Tales of the Long Bow

Tales of the Long Bow

by G. K. Chesterton

First published 1925 by Cassell and Company, Ltd.

Electronic Edition 1993 by Jim Henry III, Jim.Henry@pobox.com, http://www.pobox.com/~Jim.Henry/etext/

Contents

I. The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane II. The Improbable Success of Mr. Owen Hood III. The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce IV. The Elusive Companion of Parson White V. The Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates VI. The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green VII. The Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair VIII. The Ultimate Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow

Chapter I

The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane

These tales concern the doing of things recognized as impossible to do; impossible to believe; and, as the weary reader may well cry aloud, impossible to read about. Did the narrator merely say that they happened, without saying how they happened, they could easily be classified with the cow who jumped over the moon or 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, 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 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 had 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 to him at breakfast, and it evidently called for 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 handy-man, named Archer, was acting as kitchen-gardener.

Archer was also 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 that 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 words would suggest. Hence the kitchen-garden was not artificial, but autochthonous; it really looked like the 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 in 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 a 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 of 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 Caesars, 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 not 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 shirt-front 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 that 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 courage 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 by 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 which 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’s 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 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 this, 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 all seem 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 so 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 a 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 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 house 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 than 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. “Buy 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 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 literary 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 subpoena’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 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 humourously 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 really the 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 light-headed 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 someone 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-humourous 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 in a younger world, which says what it thinks, and cannot see what most of our silences and 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 and echo, was the music of old and ritual dance 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 intention 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 sound 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 stove-pipe 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 side. “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.

Chapter 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 myths. 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 to 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 especially loved 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 ask 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 doubt 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 has taken the form of a proverb. In due time the patient, 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 really be 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 only 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 pools 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 Judgement.”

“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, off 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 would often carry a volume of Isaac 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 bands 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 in 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 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 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 had 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 the 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 were 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 debris, 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 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 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 afterward 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 flowing 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 smelled 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 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 somewhat 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 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 he 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 aristocracy, with all 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 judgement, 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 judgement 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 judgement. 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 a 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 abstracted 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 bathos, 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 said 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 Normantower’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 have left 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 skulky scruple in the soul. I could not bear to approach you by that door, with that gross and grinning flunky 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 inward, 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,” said 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’ve been 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 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 chose 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 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 Judgement. 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 up 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 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 had 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 of that 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 vote 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 the 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 heating 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 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 they must gird themselves for the ordeal of reading the story of The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce, and their trials are for a time deferred.

Chapter III

The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce

Those acquainted with Colonel Crane and Mr. Owen Hood, the lawyer, may or may not be concerned to know that they partook of an early lunch of eggs and bacon and beer at the inn called the Blue Boar, which stands at the turn of a steep road scaling a wooded ridge in the West Country. Those unacquainted with them may be content to know that the Colonel was a sunburnt, neatly-dressed gentleman, who looked taciturn and was; while the lawyer was a more rusty red-haired gentleman with a long Napoleonic face, who looked taciturn and was rather talkative. Crane was fond of good cooking; and the cooking in that secluded inn was better than that of a Soho restaurant and immeasurably better than that of a fashionable restaurant. Hood was fond of the legends and less-known aspects of the English country-side; 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 winter’s 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 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 our 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.

“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.”

“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 region, 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 mediaeval buildings the better.”

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

“Mediaeval 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 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 arm 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 rather a ramshackle affair of leaning and broken boards hung loosely together, though in practice it was practical enough. “This, the most unmistakably mellow of all mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 that 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 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 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 shall 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 into 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 those 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 whereupon 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. 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 judgement 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 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 at 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 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 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 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 were ever 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 pinewood 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 settling 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. Artist 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 aerial monster moved up the valley it paused over the inn of the Blue Boar, and something fell fluttering from it like a brightly coloured feather.

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

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

From that distance, the objects in question had something of the appearance of cherubs in some gaily coloured Gothic picture, with the yellow sky for their gold-leaf background. The parachute apparatus from which they hung and hovered was designed and coloured with the appearance of a great wheel of gorgeously painted plumage, looking more gaudy than ever in the strong evening light that lay over all. The more the two men in the quarry stared at these strange objects, the more certain it seemed that they were indeed pigs; though whether the pigs were dead or alive it was impossible at that distance to say. They looked down into the garden of the inn into which the feathered things were dropping, and they could see the figure of Joan Hardy standing in front of the old pig-sty, with her bird-like head lifted, looking up into the sky.

“Singular present for a young lady,” remarked Crane, “but I suppose when our mad young friend does start love-making, he would be likely to give impossible presents.”

The eyes of the more poetical Hood were full of larger visions, and he hardly seemed to be listening. But as the sentence ended he seemed to start from a trance and struck his hands together.

“Yes!” he cried in a new voice, “we always come back to that word!”

“Come back to what word?” asked his friend.

“‘Impossible,’” answered Owen Hood. “It’s the word that runs through his whole life, and ours too for that matter. Don’t you see what he has done?”

“I see what he has done all right,” answered the Colonel, “but I’m not at all sure I see what you’re driving at.”

“What we have seen is another impossible thing,” said Owen Hood; “a thing that common speech has set up as a challenge; a thing that a thousand rhymes and jokes and phrases have called impossible. We have seen pigs fly.”

“It’s pretty extraordinary,” admitted Crane, “but it’s not so extraordinary as their not being allowed to walk.”

And they gathered their travelling tackle together and began to descend the steep hill.

In doing so, they descended into a deeper twilight between the stems of the darkling trees; the walls of the valley began to close over them, as it were, and they lost that sense of being in the upper air in a radiant topsy-turvydom of clouds. It was almost as if they had really had a vision; and the voice of Crane came abruptly out of the dusk, almost like that of a doubter when he speaks of a dream.

“The thing I can’t understand,” he said abruptly, “is how Hilary managed to DO all that by himself.”

“He really is a very wonderful fellow,” said Hood. “You told me yourself he did wonders in the War. And though he turns it to these fanatical ends now, it takes as much trouble to do one as the other.”

“Takes a devilish lot more trouble to do it alone,” said Crane. “In the War there was a whole organization.”

“You mean he must be more than a remarkable person,” suggested Hood, “a sort of giant with a hundred hands or god with a hundred eyes. Well, a man will work frightfully hard when he wants something very much; even a man who generally looks like a lounging minor poet. And I think I know what it was he wanted. He deserves to get it. It’s certainly his hour of triumph.”

“Mystery to me all the same,” said the Colonel frowning. “Wonder whether he’ll ever clear it up.” But that part of the mystery was not to be cleared up until many other curious things had come to pass.

Away on another part of the slope Hilary Pierce, new lighted upon the earth like the herald Mercury, leapt down into a red hollow of the quarry and came towards Joan Hardy with uplifted arms.

“This is no time for false modesty,” he said. “It is the hour, and I come to you covered with glory—”

“You come covered with mud,” she said smiling, “and it’s that horrible red mud that takes so long to dry. It’s no use trying to brush it till—”

“I bring you the Golden Fleece, or at any rate the Golden Pig-Skin,” he cried in lyric ecstasy. “I have endured the labours; I have achieved the quest. I have made the Hampshire Hog as legendary as the Calydonian Boar. They forbade me to drive it on foot, and I drove it in a car, disguised as a pug. They forbade me to bring it in a car, and I brought it in a railway-train, disguised as an invalid. They forbade me to use a railway-train, and I took to the wings of the morning and rose to the uttermost parts of the air; by a way secret and pathless and lonely as the wilful way of love. I have made my romance immortal. I have made my romance immortal. I have written your name upon the sky. What do you say to me now? I have turned a Pig into a Pegasus. I have done impossible things.”

“I know you have,” she said, “but somehow I can’t help liking you for all that.”

“BUT you can’t help liking me,” he repeated in a hollow voice. “I have stormed heaven, but still I am not so bad. Hercules can be tolerated in spite of his Twelve Labours. St. George can be forgiven for killing the Dragon. Woman, is this the way I am treated in the hour of victory; and is this the graceful fashion of an older world? Have you become a New Woman, by any chance? What has your father been doing? What does he say—about us?”

“My father says you are quite mad, of course,” she replied, “but he can’t help liking you either. He says he doesn’t believe in people marrying out of their class; but that if I must marry a gentleman he’d rather it was somebody like you, and not one of the new gentlemen.”

“Well, I’m glad I’m an old gentleman, any how,” he answered somewhat mollified. “But really this prevalence of common sense is getting quite dangerous. Will nothing rouse you all to a little unreality; to saying, so to speak, ‘O, for the wings of a pig that I might flee away and be at rest.’ What would you say if I turned the world upside down and set my foot upon the sun and moon?”

“I should say,” replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, “that you wanted somebody to look after you.”

He stared at her for a moment in an almost abstracted fashion as if he had not fully understood; then he laughed uncontrollably, like a man who has seen something very close to him that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. So a man will fall over something in a game of hiding-and-seeking, and get shaken up with laughter.

“What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an aeroplane,” he said, “especially when your flying ship is only a flying pig. The earth of the real peasants and the real pigs—don’t be offended; I assure you the confusion is a compliment. What a thing is horse-sense, and how much finer really than the poetry of Pegasus! And when there is everything else as well that makes the sky clean and the earth kind, beauty and bravery and the lifting of the head— well, you are right enough, Joan. Will you take care of me? Will you stop at home and clip my pig’s wings?”

He had caught hold of her by the hands; but she still laughed as she answered.

“Yes—I told you I couldn’t help—but you really must let go, Hilary. I can see your friends coming down from the quarry.”

As she spoke, indeed, Colonel Crane and Owen Hood could be seen descending the slope and passing through a screen of slender trees towards them.

“Hullo!” said Hilary Pierce cheerfully. “I want you to congratulate me. Joan thinks I’m an awful humbug, and right she is; I am what has been called a happy hypocrite. At least you fellows may think I’ve been guilty of a bit of fake in this last affair, when I tell you the news. Well, I will confess.”

“What news do you mean?” inquired the Colonel with curiosity.

Hilary Pierce grinned and made a gesture over his shoulder to the litter of porcine parachutes, to indicate his last and crowning folly.

“The truth is,” he said laughing, “that was only a final firework display to celebrate victory or failure, whichever you choose to call it. There isn’t any need to do so any more, because the veto is removed.

“Removed?” exclaimed Hood. “Why on earth is that? It’s rather unnerving when lunatics suddenly go sane like that.”

“It wasn’t anything to do with the lunatics,” answered Pierce quietly. “The real change was much higher up, or rather lower down. Anyhow, it was much farther at the back of things, where the Big Businesses are settled by the big people.”

“What was the change?” asked the Colonel.

“Old Oates has gone into another business,” answered Pierce quietly.

“What on earth has old Oates got to do with it?” asked Hood staring. “Do you mean that Yankee mooning about over mediaeval ruins?”

“Oh, I know,” said Pierce wearily, “I thought he had nothing to do with it; I thought it was the Jews and vegetarians, and the rest; but they’re very innocent instruments. The truth is that Enoch Oates is the biggest pork-packer and importer in the world, and HE didn’t want any competition from our cottagers. And what he says goes, as he would express it. Now, thank God, he’s taken up another line.”

But if any indomitable reader wishes to know what was the new line Mr. Oates pursued and why, it is to be feared that his only course is to await and patiently read the story of the Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates; and even before reaching that supreme test, he will have to support the recital of The Elusive Companion of Parson White; for these, as has been said, are tales of topsy-turvydom, and they often work backwards.

Chapter IV

The Elusive Companion of Parson White

In the scriptures and the chronicles of the League of the Long Bow, or fellowship of foolish persons doing impossible things, it is recorded that Owen Hood, the lawyer, and his friend Crane, the retired Colonel, were partaking one afternoon of a sort of picnic on the river-island that had been the first scene of a certain romantic incident in the life of the former, the burden of reading about which has fallen upon the readers in other days. Suffice it to say that the island had been devoted by Mr. Hood to his hobby of angling, and that the meal then in progress was a somewhat early interruption of the same leisurely pursuit. The two old cronies had a third companion, who, though considerably younger, was not only a companion but a friend. He was a light-haired, lively young man, with rather a wild eye, known by the name of Pierce, whose wedding to the daughter of the innkeeper of the Blue Boar the others had only recently attended.

He was an aviator and given to many other forms of skylarking. The two older men had eccentric tastes of their own; but there is always a difference between the eccentricity of an elderly man who defies the world and the enthusiasm of a younger man who hopes to alter it. The old gentleman may be willing, in a sense, to stand on his head; but he does not hope, as the boy does, to stand the world on its head. With a young man like Hilary Pierce it was the world itself that was to be turned upside-down; and that was a game at which his more grizzled companions could only look on, as at a child they loved playing with a big coloured balloon.

Perhaps it was this sense of a division by time, altering the tone, though not the fact, of friendship, which sent the mind of one of the older men back to the memory of an older friend. He remembered that he had had a letter that morning from the only contemporary of his who could fitly have made a fourth to their party. Owen Hood drew the letter from his pocket with a smile that wrinkled his long, humourous, cadaverous face.

“By the way, I forgot to tell you,” he said, “I had a letter from White yesterday.”

The bronzed visage of the Colonel was also seamed with the external signs of a soundless chuckle.

“Read it yet?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied the lawyer; “the hieroglyphic was attacked with fresh vigour after breakfast this morning, and the clouds and mysteries of yesterday’s labours seemed to be rolled away. Some portions of the cuneiform still await an expert translation; but the sentences themselves appear to be in the original English.”

“Very original English,” snorted Colonel Crane.

“Yes, our friend is an original character,” replied Hood. “Vanity tempts me to hint that he is our friend because he has an original taste in friends. The habit of his of putting the pronoun on the first page and the noun on the next has brightened many winter evenings for me. You haven’t met our friend White, have you?” he added to Pierce. “That is a shock that still threatens you.”

“Why, what’s the matter with him?” inquired Pierce.

“Nothing,” observed Crane in his more staccato style. “Has a taste for starting a letter with ‘Yours Truly’ and ending it with ‘Dear Sir’; that’s all.”

“I should rather like to hear that letter,” observed the young man.

“So you shall,” answered Hood, “there’s nothing confidential in it; and if there were, you wouldn’t find it out merely by reading it. The Rev. Wilding White, called by some of his critics ‘Wild White,’ is one of those country parsons, to be found in corners of the English countryside, of whom their old college friends usually think in order to wonder what the devil their parishioners think of them. As a matter of fact, my dear Hilary, he was rather like you when he was your age; and what in the world you would be like as a vicar in the Church of England, aged fifty, might at first stagger the imagination; but the problem might be solved by supposing you would be like him. But I only hope you will have a more lucid style in letter-writing. The old boy is always in such a state of excitement about something that it comes out anyhow.”

It has been said elsewhere that these tales are, in some sense, of necessity told tail-foremost, and certainly the letter of the Rev. Wilding White was a document suited to such a scheme of narrative. It was written in what had once been a good hand-writing of the bolder sort, but which had degenerated through excessive energy and haste into an illegible scrawl. It appeared to run as follows:

“‘My dear Owen,—My mind is quite made up; though I know the sort of legal long-winded things you will say against it; I know especially one thing a leathery old lawyer like you is bound to say; but as a matter of fact even you can’t say it in a case like this, because the timber came from the other end of the county and had nothing whatever to do with him or any of his flunkeys and sycophants. Besides, I did it all myself with a little assistance I’ll tell you about later; and even in these days I should be surprised to hear THAT sort of assistance could be anything but a man’s own affair. I defy you and all your parchments to maintain that IT comes under the Game Laws. You won’t mind me talking like this; I know jolly well you’d think you were acting as a friend; but I think the time has come to speak plainly.’”

“Quite right,” said the Colonel.

“Yes,” said young Pierce, with a rather vague expression, “I’m glad he feels that the time has come to speak plainly.”

“Quite so,” observed the lawyer dryly; “he continues as follows:”

“‘I’ve got a lot to tell you about the new arrangement, which works much better even than I hoped. I was afraid at first it would really be an encumbrance, as you know it’s always supposed to be. But there are more things, and all the rest of it, and God fulfils himself, and so on and so on. It gives one quite a weird Asiatic feeling sometimes.’”

“Yes,” said the Colonel, “it does.”

“What does?” asked Pierce, sitting up suddenly, like one who can bear no more.

“You are not used to the epistolary method,” said Hood indulgently; “you haven’t got into the swing of the style. It goes on:”

“‘Of course, he’s a big pot down here, and all sorts of skunks are afraid of him and pretend to boycott me. Nobody could expect anything else of those pineapple people, but I confess I was surprised at Parkinson. Sally of course is as sound as ever; but she goes to Scotland a good deal and you can’t blame her. Sometimes I’m left pretty severely alone, but I’m not downhearted; you’ll probably laugh if I tell you that Snowdrop is really a very intelligent companion.’”

“I confess I am long past laughter,” said Hilary Pierce sadly; “but I rather wish I knew who Snowdrop is.”

“Child, I suppose,” said the Colonel shortly.

“Yes; I suppose it must be a child,” said Pierce. “Has he any children?”

“No,” said the Colonel. “Bachelor.”

“I believe he was in love with a lady in those parts and never married in consequence,” said Hood. “It would be quite on the lines of fiction and film-drama if Snowdrop were the daughter of the lady, when she had married Another. But there seems to be something more about Snowdrop, that little sunbeam in the house:”

“‘Snowdrop tries to enter our ways, as they always do; but, of course, it would be awkward if she played tricks. How alarmed they would all be if she took it into her head to walk about on two legs, like everybody else.’”

“Nonsense!” ejaculated Colonel Crane. “Can’t be a child— talking about it walking about on two legs.”

“After all,” said Pierce thoughtfully, “a little girl does walk about on two legs.”

“Bit startling if she walked about on three,” said Crane.

“If my learned brother will allow me,” said Hood, in his forensic manner, “would he describe the fact of a little girl walking on two legs as alarming?”

“A little girl is always alarming,” replied Pierce.

“I’ve come to the conclusion myself,” went on Hood, “that Snowdrop must be a pony. It seems a likely enough name for a pony. I thought at first it was a dog or a cat, but alarming seems a strong word even for a dog or a cat sitting up to beg. But a pony on its hind legs might be a little alarming, especially when you’re riding it. Only I can’t fit this view in with the next sentence: ‘I’ve taught her to reach down the things I want.’”

“Lord!” cried Pierce. “It’s a monkey!”

“That,” replied Hood, “had occurred to me as possibly explaining the weird Asiatic atmosphere. But a monkey on two legs is even less unusual than a dog on two legs. Moreover, the reference to Asiatic mystery seems really to refer to something else and not to any animal at all. For he ends up by saying: ‘I feel now as if my mind were moving in much larger and more ancient spaces of time or eternity; and as if what I thought at first was an oriental atmosphere was only an atmosphere of the orient in the sense of dayspring and the dawn. It has nothing to do with the stagnant occultism of decayed Indian cults; it is something that unites a real innocence with the immensities, a power as of the mountains with the purity of snow. This vision does not violate my own religion, but rather reinforces it; but I cannot help feeling that I have larger views. I hope in two senses to preach liberty in these parts. So I may live to falsify the proverb after all.’

“That,” added Hood, folding up the letter, “is the only sentence in the whole thing that conveys anything to my mind. As it happens, we have all three of us lived to falsify proverbs.”

Hilary Pierce had risen to his feet with the restless action that went best with his alert figure. “Yes,” he said; “I suppose we can all three of us say we have lived for adventures, or had some curious ones anyhow. And to tell you the truth, the adventure feeling has come on me very strong at this very minute. I’ve got the detective fever about that parson of yours. I should like to get at the meaning of that letter, as if it were a cipher about buried treasure.”

Then he added more gravely: “And if, as I gather, your clerical friend is really a friend worth having, I do seriously advise you to keep an eye on him just now. Writing letters upside-down is all very well, and I shouldn’t be alarmed about that. Lots of people think they’ve explained things in previous letters they never wrote. I don’t think it matters who Snowdrop is, or what sort of children or animals he chooses to be fond of. That’s all being eccentric in the good old English fashion, like poetical tinkers and mad squires. You’re both of you eccentric in that sort of way, and it’s one of the things I like about you. But just because I naturally knock about more among the new people, I see something of the new eccentricities. And believe me, they’re not half so nice as the old ones. I’m a student of scientific aviation, which is a new thing itself, and I like it. But there’s a sort of spiritual aviation that I don’t like at all.”

“Sorry,” observed Crane. “Really no notion of what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you haven’t,” answered Pierce with engaging candour; “that’s another thing I like about you. But I don’t like the way your clerical friend talks about new visions and larger religions and light and liberty from the East. I’ve heard a good many people talk like that, and they were mountebanks or the dupes of mountebanks. And I’ll tell you another thing. It’s a long shot even with the long bow we used to talk about. It’s a pretty wild guess even in this rather wild business. But I have a creepy sort of feeling that if you went down to his house and private parlour to see Snowdrop, you’d be surprised at what you saw.”

“What should we see?” asked the Colonel, staring.

“You’d see nothing at all,” replied the young man.

“What on earth do you mean?”

“I mean,” replied Pierce, “that you’d find Mr. White talking to somebody who didn’t seem to be there.”

Hilary Pierce, fired by his detective fever, made a good many more inquiries about the Rev. Wilding White, both of his two old friends and elsewhere.

One long legal conversation with Owen Hood did indeed put him in possession of the legal outline of certain matters, which might be said to throw a light on some parts of the strange letter, and which might in time even be made to throw a light on the rest. White was the vicar of a parish lying deep in the western parts of Somersetshire, where the principal landowner was a certain Lord Arlington. And in this case there had been a quarrel between the squire and the parson, of a more revolutionary sort than is common in the case of parsons. The clergyman intensely resented that irony or anomaly which has caused so much discontent among tenants in Ireland and throughout the world; the fact that improvements or constructive work actually done by the tenant only pass into the possession of the landlord. He had considerably improved a house that he himself had rented from the squire, but in some kind of crisis of defiance or renunciation, he had quitted this more official residence bag and baggage, and built himself a sort of wooden lodge or bungalow on a small hill or mound that rose amid woods on the extreme edge of the same grounds. This quarrel about the claim of the tenant to his own work was evidently the meaning of certain phrases in the letter—such as the timber coming from the other end of the county, the sort of work being a man’s own affair, and the general allusion to somebody’s flunkeys or sycophants who attempted to boycott the discontented tenant. But it was not quite so clear whether the allusions to a new arrangement, and how it worked, referred to the bungalow or to the other and more elusive mystery of the presence of Snowdrop.

One phrase in the letter he found to have been repeated in many places and to many persons without becoming altogether clear in the process. It was the sentence that ran: “I was afraid at first it would really be an encumbrance, as you know it’s always supposed to be.” Both Colonel Crane and Owen Hood, and also several other persons whom he met later in his investigations, were agreed in saying that Mr. White had used some expression indicating that he had entangled himself with something troublesome or at least useless; something that he did not want. None of them could remember the exact words he had used; but all could state in general terms that it referred to some sort of negative nuisance or barren responsibility. This could hardly refer to Snowdrop, of whom he always wrote in terms of tenderness as if she were a baby or a kitten. It seemed hard to believe it could refer to the house he had built entirely to suit himself. It seemed as if there must be some third thing in his muddled existence, which loomed vaguely in the background through the vapour of his confused correspondence.

Colonel Crane snapped his fingers with a mild irritation in trying to recall a trifle. “He said it was a—you know, I’ve forgotten the word—a botheration or embarrassment. But then he’s always in a state of botheration and embarrassment. I didn’t tell you, by the way, that I had a letter from him too. Came the day after I heard yours. Shorter, and perhaps a little plainer.” And he handed the letter to Hood, who read it out slowly:

“‘I never knew the old British populace, here in Avalon itself, could be so broken down by squires and sneaking lawyers. Nobody dared help me move my house again; said it was illegal and they were afraid of the police. But Snowdrop helped, and we carted it all away in two or three journeys; took it right clean off the old fool’s land altogether this time. I fancy the old fool will have to admit there are things in this world he wasn’t prepared to believe in.’”

“But look here,” began Hood as if impulsively, and then stopped and spoke more slowly and carefully. “I don’t understand this; I think it’s extremely odd. I don’t mean odd for an ordinary person, but odd for an odd person; odd for this odd person. I know White better than either of you can, and I can tell you that, though he tells a tale anyhow, the tale is always true. He’s rather precise and pedantic when you do come to the facts; these litigious quarrelsome people always are. He would do extraordinary things, but he wouldn’t make them out more extraordinary than they were. I mean he’s the sort of man who might break all the squire’s windows, but he wouldn’t say he’d broken six when he’d broken five. I’ve always found when I’d got to the meaning of those mad letters that it was quite true. But how can this be true? How could Snowdrop, whatever she is, have moved a whole house, or old White either?”

“I suppose you know what I think,” said Pierce. “I told you that Snowdrop, whatever else she is, is invisible. I’m certain your friend has gone Spiritualist, and Snowdrop is the name of a spirit, or a control, or whatever they call it. The spirit would say, of course, that it was mere child’s play to throw the house from one end of the county to the other. But if this unfortunate gentleman believes himself to have been thrown, house and all, in that fashion, I’m very much afraid he’s begun really to suffer from delusions.”

The faces of the two older men looked suddenly much older, perhaps for the first time they looked old. The young man seeing their dolorous expression was warmed and fired to speak quickly.

“Look here,” he said hastily, “I’ll go down there myself and find out what I can for you. I’ll go this afternoon.”

“Train journey takes ages,” said the Colonel, shaking his head. “Other end of nowhere. Told me yourself you had an appointment at the Air Ministry to-morrow.”

“Be there in no time,” replied Pierce cheerfully. “I’ll fly down.”

And there was something in the lightness and youth of his vanishing gesture that seemed really like Icarus spurning the earth, the first man to mount upon wings.

Perhaps this literally flying figure shone the more vividly in their memories because, when they saw it again, it was in a subtle sense changed. When the other two next saw Hilary Pierce on the steps of the Air Ministry, they were conscious that his manner was a little quieter, but his wild eye rather wilder than usual. They adjourned to a neighbouring restaurant and talked of trivialities while luncheon was served; but the Colonel, who was a keen observer, was sure that Pierce had suffered some sort of shock, or at least some sort of check. While they were considering what to say Pierce himself said abruptly, staring at a mustard-pot on the table:

“What do you think about spirits?”

“Never touch ‘em,” said the Colonel. “Sound port never hurt anybody.”

“I mean the other sort,” said Pierce. “Things like ghosts and all that.”

“I don’t know,” said Owen Hood. “The Greek for it is agnosticism. The Latin for it is ignorance. But have you really been dealing with ghosts and spirits down at poor White’s parsonage?”

“I don’t know,” said Pierce gravely.

“You don’t mean you really think you saw something!” cried Hood sharply.

“There goes the agnostic!” said Pierce with a rather weary smile. “The minute the agnostic hears a bit of real agnosticism he shrieks out that it’s superstition. I say I don’t know whether it was a spirit. I also say I don’t know what the devil else it was if it wasn’t. In plain words, I went down to that place convinced that poor White had got some sort of delusions. Now I wonder whether it’s I that have got the delusions.”

He paused a moment and then went on in a more collected manner:

“But I’d better tell you all about it. To begin with, I don’t admit it as an explanation, but it’s only fair to allow for it as a fact— that all that part of the world seems to be full of that sort of thing. You know how the glamour of Glastonbury lies over all that land and the lost tomb of King Arthur and time when he shall return and the prophecies of Merlin and all the rest. To begin with, the village they call Ponder’s End ought to be called World’s End; it gives one the impression of being somewhere west of the sunset. And then the parsonage is quite a long way west of the parish, in large neglected grounds fading into pathless woods and hills; I mean the old empty rectory that our wild friend has evacuated. It stood there a cold empty shell of flat classical architecture, as hollow as one of those classical temples they used to stick up in country seats. But White must have done some sort of parish work there, for I found a great big empty shed in the grounds— that sort of thing that’s used for a schoolroom or drill-hall or what not. But not a sign of him or his work can be seen there now. I’ve said it’s a long way west of the village that you come at last to the old house. Well, it’s a long way west of that that you come to the new house—if you come to it at all. As for me, I came and I came now, as in some old riddle of Merlin. But you shall hear.

“I had come down about sunset in a meadow near Ponder’s End, and I did the rest of the journey on foot, for I wanted to see things in detail. This was already difficult as it was growing dusk, and I began to fear I should find nothing of importance before nightfall. I had asked a question or two of the villagers about the vicar and his new self-made vicarage. They were very reticent about the former, but I gathered that the latter stood at the extreme edge of his original grounds on a hill rising out of a thicket of wood. In the increasing darkness it was difficult to find the place, but I came on it at last, in a place where a fringe of forest ran along under the low brows of a line of rugged cliffs, such as sometimes break the curves of great downlands. I seemed to be descending a thickly wooded slope, with a sea of tree-tops below me, and out of that sea, like an island, rose the dome of the isolated hill; and I could faintly see the building on it, darker against the dark-clouded sky. For a moment a faint line of light from the masked moon showed me a little more of its shape, which seemed singularly simple and airy in its design. Against that pallid gleam stood four strong columns, with the bulk of building apparently lifted above them; but it produced a queer impression, as if this Christian priest had built for his final home a heathen temple of the winds. As I leaned forward, peering at it, I overbalanced myself and slid rapidly down the steep thicket into the darkest entrails of the wood. From there I could see nothing of the pillared house or temple or whatever it was on the hill; the thick woods had swallowed me up literally like a sea, and I groped for what must have been nearly half an hour amid tangled roots and low branches, in that double darkness of night and shadow, before I found my feet slipping up the opposite slope and began to climb the hill on the top of which the temple stood. It was very difficult climbing, of course, through a network of briars and branching trees, and it was some little time afterwards that I burst through the last screen of foliage and came out upon the bare hill-top.

“Yes; upon the bare hill-top. Rank grasses grew upon it, and the wind blew them about like hair on a head; but for any trace of anything else, that green dome was as bare as a skull. There was no sign or shadow of the building I had seen there a little time before; it had vanished like a fairy palace. A broad track broken through the woods seemed to lead up to it, so far as I could make out in that obscurity; but there was no trace of the building to which it led. And when I saw that, I gave up. Something told me I should find out no more; perhaps I had some shaken sense that there were things past finding out. I retraced my steps, descending the hill as best I might; but when I was again swallowed up in that leafy sea, something happened that, for an instant, turned me cold as stone. An unearthly noise, like long hooting laughter, rang out in vast volume over the forest and rose to the stars. It was no noise to which I could put a name; it was certainly no noise I had ever heard before; it bore some sort of resemblance to the neighing of a horse immensely magnified; yet it might have been half human, and there was triumph in it and derision.

“I will tell you one more thing I learnt before I left those parts. I left them at once, partly because I really had an appointment early this morning, as I told you; partly also, I think, because I felt you had the right to know at once what sort of things were to be faced. I was alarmed when I thought your friend was tormented with imaginary bogies; I am not less alarmed if he had got mixed up with real ones. Anyhow, before I left that village I had told one man what I had seen, and he told me he had seen it also. But he had seen it actually moving, in dusk turning to dark; the whole great house, with its high columns, moving across the fields like a great ship sailing on land.”

Owen Hood sat up suddenly, with awakened eyes, and struck the table.

“Look here,” he cried, with a new ring in his voice, “we must all go down to Ponder’s End and bring this business to a finish.”

“Do you think you will bring it to a finish?” asked Pierce gloomily; “or can you tell us what sort of finish?”

“Yes,” replied Hood resolutely. “I think I can finish it, and I think I know what the finish will be. The truth is, my friend, I think I understand the whole thing now. And as I told you before, White, so far from being deluded by imaginary bogies, is a gentleman very exact in his statements. In this matter he has been very exact. That has been the whole mystery about him— that he has been very much too exact.”

“What on earth do you mean by that?” asked Pierce.

“I mean,” said the lawyer, “that I have suddenly remembered the phrase he used. It was very exact; it was dull, deadly, literal truth. But I can be exact, too, at times, and just now I should like to look at a time-table.”

They found the village of Ponder’s End in a condition as comically incongruous as could well be with the mystical experiences of Mr. Hilary Pierce. When we talk of such places as sleepy, we forget that they are very wide-awake about their own affairs, and especially on their own festive occasions. Piccadilly Circus looks much the same on Christmas Day or any other; but the market-place of a country town or village looks very different on the day of a fair or a bazaar. And Hilary Pierce, who had first come down there to find in a wood at midnight the riddle that he thought worthy of Merlin, came down the second time to find himself plunged suddenly into the middle of the bustling bathos of a jumble sale. It was one of those bazaars to provide bargains for the poor, at which all sorts of odds and ends are sold off. But it was treated as a sort of fete, and highly-coloured posters and handbills announced its nature on every side. The bustle seemed to be dominated by a tall dark lady of distinguished appearance, whom Owen Hood, rather to the surprise of his companions, hailed as an old acquaintance and managed to draw aside for a private talk. She had appeared to have her hands full at the bazaar; nevertheless, her talk with Hood was rather a long one. Pierce heard only the last words of it:

“Oh, he promised he was bringing something for the sale. I assure you he always keeps his word.”

All Hood said when he rejoined his companion was: “That’s the lady White was going to marry. I think I know now why things went wrong, and I hope they may go right. But there seems to be another bother. You see that clump of clod-hopping policemen over there, inspector and all. It seems they’re waiting for White. Says he’s broken the law in taking his house off the land, and that he has always eluded them. I hope there won’t be a scene when he turns up.”

If this was Mr. Hood’s hope, it was ill-founded and destined to disappointment. A scene was but a faint description of what was in store for that hopeful gentleman. Within ten minutes the greater part of the company were in a world in which the sun and the moon seemed to have turned topsy-turvy and the last limit of unlikelihood had been reached. Pierce had imagined he was very near that limit of the imagination when he groped after the vanishing temple in the dark forest. But nothing he had seen in that darkness and solitude was so fantastic as what he saw next in broad daylight and in a crowd.

At one extreme edge of the crowd there was a sudden movement— a wave of recoil and wordless cries. The next moment it had swept like a wind over the whole populace, and hundreds of faces were turned in one direction—in the direction of the road that descended by a gradual slope towards the woods that fringed the vicarage grounds. Out of these woods at the foot of the hill had emerged something that might from its size have been a large light grey omnibus. But it was not an omnibus. It scaled the slope so swiftly, in great strides, that it became instantly self-evident what it was. It was an elephant, whose monstrous form was moulded in grey and silver in the sunlight, and on whose back sat very erect a vigorous middle-aged gentleman in black clerical attire, with blanched hair and a rather fierce aquiline profile that glanced proudly to left and right.

The police inspector managed to make one step forward, and then stood like a statue. The vicar, on his vast steed, sailed into the middle of the market-place as serenely as if he had been the master of a familiar circus. He pointed in triumph to one of the red and blue posters on the wall, which bore the traditional title of “White Elephant Sale.”

“You see I’ve kept my word,” he said to the lady in a loud, cheerful voice. “I’ve brought a white elephant.”

The next moment he had waved his hand hilariously in another direction, having caught sight of Hood and Crane in the crowd.

“Splendid of you to come!” he called out. “Only you were in the secret. I told you I’d got a white elephant.”

“So he did,” said Hood, “only it never occurred to us that the elephant was an elephant and not a metaphor. So that’s what he meant by Asiatic atmosphere and snow and mountains. And that’s what the big shed was really for.”

“Look here,” said the inspector, recovering from his astonishment and breaking in on these felicitations. “I don’t understand all these games, but it’s my business to ask a few questions. Sorry to say it, sir, but you’ve ignored our notifications and evaded our attempts to—”

“Have I?” inquired Mr. White brightly. “Have I really evaded you? Well, well, perhaps I have. An elephant is such a standing temptation to evasion, to evanescence, to fading away like a dewdrop. Like a snowdrop perhaps would be more appropriate. Come on, Snowdrop.”

The last word came smartly, and he gave a smart smack to the huge head of the pachyderm. Before the inspector could move or anyone had realized what had happened, the whole big bulk had pitched forward with a plunge like a cataract and went in great whirling strides, the crowd scattering before it. The police had not come provided for elephants, which are rare in those parts. Even if they had overtaken it on bicycles, they would have found it difficult to climb it on bicycles. Even if they had had revolvers, they had omitted to conceal about their persons anything in the way of big-game rifles. The white monster vanished rapidly up the long white road, so rapidly that when it dwindled to a small object and disappeared, people could hardly believe that such a prodigy had ever been present, or that their eyes had not been momentarily bewitched. Only, as it disappeared in the distance, Pierce heard once more the high nasal trumpeting noise which, in the eclipse of night, had seemed to fill the forest with fear.

It was at a subsequent meeting in London that Crane and Pierce had an opportunity of learning, more or less, the true story of the affair, in the form of another letter from the parson to the lawyer.

“Now that we know the secret,” said Pierce cheerfully, “even his account of it ought to be quite clear.”

“Quite clear,” replied Hood calmly. “His letter begins, ‘Dear Owen, I am really tremendously grateful in spite of all I used to say about leather and about horse-hair.’”

“About what?” asked Pierce.

“Horse-hair,” said Hood with severity. “He goes on, ‘The truth is they thought they could do what they liked with me because I always boasted that I hadn’t got one, and never wanted to have one; but when they found I had got one, and I must really say a jolly good one, of course it was all quite different.’”

Pierce had his elbows up on the table, and his fingers thrust up into his loose yellow hair. He had rather the appearance of holding his head on. He was muttering to himself very softly, like a schoolboy learning a lesson.

“He had got one, but he didn’t want one, and he hadn’t got one and he had a jolly good one.”

“One what?” asked Crane irritably. “Seems like a missing word competition.”

“I’ve got the prize,” observed Hood placidly. “The missing word is ‘solicitor.’ What he means is that the police took liberties with him because they knew he would not have a lawyer. And he is perfectly right; for when I took the matter up on his behalf, I soon found that they had put themselves on the wrong side of the law at least as much as he had. In short, I was able to extricate him from this police business; hence his hearty if not lucid gratitude. But he goes on to talk about something rather more personal; and I think it really has been a rather interesting case, if he does not exactly shine as a narrator of it. As I dare say you noticed, I did know something of the lady whom our eccentric friend went courting years ago, rather in the spirit of Sir Roger de Coverly when he went courting the widow. She is a Miss Julia Drake, daughter of a country gentleman. I hope you won’t misunderstand me if I say that she is a rather formidable lady. She is really a thoroughly good sort; but that air of the black-browed Juno she has about her does correspond to some real qualities. She is one of those people who can manage big enterprises, and the bigger they are the happier she is. When that sort of force functions within the limits of a village or a small valley, the impact is sometimes rather overpowering. You saw her managing the White Elephant Sale at Ponder’s End. Well, if it had been literally an army of wild elephants, it would hardly have been on too large a scale for her tastes. In that sense, I may say that our friend’s white elephant was not so much of a white elephant. I mean that in that sense it was not so much of an irrelevancy and hardly even a surprise. But in another way, it was a very great relief.”

“You’re getting nearly as obscure as he is,” remonstrated Pierce. “What is all this mysterious introduction leading up to? What do you mean?”

“I mean,” replied the lawyer, “that experience has taught me a little secret about very practical public characters like that lady. It sounds a paradox; but those practical people are often more morbid than theoretical people. They are capable of acting; but they are also capable of brooding when they are not acting. Their very stoicism makes too sentimental a secret of their sentimentalism. They misunderstand those they love; and make a mystery of the misunderstanding. They suffer in silence; a horrid habit. In short, they can do everything; but they don’t know how to do nothing. Theorists, happy people who do nothing, like our friend Pierce—”

“Look here,” cried the indignant Pierce. “I should like to know what the devil you mean? I’ve broken more law than you ever read in your life. If this psychological lecture is the new lucidity, give me Mr. White.”

“Oh, very well,” replied Hood, “if you prefer his text to my exposition, he describes the same situation as follows: ‘I ought to be grateful, being perfectly happy after all this muddle; I suppose one ought to be careful about nomenclature; but it never even occurred to me that her nose would be out of joint. Rather funny to be talking about noses, isn’t it, for I suppose really it was her rival’s nose that figured most prominently. Think of having a rival with a nose like that to turn up at you! Talk about a spire pointing to the stars—’”

“I think,” said Crane, interposing mildly, “that it would be better if you resumed your duties as official interpreter. What was it that you were going to say about the lady who brooded over misunderstandings?”

“I was going to say,” replied the lawyer, “that when I first came upon that crowd in the village, and saw that tall figure and dark strong face dominating it in the old way, my mind went back to a score of things I remembered about her in the past. Though we have not met for ten years, I knew from the first glimpse of her face that she had been worrying, in a powerful secretive sort of way; worrying about something she didn’t understand and would not inquire about. I remember long ago, when she was an ordinary fox-hunting squire’s daughter and White was one of Sydney Smith’s wild curates, how she sulked for two months over a mistake about a post-card that could have been explained in two minutes. At least it could have been explained by anybody except White. But you will understand that if he tried to explain the post-card on another post-card, the results may not have been luminous, let alone radiant.”

“But what has all this to do with noses?” inquired Pierce.

“Don’t you understand yet?” asked Hood with a smile. “Don’t you know who was the rival with the long nose?”

He paused for a moment and then continued, “It occurred to me as soon as I had guessed at the nature of the nose which may certainly be called the main feature of the story. An elusive, flexible and insinuating nose, the serpent of their Eden. Well, they seem to have returned to their Eden now; and I have no doubt it will be all right; for it is when people are separated that these sort of secrets spring up between them. After all, it was a mystery to us and we cannot be surprised if it was a mystery to her.”

“A good deal of this talk is still rather a mystery to me,” remarked Pierce, “though I admit it is getting a little clearer. You mean that the point that has just been cleared up is—”

“The point about Snowdrop,” replied Hood. “We thought of a pony, and a monkey, and a baby, and a good many other things that Snowdrop might possibly be. But we never thought of the interpretation which was the first to occur to the lady.”

There was silence, and then Crane laughed in an internal fashion.

“Well, I don’t blame her,” he said. “One could hardly expect a lady of any delicacy to deduce an elephant.”

“It’s an extraordinary business, when you come to think of it,” said Pierce. “Where did he get the elephant?”

“He says something about that too,” said Hood, referring to the letter. “He says, ‘I may be a quarrelsome fellow. But quarrels sometimes do good. And though it wasn’t actually one of Captain Pierce’s caravans—’”

“No, hang it all!” cried Pierce. “This is really too much! To see one’s own name entangled in such hieroglyphics—it reminds me of seeing it in a Dutch paper during the war; and wondering whether all the other words were terms of abuse.”

“I think I can explain,” answered Hood patiently. “I assure you the reverend gentleman is not taking liberties with your name in a merely irresponsible spirit. As I told you before, he is strictly truthful when you get at the facts, though they may be difficult to get at. Curiously enough, there really is a connexion. I sometimes think there is a connexion beyond coincidence running through all our adventures; a purpose in these unconscious practical jokes. It seems rather eccentric to make friends with a white elephant—”

“Rather eccentric to make friends with us,” said the Colonel. “We are a set of white elephants.”

“As a matter of fact,” said the lawyer, “this particular last prank of the parson really did arise out of the last prank of our friend Pierce.”

“Me!” said Pierce in surprise. “Have I been producing elephants without knowing it?”

“Yes,” replied Hood. “You remember when you were smuggling pigs in defiance of the regulations, you indulged (I regret to say) in a deception of putting them in cages and pretending you were travelling with a menagerie of dangerous animals. The consequence was, you remember, that the authorities forbade menageries altogether. Our friend White took up the case of a travelling circus being stopped in his town as a case of gross oppression; and when they had to break it up, he took over the elephant.”

“Sort of small payment for his services, I suppose,” said Crane. “Curious idea, taking a tip in the form of an elephant.”

“He might not have done it if he’d known what it involved,” said Hood. “As I say, he was a quarrelsome fellow, with all his good points.”

There was a silence, and then Pierce said in a musing manner: “It’s odd it should be the sequel of my little pig adventure. A sort of reversal of the parturiunt montes; I put in a little pig and it brought forth an elephant.”

“It will bring forth more monsters yet,” said Owen Hood. “We have not see all the sequels of your adventures as a swineherd.”

But touching the other monsters or monstrous events so produced the reader has already been warned—nay, threatened—that they are involved in the narrative called the Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates, and for the moment the threat must hang like thunder in the air.

Chapter V

The Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates

“Since the Colonel ate his hat the Lunatic Asylum has lacked a background.”

The conscientious scribe cannot but be aware that the above sentence, standing alone and without reference to previous matters, may not entirely explain itself. Anyone trying the experiment of using that sentence for practical social purposes; tossing that sentence lightly as a greeting to a passer-by; sending that sentence as a telegram to a total stranger; whispering that sentence hoarsely into the ear of the nearest policeman, and so on, will find that its insufficiency as a full and final statement is generally felt. With no morbid curiosity, with no exaggerated appetite for omniscience, men will want to know more about this statement before acting upon it. And the only way of explaining it, and the unusual circumstances in which it came to be said, is to pursue the doubling and devious course of these narratives, and return to a date very much earlier, when men now more than middle-aged were quite young.

It was in the days when the Colonel was not the Colonel, but only Jimmy Crane, a restless youth tossed about by every wind of adventure, but as yet as incapable of discipline as of dressing for dinner. It was in days before Robert Owen Hood, the lawyer, had ever begun to study the law and had only got so far as to abolish it; coming down to the club every night with a new plan for a revolution to turn all earthly tribunals upside down. It was in days before Wilding White settled down as a country parson, returning to the creed though not the conventions of his class and country; when he was still ready to change his religion once a week, turning up sometimes in the costume of a monk and sometimes of a mufti, and sometimes in what he declared to be the original vestments of a Druid, whose religion was shortly to be resumed by the whole British people. It was in days when their young friend Hilary Pierce, the aviator, was still anticipating aviation by flying a small kite. In short, it was early in the lives even of the elders of the group that they had founded a small social club, in which their long friendships had flourished. The club had to have some sort of name, and the more thoughtful and detached among them, who saw the club steadily and saw it as a whole, considered the point with ripe reflection, and finally called their little society the Lunatic Asylum.

“We might all stick straws in our hair for dinner, as the Romans crowned themselves with roses for the banquet,” observed Hood. “It would correspond to dressing for dinner; I don’t know what else we could do to vary the vulgar society trick of all wearing the same sort of white waistcoats.”

“All wearing strait waistcoats, I suppose,” said Crane.

“We might each dine separately in a padded cell, if it comes to that,” said Hood; “but there seems to be something lacking in it considered as a social evening.”

Here Wilding White, who was then in a monastic phase, intervened eagerly. He explained that in some monasteries a monk of particular holiness was allowed to become a hermit in an inner cell, and proposed a similar arrangement at the club. Hood, with his more mellow rationalism, intervened with a milder amendment. He suggested that a large padded chair should represent the padded cell, and be reserved like a throne for the loftiest of the lunatics.

“Do not,” he said gently and earnestly, “do not let us be divided by jealousies and petty ambitions. Do not let us dispute among ourselves which shall be the dottiest in the domain of the dotty. Perhaps one will appear worthier than us all, more manifestly and magnificently weak in the head; for him let the padded throne stand empty.”

Jimmy Crane had said no more after his brief suggestion, but was pacing the room like a polar bear, as he generally did when there came upon him a periodical impulse to go off after things like polar bears. He was the wildest of all those wild figures so far as the scale of his adventures was concerned, constantly vanishing to the ends of the earth nobody knew why, and turning up again nobody knew how. He had a hobby, even in his youth, that made his outlook seem even stranger than the bewildering successive philosophies of his friend White. He had an enthusiasm for the myths of savages, and while White was balancing the relative claims of Buddhism and Brahminism, Crane would boldly declare his preference for the belief that a big fish ate the sun every night, or that the whole cosmos was created by cutting up a giant. Moreover, there was with all this something indefinable but in some way more serious about Crane even in those days. There was much that was merely boyish about the blind impetuosity of Wilding White, with his wild hair and eager aquiline face. He was evidently one who might (as he said) learn the secret of Isis, but would be quite incapable of keeping it to himself. The long, legal face of Owen Hood had already learned to laugh at most things, if not to laugh loudly. But in Crane there was something more hard and militant like steel, and as he proved afterwards in the affair of the hat, he could keep a secret even when it was a joke. So that when he finally went off on a long tour round the world, with the avowed intention of studying all the savages he could find, nobody tried to stop him. He went off in a startlingly shabby suit, with a faded sash instead of a waistcoat, and with no luggage in particular, except a large revolver slung round him in a case like a field-glass, and a big, green umbrella that he flourished resolutely as he walked.

“Well, he’ll come back a queerer figure than he went, I suppose,” said Wilding White.

“He couldn’t,” answered Hood, the lawyer, shaking his head. “I don’t believe all the devil-worship in Africa could make him any madder than he is.”

“But he’s going to America first, isn’t he?” said the other.

“Yes,” said Hood. “He’s going to America, but not to see the Americans. He would think the Americans very dull compared with the American Indians. Possibly he will come back in feathers and war-paint.”

“He’ll come back scalped, I suppose,” said White hopefully. “I suppose being scalped is all the rage in the best Red Indian society?”

“Then he’s working round by the South Sea Islands,” said Hood. “They don’t scalp people there; they only stew them in pots.”

“He couldn’t very well come back stewed,” said White, musing. “Does it strike you, Owen, that we should hardly be talking nonsense like this if we hadn’t a curious faith that a fellow like Crane will know how to look after himself?”

“Yes,” said Hood gravely. “I’ve got a very fixed fundamental conviction that Crane will turn up again all right. But it’s true that he may look jolly queer after going fantee for all that time.”

It became a sort of pastime at the club of the Lunatics to compete in speculations about the guise in which the maddest of their madmen would return, after being so long lost to civilization. And grand preparations were made as for a sort of Walpurgis Night of nonsense when it was known at last that he was really returning. Hood had received letters from him occasionally, full of queer mythologies, and then a rapid succession of telegrams from places nearer and nearer home, culminating in the announcement that he would appear in the club that night. It was about five minutes before dinner-time that a sharp knock on the door announced his arrival.

“Bang all the gongs and the tom-toms,” cried Wilding White. “The Lord High Mumbo-Jumbo arrives riding on the nightmare.”

“We had better bring out the throne of the King of the Maniacs,” said Hood, laughing. “We may want it at last,” and he turned towards the big padded chair that still stood at the top of the table.

As he did so James Crane walked into the room. He was clad in very neat and well-cut evening clothes, not too fashionable, and a little formal. His hair was parted on one side, and his moustache clipped rather close; he took a seat with a pleasant smile, and began talking about the weather.

He was not allowed, however, to confine his conversation to the weather. He had certainly succeeded in giving his old friends the only sort of surprise that they really had not expected; but they were too old friends for their friend to be able to conceal from them the meaning of such a change. And it was on that festive evening that Crane explained his position; a position which he maintained in most things ever afterwards, and one which is the original foundation of the affair that follows.

“I have lived with the men we call savages all over the world,” he said simply, “and I have found out one truth about them. And I tell you, my friends, you may talk about independence and individual self-expression till you burst. But I’ve always found, wherever I went, that the man who could really be trusted to keep his word, and to fight, and to work for his family, was the man who did a war-dance before the moon where the moon was worshipped, and wore a nose-ring in his nose where nose-rings were worn. I have had plenty of fun, and I won’t interfere with anyone else having it. But I believe I have seen what is the real making of mankind, and I have come back to my tribe.”

This was the first act of the drama which ended in the remarkable appearance and disappearance of Mr. Enoch Oates, and it has been necessary to narrate it briefly before passing on to the second act. Ever since that time Crane had preserved at once his eccentric friends and his own more formal customs. And there were many among the newer members of the club who had never known him except as the Colonel, the grizzled, military gentleman whose severe scheme of black and white attire and strict politeness in small things formed the one foil of sharp contrast to that many-coloured Bohemia. One of these was Hilary Pierce, the young aviator; and much as he liked the Colonel, he never quite understood him. He had never known the old soldier in his volcanic youth, as had Hood and White, and therefore never knew how much of the fire remained under the rock or the snows. The singular affair of the hat, which has been narrated to the too patient reader elsewhere, surprised him more than it did the older men, who knew very well that the Colonel was not so old as he looked. And the impression increased with all the incidents which a fanatical love of truth has forced the chronicler to relate in the same connexion; the incident of the river and of the pigs and of the somewhat larger pet of Mr. Wilding White. There was talk of renaming the Lunatic Asylum as the League of the Long Bow, and of commemorating its performances in a permanent ritual. The Colonel was induced to wear a crown of cabbage on state occasions, and Pierce was gravely invited to bring his pigs with him to dine at the club.

“You could easily bring a little pig in your large pocket,” said Hood. “I often wonder people do not have pigs as pets.”

“A pig in a poke, in fact,” said Pierce. “Well, so long as you have the tact to avoid the indelicacy of having pork for dinner that evening, I suppose I could bring my pig in my pocket.”

“White’d find it rather a nuisance to bring his elephant in his pocket,” observed the Colonel.

Pierce glanced at him, and had again the feeling of incongruity at seeing the ceremonial cabbage adorning his comparatively venerable head. For the Colonel had just been married, and was rejuvenated in an almost jaunty degree. Somehow the philosophical young man seemed to miss something, and sighed. It was then that he made the remark which is the pivot of this precise though laborious anecdote.

“Since the Colonel ate his hat,” he said, “the Lunatic Asylum has lacked a background.”

“Damn your impudence,” said the Colonel cheerfully. “Do you mean to call me a background to my face?”

“A dark background,” said Pierce soothingly. “Do not resent my saying a dark background. I mean a grand, mysterious background like that of night; a sublime and even starry background.”

“Starry yourself,” said Crane indignantly.

“It was against that background of ancient night,” went on the young man dreamily, “that the fantastic shapes and fiery colours of our carnival could really be seen. So long as he came here with his black coat and beautiful society manners there was a foil to our follies. We were eccentric, but he was our centre. You cannot be eccentric without a centre.”

“I believe Hilary is quite right,” said Owen Hood earnestly. “I believe we have made a great mistake. We ought not to have all gone mad at once. We ought to have taken it in turns to go mad. Then I could have been shocked at his behaviour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and he could have been shocked at my behaviour on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. But there is no moral value in going mad when nobody is shocked. If Crane leaves off being shocked, what are we to do?”

“I know what we want,” began Pierce excitedly.

“So do I,” interrupted Hood. “We want a sane man.”

“Not so easy to find nowadays,” said the old soldier. “Going to advertise?”

“I mean a stupid man,” explained Owen Hood. “I mean a man who’s conventional all through, not a humbug like Crane. I mean, I want a solid, serious, business man, a hard-headed, practical man of affairs, a man to whom vast commercial interests are committed. In a word, I want a fool; some beautiful, rounded, homogenous fool, in whose blameless face, as in a round mirror, all our fancies may really be reflected and renewed. I want a very successful man, a very wealthy man, a man—”

“I know! I know!” cried young Pierce, almost waving his arms. “Enoch Oates!”

“Who’s Enoch Oates?” inquired White.

“Are the lords of the world so little known?” asked Hood. “Enoch Oates is Pork, and nearly everything else; Enoch Oates is turning civilization into one vast sausage-machine. Didn’t I ever tell you how Hilary ran into him over that pig affair?”

“He’s the very man you want,” cried Hilary Pierce enthusiastically. “I know him, and I believe I can get him. Being a millionaire, he’s entirely ignorant. Being an American, he’s entirely in earnest. He’s got just that sort of negative Nonconformist conscience of New England that balances the positive money-getting of New York. If we want to surprise anybody we’ll surprise him. Let’s ask Enoch Oates to dinner.”

“I won’t have any practical jokes played on guests,” said the Colonel.

“Of course not,” replied Hood. “He’ll be only too pleased to take it seriously. Did you ever know an American who didn’t like seeing the Sights? And if you don’t know you’re a Sight with that cabbage on your head, it’s time an American tourist taught you.”

“Besides, there’s a difference,” said Pierce. “I wouldn’t ask a fellow like that doctor, Horace Hunter—”

“Sir Horace Hunter,” murmured Hood reverently.

“I wouldn’t ask him, because I really think him a sneak and a snob, and my invitation could only be meant as an insult. But Oates is not a man I hate, nor is he hateful. That’s the curious part of it. He’s a simple, sincere sort of fellow, according to his lights, which are pretty dim. He’s a thief and a robber of course, but he doesn’t know it. I’m asking him because he’s different; but I don’t imagine he’s at all sorry to be different. There’s no harm in giving a man a good dinner and letting him be a background without knowing it.”

When Mr. Enoch Oates in due course accepted the invitation and presented himself at the club, many were reminded of that former occasion when a stiff and conventional figure in evening dress had first appeared like a rebuke to the revels. But in spite of the stiff sameness of both those black and white costumes, there was a great deal of difference between the old background and the new background. Crane’s good manners were of that casual kind that are rather peculiarly English, and mark an aristocracy at its ease in the saddle. Curiously enough, if the American had one point in common with a Continental noble of ancient lineage (whom his daughter might have married any day), it was that they would both be a little more on the defensive, living in the midst of democracy. Mr. Oates was perfectly polite, but there was something a little rigid about him. He walked to his chair rather stiffly and sat down rather heavily. He was a powerful, ponderous man with a large sallow face, a little suggestive of a corpulent Red Indian. He had a ruminant eye, and an equally ruminant manner of chewing an unlighted cigar. These were signs that might well have gone with a habit of silence. But they did not.

Mr. Oates’s conversation might not be brilliant, but it was continuous. Pierce and his friends had begun with some notion of dangling their own escapades before him, like dancing dolls before a child; they had told him something of the affair of the Colonel and his cabbage, of the captain and his pigs, of the parson and his elephant; but they soon found that their hearer had not come there merely as a listener. What he thought of their romantic buffooneries it would be hard to say; probably he did not understand them, possibly he did not even hear them. Anyhow, his own monologue went on. He was a leisurely speaker. They found themselves revising much that they had heard about the snap and smartness and hurry of American talk. He spoke without haste or embarrassment, his eye boring into space, and he more than fulfilled Mr. Pierce’s hopes of somebody who would talk about business matters. His talk was a mild torrent of facts and figures, especially figures. In fact the background was doing all it could to contribute the required undertone of common commercial life. The background was justifying all their hopes that it would be practical and prosaic. Only the background had rather the air of having become the foreground.

“When they put that up to me I saw it was the proposition,” Mr. Oates was saying. “I saw I’d got on to something better than my old regulation turnover of eighty-five thousand dollars on each branch. I reckoned I should save a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in the long run by scrapping the old plant, even if I had to drop another thirty thousand dollars on new works, where I’d get the raw material for a red cent. I saw right away that was the point to freeze on to; that I just got a chance to sell something I didn’t need to buy; something that could be sort of given away like old match-ends. I figured out it would be better by a long chalk to let the other guys rear the stock and sell me their refuse for next to nix, so I could get ahead with turning it into the goods. So I started in right away and got there at the first go off with an increase of seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars.”

“Seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars,” murmured Owen Hood. “How soothing it all seems.”

“I reckon those mutts didn’t get on to what they were selling me,” continued Mr. Oates, “or didn’t have the pep to use it that way themselves; for though it was the sure-enough hot tip, it isn’t everybody who would have thought of it. When I was in pork, of course, I wanted the other guys out; but just now I wasn’t putting anything on pork, but only on just that part of a pig I wanted and they didn’t want. By notifying all your pig farmers I was able to import nine hundred and twenty-five thousand pigs’ ears this fall, and I guess I can get consignments all winter.”

Hood had some little legal experience with long-winded commercial witnesses, and he was listening by this time with a cocked eyebrow and an attention much sharper than the dreamy ecstasy with which the poetic Pierce was listening to the millionaire’s monologue, as if to the wordless music of some ever-murmuring brook.

“Excuse me,” said Hood earnestly, “but did I understand you to say pigs’ ears?”

“That is so, Mr. Hood,” said the American with great patience and politeness. “I don’t know whether I gave you a sufficiently detailed description for you to catch on to the proposition, but—”

“Well,” murmured Pierce wistfully, “it sounded to me like a detailed description.”

“Pardon me,” said Hood, checking him with a frown. “I really want to understand this proposition of Mr. Oates. Do I understand that you bought pigs’ ears cheap, when the pigs were cut up for other purposes, and that you thought you could use them for some purpose of your own?”

“Sure!” said Mr. Enoch Oates, nodding. “And my purpose was about the biggest thing in fancy goods ever done in the States. In the publicity line there’s nothing like saying you can do what folks say can’t be done. Flying in the face of proverbs instead of providence, I reckon. It catches on at once. We got to work, and got out the first advertisement in no time; just a blank space with ‘We Can Do It’ in the middle. Got folks wondering for a week what it was.”

“I hope, sir,” said Pierce in a low voice, “that you will not carry sound commercial principles so far as to keep us wondering for a week what it was.”

“Well,” said Oates, “we found we could subject the pigskin and bristles to a new gelat’nous process for making artificial silk, and we figured that publicity would do the rest. We came out with the second set of posters: ‘She Wants it Now’… ‘The Most Wonderful Woman on Earth is waiting by the Old Fireside, hoping you’ll bring her home a Pig’s Whisper Purse.’”

“A purse!” gasped Hilary.

“I see you’re on the notion,” proceeded the unmoved American. “We called ‘em Pig’s Whisper Purses after the smartest and most popular poster we ever had: ‘There was a Lady Loved a Swine.’ You know the nursery rhyme, I guess; featured a slap-up princess whispering in a pig’s ear. I tell you there isn’t a smart woman in the States now that can do without one of our pig-silk purses, and all because it upsets the proverb. Why, see here—”

Hilary Pierce had sprung wildly to his feet with a sort of stagger and clutched at the American’s arm.

“Found! Found!” he cried hysterically. “Oh, sir, I implore you to take the chair! Do, do take the chair!”

“Take the chair!” repeated the astonished millionaire, who was already almost struggling in his grasp. “Really, gentlemen, I hadn’t supposed the proceedings were so formal as to require a chairman, but in any case—”

It could hardly be said, however, that the proceedings were formal. Mr. Hilary Pierce had the appearance of forcibly dragging Mr. Enoch Oates in the direction of the large padded arm-chair, that had always stood empty at the top of the club table, uttering cries which, though incoherent, appeared to be partly apologetic.

“No offence,” he gasped. “Hope no misunderstanding… Honoris causa… you, you alone are worthy of that seat… the club has found its king and justified its title at last.”

Here the Colonel intervened and restored order. Mr. Oates departed in peace; but Mr. Hilary Pierce was still simmering.

“And that is the end of our quiet, ordinary business man,” he cried. “Such is the behaviour of our monochrome and unobtrusive background.” His voice rose to a sort of wail. “And we thought we were dotty! We deluded ourselves with the hope that we were pretty well off our chump! Lord have mercy on us! American big business rises to a raving idiocy compared with which we are as sane as the beasts of the field. The modern commercial world is far madder than anything we can do to satirize it.”

“Well,” said the Colonel good-humouredly, “we’ve done some rather ridiculous things ourselves.”

“Yes, yes,” cried Pierce excitedly, “but we did them to make ourselves ridiculous. That unspeakable man is wholly, serenely serious. He thinks those maniacal monkey tricks are the normal life of man. Your argument really answers itself. We did the maddest things we could think of, meaning them to look mad. But they were nothing like so mad as what a modern business man does in the way of business.”

“Perhaps it’s the American business man,” said White, “who’s too keen to see the humour of it.”

“Nonsense,” said Crane. “Millions of Americans have a splendid sense of humour.”

“Then how fortunate are we,” said Pierce reverently, “through whose lives this rare, this ineffable, this divine being has passed.”

“Passed away for ever, I suppose,” said Hood with a sigh. “I fear the Colonel must be our only background once more.”

Colonel Crane was frowning thoughtfully, and at the last words his frown deepened to disapproval. He puffed at his smouldering cigar and then, removing it, said abruptly:

“I suppose you fellows have forgotten how I came to be a background? I mean, why I rather approve of people being backgrounds.”

“I remember something you said a long time ago,” replied Hood. “Hilary must have been in long-clothes at that time.”

“I said I had found out something by going round the world,” said Crane. “You young people think I am an old Tory; but remember I am also an old traveller. Well, it’s part of the same thing. I’m a traditionalist because I’m a traveller. I told you when I came back to the club that I’d come back to the tribe. I told you the best man was the man who wore a nose-ring where nose-rings were worn.”

“I remember,” said Owen Hood.

“No, you forget,” said Crane rather gruffly. “You forget it when you talk about Enoch Oates the American. I’m no politician, thank God, and I shall look on with detachment if you dynamite him for being a millionaire. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t think half so much of money as old Normantowers, who thinks it’s too sacred to talk about. But you’re not dynamiting him for being a millionaire. You’re simply laughing at him for being an American. You’re laughing at him for being national and normal, for being a good citizen, a good tribesman, for wearing a nose-ring where nose-rings are worn.

“I say… Kuklux, you know,” remonstrated Wilding White in his hazy way. “Americans wouldn’t be flattered—”

“Do you suppose you haven’t got a nose-ring?” cried Crane so sharply that the clergyman started from his trance and made a mechanical gesture as if to feel for that feature. “Do you suppose a man like you doesn’t carry his nationality as plain as the nose on his face? Do you think a man as hopelessly English as you are wouldn’t be laughed at in America? You can’t be a good Englishman without being a good joke. The better Englishman you are the more of a joke you are; but still it’s better to be better. Nose-rings are funny to people who don’t wear ‘em. Nations are funny to people who don’t belong to ‘em. But it’s better to wear a nose-ring than to be a cosmopolitan crank who cuts off his nose to spite his face.”

This being by far the longest speech the Colonel had ever delivered since the day he returned from his tropical travels long ago, his old friend looked at him with a certain curiosity; even his old friends hardly understood how much he had been roused in defence of a guest and of his own deep delicacies about the point of hospitality. He went on with undiminished warmth:

“Well, it’s like that with poor Oates. He has, as we see it, certain disproportions, certain insensibilities, certain prejudices that stand out in our eyes like deformities. They offend you; they offend me, possibly rather more than they do you. You young revolutionists think you’re very liberal and universal; but the only result is that you’re narrow and national without knowing it. We old fogeys know our tastes are narrow and national; but we know they are only tastes. And we know, at any rate I know, that Oates is far more likely to be an honest man, a good husband and a good father, because he stinks of the rankest hickory patch in the Middle West, than if he were some fashionable New Yorker pretending to be an English aristocrat or playing the aesthete in Florence.”

“Don’t say a good husband,” pleaded Pierce with a faint shudder. “It reminds me of the grand slap-up advertisement of the Pig’s Whisper. How do you feel about that, my dear Colonel? The Most Wonderful Woman on Earth Waiting by the Old Fireside—”

“It makes my flesh creep,” replied Crane. “It chills me to the spine. I feel I would rather die than have anything to do with it. But that has nothing to do with my point. I don’t belong to the tribe who wear nose-rings; nor to the tribe who talk through their noses.”

“Well, aren’t you a little thankful for that?” asked White.

“I’m thankful I can be fair in spite of it,” answered Crane. “When I put a cabbage on my head, I didn’t expect people not to stare at it. And I know that each one of us in a foreign land is a foreigner, and a thing to be stared at.”

“What I don’t understand about him,” said Hood, “is the sort of things he doesn’t mind having stared at. How can people tolerate all that vulgar, reeking, gushing commercial cant everywhere? How can a man talk about the Old Fireside? It’s obscene. The police ought to interfere.”

“And that’s just where you’re wrong,” said the Colonel. “It’s vulgar enough and mad enough and obscene enough if you like. But it’s not cant. I have travelled amongst these wild tribes, for years on end; and I tell you emphatically it is not cant. And if you want to know, just ask your extraordinary American friend about his own wife and his own relatively Old Fireside. He won’t mind. That’s the extraordinary part of it.”

“What does all this really mean, Colonel?” asked Hilary Pierce.

“It means, my boy,” answered the Colonel, “that I think you owe our guest an apology.”

So it came about that there was an epilogue, as there had been a prologue, to the drama of the entrance and exit of Mr. Enoch B. Oates; an epilogue which in its turn became a prologue to the later dramas of the League of the Long Bow. For the words of the Colonel had a certain influence on the Captain, and the actions of the Captain had a certain influence on the American millionaire; and so the whole machinery of events was started afresh by that last movement over the nuts and wine, when Colonel Crane had stirred moodily in his seat and taken his cigar out of his mouth.

Hilary Pierce was an amiable and even excessively optimistic young man by temperament, in spite of his pugnacity; he would really have been the last man in the world to wish to hurt the feelings of a harmless stranger; and he had a deep and almost secret respect for the opinions of the older soldier. So, finding himself soon afterwards passing the great gilded gateways of the highly American hotel that was the London residence of the American, he paused a moment in hesitation and then went in and gave his name to various overpowering officials in uniforms that might have been those of the German General Staff. He was relieved when the large American came out to meet him with a simple and lumbering affability, and offered his large limp hand as if there had never been a shadow of misunderstanding. It was somehow borne in upon Pierce that his own rather intoxicated behaviour that evening had merely been noted down along with the architectural styles and the mellow mediaevalism of the pig-sty, as part of the fantasies of a feudal land. All the antics of the Lunatic Asylum had left the American traveller with the impression that similar parlour games were probably being played that evening in all the parlours of England. Perhaps there was something, after all, in Crane’s suggestion that every nation assumes that every other nation is a sort of mild madhouse.

Mr. Enoch Oates received his guest with great hospitality and pressed on him cocktails of various occult names and strange colours, though he himself partook of nothing but a regimen of tepid milk.

Pierce fell into the confidence of Mr. Enoch Oates with a silent swiftness that made his brain reel with bewilderment. He was staggered like a man who had fallen suddenly through fifteen floors of a sky-scraper and found himself in somebody’s bedroom. At the lightest hint of the sort of thing to which Colonel Crane had alluded, the American opened himself with an expansiveness that was like some gigantic embrace. All the interminable tables of figures and calculations in dollars had for the moment disappeared; yet Oates was talking in the same easy and natural nasal drawl, very leisurely and a little monotonous, as he said:

“I’m married to the best and brightest woman God ever made, and I tell you it’s her and God between them that have made me, and I reckon she had the hardest part of it. We had nothing but a few sticks when I started; and it was the way she stood by that gave me the heart to risk even those on my own judgement of how things were going in the Street. I counted on a rise in Pork, and if it hadn’t risen I’d have been broke and I dare say in the jug. But she’s just wonderful. You should see her.”

He produced her photograph with a paralysing promptitude; it represented a very regal lady dressed up to the nines, probably for the occasion, with very brilliant eyes and an elaborate load of light hair.

“‘I believe in your star, Enoch,’ she said; ‘you stick to Pork,’” said Oates, with tender reminiscence, “and so we saw it through.”

Pierce, who had been speculating with involuntary irreverence on the extreme difficulty of conducting a love-affair or a sentimental conversation in which one party had to address the other as Enoch, felt quite ashamed of his cynicism when the Star of Pork shone with such radiance in the eyes of his new friend.

“It was a terrible time, but I stuck to Pork, sometimes feeling she could see clearer than I could; and of course she was right, and I’ve never known her wrong. Then came my great chance of making the combination and freezing out competition; and I was able to give her the sort of things she ought to have and let her take the lead as she should. I don’t care for society much myself; but I’m often glad on a late night at the office to ring her up and hear she’s enjoying it.”

He spoke with a ponderous simplicity that seemed to disarm and crush the criticism of a more subtle civilization. It was one of those things that are easily seen to be absurd; but even after they are seen to be absurd, they are still there. It may be, after all, that that is the definition of the great things.

“I reckon that’s what people mean by the romance of business,” continued Oates, “and though my business got bigger and bigger, it made me feel kinda pleased there had been a romance at the heart of it. It had to get bigger, because we wanted to make the combination water-tight all over the world. I guess I had to fix things up a bit with your politicians. But Congress men are alike all the world over, and it didn’t trouble me any.”

There was a not uncommon conviction among those acquainted with Captain Hilary Pierce that that ingenious young man was cracked. He did a great many things to justify the impression; and in one sense certainly had never shown any reluctance to make a fool of himself. But if he was a lunatic, he was none the less a very English lunatic. And the notion of talking about his most intimate affections, suddenly, to a foreigner in a hotel, merely because the conversation had taken that turn, was something that he found quite terrifying. And yet an instinct, an impulse running through all these developments, told him that a moment had come and that he must seize some opportunity that he hardly understood.

“Look here,” he said rather awkwardly, “I want to tell you something.”

He looked down at the table as he continued.

“You said just now you were married to the best woman in the world. Well, curiously enough, so am I. It’s a coincidence that often happens. But it’s a still more curious coincidence that, in our own quiet way, we went in for Pork too. She kept pigs at the back of the little country inn where I met her; and at one time it looked as if the pigs might have to be given up. Perhaps the inn as well. Perhaps the wedding as well. We were quite poor, as poor as you were when you started; and to the poor those extra modes of livelihood are often life. We might have been ruined; and the reason was, I gather, that you had gone in for Pork. But after all ours was the real pork; pork that walked about on legs. We made the bed for the pigs and filled the inside of the pig; you only bought and sold the name of the pig. You didn’t go to business with a live little pig under your arm or walk down Wall Street followed by a herd of swine. It was a phantom pig, the ghost of a pig, that was able to kill our real pig and perhaps us as well. Can you really justify the way in which your romance nearly ruined our romance? Don’t you think there must be something wrong somewhere?”

“Well,” said Oates after a very long silence, “that’s a mighty big question and will take a lot of discussing.”

But the end to which their discussion led must be left to reveal itself when the prostrate reader has recovered sufficient strength to support the story of The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green, which those who would endure to the end may read at some later date.

Chapter VI

The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green

If the present passage in the chronicles of the Long Bow seem but a side issue, an interlude and an idyll, a mere romantic episode lacking that larger structural achievement which gives solidity and hard actuality to the other stories, the reader is requested not to be hasty in his condemnation; for in the little love-story of Mr. Oliver Green is to be found, as in a parable, the beginning of the final apotheosis and last judgement of all these things.

It may well begin on a morning when the sunlight came late but brilliant, under the lifting of great clouds from a great grey sweep of wolds that grew purple as they dipped again into distance. Much of that mighty shape was striped and scored with ploughed fields, but a rude path ran across it, along which two figures could be seen in full stride outlined against the morning sky.

They were both tall; but beyond the fact that they had both once been professional soldiers, of rather different types and times, they had very little in common. By their ages they might almost have been father and son; and this would not have been contradicted by the fact that the younger appeared to be talking all the time, in a high, confident and almost crowing voice, while the elder only now and then put in a word. But they were not father and son; strangely enough they were really talking and walking together because they were friends. Those who know only too well their proceedings as narrated elsewhere would have recognized Colonel Crane, once of the Coldstream Guards, and Captain Pierce, late of the Flying Corps.

The young man appeared to be talking triumphantly about a great American capitalist whom he professed to have persuaded to see the error of his ways. He talked rather as if he had been slumming.

“I’m very proud of it, I can tell you,” he said. “Anybody can produce a penitent murderer. It’s something to produce a penitent millionaire. And I do believe that poor Enoch Oates has seen the light (thanks to my conversations at lunch); since I talked to him, Oates is another and a better man.”

“Sown his wild oats, in fact,” remarked Crane.

“Well,” replied the other. “In a sense they were very quiet oats. Almost what you might call Quaker Oats. He was a Puritan and a Prohibitionist and a Pacifist and an Internationalist; in short, everything that is in darkness and the shadow of death. But what you said about him was quite right. His heart’s in the right place. It’s on his sleeve. That’s why I preached the gospel to the noble savage and made him a convert.”

“But what did you convert him to?” inquired the other.

“Private property,” replied Pierce promptly. “Being a millionaire he had never heard of it. But when I explained the first elementary idea of it in a simple form, he was quite taken with the notion. I pointed out that he might abandon robbery on a large scale and create property on a small scale. He felt it was very revolutionary, but he admitted it was right. Well, you know, he’d bought this big English estate out here. He was going to play the philanthropist, and have a model estate with all the regular trimmings; heads hygienically shaved by machinery every morning; and the cottagers admitted once a month into their own front gardens and told to keep off the grass. But I said to him: ‘If you’re going to give things to people, why not give ‘em? If you give your friend a plant in a pot, you don’t send him an inspector from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vegetables to see he waters it properly. If you give your friend a box of cigars, you don’t make him write a monthly report of how many he smokes a day. Can’t you be a little generous with your generosity? Why don’t you use your money to make free men instead of to make slaves? Why don’t you give your tenants their land and have done with it, or let ‘em have it very cheap?’ And he’s done it; he’s really done it. He’s created hundreds of small proprietors, and changed the whole of this countryside. That’s why I want you to come up and see one of the small farms.”

“Yes,” said Colonel Crane, “I should like to see the farm.”

“There’s a lot of fuss about it, too; there’s the devil of a row,” went on the young man, in very high spirits. “Lots of big combines and things are trying to crush the small farmers with all sorts of tricks; they even complain of interference by an American. You can imagine how much Rosenbaum Low and Goldstein and Guggenheimer must be distressed by the notion of a foreigner interfering in England. I want to know how a foreigner could interfere less than by giving back their land to the English people and clearing out. They all put it on to me; and right they are. I regard Oates as my property; my convert; captive of my bow and spear.”

“Captive of your long bow, I imagine,” said the Colonel. “I bet you told him a good many things that nobody but a shrewd business man would have been innocent enough to believe.”

“If I use the long bow,” replied Pierce with dignity, “it is a weapon with heroic memories proper to a yeoman of England. With what more fitting weapon could we try to establish a yeomanry?”

“There is something over there,” said Colonel quietly, “that looks to me rather like another sort of weapon.”

They had by this time come in full sight of the farm buildings which crowned the long slope; and beyond a kitchen-garden and an orchard rose a thatched roof with a row of old-fashioned lattice windows under it; the window at the end standing open. And out of this window at the edge of the block of building protruded a big black object, rigid and apparently cylindrical, thrust out above the garden and dark against the morning daylight.

“A gun!” cried Pierce involuntarily; “looks just like a howitzer; or is it an anti-aircraft gun?”

“Anti-airman gun, no doubt,” said Crane; “they heard you were coming down and took precautions.”

“But what the devil can he want with a gun?” muttered Pierce, peering at the dark outline.

“And who the devil is HE, if it comes to that?” said the Colonel.

“Why, that window,” explained Pierce, “that’s the window of the room they’ve let to a paying guest, I know. Man of the name of Green, I understand; rather a recluse, and I suppose some sort of crank.”

“Not an anti-armament crank, anyhow,” said the Colonel.

“By George!” said Pierce, whistling softly. “I wonder whether things really have moved faster than we could fancy! I wonder whether it’s a revolution or a civil war beginning after all. I suppose we are an army ourselves; I represent the Air Force and you represent the infantry.”

“You represent the infants,” answered the Colonel. “You’re too young for this world; you and your revolutions! As a matter of fact, it isn’t a gun, though it does look rather like one. I see now what it is.”

“And what in the world is it?” asked his friend.

“It’s a telescope,” said Crane. “One of those very big telescopes they usually have in observatories.”

“Couldn’t be partly a gun and partly a telescope?” pleaded Pierce, reluctant to abandon his first fancy. “I’ve often seen the phrase ‘shooting stars,’ but perhaps I’ve got the grammar and sense of it wrong. The young man lodging with the farmer may be following one of the local sports—the local substitute for duck-shooting!”

“What in the world are you talking about?” growled the other.

“Their lodger may be shooting the stars,” explained Pierce.

“Hope their lodger isn’t shooting the moon,” said the flippant Crane.

As they spoke there came towards them, through the green and twinkling twilight of the orchard, a young woman with copper-coloured hair and a square and rather striking face, whom Pierce saluted respectfully as the daughter of the house. He was very punctilious upon the point that these new peasant farmers must be treated like small squires and not like tenants or serfs.

“I see your friend Mr. Green has got his telescope out,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said the girl. “They say Mr. Green is a great astronomer.”

“I doubt if you ought to call me ‘sir,’” said Pierce reflectively. “It suggests rather the forgotten feudalism than the new equality. Perhaps you might oblige me by saying ‘Yes, citizen,’ then we could continue our talk about Citizen Green on an equal footing. By the way, pardon me, let me present Citizen Crane.”

Citizen Crane bowed politely to the young woman without any apparent enthusiasm for his new title; but Pierce went on.

“Rather rum to call ourselves citizens when we’re all so glad to be out of the city. We really want some term suitable to rural equality. The Socialists have spoilt ‘Comrade’; you can’t be a comrade without a Liberty tie and a pointed beard. Morris had a good notion of one man calling another Neighbour. That sounds a little more rustic. I suppose,” he added wistfully to the girl, “I suppose I could not induce you to call me Gaffer?”

“Unless I’m mistaken,” observed Crane, “that’s your astronomer wandering about in the garden. Thinks he’s a botanist, perhaps. Appropriate to the name of Green.”

“Oh, he often wanders in the garden and down to the meadow and the cowsheds,” said the young woman. “He talks to himself a good deal, explaining a great theory he’s got. He explains it to everybody he meets, too. Sometimes he explains it to me when I’m milking the cow.”

“Perhaps you can explain it to us?” said Pierce.

“Not so bad as that,” she said, laughing. “It’s something like that Fourth Dimension they talk about. But I’ve no doubt he’ll explain it to you if you meet him.”

“Not for me,” said Pierce. “I’m a simple peasant proprietor and ask nothing but Three Dimensions and a Cow.”

“Cow’s the Fourth Dimension, I suppose,” said Crane.

“I must go and attend to the Fourth Dimension,” she said with a smile.

“Peasants all live by patchwork, running two or three side-shows,” observed Pierce. “Curious sort of livestock on the farm. Think of people living on a cow and chickens and an astronomer.”

As he spoke the astronomer approached along the path by which the girl had just passed. His eyes were covered with huge horn spectacles of a dim blue colour; for he was warned to save his eyesight for his starry vigils. This gave a misleading look of morbidity to a face that was naturally frank and healthy; and the figure, though stooping, was stalwart. He was very absent-minded. Every now and then he looked at the ground and frowned as if he did not like it.

Oliver Green was a very young professor, but a very old young man. He had passed from science as the hobby of a schoolboy to science as the ambition of a middle-aged man, without any intermediate holiday of youth. Moreover, his monomania had been fixed and frozen by success; at least by a considerable success for a man of his years. He was already a fellow of the chief learned societies connected with his subject, when there grew up in his mind the grand, universal, all-sufficing Theory which had come to fill the whole of his life as the daylight fills the day. If we attempted the exposition of that theory here, it is doubtful whether the result would resemble daylight. Professor Green was always ready to prove it; but if we were to set out the proof in this place, the next four or five pages would be covered with closely printed columns of figures, brightened here and there by geometrical designs, such as seldom form part of the text of a romantic story. Suffice it to say that the theory had something to do with Relativity and the reversal of the relations between the stationary and the moving object. Pierce, the aviator, who had passed much of his time on moving objects not without the occasional anticipation of bumping into stationary objects, talked to Green a little on the subject. Being interested in scientific aviation, he was nearer to the abstract sciences than were his friends, Crane with his hobby of folk-lore or Hood with his love of classic literature or Wilding White with his reading of the mystics. But the young aviator frankly admitted that Professor Green soared high into the heavens of the Higher Mathematics, far beyond the flight of his little aeroplane.

