.”
-
-“No,” said the Colonel gently; “I have many generous and friendly
-neighbours here, including your cousin. Believe me, there is a case for
-conventions, and the world is wiser than you know. You are too young
-not to be intolerant. But I can see you’ve got the fighting spirit;
-that is the best part of youth and intolerance. When you said that word
-just now, by Jove you looked like Britomart.”
-
-“She is the Militant Suffragette in the Faerie Queene, isn’t she?”
-answered the girl. “I’m afraid I don’t know my English literature as
-well as you do. You see, I’m an artist, or trying to be one; and some
-people say that narrows a person. But I can’t help getting cross with
-all the varnished vulgarity they talk about everything--look at what
-he said about Socialism.”
-
-“It was a little superficial,” said Crane with a smile.
-
-“And that,” she concluded, “is why I admire your hat, though I don’t
-know why you wear it.”
-
-This trivial conversation had a curious effect on the Colonel. There
-went with it a sort of warmth and a sense of crisis that he had not
-known since the war. A sudden purpose formed itself in his mind, and he
-spoke like one stepping across a frontier.
-
-“Miss Smith,” he said, “I wonder if I might ask you to pay me a further
-compliment. It may be unconventional, but I believe you do not stand on
-these conventions. An old friend of mine will be calling on me shortly,
-to wind up the rather unusual business or ceremonial of which you have
-chanced to see a part. If you would do me the honour to lunch with me
-to-morrow at half-past one, the true story of the cabbage awaits you. I
-promise that you shall hear the real reason. I might even say I promise
-you shall _see_ the real reason.”
-
-“Why, of course I will,” said the unconventional one heartily. “Thanks
-awfully.”
-
-The Colonel took an intense interest in the appointments of the
-luncheon next day. With subconscious surprise he found himself not only
-interested, but excited. Like many of his type, he took pleasure in
-doing such things well, and knew his way about in wine and cookery. But
-that would not alone explain his pleasure. For he knew that young women
-generally know very little about wine, and emancipated young women
-possibly least of all. And though he meant the cookery to be good, he
-knew that in one feature it would appear rather fantastic. Again, he
-was a good-natured gentleman who would always have liked young people
-to enjoy a luncheon party, as he would have liked a child to enjoy a
-Christmas tree. But there seemed no reason why he should be restless
-and expectant about it, as if he were the child himself. There was no
-reason why he should have a sort of happy insomnia, like a child on
-Christmas Eve. There was really no excuse for his pacing up and down
-the garden with his cigar, smoking furiously far into the night. For as
-he gazed at the purple irises and the grey pool in the faint moonshine,
-something in his feelings passed as if from the one tint to the other;
-he had a new and unexpected reaction. For the first time he really
-hated the masquerade he had made himself endure. He wished he could
-smash the cabbage as he had smashed the top-hat. He was little more
-than forty years old; but he had never realized how much there was of
-what was dried and faded about his flippancy, till he felt unexpectedly
-swelling within him the monstrous and solemn vanity of a young man.
-Sometimes he looked up at the picturesque, the too picturesque, outline
-of the villa next door, dark against the moonrise, and thought he heard
-faint voices in it, and something like a laugh.
-
-The visitor who called on the Colonel next morning may have been an old
-friend, but he was certainly an odd contrast. He was a very abstracted,
-rather untidy man in a rusty knickerbocker suit; he had a long head
-with straight hair of the dark red called auburn, one or two wisps of
-which stood on end however he brushed it, and a long face, clean-shaven
-and heavy about the jaw and chin, which he had a way of sinking and
-settling squarely into his cravat. His name was Hood, and he was
-apparently a lawyer, though he had not come on strictly legal business.
-Anyhow, he exchanged greetings with Crane with a quiet warmth and
-gratification, smiled at the old manservant as if he were an old joke,
-and showed every sign of an appetite for his luncheon.
-
-The appointed day was singularly warm and bright and everything in
-the garden seemed to glitter; the goblin god of the South Seas seemed
-really to grin; and the scarecrow really to have a new hat. The irises
-round the pool were swinging and flapping in a light breeze; and he
-remembered they were called “flags” and thought of purple banners going
-into battle.
-
-She had come suddenly round the corner of the house. Her dress was
-of a dark but vivid blue, very plain and angular in outline, but not
-outrageously artistic; and in the morning light she looked less like
-a schoolgirl and more like a serious woman of twenty-five or thirty;
-a little older and a great deal more interesting. And something in
-this morning seriousness increased the reaction of the night before.
-One single wave of thanksgiving went up from Crane to think that at
-least his grotesque green hat was gone and done with for ever. He had
-worn it for a week without caring a curse for anybody; but during that
-ten minutes’ trivial talk under the lamp-post, he felt as if he had
-suddenly grown donkey’s ears in the street.
-
-He had been induced by the sunny weather to have a little table laid
-for three in a sort of veranda open to the garden. When the three sat
-down to it, he looked across at the lady and said: “I fear I must
-exhibit myself as a crank; one of those cranks your cousin disapproves
-of, Miss Smith. I hope it won’t spoil this little lunch for anybody
-else. But I am going to have a vegetarian meal.”
-
-“Are you?” she said. “I should never have said you looked like a
-vegetarian.”
-
-“Just lately I have only looked like a fool,” he said dispassionately;
-“but I think I’d sooner look a fool than a vegetarian in the ordinary
-way. This is rather a special occasion. Perhaps my friend Hood had
-better begin; it’s really his story more than mine.”
-
-“My name is Robert Owen Hood,” said that gentleman, rather
-sardonically. “That’s how improbable reminiscences often begin; but
-the only point now is that my old friend here insulted me horribly by
-calling me Robin Hood.”
-
-“I should have called it a compliment,” answered Audrey Smith. “But why
-did he call you Robin Hood?”
-
-“Because I drew the long bow,” said the lawyer.
-
-“But to do you justice,” said the Colonel, “it seems that you hit the
-bull’s-eye.”
-
-As he spoke Archer came in bearing a dish which he placed before his
-master. He had already served the others with the earlier courses, but
-he carried this one with the pomp of one bringing in the boar’s head at
-Christmas. It consisted of a plain boiled cabbage.
-
-“I was challenged to do something,” went on Hood, “which my friend here
-declared to be impossible. In fact, any sane man would have declared
-it to be impossible. But I did it for all that. Only my friend, in
-the heat of rejecting and ridiculing the notion, made use of a hasty
-expression. I might almost say he made a rash vow.”
-
-“My exact words were,” said Colonel Crane solemnly: “‘If you can do
-that, I’ll eat my hat.’”
-
-He leaned forward thoughtfully and began to eat it. Then he resumed in
-the same reflective way:
-
-“You see, all rash vows are verbal or nothing. There might be a debate
-about the logical and literal way in which my friend Hood fulfilled
-_his_ rash vow. But I put it to myself in the same pedantic sort of
-way. It wasn’t possible to eat any hat that I wore. But it might be
-possible to wear a hat that I could eat. Articles of dress could hardly
-be used for diet; but articles of diet could really be used for dress.
-It seemed to me that I might fairly be said to have made it my hat, if
-I wore it systematically as a hat and had no other, putting up with all
-the disadvantages. Making a blasted fool of myself was the fair price
-to be paid for the vow or wager; for one ought always to lose something
-on a wager.”
-
-And he rose from the table with a gesture of apology.
-
-The girl stood up. “I think it’s perfectly splendid,” she said. “It’s
-as wild as one of those stories about looking for the Holy Grail.”
-
-The lawyer also had risen, rather abruptly, and stood stroking his long
-chin with his thumb and looking at his old friend under bent brows in a
-rather reflective manner.
-
-“Well, you’ve subpœna’d me as a witness all right,” he said, “and now,
-with the permission of the court, I’ll leave the witness-box. I’m
-afraid I must be going. I’ve got important business at home. Good-bye,
-Miss Smith.”
-
-The girl returned his farewell a little mechanically; and Crane seemed
-to recover suddenly from a similar trance as he stepped after the
-retreating figure of his friend.
-
-“I say, Owen,” he said hastily, “I’m sorry you’re leaving so early.
-Must you really go?”
-
-“Yes,” replied Owen Hood gravely. “My private affairs are quite
-real and practical, I assure you.” His grave mouth worked a little
-humorously at the corners as he added: “The truth is, I don’t think I
-mentioned it, but I’m thinking of getting married.”
-
-“Married!” repeated the Colonel, as if thunderstruck.
-
-“Thanks for your compliments and congratulations, old fellow,” said the
-satiric Mr. Hood. “Yes, it’s all been thought out. I’ve even decided
-whom I am going to marry. She knows about it herself. She has been
-warned.”
-
-“I really beg your pardon,” said the Colonel in great distress, “of
-course I congratulate you most heartily; and her even more heartily. Of
-course I’m delighted to hear it. The truth is, I was surprised ... not
-so much in that way....”
-
-“Not so much in what way?” asked Hood. “I suppose you mean some would
-say I am on the way to be an old bachelor. But I’ve discovered it isn’t
-half so much a matter of years as of ways. Men like me get elderly
-more by choice than chance; and there’s much more choice and less
-chance in life than your modern fatalists make out. For such people
-fatalism falsifies even chronology. They’re not unmarried because
-they’re old. They’re old because they’re unmarried.”
-
-“Indeed you are mistaken,” said Crane earnestly. “As I say, I was
-surprised, but my surprise was not so rude as you think. It wasn’t that
-I thought there was anything unfitting about ... somehow it was rather
-the other way ... as if things could fit better than one thought ...
-as if--but anyhow, little as I know about it, I really do congratulate
-you.”
-
-“I’ll tell you all about it before long,” replied his friend. “It’s
-enough to say just now that it was all bound up with my succeeding
-after all in doing--what I did. She was the inspiration, you know. I
-have done what is called an impossible thing; but believe me, she is
-the really impossible part of it.”
-
-“Well, I must not keep you from such an impossible engagement,” said
-Crane smiling. “Really, I’m confoundedly glad to hear about all this.
-Well, good-bye for the present.”
-
-Colonel Crane stood watching the square shoulders and russet mane
-of his old friend, as they disappeared down the road, in a rather
-indescribable state of mind. As he turned hastily back towards his
-garden and his other guest, he was conscious of a change; things
-seemed different in some lightheaded and illogical fashion. He could
-not himself trace the connexion; indeed, he did not know whether it was
-a connexion or a disconnexion. He was very far from being a fool; but
-his brains were of the sort that are directed outwards to things; the
-brains of the soldier or the scientific man; and he had no practice
-in analysing his own mind. He did not quite understand why the news
-about Owen Hood should give him that dazed sense of a difference in
-things in general. Doubtless he was very fond of Owen Hood; but he
-had been fond of other people who had got married without especially
-disturbing the atmosphere of his own back garden. He even dimly felt
-that mere affection might have worked the other way; that it might have
-made him worry about Hood, and wonder whether Hood was making a fool
-of himself, or even feel suspicious or jealous of Mrs. Hood--if there
-had not been something else that made him feel quite the other way. He
-could not quite understand it; there seemed to be an increasing number
-of things that he could not understand. This world in which he himself
-wore garlands of green cabbage and in which his old friend the lawyer
-got married suddenly like a man going mad--this world was a new world,
-at once fresh and frightening, in which he could hardly understand
-the figures that were walking about, even his own. The flowers in the
-flower-pots had a new look about them, at once bright and nameless;
-and even the line of vegetables beyond could not altogether depress him
-with the memories of recent levity. Had he indeed been a prophet, or
-a visionary seeing the future, he might have seen that green line of
-cabbages extending infinitely like a green sea to the horizon. For he
-stood at the beginning of a story which was not to terminate until his
-incongruous cabbage had come to mean something that he had never meant
-by it. That green patch was to spread like a great green conflagration
-almost to the ends of the earth. But he was a practical person and the
-very reverse of a prophet; and like many other practical persons, he
-often did things without very clearly knowing what he was doing. He had
-the innocence of some patriarch or primitive hero in the morning of the
-world, founding more than he could himself realize of his legend and
-his line. Indeed he felt very much like somebody in the morning of the
-world; but beyond that he could grasp nothing.
-
-Audrey Smith was standing not so very many yards away; for it was only
-for a few strides that he had followed his elder guest towards the
-gate. Yet her figure had fallen far enough back out of the foreground
-to take on the green framework of the garden; so that her dress might
-almost have been blue with a shade of distance. And when she spoke to
-him, even from that little way off, her voice took on inevitably a new
-suggestion of one calling out familiarly and from afar, as one calls
-to an old companion. It moved him in a disproportionate fashion, though
-all that she said was:
-
-“What became of your old hat?”
-
-“I lost it,” he replied gravely, “obviously I had to lose it. I believe
-the scarecrow found it.”
-
-“Oh, do let’s go and look at the scarecrow,” she cried.
-
-He led her without a word to the kitchen-garden and gravely explained
-each of its outstanding features; from the serious Mr. Archer resting
-on his spade to the grotesque South Sea Island god grinning at the
-corner of the plot. He spoke as with an increasing solemnity and
-verbosity, and all the time knew little or nothing of what he said.
-
-At last she cut into his monologue with an abstraction that was almost
-rude; yet her brown eyes were bright and her sympathy undisguised.
-
-“Don’t talk about it,” she cried with illogical enthusiasm. “It looks
-as if we were really right in the middle of the country. It’s as unique
-as the Garden of Eden. It’s simply the most delightful place----”
-
-It was at this moment, for some unaccountable reason, that the Colonel
-who had lost his hat suddenly proceeded to lose his head. Standing in
-that grotesque vegetable scenery, a black and stiff yet somehow stately
-figure, he proceeded in the most traditional manner to offer the lady
-everything he possessed, not forgetting the scarecrow or the cabbages;
-a half-humorous memory of which returned to him with the boomerang of
-bathos.
-
-“When I think of the encumbrances on the estate--” he concluded
-gloomily. “Well, there they are; a scarecrow and a cannibal fetish and
-a stupid man who has stuck in a rut of respectability and conventional
-ways.”
-
-“Very conventional,” she said, “especially in his taste in hats.”
-
-“That was the exception, I’m afraid,” he said earnestly. “You’d find
-those things very rare and most things very dull. I can’t help having
-fallen in love with you; but for all that we are in different worlds;
-and you belong to a younger world, which says what it thinks, and
-cannot see what most of our silences and our scruples meant.”
-
-“I suppose we are very rude,” she said thoughtfully, “and you must
-certainly excuse me if I do say what I think.”
-
-“I deserve no better,” he replied mournfully.
-
-“Well, I think I must be in love with you too,” she replied calmly. “I
-don’t see what time has to do with being fond of people. You are the
-most original person I ever knew.”
-
-“My dear, my dear,” he protested almost brokenly, “I fear you are
-making a mistake. Whatever else I am, I never set up to be original.”
-
-“You must remember,” she replied, “that I have known a good many people
-who did set up to be original. An Art School swarms with them; and
-there are any number among those socialist and vegetarian friends
-of mine you were talking about. They would think nothing of wearing
-cabbages on their heads, of course. Any one of them would be capable of
-getting inside a pumpkin if he could. Any one of them might appear in
-public dressed entirely in watercress. But that’s just it. They might
-well wear watercress for they are water-creatures; they go with the
-stream. They do those things because those things are done; because
-they are done in their own Bohemian set. Unconventionality is their
-convention. I don’t mind it myself; I think it’s great fun; but that
-doesn’t mean that I don’t know real strength or independence when I see
-it. All that is just molten and formless; but the really strong man is
-one who can make a mould and then break it. When a man like you can
-suddenly do a thing like that, after twenty years of habit, for the
-sake of his word, then somehow one really does feel that man is man and
-master of his fate.”
-
-“I doubt if I am master of my fate,” replied Crane, “and I do not know
-whether I ceased to be yesterday or two minutes ago.”
-
-He stood there for a moment like a man in heavy armour. Indeed, the
-antiquated image is not inappropriate in more ways than one. The new
-world within him was so alien from the whole habit in which he lived,
-from the very gait and gestures of his daily life, conducted through
-countless days, that his spirit had striven before it broke its shell.
-But it was also true that even if he could have done what every man
-wishes to do at such a moment, something supreme and satisfying, it
-would have been something in a sense formal or it would not have
-satisfied him. He was one of those to whom it is natural to be
-ceremonial. Even the music in his mind, too deep and distant for him
-to catch or echo, was the music of old and ritual dances and not of
-revelry; and it was not for nothing that he had built gradually about
-him that garden of the grey stone fountain and the great hedge of yew.
-He bent suddenly and kissed her hand.
-
-“I like that,” she said. “You ought to have powdered hair and a sword.”
-
-“I apologize,” he said gravely, “no modern man is worthy of you. But
-indeed I fear, in every sense I am not a very modern man.”
-
-“You must never wear that hat again,” she said, indicating the battered
-original topper.
-
-“To tell the truth,” he observed mildly, “I had not any attention of
-resuming that one.”
-
-“Silly,” she said briefly, “I don’t mean that hat; I mean that sort
-of hat. As a matter of fact, there couldn’t be a finer hat than the
-cabbage.”
-
-“My dear--” he protested; but she was looking at him quite seriously.
-
-“I told you I was an artist, and didn’t know much about literature,”
-she said. “Well, do you know, it really does make a difference.
-Literary people let words get between them and things. We do at least
-look at the things and not the names of the things. You think a cabbage
-is comic because the name sounds comic and even vulgar; something
-between ‘cab’ and ‘garbage,’ I suppose. But a cabbage isn’t really
-comic or vulgar. You wouldn’t think so if you simply had to paint
-it. Haven’t you seen Dutch and Flemish galleries, and don’t you know
-what great men painted cabbages? What they saw was certain lines and
-colours; very wonderful lines and colours.”
-
-“It may be all very well in a picture,” he began doubtfully.
-
-She suddenly laughed aloud.
-
-“You idiot,” she cried; “don’t you know you looked perfectly splendid?
-The curves were like a great turban of leaves and the root rose like
-the spike of a helmet; it was rather like the turbaned helmets on some
-of Rembrandt’s figures, with the face like bronze in the shadows of
-green and purple. That’s the sort of thing artists can see, who keep
-their eyes and heads clear of words! And then you want to apologize for
-not wearing that stupid stovepipe covered with blacking, when you went
-about wearing a coloured crown like a king. And you were like a king in
-this country; for they were all afraid of you.”
-
-As he continued a faint protest, her laughter took on a more
-mischievous shade. “If you’d stuck to it a little longer, I swear
-they’d all have been wearing vegetables for hats. I swear I saw my
-cousin the other day standing with a sort of trowel, and looking
-irresolutely at a cabbage.”
-
-Then, after a pause, she said with a beautiful irrelevancy:
-
-“What was it Mr. Hood did that you said he couldn’t do?”
-
-But these are tales of topsy-turvydom even in the sense that they have
-to be told tail-foremost. And he who would know the answer to that
-question must deliver himself up to the intolerable tedium of reading
-the story of The Improbable Success of Mr. Owen Hood, and an interval
-must be allowed him before such torments are renewed.
-
-
-
-
-II
-
-THE IMPROBABLE SUCCESS OF MR. OWEN HOOD
-
-
-
-
-II
-
-THE IMPROBABLE SUCCESS OF MR. OWEN HOOD
-
-
-Heroes who have endured the heavy labour of reading to the end the
-story of The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane are aware that
-his achievement was the first of a series of feats counted impossible,
-like the quests of the Arthurian knights. For the purpose of this tale,
-in which the Colonel is but a secondary figure, it is enough to say
-that he was long known and respected, before his last escapade, as a
-respectable and retired military man in a residential part of Surrey,
-with a sunburnt complexion and an interest in savage mythology. As
-a fact, however, he had gathered the sunburn and the savage myths
-some time before he had managed to collect the respectability and the
-suburban residence. In his early youth he had been a traveller of the
-adventurous and even restless sort; and he only concerns this story
-because he was a member of a sort of club or clique of young men whose
-adventurousness verged on extravagance. They were all eccentrics of one
-kind or another, some professing extreme revolutionary and some extreme
-reactionary opinions, and some both. Among the latter may be classed
-Mr. Robert Owen Hood, the somewhat unlegal lawyer who is the hero of
-this tale.
-
-Robert Owen Hood was Crane’s most intimate and incongruous friend. Hood
-was from the first as sedentary as Crane was adventurous. Hood was to
-the end as casual as Crane was conventional. The prefix of Robert Owen
-was a relic of a vague revolutionary tradition in his family; but he
-inherited along with it a little money that allowed him to neglect the
-law and cultivate a taste for liberty and for drifting and dreaming in
-lost corners of the country, especially in the little hills between
-the Severn and the Thames. In the upper reaches of the latter river is
-an islet in which he loved especially to sit fishing, a shabby but not
-commonplace figure clad in grey, with a mane of rust-coloured hair and
-a long face with a large chin, rather like Napoleon. Beside him, on
-the occasion now in question, stood the striking contrast of his alert
-military friend in full travelling kit; being on the point of starting
-for one of his odysseys in the South Seas.
-
-“Well,” demanded the impatient traveller in a tone of remonstrance,
-“have you caught anything?”
-
-“You once asked me,” replied the angler placidly, “what I meant by
-calling you a materialist. That is what I meant by calling you a
-materialist.”
-
-“If one must be a materialist or a madman,” snorted the soldier, “give
-me materialism.”
-
-“On the contrary,” replied his friend, “your fad is far madder than
-mine. And I doubt if it’s any more fruitful. The moment men like you
-see a man sitting by a river with a rod, they are insanely impelled
-to ask him what he has caught. But when you go off to shoot big game,
-as you call it, nobody asks you what you have caught. Nobody expects
-you to bring home a hippopotamus for supper. Nobody has ever seen you
-walking up Pall Mall, followed respectfully by a captive giraffe.
-Your bag of elephants, though enormous, seems singularly unobtrusive;
-left in the cloak-room, no doubt. Personally, I doubt if you ever
-catch anything. It’s all decorously hidden in desert sand and dust
-and distance. But what I catch is something far more elusive, and as
-slippery as any fish. It is the soul of England.”
-
-“I should think you’d catch a cold if not a fish,” answered Crane,
-“sitting dangling your feet in a pool like that. I like to move about a
-little more. Dreaming is all very well in its way.”
-
-At this point a symbolic cloud ought to have come across the sun, and
-a certain shadow of mystery and silence must rest for a moment upon
-the narrative. For it was at this moment that James Crane, being blind
-with inspiration, uttered his celebrated Prophecy, upon which this
-improbable narrative turns. As was commonly the case with men uttering
-omens, he was utterly unconscious of anything ominous about what he
-said. A moment after he would probably not know that he had said it. A
-moment after, it was as if a cloud of strange shape had indeed passed
-from the face of the sun.
-
-The prophecy had taken the form of a proverb. In due time the patient,
-the all-suffering reader, may learn what proverb. As it happened,
-indeed, the conversation had largely consisted of proverbs; as is often
-the case with men like Hood, whose hearts are with that old English
-country life from which all the proverbs came. But it was Crane who
-said:
-
-“It’s all very well to be fond of England; but a man who wants to help
-England mustn’t let the grass grow under his feet.”
-
-“And that’s just what I want to do,” answered Hood. “That’s exactly
-what even your poor tired people in big towns really want to do. When
-a wretched clerk walks down Threadneedle Street, wouldn’t he be really
-delighted if he could look down and see the grass growing under his
-feet; a magic green carpet in the middle of the pavement? It would be
-like a fairy-tale.”
-
-“Well, but he wouldn’t sit like a stone as you do,” replied the other.
-“A man might let the grass grow under his feet without actually letting
-the ivy grow up his legs. That sounds like a fairy-tale too, if you
-like, but there’s no proverb to recommend it.”
-
-“Oh, there are proverbs on my side, if you come to that,” answered Hood
-laughing. “I might remind you about the rolling stone that gathers no
-moss.”
-
-“Well, who wants to gather moss except a few fussy old ladies?”
-demanded Crane. “Yes, I’m a rolling stone, I suppose; and I go rolling
-round the earth as the earth goes rolling round the sun. But I’ll tell
-you what; there’s one kind of stone that does really gather moss.”
-
-“And what is that, my rambling geologist?”
-
-“A gravestone,” said Crane.
-
-There was a silence, and Hood sat gazing with his owlish face at the
-dim pool in which the dark woods were mirrored. At last he said:
-
-“Moss isn’t the only thing found on that. Sometimes there is the word
-_Resurgam_.”
-
-“Well, I hope you will,” said Crane genially. “But the trumpet will
-have to be pretty loud to wake you up. It’s my opinion you’ll be too
-late for the Day of Judgment.”
-
-“Now if this were a true dramatic dialogue,” remarked Hood, “I should
-answer that it would be better for you if you were. But it hardly seems
-a Christian sentiment for a parting. Are you really off to-day?”
-
-“Yes, to-night,” replied his friend. “Sure you won’t come with me to
-the Cannibal Islands?”
-
-“I prefer my own island,” said Mr. Owen Hood.
-
-When his friend had gone he continued to gaze abstractedly at the
-tranquil topsy-turvydom in the green mirror of the pool, nor did he
-change his posture and hardly moved his head. This might be partly
-explained by the still habits of a fisherman; but to tell the truth,
-it was not easy to discover whether the solitary lawyer really wanted
-to catch any fish. He often carried a volume of Isaak Walton in his
-pocket, having a love of the old English literature as of the old
-English landscape. But if he was an angler, he certainly was not a very
-complete angler.
-
-But the truth is that Owen Hood had not been quite candid with his
-friend about the spell that held him to that particular islet in the
-Upper Thames. If he had said, as he was quite capable of saying, that
-he expected to catch the miraculous draught of fishes or the whale
-that swallowed Jonah, or even the great sea-serpent, his expressions
-would have been merely symbolical. But they would have been the symbol
-of something as unique and unattainable. For Mr. Owen Hood was really
-fishing for something that very few fishermen ever catch; and that was
-a dream of his boyhood, and something that had happened on that lonely
-spot long ago.
-
-Years before, when he was a very young man, he had sat fishing on that
-island one evening as the twilight turned to dark, and two or three
-broad bands of silver were all that was left of the sunset behind the
-darkening trees. The birds were dropping out of the sky and there was
-no noise except the soft noises of the river. Suddenly and without a
-sound, as comes a veritable vision, a girl had come out of the woods
-opposite. She spoke to him across the stream, asking him he hardly
-knew what, which he answered he hardly knew how. She was dressed in
-white and carried a bunch of bluebells loose in her hand; her hair
-in a straight fringe of gold was low on her forehead; she was pale
-like ivory, and her pale eyelids had a sort of flutter as of nervous
-emotion. There came on him a strangling sense of stupidity. But he must
-have managed to speak civilly, for she lingered; and he must have said
-something to amuse her, for she laughed. Then followed the incident he
-could never analyse, though he was an introspective person. Making a
-gesture towards something, she managed to drop her loose blue flowers
-into the water. He knew not what sort of whirlwind was in his head,
-but it seemed to him that prodigious things were happening, as in an
-epic of the gods, of which all visible things were but the small signs.
-Before he knew where he was he was standing dripping on the other bank;
-for he had splashed in somehow and saved the bunch as if it had been
-a baby drowning. Of all the things she said he could only recall one
-sentence, that repeated itself perpetually in his mind: “You’ll catch
-your death of cold.”
-
-He only caught the cold and not the death; yet even the notion of the
-latter did not somehow seem disproportionate. The doctor, to whom he
-was forced to give some sort of explanation of his immersion, was much
-interested in the story, or what he heard of it, having a pleasure in
-working out the pedigrees of the county families and the relationships
-of the best houses in the neighbourhood. By some rich process of
-elimination he deduced that the lady must be Miss Elizabeth Seymour
-from Marley Court. The doctor spoke with a respectful relish of such
-things; he was a rising young practitioner named Hunter, afterwards a
-neighbour of Colonel Crane. He shared Hood’s admiration for the local
-landscape, and said it was owing to the beautiful way in which Marley
-Court was kept up.
-
-“It’s land-owners like that,” he said, “who have made England. It’s
-all very well for Radicals to talk; but where should we be without the
-land-owners?”
-
-“Oh, I’m all for land-owners,” said Hood rather wearily. “I like them
-so much I should like more of them. More and more land-owners. Hundreds
-and thousands of them.”
-
-It is doubtful whether Dr. Hunter quite followed his enthusiasm, or
-even his meaning; but Hood had reason later to remember this little
-conversation; so far as he was in a mood to remember any conversations
-except one.
-
-Anyhow, it were vain to disguise from the intelligent though exhausted
-reader that this was probably the true origin of Mr. Hood’s habit of
-sitting solidly on that island and gazing abstractedly at that bank.
-All through the years when he felt his first youth was passing, and
-even when he seemed to be drifting towards middle age, he haunted that
-valley like a ghost, waiting for something that never came again. It is
-by no means certain, in the last and most subtle analysis, that he even
-expected it to come again. Somehow it seemed too like a miracle for
-that. Only this place had become the shrine of the miracle; and he felt
-that if anything ever did happen there, he must be there to see. And
-so it came about that he was there to see when things did happen; and
-rather queer things had happened before the end.
-
-One morning he saw an extraordinary thing. That indeed would not have
-seemed extraordinary to most people; but it was quite apocalyptic to
-him. A dusty man came out of the woods carrying what looked like dusty
-pieces of timber, and proceeded to erect on the bank what turned out
-to be a sort of hoarding, a very large wooden notice-board on which
-was written in enormous letters: “To Be Sold,” with remarks in smaller
-letters about the land and the name of the land agents. For the first
-time for years Owen Hood stood up in his place and left his fishing,
-and shouted questions across the river. The man answered with the
-greatest patience and good-humour; but it is probable that he went
-away convinced that he had been talking to a wandering lunatic.
-
-That was the beginning of what was for Owen Hood a crawling nightmare.
-The change advanced slowly, by a process covering years, but it
-seemed to him all the time that he was helpless and paralysed in its
-presence, precisely as a man is paralysed in an actual nightmare. He
-laughed with an almost horrible laughter to think that a man in a
-modern society is supposed to be master of his fate and free to pursue
-his pleasures; when he has not power to prevent the daylight he looks
-on from being darkened, or the air he breathes from being turned to
-poison, or the silence that is his full possession from being shaken
-with the cacophony of hell. There was something, he thought grimly, in
-Dr. Hunter’s simple admiration for agricultural aristocracy. There was
-something in quite primitive and even barbarous aristocracy. Feudal
-lords went in fitfully for fights and forays; they put collars round
-the necks of some serfs; they occasionally put halters round the necks
-of a few of them. But they did not wage war day and night against the
-five senses of man.
-
-There had appeared first on the river-bank small sheds and shanties,
-for workmen who seemed to be rather lengthily occupied in putting
-up larger sheds and shanties. To the very last, when the factory
-was finished, it was not easy for a traditional eye to distinguish
-between what was temporary and what was permanent. It did not look as
-if any of it could be permanent, if there was anything natural in the
-nature of things, so to speak. But whatever was the name and nature
-of that amorphous thing, it swelled and increased and even multiplied
-without clear division; until there stood on the river-bank a great
-black patchwork block of buildings terminating in a tall brick factory
-chimney from which a stream of smoke mounted into the silent sky. A
-heap of some sort of débris, scrapped iron and similar things, lay in
-the foreground; and a broken bar, red with rust, had fallen on the spot
-where the girl had been standing when she brought bluebells out of the
-wood.
-
-He did not leave his island. Rural and romantic and sedentary as he may
-have seemed, he was not the son of an old revolutionist for nothing. It
-was not altogether in vain that his father had called him Robert Owen
-or that his friends had sometimes called him Robin Hood. Sometimes,
-indeed, his soul sank within him with a mortal sickness that was
-near to suicide, but more often he marched up and down in a militant
-fashion, being delighted to see the tall wild-flowers waving on the
-banks like flags within a stone’s-throw of all he hated, and muttering,
-“Throw out the banners on the outward wall.” He had already, when the
-estate of Marley Court was broken up for building, taken some steps
-to establish himself on the island, had built a sort of hut there, in
-which it was possible to picnic for considerable periods.
-
-One morning when dawn was still radiant behind the dark factory and
-light lay in a satin sheen upon the water, there crept out upon that
-satin something like a thickening thread of a different colour and
-material. It was a thin ribbon of some other liquid that did not mingle
-with the water, but lay on top of it wavering like a worm; and Owen
-Hood watched it as a man watches a snake. It looked like a snake,
-having opalescent colours not without intrinsic beauty; but to him it
-was a very symbolic snake; like the serpent that destroyed Eden. A few
-days afterwards there were a score of snakes covering the surface;
-little crawling rivers that moved on the river but did not mix with it,
-being as alien as witch’s oils. Later there came darker liquids with no
-pretensions to beauty, black and brown flakes of grease that floated
-heavily.
-
-It was highly characteristic of Hood that to the last he was rather
-hazy about the nature and purpose of the factory; and therefore about
-the ingredients of the chemicals that were floating into the river;
-beyond the fact that they were mostly of the oily sort and floated
-on the water in flakes and lumps, and that something resembling
-petrol seemed to predominate, used perhaps rather for power than
-raw material. He had heard a rustic rumour that the enterprise was
-devoted to hair-dye. It smelt rather like a soap factory. So far as he
-ever understood it, he gathered that it was devoted to what might be
-considered as a golden mean between hair-dye and soap, some kind of
-new and highly hygienic cosmetics. There had been a yet more feverish
-fashion in these things, since Professor Hake had written his great
-book proving that cosmetics were of all things the most hygienic. And
-Hood had seen many of the meadows of his childhood now brightened and
-adorned by large notices inscribed “Why Grow Old?” with the portrait of
-a young woman grinning in a regrettable manner. The appropriate name on
-the notices was Bliss, and he gathered that it all had something to do
-with the great factory.
-
-Resolved to know a little more than this about the matter, he began
-to make inquiries and complaints, and engaged in a correspondence
-which ended in an actual interview with some of the principal persons
-involved. The correspondence had gone on for a long time before
-it came anywhere near to anything so natural as that. Indeed, the
-correspondence for a long time was entirely on his side. For the big
-businesses are quite as unbusinesslike as the Government departments;
-they are no better in efficiency and much worse in manners. But he
-obtained his interview at last, and it was with a sense of sour
-amusement that he came face to face with four people whom he wanted to
-meet.
-
-One was Sir Samuel Bliss, for he had not yet performed those party
-services which led to his being known to us all as Lord Normantowers.
-He was a small, alert man like a ferret, with bristles of grey beard
-and hair, and active or even agitated movements. The second was his
-manager, Mr. Low, a stout, dark man with a thick nose and thick rings,
-who eyed strangers with a curious heavy suspicion like a congested
-sense of injury. It is believed that he expected to be persecuted. The
-third man was something of a surprise, for he was no other than his
-old friend Dr. Horace Hunter, as healthy and hearty as ever, but even
-better dressed; as he now had a great official appointment as some kind
-of medical inspector of the sanitary conditions of the district. But
-the fourth man was the greatest surprise of all. For it appeared that
-their conference was honoured by so great a figure in the scientific
-world as Professor Hake himself, who had revolutionized the modern
-mind with his new discoveries about the complexion in relation to
-health. When Hood realized who he was, a light of somewhat sinister
-understanding dawned on his long face.
