THE VICTORIAN AND THE ARROW
The arrow that had entered the summer-house with a sound like song awakened the worthy proprietor of the place to a world without which had been entirely transformed. Why it had been transformed, and what was the nature of the transformation, he found it sufficiently bewildering to discover; but it is almost equally bewildering to describe. It began, in a sense, with the isolated insanity of one man; yet it was almost equally due, by a not uncommon paradox, to the equally isolated sanity of one woman.
Mr. Herne, the librarian, had positively and finally refused to change his clothes.
“Well I can’t,” he cried in despair. “I simply can’t. I should feel like a fool, just as if–.”
“Well,” asked Rosamund regarding him with round eyes.
“I should feel as if I were in fancy dress,” he said. Rosamund was less impatient than might have been expected.
“Do you mean,” she asked very slowly, as if she were thinking things out, “that you find you feel more natural in those things?”
“Why, of course,” he cried with a sort of delight. “Why, they are more natural. Lots of things are really more natural, though I’ve never had them in my life. It’s natural to hold your head up, but I never did it before. I used to put my hands in my trousers’ pockets and somehow that seems to mean standing always with a sort of a stoop. Now I put my hands in my belt and it makes me feel ten inches taller. Why, look at this spear.”
He had a habit of walking about with the boar-spear which King Richard had carried in his capacity of forester; and he now planted the staff in the grass to bring it to her attention, though it was very literally as plain as a pike-staff.
“The minute you begin to carry a thing of this sort,” he cried, “you realise at once why men generally used to carry long poles of one sort or another; spears or pikes or pilgrims’ staffs, or pastoral staffs. You can hold them at arm’s length and then throw your head back as if it wore a crest. You have to lean down to the little modern walking-sticks in order to lean on them; as if you were leaning on a crutch, and so you are. The whole of this world of ours is leaning on a crutch, because it is a cripple.”
Then he stopped abruptly and looked at her with a sort of sudden timidity.
“But you . . . I was just thinking you ought to walk about with a sceptre like a spear . . . but, of course . . . if you really disapprove of it all–.”
“I’m not sure,” she answered in her slow and slightly perplexed manner, which contrasted occasionally with her usual voluble efficiency, “I’m not perfectly sure I do disapprove of it.”
He seemed to experience a silent shock of relief, not perhaps very easy to explain. But indeed this was the element in his demeanour which is least easily explained. For all his lifted head and leonine demeanour in moments of abstraction, for all the fixity of his attitude or antic, he had not any air of impudence or even, in the ordinary sense, of defiance. He was simply embarrassed, or rather paralysed, in the presence of his own old clothes. In short he had precisely the same attitude about getting out of his green costume that he had once had about getting into it.
When Rosamund had swept in her swift way across the lawn to the little group where Herne was arguing with Braintree, everyone in the world, including the two distracted disputants, would have expected her to dash into nothing the whole nonsensical dispute. She might have been expected to tell the librarian to run and change his clothes at once, like a naughty little boy who had fallen in a pond. But the quaint and almost fabulous creatures called human souls do not always, or perhaps even often, do what is expected of them. If any sensible person can be supposed to have foreseen all this crazy tale, he would have had no doubt about which of the two women involved would have been more impatient with its craziness. The sensible man would have said that Olive Ashley, with her hobby of medievalism, would have understood even a rather mad medievalist; whereas anyone so modern as her red-haired friend would not even have stopped to ask whether it was medievalism, in face of the obvious fact that it was madness. But then no sensible man would ever have believed that it would happen at all.
In any case the sensible man would have been wrong, as he often is. Olive always had her own dreams: but Rosamund’s heart hungered after two things, simplification and action. Her thinking was slow; so she liked simplicity. Her impulses were swift; so she liked action.