The Professor had begun, as he always began, by saying that it was quite easy to explain; which was doubtless true, as he was always explaining it. But he often ended by affirming fallaciously that it was quite easy to understand, and it would be an exaggeration to say that it was always understood. Anyhow, he was just about to read his great paper on his great theory at the great Astronomical Congress that was to be held that year at Bath; which was one reason why he had pitched his astronomical camp, or emplaced his astronomical gun, in the house of Farmer Dale on the hills of Somerset. Mr. Enoch Oates could not but feel the lingering hesitation of the landlord when he heard that his proteges the Dales were about to admit an unknown stranger into their household. But Pierce sternly reminded him that this paternal attitude was a thing of the past and that a free peasant was free to let lodgings to a homicidal maniac if he liked. Nevertheless, Pierce was rather relieved to find the maniac was only an astronomer; but it would have been all the same if he had been an astrologer. Before coming to the farm, the astronomer had set up his telescope in much dingier places—in lodgings in Bloomsbury and the grimy buildings of a Midland University. He thought he was, and to a great extent he was, indifferent to his surroundings. But for all that the air and colour of those country surroundings were slowly and strangely sinking into him.

“The idea is simplicity itself,” he said earnestly, when Pierce rallied him about the theory. “It is only the proof that is, of course, a trifle technical. Put in a very crude and popular shape, it depends on the mathematical formula for the inversion of the sphere.”

“What we call turning the world upside down,” said Pierce. “I’m all in favour of it.”

“Everyone knows the idea of relativity applied to motion,” went on the Professor. “When you run out of a village in a motor-car, you might say that the village runs away from you.”

“The village does run away when Pierce is out motoring,” remarked Crane. “Anyhow, the villagers do. But he generally prefers to frighten them with an aeroplane.”

“Indeed?” said the astronomer with some interest. “An aeroplane would make an even better working model. Compare the movement of an aeroplane with what we call merely for convenience the fixity of the fixed stars.”

“I dare say they got a bit unfixed when Pierce bumped into them,” said the Colonel.

Professor Green sighed in a sad but patient spirit. He could not help being a little disappointed even with the most intelligent outsiders with whom he conversed. Their remarks were pointed but hardly to the point. He felt more and more that he really preferred those who made no remarks. The flowers and the trees made no remarks; they stood in rows and allowed him to lecture to them for hours on the fallacies of accepted astronomy. The cow made no remarks. The girl who milked the cow made no remarks; or, if she did, they were pleasant and kindly remarks, not intended to be clever. He drifted, as he had done many times before, in the direction of the cow.

The young woman who milked the cow was not in the common connotation what is meant by a milkmaid. Margery Dale was the daughter of a substantial farmer already respected in that county. She had been to school and learnt various polite things before she came back to the farm and continued to do the thousand things that she could have taught the schoolmasters. And something of this proportion or disproportion of knowledge was dawning on Professor Green, as he stood staring at the cow and talking, often in a sort of soliloquy. For he had a rather similar sensation of a great many other things growing up thickly like a jungle round his own particular thing; impressions and implications from all the girl’s easy actions and varied avocations. Perhaps he began to have a dim suspicion that he was the schoolmaster who was being taught.

The earth and the sky were already beginning to be enriched with evening; the blue was already almost a glow like apple-green behind the line of branching apple-trees; against it the bulk of the farm stood in a darker outline, and for the first time he realized something quaint or queer added to that outline by his own big telescope stuck up like a gun pointed at the moon. Somehow it looked, he could not tell why, like the beginning of a story. The hollyhocks also looked incredibly tall. To see what he would have called “flowers” so tall as that seemed like seeing a daisy or a dandelion as large as a lamp-post. He was positive there was nothing exactly like it in Bloomsbury. These tall flowers also looked like the beginning of a story— the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. Though he knew little enough of what influences were slowly sinking into him, he felt something apt in the last memory. Whatever was moving within him was something very far back, something that came before reading and writing. He had some dream, as from a previous life, of dark streaks of field under stormy clouds of summer and the sense that the flowers to be found there were things like gems. He was in that country home that every cockney child feels he has always had and never visited.

“I have to read my paper to-night,” he said abruptly. “I really ought to be thinking about it.”

“I do hope it will be a success,” said the girl; “but I rather thought you were always thinking about it.”

“Well, I was—generally,” he said in a rather dazed fashion; and indeed it was probably the first time that he had ever found himself fully conscious of not thinking about it. Of what he was thinking about he was by no means fully conscious.

“I suppose you have to be awfully clever even to understand it,” observed Margery Dale conversationally.

“I don’t know,” he said, slightly stirred to the defensive. “I’m sure I could make you see—I don’t mean you aren’t clever, of course; I mean I’m quite sure you’re clever enough to see— to see anything.”

“Only some sorts of things, I’m afraid,” she said, smiling. “I’m sure your theory has got nothing to do with cows and milking-stools.”

“It’s got to do with anything,” he said eagerly; “with everything, in fact. It would be just as easy to prove it from stools and cows as anything else. It’s really quite simple. Reversing the usual mathematical formula, it’s possible to reach the same results in reality by treating motion as a fixed point and stability as a form of motion. You were told that the earth goes round the sun, and the moon goes round the earth. Well, in my formula, we first treat it as if the sun went round the earth—”

She looked up radiantly. “I always THOUGHT it looked like that,” she said emphatically.

“And you will, of course, see for yourself,” he continued triumphantly, “that by the same logical inversion we must suppose the earth to be going round the moon.”

The radiant face showed a shadow of doubt and she said “Oh!”

“But any of the things you mention, the milking-stool or the cow or what not, would serve the same purpose, since they are objects generally regarded as stationary.”

He looked up vaguely at the moon which was steadily brightening as vast shadows spread over the sky.

“Well, take those things you talk of,” he went on, moved by a meaningless unrest and tremor. “You see the moon rise behind the woods over there and sweep in a great curve through the sky and seem to set again beyond the hill. But it would be just as easy to preserve the same mathematical relations by regarding the moon as the centre of the circle and the curve described by some object such as the cow—”

She threw her head back and looked at him, with eyes blazing with laughter that was not in any way mockery, but a childish delight at the crowning coincidence of a fairy-tale.

“Splendid!” she cried. “So the cow really does jump over the moon!”

Green put up his hand to his hair; and after a short silence said suddenly, like a man recalling a recondite Greek quotation:

“Why, I’ve heard that somewhere. There was something else—‘The little dog laughed—’”

Then something happened, which was in the world of ideas much more dramatic than the fact that the little dog laughed. The professor of astronomy laughed. If the world of things had corresponded to the world of ideas, the leaves of the apple tree might have curled up in fear or the birds dropped out of the sky. It was rather as if the cow had laughed.

Following that curt and uncouth noise was a silence; and then the hand he had raised to his head abruptly rent off his big blue spectacles and showed his staring blue eyes. He looked boyish and even babyish.

“I wonder whether you always wore them,” she said. “I should think they made that moon of yours look blue. Isn’t there a proverb or something about a thing happening once in a blue moon?”

He threw the great goggles on the ground and broke them.

“Good gracious!” she exclaimed, “you seem to have taken quite a dislike to them all of a sudden. I thought you were going to wear them till—well, till all is blue, as they say.”

He shook his head. “All is beautiful,” he said. “You are beautiful.”

The young woman was normally very lucid and decisive in dealing with gentlemen who made remarks of that kind, especially when she concluded that the gentlemen were not gentlemen. But for some reason in this case it never occurred to her that she needed defence; possibly because the other party seemed more defenceless than indefensible. She said nothing. But the other party said a great deal, and his remarks did not grow more rational. At that moment, far away in their inn-parlour in the neighbouring town, Hood and Crane and the fellowship of the Long Bow were actually discussing with considerable interest the meaning and possibilities of the new astronomical theory. In Bath the lecture-hall was being prepared for the exposition of the theory. The theorist had forgotten all about it.

“I have been thinking a good deal,” Hilary Pierce was saying, “about that astronomical fellow who is going to lecture in Bath to-night. It seemed to me somehow that he was a kindred spirit and that sooner or later we were bound to get mixed up with him— or he was bound to get mixed up with us. I don’t say it’s always very comfortable to get mixed up with us. I feel in my bones that there is going to be a big row soon. I feel as if I’d consulted an astrologer; as if Green were the Merlin of our Round Table. Anyhow, the astrologer has an interesting astronomical theory.”

“Why?” inquired Wilding White with some surprise. “What have you got to do with his theory?”

“Because,” answered the young man, “I understand his astronomical theory a good deal better than he thinks I do. And, let me tell you, his astronomical theory is an astronomical allegory.”

“An allegory?” repeated Crane. “What of?”

“An allegory of us,” said Pierce; “and, as with many an allegory, we’ve acted it without knowing it. I realized something about our history, when he was talking, that I don’t think I’d ever thought of before.”

“What in the world are you talking about?” demanded the Colonel.

“His theory,” said Pierce in a meditative manner, “has got something to do with moving objects being really stationary, and stationary objects being really moving. Well, you always talk of me as if I were a moving object.”

“Heartbreaking object sometimes,” assented the Colonel with cordial encouragement.

“I mean,” continued Pierce calmly, “that you talk of me as if I were always motoring too fast or flying too far. And what you say of me is pretty much what most people say of you. Most sane people think we all go a jolly lot too far. They think we’re a lot of lunatics out-running the constable or looping the loop, and always up to some new nonsense. But when you come to think of it, it’s we who always stay where we are, and the rest that’s always moving and shifting and changing.”

“Yes,” said Owen Hood; “I begin to have some dim idea of what you are talking about.”

“In all our little adventures,” went on the other, “we have all of us taken up some definite position and stuck to it, however difficult it might be; that was the whole fun of it. But our critics did not stick to their own position—not even to their own conventional or conservative position. In each one of the stories it was they who were fickle, and we who were fixed. When the Colonel said he would eat his hat, he did it; when he found it meant wearing a preposterous hat, he wore it. But his neighbours didn’t even stick to their own conviction that the hat was preposterous. Fashion is too fluctuating and sensitive a thing; and before the end, half of them were wondering whether they oughtn’t to have hats of the same sort. In that affair of the Thames factory, Hood admired the old landscape and Hunter admired the old landlords. But Hunter didn’t go on admiring the old landlords; he deserted to the new landlords as soon as they got the land. His conservatism was too snobbish to conserve anything. I wanted to import pigs, and I went on importing pigs, though my methods of smuggling might land me in a mad-house. But Enoch Oates, the millionaire, didn’t go on importing pork; he went off at once on some new stunt, first on the booming of his purses, and afterwards on the admirable stunt of starting English farms. The business mind isn’t steadfast; even when it can be turned the right way, it’s too easy to turn. And everything has been like that, down to the little botheration about the elephant. The police began to prosecute Mr. White, but they soon dropped it when Hood showed them that he had some backing. Don’t you see that’s the moral of the whole thing? The modern world is materialistic, but it isn’t solid. It isn’t hard or stern or ruthless in pursuit of its purpose, or all the things that the newspapers and novels say it is; and sometimes actually praise it for being. Materialism isn’t like stone; it’s like mud, and liquid mud at that.”

“There’s something in what you say,” said Owen Hood, “and I should be inclined to add something to it. On a rough reckoning of the chances in modern England, I should say the situation is something like this. In that dubious and wavering atmosphere it is very unlikely there would ever be a revolution, or any very vital reform. But if there were, I believe on my soul that it might be successful. I believe everything else would be too weak and wobbly to stand up against it.”

“I suppose that means,” said the Colonel, “that you’re going to do something silly.”

“Silliest thing I can think of,” replied Pierce cheerfully. “I’m going to an astronomical lecture.”

The degree of silliness involved in the experiment can be most compactly and clearly stated in the newspaper report, at which the friends of the experimentalists found themselves gazing with more than their usual bewilderment on the following morning. The Colonel, sitting at his club with his favourite daily paper spread out before him, was regarding with a grave wonder a paragraph that began with the following head-lines:

AMAZING SCENE AT SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS

LECTURER GOES MAD AND ESCAPES

“A scene equally distressing and astonishing took place at the third meeting of the Astronomical Society now holding its congress at Bath. Professor Oliver Green, one of the most promising of the younger astronomers, was set down in the syllabus to deliver a lecture on ‘Relativity in Relation to Planetary Motion.’ About an hour before the lecture, however, the authorities received a telegram from Professor Green, altering the subject of his address on the ground that he had just discovered a new star, and wished immediately to communicate his discovery to the scientific world. Great excitement and keen anticipation prevailed at the meeting, but these feelings changed to bewilderment as the lecture proceeded. The lecturer announced without hesitation the existence of a new planet attached to one of the fixed stars, but proceeded to describe its geological formation and other features with a fantastic exactitude beyond anything yet obtained by way of the spectrum or the telescope. He was understood to say that it produced life in an extravagant form, in towering objects which constantly doubled or divided themselves until they ended in flat filaments, or tongues of a bright green colour. He was proceeding to give a still more improbable of a more mobile but equally monstrous form of life, resting on four trunks or columns which swung in rotation, and terminating in some curious curved appendages, when a young man in the front row, whose demeanour had shown an increasing levity, called out abruptly: ‘Why, that’s a cow!’ To this the professor, abandoning abruptly all pretence of scientific dignity, replied by shouting in a voice like thunder: ‘Yes, of course it’s a cow; and you fellows would never have noticed a cow, even if she jumped over the moon!’ The unfortunate professor then began to rave in the most incoherent manner, throwing his arms about and shouting aloud that he and his fellow scientists were all a pack of noodles who had never looked at the world they were walking on, which contained the most miraculous things. But the latter part of his remarks, which appeared to be an entirely irrelevant outburst in praise of the beauty of Woman, were interrupted by the Chairman and officials of the Congress, who called for medical and constabulary interference. No less a person than Sir Horace Hunter, who, although best known as a psycho-physiologist, has taken all knowledge for his province and was present to show his interest in astronomical progress, was able to certify on the spot that the unfortunate Green was clearly suffering from dementia, which was immediately corroborated by a local doctor, so that the unhappy man might be removed without further scandal.

“At this point, however, a still more extraordinary development took place. The young man in the front row, who had several times interrupted the proceedings with irrelevant remarks, sprang to his feet, and loudly declaring that Professor Green was the only sane man in the Congress, rushed at the group surrounding him, violently hurled Sir Horace Hunter from the platform, and with the assistance of a friend and fellow-rioter, managed to recapture the lunatic from the doctors and police, and carry him outside the building. Those pursuing the fugitives found themselves at first confronted with a new mystery, in the form of their complete disappearance. It has since been discovered that they actually escaped by aeroplane; the young man, whose name is said to be Pierce, being a well-known aviator formerly connected with the Flying Corps. The other young man, who assisted him and acted as pilot, has not yet been identified.”

Night closed and the stars stood out over Dale’s Farm; and the telescope pointed at the stars in vain. Its giant lenses had vainly mirrored the moon of which its owner had spoken in so vain a fashion; but its owner did not return. Miss Dale was rather unaccountably troubled by his absence, and mentioned it once or twice; after all, as her family said, it was very natural that he should go to an hotel in Bath for the night, especially if the revels of the roystering astronomers were long and late. “It’s no affair of ours,” said the farmer’s wife cheerfully. “He is not a child.” But the farmer’s daughter was not quite so sure on the point.

Next morning she rose even earlier than usual and went about her ordinary tasks, which by some accident or other seemed to look more ordinary than usual. In the blank morning hours, it was perhaps natural that her mind should go back to the previous afternoon, when the conduct of the astronomer could by no means be dismissed as ordinary.

“It’s all very well to say he’s not a child,” she said to herself. “I wish I were as certain he’s not an idiot. If he goes to an hotel, they’ll cheat him.”

The more angular and prosaic her own surroundings seemed in the daylight, the more doubt she felt about the probable fate of the moonstruck gentleman who looked at a blue moon through his blue spectacles. She wondered whether his family or his friends were generally responsible for his movements; for really he must be a little dotty. She had never heard him talk about his family; and she remembered a good many things he had talked about. She had never even seen him talking to a friend, except once to Captain Pierce, when they talked about astronomy. But the name of Captain Pierce linked itself up rapidly with other and more relevant suggestions. Captain Pierce lived at the Blue Boar on the other side of the down, having been married a year or two before to the daughter of the inn-keeper, who was an old friend of the daughter of the farmer. They had been to the same school in the neighbouring provincial town, and had once been, as the phrase goes, inseparable. Perhaps friends ought to pass through the phase in which they are inseparable to reach the phase in which they can safely be separated.

“Joan might know something about it,” she said to herself. “At least her husband might know.”

She turned back into the kitchen and began to rout things out for breakfast; when she had done everything she could think of doing for a family that had not yet put in an appearance, she went out again into the garden and found herself at the same gate, staring at the steep wooded hill that lay between the farm and the valley of the Blue Boar. She thought of harnessing the pony; and then went walking rather restlessly along the road over the hill.

On the map it was only a few miles to the Blue Boar; and she was easily capable of walking ten times the distance. But maps, like many other scientific documents, are very inaccurate. The ridge that ran between the two valleys was, relatively to that rolling plain, as definite as a range of mountains. The path through the dark wood that lay just beyond the farm began like a lane and then seemed to go up like a ladder. By the time she had scaled it, under its continuous canopy of low spreading trees, she had the sensation of having walked for a long time. And when the ascent ended with a gap in the trees and a blank space of sky, she looked over the edge like one looking into another world.

Mr. Enoch Oates, in his more expansive moments, had been known to allude to what he called God’s Great Prairies. Mr. Rosenbaum Low, having come to London from, or through, Johannesburg, often referred in his imperialistic speeches to the “illimitable veldt.” But neither the American prairie nor the African veldt really looks any larger, or could look any larger, than a wide English vale seen from a low English hill. Nothing can be more distant than the distance; the horizon or the line drawn by heaven across the vision of man. Nothing is so illimitable as that limit. Within our narrow island there is a whole series of such infinities; as if the island itself could hold seven seas. As she looked out over that new landscape, the soul seemed to be slaked and satisfied with immensity and, by a paradox, to be filled at last with emptiness. All things seemed not only great but growing in greatness. She could fancy that the tall trees standing up in the sunlight grew taller while she looked at them. The sun was rising and it seemed as if the whole world rose with it. Even the dome of heaven seemed to be lifting slowly; as if the very sky were a skirt drawn up and disappearing into the altitudes of light.

The vast hollow below her was coloured as variously as a map in an atlas. Fields of grass or grain or red earth seemed so far away that they might have been the empires and kingdoms of a world newly created. But she could already see on the brow of a hill above the pine-woods the pale scar of the quarry and below it the glittering twist in the river where stood the inn of the Blue Boar. As she drew nearer and nearer to it she could see more and more clearly a green triangular field with tiny black dots, which were little black pigs; and another smaller dot, which was a child. Something like a wind behind her or within her, that had driven her over the hills, seemed to sweep all the long lines of that landslide of a landscape, so that they pointed to that spot.

As the path dropped to the level and she began to walk by farms and villages, the storm in her mind began to settle and she recovered the reasonable prudence with which she had pottered about her own farm. She even felt some responsibility and embarrassment about troubling her friend by coming on so vague an errand. But she told herself convincingly enough that after all she was justified. One would not normally be alarmed about a strayed lodger as if he were a lion escaped from a menagerie. But she had after all very good reason for regarding this lion as rather a fearful wildfowl. His way of talking had been so eccentric that everybody for miles round would have agreed, if they had heard him, that he had a tile loose. She was very glad they had not heard him; but their imaginary opinion fortified her own. They had a duty in common humanity; they could not let a poor gentleman of doubtful sanity disappear without further inquiry.

She entered the inn with a firm step and hailed her friend with something of that hearty cheerfulness that is so unpopular in the early riser. She was rather younger and by nature rather more exuberant than Joan; and Joan had already felt the drag and concentration of children. But Joan had not lost her rather steely sense of humour, and she heard the main facts of her friend’s difficulty with a vigilant smile.

“We should rather like to know what has happened,” said the visitor with vague carelessness. “If anything unpleasant had happened, people might even blame us, when we knew he was like that.”

“Like what?” asked Joan smiling.

“Why, a bit off, I suppose we must say,” answered the other. “The things he said to me about cows and trees and having found a new star were really—”

“Well, it’s rather lucky you came to me,” said Joan quietly. “For I don’t believe you’d have found anybody else on the whole face of the earth who knows exactly where he is now.”

“And where is he?”

“Well, he’s not on the face of the earth,” said Joan Hardy.

“You don’t mean he’s—dead?” asked the other in an unnatural voice.

“I mean he’s up in the air,” said Joan, “or, what is often much the same thing, he is with my husband. Hilary rescued him when they were just going to nab him, and carried him off in an aeroplane. He says they’d better hide in the clouds for a bit. You know the way he talks; of course, they do come down every now and then when it’s safe.”

“Escaped! Nabbed him! Safe!” ejaculated the other young woman with round eyes. “What in the world does it all mean?”

“Well,” replied her friend, “he seems to have said the same sort of things that he said to you to a whole roomful of scientific men at Bath. And, of course, the scientific men all said he was mad; I suppose that’s what scientific men are for. So they were just going to take him away to an asylum, when Hilary—”

The farmer’s daughter rose in a glory of rage that might have seemed to lift the roof, as the great sunrise had seemed to lift the sky.

“Take him away!” she cried. “How dare they talk about such things? How dare they say he is mad? It’s they who must be mad to say such stuff! Why, he’s got more brains in his boots than they have in all their silly old bald heads knocked together—and I’d like to knock ‘em together! Why, they’d all smash like egg-shells, and he’s got a head like cast-iron. Don’t you know he’s beaten all the old duffers at their own business, of stars and things? I expect they’re all jealous; it’s just what I should have expected of them.”

The fact that she was entirely unacquainted with the names, and possibly the existence, of these natural philosophers did not arrest the vigorous word-painting with which she completed their portraits. “Nasty spiteful old men with whiskers,” she said, “all bunched together like so many spiders and weaving dirty cobwebs to catch their betters; of course, it’s all a conspiracy. Just because they’re all mad and hate anybody who’s quite sane.”

“So you think he’s quite sane?” asked her hostess gravely.

“Sane? What do you mean? Of course he’s quite sane,” retorted Margery Dale.

With a mountainous magnanimity Joan was silent. Then after a pause she said:

“Well, Hilary has taken his case in hand and your friend’s safe for the present; Hilary generally brings things off, however queer they sound. And I don’t mind telling you in confidence that he’s bringing that and a good many other things off, rather big things, just now. You can’t keep him from fighting whatever you do; and he seems to be out just now to fight everybody. So I shouldn’t wonder if you saw all your old gentlemen’s heads knocked together after all. There are rather big preparations going on; that friend of his named Blair is for ever going and coming with his balloons and things; and I believe something will happen soon on a pretty large scale, perhaps all over England.”

“Will it?” asked Miss Dale in an absent-minded manner (for she was sadly deficient in civic and political sense). “Is that your Tommy out there?”

And they talked about the child and then about a hundred entirely trivial things; for they understood each other perfectly.

And if there are still things the reader fails to understand, if (as seems almost incredible) there are things that he wishes to understand, then it can only be at the heavy price of studying the story of the Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair; and with that, it is comforting to know, the story of all these things will be drawing near its explanation and its end.

Chapter VII

The Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair

The Earl of Eden had become Prime Minister for the third time, and his face and figure were therefore familiar in the political cartoons and even in the public streets. His yellow hair and lean and springy figure gave him a factitious air of youth; but his face on closer study looked lined and wrinkled and gave almost a shock of decrepitude. He was in truth a man of great experience and dexterity in his own profession. He had just succeeded in routing the Socialist Party and overthrowing the Socialist Government, largely by the use of certain rhymed mottoes and maxims which he had himself invented with considerable amusement. His great slogan of “Don’t Nationalize but Rationalize” was generally believed to have led him to victory. But at the moment when this story begins he had other things to think of. He had just received an urgent request for a consultation from three of his most prominent supporters— Lord Normantowers, Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., the great advocate of scientific politics, and Mr. R. Low, the philanthropist. They were confronted with a problem, and their problem concerned the sudden madness of an American millionaire.

The Prime Minister was not unacquainted with American millionaires, even those whose conduct suggested that they were hardly representative of a normal or national type. There was the great Grigg, the millionaire inventor, who had pressed upon the War Office a scheme for finishing the War at a blow; it consisted of electrocuting the Kaiser by wireless telegraphy. There was Mr. Napper, of Nebraska, whose negotiations for removing Shakespeare’s Cliff to America as a symbol of Anglo-Saxon unity were unaccountably frustrated by the firm refusal of the American Republic to send us Plymouth Rock in exchange. And there was that charming and cultured Bostonian, Colonel Hoopoe, whom all England welcomed in his crusade for Purity and the League of the Lily, until England discovered with considerable surprise that the American Ambassador and all respectable Americans flatly refused to meet the Colonel, whose record at home was that of a very narrow escape from Sing-Sing.

But the problem of Enoch Oates, who had made his money in pork, was something profoundly different. As Lord Eden’s three supporters eagerly explained to him, seated round a garden table at his beautiful country seat in Somerset, Mr. Oates had done something that the maddest millionaire had never thought of doing before. Up to a certain point he had proceeded in a manner normal to such a foreigner. He had purchased amid general approval an estate covering about a quarter of a county; and it was expected that he would make it a field for some of those American experiments in temperance or eugenics for which the English agricultural populace offer a sort of virgin soil. Instead of that, he suddenly went mad and made a present of his land to his tenants; so that by an unprecedented anomaly the farms became the property of the farmers. That an American millionaire should take away English things from England, English rent, English relics, English pictures, English cathedrals or the cliffs of Dover, was a natural operation to which everybody was by this time accustomed. But that an American millionaire should give English land to English people was an unwarrantable interference and tantamount to an alien enemy stirring up revolution. Enoch Oates had therefore been summoned to the Council, and sat scowling at the table as if he were in the dock.

“Results most deplorable already,” said Sir Horace Hunter, in his rather loud voice. “Give you an example, my lord; people of the name of Dale in Somerset took in a lunatic as a lodger. May have been a homicidal maniac for all I know; some do say he had a great cannon or culverin sticking out of his bedroom window. But with no responsible management of the estate, no landlord, no lawyer, no educated person anywhere, there was nothing to prevent their letting the bedroom to a Bengal tiger. Anyhow, the man was mad, rushed raving on to the platform at the Astronomical Congress talking about Lovely Woman and the cow that jumped over the moon. That damned agitator Pierce, who used to be in the Flying Corps, was in the hall, and made a riot and carried the crazy fellow off in an aeroplane. That’s the sort of thing you’ll have happening all over the place if these ignorant fellows are allowed to do just as they like.”

“It is quite true,” said Lord Normantowers. “I could give many other examples. They say that Owen Hood, another of these eccentrics, has actually bought one of these little farms and stuck it all round with absurd battlements and a moat and drawbridge, with the motto ‘The Englishman’s House is his Castle.’”

“I think,” said the Prime Minister quietly, “that however English the Englishman may be, he will find his castle is a castle in Spain; not to say a castle in the air. Mr. Oates,” he said, addressing very courteously the big brooding American at the other end of the table, “please do not imagine that I cannot sympathize with such romances, although they are only in the air. But I think in all sincerity that you will find they are unsuited to the English climate. Et ego in Arcadia, you know; we have all had such dreams of all men piping in Arcady. But after all, you have already paid the piper; and if you are wise, I think you can still call the tune.”

“Gives me great gratification to say it’s too late,” growled Oates. “I want them to learn to play and pay for themselves.”

“But you want them to learn,” said Lord Eden gently, “and I should not be in too much of a hurry to call it too late. It seems to me that the door is still open for a reasonable compromise; I understand that the deed of gift, considered as a legal instrument, is still the subject of some legal discussion and may well be the subject of revision. I happened to be talking of it yesterday with the law officers of the Crown; and I am sure that the least hint that you yourself—”

“I take it to mean,” said Mr. Oates with great deliberation, “that you’ll tell your lawyers it’ll pay them to pick a hole in the deal.”

“That is what we call the bluff Western humour,” said Lord Eden, smiling, “but I only mean that we do a great deal in this country by reconsideration and revision. We make mistakes and unmake them. We have a phrase for it in our history books; we call it the flexibility of an unwritten constitution.”

“We have a phrase for it too,” said the American reflectively. “We call it graft.”

“Really,” cried Normantowers, a little bristly man, with sudden shrillness, “I did not know you were so scrupulous in your own methods.”

“Motht unthcrupulouth,” said Mr. Low virtuously.

Enoch Oates rose slowly like an enormous leviathan rising to the surface of the sea; his large sallow face had never changed in expression; but he had the air of one drifting dreamily away.

“Wal,” he said, “I dare say it’s true I’ve done some graft in my time, and a good many deals that weren’t what you might call modelled on the Sermon on the Mount. But if I smashed people, it was when they were all out to smash me; and if some of ‘em were poor, they were the sort that were ready to shoot or knife or blow me to bits. And I tell you, in my country the whole lot of you would be lynched or tarred and feathered to-morrow, if you talked about lawyers taking away people’s land when once they’d got it. Maybe the English climate’s different, as you say; but I’m going to see it through. As for you, Mr. Rosenbaum—”

“My name is Low,” said the philanthropist. “I cannot thee why anyone should object to uthing my name.”

“Not on your life,” said Mr. Oates affably. “Seems to be a pretty appropriate name.”

He drifted heavily from the room, and the four other men were left, staring at a riddle.

“He’s going on with it, or, rather, they’re going on with it,” groaned Horace Hunter. “And what the devil is to be done now?”

“It really looks as if he were right in calling it too late,” said Lord Normantowers bitterly. “I can’t think of anything to be done.”

“I can,” said the Prime Minister. They all looked at him; but none of them could read the indecipherable subtleties in his old and wrinkled face under his youthful yellow hair.

“The resources of civilization are not exhausted,” he said grimly. “That’s what the old governments used to say when they started shooting people. Well, I could understand you gentlemen feeling inclined to shoot people now. I suppose it seems to you that all your own power in the State, which you wield with such public spirit of course, all Sir Horace’s health reforms, the Normantowers’ new estate, and so on, are all broken to bits, to rotten little bits of rusticity. What’s to become of a governing class if it doesn’t hold all the land, eh? Well, I’ll tell you. I know the next move, and the time has come to take it.”

“But what is it?” demanded Sir Horace.

“The time has come,” said the Prime Minister, “to Nationalize the Land.”

Sir Horace Hunter rose from his chair, opened his mouth, shut it, and sat down again, all with what he himself might have called a reflex action.

“But that is Socialism!” cried Lord Normantowers, his eyes standing out of his head.

“True Socialism, don’t you think?” mused the Prime Minister. “Better call it True Socialism; just the sort of thing to be remembered at elections. Theirs is Socialism, and ours is True Socialism.”

“Do you really mean, my lord,” cried Hunter in a heat of sincerity stronger than the snobbery of a lifetime, “that you are going to support the Bolshies?”

“No,” said Eden, with the smile of a sphinx. “I mean the Bolshies are going to support me. Idiots!”

After a silence, he added in a more wistful tone:

“Of course, as a matter of sentiment, it is a little sad. All our fine old English castles and manors, the homes of the gentry… they will become public property, like post offices, I suppose. When I think of the happy hours I have myself passed at the Normantowers—” He smiled across at the nobleman of that name and went on. “And Sir Horace has now, I believe, the joy of living in Warbridge Castle— fine old place. Dear me, yes, and I think Mr. Low has a castle, though the name escapes me.”

“Rosewood Castle,” said Mr. Low rather sulkily.

“But I say,” cried Sir Horace, rising, “what becomes of ‘Don’t Nationalize but Rationalize’?”

“I suppose,” replied Eden lightly, “it will have to be ‘Don’t Rationalize but Nationalize.’ It comes to the same thing. Besides, we can easily get a new motto of some sort. For instance, we, after all, are the patriotic party, the national party. What about ‘Let the Nationalists Nationalize’?”

“Well, all I can say is—” began Normantowers explosively.

“Compensation, there will be compensation, of course,” said the Prime Minister soothingly; “a great deal can be done with compensation. If you will all turn up here this day week, say at four o’clock, I think I can lay all the plans before you.”

When they did turn up next week and were shown again into the Prime Minister’s sunny garden, they found that the plans were, indeed, laid before them; for the table that stood on the sunny lawn was covered with large and small maps and a mass of official documents. Mr. Eustace Pym, one of the Prime Minister’s numerous private secretaries, was hovering over them, and the Prime Minister himself was sitting at the head of the table studying one of them with an intelligent frown.

“I thought you’d like to hear the terms of the arrangements,” he said. “I’m afraid we must all make sacrifices in the cause of progress.”

“Oh, progress be ----” cried Normantowers, losing patience. “I want to know if you really mean that my estate—”

“It comes under the department of Castle and Abbey Estates in Section Four,” said Lord Eden, referring to the paper before him. “By the provisions of the new Bill the public control in such cases will be vested in the Lord-Lieutenant of the County. In the particular case of your castle—let me see—why, yes, of course, you are Lord Lieutenant of that county.”

Little Lord Normantowers was staring, with his stiff hair all standing on end; but a new look was dawning in his shrewd though small-featured face.

“The case of Warbridge Castle is different,” said the Prime Minister. “It happens unfortunately to stand in a district desolated by all the recent troubles about swine-fever, touching which the Health Comptroller” (here he bowed to Sir Horace Hunter) “has shown such admirable activity. It has been necessary to place the whole of this district in the hands of the Health Comptroller, that he may study any traces of swine-fever that may be found in the Castle, the Cathedral, the Vicarage, and so on. So much for that case, which stands somewhat apart; the others are mostly normal. Rosenbaum Castle—I should say Rosewood Castle—being of a later date, comes under Section Five, and the appointment of a permanent Castle Custodian is left to the discretion of the Government. In this case the Government has decided to appoint Mr. Rosewood Low to the post, in recognition of his local services to social science and economics. In all these cases, of course, due compensation will be paid to the present owners of the estates, and ample salaries and expenses of entertainment paid to the new officials, that the places may be kept up in a manner worthy of their historical and national character.”

He paused, as if for cheers, and Sir Horace was vaguely irritated into saying: “But look here, my castle—”

“Damn it all!” said the Prime Minister, with his first flash of impatience and sincerity. “Can’t you see you’ll get twice as much as before? First you’ll be compensated for losing your castle, and then you’ll be paid for keeping it.”

“My lord,” said Lord Normantowers humbly, “I apologize for anything I may have said or suggested. I ought to have known I stood in the presence of a great English statesman.”

“Oh, it’s easy enough,” said Lord Eden frankly. “Look how easily we remained in the saddle, in spite of democratic elections; how we managed to dominate the Commons as well as the Lords. It’ll be the same with what they call Socialism. We shall still be there; only we shall be called bureaucrats instead of aristocrats.”

“I see it all now!” cried Hunter, “and by Heaven, it’ll be the end of all this confounded demagogy of Three Acres and a Cow.”

“I think so,” said the Prime Minister with a smile; and began to fold up the maps.

As he was folding up the last and largest, he suddenly stopped and said:

“Hallo!”

A letter was lying in the middle of the table; a letter in a sealed envelope, and one which he evidently did not recognize as any part of his paper paraphernalia.

“Where did this letter come from?” he asked rather sharply. “Did you put it here, Eustace?”

“No,” said Mr. Pym staring. “I never saw it before. It didn’t come with your letters this morning.”

“It didn’t come by post at all,” said Lord Eden; “and none of the servants brought it in. How the devil did it get out here in the garden?”

He ripped it open with his finger and remained for some time staring in mystification at its contents.

“Welkin Castle, Sept. 4th, 19—.

“Dear Lord Eden,—As I understand you are making public provision for the future disposal of our historic national castles, such as Warbridge Castle, I should much appreciate any information about your intentions touching Welkin Castle, my own estate, as it would enable me to make my own arrangements.—Yours very truly, “Welkyn of Welkin.”

“Who is Welkyn?” asked the puzzled politician; “he writes as if he knew me; but I can’t recall him at the moment. And where is Welkin Castle? We must look at the maps again.”

But though they looked at the maps for hours, and searched Burke, Debrett, “Who’s Who,” the atlas, and every other work of reference, they could come upon no trace of that firm but polite country gentleman.

Lord Eden was a little worried, because he knew that curiously important people could exist in a corner in this country, and suddenly emerge from their corner to make trouble. He knew it was very important that his own governing class should stand with him in this great public change (and private understanding), and that no rich eccentric should be left out or offended. But although he was worried to that extent, it is probable that his worry would soon have faded from his mind if it had not been for something that happened some days later.

Going out into the same garden to the same table, with the more agreeable purpose of taking tea there, he was amazed to find another letter, though this was lying not on the table but on the turf just beside it. It was unstamped like the other and addressed in the same handwriting; but its tone was more stern.

“Welkin Castle, Oct. 6th, 19—.

“My Lord,—As you seem to have decided to continue your sweeping scheme of confiscation, as in the case of Warbridge Castle, without the slightest reference to the historic and even heroic claims of Welkin Castle, I can only inform you that I shall defend the fortress of my fathers to the death. Moreover, I have decided to make a protest of a more public kind; and when you next hear from me it will be in the form of a general appeal to the justice of the English people.—Yours truly, Welkyn of Welkin.”

The historic and even heroic traditions of Welkin Castle kept a dozen of the Prime Minister’s private secretaries busy for a week, looking up encyclopaedias and chronicles and books of history. But the Prime Minister himself was more worried about another problem. How did these mysterious letters get into the house, or rather into the garden? None of them came by post and none of the servants knew anything about them. Moreover, the Prime Minister, in an unobtrusive way, was very carefully guarded. Prime Ministers always are. But he had been especially protected ever since the Vegetarians a few years before had gone about killing everybody who believed in killing animals. There were always plain-clothes policemen at every entrance of his house and garden. And from their testimony it would appear certain that the letter could not have got into the garden; but for the trifling fact that it was lying there on the garden-table. Lord Eden cogitated in a grim fashion for some time; then he said as he rose from his chair:

“I think I will have a talk to our American friend Mr. Oates.”

Whether from a sense of humour or a sense of justice, Lord Eden summoned Enoch Oates before the same special jury of three; or summoned them before him, as the case may be. For it was even more difficult than before to read the exact secret of Eden’s sympathies or intentions; he talked about a variety of indifferent subjects leading up to that of the letters, which he treated very lightly. Then he said quite suddenly:

“Do you know anything about those letters, by the way?”

The American presented his poker face to the company for some time without reply. Then he said:

“And what makes you think I know anything about them?”

“Because,” said Horace Hunter, breaking in with uncontrollable warmth, “we know you’re hand and glove with all those lunatics in the League of the Long Bow who are kicking up all this shindy.”

“Well,” said Oates calmly, “I’ll never deny I like some of their ways. I like live wires myself; and, after all, they’re about the liveliest thing in this old country. And I’ll tell you more. I like people who take trouble; and, believe me, they do take trouble. You say they’re all nuts; but I reckon there really is method in their madness. They take trouble to keep those crazy vows of theirs. You spoke about the fellows who carried off the astronomer in an aeroplane. Well, I know Bellew Blair, the man who worked with Pierce in that stunt, and believe me he’s not a man to be sniffed at. He’s one of the finest experts in aeronautics in the country; and if he’s gone over to them, it means there’s something in their notion for a scientific intellect to take hold of. It was Blair that worked that pig stunt for Hilary Pierce; made a great gas-bag shaped like a sow and gave all the little pigs parachutes.”

“Well, there you are,” cried Hunter. “Of all the lunacy—”

“I remember Commander Blair in the War,” said the Prime Minister quietly. “Bellows Blair, they called him. He did expert work: some new scheme with dirigible balloons. But I was only going to ask Mr. Oates whether he happens to know where Welkin Castle is.”

“Must be somewhere near here,” suggested Normantowers, “as the letters seem to come by hand.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Enoch Oates doubtfully. “I know a man living in Ely, who had one of those letters delivered by hand. And I know another near Land’s End who thought the letter must have come from somebody living near. As you say, they all seem to come by hand.”

“By what hand?” asked the Prime Minister, with a queer, grim expression.

“Mr. Oates,” said Lord Normantowers firmly, “where IS Welkin Castle?”

“Why, it’s everywhere, in a manner of speaking,” said Mr. Oates reflectively. “It’s anywhere, anyhow. Gee—!” he broke off suddenly: “Why, as a matter of fact, it’s here!”

“Ah,” said the Prime Minister quietly, “I thought we should see something if we watched here long enough! You didn’t think I kept you hanging about here only to ask Mr. Oates questions that I knew the answer to.”

“What do you mean? Thought we would see what?”

“Where the unstamped letters come from,” replied Lord Eden.

Luminous and enormous, there heaved up above the garden trees something that looked at first like a coloured cloud; it was flushed with light such as lies on clouds opposite the sunset, a light at once warm and wan; and it shone like an opaque flame. But as it came closer it grew more and more incredible. It took on solid proportions and perspective, as if a cloud could brush and crush the dark tree-tops. It was something never seen before in the sky; it was a cubist cloud. Men gazing at such a sunset cloud-land often imagine they see castles and cities of an almost uncanny completeness. But there would be a possible point of completeness at which they would cry aloud, or perhaps shriek aloud, as at a sign in heaven; and that completeness had come. The big luminous object that sailed above the garden was outlined in battlements and turrets like a fairy castle; but with an architectural exactitude impossible in any cloudland. With the very look of it a phrase and a proverb leapt into the mind.

“There, my lord!” cried Oates, suddenly lifting his nasal and drawling voice and pointing, “there’s that dream you told me about. There’s your castle in the air.”

As the shadow of the flying thing travelled over the sun-lit lawn, they looked up and saw for the first time that the lower part of the edifice hung downwards like the car of a great balloon. They remembered the aeronautical tricks of Commander Blair and Captain Pierce and the model of the monstrous pig. As it passed over the table a white speck detached itself and dropped from the car. It was a letter.

The next moment the white speck was followed by a shower that was like a snowstorm. Countless letters, leaflets, and scraps of paper were littered all over the lawn. The guests seemed to stand staring wildly in a wilderness of waste-paper; but the keen and experienced eyes of Lord Eden recognized the material which, in political elections, is somewhat satirically called “literature.”

It took the twelve private secretaries some time to pick them all up and make the lawn neat and tidy again. On examination they proved to be mainly of two kinds: one a sort of electioneering pamphlet of the League of the Long Bow, and the other a somewhat airy fantasy about private property in air. The most important of the documents, which Lord Eden studied more attentively, though with a grim smile, began with the sentence in large letters:

“An Englishman’s House Is No Longer His Castle On The Soil Of England. If It Is To Be His Castle, It Must Be A Castle In The Air.

“If There Seem To Be Something Unfamiliar And Even Fanciful In The Idea, We Reply That It Is Not Half So Fantastic To Own Your Own Houses In The Clouds As Not To Own Your Own Houses On The Earth.”

Then followed a passage of somewhat less solid political value, in which the acute reader might trace the influence of the poetical Mr. Pierce rather than the scientific Mr. Blair. It began “They Have Stolen the Earth; We Will Divide the Sky.” But the writer followed this with a somewhat unconvincing claim to have trained rooks and swallows to hover in rows in the air to represent the hedges of “the blue meadows of the new realm,” and he was so obliging as to accompany the explanation with diagrams of space showing the exact ornithological boundaries in dotted lines. There were other equally scientific documents dealing with the treatment of clouds, the driving of birds to graze on insects, and so on. The whole of this section concluded with the great social and economic slogan: “Three Acres and a Crow.”

But when Lord Eden read on, his attention appeared graver than this particular sort of social reconstruction would seem to warrant. The writer of the pamphlet resumed:

“Do not be surprised if there seems to be something topsy-turvy in the above programme. That topsy-turvydom marks the whole of our politics. It may seem strange that the air which has always been public should become private, when the land which has always been private has become public. We answer that this is exactly how things really stand to-day in the matter of all publicity and privacy. Private things are indeed being made public. But public things are being kept private.

“Thus we all had the pleasure of seeing in the papers a picture of Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., smiling in an ingratiating manner at his favourite cockatoo. We know this detail of his existence, which might seem a merely domestic one. But the fact that he is shortly to be paid thirty thousand pounds of public money, for continuing to live in his own house, is concealed with the utmost delicacy.

“Similarly we have seen whole pages of an illustrated paper filled with glimpses of Lord Normantowers enjoying his honeymoon, which the papers in question are careful to describe as his Romance. Whatever it may be, an antiquated and fastidious taste might possibly be disposed to regard it as his own affair. But the fact that the taxpayer’s money, which is the taxpayer’s affair, is to be given him in enormous quantities, first for going out of his castle, and then for coming back into it—this little domestic detail is thought too trivial for the taxpayer to be told of it.

“Or again, we are frequently informed that the hobby of Mr. Rosenbaum Low is improving the breed of Pekinese, and God knows they need it. But it would seem the sort of hobby that anybody might have without telling everybody else about it. On the other hand, the fact that Mr. Rosenbaum Low is being paid twice over for the same house, and keeping the house as well, is concealed from the public; along with the equally interesting fact that he is allowed to do these things chiefly because he lends money to the Prime Minister.”

The Prime Minister smiled still more grimly and glanced in a light yet lingering fashion at some of the accompanying leaflets. They seemed to be in the form of electioneering leaflets, though not apparently connected with any particular election.

“Vote for Crane. He Said He would Heat His Hat and Did It. Lord Normantowers said he would explain how people came to swallow his coronet; but he hasn’t done it yet.

“Vote for Pierce. He Said Pigs Would Fly And They Did. Rosenbaum Low said a service of international aerial express trains would fly; and they didn’t. It was your money he made to fly.

“Vote for the League of the Long Bow. They Are The Only Men Who Don’t Tell Lies.”

The Prime Minister stood gazing after the vanishing cloud-castle, as it faded into the clouds, with a curious expression in his eyes. Whether it were better or worse for his soul, there was something in him that understood much that the muddled materialists around him could never understand.

“Quite poetical, isn’t it?” he said drily. “Wasn’t it Victor Hugo or some French poet who said something about politics and the clouds?… The people say, ‘Bah, the poet is in the clouds. So is the thunderbolt.’”

“Thunderbolts!” said Normantowers contemptuously. “What can these fools do but go about flinging fireworks?”

“Quite so,” replied Eden; “but I’m afraid by this time they are flinging fireworks into a powder-magazine.”

He continued to gaze into the sky with screwed-up eyes, though the object had become invisible.

If his eye could really have followed the thing after which he gazed, he would have been surprised; if his unfathomable scepticism was still capable of surprise. It passed over woods and meadows like a sunset cloud towards the sunset, or a little to the north-west of it, like the fairy castle that was west of the moon. It left behind the green orchards and the red towers of Hereford and passed into bare places whose towers are mightier than any made by man, where they buttress the mighty wall of Wales. Far away in this wilderness of columned cliffs and clefts it found a cleft or hollow, along the floor of which ran a dark line that might have been a black river running through a rocky valley. But it was in fact a crack opening below into another abyss. The strange flying-ship followed the course of the winding fissure till it came to a place where the crack opened into a chasm, round like a cauldron and accidental as the knot in some colossal tree-trunk; through which it sank, entering the twilight of the tremendous cavern beneath. The abyss below was lit here and there with artificial lights, like fallen stars of the underworld, and bridged with wooden platforms and galleries, on which were wooden huts and huge packing-cases and many things somewhat suggestive of a munition dump. On the rocky walls were spread out various balloon coverings, some of them even more grotesque in outline than the castle. Some were in the shapes of animals; and on that primeval background looked like the last fossils, or possibly the first outlines of vast prehistoric creatures. Perhaps there was something suggestive in the fancy that in that underworld a new world was being created. The man who alighted from the flying castle recognized, almost as one recognizes a domestic pet, the outline of a highly primitive pig stretching like a large archaic drawing across the wall. For the young man was called Hilary Pierce, and had had previous dealings with the flying pig, though for that day he had been put in charge of the flying castle.

On the platform on which he alighted stood a table covered with papers, with almost more papers than Lord Eden’s table. But these papers were covered almost entirely with figures and numbers and mathematical symbols. Two men were bending over the table, discussing and occasionally disputing. In the taller of the two the scientific world might have recognized Professor Green, whom it was seeking everywhere like the Missing Link, to incarcerate him in the interests of science. In the shorter and sturdier figure a very few people might have recognized Bellew Blair, the organizing brain of the English Revolution.

“I haven’t come to stay,” explained Pierce hastily. “I’m going on in a minute.”

“Why shouldn’t you stay?” asked Blair, in the act of lighting a pipe.

“I don’t want your talk interrupted. Still less, far, far less, do I want it uninterrupted. I mean while I’m here. A little of your scientific conversation goes a long way with me; I know what you’re like when you’re really chatty. Professor Green will say in his satirical way ‘9920.05,’ to which you will reply with quiet humour ‘75.007.’ This will be too good an opening for a witty fellow like the Professor, who will instantly retort ‘982.09.’ Not in the best taste perhaps, but a great temptation in the heat of debate.”

“Commander Blair,” said the Professor, “is very kind to let me share his calculations.”

“Lucky for me,” said Blair. “I’d have done ten times more with a mathematician like you.”

“Well,” said Pierce casually, “as you are so much immersed in mathematics, I’ll leave you. As a matter of fact, I had a message for Professor Green, about Miss Dale at the house where he was lodging; but we mustn’t interrupt scientific studies for a little thing like that.”

Green’s head came up from the papers with great abruptness.

“Message!” he cried eagerly. “What message? Is it really for me?”

“8282.003,” replied Pierce coldly.

“Don’t be offended,” said Blair. “Give the Professor his message and then go if you like.”

“It’s only that she came over to see my wife to find out where you had gone to,” said Pierce. “I told her, so far as it’s possible to tell anybody. That’s all,” he added, but rather with the air of one saying, “it ought to be enough.”

Apparently it was, for Green, who was once more looking down upon the precious papers, crumpled one of them in his clenched hand unconsciously, like a man suddenly controlling his feelings.

“Well, I’m off,” said Pierce cheerfully; “got to visit the other dumps.”

“Stop a minute,” said Blair, as the other turned away. “Haven’t you any sort of public news as well as private news? How are things going in the political world?”

“Expressed in mathematical formula,” replied Pierce over his shoulder, “the political news is MP squared plus LSD over U equals L. L let loose. L upon earth, my boy.”

And he climbed again into his castle of the air.

Oliver Green stood staring at the crumbled paper and suddenly began to straighten it out.

“Mr. Blair,” he said, “I am terribly ashamed of myself. When I see you living here like a hermit in the mountains and scrawling your calculations, so to speak, on the rocks of the wilderness, devoted to your great abstract idea, vowed to a great cause, it makes me feel very small to have entangled you and your friends in my small affairs. Of course, the affair isn’t at all small to me; but it must seem very small to you.”

“I don’t know very precisely,” answered Blair, “what was the nature of the affair. But that is emphatically your affair. For the rest, I assure you we’re delighted to have you, apart from your valuable services as a calculating machine.”

Bellew Blair, the last and, in the worldly sense, by far the ablest of the recruits of the Long Bow, was a man in early middle age, square built, but neat in figure and light on his feet, clad in a suit of leather. He mostly moved about so quickly that his figure made more impression than his face; but when he sat down smoking, in one of his rare moments of leisure, as now, it could be remarked that his face was rather calm than vivacious; a short square face with a short resolute nose, but reflective eyes much lighter than his close black hair.

“It’s quite Homeric,” he added, “the two armies fighting for the body of an astronomer. You would be a sort of symbol anyhow, since they started that insanity of calling you insane. Nobody has any business to bother you about the personal side of the matter.”

Green seemed to be ruminating, and the last phrase awoke him to a decision. He began to talk. Quite straightforwardly, though with a certain schoolboy awkwardness, he proceeded to tell his friend the whole of his uncouth love-story—the overturning of his spiritual world to the tune the old cow died of, or rather danced to.

“And I’ve let you in for hiding me like a murderer,” he concluded. “For the sake of something that must seem to you, not even like a cow jumping over the moon, but more like a calf falling over the milking-stool. Perhaps people vowed to a great work like this ought to leave all that sort of thing behind them.”

“Well, I don’t see anything to be ashamed of,” said Blair, “and in this case I don’t agree with what you say about leaving those things behind. Of some sorts of work it’s true; but not this. Shall I tell you a secret?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“The cow never does jump over the moon,” said Blair gravely. “It’s one of the sports of the bulls of the herd.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” said the Professor.

“I mean that women can’t be kept out of this war, because it’s a land war,” answered Blair. “If it were really a war in the air, you could have done it all by yourself. But in all wars of peasants defending their farms and homes, women have been very much on the spot; as they used to pour hot water out of windows during the Irish evictions. Look here, I’ll tell you a story. It’s relevant because it has a moral. After all, it’s my turn, so to speak. You’ve told me the true story of the Cow that Jumped over the Moon. It’s time I told you the true story of the Castle in the Air.”

He smoked silently for a moment, and then said:

“You may have wondered how a very prosaic practical Scotch engineer like myself ever came to make a thing like that pantomime palace over there, as childish as a child’s coloured balloon. Well, the answer is the same; because in certain circumstances a man may be very different from himself. At a certain period of the old war preparations, I was doing some work for the government in a secluded part of the western coast of Ireland. There were very few people for me to talk to; but one of them was the daughter of a bankrupt squire named Malone; and I talked to her a good deal. I was about as mechanical a mechanic as you could dig out anywhere; grimy, grumpy, tinkering about with dirty machinery. She was really like those princesses you read about in the Celtic poems; with a red crown made of curling elf-locks like little flames, and a pale elfin face that seemed somehow thin and luminous like glass; and she could make you listen to silence like a song. It wasn’t a pose with her, it was a poem; there are people like that, but very few of them like her. I tried to keep up my end by telling her about the wonders of science, and the great new architecture of the air. And then Sheila used to say, ‘And what is the good of them to me, when you HAVE built them. I can see a castle build itself without hands out of gigantic rocks of clear jewels in the sky every night.’ And she would point to where crimson or violet clouds hung in the green after-glow over the great Atlantic.

“You would probably say I was mad, if you didn’t happen to have been mad yourself. But I was wild with the idea that there was something she admired and that she thought science couldn’t do. I was as morbid as a boy; I half thought she despised me; and I wanted half to prove her wrong and half to do whatever she thought right. I resolved my science should beat the clouds at their own game; and I laboured till I’d actually made a sort of rainbow castle that would ride on the air. I think at the back of my mind there was some sort of crazy idea of carrying her off into the clouds she lived among, as if she were literally an angel and ought to dwell on wings. It never quite came to that, as you will hear, but as my experiments progressed my romance progressed too. You won’t need any telling about that; I only want to tell you the end of the story because of the moral. We made arrangements to get married; and I had to leave a good many of the arrangements to her, while I completed my great work. Then at last it was ready and I came to seek her like a pagan god descending in a cloud to carry a nymph up to Olympus. And I found she had already taken a very solid little brick villa on the edge of a town, having got it remarkably cheap and furnished it with most modern conveniences. And when I talked to her about castles in the air, she laughed and said her castle had come down to the ground. That is the moral. A woman, especially an Irishwoman, is always uncommonly practical when it comes to getting married. That is what I meant by saying it is never the cow who jumps over the moon. It is the cow who stands firmly planted in the middle of the three acres; and who always counts in any struggle of the land. That is why there must be women in this story, especially like those in your story and Pierce’s, women who come from the land. When the world needs a Crusade for communal ideals, it is best waged by men without ties, like the Franciscans. But when it comes to a fight for private property—you can’t keep women out of that. You can’t have the family farm without the family. You must have concrete Christian marriage again: you can’t have solid small property with all this vagabond polygamy; a harem that isn’t even a home.”

Green nodded and rose slowly to his feet, with his hands in his pockets.

“When it comes to a fight,” he said. “When I look at these enormous underground preparations, it is not difficult to infer that you think it will come to a fight.”

“I think it has come to a fight,” answered Blair. “Lord Eden has decided that. And the others may not understand exactly what they are doing; but he does.”

And Blair knocked out his pipe and stood up, to resume his work in that mountain laboratory, at about the same time at which Lord Eden awoke from his smiling meditations; and, lighting a cigarette, went languidly indoors.

He did not attempt to explain what was in his mind to the men around him. He was the only man there who understood that the England about him was not the England that had surrounded his youth and supported his leisure and luxury; that things were breaking up, first slowly and then more and more swiftly, and that the things detaching themselves were both good and evil. And one of them was this bald, broad and menacing new fact; a peasantry. The class of small farmers already existed, and might yet be found fighting for its farms like the same class all over the world. It was no longer certain that the sweeping social adjustments settled in that garden could be applied to the whole English land. But the story of how far his doubts were justified, and how far his whole project fared, is a part of the story of The Ultimate Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow, after which the exhausted and broken-spirited reader may find rest at last.

Chapter VIII

The Ultimate Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow

Mr. Robert Owen Hood came through his library that was lined with brown leather volumes with a brown paper parcel in his hand; a flippant person (such as his friend Mr. Pierce) might have said he was in a brown study. He came out into the sunlight of his garden, however, where his wife was arranging tea-things, for she was expecting visitors. Even in the strong daylight he looked strangely little altered, despite the long and catastrophic period that had passed since he had met her in the Thames valley and managed really to set the Thames on fire. That fire had since spread in space and time and become a conflagration in which much of modern civilization had been consumed; but in which (as its advocates alleged) English agriculture had been saved and a new and more hopeful chapter opened in English history. His angular face was rather more lined and wrinkled, but his straight shock of copper-coloured hair was as unchanged as if it had been a copper-coloured wig. His wife Elizabeth was even less marked, for she was younger; she had the same slightly nervous or short-sighted look in the eyes that was like a humanizing touch to her beauty made of ivory and gold. But though she was not old she had always been a little old-fashioned; for she came of a forgotten aristocracy whose women had moved with a certain gravity as well as grace about the old country houses, before coronets were sold like cabbages or the Jews lent money to the squires. But her husband was old-fashioned too; though he had just taken part in a successful revolution and bore a revolutionary name, he also had his prejudices; and one of them was a weakness for his wife being a lady—especially that lady.

“Owen,” she said, looking up from the tea-table with alarmed severity, “you’ve been buying more old books.”

“As it happens, these are particularly new books,” he replied; “but I suppose in one sense it’s all ancient history now.”

“What ancient history?” she asked. “Is it a History of Babylon or prehistoric China?”

“It is a History of Us.”

“I hope not,” she said; “but what do you mean?”

“I mean it’s a history of Our Revolution,” said Owen Hood, “a true and authentic account of the late glorious victories, as the old broadsheets said. The Great War of 1914 started the fashion of bringing out the history of events almost before they’d happened. There were standard histories of that war while it was still going on. Our little civil war is at least finished, thank God; and this is the brand-new history of it. Written by a rather clever fellow, detached but understanding and a little ironical on the right side. Above all, he gives quite a good description of the Battle of the Bows.”

“I shouldn’t call that our history,” said Elizabeth quietly. “I’m devoutly thankful that nobody can ever write our history or put it in a book. Do you remember when you jumped into the water after the flowers? I fancy it was then that you really set the Thames on fire.”

“With my red hair, no doubt,” he replied; “but I don’t think I did set the Thames on fire. I think it was the Thames that set me on fire. Only you were always the spirit of the stream and the goddess of the valley.”

“I hope I’m not quite so old as that,” answered Elizabeth.

“Listen to this,” cried her husband, turning over the pages of the book. “‘According to the general belief, which prevailed until the recent success of the agrarian movement of the Long Bow, it was overwhelmingly improbable that a revolutionary change could be effected in England. The recent success of the agrarian protest—’”

“Do come out of that book,” remonstrated his wife. “One of our visitors has just arrived.”

The visitor proved to be the Reverend Wilding White, a man who had also played a prominent part in the recent triumph, a part that was sometimes highly public and almost pontifical; but in private life he had always a way of entering with his grey hair brushed or blown the wrong way and his eagle face eager or indignant; and his conversation like his correspondence came in a rush and was too explosive to be explanatory.

“I say,” he cried, “I’ve come to talk to you about that idea, you know—Enoch Oates wrote about it from America, and he’s a jolly good fellow and all that; but after all he does come from America, and so he thinks it’s quite easy. But you can see for yourself it isn’t quite so easy, what with Turks and all that. It’s all very well to talk about the Unites States—”

“Never you mind about the United States,” said Hood easily; “I think I’m rather in favour of the Heptarchy. You just listen to this; the epic of our own Heptarchy, the story of our own dear little domestic war. ‘The recent success of the agrarian protest—’”

He was interrupted again by the arrival of two more guests; by the silent entrance of Colonel Crane and the very noisy entrance of Captain Pierce, who had brought his young wife with him from the country, for they had established themselves in the ancestral inn of the Blue Boar. White’s wife was still in the country, and Crane’s having long been busy in her studio with war-posters, was now equally busy with peace-posters.

Hood was one of those men whom books almost literally seize and swallow, like monsters with leather or paper jaws. It was no exaggeration to say he was deep in a book as an incautious traveller might be deep in a swamp or some strange man-eating plant of the tropics; only that the traveller was magnetized and did not even struggle. He would fall suddenly silent in the middle of a sentence and go on reading; or he would suddenly begin to read aloud with great passion, arguing with somebody in the book without reference to anybody in the room. Though not normally rude, he would drift through other people’s drawing-rooms towards other people’s bookshelves and disappear into them, so to speak, like a rusty family ghost. He would travel a hundred miles to see a friend for an hour, and then waste half an hour with his head in some odd volume he never happened to have seen before. On all that side of him there was a sort of almost creepy unconsciousness. His wife, who had old-world notions of the graces of a hostess, sometimes had double work to do.

“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” began Hood cheerfully as his wife rose swiftly to receive two more visitors. These were Professor Green and Commander Bellew Blair; for a queer friendship had long linked together the most practical and the most unpractical of the brothers of the Long Bow. The friendship, as Pierce remarked, was firmly rooted in the square root of minus infinity.

“How beautiful your garden is looking,” said Blair to his hostess. “One so seldom sees flower-beds like that now; but I shall always think the old gardeners were right.”

“Most things are old-fashioned here, I’m afraid,” replied Elizabeth, “but I always like them like that. And how are the children?”

“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” remarked her husband in a clear voice, “is doubtless—”

“Really,” she said, laughing, “you are too ridiculous for anything. Why in the world should you want to read out the history of the war to the people who were in it, and know quite well already what really happened?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Colonel Crane. “Very improper to contradict a lady, but indeed you are mistaken. The very last thing the soldier generally knows is what has really happened. Has to look at a newspaper next morning for the realistic description of what never happened.”

“Why, then you’d better go on reading, Hood,” said Hilary Pierce. “The Colonel wants to know whether he was killed in battle; or whether there was any truth in that story that he was hanged as a spy on the very tree he had climbed when running away as a deserter.”

“Should rather like to know what they make of it all,” said the Colonel. “After all, we were all too deep in it to see it. I mean see it as a whole.”

“If Owen once begins he won’t stop for hours,” said the lady.

“Perhaps,” began Blair, “we had better—”

“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” remarked Hood in authoritative tones, “is doubtless to be attributed largely to the economic advantage belonging to an agrarian population. It can feed the town or refuse to feed the town; and this question appeared quite early in the politics of the peasantry that had arisen in the western counties. Nobody will forget the scene at Paddington Station in the first days of the rebellion. Men who had grown used to seeing on innumerable mornings the innumerable ranks and rows of great milk-cans, looking leaden in a grey and greasy light, found themselves faced with a blank, in which those neglected things shone in the memory like stolen silver. It was true, as Sir Horace Hunter eagerly pointed out when he was put in command of the highly hygienic problem of the milk supply, that there would be no difficulty about manufacturing the metal cans, perhaps even of an improved pattern, with a rapidity and finish of which the rustics of Somerset were quite incapable. He had long been of the opinion, the learned doctor explained, that the shape of the cans, especially the small cans left outside poor houses, left much to be desired, and the whole process of standing these small objects about in the basements of private houses was open to grave objection in the matter of waste of space. The public, however, showed an indifference to this new issue and a disposition to go back on the old demand for milk; in which matter, they said, there was an unfair advantage for the man who possessed a cow over the man who only possessed a can. But the story that Hunter had rivalled the agrarian slogan by proclaiming the policy of ‘Three Areas and a Can’ was in all probability a flippant invention of his enemies.

“These agrarian strikes had already occurred at intervals before they culminated in the agrarian war. They were the result of the attempt to enforce on the farmers certain general regulations and precautions about their daily habit, dress and diet, which Sir Horace Hunter and Professor Hake had found to be of great advantage in the large State laboratories for the manufacture of poisons and destructive gases. There was every reason to believe that the people, especially the young people, of the village often evaded the regulation about the gutta-percha masks, and the rule requiring the worker to paint himself all over with an antiseptic gum; and the sending of inspectors from London to see that these rules were enforced led to lamentable scenes of violence. It would be an error, however, to attribute the whole of this great social convulsion to any local agricultural dispute. The causes must also be sought in the general state of society, especially political society. The Earl of Eden was a statesman of great skill by the old Parliamentary standards, but he was already old when he launched his final defiance to the peasants in the form of Land Nationalization; and the General Election which was the result of this departure fell largely into the hands of his lieutenants like Hunter and Low. It soon became apparent that some of the illusions of the Eden epoch had worn rather thin. It was found that the democracy could not always be intimidated even by the threat of consulting them about the choice of a Government.

“Nor can it be denied that the General Election of 19— was from the first rendered somewhat unreal by certain legal fictions which had long been spreading. There was a custom, originating in the harmless and humane deception used upon excited maiden ladies from the provinces, by which the private secretaries of the Prime Minister would present themselves as that politician himself; sometimes completing the innocent illusion by brushing their hair, waxing their moustaches or wearing their eyeglasses in the manner of their master. When this custom was extended to public platforms it cannot be denied that it became more questionable. In the last days of that venerable statesman it has been asserted that there were no less than five Lloyd Georges touring the country at the same time, and that the contemporary Chancellor of the Exchequer had appeared simultaneously in three cities on the same night, while the original of all these replicas, the popular and brilliant Chancellor himself, was enjoying a well-earned rest by the Lake of Como. The incident of two identical Lord Smiths appearing side by side on the same platform (through a miscalculation of the party agents), though received with good humour and honest merriment by the audience, did but little good to the serious credit of parliamentary institutions. There was of course a certain exaggeration in the suggestion of the satirist that a whole column of identical Prime Ministers, walking two and two like soldiers, marched out of Downing Street every morning and distributed themselves to their various posts like policemen; but such satires were popular and widely scattered, especially by an active young gentleman who was the author of most of them—Captain Hilary Pierce, late of the Flying Corps.

“But if this was true of such trifles as half a dozen of Prime Ministers, it was even truer and more trying in the practical matter of party programmes and proposals. The heading of each party programme with the old promise ‘Every Man a Millionaire’ had of course become merely formal, like a decorative pattern or border. But it cannot be denied that the universal use of this phrase, combined with the equally universal sense of the unfairness of expecting any politician to carry it out, somewhat weakened the force of words in political affairs. It would have been well if statesmen had confined themselves to these accepted and familiar formalities. Unfortunately, under the stress of the struggle which arose out of the menacing organization of the League of the Long Bow, they sought to dazzle their followers with new improbabilities instead of adhering to the tried and trusty improbabilities that had done them yeoman service in the past.

“Thus it was unwise of Lord Normantowers, so far to depart from the temperance principles of a lifetime as to promise all his workers a bottle of champagne at every meal, if they would consent to complete the provision of munitions for suppressing the League of the Long Bow rebellion. The great philanthropist unquestionably had the highest intentions, both in his rash promise and his more reasonable fulfilment. But when the munitions-workers found that the champagne-bottles, though carefully covered with the most beautiful gold-foil, contained in fact nothing but hygienically boiled water, the result was a sudden and sensational strike, which paralysed the whole output of munitions and led to the first incredible victories of the League of the Long Bow.

“There followed in consequence one of the most amazing wars of human history—a one-sided war. One side would have been insignificant if the other had not been impotent. The minority could not have fought for long; only the majority could not fight at all. There prevailed through the whole of the existing organizations of society a universal distrust that turned them into a dust of disconnected atoms. What was the use of offering men higher pay when they did not believe they would ever receive it, but only alluded jeeringly to Lord Normantowers and his brand of champagne? What was the use of telling every man that he would have a bonus, when you had told him for twenty years that he would soon be a millionaire? What was the good of the Prime Minister pledging his honour in a ringing voice on platform after platform, when it was already an open jest that it was not the Prime Minister at all? The Government voted taxes and they were not paid. It mobilized armies and they did not move. It introduced the pattern of a new all-pulverizing gun, and nobody would make it and nobody would fire it off. We all remember the romantic crisis when no less a genius than Professor Hake came to Sir Horace Hunter, the Minister of Scientific Social Organization, with a new explosive capable of shattering the whole geological formation of Europe and sinking these islands in the Atlantic, but was unable to induce the cabman or any of the clerks to assist him in lifting it out of the cab.

“Against all this anarchy of broken promises the little organization of the League of the Long Bow stood solid and loyal and dependable. The Long Bowmen had become popular by the nickname of the Liars. Everywhere the jest or catchword was repeated like a song, ‘Only the Liars Tell the Truth.’ They found more and more men to work and fight for them, because it was known that they would pay whatever wages they promised, and refuse to promise anything that they could not perform. The nickname became an ironical symbol of idealism and dignity. A man was proud of being a little precise and even pedantic in his accuracy and probity because he was a Liar. The whole of this strange organization had originated in certain wild bets or foolish practical jokes indulged in by a small group of eccentrics. But they had prided themselves on the logical, if rather literal, fashion in which they had fulfilled certain vows about white elephants or flying pigs. Hence, when they came to stand for a policy of peasant proprietorship, and were enabled by the money of an American crank to establish it in a widespread fashion across the west of England, they took the more serious task with the same tenacity. When their foes mocked them with ‘the myth of three acres and a cow,’ they answered: ‘Yes, it is as mythical as the cow that jumped over the moon. But our myths come true.’

“The inexplicable and indeed incredible conclusion of the story was due to a new fact; the fact of the actual presence of the new peasantry. They had first come into complete possession of their new farms, by the deed of gift signed by Enoch Oates in the February of 19— and had thus been settled on the land a great many years when Lord Eden and his Cabinet finally committed themselves to the scheme of Land Nationalization by which their homesteads were to pass into official control. That curious and inexplicable thing, the spirit of the peasant, had made great strides in the interval. It was found that the Government could not move such people about from place to place, as it is possible to do with the urban poor in the reconstruction of streets or the destruction of slums. It was not a thing like moving pawns, but a thing like pulling up plants; and plants that had already struck their roots very deep. In short, the Government, which had already adopted a policy commonly called Socialist from motives that were in fact very conservative, found itself confronted with the same peasant resistance as brought the Bolshevist Government in Russia to a standstill. And when Lord Eden and his Cabinet put in motion the whole modern machinery of militarism and coercion to crush the little experiment, he found himself confronted with a rural rising such as has not been known in England since the Middle Ages.

“It is said that the men of the Long Bow carried their mediaeval symbolism so far as to wear Lincoln green as their uniform when they retired to the woods in the manner of Robin Hood. It is certain that they did employ the weapon after which they were named; and curiously enough, as will be seen, by no means without effect. But it must be clearly understood that when the new agrarian class took to the woods like outlaws, they did not feel in the least like robbers. They hardly even felt like rebels. From their point of view at least, they were and long had been the lawful owners of their own fields, and the officials who came to confiscate were the robbers. Therefore when Lord Eden proclaimed Nationalization, they turned out in thousands as their fathers would have gone out against pirates or wolves.

“The Government acted with great promptitude. It instantly voted 50,000 pounds to Mr. Rosenbaum Low, the expenditure of which was wisely left to his discretion at so acute a crisis, with no more than the understanding that he should take a thorough general survey of the situation. He proved worthy of the trust; and it was with the gravest consideration and sense of responsibility that he selected Mr. Leonard Kramp, the brilliant young financier, from all his other nephews to take command of the forces in the field. In the field, however, fortune is well known to be somewhat more incalculable; and all the intelligence and presence of mind that had enabled Kramp to postpone the rush on the Potosi Bank were not sufficient to balance the accidental possession by Crane and Pierce of an elementary knowledge of strategy.

“Before considering the successes obtained by these commanders in the rather rude fashion of warfare which they were forced to adopt, it must be noted, of course, that even on their side there were also scientific resources of a kind; and an effective if eccentric kind. The scientific genius of Bellew Blair had equipped his side with many secret processes affecting aviation and aeronautics, and it is the peculiarity of this extraordinary man that his secret processes really remained for a considerable time secret. For he had not told them to anybody with any intention of making any money out of them. This quixotic and visionary behaviour contrasted sharply with the shrewd good sense of the great business men who know that publicity is the soul of business. For some time past they had successfully ignored the outworn sentimental prejudice that had prevented soldiers and sailors from advertising the best methods of defeating the enemy; and we can all recall those brilliantly coloured announcements which used to brighten so many hoardings in those days, ‘Sink in Smith’s Submarine; Pleasure Trips for Patriots.’ Or ‘Duffin’s Portable Dug-Out Makes War a Luxury.’ Advertisement cannot fail to effect its aim; the name of an aeroplane that had been written on the sky in pink and pea-green lights could not but become a symbol of the conquest of the air; and the patriotic statesman, deeply considering what sort of battleship might best defend his country’s coasts, was insensibly and subtly influenced by the number of times that he had seen its name repeated on the steps of a moving staircase at an Imperial Exhibition. Nor could there be any doubt about the brilliant success that attended these scientific specialties so long as their operations were confined to the market. The methods of Commander Blair were in comparison private, local, obscure and lacking any general recognition; and by a strange irony it was a positive advantage to this nameless and secretive crank that he had never advertised his weapons until he used them. He had paraded a number of merely fanciful balloons and fireworks for a jest; but the secrets to which he attached importance he had hidden in cracks of the Welsh mountains with a curious and callous indifference to the principles of commercial distribution and display. He could not in any case have conducted operations on so large a scale, being deficient in that capital, the lack of which has so often been fatal to inventors; and had made it useless for a man to discover a machine unless he could also discover a millionaire. But it cannot be denied that when his machine was brought into operation it was always operative, even to the point of killing the millionaire who might have financed it. For the millionaire had so persistently cultivated the virtues of self-advertisement that it was difficult for him to become suddenly unknown and undistinguished, even in scenes of conflict where he most ardently desired to do so. There was a movement on foot for treating all millionaires as non-combatants, as being treasures belonging alike to all nations, like the Cathedrals or the Parthenon. It is said that there was even an alternative scheme for camouflaging the millionaire by the pictorial methods that can disguise a gun as a part of the landscape; and that Captain Pierce devoted much eloquence to persuading Mr. Rosenbaum Low how much better it would be for all parties if his face could be made to melt away into the middle distance or take on the appearance of a blank wall or a wooden post.”

“The extraordinary thing is,” interrupted Pierce, who had been listening eagerly, “that he said I was personal. Just at the moment when I was trying to wave away all personal features that could come between us, he actually said I was personal.”

Hood went on reading as if nobody had spoken. “In truth the successes of Blair’s instruments revealed a fallacy in the common commercial argument. We talk of a competition between two kinds of soap or two kinds of jam or cocoa, but it is a competition in purchase and not in practice. We do not make two men eat two kinds of jam and then observe which wears the most radiant smile of satisfaction. We do not give two men two kinds of cocoa and note which endures it with most resignation. But we do use two guns directly against each other; and in the case of Blair’s methods the less advertised gun was the better. Nevertheless his scientific genius could only cover a corner of the field; and a great part of the war must be considered as a war in the open country of a much more primitive and sometimes almost prehistoric kind.

“It is admitted of course by all students that the victories of Crane and Pierce were gross violations of strategic science. The victors themselves afterwards handsomely acknowledged the fact; but it was then too late to repair the error. In order to understand it, however, it is necessary to grasp the curious condition into which so many elements of social life had sunk in the time just preceding the outbreak. It was this strange social situation which rendered the campaign a contradiction to so many sound military maxims.

“For instance, it is a recognized military maxim that armies depend upon roads. But anyone who had noticed the conditions that were already beginning to appear in the London streets as early as 1924 will understand that a road was something less simple and static than the Romans imagined. The Government had adopted everywhere in their road-making the well-known material familiar to us all from the advertisements by the name of “Nobumpo,” thereby both insuring the comfort of travellers and rewarding a faithful supporter by placing a large order with Mr. Hugg. As several members of the Government themselves held shares in Nobumpo their enthusiastic co-operation in the public work was assured. But, as has no doubt been observed everywhere, it is one of the many advantages of Nobumpo, as preserving that freshness of surface so agreeable to the pedestrian, that the whole material can be (and is) taken up and renewed every three months, for the comfort of travellers and the profit and encouragement of trade. It so happened that at the precise moment of the outbreak of hostilities all the country roads, especially in the west, were as completely out of use as if they had been the main thoroughfares of London. This in itself tended to equalize the chances or even to increase them in favour of a guerilla force, such as that which had disappeared into the woods and was everywhere moving under cover of the trees. Under modern conditions, it was found that by carefully avoiding roads, it was still more or less possible to move from place to place.

“Again, another recognized military fact is the fact the bow is an obsolete weapon. And nothing is more irritating to a finely balanced taste than to be killed with an obsolete weapon, especially while persistently pulling the trigger of an efficient weapon, without any apparent effect. Such was the fate of the few unfortunate regiments which ventured to advance into the forests and fell under showers of arrows from trackless ambushes. For it must be remembered that the conditions of this extraordinary campaign entirely reversed the normal military rule about the essential military department of supply. Mechanical communications theoretically accelerate supply, while the supply of a force cut loose and living on the country is soon exhausted. But the mechanical factor also depends upon a moral factor. Ammunition would on normal occasions have been produced with unequalled rapidity by Poole’s Process and brought up with unrivalled speed in Blinker’s Cars; but not at the moment when riotous employees were engaged in dipping Poole repeatedly in a large vat at the factory; or in the quieter conditions of the country-side, where various tramps were acquiring squatter’s rights in Blinker’s Cars, accidentally delayed upon their journey. Everywhere the same thing happened; just as the great manufacturer failed to keep his promise to the workers who produced munitions, so the petty officials driving the lorries had failed to keep their promises to loafers and vagrants who had helped them out of temporary difficulties; and the whole system of supply broke down upon a broken word. On the other hand, the supply of the outlaws was in a sense almost infinite. With the woodcutters and the blacksmiths on their side, they could produce their own rude mediaeval weapons everywhere. It was in vain that Professor Hake delivered a series of popular lectures, proving to the lower classes that in the long run it would be to their economic advantage to be killed in battle. Captain Pierce is reported to have said: ‘I believe the Professor is a botanist as well as an economist; but as a botanist he has not yet discovered that guns and arrows do not grow on trees. Bows and arrows do.’

“But the incident which history will have most difficulty in explaining, and which it may perhaps refer to the region of myth or romance, is the crowning victory commonly called the Battle of the Bows. It was indeed originally called ‘The Battle of the Bows of God’; in reference to some strangely fantastic boast, equally strangely fulfilled, that is said to have been uttered by the celebrated Parson White, a sort of popular chaplain who seems to have been the Friar Tuck of this new band of Robin Hood. Coming on a sort of embassy to Sir Horace Hunter, this clergyman is said to have threatened the Government with something like a miracle. When rallied about the archaic sport of the long bow, he replied: ‘Yes, we have long bows and we shall have longer bows; the longest bows the world has ever seen; bows taller than houses; bows given to us by God Himself and big enough for His gigantic angels.’

“The whole business of this battle, historic and decisive as it was, is covered with some obscurity, like that cloud of storm that hung heavy upon the daybreak of that gloomy November day. Had anyone been present with the Government forces who was well acquainted with the western valley in which they were operating, such a person could not have failed to notice that the very landscape looked different; looked new and abnormal. Dimly as it could be traced through the morning twilight, the very line of the woodland against the sky would have shown him a new shape; a deformity like a hump. But the plans had all been laid out in London long before, in imitation of that foresight, fixity of purpose, and final success that will always be associated with the last German Emperor. It was enough for them that there was a wood of some sort marked on the map, and they advanced toward it, low and crouching as its entrance appeared to be.

“Then something happened, which even those who saw it and survived cannot describe. The dark trees seemed to spring up to twice their height as in a nightmare. In the half-dark the whole wood seemed to rise from the earth like a rush of birds and then to turn over in mid-air and come towards the invaders like a roaring wave. Some such dim and dizzy sight they saw; but many of them at least saw little enough afterwards. Simultaneously with the turning of this wheel of waving trees, rocks seemed to rain down out of heaven; beams and stones and shafts and missiles of all kinds, flattening out the advancing force as under a pavement produced by a shower of paving-stones. It is asserted that some of the countrymen cunning in woodcraft, in the service of the Long Bow, had contrived to fit up a tree as a colossal catapult; calculating how to bend back the boughs and sometimes even the trunks to the breaking-point, and gaining a huge and living resilience with their release. If this story is true, it is certainly an appropriate conclusion to the career of the Long Bow and a rather curious fulfilment of the visionary vaunt of Parson White, when he said that the bows would be big enough for giants, and that the maker of the bows was God.”

“Yes,” interrupted the excitable White, “and do you know what he said to me when I first said it?”

“What who said when you said what?” asked Hood patiently.

“I mean that fellow Hunter,” replied the clergyman. “That varnished society doctor turned politician. Do you know what he said when I told him we would get our bows from God?”

Owen Hood paused in the act of lighting a cigar.

“Yes,” he said grimly. “I believe I can tell you exactly what he said. I’ve watched him off and on for twenty years. I bet he began by saying: ‘I don’t profess to be a religious man.’”

“Right, quite right,” cried the cleric bounding upon his chair in a joyous manner, “that’s exactly how he began. ‘I don’t profess to be a religious man, but I trust I have some reverence and good taste. I don’t drag religion into politics.’ And I said: ‘No, I don’t think you do.’”

A moment after, he bounded, as it were, in a new direction. “And that reminds me of what I came about,” he cried. “Enoch Oates, your American friend, drags religion into politics all right; only it’s a rather American sort of religion. He’s talking about a United States of Europe and wants to introduce you to a Lithuanian Prophet. It seems this Lithuanian party has started a movement for a Universal Peasant Republic or World State of Workers on the Land; but at present he’s only got as far as Lithuania. But he seems inclined to pick up England on the way, after the unexpected success of the English agrarian party.”

“What’s the good of talking to me about a World State,” growled Hood. “Didn’t I say I preferred a Heptarchy?”

“Don’t you understand?” interrupted Hilary Pierce excitedly. “What can we have to do with international republics? We can turn England upside down if we like; but it’s England that we like, whichever way up. Why, our very names and phrases, the very bets and jokes in which the whole thing began, will never be translated. It takes an Englishman to eat his hat; I never heard of a Spaniard threatening to eat his sombrero, or a Chinaman to chew his pigtail. You can only set the Thames on fire; you cannot set the Tiber or the Ganges on fire, because the habit of speech has never been heard of. What’s the good of talking about white elephants in countries where they are only white elephants? Go and say to a Frenchman, ‘Pour mon chateau, je le trouve un elephant blanc’ and he will send two Parisian alienists to look at you seriously, like a man who says that his motor-car is a green giraffe. There is no point in telling Czecho-Slovakian pigs to fly, or Jugo-Slavonic cows to jump over the moon. Why, the unhappy Lithuanian would be bewildered to the point of madness by our very name. There is no reason to suppose that he and his countrymen talk about a long bowman when they mean a liar. We talk about tall stories, but a tall story may mean a true story in colloquial Lithuanian.”