-
-On this occasion the Professor advanced an even more interesting
-theory. He was a big, blond man with blinking eyes and a bull neck;
-and doubtless there was more in him than met the eye, as is the way
-with great men. He spoke last, and his theory was expounded with a
-certain air of finality. The manager had already stated that it was
-quite impossible for large quantities of petrol to have escaped, as
-only a given amount was used in the factory. Sir Samuel had explained,
-in what seemed an irascible and even irrelevant manner, that he had
-presented several parks to the public, and had the dormitories of his
-work-people decorated in the simplest and best taste, and nobody could
-accuse him of vandalism or not caring for beauty and all that. Then it
-was that Professor Hake explained the theory of the Protective Screen.
-Even if it were possible, he said, for some thin film of petrol to
-appear on the water, as it would not mix with the water the latter
-would actually be kept in a clearer condition. It would act, as it
-were, as a Cap; as does the gelatinous Cap upon certain preserved foods.
-
-“That is a very interesting view,” observed Hood; “I suppose you will
-write another book about that?”
-
-“I think we are all the more privileged,” remarked Bliss, “in hearing
-of the discovery in this personal fashion, before our expert has laid
-it before the public.”
-
-“Yes,” said Hood, “your expert is very expert, isn’t he--in writing
-books?”
-
-Sir Samuel Bliss stiffened in all his bristles. “I trust,” he said,
-“you are not implying any doubt that our expert is an expert.”
-
-“I have no doubt of your expert,” answered Hood gravely, “I do not
-doubt either that he is expert or that he is yours.”
-
-“Really, gentlemen,” cried Bliss in a sort of radiance of protest, “I
-think such an insinuation about a man in Professor Hake’s position----”
-
-“Not at all, not at all,” said Hood soothingly, “I’m sure it’s a most
-comfortable position.”
-
-The Professor blinked at him, but a light burned in the eyeballs under
-the heavy eyelids.
-
-“If you come here talking like that--” he began, when Hood cut off
-his speech by speaking across him to somebody else, with a cheerful
-rudeness that was like a kick in its contempt.
-
-“And what do you say, my dear doctor?” he observed, addressing Hunter.
-“You used to be almost as romantic as myself about the amenities of
-this place. Do you remember how much you admired the landlords for
-keeping the place quiet and select; and how you said the old families
-preserved the beauty of old England?”
-
-There was a silence, and then the young doctor spoke.
-
-“Well, it doesn’t follow a fellow can’t believe in progress. That’s
-what’s the matter with you, Hood; you don’t believe in progress. We
-must move with the times; and somebody always has to suffer. Besides,
-it doesn’t matter so much about river-water nowadays. It doesn’t even
-matter so much about the main water-supply. When the new Bill is
-passed, people will be obliged to use the Bulton Filter in any case.”
-
-“I see,” said Hood reflectively. “You first make a mess of the water
-for money, and then make a virtue of forcing people to clean it
-themselves.”
-
-“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Hunter angrily.
-
-“Well, I was thinking at the moment,” said Hood in his rather cryptic
-way. “I was thinking about Mr. Bulton. The man who owns the filters.
-I was wondering whether he might join us. We seem such a happy family
-party.”
-
-“I cannot see the use of prolonging this preposterous conversation,”
-said Sir Samuel.
-
-“Don’t call the poor Professor’s theory preposterous,” remonstrated
-Hood. “A little fanciful, perhaps. And as for the doctor’s view, surely
-there’s nothing preposterous in that. You don’t think the chemicals
-will poison all the fish I catch, do you, Doctor?”
-
-“No, of course not,” replied Hunter curtly.
-
-“They will adapt themselves by natural selection,” said Hood dreamily.
-“They will develop organs suitable to an oily environment--will learn
-to love petrol.”
-
-“Oh, I have no time for this nonsense,” said Hunter, and was turning to
-go, when Hood stepped in front of him and looked at him very steadily.
-
-“You mustn’t call natural selection nonsense,” he said. “I know all
-about that, at any rate. I can’t tell whether liquids tipped off the
-shore will fall into the river, because I don’t understand hydraulics.
-I don’t know whether your machinery makes a hell of a noise every
-morning, for I’ve never studied acoustics. I don’t know whether it
-stinks or not, because I haven’t read your expert’s book on ‘The Nose.’
-But I know all about adaptation to environment. I know that some of
-the lower organisms do really change with their changing conditions. I
-know there are creatures so low that they do survive by surrendering
-to every succession of mud and slime; and when things are slow they
-are slow, and when things are fast they are fast, and when things are
-filthy they are filthy. I thank you for convincing me of that.”
-
-He did not wait for a reply, but walked out of the room after bowing
-curtly to the rest; and that was the end of the great conference on the
-question of riparian rights and perhaps the end of Thames Conservancy
-and of the old aristocratic England, with its good and ill.
-
-The general public never heard very much about it; at least until one
-catastrophic scene which was to follow. There was some faint ripple of
-the question some months later, when Dr. Horace Hunter was standing
-for Parliament in that division. One or two questions were asked about
-his duties in relation to river pollution; but it was soon apparent
-that no party particularly wished to force the issue against the best
-opinions advanced on the other side. The greatest living authority on
-hygiene, Professor Hake, had actually written to _The Times_ (in the
-interests of science) to say that in such a hypothetical case as that
-mentioned, a medical man could only do what Dr. Hunter had apparently
-done. It so happened that the chief captain of industry in that part
-of the Thames Valley, Sir Samuel Bliss, had himself, after gravely
-weighing the rival policies, decided to Vote for Hunter. The great
-organizer’s own mind was detached and philosophical in the matter; but
-it seems that his manager, a Mr. Low, was of the same politics and a
-more practical and pushful spirit; warmly urging the claims of Hunter
-on his work-people; pointing out the many practical advantages they
-would gain by voting for that physician, and the still more practical
-disadvantages they might suffer by not doing so. Hence it followed that
-the blue ribbons, which were the local badges of the Hunterians, were
-not only to be found attached to the iron railings and wooden posts
-of the factory, but to various human figures, known as “hands,” which
-moved to and fro in it.
-
-Hood took no interest in the election; but while it was proceeding he
-followed the matter a little further in another form. He was a lawyer,
-a lazy, but in some ways a learned one; for, his tastes being studious,
-he had originally learned the trade he had never used. More in defiance
-than in hope, he once carried the matter into the Courts, pleading his
-own cause on the basis of a law of Henry the Third against frightening
-the fish of the King’s liege subjects in the Thames Valley. The judge,
-in giving judgment, complimented him on the ability and plausibility of
-his contention, but ultimately rejected it on grounds equally historic
-and remote. His lordship argued that no test seemed to be provided for
-ascertaining the degree of fear in the fish, or whether it amounted
-to that bodily fear of which the law took cognizance. But the learned
-judge pointed out the precedent of a law of Richard the Second against
-certain witches who had frightened children; which had been interpreted
-by so great an authority as Coke in the sense that the child “must
-return and of his own will testify to his fear.” It did not seem to
-be alleged that any one of the fish in question had returned and laid
-any such testimony before any proper authority; and he therefore gave
-judgment for the defendants. And when the learned judge happened to
-meet Lord Normantowers (as he was by this time) out at dinner that
-evening, he was gaily rallied and congratulated by that new nobleman on
-the lucidity and finality of his judgment. Indeed, the learned judge
-had really relished the logic both of his own and Hood’s contention;
-but the conclusion was what he would have come to in any case. For our
-judges are not hampered by any hide-bound code; they are progressive,
-like Dr. Hunter, and ally themselves on principle with the progressive
-forces of the age, especially those they are likely to meet out at
-dinner.
-
-But it was this abortive law case that led up to something that
-altogether obliterated it in a blaze of glory, so far as Mr. Owen
-Hood was concerned. He had just left the courts, and turning down the
-streets that led in the direction of the station, he made his way
-thither in something of a brown study, as was his wont. The streets
-were filled with faces; it struck him for the first time that there
-were thousands and thousands of people in the world. There were more
-faces at the railway station, and then, when he had glanced idly at
-four or five of them, he saw one that was to him as incredible as the
-face of the dead.
-
-She was coming casually out of the tea-room, carrying a handbag, just
-like anybody else. That mystical perversity of his mind, which had
-insisted on sealing up the sacred memory like something hardly to be
-sought in mere curiosity, had fixed it in its original colours and
-setting, like something of which no detail could be changed without
-the vision dissolving. He would have conceived it almost impossible
-that she could appear in anything but white or out of anything but a
-wood. And he found himself turned topsy-turvy by an old and common
-incredulity of men in his condition; being startled by the coincidence
-that blue suited her as well as white; and that in what he remembered
-of that woodland there was something else; something to be said even
-for teashops and railway stations.
-
-She stopped in front of him and her pale, fluttering eyelids lifted
-from her blue-grey eyes.
-
-“Why,” she said, “you are the boy that jumped in the river!”
-
-“I’m no longer a boy,” answered Hood, “but I’m ready to jump in the
-river again.”
-
-“Well, don’t jump on the railway-line,” she said, as he turned with a
-swiftness suggestive of something of the kind.
-
-“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I was thinking of jumping into your
-railway-train. Do you mind if I jump into your railway-train?”
-
-“Well, I’m going to Birkstead,” she said rather doubtfully.
-
-Mr. Owen Hood did not in the least care where she was going, as he
-had resolved to go there; but as a matter of fact, he remembered a
-wayside station on that line that lay very near to what he had in view;
-so he tumbled into the carriage if possible with more alacrity; and
-landscapes shot by them as they sat looking in a dazed and almost
-foolish fashion at each other. At last the girl smiled with a sense of
-the absurdity of the thing.
-
-“I heard about you from a friend of yours,” she said; “he came to call
-on us soon after it happened; at least that was when he first came. You
-know Dr. Hunter, don’t you?”
-
-“Yes,” replied Owen, a shadow coming over his shining hour. “Do you--do
-you know him well?”
-
-“I know him pretty well now,” said Miss Elizabeth Seymour.
-
-The shadow on his spirit blackened swiftly; he suspected something
-quite suddenly and savagely. Hunter, in Crane’s old phrase, was not
-a man who let the grass grow under his feet. It was so like him to
-have somehow used the incident as an introduction to the Seymours.
-Things were always stepping-stones for Hunter, and the little rock
-in the river had been a stepping-stone to the country house. But was
-the country house a stepping-stone to something else? Suddenly Hood
-realized that all his angers had been very abstract angers. He had
-never hated a man before.
-
-At that moment the train stopped at the station of Cowford.
-
-“I wish you’d get out here with me,” he said abruptly, “only for a
-little--and it might be the last time. I want you to do something.”
-
-She looked at him with a curious expression and said in a rather low
-voice, “What do you want me to do?”
-
-“I want you to come and pick bluebells,” he said harshly.
-
-She stepped out of the train, and they went up a winding country road
-without a word.
-
-“I remember!” she said suddenly. “When you get to the top of this hill
-you see the wood where the bluebells were, and your little island
-beyond.”
-
-“Come on and see it,” said Owen.
-
-They stepped on the crest of the hill and stood. Below them the black
-factory belched its livid smoke into the air; and where the wood had
-been were rows of little houses like boxes, built of dirty yellow brick.
-
-Hood spoke. “And when you shall see the abomination of desolation
-sitting in the Holy of Holies--isn’t that when the world is supposed
-to end? I wish the world would end now; with you and me standing on a
-hill.”
-
-She was staring at the place with parted lips and more than her
-ordinary pallor; he knew she understood something monstrous and
-symbolic in the scene; yet her first remark was jerky and trivial. On
-the nearest of the yellow brick boxes were visible the cheap colours
-of various advertisements; and larger than the rest a blue poster
-proclaiming “Vote for Hunter.” With a final touch of tragic pathos,
-Hood remembered that it was the last and most sensational day of the
-election. But the girl had already found her voice.
-
-“Is that Dr. Hunter?” she asked with commonplace curiosity; “is he
-standing for Parliament?”
-
-A load that lay on Hood’s mind like a rock suddenly rose like an eagle;
-and he felt as if the hill he stood on were higher than Everest. By the
-insight of his own insanity, he knew well enough that _she_ would have
-known well enough whether Hunter was standing, if--if there had been
-anything like what he supposed. The removal of the steadying weight
-staggered him, and he had something quite indefensible.
-
-“I thought you would know. I thought you and he were probably--well,
-the truth is I thought you were engaged, though I really don’t know
-why.”
-
-“I can’t imagine why,” said Elizabeth Seymour. “I heard he was engaged
-to Lord Normantowers’s daughter. They’ve got our old place now, you
-know.”
-
-There was a silence and then Hood spoke suddenly in a loud and cheerful
-voice.
-
-“Well, what I say is ‘Vote for Hunter,’” he said heartily. “After all,
-why not vote for Hunter? Good old Hunter! I hope he’ll be a Member of
-Parliament. I hope he’ll be Prime Minister. I hope he’ll be President
-of the World State that Wells talks about. By George, he deserves to
-be Emperor of the Solar System.”
-
-“But why,” she protested, “why should he deserve all that?”
-
-“For not being engaged to you, of course,” he replied.
-
-“Oh!” she said, and something of a secret shiver in her voice went
-through him like a silver bell.
-
-Abruptly, all of a sudden, the rage of raillery seemed to leave his
-voice and his face, so that his Napoleonic profile looked earnest and
-eager and much younger, like the profile of the young Napoleon. His
-wide shoulders lost the slight stoop that books had given them, and his
-rather wild red hair fell away from his lifted head.
-
-“There is one thing I must tell you about him,” he said, “and one
-thing you must hear about me. My friends tell me I am a drifter and a
-dreamer; that I let the grass grow under my feet; I must tell you at
-least how and why I once let it grow. Three days after that day by the
-river, I talked to Hunter; he was attending me and he talked about it
-and you. Of course he knew nothing about either. But he is a practical
-man; a very practical man; he does not dream or drift. From the way
-he talked I knew he was considering even then how the accident could
-be turned to account; to his account and perhaps to mine too; for he
-is good-natured; yes, he is quite good-natured. I think that if I had
-taken his hint and formed a sort of social partnership, I might have
-known you six years sooner, not as a memory, but--an acquaintance. And
-I could not do it. Judge me how you will, I could not bring myself to
-do it. That is what is meant by being born with a bee in the bonnet,
-with an impediment in the speech, with a stumbling-block in the path,
-with a sulky scruple in the soul. I could not bear to approach you by
-that door, with that gross and grinning flunkey holding it open. I
-could not bear that suffocatingly substantial snob to bulk so big in
-my story or know so much of my secret. A revulsion I could never utter
-made me feel that the vision should remain my own even by remaining
-unfulfilled; but it should not be vulgarized. That is what is meant by
-being a failure in life. And when my best friend made a prophecy about
-me, and said there was something I should never do, I thought he was
-right.”
-
-“Why, what do you mean?” she asked rather faintly, “what was it you
-would never do?”
-
-“Never mind that now,” he said, with the shadow of a returning smile.
-“Rather strange things are stirring in me just now, and who knows but
-I may attempt something yet? But before all else, I must make clear
-for once what I am and for what I lived. There are men like me in the
-world; I am far from thinking they are the best or the most valuable;
-but they exist, to confound all the clever people and the realists and
-the new novelists. There has been and there is only one thing for me;
-something that in the normal sense I never even knew. I walked about
-the world blind, with my eyes turned inwards, looking at you. For days
-after a night when I had dreamed of you, I was broken; like a man who
-had seen a ghost. I read over and over the great and grave lines of the
-old poets, because they alone were worthy of you. And when I saw you
-again by chance, I thought the world had already ended; and it was that
-return and tryst beyond the grave that is too good to be true.”
-
-“I do not think,” she answered in a low voice, “that the belief is too
-good to be true.”
-
-As he looked at her a thrill went through him like a message too swift
-to be understood; and at the back of his mind something awoke that
-repeated again and again like a song the same words: “too good to be
-true.” There was always something pathetic, even in her days of pride,
-about the short-sighted look of her half-closed eyes; but it was for
-other reasons that they were now blinking in the strong white sunlight,
-almost as if they were blind. They were blind and bright with tears:
-she mastered her voice and it was steady.
-
-“You talk about failures,” she said. “I suppose most people would call
-me a failure and all my people failures now; except those who would say
-we never failed, because we never had to try. Anyhow, we’re all poor
-enough now; I don’t know whether you know that I’m teaching music.
-I dare say we deserved to go. I dare say we were useless. Some of us
-tried to be harmless. But--but now I _must_ say something, about some
-of us who tried rather hard to be harmless--in that way. The new people
-will tell you those ideals were Victorian and Tennysonian, and all the
-rest of it--well, it doesn’t matter what they say. They know quite as
-little about us as we about them. But to you, when you talk like that
-... what can I do, but tell you that if we were stiff, if we were cold,
-if we were careful and conservative, it was because deep down in our
-souls some of us _did_ believe that there might be loyalty and love
-like that, for which a woman might well wait even to the end of the
-world. What is it to these people if we choose not to be drugged or
-distracted with anything less worthy? But it would be hard indeed if
-when I find it _does_ exist after all ... hard on you, harder on me,
-if when I had really found it at last....” The catch in her voice came
-again and silence caught and held her.
-
-He took one stride forward as into the heart of a whirlwind; and they
-met on the top of that windy hill as if they had come from the ends of
-the earth.
-
-“This is an epic,” he said, “which is rather an action than a word. I
-have lived with words too long.”
-
-“What do you mean?”
-
-“I mean you have turned me into a man of action,” he replied. “So long
-as you were in the past, nothing was better than the past. So long as
-you were only a dream, nothing was better than dreaming. But now I am
-going to do something that no man has ever done before.”
-
-He turned towards the valley and flung out his hand with a gesture,
-almost as if the hand had held a sword.
-
-“I am going to break the Prophecy,” he cried in a loud voice. “I am
-going to defy the omens of my doom and make fun of my evil star. Those
-who called me a failure shall own I have succeeded where all humanity
-has failed. The real hero is not he who is bold enough to fulfil the
-predictions, but he who is bold enough to falsify them. And you shall
-see one falsified to-night.”
-
-“What in the world are you going to do?” she asked.
-
-He laughed suddenly. “The first thing to do,” he cried, swinging round
-with a new air of resolution and even cheerfulness, “the very first
-thing to do is to Vote For Hunter. Or, at any rate, help to get him
-into Parliament.”
-
-“But why in the world,” she asked wondering, “should you want so much
-to get Dr. Hunter into Parliament?”
-
-“Well, one must do something,” he said with an appearance of easy good
-sense, “to celebrate the occasion. We must do something; and after all
-he must go somewhere, poor devil. You will say, why not throw him into
-the river? It would relieve the feelings and make a splash. But I’m
-going to make something much bigger than a splash. Besides, I don’t
-want him in my nice river. I’d much rather pick him up and throw him
-all the way to Westminster. Much more sensible and suitable. Obviously
-there ought to be a brass band and a torchlight procession somewhere
-to-night; and why shouldn’t he have a bit of the fun?”
-
-He stopped suddenly as if surprised at his own words: for indeed his
-own phrase had fallen, for him, with the significance of a falling star.
-
-“Of course!” he muttered. “A torchlight procession! I’ve been feeling
-that what I wanted was trumpets and what I really want is torches. Yes,
-I believe it could be done! Yes, the hour is come! By stars and blazes,
-I will give him a torchlight procession!”
-
-He had been almost dancing with excitement on the top of the ridge; now
-he suddenly went bounding down the slope beyond, calling to the girl to
-follow, as carelessly as if they had been two children playing at hide
-and seek. Strangely enough, perhaps, she did follow; more strangely
-still when we consider the extravagant scenes through which she allowed
-herself to be led. They were scenes more insanely incongruous with all
-her sensitive and even secretive dignity than if she had been changing
-hats with a costermonger on a Bank Holiday. For there the world would
-only be loud with vulgarity, and here it was also loud with lies. She
-could never have described that Saturnalia of a political election; but
-she did dimly feel the double impression of a harlequinade at the end
-of a pantomime and of Hood’s phrase about the end of the world. It was
-as if a Bank Holiday could also be a Day of Judgment. But as the farce
-could no longer offend her, so the tragedy could no longer terrify.
-She went through it all with a wan smile, which perhaps nobody in the
-world would have known her well enough to interpret. It was not in the
-normal sense excitement; yet it was something much more positive than
-patience. In a sense perhaps, more than ever before in her lonely life,
-she was walled up in her ivory tower; but it was all alight within, as
-if it were lit with candles or lined with gold.
-
-Hood’s impetuous movements brought them to the bank of the river and
-the outer offices of the factory, all of which were covered with the
-coloured posters of the candidature, and one of which was obviously
-fitted up as a busy and bustling committee-room. Hood actually met
-Mr. Low coming out of it, buttoned up in a fur coat and bursting
-with speechless efficiency. But Mr. Low’s beady black eyes glistened
-with an astonishment bordering on suspicion when Hood in the most
-hearty fashion offered his sympathy and co-operation. That strange
-subconscious fear, that underlay all the wealthy manager’s success and
-security in this country, always came to the surface at the sight of
-Owen Hood’s long ironical face. Just at that moment, however, one of
-the local agents rushed at him in a distracted fashion, with telegrams
-in his hand. They were short of canvassers; they were short of cars;
-they were short of speakers; the crowd at Little Puddleton had been
-waiting half an hour; Dr. Hunter could not get round to them till ten
-past nine, and so on. The agent in his agony would probably have hailed
-a Margate nigger and entrusted him with the cause of the great National
-Party, without any really philosophical inquiry into the nigger’s
-theory of citizenship. For all such over-practical push and bustle in
-our time is always utterly unpractical at the last minute and in the
-long run. On that night Robert Owen Hood would have been encouraged to
-go anywhere and say anything; and he did. It might be interesting to
-imagine what the lady thought about it; but it is possible that she did
-not think about it. She had a radiantly abstracted sense of passing
-through a number of ugly rooms and sheds with flaring gas and stacks of
-leaflets behind which little irritable men ran about like rabbits. The
-walls were covered with large allegorical pictures printed in line or
-in a few bright colours, representing Dr. Hunter as clad in armour, as
-slaying dragons, as rescuing ladies rather like classical goddesses,
-and so on. Lest it should be too literally understood that Dr. Hunter
-was in the habit of killing dragons in his daily round, as a form of
-field-sport, the dragon was inscribed with its name in large letters.
-Apparently its name was “National Extravagance.” Lest there should be
-any doubt about the alternative which Dr. Hunter had discovered as a
-corrective to extravagance, the sword which he was thrusting through
-the dragon’s body was inscribed with the word “Economy.” Elizabeth
-Seymour, through whose happy but bewildered mind these pictures
-passed, could not but reflect vaguely that she herself had lately but
-to practise a good deal of economy and resist a good many temptations
-to extravagance; but it would never have occurred to her unaided
-imagination to conceive the action as that of plunging a sword into
-a scaly monster of immense size. In the central committee-room they
-actually came face to face for a moment with the candidate, who came
-in very hot and breathless with a silk hat on the back of his head;
-where he had possibly forgotten it, for he certainly did not remove it.
-She was a little ashamed of being sensitive about such trifles; but
-she came to the conclusion that she would not like to have a husband
-standing for Parliament.
-
-“We’ve rounded up all those people down Bleak Row,” said Dr. Hunter.
-“No good going down The Hole and those filthy places. No votes there.
-Streets ought to be abolished and the people too.”
-
-“Well, we’ve had a very good meeting in the Masonic Hall,” said the
-agent cheerfully. “Lord Normantowers spoke, and really he got through
-all right. Told some stories, you know; and they stood it capitally.”
-
-“And now,” said Owen Hood, slapping his hands together in an almost
-convivial manner, “what about this torchlight procession?”
-
-“This what procession?” asked the agent.
-
-“Do you mean to tell me,” said Hood sternly, “that arrangements are
-not complete for the torchlight procession of Dr. Hunter? That you are
-going to let this night of triumph pass without kindling a hundred
-flames to light the path of the conqueror? Do you realize that the
-hearts of a whole people have spontaneously stirred and chosen him?
-That the suffering poor murmured in their sleep ‘Vote For Hunter’
-long before the Caucus came by a providential coincidence to the
-same conclusion? Would not the people in The Hole set fire to their
-last poor sticks of furniture to do him honour? Why, from this chair
-alone----”
-
-He caught up the chair on which Hunter had been sitting and began to
-break it enthusiastically. In this he was hastily checked; but he
-actually succeeded in carrying the company with him in his proposal,
-thus urged at the eleventh hour.
-
-By nightfall he had actually organized his torchlight procession,
-escorting the triumphant Hunter, covered with blue ribbons, to the
-riverside, rather as if the worthy doctor were to be baptized like a
-convert or drowned like a witch. For that matter, Hood might possibly
-intend to burn the witch; for he brandished a blazing torch he carried
-so as to make a sort of halo round Hunter’s astonished countenance.
-Then, springing on the scrap-heap by the brink of the river, he
-addressed the crowd for the last time.
-
-“Fellow-citizens, we meet upon the shore of the Thames, the Thames
-which is to Englishmen all that the Tiber ever was to Romans. We meet
-in a valley which has been almost as much the haunt of English poets as
-of English birds. Never was there an art so native to our island as our
-old national tradition of landscape-painting in water-colour; never was
-that water-colour so luminous or so delicate as when dedicated to these
-holy waters. It was in such a scene that one of the most exquisite of
-our elder poets repeated as a burden to his meditations the single
-line, ‘Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.’
-
-“Rumours have been heard of some intention to trouble these waters; but
-we have been amply reassured. Names that now stand as high as those of
-our national poets and painters are a warrant that the stream is still
-as clear and pure and beneficent as of old. We all know the beautiful
-work that Mr. Bulton has done in the matter of filters. Dr. Hunter
-supports Mr. Bulton. I mean Mr. Bulton supports Dr. Hunter. I may also
-mention no less a man than Mr. Low. Sweet Thames, run softly till I end
-my song.
-
-“But, then, for that matter, we all support Dr. Hunter. I myself have
-always found him quite supportable; I should say quite satisfactory. He
-is truly a progressive, and nothing gives me greater pleasure than to
-watch him progress. As somebody said, I lie awake at night; and in the
-silence of the whole universe, I seem to hear him climbing, climbing,
-climbing. All the numerous patients among whom he has laboured so
-successfully in this locality will join in a heartfelt expression of
-joy if he passes to the higher world of Westminster. I trust I shall
-not be misunderstood. Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.
-
-“My only purpose to-night is to express that unanimity. There may
-have been times when I differed from Dr. Hunter; but I am glad to say
-that all that is passed, and I have now nothing but the most friendly
-feelings towards him, for reasons which I will not mention, though I
-have plenty to say. In token of this reconciliation I here solemnly
-cast from me this torch. As that firebrand is quenched in the cool
-crystal waters of that sacred stream, so shall all such feuds perish in
-the healing pool of universal peace.”
-
-Before anybody knew what he was doing, he had whirled his flambeau in a
-flaming wheel round his head and sent it flying like a meteor out into
-the dim eddies of the river.
-
-The next moment a short, sharp cry was uttered, and every face in that
-crowd was staring at the river. All the faces were visibly staring, for
-they were all lit up as by a ghastly firelight by a wide wan unnatural
-flame that leapt up from the very surface of the stream; a flame that
-the crowd watched as it might have watched a comet.
-
-“There,” cried Owen Hood, turning suddenly on the girl and seizing
-her arm, as if demanding congratulations. “So much for old Crane’s
-prophecy!”
-
-“Who in the world is Old Crane?” she asked, “and what did he prophesy?
-Is he something like Old Moore?”
-
-“Only an old friend,” said Hood hastily, “only an old friend of mine.
-It’s what he said that’s so important. He didn’t like my moping about
-with books and a fishing-rod, and he said, standing on that very
-island, ‘You may know a lot; but I don’t think you’ll ever set the
-Thames on fire. I’ll eat my hat if you do.’”
-
-But the story of how old Crane ate his hat is one upon which some
-readers at least can now look back as on labour and suffering bravely
-endured. And if it be possible for any of them to desire to know any
-more either about Mr. Crane or Mr. Hood, then must they gird themselves
-for the ordeal of reading the story of The Unobtrusive Traffic of
-Captain Pierce, and their trials are for a time deferred.
-
-
-
-
-III
-
-THE UNOBTRUSIVE TRAFFIC OF CAPTAIN PIERCE
-
-
-
-
-III
-
-THE UNOBTRUSIVE TRAFFIC OF CAPTAIN PIERCE
-
-
-Those acquainted with Colonel Crane and Mr. Owen Hood, the lawyer, may
-or may not be concerned to know that they partook of an early lunch
-of eggs and bacon and beer at the inn called the Blue Boar, which
-stands at the turn of a steep road scaling a wooded ridge in the West
-Country. Those unacquainted with them may be content to know that the
-Colonel was a sunburnt, neatly-dressed gentleman, who looked taciturn
-and was; while the lawyer was a more rusty red-haired gentleman with
-a long Napoleonic face, who looked taciturn and was rather talkative.
-Crane was fond of good cooking; and the cooking in that secluded inn
-was better than that of a Soho restaurant and immeasurably better than
-that of a fashionable restaurant. Hood was fond of the legends and
-less-known aspects of the English countryside; and that valley had
-a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment, as if the west wind
-had been snared in it and tamed into a summer air. Both had a healthy
-admiration for beauty, in ladies as well as landscapes; although (or
-more probably because) both were quite romantically attached to the
-wives they had married under rather romantic circumstances, which are
-related elsewhere for such as can wrestle with so steep a narrative.
-And the girl who waited on them, the daughter of the innkeeper, was
-herself a very agreeable thing to look at; she was of a slim and quiet
-sort with a head that moved like a brown bird, brightly and as it
-were unexpectedly. Her manners were full of unconscious dignity, for
-her father, old John Hardy, was the type of old innkeeper who had the
-status, if not of a gentleman, at least of a yeoman. He was not without
-education and ability; a grizzled man with a keen, stubborn face that
-might have belonged to Cobbett, whose _Register_ he still read on
-winters’ nights. Hardy was well known to Hood, who had the same sort of
-antiquarian taste in revolutions.
-
-There was little sound in the valley or the brilliant void of sky;
-the notes of birds fell only intermittently; a faint sound of tapping
-came from the hills opposite where the wooded slope was broken here
-and there by the bare face of a quarry, and a distant aeroplane passed
-and re-passed, leaving a trail of faint thunder. The two men at lunch
-took no more notice of it than if it had been a buzzing fly; but an
-attentive study of the girl might have suggested that she was at least
-conscious of the fly. Occasionally she looked at it, when no one was
-looking at her; for the rest, she had rather a marked appearance of
-not looking at it.
-
-“Good bacon you get here,” remarked Colonel Crane.
-
-“The best in England, and in the matter of breakfast England is the
-Earthly Paradise,” replied Hood readily. “I can’t think why we should
-descend to boast of the British Empire when we have bacon and eggs to
-boast of. They ought to be quartered on the Royal Arms: three pigs
-passant and three poached eggs on a chevron. It was bacon and eggs that
-gave all that morning glory to the great English poets; it must have
-been a man who had a breakfast like this who could rise with that giant
-gesture: ‘Night’s candles are burnt out; and jocund day----’”
-
-“Bacon did write Shakespeare, in fact,” said the Colonel.
-
-“This sort of bacon did,” answered the other laughing; then, noticing
-the girl within earshot, he added: “We are saying how good your bacon
-is, Miss Hardy.”
-
-“It is supposed to be very good,” she said with legitimate pride, “but
-I am afraid you won’t get much more of it. People aren’t going to be
-allowed to keep pigs much longer.”
-
-“Not allowed to keep pigs!” ejaculated the Colonel in astonishment.
-
-“By the old regulations they had to be away from the house, and we’ve
-got ground enough for that, though most of the cottagers hadn’t. But
-now they say the law is evaded, and the county council are going to
-stop pig-keeping altogether.”
-
-“Silly swine,” snorted the Colonel.
-
-“The epithet is ill-chosen,” replied Hood. “Men are lower than swine
-when they do not appreciate swine. But really I don’t know what the
-world’s coming to. What will the next generation be like without proper
-pork? And, talking about the next generation, what has become of your
-young friend Pierce? He said he was coming down, but he can’t have come
-by that train.”
-
-“I think Captain Pierce is up there, sir,” said Joan Hardy in a correct
-voice, as she unobtrusively withdrew.
-
-Her tone might have indicated that the gentleman was upstairs, but her
-momentary glance had been towards the blue emptiness of the sky. Long
-after she was gone, Owen Hood remained staring up into it, until he saw
-the aeroplane darting and wheeling like a swallow.
-
-“Is that Hilary Pierce up there?” he inquired, “looping the loop and
-playing the lunatic generally. What the devil is he doing?”
-
-“Showing off,” said the Colonel shortly, and drained his pewter mug.
-
-“But why should he show off to us?” asked Hood.
-
-“He jolly well wouldn’t,” replied the Colonel. “Showing off to the
-girl, of course.” Then after a pause he added: “A very nice girl.”
-
-“A very good girl,” said Owen Hood gravely. “If there’s anything going
-on, you may be sure it’s all straight and serious.”
-
-The Colonel blinked a little. “Well, times change,” he said. “I suppose
-I’m old-fashioned myself; but speaking as an old Tory, I must confess
-he might do worse.”
-
-“Yes,” replied Hood, “and speaking as an old Radical, I should say he
-could hardly do better.”
-
-While they were speaking the erratic aviator had eventually swept
-earthwards towards a flat field at the foot of the slope, and was now
-coming towards them. Hilary Pierce had rather the look of a poet than
-a professional aviator; and though he had distinguished himself in the
-war, he was very probably one of those whose natural dream was rather
-of conquering the air than conquering the enemy. His yellow hair was
-longer and more untidy than when he was in the army; and there was a
-touch of something irresponsible in his roving blue eye. He had a vein
-of pugnacity in him, however, as was soon apparent. He had paused to
-speak to Joan Hardy by the rather tumble-down pig-sty in the corner,
-and when he came towards the breakfast-table he seemed transfigured as
-with flame.
-
-“What’s all this infernal insane foolery?” he demanded. “Who has the
-damned impudence to tell the Hardys they mustn’t keep pigs? Look here,
-the time is come when we must burst up all this sort of thing. I’m
-going to do something desperate.”
-
-“You’ve been doing desperate things enough for this morning,” said
-Hood. “I advise you to take a little desperate luncheon. Do sit down,
-there’s a good fellow, and don’t stamp about like that.”
-
-“No, but look here----”
-
-Pierce was interrupted by Joan Hardy, who appeared quietly at his elbow
-and said demurely to the company: “There’s a gentleman here who asks if
-he may be pardoned for speaking to you.”
-
-The gentleman in question stood some little way behind in a posture
-that was polite but so stiff and motionless as almost to affect the
-nerves. He was clad in so complete and correct a version of English
-light holiday attire that they felt quite certain he was a foreigner.
