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

  CHAPTER                                                       PAGE

     I THE UNPRESENTABLE APPEARANCE OF COLONEL CRANE               3

    II THE IMPROBABLE SUCCESS OF MR. OWEN HOOD                    39

   III THE UNOBTRUSIVE TRAFFIC OF CAPTAIN PIERCE                  81

    IV THE ELUSIVE COMPANION OF PARSON WHITE                     113

     V THE EXCLUSIVE LUXURY OF ENOCH OATES                       147

    VI THE UNTHINKABLE THEORY OF PROFESSOR GREEN                 177

   VII THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR         211

  VIII THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM OF THE LEAGUE OF THE LONG BOW      247

THE UNPRESENTABLE APPEARANCE OF COLONEL CRANE

TALES OF THE LONG BOW

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.

THE UNOBTRUSIVE TRAFFIC OF CAPTAIN PIERCE

THE UNOBTRUSIVE TRAFFIC OF CAPTAIN PIERCE

Those acquainted with Colonel Crane and Mr. Owen Hood, the lawyer, may
or may not be concerned to know that they partook of an early lunch
of eggs and bacon and beer at the inn called the Blue Boar, which
stands at the turn of a steep road scaling a wooded ridge in the West
Country. Those unacquainted with them may be content to know that the
Colonel was a sunburnt, neatly-dressed gentleman, who looked taciturn
and was; while the lawyer was a more rusty red-haired gentleman with
a long Napoleonic face, who looked taciturn and was rather talkative.
Crane was fond of good cooking; and the cooking in that secluded inn
was better than that of a Soho restaurant and immeasurably better than
that of a fashionable restaurant. Hood was fond of the legends and
less-known aspects of the English countryside; and that valley had
a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment, as if the west wind
had been snared in it and tamed into a summer air. Both had a healthy
admiration for beauty, in ladies as well as landscapes; although (or
more probably because) both were quite romantically attached to the
wives they had married under rather romantic circumstances, which are
related elsewhere for such as can wrestle with so steep a narrative.
And the girl who waited on them, the daughter of the innkeeper, was
herself a very agreeable thing to look at; she was of a slim and quiet
sort with a head that moved like a brown bird, brightly and as it
were unexpectedly. Her manners were full of unconscious dignity, for
her father, old John Hardy, was the type of old innkeeper who had the
status, if not of a gentleman, at least of a yeoman. He was not without
education and ability; a grizzled man with a keen, stubborn face that
might have belonged to Cobbett, whose _Register_ he still read on
winters’ nights. Hardy was well known to Hood, who had the same sort of
antiquarian taste in revolutions.

There was little sound in the valley or the brilliant void of sky;
the notes of birds fell only intermittently; a faint sound of tapping
came from the hills opposite where the wooded slope was broken here
and there by the bare face of a quarry, and a distant aeroplane passed
and re-passed, leaving a trail of faint thunder. The two men at lunch
took no more notice of it than if it had been a buzzing fly; but an
attentive study of the girl might have suggested that she was at least
conscious of the fly. Occasionally she looked at it, when no one was
looking at her; for the rest, she had rather a marked appearance of
not looking at it.

“Good bacon you get here,” remarked Colonel Crane.

“The best in England, and in the matter of breakfast England is the
Earthly Paradise,” replied Hood readily. “I can’t think why we should
descend to boast of the British Empire when we have bacon and eggs to
boast of. They ought to be quartered on the Royal Arms: three pigs
passant and three poached eggs on a chevron. It was bacon and eggs that
gave all that morning glory to the great English poets; it must have
been a man who had a breakfast like this who could rise with that giant
gesture: ‘Night’s candles are burnt out; and jocund day----’”

“Bacon did write Shakespeare, in fact,” said the Colonel.

“This sort of bacon did,” answered the other laughing; then, noticing
the girl within earshot, he added: “We are saying how good your bacon
is, Miss Hardy.”