“Tall stories are true stories sometimes, I hope,” said Colonel Crane, “and people don’t believe ‘em. But people’ll say that was a very tall story about the tall trees throwing darts and stones. Afraid it’ll come to be a bit of a joke.”

“All our battles began as jokes and they will end as jokes,” said Owen Hood, staring at the smoke of his cigar as it threaded its way towards the sky in grey and silver arabesque. “They will linger only as faintly laughable legends, if they linger at all; they may pass an hour or two or fill an empty page; and even the man who tells them will not take them seriously. It will all end in smoke like the smoke I am looking at; in eddying and topsy-turvy patterns hovering for a moment in the air. And I wonder how many, who may smile or yawn over them, will realize that where there was smoke there was fire.”

There was a silence; then Colonel Crane stood up, a solitary figure in his severe and formal clothes, and gravely said farewell to his hostess. With the failing afternoon light he knew that his own wife, who was a well-known artist, would be abandoning her studio work, and he always looked forward to a talk with her before dinner, which was often a more social function. Nevertheless, as he approached his old home a whim induced him to delay the meeting for a few minutes and to walk round to his old kitchen garden, where his old servant Archer was still leaning on a spade, as in the days before the Flood.

So he stood for a moment amid a changing world, exactly as he had stood on that distant Sunday morning at the beginning of all these things. The South Sea idol still stood at the corner; the scarecrow still wore the hat that he had sacrificed; the cabbages still looked green and solid like the cabbage he had once dug up, digging up so much along with it.

“Queer thing,” he said, “how true it is what Hilary once said about acting an allegory without knowing it. Never had a notion of what I was doing when I picked up a cabbage and wore it for a wager. Damned awkward position, but I never dreamed I was being martyred for a symbol. And the right symbol, too, for I’ve lived to see Britannia crowned with cabbage. All very well to say Britannia ruled the waves; it was the land she couldn’t rule, her own land, and it was heaving like earthquakes. But while there’s cabbage there’s hope. Archer, my friend, this is the moral: any country that tries to do without cabbages is done for. And even in war you often fight as much with cabbages as cannon-balls.”

“Yes, sir,” said Archer respectfully; “would you be wanting another cabbage now, sir?”

Colonel Crane repressed a slight shudder. “No, thank you; no, thank you,” he said hastily. Then he muttered as he turned away: “I don’t mind revolutions so much, but I wouldn’t go through that again.”

And he passed swiftly round his house, of which the windows began to show the glow of kindled lamps, and went in to his wife.

Archer was left alone in the garden, tidying up after his work and shifting the potted shrubs; a dark and solitary figure as sunset and twilight sank all around the enclosure like soft curtains of grey with a border of purple; and the windows, as yet uncurtained and full of lamplight, painted patterns of gold on the lawns and flagged walks without. It was perhaps appropriate that he should remain alone and apart; for he alone in all these changes had remained quite unchanged. It was perhaps fitting that his figure should stand in a dark outline against the darkening scene; for the mystery of his immutable respectability remains more of a riddle than all the riot of the rest. No revolution could revolutionize Mr. Archer. Attempts had been made to provide so excellent a gardener with a garden of his own; with a farm of his own, in accordance with the popular policy of the hour. But he would not adapt himself to the new world; nor would he hasten to die out, as was his duty on evolutionary principles. He was merely a survival; but he showed a perplexing disposition to survive.

Suddenly the lonely gardener realized that he was not alone. A face had appeared above the hedge, gazing at him with blue eyes dreaming yet burning; a face with something of the tint and profile of Shelley. It was impossible that Mr. Archer should have heard of such a person as Shelley: fortunately he recognized the visitor as a friend of his master.

“Forgive me if I am mistaken, Citizen Archer,” said Hilary Pierce with pathetic eagerness, “but it seems to me that you are not swept along with the movement; that a man of your abilities has been allowed to stand apart, as it were, from the campaign of the Long Bow. And yet how strange! Are you not Archer? Does not your very name rise up and reproach you? Ought you not to have shot more arrows or told more tarradiddles than all the rest? Or is there perhaps a more elemental mystery behind your immobility, like that of a statue in the garden? Are you indeed the god of the garden, more beautiful than this South Sea idol and more respectable than Priapus? Are you in no mortal sense an Archer? Are you perhaps Apollo, serving this military Admetus; successfully, yes, successfully, hiding your radiance from me?” He paused for a reply, and then lowered his voice as he resumed: “Or are you not rather that other Archer whose shafts are not shafts of death but of life and fruitfulness; whose arrows plant themselves like little flowering trees; like the little shrubs you are planting in this garden? Are you he that gives the sunstroke not in the head but the heart; and have you stricken each of us in turn with the romance that has awakened us for the revolution? For without that spirit of fruitfulness and the promise of the family, these visions would indeed be vain. Are you in truth the God of Love; and has your arrow stung and startled each of us into telling his story? I will not call you Cupid,” he said with a slight air of deprecation or apology, “I will not call you Cupid, Mr. Archer, for I conceive you as no pagan deity, but rather as that image clarified and spiritualized to a symbol almost Christian, as he might have appeared to Chaucer or to Botticelli. Nay, it was you that, clad in no heathen colours, but rather in mediaeval heraldry, blew a blast on his golden trumpet when Beatrice saluted Dante on the bridge. Are you indeed that Archer, O Archer, and did you give each one of us his Vita Nuova?”

“No, sir,” said Mr. Archer.

---

Thus does the chronicler of the League of the Long Bow come to the end of his singularly unproductive and unprofitable labours, without, perhaps, having yet come to the beginning. The reader may have once hoped, perhaps, that the story would be like the universe; which when it ends, will explain why it ever began. But the reader has long since been sleeping, after the toils and trials of his part in the affair; and the writer is too tactful to ask at how early a stage of his story-telling that generally satisfactory solution of all our troubles was found. He knows not if the sleep has been undisturbed, or in that sleep what dreams may come, if there has been cast upon it any shadow of the shapes of his own very private and comfortable nightmare; turrets clad with the wings of morning or temples marching over dim meadows as living monsters, or swine plumed like cherubim or forests bent like bows, or a fiery river winding through a dark land. Images are in their nature indefensible, if they miss the imagination of another; and the foolish scribe of the Long Bow will not commit the last folly of defending his dreams. He at least has drawn a bow at a venture and shot an arrow into the air; and he has no intention of looking for it in oaks, all over the neighbourhood, or expecting to find it still sticking in a mortal and murderous manner in the heart of a friend. His is only a toy bow; and when a boy shoots with such a bow, it is generally very difficult to find the arrow—or the boy.

Chapter I

The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane

These tales concern the doing of things recognized as impossible to do; impossible to believe; and, as the weary reader may well cry aloud, impossible to read about. Did the narrator merely say that they happened, without saying how they happened, they could easily be classified with the cow who jumped over the moon or 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, 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 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 had 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 to him at breakfast, and it evidently called for 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 handy-man, named Archer, was acting as kitchen-gardener.

Archer was also 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 that 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 words would suggest. Hence the kitchen-garden was not artificial, but autochthonous; it really looked like the 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 in 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.

Capitolo I

L’Impresentabile Apparizione del Colonnello Crane

Questi racconti riguardano il compimento di cose ritenute impossibili da fare; impossibili da credere; e, come lo stanco lettore ben può gridare, impossibili da leggere. Se il narratore si limitasse a dire che accaddero, senza dire come accaddero, potrebbero facilmente essere classificate insieme alla mucca che saltò oltre la luna o al più introspettivo individuo che saltò giù per la propria gola. In breve, sono tutte storie gonfiate; e sebbene le storie gonfiate possano anche essere storie vere, c’è qualcosa nella frase stessa di appropriato a un simile mondo alla rovescia; poiché il logico presumibilmente classificherà una storia gonfiata insieme a un epigramma corpulento o a un saggio dalle lunghe gambe. È del tutto giusto che simili incidenti impossibili comincino nel più compassato e prosaico di tutti i luoghi, e in apparenza con il più compassato e prosaico di tutti gli esseri umani.

Il luogo era una diritta strada suburbana di case suburbane rigorosamente recintate, ai margini di una città moderna. L’ora era circa le undici meno venti di una domenica mattina, quando una processione di famiglie suburbane in abiti della domenica saliva con decoro lungo la strada verso la chiesa. E l’uomo era un rispettabilissimo militare in congedo di nome colonnello Crane, che anch’egli si recava in chiesa, come aveva fatto ogni domenica alla stessa ora per una lunga serie d’anni. Non vi era differenza evidente tra lui e i suoi vicini, salvo che egli era un po’ meno evidente. La sua casa si chiamava soltanto White Lodge, ed era perciò meno allettante per il passante romantico di Rowanmere da un lato o Heatherbrae dall’altro. Si presentava lindo e azzimato per la chiesa come per una parata; ma era troppo ben vestito per essere additato come un uomo ben vestito. Era piuttosto bello in uno stile secco e cotto dal sole; ma i suoi capelli biondo slavato erano di una tinta scialba che poteva sembrare castano chiaro o grigio pallido; e sebbene i suoi occhi azzurri fossero limpidi, guardavano un po’ pesantemente sotto le palpebre abbassate. Il colonnello Crane era una specie di sopravvissuto. Non era veramente vecchio; anzi era appena di mezza età; e aveva conquistato le sue ultime onorificenze nella grande guerra. Ma una varietà di cause lo aveva mantenuto fedele al tipo tradizionale del vecchio soldato di professione, quale era esistito prima del 1914; quando una piccola parrocchia aveva un solo colonnello come aveva un solo curato. Sarebbe del tutto ingiusto chiamarlo un richiamato; anzi, sarebbe assai più vero chiamarlo un trincerato. Poiché era rimasto nelle tradizioni con la stessa fermezza e pazienza con cui era rimasto nelle trincee. Era semplicemente un uomo che non aveva alcun gusto per il mutare le proprie abitudini, e non si era mai curato delle convenzioni abbastanza da alterarle. Una delle sue eccellenti abitudini era andare in chiesa alle undici in punto, e perciò vi andava; e non sapeva che con lui andava qualcosa di un’aria d’altri tempi e un brano nella storia d’Inghilterra.

Mentre usciva dalla porta di casa, tuttavia, quella particolare mattina, torceva tra le dita un pezzetto di carta e aggrottava la fronte con una perplessità piuttosto insolita. Invece di dirigersi diritto al cancello del giardino passeggiò una o due volte su e giù per il giardino antistante, facendo dondolare il suo nero bastone da passeggio. Il biglietto gli era stato consegnato a colazione, ed evidentemente poneva un qualche problema pratico che esigeva immediata soluzione. Rimase alcuni minuti con l’occhio inchiodato su una margherita rossa all’angolo dell’aiuola più vicina; e poi una nuova espressione cominciò a muoversi nei muscoli del suo volto abbronzato, dando un cenno lievemente arcigno di umorismo, di cui pochi, tranne i suoi intimi, erano consapevoli. Ripiegato il foglio e cacciatolo nel taschino del panciotto, girò intorno alla casa fino al giardino posteriore, dietro il quale c’era l’orto, dove un vecchio domestico, una sorta di factotum o tuttofare di nome Archer, faceva da ortolano.

Anche Archer era un sopravvissuto. In verità, i due erano sopravvissuti insieme; erano sopravvissuti a un buon numero di cose che avevano ucciso parecchi altri. Ma sebbene fossero stati insieme attraverso la guerra che fu anche una rivoluzione, e avessero completa fiducia l’uno nell’altro, quell’uomo, Archer, non era mai riuscito a perdere le maniere opprimenti del servitore. Svolgeva i doveri del giardiniere con l’aria di un maggiordomo. Svolgeva davvero quei doveri assai bene e ci si divertiva molto; forse ci si divertiva tanto più in quanto era un abile cockney, per il quale i mestieri di campagna erano un nuovo passatempo. Ma in qualche modo, ogni volta che diceva: «Ho messo i semi, signore», suonava sempre come: «Ho messo lo sherry in tavola, signore»; e non poteva dire: «Devo strappare le carote?» senza sembrare dire: «Desidererebbe il claret?»

«Spero tu non stia lavorando di domenica», disse il colonnello, con un sorriso assai più cordiale di quello che la maggior parte della gente riceveva da lui, benché fosse sempre cortese con tutti. «Ti stai affezionando troppo a questi passatempi campestri. Sei diventato uno zotico rustico.»

«Mi stavo azzardando a esaminare i cavoli, signore», rispose lo zotico rustico, con una dolorosa precisione d’articolazione. «Il loro stato ieri sera non mi è parso soddisfacente.»

«Contento che tu non abbia vegliato con loro», rispose il colonnello. «Ma è una fortuna che t’interessino i cavoli. Voglio parlarti dei cavoli.»

«Dei cavoli, signore?» s’informò l’altro rispettosamente.

Ma il colonnello non parve dar seguito all’argomento, poiché stava fissando in un’improvvisa astrazione un altro oggetto negli appezzamenti di ortaggi davanti a sé. Il giardino del colonnello, come la casa del colonnello, il cappello, il cappotto e il contegno, era ben tenuto in un modo discreto; e nella parte di esso dedicata ai fiori dimorava qualcosa d’indefinibile che pareva più antico dei sobborghi. Le siepi stesse, pur essendo nette come quelle di Surbiton, riuscivano a sembrare mature come Hampton Court, come se la loro medesima artificiosità appartenesse più alla regina Anna che alla regina Vittoria; e lo stagno dal bordo di pietra con una ghirlanda d’iris pareva in qualche modo una vasca classica e non una mera pozzanghera artificiale. È ozioso analizzare come l’anima e il tipo sociale di un uomo in qualche modo si impregnino di ciò che lo circonda; comunque sia, l’anima del signor Archer era penetrata nell’orto sì da conferirgli una fine sfumatura di differenza. Egli era, dopo tutto, un uomo pratico, e la pratica del suo nuovo mestiere era per lui assai più un vero appetito di quanto le parole lascerebbero intendere. Perciò l’orto non era artificiale, ma autoctono; sembrava davvero l’angolo di una fattoria in campagna; e vi erano allestiti ogni sorta di espedienti pratici. Le fragole erano protette da reti contro gli uccelli; erano tese delle corde di traverso con penne che vi svolazzavano; e in mezzo all’aiuola principale stava un antico e autentico spaventapasseri. Forse l’unico intruso incongruo, capace di contendere allo spaventapasseri il suo regno rurale, era la curiosa pietra di confine che segnava il limite del suo dominio; e che era, in effetti, un informe idolo dei Mari del Sud, piantato lì senza più appropriatezza di un raschietto da porta. Ma il colonnello Crane non sarebbe stato un esemplare così compiuto del vecchio uomo d’esercito se non avesse nascosto da qualche parte un passatempo legato ai suoi viaggi. Il suo passatempo un tempo era stato il folklore selvaggio; e ne conservava la reliquia sul bordo dell’orto. In quel momento, tuttavia, non stava guardando l’idolo, ma lo spaventapasseri.

“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 a 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 of 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 Caesars, 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 not 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!”

«A proposito, Archer», disse, «non credi che lo spaventapasseri voglia un cappello nuovo?»

«Difficilmente lo riterrei necessario, signore», disse gravemente il giardiniere.

«Ma senti un po’», disse il colonnello, «devi considerare la filosofia degli spaventapasseri. In teoria, quel coso dovrebbe convincere qualche uccello piuttosto sempliciotto che io stia passeggiando nel mio giardino. Quella cosa con il cappello innominabile sono Io. Un tantino abbozzato, forse. Una specie di ritratto impressionista; ma difficilmente atto a fare impressione. Un uomo con un cappello simile non saprebbe mai tenere testa a un passero. Conflitto di volontà, e tutto il resto, e scommetto che il passero avrebbe la meglio. A proposito, cos’è quel bastone legato sopra?»

«Credo, signore», disse Archer, «che dovrebbe rappresentare un fucile.»

«Tenuto a un’inclinazione assai poco convincente», osservò Crane. «Un uomo con un cappello simile mancherebbe di sicuro il bersaglio.»

«Desidera che mi procuri un altro cappello?» s’informò il paziente Archer.

«No, no», rispose il padrone con noncuranza. «Dato che il poveretto ha un cappello così scalcinato, gli darò il mio. Come la scena di San Martino e il mendicante.»

«Gli dà il suo», ripeté Archer rispettosamente, ma con voce fioca.

Il colonnello si tolse il lucido cilindro e gravemente lo posò sul capo dell’idolo dei Mari del Sud ai suoi piedi. Ebbe un curioso effetto di ridar vita al grottesco blocco di pietra, come se un folletto in cilindro stesse sogghignando al giardino.

«Pensi che il cappello non dovrebbe essere del tutto nuovo?» domandò quasi con ansia. «Non si conviene forse tra i migliori spaventapasseri. Bene, vediamo cosa possiamo fare per ingentilirlo un poco.»

Fece roteare il bastone sopra la testa e vibrò un colpo secco sul cappello di seta, sfondandolo sopra gli occhi cavi dell’idolo.

«Ammorbidito dal tocco del tempo, adesso, direi», osservò, porgendo i resti di seta al giardiniere. «Mettilo sullo spaventapasseri, amico mio; non lo voglio. Puoi testimoniare che a me non serve.»

Archer obbedì come un automa, un automa dagli occhi piuttosto tondi.

«Dobbiamo sbrigarci», disse allegramente il colonnello. «Ero in anticipo per la chiesa, ma temo di essere un po’ in ritardo adesso.»

«Intendeva recarsi in chiesa senza cappello, signore?» chiese l’altro.

«Certo che no. Sarebbe di somma irriverenza», disse il colonnello. «Nessuno dovrebbe trascurare di togliersi il cappello entrando in chiesa. Ebbene, se non ho un cappello, trascurerò di togliermelo. Dov’è la tua facoltà di ragionare stamattina? No, no, dissotterra soltanto uno dei tuoi cavoli.»

Ancora una volta il servitore ben addestrato riuscì a ripetere la parola «Cavoli» con il proprio rigoroso accento; ma nella sua costrizione c’era un che di strangolato.

«Sì, va’ a strappare un cavolo, da bravo», disse il colonnello. «Devo proprio incamminarmi; mi pare di aver sentito battere le undici.»

Il signor Archer si mosse pesantemente in direzione di un appezzamento di cavoli, che si gonfiavano di contorni mostruosi e di molti colori; oggetti, forse, più degni dell’occhio filosofico di quanto tenga conto la lingua più frivola. Gli ortaggi sono cose dall’aspetto curioso e meno banali di quanto il loro nome suggerisca. Se chiamassimo un cavolo un cactus, o con qualche altro nome bizzarro, potremmo vederlo come una cosa altrettanto bizzarra.

Queste verità filosofiche il colonnello le rivelò anticipando il dubbioso Archer, e strappando dalla terra un grande cavolo verde con la sua radice pendula. Poi raccolse una sorta di roncola e recise la lunga coda della radice; scavò via le foglie interne così da farne una specie d’incavo, e gravemente capovoltolo, se lo posò sul capo. Napoleone e altri principi guerrieri si sono incoronati da sé; ed egli, come i Cesari, indossava una corona che era, dopo tutto, fatta di verdi foglie o vegetazione. Senza dubbio vi sono altri paragoni che potrebbero venire in mente a qualunque storico filosofico che lo considerasse in astratto.

La gente che andava in chiesa certamente lo guardò; ma non lo guardò in astratto. Ai loro occhi appariva singolarmente concreto; e in verità incredibilmente solido. Gli abitanti di Rowanmere e Heatherbrae seguirono il colonnello mentre saliva quasi baldanzosamente lungo la strada, con sentimenti che nessuna filosofia poteva per il momento soddisfare. Sembrava non vi fosse nulla da dire, salvo che uno dei più rispettabili e rispettati dei loro vicini, uno che avrebbe potuto essere definito, in modo sommesso, un modello di buone maniere se non un arbitro dell’eleganza, saliva solennemente verso la chiesa con un cavolo in cima al capo.

Non vi fu invero alcuna azione collettiva per affrontare la crisi. Il loro mondo non era di quelli in cui una folla può radunarsi per gridare, e ancor meno per schernire. Nessun uovo marcio poteva essere raccolto dalle loro ordinate tavole della colazione; e non erano il tipo da scagliare torsoli di cavolo contro il cavolo. Forse c’era proprio quel tanto di verità nei nomi pateticamente pittoreschi sui loro cancelli, nomi che evocavano montagne e possenti laghi celati in qualche punto della proprietà. Era vero che, in un certo senso, una simile casa era un eremo. Ciascuno di questi uomini viveva solo e non potevano essere trasformati in una plebaglia. Per miglia all’intorno non c’era né osteria né opinione pubblica.

Mentre il colonnello si avvicinava al portico della chiesa e si preparava a togliersi con reverenza il suo vegetariano copricapo, fu salutato in un tono un po’ più cordiale della umana cortesia che era l’esile legame di quella società. Ricambiò il saluto senza imbarazzo, e s’arrestò un istante mentre l’uomo che gli aveva parlato si lanciava in un ulteriore discorso. Era un giovane dottore di nome Horace Hunter, alto, elegantemente vestito e sicuro nei modi; e benché i suoi tratti fossero piuttosto comuni e i suoi capelli piuttosto rossi, gli si attribuiva un certo fascino.

«Buongiorno, colonnello», disse il dottore con i suoi toni sonori, «che b—che bella giornata.»

Le stelle deviarono dal loro corso come comete, per così dire, e il mondo virò verso possibilità più selvagge, in quell’istante cruciale in cui il dottor Hunter si corresse e disse: «Che bella giornata!» invece di «Che buffo cappello!»

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 shirt-front 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 that 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 courage 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 by 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 which 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.

Quanto al perché si corresse, un quadro fedele di ciò che gli passò per la mente potrebbe suonare piuttosto fantasioso in sé. Sarebbe poco esplicito dire che lo fece a causa di una lunga automobile grigia in attesa fuori da White Lodge. Potrebbe non essere una spiegazione completa dire che ciò fu dovuto a una signora che camminava sui trampoli a una festa in giardino. Qualche oscurità potrebbe permanere, anche se dicessimo che aveva qualcosa a che fare con una camicia morbida e un soprannome; ciò nondimeno tutte queste cose si mescolarono nella mente del signor dottore quando prese la sua frettolosa decisione. Soprattutto, potrebbe o non potrebbe essere sufficiente spiegazione dire che Horace Hunter era un giovane assai ambizioso, che lo squillo nella sua voce e la sicurezza nei suoi modi venivano da una semplicissima risoluzione a salire nel mondo, e che il mondo in questione era piuttosto mondano.

Gli piaceva farsi vedere a parlare con tanta sicurezza col colonnello Crane in quella parata della domenica. Crane era relativamente povero, ma conosceva le Persone. E chi conosceva le Persone sapeva cosa le Persone stessero facendo adesso; mentre chi non conosceva le Persone poteva soltanto domandarsi cosa mai al mondo le Persone avrebbero fatto poi. Una signora che era venuta con la Duchessa quando aveva inaugurato il Bazar aveva fatto un cenno a Crane e detto: «Salve, Cicogna», e il dottore ne aveva dedotto che si trattava di una sorta di scherzo di famiglia e non di una momentanea confusione ornitologica. Ed era stata la Duchessa a dar via a tutte quelle corse sui trampoli, che i Vernon-Smith avevano introdotto a Heatherbrae. Ma sarebbe stato maledettamente imbarazzante non aver saputo cosa intendesse la signora Vernon-Smith quando disse: «Naturalmente lei fa i trampoli.» Non si sapeva mai cosa avrebbero inventato dopo. Ricordava come lui stesso avesse pensato che il primo uomo in camicia morbida fosse un tipo bizzarro venuto dal nulla; e poi ne aveva cominciati a vedere altri qua e là, e aveva scoperto che non era un passo falso, ma una moda. Era strano immaginare che un giorno avrebbe cominciato a vedere cappelli di verdura qua e là, ma non si poteva mai dire; e non aveva intenzione di commettere di nuovo lo stesso errore. Il suo primo impulso medico era stato di aggiungere al bizzarro costume del colonnello una camicia di forza. Ma Crane non aveva l’aria di un pazzo, e di certo non aveva l’aria di un uomo che fa uno scherzo. Non aveva la rigida e inibita solennità del burlone. La prendeva con la massima naturalezza. E una cosa era certa: se era davvero l’ultima novità, il dottore doveva prenderla con la stessa naturalezza del colonnello. Così disse che era una bella giornata, e fu compiaciuto d’apprendere che su quel punto non v’era disaccordo.

Il dilemma del dottore, se possiamo applicare la frase, era stato il dilemma dell’intero vicinato. La decisione del dottore fu anche la decisione dell’intero vicinato. Non era tanto che la maggior parte di quella brava gente condividesse le serie ambizioni sociali di Hunter, quanto piuttosto che erano per natura inclini a decisioni negative e prudenti. Vivevano in un delicato terrore di essere disturbati; ed erano appena abbastanza giusti da applicare il principio non disturbando gli altri. Avevano anche un senso subconscio che il mite e rispettabile signor militare non sarebbe stato del tutto una persona facile da disturbare. La conseguenza fu che il colonnello portò in giro il suo mostruoso copricapo verde per le strade di quel sobborgo per quasi una settimana, e nessuno gli fece mai cenno all’argomento. Fu press’a poco alla fine di quel periodo (mentre il dottore aveva scrutato l’orizzonte in cerca di aristocratici incoronati di cavolo e, non vedendone alcuno, andava raccogliendo il coraggio di parlare) che venne l’interruzione finale; e con l’interruzione la spiegazione.

Il colonnello aveva tutta l’apparenza d’aver dimenticato del tutto il cappello. Se lo toglieva e se lo metteva come qualsiasi altro cappello; lo appendeva all’attaccapanni nel suo stretto ingresso, dove non c’era altro che la sua spada appesa a due ganci e una vecchia mappa bruna del diciassettesimo secolo. Lo porgeva ad Archer quando quel corretto personaggio pareva insistere sul suo diritto ufficiale di reggerlo; non insisteva sul suo diritto ufficiale di spazzolarlo, per paura che andasse in pezzi; ma di tanto in tanto gli dava una cauta scrollata, accompagnata da uno sguardo di trattenuto disgusto. Ma il colonnello stesso non ebbe mai l’aria né di gradirlo né di sgradirlo. La cosa anticonvenzionale era già divenuta una delle sue convenzioni—le convenzioni che non considerava mai abbastanza da violare. È probabile, dunque, che ciò che alla fine accadde fosse una sorpresa per lui non meno che per chiunque altro. Comunque sia, la spiegazione, o esplosione, venne nel modo seguente.

Il signor Vernon-Smith, l’alpinista il cui piede posava sulla propria brughiera natia a Heatherbrae, era un ometto azzimato dal naso dal grosso dorso, baffi scuri e occhi scuri con una fissa espressione d’ansia, benché nessuno sapesse cosa ci fosse da temere nella sua solidissima esistenza sociale. Era amico del dottor Hunter; si potrebbe quasi dire un umile amico. Poiché aveva quello snobismo negativo che poteva soltanto ammirare lo snobismo positivo e progressivo di quella figura svettante e mondana. Un uomo come il dottor Hunter ama avere un uomo come il signor Smith, davanti al quale poter posare da perfetto uomo di mondo. Ciò che appare più straordinario, un uomo come il signor Smith ama davvero avere un uomo come il dottor Hunter che posa dinanzi a lui e si pavoneggia su di lui e lo tratta con sussiego. Comunque sia, Vernon-Smith si era azzardato a insinuare che il nuovo cappello del suo vicino Crane non fosse di un modello familiare in ogni figurino. E il dottor Hunter, scoppiando col segreto della propria originale diplomazia, aveva respinto l’insinuazione e l’aveva sepolta sotto un gelido disprezzo. Con gesti scaltri e risoluti, con ampie frasi allusive, aveva lasciato nella mente dell’amico l’impressione che l’intero mondo sociale si sarebbe dissolto se una parola fosse stata detta su un argomento così delicato. Il signor Vernon-Smith si fece l’idea generale che il colonnello sarebbe esploso con un forte scoppio alla più vaga allusione agli ortaggi, o alla più innocua adombratura o verbale ombra di un cappello. Come di solito accade in questi casi, le parole che gli era vietato dire si ripetevano perpetuamente nella sua mente con la pressione ritmica di un polso. Era la sua tentazione, in quel momento, di chiamare cappelli tutte le case e ortaggi tutti i visitatori.

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’s 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 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 this, 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 all seem 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 so 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.”

Quando quella mattina Crane uscì dal cancello di casa trovò il suo vicino Vernon-Smith ritto fuori, tra il maggiociondolo espanso e il lampione, a parlare con una giovane signora, una lontana cugina della sua famiglia. Questa ragazza era una studentessa d’arte che faceva da sé—un po’ troppo da sé per gli standard di Heatherbrae, e perciò (qualcuno ne dedurrebbe) ancor più al di là di quelli di White Lodge. Aveva i capelli castani tagliati corti, e il colonnello non ammirava i capelli tagliati corti. D’altro canto, aveva un viso piuttosto attraente, con onesti occhi castani un po’ troppo distanti tra loro, il che sminuiva l’impressione di bellezza ma accresceva l’impressione di onestà. Aveva inoltre una voce assai fresca e schietta, e il colonnello l’aveva spesso udita gridare i punteggi al tennis dall’altro lato del muro del giardino. In qualche modo vago ciò lo faceva sentire vecchio; o almeno, non era certo se si sentisse più vecchio di quanto fosse, o più giovane di quanto avrebbe dovuto. Fu solo quando s’incontrarono sotto il lampione che seppe che il suo nome era Audrey Smith; e fu debolmente grato di quell’unico monosillabo. Il signor Vernon-Smith la presentò, e per poco non disse: «Posso presentarle il mio cavolo?» invece di «mia cugina.»

Il colonnello, con schietta ottusità, disse che era una bella giornata; e il suo vicino, riprendendosi dall’ultimo scampato pericolo, proseguì la conversazione con animazione. I suoi modi, come quando ficcava il suo gran naso e i suoi occhietti neri e lucenti nelle riunioni e nei comitati locali, erano insieme esitanti ed enfatici.

«Questa signorina si dà all’Arte», disse; «una ben magra prospettiva, non è vero? M’aspetto che la vedremo disegnare col gesso sul lastricato aspettando che le gettiamo un penny nel—in un vassoio, o qualcosa del genere.» Qui schivò un altro pericolo. «Ma naturalmente lei crede che diventerà un membro della Royal Academy.»

«Spero di no», disse la giovane con foga. «I pittori da marciapiede sono assai più onesti della maggior parte dei membri della Royal Academy.»

«Vorrei che quei tuoi amici non ti mettessero in testa idee così rivoluzionarie», disse il signor Vernon-Smith. «Mia cugina conosce i più terribili esaltati, vegetariani e—e Socialisti.» Si arrischiò, sentendo che i vegetariani non erano proprio la stessa cosa degli ortaggi; ed era certo che il colonnello avrebbe condiviso il suo orrore per i Socialisti. «Gente che vuole essere uguale, e via dicendo. Quello che io dico è: non siamo uguali e non potremo mai esserlo. Come dico sempre ad Audrey—se anche domani si dividessero tutte le proprietà, tornerebbero nelle stesse mani. È una legge di natura, e se un uomo crede di poter aggirare una legge di natura, be’, parla a vanvera—voglio dire, è matto come un—»

Rifuggendo dall’onnipresente immagine, brancolò freneticamente nella mente in cerca dell’alternativa della lepre marzolina. Ma prima che potesse trovarla, la ragazza s’era intromessa e aveva completato la sua frase. Sorrise serena, e disse con i suoi toni limpidi e squillanti:

«Matto come il cappellaio del colonnello Crane.»

Non è ingiusto verso il signor Vernon-Smith dire che fuggì come da un’esplosione di dinamite. Sarebbe ingiusto dire che abbandonò una dama in pericolo, poiché lei non aveva affatto l’aria di una dama in pericolo, mentre lui era un signore assai in pericolo. Tentò di farla entrare in casa con un cenno e qualche pretesto stravagante, e alla fine vi scomparve egli stesso con una scusa altrettanto casuale. Ma gli altri due non gli prestarono attenzione; continuarono a fronteggiarsi, ed entrambi sorridevano.

«Credo che lei debba essere l’uomo più coraggioso d’Inghilterra», disse. «Non intendo nulla riguardo alla guerra, o al D.S.O. e tutto il resto; intendo riguardo a questo. Oh, sì, qualcosa ne so, di questo, ma c’è una cosa che non so. Perché lo fa?»

«Credo che sia lei la donna più coraggiosa d’Inghilterra», rispose lui, «o, quantomeno, la persona più coraggiosa di queste parti. Ho girato per questa città per una settimana, sentendomi come l’ultimo folle del creato, e aspettandomi che qualcuno dicesse qualcosa. E non un’anima ha detto una parola. Sembrano tutti aver paura di dire la cosa sbagliata.»

«Li trovo mortiferi», osservò la signorina Smith. «E se non hanno cavoli per cappelli, è solo perché hanno rape per teste.»

«No», disse il colonnello con dolcezza; «ho qui molti vicini generosi e cordiali, compresa sua cugina. Mi creda, c’è un buon motivo per le convenzioni, e il mondo è più saggio di quanto lei sappia. Lei è troppo giovane per non essere intollerante. Ma vedo che ha lo spirito combattivo; è la parte migliore della giovinezza e dell’intolleranza. Quando poco fa ha detto quella parola, perbacco, aveva l’aria di Britomart.»

«È la Suffragetta Militante nella Regina delle Fate, non è vero?» rispose la ragazza. «Temo di non conoscere la mia letteratura inglese bene come la conosce lei. Vede, sono un’artista, o cerco di esserlo; e alcuni dicono che ciò rende una persona limitata. Ma non posso fare a meno di arrabbiarmi con tutta la volgarità inverniciata con cui parlano di ogni cosa—guardi cos’ha detto sul Socialismo.»

«Era un po’ superficiale», disse Crane con un sorriso.

«Ed ecco», concluse lei, «perché ammiro il suo cappello, benché non sappia perché lo porta.»

Questa banale conversazione ebbe un curioso effetto sul colonnello. Vi si accompagnava una sorta di calore e un senso di crisi che non provava dai tempi della guerra. Un improvviso proposito prese forma nella sua mente, ed egli parlò come chi varca una frontiera.

«Signorina Smith», disse, «mi domando se potrei chiederle di concedermi un ulteriore favore. Forse è anticonvenzionale, ma credo che lei non si tenga a queste convenzioni. Un mio vecchio amico verrà presto a farmi visita, per concludere la faccenda o cerimonia piuttosto insolita di cui ha per caso visto una parte. Se volesse farmi l’onore di pranzare con me domani all’una e mezza, la vera storia del cavolo l’attende. Le prometto che udrà la vera ragione. Potrei perfino dire che le prometto che VEDRÀ la vera ragione.»

«Ma certo che verrò», disse l’anticonvenzionale con cordialità. «Grazie infinite.»

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 a 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 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 house 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 than 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. “Buy 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 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 literary 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.”

Il colonnello prese un vivo interesse nei preparativi del pranzo del giorno seguente. Con subconscia sorpresa si scoprì non solo interessato, ma eccitato. Come molti del suo tipo, provava piacere a far bene tali cose, e se ne intendeva di vini e di cucina. Ma ciò non basterebbe da solo a spiegare il suo piacere. Poiché sapeva che le giovani donne di solito sanno assai poco di vini, e le giovani donne emancipate forse meno di tutte. E benché intendesse che la cucina fosse buona, sapeva che in un particolare sarebbe apparsa piuttosto fantastica. Inoltre, era un signore di buon carattere a cui sarebbe sempre piaciuto vedere i giovani godersi un pranzo, come gli sarebbe piaciuto veder un bambino godersi un albero di Natale. Ma non pareva esserci ragione perché egli dovesse avere una sorta di felice insonnia, come un bambino alla vigilia di Natale. Non c’era davvero alcuna scusa per il suo andare su e giù per il giardino col sigaro, fumando furiosamente fino a notte fonda. Poiché mentre fissava gli iris purpurei e il grigio stagno nel fioco chiaro di luna, qualcosa nei suoi sentimenti trascorse come dall’una all’altra tinta; ebbe una nuova e inattesa reazione. Per la prima volta odiò davvero la mascherata che si era imposto di sopportare. Avrebbe voluto poter fracassare il cavolo come aveva fracassato il cilindro. Aveva poco più di quarant’anni; ma non aveva mai capito quanto ci fosse di appassito e sbiadito nella sua frivolezza, finché non sentì gonfiarsi inaspettatamente dentro di sé la mostruosa e solenne vanità di un giovane. A volte alzava lo sguardo verso il pittoresco, troppo pittoresco, profilo della casa accanto, scura contro il sorgere della luna, e credeva di udirvi deboli voci, e qualcosa come una risata.

Il visitatore che fece visita al colonnello la mattina seguente poteva anche essere un vecchio amico, ma era certamente uno strano contrasto. Era un uomo assai distratto, piuttosto trasandato, in un logoro completo alla zuava; aveva una testa lunga con capelli lisci del rosso scuro chiamato ramato, uno o due ciuffi dei quali gli stavano dritti comunque li spazzolasse, e un volto lungo, ben rasato e pesante attorno alla mascella e al mento, che aveva l’abitudine di affondare e assestare quadratamente nella cravatta. Il suo nome era Hood, ed era a quanto pareva un avvocato, benché non fosse venuto per affari strettamente legali. Comunque sia, scambiò saluti con Crane con un quieto calore e compiacimento, sorrise al vecchio servitore come se fosse un vecchio scherzo, e diede ogni segno di appetito per il suo pranzo.

Il giorno stabilito era singolarmente caldo e luminoso e ogni cosa nel giardino pareva scintillare; il dio folletto dei Mari del Sud sembrava davvero sogghignare; e lo spaventapasseri avere davvero un cappello nuovo. Gli iris intorno allo stagno oscillavano e sventolavano in una lieve brezza; ed egli ricordò che li chiamavano «bandiere» e pensò a purpurei vessilli che andavano in battaglia.

Lei era comparsa d’improvviso dietro l’angolo della casa. Il suo abito era di un azzurro cupo ma vivido, assai semplice e squadrato di linea, ma non oltraggiosamente artistico; e nella luce del mattino appariva meno come una scolaretta e più come una donna seria di venticinque o trent’anni; un po’ più matura e assai più interessante. E qualcosa in questa serietà mattutina accresceva la reazione della notte precedente. Una sola ondata di gratitudine si levò da Crane al pensiero che almeno il suo grottesco cappello verde era sparito e finito per sempre. L’aveva portato per una settimana senza curarsi un accidente di nessuno; ma durante quei dieci minuti di banale conversazione sotto il lampione, si era sentito come se gli fossero d’un tratto cresciute le orecchie d’asino in mezzo alla strada.

Il tempo soleggiato l’aveva indotto a far apparecchiare una piccola tavola per tre in una specie di veranda aperta sul giardino. Quando i tre vi si sedettero, egli guardò la signora e disse: «Temo di dovermi mostrare come un esaltato; uno di quegli esaltati che suo cugino disapprova, signorina Smith. Spero che ciò non rovinerà questo pranzetto a nessun altro. Ma sto per consumare un pasto vegetariano.»

«Davvero?» disse lei. «Non avrei mai detto che avesse l’aria di un vegetariano.»

«Di recente ho avuto soltanto l’aria di un folle», disse impassibile; «ma credo che preferirei aver l’aria di un folle che di un vegetariano, nel senso ordinario. Questa è piuttosto un’occasione speciale. Forse è meglio che il mio amico Hood cominci; la storia è più sua che mia.»

«Il mio nome è Robert Owen Hood», disse quel signore, piuttosto sardonicamente. «È così che spesso cominciano le rimembranze inverosimili; ma l’unico punto ora è che il mio vecchio amico qui presente mi ha orribilmente insultato chiamandomi Robin Hood.»

«L’avrei chiamato un complimento», rispose Audrey Smith. «Ma perché la chiamò Robin Hood?»

«Perché tiravo di lungo l’arco», disse l’avvocato.

«Ma per renderle giustizia», disse il colonnello, «pare che lei abbia colpito il centro del bersaglio.»

Mentre parlava entrò Archer recando un piatto che pose davanti al suo padrone. Aveva già servito gli altri con le portate precedenti, ma portava questa con la pompa di chi reca la testa del cinghiale a Natale. Consisteva in un semplice cavolo bollito.

«Fui sfidato a fare una cosa», riprese Hood, «che il mio amico qui dichiarava impossibile. In effetti, ogni uomo di buon senso l’avrebbe dichiarata impossibile. Ma io la feci ugualmente. Solo che il mio amico, nella foga di respingere e ridicolizzare l’idea, fece uso di un’espressione avventata. Potrei quasi dire che pronunciò un voto temerario.»

«Le mie precise parole furono», disse solennemente il colonnello Crane: «‘Se riesci a farlo, mi mangio il cappello.’»

Si chinò in avanti pensoso e cominciò a mangiarlo. Poi riprese nello stesso modo riflessivo:

«Vedete, tutti i voti temerari sono verbali o non sono nulla. Vi potrebbe essere un dibattito sul modo logico e letterario in cui il mio amico Hood adempì il SUO voto temerario. Ma io lo posi a me stesso nella stessa maniera pedante. Non era possibile mangiare alcun cappello che io portassi. Ma poteva essere possibile portare un cappello che io potessi mangiare. Gli articoli di vestiario ben difficilmente potevano essere usati come alimento; ma gli articoli di alimento potevano davvero essere usati come vestiario. Mi parve che si potesse a buon diritto dire che l’avessi fatto mio cappello, se lo portavo sistematicamente come cappello e non ne avevo altro, sopportando tutti gli svantaggi. Fare di me stesso un maledetto folle era il giusto prezzo da pagare per il voto o la scommessa; poiché su una scommessa si dovrebbe sempre perdere qualcosa.»

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 subpoena’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 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 humourously 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 really the 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 light-headed 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 someone 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:

E si alzò da tavola con un gesto di scusa.

La ragazza si alzò in piedi. «Trovo che sia assolutamente splendido», disse. «È folle come una di quelle storie sulla ricerca del Santo Graal.»

Anche l’avvocato si era alzato, piuttosto bruscamente, e stava lisciandosi il lungo mento col pollice e guardando il suo vecchio amico da sotto le sopracciglia aggrottate in un modo piuttosto riflessivo.

«Bene, mi hai regolarmente citato come testimone», disse, «e ora, col permesso della corte, lascerò il banco dei testimoni. Temo di dovermene andare. Ho affari importanti a casa. Arrivederla, signorina Smith.»

La ragazza ricambiò il suo commiato un po’ meccanicamente; e Crane parve riscuotersi da una trance simile mentre muoveva dietro alla figura in ritirata del suo amico.

«Senti, Owen», disse in fretta, «mi dispiace che te ne vada così presto. Devi proprio andare?»

«Sì», rispose Owen Hood gravemente. «I miei affari privati sono del tutto reali e concreti, te l’assicuro.» La sua bocca grave si mosse un po’ con umorismo agli angoli mentre aggiungeva: «La verità è che, non credo di averlo accennato, ma sto pensando di sposarmi.»

«Sposarti!» ripeté il colonnello, come folgorato.

«Grazie per i tuoi complimenti e le tue congratulazioni, vecchio mio», disse il satirico signor Hood. «Sì, è tutto ben ponderato. Ho persino deciso chi sposerò. Lei lo sa da sé. È stata avvertita.»

«Ti chiedo davvero scusa», disse il colonnello in grande turbamento, «naturalmente mi congratulo con te di tutto cuore; e con lei ancor più di cuore. Naturalmente sono lietissimo di sentirlo. La verità è che ero sorpreso… non tanto in quel senso…»

«Non tanto in quale senso?» chiese Hood. «Suppongo tu voglia dire che qualcuno direbbe che sono in via di diventare un vecchio scapolo. Ma ho scoperto che non è affatto tanto una questione d’anni quanto di modi. Uomini come me diventano attempati più per scelta che per caso; e nella vita c’è assai più scelta e assai meno caso di quanto sostengano i vostri fatalisti moderni. Per gente simile il fatalismo falsifica perfino la cronologia. Non sono scapoli perché sono vecchi. Sono vecchi perché sono scapoli.»

«Ti sbagli davvero», disse Crane con serietà. «Come dico, ero sorpreso, ma la mia sorpresa non era così scortese come credi. Non era che pensassi ci fosse qualcosa di sconveniente in… in qualche modo era piuttosto il contrario… come se le cose potessero combaciare meglio di quanto si pensasse… come se—ma comunque sia, per poco che ne sappia, mi congratulo davvero con te.»

«Ti racconterò tutto quanto tra non molto», rispose l’amico. «Basti dire per ora che era tutto legato al mio riuscire, dopo tutto, a fare—ciò che ho fatto. Lei fu l’ispirazione, sai. Ho compiuto ciò che si dice una cosa impossibile; ma credimi, è lei la parte davvero impossibile.»

«Bene, non voglio trattenerti da un fidanzamento così impossibile», disse Crane sorridendo. «Davvero, sono maledettamente contento di sentire tutto questo. Bene, arrivederci per ora.»

Il colonnello Crane rimase a osservare le spalle quadre e la criniera rossiccia del suo vecchio amico, mentre scomparivano giù per la strada, in uno stato d’animo piuttosto indescrivibile. Mentre si voltava in fretta verso il suo giardino e l’altra sua ospite, ebbe coscienza di un mutamento; le cose parevano diverse in un modo frivolo e illogico. Non riusciva egli stesso a rintracciare il nesso; anzi, non sapeva se fosse un nesso o una sconnessione. Era ben lungi dall’essere uno sciocco; ma il suo cervello era del tipo diretto all’esterno, alle cose; il cervello del soldato o dell’uomo di scienza; e non aveva pratica nell’analizzare la propria mente. Non capiva bene perché la notizia su Owen Hood dovesse dargli quello stordito senso di una differenza nelle cose in generale. Senza dubbio era molto affezionato a Owen Hood; ma era stato affezionato ad altre persone che si erano sposate senza turbare in particolar modo l’atmosfera del proprio giardino sul retro. Sentiva perfino oscuramente che il mero affetto avrebbe potuto operare nell’altro verso; che avrebbe potuto indurlo a preoccuparsi per Hood, e a domandarsi se Hood non stesse facendo di sé uno sciocco, o perfino a sentirsi sospettoso o geloso della signora Hood—se non ci fosse stato qualcos’altro che lo faceva sentire tutto il contrario. Non riusciva a capirlo bene; sembrava esserci un numero crescente di cose che non riusciva a capire. Questo mondo in cui egli stesso portava ghirlande di verde cavolo e in cui il suo vecchio amico avvocato si sposava d’improvviso come un uomo che impazzisce—questo mondo era un mondo nuovo, insieme fresco e spaventoso, in cui a stento riusciva a comprendere le figure che vi si aggiravano, perfino la propria. I fiori nei vasi avevano un aspetto nuovo, insieme luminoso e senza nome; e persino la fila di ortaggi al di là non riusciva del tutto a deprimerlo con i ricordi della recente frivolezza. Fosse stato invero un profeta, o un visionario che scorge il futuro, avrebbe potuto vedere quella verde fila di cavoli estendersi all’infinito come un verde mare fino all’orizzonte. Poiché egli stava all’inizio di una storia che non doveva terminare finché il suo incongruo cavolo non fosse giunto a significare qualcosa che egli non aveva mai inteso con esso. Quella verde chiazza doveva dilagare come un grande verde incendio quasi fino ai confini della terra. Ma egli era una persona pratica e l’esatto contrario di un profeta; e come molte altre persone pratiche, spesso faceva le cose senza sapere con troppa chiarezza cosa stesse facendo. Aveva l’innocenza di qualche patriarca o eroe primitivo nel mattino del mondo, che fonda più di quanto egli stesso possa comprendere della propria leggenda e della propria stirpe. In verità si sentiva molto come qualcuno nel mattino del mondo; ma al di là di ciò non riusciva ad afferrare nulla.

Audrey Smith stava ritta non troppi passi discosto; poiché era solo per pochi passi che aveva seguito il suo ospite più anziano verso il cancello. Eppure la sua figura era arretrata abbastanza fuori dal primo piano da assumere la verde cornice del giardino; sicché il suo abito avrebbe potuto quasi sembrare azzurro con una sfumatura di lontananza. E quando gli parlò, anche da quel breve tratto, la sua voce assunse inevitabilmente un nuovo che di chi chiama familiarmente e da lontano, come si chiama un vecchio compagno. Lo commosse in modo sproporzionato, benché tutto ciò che disse fosse:

“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-humourous 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 in a younger world, which says what it thinks, and cannot see what most of our silences and 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 and echo, was the music of old and ritual dance 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 intention 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 sound 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 stove-pipe 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 side. “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.

«Che ne è stato del suo vecchio cappello?»

«L’ho perduto», rispose gravemente, «ovviamente dovevo perderlo. Credo che l’abbia trovato lo spaventapasseri.»

«Oh, andiamo a vedere lo spaventapasseri», esclamò lei.

La condusse senza una parola all’orto e gravemente le illustrò ciascuna delle sue caratteristiche di spicco; dal serio signor Archer appoggiato alla vanga fino al grottesco dio delle Isole dei Mari del Sud che sogghignava all’angolo dell’appezzamento. Parlava con crescente solennità e prolissità, e per tutto il tempo sapeva poco o nulla di ciò che diceva.

Alla fine lei interruppe il suo monologo con una distrazione quasi scortese; eppure i suoi occhi castani erano lucenti e la sua simpatia non dissimulata.

«Non ne parli», esclamò con illogico entusiasmo. «Sembra che siamo davvero in piena campagna. È unico come il Giardino dell’Eden. È semplicemente il luogo più delizioso—»

Fu in quel momento che, per qualche ragione inspiegabile, il colonnello che aveva perso il cappello d’un tratto passò a perdere la testa. Ritto in quella grottesca scenografia di ortaggi, figura nera e rigida eppure in qualche modo maestosa, procedette nel modo più tradizionale a offrire alla signora tutto ciò che possedeva, senza dimenticare lo spaventapasseri o i cavoli; il cui ricordo semiumoristico gli tornò col boomerang del bathos.

«Quando penso ai gravami che pesano sulla tenuta—» concluse cupo. «Be’, eccoli lì; uno spaventapasseri e un feticcio cannibalesco e un uomo stupido che si è impantanato in un solco di rispettabilità e di modi convenzionali.»

«Assai convenzionali», disse lei, «specie nel suo gusto in fatto di cappelli.»

«Quella fu l’eccezione, temo», disse con serietà. «Troverebbe quelle cose assai rare e la maggior parte delle cose assai noiose. Non ho potuto fare a meno d’innamorarmi di lei; ma ciò nondimeno noi siamo in mondi diversi; e lei appartiene a un mondo più giovane, che dice ciò che pensa, e non sa vedere cosa significassero la maggior parte dei nostri silenzi e dei nostri scrupoli.»

«Suppongo che siamo assai maleducati», disse lei pensosa, «e deve certamente scusarmi se dico ciò che penso.»

«Non merito di meglio», rispose lui mestamente.

«Bene, credo che anch’io debba essere innamorata di lei», rispose lei con calma. «Non vedo cosa abbia a che fare il tempo con l’essere affezionati alle persone. Lei è la persona più originale che io abbia mai conosciuto.»

«Mia cara, mia cara», protestò lui quasi con voce spezzata, «temo che lei stia commettendo un errore. Qualunque altra cosa io sia, non ho mai preteso di essere originale.»

«Deve ricordare», rispose lei, «che ho conosciuto parecchia gente che pretendeva di essere originale. Una Scuola d’Arte ne pullula; e ce ne sono in gran numero tra quei miei amici socialisti e vegetariani di cui lei parlava. Per loro non sarebbe nulla portare cavoli in testa, naturalmente. Chiunque di loro sarebbe capace di infilarsi dentro una zucca, se potesse. Chiunque di loro potrebbe comparire in pubblico vestito interamente di crescione. Ma è proprio questo il punto. Potrebbero ben portare il crescione, perché sono creature d’acqua; vanno con la corrente. Fanno quelle cose perché quelle cose si fanno; perché si fanno nella loro cerchia bohémienne. L’anticonvenzionalità è la loro convenzione. A me non dispiace; la trovo un gran divertimento; ma ciò non significa che io non riconosca la vera forza o indipendenza quando la vedo. Tutto ciò è soltanto fuso e informe; ma l’uomo davvero forte è colui che sa foggiare uno stampo e poi spezzarlo. Quando un uomo come lei sa d’un tratto fare una cosa simile, dopo vent’anni d’abitudine, per amore della sua parola, allora in qualche modo si sente davvero che quell’uomo è uomo e padrone del proprio destino.»

«Dubito di essere padrone del mio destino», rispose Crane, «e non so se cessai di esserlo ieri o due minuti fa.»

Rimase lì un momento come un uomo in pesante armatura. Invero, l’antiquata immagine non è inappropriata sotto più d’un aspetto. Il mondo nuovo dentro di lui era così estraneo all’intera abitudine in cui viveva, alla stessa andatura e ai gesti della sua vita quotidiana, condotta lungo innumerevoli giorni, che il suo spirito aveva lottato prima di spezzare il proprio guscio. Ma era anche vero che, anche se avesse potuto fare ciò che ogni uomo desidera fare in un simile momento, qualcosa di supremo e appagante, sarebbe stato qualcosa in un certo senso formale, o non l’avrebbe appagato. Era uno di quelli per cui è naturale essere cerimoniosi. Perfino la musica nella sua mente, troppo profonda e lontana perché egli potesse coglierla e riecheggiarla, era la musica di un’antica danza rituale e non di baldoria; e non per nulla egli aveva costruito a poco a poco intorno a sé quel giardino della grigia fontana di pietra e della grande siepe di tasso. Si chinò d’improvviso e le baciò la mano.

«Mi piace», disse lei. «Dovrebbe avere i capelli incipriati e una spada.»

«Chiedo scusa», disse gravemente, «nessun uomo moderno è degno di lei. Ma in verità temo che, in ogni senso, io non sia un uomo molto moderno.»

«Non deve più portare quel cappello», disse lei, indicando il malconcio cilindro originale.

«A dire il vero», osservò lui con mitezza, «non avevo alcuna intenzione di riprendere quello.»

«Sciocco», disse lei brevemente, «non intendo quel cappello; intendo quel genere di cappello. A dire il vero, non potrebbe esserci cappello più bello del cavolo.»

«Mia cara—» protestò lui; ma lei lo guardava con tutta serietà.

«Le ho detto che sono un’artista, e che non sapevo molto di letteratura», disse. «Ebbene, sa, fa davvero una differenza. Le persone letterarie lasciano che le parole si frappongano tra loro e le cose. Noi almeno guardiamo le cose e non i nomi delle cose. Lei crede che un cavolo sia comico perché il nome suona comico e perfino volgare; qualcosa a metà tra ‘caduco’ e ‘cavolata’, suppongo. Ma un cavolo non è affatto comico o volgare. Non lo penserebbe se dovesse semplicemente dipingerlo. Non ha visto le pinacoteche olandesi e fiamminghe, e non sa quali grandi maestri dipinsero cavoli? Ciò che vedevano erano certe linee e certi colori; linee e colori meravigliosi davvero.»

«Può darsi che vada benissimo in un quadro», cominciò lui dubbioso.

Lei d’improvviso rise forte.

«Sciocco che è», esclamò; «non sa che aveva un aspetto assolutamente splendido? Le curve erano come un gran turbante di foglie e la radice si ergeva come la punta di un elmo; era piuttosto simile agli elmi a turbante di alcune figure di Rembrandt, col volto come bronzo nelle ombre di verde e di porpora. Ecco il genere di cose che gli artisti sanno vedere, quelli che tengono occhi e testa sgombri dalle parole! E poi lei vuole scusarsi per non portare quello stupido tubo di stufa coperto di lucido, quando andava in giro portando una corona colorata come un re. E lei era come un re in questo paese; poiché avevano tutti paura di lei.»

Mentre egli continuava una debole protesta, la risata di lei prese un piega più maliziosa. «Se avesse insistito un po’ più a lungo, giuro che avrebbero finito tutti col portare ortaggi per cappelli. Giuro che l’altro giorno ho visto mio cugino starsene lì con una specie di paletta, e guardare irresoluto un cavolo.»

Poi, dopo una pausa, disse con una bella impertinenza fuori luogo:

«Che cosa fece il signor Hood che lei diceva non potesse fare?»

Ma questi sono racconti di un mondo alla rovescia perfino nel senso che devono essere narrati a coda in avanti. E chi voglia conoscere la risposta a quella domanda deve consegnarsi all’intollerabile tedio di leggere la storia dell’Improbabile Successo del Signor Owen Hood, e gli si deve concedere un intervallo prima che simili tormenti siano rinnovati.

Chapter 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 myths. 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 to 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 especially loved 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 ask 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 doubt 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 has taken the form of a proverb. In due time the patient, 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 really be 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 only 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 pools 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 Judgement.”

Capitolo II

L’improbabile successo del signor Owen Hood

Gli eroi che hanno sopportato la pesante fatica di leggere fino in fondo la storia dell’Impresentabile apparizione del colonnello Crane sanno che quell’impresa fu la prima di una serie di prodezze ritenute impossibili, come le cerche dei cavalieri di Artù. Ai fini di questo racconto, in cui il colonnello non è che una figura secondaria, basti dire che egli fu a lungo conosciuto e stimato, prima della sua ultima scappatella, come un rispettabile militare in pensione in una zona residenziale del Surrey, dalla carnagione abbronzata dal sole e con un interesse per la mitologia selvaggia. In verità, però, egli aveva raccolto l’abbronzatura e i miti selvaggi qualche tempo prima di riuscire a mettere insieme la rispettabilità e i miti suburbani. Nella sua prima giovinezza era stato un viaggiatore del tipo avventuroso e persino irrequieto; e riguarda questa storia soltanto perché fu membro di una specie di circolo o cricca di giovani la cui audacia rasentava la stravaganza. Erano tutti eccentrici dell’uno o dell’altro genere, alcuni professando opinioni rivoluzionarie estreme e altri opinioni reazionarie estreme, e alcuni entrambe. Tra questi ultimi si può annoverare il signor Robert Owen Hood, l’avvocato alquanto poco legale che è l’eroe di questo racconto.

Robert Owen Hood era l’amico più intimo e più incongruo di Crane. Hood fu fin dal principio tanto sedentario quanto Crane era avventuroso. Hood fu fino all’ultimo tanto noncurante quanto Crane era convenzionale. Il prefisso di Robert Owen era una reliquia di una vaga tradizione rivoluzionaria nella sua famiglia; ma con esso egli ereditò anche un po’ di denaro che gli permetteva di trascurare la legge e di coltivare il gusto della libertà e del vagabondare e sognare negli angoli sperduti della campagna, specialmente tra le piccole colline tra il Severn e il Tamigi. Nel corso superiore di quest’ultimo fiume c’è un isolotto sul quale amava particolarmente sedersi a pescare, figura trasandata ma non comune, vestita di grigio, con una criniera di capelli color ruggine e un viso lungo dal mento pronunciato, non dissimile da Napoleone. Accanto a lui, nell’occasione di cui ora si parla, stava lo spiccato contrasto del suo sveglio amico militare in pieno assetto da viaggio; sul punto di partire per una delle sue odissee nei Mari del Sud.

«Allora», domandò l’impaziente viaggiatore in tono di rimprovero, «hai preso qualcosa?»

«Una volta mi hai chiesto», rispose placidamente il pescatore, «che cosa intendessi chiamandoti materialista. Questo è ciò che intendevo chiamandoti materialista.»

«Se si deve essere o materialisti o pazzi», sbuffò il soldato, «datemi il materialismo.»

«Al contrario», rispose l’amico, «la tua fissazione è ben più folle della mia. E dubito che sia più fruttuosa. Nel momento in cui uomini come te vedono un uomo seduto in riva a un fiume con una canna, sono follemente spinti a chiedergli che cosa abbia preso. Ma quando tu parti per andare a caccia grossa, come la chiami tu, nessuno ti chiede che cosa hai preso. Nessuno si aspetta che tu porti a casa un ippopotamo per cena. Nessuno ti ha mai visto risalire Pall Mall, seguito rispettosamente da una giraffa in cattività. Il tuo carniere di elefanti, per quanto enorme, sembra singolarmente discreto; lasciato al guardaroba, senza dubbio. Personalmente, dubito che tu prenda mai qualcosa. È tutto decorosamente nascosto nella sabbia del deserto e nel dubbio e nella distanza. Ma ciò che io prendo è qualcosa di assai più elusivo, e sfuggente come qualunque pesce. È l’anima dell’Inghilterra.»

«Direi che prenderai un raffreddore, se non un pesce», rispose Crane, «a startene lì con i piedi penzoloni in una pozza a quel modo. A me piace muovermi un po’ di più. Sognare va benissimo, a modo suo.»

A questo punto una nuvola simbolica avrebbe dovuto passare davanti al sole, e una certa ombra di mistero e di silenzio dovrebbe posarsi per un momento sulla narrazione. Poiché fu in questo momento che James Crane, cieco per l’ispirazione, pronunciò la sua celebre Profezia, attorno alla quale ruota questa improbabile vicenda. Come accadeva di solito agli uomini che pronunciano presagi, egli era del tutto inconsapevole che ci fosse qualcosa di ominoso in ciò che diceva. Un attimo dopo probabilmente non avrebbe più saputo di averlo detto. Un attimo dopo, fu come se una nuvola di strana forma fosse davvero passata dinanzi al volto del sole.

La profezia ha assunto la forma di un proverbio. A tempo debito il paziente lettore, che tutto sopporta, potrà apprendere quale proverbio. Come accadde, in effetti, la conversazione era in gran parte consistita di proverbi; come spesso avviene con uomini come Hood, il cui cuore è con quell’antica vita campestre inglese da cui vennero tutti i proverbi. Ma fu Crane a dire:

«Va benissimo essere affezionati all’Inghilterra; ma un uomo che vuole aiutare l’Inghilterra non deve lasciar crescere l’erba sotto i piedi.»

«Ed è proprio quello che voglio fare io», rispose Hood. «È esattamente ciò che perfino la tua povera gente stanca delle grandi città vuole davvero fare. Quando un misero impiegato percorre Threadneedle Street, non sarebbe davvero deliziato se potesse abbassare lo sguardo e vedere l’erba crescere sotto i suoi piedi; un magico tappeto verde in mezzo al marciapiede? Sarebbe come una fiaba.»

«Sì, ma non se ne starebbe seduto come un sasso come fai tu», ribatté l’altro. «Un uomo potrebbe lasciar crescere l’erba sotto i piedi senza lasciare che l’edera gli salga su per le gambe. Anche questo suona come una fiaba, se vuoi, ma non c’è proverbio che lo raccomandi.»

«Oh, ci sono proverbi dalla mia parte, se è per questo», rispose Hood ridendo. «Potrei ricordarti quello della pietra che rotola e non fa muschio.»

«Be’, chi vuole fare muschio, a parte qualche vecchia signora pignola?» domandò Crane. «Sì, sono una pietra che rotola, suppongo; e vado rotolando attorno alla terra come la terra va rotolando attorno al sole. Ma ti dirò una cosa; c’è un solo tipo di pietra che il muschio lo fa davvero.»

«E quale sarebbe, mio errante geologo?»

«Una pietra tombale», disse Crane.

Ci fu un silenzio, e Hood se ne stava seduto a fissare con il suo viso da gufo le pozze fioche in cui i boschi scuri si specchiavano. Alla fine disse:

«Il muschio non è l’unica cosa che vi si trova. A volte c’è la parola “Resurgam”.»

«Ebbene, lo spero proprio», disse Crane bonariamente. «Ma la tromba dovrà essere piuttosto forte per svegliarti. A mio parere arriverai troppo tardi persino per il Giorno del Giudizio.»

“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, off 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 would often carry a volume of Isaac 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 bands 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 in 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 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.

«Ora, se questo fosse un vero dialogo drammatico», osservò Hood, «dovrei risponderti che sarebbe meglio per te se lo fossi. Ma non sembra proprio un sentimento cristiano per un commiato. Parti davvero oggi?»

«Sì, parto questa notte», rispose l’amico. «Sicuro di non voler venire con me alle Isole dei Cannibali?»

«Preferisco la mia isola», disse il signor Owen Hood.

Quando l’amico se ne fu andato, egli continuò a fissare distrattamente il tranquillo mondo alla rovescia nel verde specchio della pozza, né mutò postura e a malapena mosse il capo. Ciò poteva spiegarsi in parte con le immobili abitudini di un pescatore; ma a dire il vero, non era facile scoprire se il solitario avvocato desiderasse davvero prendere qualche pesce. Portava spesso in tasca un volume di Isaac Walton, avendo un amore per l’antica letteratura inglese non minore che per l’antico paesaggio inglese. Ma se era un pescatore, di certo non era un pescatore molto completo.

Ma la verità è che Owen Hood non era stato del tutto sincero con il suo amico riguardo all’incantesimo che lo legava a quel particolare isolotto dell’Alto Tamigi. Se avesse detto, come era ben capace di dire, che sperava di prendere la pesca miracolosa, o la balena che inghiottì Giona, o addirittura il grande serpente marino, le sue espressioni sarebbero state meramente simboliche. Ma sarebbero state il simbolo di qualcosa di altrettanto unico e irraggiungibile. Poiché il signor Owen Hood pescava in realtà qualcosa che pochissimi pescatori prendono mai; e cioè un sogno della sua fanciullezza, e qualcosa che era accaduto in quel luogo solitario molto tempo prima.

Anni prima, quando era ancora molto giovane, se ne stava a pescare su quell’isola una sera, mentre le fasce del crepuscolo si mutavano in tenebra, e due o tre larghe fasce d’argento erano tutto ciò che restava del tramonto dietro gli alberi che s’oscuravano. Gli uccelli calavano giù dal cielo e non c’era alcun rumore se non i lievi rumori del fiume. Improvvisamente, e senza un suono, come giunge una vera visione, una fanciulla era uscita dal bosco di fronte. Gli parlò attraverso il ruscello, chiedendogli egli stesso non sapeva bene che cosa, cui egli rispose non sapeva bene come. Era vestita di bianco e portava un mazzo di campanule sciolte nella mano; i capelli, in una frangia diritta d’oro, le scendevano bassi sulla fronte; era pallida come avorio, e le sue pallide palpebre avevano una sorta di fremito come di emozione nervosa. Lo colse un soffocante senso di stupidità. Ma dovette riuscire a parlare con garbo, perché ella si attardò; e dovette dire qualcosa che la divertì, perché ella rise. Seguì poi l’episodio che egli non riuscì mai ad analizzare, benché fosse persona incline all’introspezione. Facendo un gesto verso qualcosa, ella lasciò cadere i suoi sciolti fiori azzurri nell’acqua. Egli non seppe che sorta di turbine gli fosse nella testa, ma gli parve che stessero accadendo cose prodigiose, come in un’epopea degli dèi, di cui tutte le cose visibili non erano che i piccoli segni. Prima di rendersi conto di dove fosse, si ritrovò in piedi grondante sull’altra riva; poiché in qualche modo vi si era tuffato e aveva salvato il mazzo come se fosse un bimbo che stesse annegando. Di tutte le cose che ella disse egli riuscì a ricordarne una frase, che si ripeteva perpetuamente nella sua mente: «Ti prenderai la morte di freddo.»

Prese solo il raffreddore e non la morte; eppure persino l’idea di quest’ultima non pareva, chissà come, sproporzionata. Il medico, al quale fu costretto a fornire una qualche spiegazione della sua immersione, s’interessò molto alla storia, o a quel che ne udì, provando piacere nel ricostruire gli alberi genealogici delle famiglie della contea e le parentele delle migliori casate del vicinato. Per un qualche ricco processo di eliminazione dedusse che la dama doveva essere la signorina Elizabeth Seymour di Marley Court. Il medico parlava con rispettoso compiacimento di tali cose; era un giovane professionista in ascesa di nome Hunter, in seguito vicino di casa del colonnello Crane. Condivideva l’ammirazione di Hood per il paesaggio locale, e diceva che ciò era dovuto al bel modo in cui Marley Court veniva tenuta.

«Sono i proprietari terrieri come quello», disse, «che hanno fatto l’Inghilterra. Va tutto bene che i Radicali parlino; ma dove saremmo senza i proprietari terrieri?»

«Oh, io sono tutto per i proprietari terrieri», disse Hood piuttosto stancamente. «Mi piacciono tanto che ne vorrei di più. Sempre più proprietari terrieri. Centinaia e migliaia di loro.»

È dubbio che il dottor Hunter seguisse appieno il suo entusiasmo, o anche solo il suo significato; ma Hood ebbe in seguito ragione di ricordare questa breve conversazione; per quanto fosse dell’umore di ricordare qualsiasi conversazione tranne una.

Ad ogni modo, sarebbe vano nascondere all’intelligente per quanto esausto lettore che questa era probabilmente la vera origine dell’abitudine del signor Hood di sedere saldamente su quell’isola e di fissare distrattamente quella riva. Per tutti gli anni in cui sentiva che la sua prima giovinezza andava svanendo, e persino quando pareva scivolare verso la mezza età, egli infestava quella valle come un fantasma, in attesa di qualcosa che non tornò mai più. Non è affatto certo, nell’ultima e più sottile analisi, che egli si aspettasse persino che tornasse. In qualche modo pareva troppo simile a un miracolo perché ciò avvenisse. Soltanto, quel luogo era divenuto il santuario del miracolo; ed egli sentiva che se qualcosa fosse mai accaduto lì, doveva esserci per vederlo. E così avvenne che egli era lì a vedere quando le cose accaddero davvero; e cose piuttosto strane erano accadute prima della fine.

Una mattina vide una cosa straordinaria. Certo non sarebbe parsa straordinaria alla maggior parte della gente; ma per lui fu del tutto apocalittica. Un uomo impolverato uscì dal bosco portando quelli che parevano polverosi pezzi di legname, e si accinse a innalzare sulla riva ciò che si rivelò essere una sorta di tabellone, un enorme cartello di legno sul quale era scritto a lettere gigantesche: «Vendesi», con annotazioni in caratteri più piccoli riguardo al terreno e il nome degli agenti immobiliari. Per la prima volta da anni Owen Hood si alzò in piedi dal suo posto e abbandonò la pesca, e gridò domande attraverso il fiume. L’uomo rispose con la più grande pazienza e buonumore; ma è probabile che se ne andasse convinto di aver parlato con un lunatico errante.

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 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 had 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 the 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 were 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 debris, 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 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 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 afterward 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 flowing 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 smelled 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 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 somewhat 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.

Quello fu l’inizio di quello che per Owen Hood fu un incubo strisciante. Il mutamento avanzava lentamente, per un processo che si stese lungo gli anni, ma gli pareva di essere impotente e paralizzato al suo cospetto, esattamente come un uomo è paralizzato in un vero incubo. Rideva di una risata quasi orribile al pensiero che si suppone che un uomo in una società moderna sia padrone del proprio destino e libero di perseguire i propri piaceri; quando non aveva il potere d’impedire che la luce del giorno che egli contempla venisse oscurata, o che l’aria che respira venisse tramutata in veleno, o che il silenzio che è suo pieno possesso venisse scosso dalla cacofonia dell’inferno. C’era qualcosa, pensava cupamente, nella semplice ammirazione del dottor Hunter per l’aristocrazia agraria. C’era qualcosa nell’aristocrazia del tutto primitiva e persino barbara. I signori feudali si davano a sprazzi alle battaglie e alle razzie; mettevano collari attorno al collo di alcuni servi della gleba; di tanto in tanto mettevano cappi attorno al collo di qualcuno di loro. Ma non facevano guerra giorno e notte contro i cinque sensi dell’uomo.

Erano dapprima comparse sulla riva del fiume piccole baracche e capanni, per operai che parevano piuttosto lungamente occupati a innalzare baracche e capanni più grandi. Fino all’ultimo, quando la fabbrica fu terminata, non era facile per l’occhio tradizionale distinguere fra ciò che era temporaneo e ciò che era permanente. Non pareva che nulla di tutto ciò potesse essere permanente, se vi era qualcosa di naturale nella natura delle cose, per così dire. Ma qualunque fosse il nome e la natura di quella cosa amorfa, essa si gonfiava e cresceva e persino si moltiplicava senza chiara divisione; finché sulla riva del fiume sorse un grande blocco nero e rappezzato di edifici che terminava in un’alta ciminiera di mattoni da cui un fiotto di fumo saliva nel cielo silenzioso. Un cumulo di una qualche sorta di detriti, ferraglia e cose simili, giaceva in primo piano; e una sbarra spezzata, rossa di ruggine, era caduta sul punto in cui la fanciulla era stata in piedi quando portò le campanule fuori dal bosco.

Non lasciò la sua isola. Per rurale e romantico e sedentario che potesse sembrare, non era figlio di un vecchio rivoluzionario per nulla. Non fu del tutto invano che suo padre lo aveva chiamato Robert Owen o che i suoi amici lo avevano talvolta chiamato Robin Hood. A volte, in verità, l’anima gli sprofondava dentro con un male mortale che rasentava il suicidio, ma più spesso marciava avanti e indietro in modo militante, deliziato di vedere gli alti fiori selvatici ondeggiare sulle rive come bandiere a un tiro di sasso da tutto ciò che odiava, e mormorando: «Spiegate i vessilli sul muro esterno.» Aveva già, quando la tenuta di Marley Court fu smembrata per l’edificazione, preso alcuni provvedimenti per stabilirsi sull’isola, vi aveva costruito una sorta di capanna, nella quale era possibile fare picnic per periodi considerevoli.

Una mattina, quando l’alba era ancora radiosa dietro la fabbrica scura e la luce posava un lucore di raso sull’acqua, strisciò fuori su quel raso qualcosa come un filo che s’ispessiva, di diverso colore e materia. Era un sottile nastro di un qualche liquido che non si mescolava con l’acqua, ma giaceva sopra di essa ondeggiando come un verme; e Owen Hood lo osservava come un uomo osserva un serpente. Sembrava un serpente, avendo colori opalescenti non privi di intrinseca bellezza; ma per lui era un serpente assai simbolico; come il serpente che distrusse l’Eden. Pochi giorni dopo c’erano una ventina di serpenti che coprivano la superficie; piccoli fiumi striscianti che si muovevano sul fiume ma non si mescolavano ad esso, essendo estranei come oli di strega. Più tardi vennero liquidi più scuri senza pretese di bellezza, scaglie nere e brune di grasso che galleggiavano pesantemente.

Era assai caratteristico di Hood che fino all’ultimo restasse piuttosto vago sulla natura e sullo scopo della fabbrica; e perciò sugli ingredienti delle sostanze chimiche che scorrevano nel fiume; oltre al fatto che erano per lo più del tipo oleoso e galleggiavano sull’acqua in scaglie e grumi, e che qualcosa di simile alla benzina pareva predominare, usata forse più per l’energia che come materia prima. Aveva udito una voce campagnola che l’impresa fosse dedita alla tintura per capelli. Odorava piuttosto come una fabbrica di sapone. Per quanto mai lo comprese, ricavò che era dedita a ciò che poteva considerarsi una giusta via di mezzo tra la tintura per capelli e il sapone, una qualche sorta di nuovi e altamente igienici cosmetici. C’era stata una moda ancora più febbrile di queste cose, da quando il professor Hake aveva scritto il suo libro che dimostrava che i cosmetici erano fra tutte le cose la più igienica. E Hood aveva visto molti dei prati della sua fanciullezza ora ravvivati e adornati da grandi avvisi con su scritto «Perché invecchiare?», con il ritratto di una giovane donna che sorrideva a denti scoperti in modo deplorevole. Il nome appropriato sugli avvisi era Bliss, ed egli ricavò che tutto ciò aveva qualcosa a che fare con la grande fabbrica.

Deciso a saperne un po’ più di questo sulla faccenda, cominciò a fare indagini e reclami, e s’impegnò in una corrispondenza che si concluse in un vero e proprio colloquio con alcune delle principali persone coinvolte. La corrispondenza era andata avanti per lungo tempo prima di avvicinarsi anche solo a qualcosa di tanto naturale. In effetti, la corrispondenza per lungo tempo fu interamente da parte sua. Poiché le grandi imprese sono affaristiche assai poco quanto i dipartimenti del Governo; non sono migliori in efficienza e assai peggiori nei modi. Ma ottenne infine il suo colloquio, e fu con un senso di aspro divertimento che si trovò faccia a faccia con quattro persone che desiderava incontrare.

Uno era Sir Samuel Bliss, poiché non aveva ancora reso quei servizi di partito che lo portarono a essere noto a tutti noi come Lord Normantowers. Era un uomo piccolo e sveglio come un furetto, con setole di barba e capelli grigi, e movimenti attivi o persino agitati. Il secondo era il suo direttore, il signor Low, un uomo tarchiato e bruno dal naso grosso e dai grossi anelli, che squadrava gli estranei con una curiosa e pesante diffidenza, come un congestionato senso di offesa. Si ritiene che si aspettasse di essere perseguitato. Il terzo uomo fu una certa sorpresa, poiché non era altri che il suo vecchio amico, il dottor Horace Hunter, sano e vigoroso come sempre, ma vestito ancora meglio; giacché aveva ora un grande incarico ufficiale come una sorta di ispettore medico delle condizioni sanitarie del distretto. Ma il quarto uomo fu la più grande sorpresa di tutte. Poiché parve che il loro convegno fosse onorato da una figura tanto grande del mondo scientifico quale il professor Hake in persona, che aveva rivoluzionato la mente moderna con le sue nuove scoperte sulla carnagione in relazione alla salute. Quando Hood comprese chi fosse, una luce di comprensione alquanto sinistra spuntò sul suo lungo viso.

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 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 he 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 aristocracy, with all 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.

In questa occasione il professore avanzò una teoria ancora più interessante. Era un uomo grosso e biondo, dagli occhi ammiccanti e dal collo taurino; e senza dubbio in lui c’era più di quanto apparisse all’occhio, come suole accadere con i grandi uomini. Parlò per ultimo, e la sua teoria fu esposta con una certa aria di definitività. Il direttore aveva già affermato che era del tutto impossibile che grandi quantità di benzina fossero sfuggite, giacché nella fabbrica se ne usava solo una data quantità. Sir Samuel aveva spiegato, in un modo che pareva irascibile e persino irrilevante, che aveva donato al pubblico diversi parchi, e aveva fatto decorare i dormitori dei suoi operai con il gusto più semplice e migliore, e che nessuno poteva accusarlo di vandalismo o di non curarsi della bellezza e di tutto ciò. Fu allora che il professor Hake spiegò la teoria dello Schermo Protettivo. Anche se fosse possibile, disse, che una qualche sottile pellicola di benzina comparisse sull’acqua, poiché essa non si mescolerebbe con l’acqua, quest’ultima verrebbe in realtà mantenuta in condizioni più limpide. Agirebbe, per così dire, come una Calotta; come fa la Calotta gelatinosa su certi cibi conservati.

«È una veduta assai interessante», osservò Hood; «suppongo che ne scriverà un altro libro?»

«Credo che siamo tanto più privilegiati», osservò Bliss, «nell’apprendere la scoperta in questo modo personale, prima che il nostro esperto la esponga al pubblico.»

«Sì», disse Hood, «il vostro esperto è davvero esperto, non è vero… nello scrivere libri?»

Sir Samuel Bliss s’irrigidì in tutte le sue setole. «Confido», disse, «che non stiate insinuando alcun dubbio che il nostro esperto sia un esperto.»

«Non ho alcun dubbio sul vostro esperto», rispose Hood gravemente. «Non dubito né che sia esperto né che sia vostro.»

«Davvero, signori», esclamò Bliss in una sorta di raggiante protesta, «trovo che una simile insinuazione su un uomo nella posizione del professor Hake…»

«Niente affatto, niente affatto», disse Hood in tono placante, «sono certo che sia una posizione quanto mai comoda.»

Il professore lo scrutò ammiccando, ma una luce ardeva nei bulbi oculari sotto le pesanti palpebre.

«Se venite qui a parlare in questo modo…» cominciò, quando Hood gli troncò il discorso rivolgendo la parola, al di sopra di lui, a qualcun altro, con una gaia scortesia che nel suo disprezzo era come un calcio.

«E voi che dite, mio caro dottore?» osservò, rivolgendosi a Hunter. «Un tempo eravate romantico quasi quanto me riguardo alle amenità di questo luogo. Ricordate quanto ammiravate i proprietari terrieri per aver tenuto il luogo quieto e scelto; e come diceste che le antiche famiglie preservavano la bellezza della vecchia Inghilterra?»

Ci fu un silenzio, e poi il giovane dottore parlò.

«Ebbene, non ne consegue che uno non possa credere nel progresso. È questo il tuo guaio, Hood; tu non credi nel progresso. Dobbiamo muoverci con i tempi; e qualcuno deve sempre soffrire. E poi, oggigiorno non conta più tanto l’acqua di fiume. Non conta neppure tanto la principale fornitura d’acqua. Quando sarà approvata la nuova legge, la gente sarà comunque obbligata a usare il Filtro Bulton.»

«Capisco», disse Hood riflessivo, «prima insozzate l’acqua per denaro, e poi vi fate un merito di costringere la gente a pulirsela da sé.»

«Non so di che cosa tu stia parlando», disse Hunter con ira.

«Ebbene, stavo pensando in questo momento», disse Hood nel suo modo piuttosto criptico. «Stavo pensando al signor Bulton. L’uomo che possiede i filtri. Mi domandavo se non potesse unirsi a noi. Sembriamo una così felice riunione di famiglia.»

«Non vedo l’utilità di prolungare questa conversazione assurda», disse Sir Samuel.

«Non chiamate assurda la povera teoria del professore», protestò Hood. «Un po’ fantasiosa, forse. E quanto alla veduta del dottore, di certo non c’è nulla di assurdo in essa. Non pensa che le sostanze chimiche avveleneranno tutti i pesci che prendo, vero, dottore?»

«No, certo che no», rispose Hunter seccamente.

«Si adatteranno per selezione naturale», disse Hood sognante. «Svilupperanno organi adatti a un ambiente oleoso… impareranno ad amare la benzina.»

«Oh, non ho tempo per queste sciocchezze», disse Hunter, e si stava voltando per andarsene, quando Hood gli si parò davanti e lo guardò fissamente.

«Non dovete chiamare sciocchezza la selezione naturale», disse. «Di quella so tutto, in ogni caso. Non so dire se i liquidi versati dalla riva finiscano nel fiume, perché non m’intendo di idraulica. Non so se i vostri macchinari facciano un fracasso d’inferno ogni mattina, perché non ho mai studiato acustica. Non so se puzzi o no, perché non ho letto il libro del vostro esperto su “Il Naso”. Ma so tutto sull’adattamento all’ambiente. So che alcuni degli organismi inferiori mutano davvero con le loro mutevoli condizioni. So che ci sono creature tanto infime da sopravvivere arrendendosi a ogni successione di fango e melma; e quando le cose sono lente esse sono lente, e quando le cose sono rapide esse sono rapide, e quando le cose sono lorde esse sono lorde. Vi ringrazio di avermene convinto.»