Rosamund Severne in a bodily sense was born worthy of a crown; and even in a biographical sense under the shadow of a coronet. It was her fate to move against a magnificent background of river and terraced hills and the ruins of a historic place, and the medieval masquerade she had assumed seemed altogether fitted to her presence. To the visionary eyes of the librarian, she appeared to be equally a princess in that costume or in a more conventional one. But these accidents of birth and even of beauty are very misleading in psychology. If Mr. Herne had possessed more knowledge of the world, he would have recognised a type to be seen in very different surroundings. The great green valley and the great grey abbey house would have faded from his sight and he would have seen in their place desks and typewriters and rows of very dull works of reference. He would have seen in that square face and those grave and honest eyes a type that is very modern and very variously distributed in the modern world. That young woman is to be found in many places where she is wanted to support the wavering unworldliness of men like Mr. Herne. As Secretary to the Submarine Colonisation Company, she explains firmly to a long procession of inquirers that there is room in the sea for more men that ever went into it. As Lady Manager of the Elastic Pavements Society, she knows the whole case for this essential reform, and can show how it eliminates the necessity for better boots or a country life. The movement for proving that “Paradise Lost” was written by Charles II owes its wide popularity entirely to her energy and efficiency. The arrangement by which the tops of top-hats can be lifted with a string, for purposes of ventilation, would never have reached its present universal success, if there had not been one sane person in the office. In all these positions she has the same powerful simplicity and the same sincerity in following out one idea at a time. In all these positions she is very conscientious and very unscrupulous.
It was characteristic of Rosamund that she had always been not only bewildered but wearied by the broadmindedness, or rather the indiscriminate intellectual hospitality of a man like Douglas Murrel. To her it appeared mere vagueness and emptiness and absence of object. She could never comprehend how he could be at once an intimate friend of Olive and her medievalism and of Braintree and his Bolshevism. She wanted somebody who would do something; and Murrel absolutely refused to do anything. But when somebody was really ready to do something, she was so pleased that she rather neglected to criticise what it was that he was going to do.
Quite suddenly, and perhaps accidentally, there had become clear to her very single eye something like a ray of light that she could follow; something that she could understand. Doubtless she understood it better because it was linked up in a loose fashion with the traditions that she had been taught from childhood to preserve. She had never bothered about her father’s taste in heraldry; she had not even seen very much of her father. But just as she was glad that her father was there, she was glad the heraldry was there. People who have that sort of historical support always remember it, if only in their subconsciousness. Anyhow, the obvious inference was incorrect, and people soon began to say that she was actually encouraging the librarian in his capacity of lunatic.
It is almost needless to say that the daughter of Lord Seawood moved about trailing clouds of glory in the form of crowds of young men. She had indeed a threefold claim to that sort of popularity. She was an heiress; but it is due to them to say that many of the more chivalrous admired her not because she was an heiress but because she was beautiful. She was beautiful, but it is due to her to say that many of the more rational admired her not because she was a beauty but because she was a good sort; and more especially what they called a good sport. It followed, therefore that where she led many would follow, even if she led them a dance quite different from the dances then in fashion. Thus there grew up, half in jest and yet more and more in earnest, a new fashionable “medievalism”; a chase in which all the young men followed the lady who followed the librarian. And because there was a certain candour of calf-love about it, of the moon-calf who is not ashamed to cry for the moon, it had something in it of the sincerity of youth and springtime. It was a romance as well as a rag. The young men became in a manner poets, if very minor poets. With the help of Herne as a scholar and Rosamund as a vigorous stage-manager, they filled their lines with emblems and ensigns and processions, even more defiant of modernity than the theatrical dress which they had dropped and Herne had retained. The young men were especially fascinated by the notion of reviving the use of the bow; possibly with a subconscious memory of the arrows of the god of love. Perhaps it was some foolish association of Valentine’s that started the game of sending arrows as messengers of welcome or of war.