-But their imaginations ranged the Continent in vain in the attempt
-to imagine what sort of foreigner. By the immobility of his almost
-moonlike face, with its faintly bilious tinge, he might almost have
-been a Chinaman. But when he spoke, they could instantly locate the
-alien accent.
-
-“Very much distressed to butt in, gentlemen,” he said, “but this young
-lady allows you are first-class academic authorities on the sights of
-this locality. I’ve been mouching around trying to hit the trail of an
-antiquity or two, but I don’t seem to know the way to pick it up. If
-you’d be so kind as to put me wise about the principal architectural
-styles and historic items of this section, I’d be under a great
-obligation.”
-
-As they were a little slow in recovering from their first surprise, he
-added patiently:
-
-“My name is Enoch B. Oates, and I’m pretty well known in Michigan, but
-I’ve bought a little place near here; I’ve looked about this little
-planet and I’ve come to think the safest and brightest place for a man
-with a few dollars is the place of a squire in your fine old feudal
-landscape. So the sooner I’m introduced to the more mellow mediæval
-buildings the better.”
-
-In Hilary Pierce the astonishment had given place to an ardour
-bordering on ecstasy.
-
-“Mediæval buildings! Architectural styles!” he cried enthusiastically.
-“You’ve come to the right shop, Mr. Oates. I’ll show you an ancient
-building, a sacred building, in an architectural style of such sublime
-antiquity that you’ll want to cart it all away to Michigan, as they
-tried to do with Glastonbury Abbey. You shall be privileged to see one
-historic institution before you die or before all history is forgotten.”
-
-He was walking towards the corner of the little kitchen-garden attached
-to the inn, waving his arms with wild gestures of encouragement; and
-the American was following him with the same stiff politeness, looking
-weirdly like an automaton.
-
-“Look on our architectural style before it perishes,” cried Pierce
-dramatically, pointing to the pig-sty, which looked a rather ramshackle
-affair of leaning and broken boards hung loosely together, though in
-practice it was practical enough. “This, the most unmistakably mellow
-of all mediæval buildings, may soon be only a memory. But when this
-edifice falls England will fall, and the world will shake with the
-shock of doom.”
-
-The American had what he himself might have described as a poker face;
-it was impossible to discover whether his utterances indicated the
-extreme of innocence or of irony.
-
-“And would you say,” he asked, “that this monument exemplifies the
-mediæval or Gothic architectural school?”
-
-“I should hardly call it strictly Perpendicular,” answered Pierce, “but
-there is no doubt that it is Early English.”
-
-“You would say it is antique, anyhow?” observed Mr. Oates.
-
-“I have every reason to believe,” affirmed Pierce solemnly, “that Gurth
-the Swineherd made use of this identical building. I have no doubt it
-is in fact far older. The best authorities believe that the Prodigal
-Son stayed here for some time, and the pigs--those noble and much
-maligned animals--gave him such excellent advice that he returned to
-his family. And now, Mr. Oates, they say that all that magnificent
-heritage is to be swept away. But it shall not be. We shall not so
-easily submit to all the vandals and vulgar tyrants who would thus tear
-down our temples and our holy places. The pig-sty shall rise again in a
-magnificent resurrection--larger pig-stys, loftier pig-stys, shall yet
-cover the land; the towers and domes and spires of statelier and more
-ideal pig-stys, in the most striking architectural styles, shall again
-declare the victory of the holy hog over his unholy oppressors.”
-
-“And meanwhile,” said Colonel Crane drily, “I think Mr. Oates had
-much better begin with the church down by the river. Very fine Norman
-foundations and traces of the Roman brick. The vicar understands his
-church, too, and would give Mr. Oates rather more reliable information
-than you do.”
-
-A little while later, when Mr. Oates had passed on his way, the Colonel
-curtly reproved his young friend.
-
-“Bad form,” he said, “making fun of a foreigner asking for information.”
-
-But Pierce turned on him with the same heat on his face.
-
-“But I wasn’t making fun. I was quite serious.”
-
-They stared at him steadily, and he laughed slightly but went on with
-undiminished fire.
-
-“Symbolical perhaps but serious,” he said. “I may seem to have been
-talking a bit wildly, but let me tell you the time has come to be wild.
-We’ve all been a lot too tame. I do mean, as much as I ever meant
-anything, to fight for the resurrection and the return of the pig; and
-he shall yet return as a wild boar that will rend the hunters.”
-
-He looked up and his eye caught the blue heraldic shape on the
-sign-board of the inn.
-
-“And there is our wooden ensign!” he cried, pointing in the same
-dramatic fashion. “We will go into battle under the banner of the Blue
-Boar.”
-
-“Loud and prolonged cheers,” said Crane politely, “and now come away
-and don’t spoil the peroration. Owen wants to potter about the local
-antiquities, like Mr. Oates. I’m more interested in novelties. Want to
-look at that machine of yours.”
-
-They began to descend the zig-zag pebbled path fenced and embanked with
-hedges and flower-beds like a garden grown on a staircase, and at every
-corner Hood had to remonstrate with the loitering youth.
-
-“Don’t be for ever gazing back on the paradise of pigs,” he said, “or
-you’ll be turned to a pillar of salt, or possibly of mustard as more
-appropriate to such meat. They won’t run away yet. There are other
-creatures formed by the Creator for the contemplation of man; there are
-other things made by man after the pattern of the creatures, from the
-great White Horses of Wessex to that great white bird on which you
-yourself flew among the birds. Fine subject for a poem of the first and
-last things.”
-
-“Bird that lays rather dreadful eggs,” said Crane. “In the next war----
-Why, where the deuce has he gone?”
-
-“Pigs, pigs,” said Hood sadly. “The overpowering charm which pigs
-exercise upon us at a certain time of life; when we hear their trotters
-in our dreams and their little curly tails twine about us like the
-tendrils of the vine----”
-
-“Oh, bosh,” said the Colonel.
-
-For indeed Mr. Hilary Pierce had vanished in a somewhat startling
-manner, ducking under the corner of a hedge and darting up a steeper
-path, over a gate and across the corner of a hayfield, where a final
-bound through bursting bushes brought him on top of a low wall looking
-down at the pig-sty and Miss Joan Hardy, who was calmly walking away
-from it. He sprang down on to the path; the morning sun picked out
-everything in clear colours like a child’s toy-book; and standing
-with his hands spread out and his wisps of yellow hair brushed in
-all directions by the bushes, he recalled an undignified memory of
-Shock-Headed Peter.
-
-“I felt I must speak to you before I went,” he said. “I’m going
-away, not exactly on active service, but on business--on very active
-business. I feel like the fellows did when they went to the war ...
-and what they wanted to do first.... I am aware that a proposal over
-a pig-sty is not so symbolical to some as to me, but really and truly
-... I don’t know whether I mentioned it, but you may be aware that I
-worship you.”
-
-Joan Hardy was quite aware of it; but the conventionalities in her case
-were like concentric castle-walls; the world-old conventions of the
-countryside. There was in them the stiff beauty of old country dances
-and the slow and delicate needlework of a peasantry. Of all the ladies
-whose figures must be faintly traced in the tapestry of these frivolous
-tales of chivalry, the most reticent and dignified was the one who was
-not in the worldly sense a lady at all.
-
-She stood looking at him in silence, and he at her; as the lift of her
-head had some general suggestion of a bird, the line of her profile had
-a delicate suggestion of a falcon, and her face was of the fine tint
-that has no name, unless we could talk of a bright brown.
-
-“Really, you seem in a terrible hurry,” she said. “I don’t want to be
-talked to in a rush like this.”
-
-“I apologize,” he said. “I can’t help being in a rush, but I didn’t
-want you to be in a rush. I only wanted you to know. I haven’t done
-anything to deserve you, but I am going to try. I’m going off to work;
-I feel sure you believe in quiet steady work for a young man.”
-
-“Are you going into the bank?” she asked innocently. “You said your
-uncle was in a bank.”
-
-“I hope all my conversation was not on that level,” he replied. And
-indeed he would have been surprised if he had known how exactly she
-remembered all such dull details he had ever mentioned about himself,
-and how little she knew in comparison about his theories and fancies,
-which he thought so much more important.
-
-“Well,” he said with engaging frankness, “it would be an exaggeration
-to say I am going into a bank; though of course there are banks and
-banks. Why, I know a bank whereon the wild thyme--I beg your pardon,
-I mean I know a lot of more rural and romantic occupations that are
-really quite as safe as the bank. The truth is, I think of going into
-the bacon trade. I think I see an opening for a brisk young man in the
-ham and pork business. When you see me next I shall be travelling in
-pork; an impenetrable disguise.”
-
-“You mustn’t come here, then,” she answered. “It won’t be allowed here
-by that time. The neighbours would----”
-
-“Fear not,” he said, “I should be a commercial traveller. Oh, such a
-very commercial traveller. And as for not coming here, the thing seems
-quite unthinkable. You must at least let me write to you every hour or
-so. You must let me send you a few presents every morning.”
-
-“I’m sure my father wouldn’t like you to send me presents,” she said
-gravely.
-
-“Ask your father to wait,” said Pierce earnestly. “Ask him to wait till
-he’s seen the presents. You see, mine will be rather curious presents.
-I don’t think he’ll disapprove of them. I think he’ll approve of them.
-I think he’ll congratulate me on my simple tastes and sound business
-principles. The truth is, dear Joan, I’ve committed myself to a rather
-important enterprise. You needn’t be frightened; I promise I won’t
-trouble you again till it succeeds. I will be content that you know it
-is for you I do it; and shall continue to do it, if I defy the world.”
-He sprang up on the wall again and stood there staring down at her
-almost indignantly.
-
-“That anybody should forbid _you_ to keep pigs,” he cried. “That
-anybody should forbid _you_ to do anything. That anybody should
-dispute _your_ right to keep pet crocodiles if you like! That is the
-unpardonable sin; that is the supreme blasphemy and crime against the
-nature of things, which shall not go unavenged. You shall have pigs, I
-say, if the skies fall and the whole world is whelmed in war.”
-
-He disappeared like a flash behind the high bank and the wall, and Joan
-went back in silence to the inn.
-
-The first incident of the war did not seem superficially encouraging,
-though the hero of it seemed by no means discouraged by it. As
-reported in the police news of various papers, Hilary Patrick Pierce,
-formerly of the Flying Corps, was arrested for driving pigs into the
-county of Bluntshire, in contravention of the regulations made for the
-public health. He seemed to have had almost as much trouble with the
-pigs as with the police; but he made a witty and eloquent speech on
-being arrested, to which the police and the pigs appeared to be equally
-unresponsive. The incident was considered trivial and his punishment
-was trifling; but the occasion was valued by some of the authorities as
-giving an opportunity for the final elucidation and establishment of
-the new rule.
-
-For this purpose it was fortunate that the principal magistrate of the
-bench was no less a person than the celebrated hygienist, Sir Horace
-Hunter, O.B.E., M.D., who had begun life, as some may remember, as
-a successful suburban doctor and had likewise distinguished himself
-as an officer of health in the Thames Valley. To him indeed had been
-largely due the logical extension of the existing precautions against
-infection from the pig; though he was fully supported by his fellow
-magistrates, one being Mr. Rosenbaum Low, millionaire and formerly
-manager of Bliss and Co., and the other the young Socialist, Mr. Amyas
-Minns, famous for his exposition of Shaw on the Simple Life, who sat on
-the bench as a Labour alderman. All concurred in the argument of Sir
-Horace, that just as all the difficulties and doubtful cases raised by
-the practice of moderate drinking had been simplified by the solution
-of Prohibition, so the various quarrels and evasions about swine-fever
-were best met by a straightforward and simple regulation against swine.
-In the very improper remarks which he offered after the trial, the
-prisoner appears to have said that as his three judges were a Jew, a
-vegetarian and a quack doctor on the make, he was not surprised that
-they did not appreciate pork.
-
-The next luncheon at which the three friends met was in a sufficiently
-different setting; for the Colonel had invited the other two to his
-club in London. It would have been almost impossible to have been that
-sort of Colonel without having that sort of club. But as a matter of
-fact, he very seldom went there. On this occasion it was Owen Hood who
-arrived first and was by instructions escorted by a waiter to a table
-in a bow window overlooking the Green Park. Knowing Crane’s military
-punctuality, Hood fancied that he might have mistaken the time; and
-while looking for the note of invitation in his pocket-book, he paused
-for a moment upon a newspaper cutting that he had put aside as a
-curiosity some days before. It was a paragraph headed “Old Ladies as
-Mad Motorists,” and ran as follows:
-
-  “An unprecedented number of cases of motorists exceeding the speed
-  limit have lately occurred on the Bath Road and other western
-  highways. The extraordinary feature of the case is that in so large a
-  number of cases the offenders appeared to be old ladies of great
-  wealth and respectability who professed to be merely taking their pugs
-  and other pet animals for an airing. They professed that the health of
-  the animal required much more rapid transit through the air than is
-  the case with human beings.”
-
-He was gazing at this extract with as much perplexity as on his first
-perusal, when the Colonel entered with a newspaper in his hand.
-
-“I say,” he said, “I think it is getting rather ridiculous. I’m not
-a revolutionist like you; quite the reverse. But all these rules and
-regulations are getting beyond all rational discipline. A little while
-ago they started forbidding all travelling menageries; not, mind you,
-stipulating for proper conditions for the animals, but forbidding them
-altogether for some nonsense about the safety of the public. There
-was a travelling circus stopped near Acton and another on the road to
-Reading. Crowds of village boys must never see a lion in their lives,
-because once in fifty years a lion has escaped and been caught again.
-But that’s nothing to what has happened since. Now, if you please,
-there is such mortal fear of infection that we are to leave the sick
-to suffer, just as if we were savages. You know those new hospital
-trains that were started to take patients from the hospitals down to
-the health resorts. Well, they’re not to run after all, it seems, lest
-by merely taking an invalid of any sort through the open country we
-should poison the four winds of heaven. If this nonsense goes on, I
-shall go as mad as Hilary himself.”
-
-Hilary Pierce had arrived during this conversation and sat listening to
-it with a rather curious smile. Somehow the more Hood looked at that
-smile the more it puzzled him; it puzzled him as much as the newspaper
-cutting in his hand. He caught himself looking from one to the other,
-and Pierce smiled in a still more irritating manner.
-
-“You don’t look so fierce and fanatical as when we last met, my young
-friend,” observed Owen Hood. “Have you got tired of pigs and police
-courts? These coercion acts the Colonel’s talking about would have
-roused you to lift the roof off once.”
-
-“Oh, I’m all against the new rules,” answered the young man coolly.
-“I’ve been very much against them; what you might call up against them.
-In fact, I’ve already broken all those new laws and a few more. Could
-you let me look at that cutting for a moment?”
-
-Hood handed it to him and he nodded, saying:
-
-“Yes; I was arrested for that.”
-
-“Arrested for what?”
-
-“Arrested for being a rich and respectable old lady,” answered Hilary
-Pierce; “but I managed to escape that time. It was a fine sight to see
-the old lady clear a hedge and skedaddle across a meadow.”
-
-Hood looked at him under bended brows and his mouth began to work.
-
-“But what’s all this about the old lady having a pug or a pet or
-something?”
-
-“Well, it was very nearly a pug,” said Pierce in a dispassionate
-manner. “I pointed out to everybody that it was, as it were, an
-approximate pug. I asked if it was just to punish me for a small
-mistake in spelling.”
-
-“I begin to understand,” said Hood. “You were again smuggling swine
-down to your precious Blue Boar, and thought you could rush the
-frontier in very rapid cars.”
-
-“Yes,” replied the smuggler placidly. “We were quite literally
-Road-Hogs. I thought at first of dressing the pigs up as millionaires
-and members of Parliament; but when you come to look close, there’s
-more difference than you would imagine to be possible. It was great fun
-when they forced me to take my pet out of the wrapping of shawls, and
-they found what a large pet it was.”
-
-“And do I understand,” cut in the Colonel, “that it was something like
-that--with the other laws?”
-
-“The other laws,” said Pierce, “are certainly arbitrary, but perhaps
-you do not altogether do them justice. You do not quite appreciate
-their motive. You do not fully allow for their origin. I may say, I
-trust with all modesty, that I was their origin. I not only had the
-pleasure of breaking those laws, but the pleasure of making them.”
-
-“More of your tricks, you mean,” said the Colonel; “but why don’t the
-papers say so?”
-
-“The authorities don’t want ’em to,” answered Pierce. “The authorities
-won’t advertise me, you bet. I’ve got far too much popular backing for
-that. When the real revolution happens, it won’t be mentioned in the
-newspapers.”
-
-He paused a moment in meditation and then went on.
-
-“When the police searched for my pug and found it was a pig, I started
-wondering how they could best be stopped from doing it again. It
-occurred to me they might be shy of a wild pig or a pug that bit them.
-So, of course, I travelled the next time with dreadfully dangerous
-animals in cages, warning everybody of the fiercest tigers and panthers
-that ever were known. When they found it out and didn’t want to let it
-out, they could only fall back on their own tomfoolery of a prohibition
-wholesale. Of course, it was the same with my other stunt, about the
-sick people going to health resorts to be cured of various fashionable
-and refined maladies. The pigs had a dignified, possibly a rather
-dull time, in elaborately curtained railway carriages with hospital
-nurses to wait on them; while I stood outside and assured the railway
-officials that the cure was a rest cure, and the invalids must on no
-account be disturbed.”
-
-“What a liar you are!” exclaimed Hood in simple admiration.
-
-“Not at all,” said Pierce with dignity. “It was quite true that they
-were going to be cured.”
-
-Crane, who had been gazing rather abstractedly out of the window,
-slowly turned his head and said abruptly: “And how’s it going to end?
-Do you propose to go on doing all these impossible things?”
-
-Pierce sprang to his feet with a resurrection of all the romantic
-abandon of his vow over the pig-sty.
-
-“Impossible!” he cried. “You don’t know what you’re saying or how true
-it is. All I’ve done so far was possible and prosaic. But I will do an
-impossible thing. I will do something that is written in all books and
-rhymes as impossible--something that has passed into a proverb of the
-impossible. The war is not ended yet; and if you two fellows will post
-yourselves in the quarry opposite the Blue Boar, on Thursday week at
-sunset, you will see something so impossible and so self-evident that
-even the organs of public information will find it hard to hide it.”
-
-It was in that part of the steep fall of pine-wood where the quarry
-made a sort of ledge under a roof of pine that two gentlemen of
-something more than middle age who had not altogether lost the appetite
-of adventure posted themselves with all the preparations due to a
-picnic or a practical joke. It was from that place, as from a window
-looking across the valley, that they saw what seemed more like a
-vision; what seemed indeed rather like the parody of an apocalypse. The
-large clearance of the western sky was of a luminous lemon tint, as of
-pale yellow fading to pale green, while one or two loose clouds on the
-horizon were of a rose-red and yet richer colours. But the setting sun
-itself was a cloudless fire, so that a tawny light lay over the whole
-landscape; and the inn of the Blue Boar standing opposite looked almost
-like a house of gold. Owen Hood was gazing in his dreamy fashion, and
-said at last:
-
-“There’s an apocalyptic sign in heaven for you to start with. It’s a
-queer thing, but that cloud coming up the valley is uncommonly like the
-shape of a pig.”
-
-“Very like a whale,” said Colonel Crane, yawning slightly; but when
-he turned his eyes in that direction, the eyes were keener. Artists
-have remarked that a cloud has perspective like anything else; but the
-perspective of the cloud coming up the valley was curiously solid.
-
-“That’s not a cloud,” he said sharply, “it’s a Zeppelin or something.”
-
-The solid shape grew larger and larger; and as it grew more obvious it
-grew more incredible.
-
-“Saints and angels!” cried Hood suddenly. “Why, it _is_ a pig!”
-
-“It’s shaped like a pig all right,” said the Colonel curtly; and
-indeed as the great balloon-like form bulked bigger and bigger above
-its own reflection in the winding river, they could see that the long
-sausage-shaped Zeppelin body of it had been fantastically decorated
-with hanging ears and legs, to complete that pantomimic resemblance.
-
-“I suppose it’s some more of Hilary’s skylarking,” observed Hood; “but
-what is he up to now?”
-
-As the great aërial monster moved up the valley it paused over the inn
-of the Blue Boar, and something fell fluttering from it like a brightly
-coloured feather.
-
-“People are coming down in parachutes,” said the Colonel shortly.
-
-“They’re queer-looking people,” remarked his companion, peering under
-frowning brows, for the level light was dazzling to the eyes. “By
-George, they’re not people at all! They’re pigs!”
-
-From that distance, the objects in question had something of the
-appearance of cherubs in some gaily coloured Gothic picture, with the
-yellow sky for their gold-leaf background. The parachute apparatus
-from which they hung and hovered was designed and coloured with the
-appearance of a great wheel of gorgeously painted plumage, looking
-more gaudy than ever in the strong evening light that lay over all. The
-more the two men in the quarry stared at these strange objects, the
-more certain it seemed that they were indeed pigs; though whether the
-pigs were dead or alive it was impossible at that distance to say. They
-looked down into the garden of the inn into which the feathered things
-were dropping, and they could see the figure of Joan Hardy standing in
-front of the old pig-sty, with her bird-like head lifted, looking up
-into the sky.
-
-“Singular present for a young lady,” remarked Crane, “but I suppose
-when our mad young friend does start love-making, he would be likely to
-give impossible presents.”
-
-The eyes of the more poetical Hood were full of larger visions, and he
-hardly seemed to be listening. But as the sentence ended he seemed to
-start from a trance and struck his hands together.
-
-“Yes!” he cried in a new voice, “we always come back to that word!”
-
-“Come back to what word?” asked his friend.
-
-“‘Impossible,’” answered Owen Hood. “It’s the word that runs through
-his whole life, and ours too for that matter. Don’t you see what he has
-done?”
-
-“I see what he has done all right,” answered the Colonel, “but I’m not
-at all sure I see what you are driving at.”
-
-“What we have seen is another impossible thing,” said Owen Hood; “a
-thing that common speech has set up as a challenge; a thing that a
-thousand rhymes and jokes and phrases have called impossible. We have
-seen pigs fly.”
-
-“It’s pretty extraordinary,” admitted Crane, “but it’s not so
-extraordinary as their not being allowed to walk.”
-
-And they gathered their travelling tackle together and began to descend
-the steep hill.
-
-In doing so, they descended into a deeper twilight between the stems of
-the darkling trees; the walls of the valley began to close over them,
-as it were, and they lost that sense of being in the upper air in a
-radiant topsy-turvydom of clouds. It was almost as if they had really
-had a vision; and the voice of Crane came abruptly out of the dusk,
-almost like that of a doubter when he speaks of a dream.
-
-“The thing I can’t understand,” he said abruptly, “is how Hilary
-managed to _do_ all that by himself.”
-
-“He really is a very wonderful fellow,” said Hood. “You told me
-yourself he did wonders in the War. And though he turns it to these
-fanatical ends now, it takes as much trouble to do one as the other.”
-
-“Takes a devilish lot more trouble to do it alone,” said Crane. “In the
-War there was a whole organization.”
-
-“You mean he must be more than a remarkable person,” suggested Hood, “a
-sort of giant with a hundred hands or god with a hundred eyes. Well, a
-man will work frightfully hard when he wants something very much; even
-a man who generally looks like a lounging minor poet. And I think I
-know what it was he wanted. He deserves to get it. It’s certainly his
-hour of triumph.”
-
-“Mystery to me, all the same,” said the Colonel frowning. “Wonder
-whether he’ll ever clear it up.” But that part of the mystery was not
-to be cleared up until many other curious things had come to pass.
-
-Away on another part of the slope Hilary Pierce, new lighted on the
-earth like the herald Mercury, leapt down into a red hollow of the
-quarry and came towards Joan Hardy with uplifted arms.
-
-“This is no time for false modesty,” he said. “It is the hour, and I
-come to you covered with glory----”
-
-“You come covered with mud,” she said smiling, “and it’s that horrible
-red mud that takes so long to dry. It’s no use trying to brush it
-till----”
-
-“I bring you the Golden Fleece, or at any rate the Golden Pig-Skin,” he
-cried in lyric ecstasy. “I have endured the labours; I have achieved
-the quest. I have made the Hampshire Hog as legendary as the Calydonian
-Boar. They forbade me to drive it on foot, and I drove it in a car,
-disguised as a pug. They forbade me to bring it in a car, and I brought
-it in a railway-train, disguised as an invalid. They forbade me to use
-a railway-train, and I took the wings of the morning and rose to the
-uttermost parts of the air; by a way secret and pathless and lonely as
-the wilful way of love. I have made my romance immortal. I have written
-your name upon the sky. What do you say to me now? I have turned a Pig
-into a Pegasus. I have done impossible things.”
-
-“I know you have,” she said, “but somehow I can’t help liking you for
-all that.”
-
-“_But_ you can’t help liking me,” he repeated in a hollow voice.
-“I have stormed heaven, but still I am not so bad. Hercules can be
-tolerated in spite of his Twelve Labours. St. George can be forgiven
-for killing the Dragon. Woman, is this the way I am treated in the hour
-of victory; and is this the graceful fashion of an older world? Have
-you become a New Woman, by any chance? What has your father been doing?
-What does he say--about us?”
-
-“My father says you are quite mad, of course,” she replied, “but he
-can’t help liking you either. He says he doesn’t believe in people
-marrying out of their class; but that if I must marry a gentleman he’d
-rather it was somebody like you, and not one of the new gentlemen.”
-
-“Well, I’m glad I’m an old gentleman, anyhow,” he answered somewhat
-mollified. “But really this prevalence of common sense is getting quite
-dangerous. Will nothing rouse you all to a little unreality; to saying,
-so to speak, ‘O, for the wings of a pig that I might flee away and be
-at rest.’ What would you say if I turned the world upside-down and set
-my foot upon the sun and moon?”
-
-“I should say,” replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, “that you wanted
-somebody to look after you.”
-
-He stared at her for a moment in an almost abstracted fashion as
-if he had not fully understood; then he laughed quite suddenly and
-uncontrollably, like a man who has seen something very close to him
-that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. So a man will fall
-over something in a game of hiding-and-seeking, and get up shaken with
-laughter.
-
-“What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an
-aeroplane,” he said, “especially when your flying ship is only a
-flying pig. The earth of the real peasants and the real pigs--don’t be
-offended; I assure you the confusion is a compliment. What a thing is
-horse-sense, and how much finer really than the poetry of Pegasus! And
-when there is everything else as well that makes the sky clean and the
-earth kind, beauty and bravery and the lifting of the head--well, you
-are right enough, Joan. Will you take care of me? Will you stop at home
-and clip my pig’s wings?”
-
-He had caught hold of her by the hands; but she still laughed as she
-answered:
-
-“Yes--I told you I couldn’t help--but you must really let go, Hilary.
-I can see your friends coming down from the quarry.”
-
-As she spoke, indeed, Colonel Crane and Owen Hood could be seen
-descending the slope and passing through a screen of slender trees
-towards them.
-
-“Hullo!” said Hilary Pierce cheerfully. “I want you to congratulate
-me. Joan thinks I’m an awful humbug, and right she is; I am what has
-been called a happy hypocrite. At least you fellows may think I’ve been
-guilty of a bit of a fake in this last affair, when I tell you the
-news. Well, I will confess.”
-
-“What news do you mean?” inquired the Colonel with curiosity.
-
-Hilary Pierce grinned and made a gesture over his shoulder to the
-litter of porcine parachutes, to indicate his last and crowning folly.
-
-“The truth is,” he said laughing, “that was only a final firework
-display to celebrate victory or failure, whichever you choose to call
-it. There isn’t any need to do any more, because the veto is removed.”
-
-“Removed?” exclaimed Hood. “Why on earth is that? It’s rather unnerving
-when lunatics suddenly go sane like that.”
-
-“It wasn’t anything to do with the lunatics,” answered Pierce quietly.
-“The real change was much higher up, or rather lower down. Anyhow, it
-was much farther at the back of things, where the Big Businesses are
-settled by the big people.”
-
-“What was the change?” asked the Colonel.
-
-“Old Oates has gone into another business,” answered Pierce quietly.
-
-“What on earth has old Oates to do with it?” asked Hood staring. “Do
-you mean that Yankee mooning about over mediæval ruins?”
-
-“Oh, I know,” said Pierce wearily, “I thought he had nothing to do
-with it; I thought it was the Jews and vegetarians, and the rest; but
-they’re very innocent instruments. The truth is that Enoch Oates is the
-biggest pork-packer and importer in the world, and _he_ didn’t want
-any competition from our cottagers. And what he says goes, as he would
-express it. Now, thank God, he’s taken up another line.”
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-But if any indomitable reader wishes to know what was the new line
-Mr. Oates pursued and why, it is to be feared that his only course
-is to await and read patiently the story of the Exclusive Luxury of
-Enoch Oates; and even before reaching that supreme test, he will have
-to support the recital of The Elusive Companion of Parson White; for
-these, as has been said, are tales of topsy-turvydom, and they often
-work backwards.
-
-
-
-
-IV
-
-THE ELUSIVE COMPANION OF PARSON WHITE
-
-
-
-
-IV
-
-THE ELUSIVE COMPANION OF PARSON WHITE
-
-
-In the scriptures and the chronicles of the League of the Long Bow, or
-fellowship of foolish persons doing impossible things, it is recorded
-that Owen Hood, the lawyer, and his friend Crane, the retired Colonel,
-were partaking one afternoon of a sort of picnic on the river-island
-that had been the first scene of a certain romantic incident in the
-life of the former, the burden of reading about which has fallen upon
-other readers in other days. Suffice it to say that the island had been
-devoted by Mr. Hood to his hobby of angling, and that the meal then
-in progress was a somewhat early interruption of the same leisurely
-pursuit. The two old cronies had a third companion, who, though
-considerably younger, was not only a companion but a friend. He was a
-light-haired, lively young man, with rather a wild eye, known by the
-name of Pierce, whose wedding to the daughter of the innkeeper of the
-Blue Boar the others had only recently attended.
-
-He was an aviator and given to many other forms of skylarking. The two
-older men had eccentric tastes of their own; but there is always a
-difference between the eccentricity of an elderly man who defies the
-world and the enthusiasm of a younger man who hopes to alter it. The
-old gentleman may be willing, in a sense, to stand on his head; but he
-does not hope, as the boy does, to stand the world on its head. With
-a young man like Hilary Pierce it was the world itself that was to be
-turned upside-down; and that was a game at which his more grizzled
-companions could only look on, as at a child they loved playing with a
-big coloured balloon.
-
-Perhaps it was this sense of a division by time, altering the tone,
-though not the fact, of friendship, which sent the mind of one of the
-older men back to the memory of an older friend. He remembered he had
-had a letter that morning from the only contemporary of his who could
-fitly have made a fourth to their party. Owen Hood drew the letter from
-his pocket with a smile that wrinkled his long, humorous, cadaverous
-face.
-
-“By the way, I forgot to tell you,” he said, “I had a letter from White
-yesterday.”
-
-The bronzed visage of the Colonel was also seamed with the external
-signs of a soundless chuckle.
-
-“Read it yet?” he asked.
-
-“Yes,” replied the lawyer; “the hieroglyphic was attacked with fresh
-vigour after breakfast this morning, and the clouds and mysteries of
-yesterday’s laborious hours seemed to be rolled away. Some portions of
-the cuneiform still await an expert translation; but the sentences
-themselves appear to be in the original English.”
-
-“Very original English,” snorted Colonel Crane.
-
-“Yes, our friend is an original character,” replied Hood. “Vanity
-tempts me to hint that he is our friend because he has an original
-taste in friends. That habit of his of putting the pronoun on the first
-page and the noun on the next has brightened many winter evenings for
-me. You haven’t met our friend White, have you?” he added to Pierce.
-“That is a shock that still threatens you.”
-
-“Why, what’s the matter with him?” inquired Pierce.
-
-“Nothing,” observed Crane in his more staccato style. “Has a taste for
-starting a letter with ‘Yours Truly’ and ending it with ‘Dear Sir’;
-that’s all.”
-
-“I should rather like to hear that letter,” observed the young man.
-
-“So you shall,” answered Hood, “there’s nothing confidential in it;
-and if there were, you wouldn’t find it out merely by reading it. The
-Rev. Wilding White, called by some of his critics ‘Wild White,’ is
-one of those country parsons, to be found in corners of the English
-countryside, of whom their old college friends usually think in order
-to wonder what the devil their parishoners think of them. As a matter
-of fact, my dear Hilary, he was rather like you when he was your age;
-and what in the world you would be like as a vicar in the Church of
-England, aged fifty, might at first stagger the imagination; but the
-problem might be solved by supposing you would be like him. But I only
-hope you will have a more lucid style in letter-writing. The old boy is
-always in such a state of excitement about something that it comes out
-anyhow.”
-
-It has been said elsewhere that these tales are, in some sense, of
-necessity told tail-foremost, and certainly the letter of the Rev.
-Wilding White was a document suited to such a scheme of narrative. It
-was written in what had once been a good handwriting of the bolder
-sort, but which had degenerated through excessive energy and haste into
-an illegible scrawl. It appeared to run as follows:
-
-  “‘My dear Owen,--My mind is quite made up; though I know the sort of
-  legal long-winded things you will say against it; I know especially
-  one thing a leathery old lawyer like you is bound to say; but as a
-  matter of fact even you can’t say it in a case like this, because the
-  timber came from the other end of the county and had nothing whatever
-  to do with him or any of his flunkeys and sycophants. Besides, I did
-  it all myself with a little assistance I’ll tell you about later;
-  and even in these days I should be surprised to hear _that_ sort of
-  assistance could be anything but a man’s own affair. I defy you and
-  all your parchments to maintain that _it_ comes under the Game Laws.
-  You won’t mind me talking like this; I know jolly well you’d think
-  you were acting as a friend; but I think the time has come to speak
-  plainly.’”
-
-“Quite right,” said the Colonel.
-
-“Yes,” said young Pierce, with a rather vague expression, “I’m glad he
-feels that the time has come to speak plainly.”
-
-“Quite so,” observed the lawyer drily; “he continues as follows:
-
-  “‘I’ve got a lot to tell you about the new arrangement, which works
-  much better even than I hoped. I was afraid at first it would really
-  be an encumbrance, as you know it’s always supposed to be. But there
-  are more things, and all the rest of it, and God fulfils himself,
-  and so on and so on. It gives one quite a weird Asiatic feeling
-  sometimes.’”
-
-“Yes,” said the Colonel, “it does.”
-
-“What does?” asked Pierce, sitting up suddenly, like one who can bear
-no more.
-
-“You are not used to the epistolary method,” said Hood indulgently;
-“you haven’t got into the swing of the style. It goes on:
-
-  “‘Of course, he’s a big pot down here, and all sorts of skunks
-  are afraid of him and pretend to boycott me. Nobody could expect
-  anything else of those pineapple people, but I confess I was
-  surprised at Parkinson. Sally of course is as sound as ever; but she
-  goes to Scotland a good deal and you can’t blame her. Sometimes I’m
-  left pretty severely alone, but I’m not downhearted; you’ll probably
-  laugh if I tell you that Snowdrop is really a very intelligent
-  companion.’”