Non attese risposta, ma uscì dalla stanza dopo aver fatto un secco inchino agli altri; e quella fu la fine del grande convegno sulla questione dei diritti rivieraschi e forse la fine della Tutela del Tamigi e della vecchia aristocrazia, con tutto il suo bene e il suo male.

Il grande pubblico non ne udì mai gran che; almeno fino a una scena catastrofica che doveva seguire. Ci fu qualche debole increspatura della questione alcuni mesi dopo, quando il dottor Horace Hunter si candidò al Parlamento in quella circoscrizione. Furono poste una o due domande sui suoi doveri in relazione all’inquinamento del fiume; ma fu presto evidente che nessun partito desiderava particolarmente forzare la questione contro le migliori opinioni avanzate dall’altra parte. La più grande autorità vivente in fatto d’igiene, il professor Hake, aveva addirittura scritto al Times (nell’interesse della scienza) per dire che in un caso ipotetico come quello menzionato, un uomo di medicina non poteva fare altro che quel che il dottor Hunter aveva evidentemente fatto. Volle il caso che il principale capitano d’industria di quella parte della Valle del Tamigi, Sir Samuel Bliss, avesse egli stesso, dopo aver gravemente soppesato le politiche rivali, deciso di Votare per Hunter. La mente del grande organizzatore era distaccata e filosofica nella faccenda; ma pare che il suo direttore, un certo signor Low, fosse della stessa politica e di uno spirito più pratico e intraprendente; sostenendo con calore le rivendicazioni di Hunter presso i suoi operai; additando i molti vantaggi pratici che avrebbero ottenuto votando per quel medico, e gli svantaggi ancora più pratici che avrebbero potuto subire non facendolo. Ne conseguì quindi che i nastri azzurri, che erano i distintivi locali degli Hunteriani, non solo si trovavano attaccati alle inferriate di ferro e ai pali di legno della fabbrica, ma a varie figure umane, note come “braccia”, che vi si muovevano avanti e indietro.

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 judgement, 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 judgement 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 judgement. 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 a 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 abstracted 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 non provava alcun interesse per le elezioni; ma mentre esse si svolgevano seguì la faccenda un poco oltre in un’altra forma. Era un avvocato, un avvocato pigro, ma per certi versi dotto; poiché, essendo i suoi gusti portati allo studio, aveva a suo tempo appreso il mestiere che non aveva mai esercitato. Più per sfida che per speranza, portò una volta la questione in tribunale, perorando la propria causa sulla base di una legge di Enrico Terzo contro lo spaventare i pesci dei fedeli sudditi del Re nella Valle del Tamigi. Il giudice, nel pronunciare la sentenza, si complimentò con lui per l’abilità e la plausibilità della sua tesi, ma alla fine la respinse per motivi altrettanto storici e remoti. Sua signoria sostenne che non sembrava previsto alcun criterio per accertare il grado di paura nei pesci, o se essa equivalesse a quella paura corporea di cui la legge prendeva cognizione. Ma il dotto giudice richiamò il precedente di una legge di Riccardo Secondo contro certe streghe che avevano spaventato dei bambini; legge che era stata interpretata da un’autorità tanto grande quanto Coke nel senso che il bambino «deve ritornare e di propria volontà testimoniare la sua paura». Non sembrava si sostenesse che alcuno dei pesci in questione fosse ritornato e avesse deposto una simile testimonianza dinanzi ad alcuna autorità competente; ed egli pertanto emise sentenza a favore dei convenuti. E quando il dotto giudice ebbe a incontrare Lord Normantowers (come ormai si chiamava) a cena quella sera, fu allegramente canzonato e felicitato da quel nuovo nobiluomo per la lucidità e la definitività della sua sentenza. In verità, il dotto giudice aveva davvero assaporato la logica tanto della propria tesi quanto di quella di Hood; ma la conclusione era quella cui sarebbe giunto in ogni caso. Poiché i nostri giudici non sono impacciati da alcun codice rigido; sono progressisti, come il dottor Hunter, e si alleano per principio con le forze progressiste dell’epoca, specialmente con quelle che è probabile incontrino a cena.

Ma fu questa causa fallita a condurre a qualcosa che la cancellò del tutto in una vampata di gloria, per quanto riguardava il signor Owen Hood. Aveva appena lasciato il tribunale, e imboccando le vie che conducevano in direzione della stazione, vi si diresse in una sorta di cupa fantasticheria, come era sua abitudine. Le vie erano gremite di volti; lo colpì per la prima volta il fatto che al mondo vi fossero migliaia e migliaia di persone. C’erano più volti alla stazione ferroviaria, e poi, quando ne ebbe guardati oziosamente quattro o cinque, ne vide uno che per lui era incredibile quanto il volto di un morto.

Ella usciva con disinvoltura dalla sala da tè, portando una borsetta, proprio come chiunque altro. Quella mistica perversità della sua mente, che aveva insistito nel suggellare il sacro ricordo come qualcosa che non si dovesse cercare per mera curiosità, lo aveva fissato nei suoi colori e nella sua cornice originari, come qualcosa di cui nessun dettaglio potesse mutare senza che la visione si dissolvesse. Avrebbe ritenuto quasi impossibile che ella potesse comparire in qualcosa che non fosse il bianco o uscire da qualcosa che non fosse un bosco. E si ritrovò sconvolto da un’antica e comune incredulità degli uomini nella sua condizione; trasalendo alla coincidenza che l’azzurro le si addicesse quanto il bianco; e che in ciò che ricordava di quel bosco vi fosse qualcos’altro; qualcosa da dire persino a favore delle sale da tè e delle stazioni ferroviarie.

Ella si fermò dinanzi a lui e le sue pallide palpebre tremule si sollevarono dai suoi occhi grigio-azzurri.

«Ma guarda», disse, «lei è il ragazzo che saltò nel fiume!»

«Non sono più un ragazzo», rispose Hood, «ma sono pronto a saltare di nuovo nel fiume.»

«Be’, non salti sui binari», disse ella, mentre egli si voltava con una prontezza che suggeriva qualcosa del genere.

«A dirle la verità», disse, «stavo pensando di saltare su un treno. Le dispiace se salto sul suo treno?»

«Be’, io vado a Birkstead», disse ella piuttosto dubbiosa.

Al signor Owen Hood non importava minimamente dove ella andasse, giacché aveva deciso di andarci; ma per la verità si ricordò di una stazione lungo quella linea che si trovava assai vicino a ciò che aveva in mente; sicché si gettò nella carrozza, se possibile, con ancor più alacrità; e i paesaggi sfrecciavano loro accanto mentre sedevano guardandosi l’un l’altro in modo attonito e quasi sciocco. Alla fine la ragazza sorrise con il senso dell’assurdità della cosa.

«Ho sentito parlare di lei da un suo amico», disse; «venne a farci visita poco dopo che accadde; almeno, fu allora che venne la prima volta. Conosce il dottor Hunter, vero?»

«Sì», rispose Owen, mentre un’ombra calava sulla sua ora radiosa. «Lo… lo conosce bene?»

«Ormai lo conosco piuttosto bene», disse la signorina Elizabeth Seymour.

L’ombra sul suo spirito s’incupì rapidamente; sospettò qualcosa d’un tratto, all’improvviso e ferocemente. Hunter, nella vecchia frase di Crane, non era un uomo da lasciar crescere l’erba sotto i piedi. Era proprio da lui aver in qualche modo usato l’episodio come presentazione ai Seymour. Le cose erano sempre pietre di guado per Hunter, e la piccola roccia nel fiume era stata una pietra di guado verso la casa di campagna. Ma la casa di campagna era una pietra di guado verso qualcos’altro? All’improvviso Hood si rese conto che tutte le sue collere erano state collere assai astratte. Non aveva mai odiato un uomo prima d’allora.

In quel momento il treno si fermò alla stazione di Cowford.

«Vorrei che scendesse qui con me», disse bruscamente, «solo per poco… e potrebbe essere l’ultima volta. Voglio che faccia una cosa.»

Ella lo guardò con una curiosa espressione e disse con voce piuttosto bassa: «Che cosa vuole che faccia?»

«Voglio che venga a cogliere le campanule», disse aspramente.

Ella scese dal treno, e risalirono una tortuosa strada di campagna senza una parola.

«Mi ricordo!» disse d’un tratto. «Quando si arriva in cima a questa collina si vede il bosco dove c’erano le campanule, e la sua piccola isola più oltre.»

«Venga a vederla», disse Owen.

Salirono sul crinale della collina e si fermarono. Sotto di loro la nera fabbrica eruttava il suo fumo livido nell’aria; e dove era stato il bosco c’erano file di casette come scatole, costruite di sudicio mattone giallo.

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 bathos, 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 said 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 Normantower’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 have left 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 skulky scruple in the soul. I could not bear to approach you by that door, with that gross and grinning flunky 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 inward, 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,” said 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’ve been 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 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 chose 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.

Hood parlò. «E quando vedrà l’abominio della desolazione insediato nel Santo dei Santi… non è quello il momento in cui il mondo dovrebbe finire? Vorrei che il mondo finisse ora; con lei e me in piedi su una collina.»

Ella fissava il luogo con le labbra dischiuse e con più del suo consueto pallore; egli sapeva che ella comprendeva qualcosa di mostruoso e simbolico nella scena; eppure la sua prima osservazione fu spezzata e banale. Sulla più vicina delle scatole di mattoni gialli erano visibili i colori dozzinali di varie réclame; e più grande delle altre un manifesto azzurro che proclamava «Votate Hunter». Con un ultimo tocco di anticlimax, Hood ricordò che era l’ultimo e più clamoroso giorno delle elezioni. Ma la ragazza aveva già ritrovato la voce.

«È quello il dottor Hunter?» chiese con banale curiosità; «si candida al parlamento?»

Un peso che gravava sulla mente di Hood come una roccia si sollevò d’un tratto come un’aquila; ed egli si sentì come se la collina su cui stava fosse più alta dell’Everest. Per l’intuito della propria follia, sapeva bene che LEI avrebbe saputo bene se Hunter si candidava, se… se ci fosse stato qualcosa di simile a ciò che egli supponeva. Il venir meno del peso che lo stabilizzava lo fece vacillare, ed egli disse qualcosa di del tutto indifendibile.

«Pensavo che lo sapesse. Pensavo che lei e lui foste probabilmente… be’, la verità è che pensavo foste fidanzati, benché davvero non sappia perché.»

«Non riesco a immaginare perché», disse Elizabeth Seymour. «Ho sentito che era fidanzato con la figlia di Lord Normantowers. Ora hanno la nostra vecchia dimora, sa.»

Ci fu un silenzio e poi Hood parlò d’un tratto con voce alta e allegra.

«Be’, quel che dico io è “Votate Hunter”», disse con calore. «Dopo tutto, perché non votare Hunter? Caro vecchio Hunter! Spero che sarà membro del Parlamento. Spero che sarà Primo Ministro. Spero che sarà Presidente dello Stato Mondiale di cui parla Wells. Per Giove, merita di essere Imperatore del Sistema Solare.»

«Ma perché», protestò ella, «perché dovrebbe meritare tutto ciò?»

«Per non essere fidanzato con lei, naturalmente», rispose.

«Oh!» disse ella, e un che di brivido segreto nella sua voce lo attraversò come una campanella d’argento.

Bruscamente, tutt’a un tratto, la foga dello scherzo parve aver lasciato la sua voce e il suo volto, sicché il suo profilo napoleonico apparve serio e ardente e assai più giovane, come il profilo del giovane Napoleone. Le sue ampie spalle persero la lieve curva che i libri avevano dato loro, e i suoi capelli rossi piuttosto arruffati ricaddero all’indietro dal capo sollevato.

«C’è una cosa che devo dirle su di lui», disse, «e una cosa che lei deve udire su di me. I miei amici mi dicono che sono un vagabondo e un sognatore; che lascio crescere l’erba sotto i piedi; devo almeno dirle come e perché una volta la lasciai crescere. Tre giorni dopo quel giorno lungo il fiume, parlai con Hunter; mi aveva in cura e parlò di quella faccenda e di lei. Naturalmente non sapeva nulla né dell’una né dell’altra. Ma è un uomo pratico; un uomo assai pratico; non sogna né vagabonda. Dal modo in cui parlava capii che stava già allora valutando come l’incidente potesse essere volto a profitto; a suo profitto e forse anche al mio; poiché è di buon cuore; sì, è proprio di buon cuore. Credo che se avessi colto il suo suggerimento e stretto una sorta di sodalizio sociale, avrei potuto conoscerla sei anni prima, non come un ricordo, ma… come una conoscenza. E non riuscii a farlo. Mi giudichi come vuole, non riuscii a indurmi a farlo. È questo che si intende con l’essere nati con una fissazione in testa, con un impedimento nel parlare, con un ostacolo sul cammino, con uno scrupolo rannicchiato nell’anima. Non potevo sopportare di avvicinarmi a lei per quella porta, con quel volgare e sogghignante servitore a tenerla aperta. Non potevo sopportare che quello snob soffocantemente corpulento occupasse tanto spazio nella mia storia o sapesse tanto del mio segreto. Una ripugnanza che non seppi mai esprimere mi fece sentire che la visione doveva restare mia anche a costo di restare incompiuta; ma non doveva essere volgarizzata. È questo che si intende con l’essere un fallito nella vita. E quando il mio migliore amico fece una profezia sul mio conto, e disse che c’era una cosa che non avrei mai fatto, pensai che avesse ragione.»

«Ma che intende?» chiese ella piuttosto fiocamente, «che cosa non avrebbe mai fatto?»

«Non importa ora», disse, con l’ombra di un sorriso di ritorno. «Cose piuttosto strane si agitano in me proprio ora, e chissà che non tenti ancora qualcosa? Ma prima di ogni altra cosa, devo render chiaro una volta per tutte ciò che sono e per che cosa ho vissuto. Ci sono uomini come me al mondo; sono ben lungi dal pensare che siano i migliori o i più preziosi; ma esistono, a confondere tutta la gente intelligente e i realisti e i nuovi romanzieri. C’è stata ed esiste una sola cosa per me; qualcosa che, nel senso comune, non ho mai neppure conosciuto. Andavo per il mondo cieco, con gli occhi rivolti all’interno, guardando lei. Per giorni dopo una notte in cui l’avevo sognata, ero a pezzi; come un uomo che avesse visto un fantasma. Rileggevo più e più volte i grandi e solenni versi degli antichi poeti, perché essi soli erano degni di lei. E quando la rividi per caso, pensai che il mondo fosse già finito; ed è quel ritorno e quell’appuntamento oltre la tomba che è troppo bello per essere vero.»

«Non credo», rispose ella a bassa voce, «che quella fede sia troppo bella per essere vera.»

Mentre la guardava un fremito lo attraversò come un messaggio troppo rapido per essere compreso; e in fondo alla sua mente qualcosa si destò che ripeteva ancora e ancora, come una canzone, le stesse parole: «troppo bello per essere vero». C’era sempre qualcosa di patetico, persino nei suoi giorni d’orgoglio, nello sguardo miope dei suoi occhi socchiusi; ma era per altre ragioni che essi ora ammiccavano nella forte luce bianca del sole, quasi fossero ciechi. Erano ciechi e lucenti di lacrime: ella padroneggiò la voce e questa fu ferma.

«Lei parla di fallimenti», disse ella. «Suppongo che la maggior parte della gente definirebbe me una fallita e tutta la mia gente dei falliti, ormai; tranne coloro che direbbero che non fallimmo mai, perché non dovemmo mai provarci. Comunque sia, ora siamo tutti abbastanza poveri; non so se lei sappia che ho insegnato musica. Oso dire che meritavamo di andarcene. Oso dire che eravamo inutili. Alcuni di noi cercarono di essere innocui. Ma… ma ora DEVO dire qualcosa, su alcuni di noi che si sforzarono piuttosto duramente di essere innocui… in quel modo. La gente nuova le dirà che quegli ideali erano vittoriani e tennysoniani, e tutto il resto… be’, non importa ciò che dicono. Sanno tanto poco di noi quanto noi di loro. Ma a lei, quando parla in quel modo… che posso fare, se non dirle che se eravamo rigidi, se eravamo freddi, se eravamo cauti e conservatori, era perché in fondo alle nostre anime alcuni di noi CREDEVANO davvero che potessero esistere una lealtà e un amore simili, per i quali una donna potrebbe ben attendere fino alla fine del mondo. Che importa a questa gente se scegliemmo di non farci narcotizzare o distrarre con qualcosa di meno degno? Ma sarebbe davvero duro se, quando scopro che ESISTE dopo tutto… duro per lei, più duro per me, se quando l’avessi davvero trovato finalmente…» Il nodo nella sua voce tornò e il silenzio la colse e la trattenne.

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 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 Judgement. 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 up 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 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 had 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 of that 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.

Fece un passo avanti, come nel cuore di una tromba d’aria, e si incontrarono sulla cima di quella ventosa collina, come se fossero venuti dai confini della terra.

“Questo è un poema epico”, disse, “che è piuttosto un’azione che una parola. Ho vissuto troppo a lungo con le parole.”

«Che cosa intendete?»

“Voglio dire che mi hai trasformato in un uomo d’azione”, rispose. “Fino a quando eri nel passato, nulla era migliore del passato. Fino a quando eri solo un sogno, nulla era meglio di sognare. Ma ora sto per fare qualcosa che nessuno ha mai fatto prima.”

Si voltò verso la valle e fece un gesto con la mano, quasi come se avesse tenuto una spada.

«Io infrangerò la profezia», gridò a gran voce. «Io sfiderò i presagi della mia rovina e mi prenderò gioco del mio astro maligno. Coloro che mi hanno chiamato un fallito dovranno riconoscere di essere stati sconfitti da me, là dove tutta l’umanità ha fallito. Il vero eroe non è colui che ha il coraggio di compiere le profezie, ma colui che ha il coraggio di falsificarle. E voi vedrete una falsificata questa-sera.»

«Che cosa al mondo intendete fare?» chiese lei.

Rise una risata improvvisa. «La prima cosa da fare», esclamò, girandosi con un nuovo aspetto di decisione e persino allegria, «la prima cosa da fare è votare per Hunter. O, almeno, aiutare a farlo entrare in Parlamento».

«Ma perché al mondo», chiese meravigliata, «dovreste volere così tanto che il dottor Hunter entri in Parlamento?»

«Bene, bisogna fare qualcosa», disse con un’aria di buon senso, «per celebrare l’occasione. Dobbiamo fare qualcosa; e dopotutto deve andare da qualche parte, povero diavolo. Direte: perché non buttarlo nel fiume? Sarebbe un sollievo per i sentimenti e farebbe uno schizzo d’acqua. Ma io sto per fare qualcosa di molto più grande di uno schizzo d’acqua. Inoltre, non voglio che sia nel mio bel fiume. Preferirei prenderlo e lanciarlo fino a Westminster. Molto più sensato e appropriato. È ovvio che dovrebbe esserci una banda di ottoni e una processione con torce stasera; e perché non dovrebbe partecipare anche lui un po’ alla festa?»

Si fermò improvvisamente come se fosse sorpreso dalle proprie parole; perché infatti la sua stessa frase era caduta, per lui, con il significato di una stella cadente.

“Naturalmente!”, borbottò. “Una processione con torce! Ultimamente sentivo che quello di cui avevo bisogno erano trombe e invece quello che voglio davvero sono le torce. Sì, credo che si possa fare! Sì, è giunta l’ora! Per stelle e fiamme, gli darò una processione con torce!”

Era quasi danzante dall’entusiasmo sulla cima della cresta; ora improvvisamente si mise a scendere di corsa lungo il pendio oltre, chiamando la ragazza ad andargli dietro con la stessa disinvoltura come se fossero stati due bambini che giocano a nascondino. Stranamente abbastanza, forse, lei lo seguì; ancora più stranamente quando si considerano le scene stravaganti attraverso cui si lasciò condurre. Erano scene più follemente in contrasto con tutta la sua sensibile e persino segreta dignità che se avesse scambiato i cappelli con un venditore ambulante durante il giorno festivo. Perché lì il mondo sarebbe stato solo rumoroso di volgarità, mentre qui era anche rumoroso di bugie. Non avrebbe mai potuto descrivere quel Saturnalia di un’elezione politica; ma sentiva vagamente la doppia impressione di una arlecchinata alla fine di una pantomima e della frase di Hood sulla fine del mondo. Era come se il giorno festivo potesse anche essere il Giorno del Giudizio. Ma poiché la farsa non poteva più offenderla, così la tragedia non poteva più terrorizzarla. Passò attraverso tutto con un pallido sorriso che forse nessuno al mondo l’avrebbe conosciuta abbastanza da interpretare. Non era nel senso normale dell’entusiasmo; eppure era qualcosa di molto più positivo della pazienza. In un certo senso, forse più che mai prima nella sua solitaria vita, era rinchiusa nella sua torre d’avorio; ma tutto era illuminato all’interno, come se fosse illuminata a candele o foderata d’oro.

I movimenti impetuosi di Hood li portarono sulla riva del fiume e negli uffici esterni della fabbrica, tutti ricoperti dai manifesti colorati della candidatura, uno dei quali era ovviamente allestito come una stanza del comitato affollata e frenetica. Hood incontrò effettivamente il signor Low che ne usciva, avvolto in un cappotto di pelliccia e traboccante di efficacia senza parole. Ma gli occhi neri e lucenti del signor Low brillavano di uno stupore confinante con il sospetto quando Hood, nel modo più cordiale, offrì la sua simpatia e collaborazione. Quel strano timore subconscio paura che sottostava a tutto il successo e alla sicurezza del ricco manager in questo paese, veniva sempre a galla alla vista del volto ironico di Owen Hood. In quel momento, tuttavia, uno degli agenti locali gli si avventò contro in modo distratto, con dei telegrammi in mano. Mancavano attivisti; mancavano auto; mancavano oratori; la folla a Little Puddleton aveva aspettato mezz’ora; il dottor Hunter non sarebbe potuto arrivare prima delle nove e dieci, e così via. L’agente nella sua agonia probabilmente avrebbe salutato un negro di Margate e gli avrebbe affidato la causa del grande Partito Nazionale, senza alcuna indagine filosofica sulla teoria della cittadinanza del negro. Perché tutta questa spinta e confusione così pratica nel nostro tempo è sempre del tutto impratica all’ultimo minuto e in prospettiva. In quella sera Robert Owen Hood sarebbe stato incoraggiato ad andare ovunque e dire qualsiasi cosa; e lo fece. Potrebbe essere interessante immaginare cosa ne pensasse la signorina; ma è possibile che non ci abbia pensato. Aveva un senso radioso e distratto di passare attraverso una serie di stanze brutte e capannoni con luci al gas accecanti e pile di volantini dietro cui correvano piccoli uomini irritabili come conigli. Le pareti erano coperte da grandi immagini allegoriche stampate in linee o in pochi colori vivaci, che rappresentavano il dottor Hunter vestito di armatura, mentre uccideva draghi, salvava dame piuttosto simili a dee classiche e così via. Per evitare che si potesse intendere troppo letteralmente che il dottor Hunter fosse solito uccidere draghi nel suo giro quotidiano come forma di sport di campo, il drago era iscritto con il suo nome in grandi lettere. A quanto pareva il suo nome era “Spreco Nazionale”. Per evitare che ci potesse essere qualche dubbio sull’alternativa che il dottor Hunter aveva scoperto come correttivo allo spreco, la spada che stava infilzando nel corpo del drago era iscritta con la parola “Economia”. Elizabeth Seymour, attraverso la cui mente felice ma confusa passavano queste immagini, non poteva fare a meno di riflettere vagamente che lei stessa aveva dovuto praticare molto risparmio e resistere a molte tentazioni di spreco; ma non le sarebbe mai venuto in mente da sola la sua immaginazione di concepire quell’azione come quella di piantare una spada in un enorme mostro squamoso. Nella stanza centrale del comitato si trovarono effettivamente faccia a faccia per un momento con il candidato, che entrò molto caldo e senza fiato con un cappello di seta sul retro della testa; dove probabilmente se l’era dimenticato, perché certamente non lo tolse. Era un po’ vergognosa di essere sensibile a tali frivolezze; ma arrivò alla conclusione che non le sarebbe piaciuto avere un marito candidato al Parlamento.

“We’ve rounded up all those people down Bleak Row,” said Dr. Hunter. “No good going down The Hole and those filthy places. No vote 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 the 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 heating 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 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 they must gird themselves for the ordeal of reading the story of The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce, and their trials are for a time deferred.

«Abbiamo radunato tutta quella gente giù in Bleak Row», disse il dottor Hunter. «Inutile scendere giù al Buco e in quei luoghi sudici. Là non c’è un voto. Le strade andrebbero abolite, e anche la gente.»

«Be’, abbiamo avuto un’ottima riunione nella Sala Massonica», disse l’agente allegramente. «Lord Normantowers ha parlato, e davvero se l’è cavata bene. Ha raccontato qualche storiella, sa; e l’hanno sopportata magnificamente.»

«E ora», disse Owen Hood, battendo le mani in modo quasi conviviale, «che ne è di questa fiaccolata?»

«Questa quale processione?» chiese l’agente.

«Vuole dirmi», disse Hood severamente, «che i preparativi non sono pronti per la fiaccolata del dottor Hunter? Che intende lasciar trascorrere questa notte di trionfo senza accendere cento fiamme a illuminare il cammino del conquistatore? Si rende conto che i cuori di un intero popolo si sono spontaneamente commossi e lo hanno scelto? Che i poveri sofferenti mormoravano nel sonno “Votate Hunter” molto prima che il Comitato giungesse, per una provvidenziale coincidenza, alla medesima conclusione? Non darebbero fuoco, gli abitanti del Buco, agli ultimi loro poveri pezzi di mobilio per rendergli onore? Ma via, da questa sola sedia…»

Afferrò la sedia su cui Hunter era stato seduto e cominciò a spezzarla con entusiasmo. In ciò fu frettolosamente fermato; ma riuscì davvero a trascinare con sé la compagnia nella sua proposta, così perorata all’ultimo momento.

Al calar della sera aveva davvero organizzato la sua fiaccolata, scortando il trionfante Hunter, ricoperto di nastri azzurri, fino alla riva del fiume, quasi come se il degno dottore dovesse essere battezzato come un convertito o annegato come una strega. Del resto, Hood poteva forse intendere di bruciare la strega; poiché brandiva la fiaccola ardente che portava in modo da formare una sorta di aureola attorno al volto attonito di Hunter. Poi, balzando sul cumulo di rottami in riva al fiume, si rivolse alla folla per l’ultima volta.

«Concittadini, ci raduniamo sulle sponde del Tamigi, il Tamigi che è per gli Inglesi tutto ciò che il Tevere fu mai per i Romani. Ci raduniamo in una valle che è stata quasi altrettanto rifugio dei poeti inglesi quanto degli uccelli inglesi. Mai vi fu arte tanto nativa alla nostra isola quanto la nostra antica tradizione nazionale della pittura di paesaggio all’acquerello; mai quell’acquerello fu così luminoso o così delicato come quando dedicato a queste acque sacre. Fu in una scena siffatta che uno dei più squisiti dei nostri poeti antichi ripeteva come ritornello alle sue meditazioni il verso solo: “Dolce Tamigi, scorri piano finch’io finisca il mio canto.”

«Si sono udite voci di qualche intenzione di turbare queste acque; ma siamo stati ampiamente rassicurati. Nomi che ora si levano tanto alti quanto quelli dei nostri poeti e pittori nazionali sono garanzia che il corso è ancora limpido e puro e benefico come un tempo. Tutti conosciamo la bella opera che il signor Bulton ha compiuto in materia di filtri. Il dottor Hunter sostiene il signor Bulton. Voglio dire, il signor Bulton sostiene il dottor Hunter. Posso anche menzionare niente meno che il signor Low. Dolce Tamigi, scorri piano finch’io finisca il mio canto.

«Ma d’altronde, se è per questo, sosteniamo tutti il dottor Hunter. Io stesso l’ho sempre trovato del tutto sopportabile; direi del tutto soddisfacente. È davvero un progressista, e nulla mi dà maggior piacere che osservarlo progredire. Come disse qualcuno, giaccio sveglio la notte, e nel silenzio dell’intero universo, mi par di udirlo salire, salire, salire. Tutti i numerosi pazienti tra i quali ha operato con tanto successo in questa località si uniranno in una sentita espressione di gioia se egli passerà al mondo superiore di Westminster. Confido di non essere frainteso. Dolce Tamigi, scorri piano finch’io finisca il mio canto.

«Il mio unico scopo questa notte è esprimere quell’unanimità. Vi possono essere stati momenti in cui dissentivo dal dottor Hunter; ma sono lieto di dire che tutto ciò è passato, e ora non nutro verso di lui che i più amichevoli sentimenti, per ragioni che non menzionerò, benché avrei molto da dire. In segno di questa riconciliazione getto qui solennemente da me questa fiaccola. Come quel tizzone si spegne nelle fresche acque cristalline di quel sacro corso, così periranno tutte queste faide nella riscaldante pozza della pace universale.»

Prima che alcuno capisse ciò che stava facendo, aveva fatto roteare la sua fiaccola in una fiammeggiante ruota attorno al capo e l’aveva scagliata come una meteora nei fiochi gorghi del fiume.

L’attimo dopo si levò un grido breve e acuto, e ogni volto in quella folla fissava il fiume. Tutti i volti visibilmente fissavano, poiché erano tutti illuminati come da un orribile bagliore di fuoco da un’ampia, smorta, innaturale fiamma che si levava dalla superficie stessa del corso; una fiamma che la folla osservava come avrebbe osservato una cometa.

«Ecco», gridò Owen Hood, voltandosi d’un tratto verso la ragazza e afferrandole il braccio, come esigendo congratulazioni. «Tanto per la profezia del vecchio Crane!»

«Ma chi mai è il vecchio Crane?» chiese ella, «e che cosa profetizzò? È qualcosa come il vecchio Moore?»

«Solo un vecchio amico», disse Hood frettolosamente, «solo un mio vecchio amico. È ciò che disse a essere così importante. Non gli piaceva vedermi gironzolare tetro con i libri e una canna da pesca, e disse, ritto su quella stessa isola: “Saprai anche molte cose; ma non credo che darai mai fuoco al Tamigi. Mi mangio il cappello se lo fai.”»

Ma la storia di come il vecchio Crane si mangiò il cappello è una di quelle su cui almeno alcuni lettori possono volgere lo sguardo indietro come su una fatica e una sofferenza coraggiosamente sopportate. E se sarà possibile ad alcuno di loro desiderare di sapere qualcosa di più sul signor Crane o sul signor Hood, allora dovranno cingersi i lombi per il cimento di leggere la storia del Discreto Traffico del capitano Pierce, e le loro prove sono per un poco rinviate.

Chapter III

The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce

Those acquainted with Colonel Crane and Mr. Owen Hood, the lawyer, may or may not be concerned to know that they partook of an early lunch of eggs and bacon and beer at the inn called the Blue Boar, which stands at the turn of a steep road scaling a wooded ridge in the West Country. Those unacquainted with them may be content to know that the Colonel was a sunburnt, neatly-dressed gentleman, who looked taciturn and was; while the lawyer was a more rusty red-haired gentleman with a long Napoleonic face, who looked taciturn and was rather talkative. Crane was fond of good cooking; and the cooking in that secluded inn was better than that of a Soho restaurant and immeasurably better than that of a fashionable restaurant. Hood was fond of the legends and less-known aspects of the English country-side; 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 winter’s 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 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 our 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.

“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.”

“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.

Capitolo III

Il traffico discreto del capitano Pierce

Coloro che conoscono il colonnello Crane e il signor Owen Hood, l’avvocato, saranno o non saranno interessati a sapere che consumarono un pranzo mattutino di uova, pancetta e birra alla locanda detta del Cinghiale Azzurro, che sorge alla svolta di una strada ripida inerpicata su un crinale boscoso nel West Country. Coloro che non li conoscono si accontenteranno di sapere che il colonnello era un gentiluomo abbronzato e curato nel vestire, che sembrava taciturno e lo era; mentre l’avvocato era un gentiluomo dai capelli rossi più smorti, con un lungo volto napoleonico, che sembrava taciturno ed era invece piuttosto loquace. Crane amava la buona cucina; e la cucina di quella locanda appartata era migliore di quella di un ristorante di Soho e incomparabilmente migliore di quella di un ristorante alla moda. Hood amava le leggende e gli aspetti meno noti della campagna inglese; e quella valle aveva una qualità di riposo con un fremito di frescura, come se il vento dell’ovest vi fosse stato irretito e addomesticato in un’aria estiva. Entrambi nutrivano una sana ammirazione per la bellezza, nelle dame non meno che nei paesaggi; benché (o più probabilmente perché) entrambi fossero assai romanticamente legati alle mogli che avevano sposato in circostanze piuttosto romantiche, narrate altrove per chi sappia misurarsi con una narrazione tanto scoscesa. E la ragazza che li serviva, la figlia del locandiere, era essa stessa una cosa assai gradevole a vedersi; era di corporatura snella e quieta, con una testa che si muoveva come un uccello bruno, vivacemente e quasi inaspettatamente. I suoi modi erano pieni di una dignità inconsapevole, poiché suo padre, il vecchio John Hardy, era il tipo del vecchio locandiere che aveva la condizione, se non di un gentiluomo, almeno di un piccolo possidente. Non era privo di istruzione e di ingegno; un uomo brizzolato dal volto acuto e ostinato che avrebbe potuto appartenere a Cobbett, il cui Register egli ancora leggeva nelle notti d’inverno. Hardy era ben noto a Hood, che aveva la stessa sorta di gusto antiquario per le rivoluzioni.

C’era poco suono nella valle o nel vuoto splendente del cielo; le note degli uccelli cadevano solo a intermittenza; un debole suono di picchiettio veniva dalle colline di fronte, dove il pendio boscoso era rotto qua e là dalla nuda parete di una cava, e un aeroplano lontano passava e ripassava, lasciando una scia di flebile tuono. I due uomini a pranzo non gli prestarono più attenzione che se fosse stato una mosca ronzante; ma uno studio attento della ragazza avrebbe potuto suggerire che ella era almeno consapevole della mosca. Di tanto in tanto la guardava, quando nessuno guardava lei; per il resto, aveva un’aria piuttosto marcata di non guardarla.

“Buona pancetta, quella che servono qui,” osservò il colonnello Crane.

“La migliore d’Inghilterra, e in fatto di colazione l’Inghilterra è il Paradiso Terrestre,” ribatté prontamente Hood. “Non capisco perché dovremmo abbassarci a vantare l’Impero Britannico quando abbiamo pancetta e uova di cui vantarci. Dovrebbero essere inquartate nello Stemma Reale: tre porci passanti e tre uova in camicia su una banda. Furono la pancetta e le uova a dare tutta quella gloria mattutina ai poeti inglesi; dev’essere stato un uomo che aveva fatto una colazione come questa a poter levarsi con quel gesto da gigante: ‘Le candele della notte sono consumate; e il giocondo giorno…’”

“Fu Bacon a scrivere Shakespeare, di fatto,” disse il colonnello.

“Fu questa specie di pancetta a farlo,” rispose l’altro ridendo; poi, notando la ragazza a portata d’orecchio, aggiunse: “Stavamo dicendo quanto è buona la sua pancetta, signorina Hardy.”

“Si dice che sia molto buona,” disse con legittimo orgoglio, “ma temo che non ne avrà molta di più. Non permetteranno alla gente di tenere maiali ancora per molto.”

“Non permetteranno di tenere maiali!” esclamò il colonnello stupefatto.

“Secondo i vecchi regolamenti dovevano stare lontani dalla casa, e noi abbiamo terreno a sufficienza per questo, benché la maggior parte dei contadini non lo avesse. Ma ora dicono che la legge viene elusa, e il consiglio di contea è deciso a proibire del tutto l’allevamento dei maiali.”

“Sciocchi porci,” sbuffò il colonnello.

“L’epiteto è mal scelto,” ribatté Hood. “Gli uomini sono più bassi dei porci quando non sanno apprezzare i porci. Ma davvero non so dove andrà a finire il mondo. Come sarà la prossima generazione senza un buon maiale? E, a proposito della prossima generazione, che ne è stato del nostro giovane amico Pierce? Aveva detto che sarebbe venuto, ma non può essere arrivato con quel treno.”

“Credo che il capitano Pierce sia lassù, signore,” disse Joan Hardy con voce corretta, mentre si ritirava discretamente.

Il suo tono avrebbe potuto indicare che il gentiluomo era di sopra, ma il suo sguardo fugace era stato rivolto al vuoto azzurro del cielo. A lungo dopo che se ne fu andata, Owen Hood rimase a fissarlo, finché non vide l’aeroplano guizzare e volteggiare come una rondine.

“Fa il gradasso,” disse il colonnello brevemente, e vuotò il suo boccale di peltro.

“Ma perché dovrebbe fare il gradasso con noi?” chiese Hood.

“Diavolo se lo farebbe,” rispose il colonnello. “Fa il gradasso con la ragazza, naturalmente.”

“Una ragazza molto per bene,” disse Owen Hood con gravità. “Se c’è qualcosa sotto, potete star certo che è tutto onesto e serio.”

Il colonnello batté un poco le palpebre. “Beh, i tempi cambiano,” disse. “Suppongo di essere all’antica io stesso; ma parlando da vecchio Tory, devo confessare che potrebbe far di peggio.”

“Sì,” rispose Hood, “e parlando da vecchio radicale, direi che difficilmente potrebbe far di meglio.”

Mentre parlavano, l’erratico aviatore aveva infine planato verso terra in direzione di un campo pianeggiante ai piedi del pendio, e stava ora venendo verso di loro. Hilary Pierce aveva piuttosto l’aria di un poeta che di un aviatore di professione; e benché si fosse distinto nella guerra, era assai probabilmente uno di quelli il cui sogno naturale era piuttosto la conquista dell’aria che la conquista del nemico. I suoi capelli biondi erano più lunghi e più scomposti di quando era nell’esercito; e c’era un tocco di qualcosa di irresponsabile nel suo occhio azzurro errabondo. Aveva però in sé una vena di combattività, come apparve presto evidente. Si era fermato a parlare con Joan Hardy accanto al porcile piuttosto malandato nell’angolo, e quando venne verso la tavola della colazione sembrava trasfigurato come da una fiamma.

“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 region, 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 mediaeval buildings the better.”

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

“Mediaeval 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 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 arm 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 rather a ramshackle affair of leaning and broken boards hung loosely together, though in practice it was practical enough. “This, the most unmistakably mellow of all mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 that 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 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 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 shall 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.”

“Che diavolo è tutta questa follia infernale?” chiese. “Chi ha la dannata audacia di dire ai Hardy che non possono allevare maiali? Guarda, il momento è arrivato in cui dobbiamo far saltare tutto questo genere di cose. Sto per fare qualcosa di disperato.”

«Avete fatto cose abbastanza disperate questa mattina», disse Hood. «Vi consiglio di fare un pranzo altrettanto disperato. Sedetevi, caro amico, e non continuate a camminare su e giù in quel modo».

“No, ma senti qui…”

Pierce fu interrotto da Joan Hardy che apparve silenziosamente al suo fianco e disse modestamente agli altri: «C’è un signore qui che chiede se gli è permesso parlarvi».

Il gentiluomo in questione stava un po’ indietro in una posizione che era cortese ma così rigida e immobile da quasi irritare i nervi. Era vestito con una versione così completa e corretta dell’abbigliamento leggero inglese per le vacanze, che erano sicuri fosse un forestiero. Ma la loro immaginazione vagò invano sul Continente nel tentativo di immaginare che tipo di straniero potesse essere. Per l’immobilità del suo volto quasi lunare, con una sfumatura leggermente biliosa, avrebbe anche potuto essere un cinese. Ma quando parlò, riuscirono subito a individuare l’accento straniero.

«Mi dispiace molto interrompervi, signori», disse «ma questa giovane signora dice che voi siete autorevolissimi esperti accademici sui luoghi di interesse di quest’area. Io mi sono aggirato in giro cercando di trovare le tracce di un paio di antichità, ma non sembro capire come farlo. Se vorreste essere così gentili da mettermi al corrente sugli stili architettonici principali e sui punti storici di questa regione, vi sarei molto grato».

Mentre si riprendevano lentamente dalla prima sorpresa, aggiunse pazientemente:

“Mi chiamo Enoch B. Oates, e sono abbastanza noto nel Michigan, ma ho comprato una piccola proprietà qui vicino; ho dato un’occhiata a questo piccolo pianeta e mi sono convinto che il posto più sicuro e luminoso per un uomo con qualche soldo è quello di un signorotto nel vostro bellissimo paesaggio feudale. Quindi, prima riesco a conoscere gli edifici medievali più suggestivi, meglio è.”

In Hilary Pierce lo stupore aveva lasciato il posto a un’ardente esaltazione che sfiorava l’estasi.

“Edifici medievali! Stili architettonici!” esclamò con entusiasmo. “Siete venuto nel negozio giusto, signor Oates. Vi mostrerò un edificio antico, un edificio sacro, in uno stile architettonico di tale sublime antichità che vorrete portarlo via in Michigan, come hanno tentato di fare con l’Abbazia di Glastonbury. Avrete il privilegio di vedere una istituzione storica prima di morire o prima che tutta la storia sia dimenticata.”

Stava camminando verso l’angolo del piccolo giardino della cucina attaccato all’albergo, agitando il braccio con gesti selvaggi di incoraggiamento; e l’americano lo seguiva con la stessa rigidità cortese, sembrando stranamente un’autentica macchina.

«Guardate il nostro stile architettonico prima che scompaia», gridò Pierce drammaticamente, indicando la porcilaia, che sembrava piuttosto un rudere di assi inclinate e rotte appese insieme in modo precario, anche se nella pratica era abbastanza funzionale. «Questo, il più inequivocabilmente maturo di tutti gli edifici medievali, potrebbe presto essere solo un ricordo. Ma quando questo edificio cadrà l’Inghilterra cadrà e il mondo tremolerà per lo shock della fine.»

L’americano aveva quello che lui stesso avrebbe potuto descrivere come un volto da poker; era impossibile scoprire se le sue affermazioni indicassero l’estremo della innocenza o dell’ironia.

“E direbbe”, chiese, “che questo monumento è un esempio dell’architettura medievale o gotica?”

“Non lo definirei propriamente perpendicolare”, rispose Pierce, “ma non c’è alcun dubbio che sia inglese antico”.

«Direste che è antico, comunque?» osservò il signor Oates.

“Ho ogni ragione di credere”, affermò Pierce solennemente, “che Gurth il Porcaro abbia fatto uso di questo identico edificio. Non ho alcun dubbio che sia in realtà molto più antico. Le migliori autorità ritengono che il Figliol Prodigo vi si sia fermato per qualche tempo, e i maiali— quei nobili e tanto calunniati animali—gli abbiano dato consigli così eccellenti che egli è tornato dalla sua famiglia. E ora, signor Oates, dicono che tutto quel magnifico patrimonio verrà spazzato via. Ma non sarà. Non ci sottometteremo così facilmente a tutti i vandali e i volgari tiranni che vorrebbero abbattere in tal modo i nostri templi e i nostri luoghi sacri. Il porcile risorgerà in una magnifica resurrezione— porcili più grandi, porcili più imponenti, copriranno ancora la terra; le torri e le cupole di porcili più statuari e ideali, negli stili architettonici più sorprendenti, proclameranno nuovamente la vittoria del santo suino sui suoi oppressori sacrileghi.”

“E nel frattempo,” disse il colonnello Crane in tono asciutto, “credo che sarebbe molto meglio se il signor Oates cominciasse con la chiesa giù lungo il fiume. Ha delle fondamenta normanne davvero magnifiche e tracce di mattoni romani. Anche il vicario conosce bene la sua chiesa, e darebbe al signor Oates informazioni molto più affidabili delle sue.”

Poco dopo, quando il signor Oates se ne fu andato per la sua strada, il colonnello rimproverò in modo brusco il suo giovane amico.

«Cattiva educazione», disse «prendere in giro uno straniero che chiede informazioni».

Ma Pierce si voltò verso di lui con lo stesso calore sul volto.

«Ma non stavo scherzando. Ero completamente serio».

Lo fissarono con sguardo fermo e lui rise leggermente ma continuò con lo stesso furore.

“Simbolico forse ma serio”, disse. “Potrei sembrare di aver parlato un po’ in modo folle, ma lasciatemi dire che è giunto il momento di essere folli. Siamo stati tutti troppo mansueti. Intendo davvero, tanto quanto ho mai voluto dire qualcosa, di combattere per la resurrezione e il ritorno del maiale; e tornerà ancora come un cinghiale che dilanierà i cacciatori.”

Alzò gli occhi e il suo sguardo si posò sulla forma araldica blu sulla insegna della locanda.

“Ecco il nostro vessillo di legno!”, esclamò, indicando con la stessa gestualità drammatica. “Andremo in battaglia sotto lo stendardo del Cinghiale Azzurro”.

“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 into 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 those 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 whereupon 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. 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.”

“Applausi fragorosi e prolungati,” disse Crane cortesemente, “e adesso venite via e non guastate la perorazione. Owen vuole gironzolare tra le antichità locali, come il signor Oates. A me interessano di più le novità. Voglio dare un’occhiata a quella macchina tua.”

Cominciarono a scendere il sentiero acciottolato a zig-zag recintato e arginato da siepi e aiuole come un giardino cresciuto su una scalinata, e a ogni svolta Hood doveva rimproverare il giovane che si attardava.

“Non startene lì eternamente a contemplare il paradiso dei maiali,” disse, “o sarai mutato in una statua di sale, o magari di senape, più appropriata a simile carne. Non scapperanno via subito. Ci sono altre creature formate dal Creatore per la contemplazione dell’uomo; ci sono altre cose fatte dall’uomo a somiglianza delle creature, dai grandi Cavalli Bianchi del Wessex a quel grande uccello bianco su cui tu stesso volasti tra gli uccelli. Bel soggetto per un poema sulle cose prime e ultime.”

“Un uccello che depone uova piuttosto tremende,” disse Crane. “Nella prossima guerra… Ma dove diavolo è andato?”

“Maiali, maiali,” disse Hood tristemente. “Il fascino travolgente che i maiali esercitano su di noi a un certo momento della vita; quando udiamo i loro zoccoli nei nostri sogni e le loro codine ricciute ci si attorcigliano intorno come i tralci della vite…”

“Oh, sciocchezze,” disse il colonnello.

Poiché in effetti il signor Hilary Pierce era svanito in modo alquanto sorprendente, sgusciando sotto l’angolo di una siepe e schizzando su per un sentiero più ripido, oltre un cancello e attraverso l’angolo di un campo di fieno, dove un ultimo balzo tra i cespugli che esplodevano lo portò in cima a un basso muro che guardava dall’alto il porcile e la signorina Joan Hardy, la quale se ne stava tranquillamente allontanando. Egli saltò giù sul sentiero; il sole del mattino ritagliava ogni cosa in colori nitidi come un libro illustrato di bambino; e ritto con le mani spalancate e le sue ciocche di capelli biondi spazzate in ogni direzione dai cespugli, richiamava un poco dignitoso ricordo di Pierino Scarmigliato.

“Ho sentito che dovevo parlarti prima di partire,” disse. “Vado via, non esattamente in servizio attivo, ma per affari… per affari assai attivi. Mi sento come si sentivano i ragazzi quando andavano in guerra… e ciò che volevano fare per prima cosa… So bene che una proposta di matrimonio sopra un porcile non è così simbolica per alcuni come lo è per me, ma davvero e sinceramente… Non so se te l’ho detto, ma forse sei consapevole che ti adoro.”

Joan Hardy ne era ben consapevole; ma nel suo caso le convenienze erano come mura di castello concentriche; le convenzioni vecchie come il mondo della campagna. In esse c’era la rigida bellezza delle antiche danze paesane e il lento e delicato ricamo di un ceto contadino. Di tutte le dame le cui figure devono essere debolmente tracciate nell’arazzo di quelle frivole storie di cavalleria, la più riservata e dignitosa era colei che non era affatto una dama nel senso mondano.

Ella stava a guardarlo in silenzio, ed egli guardava lei; come il portamento della sua testa aveva una vaga suggestione di uccello, la linea del suo profilo aveva una delicata suggestione di falco, e il suo volto era di quella fine sfumatura che non ha nome, se non parlando di un bruno lucente.

“Davvero, sembri terribilmente di fretta,” disse lei. “Non mi va di sentirmi parlare così, di corsa.”

“Mi scuso,” disse lui. “Non posso fare a meno di avere fretta, ma non volevo che tu avessi fretta. Volevo solo che tu sapessi. Non ho fatto nulla per meritarti, ma ci proverò. Vado a lavorare; sono certo che tu credi nel lavoro quieto e costante per un giovane.”

“Vai in banca?” chiese lei innocentemente. “Avevi detto che tuo zio era in una banca.”

“Spero che tutti i miei discorsi non siano stati a quel livello,” rispose. E in verità sarebbe rimasto sorpreso se avesse saputo con quanta esattezza ella ricordasse tutti quei noiosi particolari che egli avesse mai menzionato su di sé, e quanto poco in confronto conoscesse le sue teorie e le sue fantasie, che egli reputava tanto più importanti.

“Beh,” disse con accattivante franchezza, “sarebbe un’esagerazione dire che vado in banca; benché naturalmente ci siano banche e banche. Ma sì, conosco una sponda dove il timo selvatico… chiedo scusa, voglio dire che conosco un mucchio di occupazioni più rustiche e romantiche che sono davvero sicure quanto la banca. La verità è che penso di darmi al commercio della pancetta. Credo di vedere uno spiraglio per un giovane sveglio nell’affare del prosciutto e del maiale. Quando mi rivedrai sarò un commesso viaggiatore di maiale; un travestimento impenetrabile.”

“Allora non devi venire qui,” rispose lei. “A quel momento non sarà permesso qui. I vicini…”

“Non temere,” disse lui, “sarò un commesso viaggiatore. Oh, un commesso viaggiatore assai per bene. Quanto al non venire qui, la cosa mi pare del tutto impensabile. Devi almeno lasciarmi scriverti ogni ora o giù di lì. Devi lasciarmi mandare qualche regalo ogni mattina.”

“Sono certa che mio padre non gradirebbe che tu mi mandassi regali,” disse lei con gravità.

“Chiedi a tuo padre di aspettare,” disse Pierce con calore. “Chiedigli di aspettare finché non avrà visto i regali. Vedi, i miei saranno regali piuttosto curiosi. Non credo che li disapproverà. Credo che li approverà. Credo che si congratulerà con me per i miei gusti semplici e i miei sani principi commerciali. La verità è, cara Joan, che mi sono impegnato in un’impresa piuttosto importante. Non c’è bisogno che ti spaventi; ti prometto che non ti darò più fastidio finché non riesce. Mi accontenterò che tu sappia che è per te che lo faccio; e continuerò a farlo, dovessi sfidare il mondo intero.” Balzò di nuovo sul muro e vi rimase a fissarla dall’alto quasi con indignazione.

“Che qualcuno possa proibire a TE di tenere maiali,” gridò. “Che qualcuno possa proibire a TE qualsiasi cosa. Che qualcuno possa contestare il TUO diritto di tenere coccodrilli domestici se ti va! Questo è il peccato imperdonabile; questa è la suprema bestemmia e il delitto contro la natura delle cose, che non resterà invendicato. Avrai i maiali, io dico, dovessero crollare i cieli e il mondo intero essere travolto dalla guerra.”

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 judgement 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 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 at 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.”

Egli scomparve come un lampo dietro l’alto argine e il muro, e Joan tornò in silenzio alla locanda.

Il primo episodio della guerra non parve superficialmente incoraggiante, benché l’eroe di esso non ne apparisse affatto scoraggiato. Come riferito nella cronaca nera di vari giornali, Hilary Patrick Pierce, già del Corpo d’Aviazione, fu arrestato per aver condotto maiali nella contea di Bluntshire, in contravvenzione ai regolamenti emanati per la salute pubblica. Pareva aver avuto quasi altrettanti guai con i maiali quanti con la polizia; ma tenne un discorso arguto ed eloquente al momento dell’arresto, al quale la polizia e i maiali parvero ugualmente insensibili. L’episodio fu ritenuto irrilevante e la sua pena fu irrisoria; ma l’occasione fu apprezzata da alcune delle autorità in quanto offriva l’opportunità della definitiva delucidazione e affermazione della nuova norma.

A tale scopo fu una fortuna che il principale magistrato del collegio non fosse persona da meno del celebre igienista, Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., M.D., il quale aveva iniziato la vita, come alcuni ricorderanno, quale affermato medico di provincia e si era del pari distinto come ufficiale sanitario nella Valle del Tamigi. A lui infatti si doveva in gran parte la logica estensione delle precauzioni esistenti contro l’infezione dal maiale; benché fosse pienamente appoggiato dai colleghi magistrati, essendo l’uno il signor Rosenbaum Low, milionario e già amministratore della Bliss and Co., e l’altro il giovane socialista, il signor Amyas Minns, famoso per la sua esposizione di Shaw sulla Vita Semplice, il quale sedeva sul collegio come consigliere laburista. Tutti concordarono nel giudizio di Sir Horace, che, così come tutte le difficoltà e i casi dubbi sollevati dalla pratica del bere moderato erano stati semplificati dalla soluzione del Proibizionismo, così le varie liti ed elusioni riguardo alla febbre suina si affrontavano meglio con un regolamento franco e semplice contro i suini. Nelle assai sconvenienti osservazioni che egli offrì dopo il processo, il prigioniero pare abbia detto che, essendo i suoi tre giudici un ebreo, un vegetariano e un ciarlatano arrivista, non si stupiva che non sapessero apprezzare il maiale.

Il pranzo successivo cui i tre amici si trovarono insieme fu in una cornice abbastanza diversa; poiché il colonnello aveva invitato gli altri due al suo circolo a Londra. Sarebbe stato quasi impossibile essere quel genere di colonnello senza avere quel genere di circolo. Ma di fatto ci andava assai di rado. In quell’occasione fu Owen Hood ad arrivare per primo e, secondo le istruzioni, fu scortato da un cameriere a un tavolo in una bovindo che si affacciava sul Green Park. Conoscendo la puntualità militare di Crane, Hood si figurò che potesse aver frainteso l’ora; e mentre cercava il biglietto d’invito nel suo taccuino, si soffermò un momento su un ritaglio di giornale che aveva messo da parte come curiosità qualche giorno prima. Era un trafiletto intitolato “Vecchie signore pazze al volante,” e diceva come segue:

“Un numero senza precedenti di casi di automobilisti che superano il limite di velocità si è verificato di recente sulla strada di Bath e su altre arterie occidentali. La caratteristica straordinaria del caso è che in un numero così cospicuo di casi i trasgressori sembravano essere vecchie signore di gran ricchezza e rispettabilità che asserivano di portare semplicemente i loro carlini e altri animali domestici a prendere aria. Sostenevano che la salute dell’animale richiedeva un transito nell’aria assai più rapido di quanto non sia il caso per gli esseri umani.”

Egli stava fissando questo estratto con la stessa perplessità della prima lettura, quando il colonnello entrò con un giornale in mano.

“Senti,” disse, “credo che la cosa stia diventando piuttosto ridicola. Non sono un rivoluzionario come te; tutt’altro. Ma tutte queste regole e regolamenti stanno superando ogni razionale disciplina. Poco tempo fa hanno cominciato a vietare tutti i serragli ambulanti; non, badabene, imponendo condizioni adeguate per gli animali, ma vietandoli del tutto per qualche sciocchezza sulla sicurezza del pubblico. C’è stato un circo ambulante fermato vicino ad Acton e un altro sulla strada per Reading. Folle di ragazzi di paese non devono mai vedere un leone in vita loro, perché una volta ogni cinquant’anni un leone è scappato ed è stato ripreso. Ma non è niente rispetto a quello che è successo dopo. Ora, se non ti dispiace, c’è una tale mortale paura del contagio che dobbiamo lasciar soffrire i malati, proprio come se fossimo selvaggi. Conosci quei nuovi treni ospedale che erano stati istituiti per portare i pazienti dagli ospedali giù alle stazioni climatiche. Ebbene, pare che non entreranno in funzione dopotutto, per timore che, semplicemente trasportando un infermo di qualsiasi genere attraverso l’aperta campagna, si avvelenino i quattro venti del cielo. Se questa sciocchezza continua, finirò per diventare matto quanto Hilary in persona.”

Hilary Pierce era arrivato durante questa conversazione e sedeva ad ascoltarla con un sorriso piuttosto curioso. In qualche modo, più Hood guardava quel sorriso, più esso lo lasciava perplesso; lo lasciava perplesso quanto il ritaglio di giornale che teneva in mano. Si sorprese a guardare dall’uno all’altro, e Pierce sorrise in modo ancor più irritante.

“Non hai l’aria feroce e fanatica di quando ci siamo visti l’ultima volta, mio giovane amico,” osservò Owen Hood. “Ti sei stancato dei maiali e dei tribunali di polizia? Queste leggi coercitive di cui parla il colonnello un tempo ti avrebbero fatto saltare il tetto in un attimo.”

“Oh, sono del tutto contrario alle nuove regole,” rispose il giovane con freddezza. “Ci sono stato assai contrario; contrario, si potrebbe dire, con le unghie e coi denti. Anzi, ho già infranto tutte quelle nuove leggi e qualcuna in più. Potresti lasciarmi dare un’occhiata a quel ritaglio per un momento?”

Hood glielo porse ed egli annuì, dicendo:

“Sì; è per quello che sono stato arrestato.”

“Arrestato per cosa?”

“Arrestato per essere una vecchia signora ricca e rispettabile,” rispose Hilary Pierce; “ma quella volta riuscii a farla franca. Era un bello spettacolo vedere la vecchia signora scavalcare una siepe e filarsela di corsa attraverso un prato.”

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 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 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 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 were ever 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 pinewood 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 settling 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. Artist 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 aerial 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.

Hood lo guardò con le sopracciglia aggrottate e la sua bocca cominciò a lavorare.

“Ma cos’è tutta questa faccenda della vecchia signora con un carlino o un animaletto o quel che è?”

“Beh, era quasi un carlino,” disse Pierce con aria distaccata. “Feci notare a tutti che era, per così dire, un carlino approssimativo. Chiesi se fosse giusto punirmi per un piccolo errore di ortografia.”

“Comincio a capire,” disse Hood. “Stavi di nuovo contrabbandando suini giù al tuo prezioso Cinghiale Azzurro, e pensavi di poter forzare la frontiera con automobili velocissime.”

“Sì,” rispose il contrabbandiere placidamente. “Eravamo assai letteralmente dei pirati della strada. Da principio pensai di travestire i maiali da milionari e da membri del Parlamento; ma quando li si guarda da vicino, c’è più differenza di quanto immagineresti possibile. Fu un gran divertimento quando mi costrinsero a togliere il mio animaletto dall’ involto di scialli, e scoprirono che grosso animaletto fosse.”

“E devo intendere,” interruppe il colonnello, “che era qualcosa del genere… con le altre leggi?”

“Le altre leggi,” disse Pierce, “sono certamente arbitrarie, ma tu non rendi loro del tutto giustizia. Non ne apprezzi appieno il movente. Non tieni pienamente conto della loro origine. Posso dire, spero con modestia, che io fui la loro origine. Non solo ebbi il piacere di infrangere quelle leggi, ma anche il piacere di farle.”

“Altri tuoi trucchi, vuoi dire,” disse il colonnello; “ma perché i giornali non lo dicono?”

“Le autorità non vogliono,” rispose Pierce. “Le autorità non mi faranno pubblicità, ci puoi scommettere. Ho fin troppo appoggio popolare per questo. Quando avverrà la vera rivoluzione, non ne parleranno i giornali.”

Si fermò un momento in meditazione e poi proseguì.

“Quando la polizia cercò il mio carlino e scoprì che era un maiale, cominciai a domandarmi come impedir loro di rifarlo. Mi venne in mente che potessero temere un maiale selvatico o un carlino che li mordesse. Così, naturalmente, la volta seguente viaggiai con animali spaventosamente pericolosi in gabbia, avvertendo tutti delle più feroci tigri e pantere che si fossero mai conosciute. Quando lo scoprirono e non vollero lasciarlo uscire, non poterono che ripiegare sulla loro stessa buffonata di una proibizione all’ingrosso. Naturalmente fu lo stesso con l’altro mio numero, quello dei malati che andavano alle stazioni climatiche per essere curati di svariati e raffinati malanni alla moda. I maiali passarono un tempo dignitoso, forse un po’ noioso, in vagoni ferroviari elaboratamente tendati con infermiere ospedaliere a servirli; mentre io stavo fuori e assicuravo i funzionari ferroviari che la cura era una cura di riposo, e che gli infermi non dovevano essere disturbati per nessun motivo.”

“Che bugiardo che sei!” esclamò Hood in schietta ammirazione.

“Niente affatto,” disse Pierce con dignità. “Era del tutto vero che stavano per essere curati.”

Crane, che aveva guardato piuttosto distrattamente fuori dalla finestra, girò lentamente la testa e disse bruscamente: “E come andrà a finire? Ti proponi di continuare a fare tutte queste cose impossibili?”

Pierce balzò in piedi con una resurrezione di tutto il romantico abbandono del suo giuramento sopra il porcile.

“Impossibili!” gridò. “Non sai quel che dici né quanto è vero. Tutto quel che ho fatto finora era possibile e prosaico. Ma farò una cosa impossibile. Farò qualcosa che è scritto in tutti i libri e le rime come impossibile… qualcosa che è passato in proverbio dell’impossibile. La guerra non è ancora finita; e se voi due vi appostate nella cava di fronte al Cinghiale Azzurro, giovedì otto al tramonto, vedrete qualcosa di tanto impossibile e tanto evidente di per sé che perfino gli organi della pubblica informazione faticheranno a nasconderlo.”

Fu in quella parte del ripido declivio di pineta dove la cava formava una sorta di terrazza sotto un tetto di pini che due gentiluomini di età alquanto più che matura, i quali non avevano del tutto perduto l’appetito dell’avventura, si appostarono con tutti i preparativi propri di un picnic o di uno scherzo. Fu da quel luogo, come da una finestra che guardava attraverso la valle, che videro ciò che pareva più una visione; ciò che pareva anzi piuttosto la parodia di un’apocalisse. Il vasto squarcio del cielo occidentale era di una luminosa tinta di limone, come di un giallo pallido che sfumava in un verde pallido, mentre una o due nuvole sparse all’orizzonte erano di un rosso di rosa e di colori ancor più ricchi. Ma il sole calante stesso era un fuoco senza nubi, sì che una luce fulva giaceva su tutto il paesaggio; e la locanda del Cinghiale Azzurro che sorgeva di fronte pareva quasi una casa d’oro. Owen Hood guardava alla sua maniera sognante, e disse infine:

“Ecco un segno apocalittico in cielo per cominciare. È una cosa strana, ma quella nuvola che risale la valle è insolitamente simile alla forma di un maiale.”

“Assai simile a una balena,” disse il colonnello Crane, sbadigliando lievemente; ma quando volse gli occhi in quella direzione, gli occhi si fecero più acuti. Gli artisti hanno osservato che una nuvola ha prospettiva come qualsiasi altra cosa; ma la prospettiva della nuvola che risaliva la valle era curiosamente solida.

“Quella non è una nuvola,” disse in tono tagliente, “è uno Zeppelin o qualcosa del genere.”

La forma solida cresceva sempre più grande; e man mano che si faceva più evidente si faceva più incredibile.

“Santi e angeli!” gridò Hood all’improvviso. “Ma è un maiale!”

“Ha proprio la forma di un maiale,” disse il colonnello secco; e infatti, man mano che la grande forma simile a un pallone si gonfiava sempre più al di sopra del proprio riflesso nel fiume serpeggiante, potevano vedere che il lungo corpo a salsiccia dello Zeppelin era stato fantasticamente addobbato con orecchie e zampe pendenti, per completare quella somiglianza da pantomima.

“Suppongo siano altre birichinate di Hilary,” osservò Hood; “ma cosa sta combinando adesso?”

Mentre il grande mostro aereo risaliva la valle, si fermò sopra la locanda del Cinghiale Azzurro, e qualcosa ne cadde svolazzando come una piuma dai colori vivaci.

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

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

From that distance, the objects in question had something of the appearance of cherubs in some gaily coloured Gothic picture, with the yellow sky for their gold-leaf background. The parachute apparatus from which they hung and hovered was designed and coloured with the appearance of a great wheel of gorgeously painted plumage, looking more gaudy than ever in the strong evening light that lay over all. The more the two men in the quarry stared at these strange objects, the more certain it seemed that they were indeed pigs; though whether the pigs were dead or alive it was impossible at that distance to say. They looked down into the garden of the inn into which the feathered things were dropping, and they could see the figure of Joan Hardy standing in front of the old pig-sty, with her bird-like head lifted, looking up into the sky.

“Singular present for a young lady,” remarked Crane, “but I suppose when our mad young friend does start love-making, he would be likely to give impossible presents.”

The eyes of the more poetical Hood were full of larger visions, and he hardly seemed to be listening. But as the sentence ended he seemed to start from a trance and struck his hands together.

“Yes!” he cried in a new voice, “we always come back to that word!”

“Come back to what word?” asked his friend.

“‘Impossible,’” answered Owen Hood. “It’s the word that runs through his whole life, and ours too for that matter. Don’t you see what he has done?”

“I see what he has done all right,” answered the Colonel, “but I’m not at all sure I see what you’re driving at.”

“What we have seen is another impossible thing,” said Owen Hood; “a thing that common speech has set up as a challenge; a thing that a thousand rhymes and jokes and phrases have called impossible. We have seen pigs fly.”

“It’s pretty extraordinary,” admitted Crane, “but it’s not so extraordinary as their not being allowed to walk.”

And they gathered their travelling tackle together and began to descend the steep hill.

In doing so, they descended into a deeper twilight between the stems of the darkling trees; the walls of the valley began to close over them, as it were, and they lost that sense of being in the upper air in a radiant topsy-turvydom of clouds. It was almost as if they had really had a vision; and the voice of Crane came abruptly out of the dusk, almost like that of a doubter when he speaks of a dream.

“The thing I can’t understand,” he said abruptly, “is how Hilary managed to DO all that by himself.”

“He really is a very wonderful fellow,” said Hood. “You told me yourself he did wonders in the War. And though he turns it to these fanatical ends now, it takes as much trouble to do one as the other.”

“Takes a devilish lot more trouble to do it alone,” said Crane. “In the War there was a whole organization.”

“You mean he must be more than a remarkable person,” suggested Hood, “a sort of giant with a hundred hands or god with a hundred eyes. Well, a man will work frightfully hard when he wants something very much; even a man who generally looks like a lounging minor poet. And I think I know what it was he wanted. He deserves to get it. It’s certainly his hour of triumph.”

“Mystery to me all the same,” said the Colonel frowning. “Wonder whether he’ll ever clear it up.” But that part of the mystery was not to be cleared up until many other curious things had come to pass.

Away on another part of the slope Hilary Pierce, new lighted upon the earth like the herald Mercury, leapt down into a red hollow of the quarry and came towards Joan Hardy with uplifted arms.

“This is no time for false modesty,” he said. “It is the hour, and I come to you covered with glory—”

“You come covered with mud,” she said smiling, “and it’s that horrible red mud that takes so long to dry. It’s no use trying to brush it till—”

“I bring you the Golden Fleece, or at any rate the Golden Pig-Skin,” he cried in lyric ecstasy. “I have endured the labours; I have achieved the quest. I have made the Hampshire Hog as legendary as the Calydonian Boar. They forbade me to drive it on foot, and I drove it in a car, disguised as a pug. They forbade me to bring it in a car, and I brought it in a railway-train, disguised as an invalid. They forbade me to use a railway-train, and I took to the wings of the morning and rose to the uttermost parts of the air; by a way secret and pathless and lonely as the wilful way of love. I have made my romance immortal. I have made my romance immortal. I have written your name upon the sky. What do you say to me now? I have turned a Pig into a Pegasus. I have done impossible things.”

“I know you have,” she said, “but somehow I can’t help liking you for all that.”

“BUT you can’t help liking me,” he repeated in a hollow voice. “I have stormed heaven, but still I am not so bad. Hercules can be tolerated in spite of his Twelve Labours. St. George can be forgiven for killing the Dragon. Woman, is this the way I am treated in the hour of victory; and is this the graceful fashion of an older world? Have you become a New Woman, by any chance? What has your father been doing? What does he say—about us?”

“My father says you are quite mad, of course,” she replied, “but he can’t help liking you either. He says he doesn’t believe in people marrying out of their class; but that if I must marry a gentleman he’d rather it was somebody like you, and not one of the new gentlemen.”

“Well, I’m glad I’m an old gentleman, any how,” he answered somewhat mollified. “But really this prevalence of common sense is getting quite dangerous. Will nothing rouse you all to a little unreality; to saying, so to speak, ‘O, for the wings of a pig that I might flee away and be at rest.’ What would you say if I turned the world upside down and set my foot upon the sun and moon?”

“Sta scendendo gente col paracadute,” disse il colonnello brevemente.

“Sono persone dall’aspetto bizzarro,” osservò il suo compagno, scrutando sotto le sopracciglia aggrottate, poiché la luce radente abbagliava gli occhi. “Perbacco, non sono affatto persone! Sono maiali!”

Da quella distanza, gli oggetti in questione avevano un poco l’aspetto di cherubini in qualche gaio quadro gotico dai colori vivaci, con il cielo giallo per sfondo dorato. L’apparato del paracadute da cui pendevano e libravano era foggiato e colorato con l’aspetto di una grande ruota di piumaggio sgargiantemente dipinto, dall’aria più vistosa che mai nella forte luce serale che giaceva su tutto. Più i due uomini nella cava fissavano questi strani oggetti, più pareva certo che fossero davvero maiali; benché fosse impossibile a quella distanza dire se i maiali fossero morti o vivi. Guardarono giù nel giardino della locanda in cui le cose piumate stavano calando, e poterono vedere la figura di Joan Hardy ritta davanti al vecchio porcile, con la testa d’uccello levata, che guardava su verso il cielo.

“Singolare regalo per una signorina,” osservò Crane, “ma suppongo che quando il nostro giovane matto si mette davvero a fare la corte, sia probabile che offra regali impossibili.”

Gli occhi del più poetico Hood erano pieni di più ampie visioni, ed egli pareva a stento ascoltare. Ma quando la frase finì parve destarsi da una trance e batté le mani.

“Sì!” gridò con voce nuova, “torniamo sempre a quella parola!”

“Tornare a quale parola?” chiese l’amico.

“‘Impossibile,’” rispose Owen Hood. “È la parola che percorre tutta la sua vita, e anche la nostra, del resto. Non vedi cos’ha fatto?”

“Vedo benissimo cos’ha fatto,” rispose il colonnello, “ma non sono affatto sicuro di vedere dove vuoi arrivare.”

“Ciò che abbiamo visto è un’altra cosa impossibile,” disse Owen Hood; “una cosa che il parlar comune ha eretto a sfida; una cosa che mille rime e battute e frasi hanno definito impossibile. Abbiamo visto volare i maiali.”

“È piuttosto straordinario,” ammise Crane, “ma non è così straordinario come il fatto che non sia loro permesso di camminare.”

E raccolsero insieme il loro corredo da viaggio e cominciarono a scendere la ripida collina.

Così facendo, discesero in un crepuscolo più fondo tra i fusti degli alberi che si oscuravano; le pareti della valle cominciarono a chiudersi su di loro, per così dire, ed essi perdettero quella sensazione di essere nell’aria superiore in un raggiante sossopra di nuvole. Era quasi come se avessero davvero avuto una visione; e la voce di Crane uscì brusca dal buio, quasi come quella di un dubbioso quando parla di un sogno.

“La cosa che non riesco a capire,” disse bruscamente, “è come Hilary sia riuscito a FARE tutto quello da solo.”

“È davvero un tipo straordinario,” disse Hood. “Tu stesso mi hai detto che fece meraviglie in guerra. E benché ora volga tutto a questi fini fanatici, ci vuole altrettanta fatica per fare l’una cosa che l’altra.”

“Ci vuole una fatica del diavolo di più a farlo da soli,” disse Crane. “In guerra c’era tutta un’organizzazione.”

“Vuoi dire che dev’essere più di una persona notevole,” suggerì Hood, “una specie di gigante dalle cento mani o dio dai cento occhi. Ebbene, un uomo lavorerà spaventosamente sodo quando vuole qualcosa con tutte le sue forze; anche un uomo che di solito ha l’aria di un poetucolo sfaccendato. E credo di sapere cos’era che voleva. Merita di ottenerlo. È di certo la sua ora di trionfo.”

“Per me resta un mistero lo stesso,” disse il colonnello aggrottando la fronte. “Chissà se mai lo chiarirà.” Ma quella parte del mistero non doveva essere chiarita finché molte altre cose curiose non si furono verificate.

Lontano, su un’altra parte del pendio, Hilary Pierce, appena disceso sulla terra come l’araldo Mercurio, balzò giù in un rosso avvallamento della cava e venne verso Joan Hardy con le braccia levate.

“Non è il momento della falsa modestia,” disse. “È l’ora, e vengo a te coperto di gloria…”

“Vieni coperto di fango,” disse lei sorridendo, “e per giunta è quel terribile fango rosso che ci mette tanto ad asciugarsi. È inutile provare a spazzolarlo via finché…”

“Ti porto il Vello d’Oro, o quantomeno la Pelle di Maiale Dorata,” gridò in estasi lirica. “Ho affrontato le fatiche; ho compiuto la ricerca. Ho reso il Porco dell’Hampshire leggendario quanto il Cinghiale Calidonio. Mi proibirono di condurlo a piedi, e lo condussi in automobile, travestito da carlino. Mi proibirono di portarlo in automobile, e lo portai su un treno, travestito da infermo. Mi proibirono di usare il treno, e presi le ali del mattino e mi levai fino alle estreme regioni dell’aria; per una via segreta e senza sentieri e solitaria come la via caparbia dell’amore. Ho reso immortale il mio romanzo. Ho reso immortale il mio romanzo. Ho scritto il tuo nome sul cielo. Cos’hai da dirmi ora? Ho mutato un Maiale in un Pegaso. Ho compiuto cose impossibili.”

“So che l’hai fatto,” disse lei, “ma in qualche modo non posso fare a meno di volerti bene per questo.”

“MA non puoi fare a meno di volermi bene,” ripeté con voce cava. “Ho preso d’assalto il cielo, eppure non sono poi così malvagio. Ercole può essere tollerato malgrado le sue Dodici Fatiche. San Giorgio può essere perdonato per aver ucciso il Drago. Donna, è così che vengo trattato nell’ora della vittoria; ed è questa la garbata usanza di un mondo più antico? Sei per caso diventata una Donna Nuova? Cos’ha combinato tuo padre? Cosa dice… di noi?”

“Mio padre dice che sei del tutto matto, si capisce,” rispose lei, “ma non può fare a meno di volerti bene anche lui. Dice che non crede nel matrimonio fuori dalla propria classe; ma che se proprio devo sposare un gentiluomo preferirebbe fosse qualcuno come te, e non uno dei nuovi gentiluomini.”

“Beh, sono contento di essere un gentiluomo all’antica, in ogni caso,” rispose alquanto rabbonito. “Ma davvero questo dilagare del buon senso sta diventando piuttosto pericoloso. Nulla vi scuoterà tutti a un po’ d’irrealtà; a dire, per così dire, ‘Oh, avessi io le ali di un maiale, per fuggire via e trovare riposo.’ Cosa diresti se rivoltassi il mondo a rovescio e posassi il piede sul sole e sulla luna?”

“I should say,” replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, “that you wanted somebody to look after you.”

He stared at her for a moment in an almost abstracted fashion as if he had not fully understood; then he laughed uncontrollably, like a man who has seen something very close to him that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. So a man will fall over something in a game of hiding-and-seeking, and get shaken up with laughter.

“What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an aeroplane,” he said, “especially when your flying ship is only a flying pig. The earth of the real peasants and the real pigs—don’t be offended; I assure you the confusion is a compliment. What a thing is horse-sense, and how much finer really than the poetry of Pegasus! And when there is everything else as well that makes the sky clean and the earth kind, beauty and bravery and the lifting of the head— well, you are right enough, Joan. Will you take care of me? Will you stop at home and clip my pig’s wings?”

He had caught hold of her by the hands; but she still laughed as she answered.

“Yes—I told you I couldn’t help—but you really must let go, Hilary. I can see your friends coming down from the quarry.”

As she spoke, indeed, Colonel Crane and Owen Hood could be seen descending the slope and passing through a screen of slender trees towards them.

“Hullo!” said Hilary Pierce cheerfully. “I want you to congratulate me. Joan thinks I’m an awful humbug, and right she is; I am what has been called a happy hypocrite. At least you fellows may think I’ve been guilty of a bit of fake in this last affair, when I tell you the news. Well, I will confess.”

“What news do you mean?” inquired the Colonel with curiosity.

Hilary Pierce grinned and made a gesture over his shoulder to the litter of porcine parachutes, to indicate his last and crowning folly.

“The truth is,” he said laughing, “that was only a final firework display to celebrate victory or failure, whichever you choose to call it. There isn’t any need to do so any more, because the veto is removed.

“Removed?” exclaimed Hood. “Why on earth is that? It’s rather unnerving when lunatics suddenly go sane like that.”

“It wasn’t anything to do with the lunatics,” answered Pierce quietly. “The real change was much higher up, or rather lower down. Anyhow, it was much farther at the back of things, where the Big Businesses are settled by the big people.”

“What was the change?” asked the Colonel.

“Old Oates has gone into another business,” answered Pierce quietly.

“What on earth has old Oates got to do with it?” asked Hood staring. “Do you mean that Yankee mooning about over mediaeval ruins?”

“Oh, I know,” said Pierce wearily, “I thought he had nothing to do with it; I thought it was the Jews and vegetarians, and the rest; but they’re very innocent instruments. The truth is that Enoch Oates is the biggest pork-packer and importer in the world, and HE didn’t want any competition from our cottagers. And what he says goes, as he would express it. Now, thank God, he’s taken up another line.”

But if any indomitable reader wishes to know what was the new line Mr. Oates pursued and why, it is to be feared that his only course is to await and patiently read the story of the Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates; and even before reaching that supreme test, he will have to support the recital of The Elusive Companion of Parson White; for these, as has been said, are tales of topsy-turvydom, and they often work backwards.

«Direi,» rispose Joan Hardy, sempre sorridendo, «che avevate bisogno di qualcuno che si prendesse cura di voi.»

Egli la fissò per un istante in modo quasi assorto, come se non avesse ben compreso; poi rise in modo incontenibile, come un uomo che ha scorto qualcosa vicinissimo a sé che sa di essere uno sciocco a non aver visto prima. Così un uomo inciampa in qualcosa in un gioco a nascondino, e viene squassato dalle risa.

«Che urtone ti dà la madre terra quando cadi da un aeroplano,» disse, «specie quando la tua nave volante non è che un maiale volante. La terra dei veri contadini e dei veri maiali… non offenderti; ti assicuro che la confusione è un complimento. Che gran cosa è il buon senso del cavallo, e quanto più fine, davvero, della poesia di Pegaso! E quando c’è per giunta tutto ciò che pure rende il cielo terso e la terra benigna, bellezza e coraggio e il levare del capo… ebbene, hai ragione tu, Joan. Vuoi prenderti cura di me? Vuoi restare a casa e tarpare le ali al mio maiale?»

L’aveva presa per le mani; ma lei rideva ancora mentre rispondeva.

«Sì… te l’ho detto che non potevo farne a meno… ma devi proprio lasciarmi, Hilary. Vedo i tuoi amici scendere dalla cava.»

Mentre parlava, infatti, si vedevano il colonnello Crane e Owen Hood discendere il pendio e passare attraverso uno schermo di alberi esili verso di loro.

«Salve!» disse Hilary Pierce allegramente. «Voglio che mi facciate le vostre congratulazioni. Joan mi crede un tremendo ciarlatano, e ha ragione; sono ciò che è stato chiamato un ipocrita felice. Perlomeno voi potrete pensare che mi sia reso colpevole di un po’ d’inganno in quest’ultima faccenda, quando vi darò la notizia. Ebbene, confesserò.»

«A quale notizia alludete?» domandò il colonnello con curiosità.

Hilary Pierce ghignò e fece un gesto oltre la spalla verso la congerie di paracadute suini, a indicare la sua ultima e culminante follia.

«La verità è,» disse ridendo, «che quello era solo un fuoco d’artificio finale per festeggiare la vittoria o la sconfitta, comunque vogliate chiamarla. Non ce n’è più bisogno, perché il veto è tolto.»

«Tolto?» esclamò Hood. «E perché mai? È piuttosto sconcertante quando i pazzi di colpo rinsaviscono così.»

«Non ha avuto niente a che vedere coi pazzi,» rispose Pierce con calma. «Il vero mutamento è avvenuto molto più in alto, o piuttosto molto più in basso. Comunque sia, molto più in fondo alle cose, dove i Grandi Affari vengono decisi dai grandi personaggi.»

«Quale mutamento?» chiese il colonnello.

«Il vecchio Oates si è dato a un altro affare,» rispose Pierce con calma.

«E che diavolo c’entra il vecchio Oates?» chiese Hood sbarrando gli occhi. «Intendi quello yankee che si aggira sognante fra le rovine medievali?»

«Oh, lo so,» disse Pierce stancamente, «pensavo che non c’entrasse nulla; pensavo fossero gli ebrei e i vegetariani, e tutti gli altri; ma sono strumenti assai innocenti. La verità è che Enoch Oates è il più grande insaccatore e importatore di carne di maiale al mondo, e LUI non voleva concorrenza dai nostri contadini. E quel che dice si fa, come si esprimerebbe lui. Ora, grazie a Dio, ha imboccato un’altra strada.»

Ma se qualche lettore indomito desidera sapere quale fosse la nuova strada che il signor Oates imboccò e perché, si teme che l’unica sua via sia attendere e leggere con pazienza la storia del Lusso Esclusivo di Enoch Oates; e ancor prima di giungere a quella prova suprema, dovrà sopportare il racconto dell’Elusivo Compagno del Parroco White; perché questi, come si è detto, sono racconti di mondo alla rovescia, e spesso procedono all’indietro.

Chapter IV

The Elusive Companion of Parson White

In the scriptures and the chronicles of the League of the Long Bow, or fellowship of foolish persons doing impossible things, it is recorded that Owen Hood, the lawyer, and his friend Crane, the retired Colonel, were partaking one afternoon of a sort of picnic on the river-island that had been the first scene of a certain romantic incident in the life of the former, the burden of reading about which has fallen upon the readers in other days. Suffice it to say that the island had been devoted by Mr. Hood to his hobby of angling, and that the meal then in progress was a somewhat early interruption of the same leisurely pursuit. The two old cronies had a third companion, who, though considerably younger, was not only a companion but a friend. He was a light-haired, lively young man, with rather a wild eye, known by the name of Pierce, whose wedding to the daughter of the innkeeper of the Blue Boar the others had only recently attended.

He was an aviator and given to many other forms of skylarking. The two older men had eccentric tastes of their own; but there is always a difference between the eccentricity of an elderly man who defies the world and the enthusiasm of a younger man who hopes to alter it. The old gentleman may be willing, in a sense, to stand on his head; but he does not hope, as the boy does, to stand the world on its head. With a young man like Hilary Pierce it was the world itself that was to be turned upside-down; and that was a game at which his more grizzled companions could only look on, as at a child they loved playing with a big coloured balloon.