Archery was a fashion in the Victorian time; and many Victorian ladies and gentlemen may have hovered about the lawns of Seawood Abbey, engaged in that graceful sport; many may even have revisited the scene as mildly astonished ghosts in long whiskers and peg-top trousers or in cloudy crinolines swaying and floating like balloons. Many distinguished Victorian characters had doubtless honoured the amusement; but they did it within certain visible Victorian limitations. They shot their arrows correctly at targets and not (unaccountably) at top-hats. They used but few of those giant gestures that have belonged in the past to the great bows of the heroes. Sir Robert Peel, if prudent as Ulysses, did not turn, saying, “Now I will shoot at another mark,” and transfix with his shaft the highly decorated waistcoat of Mr. Disraeli. It is nowhere recorded that Lord Derby balanced an apple on the top of the top-hat of Lord Stanley, and then grimly informed the Prime Minister (let us say Lord Aberdeen) that he was keeping another arrow for higher political uses. Lord Palmerston, though actually known by the nick-name of Cupid, did not attract the attention of such ladies as he favoured by transfixing their Victorian bonnets in this airy fashion. Lord Shaftesbury seldom appeared in the character and costume of the archer on the Shaftesbury Fountain; and it is an error to suppose that he is there represented. Above all, it certainly never occurred to the celebrated Rowland Hill that shooting arrows about in all directions might be made a substitute for the Penny Post. There was, therefore, no real historical precedent for the state of affairs that began to develop rapidly at Seawood Abbey, under the influence of the escaped librarian.
This last idea, of conveying casual communications to persons at some little distance, by sending a winged missile singing past their heads or crashing into their windows, seemed especially to have taken Mr. Herne’s fancy; and it was by this means that he and his misguided group of sympathisers (who were beginning to enter into the fun of the thing) delivered to a large number of persons their proclamation of the New Regime. To describe at length all the details involved in the New Regime would involve the transcription of a considerable number of scrolls or strips of paper, which were conveyed to the neighbours in this rapid if not efficient manner. They all bore the title of The League of the Lion; and were apparently an appeal to all persons to imitate the better qualities of King Richard the First and the Crusaders, under conditions that could not be considered favourable to the enterprise. The astonished citizen was informed that England had now reached a crisis in which moral courage alone could save her; if it were only the moral courage required to aim a bow at a venture when engaged in dropping a line to a friend. But there was a great deal more of a more sincere sort, not without a certain juvenile eloquence, protesting against that suicidal pessimism of the great reactionary who declared that the age of chivalry was past.
Needless to say, most of the people who received these missives were amused; some were annoyed; and some, strangely enough perhaps, were rather relieved and revived, as if they had seen some game of their childhood or ideal of their boyhood rise suddenly from the dead. But it cannot be said that the appeal as it stood was adapted to the typical visitors to Lord Seawood’s country seat. Noblemen and gentlemen who had come down to shoot were often quite vexed to be told by an ardent and enthusiastic person, dressed entirely in bright green, that this was the real definition of good shooting at a little place in the country. Venerable sportsmen, who considered themselves crack shots, were not soothed when the librarian patiently and kindly explained to them how cramped, how hunchbacked, how ungainly, was the crouching attitude of one holding a gun, compared with the god-like lift and leap in the figure that has just discharged an arrow, frozen as it is forever in the stillness of the Apollo Belvedere. In short, the further afield the arrows fared, the less likely it seemed that they would really have the softening effects of the arrows of the God of Love. And this seemed to reach to a remote extreme of improbability in the very last extent or extremity of their travels; when the flying herald of chivalry had actually reached so distant and impenetrable a mark as to arouse the attention of the master of the house.
As already noted, it is rather more than a metaphor to say that the news reached Lord Seawood as a bolt from the blue. The bolt came in a flash out of the blue sky of the summer into the black shadows of the summer-house. It fixed itself in the wall above the Prime Minister’s head; and before Lord Seawood had taken it in, Lord Eden had taken it out. He found attached to it a curled-up document; which the two noblemen proceeded to stare at with somewhat differing degrees of patience. It explained the necessity of a new order of voluntary nobility; and the two involuntary nobles found its exalted aristocratic tone almost terrifying. It stated the tests and trials by which a sterner conception of chivalry could be introduced into the world; though it is only justice to all concerned to say that it did not contain the word Samurai. It explained that an appeal to the ancient virtue of loyalty could alone rally mankind to the restoration of a worthy social order, such as was envisaged by the old orders of knighthood. It explained a great many other things; but from the point of view of the two elderly gentlemen in the summer-house, it did not altogether explain the arrow in the wall.