“It is supposed to be very good,” she said with legitimate pride, “but
I am afraid you won’t get much more of it. People aren’t going to be
allowed to keep pigs much longer.”

“Not allowed to keep pigs!” ejaculated the Colonel in astonishment.

“By the old regulations they had to be away from the house, and we’ve
got ground enough for that, though most of the cottagers hadn’t. But
now they say the law is evaded, and the county council are going to
stop pig-keeping altogether.”

“Silly swine,” snorted the Colonel.

“The epithet is ill-chosen,” replied Hood. “Men are lower than swine
when they do not appreciate swine. But really I don’t know what the
world’s coming to. What will the next generation be like without proper
pork? And, talking about the next generation, what has become of your
young friend Pierce? He said he was coming down, but he can’t have come
by that train.”

“I think Captain Pierce is up there, sir,” said Joan Hardy in a correct
voice, as she unobtrusively withdrew.

Her tone might have indicated that the gentleman was upstairs, but her
momentary glance had been towards the blue emptiness of the sky. Long
after she was gone, Owen Hood remained staring up into it, until he saw
the aeroplane darting and wheeling like a swallow.

“Is that Hilary Pierce up there?” he inquired, “looping the loop and
playing the lunatic generally. What the devil is he doing?”

“Showing off,” said the Colonel shortly, and drained his pewter mug.

“But why should he show off to us?” asked Hood.

“He jolly well wouldn’t,” replied the Colonel. “Showing off to the
girl, of course.” Then after a pause he added: “A very nice girl.”

“A very good girl,” said Owen Hood gravely. “If there’s anything going
on, you may be sure it’s all straight and serious.”

The Colonel blinked a little. “Well, times change,” he said. “I suppose
I’m old-fashioned myself; but speaking as an old Tory, I must confess
he might do worse.”

“Yes,” replied Hood, “and speaking as an old Radical, I should say he
could hardly do better.”

While they were speaking the erratic aviator had eventually swept
earthwards towards a flat field at the foot of the slope, and was now
coming towards them. Hilary Pierce had rather the look of a poet than
a professional aviator; and though he had distinguished himself in the
war, he was very probably one of those whose natural dream was rather
of conquering the air than conquering the enemy. His yellow hair was
longer and more untidy than when he was in the army; and there was a
touch of something irresponsible in his roving blue eye. He had a vein
of pugnacity in him, however, as was soon apparent. He had paused to
speak to Joan Hardy by the rather tumble-down pig-sty in the corner,
and when he came towards the breakfast-table he seemed transfigured as
with flame.

“What’s all this infernal insane foolery?” he demanded. “Who has the
damned impudence to tell the Hardys they mustn’t keep pigs? Look here,
the time is come when we must burst up all this sort of thing. I’m
going to do something desperate.”

“You’ve been doing desperate things enough for this morning,” said
Hood. “I advise you to take a little desperate luncheon. Do sit down,
there’s a good fellow, and don’t stamp about like that.”

“No, but look here----”

Pierce was interrupted by Joan Hardy, who appeared quietly at his elbow
and said demurely to the company: “There’s a gentleman here who asks if
he may be pardoned for speaking to you.”

The gentleman in question stood some little way behind in a posture
that was polite but so stiff and motionless as almost to affect the
nerves. He was clad in so complete and correct a version of English
light holiday attire that they felt quite certain he was a foreigner.
But their imaginations ranged the Continent in vain in the attempt
to imagine what sort of foreigner. By the immobility of his almost
moonlike face, with its faintly bilious tinge, he might almost have
been a Chinaman. But when he spoke, they could instantly locate the
alien accent.

“Very much distressed to butt in, gentlemen,” he said, “but this young
lady allows you are first-class academic authorities on the sights of
this locality. I’ve been mouching around trying to hit the trail of an
antiquity or two, but I don’t seem to know the way to pick it up. If
you’d be so kind as to put me wise about the principal architectural
styles and historic items of this section, I’d be under a great
obligation.”