-
-“I confess I am long past laughter,” said Hilary Pierce sadly; “but I
-rather wish I knew who Snowdrop is.”
-
-“Child, I suppose,” said the Colonel shortly.
-
-“Yes; I suppose it must be a child,” said Pierce. “Has he any children?”
-
-“No,” said the Colonel. “Bachelor.”
-
-“I believe he was in love with a lady in those parts and never married
-in consequence,” said Hood. “It would be quite on the lines of fiction
-and film-drama if Snowdrop were the daughter of the lady, when she had
-married Another. But there seems to be something more about Snowdrop,
-that little sunbeam in the house:
-
-  “‘Snowdrop tries to enter into our ways, as they always do; but,
-  of course, it would be a little awkward if she played tricks. How
-  alarmed they would all be if she took it into her head to walk about
-  on two legs, like everybody else.’”
-
-“Nonsense!” ejaculated Colonel Crane. “Can’t be a child--talking about
-it walking about on two legs.”
-
-“After all,” said Pierce thoughtfully, “a little girl does walk about
-on two legs.”
-
-“Bit startling if she walked about on three,” said Crane.
-
-“If my learned brother will allow me,” said Hood, in his forensic
-manner, “would he describe the fact of a little girl walking on two
-legs as alarming?”
-
-“A little girl is always alarming,” replied Pierce.
-
-“I’ve come to the conclusion myself,” went on Hood, “that Snowdrop
-must be a pony. It seems a likely enough name for a pony. I thought at
-first it was a dog or a cat but alarming seems a strong word even for
-a dog or a cat sitting up to beg. But a pony on its hind legs might be
-a little alarming, especially when you’re riding it. Only I can’t fit
-this view in with the next sentence: ‘I’ve taught her to reach down the
-things I want.’”
-
-“Lord!” cried Pierce. “It’s a monkey!”
-
-“That,” replied Hood, “had occurred to me as possibly explaining the
-weird Asiatic atmosphere. But a monkey on two legs is even less unusual
-than a dog on two legs. Moreover, the reference to Asiatic mystery
-seems really to refer to something else and not to any animal at all.
-For he ends up by saying: ‘I feel now as if my mind were moving in much
-larger and more ancient spaces of time or eternity; and as if what I
-thought at first was an oriental atmosphere was only an atmosphere of
-the orient in the sense of dayspring and the dawn. It has nothing to do
-with the stagnant occultism of decayed Indian cults; it is something
-that unites a real innocence with the immensities, a power as of the
-mountains with the purity of snow. This vision does not violate my own
-religion, but rather reinforces it; but I cannot help feeling that I
-have larger views. I hope in two senses to preach liberty in these
-parts. So I may live to falsify the proverb after all.’
-
-“That,” added Hood, folding up the letter, “is the only sentence in the
-whole thing that conveys anything to my mind. As it happens, we have
-all three of us lived to falsify proverbs.”
-
-Hilary Pierce had risen to his feet with the restless action that went
-best with his alert figure. “Yes,” he said; “I suppose we can all
-three of us say we have lived for adventures, or had some curious ones
-anyhow. And to tell you the truth, the adventure feeling has come on me
-very strong this very minute. I’ve got the detective fever about that
-parson of yours. I should like to get at the meaning of that letter, as
-if it were a cipher about buried treasure.”
-
-Then he added more gravely: “And if, as I gather, your clerical friend
-is really a friend worth having, I do seriously advise you to keep an
-eye on him just now. Writing letters upside-down is all very well,
-and I shouldn’t be alarmed about that. Lots of people think they’ve
-explained things in previous letters they never wrote. I don’t think
-it matters who Snowdrop is, or what sort of children or animals he
-chooses to be fond of. That’s all being eccentric in the good old
-English fashion, like poetical tinkers and mad squires. You’re both of
-you eccentric in that sort of way, and it’s one of the things I like
-about you. But just because I naturally knock about more among the new
-people, I see something of the new eccentricities. And believe me,
-they’re not half so nice as the old ones. I’m a student of scientific
-aviation, which is a new thing itself, and I like it. But there’s a
-sort of spiritual aviation that I don’t like at all.”
-
-“Sorry,” observed Crane. “Really no notion of what you’re talking
-about.”
-
-“Of course you haven’t,” answered Pierce with engaging candour; “that’s
-another thing I like about you. But I don’t like the way your clerical
-friend talks about new visions and larger religions and light and
-liberty from the East. I’ve heard a good many people talk like that,
-and they were mountebanks or the dupes of mountebanks. And I’ll tell
-you another thing. It’s a long shot even with the long bow we used to
-talk about. It’s a pretty wild guess even in this rather wild business.
-But I have a creepy sort of feeling that if you went down to his house
-and private parlour to see Snowdrop, you’d be surprised at what you
-saw.”
-
-“What should we see?” asked the Colonel, staring.
-
-“You’d see nothing at all,” replied the young man.
-
-“What on earth do you mean?”
-
-“I mean,” replied Pierce, “that you’d find Mr. White talking to
-somebody who didn’t seem to be there.”
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Hilary Pierce, fired by his detective fever, made a good many more
-inquiries about the Rev. Wilding White, both of his two old friends and
-elsewhere.
-
-One long legal conversation with Owen Hood did indeed put him in
-possession of the legal outline of certain matters, which might be said
-to throw a light on some parts of the strange letter, and which might
-in time even be made to throw a light on the rest. White was the vicar
-of a parish lying deep in the western parts of Somersetshire, where
-the principal landowner was a certain Lord Arlington. And in this case
-there had been a quarrel between the squire and the parson, of a more
-revolutionary sort than is common in the case of parsons. The clergyman
-intensely resented that irony or anomaly which has caused so much
-discontent among tenants in Ireland and throughout the world; the fact
-that improvements or constructive work actually done by the tenant
-only pass into the possession of the landlord. He had considerably
-improved a house that he himself rented from the squire, but in some
-kind of crisis of defiance or renunciation, he had quitted this more
-official residence bag and baggage, and built himself a sort of wooden
-lodge or bungalow on a small hill or mound that rose amid woods on the
-extreme edge of the same grounds. This quarrel about the claim of the
-tenant to his own work was evidently the meaning of certain phrases in
-the letter--such as the timber coming from the other end of the county,
-the sort of work being a man’s own affair, and the general allusion
-to somebody’s flunkeys or sycophants who attempted to boycott the
-discontented tenant. But it was not quite clear whether the allusions
-to a new arrangement, and how it worked, referred to the bungalow or to
-the other and more elusive mystery of the presence of Snowdrop.
-
-One phrase in the letter he found to have been repeated in many places
-and to many persons without becoming altogether clear in the process.
-It was the sentence that ran: “I was afraid at first it would really
-be an encumbrance, as you know it’s always supposed to be.” Both
-Colonel Crane and Owen Hood, and also several other persons whom he
-met later in his investigations, were agreed in saying that Mr. White
-had used some expression indicating that he had entangled himself with
-something troublesome or at least useless; something that he did not
-want. None of them could remember the exact words he had used; but all
-could state in general terms that it referred to some sort of negative
-nuisance or barren responsibility. This could hardly refer to Snowdrop,
-of whom he always wrote in terms of tenderness as if she were a baby
-or a kitten. It seemed hard to believe it could refer to the house
-he had built entirely to suit himself. It seemed as if there must be
-some third thing in his muddled existence, which loomed vaguely in the
-background through the vapour of his confused correspondence.
-
-Colonel Crane snapped his fingers with a mild irritation in trying
-to recall a trifle. “He said it was a--you know, I’ve forgotten the
-word--a botheration or embarrassment. But then he’s always in a state
-of botheration and embarrassment. I didn’t tell you, by the way, that I
-had a letter from him too. Came the day after I heard yours. Shorter,
-and perhaps a little plainer.” And he handed the letter to Hood, who
-read it out slowly:
-
-  “‘I never knew the old British populace, here in Avalon itself, could
-  be so broken down by squires and sneaking lawyers. Nobody dared help
-  me move my house again; said it was illegal and they were afraid
-  of the police. But Snowdrop helped, and we carted it all away in
-  two or three journeys; took it right clean off the old fool’s land
-  altogether this time. I fancy the old fool will have to admit there
-  are things in this world he wasn’t prepared to believe in.’”
-
-“But look here,” began Hood as if impulsively, and then stopped and
-spoke more slowly and carefully. “I don’t understand this; I think it’s
-extremely odd. I don’t mean odd for an ordinary person, but odd for an
-odd person; odd for this odd person. I know White better than either
-of you can, and I can tell you that, though he tells a tale anyhow,
-the tale is always true. He’s rather precise and pedantic when you
-do come to the facts; these litigious quarrelsome people often are.
-He would do extraordinary things, but he wouldn’t make them out more
-extraordinary than they were. I mean he’s the sort of man who might
-break all the squire’s windows, but he wouldn’t say he’d broken six
-when he’d broken five. I’ve always found when I’d got to the meaning of
-those mad letters that it was quite true. But how can this be true? How
-could Snowdrop, whatever she is, have moved a whole house, or old White
-either?”
-
-“I suppose you know what I think,” said Pierce. “I told you that
-Snowdrop, whatever else she is, is invisible. I’m certain your friend
-has gone Spiritualist, and Snowdrop is the name of a spirit, or a
-control, or whatever they call it. The spirit would say, of course,
-that it was mere child’s play to throw the house from one end of the
-county to the other. But if this unfortunate gentleman believes himself
-to have been thrown, house and all, in that fashion, I’m very much
-afraid he’s begun really to suffer from delusions.”
-
-The faces of the two older men looked suddenly much older, perhaps for
-the first time they looked old. The young man seeing their dolorous
-expression was warmed and fired to speak quickly.
-
-“Look here,” he said hastily, “I’ll go down there myself and find out
-what I can for you. I’ll go this afternoon.”
-
-“Train journey takes ages,” said the Colonel, shaking his head. “Other
-end of nowhere. Told me yourself you had an appointment at the Air
-Ministry to-morrow.”
-
-“Be there in no time,” replied Pierce cheerfully. “I’ll fly down.”
-
-And there was something in the lightness and youth of his vanishing
-gesture that seemed really like Icarus spurning the earth, the first
-man to mount upon wings.
-
-Perhaps this literally flying figure shone the more vividly in their
-memories because, when they saw it again, it was in a subtle sense
-changed. When the other two next saw Hilary Pierce on the steps of
-the Air Ministry, they were conscious that his manner was a little
-quieter, but his wild eye rather wilder than usual. They adjourned to
-a neighbouring restaurant and talked of trivialities while luncheon was
-served; but the Colonel, who was a keen observer, was sure that Pierce
-had suffered some sort of shock, or at least some sort of check. While
-they were considering what to say Pierce himself said abruptly, staring
-at a mustard-pot on the table:
-
-“What do you think about spirits?”
-
-“Never touch ’em,” said the Colonel. “Sound port never hurt anybody.”
-
-“I mean the other sort,” said Pierce. “Things like ghosts and all that.”
-
-“I don’t know,” said Owen Hood. “The Greek for it is agnosticism. The
-Latin for it is ignorance. But have you really been dealing with ghosts
-and spirits down at poor White’s parsonage?”
-
-“I don’t know,” said Pierce gravely.
-
-“You don’t mean you really think you saw something!” cried Hood sharply.
-
-“There goes the agnostic!” said Pierce with a rather weary smile. “The
-minute the agnostic hears a bit of real agnosticism he shrieks out that
-it’s superstition. I say I don’t know whether it was a spirit. I also
-say I don’t know what the devil else it was if it wasn’t. In plain
-words, I went down to that place convinced that poor White had got
-some sort of delusions. Now I wonder whether it’s I that have got the
-delusions.”
-
-He paused a moment and then went on in a more collected manner:
-
-“But I’d better tell you all about it. To begin with, I don’t admit it
-as an explanation, but it’s only fair to allow for it as a fact--that
-all that part of the world seems to be full of that sort of thing.
-You know how the glamour of Glastonbury lies over all that land and
-the lost tomb of King Arthur and time when he shall return and the
-prophecies of Merlin and all the rest. To begin with, the village
-they call Ponder’s End ought to be called World’s End; it gives one
-the impression of being somewhere west of the sunset. And then the
-parsonage is quite a long way west of the parish, in large neglected
-grounds fading into pathless woods and hills; I mean the old empty
-rectory that our wild friend has evacuated. It stood there a cold
-empty shell of flat classical architecture, as hollow as one of those
-classical temples they used to stick up in country seats. But White
-must have done some sort of parish work there, for I found a great
-big empty shed in the grounds--that sort of thing that’s used for a
-schoolroom or drill-hall or what not. But not a sign of him or his work
-can be seen there now. I’ve said it’s a long way west of the village
-that you come at last to the old house. Well, it’s a long way west of
-that that you come to the new house--if you come to it at all. As for
-me, I came and I came not, as in some old riddle of Merlin. But you
-shall hear.
-
-“I had come down about sunset in a meadow near Ponder’s End, and I did
-the rest of the journey on foot, for I wanted to see things in detail.
-This was already difficult as it was growing dusk, and I began to fear
-I should find nothing of importance before nightfall. I had asked a
-question or two of the villagers about the vicar and his new self-made
-vicarage. They were very reticent about the former, but I gathered that
-the latter stood at the extreme edge of his original grounds on a hill
-rising out of a thicket of wood. In the increasing darkness it was
-difficult to find the place, but I came on it at last, in a place where
-a fringe of forest ran along under the low brows of a line of rugged
-cliffs, such as sometimes break the curves of great downlands. I seemed
-to be descending a thickly wooded slope, with a sea of tree-tops below
-me, and out of that sea, like an island, rose the dome of the isolated
-hill; and I could faintly see the building on it, darker against the
-dark-clouded sky. For a moment a faint line of light from the masked
-moon showed me a little more of its shape, which seemed singularly
-simple and airy in its design. Against that pallid gleam stood four
-strong columns, with the bulk of building apparently lifted above them;
-but it produced a queer impression, as if this Christian priest had
-built for his final home a heathen temple of the winds. As I leaned
-forward, peering at it, I overbalanced myself and slid rapidly down
-the steep thicket into the darkest entrails of the wood. From there I
-could see nothing of the pillared house or temple or whatever it was on
-the hill; the thick woods had swallowed me up literally like a sea, and
-I groped for what must have been nearly half an hour amid tangled roots
-and low branches, in that double darkness of night and shadow, before
-I found my feet slipping on the opposite slope and began to climb
-the hill on the top of which the temple stood. It was very difficult
-climbing, of course, through a network of briars and branching trees,
-and it was some little time afterwards that I burst through the last
-screen of foliage and came out upon the bare hill-top.
-
-“Yes; upon the bare hill-top. Rank grasses grew on it, and the wind
-blew them about like hair on a head; but for any trace of anything
-else, that green dome was as bare as a skull. There was no sign or
-shadow of the building I had seen there a little time before; it had
-vanished like a fairy palace. A broad track broken through the woods
-seemed to lead up to it, so far as I could make out in that obscurity;
-but there was no trace of the building to which it led. And when I saw
-that, I gave up. Something told me I should find out no more; perhaps
-I had some shaken sense that there were things past finding out. I
-retraced my steps, descending the hill as best I might; but when I was
-again swallowed up in that leafy sea, something happened that, for an
-instant, turned me cold as stone. An unearthly noise, like long hooting
-laughter, rang out in vast volume over the forest and rose to the
-stars. It was no noise to which I could put a name; it was certainly no
-noise I had ever heard before; it bore some sort of resemblance to the
-neighing of a horse immensely magnified; yet it might have been half
-human, and there was triumph in it and derision.
-
-“I will tell you one more thing I learnt before I left those parts. I
-left them at once, partly because I really had an appointment early
-this morning, as I told you; partly also, I think, because I felt you
-had the right to know at once what sort of things were to be faced. I
-was alarmed when I thought your friend was tormented with imaginary
-bogies; I am not less alarmed if he had got mixed up with real ones.
-Anyhow, before I left that village I had told one man what I had seen,
-and he told me he had seen it also. But he had seen it actually moving,
-in dusk turning to dark; the whole great house, with its high columns,
-moving across the fields like a great ship sailing on land.”
-
-Owen Hood sat up suddenly, with awakened eyes, and struck the table.
-
-“Look here,” he cried, with a new ring in his voice, “we must all go
-down to Ponder’s End and bring this business to a finish.”
-
-“Do you think you will bring it to a finish?” asked Pierce gloomily;
-“or can you tell what sort of a finish?”
-
-“Yes,” replied Hood resolutely. “I think I can finish it, and I think
-I know what the finish will be. The truth is, my friend, I think I
-understand the whole thing now. And as I told you before, Wilding
-White, so far from being deluded by imaginary bogies, is a gentleman
-very exact in his statements. In this matter he has been very exact.
-That has been the whole mystery about him--that he has been very much
-too exact.”
-
-“What on earth do you mean by that?” asked Pierce.
-
-“I mean,” said the lawyer, “that I have suddenly remembered the
-phrase he used. It was very exact; it was dull, literal truth. But I
-can be exact, too, at times, and just now I should like to look at a
-time-table.”
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-They found the village of Ponder’s End in a condition as comically
-incongruous as could well be with the mystical experiences of Mr.
-Hilary Pierce. When we talk of such places as sleepy, we forget that
-they are very wide-awake about their own affairs, and especially on
-their own festive occasions. Piccadilly Circus looks much the same
-on Christmas Day or any other; but the marketplace of a country town
-or village looks very different on the day of a fair or bazaar.
-And Hilary Pierce, who had first come down there to find in a wood
-at midnight the riddle that he thought worthy of Merlin, came down
-the second time to find himself plunged suddenly into the middle of
-the bustling bathos of a jumble sale. It was one of those bazaars to
-provide bargains for the poor, at which all sorts of odds and ends are
-sold off. But it was treated as a sort of fête, and highly-coloured
-posters and handbills announced its nature on every side. The bustle
-seemed to be dominated by a tall dark lady of distinguished appearance,
-whom Owen Hood, rather to the surprise of his companions, hailed as an
-old acquaintance and managed to draw aside for a private talk. She had
-appeared to have her hands full at the bazaar; nevertheless, her talk
-with Hood was rather a long one. Pierce only heard the last words of it:
-
-“Oh, he promised he was bringing something for the sale. I assure you
-he always keeps his word.”
-
-All Hood said when he rejoined his companion was: “That’s the lady
-White was going to marry. I think I know now why things went wrong, and
-I hope they may go right. But there seems to be another bother. You see
-that clump of clod-hopping policemen over there, inspector and all. It
-seems they’re waiting for White. Say he’s broken the law in taking his
-house off the land, and that he has always eluded them. I hope there
-won’t be a scene when he turns up.”
-
-If this was Mr. Hood’s hope, it was ill-founded and destined to
-disappointment. A scene was but a faint description of what was in
-store for that hopeful gentleman. Within ten minutes the greater part
-of the company were in a world in which the sun and moon seemed to have
-turned topsy-turvy and the last limit of unlikelihood had been reached.
-Pierce had imagined he was very near that limit of the imagination when
-he groped after the vanishing temple in the dark forest. But nothing he
-had seen in that darkness and solitude was so fantastic as what he saw
-next in broad daylight in a crowd.
-
-At one extreme edge of the crowd there was a sudden movement--a wave
-of recoil and wordless cries. The next moment it had swept like a wind
-over the whole populace, and hundreds of faces were turned in one
-direction--in the direction of the road that descended by a gradual
-slope towards the woods that fringed the vicarage grounds. Out of those
-woods at the foot of the hill had emerged something that might from its
-size have been a large light grey omnibus. But it was not an omnibus.
-It scaled the slope so swiftly, in great strides, that it became
-instantly self-evident what it was. It was an elephant, whose monstrous
-form was moulded in grey and silver in the sunlight, and on whose back
-sat very erect a vigorous middle-aged gentleman in black clerical
-attire, with blanched hair and a rather fierce aquiline profile that
-glanced proudly to left and right.
-
-The police inspector managed to make one step forward, and then stood
-like a statue. The vicar, on his vast steed, sailed into the middle of
-the marketplace as serenely as if he had been the master of a familiar
-circus. He pointed in triumph to one of the red and blue posters on the
-wall, which bore the traditional title of “White Elephant Sale.”
-
-“You see I’ve kept my word,” he said to the lady in a loud, cheerful
-voice. “I’ve brought a white elephant.”
-
-The next moment he had waved his hand hilariously in another direction,
-having caught sight of Hood and Crane in the crowd.
-
-“Splendid of you to come!” he called out. “Only you were in the secret.
-I told you I’d got a white elephant.”
-
-“So he did,” said Hood; “only it never occurred to us that the elephant
-was an elephant and not a metaphor. So that’s what he meant by Asiatic
-atmosphere and snow and mountains. And that’s what the big shed was
-really for.”
-
-“Look here,” said the inspector, recovering from his astonishment and
-breaking in on these felicitations. “I don’t understand all these
-games, but it’s my business to ask a few questions. Sorry to say it,
-sir, but you’ve ignored our notifications and evaded our attempts
-to----”
-
-“Have I?” inquired Mr. White brightly. “Have I really evaded you? Well,
-well, perhaps I have. An elephant is such a standing temptation to
-evasion, to evanescence, to fading away like a dewdrop. Like a snowdrop
-perhaps would be more appropriate. Come on, Snowdrop.”
-
-The last word came smartly, and he gave a smart smack to the huge
-head of the pachyderm. Before the inspector could move or anyone had
-realized what had happened, the whole big bulk had pitched forward with
-a plunge like a cataract and went in great whirling strides, the crowd
-scattering before it. The police had not come provided for elephants,
-which are rare in those parts. Even if they had overtaken it on
-bicycles, they would have found it difficult to climb it on bicycles.
-Even if they had had revolvers, they had omitted to conceal about their
-persons anything in the way of big-game rifles. The white monster
-vanished rapidly up the long white road, so rapidly that when it
-dwindled to a small object and disappeared, people could hardly believe
-that such a prodigy had ever been present, or that their eyes had not
-been momentarily bewitched. Only, as it disappeared in the distance,
-Pierce heard once more the high nasal trumpeting noise which, in the
-eclipse of night, had seemed to fill the forest with fear.
-
-It was at a subsequent meeting in London that Crane and Pierce had an
-opportunity of learning, more or less, the true story of the affair, in
-the form of another letter from the parson to the lawyer.
-
-“Now that we know the secret,” said Pierce cheerfully, “even his
-account of it ought to be quite clear.”
-
-“Quite clear,” replied Hood calmly. “His letter begins, ‘Dear Owen, I
-am really tremendously grateful in spite of all I used to say against
-leather and about horse-hair.’”
-
-“About what?” asked Pierce.
-
-“Horse-hair,” said Hood with severity. “He goes on, ‘The truth is they
-thought they could do what they liked with me because I always boasted
-that I hadn’t got one, and never wanted to have one; but when they
-found I had got one, and I must really say a jolly good one, of course
-it was all quite different.’”
-
-Pierce had his elbows on the table, and his fingers thrust up into his
-loose yellow hair. He had rather the appearance of holding his head on.
-He was muttering to himself very softly, like a schoolboy learning a
-lesson.
-
-“He had got one, but he didn’t want one, and he hadn’t got one and he
-had a jolly good one.”
-
-“One what?” asked Crane irritably. “Seems like a missing word
-competition.”
-
-“I’ve got the prize,” observed Hood placidly. “The missing word is
-‘solicitor.’ What he means is that the police took liberties with him
-because they knew he would not have a lawyer. And he is perfectly
-right; for when I took the matter up on his behalf, I soon found that
-they had put themselves on the wrong side of the law at least as much
-as he had. In short, I was able to extricate him from this police
-business; hence his hearty if not lucid gratitude. But he goes on to
-talk about something rather more personal; and I think it really has
-been a rather interesting case, if he does not exactly shine as a
-narrator of it. As I dare say you noticed, I did know something of the
-lady whom our eccentric friend went courting years ago, rather in the
-spirit of Sir Roger de Coverley when he went courting the widow. She is
-a Miss Julia Drake, daughter of a country gentleman. I hope you won’t
-misunderstand me if I say that she is a rather formidable lady. She is
-really a thoroughly good sort; but that air of the black-browed Juno
-she has about her does correspond to some real qualities. She is one
-of those people who can manage big enterprises, and the bigger they
-are the happier she is. When that sort of force functions within the
-limits of a village or a small valley, the impact is sometimes rather
-overpowering. You saw her managing the White Elephant Sale at Ponder’s
-End. Well, if it had been literally an army of wild elephants, it
-would hardly have been on too large a scale for her tastes. In that
-sense, I may say that our friend’s white elephant was not so much of
-a white elephant. I mean that in that sense it was not so much of an
-irrelevancy and hardly even a surprise. But in another way, it was a
-very great relief.”
-
-“You’re getting nearly as obscure as he is,” remonstrated Pierce. “What
-is all this mysterious introduction leading up to? What do you mean?”
-
-“I mean,” replied the lawyer, “that experience has taught me a little
-secret about very practical public characters like that lady. It
-sounds a paradox; but those practical people are often more morbid
-than theoretical people. They are capable of acting; but they are also
-capable of brooding when they are not acting. Their very stoicism makes
-too sentimental a secret of their sentimentalism. They misunderstand
-those they love; and make a mystery of the misunderstanding. They
-suffer in silence; a horrid habit. In short, they can do everything;
-but they don’t know how to do nothing. Theorists, happy people who do
-nothing, like our friend Pierce----”
-
-“Look here,” cried the indignant Pierce. “I should like to know what
-the devil you mean? I’ve broken more law than you ever read in your
-life. If this psychological lecture is the new lucidity, give me Mr.
-White.”
-
-“Oh, very well,” replied Hood, “if you prefer his text to my
-exposition, he describes the same situation as follows: ‘I ought to
-be grateful, being perfectly happy after all this muddle; I suppose
-one ought to be careful about nomenclature; but it never even occurred
-to me that her nose would be out of joint. Rather funny to be talking
-about noses, isn’t it, for I suppose really it was her rival’s nose
-that figured most prominently. Think of having a rival with a nose like
-that to turn up at you! Talk about a spire pointing to the stars----’”
-
-“I think,” said Crane, interposing mildly, “that it would be better if
-you resumed your duties as official interpreter. What was it that you
-were going to say about the lady who brooded over misunderstandings?”
-
-“I was going to say,” replied the lawyer, “that when I first came upon
-that crowd in the village, and saw that tall figure and dark strong
-face dominating it in the old way, my mind went back to a score of
-things I remembered about her in the past. Though we have not met for
-ten years, I knew from the first glimpse of her face that she had
-been worrying, in a powerful secretive sort of way; worrying about
-something she didn’t understand and would not inquire about. I remember
-long ago, when she was an ordinary fox-hunting squire’s daughter and
-White was one of Sydney Smith’s wild curates, how she sulked for two
-months over a mistake about a post-card that could have been explained
-in two minutes. At least it could have been explained by anybody
-except White. But you will understand that if he tried to explain the
-post-card on another post-card, the results may not have been luminous,
-let alone radiant.”
-
-“But what has all this to do with noses?” inquired Pierce.
-
-“Don’t you understand yet?” asked Hood with a smile. “Don’t you know
-who was the rival with a long nose?”
-
-He paused a moment and then continued, “It occurred to me as soon as I
-had guessed at the nature of the nose which may certainly be called the
-main feature of the story. An elusive, flexible and insinuating nose,
-the serpent of their Eden. Well, they seem to have returned to their
-Eden now; and I have no doubt it will be all right; for it is when
-people are separated that these sort of secrets spring up between them.
-After all, it was a mystery to us and we cannot be surprised if it was
-a mystery to her.”
-
-“A good deal of this is still rather a mystery to me,” remarked Pierce,
-“though I admit it is getting a little clearer. You mean that the point
-that has just been cleared up is----”
-
-“The point about Snowdrop,” replied Hood. “We thought of a pony, and a
-monkey, and a baby, and a good many other things that Snowdrop might
-possibly be. But we never thought of the interpretation which was the
-first to occur to the lady.”
-
-There was a silence, and then Crane laughed in an internal fashion.
-
-“Well, I don’t blame her,” he said. “One could hardly expect a lady of
-any delicacy to deduce an elephant.”
-
-“It’s an extraordinary business, when you come to think of it,” said
-Pierce. “Where did he get the elephant?”
-
-“He says something about that too,” said Hood referring to the letter.
-“He says, ‘I may be a quarrelsome fellow. But quarrels sometimes
-do good. And though it wasn’t actually one of Captain Pierce’s
-caravans----’”
-
-“No hang it all!” cried Pierce. “This is really too much! To see one’s
-own name entangled in such hieroglyphics--it reminds me of seeing it in
-a Dutch paper during the war; and wondering whether all the other words
-were terms of abuse.”
-
-“I think I can explain,” answered Hood patiently. “I assure you the
-reverend gentleman is not taking liberties with your name in a merely
-irresponsible spirit. As I told you before, he is strictly truthful
-when you get at the facts, though they may be difficult to get at.
-Curiously enough, there really is a connexion. I sometimes think there
-is a connexion beyond coincidence running through all our adventures; a
-purpose in these unconscious practical jokes. It seems rather eccentric
-to make friends with a white elephant----”
-
-“Rather eccentric to make friends with us,” said the Colonel. “We are a
-set of white elephants.”
-
-“As a matter of fact,” said the lawyer, “this particular last prank of
-the parson really did arise out of the last prank of our friend Pierce.”
-
-“Me!” said Pierce in surprise. “Have I been producing elephants without
-knowing it?”
-
-“Yes,” replied Hood. “You remember when you were smuggling pigs in
-defiance of the regulations, you indulged (I regret to say) in a
-deception of putting them in cages and pretending you were travelling
-with a menagerie of dangerous animals. The consequence was, you
-remember, that the authorities forbade menageries altogether. Our
-friend White took up the case of a travelling circus being stopped in
-his town as a case of gross oppression; and when they had to break it
-up, he took over the elephant.”
-
-“Sort of small payment for his services, I suppose,” said Crane.
-“Curious idea, taking a tip in the form of an elephant.”
-
-“He might not have done it if he’d known what it involved,” said Hood.
-“As I say, he was a quarrelsome fellow, with all his good points.”
-
-There was a silence, and then Pierce said in a musing manner: “It’s odd
-it should be the sequel of my little pig adventure. A sort of reversal
-of the _parturiunt montes_; I put in a little pig and it brought forth
-an elephant.”
-
-“It will bring forth more monsters yet,” said Owen Hood. “We have not
-seen all the sequels of your adventures as a swineherd.”
-
-But touching the other monsters or monstrous events so produced, the
-reader has already been warned--nay, threatened--that they are involved
-in the narrative called the Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates, and for
-the moment the threat must hang like thunder in the air.
-
-
-
-
-V
-
-THE EXCLUSIVE LUXURY OF ENOCH OATES
-
-
-
-
-V
-
-THE EXCLUSIVE LUXURY OF ENOCH OATES
-
-  “Since the Colonel ate his hat the Lunatic Asylum has lacked a
-  background.”
-
-
-The conscientious scribe cannot but be aware that the above sentence
-standing alone and without reference to previous matters, may not
-entirely explain itself. Anyone trying the experiment of using that
-sentence for practical social purposes; tossing that sentence lightly
-as a greeting to a passer-by; sending that sentence as a telegram to a
-total stranger; whispering that sentence hoarsely into the ear of the
-nearest policeman, and so on, will find that its insufficiency as a
-full and final statement is generally felt. With no morbid curiosity,
-with no exaggerated appetite for omniscience, men will want to know
-more about this statement before acting upon it. And the only way of
-explaining it, and the unusual circumstances in which it came to be
-said, is to pursue the doubling and devious course of these narratives,
-and return to a date very much earlier, when men now more than
-middle-aged were quite young.
-
-It was in the days when the Colonel was not the Colonel, but only Jimmy
-Crane, a restless youth tossed about by every wind of adventure, but
-as yet as incapable of discipline as of dressing for dinner. It was
-in days before Robert Owen Hood, the lawyer, had ever begun to study
-the Law and had only got so far as to abolish it; coming down to the
-club every night with a new plan for a revolution to turn all earthly
-tribunals upside-down. It was in days before Wilding White settled down
-as a country parson, returning to the creed though not the conventions
-of his class and country; when he was still ready to change his
-religion once a week, turning up sometimes in the costume of a monk
-and sometimes of a mufti, and sometimes in what he declared to be the
-original vestments of a Druid, whose religion was shortly to be resumed
-by the whole British people. It was in days when their young friend
-Hilary Pierce, the aviator, was still anticipating aviation by flying
-a small kite. In short, it was early in the lives even of the elders
-of the group that they had founded a small social club, in which their
-long friendships had flourished. The club had to have some sort of
-name, and the more thoughtful and detached among them, who saw the club
-steadily and saw it whole, considered the point with ripe reflection,
-and finally called their little society the Lunatic Asylum.
-
-“We might all stick straws in our hair for dinner, as the Romans
-crowned themselves with roses for the banquet,” observed Hood. “It
-would correspond to dressing for dinner; I don’t know what else we
-could do to vary the vulgar society trick of all wearing the same sort
-of white waistcoats.”
-
-“All wearing strait-waistcoats, I suppose,” said Crane.
-
-“We might each dine separately in a padded cell, if it comes to that,”
-said Hood; “but there seems to be something lacking in it considered as
-a social evening.”
-
-Here Wilding White, who was then in a monastic phase, intervened
-eagerly. He explained that in some monasteries a monk of peculiar
-holiness was allowed to become a hermit in an inner cell, and proposed
-a similar arrangement at the club. Hood, with his more mellow
-rationalism, intervened with a milder amendment. He suggested that a
-large padded chair should represent the padded cell, and be reserved
-like a throne for the loftiest of the lunatics.
-
-“Do not,” he said gently and earnestly, “do not let us be divided by
-jealousies and petty ambitions. Do not let us dispute among ourselves
-which shall be dottiest in the domain of the dotty. Perhaps one will
-appear worthier than us all, more manifestly and magnificently weak in
-the head; for him let the padded throne stand empty.”
-
-Jimmy Crane had said no more after his brief suggestion, but was
-pacing the room like a polar bear, as he generally did when there came
-upon him a periodical impulse to go off after things like polar bears.
-He was the wildest of all those wild figures so far as the scale of
-his adventures was concerned, constantly vanishing to the ends of the
-earth nobody knew why, and turning up again nobody knew how. He had a
-hobby, even in his youth, that made his outlook seem even stranger than
-the bewildering successive philosophies of his friend White. He had
-an enthusiasm for the myths of savages, and while White was balancing
-the relative claims of Buddhism and Brahmanism, Crane would boldly
-declare his preference for the belief that a big fish ate the sun every
-night, or that the whole cosmos was created by cutting up a giant.