Lord Eden remained silent; indeed he seemed to be studying the document with more gravity or grim attention than might be expected. But Lord Seawood, after some abrupt ejaculations, turned by a sort of blind instinct to the doorway and the garden from which the thunderbolt had come. And there he saw, away in the middle distance, at the end of the long lawn, something that amazed him as much as a company of angels with haloes and golden wings.
They were a company of people fantastically clad in the garments of five centuries earlier; many of them were holding bows; but what hit Lord Seawood harder than any arrow was the fact that his daughter stood in the front of the whole group, in an outrageous form of attire terminating in two horns like a buffalo; and she wore a broad smile.
He had never even thought that things so close to him could go wrong– or rather go mad. He felt as if his own boots had kicked him, or as if his cravat had come to life and throttled him like a garotter.
“Good God!” he cried, “What has been happening here?”
His feelings were simply those of a connoisseur with a collection of precious china, who finds that a pack of school-boys have been letting off catapults within an inch of an incomparable blue Chinese vase. But prodigious porcelain vases of the Ming dynasty might have crashed on every side of him without arousing his attention as it was aroused now. The hobbies of men are many and strange and mysterious. And he did most deeply resent anyone damaging his collection of Prime Ministers. That summer-house in the garden was to him as sacred as any Chinese temple full of ancestors; for in it were the thin ghosts of many politicians. Many of these quiet conferences affecting the destinies of the Empire had been held in that toy hut. It was characteristic of Lord Seawood that what pleased him most was meeting public men in a private way; even a secret way. He was far too fine a gentleman himself to desire the Sunday papers to say that the Prime Minister had visited Seawood Abbey. But he went cold as death as he thought of the papers saying that the Prime Minister had visited Seawood Abbey and lost an eye.
The glance he gave at the gang of school-boys was, therefore, very cursory and, of course, entirely contemptuous. He did vaguely apprehend that one face stood out from its confused background, with a gravity that was almost ghastly. It was the high-featured and financial face of the librarian; and in comparison with it the rest were of a mixed and almost mocking sort. Some were smiling; a few were laughing; but that merely added a touch to the nobleman’s natural annoyance and disdain. It was some silly rag, of course, among Rosamund’s friends; she must have pretty rotten friends.
“I hope you are aware,” he said coldly but in a clear and loud voice, “that you have just nearly killed the Prime Minister. Under these circumstances, I think you will see the propriety of choosing some other game.”
He turned and walked back to the summer-house, having so far controlled himself with a conventional consideration for his unwelcome guests. But when he returned under the small thatched roof and saw in the shadow the pale and angular profile of the Prime Minister still poring over the scrap of paper with cold concentration, Lord Seawood’s fury suddenly broke out again. He felt in that frozen face the unfathomable scorn which the great mind of the great statesman must be feeling for this dirty and yet deadly practical joke. The man’s silence opened like an abyss of ice; an abyss into which apology after apology might be dropped without plumbing its depths, or awakening any answer.
“I simply don’t know what to say,” he said desperately. “I’ve half a mind to kick them all out of the house, the girl and all. . . . Anything whatever I can do. . . .”
Still the Prime Minister did not look up, but continued in a frigid manner to peruse the paper in his hand. Now and then he bent his brows a little; now and then he lifted them a little; but his tight lips never moved.
His host was suddenly struck with a sort of terror, the scope of which he could not himself follow. He thought he had offered an insult blood could not wipe out. The silence snapped his nerve and he said sharply: “For God’s sake don’t go on reading that rubbish! I know it’s damned funny; but it’s not so damned funny for me–happening in my own house. You can’t imagine I like having a guest insulted, let alone you. Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.”
“Well,” said the Prime Minister, and laid down the paper slowly on the little round table. “Well, we’ve got it at last.”
“Got what?” demanded his distracted friend.
“Our last chance,” said the Prime Minister.