Perhaps it was this sense of a division by time, altering the tone, though not the fact, of friendship, which sent the mind of one of the older men back to the memory of an older friend. He remembered that he had had a letter that morning from the only contemporary of his who could fitly have made a fourth to their party. Owen Hood drew the letter from his pocket with a smile that wrinkled his long, humourous, cadaverous face.

“By the way, I forgot to tell you,” he said, “I had a letter from White yesterday.”

The bronzed visage of the Colonel was also seamed with the external signs of a soundless chuckle.

“Read it yet?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied the lawyer; “the hieroglyphic was attacked with fresh vigour after breakfast this morning, and the clouds and mysteries of yesterday’s labours seemed to be rolled away. Some portions of the cuneiform still await an expert translation; but the sentences themselves appear to be in the original English.”

“Very original English,” snorted Colonel Crane.

“Yes, our friend is an original character,” replied Hood. “Vanity tempts me to hint that he is our friend because he has an original taste in friends. The habit of his of putting the pronoun on the first page and the noun on the next has brightened many winter evenings for me. You haven’t met our friend White, have you?” he added to Pierce. “That is a shock that still threatens you.”

“Why, what’s the matter with him?” inquired Pierce.

“Nothing,” observed Crane in his more staccato style. “Has a taste for starting a letter with ‘Yours Truly’ and ending it with ‘Dear Sir’; that’s all.”

“I should rather like to hear that letter,” observed the young man.

“So you shall,” answered Hood, “there’s nothing confidential in it; and if there were, you wouldn’t find it out merely by reading it. The Rev. Wilding White, called by some of his critics ‘Wild White,’ is one of those country parsons, to be found in corners of the English countryside, of whom their old college friends usually think in order to wonder what the devil their parishioners think of them. As a matter of fact, my dear Hilary, he was rather like you when he was your age; and what in the world you would be like as a vicar in the Church of England, aged fifty, might at first stagger the imagination; but the problem might be solved by supposing you would be like him. But I only hope you will have a more lucid style in letter-writing. The old boy is always in such a state of excitement about something that it comes out anyhow.”

It has been said elsewhere that these tales are, in some sense, of necessity told tail-foremost, and certainly the letter of the Rev. Wilding White was a document suited to such a scheme of narrative. It was written in what had once been a good hand-writing of the bolder sort, but which had degenerated through excessive energy and haste into an illegible scrawl. It appeared to run as follows:

“‘My dear Owen,—My mind is quite made up; though I know the sort of legal long-winded things you will say against it; I know especially one thing a leathery old lawyer like you is bound to say; but as a matter of fact even you can’t say it in a case like this, because the timber came from the other end of the county and had nothing whatever to do with him or any of his flunkeys and sycophants. Besides, I did it all myself with a little assistance I’ll tell you about later; and even in these days I should be surprised to hear THAT sort of assistance could be anything but a man’s own affair. I defy you and all your parchments to maintain that IT comes under the Game Laws. You won’t mind me talking like this; I know jolly well you’d think you were acting as a friend; but I think the time has come to speak plainly.’”

“Quite right,” said the Colonel.

“Yes,” said young Pierce, with a rather vague expression, “I’m glad he feels that the time has come to speak plainly.”

“Quite so,” observed the lawyer dryly; “he continues as follows:”

“‘I’ve got a lot to tell you about the new arrangement, which works much better even than I hoped. I was afraid at first it would really be an encumbrance, as you know it’s always supposed to be. But there are more things, and all the rest of it, and God fulfils himself, and so on and so on. It gives one quite a weird Asiatic feeling sometimes.’”

Capitolo IV

L’inafferrabile compagno del parroco White

Nelle scritture e nelle cronache della Lega dell’Arco Lungo, ovvero compagnia di persone sciocche che compiono cose impossibili, è registrato che Owen Hood, l’avvocato, e il suo amico Crane, il colonnello a riposo, stavano un pomeriggio consumando una sorta di picnic sull’isola in mezzo al fiume che era stata la prima scena di un certo romantico episodio nella vita del primo, il gravame di leggere il quale è ricaduto sui lettori in altri giorni. Basti dire che l’isola era stata destinata dal signor Hood al suo passatempo della pesca, e che il pasto allora in corso era un’interruzione alquanto precoce di quel medesimo indolente svago. I due vecchi amiconi avevano un terzo compagno che, benché assai più giovane, era non solo un compagno ma un amico. Era un giovane dai capelli chiari, vivace, dall’occhio piuttosto selvaggio, noto col nome di Pierce, alle cui nozze con la figlia del locandiere del Cinghiale Azzurro gli altri avevano di recente presenziato.

Era un aviatore e dedito a molte altre forme di birichinate. I due uomini più anziani avevano gusti eccentrici loro propri; ma c’è sempre una differenza tra l’eccentricità di un uomo attempato che sfida il mondo e l’entusiasmo di un uomo più giovane che spera di mutarlo. Il vecchio gentiluomo può essere disposto, in un certo senso, a stare a testa in giù; ma non spera, come fa il ragazzo, di mettere il mondo a testa in giù. Con un giovane come Hilary Pierce era il mondo stesso che doveva essere rivoltato sottosopra; e a quel gioco i suoi più brizzolati compagni potevano solo assistere, come a un bambino che amavano mentre giocava con un grosso pallone colorato.

Fu forse questo senso di una divisione operata dal tempo, che alterava il tono, ma non il fatto, dell’amicizia, a spingere la mente di uno dei due uomini più anziani indietro al ricordo di un amico più antico. Ricordò di aver ricevuto quella mattina una lettera dall’unico coetaneo suo che avrebbe potuto degnamente far da quarto alla loro brigata. Owen Hood trasse la lettera di tasca con un sorriso che gli increspò il lungo volto umoristico e cadaverico.

“A proposito, dimenticavo di dirti,” disse, “ieri ho ricevuto una lettera da White.”

Anche il volto abbronzato del colonnello si solcò dei segni esteriori di una risatina silenziosa.

“L’hai già letta?” chiese.

“Sì,” rispose l’avvocato; “il geroglifico è stato attaccato con rinnovato vigore dopo colazione stamattina, e le nubi e i misteri delle fatiche di ieri sono parsi dissiparsi. Alcune parti del cuneiforme attendono ancora un’esperta traduzione; ma le frasi in sé paiono essere nell’inglese originale.”

“Assai originale, quell’inglese,” sbuffò il colonnello Crane.

“Sì, il nostro amico è un personaggio originale,” rispose Hood. “La vanità mi tenta a insinuare che è nostro amico perché ha un gusto originale in fatto di amici. La sua abitudine di mettere il pronome sulla prima pagina e il sostantivo su quella dopo mi ha rallegrato molte sere d’inverno. Tu non l’hai conosciuto il nostro amico White, vero?” aggiunse rivolto a Pierce. “È un colpo che ti minaccia ancora.”

“Ma perché, cos’ha che non va?” domandò Pierce.

“Niente,” osservò Crane nel suo stile più staccato. “Ha il gusto di cominciare una lettera con ‘Distinti saluti’ e di chiuderla con ‘Egregio signore’; tutto qui.”

“Mi piacerebbe piuttosto sentirla, quella lettera,” osservò il giovane.

“E la sentirai,” rispose Hood, “non c’è nulla di confidenziale in essa; e se anche ci fosse, non lo scopriresti solo leggendola. Il reverendo Wilding White, chiamato da alcuni suoi critici ‘White il Selvaggio,’ è uno di quei parroci di campagna, che si trovano negli angoli della campagna inglese, ai quali i loro vecchi compagni di collegio pensano di solito per domandarsi che diavolo pensino di loro i loro parrocchiani. Di fatto, mio caro Hilary, egli era piuttosto simile a te alla tua età; e come diavolo saresti tu da vicario della Chiesa d’Inghilterra, a cinquant’anni, potrebbe a tutta prima sconcertare l’immaginazione; ma il problema si potrebbe risolvere supponendo che saresti come lui. Ma spero soltanto che tu avrai uno stile più limpido nello scriver lettere. Il vecchio è sempre in un tale stato d’eccitazione per qualcosa che gli viene fuori alla rinfusa.”

È stato detto altrove che questi racconti sono, in un certo senso, per necessità narrati a rovescio, e certamente la lettera del reverendo Wilding White era un documento adatto a un simile schema narrativo. Era scritta in quella che un tempo era stata una buona calligrafia del genere più ardito, ma che era degenerata per eccesso di energia e di fretta in uno scarabocchio illeggibile. Pareva dire come segue:

“‘Mio caro Owen, la mia decisione è ormai presa; benché io sappia il genere di prolisse obiezioni legali che vi opporrai; so in particolare una cosa che un vecchio avvocato coriaceo come te è tenuto a dire; ma di fatto nemmeno tu puoi dirla in un caso come questo, perché il legname veniva dall’altro capo della contea e non aveva nulla a che fare con lui né con alcuno dei suoi lacchè e adulatori. Del resto, ho fatto tutto da solo con un piccolo aiuto di cui ti dirò più avanti; e persino di questi tempi mi sorprenderei di sentire che QUEL genere d’aiuto possa essere altro che affar privato di un uomo. Sfido te e tutte le tue pergamene a sostenere che ricada sotto le Leggi sulla Caccia. Non ti dispiacerà se parlo così; so benissimo bene che penseresti di agire da amico; ma credo che sia venuto il tempo di parlare chiaro.’”

“Giustissimo,” disse il colonnello.

“Sì,” disse il giovane Pierce, con espressione piuttosto vaga, “sono contento che egli senta che è venuto il tempo di parlare chiaro.”

“Appunto,” osservò l’avvocato seccamente; “prosegue come segue:”

“‘Ho un mucchio di cose da raccontarti sul nuovo assetto, che funziona assai meglio di quanto avessi sperato. Da principio temevo che sarebbe davvero stato un impaccio, come sai che si suppone sempre che sia. Ma vi sono più cose, e tutto il resto, e Dio compie se stesso, e così via e così via. A volte dà una sensazione del tutto strana, asiatica.’”

“Yes,” said the Colonel, “it does.”

“What does?” asked Pierce, sitting up suddenly, like one who can bear no more.

“You are not used to the epistolary method,” said Hood indulgently; “you haven’t got into the swing of the style. It goes on:”

“‘Of course, he’s a big pot down here, and all sorts of skunks are afraid of him and pretend to boycott me. Nobody could expect anything else of those pineapple people, but I confess I was surprised at Parkinson. Sally of course is as sound as ever; but she goes to Scotland a good deal and you can’t blame her. Sometimes I’m left pretty severely alone, but I’m not downhearted; you’ll probably laugh if I tell you that Snowdrop is really a very intelligent companion.’”

“I confess I am long past laughter,” said Hilary Pierce sadly; “but I rather wish I knew who Snowdrop is.”

“Child, I suppose,” said the Colonel shortly.

“Yes; I suppose it must be a child,” said Pierce. “Has he any children?”

“No,” said the Colonel. “Bachelor.”

“I believe he was in love with a lady in those parts and never married in consequence,” said Hood. “It would be quite on the lines of fiction and film-drama if Snowdrop were the daughter of the lady, when she had married Another. But there seems to be something more about Snowdrop, that little sunbeam in the house:”

“‘Snowdrop tries to enter our ways, as they always do; but, of course, it would be awkward if she played tricks. How alarmed they would all be if she took it into her head to walk about on two legs, like everybody else.’”

“Nonsense!” ejaculated Colonel Crane. “Can’t be a child— talking about it walking about on two legs.”

“After all,” said Pierce thoughtfully, “a little girl does walk about on two legs.”

“Bit startling if she walked about on three,” said Crane.

“If my learned brother will allow me,” said Hood, in his forensic manner, “would he describe the fact of a little girl walking on two legs as alarming?”

“A little girl is always alarming,” replied Pierce.

“I’ve come to the conclusion myself,” went on Hood, “that Snowdrop must be a pony. It seems a likely enough name for a pony. I thought at first it was a dog or a cat, but alarming seems a strong word even for a dog or a cat sitting up to beg. But a pony on its hind legs might be a little alarming, especially when you’re riding it. Only I can’t fit this view in with the next sentence: ‘I’ve taught her to reach down the things I want.’”

“Lord!” cried Pierce. “It’s a monkey!”

“That,” replied Hood, “had occurred to me as possibly explaining the weird Asiatic atmosphere. But a monkey on two legs is even less unusual than a dog on two legs. Moreover, the reference to Asiatic mystery seems really to refer to something else and not to any animal at all. For he ends up by saying: ‘I feel now as if my mind were moving in much larger and more ancient spaces of time or eternity; and as if what I thought at first was an oriental atmosphere was only an atmosphere of the orient in the sense of dayspring and the dawn. It has nothing to do with the stagnant occultism of decayed Indian cults; it is something that unites a real innocence with the immensities, a power as of the mountains with the purity of snow. This vision does not violate my own religion, but rather reinforces it; but I cannot help feeling that I have larger views. I hope in two senses to preach liberty in these parts. So I may live to falsify the proverb after all.’

“That,” added Hood, folding up the letter, “is the only sentence in the whole thing that conveys anything to my mind. As it happens, we have all three of us lived to falsify proverbs.”

Hilary Pierce had risen to his feet with the restless action that went best with his alert figure. “Yes,” he said; “I suppose we can all three of us say we have lived for adventures, or had some curious ones anyhow. And to tell you the truth, the adventure feeling has come on me very strong at this very minute. I’ve got the detective fever about that parson of yours. I should like to get at the meaning of that letter, as if it were a cipher about buried treasure.”

Then he added more gravely: “And if, as I gather, your clerical friend is really a friend worth having, I do seriously advise you to keep an eye on him just now. Writing letters upside-down is all very well, and I shouldn’t be alarmed about that. Lots of people think they’ve explained things in previous letters they never wrote. I don’t think it matters who Snowdrop is, or what sort of children or animals he chooses to be fond of. That’s all being eccentric in the good old English fashion, like poetical tinkers and mad squires. You’re both of you eccentric in that sort of way, and it’s one of the things I like about you. But just because I naturally knock about more among the new people, I see something of the new eccentricities. And believe me, they’re not half so nice as the old ones. I’m a student of scientific aviation, which is a new thing itself, and I like it. But there’s a sort of spiritual aviation that I don’t like at all.”

“Sorry,” observed Crane. “Really no notion of what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you haven’t,” answered Pierce with engaging candour; “that’s another thing I like about you. But I don’t like the way your clerical friend talks about new visions and larger religions and light and liberty from the East. I’ve heard a good many people talk like that, and they were mountebanks or the dupes of mountebanks. And I’ll tell you another thing. It’s a long shot even with the long bow we used to talk about. It’s a pretty wild guess even in this rather wild business. But I have a creepy sort of feeling that if you went down to his house and private parlour to see Snowdrop, you’d be surprised at what you saw.”

“What should we see?” asked the Colonel, staring.

“You’d see nothing at all,” replied the young man.

“What on earth do you mean?”

“I mean,” replied Pierce, “that you’d find Mr. White talking to somebody who didn’t seem to be there.”

“Sì,” disse il colonnello, “è vero.”

“Cos’è vero?” chiese Pierce, drizzandosi all’improvviso, come chi non ne può più.

“Non sei avvezzo al metodo epistolare,” disse Hood con indulgenza; “non hai preso il ritmo dello stile. Prosegue:”

“‘Naturalmente, quaggiù lui è un pezzo grosso, e ogni sorta di vigliacchi ne hanno paura e fingono di boicottarmi. Nessuno potrebbe aspettarsi altro da quella gente da ananas, ma confesso che sono rimasto sorpreso da Parkinson. Sally, s’intende, è salda come sempre; ma va parecchio in Scozia e non le si può dar torto. A volte resto piuttosto rigorosamente solo, ma non sono avvilito; probabilmente riderai se ti dico che Bucaneve è davvero un compagno molto intelligente.’”

“Confesso di essere da un pezzo al di là del ridere,” disse Hilary Pierce tristemente; “ma vorrei piuttosto sapere chi sia Bucaneve.”

“Una bambina, suppongo,” disse il colonnello brevemente.

“Sì; suppongo debba essere una bambina,” disse Pierce. “Ha figli?”

“No,” disse il colonnello. “Scapolo.”

“Credo che fosse innamorato di una dama di quelle parti e che di conseguenza non si sia mai sposato,” disse Hood. “Sarebbe del tutto sulla falsariga del romanzo e del dramma cinematografico se Bucaneve fosse la figlia della dama, dopo che questa avesse sposato un Altro. Ma pare esserci qualcosa di più su Bucaneve, quel piccolo raggio di sole nella casa:”

“‘Bucaneve cerca di entrare nelle nostre abitudini, come fanno sempre; ma, s’intende, sarebbe imbarazzante se combinasse dei tiri. Come si allarmerebbero tutti se le saltasse in testa di andare in giro su due gambe, come tutti gli altri.’”

“Sciocchezze!” esclamò il colonnello Crane. “Non può essere una bambina… parlare di lei che va in giro su due gambe.”

“Dopotutto,” disse Pierce pensieroso, “una bambina va bene in giro su due gambe.”

“Sarebbe un po’ sorprendente se andasse in giro su tre,” disse Crane.

“Se il mio dotto confratello me lo permette,” disse Hood, alla sua maniera forense, “descriverebbe egli il fatto di una bambina che cammina su due gambe come allarmante?”

“Una bambina è sempre allarmante,” rispose Pierce.

“Sono giunto io stesso alla conclusione,” proseguì Hood, “che Bucaneve debba essere un pony. Pare un nome abbastanza verosimile per un pony. Da principio pensai fosse un cane o un gatto, ma allarmante pare una parola forte persino per un cane o un gatto che si rizza a chiedere l’elemosina. Ma un pony sulle zampe posteriori potrebbe essere un poco allarmante, specie quando lo si cavalca. Solo che non riesco a far quadrare questa idea con la frase successiva: ‘Le ho insegnato a tirar giù le cose che voglio.’”

“Perdio!” gridò Pierce. “È una scimmia!”

“Quello,” rispose Hood, “mi era venuto in mente come possibile spiegazione della strana atmosfera asiatica. Ma una scimmia su due gambe è ancor meno insolita di un cane su due gambe. Per di più, il riferimento al mistero asiatico pare in realtà rimandare a qualcos’altro e non ad alcun animale affatto. Poiché egli conclude dicendo: ‘Sento ora come se la mia mente si muovesse in spazi assai più vasti e più antichi di tempo o d’eternità; e come se ciò che a tutta prima credevo un’atmosfera orientale fosse soltanto un’atmosfera di oriente nel senso di aurora e di alba. Non ha nulla a che fare con lo stagnante occultismo di decaduti culti indiani; è qualcosa che unisce una vera innocenza con le immensità, una potenza come quella dei monti con la purezza della neve. Questa visione non viola la mia religione, ma anzi la rafforza; eppure non posso fare a meno di sentire di avere vedute più ampie. Spero in due sensi di predicare la libertà in queste parti. Così potrei vivere abbastanza da smentire il proverbio, dopotutto.’

“Quella,” aggiunse Hood, ripiegando la lettera, “è l’unica frase di tutta la faccenda che trasmetta qualcosa alla mia mente. Guarda caso, tutti e tre abbiamo vissuto abbastanza da smentire dei proverbi.”

Hilary Pierce si era levato in piedi con quel gesto irrequieto che meglio si accompagnava alla sua figura scattante. “Sì,” disse; “suppongo che tutti e tre possiamo dire di aver vissuto per le avventure, o di averne avute comunque di curiose. E a dirti la verità, il senso dell’avventura mi è venuto addosso assai forte proprio in questo istante. Mi è presa la febbre del detective riguardo a quel tuo parroco. Vorrei arrivare al senso di quella lettera, come se fosse un cifrario su un tesoro sepolto.”

Poi aggiunse più gravemente: “E se, come intuisco, il tuo amico ecclesiastico è davvero un amico che val la pena avere, ti consiglio seriamente di tenerlo d’occhio proprio adesso. Scrivere lettere a rovescio va benissimo, e per questo non mi allarmerei. Un sacco di gente crede di aver spiegato le cose in lettere precedenti che non ha mai scritto. Non credo che importi chi sia Bucaneve, o che genere di bambini o di animali egli scelga di prediligere. È tutto essere eccentrici alla buona vecchia maniera inglese, come gli stagnini poeti e gli scudieri matti. Voi due siete entrambi eccentrici a quel modo, ed è una delle cose che mi piacciono di voi. Ma proprio perché per natura bazzico di più tra la gente nuova, vedo qualcosa delle nuove eccentricità. E credimi, non sono neppure la metà così simpatiche delle vecchie. Sono uno studioso di aviazione scientifica, che è di per sé una cosa nuova, e mi piace. Ma c’è una sorta di aviazione spirituale che non mi piace affatto.”

“Scusa,” osservò Crane. “Non ho davvero la minima idea di ciò di cui stai parlando.”

“Certo che non l’hai,” rispose Pierce con accattivante candore; “è un’altra cosa che mi piace di te. Ma non mi piace il modo in cui il tuo amico ecclesiastico parla di nuove visioni e di religioni più ampie e di luce e di libertà dall’Oriente. Ho sentito parecchia gente parlare così, ed erano ciarlatani o gli zimbelli di ciarlatani. E ti dirò un’altra cosa. È un tiro azzardato persino con quell’arco lungo di cui eravamo soliti parlare. È una supposizione piuttosto sfrenata persino in questa faccenda piuttosto sfrenata. Ma ho una sensazione da brivido, come se, se scendessi a casa sua e nel suo salottino privato a vedere Bucaneve, resteresti sorpreso di ciò che vedresti.”

“Cosa dovremmo vedere?” chiese il colonnello, sbarrando gli occhi.

“Non vedreste proprio nulla,” rispose il giovane.

“Che diavolo vuoi dire?”

“Voglio dire,” rispose Pierce, “che trovereste il signor White a parlare con qualcuno che non pareva esserci.”

Hilary Pierce, fired by his detective fever, made a good many more inquiries about the Rev. Wilding White, both of his two old friends and elsewhere.

One long legal conversation with Owen Hood did indeed put him in possession of the legal outline of certain matters, which might be said to throw a light on some parts of the strange letter, and which might in time even be made to throw a light on the rest. White was the vicar of a parish lying deep in the western parts of Somersetshire, where the principal landowner was a certain Lord Arlington. And in this case there had been a quarrel between the squire and the parson, of a more revolutionary sort than is common in the case of parsons. The clergyman intensely resented that irony or anomaly which has caused so much discontent among tenants in Ireland and throughout the world; the fact that improvements or constructive work actually done by the tenant only pass into the possession of the landlord. He had considerably improved a house that he himself had rented from the squire, but in some kind of crisis of defiance or renunciation, he had quitted this more official residence bag and baggage, and built himself a sort of wooden lodge or bungalow on a small hill or mound that rose amid woods on the extreme edge of the same grounds. This quarrel about the claim of the tenant to his own work was evidently the meaning of certain phrases in the letter—such as the timber coming from the other end of the county, the sort of work being a man’s own affair, and the general allusion to somebody’s flunkeys or sycophants who attempted to boycott the discontented tenant. But it was not quite so clear whether the allusions to a new arrangement, and how it worked, referred to the bungalow or to the other and more elusive mystery of the presence of Snowdrop.

One phrase in the letter he found to have been repeated in many places and to many persons without becoming altogether clear in the process. It was the sentence that ran: “I was afraid at first it would really be an encumbrance, as you know it’s always supposed to be.” Both Colonel Crane and Owen Hood, and also several other persons whom he met later in his investigations, were agreed in saying that Mr. White had used some expression indicating that he had entangled himself with something troublesome or at least useless; something that he did not want. None of them could remember the exact words he had used; but all could state in general terms that it referred to some sort of negative nuisance or barren responsibility. This could hardly refer to Snowdrop, of whom he always wrote in terms of tenderness as if she were a baby or a kitten. It seemed hard to believe it could refer to the house he had built entirely to suit himself. It seemed as if there must be some third thing in his muddled existence, which loomed vaguely in the background through the vapour of his confused correspondence.

Colonel Crane snapped his fingers with a mild irritation in trying to recall a trifle. “He said it was a—you know, I’ve forgotten the word—a botheration or embarrassment. But then he’s always in a state of botheration and embarrassment. I didn’t tell you, by the way, that I had a letter from him too. Came the day after I heard yours. Shorter, and perhaps a little plainer.” And he handed the letter to Hood, who read it out slowly:

“‘I never knew the old British populace, here in Avalon itself, could be so broken down by squires and sneaking lawyers. Nobody dared help me move my house again; said it was illegal and they were afraid of the police. But Snowdrop helped, and we carted it all away in two or three journeys; took it right clean off the old fool’s land altogether this time. I fancy the old fool will have to admit there are things in this world he wasn’t prepared to believe in.’”

“But look here,” began Hood as if impulsively, and then stopped and spoke more slowly and carefully. “I don’t understand this; I think it’s extremely odd. I don’t mean odd for an ordinary person, but odd for an odd person; odd for this odd person. I know White better than either of you can, and I can tell you that, though he tells a tale anyhow, the tale is always true. He’s rather precise and pedantic when you do come to the facts; these litigious quarrelsome people always are. He would do extraordinary things, but he wouldn’t make them out more extraordinary than they were. I mean he’s the sort of man who might break all the squire’s windows, but he wouldn’t say he’d broken six when he’d broken five. I’ve always found when I’d got to the meaning of those mad letters that it was quite true. But how can this be true? How could Snowdrop, whatever she is, have moved a whole house, or old White either?”

“I suppose you know what I think,” said Pierce. “I told you that Snowdrop, whatever else she is, is invisible. I’m certain your friend has gone Spiritualist, and Snowdrop is the name of a spirit, or a control, or whatever they call it. The spirit would say, of course, that it was mere child’s play to throw the house from one end of the county to the other. But if this unfortunate gentleman believes himself to have been thrown, house and all, in that fashion, I’m very much afraid he’s begun really to suffer from delusions.”

The faces of the two older men looked suddenly much older, perhaps for the first time they looked old. The young man seeing their dolorous expression was warmed and fired to speak quickly.

“Look here,” he said hastily, “I’ll go down there myself and find out what I can for you. I’ll go this afternoon.”

“Train journey takes ages,” said the Colonel, shaking his head. “Other end of nowhere. Told me yourself you had an appointment at the Air Ministry to-morrow.”

“Be there in no time,” replied Pierce cheerfully. “I’ll fly down.”

And there was something in the lightness and youth of his vanishing gesture that seemed really like Icarus spurning the earth, the first man to mount upon wings.

Hilary Pierce, infiammato dalla sua febbre da detective, raccolse parecchie altre informazioni sul reverendo Wilding White, sia dai suoi due vecchi amici sia altrove.

Una lunga conversazione legale con Owen Hood lo mise davvero in possesso del profilo giuridico di certe faccende, che si sarebbe potuto dire gettassero luce su alcune parti della strana lettera, e che col tempo si sarebbero forse potute far gettare luce anche sul resto. White era il vicario di una parrocchia sperduta nelle regioni occidentali del Somersetshire, dove il principale proprietario terriero era un certo Lord Arlington. E in questo caso c’era stata una lite fra il possidente e il pastore, di natura più rivoluzionaria di quanto sia comune nel caso dei pastori. Il chierico risentiva intensamente di quell’ironia o anomalia che ha provocato tanto malcontento fra i fittavoli in Irlanda e per tutto il mondo; il fatto che i miglioramenti o le opere costruttive effettivamente compiute dal fittavolo passino soltanto in possesso del proprietario. Aveva notevolmente migliorato una casa che egli stesso aveva preso in affitto dal possidente, ma in una sorta di crisi di sfida o di rinuncia aveva abbandonato con armi e bagagli quella residenza più ufficiale, ed erigendosi una specie di casotto o bungalow di legno su una piccola collina o altura che sorgeva fra i boschi all’estremo margine degli stessi terreni. Questa lite intorno alla pretesa del fittavolo sulla propria opera era evidentemente il significato di certe frasi della lettera: come il legname che veniva dall’altro capo della contea, il fatto che quel genere di lavoro fosse affare personale di ciascuno, e l’allusione generale ai lacchè o adulatori di qualcuno che avevano tentato di boicottare il fittavolo scontento. Ma non era del tutto chiaro se le allusioni a una nuova sistemazione, e a come funzionava, si riferissero al bungalow oppure all’altro e più sfuggente mistero della presenza di Snowdrop.

Una frase della lettera egli scoprì essere stata ripetuta in molti luoghi e a molte persone senza per questo diventare del tutto chiara. Era la frase che diceva: «All’inizio temevo che sarebbe stato davvero un impaccio, come sai che si suppone sempre debba essere». Sia il colonnello Crane sia Owen Hood, e anche parecchie altre persone che egli incontrò più tardi nelle sue indagini, concordavano nell’affermare che il signor White aveva usato qualche espressione per indicare che si era invischiato in qualcosa di fastidioso o almeno di inutile; qualcosa che non desiderava. Nessuno di loro riusciva a ricordare le parole esatte da lui usate; ma tutti potevano dichiarare in termini generali che si riferiva a una specie di negativa seccatura o di sterile responsabilità. Ciò difficilmente poteva riferirsi a Snowdrop, di cui egli scriveva sempre in termini di tenerezza come se fosse un neonato o un gattino. Sembrava difficile credere che potesse riferirsi alla casa che aveva costruito interamente a proprio piacimento. Sembrava che dovesse esserci una terza cosa nella sua confusa esistenza, che si profilava vagamente sullo sfondo attraverso il vapore della sua corrispondenza sconclusionata.

Il colonnello Crane fece schioccare le dita con lieve irritazione nel tentare di richiamare alla mente una minuzia. «Diceva che era un… sa, ho dimenticato la parola… un fastidio o un imbarazzo. Ma d’altronde è sempre in uno stato di fastidio e d’imbarazzo. A proposito, non le ho detto che avevo ricevuto anch’io una lettera da lui. È arrivata il giorno dopo che avevo saputo della vostra. Più breve, e forse un po’ più chiara.» E porse la lettera a Hood, che la lesse lentamente ad alta voce:

«“Non avrei mai immaginato che il vecchio popolino britannico, qui proprio ad Avalon, potesse lasciarsi ridurre così in soggezione da possidenti e da avvocati striscianti. Nessuno ha osato aiutarmi a spostare di nuovo la mia casa; dicevano che era illegale e avevano paura della polizia. Ma Snowdrop mi ha aiutato, e l’abbiamo portata via tutta in due o tre viaggi; l’abbiamo tolta di netto dalla terra del vecchio sciocco questa volta. Immagino che il vecchio sciocco dovrà ammettere che ci sono al mondo cose in cui non era preparato a credere.”»

«Ma senta un po’», cominciò Hood come d’impulso, e poi si fermò e parlò più lentamente e con più cautela. «Non capisco questa faccenda; la trovo estremamente strana. Non intendo strana per una persona comune, ma strana per una persona strana; strana per questa strana persona. Conosco White meglio di quanto possiate voi due, e posso dirvi che, per quanto racconti le cose alla rinfusa, il racconto è sempre vero. È piuttosto preciso e pedante quando si arriva ai fatti; questa gente litigiosa e attaccabrighe lo è sempre. Sarebbe capace di fare cose straordinarie, ma non le farebbe apparire più straordinarie di quanto fossero. Voglio dire che è il tipo d’uomo che potrebbe rompere tutte le finestre del possidente, ma non direbbe di averne rotte sei quando ne ha rotte cinque. Ho sempre scoperto, quando sono riuscito ad afferrare il senso di quelle folli lettere, che era verità pura. Ma come può essere vero questo? Come avrebbe potuto Snowdrop, qualunque cosa sia, spostare un’intera casa, o il vecchio White?»

«Suppongo che sappia cosa penso io», disse Pierce. «Le ho detto che Snowdrop, qualunque altra cosa sia, è invisibile. Sono certo che il suo amico si è dato allo spiritismo, e Snowdrop è il nome di uno spirito, o di una guida, o come diavolo la chiamano. Lo spirito direbbe, naturalmente, che era un mero gioco da bambini scagliare la casa da un capo all’altro della contea. Ma se questo sventurato gentiluomo crede di essere stato scagliato, con tanto di casa, a quel modo, ho molta paura che abbia davvero cominciato a soffrire di deliri.»

I volti dei due uomini più anziani parvero d’improvviso molto più vecchi, forse per la prima volta parvero vecchi. Il giovane, vedendo la loro espressione dolente, si sentì riscaldare e infiammare a parlare in fretta.

«Senta un po’», disse frettolosamente, «scenderò io stesso laggiù e scoprirò per voi quello che potrò. Ci vado questo pomeriggio.»

«Il viaggio in treno dura un’eternità», disse il colonnello, scuotendo il capo. «È in capo al mondo. Lei stesso mi ha detto d’avere un appuntamento al Ministero dell’Aria domani.»

«Ci sarò in un batter d’occhio», rispose Pierce allegramente. «Ci volo.»

E c’era qualcosa nella leggerezza e nella giovinezza del suo gesto che si dileguava, qualcosa che pareva davvero simile a Icaro nel disdegnare la terra, il primo uomo a levarsi sulle ali.

Perhaps this literally flying figure shone the more vividly in their memories because, when they saw it again, it was in a subtle sense changed. When the other two next saw Hilary Pierce on the steps of the Air Ministry, they were conscious that his manner was a little quieter, but his wild eye rather wilder than usual. They adjourned to a neighbouring restaurant and talked of trivialities while luncheon was served; but the Colonel, who was a keen observer, was sure that Pierce had suffered some sort of shock, or at least some sort of check. While they were considering what to say Pierce himself said abruptly, staring at a mustard-pot on the table:

“What do you think about spirits?”

“Never touch ‘em,” said the Colonel. “Sound port never hurt anybody.”

“I mean the other sort,” said Pierce. “Things like ghosts and all that.”

“I don’t know,” said Owen Hood. “The Greek for it is agnosticism. The Latin for it is ignorance. But have you really been dealing with ghosts and spirits down at poor White’s parsonage?”

“I don’t know,” said Pierce gravely.

“You don’t mean you really think you saw something!” cried Hood sharply.

“There goes the agnostic!” said Pierce with a rather weary smile. “The minute the agnostic hears a bit of real agnosticism he shrieks out that it’s superstition. I say I don’t know whether it was a spirit. I also say I don’t know what the devil else it was if it wasn’t. In plain words, I went down to that place convinced that poor White had got some sort of delusions. Now I wonder whether it’s I that have got the delusions.”

He paused a moment and then went on in a more collected manner:

“But I’d better tell you all about it. To begin with, I don’t admit it as an explanation, but it’s only fair to allow for it as a fact— that all that part of the world seems to be full of that sort of thing. You know how the glamour of Glastonbury lies over all that land and the lost tomb of King Arthur and time when he shall return and the prophecies of Merlin and all the rest. To begin with, the village they call Ponder’s End ought to be called World’s End; it gives one the impression of being somewhere west of the sunset. And then the parsonage is quite a long way west of the parish, in large neglected grounds fading into pathless woods and hills; I mean the old empty rectory that our wild friend has evacuated. It stood there a cold empty shell of flat classical architecture, as hollow as one of those classical temples they used to stick up in country seats. But White must have done some sort of parish work there, for I found a great big empty shed in the grounds— that sort of thing that’s used for a schoolroom or drill-hall or what not. But not a sign of him or his work can be seen there now. I’ve said it’s a long way west of the village that you come at last to the old house. Well, it’s a long way west of that that you come to the new house—if you come to it at all. As for me, I came and I came now, as in some old riddle of Merlin. But you shall hear.

“I had come down about sunset in a meadow near Ponder’s End, and I did the rest of the journey on foot, for I wanted to see things in detail. This was already difficult as it was growing dusk, and I began to fear I should find nothing of importance before nightfall. I had asked a question or two of the villagers about the vicar and his new self-made vicarage. They were very reticent about the former, but I gathered that the latter stood at the extreme edge of his original grounds on a hill rising out of a thicket of wood. In the increasing darkness it was difficult to find the place, but I came on it at last, in a place where a fringe of forest ran along under the low brows of a line of rugged cliffs, such as sometimes break the curves of great downlands. I seemed to be descending a thickly wooded slope, with a sea of tree-tops below me, and out of that sea, like an island, rose the dome of the isolated hill; and I could faintly see the building on it, darker against the dark-clouded sky. For a moment a faint line of light from the masked moon showed me a little more of its shape, which seemed singularly simple and airy in its design. Against that pallid gleam stood four strong columns, with the bulk of building apparently lifted above them; but it produced a queer impression, as if this Christian priest had built for his final home a heathen temple of the winds. As I leaned forward, peering at it, I overbalanced myself and slid rapidly down the steep thicket into the darkest entrails of the wood. From there I could see nothing of the pillared house or temple or whatever it was on the hill; the thick woods had swallowed me up literally like a sea, and I groped for what must have been nearly half an hour amid tangled roots and low branches, in that double darkness of night and shadow, before I found my feet slipping up the opposite slope and began to climb the hill on the top of which the temple stood. It was very difficult climbing, of course, through a network of briars and branching trees, and it was some little time afterwards that I burst through the last screen of foliage and came out upon the bare hill-top.

“Yes; upon the bare hill-top. Rank grasses grew upon it, and the wind blew them about like hair on a head; but for any trace of anything else, that green dome was as bare as a skull. There was no sign or shadow of the building I had seen there a little time before; it had vanished like a fairy palace. A broad track broken through the woods seemed to lead up to it, so far as I could make out in that obscurity; but there was no trace of the building to which it led. And when I saw that, I gave up. Something told me I should find out no more; perhaps I had some shaken sense that there were things past finding out. I retraced my steps, descending the hill as best I might; but when I was again swallowed up in that leafy sea, something happened that, for an instant, turned me cold as stone. An unearthly noise, like long hooting laughter, rang out in vast volume over the forest and rose to the stars. It was no noise to which I could put a name; it was certainly no noise I had ever heard before; it bore some sort of resemblance to the neighing of a horse immensely magnified; yet it might have been half human, and there was triumph in it and derision.

Forse questa figura letteralmente volante brillava tanto più vividamente nei loro ricordi perché, quando la rividero, essa era in un senso sottile mutata. Quando gli altri due videro Hilary Pierce sui gradini del Ministero dell’Aria, s’accorsero che i suoi modi erano un po’ più quieti, ma il suo occhio folle piuttosto più folle del solito. Si trasferirono in un ristorante vicino e parlarono di frivolezze mentre veniva servito il pranzo; ma il colonnello, che era un osservatore acuto, era sicuro che Pierce avesse subìto una specie di scossa, o almeno una specie di battuta d’arresto. Mentre stavano riflettendo su cosa dire, Pierce stesso disse bruscamente, fissando un vasetto di senape sulla tavola:

«Cosa ne pensate degli spiriti?»

«Non li tocco mai», disse il colonnello. «Un buon porto non ha mai fatto male a nessuno.»

«Intendo l’altra specie», disse Pierce. «Cose come i fantasmi e tutto il resto.»

«Non lo so», disse Owen Hood. «In greco si chiama agnosticismo. In latino si chiama ignoranza. Ma hai davvero avuto a che fare con fantasmi e spiriti laggiù, nella canonica del povero White?»

«Non lo so», disse Pierce gravemente.

«Non vorrai dire che credi davvero d’aver visto qualcosa!» esclamò Hood bruscamente.

«Ecco l’agnostico!» disse Pierce con un sorriso piuttosto stanco. «Nel momento in cui l’agnostico sente un briciolo di vero agnosticismo, strilla che è superstizione. Io dico che non so se fosse uno spirito. Dico anche che non so che diavolo altro fosse, se non lo era. In parole povere, sono sceso laggiù convinto che il povero White soffrisse di una qualche specie di deliri. Ora mi chiedo se non sia io ad averli, i deliri.»

Fece una pausa per un momento e poi proseguì in modo più composto:

«Ma è meglio che vi racconti tutto quanto. Tanto per cominciare, non lo ammetto come spiegazione, ma è pur giusto tenerne conto come di un fatto: che tutta quella parte del mondo sembra piena di cose del genere. Sapete come l’incanto di Glastonbury grava su tutta quella terra, e la tomba perduta di Re Artù e il tempo in cui egli tornerà, e le profezie di Merlino e tutto il resto. Tanto per cominciare, il villaggio che chiamano Ponder’s End dovrebbe chiamarsi World’s End, la Fine del Mondo; dà l’impressione di trovarsi da qualche parte a occidente del tramonto. E poi la canonica è parecchio più a ovest della parrocchia, in vasti terreni trascurati che sfumano in boschi e colline senza sentieri; intendo la vecchia canonica vuota che il nostro folle amico ha abbandonato. Se ne stava lì, un guscio freddo e vuoto di piatta architettura classica, cava come uno di quei templi classici che usavano ficcare nelle tenute di campagna. Ma White dev’esservi riuscito a fare una qualche opera parrocchiale, perché trovai nei terreni un grande capannone vuoto: quel genere di cosa che serve da aula scolastica o da sala per esercitazioni o chissà cos’altro. Ma non v’è più ora alcun segno di lui o della sua opera. Ho detto che è parecchio a ovest del villaggio che si arriva finalmente alla vecchia casa. Ebbene, è parecchio a ovest di quella che si arriva alla nuova casa… ammesso che ci si arrivi. Quanto a me, ci arrivai, e ci arrivai proprio adesso, come in un antico enigma di Merlino. Ma sentirete.

«Ero sceso verso il tramonto in un prato presso Ponder’s End, e feci il resto del viaggio a piedi, perché volevo vedere le cose nei particolari. Era già difficile, ché stava calando il crepuscolo, e cominciai a temere che non avrei trovato nulla d’importante prima di notte. Avevo posto una domanda o due agli abitanti del villaggio sul vicario e sulla sua nuova canonica costruita da sé. Erano molto reticenti sul primo, ma capii che la seconda sorgeva all’estremo margine dei suoi terreni originari su una collina che si levava da una macchia di bosco. Nel buio crescente era difficile trovare il luogo, ma alla fine vi giunsi, in un punto dove una frangia di foresta correva sotto le basse fronti di una fila di rupi scoscese, come quelle che talvolta spezzano le curve delle grandi lande. Mi pareva di discendere un pendio fittamente boscoso, con un mare di cime d’alberi sotto di me, e da quel mare, come un’isola, si levava la cupola della collina isolata; e potevo vedere debolmente l’edificio su di essa, più scuro contro il cielo scuro di nubi. Per un momento una debole striscia di luce dalla luna velata mi mostrò un poco di più la sua forma, che pareva singolarmente semplice e aerea nel disegno. Contro quel pallido bagliore si ergevano quattro robuste colonne, con la mole dell’edificio apparentemente sollevata al di sopra di esse; ma produceva una strana impressione, come se questo sacerdote cristiano avesse costruito per la sua ultima dimora un pagano tempio dei venti. Mentre mi sporgevo in avanti, scrutandolo, persi l’equilibrio e scivolai rapidamente giù per la ripida macchia, nelle più oscure viscere del bosco. Di là non riuscivo a vedere nulla della casa colonnata o tempio o quel che fosse sulla collina; i fitti boschi mi avevano inghiottito letteralmente come un mare, e brancolai per quasi mezz’ora fra radici aggrovigliate e rami bassi, in quella doppia oscurità di notte e d’ombra, prima di sentire i piedi scivolare su per il pendio opposto e cominciare a salire la collina sulla cui cima sorgeva il tempio. Era una salita molto difficile, s’intende, attraverso un intreccio di rovi e d’alberi ramosi, e fu qualche tempo dopo che irruppi attraverso l’ultimo schermo di fogliame e sbucai sulla nuda cima della collina.

«Sì, sulla nuda cima della collina. Vi crescevano erbe rigogliose, e il vento le agitava come capelli su una testa; ma di qualsiasi traccia d’altro, quella verde cupola era nuda come un teschio. Non v’era segno né ombra dell’edificio che vi avevo visto poco tempo prima; era svanito come un palazzo fatato. Un ampio sentiero aperto attraverso i boschi pareva condurvi su, per quanto potessi discernere in quell’oscurità; ma non v’era traccia dell’edificio a cui conduceva. E quando vidi ciò, rinunciai. Qualcosa mi diceva che non avrei scoperto altro; forse avevo una qualche scossa sensazione che vi fossero cose impossibili da scoprire. Ripercorsi i miei passi, discendendo la collina come meglio potevo; ma quando fui di nuovo inghiottito in quel mare frondoso, accadde qualcosa che, per un istante, mi gelò come pietra. Un rumore ultraterreno, come una lunga risata beffarda, echeggiò in immenso volume sopra la foresta e salì fino alle stelle. Non era rumore a cui potessi dare un nome; non era certo un rumore che avessi mai udito prima; portava una qualche somiglianza col nitrito di un cavallo immensamente amplificato; eppure poteva essere metà umano, e c’era in esso trionfo e derisione.

“I will tell you one more thing I learnt before I left those parts. I left them at once, partly because I really had an appointment early this morning, as I told you; partly also, I think, because I felt you had the right to know at once what sort of things were to be faced. I was alarmed when I thought your friend was tormented with imaginary bogies; I am not less alarmed if he had got mixed up with real ones. Anyhow, before I left that village I had told one man what I had seen, and he told me he had seen it also. But he had seen it actually moving, in dusk turning to dark; the whole great house, with its high columns, moving across the fields like a great ship sailing on land.”

Owen Hood sat up suddenly, with awakened eyes, and struck the table.

“Look here,” he cried, with a new ring in his voice, “we must all go down to Ponder’s End and bring this business to a finish.”

“Do you think you will bring it to a finish?” asked Pierce gloomily; “or can you tell us what sort of finish?”

“Yes,” replied Hood resolutely. “I think I can finish it, and I think I know what the finish will be. The truth is, my friend, I think I understand the whole thing now. And as I told you before, White, so far from being deluded by imaginary bogies, is a gentleman very exact in his statements. In this matter he has been very exact. That has been the whole mystery about him— that he has been very much too exact.”

“What on earth do you mean by that?” asked Pierce.

“I mean,” said the lawyer, “that I have suddenly remembered the phrase he used. It was very exact; it was dull, deadly, literal truth. But I can be exact, too, at times, and just now I should like to look at a time-table.”

They found the village of Ponder’s End in a condition as comically incongruous as could well be with the mystical experiences of Mr. Hilary Pierce. When we talk of such places as sleepy, we forget that they are very wide-awake about their own affairs, and especially on their own festive occasions. Piccadilly Circus looks much the same on Christmas Day or any other; but the market-place of a country town or village looks very different on the day of a fair or a bazaar. And Hilary Pierce, who had first come down there to find in a wood at midnight the riddle that he thought worthy of Merlin, came down the second time to find himself plunged suddenly into the middle of the bustling bathos of a jumble sale. It was one of those bazaars to provide bargains for the poor, at which all sorts of odds and ends are sold off. But it was treated as a sort of fete, and highly-coloured posters and handbills announced its nature on every side. The bustle seemed to be dominated by a tall dark lady of distinguished appearance, whom Owen Hood, rather to the surprise of his companions, hailed as an old acquaintance and managed to draw aside for a private talk. She had appeared to have her hands full at the bazaar; nevertheless, her talk with Hood was rather a long one. Pierce heard only the last words of it:

“Oh, he promised he was bringing something for the sale. I assure you he always keeps his word.”

All Hood said when he rejoined his companion was: “That’s the lady White was going to marry. I think I know now why things went wrong, and I hope they may go right. But there seems to be another bother. You see that clump of clod-hopping policemen over there, inspector and all. It seems they’re waiting for White. Says he’s broken the law in taking his house off the land, and that he has always eluded them. I hope there won’t be a scene when he turns up.”

If this was Mr. Hood’s hope, it was ill-founded and destined to disappointment. A scene was but a faint description of what was in store for that hopeful gentleman. Within ten minutes the greater part of the company were in a world in which the sun and the moon seemed to have turned topsy-turvy and the last limit of unlikelihood had been reached. Pierce had imagined he was very near that limit of the imagination when he groped after the vanishing temple in the dark forest. But nothing he had seen in that darkness and solitude was so fantastic as what he saw next in broad daylight and in a crowd.

At one extreme edge of the crowd there was a sudden movement— a wave of recoil and wordless cries. The next moment it had swept like a wind over the whole populace, and hundreds of faces were turned in one direction—in the direction of the road that descended by a gradual slope towards the woods that fringed the vicarage grounds. Out of these woods at the foot of the hill had emerged something that might from its size have been a large light grey omnibus. But it was not an omnibus. It scaled the slope so swiftly, in great strides, that it became instantly self-evident what it was. It was an elephant, whose monstrous form was moulded in grey and silver in the sunlight, and on whose back sat very erect a vigorous middle-aged gentleman in black clerical attire, with blanched hair and a rather fierce aquiline profile that glanced proudly to left and right.

The police inspector managed to make one step forward, and then stood like a statue. The vicar, on his vast steed, sailed into the middle of the market-place as serenely as if he had been the master of a familiar circus. He pointed in triumph to one of the red and blue posters on the wall, which bore the traditional title of “White Elephant Sale.”

“You see I’ve kept my word,” he said to the lady in a loud, cheerful voice. “I’ve brought a white elephant.”

The next moment he had waved his hand hilariously in another direction, having caught sight of Hood and Crane in the crowd.

“Splendid of you to come!” he called out. “Only you were in the secret. I told you I’d got a white elephant.”

“So he did,” said Hood, “only it never occurred to us that the elephant was an elephant and not a metaphor. So that’s what he meant by Asiatic atmosphere and snow and mountains. And that’s what the big shed was really for.”

«Vi dirò un’altra cosa che appresi prima di lasciare quelle contrade. Le lasciai subito, in parte perché avevo davvero un appuntamento di prima mattina, come vi ho detto; in parte anche, credo, perché sentivo che avevate il diritto di sapere subito che genere di cose c’era da affrontare. Ero allarmato quando pensavo che il vostro amico fosse tormentato da spauracchi immaginari; non lo sono meno se s’era imbrogliato con spauracchi veri. Comunque, prima di lasciare quel villaggio avevo raccontato a un uomo ciò che avevo visto, ed egli mi disse d’averlo visto anche lui. Ma lui l’aveva visto muoversi davvero, nel crepuscolo che volgeva al buio; l’intera [[Great House|grande casa]], con le sue alte colonne, muoversi attraverso i campi come una grande nave che veleggi sulla terraferma.»

Owen Hood si drizzò a sedere di scatto, con occhi ridestati, e batté sulla tavola.

«Sentite un po’», esclamò, con un nuovo squillo nella voce, «dobbiamo scendere tutti a Ponder’s End e portare a compimento questa faccenda.»

«Credi che la porterai a compimento?» chiese Pierce cupamente; «o puoi dirci che genere di compimento sarà?»

«Sì», rispose Hood risolutamente. «Credo di poterla concludere, e credo di sapere quale sarà la conclusione. La verità, amico mio, è che ora credo di comprendere l’intera faccenda. E come vi ho detto prima, White, lungi dall’essere ingannato da spauracchi immaginari, è un gentiluomo assai esatto nelle sue affermazioni. In questa faccenda è stato assai esatto. Ecco stato tutto il mistero intorno a lui: che è stato di gran lunga troppo esatto.»

«Che diavolo intendi con ciò?» chiese Pierce.

«Intendo», disse l’avvocato, «che mi sono d’un tratto ricordato la frase che ha usato. Era molto esatta; era piatta, mortale, letterale verità. Ma anch’io posso essere esatto, a volte, e proprio adesso mi piacerebbe dare un’occhiata a un orario.»

Trovarono il villaggio di Ponder’s End in una condizione tanto comicamente incongrua quanto meglio si potesse immaginare rispetto alle mistiche esperienze del signor Hilary Pierce. Quando diciamo che luoghi simili sono sonnolenti, dimentichiamo che sono molto ben desti quanto ai loro propri affari, e specialmente nelle loro proprie occasioni festive. Piccadilly Circus ha pressoché lo stesso aspetto il giorno di Natale o qualsiasi altro; ma la piazza del mercato di una cittadina o d’un villaggio di campagna ha un aspetto molto diverso nel giorno di una fiera o di un bazar. E Hilary Pierce, che era sceso laggiù una prima volta per trovare in un bosco a mezzanotte l’enigma che riteneva degno di Merlino, scese la seconda volta per ritrovarsi d’improvviso immerso in mezzo alla brulicante prosaicità di una vendita di beneficenza. Era uno di quei bazar per procurare occasioni ai poveri, in cui si smerciano ogni sorta di cianfrusaglie. Ma era trattato come una specie di festa, e manifesti e volantini dai colori vivaci ne annunciavano la natura da ogni parte. Il trambusto pareva dominato da una donna alta e bruna, di aspetto distinto, che Owen Hood, con non poca sorpresa dei suoi compagni, salutò come una vecchia conoscenza e riuscì a trarre in disparte per un colloquio privato. Ella sembrava avere le mani piene di lavoro al bazar; nondimeno, il suo colloquio con Hood fu piuttosto lungo. Pierce ne udì soltanto le ultime parole:

«Oh, ha promesso che avrebbe portato qualcosa per la vendita. Le assicuro che mantiene sempre la parola.»

Tutto ciò che Hood disse quando raggiunse il suo compagno fu: «Quella è la signora che White stava per sposare. Credo di sapere adesso perché le cose sono andate storte, e spero che possano andar bene. Ma pare che ci sia un altro fastidio. Vedete quel crocchio di poliziotti zoticoni laggiù, con tanto d’ispettore. Pare che stiano aspettando White. Dicono che ha violato la legge portando via la sua casa dalla terra, e che li ha sempre elusi. Spero che non ci sarà una scenata quando salterà fuori.»

Se questa era la speranza del signor Hood, era mal fondata e destinata alla delusione. Una scenata era ben poca cosa a descrivere ciò che era in serbo per quel signore fiducioso. Nel giro di dieci minuti la maggior parte della compagnia si trovò in un mondo in cui il sole e la luna parevano essersi capovolti e l’ultimo limite dell’inverosimile era stato raggiunto. Pierce aveva immaginato d’essere molto vicino a quel limite dell’immaginazione quando aveva brancolato dietro il tempio che svaniva nell’oscura foresta. Ma nulla di ciò che aveva visto in quella tenebra e solitudine era tanto fantastico quanto ciò che vide dopo, in pieno giorno e in mezzo a una folla.

A un estremo margine della folla vi fu un movimento improvviso: un’ondata di ritrarsi e grida senza parole. Un istante dopo aveva spazzato come un vento l’intera moltitudine, e centinaia di volti erano rivolti in una sola direzione: nella direzione della strada che scendeva con pendio graduale verso i boschi che orlavano i terreni della canonica. Da quei boschi ai piedi della collina era emerso qualcosa che dalle dimensioni avrebbe potuto essere un grosso omnibus grigio chiaro. Ma non era un omnibus. Scalava il pendio così rapidamente, a grandi falcate, che divenne all’istante evidente di per sé cosa fosse. Era un elefante, la cui mostruosa forma era modellata in grigio e argento nella luce del sole, e sul cui dorso sedeva ben eretto un vigoroso gentiluomo di mezza età in nero abito clericale, coi capelli imbiancati e un profilo aquilino piuttosto fiero che guardava orgoglioso a destra e a sinistra.

L’ispettore di polizia riuscì a fare un passo avanti, e poi rimase come una statua. Il vicario, sul suo enorme destriero, veleggiò in mezzo alla piazza del mercato con la stessa serenità che se fosse stato il padrone di un circo consueto. Additò trionfante uno dei manifesti rossi e blu sul muro, che portava il tradizionale titolo di «Vendita degli Elefanti Bianchi».

«Vedete, ho mantenuto la parola», disse alla signora con voce alta e gioviale. «Ho portato un elefante bianco.»

Un istante dopo agitò la mano ilarmente in un’altra direzione, avendo scorto Hood e Crane fra la folla.

«Splendido da parte vostra esser venuti!» esclamò. «Solo che voi eravate a parte del segreto. Vi avevo detto che avevo un elefante bianco.»

«È vero», disse Hood, «solo che non ci era mai venuto in mente che l’elefante fosse un elefante e non una metafora. Ecco dunque cosa intendeva per atmosfera asiatica e neve e montagne. Ed ecco a cosa serviva davvero il grande capannone.»

“Look here,” said the inspector, recovering from his astonishment and breaking in on these felicitations. “I don’t understand all these games, but it’s my business to ask a few questions. Sorry to say it, sir, but you’ve ignored our notifications and evaded our attempts to—”

“Have I?” inquired Mr. White brightly. “Have I really evaded you? Well, well, perhaps I have. An elephant is such a standing temptation to evasion, to evanescence, to fading away like a dewdrop. Like a snowdrop perhaps would be more appropriate. Come on, Snowdrop.”

The last word came smartly, and he gave a smart smack to the huge head of the pachyderm. Before the inspector could move or anyone had realized what had happened, the whole big bulk had pitched forward with a plunge like a cataract and went in great whirling strides, the crowd scattering before it. The police had not come provided for elephants, which are rare in those parts. Even if they had overtaken it on bicycles, they would have found it difficult to climb it on bicycles. Even if they had had revolvers, they had omitted to conceal about their persons anything in the way of big-game rifles. The white monster vanished rapidly up the long white road, so rapidly that when it dwindled to a small object and disappeared, people could hardly believe that such a prodigy had ever been present, or that their eyes had not been momentarily bewitched. Only, as it disappeared in the distance, Pierce heard once more the high nasal trumpeting noise which, in the eclipse of night, had seemed to fill the forest with fear.

It was at a subsequent meeting in London that Crane and Pierce had an opportunity of learning, more or less, the true story of the affair, in the form of another letter from the parson to the lawyer.

“Now that we know the secret,” said Pierce cheerfully, “even his account of it ought to be quite clear.”

“Quite clear,” replied Hood calmly. “His letter begins, ‘Dear Owen, I am really tremendously grateful in spite of all I used to say about leather and about horse-hair.’”

“About what?” asked Pierce.

“Horse-hair,” said Hood with severity. “He goes on, ‘The truth is they thought they could do what they liked with me because I always boasted that I hadn’t got one, and never wanted to have one; but when they found I had got one, and I must really say a jolly good one, of course it was all quite different.’”

Pierce had his elbows up on the table, and his fingers thrust up into his loose yellow hair. He had rather the appearance of holding his head on. He was muttering to himself very softly, like a schoolboy learning a lesson.

“He had got one, but he didn’t want one, and he hadn’t got one and he had a jolly good one.”

“One what?” asked Crane irritably. “Seems like a missing word competition.”

“I’ve got the prize,” observed Hood placidly. “The missing word is ‘solicitor.’ What he means is that the police took liberties with him because they knew he would not have a lawyer. And he is perfectly right; for when I took the matter up on his behalf, I soon found that they had put themselves on the wrong side of the law at least as much as he had. In short, I was able to extricate him from this police business; hence his hearty if not lucid gratitude. But he goes on to talk about something rather more personal; and I think it really has been a rather interesting case, if he does not exactly shine as a narrator of it. As I dare say you noticed, I did know something of the lady whom our eccentric friend went courting years ago, rather in the spirit of Sir Roger de Coverly when he went courting the widow. She is a Miss Julia Drake, daughter of a country gentleman. I hope you won’t misunderstand me if I say that she is a rather formidable lady. She is really a thoroughly good sort; but that air of the black-browed Juno she has about her does correspond to some real qualities. She is one of those people who can manage big enterprises, and the bigger they are the happier she is. When that sort of force functions within the limits of a village or a small valley, the impact is sometimes rather overpowering. You saw her managing the White Elephant Sale at Ponder’s End. Well, if it had been literally an army of wild elephants, it would hardly have been on too large a scale for her tastes. In that sense, I may say that our friend’s white elephant was not so much of a white elephant. I mean that in that sense it was not so much of an irrelevancy and hardly even a surprise. But in another way, it was a very great relief.”

“You’re getting nearly as obscure as he is,” remonstrated Pierce. “What is all this mysterious introduction leading up to? What do you mean?”

“I mean,” replied the lawyer, “that experience has taught me a little secret about very practical public characters like that lady. It sounds a paradox; but those practical people are often more morbid than theoretical people. They are capable of acting; but they are also capable of brooding when they are not acting. Their very stoicism makes too sentimental a secret of their sentimentalism. They misunderstand those they love; and make a mystery of the misunderstanding. They suffer in silence; a horrid habit. In short, they can do everything; but they don’t know how to do nothing. Theorists, happy people who do nothing, like our friend Pierce—”

“Look here,” cried the indignant Pierce. “I should like to know what the devil you mean? I’ve broken more law than you ever read in your life. If this psychological lecture is the new lucidity, give me Mr. White.”

“Oh, very well,” replied Hood, “if you prefer his text to my exposition, he describes the same situation as follows: ‘I ought to be grateful, being perfectly happy after all this muddle; I suppose one ought to be careful about nomenclature; but it never even occurred to me that her nose would be out of joint. Rather funny to be talking about noses, isn’t it, for I suppose really it was her rival’s nose that figured most prominently. Think of having a rival with a nose like that to turn up at you! Talk about a spire pointing to the stars—’”

«Senta un po’», disse l’ispettore, riprendendosi dallo stupore e irrompendo in mezzo a queste felicitazioni. «Non capisco tutti questi giochetti, ma è mio compito porre qualche domanda. Mi spiace dirlo, signore, ma lei ha ignorato le nostre notifiche ed eluso i nostri tentativi di…»

«Davvero?» s’informò il signor White vivacemente. «L’ho davvero elusa? Bene, bene, forse sì. Un elefante è una tale perenne tentazione all’evasione, all’evanescenza, al dileguarsi come una goccia di rugiada. Come un bucaneve, forse, sarebbe più appropriato. Vieni, Snowdrop.»

L’ultima parola venne pronunciata con scatto, ed egli diede un vivace schiaffetto all’enorme testa del pachiderma. Prima che l’ispettore potesse muoversi o alcuno avesse compreso cos’era accaduto, l’intera gran mole si lanciò in avanti con un tuffo simile a una cateratta e partì a grandi falcate vorticose, mentre la folla si sparpagliava davanti a essa. La polizia non era venuta provvista per gli elefanti, che sono rari da quelle parti. Anche se l’avessero raggiunto in bicicletta, avrebbero trovato difficile arrampicarcisi in bicicletta. Anche se avessero avuto le rivoltelle, avevano tralasciato di occultare sulle proprie persone qualcosa che somigliasse a fucili da caccia grossa. Il bianco mostro svanì rapidamente su per la lunga strada bianca, così rapidamente che quando si rimpicciolì in un piccolo oggetto e scomparve, la gente stentava a credere che un tale prodigio fosse mai stato presente, o che i loro occhi non fossero stati momentaneamente stregati. Solo che, mentre scompariva in lontananza, Pierce udì ancora una volta l’acuto barrito nasale che, nell’eclissi della notte, era parso riempire la foresta di paura.

Fu a un successivo incontro a Londra che Crane e Pierce ebbero occasione di apprendere, più o meno, la vera storia della faccenda, sotto forma di un’altra lettera del pastore all’avvocato.

«Ora che conosciamo il segreto», disse Pierce allegramente, «anche il suo resoconto dovrebbe essere del tutto chiaro.»

«Del tutto chiaro», rispose Hood con calma. «La sua lettera comincia: “Caro Owen, ti sono davvero enormemente grato, malgrado tutto quello che dicevo a proposito del cuoio e del crine di cavallo”.»

«A proposito di cosa?» chiese Pierce.

«Crine di cavallo», disse Hood con severità. «Prosegue: “La verità è che credevano di poter fare di me ciò che volevano perché io mi vantavo sempre di non averne uno, e di non averne mai voluto uno; ma quando scoprirono che ne avevo uno, e devo proprio dire uno maledettamente buono, naturalmente fu tutto ben diverso”.»

Pierce aveva i gomiti puntati sulla tavola, e le dita affondate nei suoi lenti capelli gialli. Aveva piuttosto l’aria di reggersi la testa. Borbottava fra sé molto sommessamente, come uno scolaro che impara la lezione.

«Ne aveva uno, ma non ne voleva uno, e non ne aveva uno e ne aveva uno maledettamente buono.»

«Uno cosa?» chiese Crane irritato. «Pare una gara delle parole mancanti.»

«Ho vinto il premio», osservò Hood placidamente. «La parola mancante è “avvocato”. Ciò che intende è che la polizia si prese delle libertà con lui perché sapevano che non avrebbe avuto un legale. E ha perfettamente ragione; perché quando presi in mano la faccenda per suo conto, scoprii ben presto che s’erano messi dalla parte del torto, davanti alla legge, almeno quanto lui. In breve, riuscii a tirarlo fuori da questa faccenda con la polizia; di qui la sua cordiale, se non lucida, gratitudine. Ma prosegue parlando di qualcosa di piuttosto più personale; e credo che sia stato davvero un caso piuttosto interessante, anche se non brilla precisamente come narratore di esso. Come oserei dire avete notato, conoscevo qualcosa della signora a cui il nostro eccentrico amico andò a far la corte anni fa, un po’ nello spirito di Sir Roger de Coverley quando andò a corteggiare la vedova. È una certa Miss Julia Drake, figlia di un gentiluomo di campagna. Spero che non mi fraintendiate se dico che è una signora piuttosto formidabile. È davvero una persona in gamba, per bene sino in fondo; ma quell’aria da Giunone dalle sopracciglia nere che porta con sé corrisponde davvero a certe reali qualità. È una di quelle persone che sanno gestire grandi imprese, e più queste sono grandi, più lei è felice. Quando quel genere di forza opera entro i limiti di un villaggio o di una piccola valle, l’impatto è talvolta piuttosto soverchiante. L’avete vista dirigere la Vendita degli Elefanti Bianchi a Ponder’s End. Ebbene, se fosse stato letteralmente un esercito di elefanti selvaggi, difficilmente sarebbe stato di scala troppo grande per i suoi gusti. In tal senso, posso dire che l’elefante bianco del nostro amico non era poi tanto un elefante bianco. Voglio dire che, in tal senso, non era poi tanto un’irrilevanza e a stento persino una sorpresa. Ma in un altro modo, fu un grandissimo sollievo.»

«Stai diventando quasi oscuro quanto lui», protestò Pierce. «Dove va a parare tutta questa misteriosa introduzione? Cosa intendi?»

«Intendo», rispose l’avvocato, «che l’esperienza mi ha insegnato un piccolo segreto sui personaggi pubblici molto pratici come quella signora. Suona come un paradosso; ma quelle persone pratiche sono spesso più morbose delle persone teoriche. Sono capaci di agire; ma sono anche capaci di rimuginare quando non agiscono. Il loro stesso stoicismo fa del loro sentimentalismo un segreto troppo sentimentale. Fraintendono coloro che amano; e fanno un mistero del fraintendimento. Soffrono in silenzio; orribile abitudine. In breve, sanno fare tutto; ma non sanno come non far nulla. I teorici, gente felice che non fa nulla, come il nostro amico Pierce…»

«Senta un po’», esclamò l’indignato Pierce. «Vorrei sapere che diavolo intendi. Ho violato più leggi di quante tu ne abbia mai lette in vita tua. Se questa conferenza psicologica è la nuova lucidità, datemi il signor White.»

«Oh, benissimo», rispose Hood, «se preferisci il suo testo alla mia esposizione, egli descrive la stessa situazione come segue: “Dovrei essere grato, essendo perfettamente felice dopo tutto questo pasticcio; suppongo che si debba stare attenti alla nomenclatura; ma non mi era mai neppure venuto in mente che a lei sarebbe andato il naso di traverso. Piuttosto buffo parlar di nasi, non è vero, perché suppongo che in realtà fosse il naso della sua rivale a figurare più in vista. Pensa d’avere una rivale con un naso simile che ti si drizza contro! Parla di una guglia che punta alle stelle…”»

“I think,” said Crane, interposing mildly, “that it would be better if you resumed your duties as official interpreter. What was it that you were going to say about the lady who brooded over misunderstandings?”

“I was going to say,” replied the lawyer, “that when I first came upon that crowd in the village, and saw that tall figure and dark strong face dominating it in the old way, my mind went back to a score of things I remembered about her in the past. Though we have not met for ten years, I knew from the first glimpse of her face that she had been worrying, in a powerful secretive sort of way; worrying about something she didn’t understand and would not inquire about. I remember long ago, when she was an ordinary fox-hunting squire’s daughter and White was one of Sydney Smith’s wild curates, how she sulked for two months over a mistake about a post-card that could have been explained in two minutes. At least it could have been explained by anybody except White. But you will understand that if he tried to explain the post-card on another post-card, the results may not have been luminous, let alone radiant.”

“But what has all this to do with noses?” inquired Pierce.

“Don’t you understand yet?” asked Hood with a smile. “Don’t you know who was the rival with the long nose?”

He paused for a moment and then continued, “It occurred to me as soon as I had guessed at the nature of the nose which may certainly be called the main feature of the story. An elusive, flexible and insinuating nose, the serpent of their Eden. Well, they seem to have returned to their Eden now; and I have no doubt it will be all right; for it is when people are separated that these sort of secrets spring up between them. After all, it was a mystery to us and we cannot be surprised if it was a mystery to her.”

“A good deal of this talk is still rather a mystery to me,” remarked Pierce, “though I admit it is getting a little clearer. You mean that the point that has just been cleared up is—”

“The point about Snowdrop,” replied Hood. “We thought of a pony, and a monkey, and a baby, and a good many other things that Snowdrop might possibly be. But we never thought of the interpretation which was the first to occur to the lady.”

There was silence, and then Crane laughed in an internal fashion.

“Well, I don’t blame her,” he said. “One could hardly expect a lady of any delicacy to deduce an elephant.”

“It’s an extraordinary business, when you come to think of it,” said Pierce. “Where did he get the elephant?”

“He says something about that too,” said Hood, referring to the letter. “He says, ‘I may be a quarrelsome fellow. But quarrels sometimes do good. And though it wasn’t actually one of Captain Pierce’s caravans—’”

“No, hang it all!” cried Pierce. “This is really too much! To see one’s own name entangled in such hieroglyphics—it reminds me of seeing it in a Dutch paper during the war; and wondering whether all the other words were terms of abuse.”

“I think I can explain,” answered Hood patiently. “I assure you the reverend gentleman is not taking liberties with your name in a merely irresponsible spirit. As I told you before, he is strictly truthful when you get at the facts, though they may be difficult to get at. Curiously enough, there really is a connexion. I sometimes think there is a connexion beyond coincidence running through all our adventures; a purpose in these unconscious practical jokes. It seems rather eccentric to make friends with a white elephant—”

“Rather eccentric to make friends with us,” said the Colonel. “We are a set of white elephants.”

“As a matter of fact,” said the lawyer, “this particular last prank of the parson really did arise out of the last prank of our friend Pierce.”

“Me!” said Pierce in surprise. “Have I been producing elephants without knowing it?”

“Yes,” replied Hood. “You remember when you were smuggling pigs in defiance of the regulations, you indulged (I regret to say) in a deception of putting them in cages and pretending you were travelling with a menagerie of dangerous animals. The consequence was, you remember, that the authorities forbade menageries altogether. Our friend White took up the case of a travelling circus being stopped in his town as a case of gross oppression; and when they had to break it up, he took over the elephant.”

“Sort of small payment for his services, I suppose,” said Crane. “Curious idea, taking a tip in the form of an elephant.”

“He might not have done it if he’d known what it involved,” said Hood. “As I say, he was a quarrelsome fellow, with all his good points.”

There was a silence, and then Pierce said in a musing manner: “It’s odd it should be the sequel of my little pig adventure. A sort of reversal of the parturiunt montes; I put in a little pig and it brought forth an elephant.”

“It will bring forth more monsters yet,” said Owen Hood. “We have not see all the sequels of your adventures as a swineherd.”

But touching the other monsters or monstrous events so produced the reader has already been warned—nay, threatened—that they are involved in the narrative called the Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates, and for the moment the threat must hang like thunder in the air.

«Credo», disse Crane, interponendosi con mitezza, «che sarebbe meglio se riprendessi le tue funzioni d’interprete ufficiale. Cos’era che stavi per dire a proposito della signora che rimuginava sui fraintendimenti?»

«Stavo per dire», rispose l’avvocato, «che quando m’imbattei per la prima volta in quella folla nel villaggio, e vidi quella figura alta e quel viso scuro e forte che la dominava alla vecchia maniera, la mia mente tornò a una ventina di cose che ricordavo di lei nel passato. Benché non ci fossimo incontrati per dieci anni, seppi dal primo sguardo al suo viso che si era tormentata, in un modo potente e riservato; tormentata per qualcosa che non capiva e su cui non voleva indagare. Ricordo tanto tempo fa, quand’ella era un’ordinaria figlia di possidente amante della caccia alla volpe e White era uno dei focosi curati di Sydney Smith, come rimase imbronciata per due mesi per un malinteso su una cartolina che si sarebbe potuto chiarire in due minuti. Almeno lo si sarebbe potuto chiarire da parte di chiunque tranne White. Ma capirete che se lui tentò di spiegare la cartolina su un’altra cartolina, i risultati potrebbero non essere stati luminosi, tanto meno radiosi.»

«Ma cosa ha a che fare tutto questo coi nasi?» s’informò Pierce.

«Non capisci ancora?» chiese Hood con un sorriso. «Non sai chi era la rivale dal lungo naso?»

Fece una pausa per un momento e poi continuò: «Mi venne in mente non appena ebbi indovinato la natura del naso, che può certamente essere definito il tratto principale della storia. Un naso sfuggente, flessibile e insinuante, il serpente del loro Eden. Ebbene, pare che siano tornati al loro Eden ora; e non ho dubbio che andrà tutto bene; perché è quando le persone sono separate che questo genere di segreti spuntano fra loro. Dopo tutto, era un mistero per noi e non possiamo stupirci se era un mistero per lei.»

«Buona parte di questo discorso è ancora piuttosto un mistero per me», osservò Pierce, «anche se ammetto che sta diventando un po’ più chiaro. Vuoi dire che il punto che è stato appena chiarito è…»

«Il punto riguardo a Snowdrop», rispose Hood. «Pensammo a un pony, e a una scimmia, e a un neonato, e a un buon numero d’altre cose che Snowdrop poteva forse essere. Ma non pensammo mai all’interpretazione che fu la prima a venire in mente alla signora.»

Vi fu silenzio, e poi Crane rise in modo trattenuto.

«Ebbene, non la biasimo», disse. «Difficilmente ci si poteva aspettare che una signora di una qualche delicatezza deducesse un elefante.»

«È una faccenda straordinaria, a pensarci bene», disse Pierce. «Dove ha preso l’elefante?»

«Dice qualcosa anche su questo», disse Hood, riferendosi alla lettera. «Dice: “Sarò pure un tipo attaccabrighe. Ma le liti a volte fanno del bene. E benché non fosse propriamente una delle carovane del capitano Pierce…”»

«No, al diavolo!» esclamò Pierce. «Questo è davvero troppo! Vedere il proprio nome invischiato in simili geroglifici… mi ricorda di averlo visto in un giornale olandese durante la guerra; e di chiedermi se tutte le altre parole fossero termini d’ingiuria.»

«Credo di poter spiegare», rispose Hood pazientemente. «Ti assicuro che il reverendo gentiluomo non si prende delle libertà col tuo nome in uno spirito puramente irresponsabile. Come ti ho detto prima, è rigorosamente veritiero quando si arriva ai fatti, per quanto possano essere difficili da raggiungere. Curiosamente, c’è davvero un nesso. Talvolta penso che ci sia un nesso oltre la coincidenza che attraversa tutte le nostre avventure; uno scopo in questi inconsapevoli scherzi pratici. Pare piuttosto eccentrico fare amicizia con un elefante bianco…»

«Piuttosto eccentrico fare amicizia con noi», disse il colonnello. «Siamo un branco di elefanti bianchi.»

«A dire il vero», disse l’avvocato, «quest’ultima particolare birichinata del pastore nacque davvero dall’ultima birichinata del nostro amico Pierce.»

«Io!» disse Pierce con sorpresa. «Ho prodotto elefanti senza saperlo?»

«Sì», rispose Hood. «Ti ricordi quando contrabbandavi maiali in sfida ai regolamenti, ti concedesti (mi rincresce dirlo) l’inganno di metterli in gabbie e di fingere di viaggiare con un serraglio di animali pericolosi. La conseguenza fu, ricordi, che le autorità proibirono del tutto i serragli. Il nostro amico White prese in mano il caso di un circo ambulante fermato nella sua città come un caso di grave sopruso; e quando furono costretti a smantellarlo, egli si prese in carico l’elefante.»

«Una specie di piccolo compenso per i suoi servigi, suppongo», disse Crane. «Curiosa idea, ricevere una mancia sotto forma di elefante.»

«Forse non l’avrebbe fatto se avesse saputo cosa comportava», disse Hood. «Come dico, era un tipo attaccabrighe, con tutte le sue buone qualità.»

Vi fu un silenzio, e poi Pierce disse in tono meditabondo: «È strano che debba essere il seguito della mia piccola avventura dei maiali. Una specie di rovesciamento del parturiunt montes; ho messo dentro un piccolo maiale e ne è venuto fuori un elefante.»

«Ne verranno fuori mostri ancora peggiori», disse Owen Hood. «Non abbiamo visto tutti i seguiti delle tue avventure di porcaro.»

Ma quanto agli altri mostri o eventi mostruosi così prodotti, il lettore è già stato avvertito, anzi minacciato, che sono coinvolti nella narrazione chiamata l’Esclusivo Lusso di Enoch Oates, e per il momento la minaccia deve restare sospesa come tuono nell’aria.

Chapter V

The Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates

“Since the Colonel ate his hat the Lunatic Asylum has lacked a background.”

The conscientious scribe cannot but be aware that the above sentence, standing alone and without reference to previous matters, may not entirely explain itself. Anyone trying the experiment of using that sentence for practical social purposes; tossing that sentence lightly as a greeting to a passer-by; sending that sentence as a telegram to a total stranger; whispering that sentence hoarsely into the ear of the nearest policeman, and so on, will find that its insufficiency as a full and final statement is generally felt. With no morbid curiosity, with no exaggerated appetite for omniscience, men will want to know more about this statement before acting upon it. And the only way of explaining it, and the unusual circumstances in which it came to be said, is to pursue the doubling and devious course of these narratives, and return to a date very much earlier, when men now more than middle-aged were quite young.

It was in the days when the Colonel was not the Colonel, but only Jimmy Crane, a restless youth tossed about by every wind of adventure, but as yet as incapable of discipline as of dressing for dinner. It was in days before Robert Owen Hood, the lawyer, had ever begun to study the law and had only got so far as to abolish it; coming down to the club every night with a new plan for a revolution to turn all earthly tribunals upside down. It was in days before Wilding White settled down as a country parson, returning to the creed though not the conventions of his class and country; when he was still ready to change his religion once a week, turning up sometimes in the costume of a monk and sometimes of a mufti, and sometimes in what he declared to be the original vestments of a Druid, whose religion was shortly to be resumed by the whole British people. It was in days when their young friend Hilary Pierce, the aviator, was still anticipating aviation by flying a small kite. In short, it was early in the lives even of the elders of the group that they had founded a small social club, in which their long friendships had flourished. The club had to have some sort of name, and the more thoughtful and detached among them, who saw the club steadily and saw it as a whole, considered the point with ripe reflection, and finally called their little society the Lunatic Asylum.

“We might all stick straws in our hair for dinner, as the Romans crowned themselves with roses for the banquet,” observed Hood. “It would correspond to dressing for dinner; I don’t know what else we could do to vary the vulgar society trick of all wearing the same sort of white waistcoats.”

“All wearing strait waistcoats, I suppose,” said Crane.

“We might each dine separately in a padded cell, if it comes to that,” said Hood; “but there seems to be something lacking in it considered as a social evening.”

Here Wilding White, who was then in a monastic phase, intervened eagerly. He explained that in some monasteries a monk of particular holiness was allowed to become a hermit in an inner cell, and proposed a similar arrangement at the club. Hood, with his more mellow rationalism, intervened with a milder amendment. He suggested that a large padded chair should represent the padded cell, and be reserved like a throne for the loftiest of the lunatics.

“Do not,” he said gently and earnestly, “do not let us be divided by jealousies and petty ambitions. Do not let us dispute among ourselves which shall be the dottiest in the domain of the dotty. Perhaps one will appear worthier than us all, more manifestly and magnificently weak in the head; for him let the padded throne stand empty.”

Jimmy Crane had said no more after his brief suggestion, but was pacing the room like a polar bear, as he generally did when there came upon him a periodical impulse to go off after things like polar bears. He was the wildest of all those wild figures so far as the scale of his adventures was concerned, constantly vanishing to the ends of the earth nobody knew why, and turning up again nobody knew how. He had a hobby, even in his youth, that made his outlook seem even stranger than the bewildering successive philosophies of his friend White. He had an enthusiasm for the myths of savages, and while White was balancing the relative claims of Buddhism and Brahminism, Crane would boldly declare his preference for the belief that a big fish ate the sun every night, or that the whole cosmos was created by cutting up a giant. Moreover, there was with all this something indefinable but in some way more serious about Crane even in those days. There was much that was merely boyish about the blind impetuosity of Wilding White, with his wild hair and eager aquiline face. He was evidently one who might (as he said) learn the secret of Isis, but would be quite incapable of keeping it to himself. The long, legal face of Owen Hood had already learned to laugh at most things, if not to laugh loudly. But in Crane there was something more hard and militant like steel, and as he proved afterwards in the affair of the hat, he could keep a secret even when it was a joke. So that when he finally went off on a long tour round the world, with the avowed intention of studying all the savages he could find, nobody tried to stop him. He went off in a startlingly shabby suit, with a faded sash instead of a waistcoat, and with no luggage in particular, except a large revolver slung round him in a case like a field-glass, and a big, green umbrella that he flourished resolutely as he walked.

“Well, he’ll come back a queerer figure than he went, I suppose,” said Wilding White.

“He couldn’t,” answered Hood, the lawyer, shaking his head. “I don’t believe all the devil-worship in Africa could make him any madder than he is.”

“But he’s going to America first, isn’t he?” said the other.

“Yes,” said Hood. “He’s going to America, but not to see the Americans. He would think the Americans very dull compared with the American Indians. Possibly he will come back in feathers and war-paint.”

Capitolo V

L’Esclusivo Lusso di Enoch Oates

«Da quando il colonnello ha mangiato il suo cappello, il Manicomio è rimasto privo di uno sfondo.»

Lo scriba coscienzioso non può fare a meno di rendersi conto che la frase qui sopra, presa da sola e senza riferimento a fatti precedenti, può non spiegarsi del tutto da sé. Chiunque tenti l’esperimento di usare quella frase per pratici scopi sociali; di lanciarla con leggerezza come un saluto a un passante; di inviarla come telegramma a un perfetto sconosciuto; di sussurrarla rocamente all’orecchio del poliziotto più vicino, e così via, scoprirà che la sua insufficienza come dichiarazione piena e definitiva è generalmente avvertita. Senza morbosa curiosità, senza esagerato appetito d’onniscienza, gli uomini vorranno saperne di più su questa affermazione prima di agire di conseguenza. E l’unico modo di spiegarla, e le insolite circostanze in cui giunse a essere pronunciata, è di seguire il corso sdoppiato e tortuoso di queste narrazioni, e risalire a una data assai anteriore, quando uomini oggi più che maturi erano del tutto giovani.