As they were a little slow in recovering from their first surprise, he
added patiently:

“My name is Enoch B. Oates, and I’m pretty well known in Michigan, but
I’ve bought a little place near here; I’ve looked about this little
planet and I’ve come to think the safest and brightest place for a man
with a few dollars is the place of a squire in your fine old feudal
landscape. So the sooner I’m introduced to the more mellow mediæval
buildings the better.”

In Hilary Pierce the astonishment had given place to an ardour
bordering on ecstasy.

“Mediæval buildings! Architectural styles!” he cried enthusiastically.
“You’ve come to the right shop, Mr. Oates. I’ll show you an ancient
building, a sacred building, in an architectural style of such sublime
antiquity that you’ll want to cart it all away to Michigan, as they
tried to do with Glastonbury Abbey. You shall be privileged to see one
historic institution before you die or before all history is forgotten.”

He was walking towards the corner of the little kitchen-garden attached
to the inn, waving his arms with wild gestures of encouragement; and
the American was following him with the same stiff politeness, looking
weirdly like an automaton.

“Look on our architectural style before it perishes,” cried Pierce
dramatically, pointing to the pig-sty, which looked a rather ramshackle
affair of leaning and broken boards hung loosely together, though in
practice it was practical enough. “This, the most unmistakably mellow
of all mediæval buildings, may soon be only a memory. But when this
edifice falls England will fall, and the world will shake with the
shock of doom.”

The American had what he himself might have described as a poker face;
it was impossible to discover whether his utterances indicated the
extreme of innocence or of irony.

“And would you say,” he asked, “that this monument exemplifies the
mediæval or Gothic architectural school?”

“I should hardly call it strictly Perpendicular,” answered Pierce, “but
there is no doubt that it is Early English.”

“You would say it is antique, anyhow?” observed Mr. Oates.

“I have every reason to believe,” affirmed Pierce solemnly, “that Gurth
the Swineherd made use of this identical building. I have no doubt it
is in fact far older. The best authorities believe that the Prodigal
Son stayed here for some time, and the pigs--those noble and much
maligned animals--gave him such excellent advice that he returned to
his family. And now, Mr. Oates, they say that all that magnificent
heritage is to be swept away. But it shall not be. We shall not so
easily submit to all the vandals and vulgar tyrants who would thus tear
down our temples and our holy places. The pig-sty shall rise again in a
magnificent resurrection--larger pig-stys, loftier pig-stys, shall yet
cover the land; the towers and domes and spires of statelier and more
ideal pig-stys, in the most striking architectural styles, shall again
declare the victory of the holy hog over his unholy oppressors.”

“And meanwhile,” said Colonel Crane drily, “I think Mr. Oates had
much better begin with the church down by the river. Very fine Norman
foundations and traces of the Roman brick. The vicar understands his
church, too, and would give Mr. Oates rather more reliable information
than you do.”

A little while later, when Mr. Oates had passed on his way, the Colonel
curtly reproved his young friend.

“Bad form,” he said, “making fun of a foreigner asking for information.”

But Pierce turned on him with the same heat on his face.

“But I wasn’t making fun. I was quite serious.”

They stared at him steadily, and he laughed slightly but went on with
undiminished fire.

“Symbolical perhaps but serious,” he said. “I may seem to have been
talking a bit wildly, but let me tell you the time has come to be wild.
We’ve all been a lot too tame. I do mean, as much as I ever meant
anything, to fight for the resurrection and the return of the pig; and
he shall yet return as a wild boar that will rend the hunters.”

He looked up and his eye caught the blue heraldic shape on the
sign-board of the inn.

“And there is our wooden ensign!” he cried, pointing in the same
dramatic fashion. “We will go into battle under the banner of the Blue
Boar.”