There was a silence in the dark summer-house so sudden and complete that they could hear the buzzing of a fly and the distant murmur of the talk of the mutineers. The silence was merely accidental; yet something rose up in Seawood’s soul to protest against it; as if silence were making destiny and must be stopped from doing it.
“What do you mean?” he demanded sharply. “What last chance?”
“The last chance we were talking about not ten minutes ago,” replied the politician with a grim smile. “Wasn’t I talking about this very thing before it flew in at the window, like the dove with the olive branch? Wasn’t I actually saying that we must have something new because the poor old Empire has gone stale? Wasn’t I saying we wanted a new positive thing to back up against Braintree and the New Democracy? Well, then.”
“What on earth do you mean?” demanded Lord Seawood.
“I mean this thing has got to be backed up,” cried the Prime Minister, slapping the little table with a vivacity almost shocking in one of his dry and dreary demeanour. “It’s got to be backed up with horse, foot and artillery; or what’s a damn sight more important, pounds, shillings, and pence. It’s got to be backed up as we never backed anything in our lives. Lord, that a man of my age should live to see the break in the enemy’s line and the chance for a cavalry charge! It’s got to be rammed home for all it’s worth and a lot more; and the sooner we begin the better. Where are these people?”
“But do you really mean,” cried the staring Seawood, “that there’s anything to be done with fools like–”
“Suppose they are,” snapped Eden. “Am I a fool that I should fancy that anything could be done without fools?”
Lord Seawood pulled himself together; but he was still staring.
“I suppose you mean that a new policy–I can hardly say a popular policy– perhaps rather a successful anti-popular policy–”
“Both, if you like,” said the other. “Why not?”
“I should hardly have thought,” said Lord Seawood, “that the populace would be particularly interested in all this elaborate antiquarian theory about chivalry.”
“Have you ever considered,” asked the Prime Minister, looking over his shoulder, “the meaning of the word chivalry?”
“Do you mean in the derivative sense?” asked the other nobleman.
“I mean in the horse sense,” replied Eden. “What people really like is a man on a horse–and they don’t mind much if it’s a high horse. Give the people plenty of sports–tournaments, horse races– panem et circenses, my boy–that will do for a popular side to the policy. If we could mobilise all that goes to make the Derby we could fight the Deluge.”
“I begin,” said Seawood, “to have some sort of wild notion of what you mean.”
“I mean,” answered his friend, “that the Democracy cares a damn sight more about the inequality of horses than about the equality of men.”
And stepping across the threshold he strode across the garden with a step almost startlingly rejuvenated; and before his host had even moved he heard the Prime Minister’s voice in the distance lifted like a trumpet, like the voice of the great orators of fifty years ago.
Thus did the librarian who refused to change his clothes contrive to change his country. For out of this small and grotesque incident came all that famous revolution, or reaction, which transformed the face of English society, and checked and changed the course of its history. Like all revolutions effected by Englishmen, and especially revolutions effected by Conservatives, it was very careful to preserve those powers that were already powerless. Some Conservatives of a rather senile sort were even heard still talking about the Constitutional characters of the complete subversal of the Constitution. It was allowed to retain, indeed it was supposed to support, the old monarchical pattern of this country. But in practice the new power was divided between three or four subordinate monarchs ruling over large provinces of England, like magnified Lords-Lieutenant; and called according to the romance or affectation of the movement Kings-at-Arms. They held indeed a position with something of the sanctity and symbolic immunity of a herald; but they also possessed not a few of the powers of a king. They were in command of the bands of young men called Orders of Chivalry, which served as a sort of yeomanry or militia. They held courts and administered high and low justice in accordance with Mr. Herne’s researches into medieval law. It was something more than a pageant; yet there passed into it much of that popular passion which at one time filled half the towns and villages in England with pageants; the hunger of a populace which Puritanism and Industrialism had so long starved for the feast of the eyes and the fancy.