-Moreover, there was with all this something indefinable but in some
-way more serious about Crane even in these days. There was much that
-was merely boyish about the blind impetuosity of Wilding White, with
-his wild hair and eager aquiline face. He was evidently one who might
-(as he said) learn the secret of Isis, but would be quite incapable of
-keeping it to himself. The long, legal face of Owen Hood had already
-learned to laugh at most things, if not to laugh loudly. But in Crane
-there was something more hard and militant like steel, and as he proved
-afterwards in the affair of the hat, he could keep a secret even when
-it was a joke. So that when he finally went off on a long tour round
-the world, with the avowed intention of studying all the savages he
-could find, nobody tried to stop him. He went off in a startlingly
-shabby suit, with a faded sash instead of a waistcoat, and with no
-luggage in particular, except a large revolver slung round him in a
-case like a field-glass, and a big, green umbrella that he flourished
-resolutely as he walked.
-
-“Well, he’ll come back a queerer figure than he went, I suppose,” said
-Wilding White.
-
-“He couldn’t,” answered Hood, the lawyer, shaking his head. “I don’t
-believe all the devil-worship in Africa could make him any madder than
-he is.”
-
-“But he’s going to America first, isn’t he?” said the other.
-
-“Yes,” said Hood. “He’s going to America, but not to see the Americans.
-He would think the Americans very dull compared with the American
-Indians. Possibly he will come back in feathers and war-paint.”
-
-“He’ll come back scalped, I suppose,” said White hopefully. “I suppose
-being scalped is all the rage in the best Red Indian society?”
-
-“Then he’s working round by the South Sea Islands,” said Hood. “They
-don’t scalp people there; they only stew them in pots.”
-
-“He couldn’t very well come back stewed,” said White, musing. “Does it
-strike you, Owen, that we should hardly be talking nonsense like this
-if we hadn’t a curious faith that a fellow like Crane will know how to
-look after himself?”
-
-“Yes,” said Hood gravely. “I’ve got a very fixed fundamental conviction
-that Crane will turn up again all right. But it’s true that he may look
-jolly queer after going _fantee_ for all that time.”
-
-It became a sort of pastime at the club of the Lunatics to compete
-in speculations about the guise in which the maddest of their madmen
-would return, after being so long lost to civilization. And grand
-preparations were made as for a sort of Walpurgis Night of nonsense
-when it was known at last that he was really returning. Hood had
-received letters from him occasionally, full of queer mythologies, and
-then a rapid succession of telegrams from places nearer and nearer
-home, culminating in the announcement that he would appear in the club
-that night. It was about five minutes before dinnertime that a sharp
-knock on the door announced his arrival.
-
-“Bang all the gongs and the tom-toms,” cried Wilding White. “The Lord
-High Mumbo-Jumbo arrives riding on the nightmare.”
-
-“We had better bring out the throne of the King of the Maniacs,” said
-Hood, laughing. “We may want it at last,” and he turned towards the big
-padded chair that still stood at the top of the table.
-
-As he did so James Crane walked into the room. He was clad in very
-neat and well-cut evening clothes, not too fashionable, and a little
-formal. His hair was parted on one side, and his moustache clipped
-rather close; he took a seat with a pleasant smile, and began talking
-about the weather.
-
-He was not allowed, however, to confine his conversation to the
-weather. He had certainly succeeded in giving his old friends the only
-sort of surprise that they really had not expected; but they were
-too old friends for their friend to be able to conceal from them the
-meaning of such a change. And it was on that festive evening that Crane
-explained his position; a position which he maintained in most things
-ever afterwards, and one which is the original foundation of the affair
-that follows.
-
-“I have lived with the men we call savages all over the world,” he said
-simply, “and I have found out one truth about them. And I tell you, my
-friends, you may talk about independence and individual self-expression
-till you burst. But I’ve always found, wherever I went, that the man
-who could really be trusted to keep his word, and to fight, and to
-work for his family, was the man who did a war-dance before the moon
-where the moon was worshipped, and wore a nose-ring in his nose where
-nose-rings were worn. I have had plenty of fun, and I won’t interfere
-with anyone else having it. But I believe I have seen what is the real
-making of mankind, and I have come back to my tribe.”
-
-This was the first act of the drama which ended in the remarkable
-appearance and disappearance of Mr. Enoch Oates, and it has been
-necessary to narrate it briefly before passing on to the second act.
-Ever since that time Crane had preserved at once his eccentric friends
-and his own more formal customs. And there were many among the newer
-members of the club who had never known him except as the Colonel,
-the grizzled, military gentleman whose severe scheme of black and
-white attire and strict politeness in small things formed the one foil
-of sharp contrast to that many-coloured Bohemia. One of these was
-Hilary Pierce, the young aviator; and much as he liked the Colonel, he
-never quite understood him. He had never known the old soldier in his
-volcanic youth, as had Hood and White, and therefore never knew how
-much of the fire remained under the rock or the snows. The singular
-affair of the hat, which has been narrated to the too patient reader
-elsewhere, surprised him more than it did the older men, who knew very
-well that the Colonel was not so old as he looked. And the impression
-increased with all the incidents which a fanatical love of truth has
-forced the chronicler to relate in the same connexion; the incident of
-the river and of the pigs and of the somewhat larger pet of Mr. Wilding
-White. There was talk of renaming the Lunatic Asylum as the League of
-the Long Bow, and of commemorating its performances in a permanent
-ritual. The Colonel was induced to wear a crown of cabbage on state
-occasions, and Pierce was gravely invited to bring his pigs with him to
-dine at the club.
-
-“You could easily bring a little pig in your large pocket,” said Hood.
-“I often wonder people do not have pigs as pets.”
-
-“A pig in a poke, in fact,” said Pierce. “Well, so long as you have the
-tact to avoid the indelicacy of having pork for dinner that evening, I
-suppose I could bring my pig in my pocket.”
-
-“White’d find it rather a nuisance to bring his elephant in his
-pocket,” observed the Colonel.
-
-Pierce glanced at him, and had again the feeling of incongruity at
-seeing the ceremonial cabbage adorning his comparatively venerable
-head. For the Colonel had just been married, and was rejuvenated in an
-almost jaunty degree. Somehow the philosophical young man seemed to
-miss something, and sighed. It was then that he made the remark which
-is the pivot of this precise though laborious anecdote.
-
-“Since the Colonel ate his hat,” he said, “the Lunatic Asylum has
-lacked a background.”
-
-“Damn your impudence,” said the Colonel cheerfully. “Do you mean to
-call me a background to my face?”
-
-“A dark background,” said Pierce soothingly. “Do not resent my saying
-a dark background. I mean a grand, mysterious background like that of
-night; a sublime and even starry background.”
-
-“Starry yourself,” said Crane indignantly.
-
-“It was against that background of ancient night,” went on the young
-man dreamily, “that the fantastic shapes and fiery colours of our
-carnival could really be seen. So long as he came here with his black
-coat and beautiful society manners there was a foil to our follies. We
-were eccentric, but he was our centre. You cannot be eccentric without
-a centre.”
-
-“I believe Hilary is quite right,” said Owen Hood earnestly. “I believe
-we have made a great mistake. We ought not to have all gone mad at
-once. We ought to have taken it in turns to go mad. Then I could have
-been shocked at his behaviour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and
-he could have been shocked at my behaviour on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and
-Saturdays. But there is no moral value in going mad when nobody is
-shocked. If Crane leaves off being shocked, what are we to do?”
-
-“I know what we want,” began Pierce excitedly.
-
-“So do I,” interrupted Hood. “We want a sane man.”
-
-“Not so easy to find nowadays,” said the old soldier. “Going to
-advertise?”
-
-“I mean a stupid man,” explained Owen Hood. “I mean a man who’s
-conventional all through, not a humbug like Crane. I mean, I want a
-solid, serious business man, a hard-headed, practical man of affairs, a
-man to whom vast commercial interests are committed. In a word, I want
-a fool; some beautiful, rounded, homogeneous fool, in whose blameless
-face, as in a round mirror, all our fancies may really be reflected and
-renewed. I want a very successful man, a very wealthy man, a man----”
-
-“I know! I know!” cried young Pierce, almost waving his arms. “Enoch
-Oates!”
-
-“Who’s Enoch Oates?” inquired White.
-
-“Are the lords of the world so little known?” asked Hood.
-
-“Enoch Oates is Pork, and nearly everything else; Enoch Oates is
-turning civilization into one vast sausage-machine. Didn’t I ever tell
-you how Hilary ran into him over that pig affair?”
-
-“He’s the very man you want,” cried Hilary Pierce enthusiastically.
-“I know him, and I believe I can get him. Being a millionaire, he’s
-entirely ignorant. Being an American, he’s entirely in earnest. He’s
-got just that sort of negative Nonconformist conscience of New England
-that balances the positive money-getting of New York. If we want to
-surprise anybody we’ll surprise him. Let’s ask Enoch Oates to dinner.”
-
-“I won’t have any practical jokes played on guests,” said the Colonel.
-
-“Of course not,” replied Hood. “He’ll be only too pleased to take it
-seriously. Did you ever know an American who didn’t like seeing the
-Sights? And if you don’t know you’re a Sight with that cabbage on your
-head, it’s time an American tourist taught you.”
-
-“Besides, there’s a difference,” said Pierce. “I wouldn’t ask a fellow
-like that doctor, Horace Hunter----”
-
-“Sir Horace Hunter,” murmured Hood reverently.
-
-“I wouldn’t ask him, because I really think him a sneak and a snob,
-and my invitation could only be meant as an insult. But Oates is not
-a man I hate, nor is he hateful. That’s the curious part of it. He’s
-a simple, sincere sort of fellow, according to his lights, which are
-pretty dim. He’s a thief and a robber of course, but he doesn’t know
-it. I’m asking him because he’s different; but I don’t imagine he’s
-at all sorry to be different. There’s no harm in giving a man a good
-dinner and letting him be a background without knowing it.”
-
-When Mr. Enoch Oates in due course accepted the invitation and
-presented himself at the club, many were reminded of that former
-occasion when a stiff and conventional figure in evening dress had
-first appeared like a rebuke to the revels. But in spite of the
-stiff sameness of both those black and white costumes, there was
-a great deal of difference between the old background and the new
-background. Crane’s good manners were of that casual kind that are
-rather peculiarly English, and mark an aristocracy at its ease in the
-saddle. Curiously enough, if the American had one point in common with
-a Continental noble of ancient lineage (whom his daughter might have
-married any day), it was that they would both be a little more on the
-defensive, living in the midst of democracy. Mr. Oates was perfectly
-polite, but there was something a little rigid about him. He walked
-to his chair rather stiffly and sat down rather heavily. He was a
-powerful, ponderous man with a large sallow face, a little suggestive
-of a corpulent Red Indian. He had a ruminant eye, and equally ruminant
-manner of chewing an unlighted cigar. These were signs that might well
-have gone with a habit of silence. But they did not.
-
-Mr. Oates’s conversation might not be brilliant, but it was continuous.
-Pierce and his friends had begun with some notion of dangling their
-own escapades before him like dancing dolls before a child; they had
-told him something of the affair of the Colonel and his cabbage, of
-the captain and his pigs, of the parson and his elephants; but they
-soon found that their hearer had not come there merely as a listener.
-What he thought of their romantic buffooneries it would be hard to
-say; probably he did not understand them, possibly he did not even
-hear them. Anyhow, his own monologue went on. He was a leisurely
-speaker. They found themselves revising much that they had heard about
-the snap and smartness and hurry of American talk. He spoke without
-haste or embarrassment, his eye boring into space, and he more than
-fulfilled Mr. Pierce’s hopes of somebody who would talk about business
-matters. His talk was a mild torrent of facts and figures, especially
-figures. In fact the background was doing all it could to contribute
-the required undertone of common commercial life. The background was
-justifying all their hopes that it would be practical and prosaic. Only
-the background had rather the air of having become the foreground.
-
-“When they put that up to me I saw it was the proposition,” Mr.
-Oates was saying. “I saw I’d got on to something better than my old
-regulation turnover of eighty-five thousand dollars on each branch. I
-reckoned I should save a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in the
-long run by scrapping the old plant, even if I had to drop another
-thirty thousand dollars on new works, where I’d get the raw material
-for a red cent. I saw right away that was the point to freeze on to;
-that I just got a chance to sell something I didn’t need to buy;
-something that could be sort of given away like old match-ends. I
-figured out it would be better by a long chalk to let the other guys
-rear the stock and sell me their refuse for next to nix, so I could get
-ahead with turning it into the goods. So I started in right away and
-got there at the first go-off with an increase of seven hundred and
-fifty-one thousand dollars.”
-
-“Seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars,” murmured Owen Hood.
-“How soothing it all seems.”
-
-“I reckon those mutts didn’t get on to what they were selling me,”
-continued Mr. Oates, “or didn’t have the pep to use it that way
-themselves; for though it was the sure-enough hot tip, it isn’t
-everybody would have thought of it. When I was in pork, of course, I
-wanted the other guys out; but just now I wasn’t putting anything on
-pork, but only on just that part of a pig I wanted and they didn’t
-want. By notifying all your pig farmers I was able to import nine
-hundred and twenty-five thousand pigs’ ears this fall, and I guess I
-can get consignments all winter.”
-
-Hood had some little legal experience with long-winded commercial
-witnesses, and he was listening by this time with a cocked eyebrow and
-an attention much sharper than the dreamy ecstasy with which the poetic
-Pierce was listening to the millionaire’s monologue, as if to the
-wordless music of some ever-murmuring brook.
-
-“Excuse me,” said Hood earnestly, “but did I understand you to say
-pigs’ ears?”
-
-“That is so, Mr. Hood,” said the American with great patience and
-politeness. “I don’t know whether I gave you a sufficiently detailed
-description for you to catch on to the proposition, but----”
-
-“Well,” murmured Pierce wistfully, “it sounded to me like a detailed
-description.”
-
-“Pardon me,” said Hood, checking him with a frown. “I really want to
-understand this proposition of Mr. Oates. Do I understand that you
-bought pigs’ ears cheap, when the pigs were cut up for other purposes,
-and that you thought you could use them for some purpose of your own?”
-
-“Sure!” said Mr. Enoch Oates, nodding. “And my purpose was about the
-biggest thing in fancy goods ever done in the States. In the publicity
-line there’s nothing like saying you can do what folks say can’t
-be done. Flying in the face of proverbs instead of providence, I
-reckon. It catches on at once. We got to work, and got out the first
-advertisement in no time; just a blank space with: ‘We Can Do It’ in
-the middle. Got folks wondering for a week what it was.”
-
-“I hope, sir,” said Pierce in a low voice, “that you will not carry
-sound commercial principles so far as to keep us wondering for a week
-what it was.”
-
-“Well,” said Oates, “we found we could subject the pigskin and bristles
-to a new gelat’nous process for making artificial silk, and we figured
-that publicity would do the rest. We came out with the second set of
-posters: ‘She Wants it Now.’... ‘The Most Wonderful Woman on Earth
-is waiting by the Old Fireside, hoping you’ll bring her home a Pig’s
-Whisper Purse.’”
-
-“A purse!” gasped Hilary.
-
-“I see you’re on the notion,” proceeded the unmoved American. “We
-called ’em Pig’s Whisper Purses after the smartest and most popular
-poster we ever had: ‘There was a Lady Loved a Swine.’ You know the
-nursery rhyme, I guess; featured a slap-up princess whispering in a
-pig’s ear. I tell you there isn’t a smart woman in the States now that
-can do without one of our pig-silk purses, and all because it upsets
-the proverb. Why, see here----”
-
-Hilary Pierce had sprung wildly to his feet with a sort of stagger and
-clutched at the American’s arm.
-
-“Found! Found!” he cried hysterically. “Oh, sir, I implore you to take
-the chair! Do, do take the chair!”
-
-“Take the chair!” repeated the astonished millionaire, who was already
-almost struggling in his grasp. “Really, gentlemen, I hadn’t supposed
-the proceedings were so formal as to require a chairman, but in any
-case----”
-
-It could hardly be said, however, that the proceedings were formal.
-Mr. Hilary Pierce had the appearance of forcibly dragging Mr. Enoch
-Oates in the direction of the large padded arm-chair, that had always
-stood empty at the top of the club table, uttering cries which, though
-incoherent, appeared to be partly apologetic.
-
-“No offence,” he gasped. “Hope no misunderstanding ... _Honoris causa_
-... you, you alone are worthy of that seat ... the club has found its
-king and justified its title at last.”
-
-Here the Colonel intervened and restored order. Mr. Oates departed in
-peace; but Mr. Hilary Pierce was still simmering.
-
-“And that is the end of our quiet, ordinary business man,” he cried.
-“Such is the behaviour of our monochrome and unobtrusive background.”
-His voice rose to a sort of wail. “And we thought we were dotty! We
-deluded ourselves with the hope that we were pretty well off our
-chump! Lord have mercy on us! American big business rises to a raving
-idiocy compared with which we are as sane as the beasts of the field.
-The modern commercial world is far madder than anything we can do to
-satirize it.”
-
-“Well,” said the Colonel good-humouredly, “we’ve done some rather
-ridiculous things ourselves.”
-
-“Yes, yes,” cried Pierce excitedly, “but we did them to make ourselves
-ridiculous. That unspeakable man is wholly, serenely serious. He thinks
-those maniacal monkey tricks are the normal life of man. Your argument
-really answers itself. We did the maddest things we could think of,
-meaning them to look mad. But they were nothing like so mad as what a
-modern business man does in the way of business.”
-
-“Perhaps it’s the American business man,” said White, “who’s too keen
-to see the humour of it.”
-
-“Nonsense,” said Crane. “Millions of Americans have a splendid sense of
-humour.”
-
-“Then how fortunate are we,” said Pierce reverently, “through whose
-lives this rare, this ineffable, this divine being has passed.”
-
-“Passed away for ever, I suppose,” said Hood with a sigh. “I fear the
-Colonel must be our only background once more.”
-
-Colonel Crane was frowning thoughtfully, and at the last words his
-frown deepened to disapproval. He puffed at his smouldering cigar and
-then, removing it, said abruptly:
-
-“I suppose you fellows have forgotten how I came to be a background? I
-mean, why I rather approve of people being backgrounds.”
-
-“I remember something you said a long time ago,” replied Hood. “Hilary
-must have been in long-clothes at that time.”
-
-“I said I had found out something by going round the world,” said
-Crane. “You young people think I am an old Tory; but remember I am
-also an old traveller. Well, it’s part of the same thing. I’m a
-traditionalist because I’m a traveller. I told you when I came back to
-the club that I’d come back to the tribe. I told you that in all the
-tribes of the world, the best man was the man true to his tribe. I told
-you the best man was the man who wore a nose-ring where nose-rings were
-worn.”
-
-“I remember,” said Owen Hood.
-
-“No, you forget,” said Crane rather gruffly. “You forget it when you
-talk about Enoch Oates the American. I’m no politician, thank God,
-and I shall look on with detachment if you dynamite him for being a
-millionaire. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t think half so much of
-money as old Normantowers, who thinks it’s too sacred to talk about.
-But you’re not dynamiting him for being a millionaire. You’re simply
-laughing at him for being an American. You’re laughing at him for being
-national and normal, for being a good citizen, a good tribesman, for
-wearing a nose-ring where nose-rings are worn.”
-
-“I say ... Kuklux, you know,” remonstrated Wilding White in his hazy
-way. “Americans wouldn’t be flattered----”
-
-“Do you suppose you haven’t got a nose-ring?” cried Crane so sharply
-that the clergyman started from his trance and made a mechanical
-gesture as if to feel for that feature. “Do you suppose a man like you
-doesn’t carry his nationality as plain as the nose on his face? Do you
-think a man as hopelessly English as you are wouldn’t be laughed at in
-America? You can’t be a good Englishman without being a good joke. The
-better Englishman you are the more of a joke you are; but still it’s
-better to be better. Nose-rings are funny to people who don’t wear ’em.
-Nations are funny to people who don’t belong to ’em. But it’s better
-to wear a nose-ring than to be a cosmopolitan crank who cuts off his
-nose to spite his face.”
-
-This being by far the longest speech the Colonel had ever delivered
-since the day he returned from his tropical travels long ago, his old
-friends looked at him with a certain curiosity; even his old friends
-hardly understood how much he had been roused in defence of a guest and
-of his own deep delicacies about the point of hospitality. He went on
-with undiminished warmth:
-
-“Well, it’s like that with poor Oates. He has, as we see it, certain
-disproportions, certain insensibilities, certain prejudices that stand
-out in our eyes like deformities. They offend you; they offend me,
-possibly rather more than they do you. You young revolutionists think
-you’re very liberal and universal; but the only result is that you’re
-narrow and national without knowing it. We old fogeys know our tastes
-are narrow and national; but we know they are only tastes. And we know,
-at any rate I know, that Oates is far more likely to be an honest man,
-a good husband and a good father, because he stinks of the rankest
-hickory patch in the Middle West, than if he were some fashionable New
-Yorker pretending to be an English aristocrat or playing the æsthete in
-Florence.”
-
-“Don’t say a good husband,” pleaded Pierce with a faint shudder. “It
-reminds me of the grand slap-up advertisement of the Pig’s Whisper.
-How do you feel about that, my dear Colonel? The Most Wonderful Woman
-on Earth Waiting by the Old Fireside----”
-
-“It makes my flesh creep,” replied Crane. “It chills me to the spine.
-I feel I would rather die than have anything to do with it. But that
-has nothing to do with my point. I don’t belong to the tribe who wear
-nose-rings; nor to the tribe who talk through their noses.”
-
-“Well, aren’t you a little thankful for that?” asked White.
-
-“I’m thankful I can be fair in spite of it,” answered Crane. “When I
-put a cabbage on my head, I didn’t expect people not to stare at it.
-And I know that each one of us in a foreign land is a foreigner, and a
-thing to be stared at.”
-
-“What I don’t understand about him,” said Hood, “is the sort of things
-he doesn’t mind having stared at. How can people tolerate all that
-vulgar, reeking, gushing commercial cant everywhere? How can a man talk
-about the Old Fireside? It’s obscene. The police ought to interfere.”
-
-“And that’s just where you’re wrong,” said the Colonel. “It’s vulgar
-enough and mad enough and obscene enough if you like. But it’s not
-cant. I have travelled amongst these wild tribes, for years on end; and
-I tell you emphatically it is not cant. And if you want to know, just
-ask your extraordinary American friend about his own wife and his own
-relatively Old Fireside. He won’t mind. That’s the extraordinary part
-of it.”
-
-“What does all this really mean, Colonel?” asked Hilary Pierce.
-
-“It means, my boy,” answered the Colonel, “that I think you owe our
-guest an apology.”
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-So it came about that there was an epilogue, as there had been a
-prologue, to the drama of the entrance and exit of Mr. Enoch B. Oates;
-an epilogue which in its turn became a prologue to the later dramas of
-the League of the Long Bow. For the words of the Colonel had a certain
-influence on the Captain, and the actions of the Captain had a certain
-influence on the American millionaire; and so the whole machinery of
-events was started afresh by that last movement over the nuts and wine,
-when Colonel Crane had stirred moodily in his seat and taken his cigar
-out of his mouth.
-
-Hilary Pierce was an aimable and even excessively optimistic young man
-by temperament, in spite of his pugnacity; he would really have been
-the last man in the world to wish to hurt the feelings of a harmless
-stranger; and he had a deep and almost secret respect for the opinions
-of the older soldier. So, finding himself soon afterwards passing
-the great gilded gateways of the highly American hotel that was the
-London residence of the American, he paused a moment in hesitation
-and then went in and gave his name to various overpowering officials
-in uniforms that might have been those of the German General Staff.
-He was relieved when the large American came out to meet him with a
-simple and lumbering affability, and offered his large limp hand as if
-there had never been a shadow of misunderstanding. It was somehow borne
-in upon Pierce that his own rather intoxicated behaviour that evening
-had merely been noted down along with the architectural styles and
-the mellow mediævalism of the pig-sty, as part of the fantasies of a
-feudal land. All the antics of the Lunatic Asylum had left the American
-traveller with the impression that similar parlour games were probably
-being played that evening in all the parlours of England. Perhaps there
-was something, after all, in Crane’s suggestion that every nation
-assumes that every other nation is a sort of mild mad-house.
-
-Mr. Enoch Oates received his guest with great hospitality and pressed
-on him cocktails of various occult names and strange colours, though he
-himself partook of nothing but a regimen of tepid milk.
-
-Pierce fell into the confidence of Mr. Enoch Oates with a silent
-swiftness that made his brain reel with bewilderment. He was staggered
-like a man who had fallen suddenly through fifteen floors of a
-sky-scraper and found himself in somebody’s bedroom. At the lightest
-hint of the sort of thing to which Crane had alluded, the American
-opened himself with an expansiveness that was like some gigantic
-embrace. All the interminable tables of figures and calculations in
-dollars had for the moment disappeared; yet Oates was talking in
-the same easy and natural nasal drawl, very leisurely and a little
-monotonous, as he said:
-
-“I’m married to the best and brightest woman God ever made, and I tell
-you it’s her and God between them that have made me, and I reckon she
-had the hardest part of it. We had nothing but a few sticks when I
-started; and it was the way she stood by that gave me the heart to risk
-even those on my own judgment of how things were going in the Street. I
-counted on a rise in Pork, and if it hadn’t risen I’d have been broke
-and I dare say in the jug. But she’s just wonderful. You should see
-her.”
-
-He produced her photograph with a paralysing promptitude; it
-represented a very regal lady dressed up to the nines, probably for the
-occasion, with very brilliant eyes and an elaborate load of light hair.
-
-“‘I believe in your star, Enoch,’ she said; ‘you stick to Pork,’” said
-Oates, with tender reminiscence, “and so we saw it through.”
-
-Pierce, who had been speculating with involuntary irreverence on
-the extreme difficulty of conducting a love-affair or a sentimental
-conversation in which one party had to address the other as Enoch,
-felt quite ashamed of his cynicism when the Star of Pork shone with
-such radiance in the eyes of his new friend.
-
-“It was a terrible time, but I stuck to Pork, sometimes feeling she
-could see clearer than I could; and of course she was right, and
-I’ve never known her wrong. Then came my great chance of making the
-combination and freezing out competition; and I was able to give her
-the sort of things she ought to have and let her take the lead as she
-should. I don’t care for society much myself; but I’m often glad on a
-late night at the office to ring her up and hear she’s enjoying it.”
-
-He spoke with a ponderous simplicity that seemed to disarm and crush
-the criticism of a more subtle civilization. It was one of those things
-that are easily seen to be absurd; but even after they are seen to be
-absurd, they are still there. It may be, after all, that that is the
-definition of the great things.
-
-“I reckon that’s what people mean by the romance of business,”
-continued Oates, “and though my business got bigger and bigger, it
-made me feel kinda pleased there had been a romance at the heart of
-it. It had to get bigger, because we wanted to make the combination
-water-tight all over the world. I guess I had to fix things up a bit
-with your politicians. But Congress men are alike all the world over,
-and it didn’t trouble me any.”
-
-There was a not uncommon conviction among those acquainted with Captain
-Hilary Pierce that that ingenious young man was cracked. He did a great
-many things to justify the impression; and in one sense certainly had
-never shown any reluctance to make a fool of himself. But if he was a
-lunatic, he was none the less a very English lunatic. And the notion of
-talking about his most intimate affections, suddenly, to a foreigner
-in an hotel, merely because the conversation had taken that turn,
-was something that he found quite terrifying. And yet an instinct,
-an impulse running through all these developments, told him that a
-moment had come and that he must seize some opportunity that he hardly
-understood.
-
-“Look here,” he said rather awkwardly, “I want to tell you something.”
-
-He looked down at the table as he continued.
-
-“You said just now you were married to the best woman in the world.
-Well, curiously enough, so am I. It’s a coincidence that often happens.
-But it’s a still more curious coincidence that, in our own quiet way,
-we went in for Pork too. She kept pigs at the back of the little
-country inn where I met her; and at one time it looked as if the pigs
-might have to be given up. Perhaps the inn as well. Perhaps the wedding
-as well. We were quite poor, as poor as you were when you started; and
-to the poor those extra modes of livelihood are often life. We might
-have been ruined; and the reason was, I gather, that you had gone in
-for Pork. But after all ours was the real pork; pork that walked about
-on legs. We made the bed for the pig and filled the inside of the pig;
-you only bought and sold the name of the pig. You didn’t go to business
-with a live little pig under your arm or walk down Wall Street followed
-by a herd of swine. It was a phantom pig, the ghost of a pig, that
-was able to kill our real pig and perhaps us as well. Can you really
-justify the way in which your romance nearly ruined our romance? Don’t
-you think there must be something wrong somewhere?”
-
-“Well,” said Oates after a very long silence, “that’s a mighty big
-question and will take a lot of discussing.”
-
-But the end to which their discussion led must be left to reveal itself
-when the prostrate reader has recovered sufficient strength to support
-the story of The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green, which those who
-would endure to the end may read at some later date.
-
-
-
-
-VI
-
-THE UNTHINKABLE THEORY OF PROFESSOR GREEN
-
-
-
-
-VI
-
-THE UNTHINKABLE THEORY OF PROFESSOR GREEN
-
-
-If the present passage in the chronicles of the Long Bow seems but a
-side issue, an interlude and an idyll, a mere romantic episode lacking
-that larger structural achievement which gives solidity and hard
-actuality to the other stories, the reader is requested not to be hasty
-in his condemnation; for in the little love story of Mr. Oliver Green
-is to be found, as in a parable, the beginning of the final apotheosis
-and last judgment of all these things.
-
-It may well begin on a morning when the sunlight came late but
-brilliant, under the lifting of great clouds from a great grey sweep
-of wolds that grew purple as they dipped again into distance. Much of
-that mighty slope was striped and scored with ploughed fields, but a
-rude path ran across it, along which two figures could be seen in full
-stride outlined against the morning sky.
-
-They were both tall; but beyond the fact that they had both once been
-professional soldiers, of rather different types and times, they had
-very little in common. By their ages they might almost have been father
-and son; and this would not have been contradicted by the fact that
-the younger appeared to be talking all the time, in a high, confident
-and almost crowing voice, while the elder only now and then put in a
-word. But they were not father and son; strangely enough they were
-really talking and walking together because they were friends. Those
-who know only too well their proceedings as narrated elsewhere would
-have recognized Colonel Crane, once of the Coldstream Guards, and
-Captain Pierce, late of the Flying Corps.
-
-The young man appeared to be talking triumphantly about a great
-American capitalist whom he professed to have persuaded to see the
-error of his ways. He talked rather as if he had been slumming.
-
-“I’m very proud of it, I can tell you,” he said. “Anybody can produce
-a penitent murderer. It’s something to produce a penitent millionaire.
-And I do believe that poor Enoch Oates has seen the light (thanks to my
-conversations at lunch); since I talked to him, Oates is another and a
-better man.”
-
-“Sown his wild oats, in fact,” remarked Crane.
-
-“Well,” replied the other. “In a sense they were very quiet oats.
-Almost what you might call Quaker Oats. He was a Puritan and a
-Prohibitionist and a Pacifist and an Internationalist; in short,
-everything that is in darkness and the shadow of death. But what you
-said about him was quite right. His heart’s in the right place. It’s on
-his sleeve. That’s why I preached the gospel to the noble savage and
-made him a convert.”
-
-“But what did you convert him to?” inquired the other.
-
-“Private property,” replied Pierce promptly. “Being a millionaire he
-had never heard of it. But when I explained the first elementary idea
-of it in a simple form, he was quite taken with the notion. I pointed
-out that he might abandon robbery on a large scale and create property
-on a small scale. He felt it was very revolutionary, but he admitted
-it was right. Well, you know he’d bought this big English estate out
-here. He was going to play the philanthropist, and have a model estate
-with all the regular trimmings; heads hygienically shaved by machinery
-every morning; and the cottagers admitted once a month into their own
-front gardens and told to keep off the grass. But I said to him: ‘If
-you’re going to give things to people, why not give ’em? If you give
-your friend a plant in a pot, you don’t send him an inspector from the
-Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vegetables to see he waters
-it properly. If you give your friend a box of cigars, you don’t make
-him write a monthly report of how many he smokes a day. Can’t you be
-a little generous with your generosity? Why don’t you use your money
-to make free men instead of to make slaves? Why don’t you give your
-tenants their land and have done with it, or let ’em have it very
-cheap?’ And he’s done it; he’s really done it. He’s created hundreds of
-small proprietors, and changed the whole of this countryside. That’s
-why I want you to come up and see one of the small farms.”
-
-“Yes,” said Colonel Crane, “I should like to see the farm.”
-
-“There’s a lot of fuss about it, too; there’s the devil of a row,”
-went on the young man, in very high spirits. “Lots of big combines and
-things are trying to crush the small farmers with all sorts of tricks;
-they even complain of interference by an American. You can imagine how
-much Rosenbaum Low and Goldstein and Guggenheimer must be distressed by
-the notion of a foreigner interfering in England. I want to know how a
-foreigner could interfere less than by giving back their land to the
-English people and clearing out. They all put it on to me; and right
-they are. I regard Oates as my property; my convert; captive of my bow
-and spear.”
-
-“Captive of your Long Bow, I imagine,” said the Colonel. “I bet you
-told him a good many things that nobody but a shrewd business man would
-have been innocent enough to believe.”
-
-“If I use the Long Bow,” replied Pierce with dignity, “it is a weapon
-with heroic memories proper to a yeoman of England. With what more
-fitting weapon could we try to establish a yeomanry?”
-
-“There is something over there,” said Crane quietly, “that looks to me
-rather like another sort of weapon.”
-
-They had by this time come in full sight of the farm buildings which
-crowned the long slope; and beyond a kitchen-garden and an orchard
-rose a thatched roof with a row of old-fashioned lattice windows under
-it; the window at the end standing open. And out of this window at the
-edge of the block of building protruded a big black object, rigid and
-apparently cylindrical, thrust out above the garden and dark against
-the morning daylight.
-
-“A gun!” cried Pierce involuntarily; “looks just like a howitzer; or is
-it an anti-aircraft gun?”
-
-“Anti-airman gun, no doubt,” said Crane; “they heard you were coming
-down and took precautions.”
-
-“But what the devil can he want with a gun?” muttered Pierce, peering
-at the dark outline.
-
-“And who the devil is _he_, if it comes to that?” said the Colonel.
-
-“Why, that window,” explained Pierce. “That’s the window of the room
-they’ve let to a paying guest, I know. Man of the name of Green, I
-understand; rather a recluse, and I suppose some sort of crank.”
-
-“Not an anti-armament crank, anyhow,” said the Colonel.
-
-“By George,” said Pierce, whistling softly, “I wonder whether things
-really have moved faster than we could fancy! I wonder whether it’s a
-revolution or a civil war beginning after all. I suppose we are an army
-ourselves; I represent the Air Force and you represent the infantry.”
-
-“You represent the infants,” answered the Colonel. “You’re too young
-for this world; you and your revolutions! As a matter of fact, it isn’t
-a gun, though it does look rather like one. I see now what it is.”
-
-“And what in the world is it?” asked his friend.
-
-“It’s a telescope,” said Crane. “One of those very big telescopes they
-usually have in observatories.”
-
-“Couldn’t be partly a gun and partly a telescope?” pleaded Pierce,
-reluctant to abandon his first fancy. “I’ve often seen the phrase
-‘shooting stars,’ but perhaps I’ve got the grammar and sense of it
-wrong. The young man lodging with the farmer may be following one of
-the local sports--the local substitute for duck-shooting!”