“Loud and prolonged cheers,” said Crane politely, “and now come away
and don’t spoil the peroration. Owen wants to potter about the local
antiquities, like Mr. Oates. I’m more interested in novelties. Want to
look at that machine of yours.”

They began to descend the zig-zag pebbled path fenced and embanked with
hedges and flower-beds like a garden grown on a staircase, and at every
corner Hood had to remonstrate with the loitering youth.

“Don’t be for ever gazing back on the paradise of pigs,” he said, “or
you’ll be turned to a pillar of salt, or possibly of mustard as more
appropriate to such meat. They won’t run away yet. There are other
creatures formed by the Creator for the contemplation of man; there are
other things made by man after the pattern of the creatures, from the
great White Horses of Wessex to that great white bird on which you
yourself flew among the birds. Fine subject for a poem of the first and
last things.”

“Bird that lays rather dreadful eggs,” said Crane. “In the next war----
Why, where the deuce has he gone?”

“Pigs, pigs,” said Hood sadly. “The overpowering charm which pigs
exercise upon us at a certain time of life; when we hear their trotters
in our dreams and their little curly tails twine about us like the
tendrils of the vine----”

“Oh, bosh,” said the Colonel.

For indeed Mr. Hilary Pierce had vanished in a somewhat startling
manner, ducking under the corner of a hedge and darting up a steeper
path, over a gate and across the corner of a hayfield, where a final
bound through bursting bushes brought him on top of a low wall looking
down at the pig-sty and Miss Joan Hardy, who was calmly walking away
from it. He sprang down on to the path; the morning sun picked out
everything in clear colours like a child’s toy-book; and standing
with his hands spread out and his wisps of yellow hair brushed in
all directions by the bushes, he recalled an undignified memory of
Shock-Headed Peter.

“I felt I must speak to you before I went,” he said. “I’m going
away, not exactly on active service, but on business--on very active
business. I feel like the fellows did when they went to the war ...
and what they wanted to do first.... I am aware that a proposal over
a pig-sty is not so symbolical to some as to me, but really and truly
... I don’t know whether I mentioned it, but you may be aware that I
worship you.”

Joan Hardy was quite aware of it; but the conventionalities in her case
were like concentric castle-walls; the world-old conventions of the
countryside. There was in them the stiff beauty of old country dances
and the slow and delicate needlework of a peasantry. Of all the ladies
whose figures must be faintly traced in the tapestry of these frivolous
tales of chivalry, the most reticent and dignified was the one who was
not in the worldly sense a lady at all.

She stood looking at him in silence, and he at her; as the lift of her
head had some general suggestion of a bird, the line of her profile had
a delicate suggestion of a falcon, and her face was of the fine tint
that has no name, unless we could talk of a bright brown.

“Really, you seem in a terrible hurry,” she said. “I don’t want to be
talked to in a rush like this.”

“I apologize,” he said. “I can’t help being in a rush, but I didn’t
want you to be in a rush. I only wanted you to know. I haven’t done
anything to deserve you, but I am going to try. I’m going off to work;
I feel sure you believe in quiet steady work for a young man.”

“Are you going into the bank?” she asked innocently. “You said your
uncle was in a bank.”

“I hope all my conversation was not on that level,” he replied. And
indeed he would have been surprised if he had known how exactly she
remembered all such dull details he had ever mentioned about himself,
and how little she knew in comparison about his theories and fancies,
which he thought so much more important.

“Well,” he said with engaging frankness, “it would be an exaggeration
to say I am going into a bank; though of course there are banks and
banks. Why, I know a bank whereon the wild thyme--I beg your pardon,
I mean I know a lot of more rural and romantic occupations that are
really quite as safe as the bank. The truth is, I think of going into
the bacon trade. I think I see an opening for a brisk young man in the
ham and pork business. When you see me next I shall be travelling in
pork; an impenetrable disguise.”