As it was more than a pageant, it was more than a fashion; but it had its stages and turning points like a fashion. Perhaps the chief turning point was the moment when Mr. Julian Archer (now Sir Julian Archer under the accolade of one of the new orders of knighthood) had seriously discovered that he must lead the fashion or be left behind it. All of us who have observed changes passing over a society know that indeterminate and yet determining instant. It applies to everything from women being allowed votes to women not being allowed hair. It was marked in the Suffragette movement, which many middle-class women had long supported, when great ladies began to take it up. It marks the transition from the time when it is the new fashion to the time when it is the fashion. Up to that moment examples may be numerous, but they are still notable; after that moment it is the neglect that is notable. That is the sort of moment, in every movement, at which Sir Julian Archer appears as he appeared now; a knight in shining armour, ready for every perilous emprise.
Yet Sir Julian Archer was too vain not to be in a sense simple, and too simple not to be in a sense sincere. Social changes of this sort are made possible among considerable masses of people, by two ironies of human nature. The first is that almost everyman’s life has been sufficiently patchy and full of possibilities for him to remember some movement of his own mind towards what has become the movement of the time. The second is that he almost always makes a false picture of his past, and fosters a fictitious memory, whereby that detail seems in retrospect to dominate his career.
Julian Archer (as has already been faithfully recorded) had written a long time ago a very boyish sort of a boy’s adventure story about the Battle of Agincourt. It was only one of the multifarious and highly modern activities of his successful career: and had not been even one of the most successful. But with the new talk all around him, Archer began to insist more and more on his initiative in the matter.
“They wouldn’t listen to me,” he said moodily shaking his head. “Doesn’t do to be a bit too early in the field. . . . Of course, Herne’s a well-read man; it’s his business. . . . I suppose he sees practically every book that comes out. Seems as if he had sense enough to take a hint, eh, what?”
“Oh, I see,” said Olive Ashley, raising her dark eyebrows in mild surprise. “I never thought of that.”
And she reflected at once ruefully and whimsically upon her own concentrated passion of medieval things, which everybody had first derided and then imitated and then forgotten.
The case was the same with Sir Aubrey Wister, that gallant though somewhat elderly knight; for thus also had been transformed the figure of the old aesthete who pottered about drawing-rooms and praised the great Victorians who had praised the great Primitives. He talked rather more about the great Primitives and less about the great Victorians. But as he had so often in the past patronised Cimabue and said an encouraging word to Giotto and Botticelli, it was not difficult for him to persuade himself that he had been a prophet lifting up his voice in vain, and predicting the coming of Mr. Herne as the Medieval Messiah.
“My dear, sir,” he would say confidentially, “the period was one of inconceivable vandalism and vulgarity. I really don’t know how I lived through it. But I pegged away; and, as you see, my work has not been altogether fruitless . . . ahem . . . not altogether fruitless. The very patterns of their costumes would have perished; hardly a single picture from which they are taking their designs would have survived–but for my little protest. It shows what a word in time will do.”
Lord Seawood himself was affected in much the same way. Insensibly, he shifted the centre of gravity between his two hobbies. He talked a little more about his private hobby of heraldry. He talked a little less about his public hobby of Parliament. He insisted less on the greatness of Lord Palmerston and more on the greatness of the Black Prince, from whom the Seawood family claimed descent. And in him also this touching belief grew silently in the shade; the sense that he had himself had a lot to do with the founding of the League of the Lion and the resurrection of Richard Coeur-de-Lion. He felt this all the more vividly because of the institution of the Shield of Honour, which was one of the latest and proudest additions to the scheme and had been inaugurated in his own park.
In all this change of climate, Herne was himself unchanged. Like many idealists, he was of a type that would have been content in complete obscurity, but could not measure or realise the scope of complete fame. If he could take one stride to the end of the park, he might as well take another stride to the end of the world. He did not see the world to scale. He had forced all his commonplace companions back into their masquerade clothes and compelled them to play the masque until they died. By hanging on himself to his Robin Hood bow and boar spear, he had come to find himself not left behind by the company but marching in front of it. The change from that loneliness to that leadership did seem to him a thrilling and triumphal thing. But the change from the leadership of that house-party to the leadership of all England hardly seemed to him a change at all. For indeed there was in that house-party one face that had fallen into the habit of watching for all changes, like the changes of sunset and dawn.