-
-“What in the world are you talking about?” growled the other.
-
-“Their lodger may be shooting the stars,” explained Pierce.
-
-“Hope their lodger isn’t shooting the moon,” said the flippant Crane.
-
-As they spoke there came towards them through the green and twinkling
-twilight of the orchard a young woman with copper-coloured hair and a
-square and rather striking face, whom Pierce saluted respectfully as
-the daughter of the house. He was very punctilious upon the point that
-these new peasant farmers must be treated like small squires and not
-like tenants or serfs.
-
-“I see your friend Mr. Green has got his telescope out,” he said.
-
-“Yes, sir,” said the girl. “They say Mr. Green is a great astronomer.”
-
-“I doubt if you ought to call me ‘sir,’” said Pierce reflectively. “It
-suggests rather the forgotten feudalism than the new equality. Perhaps
-you might oblige me by saying ‘Yes, citizen,’ then we could continue
-our talk about Citizen Green on an equal footing. By the way, pardon
-me, let me present Citizen Crane.”
-
-Citizen Crane bowed politely to the young woman without any apparent
-enthusiasm for his new title; but Pierce went on:
-
-“Rather rum to call ourselves citizens when we’re all so glad to be
-out of the city. We really want some term suitable to rural equality.
-The Socialists have spoilt ‘Comrade’; you can’t be a comrade without
-a Liberty tie and a pointed beard. Morris had a good notion of one
-man calling another Neighbour. That sounds a little more rustic. I
-suppose,” he added wistfully to the girl, “I suppose, I could not
-induce you to call me Gaffer?”
-
-“Unless I’m mistaken,” observed Crane, “that’s your astronomer
-wandering about in the garden. Think’s he’s a botanist, perhaps.
-Appropriate to the name of Green.”
-
-“Oh, he often wanders in the garden and down to the meadow and the
-cowsheds,” said the young woman. “He talks to himself a good deal,
-explaining a great theory he’s got. He explains it to everybody he
-meets, too. Sometimes he explains it to me when I’m milking the cow.”
-
-“Perhaps you can explain it to us?” said Pierce.
-
-“Not so bad as that,” she said, laughing. “It’s something like that
-Fourth Dimension they talk about. But I’ve no doubt he’ll explain it to
-you if you meet him.”
-
-“Not for me,” said Pierce. “I’m a simple peasant proprietor and ask
-nothing but Three Dimensions and a Cow.”
-
-“Cow’s the Fourth Dimension, I suppose,” said Crane.
-
-“I must go and attend to the Fourth Dimension,” she said with a smile.
-
-“Peasants all live by patchwork, running two or three side-shows,”
-observed Pierce. “Curious sort of livestock on the farm. Think of
-people living on a cow and chickens and an astronomer.”
-
-As he spoke the astronomer approached along the path by which the girl
-had just passed. His eyes were covered with huge horn spectacles of a
-dim blue colour; for he was warned to save his eyesight for his starry
-vigils. This gave a misleading look of morbidity to a face that was
-naturally frank and healthy; and the figure, though stooping, was
-stalwart. He was very absent-minded. Every now and then he looked at
-the ground and frowned as if he did not like it.
-
-Oliver Green was a very young professor, but a very old young man.
-He had passed from science as the hobby of a schoolboy to science as
-the ambition of a middle-aged man without any intermediate holiday of
-youth. Moreover, his monomania had been fixed and frozen by success; at
-least by a considerable success for a man of his years. He was already
-a fellow of the chief learned societies connected with his subject,
-when there grew up in his mind the grand, universal, all-sufficing
-Theory which had come to fill the whole of his life as the daylight
-fills the day. If we attempted the exposition of that theory here, it
-is doubtful whether the result would resemble daylight. Professor Green
-was always ready to prove it; but if we were to set out the proof in
-this place, the next four or five pages would be covered with closely
-printed columns of figures brightened here and there by geometrical
-designs, such as seldom form part of the text of a romantic story.
-Suffice it to say that the theory had something to do with Relativity
-and the reversal of the relations between the stationary and the
-moving object. Pierce, the aviator, who had passed much of his time
-on moving objects not without the occasional anticipation of bumping
-into stationary objects, talked to Green a little on the subject.
-Being interested in scientific aviation, he was nearer to the abstract
-sciences than were his friends, Crane with his hobby of folklore or
-Hood with his love of classic literature or Wilding White with his
-reading of the mystics. But the young aviator frankly admitted that
-Professor Green soared high into the heavens of the Higher Mathematics,
-far beyond the flight of his little aeroplane.
-
-The professor had begun, as he always began, by saying that it was
-quite easy to explain; which was doubtless true, as he was always
-explaining it. But he often ended by affirming fallaciously that it was
-quite easy to understand, and it would be an exaggeration to say that
-it was always understood. Anyhow, he was just about to read his great
-paper on his great theory at the great Astronomical Congress that was
-to be held that year at Bath; which was one reason why he had pitched
-his astronomical camp, or emplaced his astronomical gun, in the house
-of Farmer Dale on the hills of Somerset. Mr. Enoch Oates could not
-but feel the lingering hesitation of the landlord when he heard that
-his protégés the Dales were about to admit an unknown stranger into
-their household. But Pierce sternly reminded him that this paternal
-attitude was a thing of the past and that a free peasant was free to
-let lodging to a homicidal maniac if he liked. Nevertheless, Pierce
-was rather relieved to find the maniac was only an astronomer; but
-it would have been all the same if he had been an astrologer. Before
-coming to the farm, the astronomer had set up his telescope in much
-dingier places--in lodgings in Bloomsbury and the grimy buildings of a
-Midland University. He thought he was, and to a great extent he was,
-indifferent to his surroundings. But for all that the air and colour of
-those country surroundings were slowly and strangely sinking into him.
-
-“The idea is simplicity itself,” he said earnestly, when Pierce rallied
-him about the theory. “It is only the proof that is, of course, a
-trifle technical. Put in a very crude and popular shape, it depends on
-the mathematical formula for the inversion of the sphere.”
-
-“What we call turning the world upside-down,” said Pierce. “I’m all in
-favour of it.”
-
-“Everyone knows the idea of relativity applied to motion,” went on the
-professor. “When you run out of a village in a motor-car, you might say
-that the village runs away from you.”
-
-“The village does run away when Pierce is out motoring,” remarked
-Crane. “Anyhow, the villagers do. But he generally prefers to frighten
-them with an aeroplane.”
-
-“Indeed?” said the astronomer with some interest. “An aeroplane
-would make an even better working model. Compare the movement of an
-aeroplane with what we call merely for convenience the fixity of the
-fixed stars.”
-
-“I dare say they got a bit unfixed when Pierce bumped into them,” said
-the Colonel.
-
-Professor Green sighed in a sad but patient spirit. He could not help
-being a little disappointed even with the most intelligent outsiders
-with whom he conversed. Their remarks were pointed but hardly to the
-point. He felt more and more that he really preferred those who made
-no remarks. The flowers and the trees made no remarks; they stood in
-rows and allowed him to lecture to them for hours on the fallacies of
-accepted astronomy. The cow made no remarks. The girl who milked the
-cow made no remarks; or, if she did, they were pleasant and kindly
-remarks, not intended to be clever. He drifted, as he had done many
-times before, in the direction of the cow.
-
-The young woman who milked the cow was not in the common connotation
-what is meant by milkmaid. Margery Dale was the daughter of a
-substantial farmer already respected in that county. She had been to
-school and learnt various polite things before she came back to the
-farm and continued to do the thousand things that she could have taught
-the schoolmasters. And something of this proportion or disproportion
-of knowledge was dawning on Professor Green, as he stood staring at
-the cow and talking, often in a sort of soliloquy. For he had a rather
-similar sensation of a great many other things growing up thickly like
-a jungle round his own particular being; impressions and implications
-from all the girl’s easy actions and varied avocations. Perhaps he
-began to have a dim suspicion that he was the schoolmaster who was
-being taught.
-
-The earth and the sky were already beginning to be enriched with
-evening; the blue was already almost a glow like apple-green behind the
-line of branching apple trees; against it the bulk of the farm stood in
-a darker outline, and for the first time he realized something quaint
-or queer added to that outline by his own big telescope stuck up like a
-gun pointed at the moon. Somehow it looked, he could not tell why, like
-the beginning of a story. The hollyhocks also looked incredibly tall.
-To see what he would have called “flowers” so tall as that seemed like
-seeing a daisy or a dandelion as large as a lamp-post. He was positive
-there was nothing exactly like it in Bloomsbury. These tall flowers
-also looked like the beginning of a story--the story of Jack and the
-Beanstalk. Though he knew little enough of what influences were slowly
-sinking into him, he felt something apt in the last memory. Whatever
-was moving within him was something very far back, something that came
-before reading and writing. He had some dream, as from a previous
-life, of dark streaks of field under stormy clouds of summer and the
-sense that the flowers to be found there were things like gems. He was
-in that country home that every cockney child feels he has always had
-and never visited.
-
-“I have to read my paper to-night,” he said abruptly. “I really ought
-to be thinking about it.”
-
-“I do hope it will be a success,” said the girl; “but I rather thought
-you were always thinking about it.”
-
-“Well, I was--generally,” he said in a rather dazed fashion; and indeed
-it was probably the first time that he had ever found himself fully
-conscious of not thinking about it. Of what he was thinking about he
-was by no means fully conscious.
-
-“I suppose you have to be awfully clever even to understand it,”
-observed Margery Dale conversationally.
-
-“I don’t know,” he said, slightly stirred to the defensive. “I’m sure I
-could make you see--I don’t mean you aren’t clever, of course; I mean
-I’m quite sure you’re clever enough to see--to see anything.”
-
-“Only some sorts of things, I’m afraid,” she said, smiling. “I’m sure
-your theory has got nothing to do with cows and milking-stools.”
-
-“It’s got to do with anything,” he said eagerly; “with everything,
-in fact. It would be just as easy to prove it from stools and cows
-as anything else. It’s really quite simple. Reversing the usual
-mathematical formula, it’s possible to reach the same results in
-reality by treating motion as a fixed point and stability as a form of
-motion. You were told that the earth goes round the sun and the moon
-goes round the earth. Well, in my formula, we first treat it as if the
-sun went round the earth----”
-
-She looked up radiantly. “I always _thought_ it looked like that,” she
-said emphatically.
-
-“And you will, of course, see for yourself,” he continued triumphantly,
-“that by the same logical inversion we must suppose the earth to be
-going round the moon.”
-
-The radiant face showed a shadow of doubt and she said “Oh!”
-
-“But any of the things you mention, the milking-stool or the cow
-or what not, would serve the same purpose, since they are objects
-generally regarded as stationary.”
-
-He looked up vaguely at the moon which was steadily brightening as vast
-shadows spread over the sky.
-
-“Well, take those things you talk of,” he went on, moved by a
-meaningless unrest and tremor. “You see the moon rise behind the woods
-over there and sweep in a great curve through the sky and seem to set
-again beyond the hill. But it would be just as easy to preserve the
-same mathematical relations by regarding the moon as the centre of the
-circle and the curve described by some such object as the cow----”
-
-She threw her head back and looked at him, with eyes blazing with
-laughter that was not in any way mockery, but a childish delight at the
-crowning coincidence of a fairy-tale.
-
-“Splendid!” she cried. “So the cow really does jump over the moon!”
-
-Green put up his hand to his hair; and after a short silence said
-suddenly, like a man recalling a recondite Greek quotation:
-
-“Why, I’ve heard that somewhere. There was something else--‘The little
-dog laughed----’”
-
-Then something happened, which was in the world of ideas much more
-dramatic than the fact that the little dog laughed. The professor of
-astronomy laughed. If the world of things had corresponded to the world
-of ideas, the leaves of the apple tree might have curled up in fear
-or the birds dropped out of the sky. It was rather as if the cow had
-laughed.
-
-Following on that curt and uncouth noise was a silence; and then
-the hand he had raised to his head abruptly rent off his big blue
-spectacles and showed his staring blue eyes. He looked boyish and even
-babyish.
-
-“I wondered whether you always wore them,” she said. “I should think
-they made that moon of yours look blue. Isn’t there a proverb or
-something about a thing happening once in a blue moon?”
-
-He threw the great goggles on the ground and broke them.
-
-“Good gracious,” she exclaimed, “you seem to have taken quite a
-dislike to them all of a sudden. I thought you were going to wear them
-till--well, till all is blue, as they say.”
-
-He shook his head. “All is beautiful,” he said. “You are beautiful.”
-
-The young woman was normally very lucid and decisive in dealing with
-gentlemen who made remarks of that kind, especially when she concluded
-that the gentlemen were not gentlemen. But for some reason in this case
-it never occurred to her that she needed defence; possibly because
-the other party seemed more defenceless than indefensible. She said
-nothing. But the other party said a great deal, and his remarks did not
-grow more rational. At that moment, far away in their inn-parlour in
-the neighbouring town, Hood and Crane and the fellowship of the Long
-Bow were actually discussing with considerable interest the meaning and
-possibilities of the new astronomical theory. In Bath the lecture-hall
-was being prepared for the exposition of the theory. The theorist had
-forgotten all about it.
-
-“I have been thinking a good deal,” Hilary Pierce was saying, “about
-that astronomical fellow who is going to lecture in Bath to-night. It
-seemed to me somehow that he was a kindred spirit and that sooner or
-later we were bound to get mixed up with him--or he was bound to get
-mixed up with us. I don’t say it’s always very comfortable to get mixed
-up with us. I feel in my bones that there is going to be a big row
-soon. I feel as if I’d consulted an astrologer; as if Green were the
-Merlin of our Round Table. Anyhow, the astrologer has an interesting
-astronomical theory.”
-
-“Why?” inquired Wilding White with some surprise. “What have you got to
-do with his theory?”
-
-“Because,” answered the young man, “I understand his astronomical
-theory a good deal better than he thinks I do. And, let me tell you,
-his astronomical theory is an astronomical allegory.”
-
-“An allegory?” repeated Crane. “What of?”
-
-“An allegory of us,” said Pierce; “and, as with many an allegory, we’ve
-acted it without knowing it. I realized something about our history,
-when he was talking, that I don’t think I’d ever thought of before.”
-
-“What in the world are you talking about?” demanded the Colonel.
-
-“His theory,” said Pierce in a meditative manner, “has got something to
-do with moving objects being really stationary, and stationary objects
-being really moving. Well, you always talk of me as if I were a moving
-object.”
-
-“Heartbreaking object sometimes,” assented the Colonel with cordial
-encouragement.
-
-“I mean,” continued Pierce calmly, “that you talk of me as if I were
-always motoring too fast or flying too far. And what you say of me is
-pretty much what most people say of you. Most sane people think we all
-go a jolly lot too far. They think we’re a lot of lunatics out-running
-the constable or looping the loop, and always up to some new nonsense.
-But when you come to think of it, it’s we who always stay where we
-are, and the rest of the world that’s always moving and shifting and
-changing.”
-
-“Yes,” said Owen Hood; “I begin to have some dim idea of what you are
-talking about.”
-
-“In all our little adventures,” went on the other, “we have all of us
-taken up some definite position and stuck to it, however difficult
-it might be; that was the whole fun of it. But our critics did not
-stick to their own position--not even to their own conventional or
-conservative position. In each one of the stories it was they who
-were fickle, and we who were fixed. When the Colonel said he would
-eat his hat, he did it; when he found it meant wearing a preposterous
-hat, he wore it. But his neighbours didn’t even stick to their own
-conviction that the hat was preposterous. Fashion is too fluctuating
-and sensitive a thing; and before the end, half of them were wondering
-whether they oughtn’t to have hats of the same sort. In that affair of
-the Thames factory, Hood admired the old landscape and Hunter admired
-the old landlords. But Hunter didn’t go on admiring the old landlords;
-he deserted to the new landlords as soon as they got the land. His
-conservatism was too snobbish to conserve anything. I wanted to import
-pigs, and I went on importing pigs, though my methods of smuggling
-might land me to a mad-house. But Enoch Oates, the millionaire, didn’t
-go on importing pork; he went off at once on some new stunt, first on
-the booming of his purses, and afterwards on the admirable stunt of
-starting English farms. The business mind isn’t steadfast; even when it
-can be turned the right way, it’s too easy to turn. And everything has
-been like that, down to the little botheration about the elephant. The
-police began to prosecute Mr. White, but they soon dropped it when Hood
-showed them that he had some backing. Don’t you see that’s the moral
-of the whole thing? The modern world is materialistic, but it isn’t
-solid. It isn’t hard or stern or ruthless in pursuit of its purpose, or
-all the things that the newspapers and novels say it is; and sometimes
-actually praise it for being. Materialism isn’t like stone; it’s like
-mud, and liquid mud at that.”
-
-“There’s something in what you say,” said Owen Hood, “and I should be
-inclined to add something to it. On a rough reckoning of the chances in
-modern England, I should say the situation is something like this. In
-that dubious and wavering atmosphere it is very unlikely there would
-ever be a revolution, or any very vital reform. But if there were, I
-believe on my soul that it might be successful. I believe everything
-else would be too weak and wobbly to stand up against it.”
-
-“I suppose that means,” said the Colonel, “that you’re going to do
-something silly.”
-
-“Silliest thing I can think of,” replied Pierce cheerfully. “I’m going
-to an astronomical lecture.”
-
-The degree of silliness involved in the experiment can be most
-compactly and clearly stated in the newspaper report, at which the
-friends of the experimentalists found themselves gazing with more than
-their usual bewilderment on the following morning. The Colonel, sitting
-at his club with his favourite daily paper spread out before him, was
-regarding with a grave wonder a paragraph that began with the following
-head-lines:
-
-  “AMAZING SCENE AT SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS
-
-  “LECTURER GOES MAD AND ESCAPES
-
-  “A scene equally distressing and astonishing took place at the third
-  meeting of the Astronomical Society now holding its congress at Bath.
-  Professor Oliver Green, one of the most promising of the younger
-  astronomers, was set down in the syllabus to deliver a lecture on
-  ‘Relativity in Relation to Planetary Motion.’ About an hour before
-  the lecture, however, the authorities received a telegram from
-  Professor Green, altering the subject of his address on the ground
-  that he had just discovered a new star, and wished immediately to
-  communicate his discovery to the scientific world. Great excitement
-  and keen anticipation prevailed at the meeting, but these feelings
-  changed to bewilderment as the lecture proceeded. The lecturer
-  announced without hesitation the existence of a new planet attached
-  to one of the fixed stars, but proceeded to describe its geological
-  formation and other features with a fantastic exactitude beyond
-  anything yet obtained by way of the spectrum or the telescope. He was
-  understood to say that it produced life in an extravagant form, in
-  towering objects which constantly doubled or divided themselves until
-  they ended in flat filaments, or tongues of a bright green colour. He
-  was proceeding to give a still more improbable description of a more
-  mobile but equally monstrous form of life, resting on four trunks
-  or columns which swung in rotation, and terminating in some curious
-  curved appendages, when a young man in the front row, whose demeanour
-  had shown an increasing levity, called out abruptly: ‘Why, that’s
-  a cow!’ To this the professor, abandoning abruptly all pretence of
-  scientific dignity, replied by shouting in a voice like thunder:
-  ‘Yes, of course it’s a cow; and you fellows would never have noticed
-  a cow, even if she jumped over the moon!’ The unfortunate professor
-  then began to rave in the most incoherent manner, throwing his arms
-  about and shouting aloud that he and his fellow-scientists were all a
-  pack of noodles who had never looked at the world they were walking
-  on, which contained the most miraculous things. But the latter
-  part of his remarks, which appeared to be an entirely irrelevant
-  outburst in praise of the beauty of Woman, were interrupted by the
-  Chairman and the officials of the Congress, who called for medical
-  and constabulary interference. No less a person than Sir Horace
-  Hunter, who, although best known as a psycho-physiologist, has taken
-  all knowledge for his province and was present to show his interest
-  in astronomical progress, was able to certify on the spot that the
-  unfortunate Green was clearly suffering from dementia, which was
-  immediately corroborated by a local doctor, so that the unhappy man
-  might be removed without further scandal.
-
-  “At this point, however, a still more extraordinary development
-  took place. The young man in the front row, who had several times
-  interrupted the proceedings with irrelevant remarks, sprang to his
-  feet, and loudly declaring that Professor Green was the only sane
-  man in the Congress, rushed at the group surrounding him, violently
-  hurled Sir Horace Hunter from the platform, and with the assistance
-  of a friend and fellow-rioter, managed to recapture the lunatic from
-  the doctors and the police, and carry him outside the building.
-  Those pursuing the fugitives found themselves at first confronted
-  with a new mystery, in the form of their complete disappearance. It
-  has since been discovered that they actually escaped by aeroplane;
-  the young man, whose name is said to be Pierce, being a well-known
-  aviator formerly connected with the Flying Corps. The other
-  young man, who assisted him and acted as pilot, has not yet been
-  identified.”
-
-Night closed and the stars stood out over Dale’s Farm; and the
-telescope pointed at the stars in vain. Its giant lenses had vainly
-mirrored the moon of which its owner had spoken in so vain a fashion;
-but its owner did not return. Miss Dale was rather unaccountably
-troubled by his absence, and mentioned it once or twice; after all, as
-her family said, it was very natural that he should go to an hotel in
-Bath for the night, especially if the revels of roystering astronomers
-were long and late. “It’s no affair of ours,” said the farmer’s wife
-cheerfully. “He is not a child.” But the farmer’s daughter was not
-quite so sure on the point.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Next morning she rose even earlier than usual and went about her
-ordinary tasks, which by some accident or other seemed to look more
-ordinary than usual. In the blank morning hours, it was perhaps natural
-that her mind should go back to the previous afternoon, when the
-conduct of the astronomer could by no means be dismissed as ordinary.
-
-“It’s all very well to say he’s not a child,” she said to herself.
-“I wish I were as certain he’s not an idiot. If he goes to an hotel,
-they’ll cheat him.”
-
-The more angular and prosaic her own surroundings seemed in the
-daylight, the more doubt she felt about the probable fate of the
-moonstruck gentleman who looked at a blue moon through his blue
-spectacles. She wondered whether his family or his friends were
-generally responsible for his movements; for really he must be a
-little dotty. She had never heard him talk about his family; and she
-remembered a good many things he had talked about. She had never even
-seen him talking to a friend, except once to Captain Pierce, when they
-talked about astronomy. But the name of Captain Pierce linked itself up
-rapidly with other and more relevant suggestions. Captain Pierce lived
-at the Blue Boar on the other side of the down, having been married a
-year or two before to the daughter of the innkeeper, who was an old
-friend of the daughter of the farmer. They had been to the same school
-in the neighbouring provincial town, and had once been, as the phrase
-goes, inseparable. Perhaps friends ought to pass through the phase in
-which they are inseparable to reach the phase in which they can safely
-be separated.
-
-“Joan might know something about it,” she said to herself. “At least
-her husband might know.”
-
-She turned back into the kitchen and began to rout things out for
-breakfast; when she had done everything she could think of doing for
-a family that had not yet put in an appearance, she went out again
-into the garden and found herself at the same gate, staring at the
-steep wooded hill that lay between the farm and the valley of the Blue
-Boar. She thought of harnessing the pony; and then went walking rather
-restlessly along the road over the hill.
-
-On the map it was only a few miles to the Blue Boar; and she was easily
-capable of walking ten times the distance. But maps, like many other
-scientific documents, are very inaccurate. The ridge that ran between
-the two valleys was, relatively to that rolling plain, as definite as
-a range of mountains. The path through the dark wood that lay just
-beyond the farm began like a lane and then seemed to go up like a
-ladder. By the time she had scaled it, under its continuous canopy of
-low spreading trees, she had the sensation of having walked for a long
-time. And when the ascent ended with a gap in the trees and a blank
-space of sky, she looked over the edge like one looking into another
-world.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Mr. Enoch Oates, in his more expansive moments, had been known to
-allude to what he called God’s Great Prairies. Mr. Rosenbaum Low,
-having come to London from, or through, Johannesburg, often referred
-in his imperialistic speeches to the “illimitable veldt.” But neither
-the American prairie nor the African veldt really looks any larger, or
-could look any larger, than a wide English vale seen from a low English
-hill. Nothing can be more distant than the distance; the horizon or
-the line drawn by heaven across the vision of man. Nothing is so
-illimitable as that limit. Within our narrow island there is a whole
-series of such infinities; as if the island itself could contain seven
-seas. As she looked out over that new landscape, the soul seemed to be
-slaked and satisfied with immensity and, by a paradox, to be filled
-at last with emptiness. All things seemed not only great but growing
-in greatness. She could fancy that the tall trees standing up in the
-sunlight grew taller while she looked at them. The sun was rising and
-it seemed as if the whole world rose with it. Even the dome of heaven
-seemed to be lifting slowly; as if the very sky were a skirt drawn up
-and disappearing into the altitudes of light.
-
-The vast hollow below her was coloured as variously as a map in an
-atlas. Fields of grass or grain or red earth seemed so far away that
-they might have been the empires and kingdoms of a world newly created.
-But she could already see on the brow of a hill above the pine-woods
-the pale scar of the quarry and below it the glittering twist in the
-river where stood the inn of the Blue Boar. As she drew nearer and
-nearer to it she could see more and more clearly a green triangular
-field with tiny black dots, which were little black pigs; and another
-smaller dot, which was a child. Something like a wind behind her or
-within her, that had driven her over the hills, seemed to sweep all the
-long lines of that landslide of a landscape, so that they pointed to
-that spot.
-
-As the path dropped to the level and she began to walk by farms and
-villages, the storm in her mind began to settle and she recovered the
-reasonable prudence with which she had pottered about her own farm.
-She even felt some responsibility and embarrassment about troubling
-her friend by coming on so vague an errand. But she told herself
-convincingly enough that after all she was justified. One would not
-normally be alarmed about a strayed lodger as if he were a lion escaped
-from a menagerie. But she had after all very good reason for regarding
-this lion as rather a fearful wildfowl. His way of talking had been so
-eccentric that everybody for miles round would have agreed, if they
-had heard him, that he had a tile loose. She was very glad they had
-not heard him; but their imaginary opinion fortified her own. They had
-a duty in common humanity; they could not let a poor gentleman of
-doubtful sanity disappear without further inquiry.
-
-She entered the inn with a firm step and hailed her friend with
-something of that hearty cheerfulness that is so unpopular in the early
-riser. She was rather younger and by nature rather more exuberant than
-Joan; and Joan had already felt the drag and concentration of children.
-But Joan had not lost her rather steely sense of humour, and she heard
-the main facts of her friend’s difficulty with a vigilant smile.
-
-“We should rather like to know what has happened,” said the visitor
-with vague carelessness. “If anything unpleasant had happened, people
-might even blame us, when we knew he was like that.”
-
-“Like what?” asked Joan smiling.
-
-“Why, a bit off, I suppose we must say,” answered the other. “The
-things he said to me about cows and trees and having found a new star
-were really----”
-
-“Well, it’s rather lucky you came to me,” said Joan quietly. “For I
-don’t believe you’d have found anybody else on the face of the earth
-who knows exactly where he is now.”
-
-“And where is he?”
-
-“Well, he’s not on the face of the earth,” said Joan Hardy.
-
-“You don’t mean he’s--dead?” asked the other in an unnatural voice.
-
-“I mean he’s up in the air,” said Joan, “or, what is often much the
-same thing, he is with my husband. Hilary rescued him when they were
-just going to nab him, and carried him off in an aeroplane. He says
-they’d better hide in the clouds for a bit. You know the way he talks;
-of course, they do come down every now and then when it’s safe.”
-
-“Escaped! Nabbed him! Safe!” ejaculated the other young woman with
-round eyes. “What in the world does it all mean?”
-
-“Well,” replied her friend, “he seems to have said the same sort of
-things that he said to you to a whole roomful of scientific men at
-Bath. And, of course, the scientific men all said he was mad; I suppose
-that’s what scientific men are for. So they were just going to take him
-away to an asylum, when Hilary----”
-
-The farmer’s daughter rose in a glory of rage that might have seemed to
-lift the roof, as the great sunrise had seemed to lift the sky.
-
-“Take him away!” she cried. “How dare they talk about such things?
-How dare they say he is mad? It’s they who must be mad to say such
-stuff! Why, he’s got more brains in his boots than they have in all
-their silly old bald heads knocked together--and I’d like to knock ’em
-together! Why, they’d all smash like egg-shells, and he’s got a head
-like cast-iron. Don’t you know he’s beaten all the old duffers at their
-own business, of stars and things? I expect they’re all jealous; it’s
-just what I should have expected of them.”
-
-The fact that she was entirely unacquainted with the names, and
-possibly the existence, of these natural philosophers did not arrest
-the vigorous word-painting with which she completed their portraits.
-“Nasty spiteful old men with whiskers,” she said, “all bunched together
-like so many spiders and weaving dirty cobwebs to catch their betters;
-of course, it’s all a conspiracy. Just because they’re all mad and hate
-anybody who’s quite sane.”
-
-“So you think he’s quite sane?” asked her hostess gravely.
-
-“Sane? What do you mean? Of course he’s quite sane,” retorted Margery
-Dale.
-
-With a mountainous magnanimity Joan was silent. Then after a pause she
-said:
-
-“Well, Hilary has taken his case in hand and your friend’s safe for
-the present; Hilary generally brings things off, however queer they
-sound. And I don’t mind telling you in confidence that he’s bringing
-that and a good many other things off, rather big things, just now. You
-can’t keep him from fighting whatever you do; and he seems to be out
-just now to fight everybody. So I shouldn’t wonder if you saw all your
-old gentleman’s heads knocked together after all. There are rather big
-preparations going on; that friend of his named Blair is for ever going
-and coming with his balloons and things; and I believe something will
-happen soon on a pretty large scale, perhaps all over England.”
-
-“Will it?” asked Miss Dale in an absent-minded manner (for she was
-sadly deficient in civic and political sense). “Is that your Tommy out
-there?”
-
-And they talked about the child and then about a hundred entirely
-trivial things; for they understood each other perfectly.
-
-And if there are still things the reader fails to understand, if (as
-seems almost incredible) there are things that he wishes to understand,
-then it can only be at the heavy price of studying the story of the
-Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair; and with that, it is
-comforting to know, the story of all these things will be drawing near
-its explanation and its end.
-
-
-
-
-VII
-
-THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR
-
-
-
-
-VII
-
-THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR
-
-
-The Earl of Eden had become Prime Minister for the third time, and
-his face and figure were therefore familiar in the political cartoons
-and even in the public streets. His yellow hair and lean and springy
-figure gave him a factitious air of youth; but his face on a closer
-study looked lined and wrinkled and gave almost a shock of decrepitude.
-He was in truth a man of great experience and dexterity in his own
-profession. He had just succeeded in routing the Socialist Party
-and overthrowing the Socialist Government, largely by the use of
-certain rhymed mottoes and maxims which he had himself invented with
-considerable amusement. His great slogan of “Don’t Nationalize but
-Rationalize” was generally believed to have led him to victory. But at
-the moment when this story begins he had other things to think of. He
-had just received an urgent request for a consultation from three of
-his most prominent supporters--Lord Normantowers, Sir Horace Hunter,
-O.B.E., the great advocate of scientific politics, and Mr. R. Low, the
-philanthropist. They were confronted with a problem, and their problem
-concerned the sudden madness of an American millionaire.
-
-The Prime Minister was not unacquainted with American millionaires,
-even those whose conduct suggested that they were hardly representative
-of a normal or national type. There was the great Grigg, the
-millionaire inventor, who had pressed upon the War Office a scheme
-for finishing the War at a blow; it consisted of electrocuting the
-Kaiser by wireless telegraphy. There was Mr. Napper, of Nebraska, whose
-negotiations for removing Shakespeare’s Cliff to America as a symbol of
-Anglo-Saxon unity were unaccountably frustrated by the firm refusal of
-the American Republic to send us Plymouth Rock in exchange. And there
-was that charming and cultured Bostonian, Colonel Hoopoe, whom all
-England welcomed in his crusade for Purity and the League of the Lily,
-until England discovered with considerable surprise that the American
-Ambassador and all respectable Americans flatly refused to meet the
-Colonel, whose record at home was that of a very narrow escape from
-Sing-Sing.
-
-But the problem of Enoch Oates, who had made his money in pork, was
-something profoundly different. As Lord Eden’s three supporters eagerly
-explained to him, seated round a garden-table at his beautiful country
-seat in Somerset, Mr. Oates had done something that the maddest
-millionaire had never thought of doing before. Up to a certain point
-he had proceeded in a manner normal to such a foreigner. He had
-purchased amid general approval an estate covering about a quarter of
-a county; and it was expected that he would make it a field for some
-of those American experiments in temperance or eugenics for which the
-English agricultural populace offer a sort of virgin soil. Instead
-of that, he suddenly went mad and made a present of his land to his
-tenants; so that by an unprecedented anomaly the farms became the
-property of the farmers. That an American millionaire should take
-away English things from England, English rents, English relics,
-English pictures, English cathedrals or cliffs of Dover, was a natural
-operation to which everybody was by this time accustomed. But that an
-American millionaire should give English land to English people was an
-unwarrantable interference and tantamount to an alien enemy stirring up
-revolution. Enoch Oates had therefore been summoned to the Council, and
-sat scowling at the table as if he were in the dock.
-
-“Results most deplorable already,” said Sir Horace Hunter, in his
-rather loud voice. “Give you an example, my lord; people of the name
-of Dale in Somerset took in a lunatic as a lodger. May have been a
-homicidal maniac for all I know; some do say he had a great cannon or
-culverin sticking out of his bedroom window. But with no responsible
-management of the estate, no landlord, no lawyer, no educated person
-anywhere, there was nothing to prevent their letting the bedroom to a
-Bengal tiger. Anyhow, the man was mad, rushed raving on to the platform
-at the Astronomical Congress talking about Lovely Woman and the cow
-that jumped over the moon. That damned agitator Pierce, who used to be
-in the Flying Corps, was in the hall, and made a riot and carried the
-crazy fellow off in an aeroplane. That’s the sort of thing you’ll have
-happening all over the place if these ignorant fellows are allowed to
-do just as they like.”
-
-“It is quite true,” said Lord Normantowers. “I could give many other
-examples. They say that Owen Hood, another of these eccentrics, has
-actually bought one of these little farms and stuck it all round with
-absurd battlements and a moat and drawbridge, with the motto ‘The
-Englishman’s House is his Castle.’”
-
-“I think,” said the Prime Minister quietly, “that however English
-the Englishman may be, he will find his castle is a castle in Spain;
-not to say a castle in the air. Mr. Oates,” he said, addressing very
-courteously the big brooding American at the other end of the table,
-“please do not imagine that I cannot sympathize with such romances,
-although they are only in the air. But I think in all sincerity that
-you will find they are unsuited to the English climate. _Et ego in
-Arcadia_, you know; we have all had such dreams of all men piping in
-Arcady. But after all, you have already paid the piper; and if you are
-wise, I think you can still call the tune.”