“You mustn’t come here, then,” she answered. “It won’t be allowed here
by that time. The neighbours would----”

“Fear not,” he said, “I should be a commercial traveller. Oh, such a
very commercial traveller. And as for not coming here, the thing seems
quite unthinkable. You must at least let me write to you every hour or
so. You must let me send you a few presents every morning.”

“I’m sure my father wouldn’t like you to send me presents,” she said
gravely.

“Ask your father to wait,” said Pierce earnestly. “Ask him to wait till
he’s seen the presents. You see, mine will be rather curious presents.
I don’t think he’ll disapprove of them. I think he’ll approve of them.
I think he’ll congratulate me on my simple tastes and sound business
principles. The truth is, dear Joan, I’ve committed myself to a rather
important enterprise. You needn’t be frightened; I promise I won’t
trouble you again till it succeeds. I will be content that you know it
is for you I do it; and shall continue to do it, if I defy the world.”
He sprang up on the wall again and stood there staring down at her
almost indignantly.

“That anybody should forbid _you_ to keep pigs,” he cried. “That
anybody should forbid _you_ to do anything. That anybody should
dispute _your_ right to keep pet crocodiles if you like! That is the
unpardonable sin; that is the supreme blasphemy and crime against the
nature of things, which shall not go unavenged. You shall have pigs, I
say, if the skies fall and the whole world is whelmed in war.”

He disappeared like a flash behind the high bank and the wall, and Joan
went back in silence to the inn.

The first incident of the war did not seem superficially encouraging,
though the hero of it seemed by no means discouraged by it. As
reported in the police news of various papers, Hilary Patrick Pierce,
formerly of the Flying Corps, was arrested for driving pigs into the
county of Bluntshire, in contravention of the regulations made for the
public health. He seemed to have had almost as much trouble with the
pigs as with the police; but he made a witty and eloquent speech on
being arrested, to which the police and the pigs appeared to be equally
unresponsive. The incident was considered trivial and his punishment
was trifling; but the occasion was valued by some of the authorities as
giving an opportunity for the final elucidation and establishment of
the new rule.

For this purpose it was fortunate that the principal magistrate of the
bench was no less a person than the celebrated hygienist, Sir Horace
Hunter, O.B.E., M.D., who had begun life, as some may remember, as
a successful suburban doctor and had likewise distinguished himself
as an officer of health in the Thames Valley. To him indeed had been
largely due the logical extension of the existing precautions against
infection from the pig; though he was fully supported by his fellow
magistrates, one being Mr. Rosenbaum Low, millionaire and formerly
manager of Bliss and Co., and the other the young Socialist, Mr. Amyas
Minns, famous for his exposition of Shaw on the Simple Life, who sat on
the bench as a Labour alderman. All concurred in the argument of Sir
Horace, that just as all the difficulties and doubtful cases raised by
the practice of moderate drinking had been simplified by the solution
of Prohibition, so the various quarrels and evasions about swine-fever
were best met by a straightforward and simple regulation against swine.
In the very improper remarks which he offered after the trial, the
prisoner appears to have said that as his three judges were a Jew, a
vegetarian and a quack doctor on the make, he was not surprised that
they did not appreciate pork.

The next luncheon at which the three friends met was in a sufficiently
different setting; for the Colonel had invited the other two to his
club in London. It would have been almost impossible to have been that
sort of Colonel without having that sort of club. But as a matter of
fact, he very seldom went there. On this occasion it was Owen Hood who
arrived first and was by instructions escorted by a waiter to a table
in a bow window overlooking the Green Park. Knowing Crane’s military
punctuality, Hood fancied that he might have mistaken the time; and
while looking for the note of invitation in his pocket-book, he paused
for a moment upon a newspaper cutting that he had put aside as a
curiosity some days before. It was a paragraph headed “Old Ladies as
Mad Motorists,” and ran as follows:

  “An unprecedented number of cases of motorists exceeding the speed
  limit have lately occurred on the Bath Road and other western
  highways. The extraordinary feature of the case is that in so large a
  number of cases the offenders appeared to be old ladies of great
  wealth and respectability who professed to be merely taking their pugs
  and other pet animals for an airing. They professed that the health of
  the animal required much more rapid transit through the air than is
  the case with human beings.”