Era ai giorni in cui il colonnello non era il colonnello, ma soltanto Jimmy Crane, un giovane irrequieto sballottato da ogni vento d’avventura, ma ancora incapace di disciplina quanto di vestirsi per la cena. Era ai giorni prima che Robert Owen Hood, l’avvocato, avesse mai cominciato a studiare la legge e fosse arrivato soltanto ad abolirla; scendendo al club ogni sera con un nuovo piano per una rivoluzione che rovesciasse tutti i tribunali terreni. Era ai giorni prima che Wilding White si stabilisse come parroco di campagna, tornando al credo, se non alle convenzioni, della sua classe e del suo paese; quand’era ancora pronto a cambiare religione una volta la settimana, presentandosi ora nel costume di un monaco e ora di un mufti, e talvolta in quelle che dichiarava essere le originarie vesti di un druido, la cui religione stava per essere ripresa dall’intero popolo britannico. Era ai giorni in cui il loro giovane amico Hilary Pierce, l’aviatore, anticipava ancora l’aviazione facendo volare un piccolo aquilone. In breve, era agli inizi della vita persino dei più anziani del gruppo che essi avevano fondato un piccolo club sociale, nel quale le loro lunghe amicizie erano fiorite. Il club doveva avere una qualche sorta di nome, e i più riflessivi e distaccati fra loro, che vedevano il club con costanza e lo vedevano nella sua interezza, considerarono il punto con matura riflessione, e infine chiamarono la loro piccola società il Manicomio.

«Potremmo tutti ficcarci della paglia nei capelli per la cena, come i Romani si coronavano di rose per il banchetto», osservò Hood. «Corrisponderebbe al vestirsi per la cena; non so cos’altro potremmo fare per variare il volgare trucco mondano di portare tutti lo stesso genere di panciotti bianchi.»

«Portando tutti la camicia di forza, suppongo», disse Crane.

«Potremmo cenare ciascuno separatamente in una cella imbottita, se è per questo», disse Hood; «ma pare che manchi qualcosa, considerandola come una serata di società.»

Qui Wilding White, che era allora in una fase monastica, intervenne con entusiasmo. Spiegò che in certi monasteri a un monaco di particolare santità era concesso di farsi eremita in una cella interna, e propose una sistemazione analoga al club. Hood, col suo razionalismo più mite, intervenne con un emendamento più temperato. Suggerì che una grande poltrona imbottita rappresentasse la cella imbottita, e fosse riservata come un trono al più eccelso dei matti.

«Non lasciamo», disse dolcemente e con fervore, «non lasciamo che ci dividano gelosie e meschine ambizioni. Non mettiamoci a disputare fra noi chi sarà il più svitato nel regno degli svitati. Forse ne comparirà uno più degno di tutti noi, più manifestamente e magnificamente debole di testa; per lui resti vuoto il trono imbottito.»

Jimmy Crane non aveva detto più nulla dopo il suo breve suggerimento, ma passeggiava per la stanza come un orso polare, come faceva in genere quando lo coglieva un periodico impulso a partire dietro cose come gli orsi polari. Era il più selvaggio di tutte quelle selvagge figure, per quanto riguardava la portata delle sue avventure, svanendo di continuo ai confini della terra senza che nessuno sapesse perché, e ricomparendo senza che nessuno sapesse come. Aveva un passatempo, persino in gioventù, che rendeva la sua visione delle cose ancora più strana delle sconcertanti successive filosofie del suo amico White. Aveva un entusiasmo per i miti dei selvaggi, e mentre White soppesava le pretese relative del buddhismo e del brahmanesimo, Crane dichiarava arditamente la sua preferenza per la credenza che un grosso pesce mangiasse il sole ogni notte, o che l’intero cosmo fosse stato creato tagliando a pezzi un gigante. Per di più, c’era in tutto questo qualcosa d’indefinibile ma in certo modo più serio in Crane persino a quei tempi. C’era molto di semplicemente puerile nella cieca impetuosità di Wilding White, coi suoi capelli scarmigliati e il suo ansioso viso aquilino. Egli era evidentemente uno che avrebbe potuto (come diceva) apprendere il segreto di Iside, ma sarebbe stato del tutto incapace di tenerlo per sé. Il lungo viso legale di Owen Hood aveva già imparato a ridere della maggior parte delle cose, se non a ridere fragorosamente. Ma in Crane c’era qualcosa di più duro e militante, come l’acciaio, e come dimostrò in seguito nella faccenda del cappello, egli sapeva mantenere un segreto anche quando era uno scherzo. Sicché quando finalmente partì per un lungo giro intorno al mondo, con la dichiarata intenzione di studiare tutti i selvaggi che potesse trovare, nessuno tentò di fermarlo. Partì in un abito sorprendentemente logoro, con una fusciacca sbiadita al posto del panciotto, e senza bagaglio in particolare, salvo una grossa rivoltella appesa attorno a lui in una custodia simile a un binocolo, e un grande ombrello verde che brandiva risolutamente mentre camminava.

«Beh, tornerà una figura ancora più bizzarra di quando è partito, suppongo», disse Wilding White.

«Non potrebbe», rispose Hood, l’avvocato, scuotendo il capo. «Non credo che tutto il culto del diavolo dell’Africa potrebbe renderlo più matto di quanto già sia.»

«Ma va prima in America, non è vero?» disse l’altro.

«Sì», disse Hood. «Va in America, ma non per vedere gli americani. Riterrebbe gli americani molto insulsi in confronto agli indiani d’America. Forse tornerà in penne e pitture di guerra.»

“He’ll come back scalped, I suppose,” said White hopefully. “I suppose being scalped is all the rage in the best Red Indian society?”

“Then he’s working round by the South Sea Islands,” said Hood. “They don’t scalp people there; they only stew them in pots.”

“He couldn’t very well come back stewed,” said White, musing. “Does it strike you, Owen, that we should hardly be talking nonsense like this if we hadn’t a curious faith that a fellow like Crane will know how to look after himself?”

“Yes,” said Hood gravely. “I’ve got a very fixed fundamental conviction that Crane will turn up again all right. But it’s true that he may look jolly queer after going fantee for all that time.”

It became a sort of pastime at the club of the Lunatics to compete in speculations about the guise in which the maddest of their madmen would return, after being so long lost to civilization. And grand preparations were made as for a sort of Walpurgis Night of nonsense when it was known at last that he was really returning. Hood had received letters from him occasionally, full of queer mythologies, and then a rapid succession of telegrams from places nearer and nearer home, culminating in the announcement that he would appear in the club that night. It was about five minutes before dinner-time that a sharp knock on the door announced his arrival.

“Bang all the gongs and the tom-toms,” cried Wilding White. “The Lord High Mumbo-Jumbo arrives riding on the nightmare.”

“We had better bring out the throne of the King of the Maniacs,” said Hood, laughing. “We may want it at last,” and he turned towards the big padded chair that still stood at the top of the table.

As he did so James Crane walked into the room. He was clad in very neat and well-cut evening clothes, not too fashionable, and a little formal. His hair was parted on one side, and his moustache clipped rather close; he took a seat with a pleasant smile, and began talking about the weather.

He was not allowed, however, to confine his conversation to the weather. He had certainly succeeded in giving his old friends the only sort of surprise that they really had not expected; but they were too old friends for their friend to be able to conceal from them the meaning of such a change. And it was on that festive evening that Crane explained his position; a position which he maintained in most things ever afterwards, and one which is the original foundation of the affair that follows.

“I have lived with the men we call savages all over the world,” he said simply, “and I have found out one truth about them. And I tell you, my friends, you may talk about independence and individual self-expression till you burst. But I’ve always found, wherever I went, that the man who could really be trusted to keep his word, and to fight, and to work for his family, was the man who did a war-dance before the moon where the moon was worshipped, and wore a nose-ring in his nose where nose-rings were worn. I have had plenty of fun, and I won’t interfere with anyone else having it. But I believe I have seen what is the real making of mankind, and I have come back to my tribe.”

This was the first act of the drama which ended in the remarkable appearance and disappearance of Mr. Enoch Oates, and it has been necessary to narrate it briefly before passing on to the second act. Ever since that time Crane had preserved at once his eccentric friends and his own more formal customs. And there were many among the newer members of the club who had never known him except as the Colonel, the grizzled, military gentleman whose severe scheme of black and white attire and strict politeness in small things formed the one foil of sharp contrast to that many-coloured Bohemia. One of these was Hilary Pierce, the young aviator; and much as he liked the Colonel, he never quite understood him. He had never known the old soldier in his volcanic youth, as had Hood and White, and therefore never knew how much of the fire remained under the rock or the snows. The singular affair of the hat, which has been narrated to the too patient reader elsewhere, surprised him more than it did the older men, who knew very well that the Colonel was not so old as he looked. And the impression increased with all the incidents which a fanatical love of truth has forced the chronicler to relate in the same connexion; the incident of the river and of the pigs and of the somewhat larger pet of Mr. Wilding White. There was talk of renaming the Lunatic Asylum as the League of the Long Bow, and of commemorating its performances in a permanent ritual. The Colonel was induced to wear a crown of cabbage on state occasions, and Pierce was gravely invited to bring his pigs with him to dine at the club.

“You could easily bring a little pig in your large pocket,” said Hood. “I often wonder people do not have pigs as pets.”

“A pig in a poke, in fact,” said Pierce. “Well, so long as you have the tact to avoid the indelicacy of having pork for dinner that evening, I suppose I could bring my pig in my pocket.”

“White’d find it rather a nuisance to bring his elephant in his pocket,” observed the Colonel.

Pierce glanced at him, and had again the feeling of incongruity at seeing the ceremonial cabbage adorning his comparatively venerable head. For the Colonel had just been married, and was rejuvenated in an almost jaunty degree. Somehow the philosophical young man seemed to miss something, and sighed. It was then that he made the remark which is the pivot of this precise though laborious anecdote.

“Since the Colonel ate his hat,” he said, “the Lunatic Asylum has lacked a background.”

“Damn your impudence,” said the Colonel cheerfully. “Do you mean to call me a background to my face?”

“A dark background,” said Pierce soothingly. “Do not resent my saying a dark background. I mean a grand, mysterious background like that of night; a sublime and even starry background.”

“Starry yourself,” said Crane indignantly.

«Tornerà con la testa rasata, immagino», disse White speranzoso. «Immagino che farsi radere il capo sia alla moda nella migliore società degli indiani rossi?»

«Allora sta lavorando da quelle parti delle isole del Pacifico meridionale», disse Hood. «Là non scalpellano la gente, li fanno solo bollire nelle pentole».

«Non poteva certo tornare sbronzo», disse White pensieroso. «Ti sembra, Owen, che non staremmo parlando di queste sciocchezze se non avessimo una strana fiducia nel fatto che un tipo come Crane saprà cavarsela?»

“Sì”, disse Hood con serietà, “ho una convinzione fondamentale e ben radicata che Crane ricomparirà presto in perfette condizioni. Ma è vero che potrebbe avere un aspetto piuttosto strano dopo essersi fantee per tutto quel tempo.”

Divenne una specie di passatempo al Circolo dei Lunatici competere nelle congetture sulle sembianze che avrebbe assunto il più pazzo tra i loro pazzi, tornando dopo essere stato per tanto tempo lontano dalla civiltà. E si fecero grandi preparativi come per una sorta di notte di Valpurga dell’assurdità quando alla fine si seppe che stava davvero ritornando. Hood aveva ricevuto occasionalmente lettere da lui, piene di strane mitologie, e poi una rapida successione di telegrammi da luoghi sempre più vicini a casa, culminanti nell’annuncio che sarebbe apparso al circolo quella sera. Erano circa cinque minuti prima dell’ora di cena quando un forte bussare alla porta annunciò il suo arrivo.

«Suonate tutti i gong e i tamburi», gridò Wilding White. «Il Gran Mumbo-Jumbo arriva cavalcando l’incubo».

«Faremmo meglio a tirar fuori il trono del Re dei Maniaci», disse Hood ridendo. «Potremmo averne bisogno alla fine» e si voltò verso la grande poltrona imbottita che stava ancora in cima al tavolo.

Mentre faceva così James Crane entrò nella stanza. Era vestito con abiti da sera molto ordinati e ben tagliati, non troppo alla moda e un po’ formali. I suoi capelli erano divisi su un lato e i baffi erano tagliati piuttosto corti; si sedette con un sorriso piacevole e iniziò a parlare del tempo.

Non gli fu però consentito di limitare la conversazione al tempo atmosferico. Egli era riuscito certamente a dare ai suoi vecchi amici l’unica sorpresa che non si aspettavano davvero; ma erano troppo vecchi amici perché il loro amico potesse nasconder loro il significato di un tale cambiamento. E fu in quella serata festiva che Crane spiegò la sua posizione; una posizione che mantenne nella maggior parte delle cose da allora in poi, e che è la fondazione originale della vicenda che segue.

«Ho vissuto con gli uomini che chiamiamo selvaggi in tutto il mondo», disse semplicemente, «e ho scoperto una verità su di loro. E vi dico, amici miei, potete parlare di indipendenza e di espressione individuale finché non ne potete più. Ma io ho sempre trovato, ovunque andassi, che l’uomo in cui si poteva davvero fidarsi per mantenere la parola, per combattere e lavorare per la sua famiglia, era colui che faceva una danza di guerra davanti alla luna dove la luna veniva adorata, e indossava un anello al naso dove gli anelli al naso erano usati. Ho avuto molta divertimento, e non interferirò con chiunque altro lo voglia avere. Ma credo di aver visto ciò che è la vera essenza dell’umanità, e sono tornato alla mia tribù».

Questo fu il primo atto del dramma che si concluse con la notevole comparsa e scomparsa di Mr. Enoch Oates, ed è stato necessario raccontarlo brevemente prima di passare al secondo atto. Da allora Crane aveva conservato sia i suoi eccentrici amici che le sue più formali abitudini. E molti tra i nuovi membri del club non lo avevano mai conosciuto se non come il Colonnello, l’anziano gentiluomo militare la cui severa combinazione di abiti neri e bianchi e la sua rigida cortesia nei piccoli dettagli formavano l’unica cornice di netto contrasto a quella bohémien multicolore. Uno di questi era Hilary Pierce, il giovane aviatore; e per quanto gli piacesse il Colonnello, non lo capiva del tutto. Non aveva mai conosciuto il vecchio soldato nella sua gioventù vulcanica, come invece Hood e White, e quindi non sapeva quanta di quella fiamma rimanesse sotto la roccia o le nevi. La singolare faccenda del cappello, che è stata raccontata altrove al troppo paziente lettore, lo sorprese più di quanto avesse fatto con gli uomini più anziani, che sapevano benissimo che il Colonnello non era così vecchio come sembrava. E l’impressione aumentò con tutti gli incidenti che un fanatico amore per la verità ha costretto lo scrivente a raccontare nello stesso contesto; l’incidente del fiume e dei maiali e dell’animale domestico di Mr. Wilding White, leggermente più grande. Si parlò di rinominare il Manicomio come la Lega dell’Arco Lungo, e di commemorarne le imprese in un rituale permanente. Il Colonnello fu indotto a portare una corona di cavolo nelle occasioni ufficiali, e Pierce fu seriamente invitato ad accompagnarsi ai suoi maiali per cenare al club.

«Potresti facilmente portare un piccolo maiale nella tua grande tasca», disse Hood. «Mi chiedo spesso perché la gente non abbia i maiali come animali domestici».

«Un gatto nel sacco, infatti», disse Pierce. «Bene, fintanto che avete il tatto di evitare l’indelicatezza di servire del maiale per cena quella sera, immagino potrei portare il mio porcellino in tasca».

«White troverebbe piuttosto scomodo portare l’elefante in tasca», osservò il colonnello.

Pierce lo guardò e provò di nuovo la sensazione di incongruità nel vedere il cavolo cerimoniale che adornava la sua testa relativamente venerabile. Il colonnello si era appena sposato ed era ringiovanito in modo quasi spavaldo. In qualche modo al giovane filosofo sembrò mancasse qualcosa, e sospirò. Fu allora che fece l’osservazione che è il cardine di questa precisa sebbene laboriosa aneddoto.

«Da quando il colonnello si è mangiato il cappello», disse «il manicomio non ha più un contesto.»

«Maleducata la tua audacia», disse il colonnello allegramente, «intendi chiamarmi uno sfondo in faccia?»

«Uno sfondo scuro», disse Pierce con tono rassicurante. «Non prendetevela se dico uno sfondo scuro. Intendo un grande e misterioso sfondo come quello della notte, uno sfondo sublime e addirittura stellato».

«Fatti stellare tu stesso», disse Crane con sdegno.

“It was against that background of ancient night,” went on the young man dreamily, “that the fantastic shapes and fiery colours of our carnival could really be seen. So long as he came here with his black coat and beautiful society manners there was a foil to our follies. We were eccentric, but he was our centre. You cannot be eccentric without a centre.”

“I believe Hilary is quite right,” said Owen Hood earnestly. “I believe we have made a great mistake. We ought not to have all gone mad at once. We ought to have taken it in turns to go mad. Then I could have been shocked at his behaviour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and he could have been shocked at my behaviour on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. But there is no moral value in going mad when nobody is shocked. If Crane leaves off being shocked, what are we to do?”

“I know what we want,” began Pierce excitedly.

“So do I,” interrupted Hood. “We want a sane man.”

“Not so easy to find nowadays,” said the old soldier. “Going to advertise?”

“I mean a stupid man,” explained Owen Hood. “I mean a man who’s conventional all through, not a humbug like Crane. I mean, I want a solid, serious, business man, a hard-headed, practical man of affairs, a man to whom vast commercial interests are committed. In a word, I want a fool; some beautiful, rounded, homogenous fool, in whose blameless face, as in a round mirror, all our fancies may really be reflected and renewed. I want a very successful man, a very wealthy man, a man—”

“I know! I know!” cried young Pierce, almost waving his arms. “Enoch Oates!”

“Who’s Enoch Oates?” inquired White.

“Are the lords of the world so little known?” asked Hood. “Enoch Oates is Pork, and nearly everything else; Enoch Oates is turning civilization into one vast sausage-machine. Didn’t I ever tell you how Hilary ran into him over that pig affair?”

“He’s the very man you want,” cried Hilary Pierce enthusiastically. “I know him, and I believe I can get him. Being a millionaire, he’s entirely ignorant. Being an American, he’s entirely in earnest. He’s got just that sort of negative Nonconformist conscience of New England that balances the positive money-getting of New York. If we want to surprise anybody we’ll surprise him. Let’s ask Enoch Oates to dinner.”

“I won’t have any practical jokes played on guests,” said the Colonel.

“Of course not,” replied Hood. “He’ll be only too pleased to take it seriously. Did you ever know an American who didn’t like seeing the Sights? And if you don’t know you’re a Sight with that cabbage on your head, it’s time an American tourist taught you.”

“Besides, there’s a difference,” said Pierce. “I wouldn’t ask a fellow like that doctor, Horace Hunter—”

“Sir Horace Hunter,” murmured Hood reverently.

“I wouldn’t ask him, because I really think him a sneak and a snob, and my invitation could only be meant as an insult. But Oates is not a man I hate, nor is he hateful. That’s the curious part of it. He’s a simple, sincere sort of fellow, according to his lights, which are pretty dim. He’s a thief and a robber of course, but he doesn’t know it. I’m asking him because he’s different; but I don’t imagine he’s at all sorry to be different. There’s no harm in giving a man a good dinner and letting him be a background without knowing it.”

When Mr. Enoch Oates in due course accepted the invitation and presented himself at the club, many were reminded of that former occasion when a stiff and conventional figure in evening dress had first appeared like a rebuke to the revels. But in spite of the stiff sameness of both those black and white costumes, there was a great deal of difference between the old background and the new background. Crane’s good manners were of that casual kind that are rather peculiarly English, and mark an aristocracy at its ease in the saddle. Curiously enough, if the American had one point in common with a Continental noble of ancient lineage (whom his daughter might have married any day), it was that they would both be a little more on the defensive, living in the midst of democracy. Mr. Oates was perfectly polite, but there was something a little rigid about him. He walked to his chair rather stiffly and sat down rather heavily. He was a powerful, ponderous man with a large sallow face, a little suggestive of a corpulent Red Indian. He had a ruminant eye, and an equally ruminant manner of chewing an unlighted cigar. These were signs that might well have gone with a habit of silence. But they did not.

Mr. Oates’s conversation might not be brilliant, but it was continuous. Pierce and his friends had begun with some notion of dangling their own escapades before him, like dancing dolls before a child; they had told him something of the affair of the Colonel and his cabbage, of the captain and his pigs, of the parson and his elephant; but they soon found that their hearer had not come there merely as a listener. What he thought of their romantic buffooneries it would be hard to say; probably he did not understand them, possibly he did not even hear them. Anyhow, his own monologue went on. He was a leisurely speaker. They found themselves revising much that they had heard about the snap and smartness and hurry of American talk. He spoke without haste or embarrassment, his eye boring into space, and he more than fulfilled Mr. Pierce’s hopes of somebody who would talk about business matters. His talk was a mild torrent of facts and figures, especially figures. In fact the background was doing all it could to contribute the required undertone of common commercial life. The background was justifying all their hopes that it would be practical and prosaic. Only the background had rather the air of having become the foreground.

“When they put that up to me I saw it was the proposition,” Mr. Oates was saying. “I saw I’d got on to something better than my old regulation turnover of eighty-five thousand dollars on each branch. I reckoned I should save a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in the long run by scrapping the old plant, even if I had to drop another thirty thousand dollars on new works, where I’d get the raw material for a red cent. I saw right away that was the point to freeze on to; that I just got a chance to sell something I didn’t need to buy; something that could be sort of given away like old match-ends. I figured out it would be better by a long chalk to let the other guys rear the stock and sell me their refuse for next to nix, so I could get ahead with turning it into the goods. So I started in right away and got there at the first go off with an increase of seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars.”

«Fu su quel sfondo di antica notte», continuò il giovane sognante, «che le forme fantastiche e i colori ardenti del nostro carnevale potevano veramente essere visti. Finché veniva qui con la sua giacca nera e i suoi bellissimi modi da società, c’era un contrasto alle nostre follie. Eravamo eccentrici, ma lui era il nostro centro. Non si può essere eccentrici senza un centro».

«Credo che Hilary abbia perfettamente ragione», disse Owen Hood con serietà. «Penso che abbiamo commesso un grande errore. Non avremmo dovuto impazzire tutti insieme. Avremmo dovuto farlo a turno. Allora io avrei potuto scandalizzarmi del suo comportamento di lunedì, mercoledì e venerdì, e lui si sarebbe scandalizzato del mio comportamento di martedì, giovedì e sabato. Ma non c’è alcun valore morale nell’impazzire quando nessuno è scandalizzato. Se Crane smette di scandalizzarsi, che cosa dovremo fare?»

«So cosa vogliamo», esordì Pierce con entusiasmo.

«E io pure», interruppe Hood «vogliamo un uomo sano di mente».

«Non è così facile trovarli al giorno d’oggi», disse il vecchio soldato. «Pensi di mettere un annuncio?»

«Intendo un uomo stupido», spiegò Owen Hood. «Intendo un uomo che è convenzionale in tutto e per tutto, non un ipocrita come Crane. Intendo dire che voglio un uomo solido, serio, d’affari, un uomo di testa dura, pratico negli affari, a cui sono affidati vasti interessi commerciali. In una parola, voglio uno sciocco; qualche bello, rotondo, omogeneo sciocco, in cui la sua faccia immacolata, come in uno specchio tondo, tutte le nostre fantasie possano davvero riflettersi e rinnovarsi. Voglio un uomo molto di successo, un uomo molto ricco, un uomo…»

«Lo so! Lo so!» gridò il giovane Pierce, quasi agitando le braccia. «Enoch Oates!»

«Chi è Enoch Oates?» chiese White.

«Gli uomini al potere nel mondo sono così poco conosciuti?» chiese Hood. «Enoch Oates è il Porco, e quasi tutto il resto; Enoch Oates sta trasformando la civiltà in una vasta macchina per salsicce. Non vi ho mai raccontato come Hilary gli sia incappato nel corso di quella faccenda dei maiali?»

«È proprio l’uomo che vi serve», esclamò Hilary Pierce con entusiasmo. «Lo conosco e credo di poterlo convincere. Essendo un milionario, è completamente ignorante. Essendo americano, è completamente serio. Ha proprio quel tipo di coscienza negativa non conformista della Nuova Inghilterra che bilancia il guadagno positivo dei soldi di New York. Se vogliamo sorprendere qualcuno lo sorprenderemo lui. Invitiamo Enoch Oates a cena».

«Non voglio che si facciano scherzi ai miei ospiti», disse il colonnello.

«Certo che no», rispose Hood. «Ne sarà solo troppo felice di prenderla sul serio. Avete mai conosciuto un americano che non gli piacesse vedere le Attrazioni? E se non sapete di essere un’Attrazione con quel cavolo in testa, è ora che un turista americano ve lo insegni».

«Inoltre c’è una differenza», disse Pierce «non chiederei mai a un tipo come quel dottore, Horace Hunter…»

«Sir Horace Hunter», mormorò Hood con riverenza.

“Non glielo chiederei, perché lo ritengo davvero un furbo e uno snob, e il mio invito potrebbe essere interpretato solo come un insulto. Ma Oates non è un uomo che odio, né è odioso. Questa è la parte curiosa. È un tipo semplice e sincero, secondo i suoi criteri, che sono piuttosto limitati. È naturalmente un ladro e un brigante, ma non lo sa. Lo sto invitando perché è diverso; ma immagino che non gli dispiaccia affatto essere diverso. Non c’è niente di male a offrire a un uomo una buona cena e lasciarlo fare da sfondo senza che se ne accorga.”

Quando il signor Enoch Oates, nel dovuto tempo, accettò l’invito e si presentò al club, molti furono ricordati di quella precedente occasione in cui una figura rigida e convenzionale in abito da sera era apparsa per la prima volta come un rimprovero ai festeggiamenti. Ma nonostante la rigida somiglianza di quei costumi bianchi e neri, c’era molta differenza tra il vecchio sfondo e il nuovo sfondo. I buoni modi di Crane erano di quel genere casuale che è piuttosto peculiare degli inglesi e segna un’aristocrazia a suo agio in sella. Curiosamente, se l’americano aveva un punto in comune con un nobile continentale di antica discendenza (che sua figlia avrebbe potuto sposare da un giorno all’altro), era che entrambi sarebbero stati un po’ più sulla difensiva, vivendo nel mezzo della democrazia. Il signor Oates fu perfettamente educato, ma c’era qualcosa di un po’ rigido in lui. Camminò verso la sua sedia piuttosto rigidamente e si sedette piuttosto pesantemente. Era un uomo potente e imponente con un grande volto giallastro, un po’ suggestivo di un corpulento indiano rosso. Aveva uno sguardo ruminante e una maniera altrettanto ruminante di masticare un sigaro spento. Questi erano segni che avrebbero potuto benissimo andare insieme a un abitudine al silenzio. Ma non fu così.

La conversazione del signor Oates non era brillante, ma era continua. Pierce e i suoi amici avevano iniziato con l’idea di sventolare le loro prodezze davanti a lui, come bambole danzanti davanti a un bambino; gli avevano raccontato qualcosa dell’affare del colonnello e il suo cavolo, del capitano e i suoi maiali, del pastore e la sua elefante; ma ben presto si accorsero che l’ascoltatore non era venuto lì solo per ascoltare. Cosa pensasse delle loro buffonate romantiche sarebbe stato difficile da dire; probabilmente non le capiva, forse non le sentiva nemmeno. Comunque, il suo monologo continuava. Era un oratore lento. Si ritrovarono a rivedere molto di quello che avevano sentito sulla vivacità e lo stile e la fretta del parlare americano. Parlava senza fretta né imbarazzo, con gli occhi fissi nel vuoto, e più che altro soddisfaceva le speranze del signor Pierce di qualcuno che avrebbe parlato di questioni commerciali. Il suo discorso era un mite torrente di fatti e cifre, soprattutto cifre. Infatti lo sfondo stava facendo tutto il possibile per contribuire al richiesto sottofondo della vita commerciale comune. Lo sfondo stava giustificando tutte le loro speranze che sarebbe stato pratico e prosaico. Solo che lo sfondo aveva piuttosto l’aria di essere diventato il primo piano.

«Quando mi proposero l’affare, capii subito che era quello giusto», stava dicendo il signor Oates. «Vidi che avevo trovato qualcosa di meglio del mio vecchio giro d’affari regolamentare di ottantacinquemila dollari per ogni filiale. Calcolai che avrei risparmiato centoventimila dollari a lungo termine smantellando l’attrezzatura obsoleta, anche se mi sarebbe costato altri trentamila dollari in nuove opere, dove avrei ottenuto la materia prima per un centesimo. Capii subito che quello era il punto su cui concentrarmi; che avevo solo la possibilità di vendere qualcosa che non avevo bisogno di comprare; qualcosa che poteva essere quasi regalato come i vecchi fiammiferi usati. Pensai che sarebbe stato molto meglio lasciare agli altri il compito di allevare il bestiame e vendermi i loro scarti per quasi niente, così avrei potuto procedere a trasformarli in merci. Così mi misi subito all’opera e riuscii al primo tentativo con un aumento di settecentocinquantunomila dollari».

“Seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars,” murmured Owen Hood. “How soothing it all seems.”

“I reckon those mutts didn’t get on to what they were selling me,” continued Mr. Oates, “or didn’t have the pep to use it that way themselves; for though it was the sure-enough hot tip, it isn’t everybody who would have thought of it. When I was in pork, of course, I wanted the other guys out; but just now I wasn’t putting anything on pork, but only on just that part of a pig I wanted and they didn’t want. By notifying all your pig farmers I was able to import nine hundred and twenty-five thousand pigs’ ears this fall, and I guess I can get consignments all winter.”

Hood had some little legal experience with long-winded commercial witnesses, and he was listening by this time with a cocked eyebrow and an attention much sharper than the dreamy ecstasy with which the poetic Pierce was listening to the millionaire’s monologue, as if to the wordless music of some ever-murmuring brook.

“Excuse me,” said Hood earnestly, “but did I understand you to say pigs’ ears?”

“That is so, Mr. Hood,” said the American with great patience and politeness. “I don’t know whether I gave you a sufficiently detailed description for you to catch on to the proposition, but—”

“Well,” murmured Pierce wistfully, “it sounded to me like a detailed description.”

“Pardon me,” said Hood, checking him with a frown. “I really want to understand this proposition of Mr. Oates. Do I understand that you bought pigs’ ears cheap, when the pigs were cut up for other purposes, and that you thought you could use them for some purpose of your own?”

“Sure!” said Mr. Enoch Oates, nodding. “And my purpose was about the biggest thing in fancy goods ever done in the States. In the publicity line there’s nothing like saying you can do what folks say can’t be done. Flying in the face of proverbs instead of providence, I reckon. It catches on at once. We got to work, and got out the first advertisement in no time; just a blank space with ‘We Can Do It’ in the middle. Got folks wondering for a week what it was.”

“I hope, sir,” said Pierce in a low voice, “that you will not carry sound commercial principles so far as to keep us wondering for a week what it was.”

“Well,” said Oates, “we found we could subject the pigskin and bristles to a new gelat’nous process for making artificial silk, and we figured that publicity would do the rest. We came out with the second set of posters: ‘She Wants it Now’… ‘The Most Wonderful Woman on Earth is waiting by the Old Fireside, hoping you’ll bring her home a Pig’s Whisper Purse.’”

“A purse!” gasped Hilary.

“I see you’re on the notion,” proceeded the unmoved American. “We called ‘em Pig’s Whisper Purses after the smartest and most popular poster we ever had: ‘There was a Lady Loved a Swine.’ You know the nursery rhyme, I guess; featured a slap-up princess whispering in a pig’s ear. I tell you there isn’t a smart woman in the States now that can do without one of our pig-silk purses, and all because it upsets the proverb. Why, see here—”

Hilary Pierce had sprung wildly to his feet with a sort of stagger and clutched at the American’s arm.

“Found! Found!” he cried hysterically. “Oh, sir, I implore you to take the chair! Do, do take the chair!”

“Take the chair!” repeated the astonished millionaire, who was already almost struggling in his grasp. “Really, gentlemen, I hadn’t supposed the proceedings were so formal as to require a chairman, but in any case—”

It could hardly be said, however, that the proceedings were formal. Mr. Hilary Pierce had the appearance of forcibly dragging Mr. Enoch Oates in the direction of the large padded arm-chair, that had always stood empty at the top of the club table, uttering cries which, though incoherent, appeared to be partly apologetic.

“No offence,” he gasped. “Hope no misunderstanding… Honoris causa… you, you alone are worthy of that seat… the club has found its king and justified its title at last.”

Here the Colonel intervened and restored order. Mr. Oates departed in peace; but Mr. Hilary Pierce was still simmering.

“And that is the end of our quiet, ordinary business man,” he cried. “Such is the behaviour of our monochrome and unobtrusive background.” His voice rose to a sort of wail. “And we thought we were dotty! We deluded ourselves with the hope that we were pretty well off our chump! Lord have mercy on us! American big business rises to a raving idiocy compared with which we are as sane as the beasts of the field. The modern commercial world is far madder than anything we can do to satirize it.”

“Well,” said the Colonel good-humouredly, “we’ve done some rather ridiculous things ourselves.”

“Yes, yes,” cried Pierce excitedly, “but we did them to make ourselves ridiculous. That unspeakable man is wholly, serenely serious. He thinks those maniacal monkey tricks are the normal life of man. Your argument really answers itself. We did the maddest things we could think of, meaning them to look mad. But they were nothing like so mad as what a modern business man does in the way of business.”

“Perhaps it’s the American business man,” said White, “who’s too keen to see the humour of it.”

“Nonsense,” said Crane. “Millions of Americans have a splendid sense of humour.”

“Then how fortunate are we,” said Pierce reverently, “through whose lives this rare, this ineffable, this divine being has passed.”

“Passed away for ever, I suppose,” said Hood with a sigh. “I fear the Colonel must be our only background once more.”

Colonel Crane was frowning thoughtfully, and at the last words his frown deepened to disapproval. He puffed at his smouldering cigar and then, removing it, said abruptly:

“I suppose you fellows have forgotten how I came to be a background? I mean, why I rather approve of people being backgrounds.”

“I remember something you said a long time ago,” replied Hood. “Hilary must have been in long-clothes at that time.”

«Settecentocinquantunmila dollari», mormorò Owen Hood. «Come suona tutto rasserenante.»

«Mi sa che quei babbei non hanno afferrato cosa mi stavano vendendo», proseguì il signor Oates, «o non avevano lo sprint per usarlo a quel modo loro stessi; perché, benché fosse la dritta più sicura che ci sia, non è chiunque che ci avrebbe pensato. Quando trattavo il maiale, naturalmente volevo gli altri fuori dai piedi; ma proprio ora non puntavo nulla sul maiale, ma solo su quella precisa parte del maiale che io volevo e loro non volevano. Avvertendo tutti i vostri allevatori di maiali, sono riuscito a importare quest’autunno novecentoventicinquemila orecchie di maiale, e credo di poter avere partite per tutto l’inverno.»

Hood aveva una certa piccola esperienza legale coi testimoni commerciali prolissi, e a questo punto ascoltava con un sopracciglio inarcato e un’attenzione assai più acuta della sognante estasi con cui il poetico Pierce ascoltava il monologo del milionario, come se fosse la musica senza parole di qualche ruscello dall’eterno mormorio.

«Mi scusi», disse Hood con serietà, «ma ho capito bene che ha detto orecchie di maiale?»

«Proprio così, signor Hood», disse l’americano con grande pazienza e cortesia. «Non so se le ho dato una descrizione abbastanza dettagliata perché lei afferrasse la proposta, ma…»

«Beh», mormorò Pierce con aria trasognata, «a me è suonata come una descrizione dettagliata.»

«Mi perdoni», disse Hood, trattenendolo con un cipiglio. «Voglio davvero capire questa proposta del signor Oates. Devo intendere che lei ha comprato le orecchie di maiale a buon mercato, quando i maiali venivano macellati per altri scopi, e che pensava di poterle usare per qualche suo scopo personale?»

«Sicuro!» disse il signor Enoch Oates, annuendo. «E il mio scopo era press’a poco la cosa più grossa mai realizzata negli Stati Uniti nel ramo della fantasia. Nel campo della pubblicità non c’è niente come dire che si può fare ciò che la gente dice non si possa fare. Sfidare i proverbi anziché la provvidenza, direi. Fa presa all’istante. Ci mettemmo al lavoro, e sfornammo la prima réclame in un baleno: solo uno spazio bianco con “Noi Possiamo Farlo” nel mezzo. Tenemmo la gente per una settimana a domandarsi cosa fosse.»

«Spero, signore», disse Pierce a voce bassa, «che lei non spingerà i sani princìpi commerciali al punto di tenerci per una settimana a domandarci cosa fosse.»

«Beh», disse Oates, «scoprimmo che potevamo sottoporre la cotenna e le setole a un nuovo processo gelatinoso per fabbricare seta artificiale, e calcolammo che la pubblicità avrebbe fatto il resto. Uscimmo col secondo gruppo di manifesti: “Lei la Vuole Adesso”… “La Donna più Meravigliosa della Terra aspetta accanto al Vecchio Focolare, sperando che tu le porti a casa una Borsetta Sussurro di Maiale”.»

«Una borsetta!» sussultò Hilary.

«Vedo che ci siete arrivato», proseguì l’imperturbabile americano. «Le chiamammo Borsette Sussurro di Maiale dal più abile e popolare manifesto che avessimo mai avuto: “C’era una Dama che Amava un Maiale”. Conoscete la filastrocca, credo; ci figurava una principessa in gran ghingheri che sussurrava all’orecchio di un maiale. Vi dico che non c’è ormai una donna alla moda negli Stati Uniti che possa fare a meno di una delle nostre borsette in seta di maiale, e tutto perché capovolge il proverbio. Ecco, guardate qui…»

Hilary Pierce era balzato freneticamente in piedi con una specie di barcollamento e s’era aggrappato al braccio dell’americano.

«Trovato! Trovato!» gridò istericamente. «Oh, signore, la imploro di prendere la poltrona! Su, su, prenda la poltrona!»

«Prendere la poltrona!» ripeté lo stupefatto milionario, che stava già quasi dibattendosi nella sua stretta. «Davvero, signori, non avevo supposto che i lavori fossero tanto formali da richiedere un presidente, ma in ogni caso…»

Non si poteva certo dire, tuttavia, che i lavori fossero formali. Il signor Hilary Pierce aveva l’aria di trascinare a forza il signor Enoch Oates in direzione della grande poltrona imbottita, che era sempre rimasta vuota in capo alla tavola del club, emettendo grida che, per quanto incoerenti, parevano in parte di scusa.

«Senza offesa», ansimava. «Spero non ci siano malintesi… Honoris causa… lei, lei solo è degno di quel seggio… il club ha trovato il suo re e giustificato finalmente il suo titolo.»

Qui il colonnello intervenne e ristabilì l’ordine. Il signor Oates se ne andò in pace; ma il signor Hilary Pierce ribolliva ancora.

«Ed ecco la fine del nostro tranquillo, ordinario uomo d’affari», esclamò. «Tale è il comportamento del nostro sfondo monocromo e discreto.» La sua voce si levò in una specie di lamento. «E noi che credevamo d’essere svitati! Ci illudevamo con la speranza d’essere belli e fuori di testa! Signore, abbi pietà di noi! Il grande affare americano si eleva a un’idiozia delirante in confronto alla quale noi siamo sani come le bestie dei campi. Il moderno mondo commerciale è assai più folle di qualsiasi cosa possiamo fare per satireggiarlo.»

«Beh», disse il colonnello bonariamente, «anche noi abbiamo fatto qualche cosa piuttosto ridicola.»

«Sì, sì», gridò Pierce eccitato, «ma le facevamo per rendere ridicoli noi stessi. Quell’uomo indicibile è totalmente, serenamente serio. Crede che quei manicomiali giochetti da scimmia siano la vita normale dell’uomo. Il tuo argomento si risponde da sé. Noi facemmo le cose più folli che ci venissero in mente, con l’intenzione di farle apparire folli. Ma non erano niente di tanto folle quanto ciò che un moderno uomo d’affari fa nel modo degli affari.»

«Forse è l’uomo d’affari americano», disse White, «troppo pronto a coglierne il lato comico.»

«Sciocchezze», disse Crane. «Milioni di americani hanno uno splendido senso dell’umorismo.»

«Allora quanto siamo fortunati», disse Pierce con reverenza, «attraverso le cui vite è passato questo raro, questo ineffabile, questo divino essere.»

«Passato via per sempre, suppongo», disse Hood con un sospiro. «Temo che il colonnello debba tornare a essere il nostro unico sfondo.»

Il colonnello Crane aggrottava la fronte pensosamente, e alle ultime parole il suo cipiglio s’approfondì in disapprovazione. Tirò una boccata dal sigaro fumante e poi, togliendoselo di bocca, disse bruscamente:

«Suppongo che voialtri abbiate dimenticato come sia arrivato a essere uno sfondo. Voglio dire, perché piuttosto approvo che la gente sia uno sfondo.»

«Ricordo qualcosa che dicesti molto tempo fa», rispose Hood. «Hilary doveva essere in fasce a quel tempo.»

“I said I had found out something by going round the world,” said Crane. “You young people think I am an old Tory; but remember I am also an old traveller. Well, it’s part of the same thing. I’m a traditionalist because I’m a traveller. I told you when I came back to the club that I’d come back to the tribe. I told you the best man was the man who wore a nose-ring where nose-rings were worn.”

“I remember,” said Owen Hood.

“No, you forget,” said Crane rather gruffly. “You forget it when you talk about Enoch Oates the American. I’m no politician, thank God, and I shall look on with detachment if you dynamite him for being a millionaire. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t think half so much of money as old Normantowers, who thinks it’s too sacred to talk about. But you’re not dynamiting him for being a millionaire. You’re simply laughing at him for being an American. You’re laughing at him for being national and normal, for being a good citizen, a good tribesman, for wearing a nose-ring where nose-rings are worn.

“I say… Kuklux, you know,” remonstrated Wilding White in his hazy way. “Americans wouldn’t be flattered—”

“Do you suppose you haven’t got a nose-ring?” cried Crane so sharply that the clergyman started from his trance and made a mechanical gesture as if to feel for that feature. “Do you suppose a man like you doesn’t carry his nationality as plain as the nose on his face? Do you think a man as hopelessly English as you are wouldn’t be laughed at in America? You can’t be a good Englishman without being a good joke. The better Englishman you are the more of a joke you are; but still it’s better to be better. Nose-rings are funny to people who don’t wear ‘em. Nations are funny to people who don’t belong to ‘em. But it’s better to wear a nose-ring than to be a cosmopolitan crank who cuts off his nose to spite his face.”

This being by far the longest speech the Colonel had ever delivered since the day he returned from his tropical travels long ago, his old friend looked at him with a certain curiosity; even his old friends hardly understood how much he had been roused in defence of a guest and of his own deep delicacies about the point of hospitality. He went on with undiminished warmth:

“Well, it’s like that with poor Oates. He has, as we see it, certain disproportions, certain insensibilities, certain prejudices that stand out in our eyes like deformities. They offend you; they offend me, possibly rather more than they do you. You young revolutionists think you’re very liberal and universal; but the only result is that you’re narrow and national without knowing it. We old fogeys know our tastes are narrow and national; but we know they are only tastes. And we know, at any rate I know, that Oates is far more likely to be an honest man, a good husband and a good father, because he stinks of the rankest hickory patch in the Middle West, than if he were some fashionable New Yorker pretending to be an English aristocrat or playing the aesthete in Florence.”

“Don’t say a good husband,” pleaded Pierce with a faint shudder. “It reminds me of the grand slap-up advertisement of the Pig’s Whisper. How do you feel about that, my dear Colonel? The Most Wonderful Woman on Earth Waiting by the Old Fireside—”

“It makes my flesh creep,” replied Crane. “It chills me to the spine. I feel I would rather die than have anything to do with it. But that has nothing to do with my point. I don’t belong to the tribe who wear nose-rings; nor to the tribe who talk through their noses.”

“Well, aren’t you a little thankful for that?” asked White.

“I’m thankful I can be fair in spite of it,” answered Crane. “When I put a cabbage on my head, I didn’t expect people not to stare at it. And I know that each one of us in a foreign land is a foreigner, and a thing to be stared at.”

“What I don’t understand about him,” said Hood, “is the sort of things he doesn’t mind having stared at. How can people tolerate all that vulgar, reeking, gushing commercial cant everywhere? How can a man talk about the Old Fireside? It’s obscene. The police ought to interfere.”

“And that’s just where you’re wrong,” said the Colonel. “It’s vulgar enough and mad enough and obscene enough if you like. But it’s not cant. I have travelled amongst these wild tribes, for years on end; and I tell you emphatically it is not cant. And if you want to know, just ask your extraordinary American friend about his own wife and his own relatively Old Fireside. He won’t mind. That’s the extraordinary part of it.”

“What does all this really mean, Colonel?” asked Hilary Pierce.

“It means, my boy,” answered the Colonel, “that I think you owe our guest an apology.”

So it came about that there was an epilogue, as there had been a prologue, to the drama of the entrance and exit of Mr. Enoch B. Oates; an epilogue which in its turn became a prologue to the later dramas of the League of the Long Bow. For the words of the Colonel had a certain influence on the Captain, and the actions of the Captain had a certain influence on the American millionaire; and so the whole machinery of events was started afresh by that last movement over the nuts and wine, when Colonel Crane had stirred moodily in his seat and taken his cigar out of his mouth.

Hilary Pierce was an amiable and even excessively optimistic young man by temperament, in spite of his pugnacity; he would really have been the last man in the world to wish to hurt the feelings of a harmless stranger; and he had a deep and almost secret respect for the opinions of the older soldier. So, finding himself soon afterwards passing the great gilded gateways of the highly American hotel that was the London residence of the American, he paused a moment in hesitation and then went in and gave his name to various overpowering officials in uniforms that might have been those of the German General Staff. He was relieved when the large American came out to meet him with a simple and lumbering affability, and offered his large limp hand as if there had never been a shadow of misunderstanding. It was somehow borne in upon Pierce that his own rather intoxicated behaviour that evening had merely been noted down along with the architectural styles and the mellow mediaevalism of the pig-sty, as part of the fantasies of a feudal land. All the antics of the Lunatic Asylum had left the American traveller with the impression that similar parlour games were probably being played that evening in all the parlours of England. Perhaps there was something, after all, in Crane’s suggestion that every nation assumes that every other nation is a sort of mild madhouse.

«Ho detto che avevo scoperto qualcosa girando il mondo», disse Crane. «Voialtri giovani mi credete un vecchio Tory; ma ricordate che sono anche un vecchio viaggiatore. Ebbene, è tutt’uno. Sono un tradizionalista perché sono un viaggiatore. Vi dissi, quando tornai al circolo, che ero tornato alla tribù. Vi dissi che l’uomo migliore era colui che portava l’anello al naso là dove si portano gli anelli al naso.»

«Ricordo», disse Owen Hood.

«No, dimenticate», ribatté Crane piuttosto burbero. «Lo dimenticate quando parlate di Enoch Oates l’americano. Non sono un politico, grazie a Dio, e guarderò con distacco se lo farete saltare in aria per il fatto d’essere un milionario. In verità egli non tiene al denaro neppure la metà di quanto ci tenga il vecchio Normantowers, che lo reputa troppo sacro per parlarne. Ma voi non lo fate saltare in aria perché è un milionario. Voi semplicemente lo deridete perché è un americano. Lo deridete perché è nazionale e normale, perché è un buon cittadino, un buon membro della tribù, perché porta l’anello al naso là dove si portano gli anelli al naso.»

«Dico io… Kuklux, sapete», obiettò Wilding White nel suo modo nebuloso. «Gli americani non ne sarebbero lusingati…»

«Credete forse di non avere un anello al naso voi?» esclamò Crane con tale asprezza che il curato trasalì dalla sua trance e fece un gesto meccanico come per tastarsi quel lineamento. «Credete forse che un uomo come voi non porti la propria nazionalità chiara come il naso in mezzo alla faccia? Credete che un uomo inguaribilmente inglese come siete voi non verrebbe deriso in America? Non si può essere un buon inglese senza essere una buona barzelletta. Più siete buon inglese, più siete barzelletta; eppure è meglio essere migliori. Gli anelli al naso fanno ridere chi non li porta. Le nazioni fanno ridere chi non vi appartiene. Ma è meglio portare un anello al naso che essere un maniaco cosmopolita che si taglia il naso per far dispetto alla propria faccia.»

Essendo questo di gran lunga il più lungo discorso che il Colonnello avesse mai tenuto dal giorno in cui era tornato dai suoi viaggi tropicali tanto tempo addietro, il suo vecchio amico lo guardò con una certa curiosità; perfino i suoi vecchi amici comprendevano a stento quanto egli si fosse infervorato in difesa di un ospite e delle proprie profonde delicatezze intorno al punto d’onore dell’ospitalità. Egli proseguì con calore immutato:

«Ebbene, è così anche col povero Oates. Egli ha, come noi la vediamo, certe sproporzioni, certe insensibilità, certi pregiudizi che spiccano ai nostri occhi come deformità. Offendono voi; offendono me, forse un po’ più di quanto offendano voi. Voialtri giovani rivoluzionari vi credete assai liberali e universali; ma il solo risultato è che siete gretti e nazionali senza saperlo. Noi vecchi barbogi sappiamo che i nostri gusti sono gretti e nazionali; ma sappiamo che sono soltanto gusti. E sappiamo, o almeno io so, che Oates ha assai più probabilità di essere un uomo onesto, un buon marito e un buon padre, proprio perché puzza del più rancido angolo di noce del Middle West, che se fosse un qualche newyorkese alla moda che finge di essere un aristocratico inglese o fa l’esteta a Firenze.»

«Non dite un buon marito», implorò Pierce con un lieve brivido. «Mi ricorda la sfarzosa réclame del Pig’s Whisper. Che ne pensate, mio caro Colonnello? La Donna Più Meravigliosa Della Terra Che Aspetta Accanto al Vecchio Focolare…»

«Mi fa venire la pelle d’oca», replicò Crane. «Mi gela lungo la spina dorsale. Sento che preferirei morire piuttosto che averci a che fare. Ma questo nulla ha a che vedere col mio punto. Io non appartengo alla tribù di chi porta l’anello al naso; né alla tribù di chi parla col naso.»

«Ebbene, non ne siete un poco grato?» chiese White.

«Sono grato di poter essere giusto malgrado ciò», rispose Crane. «Quando mi misi un cavolo in testa, non mi aspettavo che la gente non lo fissasse. E so che ciascuno di noi, in terra straniera, è uno straniero, e una cosa da fissare.»

«Ciò che di lui non capisco», disse Hood, «è il genere di cose che non gli dispiace far fissare. Come può la gente tollerare dovunque tutta quella retorica commerciale volgare, fetida, sdolcinata? Come può un uomo parlare del Vecchio Focolare? È osceno. La polizia dovrebbe intervenire.»

«Ed è proprio qui che vi sbagliate», disse il Colonnello. «È abbastanza volgare, e abbastanza folle, e abbastanza oscena, se volete. Ma non è retorica vuota. Ho viaggiato tra queste tribù selvagge per anni e anni; e vi dico con enfasi che non è retorica vuota. E se volete saperlo, domandate pure al vostro straordinario amico americano della sua propria moglie e del suo proprio, relativamente Vecchio, Focolare. Non se ne avrà a male. È questa la parte straordinaria.»

«Che significa davvero tutto questo, Colonnello?» chiese Hilary Pierce.

«Significa, ragazzo mio», rispose il Colonnello, «che credo dobbiate al nostro ospite delle scuse.»

Così avvenne che vi fu un epilogo, come vi era stato un prologo, al dramma dell’entrata e dell’uscita di Mr. Enoch B. Oates; un epilogo che a sua volta divenne un prologo ai drammi successivi della Lega del Lungo Arco. Poiché le parole del Colonnello ebbero una certa influenza sul Capitano, e le azioni del Capitano ebbero una certa influenza sul milionario americano; e così l’intero meccanismo degli eventi fu rimesso in moto da quell’ultimo gesto sopra le noci e il vino, quando il Colonnello Crane si era agitato tetro sulla sedia e aveva tolto il sigaro dalla bocca.

Hilary Pierce era per temperamento un giovane amabile e persino eccessivamente ottimista, malgrado la sua combattività; sarebbe stato davvero l’ultimo uomo al mondo a voler ferire i sentimenti di un innocuo forestiero; e nutriva un rispetto profondo e quasi segreto per le opinioni del più anziano soldato. Così, trovandosi poco dopo a passare davanti ai grandi portali dorati del quanto mai americano albergo che era la residenza londinese dell’americano, si fermò un istante esitante e poi entrò e diede il proprio nome a vari funzionari intimidatori in uniformi che avrebbero potuto essere quelle dello Stato Maggiore tedesco. Fu sollevato quando il corpulento americano venne a incontrarlo con semplice e goffa affabilità, e gli porse la sua grande mano molle come se non vi fosse mai stata ombra di malinteso. In qualche modo Pierce si convinse che la propria condotta piuttosto alticcia di quella sera era stata semplicemente annotata insieme agli stili architettonici e al morbido medievalismo del porcile, come parte delle fantasie di una terra feudale. Tutte le buffonate del Manicomio avevano lasciato al viaggiatore americano l’impressione che simili giochi di società si stessero probabilmente giocando quella sera in tutti i salotti d’Inghilterra. Forse c’era qualcosa di vero, dopotutto, nella tesi di Crane secondo cui ogni nazione presume che ogni altra nazione sia una sorta di mite manicomio.

Mr. Enoch Oates received his guest with great hospitality and pressed on him cocktails of various occult names and strange colours, though he himself partook of nothing but a regimen of tepid milk.

Pierce fell into the confidence of Mr. Enoch Oates with a silent swiftness that made his brain reel with bewilderment. He was staggered like a man who had fallen suddenly through fifteen floors of a sky-scraper and found himself in somebody’s bedroom. At the lightest hint of the sort of thing to which Colonel Crane had alluded, the American opened himself with an expansiveness that was like some gigantic embrace. All the interminable tables of figures and calculations in dollars had for the moment disappeared; yet Oates was talking in the same easy and natural nasal drawl, very leisurely and a little monotonous, as he said:

“I’m married to the best and brightest woman God ever made, and I tell you it’s her and God between them that have made me, and I reckon she had the hardest part of it. We had nothing but a few sticks when I started; and it was the way she stood by that gave me the heart to risk even those on my own judgement of how things were going in the Street. I counted on a rise in Pork, and if it hadn’t risen I’d have been broke and I dare say in the jug. But she’s just wonderful. You should see her.”

He produced her photograph with a paralysing promptitude; it represented a very regal lady dressed up to the nines, probably for the occasion, with very brilliant eyes and an elaborate load of light hair.

“‘I believe in your star, Enoch,’ she said; ‘you stick to Pork,’” said Oates, with tender reminiscence, “and so we saw it through.”

Pierce, who had been speculating with involuntary irreverence on the extreme difficulty of conducting a love-affair or a sentimental conversation in which one party had to address the other as Enoch, felt quite ashamed of his cynicism when the Star of Pork shone with such radiance in the eyes of his new friend.

“It was a terrible time, but I stuck to Pork, sometimes feeling she could see clearer than I could; and of course she was right, and I’ve never known her wrong. Then came my great chance of making the combination and freezing out competition; and I was able to give her the sort of things she ought to have and let her take the lead as she should. I don’t care for society much myself; but I’m often glad on a late night at the office to ring her up and hear she’s enjoying it.”

He spoke with a ponderous simplicity that seemed to disarm and crush the criticism of a more subtle civilization. It was one of those things that are easily seen to be absurd; but even after they are seen to be absurd, they are still there. It may be, after all, that that is the definition of the great things.

“I reckon that’s what people mean by the romance of business,” continued Oates, “and though my business got bigger and bigger, it made me feel kinda pleased there had been a romance at the heart of it. It had to get bigger, because we wanted to make the combination water-tight all over the world. I guess I had to fix things up a bit with your politicians. But Congress men are alike all the world over, and it didn’t trouble me any.”

There was a not uncommon conviction among those acquainted with Captain Hilary Pierce that that ingenious young man was cracked. He did a great many things to justify the impression; and in one sense certainly had never shown any reluctance to make a fool of himself. But if he was a lunatic, he was none the less a very English lunatic. And the notion of talking about his most intimate affections, suddenly, to a foreigner in a hotel, merely because the conversation had taken that turn, was something that he found quite terrifying. And yet an instinct, an impulse running through all these developments, told him that a moment had come and that he must seize some opportunity that he hardly understood.

“Look here,” he said rather awkwardly, “I want to tell you something.”

He looked down at the table as he continued.

“You said just now you were married to the best woman in the world. Well, curiously enough, so am I. It’s a coincidence that often happens. But it’s a still more curious coincidence that, in our own quiet way, we went in for Pork too. She kept pigs at the back of the little country inn where I met her; and at one time it looked as if the pigs might have to be given up. Perhaps the inn as well. Perhaps the wedding as well. We were quite poor, as poor as you were when you started; and to the poor those extra modes of livelihood are often life. We might have been ruined; and the reason was, I gather, that you had gone in for Pork. But after all ours was the real pork; pork that walked about on legs. We made the bed for the pigs and filled the inside of the pig; you only bought and sold the name of the pig. You didn’t go to business with a live little pig under your arm or walk down Wall Street followed by a herd of swine. It was a phantom pig, the ghost of a pig, that was able to kill our real pig and perhaps us as well. Can you really justify the way in which your romance nearly ruined our romance? Don’t you think there must be something wrong somewhere?”

“Well,” said Oates after a very long silence, “that’s a mighty big question and will take a lot of discussing.”

But the end to which their discussion led must be left to reveal itself when the prostrate reader has recovered sufficient strength to support the story of The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green, which those who would endure to the end may read at some later date.

Mr. Enoch Oates accolse il suo ospite con grande ospitalità e gli premette addosso cocktail dai nomi occulti e dai colori strani, benché egli stesso non prendesse altro che un regime di latte tiepido.

Pierce cadde nella confidenza di Mr. Enoch Oates con una silenziosa rapidità che gli fece girare il cervello per lo sbigottimento. Fu sconvolto come un uomo che fosse precipitato d’improvviso attraverso quindici piani di un grattacielo e si ritrovasse nella camera da letto di qualcuno. Al più lieve accenno al genere di cose cui il Colonnello Crane aveva alluso, l’americano si aprì con un’espansività che era come un gigantesco abbraccio. Tutte le interminabili tabelle di cifre e di calcoli in dollari erano per il momento scomparse; eppure Oates parlava con la medesima placida e naturale cadenza nasale, molto posato e un po’ monotono, mentre diceva:

«Sono sposato con la donna migliore e più luminosa che Dio abbia mai fatto, e vi dico che sono lei e Dio insieme ad avermi fatto, e credo proprio che a lei sia toccata la parte più dura. Non avevamo che pochi cenci quando cominciai; e fu il modo in cui mi restò accanto a darmi il coraggio di rischiare persino quelli sul mio proprio giudizio di come andavano le cose nella Borsa. Contai su un rialzo del Maiale, e se non fosse salito sarei stato rovinato e, oso dire, in gattabuia. Ma lei è semplicemente meravigliosa. Dovreste vederla.»

Tirò fuori la fotografia di lei con una prontezza paralizzante; raffigurava una dama assai regale agghindata di tutto punto, probabilmente per l’occasione, con occhi vividissimi e un’elaborata massa di capelli chiari.

«“Credo nella tua stella, Enoch”, disse lei; “attieniti al Maiale”», disse Oates con tenera reminiscenza, «e così la portammo a termine.»

Pierce, che con involontaria irriverenza aveva riflettuto sull’estrema difficoltà di condurre una relazione amorosa o una conversazione sentimentale in cui una delle parti dovesse rivolgersi all’altra chiamandola Enoch, si vergognò del proprio cinismo quando la Stella del Maiale brillò con tanto splendore negli occhi del suo nuovo amico.

«Fu un tempo terribile, ma mi attenni al Maiale, sentendo talvolta che lei vedeva più chiaro di me; e naturalmente aveva ragione, e non l’ho mai conosciuta in errore. Poi venne la mia grande occasione di fare la combinazione e strozzare la concorrenza; e potei darle il genere di cose che le spettavano e lasciare che prendesse il comando come doveva. A me non importa granché della società; ma spesso, la sera tardi in ufficio, sono lieto di telefonarle e di sentire che se ne sta godendo.»

Parlava con una ponderosa semplicità che pareva disarmare e schiacciare la critica di una civiltà più sottile. Era una di quelle cose che si vedono facilmente essere assurde; ma anche dopo che le si è viste essere assurde, restano lì. Può darsi, dopotutto, che sia questa la definizione delle grandi cose.

«Credo che sia questo che la gente intende per il romanzo degli affari», proseguì Oates, «e per quanto i miei affari si facessero sempre più grandi, mi faceva un certo piacere che vi fosse stato un romanzo al loro cuore. Dovevano farsi più grandi, perché volevamo rendere la combinazione a tenuta stagna in tutto il mondo. Immagino che abbia dovuto sistemare un po’ le cose con i vostri politici. Ma i membri del Congresso sono uguali in tutto il mondo, e la cosa non mi turbò affatto.»

Vi era una convinzione non rara tra coloro che conoscevano il Capitano Hilary Pierce che quell’ingegnoso giovane fosse svitato. Faceva un gran numero di cose per giustificare tale impressione; e in un certo senso non aveva certo mai mostrato alcuna riluttanza a rendersi ridicolo. Ma se era un pazzo, era nondimeno un pazzo assai inglese. E l’idea di parlare dei propri più intimi affetti, così, d’improvviso, a uno straniero in un albergo, solo perché la conversazione aveva preso quella piega, era qualcosa che egli trovava del tutto terrificante. Eppure un istinto, un impulso che attraversava tutti questi sviluppi, gli diceva che era giunto un momento e che doveva cogliere una qualche occasione che egli stesso a stento comprendeva.

«Sentite», disse piuttosto goffamente, «voglio dirvi una cosa.»

Guardò giù verso il tavolo mentre proseguiva.

«Avete detto poco fa che eravate sposato con la donna migliore del mondo. Ebbene, per un curioso caso, lo sono anch’io. È una coincidenza che accade spesso. Ma è una coincidenza ancor più curiosa che, a modo nostro, tranquillamente, ci dedicammo anche noi al Maiale. Lei allevava maiali sul retro della piccola locanda di campagna dove la conobbi; e a un certo punto parve che i maiali si dovessero abbandonare. Forse anche la locanda. Forse anche le nozze. Eravamo assai poveri, poveri come lo eravate voi quando cominciaste; e per i poveri quei modi supplementari di guadagnarsi la vita sono spesso la vita stessa. Avremmo potuto essere rovinati; e la ragione era, da quanto capisco, che voi vi eravate dedicato al Maiale. Ma dopotutto il nostro era il vero maiale; maiale che camminava sulle proprie gambe. Noi facevamo il giaciglio per i maiali e riempivamo l’interno del maiale; voi non facevate che comprare e vendere il nome del maiale. Voi non andavate agli affari con un piccolo maiale vivo sotto il braccio, né scendevate per Wall Street seguito da un branco di porci. Era un maiale fantasma, il fantasma di un maiale, che poteva uccidere il nostro vero maiale e forse anche noi. Potete davvero giustificare il modo in cui il vostro romanzo per poco non rovinò il nostro? Non pensate che debba esserci qualcosa di sbagliato da qualche parte?»

«Ebbene», disse Oates dopo un lunghissimo silenzio, «questa è una domanda parecchio grossa e ci vorrà un bel po’ a discuterla.»

Ma il fine cui condusse la loro discussione dovrà rivelarsi da sé quando il prostrato lettore abbia recuperato forze sufficienti a sostenere la storia dell’Impensabile Teoria del Professor Green, che coloro i quali resisteranno fino in fondo potranno leggere in qualche data futura.

Chapter VI

The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green

If the present passage in the chronicles of the Long Bow seem but a side issue, an interlude and an idyll, a mere romantic episode lacking that larger structural achievement which gives solidity and hard actuality to the other stories, the reader is requested not to be hasty in his condemnation; for in the little love-story of Mr. Oliver Green is to be found, as in a parable, the beginning of the final apotheosis and last judgement of all these things.

It may well begin on a morning when the sunlight came late but brilliant, under the lifting of great clouds from a great grey sweep of wolds that grew purple as they dipped again into distance. Much of that mighty shape was striped and scored with ploughed fields, but a rude path ran across it, along which two figures could be seen in full stride outlined against the morning sky.

They were both tall; but beyond the fact that they had both once been professional soldiers, of rather different types and times, they had very little in common. By their ages they might almost have been father and son; and this would not have been contradicted by the fact that the younger appeared to be talking all the time, in a high, confident and almost crowing voice, while the elder only now and then put in a word. But they were not father and son; strangely enough they were really talking and walking together because they were friends. Those who know only too well their proceedings as narrated elsewhere would have recognized Colonel Crane, once of the Coldstream Guards, and Captain Pierce, late of the Flying Corps.

The young man appeared to be talking triumphantly about a great American capitalist whom he professed to have persuaded to see the error of his ways. He talked rather as if he had been slumming.

“I’m very proud of it, I can tell you,” he said. “Anybody can produce a penitent murderer. It’s something to produce a penitent millionaire. And I do believe that poor Enoch Oates has seen the light (thanks to my conversations at lunch); since I talked to him, Oates is another and a better man.”

“Sown his wild oats, in fact,” remarked Crane.

“Well,” replied the other. “In a sense they were very quiet oats. Almost what you might call Quaker Oats. He was a Puritan and a Prohibitionist and a Pacifist and an Internationalist; in short, everything that is in darkness and the shadow of death. But what you said about him was quite right. His heart’s in the right place. It’s on his sleeve. That’s why I preached the gospel to the noble savage and made him a convert.”

“But what did you convert him to?” inquired the other.

“Private property,” replied Pierce promptly. “Being a millionaire he had never heard of it. But when I explained the first elementary idea of it in a simple form, he was quite taken with the notion. I pointed out that he might abandon robbery on a large scale and create property on a small scale. He felt it was very revolutionary, but he admitted it was right. Well, you know, he’d bought this big English estate out here. He was going to play the philanthropist, and have a model estate with all the regular trimmings; heads hygienically shaved by machinery every morning; and the cottagers admitted once a month into their own front gardens and told to keep off the grass. But I said to him: ‘If you’re going to give things to people, why not give ‘em? If you give your friend a plant in a pot, you don’t send him an inspector from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vegetables to see he waters it properly. If you give your friend a box of cigars, you don’t make him write a monthly report of how many he smokes a day. Can’t you be a little generous with your generosity? Why don’t you use your money to make free men instead of to make slaves? Why don’t you give your tenants their land and have done with it, or let ‘em have it very cheap?’ And he’s done it; he’s really done it. He’s created hundreds of small proprietors, and changed the whole of this countryside. That’s why I want you to come up and see one of the small farms.”

“Yes,” said Colonel Crane, “I should like to see the farm.”

“There’s a lot of fuss about it, too; there’s the devil of a row,” went on the young man, in very high spirits. “Lots of big combines and things are trying to crush the small farmers with all sorts of tricks; they even complain of interference by an American. You can imagine how much Rosenbaum Low and Goldstein and Guggenheimer must be distressed by the notion of a foreigner interfering in England. I want to know how a foreigner could interfere less than by giving back their land to the English people and clearing out. They all put it on to me; and right they are. I regard Oates as my property; my convert; captive of my bow and spear.”

“Captive of your long bow, I imagine,” said the Colonel. “I bet you told him a good many things that nobody but a shrewd business man would have been innocent enough to believe.”

“If I use the long bow,” replied Pierce with dignity, “it is a weapon with heroic memories proper to a yeoman of England. With what more fitting weapon could we try to establish a yeomanry?”

“There is something over there,” said Colonel quietly, “that looks to me rather like another sort of weapon.”

They had by this time come in full sight of the farm buildings which crowned the long slope; and beyond a kitchen-garden and an orchard rose a thatched roof with a row of old-fashioned lattice windows under it; the window at the end standing open. And out of this window at the edge of the block of building protruded a big black object, rigid and apparently cylindrical, thrust out above the garden and dark against the morning daylight.

“A gun!” cried Pierce involuntarily; “looks just like a howitzer; or is it an anti-aircraft gun?”

“Anti-airman gun, no doubt,” said Crane; “they heard you were coming down and took precautions.”

Capitolo VI

L’Impensabile Teoria del Professor Green

Se il presente passo nelle cronache del Lungo Arco dovesse sembrare soltanto un episodio marginale, un intermezzo e un idillio, un mero episodio romantico privo di quella più ampia costruzione strutturale che dà solidità e dura concretezza alle altre storie, si prega il lettore di non essere frettoloso nella sua condanna; poiché nella piccola storia d’amore di Mr. Oliver Green si trova, come in una parabola, l’inizio dell’apoteosi finale e dell’ultimo giudizio di tutte queste cose.

Ben può cominciare in un mattino in cui la luce del sole giunse tardi ma splendente, sotto il sollevarsi di grandi nubi da un’ampia grigia distesa di brughiere che si facevano purpuree mentre di nuovo digradavano nella lontananza. Gran parte di quella possente forma era striata e solcata di campi arati, ma un rozzo sentiero la attraversava, lungo il quale si vedevano due figure a passo spedito stagliate contro il cielo del mattino.

Erano entrambi alti; ma al di là del fatto che entrambi erano stati un tempo soldati di professione, di tipi e di epoche piuttosto diversi, avevano assai poco in comune. Dalle loro età avrebbero potuto quasi essere padre e figlio; e ciò non sarebbe stato smentito dal fatto che il più giovane pareva parlare in continuazione, con voce alta, sicura e quasi trionfante, mentre il più vecchio ficcava dentro una parola solo di tanto in tanto. Ma non erano padre e figlio; per quanto strano, in verità parlavano e camminavano insieme perché erano amici. Coloro che conoscono fin troppo bene le loro imprese, narrate altrove, vi avrebbero riconosciuto il Colonnello Crane, già delle Guardie Coldstream, e il Capitano Pierce, ex del Corpo d’Aviazione.

Il giovane pareva parlare trionfalmente di un grande capitalista americano che vantava di aver persuaso a riconoscere l’errore delle proprie vie. Ne parlava piuttosto come se avesse fatto opera di beneficenza nei bassifondi.

«Ne sono molto orgoglioso, ve l’assicuro», disse. «Chiunque può produrre un assassino pentito. È già qualcosa produrre un milionario pentito. E credo davvero che il povero Enoch Oates abbia visto la luce (grazie ai miei discorsi a pranzo); da quando gli ho parlato, Oates è un altro uomo, e migliore.»

«In sostanza ha seminato la sua avena selvatica», osservò Crane.

«Ebbene», replicò l’altro. «In un certo senso era avena assai tranquilla. Quasi ciò che si potrebbe chiamare Quaker Oats. Era un Puritano e un Proibizionista e un Pacifista e un Internazionalista; in breve, tutto ciò che sta nelle tenebre e nell’ombra della morte. Ma quel che dicevate di lui era del tutto giusto. Ha il cuore al posto giusto. Ce l’ha sulla manica, ben in vista. È per questo che ho predicato il vangelo al nobile selvaggio e ne ho fatto un convertito.»

«Ma a che cosa lo avete convertito?» domandò l’altro.

«Alla proprietà privata», replicò Pierce prontamente. «Essendo un milionario, non ne aveva mai sentito parlare. Ma quando gliene spiegai la prima elementare idea in forma semplice, ne fu del tutto conquistato. Gli feci notare che poteva abbandonare la rapina su larga scala e creare proprietà su piccola scala. Sentì che era cosa assai rivoluzionaria, ma ammise che era giusta. Ebbene, sapete, aveva comprato quella grande tenuta inglese qui fuori. Voleva fare il filantropo, e avere una tenuta modello con tutte le regolari guarnizioni; teste rasate igienicamente a macchina ogni mattina; e i mezzadri ammessi una volta al mese nei loro stessi giardinetti davanti a casa, con l’ordine di non calpestare l’erba. Ma io gli dissi: “Se avete intenzione di dare le cose alla gente, perché non dargliele? Se date a un amico una pianta in vaso, non gli mandate un ispettore della Società per la Prevenzione della Crudeltà sui Vegetali a controllare che la annaffi come si deve. Se date a un amico una scatola di sigari, non gli fate scrivere un rapporto mensile su quanti ne fuma al giorno. Non potreste essere un poco generoso con la vostra generosità? Perché non usate il vostro denaro per fare uomini liberi invece che per fare schiavi? Perché non date ai vostri affittuari la loro terra e farla finita, o non gliela lasciate a bassissimo prezzo?” E l’ha fatto; l’ha fatto davvero. Ha creato centinaia di piccoli proprietari, e ha mutato l’intera campagna. Ecco perché voglio che veniate a vedere una delle piccole fattorie.»

«Sì», disse il Colonnello Crane, «mi piacerebbe vedere la fattoria.»

«C’è un gran trambusto intorno alla cosa, per giunta; c’è un putiferio del diavolo», proseguì il giovane, di ottimo umore. «Un mucchio di grandi cartelli e simili cercano di schiacciare i piccoli agricoltori con ogni sorta di trucchi; si lamentano perfino dell’ingerenza di un americano. Potete immaginare quanto Rosenbaum Low e Goldstein e Guggenheimer debbano essere addolorati all’idea di uno straniero che si intromette in Inghilterra. Vorrei sapere come uno straniero potrebbe intromettersi meno che restituendo la loro terra al popolo inglese e togliendosi di mezzo. Danno tutta la colpa a me; e hanno ragione. Considero Oates come mia proprietà; il mio convertito; prigioniero del mio arco e della mia lancia.»

«Prigioniero del vostro lungo arco, immagino», disse il Colonnello. «Scommetto che gli avete raccontato un bel po’ di cose che nessuno tranne uno scaltro uomo d’affari sarebbe stato abbastanza ingenuo da credere.»

«Se io uso il lungo arco», replicò Pierce con dignità, «è un’arma dalle memorie eroiche, propria di un piccolo proprietario terriero d’Inghilterra. Con quale arma più acconcia potremmo tentare di ristabilire una piccola proprietà contadina?»

«C’è qualcosa laggiù», disse il Colonnello con calma, «che a me sembra piuttosto un’altra sorta d’arma.»

Erano ormai giunti in piena vista degli edifici della fattoria che coronavano il lungo pendio; e oltre un orto e un frutteto sorgeva un tetto di paglia con sotto una fila di finestre a graticcio all’antica; la finestra all’estremità stava aperta. E fuori da questa finestra, all’angolo del corpo di fabbrica, sporgeva un grande oggetto nero, rigido e apparentemente cilindrico, proteso al di sopra dell’orto e scuro contro la luce del mattino.

«Un cannone!» esclamò Pierce involontariamente; «sembra proprio un obice; o è un cannone antiaereo?»

«Un cannone anti-aviatore, senza dubbio», disse Crane; «hanno saputo che stavate arrivando e hanno preso le loro precauzioni.»

“But what the devil can he want with a gun?” muttered Pierce, peering at the dark outline.

“And who the devil is HE, if it comes to that?” said the Colonel.

“Why, that window,” explained Pierce, “that’s the window of the room they’ve let to a paying guest, I know. Man of the name of Green, I understand; rather a recluse, and I suppose some sort of crank.”

“Not an anti-armament crank, anyhow,” said the Colonel.

“By George!” said Pierce, whistling softly. “I wonder whether things really have moved faster than we could fancy! I wonder whether it’s a revolution or a civil war beginning after all. I suppose we are an army ourselves; I represent the Air Force and you represent the infantry.”

“You represent the infants,” answered the Colonel. “You’re too young for this world; you and your revolutions! As a matter of fact, it isn’t a gun, though it does look rather like one. I see now what it is.”

“And what in the world is it?” asked his friend.

“It’s a telescope,” said Crane. “One of those very big telescopes they usually have in observatories.”

“Couldn’t be partly a gun and partly a telescope?” pleaded Pierce, reluctant to abandon his first fancy. “I’ve often seen the phrase ‘shooting stars,’ but perhaps I’ve got the grammar and sense of it wrong. The young man lodging with the farmer may be following one of the local sports—the local substitute for duck-shooting!”

“What in the world are you talking about?” growled the other.

“Their lodger may be shooting the stars,” explained Pierce.

“Hope their lodger isn’t shooting the moon,” said the flippant Crane.

As they spoke there came towards them, through the green and twinkling twilight of the orchard, a young woman with copper-coloured hair and a square and rather striking face, whom Pierce saluted respectfully as the daughter of the house. He was very punctilious upon the point that these new peasant farmers must be treated like small squires and not like tenants or serfs.

“I see your friend Mr. Green has got his telescope out,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said the girl. “They say Mr. Green is a great astronomer.”

“I doubt if you ought to call me ‘sir,’” said Pierce reflectively. “It suggests rather the forgotten feudalism than the new equality. Perhaps you might oblige me by saying ‘Yes, citizen,’ then we could continue our talk about Citizen Green on an equal footing. By the way, pardon me, let me present Citizen Crane.”

Citizen Crane bowed politely to the young woman without any apparent enthusiasm for his new title; but Pierce went on.

“Rather rum to call ourselves citizens when we’re all so glad to be out of the city. We really want some term suitable to rural equality. The Socialists have spoilt ‘Comrade’; you can’t be a comrade without a Liberty tie and a pointed beard. Morris had a good notion of one man calling another Neighbour. That sounds a little more rustic. I suppose,” he added wistfully to the girl, “I suppose I could not induce you to call me Gaffer?”

“Unless I’m mistaken,” observed Crane, “that’s your astronomer wandering about in the garden. Thinks he’s a botanist, perhaps. Appropriate to the name of Green.”

“Oh, he often wanders in the garden and down to the meadow and the cowsheds,” said the young woman. “He talks to himself a good deal, explaining a great theory he’s got. He explains it to everybody he meets, too. Sometimes he explains it to me when I’m milking the cow.”

“Perhaps you can explain it to us?” said Pierce.

“Not so bad as that,” she said, laughing. “It’s something like that Fourth Dimension they talk about. But I’ve no doubt he’ll explain it to you if you meet him.”

“Not for me,” said Pierce. “I’m a simple peasant proprietor and ask nothing but Three Dimensions and a Cow.”

“Cow’s the Fourth Dimension, I suppose,” said Crane.

“I must go and attend to the Fourth Dimension,” she said with a smile.

“Peasants all live by patchwork, running two or three side-shows,” observed Pierce. “Curious sort of livestock on the farm. Think of people living on a cow and chickens and an astronomer.”

As he spoke the astronomer approached along the path by which the girl had just passed. His eyes were covered with huge horn spectacles of a dim blue colour; for he was warned to save his eyesight for his starry vigils. This gave a misleading look of morbidity to a face that was naturally frank and healthy; and the figure, though stooping, was stalwart. He was very absent-minded. Every now and then he looked at the ground and frowned as if he did not like it.

Oliver Green was a very young professor, but a very old young man. He had passed from science as the hobby of a schoolboy to science as the ambition of a middle-aged man, without any intermediate holiday of youth. Moreover, his monomania had been fixed and frozen by success; at least by a considerable success for a man of his years. He was already a fellow of the chief learned societies connected with his subject, when there grew up in his mind the grand, universal, all-sufficing Theory which had come to fill the whole of his life as the daylight fills the day. If we attempted the exposition of that theory here, it is doubtful whether the result would resemble daylight. Professor Green was always ready to prove it; but if we were to set out the proof in this place, the next four or five pages would be covered with closely printed columns of figures, brightened here and there by geometrical designs, such as seldom form part of the text of a romantic story. Suffice it to say that the theory had something to do with Relativity and the reversal of the relations between the stationary and the moving object. Pierce, the aviator, who had passed much of his time on moving objects not without the occasional anticipation of bumping into stationary objects, talked to Green a little on the subject. Being interested in scientific aviation, he was nearer to the abstract sciences than were his friends, Crane with his hobby of folk-lore or Hood with his love of classic literature or Wilding White with his reading of the mystics. But the young aviator frankly admitted that Professor Green soared high into the heavens of the Higher Mathematics, far beyond the flight of his little aeroplane.

«Ma che diavolo può volersene fare di un cannone?» mormorò Pierce, scrutando l’oscuro profilo.

«E chi diavolo è LUI, se è per questo?» disse il Colonnello.

«Ma quella finestra», spiegò Pierce, «quella è la finestra della camera che hanno affittato a un pensionante, lo so. Un tale di nome Green, mi risulta; piuttosto un eremita, e immagino qualche sorta di stravagante.»

«Non uno stravagante antimilitarista, in ogni caso», disse il Colonnello.

«Per Giove!» disse Pierce, fischiettando piano. «Mi chiedo se le cose non si siano mosse più in fretta di quanto potessimo immaginare! Mi chiedo se dopotutto stia cominciando una rivoluzione o una guerra civile. Immagino che siamo un esercito noi stessi; io rappresento l’Aeronautica e voi rappresentate la fanteria.»

«Voi rappresentate i lattanti», rispose il Colonnello. «Siete troppo giovane per questo mondo; voi e le vostre rivoluzioni! In verità, non è un cannone, benché ne abbia proprio l’aspetto. Ora vedo che cos’è.»

«E che cosa mai è?» chiese l’amico.

«È un telescopio», disse Crane. «Uno di quei telescopi molto grandi che di solito si hanno negli osservatori.»

«Non potrebbe essere in parte un cannone e in parte un telescopio?» implorò Pierce, riluttante ad abbandonare la sua prima fantasia. «Ho spesso incontrato l’espressione “stelle cadenti”, ma forse ne ho frainteso la grammatica e il senso. Il giovane che alloggia dal fattore potrebbe praticare uno degli sport locali… il surrogato locale della caccia all’anatra!»

«Ma di che diamine state parlando?» brontolò l’altro.

«Il loro pensionante potrebbe cacciare le stelle», spiegò Pierce.

«Spero che il loro pensionante non se la cacci all’inglese», disse il frivolo Crane.

Mentre parlavano venne loro incontro, attraverso il verde e scintillante crepuscolo del frutteto, una giovane donna dai capelli color rame e dal volto squadrato e piuttosto notevole, che Pierce salutò rispettosamente come la figlia di casa. Egli era assai puntiglioso sul punto che questi nuovi coltivatori contadini dovessero essere trattati come piccoli signorotti e non come affittuari o servi.

«Vedo che il vostro amico Mr. Green ha tirato fuori il suo telescopio», disse.

«Sì, signore», disse la ragazza. «Dicono che Mr. Green sia un grande astronomo.»

«Dubito che dovreste chiamarmi “signore”», disse Pierce meditabondo. «Suggerisce piuttosto il dimenticato feudalesimo che la nuova uguaglianza. Forse potreste farmi il favore di dire “Sì, cittadino”, e allora potremmo continuare il nostro discorso sul Cittadino Green su un piede di parità. A proposito, perdonatemi, lasciate che vi presenti il Cittadino Crane.»

Il Cittadino Crane si inchinò cortesemente alla giovane donna senza alcun apparente entusiasmo per il suo nuovo titolo; ma Pierce proseguì.

