TALES OF THE LONG BOW

TALES OF THE
LONG BOW

BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
AUTHOR OF
“THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER
BROWN,� “HERETICS,� ETC.

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

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.