He was gazing at this extract with as much perplexity as on his first
perusal, when the Colonel entered with a newspaper in his hand.

“I say,” he said, “I think it is getting rather ridiculous. I’m not
a revolutionist like you; quite the reverse. But all these rules and
regulations are getting beyond all rational discipline. A little while
ago they started forbidding all travelling menageries; not, mind you,
stipulating for proper conditions for the animals, but forbidding them
altogether for some nonsense about the safety of the public. There
was a travelling circus stopped near Acton and another on the road to
Reading. Crowds of village boys must never see a lion in their lives,
because once in fifty years a lion has escaped and been caught again.
But that’s nothing to what has happened since. Now, if you please,
there is such mortal fear of infection that we are to leave the sick
to suffer, just as if we were savages. You know those new hospital
trains that were started to take patients from the hospitals down to
the health resorts. Well, they’re not to run after all, it seems, lest
by merely taking an invalid of any sort through the open country we
should poison the four winds of heaven. If this nonsense goes on, I
shall go as mad as Hilary himself.”

Hilary Pierce had arrived during this conversation and sat listening to
it with a rather curious smile. Somehow the more Hood looked at that
smile the more it puzzled him; it puzzled him as much as the newspaper
cutting in his hand. He caught himself looking from one to the other,
and Pierce smiled in a still more irritating manner.

“You don’t look so fierce and fanatical as when we last met, my young
friend,” observed Owen Hood. “Have you got tired of pigs and police
courts? These coercion acts the Colonel’s talking about would have
roused you to lift the roof off once.”

“Oh, I’m all against the new rules,” answered the young man coolly.
“I’ve been very much against them; what you might call up against them.
In fact, I’ve already broken all those new laws and a few more. Could
you let me look at that cutting for a moment?”

Hood handed it to him and he nodded, saying:

“Yes; I was arrested for that.”

“Arrested for what?”

“Arrested for being a rich and respectable old lady,” answered Hilary
Pierce; “but I managed to escape that time. It was a fine sight to see
the old lady clear a hedge and skedaddle across a meadow.”

Hood looked at him under bended brows and his mouth began to work.

“But what’s all this about the old lady having a pug or a pet or
something?”

“Well, it was very nearly a pug,” said Pierce in a dispassionate
manner. “I pointed out to everybody that it was, as it were, an
approximate pug. I asked if it was just to punish me for a small
mistake in spelling.”

“I begin to understand,” said Hood. “You were again smuggling swine
down to your precious Blue Boar, and thought you could rush the
frontier in very rapid cars.”

“Yes,” replied the smuggler placidly. “We were quite literally
Road-Hogs. I thought at first of dressing the pigs up as millionaires
and members of Parliament; but when you come to look close, there’s
more difference than you would imagine to be possible. It was great fun
when they forced me to take my pet out of the wrapping of shawls, and
they found what a large pet it was.”

“And do I understand,” cut in the Colonel, “that it was something like
that--with the other laws?”

“The other laws,” said Pierce, “are certainly arbitrary, but perhaps
you do not altogether do them justice. You do not quite appreciate
their motive. You do not fully allow for their origin. I may say, I
trust with all modesty, that I was their origin. I not only had the
pleasure of breaking those laws, but the pleasure of making them.”

“More of your tricks, you mean,” said the Colonel; “but why don’t the
papers say so?”

“The authorities don’t want ’em to,” answered Pierce. “The authorities
won’t advertise me, you bet. I’ve got far too much popular backing for
that. When the real revolution happens, it won’t be mentioned in the
newspapers.”

He paused a moment in meditation and then went on.