«Piuttosto buffo chiamarci cittadini quando siamo tutti così contenti di essere fuori dalla città. Ci vorrebbe davvero qualche termine adatto all’uguaglianza rurale. I Socialisti hanno rovinato “Compagno”; non si può essere compagni senza una cravatta della Libertà e una barba a punta. Morris aveva una buona idea, quella di chiamare un uomo Vicino. Suona un po’ più rustico. Immagino», aggiunse malinconico alla ragazza, «immagino che non potrei indurvi a chiamarmi Nonnetto?»

«Se non m’inganno», osservò Crane, «quello è il vostro astronomo che se ne va vagando nel giardino. Crede d’essere un botanico, forse. Appropriato al nome di Green.»

«Oh, spesso vaga nel giardino e giù fino al prato e alle stalle», disse la giovane donna. «Parla molto tra sé, spiegando una gran teoria che ha. La spiega anche a tutti quelli che incontra. A volte la spiega a me mentre mungo la mucca.»

«Forse potreste spiegarla a noi?» disse Pierce.

«Non fino a questo punto», disse lei, ridendo. «È qualcosa come quella Quarta Dimensione di cui parlano. Ma non ho dubbio che ve la spiegherà se lo incontrate.»

«Non per me», disse Pierce. «Sono un semplice piccolo proprietario contadino e non chiedo altro che Tre Dimensioni e una Mucca.»

«La Mucca è la Quarta Dimensione, immagino», disse Crane.

«Devo andare ad occuparmi della Quarta Dimensione», disse lei con un sorriso.

«I contadini vivono tutti di rappezzi, mandando avanti due o tre attività secondarie», osservò Pierce. «Curiosa sorta di bestiame in questa fattoria. Pensate a gente che vive di una mucca, di galline e di un astronomo.»

Mentre egli parlava l’astronomo si avvicinò lungo il sentiero per cui la ragazza era appena passata. I suoi occhi erano coperti da enormi occhiali di tartaruga di un color bluastro spento; poiché gli era stato raccomandato di risparmiare la vista per le sue veglie stellari. Ciò dava un ingannevole aspetto di morbosità a un volto che era per natura franco e sano; e la figura, benché curva, era robusta. Era molto distratto. Di tanto in tanto guardava il suolo e aggrottava le sopracciglia come se non gli piacesse.

Oliver Green era un professore assai giovane, ma un giovane assai vecchio. Era passato dalla scienza come passatempo di uno scolaretto alla scienza come ambizione di un uomo di mezz’età, senza alcuna intermedia vacanza di gioventù. Per di più, la sua monomania era stata fissata e congelata dal successo; almeno da un successo considerevole per un uomo dei suoi anni. Era già membro delle principali società dotte connesse alla sua materia, quando gli crebbe nella mente la grande, universale, onnisufficiente Teoria che era giunta a colmare l’intera sua vita come la luce del giorno colma il giorno. Se tentassimo qui l’esposizione di quella teoria, è dubbio che il risultato somiglierebbe alla luce del giorno. Il Professor Green era sempre pronto a dimostrarla; ma se dovessimo esporne la prova in questo luogo, le prossime quattro o cinque pagine sarebbero coperte di fitte colonne di cifre a stampa, rallegrate qua e là da disegni geometrici, quali di rado fanno parte del testo di una storia romantica. Basti dire che la teoria aveva a che fare con la Relatività e con l’inversione dei rapporti tra l’oggetto fermo e quello in moto. Pierce, l’aviatore, che aveva trascorso gran parte del suo tempo su oggetti in moto non senza l’occasionale previsione di schiantarsi contro oggetti fermi, ne parlò un poco con Green. Interessandosi di aviazione scientifica, era più vicino alle scienze astratte di quanto lo fossero i suoi amici, Crane col suo passatempo del folklore o Hood col suo amore per la letteratura classica o Wilding White con le sue letture dei mistici. Ma il giovane aviatore ammise francamente che il Professor Green si librava alto nei cieli della Matematica Superiore, assai oltre il volo del suo piccolo aeroplano.

The Professor had begun, as he always began, by saying that it was quite easy to explain; which was doubtless true, as he was always explaining it. But he often ended by affirming fallaciously that it was quite easy to understand, and it would be an exaggeration to say that it was always understood. Anyhow, he was just about to read his great paper on his great theory at the great Astronomical Congress that was to be held that year at Bath; which was one reason why he had pitched his astronomical camp, or emplaced his astronomical gun, in the house of Farmer Dale on the hills of Somerset. Mr. Enoch Oates could not but feel the lingering hesitation of the landlord when he heard that his proteges the Dales were about to admit an unknown stranger into their household. But Pierce sternly reminded him that this paternal attitude was a thing of the past and that a free peasant was free to let lodgings to a homicidal maniac if he liked. Nevertheless, Pierce was rather relieved to find the maniac was only an astronomer; but it would have been all the same if he had been an astrologer. Before coming to the farm, the astronomer had set up his telescope in much dingier places—in lodgings in Bloomsbury and the grimy buildings of a Midland University. He thought he was, and to a great extent he was, indifferent to his surroundings. But for all that the air and colour of those country surroundings were slowly and strangely sinking into him.

“The idea is simplicity itself,” he said earnestly, when Pierce rallied him about the theory. “It is only the proof that is, of course, a trifle technical. Put in a very crude and popular shape, it depends on the mathematical formula for the inversion of the sphere.”

“What we call turning the world upside down,” said Pierce. “I’m all in favour of it.”

“Everyone knows the idea of relativity applied to motion,” went on the Professor. “When you run out of a village in a motor-car, you might say that the village runs away from you.”

“The village does run away when Pierce is out motoring,” remarked Crane. “Anyhow, the villagers do. But he generally prefers to frighten them with an aeroplane.”

“Indeed?” said the astronomer with some interest. “An aeroplane would make an even better working model. Compare the movement of an aeroplane with what we call merely for convenience the fixity of the fixed stars.”

“I dare say they got a bit unfixed when Pierce bumped into them,” said the Colonel.

Professor Green sighed in a sad but patient spirit. He could not help being a little disappointed even with the most intelligent outsiders with whom he conversed. Their remarks were pointed but hardly to the point. He felt more and more that he really preferred those who made no remarks. The flowers and the trees made no remarks; they stood in rows and allowed him to lecture to them for hours on the fallacies of accepted astronomy. The cow made no remarks. The girl who milked the cow made no remarks; or, if she did, they were pleasant and kindly remarks, not intended to be clever. He drifted, as he had done many times before, in the direction of the cow.

The young woman who milked the cow was not in the common connotation what is meant by a milkmaid. Margery Dale was the daughter of a substantial farmer already respected in that county. She had been to school and learnt various polite things before she came back to the farm and continued to do the thousand things that she could have taught the schoolmasters. And something of this proportion or disproportion of knowledge was dawning on Professor Green, as he stood staring at the cow and talking, often in a sort of soliloquy. For he had a rather similar sensation of a great many other things growing up thickly like a jungle round his own particular thing; impressions and implications from all the girl’s easy actions and varied avocations. Perhaps he began to have a dim suspicion that he was the schoolmaster who was being taught.

The earth and the sky were already beginning to be enriched with evening; the blue was already almost a glow like apple-green behind the line of branching apple-trees; against it the bulk of the farm stood in a darker outline, and for the first time he realized something quaint or queer added to that outline by his own big telescope stuck up like a gun pointed at the moon. Somehow it looked, he could not tell why, like the beginning of a story. The hollyhocks also looked incredibly tall. To see what he would have called “flowers” so tall as that seemed like seeing a daisy or a dandelion as large as a lamp-post. He was positive there was nothing exactly like it in Bloomsbury. These tall flowers also looked like the beginning of a story— the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. Though he knew little enough of what influences were slowly sinking into him, he felt something apt in the last memory. Whatever was moving within him was something very far back, something that came before reading and writing. He had some dream, as from a previous life, of dark streaks of field under stormy clouds of summer and the sense that the flowers to be found there were things like gems. He was in that country home that every cockney child feels he has always had and never visited.

“I have to read my paper to-night,” he said abruptly. “I really ought to be thinking about it.”

“I do hope it will be a success,” said the girl; “but I rather thought you were always thinking about it.”

“Well, I was—generally,” he said in a rather dazed fashion; and indeed it was probably the first time that he had ever found himself fully conscious of not thinking about it. Of what he was thinking about he was by no means fully conscious.

“I suppose you have to be awfully clever even to understand it,” observed Margery Dale conversationally.

Il Professore aveva cominciato, come cominciava sempre, col dire che era assai facile spiegarla; il che era senza dubbio vero, poiché la stava sempre spiegando. Ma spesso finiva col dichiarare fallacemente che era assai facile capirla, e sarebbe un’esagerazione dire che fosse sempre capita. Comunque sia, egli era proprio sul punto di leggere la sua grande memoria sulla sua grande teoria al grande Congresso Astronomico che si sarebbe tenuto quell’anno a Bath; il che era una delle ragioni per cui aveva piantato il suo campo astronomico, o appostato il suo cannone astronomico, nella casa del Fattore Dale sulle colline del Somerset. Mr. Enoch Oates non poté non avvertire la persistente esitazione del padrone di casa quando udì che i suoi protetti, i Dale, stavano per ammettere uno sconosciuto straniero nella loro famiglia. Ma Pierce gli rammentò severamente che quell’atteggiamento paternalistico era cosa del passato e che un libero contadino era libero di affittare stanze a un maniaco omicida, se voleva. Ciò nondimeno, Pierce fu piuttosto sollevato di scoprire che il maniaco era soltanto un astronomo; ma sarebbe stato lo stesso se fosse stato un astrologo. Prima di venire alla fattoria, l’astronomo aveva installato il suo telescopio in luoghi assai più squallidi… in una pensione di Bloomsbury e nei fuligginosi edifici di un’Università delle Midlands. Egli credeva d’essere, e in gran parte lo era, indifferente all’ambiente che lo circondava. Ma con tutto ciò l’aria e il colore di quell’ambiente campestre gli penetravano lentamente e stranamente dentro.

«L’idea è la semplicità stessa», disse con serietà, quando Pierce lo prese in giro sulla teoria. «È solo la prova a essere, s’intende, un tantino tecnica. Ridotta in forma assai grezza e popolare, dipende dalla formula matematica dell’inversione della sfera.»

«Ciò che noi chiamiamo mettere il mondo alla rovescia», disse Pierce. «Sono del tutto favorevole.»

«Tutti conoscono l’idea della relatività applicata al moto», proseguì il Professore. «Quando si esce da un villaggio in automobile, si potrebbe dire che è il villaggio a fuggire da voi.»

«Il villaggio fugge davvero quando Pierce è fuori in automobile», osservò Crane. «Gli abitanti, in ogni caso. Ma di solito egli preferisce spaventarli con un aeroplano.»

«Davvero?» disse l’astronomo con un certo interesse. «Un aeroplano sarebbe un modello di lavoro ancora migliore. Confrontate il movimento di un aeroplano con quella che chiamiamo, solo per comodità, la fissità delle stelle fisse.»

«Oserei dire che si scombinarono un poco quando Pierce vi si schiantò contro», disse il Colonnello.

Il Professor Green sospirò in uno spirito triste ma paziente. Non poteva fare a meno di restare un poco deluso anche dai più intelligenti profani con cui conversava. Le loro osservazioni erano argute ma poco pertinenti. Sentiva sempre più che davvero preferiva coloro che non facevano osservazioni. I fiori e gli alberi non facevano osservazioni; stavano in fila e gli permettevano di far loro lezione per ore intere sulle fallacie dell’astronomia accettata. La mucca non faceva osservazioni. La ragazza che mungeva la mucca non faceva osservazioni; o, se ne faceva, erano osservazioni gentili e cortesi, non intese a fare sfoggio di spirito. Egli andò alla deriva, come aveva già fatto molte volte, nella direzione della mucca.

La giovane donna che mungeva la mucca non era, nell’accezione comune, ciò che si intende per una lattaia. Margery Dale era la figlia di un solido fattore già rispettato in quella contea. Era andata a scuola e aveva imparato varie cose educate prima di tornare alla fattoria e continuare a fare le mille cose che avrebbe potuto insegnare ai maestri di scuola. E qualcosa di questa proporzione o sproporzione di sapere andava albeggiando nel Professor Green, mentre stava a fissare la mucca e parlava, spesso in una sorta di soliloquio. Poiché aveva una sensazione piuttosto simile di un gran numero di altre cose che gli crescevano intorno fitte come una giungla attorno alla sua cosa particolare; impressioni e implicazioni da tutte le disinvolte azioni della ragazza e dalle sue varie occupazioni. Forse cominciava ad avere un vago sospetto d’essere lui il maestro di scuola che veniva istruito.

La terra e il cielo cominciavano già ad arricchirsi di sera; l’azzurro era già quasi un bagliore come verde-mela dietro la linea dei rami dei meli; contro di esso la mole della fattoria si stagliava in un profilo più scuro, e per la prima volta egli si accorse di qualcosa di bizzarro o di strano aggiunto a quel profilo dal suo grosso telescopio piantato in alto come un cannone puntato alla luna. In qualche modo sembrava, non avrebbe saputo dire perché, l’inizio di una storia. Anche le malvarose parevano incredibilmente alte. Vedere quelli che egli avrebbe chiamato «fiori» così alti pareva come vedere una margherita o un dente di leone grande come un lampione. Era certo che nulla di esattamente simile esistesse a Bloomsbury. Anche questi alti fiori parevano l’inizio di una storia… la storia di Jack e il fagiolo magico. Benché sapesse assai poco di quali influenze andassero lentamente penetrando in lui, sentiva qualcosa di calzante nell’ultimo ricordo. Qualunque cosa si muovesse dentro di lui era qualcosa di assai remoto, qualcosa che veniva prima del leggere e dello scrivere. Aveva un sogno, come di una vita precedente, di scure striature di campo sotto nubi tempestose d’estate e la sensazione che i fiori che vi si trovavano fossero cose come gemme. Era in quella casa di campagna che ogni bambino di città sente d’aver sempre avuto e mai visitato.

«Devo leggere la mia memoria stasera», disse d’improvviso. «Dovrei davvero starci pensando.»

«Spero proprio che sarà un successo», disse la ragazza; «ma mi pareva che ci steste sempre pensando.»

«Beh, ci pensavo… in generale», disse in un modo piuttosto smarrito; e in verità era probabilmente la prima volta che egli si fosse mai trovato pienamente consapevole di non starci pensando. A che cosa stesse pensando non era affatto pienamente consapevole.

«Immagino che si debba essere terribilmente intelligenti anche solo per capirla», osservò Margery Dale, tanto per conversare.

“I don’t know,” he said, slightly stirred to the defensive. “I’m sure I could make you see—I don’t mean you aren’t clever, of course; I mean I’m quite sure you’re clever enough to see— to see anything.”

“Only some sorts of things, I’m afraid,” she said, smiling. “I’m sure your theory has got nothing to do with cows and milking-stools.”

“It’s got to do with anything,” he said eagerly; “with everything, in fact. It would be just as easy to prove it from stools and cows as anything else. It’s really quite simple. Reversing the usual mathematical formula, it’s possible to reach the same results in reality by treating motion as a fixed point and stability as a form of motion. You were told that the earth goes round the sun, and the moon goes round the earth. Well, in my formula, we first treat it as if the sun went round the earth—”

She looked up radiantly. “I always THOUGHT it looked like that,” she said emphatically.

“And you will, of course, see for yourself,” he continued triumphantly, “that by the same logical inversion we must suppose the earth to be going round the moon.”

The radiant face showed a shadow of doubt and she said “Oh!”

“But any of the things you mention, the milking-stool or the cow or what not, would serve the same purpose, since they are objects generally regarded as stationary.”

He looked up vaguely at the moon which was steadily brightening as vast shadows spread over the sky.

“Well, take those things you talk of,” he went on, moved by a meaningless unrest and tremor. “You see the moon rise behind the woods over there and sweep in a great curve through the sky and seem to set again beyond the hill. But it would be just as easy to preserve the same mathematical relations by regarding the moon as the centre of the circle and the curve described by some object such as the cow—”

She threw her head back and looked at him, with eyes blazing with laughter that was not in any way mockery, but a childish delight at the crowning coincidence of a fairy-tale.

“Splendid!” she cried. “So the cow really does jump over the moon!”

Green put up his hand to his hair; and after a short silence said suddenly, like a man recalling a recondite Greek quotation:

“Why, I’ve heard that somewhere. There was something else—‘The little dog laughed—’”

Then something happened, which was in the world of ideas much more dramatic than the fact that the little dog laughed. The professor of astronomy laughed. If the world of things had corresponded to the world of ideas, the leaves of the apple tree might have curled up in fear or the birds dropped out of the sky. It was rather as if the cow had laughed.

Following that curt and uncouth noise was a silence; and then the hand he had raised to his head abruptly rent off his big blue spectacles and showed his staring blue eyes. He looked boyish and even babyish.

“I wonder whether you always wore them,” she said. “I should think they made that moon of yours look blue. Isn’t there a proverb or something about a thing happening once in a blue moon?”

He threw the great goggles on the ground and broke them.

“Good gracious!” she exclaimed, “you seem to have taken quite a dislike to them all of a sudden. I thought you were going to wear them till—well, till all is blue, as they say.”

He shook his head. “All is beautiful,” he said. “You are beautiful.”

The young woman was normally very lucid and decisive in dealing with gentlemen who made remarks of that kind, especially when she concluded that the gentlemen were not gentlemen. But for some reason in this case it never occurred to her that she needed defence; possibly because the other party seemed more defenceless than indefensible. She said nothing. But the other party said a great deal, and his remarks did not grow more rational. At that moment, far away in their inn-parlour in the neighbouring town, Hood and Crane and the fellowship of the Long Bow were actually discussing with considerable interest the meaning and possibilities of the new astronomical theory. In Bath the lecture-hall was being prepared for the exposition of the theory. The theorist had forgotten all about it.

“I have been thinking a good deal,” Hilary Pierce was saying, “about that astronomical fellow who is going to lecture in Bath to-night. It seemed to me somehow that he was a kindred spirit and that sooner or later we were bound to get mixed up with him— or he was bound to get mixed up with us. I don’t say it’s always very comfortable to get mixed up with us. I feel in my bones that there is going to be a big row soon. I feel as if I’d consulted an astrologer; as if Green were the Merlin of our Round Table. Anyhow, the astrologer has an interesting astronomical theory.”

“Why?” inquired Wilding White with some surprise. “What have you got to do with his theory?”

“Because,” answered the young man, “I understand his astronomical theory a good deal better than he thinks I do. And, let me tell you, his astronomical theory is an astronomical allegory.”

“An allegory?” repeated Crane. “What of?”

“An allegory of us,” said Pierce; “and, as with many an allegory, we’ve acted it without knowing it. I realized something about our history, when he was talking, that I don’t think I’d ever thought of before.”

“What in the world are you talking about?” demanded the Colonel.

“His theory,” said Pierce in a meditative manner, “has got something to do with moving objects being really stationary, and stationary objects being really moving. Well, you always talk of me as if I were a moving object.”

“Heartbreaking object sometimes,” assented the Colonel with cordial encouragement.

“I mean,” continued Pierce calmly, “that you talk of me as if I were always motoring too fast or flying too far. And what you say of me is pretty much what most people say of you. Most sane people think we all go a jolly lot too far. They think we’re a lot of lunatics out-running the constable or looping the loop, and always up to some new nonsense. But when you come to think of it, it’s we who always stay where we are, and the rest that’s always moving and shifting and changing.”

«Non lo so», disse, lievemente spinto sulla difensiva. «Sono certo che potrei fervela vedere… non voglio dire che non siate intelligente, s’intende; voglio dire che sono più che certo che siete abbastanza intelligente da vedere… da vedere qualunque cosa.»

«Solo certe specie di cose, temo», disse lei, sorridendo. «Sono certa che la vostra teoria non ha nulla a che fare con mucche e sgabelli da mungitura.»

«Ha a che fare con qualunque cosa», disse con foga; «con ogni cosa, in verità. Sarebbe altrettanto facile dimostrarla partendo dagli sgabelli e dalle mucche come da qualunque altra cosa. È davvero assai semplice. Invertendo l’usuale formula matematica, è possibile raggiungere gli stessi risultati nella realtà trattando il moto come un punto fisso e la stabilità come una forma di moto. Vi hanno detto che la terra gira intorno al sole, e la luna gira intorno alla terra. Beh, nella mia formula, dapprima lo trattiamo come se il sole girasse intorno alla terra…»

Lei alzò lo sguardo raggiante. «Ho sempre PENSATO che avesse quell’aria», disse con enfasi.

«E vedrete, naturalmente, da voi stessa», proseguì lui trionfalmente, «che per la medesima inversione logica dobbiamo supporre che la terra giri intorno alla luna.»

Il volto raggiante mostrò un’ombra di dubbio e lei disse «Oh!»

«Ma una qualunque delle cose che menzionate, lo sgabello da mungitura o la mucca o quel che sia, servirebbe al medesimo scopo, poiché sono oggetti generalmente considerati fermi.»

Egli alzò vagamente lo sguardo verso la luna, che si andava costantemente rischiarando mentre vaste ombre si stendevano sul cielo.

«Beh, prendete quelle cose di cui parlate», proseguì, mosso da un’irrequietezza e da un tremito senza senso. «Voi vedete la luna sorgere dietro i boschi laggiù e descrivere una grande curva attraverso il cielo e parere tramontare di nuovo oltre la collina. Ma sarebbe altrettanto facile conservare le medesime relazioni matematiche considerando la luna come il centro del cerchio e la curva descritta da qualche oggetto come la mucca…»

Lei gettò la testa all’indietro e lo guardò, con gli occhi sfavillanti di un riso che non era in alcun modo scherno, ma un fanciullesco diletto per la coincidenza culminante di una fiaba.

«Splendido!» esclamò. «Così la mucca salta davvero al di sopra della luna!»

Green si portò la mano ai capelli; e dopo un breve silenzio disse d’improvviso, come un uomo che rammenti una recondita citazione greca:

«Ma sì, l’ho già udito da qualche parte. C’era qualcos’altro… “il cagnolino rise…”»

Poi accadde qualcosa che, nel mondo delle idee, fu assai più drammatico del fatto che il cagnolino ridesse. Il professore d’astronomia rise. Se il mondo delle cose avesse corrisposto al mondo delle idee, le foglie del melo avrebbero potuto accartocciarsi per lo spavento o gli uccelli precipitare dal cielo. Fu piuttosto come se avesse riso la mucca.

A quel brusco e sgraziato suono seguì un silenzio; e poi la mano che aveva alzato al capo strappò via d’un tratto i grossi occhiali azzurri e mostrò i suoi fissi occhi azzurri. Aveva un’aria di ragazzo, anzi persino di bambino.

«Mi chiedo se li avete sempre portati», disse lei. «Credo che facessero sembrare azzurra quella vostra luna. Non c’è un proverbio o qualcosa del genere su una cosa che accade una volta ogni luna blu?»

Egli gettò a terra i grandi occhialoni e li ruppe.

«Santo cielo!» esclamò lei, «pare che vi siano venuti in uggia tutt’a un tratto. Credevo che li avreste portati finché… beh, finché tutto fosse blu, come si dice.»

Egli scosse il capo. «Tutto è bello», disse. «Voi siete bella.»

La giovane donna era di norma assai lucida e risoluta nel trattare i signori che facevano osservazioni di quel genere, specialmente quando concludeva che i signori non erano signori. Ma per qualche ragione, in questo caso non le passò mai per la mente d’aver bisogno di difesa; forse perché l’altra parte pareva più indifesa che indifendibile. Ella non disse nulla. Ma l’altra parte disse assai, e le sue osservazioni non si fecero più razionali. In quel momento, lontano, nel salotto della loro locanda nella cittadina vicina, Hood e Crane e la confraternita del Lungo Arco stavano proprio discutendo con considerevole interesse il significato e le possibilità della nuova teoria astronomica. A Bath la sala delle conferenze veniva preparata per l’esposizione della teoria. Il teorico se n’era completamente dimenticato.

«Ho riflettuto parecchio», stava dicendo Hilary Pierce, «su quel tale astronomo che stasera terrà una conferenza a Bath. Mi è parso in qualche modo che fosse uno spirito affine e che presto o tardi fossimo destinati a ritrovarci mischiati con lui… o che lui fosse destinato a ritrovarsi mischiato con noi. Non dico che sia sempre molto comodo ritrovarsi mischiati con noi. Sento nelle ossa che presto ci sarà un gran putiferio. Mi sento come se avessi consultato un astrologo; come se Green fosse il Merlino della nostra Tavola Rotonda. Comunque sia, l’astrologo ha un’interessante teoria astronomica.»

«Perché?» domandò Wilding White con una certa sorpresa. «Che cosa avete voi a che fare con la sua teoria?»

«Perché», rispose il giovane, «io comprendo la sua teoria astronomica assai meglio di quanto egli creda. E, lasciate che ve lo dica, la sua teoria astronomica è un’allegoria astronomica.»

«Un’allegoria?» ripeté Crane. «Di che cosa?»

«Un’allegoria di noi», disse Pierce; «e, come accade con molte allegorie, l’abbiamo recitata senza saperlo. Ho capito qualcosa sulla nostra storia, mentre egli parlava, che non credo d’aver mai pensato prima.»

«Ma di che diamine state parlando?» esigette il Colonnello.

«La sua teoria», disse Pierce in tono meditabondo, «ha qualcosa a che fare col fatto che gli oggetti in moto sono in realtà fermi, e gli oggetti fermi sono in realtà in moto. Ebbene, voi parlate sempre di me come se fossi un oggetto in moto.»

«Un oggetto talvolta straziante», assentì il Colonnello con cordiale incoraggiamento.

«Voglio dire», proseguì Pierce con calma, «che voi parlate di me come se stessi sempre andando troppo in fretta in automobile o volando troppo lontano. E ciò che dite di me è pressappoco ciò che la maggior parte della gente dice di voi. Le persone assennate credono che tutti noi andiamo un bel po’ troppo oltre. Ci credono un branco di pazzi che sfuggono al gendarme o fanno il giro della morte, e sono sempre dietro a qualche nuova sciocchezza. Ma se ci si pensa bene, siamo noi a restare sempre dove siamo, e sono gli altri a essere sempre in moto, a spostarsi e a mutare.»

“Yes,” said Owen Hood; “I begin to have some dim idea of what you are talking about.”

“In all our little adventures,” went on the other, “we have all of us taken up some definite position and stuck to it, however difficult it might be; that was the whole fun of it. But our critics did not stick to their own position—not even to their own conventional or conservative position. In each one of the stories it was they who were fickle, and we who were fixed. When the Colonel said he would eat his hat, he did it; when he found it meant wearing a preposterous hat, he wore it. But his neighbours didn’t even stick to their own conviction that the hat was preposterous. Fashion is too fluctuating and sensitive a thing; and before the end, half of them were wondering whether they oughtn’t to have hats of the same sort. In that affair of the Thames factory, Hood admired the old landscape and Hunter admired the old landlords. But Hunter didn’t go on admiring the old landlords; he deserted to the new landlords as soon as they got the land. His conservatism was too snobbish to conserve anything. I wanted to import pigs, and I went on importing pigs, though my methods of smuggling might land me in a mad-house. But Enoch Oates, the millionaire, didn’t go on importing pork; he went off at once on some new stunt, first on the booming of his purses, and afterwards on the admirable stunt of starting English farms. The business mind isn’t steadfast; even when it can be turned the right way, it’s too easy to turn. And everything has been like that, down to the little botheration about the elephant. The police began to prosecute Mr. White, but they soon dropped it when Hood showed them that he had some backing. Don’t you see that’s the moral of the whole thing? The modern world is materialistic, but it isn’t solid. It isn’t hard or stern or ruthless in pursuit of its purpose, or all the things that the newspapers and novels say it is; and sometimes actually praise it for being. Materialism isn’t like stone; it’s like mud, and liquid mud at that.”

“There’s something in what you say,” said Owen Hood, “and I should be inclined to add something to it. On a rough reckoning of the chances in modern England, I should say the situation is something like this. In that dubious and wavering atmosphere it is very unlikely there would ever be a revolution, or any very vital reform. But if there were, I believe on my soul that it might be successful. I believe everything else would be too weak and wobbly to stand up against it.”

“I suppose that means,” said the Colonel, “that you’re going to do something silly.”

“Silliest thing I can think of,” replied Pierce cheerfully. “I’m going to an astronomical lecture.”

The degree of silliness involved in the experiment can be most compactly and clearly stated in the newspaper report, at which the friends of the experimentalists found themselves gazing with more than their usual bewilderment on the following morning. The Colonel, sitting at his club with his favourite daily paper spread out before him, was regarding with a grave wonder a paragraph that began with the following head-lines:

AMAZING SCENE AT SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS

LECTURER GOES MAD AND ESCAPES

“A scene equally distressing and astonishing took place at the third meeting of the Astronomical Society now holding its congress at Bath. Professor Oliver Green, one of the most promising of the younger astronomers, was set down in the syllabus to deliver a lecture on ‘Relativity in Relation to Planetary Motion.’ About an hour before the lecture, however, the authorities received a telegram from Professor Green, altering the subject of his address on the ground that he had just discovered a new star, and wished immediately to communicate his discovery to the scientific world. Great excitement and keen anticipation prevailed at the meeting, but these feelings changed to bewilderment as the lecture proceeded. The lecturer announced without hesitation the existence of a new planet attached to one of the fixed stars, but proceeded to describe its geological formation and other features with a fantastic exactitude beyond anything yet obtained by way of the spectrum or the telescope. He was understood to say that it produced life in an extravagant form, in towering objects which constantly doubled or divided themselves until they ended in flat filaments, or tongues of a bright green colour. He was proceeding to give a still more improbable of a more mobile but equally monstrous form of life, resting on four trunks or columns which swung in rotation, and terminating in some curious curved appendages, when a young man in the front row, whose demeanour had shown an increasing levity, called out abruptly: ‘Why, that’s a cow!’ To this the professor, abandoning abruptly all pretence of scientific dignity, replied by shouting in a voice like thunder: ‘Yes, of course it’s a cow; and you fellows would never have noticed a cow, even if she jumped over the moon!’ The unfortunate professor then began to rave in the most incoherent manner, throwing his arms about and shouting aloud that he and his fellow scientists were all a pack of noodles who had never looked at the world they were walking on, which contained the most miraculous things. But the latter part of his remarks, which appeared to be an entirely irrelevant outburst in praise of the beauty of Woman, were interrupted by the Chairman and officials of the Congress, who called for medical and constabulary interference. No less a person than Sir Horace Hunter, who, although best known as a psycho-physiologist, has taken all knowledge for his province and was present to show his interest in astronomical progress, was able to certify on the spot that the unfortunate Green was clearly suffering from dementia, which was immediately corroborated by a local doctor, so that the unhappy man might be removed without further scandal.

«Sì», disse Owen Hood; «comincio ad avere una vaga idea di ciò di cui state parlando.»

«In tutte le nostre piccole avventure», proseguì l’altro, «ciascuno di noi ha assunto una qualche posizione ben definita e vi si è tenuto, per difficile che potesse essere; era in ciò tutto il divertimento. Ma i nostri critici non si tennero alla loro propria posizione… neppure alla loro propria posizione convenzionale o conservatrice. In ognuna delle storie furono loro a essere volubili, e noi a essere saldi. Quando il Colonnello disse che avrebbe mangiato il suo cappello, lo fece; quando scoprì che ciò significava portare un cappello assurdo, lo portò. Ma i suoi vicini non si tennero neppure alla loro propria convinzione che il cappello fosse assurdo. La moda è cosa troppo fluttuante e sensibile; e prima della fine, la metà di loro si chiedeva se non avrebbe dovuto avere cappelli dello stesso tipo. In quell’affare della fabbrica sul Tamigi, Hood ammirava il vecchio paesaggio e Hunter ammirava i vecchi proprietari terrieri. Ma Hunter non continuò ad ammirare i vecchi proprietari; disertò verso i nuovi proprietari non appena questi ebbero la terra. Il suo conservatorismo era troppo snob per conservare alcunché. Io volevo importare maiali, e continuai a importare maiali, benché i miei metodi di contrabbando potessero farmi finire in manicomio. Ma Enoch Oates, il milionario, non continuò a importare carne di maiale; se ne andò subito dietro a qualche nuovo colpo di scena, prima sul lancio delle sue borse, e poi sull’ammirevole colpo di scena di avviare fattorie inglesi. La mente d’affari non è costante; anche quando la si può volgere nel verso giusto, è troppo facile da volgere. E tutto è stato così, fino alla piccola noia dell’elefante. La polizia cominciò a perseguire Mr. White, ma ci rinunciò presto quando Hood le mostrò che egli aveva qualche appoggio. Non vedete che è questa la morale di tutta la faccenda? Il mondo moderno è materialistico, ma non è solido. Non è duro né severo né spietato nel perseguire il proprio scopo, né tutte le cose che i giornali e i romanzi dicono che sia; e talvolta addirittura lo lodano per esserlo. Il materialismo non è come la pietra; è come il fango, e per giunta fango liquido.»

«C’è del vero in ciò che dite», disse Owen Hood, «e sarei incline ad aggiungervi qualcosa. A un calcolo approssimativo delle probabilità nell’Inghilterra moderna, direi che la situazione è pressappoco questa. In quell’atmosfera dubbia e vacillante è assai improbabile che vi sia mai una rivoluzione, o una qualche riforma davvero vitale. Ma se vi fosse, credo sull’anima mia che potrebbe riuscire. Credo che ogni altra cosa sarebbe troppo debole e traballante per tenerle testa.»

«Immagino che ciò significhi», disse il Colonnello, «che state per fare qualcosa di sciocco.»

«La cosa più sciocca che riesca a immaginare», replicò Pierce allegramente. «Sto andando a una conferenza di astronomia.»

Il grado di sciocchezza implicato nell’esperimento può essere esposto nel modo più compatto e chiaro dal resoconto giornalistico, che gli amici degli sperimentatori si trovarono a fissare con più del consueto sbigottimento il mattino seguente. Il Colonnello, seduto al suo circolo con il suo quotidiano prediletto spiegato dinanzi, contemplava con grave stupore un trafiletto che cominciava con i seguenti titoli:

SCENA STUPEFACENTE A UN CONGRESSO SCIENTIFICO

IL RELATORE IMPAZZISCE E FUGGE

«Una scena tanto penosa quanto sconcertante ha avuto luogo alla terza seduta della Società Astronomica che tiene ora il suo congresso a Bath. Il Professor Oliver Green, uno dei più promettenti fra i più giovani astronomi, era iscritto nel programma per tenere una conferenza su “La Relatività in Relazione al Moto Planetario”. Circa un’ora prima della conferenza, tuttavia, le autorità hanno ricevuto un telegramma dal Professor Green, che modificava l’argomento del suo intervento adducendo di aver appena scoperto una nuova stella e di desiderare comunicare immediatamente la sua scoperta al mondo scientifico. Grande eccitazione e viva attesa regnavano alla seduta, ma questi sentimenti si mutarono in sbigottimento con il procedere della conferenza. Il relatore ha annunciato senza esitazione l’esistenza di un nuovo pianeta legato a una delle stelle fisse, ma ha proseguito descrivendone la formazione geologica e altre caratteristiche con una fantastica esattezza che va oltre qualunque cosa finora ottenuta per via dello spettro o del telescopio. Si è compreso che egli dicesse che esso produce vita in forma stravagante, in oggetti torreggianti che continuamente si sdoppiavano o si dividevano finché terminavano in piatti filamenti, o lingue di un vivido color verde. Stava procedendo a descrivere una forma di vita ancor più improbabile, più mobile ma egualmente mostruosa, poggiante su quattro tronchi o colonne che oscillavano in rotazione, e terminante in certe curiose appendici ricurve, quando un giovane in prima fila, il cui contegno aveva mostrato una crescente leggerezza, esclamò d’improvviso: “Ma è una mucca!” A ciò il professore, abbandonando bruscamente ogni pretesa di dignità scientifica, ha replicato gridando con voce di tuono: “Sì, certo che è una mucca; e voialtri non vi sareste mai accorti di una mucca, neppure se saltasse al di sopra della luna!” Lo sventurato professore ha poi cominciato a delirare nel modo più incoerente, agitando le braccia e gridando a gran voce che egli e i suoi colleghi scienziati erano tutti una masnada di gonzi che non avevano mai guardato il mondo su cui camminavano, il quale conteneva le cose più miracolose. Ma l’ultima parte delle sue osservazioni, che pareva uno sfogo del tutto irrilevante in lode della bellezza della Donna, è stata interrotta dal Presidente e dai funzionari del Congresso, che hanno invocato l’intervento medico e della forza pubblica. Nientemeno che Sir Horace Hunter, il quale, benché noto soprattutto come psico-fisiologo, ha fatto di ogni sapere il proprio dominio ed era presente per mostrare il suo interesse per il progresso astronomico, ha potuto certificare sul posto che lo sventurato Green soffriva chiaramente di demenza, il che è stato immediatamente corroborato da un medico locale, cosicché l’infelice uomo ha potuto essere condotto via senza ulteriore scandalo.

“At this point, however, a still more extraordinary development took place. The young man in the front row, who had several times interrupted the proceedings with irrelevant remarks, sprang to his feet, and loudly declaring that Professor Green was the only sane man in the Congress, rushed at the group surrounding him, violently hurled Sir Horace Hunter from the platform, and with the assistance of a friend and fellow-rioter, managed to recapture the lunatic from the doctors and police, and carry him outside the building. Those pursuing the fugitives found themselves at first confronted with a new mystery, in the form of their complete disappearance. It has since been discovered that they actually escaped by aeroplane; the young man, whose name is said to be Pierce, being a well-known aviator formerly connected with the Flying Corps. The other young man, who assisted him and acted as pilot, has not yet been identified.”

Night closed and the stars stood out over Dale’s Farm; and the telescope pointed at the stars in vain. Its giant lenses had vainly mirrored the moon of which its owner had spoken in so vain a fashion; but its owner did not return. Miss Dale was rather unaccountably troubled by his absence, and mentioned it once or twice; after all, as her family said, it was very natural that he should go to an hotel in Bath for the night, especially if the revels of the roystering astronomers were long and late. “It’s no affair of ours,” said the farmer’s wife cheerfully. “He is not a child.” But the farmer’s daughter was not quite so sure on the point.

Next morning she rose even earlier than usual and went about her ordinary tasks, which by some accident or other seemed to look more ordinary than usual. In the blank morning hours, it was perhaps natural that her mind should go back to the previous afternoon, when the conduct of the astronomer could by no means be dismissed as ordinary.

“It’s all very well to say he’s not a child,” she said to herself. “I wish I were as certain he’s not an idiot. If he goes to an hotel, they’ll cheat him.”

The more angular and prosaic her own surroundings seemed in the daylight, the more doubt she felt about the probable fate of the moonstruck gentleman who looked at a blue moon through his blue spectacles. She wondered whether his family or his friends were generally responsible for his movements; for really he must be a little dotty. She had never heard him talk about his family; and she remembered a good many things he had talked about. She had never even seen him talking to a friend, except once to Captain Pierce, when they talked about astronomy. But the name of Captain Pierce linked itself up rapidly with other and more relevant suggestions. Captain Pierce lived at the Blue Boar on the other side of the down, having been married a year or two before to the daughter of the inn-keeper, who was an old friend of the daughter of the farmer. They had been to the same school in the neighbouring provincial town, and had once been, as the phrase goes, inseparable. Perhaps friends ought to pass through the phase in which they are inseparable to reach the phase in which they can safely be separated.

“Joan might know something about it,” she said to herself. “At least her husband might know.”

She turned back into the kitchen and began to rout things out for breakfast; when she had done everything she could think of doing for a family that had not yet put in an appearance, she went out again into the garden and found herself at the same gate, staring at the steep wooded hill that lay between the farm and the valley of the Blue Boar. She thought of harnessing the pony; and then went walking rather restlessly along the road over the hill.

On the map it was only a few miles to the Blue Boar; and she was easily capable of walking ten times the distance. But maps, like many other scientific documents, are very inaccurate. The ridge that ran between the two valleys was, relatively to that rolling plain, as definite as a range of mountains. The path through the dark wood that lay just beyond the farm began like a lane and then seemed to go up like a ladder. By the time she had scaled it, under its continuous canopy of low spreading trees, she had the sensation of having walked for a long time. And when the ascent ended with a gap in the trees and a blank space of sky, she looked over the edge like one looking into another world.

Mr. Enoch Oates, in his more expansive moments, had been known to allude to what he called God’s Great Prairies. Mr. Rosenbaum Low, having come to London from, or through, Johannesburg, often referred in his imperialistic speeches to the “illimitable veldt.” But neither the American prairie nor the African veldt really looks any larger, or could look any larger, than a wide English vale seen from a low English hill. Nothing can be more distant than the distance; the horizon or the line drawn by heaven across the vision of man. Nothing is so illimitable as that limit. Within our narrow island there is a whole series of such infinities; as if the island itself could hold seven seas. As she looked out over that new landscape, the soul seemed to be slaked and satisfied with immensity and, by a paradox, to be filled at last with emptiness. All things seemed not only great but growing in greatness. She could fancy that the tall trees standing up in the sunlight grew taller while she looked at them. The sun was rising and it seemed as if the whole world rose with it. Even the dome of heaven seemed to be lifting slowly; as if the very sky were a skirt drawn up and disappearing into the altitudes of light.

The vast hollow below her was coloured as variously as a map in an atlas. Fields of grass or grain or red earth seemed so far away that they might have been the empires and kingdoms of a world newly created. But she could already see on the brow of a hill above the pine-woods the pale scar of the quarry and below it the glittering twist in the river where stood the inn of the Blue Boar. As she drew nearer and nearer to it she could see more and more clearly a green triangular field with tiny black dots, which were little black pigs; and another smaller dot, which was a child. Something like a wind behind her or within her, that had driven her over the hills, seemed to sweep all the long lines of that landslide of a landscape, so that they pointed to that spot.

“A questo punto, tuttavia, si verificò uno sviluppo ancora più straordinario. Il giovanotto in prima fila, che a più riprese aveva interrotto i lavori con osservazioni fuori luogo, balzò in piedi e, dichiarando ad alta voce che il professor Green era l’unico uomo sano di mente del Congresso, si scagliò contro il gruppo che lo circondava, scaraventò con violenza Sir Horace Hunter giù dal palco e, con l’aiuto di un amico e compagno di tumulto, riuscì a strappare il pazzo dalle mani dei medici e della polizia, portandolo fuori dall’edificio. Coloro che inseguirono i fuggitivi si trovarono dapprima di fronte a un nuovo mistero, sotto forma della loro completa scomparsa. Da allora si è scoperto che in realtà fuggirono in aeroplano; il giovanotto, il cui nome pare essere Pierce, essendo un noto aviatore un tempo legato al Flying Corps. L’altro giovane, che lo aiutò e fungeva da pilota, non è ancora stato identificato.”

Scese la Night e le stelle si stagliarono sopra la fattoria dei Dale; e il telescopio puntava invano alle stelle. Le sue lenti gigantesche avevano invano rispecchiato la luna di cui il suo proprietario aveva parlato in modo così vano; ma il suo proprietario non tornava. La signorina Dale era turbata in modo piuttosto inspiegabile dalla sua assenza, e la menzionò una o due volte; dopotutto, come diceva la sua famiglia, era del tutto naturale che egli fosse andato in un albergo di Bath per la notte, specie se le baldorie dei chiassosi astronomi erano state lunghe e tardive. “Non è affar nostro,” disse allegramente la moglie del contadino. “Non è un bambino.” Ma la figlia del contadino non ne era del tutto sicura su questo punto.

Il mattino seguente si alzò persino prima del solito e attese ai suoi soliti compiti, che per un qualche caso o l’altro parevano sembrare più ordinari del solito. Nelle vuote ore del mattino, era forse naturale che la sua mente tornasse al pomeriggio precedente, quando la condotta dell’astronomo non poteva in alcun modo essere liquidata come ordinaria.

“È tutto molto bello dire che non è un bambino,” disse tra sé. “Vorrei essere altrettanto certa che non sia un idiota. Se va in un albergo, lo imbroglieranno.”

Quanto più i suoi dintorni apparivano angolosi e prosaici alla luce del giorno, tanto più dubbio provava riguardo al probabile destino del gentiluomo lunatico che guardava una luna azzurra attraverso i suoi occhiali azzurri. Si chiedeva se in genere fossero la sua famiglia o i suoi amici a essere responsabili dei suoi movimenti; perché davvero doveva essere un po’ tocco. Non l’aveva mai sentito parlare della sua famiglia; e ricordava parecchie cose di cui aveva parlato. Non l’aveva mai neppure visto parlare con un amico, salvo una volta col capitano Pierce, quando parlarono di astronomia. Ma il nome del capitano Pierce si collegò rapidamente ad altri e più pertinenti suggerimenti. Il capitano Pierce viveva al Blue Boar dall’altro lato della collina, essendosi sposato un anno o due prima con la figlia del locandiere, che era una vecchia amica della figlia del contadino. Erano state alla stessa scuola nella cittadina di provincia vicina, ed erano state un tempo, come si suol dire, inseparabili. Forse gli amici devono attraversare la fase in cui sono inseparabili per raggiungere la fase in cui possono essere separati senza pericolo.

“Joan potrebbe saperne qualcosa,” disse tra sé. “Almeno suo marito potrebbe saperlo.”

Rientrò in cucina e cominciò a tirar fuori le cose per la colazione; quando ebbe fatto tutto ciò che le venne in mente di fare per una famiglia che non si era ancora fatta viva, uscì di nuovo nel giardino e si ritrovò allo stesso cancello, fissando la ripida collina boscosa che si stendeva tra la fattoria e la valle del Blue Boar. Pensò di attaccare il pony; e poi si mise a camminare piuttosto irrequieta lungo la strada oltre la collina.

Sulla mappa erano solo poche miglia fino al Blue Boar; ed ella era facilmente capace di camminare dieci volte quella distanza. Ma le mappe, come molti altri documenti scientifici, sono assai inesatte. La cresta che correva tra le due valli era, in rapporto a quella pianura rolling ondulata, netta quanto una catena di monti. Il sentiero attraverso il bosco oscuro che si stendeva poco oltre la fattoria cominciava come un viottolo e poi pareva salire come una scala. Quando l’ebbe scalato, sotto la sua continua volta di alberi bassi e ramosi, ebbe la sensazione di aver camminato per un lungo tempo. E quando l’ascesa terminò con un varco tra gli alberi e uno spazio vuoto di cielo, guardò oltre l’orlo come chi si affaccia su un altro mondo.

Il signor Enoch Oates, nei suoi momenti più espansivi, era noto per alludere a ciò che chiamava le Grandi Praterie di Dio. Il signor Rosenbaum Low, essendo giunto a London da, o attraverso, Johannesburg, faceva spesso riferimento nei suoi discorsi imperialisti allo “sconfinato veldt.” Ma né la prateria americana né il veldt africano appaiono in realtà più vasti, né potrebbero apparire più vasti, di un’ampia valle inglese vista da una bassa collina inglese. Nulla può essere più distante della distanza; l’orizzonte o la linea tracciata dal cielo attraverso la vista dell’uomo. Nulla è così sconfinato quanto quel confine. Entro la nostra angusta isola vi è un’intera serie di simili infinità; come se l’isola stessa potesse contenere sette mari. Mentre guardava quel nuovo paesaggio, l’anima pareva dissetarsi e appagarsi d’immensità e, per un paradosso, riempirsi infine di vuoto. Tutte le cose parevano non soltanto grandi ma crescenti in grandezza. Poteva immaginare che gli alti alberi ritti nella luce del sole crescessero più alti mentre li guardava. Il sole stava sorgendo e pareva che il mondo intero sorgesse con esso. Persino la cupola del cielo pareva sollevarsi lentamente; come se il cielo stesso fosse una gonna tirata su e svanente nelle altezze della luce.

La vasta conca sotto di lei era colorata in modo vario quanto una mappa in un atlante. Campi d’erba o di grano o di terra rossa parevano così lontani da poter essere gli imperi e i regni di un mondo appena creato. Ma già poteva scorgere sul ciglio di una collina sopra le pinete la pallida cicatrice della cava e sotto di essa lo scintillante serpeggiare del fiume dove sorgeva la locanda del Blue Boar. Man mano che le si avvicinava sempre più poteva vedere sempre più distintamente un verde campo triangolare con minuscoli puntini neri, che erano porcellini neri; e un altro puntino più piccolo, che era un bambino. Qualcosa come un vento dietro di lei o dentro di lei, che l’aveva spinta oltre le colline, pareva spazzare tutte le lunghe linee di quella frana di paesaggio, sì che esse indicavano quel punto.

As the path dropped to the level and she began to walk by farms and villages, the storm in her mind began to settle and she recovered the reasonable prudence with which she had pottered about her own farm. She even felt some responsibility and embarrassment about troubling her friend by coming on so vague an errand. But she told herself convincingly enough that after all she was justified. One would not normally be alarmed about a strayed lodger as if he were a lion escaped from a menagerie. But she had after all very good reason for regarding this lion as rather a fearful wildfowl. His way of talking had been so eccentric that everybody for miles round would have agreed, if they had heard him, that he had a tile loose. She was very glad they had not heard him; but their imaginary opinion fortified her own. They had a duty in common humanity; they could not let a poor gentleman of doubtful sanity disappear without further inquiry.

She entered the inn with a firm step and hailed her friend with something of that hearty cheerfulness that is so unpopular in the early riser. She was rather younger and by nature rather more exuberant than Joan; and Joan had already felt the drag and concentration of children. But Joan had not lost her rather steely sense of humour, and she heard the main facts of her friend’s difficulty with a vigilant smile.

“We should rather like to know what has happened,” said the visitor with vague carelessness. “If anything unpleasant had happened, people might even blame us, when we knew he was like that.”

“Like what?” asked Joan smiling.

“Why, a bit off, I suppose we must say,” answered the other. “The things he said to me about cows and trees and having found a new star were really—”

“Well, it’s rather lucky you came to me,” said Joan quietly. “For I don’t believe you’d have found anybody else on the whole face of the earth who knows exactly where he is now.”

“And where is he?”

“Well, he’s not on the face of the earth,” said Joan Hardy.

“You don’t mean he’s—dead?” asked the other in an unnatural voice.

“I mean he’s up in the air,” said Joan, “or, what is often much the same thing, he is with my husband. Hilary rescued him when they were just going to nab him, and carried him off in an aeroplane. He says they’d better hide in the clouds for a bit. You know the way he talks; of course, they do come down every now and then when it’s safe.”

“Escaped! Nabbed him! Safe!” ejaculated the other young woman with round eyes. “What in the world does it all mean?”

“Well,” replied her friend, “he seems to have said the same sort of things that he said to you to a whole roomful of scientific men at Bath. And, of course, the scientific men all said he was mad; I suppose that’s what scientific men are for. So they were just going to take him away to an asylum, when Hilary—”

The farmer’s daughter rose in a glory of rage that might have seemed to lift the roof, as the great sunrise had seemed to lift the sky.

“Take him away!” she cried. “How dare they talk about such things? How dare they say he is mad? It’s they who must be mad to say such stuff! Why, he’s got more brains in his boots than they have in all their silly old bald heads knocked together—and I’d like to knock ‘em together! Why, they’d all smash like egg-shells, and he’s got a head like cast-iron. Don’t you know he’s beaten all the old duffers at their own business, of stars and things? I expect they’re all jealous; it’s just what I should have expected of them.”

The fact that she was entirely unacquainted with the names, and possibly the existence, of these natural philosophers did not arrest the vigorous word-painting with which she completed their portraits. “Nasty spiteful old men with whiskers,” she said, “all bunched together like so many spiders and weaving dirty cobwebs to catch their betters; of course, it’s all a conspiracy. Just because they’re all mad and hate anybody who’s quite sane.”

“So you think he’s quite sane?” asked her hostess gravely.

“Sane? What do you mean? Of course he’s quite sane,” retorted Margery Dale.

With a mountainous magnanimity Joan was silent. Then after a pause she said:

“Well, Hilary has taken his case in hand and your friend’s safe for the present; Hilary generally brings things off, however queer they sound. And I don’t mind telling you in confidence that he’s bringing that and a good many other things off, rather big things, just now. You can’t keep him from fighting whatever you do; and he seems to be out just now to fight everybody. So I shouldn’t wonder if you saw all your old gentlemen’s heads knocked together after all. There are rather big preparations going on; that friend of his named Blair is for ever going and coming with his balloons and things; and I believe something will happen soon on a pretty large scale, perhaps all over England.”

“Will it?” asked Miss Dale in an absent-minded manner (for she was sadly deficient in civic and political sense). “Is that your Tommy out there?”

And they talked about the child and then about a hundred entirely trivial things; for they understood each other perfectly.

And if there are still things the reader fails to understand, if (as seems almost incredible) there are things that he wishes to understand, then it can only be at the heavy price of studying the story of the Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair; and with that, it is comforting to know, the story of all these things will be drawing near its explanation and its end.

Man mano che il sentiero scendeva verso il piano ed ella cominciava a camminare tra fattorie e villaggi, la tempesta nella sua mente cominciò a placarsi ed ella ritrovò la ragionevole prudenza con cui aveva sbrigato le faccende nella propria fattoria. Provò persino un certo senso di responsabilità e d’imbarazzo all’idea di disturbare la sua amica venendo per una commissione tanto vaga. Ma si disse in modo abbastanza convincente che dopotutto era giustificata. Di norma non ci si allarmerebbe per un pensionante smarrito come se fosse un leone scappato da un serraglio. Ma aveva dopotutto ottime ragioni per considerare questo leone un uccellaccio piuttosto temibile. Il suo modo di parlare era stato così eccentrico che tutti per miglia intorno avrebbero convenuto, se l’avessero udito, che aveva qualche rotella fuori posto. Era ben lieta che non l’avessero udito; ma la loro immaginaria opinione fortificava la propria. Avevano un dovere di comune umanità; non potevano lasciar sparire un povero gentiluomo di dubbia sanità mentale senza ulteriori indagini.

Entrò nella locanda con passo fermo e salutò la sua amica con qualcosa di quella cordiale allegria che è tanto sgradita in chi si alza presto. Era piuttosto più giovane e per natura piuttosto più esuberante di Joan; e Joan aveva già sentito il peso e la concentrazione dei figli. Ma Joan non aveva perduto il suo senso dell’umorismo piuttosto tagliente, e ascoltò i fatti principali della difficoltà dell’amica con un sorriso vigile.

“Ci farebbe piuttosto piacere sapere cosa è successo,” disse la visitatrice con vaga noncuranza. “Se fosse successo qualcosa di spiacevole, la gente potrebbe persino biasimare noi, dato che sapevamo che era fatto così.”

“Fatto come?” chiese Joan sorridendo.

“Ma, un po’ svitato, suppongo si debba dire,” rispose l’altra. “Le cose che mi ha detto sulle mucche e sugli alberi e sull’aver trovato una nuova stella erano davvero—”

“Well, è piuttosto una fortuna che tu sia venuta da me,” disse Joan tranquillamente. “Perché non credo che avresti trovato nessun altro su tutta la faccia della terra che sappia esattamente dove si trova adesso.”

“E dove si trova?”

“Well, non è sulla faccia della terra,” disse Joan Hardy.

“Non vorrai dire che è… morto?” chiese l’altra con voce innaturale.

“Voglio dire che è su in aria,” disse Joan, “o, il che spesso è più o meno la stessa cosa, è con mio marito. Hilary l’ha salvato proprio mentre stavano per acciuffarlo, e l’ha portato via in aeroplano. Dice che faranno meglio a nascondersi tra le nuvole per un po’. Sai come parla; naturalmente, scendono ogni tanto quando è sicuro.”

“Scappato! Acciuffato! Sicuro!” esclamò l’altra giovane donna con gli occhi sgranati. “Che diamine vuol dire tutto questo?”

“Well,” rispose la sua amica, “pare abbia detto lo stesso genere di cose che ha detto a te a un’intera sala piena di uomini di scienza a Bath. E, naturalmente, gli uomini di scienza hanno tutti detto che era matto; suppongo sia a questo che servono gli uomini di scienza. Così stavano proprio per portarlo via in manicomio, quando Hilary—”

La figlia del contadino si levò in una gloria di collera che avrebbe potuto sembrare capace di sollevare il tetto, come il grande sorgere del sole aveva sembrato sollevare il cielo.

“Portarlo via!” gridò. “Come osano parlare di cose simili? Come osano dire che è matto? Sono loro a dover essere matti per dire simili sciocchezze! Ma se ha più cervello lui negli stivali di quanto ne abbiano loro in tutte le loro sciocche vecchie teste pelate messe insieme—e mi piacerebbe metterle insieme a cozzare! Ma se andrebbero tutte in frantumi come gusci d’uovo, e lui ha una testa come di ghisa. Non lo sai che ha battuto tutti quei vecchi babbei nel loro stesso mestiere, delle stelle e di simili cose? Scommetto che sono tutti gelosi; è proprio quello che mi sarei aspettata da loro.”

Il fatto che ella non conoscesse affatto i nomi, e forse l’esistenza, di questi filosofi naturali non arrestò il vigoroso ritratto a parole con cui completò le loro effigi. “Brutti vecchi dispettosi con le basette,” disse, “tutti raggruppati come tanti ragni a tessere sporche ragnatele per catturare i loro migliori; naturalmente, è tutta una congiura. Solo perché sono tutti matti e odiano chiunque sia del tutto sano di mente.”

“Così tu pensi che sia del tutto sano di mente?” chiese la padrona di casa con gravità.

“Sano? Cosa vuoi dire? Ma certo che è del tutto sano di mente,” ribatté Margery Dale.

Con una montuosa magnanimità Joan tacque. Poi, dopo una pausa, disse:

“Well, Hilary ha preso in mano il suo caso e il tuo amico per ora è al sicuro; Hilary di solito porta a termine le cose, per quanto strane possano suonare. E non mi dispiace dirti in confidenza che sta portando a termine quella e parecchie altre cose, cose piuttosto grosse, proprio adesso. Non c’è verso di impedirgli di combattere qualunque cosa tu faccia; e pare che al momento sia in campo per combattere tutti quanti. Perciò non mi meraviglierei se tu vedessi dopotutto tutte le teste dei tuoi vecchi signori messe a cozzare. Sono in corso preparativi piuttosto grossi; quel suo amico di nome Blair va e viene di continuo con i suoi palloni e simili cose; e credo che presto accadrà qualcosa su scala piuttosto vasta, forse in tutta l’Inghilterra.”

“Davvero?” chiese la signorina Dale in modo distratto (perché era tristemente carente di senso civico e politico). “È quello il tuo Tommy là fuori?”

E parlarono del bambino e poi di un centinaio di cose del tutto insignificanti; perché si comprendevano a perfezione.

E se vi sono ancora cose che il lettore non riesce a comprendere, se (cosa che pare quasi incredibile) vi sono cose che egli desidera comprendere, allora ciò potrà avvenire solo al caro prezzo di studiare la storia dell’Architettura Senza Precedenti del Comandante Blair; e con ciò, è confortante saperlo, la storia di tutte queste cose si andrà avvicinando alla sua spiegazione e alla sua fine.

Chapter VII

The Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair

The Earl of Eden had become Prime Minister for the third time, and his face and figure were therefore familiar in the political cartoons and even in the public streets. His yellow hair and lean and springy figure gave him a factitious air of youth; but his face on closer study looked lined and wrinkled and gave almost a shock of decrepitude. He was in truth a man of great experience and dexterity in his own profession. He had just succeeded in routing the Socialist Party and overthrowing the Socialist Government, largely by the use of certain rhymed mottoes and maxims which he had himself invented with considerable amusement. His great slogan of “Don’t Nationalize but Rationalize” was generally believed to have led him to victory. But at the moment when this story begins he had other things to think of. He had just received an urgent request for a consultation from three of his most prominent supporters— Lord Normantowers, Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., the great advocate of scientific politics, and Mr. R. Low, the philanthropist. They were confronted with a problem, and their problem concerned the sudden madness of an American millionaire.

The Prime Minister was not unacquainted with American millionaires, even those whose conduct suggested that they were hardly representative of a normal or national type. There was the great Grigg, the millionaire inventor, who had pressed upon the War Office a scheme for finishing the War at a blow; it consisted of electrocuting the Kaiser by wireless telegraphy. There was Mr. Napper, of Nebraska, whose negotiations for removing Shakespeare’s Cliff to America as a symbol of Anglo-Saxon unity were unaccountably frustrated by the firm refusal of the American Republic to send us Plymouth Rock in exchange. And there was that charming and cultured Bostonian, Colonel Hoopoe, whom all England welcomed in his crusade for Purity and the League of the Lily, until England discovered with considerable surprise that the American Ambassador and all respectable Americans flatly refused to meet the Colonel, whose record at home was that of a very narrow escape from Sing-Sing.

But the problem of Enoch Oates, who had made his money in pork, was something profoundly different. As Lord Eden’s three supporters eagerly explained to him, seated round a garden table at his beautiful country seat in Somerset, Mr. Oates had done something that the maddest millionaire had never thought of doing before. Up to a certain point he had proceeded in a manner normal to such a foreigner. He had purchased amid general approval an estate covering about a quarter of a county; and it was expected that he would make it a field for some of those American experiments in temperance or eugenics for which the English agricultural populace offer a sort of virgin soil. Instead of that, he suddenly went mad and made a present of his land to his tenants; so that by an unprecedented anomaly the farms became the property of the farmers. That an American millionaire should take away English things from England, English rent, English relics, English pictures, English cathedrals or the cliffs of Dover, was a natural operation to which everybody was by this time accustomed. But that an American millionaire should give English land to English people was an unwarrantable interference and tantamount to an alien enemy stirring up revolution. Enoch Oates had therefore been summoned to the Council, and sat scowling at the table as if he were in the dock.

“Results most deplorable already,” said Sir Horace Hunter, in his rather loud voice. “Give you an example, my lord; people of the name of Dale in Somerset took in a lunatic as a lodger. May have been a homicidal maniac for all I know; some do say he had a great cannon or culverin sticking out of his bedroom window. But with no responsible management of the estate, no landlord, no lawyer, no educated person anywhere, there was nothing to prevent their letting the bedroom to a Bengal tiger. Anyhow, the man was mad, rushed raving on to the platform at the Astronomical Congress talking about Lovely Woman and the cow that jumped over the moon. That damned agitator Pierce, who used to be in the Flying Corps, was in the hall, and made a riot and carried the crazy fellow off in an aeroplane. That’s the sort of thing you’ll have happening all over the place if these ignorant fellows are allowed to do just as they like.”

“It is quite true,” said Lord Normantowers. “I could give many other examples. They say that Owen Hood, another of these eccentrics, has actually bought one of these little farms and stuck it all round with absurd battlements and a moat and drawbridge, with the motto ‘The Englishman’s House is his Castle.’”

“I think,” said the Prime Minister quietly, “that however English the Englishman may be, he will find his castle is a castle in Spain; not to say a castle in the air. Mr. Oates,” he said, addressing very courteously the big brooding American at the other end of the table, “please do not imagine that I cannot sympathize with such romances, although they are only in the air. But I think in all sincerity that you will find they are unsuited to the English climate. Et ego in Arcadia, you know; we have all had such dreams of all men piping in Arcady. But after all, you have already paid the piper; and if you are wise, I think you can still call the tune.”

“Gives me great gratification to say it’s too late,” growled Oates. “I want them to learn to play and pay for themselves.”

“But you want them to learn,” said Lord Eden gently, “and I should not be in too much of a hurry to call it too late. It seems to me that the door is still open for a reasonable compromise; I understand that the deed of gift, considered as a legal instrument, is still the subject of some legal discussion and may well be the subject of revision. I happened to be talking of it yesterday with the law officers of the Crown; and I am sure that the least hint that you yourself—”

Capitolo VII

L’Architettura Senza Precedenti del Comandante Blair

Il Conte di Eden era divenuto Primo Ministro per la terza volta, e il suo volto e la sua figura erano perciò familiari nelle vignette politiche e persino nelle pubbliche vie. I suoi capelli biondi e la sua figura magra ed elastica gli davano un’aria fittizia di giovinezza; ma il suo volto, a un esame più attento, appariva segnato e rugoso e dava quasi un colpo di decrepitezza. Era in verità un uomo di grande esperienza e destrezza nella propria professione. Aveva appena mandato in rotta il Partito Socialista e rovesciato il Governo socialista, in gran parte grazie all’uso di certi motti e massime in rima che aveva egli stesso inventato con considerevole divertimento. Il suo grande slogan “Non nazionalizzare ma razionalizzare” era generalmente ritenuto averlo condotto alla vittoria. Ma nel momento in cui questa storia comincia, egli aveva altre cose a cui pensare. Aveva appena ricevuto un’urgente richiesta di consultazione da tre dei suoi più eminenti sostenitori—Lord Normantowers, Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., il grande fautore della politica scientifica, e il signor R. Low, il filantropo. Si trovavano di fronte a un problema, e il loro problema riguardava l’improvvisa follia di un milionario americano.

Il Primo Ministro non era ignaro dei milionari americani, persino di quelli la cui condotta suggeriva che fossero difficilmente rappresentativi di un tipo normale o nazionale. C’era stato il grande Grigg, il milionario inventore, che aveva insistito presso il Ministero della Guerra con un piano per porre fine alla Guerra con un sol colpo; consisteva nel folgorare il Kaiser mediante telegrafia senza fili. C’era stato il signor Napper, del Nebraska, le cui trattative per trasferire la Rupe di Shakespeare in America come simbolo dell’unity anglosassone furono inspiegabilmente frustrate dal fermo rifiuto della Repubblica Americana di inviarci in cambio la Plymouth Rock. E c’era stato quell’affascinante e colto bostoniano, il colonnello Hoopoe, che tutta l’Inghilterra accolse nella sua crociata per la Purezza e la Lega del Giglio, finché l’Inghilterra non scoprì con considerevole sorpresa che l’Ambasciatore americano e tutti gli americani rispettabili si rifiutavano recisamente d’incontrare il Colonnello, il cui trascorso in patria era quello di uno scampo per un pelo da Sing-Sing.

Ma il problema di Enoch Oates, che aveva fatto i suoi soldi con la carne di maiale, era qualcosa di profondamente diverso. Come i tre sostenitori di Lord Eden gli spiegarono con foga, seduti attorno a un tavolo da giardino nella sua bella tenuta di campagna nel Somerset, il signor Oates aveva fatto qualcosa che il milionario più matto non aveva mai pensato di fare prima. Fino a un certo punto aveva proceduto in un modo normale per un tale straniero. Aveva acquistato tra l’approvazione generale una tenuta che copriva circa un quarto di una contea; e ci si aspettava che ne facesse un campo per alcuni di quegli esperimenti americani di temperanza o eugenetica per i quali la popolazione agricola inglese offre una sorta di suolo vergine. Invece di ciò, all’improvviso impazzì e fece dono della sua terra ai suoi affittuari; sicché per un’anomalia senza precedenti le fattorie divennero proprietà dei contadini. Che un milionario americano portasse via cose inglesi dall’Inghilterra—affitti inglesi, reliquie inglesi, quadri inglesi, cattedrali inglesi o le scogliere di Dover—era un’operazione naturale a cui a questo punto tutti erano abituati. Ma che un milionario americano donasse terra inglese a gente inglese era un’ingerenza ingiustificabile ed equivaleva a un nemico straniero che fomentasse la rivoluzione. Enoch Oates era stato perciò convocato al Consiglio, e sedeva accigliato al tavolo come se fosse sul banco degli imputati.

“Risultati già oltremodo deplorevoli,” disse Sir Horace Hunter, con la sua voce piuttosto forte. “Le do un esempio, mio signore; certa gente di nome Dale nel Somerset ha preso in casa un pazzo come pensionante. Può essere stato un maniaco omicida, per quanto ne so io; qualcuno dice addirittura che avesse un gran cannone o colubrina che sporgeva dalla finestra della sua camera. Ma senza alcuna gestione responsabile della tenuta, nessun proprietario terriero, nessun avvocato, nessuna persona istruita in giro, nulla impediva loro di affittare la camera a una tigre del Bengala. Comunque, l’uomo era matto, si precipitò delirante sul palco al Congresso Astronomico parlando della Bella Donna e della mucca che saltò oltre la luna. Quel maledetto agitatore di Pierce, che stava un tempo nel Flying Corps, era in sala, e fece un tumulto e portò via quel folle in aeroplano. È quel genere di cose che vi capiterà dappertutto se a questi individui ignoranti si permette di fare come gli pare.”

“È verissimo,” disse Lord Normantowers. “Potrei fare molti altri esempi. Dicono che Owen Hood, un altro di questi eccentrici, abbia addirittura comprato una di queste piccole fattorie e l’abbia attorniata tutta di merli assurdi e di un fossato e di un ponte levatoio, con il motto ‘La casa dell’inglese è il suo castello.’”

“Io penso,” disse il Primo Ministro tranquillamente, “che per quanto inglese possa essere l’inglese, scoprirà che il suo castello è un castello in Spagna; per non dire un castello in aria. Signor Oates,” disse, rivolgendosi con grande cortesia al grande americano rimuginante all’altro capo del tavolo, “la prego di non immaginare che io non sappia simpatizzare con simili romanticherie, benché siano soltanto per aria. Ma penso in tutta sincerità che scoprirà che sono inadatte al clima inglese. Et ego in Arcadia, sa; abbiamo tutti fatto simili sogni di tutti gli uomini che zufolano in Arcadia. Ma dopotutto, lei ha già pagato lo zufolatore; e se è saggio, penso che possa ancora ordinare la melodia.”

“Mi dà gran soddisfazione dire che è troppo tardi,” borbottò Oates. “Voglio che imparino a suonare e a pagare da soli.”

“Ma lei vuole che imparino,” disse Lord Eden con dolcezza, “e io non avrei tanta fretta di dire che è troppo tardi. Mi pare che la porta sia ancora aperta per un ragionevole compromesso; ho inteso che l’atto di donazione, considerato come strumento giuridico, è ancora oggetto di qualche discussione legale e potrebbe benissimo essere oggetto di revisione. Mi è capitato di parlarne ieri con i legali della Corona; e sono certo che il minimo cenno che lei stesso—”

“I take it to mean,” said Mr. Oates with great deliberation, “that you’ll tell your lawyers it’ll pay them to pick a hole in the deal.”

“That is what we call the bluff Western humour,” said Lord Eden, smiling, “but I only mean that we do a great deal in this country by reconsideration and revision. We make mistakes and unmake them. We have a phrase for it in our history books; we call it the flexibility of an unwritten constitution.”

“We have a phrase for it too,” said the American reflectively. “We call it graft.”

“Really,” cried Normantowers, a little bristly man, with sudden shrillness, “I did not know you were so scrupulous in your own methods.”

“Motht unthcrupulouth,” said Mr. Low virtuously.

Enoch Oates rose slowly like an enormous leviathan rising to the surface of the sea; his large sallow face had never changed in expression; but he had the air of one drifting dreamily away.

“Wal,” he said, “I dare say it’s true I’ve done some graft in my time, and a good many deals that weren’t what you might call modelled on the Sermon on the Mount. But if I smashed people, it was when they were all out to smash me; and if some of ‘em were poor, they were the sort that were ready to shoot or knife or blow me to bits. And I tell you, in my country the whole lot of you would be lynched or tarred and feathered to-morrow, if you talked about lawyers taking away people’s land when once they’d got it. Maybe the English climate’s different, as you say; but I’m going to see it through. As for you, Mr. Rosenbaum—”

“My name is Low,” said the philanthropist. “I cannot thee why anyone should object to uthing my name.”

“Not on your life,” said Mr. Oates affably. “Seems to be a pretty appropriate name.”

He drifted heavily from the room, and the four other men were left, staring at a riddle.

“He’s going on with it, or, rather, they’re going on with it,” groaned Horace Hunter. “And what the devil is to be done now?”

“It really looks as if he were right in calling it too late,” said Lord Normantowers bitterly. “I can’t think of anything to be done.”

“I can,” said the Prime Minister. They all looked at him; but none of them could read the indecipherable subtleties in his old and wrinkled face under his youthful yellow hair.

“The resources of civilization are not exhausted,” he said grimly. “That’s what the old governments used to say when they started shooting people. Well, I could understand you gentlemen feeling inclined to shoot people now. I suppose it seems to you that all your own power in the State, which you wield with such public spirit of course, all Sir Horace’s health reforms, the Normantowers’ new estate, and so on, are all broken to bits, to rotten little bits of rusticity. What’s to become of a governing class if it doesn’t hold all the land, eh? Well, I’ll tell you. I know the next move, and the time has come to take it.”

“But what is it?” demanded Sir Horace.

“The time has come,” said the Prime Minister, “to Nationalize the Land.”

Sir Horace Hunter rose from his chair, opened his mouth, shut it, and sat down again, all with what he himself might have called a reflex action.

“But that is Socialism!” cried Lord Normantowers, his eyes standing out of his head.

“True Socialism, don’t you think?” mused the Prime Minister. “Better call it True Socialism; just the sort of thing to be remembered at elections. Theirs is Socialism, and ours is True Socialism.”

“Do you really mean, my lord,” cried Hunter in a heat of sincerity stronger than the snobbery of a lifetime, “that you are going to support the Bolshies?”

“No,” said Eden, with the smile of a sphinx. “I mean the Bolshies are going to support me. Idiots!”

After a silence, he added in a more wistful tone:

“Of course, as a matter of sentiment, it is a little sad. All our fine old English castles and manors, the homes of the gentry… they will become public property, like post offices, I suppose. When I think of the happy hours I have myself passed at the Normantowers—” He smiled across at the nobleman of that name and went on. “And Sir Horace has now, I believe, the joy of living in Warbridge Castle— fine old place. Dear me, yes, and I think Mr. Low has a castle, though the name escapes me.”

“Rosewood Castle,” said Mr. Low rather sulkily.

“But I say,” cried Sir Horace, rising, “what becomes of ‘Don’t Nationalize but Rationalize’?”

“I suppose,” replied Eden lightly, “it will have to be ‘Don’t Rationalize but Nationalize.’ It comes to the same thing. Besides, we can easily get a new motto of some sort. For instance, we, after all, are the patriotic party, the national party. What about ‘Let the Nationalists Nationalize’?”

“Well, all I can say is—” began Normantowers explosively.

“Compensation, there will be compensation, of course,” said the Prime Minister soothingly; “a great deal can be done with compensation. If you will all turn up here this day week, say at four o’clock, I think I can lay all the plans before you.”

When they did turn up next week and were shown again into the Prime Minister’s sunny garden, they found that the plans were, indeed, laid before them; for the table that stood on the sunny lawn was covered with large and small maps and a mass of official documents. Mr. Eustace Pym, one of the Prime Minister’s numerous private secretaries, was hovering over them, and the Prime Minister himself was sitting at the head of the table studying one of them with an intelligent frown.

“I thought you’d like to hear the terms of the arrangements,” he said. “I’m afraid we must all make sacrifices in the cause of progress.”

“Oh, progress be ----” cried Normantowers, losing patience. “I want to know if you really mean that my estate—”

“It comes under the department of Castle and Abbey Estates in Section Four,” said Lord Eden, referring to the paper before him. “By the provisions of the new Bill the public control in such cases will be vested in the Lord-Lieutenant of the County. In the particular case of your castle—let me see—why, yes, of course, you are Lord Lieutenant of that county.”

“Lo intendo nel senso,” disse il signor Oates con grande ponderatezza, “che direte ai vostri avvocati che gli converrà trovare un cavillo nell’accordo.”

“Questo è ciò che noi chiamiamo il rude umorismo del West,” disse Lord Eden, sorridendo, “ma io intendo soltanto che in questo paese facciamo molto per via di riesame e revisione. Commettiamo errori e li disfacciamo. Abbiamo una locuzione per ciò nei nostri libri di storia; la chiamiamo la flessibilità di una costituzione non scritta.”

“Anche noi abbiamo una locuzione per ciò,” disse l’americano riflessivo. “Noi la chiamiamo corruzione.”

“Davvero,” gridò Normantowers, un ometto piuttosto irsuto, con improvvisa stridulità, “non sapevo che lei fosse così scrupoloso nei propri metodi.”

“Del tutto thenza thcrupoli,” disse virtuosamente il signor Low.

Enoch Oates si levò lentamente come un enorme leviatano che risale alla superficie del mare; il suo grande volto giallastro non aveva mai mutato espressione; ma aveva l’aria di uno che si allontana sognante alla deriva.

“Bèh,” disse, “ammetto che è vero che ho fatto un po’ di corruzione ai miei tempi, e parecchi affari che non erano quello che si potrebbe dire modellati sul Sermone della Montagna. Ma se ho stritolato la gente, è stato quando erano tutti pronti a stritolare me; e se alcuni di loro erano poveri, erano di quel genere pronto a spararmi o a pugnalarmi o a farmi saltare in pezzi. E vi dico che nel mio paese tutti quanti voi sareste linciati o incatramati e impiumati entro domani, se parlaste di avvocati che portano via la terra alla gente una volta che l’ha ottenuta. Forse il clima inglese è diverso, come dite; ma io intendo andare fino in fondo. Quanto a lei, signor Rosenbaum—”

“Il mio nome è Low,” disse il filantropo. “Non capithco perché qualcuno dovrebbe aver da ridire nell’uthare il mio nome.”

“Per carità,” disse il signor Oates affabilmente. “Pare essere un nome piuttosto azzeccato.”

Si trascinò pesantemente fuori dalla stanza, e gli altri quattro uomini rimasero a fissare un enigma.

“Va avanti con la cosa, o, piuttosto, ci vanno avanti loro,” gemette Horace Hunter. “E cosa diavolo si deve fare adesso?”

“Sembra davvero che avesse ragione a dire che è troppo tardi,” disse Lord Normantowers amaramente. “Non riesco a pensare a nulla che si possa fare.”

“Io sì,” disse il Primo Ministro. Tutti lo guardarono; ma nessuno di loro sapeva leggere le indecifrabili sottigliezze del suo volto vecchio e rugoso sotto i suoi giovanili capelli biondi.

“Le risorse della civiltà non sono esaurite,” disse cupamente. “Questo è ciò che i vecchi governi solevano dire quando cominciavano a fucilare la gente. Bene, potrei capire che voi signori vi sentiate inclini a fucilare la gente adesso. Suppongo vi paia che tutto il vostro potere nello Stato, che voi esercitate con tanto spirito pubblico naturalmente, tutte le riforme sanitarie di Sir Horace, la nuova tenuta dei Normantowers, e via dicendo, sia tutto ridotto in pezzi, in marci pezzettini di rusticità. Che ne sarà di una classe dirigente se non possiede tutta la terra, eh? Bene, ve lo dirò io. Conosco la prossima mossa, ed è giunto il momento di compierla.”

“Ma qual è?” domandò Sir Horace.

“È giunto il momento,” disse il Primo Ministro, “di nazionalizzare la Terra.”

Sir Horace Hunter si levò dalla sedia, aprì la bocca, la richiuse, e si rimise a sedere, il tutto con ciò che egli stesso avrebbe potuto chiamare un’azione riflessa.

“Ma questo è Socialismo!” gridò Lord Normantowers, con gli occhi che gli schizzavano fuori dalla testa.

“Vero Socialismo, non credete?” meditò il Primo Ministro. “Meglio chiamarlo Vero Socialismo; proprio il genere di cosa da ricordare alle elezioni. Il loro è Socialismo, e il nostro è Vero Socialismo.”

“Volete davvero dire, mio signore,” gridò Hunter in un calore di sincerità più forte dello snobismo di tutta una vita, “che intendete sostenere i bolscevichi?”

“No,” disse Eden, con il sorriso di una sfinge. “Intendo che i bolscevichi sosterranno me. Idioti!”

Dopo un silenzio, aggiunse in tono più malinconico:

“Naturalmente, come questione di sentimento, è un po’ triste. Tutti i nostri bei vecchi castelli e manieri inglesi, le dimore della piccola nobiltà… diverranno proprietà pubblica, come gli uffici postali, suppongo. Quando penso alle ore felici che io stesso ho trascorso ai Normantowers—” Sorrise verso il nobiluomo di quel nome e proseguì. “E Sir Horace ha ora, mi pare, la gioia di vivere nel Castello di Warbridge—bella vecchia dimora. Povero me, sì, e mi pare che il signor Low abbia un castello, benché il nome mi sfugga.”

“Castello di Rosewood,” disse il signor Low piuttosto imbronciato.

“Ma dico io,” gridò Sir Horace, levandosi, “che ne è di ‘Non nazionalizzare ma razionalizzare’?”

“Suppongo,” rispose Eden con leggerezza, “che dovrà diventare ‘Non razionalizzare ma nazionalizzare.’ È la stessa cosa. Del resto, possiamo facilmente trovare un nuovo motto di qualche sorta. Per esempio, noi, dopotutto, siamo il partito patriottico, il partito nazionale. Che ne dite di ‘Che i Nazionalisti nazionalizzino’?”

“Well, tutto quel che posso dire è—” cominciò Normantowers esplosivamente.

“Compenso, ci sarà un compenso, naturalmente,” disse il Primo Ministro in tono rassicurante; “molto si può fare con un compenso. Se vorrete tutti presentarvi qui a otto giorni da oggi, diciamo alle quattro in punto, penso di potervi esporre tutti i piani.”

Quando si presentarono la settimana seguente e furono introdotti di nuovo nel soleggiato giardino del Primo Ministro, trovarono che i piani erano, in effetti, esposti dinanzi a loro; poiché il tavolo che stava sul prato assolato era coperto di mappe grandi e piccole e di una massa di documenti ufficiali. Il signor Eustace Pym, uno dei numerosi segretari privati del Primo Ministro, aleggiava su di esse, e il Primo Ministro in persona sedeva a capotavola studiandone una con un cipiglio intelligente.

“Ho pensato che vi avrebbe fatto piacere udire i termini degli accordi,” disse. “Temo che dobbiamo tutti fare dei sacrifici nella causa del progresso.”

“Oh, il progresso vada al ----” gridò Normantowers, perdendo la pazienza. “Voglio sapere se intendete davvero che la mia tenuta—”

“Rientra nel dipartimento delle Tenute di Castle e Abbazia nella Sezione Quattro,” disse Lord Eden, riferendosi al foglio dinanzi a lui. “Secondo le disposizioni del nuovo disegno di legge il controllo pubblico in tali casi sarà affidato al Lord-Luogotenente della Contea. Nel caso particolare del vostro castello—vediamo un po’—ma sì, certo, voi siete il Lord-Luogotenente di quella contea.”

Little Lord Normantowers was staring, with his stiff hair all standing on end; but a new look was dawning in his shrewd though small-featured face.

“The case of Warbridge Castle is different,” said the Prime Minister. “It happens unfortunately to stand in a district desolated by all the recent troubles about swine-fever, touching which the Health Comptroller” (here he bowed to Sir Horace Hunter) “has shown such admirable activity. It has been necessary to place the whole of this district in the hands of the Health Comptroller, that he may study any traces of swine-fever that may be found in the Castle, the Cathedral, the Vicarage, and so on. So much for that case, which stands somewhat apart; the others are mostly normal. Rosenbaum Castle—I should say Rosewood Castle—being of a later date, comes under Section Five, and the appointment of a permanent Castle Custodian is left to the discretion of the Government. In this case the Government has decided to appoint Mr. Rosewood Low to the post, in recognition of his local services to social science and economics. In all these cases, of course, due compensation will be paid to the present owners of the estates, and ample salaries and expenses of entertainment paid to the new officials, that the places may be kept up in a manner worthy of their historical and national character.”