-
-“Gives me great gratification to say it’s too late,” growled Oates. “I
-want them to learn to play and pay for themselves.”
-
-“But you want them to learn,” said Lord Eden gently, “and I should not
-be in too much of a hurry to call it too late. It seems to me that the
-door is still open for a reasonable compromise; I understand that the
-deed of gift, considered as a legal instrument, is still the subject of
-some legal discussion and may well be subject to revision. I happened
-to be talking of it yesterday with the law officers of the Crown; and I
-am sure that the least hint that you yourself----”
-
-“I take it you mean,” said Mr. Oates with great deliberation, “that
-you’ll tell your lawyers it’ll pay them to pick a hole in the deal.”
-
-“That is what we call the bluff Western humour,” said Lord Eden,
-smiling, “but I only mean that we do a great deal in this country by
-reconsideration and revision. We make mistakes and unmake them. We have
-a phrase for it in our history books; we call it the flexibility of an
-unwritten constitution.”
-
-“We have a phrase for it too,” said the American reflectively. “We call
-it graft.”
-
-“Really,” cried Normantowers, a little bristly man, with sudden
-shrillness, “I did not know you were so scrupulous in your own methods.”
-
-“Motht unthcrupulouth,” said Mr. Low virtuously.
-
-Enoch Oates rose slowly like an enormous leviathan rising to the
-surface of the sea; his large sallow face had never changed in
-expression; but he had the air of one drifting dreamily away.
-
-“Wal,” he said, “I dare say it’s true I’ve done some graft in my time,
-and a good many deals that weren’t what you might call modelled on the
-Sermon on the Mount. But if I smashed people, it was when they were
-all out to smash me; and if some of ’em were poor, they were the sort
-that were ready to shoot or knife or blow me to bits. And I tell you,
-in my country the whole lot of you would be liable to be lynched or
-tarred and feathered to-morrow, if you talked about lawyers taking away
-people’s land when once they’d got it. Maybe the English climate’s
-different, as you say; but I’m going to see it through. As for you, Mr.
-Rosenbaum----”
-
-“My name is Low,” said the philanthropist. “I cannot thee why anyone
-should object to uthing my name.”
-
-“Not on your life,” said Mr. Oates affably. “Seems to me a pretty
-appropriate name.”
-
-He drifted heavily from the room, and the four other men were left,
-staring at a riddle.
-
-“He’s going on with it, or, rather, they’re going on with it,” groaned
-Horace Hunter. “And what the devil is to be done now?”
-
-“It really looks as if he were right in calling it too late,” said Lord
-Normantowers bitterly. “I can’t think of anything to be done.”
-
-“I can,” said the Prime Minister. They all looked at him; but none of
-them could read the undecipherable subtleties in his old and wrinkled
-face under his youthful yellow hair.
-
-“The resources of civilization are not exhausted,” he said grimly.
-“That’s what the old governments used to say when they started shooting
-people. Well, I could understand you gentlemen feeling inclined to
-shoot people now. I suppose it seems to you that all your power in
-the State, which you wield with such public spirit of course; all Sir
-Horace’s health reforms, the Normantowers’s new estate, and so on,
-are all broken to bits, to rotten little bits of rusticity. What’s to
-become of a governing class if it doesn’t hold all the land, eh? Well,
-I’ll tell you. I know the next move, and the time has come to take it.”
-
-“But what is it?” demanded Sir Horace.
-
-“The time has come,” said the Prime Minister, “to Nationalize the Land.”
-
-Sir Horace Hunter rose from his chair, opened his mouth, shut it, and
-sat down again, all with what he himself might have called a reflex
-action.
-
-“But that is Socialism!” cried Lord Normantowers, his eyes standing out
-of his head.
-
-“True Socialism, don’t you think?” mused the Prime Minister. “Better
-call it True Socialism; just the sort of thing to be remembered at
-elections. Theirs is Socialism, and ours is True Socialism.”
-
-“Do you really mean, my lord,” cried Hunter in a heat of sincerity
-stronger than the snobbery of a lifetime, “that you are going to
-support the Bolshies?”
-
-“No,” said Eden, with the smile of a sphinx. “I mean the Bolshies are
-going to support me. Idiots!”
-
-After a silence, he added in a more wistful tone:
-
-“Of course, as a matter of sentiment, it is a little sad. All our fine
-old English castles and manors, the homes of the gentry ... they will
-become public property, like post offices, I suppose. When I think
-of the happy hours I have myself passed at Normantowers--” He smiled
-across at the nobleman of that name and went on. “And Sir Horace has
-now, I believe, the joy of living in Warbridge Castle--fine old place.
-Dear me, yes, and I think Mr. Low has a castle, though the name escapes
-me.”
-
-“Rosewood Castle,” said Mr. Low rather sulkily.
-
-“But I say,” cried Sir Horace, rising, “what becomes of ‘Don’t
-Nationalize but Rationalize’?”
-
-“I suppose,” replied Eden lightly, “it will have to be ‘Don’t
-Rationalize but Nationalize.’ It comes to the same thing. Besides,
-we can easily get a new motto of some sort. For instance, we, after
-all, are the patriotic party, the national party. What about ‘Let the
-Nationalists Nationalize’?”
-
-“Well, all I can say is--” began Normantowers explosively.
-
-“Compensation, there will be compensation, of course,” said the Prime
-Minister soothingly; “a great deal can be done with compensation. If
-you will all turn up here this day week, say at four o’clock, I think I
-can lay all the plans before you.”
-
-When they did turn up next week and were shown again into the Prime
-Minister’s sunny garden, they found that the plans were, indeed, laid
-before them; for the table that stood on the sunny lawn was covered
-with large and small maps and a mass of official documents. Mr. Eustace
-Pym, one of the Prime Minister’s numerous private secretaries, was
-hovering over them, and the Prime Minister himself was sitting at the
-head of the table studying one of them with an intelligent frown.
-
-“I thought you’d like to hear the terms of the arrangements,” he said.
-“I’m afraid we must all make sacrifices in the cause of progress.”
-
-“Oh, progress be----” cried Normantowers, losing patience. “I want to
-know if you really mean that my estate----”
-
-“It comes under the department of Castle and Abbey Estates in Section
-Four,” said Lord Eden, referring to the paper before him. “By the
-provisions of the new Bill the public control in such cases will be
-vested in the Lord-Lieutenant of the County. In the particular case of
-your castle--let me see--why, yes, of course, you are Lord-Lieutenant
-of that county.”
-
-Little Lord Normantowers was staring, with his stiff hair all standing
-on end; but a new look was dawning in his shrewd though small-featured
-face.
-
-“The case of Warbridge Castle is different,” said the Prime Minister.
-“It happens unfortunately to stand in a district desolated by all
-the recent troubles about swine-fever, touching which the Health
-Controller” (here he bowed to Sir Horace Hunter) “has shown such
-admirable activity. It has been necessary to place the whole of this
-district in the hands of the Health Controller, that he may study any
-traces of swine-fever that may be found in the Castle, the Cathedral,
-the Vicarage, and so on. So much for that case, which stands somewhat
-apart; the others are mostly normal. Rosenbaum Castle--I should say
-Rosewood Castle--being of a later date, comes under Section Five,
-and the appointment of a permanent Castle Custodian is left to the
-discretion of the Government. In this case the Government has decided
-to appoint Mr. Rosewood Low to the post, in recognition of his local
-services to social science and economics. In all these cases, of
-course, due compensation will be paid to the present owners of the
-estates, and ample salaries and expenses of entertainment paid to the
-new officials, that the places may be kept up in a manner worthy of
-their historical and national character.”
-
-He paused, as if for cheers, and Sir Horace was vaguely irritated into
-saying: “But look here, my castle----”
-
-“Damn it all!” said the Prime Minister, with his first flash of
-impatience and sincerity. “Can’t you see you’ll get twice as much as
-before? First you’ll be compensated for losing your castle, and then
-you’ll be paid for keeping it.”
-
-“My lord,” said Lord Normantowers humbly, “I apologize for anything
-I may have said or suggested. I ought to have known I stood in the
-presence of a great English statesman.”
-
-“Oh, it’s easy enough,” said Lord Eden frankly. “Look how easily we
-remained in the saddle, in spite of democratic elections; how we
-managed to dominate the Commons as well as the Lords. It’ll be the same
-with what they call Socialism. We shall still be there; only we shall
-be called bureaucrats instead of aristocrats.”
-
-“I see it all now!” cried Hunter, “and by Heaven, it’ll be the end of
-all this confounded demagogy of Three Acres and a Cow.”
-
-“I think so,” said the Prime Minister with a smile; and began to fold
-up the large maps.
-
-As he was folding up the last and largest, he suddenly stopped and said:
-
-“Hallo!”
-
-A letter was lying in the middle of the table; a letter in a sealed
-envelope, and one which he evidently did not recognize as any part of
-his paper paraphernalia.
-
-“Where did this letter come from?” he asked rather sharply. “Did you
-put it here, Eustace?”
-
-“No,” said Mr. Pym staring. “I never saw it before. It didn’t come with
-your letters this morning.”
-
-“It didn’t come by post at all,” said Lord Eden; “and none of the
-servants brought it in. How the devil did it get out here in the
-garden?”
-
-He ripped it open with his finger and remained for some time staring in
-mystification at its contents.
-
-                                                      WELKIN CASTLE,
-                                                        Sept. 4th, 19--.
-
-  “DEAR LORD EDEN,--As I understand you are making public provision
-  for the future disposal of our historic national castles, such as
-  Warbridge Castle, I should much appreciate any information about your
-  intentions touching Welkin Castle, my own estate, as it would enable
-  me to make my own arrangements.--Yours very truly,
-
-                                                     “WELKYN OF WELKIN.”
-
-“Who is Welkyn?” asked the puzzled politician; “he writes as if he knew
-me; but I can’t recall him at the moment. And where is Welkin Castle?
-We must look at the maps again.”
-
-But though they looked at the maps for hours, and searched Burke,
-Debrett, “Who’s Who,” the atlas and every other work of reference, they
-could come upon no trace of that firm but polite country gentleman.
-
-Lord Eden was a little worried, because he knew that curiously
-important people could exist in a corner in this country, and suddenly
-emerge from their corner to make trouble. He knew it was very important
-that his own governing class should stand in with him in this great
-public change (and private understanding), and that no rich eccentric
-should be left out and offended. But although he was worried to that
-extent, it is probable that his worry would soon have faded from his
-mind if it had not been for something that happened some days later.
-
-Going out into the same garden to the same table, with the more
-agreeable purpose of taking tea there, he was amazed to find another
-letter, though this was lying not on the table but on the turf just
-beside it. It was unstamped like the other and addressed in the same
-handwriting; but its tone was more stern.
-
-                                                       WELKIN CASTLE,
-                                                         Oct. 6th, 19--.
-
-  “MY LORD,--As you seem to have decided to continue your sweeping
-  scheme of confiscation, as in the case of Warbridge Castle, without
-  the slightest reference to the historic and even heroic claims and
-  traditions of Welkin Castle, I can only inform you that I shall
-  defend the fortress of my fathers to the death. Moreover, I have
-  decided to make a protest of a more public kind; and when you next
-  hear from me it will be in the form of a general appeal to the
-  justice of the English people.--Yours truly,
-
-                                                     “WELKYN OF WELKIN.”
-
-The historic and even heroic traditions of Welkin Castle kept a dozen
-of the Prime Minister’s private secretaries busy for a week, looking
-up encyclopædias and chronicles and books of history. But the Prime
-Minister himself was more worried about another problem. How did these
-mysterious letters get into the house, or rather into the garden? None
-of them came by post and none of the servants knew anything whatever
-about them. Moreover, the Prime Minister, in an unobtrusive way, was
-very carefully guarded. Prime Ministers always are, but he had been
-especially protected ever since the Vegetarians a few years before had
-gone about killing everybody who believed in killing animals. There
-were always plain-clothes policemen at every entrance of his house
-and garden. And from their testimony it would appear certain that the
-letter could not have got into the garden; but for the trifling fact
-that it was lying there on the garden-table. Lord Eden cogitated in a
-grim fashion for some time; then he said as he rose from his chair:
-
-“I think I will have a talk to our American friend Mr. Oates.”
-
-Whether from a sense of humour or a sense of justice, Lord Eden
-summoned Enoch Oates before the same special jury of three; or
-summoned them before him, as the case may be. For it was even more
-difficult than before to read the exact secret of Eden’s sympathies or
-intentions; he talked about a variety of indifferent subjects leading
-up to that of the letters, which he treated very lightly. Then he said
-quite suddenly:
-
-“Do you know anything about those letters, by the way?”
-
-The American presented his poker face to the company for some time
-without reply. Then he said:
-
-“And what makes you think I know anything about them?”
-
-“Because,” said Horace Hunter, breaking in with uncontrollable warmth,
-“we know you’re hand and glove with all those lunatics in the League of
-the Long Bow who are kicking up all this shindy.”
-
-“Well,” said Oates calmly, “I’ll never deny I like some of their ways.
-I like live wires myself; and, after all, they’re about the liveliest
-thing in this old country. And I’ll tell you more. I like people who
-take trouble; and, believe me, they do take trouble. You say they’re
-all nuts; but I reckon there really is method in their madness. They
-take trouble to keep those crazy vows of theirs. You spoke about the
-fellows who carried off the astronomer in an aeroplane. Well, I know
-Bellew Blair, the man who worked with Pierce in that stunt, and believe
-me he’s not a man to be sniffed at. He’s one of the first experts in
-aeronautics in the country; and if he’s gone over to them, it means
-there’s something in their notion for a scientific intellect to take
-hold of. It was Blair that worked that pig’s stunt for Hilary Pierce;
-made a great gasbag shaped like a sow and gave all the little pigs
-parachutes.”
-
-“Well, there you are,” cried Hunter. “Of all the lunacy----”
-
-“I remember Commander Blair in the War,” said the Prime Minister
-quietly. “Bellows Blair, they called him. He did excellent expert work.
-Some new scheme with dirigible balloons. But I was only going to ask
-Mr. Oates whether he happens to know where Welkin Castle is.”
-
-“Must be somewhere near here,” suggested Normantowers, “as the letters
-seem to come by hand.”
-
-“Well, I don’t know,” said Enoch Oates doubtfully. “I know a man living
-in Ely, who had one of those letters delivered by hand. And I know
-another near Land’s End who thought the letter must have come from
-somebody living near. As you say, they all seem to come by hand.”
-
-“By what hand?” asked the Prime Minister, with a queer, grim expression.
-
-“Mr. Oates,” said Lord Normantowers firmly, “where _is_ Welkin Castle?”
-
-“Why, it’s everywhere, in a manner of speaking,” said Mr. Oates
-reflectively. “It’s anywhere, anyhow. Gee--!” he broke off suddenly:
-“Why, as a matter of fact, it’s here!”
-
-“Ah,” said the Prime Minister quietly, “I thought we should see
-something if we watched here long enough! You didn’t think I kept you
-hanging about here only to ask Mr. Oates questions that I knew the
-answer to.”
-
-“What do you mean? Thought we would see what?”
-
-“Where the unstamped letters come from,” replied Lord Eden.
-
-Luminous and enormous, there heaved up above the garden trees something
-that looked at first like a coloured cloud; it was flushed with light
-such as lies on clouds opposite the sunset, a light at once warm
-and wan; and it shone like an opaque flame. But as it came closer
-it grew more and more incredible. It took on solid proportions and
-perspective, as if a cloud could brush and crush the dark tree-tops. It
-was something never seen before in the sky; it was a cubist cloud. Men
-gazing at such a sunset cloudland often imagine they see castles and
-cities of an almost uncanny completeness. But there would be a possible
-point of completeness at which they would cry aloud, or perhaps shriek
-aloud, as at a sign in heaven; and that completeness had come. The
-big luminous object that sailed above the garden was outlined in
-battlements and turrets like a fairy castle; but with an architectural
-exactitude impossible in any cloudland. With the very look of it a
-phrase and a proverb leapt into the mind.
-
-“There, my lord!” cried Oates, suddenly lifting his nasal and drawling
-voice and pointing, “there’s that dream you told me about. There’s your
-castle in the air.”
-
-As the shadow of the flying thing travelled over the sun-lit lawn,
-they looked up and saw for the first time that the lower part of the
-edifice hung downwards like the car of a great balloon. They remembered
-the aeronautical tricks of Commander Blair and Captain Pierce and the
-model of the monstrous pig. As it passed over the table a white speck
-detached itself and dropped from the car. It was a letter.
-
-The next moment the white speck was followed by a shower that was like
-a snowstorm. Countless letters, leaflets, and scraps of paper were
-littered all over the lawn. The guests seemed to stand staring wildly
-in a wilderness of waste-paper; but the keen and experienced eyes of
-Lord Eden recognized the material which, in political elections, is
-somewhat satirically called “literature.”
-
-It took the twelve private secretaries some time to pick them all up
-and make the lawn neat and tidy again. On examination they proved to
-be mainly of two kinds: one a sort of electioneering pamphlet of the
-League of the Long Bow, and the other a somewhat airy fantasy about
-private property in air. The most important of the documents, which
-Lord Eden studied more attentively, though with a grim smile, began
-with the sentence in large letters:
-
-  “An Englishman’s House Is No Longer His Castle On The Soil Of
-  England. If It Is To Be His Castle, It Must Be A Castle In The Air.
-
-  “If There Seem To Be Something Unfamiliar And Even Fanciful In The
-  Idea, We Reply That It Is Not Half So Fantastic To Own Your Own
-  Houses In The Clouds As Not To Own Your Own Houses On The Earth.”
-
-Then followed a passage of somewhat less solid political value, in
-which the acute reader might trace the influence of the poetical Mr.
-Pierce rather than the scientific Mr. Blair. It began “They Have Stolen
-the Earth; We Will Divide the Sky.” But the writer followed this with a
-somewhat unconvincing claim to have trained rooks and swallows to hover
-in rows in the air to represent the hedges of “The blue meadows of the
-new realm,” and he was so obliging as to accompany the explanation
-with diagrams of space showing these exact ornithological boundaries
-in dotted lines. There were other equally scientific documents dealing
-with the treatment of clouds, the driving of birds to graze on insects,
-and so on. The whole of this section concluded with the great social
-and economic slogan: “Three Acres and a Crow.”
-
-But when Lord Eden read on, his attention appeared graver than this
-particular sort of social reconstruction would seem to warrant. The
-writer of the pamphlet resumed:
-
-  “Do not be surprised if there seems to be something topsy-turvy in
-  the above programme. That topsy-turvydom marks the whole of our
-  politics. It may seem strange that the air which has always been
-  public should become private, when the land which has always been
-  private has become public. We answer that this is exactly how things
-  really stand to-day in the matter of all publicity and privacy.
-  Private things are indeed being made public. But public things are
-  being kept private.
-
-  “Thus we all had the pleasure of seeing in the papers a picture of
-  Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., smiling in an ingratiating manner at his
-  favourite cockatoo. We know this detail of his existence, which might
-  seem a merely domestic one. But the fact that he is shortly to be
-  paid thirty thousand pounds of public money, for continuing to live
-  in his own house, is concealed with the utmost delicacy.
-
-  “Similarly we have seen whole pages of an illustrated paper filled
-  with glimpses of Lord Normantowers enjoying his honeymoon, which the
-  papers in question are careful to describe as his Romance. Whatever
-  it may be, an antiquated and fastidious taste might possibly be
-  disposed to regard it as his own affair. But the fact that the
-  taxpayer’s money, which is the taxpayer’s affair, is to be given him
-  in enormous quantities, first for going out of his castle, and then
-  for coming back into it--this little domestic detail is thought too
-  trivial for the taxpayer to be told of it.
-
-  “Or again, we are frequently informed that the hobby of Mr. Rosenbaum
-  Low is improving the breed of Pekinese, and God knows they need it.
-  But it would seem the sort of hobby that anybody might have without
-  telling everybody else about it. On the other hand, the fact that
-  Mr. Rosenbaum Low is being paid twice over for the same house, and
-  keeping the house as well, is concealed from the public; along with
-  the equally interesting fact that he is allowed to do these things
-  chiefly because he lends money to the Prime Minister.”
-
-The Prime Minister smiled still more grimly and glanced in a light yet
-lingering fashion at some of the accompanying leaflets. They seemed
-to be in the form of electioneering leaflets, though not apparently
-connected with any particular election.
-
-  “Vote for Crane. He Said He would Eat His Hat and Did It. Lord
-  Normantowers said he would explain how people came to swallow his
-  coronet; but he hasn’t done it yet.
-
-  “Vote for Pierce. He Said Pigs Would Fly And They Did. Rosenbaum Low
-  said a service of international aërial express trains would fly; and
-  they didn’t. It was your money he made to fly.
-
-  “Vote for the League of the Long Bow. They Are The Only Men Who Don’t
-  Tell Lies.”
-
-The Prime Minister stood gazing after the vanishing cloud-castle, as it
-faded into the clouds, with a curious expression in his eyes. Whether
-it were better or worse for his soul, there was something in him that
-understood much that the muddled materialists around him could never
-understand.
-
-“Quite poetical, isn’t it?” he said drily. “Wasn’t it Victor Hugo
-or some French poet who said something about politics and the
-clouds?... The people say, ‘Bah, the poet is in the clouds. So is the
-thunderbolt.’”
-
-“Thunderbolts!” said Normantowers contemptuously. “What can those fools
-do but go about flinging fireworks?”
-
-“Quite so,” replied Eden; “but I’m afraid by this time they are
-flinging fireworks into a powder magazine.”
-
-He continued to gaze into the sky with screwed-up eyes, though the
-object had become invisible.
-
-If his eye could really have followed the thing after which he gazed,
-he would have been surprised; if his unfathomable scepticism was still
-capable of surprise. It passed over woods and meadows like a sunset
-cloud towards the sunset, or a little to the north-west of it, like
-the fairy castle that was west of the moon. It left behind the green
-orchards and the red towers of Hereford and passed into bare places
-whose towers are mightier than any made by man, where they buttress the
-mighty wall of Wales. Far away in this wilderness of columned cliffs
-and clefts it found a cleft or hollow, along the floor of which ran a
-dark line that might have been a black river running through a rocky
-valley. But it was in fact a crack opening below into another abyss.
-The strange flying ship followed the course of the winding fissure till
-it came to a place where the crack opened into a chasm, round like
-a cauldron and accidental as the knot in some colossal tree-trunk;
-through which it sank, entering the twilight of the tremendous cavern
-beneath. The abyss below was lit here and there with artificial lights,
-like fallen stars of the underworld, and bridged with wooden platforms
-and galleries, on which were wooden huts and huge packing-cases and
-many things somewhat suggestive of a munition dump. On the rocky
-walls were spread out various balloon coverings, some of them of even
-more grotesque outline than the castle. Some were in the shapes of
-animals; and on that primeval background looked like the last fossils,
-or possibly the first outlines of vast prehistoric creatures. Perhaps
-there was something suggestive in the fancy that in that underworld
-a new world was being created. The man who alighted from the flying
-castle recognized, almost as one recognizes a domestic pet, the outline
-of a highly primitive pig stretching like a large archaic drawing
-across the wall. For the young man was called Hilary Pierce, and had
-had previous dealings with the flying pig, though for that day he had
-been put in charge of the flying castle.
-
-On the platform on which he alighted stood a table covered with
-papers, with almost more papers than Lord Eden’s table. But these
-papers were covered almost entirely with figures and numbers and
-mathematical symbols. Two men were bending over the table, discussing
-and occasionally disputing. In the taller of the two the scientific
-world might have recognized Professor Green, whom it was seeking
-everywhere like the Missing Link, to incarcerate him in the interests
-of science. In the shorter and sturdier figure a very few people might
-have recognized Bellew Blair, the organizing brain of the English
-Revolution.
-
-“I haven’t come to stay,” explained Pierce hastily. “I’m going on in a
-minute.”
-
-“Why shouldn’t you stay?” asked Blair, in the act of lighting a pipe.
-
-“I don’t want your little talk interrupted. Still less, far, far
-less, do I want it uninterrupted. I mean while I’m here. A little of
-your scientific conversation goes a long way with me; I know what
-you’re like when you’re really chatty. Professor Green will say in his
-satirical way ‘9920.05,’ to which you will reply with quiet humour
-‘75.007.’ This will be too good an opening for a witty fellow like the
-Professor, who will instantly retort ‘982.09.’ Not in the best taste
-perhaps, but a great temptation in the heat of debate.”
-
-“Commander Blair,” said the Professor, “is very kind to let me share
-his calculations.”
-
-“Lucky for me,” said Blair. “I’d have done ten times more with a
-mathematician like you.”
-
-“Well,” said Pierce casually, “as you are so much immersed in
-mathematics, I’ll leave you. As a matter of fact, I had a message for
-Professor Green, about Miss Dale at the house where he was lodging; but
-we mustn’t interrupt scientific studies for a little thing like that.”
-
-Green’s head came up from the papers with great abruptness.
-
-“Message!” he cried eagerly. “What message? Is it really for me?”
-
-“8282.003,” replied Pierce coldly.
-
-“Don’t be offended,” said Blair. “Give the Professor his message and
-then go if you like.”
-
-“It’s only that she came over to see my wife to find out where you had
-gone to,” said Pierce. “I told her, so far as it’s possible to tell
-anybody. That’s all,” he added, but rather with the air of one saying
-“it ought to be enough.”
-
-Apparently it was, for Green, who was once more looking down upon
-the precious papers, crumpled one of them in his clenched hand
-unconsciously, like a man suddenly controlling his feelings.
-
-“Well, I’m off,” said Pierce cheerfully; “got to visit the other dumps.”
-
-“Stop a minute,” said Blair, as the other turned away. “Haven’t you any
-sort of public news as well as private news? How are things going in
-the political world?”
-
-“Expressed in mathematical formula,” replied Pierce over his shoulder,
-“the political news is MP squared plus LSD over U equals L. L let
-loose. L upon earth, my boy.”
-
-And he climbed again into his castle of the air.
-
-Oliver Green stood staring at the crumpled paper and suddenly began to
-straighten it out.
-
-“Mr. Blair,” he said, “I’m terribly ashamed of myself. When I see
-you living here like a hermit in the mountains and scrawling your
-calculations, so to speak, on the rocks of the wilderness, devoted to
-your great abstract idea, vowed to a great cause, it makes me feel
-very small to have entangled you and your friends in my small affairs.
-Of course, the affair isn’t at all small to me; but it must seem very
-small to you.”
-
-“I don’t know very precisely,” answered Blair, “what was the nature
-of the affair. But that is emphatically your affair. For the rest,
-I assure you we’re delighted to have you, apart from your valuable
-services as a calculating machine.”
-
-Bellew Blair, the last and, in the worldly sense, by far the ablest of
-the recruits of the Long Bow, was a man in early middle age, square
-built, but neat in figure and light on his feet, clad in a suit of
-leather. He mostly moved about so quickly that his figure made more
-impression than his face; but when he sat down smoking, in one of his
-rare moments of leisure, as now, it could be remarked that his face was
-rather calm than vivacious; a short square face with a short resolute
-nose, but reflective eyes much lighter than his close black hair.
-
-“It’s quite Homeric,” he added, “the two armies fighting for the body
-of an astronomer. You would be a sort of a symbol anyhow, since they
-started that insanity of calling you insane. Nobody has any business to
-bother you about the personal side of the matter.”
-
-Green seemed to be ruminating, and the last phrase awoke him to a
-decision. He began to talk. Quite straightforwardly, though with a
-certain schoolboy awkwardness, he proceeded to tell his friend the
-whole of his uncouth love story--the overturning of his spiritual world
-to the tune the old cow died of, or rather danced to.
-
-“And I’ve let you in for hiding me like a murderer,” he concluded.
-“For the sake of something that must seem to you, not even like a
-cow jumping over the moon, but more like a calf falling over the
-milking-stool. Perhaps people vowed to a great work like this ought to
-leave all that sort of thing behind them.”
-
-“Well, I don’t see anything to be ashamed of,” said Blair, “and in this
-case I don’t agree with what you say about leaving those things behind.
-Of some sorts of work it’s true; but not this. Shall I tell you a
-secret?”
-
-“If you don’t mind.”
-
-“The cow never does jump over the moon,” said Blair gravely. “It’s one
-of the sports of the bulls of the herd.”
-
-“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” said the Professor.
-
-“I mean that women can’t be kept out of this war, because it’s a land
-war,” answered Blair. “If it were really a war in the air, you could
-have done it all by yourself. But in all wars of peasants defending
-their farms and homes, women have been very much on the spot; as they
-used to pour hot water out of the windows during the Irish evictions.
-Look here, I’ll tell you a story. It’s relevant because it has a moral.
-After all, it’s my turn, so to speak. You’ve told me the true story of
-the Cow that Jumped over the Moon. It’s time I told you the true story
-of the Castle in the Air.”
-
-He smoked silently for a moment, and then said:
-
-“You may have wondered how a very prosaic practical Scotch engineer
-like myself ever came to make a thing like that pantomime palace over
-there, as childish as a child’s coloured balloon. Well, the answer is
-the same; because in certain circumstances a man may be different from
-himself. At a certain period of the old war preparations, I was doing
-some work for the government in a secluded part of the western coast
-of Ireland. There were very few people for me to talk to; but one of
-them was the daughter of a bankrupt squire named Malone; and I talked
-to her a good deal. I was about as mechanical a mechanic as you could
-dig out anywhere; grimy, grumpy, tinkering about with dirty machinery.
-She was really like those princesses you read about in the Celtic
-poems; with a red crown made of curling elf-locks like little flames,
-and a pale elfin face that seemed somehow thin and luminous like
-glass; and she could make you listen to silence like a song. It wasn’t
-a pose with her, it was a poem; there are people like that, but very
-few of them like her. I tried to keep my end up by telling her about
-the wonders of science, and the great new architecture of the air. And
-then Sheila used to say, ‘And what is the good of them to me, when you
-_have_ built them. I can see a castle build itself without hands out of
-gigantic rocks of clear jewels in the sky every night.’ And she would
-point to where crimson or violet clouds hung in the green afterglow
-over the great Atlantic.
-
-“You would probably say I was mad, if you didn’t happen to have been
-mad yourself. But I was wild with the idea that there was something
-that she admired and that she thought science couldn’t do. I was as
-morbid as a boy; I half thought she despised me; and I wanted half to
-prove her wrong and half to do whatever she thought right. I resolved
-my science should beat the clouds at their own game; and I laboured
-till I’d actually made a sort of rainbow castle that would ride on
-the air. I think at the back of my mind there was some sort of crazy
-idea of carrying her off into the clouds she lived among, as if she
-were literally an angel and ought to dwell on wings. It never quite
-came to that, as you will hear, but as my experiments progressed my
-romance progressed too. You won’t need any telling about that; I only
-want to tell you the end of the story because of the moral. We made
-arrangements to get married; and I had to leave a good many of the
-arrangements to her, while I completed my great work. Then at last
-it was ready and I came to seek her like a pagan god descending in a
-cloud to carry a nymph up to Olympus. And I found she had already taken
-a very solid little brick villa on the edge of a town, having got it
-remarkably cheap and furnished it with most modern conveniences. And
-when I talked to her about castles in the air, she laughed and said
-her castle had come down to the ground. That is the moral. A woman,
-especially an Irishwoman, is always uncommonly practical when it comes
-to getting married. That is what I mean by saying it is never the cow
-who jumps over the moon. It is the cow who stands firmly planted in the
-middle of the three acres; and who always counts in any struggle of
-the land. That is why there must be women in this story, especially
-like those in your story and Pierce’s, women who come from the land.
-When the world needs a Crusade for communal ideals, it is best waged by
-men without ties, like the Franciscans. But when it comes to a fight
-for private property--you can’t keep women out of that. You can’t have
-the family farm without the family. You must have concrete Christian
-marriage again: you can’t have solid small property with all this
-vagabond polygamy: a harem that isn’t even a home.”
-
-Green nodded and rose slowly to his feet, with his hands in his pockets.
-
-“When it comes to a fight,” he said. “When I look at these enormous
-underground preparations, it is not difficult to infer that you think
-it will come to a fight.”
-
-“I think it has come to a fight,” answered Blair. “Lord Eden has
-decided that. And the others may not understand exactly what they are
-doing; but he does.”
-
-And Blair knocked out his pipe and stood up, to resume his work in that
-mountain laboratory, at about the same time at which Lord Eden awoke
-from his smiling meditations; and, lighting a cigarette, went languidly
-indoors.
-
-He did not attempt to explain what was in his mind to the men around
-him. He was the only man there who understood that the England about
-him was not the England that had surrounded his youth and supported
-his leisure and luxury; that things were breaking up, first slowly and
-then more and more swiftly, and that the things detaching themselves
-were both good and evil. And one of them was this bald, broad and
-menacing new fact: a peasantry. The class of small farmers already
-existed, and might yet be found fighting for its farms like the same
-class all over the world. It was no longer certain that the sweeping
-social adjustments settled in that garden could be applied to the whole
-English land. But the story of how far his doubts were justified,
-and how far his whole project fared, is a part of the story of “The
-Ultimate Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow,” after which the
-exhausted and broken-spirited reader may find rest at last.
-
-
-
-
-VIII
-
-THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM OF THE LEAGUE OF THE LONG BOW
-
-
-
-
-VIII
-
-THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM OF THE LEAGUE OF THE LONG BOW
-
-
-Mr. Robert Owen Hood came through his library that was lined with brown
-leather volumes with a brown paper parcel in his hand; a flippant
-person (such as his friend Mr. Pierce) might have said he was in a
-brown study. He came out into the sunlight of his garden, however,
-where his wife was arranging tea-things, for she was expecting
-visitors. Even in the strong daylight he looked strangely little
-altered, despite the long and catastrophic period that had passed since
-he met her in the Thames Valley and managed really to set the Thames
-on fire. That fire had since spread in space and time and become a
-conflagration in which much of modern civilization had been consumed;
-but in which (as its advocates alleged) English agriculture had been
-saved and a new and more hopeful chapter opened in English history.
-His angular face was rather more lined and wrinkled, but his straight
-shock of copper-coloured hair was as unchanged as if it had been a
-copper-coloured wig. His wife Elizabeth was even less marked, for she
-was younger; she had the same slightly nervous or short-sighted look
-in the eyes that was like a humanizing touch to her beauty made of
-ivory and gold. But though she was not old she had always been a little
-old-fashioned; for she came of a forgotten aristocracy whose women had
-moved with a certain gravity as well as grace about the old country
-houses, before coronets were sold like cabbages or the Jews lent money
-to the squires. But her husband was old-fashioned too; though he had
-just taken part in a successful revolution and bore a revolutionary
-name, he also had his prejudices; and one of them was a weakness for
-his wife being a lady--especially that lady.
-
-“Owen,” she said, looking up from the tea-table with alarmed severity,
-“you’ve been buying more old books.”
-
-“As it happens, these are particularly new books,” he replied; “but I
-suppose in one sense it’s all ancient history now.”
-
-“What ancient history?” she asked. “Is it a History of Babylon or
-prehistoric China?”
-
-“It is a History of Us.”
-
-“I hope not,” she said; “but what do you mean?”