“When the police searched for my pug and found it was a pig, I started
wondering how they could best be stopped from doing it again. It
occurred to me they might be shy of a wild pig or a pug that bit them.
So, of course, I travelled the next time with dreadfully dangerous
animals in cages, warning everybody of the fiercest tigers and panthers
that ever were known. When they found it out and didn’t want to let it
out, they could only fall back on their own tomfoolery of a prohibition
wholesale. Of course, it was the same with my other stunt, about the
sick people going to health resorts to be cured of various fashionable
and refined maladies. The pigs had a dignified, possibly a rather
dull time, in elaborately curtained railway carriages with hospital
nurses to wait on them; while I stood outside and assured the railway
officials that the cure was a rest cure, and the invalids must on no
account be disturbed.”

“What a liar you are!” exclaimed Hood in simple admiration.

“Not at all,” said Pierce with dignity. “It was quite true that they
were going to be cured.”

Crane, who had been gazing rather abstractedly out of the window,
slowly turned his head and said abruptly: “And how’s it going to end?
Do you propose to go on doing all these impossible things?”

Pierce sprang to his feet with a resurrection of all the romantic
abandon of his vow over the pig-sty.

“Impossible!” he cried. “You don’t know what you’re saying or how true
it is. All I’ve done so far was possible and prosaic. But I will do an
impossible thing. I will do something that is written in all books and
rhymes as impossible--something that has passed into a proverb of the
impossible. The war is not ended yet; and if you two fellows will post
yourselves in the quarry opposite the Blue Boar, on Thursday week at
sunset, you will see something so impossible and so self-evident that
even the organs of public information will find it hard to hide it.”

It was in that part of the steep fall of pine-wood where the quarry
made a sort of ledge under a roof of pine that two gentlemen of
something more than middle age who had not altogether lost the appetite
of adventure posted themselves with all the preparations due to a
picnic or a practical joke. It was from that place, as from a window
looking across the valley, that they saw what seemed more like a
vision; what seemed indeed rather like the parody of an apocalypse. The
large clearance of the western sky was of a luminous lemon tint, as of
pale yellow fading to pale green, while one or two loose clouds on the
horizon were of a rose-red and yet richer colours. But the setting sun
itself was a cloudless fire, so that a tawny light lay over the whole
landscape; and the inn of the Blue Boar standing opposite looked almost
like a house of gold. Owen Hood was gazing in his dreamy fashion, and
said at last:

“There’s an apocalyptic sign in heaven for you to start with. It’s a
queer thing, but that cloud coming up the valley is uncommonly like the
shape of a pig.”

“Very like a whale,” said Colonel Crane, yawning slightly; but when
he turned his eyes in that direction, the eyes were keener. Artists
have remarked that a cloud has perspective like anything else; but the
perspective of the cloud coming up the valley was curiously solid.

“That’s not a cloud,” he said sharply, “it’s a Zeppelin or something.”

The solid shape grew larger and larger; and as it grew more obvious it
grew more incredible.

“Saints and angels!” cried Hood suddenly. “Why, it _is_ a pig!”

“It’s shaped like a pig all right,” said the Colonel curtly; and
indeed as the great balloon-like form bulked bigger and bigger above
its own reflection in the winding river, they could see that the long
sausage-shaped Zeppelin body of it had been fantastically decorated
with hanging ears and legs, to complete that pantomimic resemblance.

“I suppose it’s some more of Hilary’s skylarking,” observed Hood; “but
what is he up to now?”

As the great aërial monster moved up the valley it paused over the inn
of the Blue Boar, and something fell fluttering from it like a brightly
coloured feather.

“People are coming down in parachutes,” said the Colonel shortly.

“They’re queer-looking people,” remarked his companion, peering under
frowning brows, for the level light was dazzling to the eyes. “By
George, they’re not people at all! They’re pigs!”

From that distance, the objects in question had something of the
appearance of cherubs in some gaily coloured Gothic picture, with the