-
-“I mean it’s a history of Our Revolution,” said Owen Hood, “a true
-and authentic account of the late glorious victories, as the old
-broadsheets said. The Great War of 1914 started the fashion of bringing
-out the history of events almost before they’d happened. There were
-standard histories of that war while it was still going on. Our little
-civil war is at least finished, thank God; and this is the brand-new
-history of it. Written by a rather clever fellow, detached but
-understanding and a little ironical on the right side. Above all, he
-gives quite a good description of the Battle of the Bows.”
-
-“I shouldn’t call that our history,” said Elizabeth quietly. “I’m
-devoutly thankful that nobody can ever write our history or put it in a
-book. Do you remember when you jumped into the water after the flowers?
-I fancy it was then that you really set the Thames on fire.”
-
-“With my red hair, no doubt,” he replied, “but I don’t think I did set
-the Thames on fire. I think it was the Thames that set me on fire. Only
-you were always the spirit of the stream and the goddess of the valley.”
-
-“I hope I’m not quite so old as that,” answered Elizabeth.
-
-“Listen to this,” cried her husband, turning over the pages of the
-book. “‘According to the general belief, which prevailed until the
-recent success of the agrarian movement of the Long Bow, it was
-overwhelmingly improbable that a revolutionary change could be effected
-in England. The recent success of the agrarian protest----’”
-
-“Do come out of that book,” remonstrated his wife. “One of our visitors
-has just arrived.”
-
-The visitor proved to be the Reverend Wilding White, a man who had
-also played a prominent part in the recent triumph, a part that was
-sometimes highly public and almost pontifical; but in private life he
-had always a way of entering with his grey hair brushed or blown the
-wrong way and his eagle face eager or indignant; and his conversation
-like his correspondence came in a rush and was too explosive to be
-explanatory.
-
-“I say,” he cried, “I’ve come to talk to you about that idea, you
-know--Enoch Oates wrote about it from America and he’s a jolly good
-fellow and all that; but after all he does come from America and so he
-thinks it’s quite easy. But you can see for yourself it isn’t quite so
-easy, what with Turks and all that. It’s all very well to talk about
-the United States----”
-
-“Never you mind about the United States,” said Hood easily; “I think
-I’m rather in favour of the Heptarchy. You just listen to this; the
-epic of our own Heptarchy, the story of our own dear little domestic
-war. ‘The recent success of the agrarian protest----’”
-
-He was interrupted again by the arrival of two more guests; by the
-silent entrance of Colonel Crane and the very noisy entrance of Captain
-Pierce, who had brought his young wife with him from the country,
-for they had established themselves in the ancestral inn of the Blue
-Boar. White’s wife was still in the country, and Crane’s having long
-been busy in her studio with war-posters, was now equally busy with
-peace-posters.
-
-Hood was one of those men whom books almost literally seize and
-swallow, like monsters with leather or paper jaws. It was no
-exaggeration to say he was deep in a book as an incautious traveller
-might be deep in a swamp or some strange man-eating plant of the
-tropics; only that the traveller was magnetized and did not even
-struggle. He would fall suddenly silent in the middle of a sentence
-and go on reading; or he would suddenly begin to read aloud with great
-passion, arguing with somebody in the book without any reference to
-anybody in the room. Though not normally rude, he would drift through
-other people’s drawing-rooms towards other people’s bookshelves and
-disappear into them, so to speak, like a rusty family ghost. He would
-travel a hundred miles to see a friend for an hour, and then waste half
-an hour with his head in some odd volume he never happened to have
-seen before. On all that side of him there was a sort of almost creepy
-unconsciousness. His wife, who had old-world notions of the graces of a
-hostess, sometimes had double work to do.
-
-“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” began Hood cheerfully
-as his wife rose swiftly to receive two more visitors. These were
-Professor Green and Commander Bellew Blair; for a queer friendship had
-long linked together the most practical and the most unpractical of
-the brothers of the Long Bow. The friendship, as Pierce remarked, was
-firmly rooted in the square root of minus infinity.
-
-“How beautiful your garden is looking,” said Blair to his hostess. “One
-so seldom sees flower-beds like that now; but I shall always think the
-old gardeners were right.”
-
-“Most things are old-fashioned here, I’m afraid,” replied Elizabeth,
-“but I always like them like that. And how are the children?”
-
-“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” remarked her husband in a
-clear voice, “is doubtless----”
-
-“Really,” she said, laughing, “you are too ridiculous for anything.
-Why in the world should you want to read out the history of the war
-to the people who were in it, and know quite well already what really
-happened?”
-
-“I beg your pardon,” said Colonel Crane. “Very improper to contradict
-a lady, but indeed you are mistaken. The very last thing the soldier
-generally knows is what has really happened. Has to look at a newspaper
-next morning for the realistic description of what never happened.”
-
-“Why, then you’d better go on reading, Hood,” said Hilary Pierce. “The
-Colonel wants to know whether he was killed in battle; or whether there
-was any truth in that story that he was hanged as a spy on the very
-tree he had climbed when running away as a deserter.”
-
-“Should rather like to know what they make of it all,” said the
-Colonel. “After all, we were all too deep in it to see it. I mean see
-it as a whole.”
-
-“If Owen once begins he won’t stop for hours,” said the lady.
-
-“Perhaps,” began Blair, “we had better----”
-
-“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” remarked Hood in
-authoritative tones, “is doubtless to be attributed largely to the
-economic advantage belonging to an agrarian population. It can feed the
-town or refuse to feed the town; and this question appeared early in
-the politics of the peasantry that had arisen in the western counties.
-Nobody will forget the scene at Paddington Station in the first days of
-the rebellion. Men who had grown used to seeing on innumerable mornings
-the innumerable ranks and rows of great milk-cans, looking leaden in a
-grey and greasy light, found themselves faced with a blank, in which
-those neglected things shone in the memory like stolen silver. It was
-true, as Sir Horace Hunter eagerly pointed out when he was put in
-command of the highly hygienic problem of the milk supply, that there
-would be no difficulty about manufacturing the metal cans, perhaps
-even of an improved pattern, with a rapidity and finish of which the
-rustics of Somerset were quite incapable. He had long been of opinion,
-the learned doctor explained, that the shape of the cans, especially
-the small cans left outside poor houses, left much to be desired,
-and the whole process of standing these small objects about in the
-basements of private houses was open to grave objection in the matter
-of waste of space. The public, however, showed an indifference to this
-new issue and a disposition to go back on the old demand for milk; in
-which matter, they said, there was an unfair advantage for the man who
-possessed a cow over the man who only possessed a can. But the story
-that Hunter had rivalled the agrarian slogan by proclaiming the policy
-of ‘Three Areas and a Can’ was in all probability a flippant invention
-of his enemies.
-
-“These agrarian strikes had already occurred at intervals before they
-culminated in the agrarian war. They were the result of the attempt
-to enforce on the farmers certain general regulations and precautions
-about their daily habit, dress and diet, which Sir Horace Hunter and
-Professor Hake had found to be of great advantage in the large State
-laboratories for the manufacture of poisons and destructive gases.
-There was every reason to believe that the people, especially the
-young people, of the village often evaded the regulation about the
-gutta-percha masks, and the rule requiring the worker to paint himself
-all over with an antiseptic gum: and the sending of inspectors from
-London to see that these rules were enforced led to lamentable scenes
-of violence. It would be an error, however, to attribute the whole of
-this great social convulsion to any local agricultural dispute. The
-causes must also be sought in the general state of society, especially
-political society. The Earl of Eden was a statesman of great skill
-by the old Parliamentary standards, but he was already old when he
-launched his final defiance to the peasants in the form of Land
-Nationalization; and the General Election which was the result of this
-departure fell largely into the hands of his lieutenants like Hunter
-and Low. It soon became apparent that some of the illusions of the Eden
-epoch had worn rather thin. It was found that the democracy could not
-always be intimidated even by the threat of consulting them about the
-choice of a Government.
-
-“Nor can it be denied that the General Election of 19-- was from the
-first rendered somewhat unreal by certain legal fictions which had long
-been spreading. There was a custom, originating in the harmless and
-humane deception used upon excited maiden ladies from the provinces,
-by which the private secretaries of the Prime Minister would present
-themselves as that politician himself; sometimes completing the
-innocent illusion by brushing their hair, waxing their moustaches or
-wearing their eye-glasses in the manner of their master. When this
-custom was extended to public platforms it cannot be denied that it
-became more questionable. In the last days of that venerable statesman
-it has been asserted that there were no less than five Lloyd Georges
-touring the country at the same time, and that the contemporary
-Chancellor of the Exchequer had appeared simultaneously in three cities
-on the same night, while the original of all these replicas, the
-popular and brilliant Chancellor himself, was enjoying a well-earned
-rest by the Lake of Como. The incident of the two identical Lord Smiths
-appearing side by side on the same platform (through a miscalculation
-of the party agents), though received with good-humour and honest
-merriment by the audience, did but little good to the serious credit of
-parliamentary institutions. There was of course a certain exaggeration
-in the suggestion of the satirist that a whole column of identical
-Prime Ministers, walking two and two like soldiers, marched out of
-Downing Street every morning and distributed themselves to their
-various posts like policemen; but such satires were popular and widely
-scattered, especially by an active young gentleman who was the author
-of most of them--Captain Hilary Pierce, late of the Flying Corps.
-
-“But if this was true of such trifles as a half a dozen of Prime
-Ministers, it was even truer and more trying in the practical matter
-of party programmes and proposals. The heading of each party programme
-with the old promise ‘Every Man a Millionaire’ had of course become
-merely formal, like a decorative pattern or border. But it cannot
-be denied that the universal use of this phrase, combined with the
-equally universal sense of the unfairness of expecting any politician
-to carry it out, somewhat weakened the force of words in political
-affairs. It would have been well if statesmen had confined themselves
-to these accepted and familiar formalities. Unfortunately, under the
-stress of the struggle which arose out of the menacing organization
-of the League of the Long Bow, they sought to dazzle their followers
-with new improbabilities instead of adhering to the tried and trusty
-improbabilities that had done them yeoman service in the past.
-
-“Thus it was unwise of Lord Normantowers so far to depart from
-the temperance principles of a lifetime as to promise all his
-workers a bottle of champagne each at every meal, if they would
-consent to complete the provision of munitions for suppressing
-the Long Bow rebellion. The great philanthropist unquestionably
-had the highest intentions, both in his rash promise and his more
-reasonable fulfilment. But when the munition-workers found that the
-champagne-bottles, though carefully covered with the most beautiful
-gold-foil, contained in fact nothing but hygienically boiled water, the
-result was a sudden and sensational strike, which paralysed the whole
-output of munitions and led to the first incredible victories of the
-League of the Long Bow.
-
-“There followed in consequence one of the most amazing wars of human
-history--a one-sided war. One side would have been insignificant if
-the other had not been impotent. The minority could not have fought
-for long; only the majority could not fight at all. There prevailed
-through the whole of the existing organizations of society a universal
-distrust that turned them into a dust of disconnected atoms. What was
-the use of offering men higher pay when they did not believe they would
-ever receive it, but only alluded jeeringly to Lord Normantowers and
-his brand of champagne? What was the use of telling every man that he
-would have a bonus, when you had told him for twenty years that he
-would soon be a millionaire? What was the good of the Prime Minister
-pledging his honour in a ringing voice on platform after platform,
-when it was already an open jest that it was not the Prime Minister at
-all? The Government voted taxes and they were not paid. It mobilized
-armies and they did not move. It introduced the pattern of a new
-all-pulverizing gun, and nobody would make it and nobody would fire it
-off. We all remember the romantic crisis when no less a genius than
-Professor Hake came to Sir Horace Hunter, the Minister of Scientific
-Social Organization, with a new explosive capable of shattering the
-whole geological formation of Europe and sinking these islands in the
-Atlantic, but was unable to induce the cabman or any of the clerks to
-assist him in lifting it out of the cab.
-
-“Against all this anarchy of broken promises the little organization
-of the Long Bow stood solid and loyal and dependable. The Long Bowmen
-had become popular by the nickname of the Liars. Everywhere the jest or
-catch-word was repeated like a song, ‘Only the Liars Tell the Truth.’
-They found more and more men to work and fight for them, because it
-was known that they would pay whatever wages they promised, and refuse
-to promise anything that they could not perform. The nickname became
-an ironical symbol of idealism and dignity. A man was proud of being a
-little precise and even pedantic in his accuracy and probity because
-he was a Liar. The whole of this strange organization had originated
-in certain wild bets or foolish practical jokes indulged in by a small
-group of eccentrics. But they had prided themselves on the logical, if
-rather literal, fashion in which they had fulfilled certain vows about
-white elephants or flying pigs. Hence, when they came to stand for a
-policy of peasant proprietorship, and were enabled by the money of an
-American crank to establish it in a widespread fashion across the west
-of England, they took the more serious task with the same tenacity.
-When their foes mocked them with ‘the myth of three acres and a cow,’
-they answered: ‘Yes, it is as mythical as the cow that jumped over the
-moon. But our myths come true.’
-
-“The inexplicable and indeed incredible conclusion of the story was due
-to a new fact; the fact of the actual presence of the new peasantry.
-They had first come into complete possession of their farms, by the
-deed of gift signed by Enoch Oates in the February of 19-- and had
-thus been settled on the land for ten or twelve years when Lord Eden
-and his Cabinet finally committed themselves to the scheme of Land
-Nationalization by which their homesteads were to pass into official
-control. That curious and inexplicable thing, the spirit of the
-peasant, had made great strides in the interval. It was found that
-the Government could not move such people about from place to place,
-as it is possible to do with the urban poor in the reconstruction of
-streets or the destruction of slums. It was not a thing like moving
-pawns, but a thing like pulling up plants; and plants that had already
-struck their roots very deep. In short, the Government, which had
-adopted a policy commonly called Socialist from motives that were in
-fact very conservative, found themselves confronted with the same
-peasant resistance as brought the Bolshevist Government in Russia to
-a standstill. And when Lord Eden and his Cabinet put in motion the
-whole modern machinery of militarism and coercion to crush the little
-experiment, he found himself confronted with a rural rising such as
-has not been known in England since the Middle Ages.
-
-“It is said that the men of the Long Bow carried their mediæval
-symbolism so far as to wear Lincoln green as their uniform when they
-retired to the woods in the manner of Robin Hood. It is certain that
-they did employ the weapon after which they were named; and curiously
-enough, as will be seen, by no means without effect. But it must be
-clearly understood that when the new agrarian class took to the woods
-like outlaws, they did not feel in the least like robbers. They hardly
-even felt like rebels. From their point of view at least, they were
-and had long been the lawful owners of their own fields, and the
-officials who came to confiscate were the robbers. Therefore when Lord
-Eden proclaimed Nationalization, they turned out in thousands as their
-fathers would have gone out against pirates or wolves.
-
-“The Government acted with great promptitude. It instantly voted
-£50,000 to Mr. Rosenbaum Low, the expenditure of which was wisely
-left to his discretion at so acute a crisis, with no more than the
-understanding that he should take a thorough general survey of the
-situation. He proved worthy of the trust; and it was with the gravest
-consideration and sense of responsibility that he selected Mr. Leonard
-Kramp, the brilliant young financier, from all his other nephews to
-take command of the forces in the field. In the field, however,
-fortune is well known to be somewhat more incalculable; and all the
-intelligence and presence of mind that had enabled Kramp to postpone
-the rush on the Potosi Bank were not sufficient to balance the
-accidental possession by Crane and Pierce of an elementary knowledge of
-strategy.
-
-“Before considering the successes obtained by these commanders in
-the rather rude fashion of warfare which they were forced to adopt,
-it must be noted, of course, that even on their side there were also
-scientific resources of a kind; and an effective if eccentric kind.
-The scientific genius of Bellew Blair had equipped his side with many
-secret processes affecting aviation and aeronautics, and it is the
-peculiarity of this extraordinary man that his secret processes really
-remained for a considerable time secret. For he had not told them
-to anybody with any intention of making any money out of them. This
-quixotic and visionary behaviour contrasted sharply with the shrewd
-good sense of the great business men who knew that publicity is the
-soul of business. For some time past they had successfully ignored the
-outworn sentimental prejudice that had prevented soldiers and sailors
-from advertising the best methods of defeating the enemy; and we can
-all recall those brilliantly coloured announcements which used to
-brighten so many hoardings in those days, ‘Sink in Smith’s Submarine;
-Pleasure Trips for Patriots.’ Or ‘Duffin’s Portable Dug-Out Makes War
-a Luxury.’ Advertisement cannot fail to effect its aim; the name of
-an aeroplane that had been written on the sky in pink and pea-green
-lights could not but become a symbol of the conquest of the air; and
-the patriotic statesman, deeply considering what sort of battleship
-might best defend his country’s coasts, was insensibly and subtly
-influenced by the number of times that he had seen its name repeated on
-the steps of a moving staircase at an Imperial Exhibition. Nor could
-there be any doubt about the brilliant success that attended these
-scientific specialities so long as their operations were confined to
-the market. The methods of Commander Blair were in comparison private,
-local, obscure and lacking any general recognition; and by a strange
-irony it was a positive advantage to this nameless and secretive crank
-that he had never advertised his weapons until he used them. He had
-paraded a number of merely fanciful balloons and fireworks for a jest;
-but the secrets to which he attached importance he had hidden in cracks
-of the Welsh mountains with a curious and callous indifference to the
-principles of commercial distribution and display. He could not in any
-case have conducted operations on a large scale, being deficient in
-that capital, the lack of which has so often been fatal to inventors;
-and had made it useless for a man to discover a machine unless he
-could also discover a millionaire. But it cannot be denied that when
-his machine was brought into operation it was always operative, even
-to the point of killing the millionaire who might have financed it.
-For the millionaire had so persistently cultivated the virtues of
-self-advertisement that it was difficult for him to become suddenly
-unknown and undistinguished, even in scenes of conflict where he most
-ardently desired to do so. There was a movement on foot for treating
-all millionaires as non-combatants, as being treasures belonging alike
-to all nations, like the Cathedrals or the Parthenon. It is said that
-there was even an alternative scheme for camouflaging the millionaire
-by the pictorial methods that can disguise a gun as a part of the
-landscape; and that Captain Pierce devoted much eloquence to persuading
-Mr. Rosenbaum Low how much better it would be for all parties if his
-face could be made to melt away into the middle distance or take on the
-appearance of a blank wall or a wooden post.”
-
-“The extraordinary thing is,” interrupted Pierce, who had been
-listening eagerly, “that he said I was personal. Just at the moment
-when I was trying to make him most _im_personal, when I was trying to
-wave away all personal features that could come between us, he actually
-said I was personal.”
-
-Hood went on reading as if nobody had spoken. “In truth the successes
-of Blair’s instruments revealed a fallacy in the common commercial
-argument. We talk of a competition between two kinds of soap or two
-kinds of jam or cocoa, but it is a competition in purchase and not in
-practice. We do not make two men eat two kinds of jam and then observe
-which wears the most radiant smile of satisfaction. We do not give two
-men two kinds of cocoa and note which endures it with most resignation.
-But we do use two guns directly against each other; and in the case of
-Blair’s methods the less advertised gun was the better. Nevertheless
-his scientific genius could only cover a corner of the field; and a
-great part of the war must be considered as a war in the open country
-of a much more primitive and sometimes almost prehistoric kind.
-
-“It is admitted of course by all students that the victories of Crane
-and Pierce were gross violations of strategic science. The victors
-themselves afterwards handsomely acknowledged the fact; but it was then
-too late to repair the error. In order to understand it, however, it is
-necessary to grasp the curious condition into which so many elements
-of social life had sunk in the time just preceding the outbreak.
-It was this strange social situation which rendered the campaign a
-contradiction to so many sound military maxims.
-
-“For instance, it is a recognized military maxim that armies depend
-upon roads. But anyone who had noticed the conditions that were
-already beginning to appear in the London streets as early as 1924
-will understand that a road was something less simple and static
-than the Romans imagined. The Government had adopted everywhere in
-their road-making the well-known material familiar to us all from the
-advertisements by the name of ‘Nobumpo,’ thereby both insuring the
-comfort of travellers and rewarding a faithful supporter by placing
-a large order with Mr. Hugg. As several members of the Government
-themselves held shares in ‘Nobumpo’ their enthusiastic co-operation
-in the public work was assured. But, as has no doubt been observed
-everywhere, it is one of the many advantages of ‘Nobumpo,’ as
-preserving that freshness of surface so agreeable to the pedestrian,
-that the whole material can be (and is) taken up and renewed every
-three months, for the comfort of travellers and the profit and
-encouragement of trade. It so happened that at the precise moment
-of the outbreak of hostilities all the country roads, especially in
-the west, were as completely out of use as if they had been the main
-thoroughfares of London. This in itself tended to equalize the chances
-or even to increase them in favour of a guerilla force, such as that
-which had disappeared into the woods and was everywhere moving under
-the cover of the trees. Under modern conditions, it was found that by
-carefully avoiding roads, it was still more or less possible to move
-from place to place.
-
-“Again, another recognized military fact is the fact that the bow
-is an obsolete weapon. And nothing is more irritating to a finely
-balanced taste than to be killed with an obsolete weapon, especially
-while persistently pulling the trigger of an efficient weapon,
-without any apparent effect. Such was the fate of the few unfortunate
-regiments which ventured to advance into the forests and fell under
-showers of arrows from trackless ambushes. For it must be remembered
-that the conditions of this extraordinary campaign entirely reversed
-the normal military rule about the essential military department of
-supply. Mechanical communications theoretically accelerate supply,
-while the supply of a force cut loose and living on the country is
-soon exhausted. But the mechanical factor also depends upon a moral
-factor. Ammunition would on normal occasions have been produced with
-unequalled rapidity by Poole’s Process and brought up with unrivalled
-speed in Blinker’s Cars; but not at the moment when riotous employees
-were engaged in dipping Poole repeatedly in a large vat at the factory
-or in the quieter conditions of the countryside, where various tramps
-were acquiring squatters’ rights in Blinker’s Cars, accidentally
-delayed upon their journey. Everywhere the same thing happened; just
-as the great manufacturer failed to keep his promise to the workers
-who produced munitions, so the petty officials driving the lorries had
-failed to keep their promise to loafers and vagrants who had helped
-them out of temporary difficulties; and the whole system of supply
-broke down upon a broken word. On the other hand, the supply of the
-outlaws was in a sense almost infinite. With the woodcutters and the
-blacksmiths on their side, they could produce their own rude mediæval
-weapons everywhere. It was in vain that Professor Hake delivered a
-series of popular lectures, proving to the lower classes that in
-the long run it would be to their economic advantage to be killed
-in battle. Captain Pierce is reported to have said: ‘I believe the
-Professor is a botanist as well as an economist; but as a botanist he
-has not yet discovered that guns do not grow on trees. Bows and arrows
-do.’
-
-“But the incident which history will have most difficulty in
-explaining, and which it may perhaps refer to the region of myth or
-romance, is the crowning victory commonly called the Battle of the
-Bows. It was indeed originally called ‘The Battle of the Bows of God’;
-in reference to some strangely fantastic boast, equally strangely
-fulfilled, that is said to have been uttered by the celebrated Parson
-White, a sort of popular chaplain who seems to have been the Friar Tuck
-of this new band of Robin Hood. Coming on a sort of embassy to Sir
-Horace Hunter, this clergyman is said to have threatened the Government
-with something like a miracle. When rallied about the archaic sport of
-the Long Bow, he replied: ‘Yes, we have long bows and we shall have
-longer bows; the longest bows the world has ever seen; bows taller
-than houses; bows given to us by God Himself and big enough for His
-gigantic angels.’
-
-“The whole business of this battle, historic and decisive as it was, is
-covered with some obscurity, like that cloud of storm that hung heavy
-upon the daybreak of that gloomy November day. Had anyone been present
-with the Government forces who was well acquainted with the western
-valley in which they were operating, such a person could not have
-failed to notice that the very landscape looked different; looked new
-and abnormal. Dimly as it could be traced through the morning twilight,
-the very line of the woodland against the sky would have shown him a
-new shape; a deformity like a hump. But the plans had all been laid
-out in London long before in imitation of that foresight, fixity of
-purpose, and final success that will always be associated with the last
-German Emperor. It was enough for them that there was a wood of some
-sort marked on the map, and they advanced towards it, low and crouching
-as its entrance appeared to be.
-
-“Then something happened, which even those who saw it and survived
-cannot describe. The dark trees seemed to spring up to twice their
-height as in a nightmare. In the half-dark the whole wood seemed to
-rise from the earth like a rush of birds and then to turn over in
-mid-air and come towards the invaders like a roaring wave. Some such
-dim and dizzy sight they saw; but many of them at least saw little
-enough afterwards. Simultaneously with the turning of this wheel of
-waving trees, rocks seemed to rain down out of heaven; beams and stones
-and shafts and missiles of all kinds, flattening out the advancing
-force as under a pavement produced by a shower of paving-stones. It
-is asserted that some of the countrymen cunning in woodcraft, in the
-service of the Long Bow, had contrived to fit up a tree as a colossal
-catapult; calculating how to bend back the boughs and sometimes even
-the trunks to the breaking-point, and gaining a huge and living
-resilience with their release. If this story is true, it is certainly
-an appropriate conclusion to the career of the Long Bow and a rather
-curious fulfilment of the visionary vaunt of Parson White when he said
-that the bows would be big enough for giants, and that the maker of the
-bows was God.”
-
-“Yes,” interrupted the excitable White, “and do you know what he said
-to me when I first said it?”
-
-“What who said when you said what?” asked Hood patiently.
-
-“I mean that fellow Hunter,” replied the clergyman. “That varnished
-society doctor turned politician. Do you know what he said when I told
-him we would get our bows from God?”
-
-Owen Hood paused in the act of lighting a cigar.
-
-“Yes,” he said grimly. “I believe I can tell you exactly what he said.
-I’ve watched him off and on for twenty years. I bet he began by saying:
-‘I don’t profess to be a religious man.’”
-
-“Right, quite right,” cried the cleric bounding upon his chair in a
-joyous manner, “that’s exactly how he began. ‘I don’t profess to be
-a religious man, but I trust I have some reverence and good taste. I
-don’t drag religion into politics.’ And I said: ‘No, I don’t think you
-do.’”
-
-A moment after, he bounded, as it were, in a new direction. “And
-that reminds me of what I came about,” he cried. “Enoch Oates, your
-American friend, drags religion into politics all right; only it’s a
-rather American sort of religion. He’s talking about a United States
-of Europe and wants to introduce you to a Lithuanian Prophet. It seems
-this Lithuanian party has started a movement for a Universal Peasant
-Republic or World State of Workers on the Land; but at present he’s
-only got as far as Lithuania. But he seems inclined to pick up England
-on the way, after the unexpected success of the English agrarian party.”
-
-“What’s the good of talking to me about a World State,” growled Hood.
-“Didn’t I say I preferred a Heptarchy?”
-
-“Don’t you understand?” interrupted Hilary Pierce excitedly. “What
-can we have to do with international republics? We can turn England
-upside-down if we like; but it’s England that we like, whichever
-way up. Why, our very names and phrases, the very bets and jokes in
-which the whole thing began, will never be translated. It takes an
-Englishman to eat his hat; I never heard of a Spaniard threatening to
-eat his sombrero, or a Chinaman to chew his pigtail. You can only set
-the Thames on fire; you cannot set the Tiber or the Ganges on fire,
-because the habit of speech has never been heard of. What’s the good of
-talking about white elephants in countries where they are only white
-elephants? Go and say to a Frenchman, ‘_Pour mon château, je le trouve
-un elephant blanc_’ and he will send two Parisian alienists to look
-at you seriously, like a man who says that his motor-car is a green
-giraffe. There is no point in telling Czecho-Slovakian pigs to fly, or
-Jugo-Slavonic cows to jump over the moon. Why, the unhappy Lithuanian
-would be bewildered to the point of madness by our very name. There
-is no reason to suppose that he and his countrymen talk about a Long
-Bowman when they mean a liar. We talk about tall stories, but a tall
-story may mean a true story in colloquial Lithuanian.”
-
-“Tall stories are true stories sometimes, I hope,” said Colonel Crane,
-“and people don’t believe ’em. But people’ll say that was a very tall
-story about the tall trees throwing darts and stones. Afraid it’ll come
-to be a bit of a joke.”
-
-“All our battles began as jokes and they will end as jokes,” said Owen
-Hood, staring at the smoke of his cigar as it threaded its way towards
-the sky in grey and silver arabesque. “They will linger only as faintly
-laughable legends, if they linger at all; they may pass an idle hour or
-fill an empty page; and even the man who tells them will not take them
-seriously. It will all end in smoke like the smoke I am looking at; in
-eddying and topsy-turvy patterns hovering for a moment in the air. And
-I wonder how many, who may smile or yawn over them, will realize that
-where there was smoke there was fire?”
-
-There was a silence; then Colonel Crane stood up, a solitary figure
-in his severe and formal clothes, and gravely said farewell to his
-hostess. With the failing afternoon light he knew that his own wife,
-who was a well-known artist, would be abandoning her studio work, and
-he always looked forward to a talk with her before dinner, which was
-often a more social function. Nevertheless, as he approached his old
-home a whim induced him to delay the meeting for a few minutes and to
-walk around to his old kitchen-garden, where his old servant Archer was
-still leaning on a spade, as in the days before the Flood.
-
-So he stood for a moment amid a changing world exactly as he had stood
-on that distant Sunday morning at the beginning of all these things.
-The South Sea idol still stood at the corner; the scarecrow still wore
-the hat that he had sacrificed; the cabbages still looked green and
-solid like the cabbage he had once dug up, digging up so much along
-with it.
-
-“Queer thing,” he said, “how true it is what Hilary once said about
-acting an allegory without knowing it. Never had a notion of what I
-was doing when I picked up a cabbage and wore it for a wager. Damned
-awkward position, but I never dreamed I was being martyred for a
-symbol. And the right symbol too, for I’ve lived to see Britannia
-crowned with cabbage. All very well to say Britannia ruled the waves;
-it was the land she couldn’t rule, her own land, and it was heaving
-like earthquakes. But while there’s cabbage there’s hope. Archer,
-my friend, this is the moral: any country that tries to do without
-cabbages is done for. And even in war you often fight as much with
-cabbages as cannon balls.”
-
-“Yes, sir,” said Archer respectfully; “would you be wanting another
-cabbage now, sir?”
-
-Colonel Crane repressed a slight shudder. “No, thank you; no, thank
-you,” he said hastily. Then he muttered as he turned away: “I don’t
-mind revolutions so much, but I wouldn’t go through that again.”
-
-And he passed swiftly round his house, of which the windows began to
-show the glow of kindled lamps, and went in to his wife.
-
-Archer was left alone in the garden, tidying up after his work and
-shifting the potted shrubs; a dark and solitary figure as sunset and
-twilight sank all around the enclosure like soft curtains of grey with
-a border of purple; and the windows, as yet uncurtained and full of
-lamplight, painted patterns of gold on the lawns and flagged walks
-without. It was perhaps appropriate that he should remain alone and
-apart; for he alone in all these changes had remained quite unchanged.
-It was perhaps fitting that his figure should stand in a dark outline
-against the darkening scene; for the mystery of his immutable
-respectability remains more of a riddle than all the riot of the rest.
-No revolution could revolutionize Mr. Archer. Attempts had been made
-to provide so excellent a gardener with a garden of his own; with a
-farm of his own, in accordance with the popular policy of the hour. But
-he would not adapt himself to the new world; nor would he hasten to
-die out, as was his duty on evolutionary principles. He was merely a
-survival; but he showed a perplexing disposition to survive.
-
-Suddenly the lonely gardener realized that he was not alone. A face
-had appeared above the hedge, gazing at him with blue eyes dreaming
-yet burning; a face with something of the tint and profile of Shelley.
-It was impossible that Mr. Archer should have heard of such a person
-as Shelley: fortunately he recognized the visitor as a friend of his
-master.
-
-“Forgive me if I am mistaken, Citizen Archer,” said Hilary Pierce
-with pathetic earnestness, “but it seems to me that you are not
-swept along with the movement; that a man of your abilities has been
-allowed to stand apart, as it were, from the campaign of the Long
-Bow. And yet how strange! Are you not Archer? Does not your very name
-rise up and reproach you? Ought you not to have shot more arrows or
-told more tarradiddles than all the rest? Or is there perhaps a more
-elemental mystery behind your immobility, like that of a statue in
-the garden? Are you indeed the god of the garden, more beautiful than
-this South Sea idol and more respectable than Priapus? Are you in no
-mortal sense an Archer? Are you perhaps Apollo, serving this military
-Admetus; successfully, yes, successfully, hiding your radiance from
-me?” He paused for a reply, and then lowered his voice as he resumed:
-“Or are you not rather that other Archer whose shafts are not shafts
-of death but of life and fruitfulness; whose arrows plant themselves
-like little flowering trees; like the little shrubs you are planting in
-this garden? Are you he that gives the sunstroke not in the head but
-the heart; and have you stricken each of us in turn with the romance
-that has awakened us for the revolution? For without that spirit of
-fruitfulness and the promise of the family, these visions would indeed
-be vain. Are you in truth the God of Love; and has your arrow stung and
-startled each of us into telling his story? I will not call you Cupid,”
-he said with a slight air of deprecation or apology, “I will not call
-you Cupid, Mr. Archer, for I conceive you as no pagan deity, but rather
-as that image clarified and spiritualized to a symbol almost Christian,
-as he might have appeared to Chaucer or to Botticelli. Nay, it was you
-that, clad in no heathen colours, but rather in mediæval heraldry,
-blew a blast on his golden trumpet when Beatrice saluted Dante on the
-bridge. Are you indeed that Archer, O Archer, and did you give each one
-of us his Vita Nuova?”
-
-“No, sir,” said Mr. Archer.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Thus does the chronicler of the League of the Long Bow come to the
-end of his singularly unproductive and unprofitable labours, without,
-perhaps, having yet come to the beginning. The reader may have once
-hoped, perhaps, that the story would be like the universe; which when
-it ends, will explain why it ever began. But the reader has long been
-sleeping, after the toils and trials of his part in the affair; and the
-writer is too tactful to ask at how early a stage of his story-telling
-that generally satisfactory solution of all our troubles was found.
-He knows not if the sleep has been undisturbed, or in that sleep what
-dreams may come, if there has been cast upon it any shadow of the
-shapes in his own very private and comfortable nightmare; turrets clad
-with the wings of morning or temples marching over dim meadows as
-living monsters, or swine plumed like cherubim or forests bent like
-bows, or a fiery river winding through a dark land. Images are in
-their nature indefensible, if they miss the imagination of another;
-and the foolish scribe of the Long Bow will not commit the last folly
-of defending his dreams. He at least has drawn a bow at a venture and
-shot an arrow into the air; and he has no intention of looking for it
-in oaks, all over the neighbourhood, or expecting to find it still
-sticking in a mortal and murderous manner in the heart of a friend.
-His is only a toy bow; and when a boy shoots with such a bow, it is
-generally very difficult to find the arrow--or the boy.
-
-
-THE END
-
-
-
-
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