He paused, as if for cheers, and Sir Horace was vaguely irritated into saying: “But look here, my castle—”

“Damn it all!” said the Prime Minister, with his first flash of impatience and sincerity. “Can’t you see you’ll get twice as much as before? First you’ll be compensated for losing your castle, and then you’ll be paid for keeping it.”

“My lord,” said Lord Normantowers humbly, “I apologize for anything I may have said or suggested. I ought to have known I stood in the presence of a great English statesman.”

“Oh, it’s easy enough,” said Lord Eden frankly. “Look how easily we remained in the saddle, in spite of democratic elections; how we managed to dominate the Commons as well as the Lords. It’ll be the same with what they call Socialism. We shall still be there; only we shall be called bureaucrats instead of aristocrats.”

“I see it all now!” cried Hunter, “and by Heaven, it’ll be the end of all this confounded demagogy of Three Acres and a Cow.”

“I think so,” said the Prime Minister with a smile; and began to fold up the maps.

As he was folding up the last and largest, he suddenly stopped and said:

“Hallo!”

A letter was lying in the middle of the table; a letter in a sealed envelope, and one which he evidently did not recognize as any part of his paper paraphernalia.

“Where did this letter come from?” he asked rather sharply. “Did you put it here, Eustace?”

“No,” said Mr. Pym staring. “I never saw it before. It didn’t come with your letters this morning.”

“It didn’t come by post at all,” said Lord Eden; “and none of the servants brought it in. How the devil did it get out here in the garden?”

He ripped it open with his finger and remained for some time staring in mystification at its contents.

“Welkin Castle, Sept. 4th, 19—.

“Dear Lord Eden,—As I understand you are making public provision for the future disposal of our historic national castles, such as Warbridge Castle, I should much appreciate any information about your intentions touching Welkin Castle, my own estate, as it would enable me to make my own arrangements.—Yours very truly, “Welkyn of Welkin.”

“Who is Welkyn?” asked the puzzled politician; “he writes as if he knew me; but I can’t recall him at the moment. And where is Welkin Castle? We must look at the maps again.”

But though they looked at the maps for hours, and searched Burke, Debrett, “Who’s Who,” the atlas, and every other work of reference, they could come upon no trace of that firm but polite country gentleman.

Lord Eden was a little worried, because he knew that curiously important people could exist in a corner in this country, and suddenly emerge from their corner to make trouble. He knew it was very important that his own governing class should stand with him in this great public change (and private understanding), and that no rich eccentric should be left out or offended. But although he was worried to that extent, it is probable that his worry would soon have faded from his mind if it had not been for something that happened some days later.

Going out into the same garden to the same table, with the more agreeable purpose of taking tea there, he was amazed to find another letter, though this was lying not on the table but on the turf just beside it. It was unstamped like the other and addressed in the same handwriting; but its tone was more stern.

“Welkin Castle, Oct. 6th, 19—.

“My Lord,—As you seem to have decided to continue your sweeping scheme of confiscation, as in the case of Warbridge Castle, without the slightest reference to the historic and even heroic claims of Welkin Castle, I can only inform you that I shall defend the fortress of my fathers to the death. Moreover, I have decided to make a protest of a more public kind; and when you next hear from me it will be in the form of a general appeal to the justice of the English people.—Yours truly, Welkyn of Welkin.”

The historic and even heroic traditions of Welkin Castle kept a dozen of the Prime Minister’s private secretaries busy for a week, looking up encyclopaedias and chronicles and books of history. But the Prime Minister himself was more worried about another problem. How did these mysterious letters get into the house, or rather into the garden? None of them came by post and none of the servants knew anything about them. Moreover, the Prime Minister, in an unobtrusive way, was very carefully guarded. Prime Ministers always are. But he had been especially protected ever since the Vegetarians a few years before had gone about killing everybody who believed in killing animals. There were always plain-clothes policemen at every entrance of his house and garden. And from their testimony it would appear certain that the letter could not have got into the garden; but for the trifling fact that it was lying there on the garden-table. Lord Eden cogitated in a grim fashion for some time; then he said as he rose from his chair:

Il piccolo Lord Normantowers fissava, con i suoi capelli irsuti tutti ritti in cima; ma un nuovo sguardo albeggiava sul suo volto scaltro benché dai lineamenti minuti.

“Il caso del Castello di Warbridge è diverso,” disse il Primo Ministro. “Si dà il caso, purtroppo, che si trovi in un distretto devastato da tutti i recenti guai riguardo alla peste suina, in merito alla quale il Controllore Sanitario” (qui s’inchinò verso Sir Horace Hunter) “ha mostrato una così ammirevole solerzia. È stato necessario porre l’intero distretto nelle mani del Controllore Sanitario, affinché egli possa studiare qualsiasi traccia di peste suina che possa trovarsi nel Castello, nella Cattedrale, nella Canonica, e via dicendo. Tanto basti per quel caso, che sta in certo qual modo a sé; gli altri sono per lo più normali. Il Castello di Rosenbaum—dovrei dire il Castello di Rosewood—essendo di data più recente, rientra nella Sezione Cinque, e la nomina di un Custode permanente del Castello è lasciata alla discrezione del Governo. In questo caso il Governo ha deciso di nominare a tale carica il signor Rosewood Low, in riconoscimento dei suoi servigi locali alla scienza sociale e all’economia. In tutti questi casi, naturalmente, sarà versato ai presenti proprietari delle tenute il dovuto compenso, e stipendi cospicui e spese di rappresentanza saranno versati ai nuovi funzionari, affinché quei luoghi possano essere mantenuti in modo degno del loro carattere storico e nazionale.”

Si fermò, come in attesa di applausi, e Sir Horace fu vagamente irritato al punto di dire: “Ma senta un po’, il mio castello—”

“Al diavolo tutto quanto!” disse il Primo Ministro, con il suo primo lampo d’impazienza e di sincerità. “Non vedete che ne ricaverete il doppio di prima? Prima sarete compensato per la perdita del vostro castello, e poi sarete pagato per custodirlo.”

“Mio signore,” disse Lord Normantowers umilmente, “mi scuso per qualunque cosa io possa aver detto o insinuato. Avrei dovuto sapere che mi trovavo alla presenza di un grande statista inglese.”

“Oh, è abbastanza facile,” disse Lord Eden francamente. “Guardate con quanta facilità siamo rimasti in sella, malgrado le elezioni democratiche; come siamo riusciti a dominare i Comuni tanto bene quanto i Lord. Sarà lo stesso con ciò che chiamano Socialismo. Saremo ancora là; solo che ci chiameranno burocrati invece che aristocratici.”

“Ora vedo tutto!” gridò Hunter, “e per il Cielo, sarà la fine di tutta questa maledetta demagogia dei Tre Acri e una Mucca.”

“Credo di sì,” disse il Primo Ministro con un sorriso; e cominciò a ripiegare le mappe.

Mentre stava ripiegando l’ultima e la più grande, si arrestò all’improvviso e disse:

“Ehilà!”

Una lettera giaceva in mezzo al tavolo; una lettera in una busta sigillata, e una che egli evidentemente non riconosceva come parte alcuna del suo armamentario cartaceo.

“Da dove è venuta questa lettera?” chiese piuttosto seccamente. “L’hai messa qui tu, Eustace?”

“No,” disse il signor Pym fissandola. “Non l’ho mai vista prima. Non è arrivata con la sua posta stamattina.”

“Non è affatto arrivata per posta,” disse Lord Eden; “e nessuno dei domestici l’ha portata dentro. Come diavolo è finita qui fuori nel giardino?”

La lacerò con il dito e rimase per qualche tempo a fissare sconcertato il suo contenuto.

“Castello di Welkin, 4 sett., 19—.

“Caro Lord Eden,—Poiché intendo che state prendendo pubbliche disposizioni per la futura destinazione dei nostri storici castelli nazionali, quali il Castello di Warbridge, apprezzerei molto qualsiasi informazione sulle vostre intenzioni riguardo al Castello di Welkin, la mia propria tenuta, poiché ciò mi permetterebbe di prendere le mie disposizioni.—Vostro devotissimo, “Welkyn di Welkin.”

“Chi è Welkyn?” chiese lo sconcertato uomo politico; “scrive come se mi conoscesse; ma non riesco a rammentarlo al momento. E dov’è il Castello di Welkin? Dobbiamo guardare di nuovo le mappe.”

Ma per quanto guardassero le mappe per ore, e scrutassero il Burke, il Debrett, il “Who’s Who,” l’atlante, e ogni altra opera di consultazione, non riuscirono a trovare traccia alcuna di quel fermo ma cortese gentiluomo di campagna.

Lord Eden era un poco preoccupato, perché sapeva che persone curiosamente importanti potevano esistere in un angolo di questo paese, ed emergere all’improvviso dal loro angolo per creare guai. Sapeva che era molto importante che la sua stessa classe dirigente stesse con lui in questo grande mutamento pubblico (e intesa privata), e che nessun ricco eccentrico fosse lasciato fuori od offeso. Ma benché fosse preoccupato a tal punto, è probabile che la sua preoccupazione si sarebbe presto dileguata dalla sua mente se non fosse stato per qualcosa che accadde alcuni giorni dopo.

Uscendo nello stesso giardino verso lo stesso tavolo, col più gradevole proposito di prendervi il tè, fu stupito di trovare un’altra lettera, benché questa giacesse non sul tavolo ma sul tappeto erboso proprio accanto ad esso. Era priva di francobollo come l’altra e indirizzata con la stessa calligrafia; ma il suo tono era più severo.

“Castello di Welkin, 6 ott., 19—.

“Mio Signore,—Poiché parete aver deciso di proseguire il vostro radicale piano di confisca, come nel caso del Castello di Warbridge, senza il minimo riguardo per le storiche e persino eroiche rivendicazioni del Castello di Welkin, non posso far altro che informarvi che difenderò la fortezza dei miei padri fino alla morte. Inoltre, ho deciso di levare una protesta di carattere più pubblico; e quando avrete di nuovo mie notizie, sarà sotto forma di un appello generale alla giustizia del popolo inglese.—Vostro sinceramente, Welkyn di Welkin.”

Le storiche e persino eroiche tradizioni del Castello di Welkin tennero occupata per una settimana una dozzina di segretari privati del Primo Ministro, a consultare enciclopedie e cronache e libri di storia. Ma il Primo Ministro stesso era più preoccupato di un altro problema. Come facevano queste misteriose lettere a entrare nella casa, o piuttosto nel giardino? Nessuna di esse arrivava per posta e nessuno dei domestici ne sapeva nulla. Per di più, il Primo Ministro, in modo discreto, era assai attentamente sorvegliato. I Primi Ministri lo sono sempre. Ma egli era stato particolarmente protetto fin da quando, alcuni anni prima, i Vegetariani se n’erano andati in giro a uccidere chiunque credesse nell’uccidere gli animali. C’erano sempre poliziotti in borghese a ogni ingresso della sua casa e del suo giardino. E dalla loro testimonianza sarebbe parso certo che la lettera non potesse essere entrata nel giardino; se non per l’insignificante fatto che giaceva là sul tavolo del giardino. Lord Eden meditò in modo torvo per qualche tempo; poi disse mentre si levava dalla sedia:

“I think I will have a talk to our American friend Mr. Oates.”

Whether from a sense of humour or a sense of justice, Lord Eden summoned Enoch Oates before the same special jury of three; or summoned them before him, as the case may be. For it was even more difficult than before to read the exact secret of Eden’s sympathies or intentions; he talked about a variety of indifferent subjects leading up to that of the letters, which he treated very lightly. Then he said quite suddenly:

“Do you know anything about those letters, by the way?”

The American presented his poker face to the company for some time without reply. Then he said:

“And what makes you think I know anything about them?”

“Because,” said Horace Hunter, breaking in with uncontrollable warmth, “we know you’re hand and glove with all those lunatics in the League of the Long Bow who are kicking up all this shindy.”

“Well,” said Oates calmly, “I’ll never deny I like some of their ways. I like live wires myself; and, after all, they’re about the liveliest thing in this old country. And I’ll tell you more. I like people who take trouble; and, believe me, they do take trouble. You say they’re all nuts; but I reckon there really is method in their madness. They take trouble to keep those crazy vows of theirs. You spoke about the fellows who carried off the astronomer in an aeroplane. Well, I know Bellew Blair, the man who worked with Pierce in that stunt, and believe me he’s not a man to be sniffed at. He’s one of the finest experts in aeronautics in the country; and if he’s gone over to them, it means there’s something in their notion for a scientific intellect to take hold of. It was Blair that worked that pig stunt for Hilary Pierce; made a great gas-bag shaped like a sow and gave all the little pigs parachutes.”

“Well, there you are,” cried Hunter. “Of all the lunacy—”

“I remember Commander Blair in the War,” said the Prime Minister quietly. “Bellows Blair, they called him. He did expert work: some new scheme with dirigible balloons. But I was only going to ask Mr. Oates whether he happens to know where Welkin Castle is.”

“Must be somewhere near here,” suggested Normantowers, “as the letters seem to come by hand.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Enoch Oates doubtfully. “I know a man living in Ely, who had one of those letters delivered by hand. And I know another near Land’s End who thought the letter must have come from somebody living near. As you say, they all seem to come by hand.”

“By what hand?” asked the Prime Minister, with a queer, grim expression.

“Mr. Oates,” said Lord Normantowers firmly, “where IS Welkin Castle?”

“Why, it’s everywhere, in a manner of speaking,” said Mr. Oates reflectively. “It’s anywhere, anyhow. Gee—!” he broke off suddenly: “Why, as a matter of fact, it’s here!”

“Ah,” said the Prime Minister quietly, “I thought we should see something if we watched here long enough! You didn’t think I kept you hanging about here only to ask Mr. Oates questions that I knew the answer to.”

“What do you mean? Thought we would see what?”

“Where the unstamped letters come from,” replied Lord Eden.

Luminous and enormous, there heaved up above the garden trees something that looked at first like a coloured cloud; it was flushed with light such as lies on clouds opposite the sunset, a light at once warm and wan; and it shone like an opaque flame. But as it came closer it grew more and more incredible. It took on solid proportions and perspective, as if a cloud could brush and crush the dark tree-tops. It was something never seen before in the sky; it was a cubist cloud. Men gazing at such a sunset cloud-land often imagine they see castles and cities of an almost uncanny completeness. But there would be a possible point of completeness at which they would cry aloud, or perhaps shriek aloud, as at a sign in heaven; and that completeness had come. The big luminous object that sailed above the garden was outlined in battlements and turrets like a fairy castle; but with an architectural exactitude impossible in any cloudland. With the very look of it a phrase and a proverb leapt into the mind.

“There, my lord!” cried Oates, suddenly lifting his nasal and drawling voice and pointing, “there’s that dream you told me about. There’s your castle in the air.”

As the shadow of the flying thing travelled over the sun-lit lawn, they looked up and saw for the first time that the lower part of the edifice hung downwards like the car of a great balloon. They remembered the aeronautical tricks of Commander Blair and Captain Pierce and the model of the monstrous pig. As it passed over the table a white speck detached itself and dropped from the car. It was a letter.

The next moment the white speck was followed by a shower that was like a snowstorm. Countless letters, leaflets, and scraps of paper were littered all over the lawn. The guests seemed to stand staring wildly in a wilderness of waste-paper; but the keen and experienced eyes of Lord Eden recognized the material which, in political elections, is somewhat satirically called “literature.”

It took the twelve private secretaries some time to pick them all up and make the lawn neat and tidy again. On examination they proved to be mainly of two kinds: one a sort of electioneering pamphlet of the League of the Long Bow, and the other a somewhat airy fantasy about private property in air. The most important of the documents, which Lord Eden studied more attentively, though with a grim smile, began with the sentence in large letters:

“An Englishman’s House Is No Longer His Castle On The Soil Of England. If It Is To Be His Castle, It Must Be A Castle In The Air.

“If There Seem To Be Something Unfamiliar And Even Fanciful In The Idea, We Reply That It Is Not Half So Fantastic To Own Your Own Houses In The Clouds As Not To Own Your Own Houses On The Earth.”

“Credo che farò due chiacchiere col nostro amico americano, il signor Oates.”

Vuoi per senso dell’umorismo vuoi per senso di giustizia, Lord Eden convocò Enoch Oates dinanzi alla stessa speciale giuria di tre; o convocò loro dinanzi a sé, secondo il caso. Poiché era ancora più difficile di prima leggere l’esatto segreto delle simpatie o delle intenzioni di Eden; egli parlò di una varietà di argomenti indifferenti conducenti a quello delle lettere, che trattò con molta leggerezza. Poi disse tutt’a un tratto:

“A proposito, sapete qualcosa di quelle lettere?”

L’americano presentò la sua faccia da giocatore di poker alla compagnia per qualche tempo senza rispondere. Poi disse:

“E cosa vi fa pensare che io ne sappia qualcosa?”

“Perché,” disse Horace Hunter, intromettendosi con incontenibile calore, “sappiamo che siete in combutta con tutti quei pazzi della Lega del Lungo Arco che stanno facendo tutta questa cagnara.”

“Well,” disse Oates con calma, “non negherò mai che mi piacciono alcuni dei loro modi. A me piacciono i tipi in gamba; e, dopotutto, sono la cosa più viva di questo vecchio paese. E vi dirò di più. Mi piace la gente che si dà da fare; e, credetemi, loro si danno da fare. Voi dite che sono tutti tocchi; ma io ritengo che ci sia davvero metodo nella loro follia. Si danno da fare per mantenere quei loro folli voti. Avete parlato di quei tizi che hanno portato via l’astronomo in aeroplano. Well, io conosco Bellew Blair, l’uomo che ha lavorato con Pierce in quell’impresa, e credetemi non è uomo da prendere sottogamba. È uno dei migliori esperti di aeronautica del paese; e se è passato dalla loro parte, vuol dire che c’è qualcosa nella loro idea a cui un intelletto scientifico possa aggrapparsi. È stato Blair a mettere in piedi quell’impresa dei maiali per Hilary Pierce; ha fatto un gran pallone a forma di scrofa e ha dato a tutti i porcellini dei paracadute.”

“Well, eccoci qua,” gridò Hunter. “Di tutte le follie—”

“Mi ricordo del Comandante Blair durante la Guerra,” disse il Primo Ministro tranquillamente. “Blair il Mantice, lo chiamavano. Faceva un lavoro da esperto: qualche nuovo piano con i dirigibili. Ma volevo solo chiedere al signor Oates se per caso sa dove si trova il Castello di Welkin.”

“Dev’essere da queste parti,” suggerì Normantowers, “dato che le lettere paiono arrivare a mano.”

“Well, non saprei,” disse Enoch Oates con esitazione. “Conosco un uomo che vive a Ely, al quale una di quelle lettere fu recapitata a mano. E ne conosco un altro presso Land’s End che pensava che la lettera dovesse esser venuta da qualcuno che viveva nei pressi. Come dite voi, paiono tutte arrivare a mano.”

“Per quale mano?” chiese il Primo Ministro, con una strana, torva espressione.

“Signor Oates,” disse Lord Normantowers con fermezza, “DOV’È il Castello di Welkin?”

“Ma è dappertutto, per così dire,” disse il signor Oates riflessivo. “È in qualunque luogo, comunque sia. Perbacco—!” s’interruppe di colpo: “Ma, a dire il vero, è qui!”

“Ah,” disse il Primo Ministro tranquillamente, “pensavo che avremmo visto qualcosa se avessimo aspettato qui abbastanza a lungo! Non crederete mica che vi abbia tenuti qui a bighellonare solo per fare al signor Oates domande di cui conoscevo già la risposta.”

“Cosa intendete? Pensavate che avremmo visto cosa?”

“Da dove vengono le lettere prive di francobollo,” rispose Lord Eden.

Luminoso ed enorme, si sollevò sopra gli alberi del giardino qualcosa che dapprima sembrava una nuvola colorata; era arrossato da una luce simile a quella che posa sulle nuvole di fronte al tramonto, una luce a un tempo calda e smorta; e brillava come una fiamma opaca. Ma man mano che si avvicinava diveniva sempre più incredibile. Assunse solide proporzioni e prospettiva, come se una nuvola potesse sfiorare e schiacciare le oscure cime degli alberi. Era qualcosa mai visto prima nel cielo; era una nuvola cubista. Gli uomini che contemplano una simile nuvola al tramonto immaginano spesso di vedere castelli e città di una compiutezza quasi perturbante. Ma vi sarebbe un possibile punto di compiutezza al quale griderebbero, o forse strillerebbero, come dinanzi a un segno nel cielo; e quella compiutezza era giunta. Il grande oggetto luminoso che veleggiava sopra il giardino era delineato in merli e torrette come un castello fatato; ma con un’esattezza architettonica impossibile in qualsiasi paese di nuvole. Al solo vederlo, una frase e un proverbio balzarono alla mente.

“Ecco, mio signore!” gridò Oates, alzando all’improvviso la sua voce nasale e strascicata e puntando il dito, “ecco quel sogno di cui mi avete parlato. Ecco il vostro castello in aria.”

Mentre l’ombra della cosa volante scorreva sul prato assolato, essi alzarono lo sguardo e videro per la prima volta che la parte inferiore dell’edificio pendeva verso il basso come la navicella di una grande mongolfiera. Ricordarono i trucchi aeronautici del Comandante Blair e del Capitano Pierce e il modello del mostruoso maiale. Mentre passava sopra il tavolo un puntino bianco si staccò e cadde dalla navicella. Era una lettera.

Un attimo dopo il puntino bianco fu seguito da una pioggia simile a una tempesta di neve. Innumerevoli lettere, volantini e ritagli di carta furono sparsi per tutto il prato. Gli ospiti parevano stare a fissare sbigottiti in una desolazione di carta straccia; ma gli occhi acuti ed esperti di Lord Eden riconobbero il materiale che, nelle elezioni politiche, viene alquanto satiricamente chiamato “letteratura.”

Ai dodici segretari privati occorse un po’ di tempo per raccoglierli tutti e rimettere il prato in ordine e pulito. All’esame risultarono essere principalmente di due tipi: uno una sorta di opuscolo elettorale della Lega del Lungo Arco, e l’altro una fantasia piuttosto aerea sulla proprietà privata dell’aria. Il più importante dei documenti, che Lord Eden studiò con maggiore attenzione, benché con un torvo sorriso, cominciava con la frase a grandi lettere:

“La Casa di un Inglese Non È Più il Suo Castello Sul Suolo d’Inghilterra. Se Deve Essere il Suo Castello, Deve Essere un Castello in Aria.

“Se Vi Sembra Esservi Qualcosa di Insolito e Persino di Bizzarro nell’Idea, Rispondiamo Che Non È Neppure la Metà Tanto Fantastico Possedere le Proprie Case Tra le Nuvole Quanto Non Possedere le Proprie Case Sulla Terra.”

Then followed a passage of somewhat less solid political value, in which the acute reader might trace the influence of the poetical Mr. Pierce rather than the scientific Mr. Blair. It began “They Have Stolen the Earth; We Will Divide the Sky.” But the writer followed this with a somewhat unconvincing claim to have trained rooks and swallows to hover in rows in the air to represent the hedges of “the blue meadows of the new realm,” and he was so obliging as to accompany the explanation with diagrams of space showing the exact ornithological boundaries in dotted lines. There were other equally scientific documents dealing with the treatment of clouds, the driving of birds to graze on insects, and so on. The whole of this section concluded with the great social and economic slogan: “Three Acres and a Crow.”

But when Lord Eden read on, his attention appeared graver than this particular sort of social reconstruction would seem to warrant. The writer of the pamphlet resumed:

“Do not be surprised if there seems to be something topsy-turvy in the above programme. That topsy-turvydom marks the whole of our politics. It may seem strange that the air which has always been public should become private, when the land which has always been private has become public. We answer that this is exactly how things really stand to-day in the matter of all publicity and privacy. Private things are indeed being made public. But public things are being kept private.

“Thus we all had the pleasure of seeing in the papers a picture of Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., smiling in an ingratiating manner at his favourite cockatoo. We know this detail of his existence, which might seem a merely domestic one. But the fact that he is shortly to be paid thirty thousand pounds of public money, for continuing to live in his own house, is concealed with the utmost delicacy.

“Similarly we have seen whole pages of an illustrated paper filled with glimpses of Lord Normantowers enjoying his honeymoon, which the papers in question are careful to describe as his Romance. Whatever it may be, an antiquated and fastidious taste might possibly be disposed to regard it as his own affair. But the fact that the taxpayer’s money, which is the taxpayer’s affair, is to be given him in enormous quantities, first for going out of his castle, and then for coming back into it—this little domestic detail is thought too trivial for the taxpayer to be told of it.

“Or again, we are frequently informed that the hobby of Mr. Rosenbaum Low is improving the breed of Pekinese, and God knows they need it. But it would seem the sort of hobby that anybody might have without telling everybody else about it. On the other hand, the fact that Mr. Rosenbaum Low is being paid twice over for the same house, and keeping the house as well, is concealed from the public; along with the equally interesting fact that he is allowed to do these things chiefly because he lends money to the Prime Minister.”

The Prime Minister smiled still more grimly and glanced in a light yet lingering fashion at some of the accompanying leaflets. They seemed to be in the form of electioneering leaflets, though not apparently connected with any particular election.

“Vote for Crane. He Said He would Heat His Hat and Did It. Lord Normantowers said he would explain how people came to swallow his coronet; but he hasn’t done it yet.

“Vote for Pierce. He Said Pigs Would Fly And They Did. Rosenbaum Low said a service of international aerial express trains would fly; and they didn’t. It was your money he made to fly.

“Vote for the League of the Long Bow. They Are The Only Men Who Don’t Tell Lies.”

The Prime Minister stood gazing after the vanishing cloud-castle, as it faded into the clouds, with a curious expression in his eyes. Whether it were better or worse for his soul, there was something in him that understood much that the muddled materialists around him could never understand.

“Quite poetical, isn’t it?” he said drily. “Wasn’t it Victor Hugo or some French poet who said something about politics and the clouds?… The people say, ‘Bah, the poet is in the clouds. So is the thunderbolt.’”

“Thunderbolts!” said Normantowers contemptuously. “What can these fools do but go about flinging fireworks?”

“Quite so,” replied Eden; “but I’m afraid by this time they are flinging fireworks into a powder-magazine.”

He continued to gaze into the sky with screwed-up eyes, though the object had become invisible.

If his eye could really have followed the thing after which he gazed, he would have been surprised; if his unfathomable scepticism was still capable of surprise. It passed over woods and meadows like a sunset cloud towards the sunset, or a little to the north-west of it, like the fairy castle that was west of the moon. It left behind the green orchards and the red towers of Hereford and passed into bare places whose towers are mightier than any made by man, where they buttress the mighty wall of Wales. Far away in this wilderness of columned cliffs and clefts it found a cleft or hollow, along the floor of which ran a dark line that might have been a black river running through a rocky valley. But it was in fact a crack opening below into another abyss. The strange flying-ship followed the course of the winding fissure till it came to a place where the crack opened into a chasm, round like a cauldron and accidental as the knot in some colossal tree-trunk; through which it sank, entering the twilight of the tremendous cavern beneath. The abyss below was lit here and there with artificial lights, like fallen stars of the underworld, and bridged with wooden platforms and galleries, on which were wooden huts and huge packing-cases and many things somewhat suggestive of a munition dump. On the rocky walls were spread out various balloon coverings, some of them even more grotesque in outline than the castle. Some were in the shapes of animals; and on that primeval background looked like the last fossils, or possibly the first outlines of vast prehistoric creatures. Perhaps there was something suggestive in the fancy that in that underworld a new world was being created. The man who alighted from the flying castle recognized, almost as one recognizes a domestic pet, the outline of a highly primitive pig stretching like a large archaic drawing across the wall. For the young man was called Hilary Pierce, and had had previous dealings with the flying pig, though for that day he had been put in charge of the flying castle.

Seguiva poi un passo di valore politico alquanto meno solido, in cui il lettore acuto avrebbe potuto rintracciare l’influsso del poetico signor Pierce piuttosto che dello scientifico signor Blair. Cominciava così: “Essi Hanno Rubato la Terra; Noi Ci Divideremo il Cielo.” Ma lo scrivente faceva seguire a ciò una pretesa alquanto poco convincente di aver addestrato corvi e rondini a librarsi in fila nell’aria per rappresentare le siepi dei “prati azzurri del nuovo reame,” ed era così compiacente da accompagnare la spiegazione con diagrammi dello spazio che mostravano gli esatti confini ornitologici con linee punteggiate. Vi erano altri documenti ugualmente scientifici che trattavano della gestione delle nuvole, della conduzione degli uccelli al pascolo sugli insetti, e via dicendo. L’intera sezione si concludeva col grande slogan sociale ed economico: “Tre Acri e un Corvo.”

Ma quando Lord Eden proseguì la lettura, la sua attenzione parve più grave di quanto questo particolare genere di ricostruzione sociale sembrasse giustificare. Lo scrittore dell’opuscolo riprendeva:

“Non stupitevi se sembra esservi qualcosa di sottosopra nel programma di cui sopra. Quel mondo alla rovescia contrassegna l’intera nostra politica. Può parere strano che l’aria, che è sempre stata pubblica, divenga privata, quando la terra, che è sempre stata privata, è divenuta pubblica. Rispondiamo che è esattamente così che stanno oggi le cose in materia di ogni pubblicità e privatezza. Le cose private vengono in effetti rese pubbliche. Ma le cose pubbliche vengono tenute private.

“Così abbiamo tutti avuto il piacere di vedere sui giornali una foto di Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., che sorride in maniera ingraziante al suo cacatua prediletto. Conosciamo questo particolare della sua esistenza, che potrebbe parere puramente domestico. Ma il fatto che egli stia per ricevere trentamila sterline di denaro pubblico, per continuare a vivere nella propria casa, è celato con la massima delicatezza.

“Similmente abbiamo visto intere pagine di un giornale illustrato riempite di scorci di Lord Normantowers che gode della sua luna di miele, che i giornali in questione hanno cura di descrivere come la sua Storia d’Amore. Qualunque cosa sia, un gusto antiquato e schizzinoso potrebbe forse essere disposto a considerarla un affar suo. Ma il fatto che il denaro del contribuente, che è affare del contribuente, gli venga dato in quantità enormi, prima per uscire dal suo castello, e poi per rientrarvi—questo piccolo particolare domestico è ritenuto troppo insignificante perché il contribuente ne venga informato.

“O ancora, veniamo di frequente informati che l’hobby del signor Rosenbaum Low è migliorare la razza dei Pechinesi, e Dio sa se ne hanno bisogno. Ma parrebbe il genere di hobby che chiunque potrebbe avere senza raccontarlo a tutti gli altri. D’altra parte, il fatto che al signor Rosenbaum Low venga pagata due volte la stessa casa, e che egli tenga anche la casa per giunta, è celato al pubblico; assieme al fatto altrettanto interessante che gli è permesso fare queste cose principalmente perché presta denaro al Primo Ministro.”

Il Primo Ministro sorrise ancor più torvamente e gettò uno sguardo in modo lieve ma indugiante su alcuni dei volantini che accompagnavano il tutto. Parevano essere in forma di volantini elettorali, benché in apparenza non collegati ad alcuna elezione particolare.

“Votate per Crane. Ha Detto Che Avrebbe Riscaldato il Suo Cappello e l’Ha Fatto. Lord Normantowers ha detto che avrebbe spiegato come mai la gente arrivasse a inghiottire la sua corona; ma non l’ha ancora fatto.

“Votate per Pierce. Ha Detto Che i Maiali Avrebbero Volato ed Essi Volarono. Rosenbaum Low disse che un servizio di treni espressi aerei internazionali avrebbe volato; ed essi non volarono. Fu il vostro denaro che egli fece volare.

“Votate per la Lega del Lungo Arco. Sono Gli Unici Uomini Che Non Dicono Bugie.”

Il Primo Ministro stava a contemplare il castello di nuvole che svaniva, mentre si dissolveva tra le nubi, con una curiosa espressione negli occhi. Che fosse un bene o un male per la sua anima, c’era in lui qualcosa che comprendeva molto di ciò che i confusi materialisti intorno a lui non avrebbero mai potuto comprendere.

“Piuttosto poetico, non è vero?” disse asciutto. “Non fu Victor Hugo o qualche poeta francese a dire qualcosa a proposito della politica e delle nuvole?… Il popolo dice: ‘Bah, il poeta è tra le nuvole. Lo è anche il fulmine.’”

“Fulmini!” disse Normantowers con disprezzo. “Cosa possono fare questi sciocchi se non andarsene in giro a lanciare fuochi d’artificio?”

“Proprio così,” rispose Eden; “ma temo che ormai stiano lanciando fuochi d’artificio dentro una polveriera.”

Continuò a fissare il cielo con gli occhi socchiusi, benché l’oggetto fosse divenuto invisibile.

Se il suo occhio avesse potuto davvero seguire la cosa che scrutava, sarebbe rimasto sorpreso; sempre che il suo insondabile scetticismo fosse ancora capace di sorpresa. Passò sopra boschi e prati come una nuvola al tramonto verso il tramonto, o un poco a nord-ovest di esso, come il castello fatato che stava a occidente della luna. Si lasciò alle spalle i verdi frutteti e le rosse torri di Hereford e passò in luoghi spogli le cui torri sono più possenti di qualsiasi cosa fatta dall’uomo, dove esse fanno da contrafforte alla possente muraglia del Galles. Lontano in questa landa selvaggia di rupi e fenditure a colonne trovò una fenditura o un incavo, lungo il cui fondo correva una linea scura che avrebbe potuto essere un nero fiume che scorreva attraverso una valle rocciosa. Ma era in realtà una crepa che si apriva sotto in un altro abisso. La strana nave volante seguì il corso della serpeggiante fessura finché non giunse a un punto in cui la crepa si apriva in una voragine, tonda come un calderone e casuale come il nodo in qualche colossale tronco d’albero; attraverso la quale sprofondò, entrando nel crepuscolo della tremenda caverna sottostante. L’abisso in basso era rischiarato qua e là da luci artificiali, come stelle cadute del mondo sotterraneo, e attraversato da piattaforme e gallerie di legno, sulle quali stavano capanne di legno e enormi casse d’imballaggio e molte cose che ricordavano in certo modo un deposito di munizioni. Sulle pareti rocciose erano dispiegati vari involucri di palloni, alcuni dei quali persino più grotteschi nel contorno del castello. Alcuni avevano la forma di animali; e su quello sfondo primordiale parevano gli ultimi fossili, o forse i primi contorni di vaste creature preistoriche. Forse c’era qualcosa di suggestivo nella fantasia che in quel mondo sotterraneo si stesse creando un nuovo mondo. L’uomo che scese dal castello volante riconobbe, quasi come si riconosce un animale domestico, il contorno di un maialino oltremodo primitivo che si stendeva come un grande disegno arcaico attraverso la parete. Poiché il giovane si chiamava Hilary Pierce, e aveva avuto trascorsi rapporti col maiale volante, benché per quel giorno fosse stato messo a capo del castello volante.

On the platform on which he alighted stood a table covered with papers, with almost more papers than Lord Eden’s table. But these papers were covered almost entirely with figures and numbers and mathematical symbols. Two men were bending over the table, discussing and occasionally disputing. In the taller of the two the scientific world might have recognized Professor Green, whom it was seeking everywhere like the Missing Link, to incarcerate him in the interests of science. In the shorter and sturdier figure a very few people might have recognized Bellew Blair, the organizing brain of the English Revolution.

“I haven’t come to stay,” explained Pierce hastily. “I’m going on in a minute.”

“Why shouldn’t you stay?” asked Blair, in the act of lighting a pipe.

“I don’t want your talk interrupted. Still less, far, far less, do I want it uninterrupted. I mean while I’m here. A little of your scientific conversation goes a long way with me; I know what you’re like when you’re really chatty. Professor Green will say in his satirical way ‘9920.05,’ to which you will reply with quiet humour ‘75.007.’ This will be too good an opening for a witty fellow like the Professor, who will instantly retort ‘982.09.’ Not in the best taste perhaps, but a great temptation in the heat of debate.”

“Commander Blair,” said the Professor, “is very kind to let me share his calculations.”

“Lucky for me,” said Blair. “I’d have done ten times more with a mathematician like you.”

“Well,” said Pierce casually, “as you are so much immersed in mathematics, I’ll leave you. As a matter of fact, I had a message for Professor Green, about Miss Dale at the house where he was lodging; but we mustn’t interrupt scientific studies for a little thing like that.”

Green’s head came up from the papers with great abruptness.

“Message!” he cried eagerly. “What message? Is it really for me?”

“8282.003,” replied Pierce coldly.

“Don’t be offended,” said Blair. “Give the Professor his message and then go if you like.”

“It’s only that she came over to see my wife to find out where you had gone to,” said Pierce. “I told her, so far as it’s possible to tell anybody. That’s all,” he added, but rather with the air of one saying, “it ought to be enough.”

Apparently it was, for Green, who was once more looking down upon the precious papers, crumpled one of them in his clenched hand unconsciously, like a man suddenly controlling his feelings.

“Well, I’m off,” said Pierce cheerfully; “got to visit the other dumps.”

“Stop a minute,” said Blair, as the other turned away. “Haven’t you any sort of public news as well as private news? How are things going in the political world?”

“Expressed in mathematical formula,” replied Pierce over his shoulder, “the political news is MP squared plus LSD over U equals L. L let loose. L upon earth, my boy.”

And he climbed again into his castle of the air.

Oliver Green stood staring at the crumbled paper and suddenly began to straighten it out.

“Mr. Blair,” he said, “I am terribly ashamed of myself. When I see you living here like a hermit in the mountains and scrawling your calculations, so to speak, on the rocks of the wilderness, devoted to your great abstract idea, vowed to a great cause, it makes me feel very small to have entangled you and your friends in my small affairs. Of course, the affair isn’t at all small to me; but it must seem very small to you.”

“I don’t know very precisely,” answered Blair, “what was the nature of the affair. But that is emphatically your affair. For the rest, I assure you we’re delighted to have you, apart from your valuable services as a calculating machine.”

Bellew Blair, the last and, in the worldly sense, by far the ablest of the recruits of the Long Bow, was a man in early middle age, square built, but neat in figure and light on his feet, clad in a suit of leather. He mostly moved about so quickly that his figure made more impression than his face; but when he sat down smoking, in one of his rare moments of leisure, as now, it could be remarked that his face was rather calm than vivacious; a short square face with a short resolute nose, but reflective eyes much lighter than his close black hair.

“It’s quite Homeric,” he added, “the two armies fighting for the body of an astronomer. You would be a sort of symbol anyhow, since they started that insanity of calling you insane. Nobody has any business to bother you about the personal side of the matter.”

Green seemed to be ruminating, and the last phrase awoke him to a decision. He began to talk. Quite straightforwardly, though with a certain schoolboy awkwardness, he proceeded to tell his friend the whole of his uncouth love-story—the overturning of his spiritual world to the tune the old cow died of, or rather danced to.

“And I’ve let you in for hiding me like a murderer,” he concluded. “For the sake of something that must seem to you, not even like a cow jumping over the moon, but more like a calf falling over the milking-stool. Perhaps people vowed to a great work like this ought to leave all that sort of thing behind them.”

“Well, I don’t see anything to be ashamed of,” said Blair, “and in this case I don’t agree with what you say about leaving those things behind. Of some sorts of work it’s true; but not this. Shall I tell you a secret?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“The cow never does jump over the moon,” said Blair gravely. “It’s one of the sports of the bulls of the herd.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” said the Professor.

“I mean that women can’t be kept out of this war, because it’s a land war,” answered Blair. “If it were really a war in the air, you could have done it all by yourself. But in all wars of peasants defending their farms and homes, women have been very much on the spot; as they used to pour hot water out of windows during the Irish evictions. Look here, I’ll tell you a story. It’s relevant because it has a moral. After all, it’s my turn, so to speak. You’ve told me the true story of the Cow that Jumped over the Moon. It’s time I told you the true story of the Castle in the Air.”

Sulla piattaforma su cui posò il piede sorgeva un tavolo coperto di carte, con quasi più carte del tavolo di Lord Eden. Ma queste carte erano coperte quasi interamente di cifre e numeri e simboli matematici. Due uomini erano chini sul tavolo, discutendo e talora bisticciando. Nel più alto dei due il mondo scientifico avrebbe potuto riconoscere il Professor Green, che andava cercando dappertutto come l’Anello Mancante, per incarcerarlo nell’interesse della scienza. Nella figura più bassa e più tozza pochissimi avrebbero potuto riconoscere Bellew Blair, il cervello organizzatore della Rivoluzione Inglese.

“Non sono venuto per fermarmi,” spiegò Pierce in fretta. “Riparto tra un minuto.”

“Perché non dovresti fermarti?” chiese Blair, nell’atto di accendere una pipa.

“Non voglio che il vostro discorso venga interrotto. Ancor meno, molto, molto meno, lo voglio ininterrotto. Intendo mentre sono qui. Un poco della vostra conversazione scientifica basta e avanza per me; so come siete quando siete davvero in vena di chiacchiere. Il Professor Green dirà nel suo modo satirico ‘9920,05,’ al che voi replicherete con tranquillo umorismo ‘75,007.’ Sarà un’apertura troppo ghiotta per un tipo arguto come il Professore, il quale ribatterà all’istante ‘982,09.’ Non di ottimo gusto, forse, ma una grande tentazione nel fervore della disputa.”

“Il Comandante Blair,” disse il Professore, “è molto gentile a lasciarmi condividere i suoi calcoli.”

“Fortuna mia,” disse Blair. “Avrei fatto dieci volte di più con un matematico come voi.”

“Bene,” disse Pierce con noncuranza, “dato che siete così immersi nella matematica, vi lascio. A dire il vero, avevo un messaggio per il Professor Green, riguardo alla signorina Dale, nella casa dove alloggiava; ma non dobbiamo interrompere gli studi scientifici per una cosuccia simile.”

La testa di Green si sollevò dalle carte con grande bruschezza.

“Un messaggio!” gridò con ansia. “Che messaggio? È davvero per me?”

“8282,003,” rispose Pierce freddamente.

“Non offenderti,” disse Blair. “Da’ a il Professore il suo messaggio e poi vattene, se vuoi.”

“È solo che è venuta a trovare mia moglie per scoprire dove foste andato,” disse Pierce. “Gliel’ho detto, per quanto sia possibile dirlo a chiunque. È tutto,” aggiunse, ma piuttosto con l’aria di chi dice: “dovrebbe bastare.”

A quanto pare bastava, perché Green, che stava di nuovo guardando le preziose carte, ne accartocciò una nella mano serrata senza accorgersene, come un uomo che domina d’improvviso i propri sentimenti.

“Bene, io vado,” disse Pierce allegramente; “devo visitare gli altri depositi.”

“Fermati un momento,” disse Blair, mentre l’altro si voltava. “Non hai qualche notizia pubblica oltre a quelle private? Come vanno le cose nel mondo politico?”

“Espresse in formula matematica,” rispose Pierce da sopra la spalla, “le notizie politiche sono MP al quadrato più LSD su U uguale L. L scatenato. L sulla terra, ragazzo mio.”

E si arrampicò di nuovo nel suo castello in aria.

Oliver Green rimase a fissare la carta accartocciata e all’improvviso cominciò a spianarla.

“Signor Blair,” disse, “mi vergogno terribilmente di me stesso. Quando vi vedo vivere qui come un eremita sulle montagne, scarabocchiando i vostri calcoli, per così dire, sulle rocce del deserto, votato alla vostra grande idea astratta, consacrato a una grande causa, mi sento molto piccolo per avere invischiato voi e i vostri amici nelle mie piccole faccende. Certo, la faccenda non è affatto piccola per me; ma a voi deve sembrare molto piccola.”

“Non so con precisione,” rispose Blair, “quale fosse la natura della faccenda. Ma quella è enfaticamente cosa vostra. Per il resto, vi assicuro che siamo lieti di avervi, a prescindere dai vostri preziosi servigi come macchina calcolatrice.”

Bellew Blair, l’ultimo e, in senso mondano, di gran lunga il più abile delle reclute del Lungo Arco, era un uomo nella prima maturità, di corporatura quadrata, ma di figura ordinata e leggero sui piedi, vestito di un abito di cuoio. Per lo più si muoveva così in fretta che la sua figura faceva più impressione del suo volto; ma quando sedeva a fumare, in uno dei suoi rari momenti d’ozio, come ora, si poteva osservare che il suo viso era piuttosto calmo che vivace; un viso corto e quadrato con un naso corto e risoluto, ma occhi riflessivi assai più chiari dei suoi capelli neri e folti.

“È del tutto omerico,” aggiunse, “i due eserciti che combattono per il corpo di un astronomo. Saresti comunque una sorta di simbolo, da quando hanno cominciato quella follia di chiamarti pazzo. Nessuno ha alcun diritto di importunarti sul lato personale della faccenda.”

Green pareva ruminare, e l’ultima frase lo destò a una decisione. Cominciò a parlare. Con grande schiettezza, benché con una certa goffaggine da scolaretto, prese a raccontare all’amico l’intera sua rozza storia d’amore—il capovolgimento del suo mondo spirituale sulla melodia con cui morì la vecchia mucca, o piuttosto su cui danzò.

“E vi ho trascinato a nascondermi come un assassino,” concluse. “Per amore di qualcosa che a voi deve sembrare non tanto come una mucca che salta oltre la luna, ma piuttosto come un vitello che ruzzola oltre lo sgabello della mungitura. Forse le persone votate a una grande opera come questa dovrebbero lasciarsi alle spalle tutto quel genere di cose.”

“Bene, non vedo nulla di cui vergognarsi,” disse Blair, “e in questo caso non concordo con ciò che dite riguardo al lasciarsi quelle cose alle spalle. Di certi generi di lavoro è vero; ma non di questo. Vi svelo un segreto?”

“Se non vi dispiace.”

“La mucca non salta mai oltre la luna,” disse Blair gravemente. “È uno degli sport dei tori della mandria.”

“Temo di non capire cosa intendiate,” disse il Professore.

“Intendo che le donne non si possono tenere fuori da questa guerra, perché è una guerra di terra,” rispose Blair. “Se fosse davvero una guerra nell’aria, avreste potuto farla tutta da solo. Ma in tutte le guerre di contadini che difendono le loro fattorie e le loro case, le donne sono state sempre molto sul posto; come quando versavano acqua bollente dalle finestre durante gli sfratti irlandesi. Ascoltate, vi racconto una storia. È pertinente perché ha una morale. Dopotutto, tocca a me, per così dire. Voi mi avete raccontato la vera storia della Mucca che Saltò oltre la Luna. È tempo che io vi racconti la vera storia del Castello in Aria.”

He smoked silently for a moment, and then said:

“You may have wondered how a very prosaic practical Scotch engineer like myself ever came to make a thing like that pantomime palace over there, as childish as a child’s coloured balloon. Well, the answer is the same; because in certain circumstances a man may be very different from himself. At a certain period of the old war preparations, I was doing some work for the government in a secluded part of the western coast of Ireland. There were very few people for me to talk to; but one of them was the daughter of a bankrupt squire named Malone; and I talked to her a good deal. I was about as mechanical a mechanic as you could dig out anywhere; grimy, grumpy, tinkering about with dirty machinery. She was really like those princesses you read about in the Celtic poems; with a red crown made of curling elf-locks like little flames, and a pale elfin face that seemed somehow thin and luminous like glass; and she could make you listen to silence like a song. It wasn’t a pose with her, it was a poem; there are people like that, but very few of them like her. I tried to keep up my end by telling her about the wonders of science, and the great new architecture of the air. And then Sheila used to say, ‘And what is the good of them to me, when you HAVE built them. I can see a castle build itself without hands out of gigantic rocks of clear jewels in the sky every night.’ And she would point to where crimson or violet clouds hung in the green after-glow over the great Atlantic.

“You would probably say I was mad, if you didn’t happen to have been mad yourself. But I was wild with the idea that there was something she admired and that she thought science couldn’t do. I was as morbid as a boy; I half thought she despised me; and I wanted half to prove her wrong and half to do whatever she thought right. I resolved my science should beat the clouds at their own game; and I laboured till I’d actually made a sort of rainbow castle that would ride on the air. I think at the back of my mind there was some sort of crazy idea of carrying her off into the clouds she lived among, as if she were literally an angel and ought to dwell on wings. It never quite came to that, as you will hear, but as my experiments progressed my romance progressed too. You won’t need any telling about that; I only want to tell you the end of the story because of the moral. We made arrangements to get married; and I had to leave a good many of the arrangements to her, while I completed my great work. Then at last it was ready and I came to seek her like a pagan god descending in a cloud to carry a nymph up to Olympus. And I found she had already taken a very solid little brick villa on the edge of a town, having got it remarkably cheap and furnished it with most modern conveniences. And when I talked to her about castles in the air, she laughed and said her castle had come down to the ground. That is the moral. A woman, especially an Irishwoman, is always uncommonly practical when it comes to getting married. That is what I meant by saying it is never the cow who jumps over the moon. It is the cow who stands firmly planted in the middle of the three acres; and who always counts in any struggle of the land. That is why there must be women in this story, especially like those in your story and Pierce’s, women who come from the land. When the world needs a Crusade for communal ideals, it is best waged by men without ties, like the Franciscans. But when it comes to a fight for private property—you can’t keep women out of that. You can’t have the family farm without the family. You must have concrete Christian marriage again: you can’t have solid small property with all this vagabond polygamy; a harem that isn’t even a home.”

Green nodded and rose slowly to his feet, with his hands in his pockets.

“When it comes to a fight,” he said. “When I look at these enormous underground preparations, it is not difficult to infer that you think it will come to a fight.”

“I think it has come to a fight,” answered Blair. “Lord Eden has decided that. And the others may not understand exactly what they are doing; but he does.”

And Blair knocked out his pipe and stood up, to resume his work in that mountain laboratory, at about the same time at which Lord Eden awoke from his smiling meditations; and, lighting a cigarette, went languidly indoors.

He did not attempt to explain what was in his mind to the men around him. He was the only man there who understood that the England about him was not the England that had surrounded his youth and supported his leisure and luxury; that things were breaking up, first slowly and then more and more swiftly, and that the things detaching themselves were both good and evil. And one of them was this bald, broad and menacing new fact; a peasantry. The class of small farmers already existed, and might yet be found fighting for its farms like the same class all over the world. It was no longer certain that the sweeping social adjustments settled in that garden could be applied to the whole English land. But the story of how far his doubts were justified, and how far his whole project fared, is a part of the story of The Ultimate Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow, after which the exhausted and broken-spirited reader may find rest at last.

Fumò in silenzio per un momento, poi disse:

“Vi sarete forse chiesto come un ingegnere scozzese assai prosaico e pratico come me sia mai arrivato a costruire una cosa come quel palazzo da pantomima laggiù, puerile come il palloncino colorato di un bambino. Ebbene, la risposta è la stessa; perché in certe circostanze un uomo può essere assai diverso da sé stesso. In un certo periodo dei vecchi preparativi di guerra, stavo facendo un lavoro per il governo in una parte appartata della costa occidentale dell’Irlanda. C’erano pochissime persone con cui potessi parlare; ma una di esse era la figlia di uno squire in rovina di nome Malone; e con lei parlai parecchio. Ero un meccanico dei più meccanici che si possano dissotterrare in giro; sporco, scontroso, sempre a trafficare con macchinari lerci. Lei era davvero come quelle principesse di cui si legge nei Poemi celtici; con una rossa corona fatta di riccioli fatati come piccole fiamme, e un pallido viso di elfo che pareva in qualche modo sottile e luminoso come vetro; e sapeva farti ascoltare il silenzio come una canzone. Non era una posa in lei, era una poesia; c’è gente così, ma pochissimi come lei. Cercavo di reggere il mio ruolo raccontandole delle meraviglie della scienza, e della grande nuova architettura dell’aria. E allora Sheila era solita dire: ‘E a che mi servono quando le AVRAI costruite. Posso vedere un castello costruirsi da sé senza mani con giganteschi macigni di limpide gemme nel cielo ogni notte.’ E indicava dove nuvole cremisi o violette pendevano nel verde bagliore del tramonto sopra il grande Atlantico.

“Probabilmente direste che ero pazzo, se non vi capitasse per caso di essere stato pazzo voi stesso. Ma io ero folle all’idea che ci fosse qualcosa che lei ammirava e che pensava la scienza non potesse fare. Ero morboso come un ragazzo; per metà credevo che mi disprezzasse; e volevo per metà darle torto e per metà fare ciò che lei riteneva giusto. Decisi che la mia scienza avrebbe battuto le nuvole al loro stesso gioco; e mi affaticai finché non ebbi davvero costruito una specie di castello d’arcobaleno che potesse cavalcare l’aria. Credo che in fondo alla mente ci fosse una sorta di folle idea di rapirla su tra le nuvole in cui viveva, come se fosse letteralmente un angelo e dovesse dimorare su ali. Non arrivò mai proprio a tanto, come sentirete, ma man mano che i miei esperimenti progredivano progrediva anche il mio romanzo d’amore. Non ci sarà bisogno di dirvi nulla al riguardo; voglio solo raccontarvi la fine della storia per via della morale. Prendemmo accordi per sposarci; e dovetti lasciare a lei molti degli accordi, mentre io completavo la mia grande opera. Poi finalmente fu pronta e venni a cercarla come un dio pagano che discende in una nuvola per portare una ninfa sull’Olimpo. E scoprii che lei aveva già preso una villetta di mattoni assai solida ai margini di una città, avendola ottenuta a un prezzo notevolmente basso e arredata con i più moderni comfort. E quando le parlai di castelli in aria, rise e disse che il suo castello era sceso a terra. Questa è la morale. Una donna, specialmente un’irlandese, è sempre straordinariamente pratica quando si tratta di sposarsi. È questo che intendevo dicendo che non è mai la mucca a saltare oltre la luna. È la mucca che sta saldamente piantata in mezzo ai tre acri; e che conta sempre in ogni lotta per la terra. Ecco perché in questa storia ci devono essere donne, specialmente come quelle nella vostra storia e in quella di Pierce, donne che vengono dalla terra. Quando il mondo ha bisogno di una Crociata per ideali comuni, è meglio condurla da uomini senza legami, come i Francescani. Ma quando si tratta di una lotta per la proprietà privata—non si possono tenerne fuori le donne. Non si può avere la fattoria di famiglia senza la famiglia. Bisogna avere di nuovo il concreto matrimonio cristiano: non si può avere solida piccola proprietà con tutta questa poligamia vagabonda; un harem che non è nemmeno una casa.”

Green annuì e si alzò lentamente in piedi, con le mani in tasca.

“Quando si tratta di una lotta,” disse. “Quando guardo questi enormi preparativi sotterranei, non è difficile dedurre che voi pensiate si arriverà a una lotta.”

“Io penso che si sia già arrivati a una lotta,” rispose Blair. “Lord Eden ha deciso così. E gli altri forse non capiscono esattamente cosa stanno facendo; ma lui sì.”

E Blair scosse la pipa e si alzò, per riprendere il suo lavoro in quel laboratorio di montagna, all’incirca nello stesso momento in cui Lord Eden si destava dalle sue sorridenti meditazioni; e, accendendo una sigaretta, rientrava languidamente in casa.

Non tentò di spiegare ciò che aveva in mente agli uomini intorno a lui. Era l’unico uomo lì che capisse che l’Inghilterra intorno a lui non era l’Inghilterra che aveva circondato la sua giovinezza e sostenuto il suo ozio e il suo lusso; che le cose si stavano sgretolando, dapprima lentamente e poi sempre più rapidamente, e che le cose che si distaccavano erano sia buone sia cattive. E una di esse era questo crudo, ampio e minaccioso fatto nuovo; un contadinato. La classe dei piccoli agricoltori esisteva già, e poteva ancora ritrovarsi a combattere per le sue fattorie come la stessa classe in tutto il mondo. Non era più certo che gli ampi aggiustamenti sociali stabiliti in quel giardino potessero applicarsi a tutta la terra inglese. Ma la storia di quanto i suoi dubbi fossero giustificati, e di quanto il suo intero progetto abbia prosperato, è parte della storia dell’Ultimo Ultimatum della Lega del Lungo Arco, dopo il quale il lettore esausto e affranto potrà trovare finalmente riposo.

Chapter VIII

The Ultimate Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow

Mr. Robert Owen Hood came through his library that was lined with brown leather volumes with a brown paper parcel in his hand; a flippant person (such as his friend Mr. Pierce) might have said he was in a brown study. He came out into the sunlight of his garden, however, where his wife was arranging tea-things, for she was expecting visitors. Even in the strong daylight he looked strangely little altered, despite the long and catastrophic period that had passed since he had met her in the Thames valley and managed really to set the Thames on fire. That fire had since spread in space and time and become a conflagration in which much of modern civilization had been consumed; but in which (as its advocates alleged) English agriculture had been saved and a new and more hopeful chapter opened in English history. His angular face was rather more lined and wrinkled, but his straight shock of copper-coloured hair was as unchanged as if it had been a copper-coloured wig. His wife Elizabeth was even less marked, for she was younger; she had the same slightly nervous or short-sighted look in the eyes that was like a humanizing touch to her beauty made of ivory and gold. But though she was not old she had always been a little old-fashioned; for she came of a forgotten aristocracy whose women had moved with a certain gravity as well as grace about the old country houses, before coronets were sold like cabbages or the Jews lent money to the squires. But her husband was old-fashioned too; though he had just taken part in a successful revolution and bore a revolutionary name, he also had his prejudices; and one of them was a weakness for his wife being a lady—especially that lady.

“Owen,” she said, looking up from the tea-table with alarmed severity, “you’ve been buying more old books.”

“As it happens, these are particularly new books,” he replied; “but I suppose in one sense it’s all ancient history now.”

“What ancient history?” she asked. “Is it a History of Babylon or prehistoric China?”

“It is a History of Us.”

“I hope not,” she said; “but what do you mean?”

“I mean it’s a history of Our Revolution,” said Owen Hood, “a true and authentic account of the late glorious victories, as the old broadsheets said. The Great War of 1914 started the fashion of bringing out the history of events almost before they’d happened. There were standard histories of that war while it was still going on. Our little civil war is at least finished, thank God; and this is the brand-new history of it. Written by a rather clever fellow, detached but understanding and a little ironical on the right side. Above all, he gives quite a good description of the Battle of the Bows.”

“I shouldn’t call that our history,” said Elizabeth quietly. “I’m devoutly thankful that nobody can ever write our history or put it in a book. Do you remember when you jumped into the water after the flowers? I fancy it was then that you really set the Thames on fire.”

“With my red hair, no doubt,” he replied; “but I don’t think I did set the Thames on fire. I think it was the Thames that set me on fire. Only you were always the spirit of the stream and the goddess of the valley.”

“I hope I’m not quite so old as that,” answered Elizabeth.

“Listen to this,” cried her husband, turning over the pages of the book. “‘According to the general belief, which prevailed until the recent success of the agrarian movement of the Long Bow, it was overwhelmingly improbable that a revolutionary change could be effected in England. The recent success of the agrarian protest—’”

“Do come out of that book,” remonstrated his wife. “One of our visitors has just arrived.”

The visitor proved to be the Reverend Wilding White, a man who had also played a prominent part in the recent triumph, a part that was sometimes highly public and almost pontifical; but in private life he had always a way of entering with his grey hair brushed or blown the wrong way and his eagle face eager or indignant; and his conversation like his correspondence came in a rush and was too explosive to be explanatory.

“I say,” he cried, “I’ve come to talk to you about that idea, you know—Enoch Oates wrote about it from America, and he’s a jolly good fellow and all that; but after all he does come from America, and so he thinks it’s quite easy. But you can see for yourself it isn’t quite so easy, what with Turks and all that. It’s all very well to talk about the Unites States—”

“Never you mind about the United States,” said Hood easily; “I think I’m rather in favour of the Heptarchy. You just listen to this; the epic of our own Heptarchy, the story of our own dear little domestic war. ‘The recent success of the agrarian protest—’”

He was interrupted again by the arrival of two more guests; by the silent entrance of Colonel Crane and the very noisy entrance of Captain Pierce, who had brought his young wife with him from the country, for they had established themselves in the ancestral inn of the Blue Boar. White’s wife was still in the country, and Crane’s having long been busy in her studio with war-posters, was now equally busy with peace-posters.

Hood was one of those men whom books almost literally seize and swallow, like monsters with leather or paper jaws. It was no exaggeration to say he was deep in a book as an incautious traveller might be deep in a swamp or some strange man-eating plant of the tropics; only that the traveller was magnetized and did not even struggle. He would fall suddenly silent in the middle of a sentence and go on reading; or he would suddenly begin to read aloud with great passion, arguing with somebody in the book without reference to anybody in the room. Though not normally rude, he would drift through other people’s drawing-rooms towards other people’s bookshelves and disappear into them, so to speak, like a rusty family ghost. He would travel a hundred miles to see a friend for an hour, and then waste half an hour with his head in some odd volume he never happened to have seen before. On all that side of him there was a sort of almost creepy unconsciousness. His wife, who had old-world notions of the graces of a hostess, sometimes had double work to do.

Capitolo VIII

L’Ultimo Ultimatum della Lega del Lungo Arco

Il signor Robert Owen Hood attraversò la sua biblioteca rivestita di volumi di cuoio bruno con in mano un pacco di carta marrone; una persona frivola (come il suo amico, il signor Pierce) avrebbe potuto dire che era immerso in cupi pensieri. Uscì tuttavia al sole del suo giardino, dove la moglie stava disponendo il servizio da tè, poiché aspettava ospiti. Persino nella forte luce del giorno pareva stranamente poco mutato, malgrado il lungo e catastrofico periodo trascorso da quando l’aveva incontrata nella valle del Tamigi ed era riuscito davvero a incendiare il Tamigi. Quel fuoco si era da allora esteso nello spazio e nel tempo ed era divenuto una conflagrazione in cui gran parte della civiltà moderna era stata consumata; ma nella quale (come i suoi fautori sostenevano) l’agricoltura inglese era stata salvata e un capitolo nuovo e più pieno di speranza s’era aperto nella storia inglese. Il suo viso angoloso era un po’ più segnato e rugoso, ma la sua diritta zazzera di capelli color rame era immutata come se fosse stata una parrucca color rame. Sua moglie Elizabeth era ancor meno segnata, poiché era più giovane; aveva negli occhi lo stesso sguardo un po’ nervoso o miope che era come un tocco di umanità alla sua bellezza fatta d’avorio e d’oro. Ma benché non fosse vecchia era sempre stata un po’ all’antica; poiché discendeva da un’aristocrazia dimenticata le cui donne s’erano mosse con una certa gravità oltre che grazia per le vecchie case di campagna, prima che le corone si vendessero come cavoli o gli ebrei prestassero denaro agli squire. Ma anche suo marito era all’antica; benché avesse appena preso parte a una rivoluzione riuscita e portasse un nome rivoluzionario, aveva anche i suoi pregiudizi; e uno di essi era la debolezza di volere che sua moglie fosse una signora—specialmente quella signora.

“Owen,” disse lei, alzando lo sguardo dal tavolo da tè con allarmata severità, “hai comprato altri vecchi libri.”

“Guarda caso, questi sono libri particolarmente nuovi,” rispose lui; “ma suppongo che in un certo senso ormai sia tutta storia antica.”

“Quale storia antica?” chiese lei. “È una Storia di Babilonia o della Cina preistorica?”

“È una Storia di Noi.”

“Spero di no,” disse lei; “ma che intendi?”

“Intendo che è una storia della Nostra Rivoluzione,” disse Owen Hood, “un resoconto verace e autentico delle recenti gloriose vittorie, come dicevano i vecchi fogli volanti. La Grande Guerra del 1914 avviò la moda di tirar fuori la storia degli eventi quasi prima che fossero accaduti. C’erano storie ufficiali di quella guerra mentre era ancora in corso. La nostra piccola guerra civile è almeno finita, grazie a Dio; e questa è la sua storia di zecca. Scritta da un tipo piuttosto in gamba, distaccato ma comprensivo e un po’ ironico dalla parte giusta. Soprattutto, dà una descrizione assai buona della Battaglia degli Archi.”

“Io non la chiamerei la nostra storia,” disse Elizabeth con calma. “Sono devotamente grata che nessuno possa mai scrivere la nostra storia o metterla in un libro. Ti ricordi quando ti tuffasti in acqua dietro ai fiori? Immagino sia stato allora che davvero incendiasti il Tamigi.”

“Con i miei capelli rossi, senza dubbio,” rispose lui; “ma non credo di aver incendiato io il Tamigi. Credo sia stato il Tamigi a incendiare me. Solo che tu sei sempre stata lo spirito della corrente e la dea della valle.”

“Spero di non essere poi così antica,” rispose Elizabeth.

“Ascolta questo,” esclamò il marito, voltando le pagine del libro. “‘Secondo la credenza generale, che prevalse fino al recente successo del movimento agrario del Lungo Arco, era straordinariamente improbabile che un mutamento rivoluzionario potesse compiersi in Inghilterra. Il recente successo della protesta agraria—’”

“Ma esci da quel libro,” lo rimproverò la moglie. “Uno dei nostri ospiti è appena arrivato.”

L’ospite risultò essere il Reverendo Wilding White, un uomo che aveva anch’egli avuto un ruolo di spicco nel recente trionfo, un ruolo che era talora assai pubblico e quasi pontificale; ma nella vita privata egli aveva sempre il modo di entrare coi capelli grigi spazzolati o soffiati nel verso sbagliato e il viso d’aquila ansioso o indignato; e la sua conversazione, come la sua corrispondenza, veniva a fiotti ed era troppo esplosiva per essere esplicativa.

“Senti,” esclamò, “sono venuto a parlarti di quell’idea, sai—Enoch Oates ne ha scritto dall’America, ed è un tipo davvero in gamba e tutto il resto; ma dopotutto viene dall’America, e perciò pensa che sia facilissimo. Ma tu stesso puoi vedere che non è poi così facile, con i Turchi e tutto quanto. È bello e buono parlare degli Stati Uniti—”

“Non ti curare degli Stati Uniti,” disse Hood con disinvoltura; “io credo di essere piuttosto favorevole all’Eptarchia. Ascolta solo questo; l’epopea della nostra Eptarchia, la storia della nostra cara piccola guerra domestica. ‘Il recente successo della protesta agraria—’”

Fu di nuovo interrotto dall’arrivo di altri due ospiti; dal silenzioso ingresso del Colonnello Crane e dal chiassosissimo ingresso del Capitano Pierce, che aveva portato con sé la giovane moglie dalla campagna, poiché si erano stabiliti nella locanda avita del Cinghiale Azzurro. La moglie di White era ancora in campagna, e quella di Crane, essendo stata a lungo indaffarata nel suo studio con manifesti di guerra, era ora ugualmente indaffarata con manifesti di pace.

Hood era uno di quegli uomini che i libri afferrano e inghiottono quasi alla lettera, come mostri dalle fauci di cuoio o di carta. Non era esagerato dire che sprofondava in un libro come un viandante incauto potrebbe sprofondare in una palude o in una strana pianta carnivora dei tropici; solo che il viandante era magnetizzato e non lottava nemmeno. Cadeva d’improvviso nel silenzio in mezzo a una frase e continuava a leggere; oppure d’improvviso cominciava a leggere ad alta voce con grande passione, discutendo con qualcuno nel libro senza alcun riferimento a chicchessia nella stanza. Benché non fosse normalmente scortese, andava alla deriva per i salotti altrui verso gli scaffali altrui e vi scompariva, per così dire, come un arrugginito fantasma di famiglia. Percorreva cento miglia per vedere un amico per un’ora, e poi sprecava mezz’ora con la testa in qualche strano volume che non gli era mai capitato di vedere prima. Da tutto quel lato di lui c’era una sorta di quasi inquietante incoscienza. Sua moglie, che aveva nozioni d’altri tempi sulle grazie di una padrona di casa, talora aveva doppio lavoro da fare.

“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” began Hood cheerfully as his wife rose swiftly to receive two more visitors. These were Professor Green and Commander Bellew Blair; for a queer friendship had long linked together the most practical and the most unpractical of the brothers of the Long Bow. The friendship, as Pierce remarked, was firmly rooted in the square root of minus infinity.

“How beautiful your garden is looking,” said Blair to his hostess. “One so seldom sees flower-beds like that now; but I shall always think the old gardeners were right.”

“Most things are old-fashioned here, I’m afraid,” replied Elizabeth, “but I always like them like that. And how are the children?”

“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” remarked her husband in a clear voice, “is doubtless—”

“Really,” she said, laughing, “you are too ridiculous for anything. Why in the world should you want to read out the history of the war to the people who were in it, and know quite well already what really happened?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Colonel Crane. “Very improper to contradict a lady, but indeed you are mistaken. The very last thing the soldier generally knows is what has really happened. Has to look at a newspaper next morning for the realistic description of what never happened.”

“Why, then you’d better go on reading, Hood,” said Hilary Pierce. “The Colonel wants to know whether he was killed in battle; or whether there was any truth in that story that he was hanged as a spy on the very tree he had climbed when running away as a deserter.”

“Should rather like to know what they make of it all,” said the Colonel. “After all, we were all too deep in it to see it. I mean see it as a whole.”

“If Owen once begins he won’t stop for hours,” said the lady.

“Perhaps,” began Blair, “we had better—”

“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” remarked Hood in authoritative tones, “is doubtless to be attributed largely to the economic advantage belonging to an agrarian population. It can feed the town or refuse to feed the town; and this question appeared quite early in the politics of the peasantry that had arisen in the western counties. Nobody will forget the scene at Paddington Station in the first days of the rebellion. Men who had grown used to seeing on innumerable mornings the innumerable ranks and rows of great milk-cans, looking leaden in a grey and greasy light, found themselves faced with a blank, in which those neglected things shone in the memory like stolen silver. It was true, as Sir Horace Hunter eagerly pointed out when he was put in command of the highly hygienic problem of the milk supply, that there would be no difficulty about manufacturing the metal cans, perhaps even of an improved pattern, with a rapidity and finish of which the rustics of Somerset were quite incapable. He had long been of the opinion, the learned doctor explained, that the shape of the cans, especially the small cans left outside poor houses, left much to be desired, and the whole process of standing these small objects about in the basements of private houses was open to grave objection in the matter of waste of space. The public, however, showed an indifference to this new issue and a disposition to go back on the old demand for milk; in which matter, they said, there was an unfair advantage for the man who possessed a cow over the man who only possessed a can. But the story that Hunter had rivalled the agrarian slogan by proclaiming the policy of ‘Three Areas and a Can’ was in all probability a flippant invention of his enemies.

“These agrarian strikes had already occurred at intervals before they culminated in the agrarian war. They were the result of the attempt to enforce on the farmers certain general regulations and precautions about their daily habit, dress and diet, which Sir Horace Hunter and Professor Hake had found to be of great advantage in the large State laboratories for the manufacture of poisons and destructive gases. There was every reason to believe that the people, especially the young people, of the village often evaded the regulation about the gutta-percha masks, and the rule requiring the worker to paint himself all over with an antiseptic gum; and the sending of inspectors from London to see that these rules were enforced led to lamentable scenes of violence. It would be an error, however, to attribute the whole of this great social convulsion to any local agricultural dispute. The causes must also be sought in the general state of society, especially political society. The Earl of Eden was a statesman of great skill by the old Parliamentary standards, but he was already old when he launched his final defiance to the peasants in the form of Land Nationalization; and the General Election which was the result of this departure fell largely into the hands of his lieutenants like Hunter and Low. It soon became apparent that some of the illusions of the Eden epoch had worn rather thin. It was found that the democracy could not always be intimidated even by the threat of consulting them about the choice of a Government.

“Nor can it be denied that the General Election of 19— was from the first rendered somewhat unreal by certain legal fictions which had long been spreading. There was a custom, originating in the harmless and humane deception used upon excited maiden ladies from the provinces, by which the private secretaries of the Prime Minister would present themselves as that politician himself; sometimes completing the innocent illusion by brushing their hair, waxing their moustaches or wearing their eyeglasses in the manner of their master. When this custom was extended to public platforms it cannot be denied that it became more questionable. In the last days of that venerable statesman it has been asserted that there were no less than five Lloyd Georges touring the country at the same time, and that the contemporary Chancellor of the Exchequer had appeared simultaneously in three cities on the same night, while the original of all these replicas, the popular and brilliant Chancellor himself, was enjoying a well-earned rest by the Lake of Como. The incident of two identical Lord Smiths appearing side by side on the same platform (through a miscalculation of the party agents), though received with good humour and honest merriment by the audience, did but little good to the serious credit of parliamentary institutions. There was of course a certain exaggeration in the suggestion of the satirist that a whole column of identical Prime Ministers, walking two and two like soldiers, marched out of Downing Street every morning and distributed themselves to their various posts like policemen; but such satires were popular and widely scattered, especially by an active young gentleman who was the author of most of them—Captain Hilary Pierce, late of the Flying Corps.

“Il recente successo della protesta agraria,” cominciò Hood allegramente mentre la moglie si alzava di scatto a ricevere altri due ospiti. Questi erano il Professor Green e il Comandante Bellew Blair; poiché una bizzarra amicizia aveva a lungo legato insieme il più pratico e il più impratico dei fratelli del Lungo Arco. L’amicizia, come osservò Pierce, era saldamente radicata nella radice quadrata di meno infinito.

“Com’è bello il vostro giardino,” disse Blair alla padrona di casa. “Così di rado si vedono ormai aiuole simili; ma io penserò sempre che i vecchi giardinieri avessero ragione.”

“Temo che qui la maggior parte delle cose sia all’antica,” rispose Elizabeth, “ma a me piacciono sempre così. E come stanno i bambini?”

“Il recente successo della protesta agraria,” osservò il marito con voce chiara, “è senza dubbio—”

“Davvero,” disse lei, ridendo, “sei ridicolo oltre ogni dire. Perché mai vorresti leggere ad alta voce la storia della guerra alle persone che vi hanno preso parte, e sanno benissimo già cosa davvero accadde?”

“Chiedo scusa,” disse il Colonnello Crane. “È molto sconveniente contraddire una signora, ma in verità vi sbagliate. L’ultimissima cosa che il soldato in genere sa è ciò che è davvero accaduto. Deve guardare un giornale la mattina dopo per la descrizione realistica di ciò che non accadde mai.”

“Ma allora faresti meglio a continuare a leggere, Hood,” disse Hilary Pierce. “Il Colonnello vuol sapere se sia stato ucciso in battaglia; o se ci fosse un fondo di verità in quella storia che fu impiccato come spia proprio sull’albero su cui si era arrampicato mentre fuggiva da disertore.”

“Mi piacerebbe piuttosto sapere che cosa ne cavano fuori,” disse il Colonnello. “Dopotutto, eravamo tutti troppo dentro per vederla. Voglio dire vederla nel suo insieme.”

“Se Owen una volta comincia non si fermerà per ore,” disse la signora.

“Forse,” cominciò Blair, “faremmo meglio a—”

“Il recente successo della protesta agraria,” osservò Hood con tono autorevole, “è senza dubbio da attribuirsi in gran parte al vantaggio economico che spetta a una popolazione agraria. Essa può nutrire la città o rifiutarsi di nutrire la città; e questa questione apparve assai presto nella politica del contadinato che era sorto nelle contee occidentali. Nessuno dimenticherà la scena alla Stazione di Paddington nei primi giorni della ribellione. Uomini che si erano abituati a vedere innumerevoli mattine gli innumerevoli ranghi e file dei grandi bidoni del latte, che parevano plumbei in una grigia e untuosa luce, si trovarono di fronte a un vuoto, in cui quelle cose trascurate brillavano nel ricordo come argenteria rubata. Era vero, come Sir Horace Hunter fece premurosamente notare quando fu messo al comando dell’assai igienico problema dell’approvvigionamento del latte, che non ci sarebbe stata difficoltà a fabbricare i bidoni di metallo, forse anche di un modello perfezionato, con una rapidità e una finitura di cui i villici del Somerset erano del tutto incapaci. Egli era da tempo dell’opinione, spiegò il dotto professore, che la forma dei bidoni, specialmente i piccoli bidoni lasciati fuori dalle case povere, lasciasse molto a desiderare, e che l’intero procedimento di collocare questi piccoli oggetti negli scantinati delle case private fosse aperto a grave obiezione in materia di spreco di spazio. Il pubblico, tuttavia, mostrò indifferenza verso questa nuova questione e una disposizione a tornare alla vecchia richiesta di latte; nel qual proposito, dicevano, c’era un vantaggio ingiusto per l’uomo che possedeva una mucca rispetto all’uomo che possedeva solo un bidone. Ma la storia che Hunter avesse rivaleggiato con lo slogan agrario proclamando la politica dei ‘Tre Aree e un Bidone’ era con ogni probabilità una frivola invenzione dei suoi nemici.

“Questi scioperi agrari erano già avvenuti a intervalli prima di culminare nella guerra agraria. Erano il risultato del tentativo di imporre agli agricoltori certi regolamenti e precauzioni generali circa le loro abitudini quotidiane, l’abbigliamento e la dieta, che Sir Horace Hunter e il Professor Hake avevano trovato di grande vantaggio nei grandi laboratori statali per la fabbricazione di veleni e gas distruttivi. C’era ogni ragione di credere che la gente, specialmente i giovani, del villaggio evadesse spesso il regolamento sulle maschere di guttaperca, e la regola che imponeva al lavoratore di verniciarsi tutto quanto con una gomma antisettica; e l’invio di ispettori da Londra per vigilare che queste regole fossero applicate condusse a lamentevoli scene di violenza. Sarebbe però un errore attribuire l’intero di questa grande convulsione sociale a una qualche disputa agricola locale. Le cause devono ricercarsi anche nello stato generale della società, specialmente della società politica. Il Conte di Eden era uno statista di grande abilità secondo i vecchi criteri parlamentari, ma era già vecchio quando lanciò la sua ultima sfida ai contadini sotto forma di Nazionalizzazione della Terra; e le Elezioni Generali che furono il risultato di questa svolta caddero in gran parte nelle mani dei suoi luogotenenti come Hunter e Low. Divenne presto evidente che alcune delle illusioni dell’epoca di Eden si erano piuttosto logorate. Si scoprì che la democrazia non poteva sempre essere intimidita nemmeno con la minaccia di consultarla circa la scelta di un Governo.

“Né si può negare che le Elezioni Generali del 19— furono fin dal principio rese alquanto irreali da certe finzioni giuridiche che si andavano diffondendo da tempo. C’era un’usanza, originatasi nell’innocuo e umano inganno usato sulle eccitate zitelle delle province, per cui i segretari privati del Primo Ministro si presentavano come quel politico in persona; completando talora l’innocente illusione col pettinarsi i capelli, lisciarsi i baffi o portare gli occhiali alla maniera del loro padrone. Quando quest’usanza fu estesa alle tribune pubbliche non si può negare che divenisse più discutibile. Negli ultimi giorni di quel venerabile statista si è affermato che non c’erano meno di cinque Lloyd George in giro per il paese nello stesso tempo, e che il Cancelliere dello Scacchiere di allora era apparso simultaneamente in tre città nella stessa notte, mentre l’originale di tutte queste repliche, il popolare e brillante Cancelliere in persona, si godeva un ben meritato riposo presso il Lago di Como. L’incidente dei due identici Lord Smith che apparvero fianco a fianco sulla stessa tribuna (per un errore di calcolo degli agenti di partito), benché accolto con buon umore e onesta allegria dal pubblico, giovò ben poco al serio credito delle istituzioni parlamentari. C’era naturalmente una certa esagerazione nel suggerimento del satirico che un’intera colonna di identici Primi Ministri, marciando a due a due come soldati, uscisse da Downing Street ogni mattina e si distribuisse ai propri vari posti come poliziotti; ma tali satire erano popolari e largamente diffuse, specialmente da un attivo giovane signore che era l’autore della maggior parte di esse—il Capitano Hilary Pierce, già del Corpo Volante.

“But if this was true of such trifles as half a dozen of Prime Ministers, it was even truer and more trying in the practical matter of party programmes and proposals. The heading of each party programme with the old promise ‘Every Man a Millionaire’ had of course become merely formal, like a decorative pattern or border. But it cannot be denied that the universal use of this phrase, combined with the equally universal sense of the unfairness of expecting any politician to carry it out, somewhat weakened the force of words in political affairs. It would have been well if statesmen had confined themselves to these accepted and familiar formalities. Unfortunately, under the stress of the struggle which arose out of the menacing organization of the League of the Long Bow, they sought to dazzle their followers with new improbabilities instead of adhering to the tried and trusty improbabilities that had done them yeoman service in the past.

“Thus it was unwise of Lord Normantowers, so far to depart from the temperance principles of a lifetime as to promise all his workers a bottle of champagne at every meal, if they would consent to complete the provision of munitions for suppressing the League of the Long Bow rebellion. The great philanthropist unquestionably had the highest intentions, both in his rash promise and his more reasonable fulfilment. But when the munitions-workers found that the champagne-bottles, though carefully covered with the most beautiful gold-foil, contained in fact nothing but hygienically boiled water, the result was a sudden and sensational strike, which paralysed the whole output of munitions and led to the first incredible victories of the League of the Long Bow.

“There followed in consequence one of the most amazing wars of human history—a one-sided war. One side would have been insignificant if the other had not been impotent. The minority could not have fought for long; only the majority could not fight at all. There prevailed through the whole of the existing organizations of society a universal distrust that turned them into a dust of disconnected atoms. What was the use of offering men higher pay when they did not believe they would ever receive it, but only alluded jeeringly to Lord Normantowers and his brand of champagne? What was the use of telling every man that he would have a bonus, when you had told him for twenty years that he would soon be a millionaire? What was the good of the Prime Minister pledging his honour in a ringing voice on platform after platform, when it was already an open jest that it was not the Prime Minister at all? The Government voted taxes and they were not paid. It mobilized armies and they did not move. It introduced the pattern of a new all-pulverizing gun, and nobody would make it and nobody would fire it off. We all remember the romantic crisis when no less a genius than Professor Hake came to Sir Horace Hunter, the Minister of Scientific Social Organization, with a new explosive capable of shattering the whole geological formation of Europe and sinking these islands in the Atlantic, but was unable to induce the cabman or any of the clerks to assist him in lifting it out of the cab.

“Against all this anarchy of broken promises the little organization of the League of the Long Bow stood solid and loyal and dependable. The Long Bowmen had become popular by the nickname of the Liars. Everywhere the jest or catchword was repeated like a song, ‘Only the Liars Tell the Truth.’ They found more and more men to work and fight for them, because it was known that they would pay whatever wages they promised, and refuse to promise anything that they could not perform. The nickname became an ironical symbol of idealism and dignity. A man was proud of being a little precise and even pedantic in his accuracy and probity because he was a Liar. The whole of this strange organization had originated in certain wild bets or foolish practical jokes indulged in by a small group of eccentrics. But they had prided themselves on the logical, if rather literal, fashion in which they had fulfilled certain vows about white elephants or flying pigs. Hence, when they came to stand for a policy of peasant proprietorship, and were enabled by the money of an American crank to establish it in a widespread fashion across the west of England, they took the more serious task with the same tenacity. When their foes mocked them with ‘the myth of three acres and a cow,’ they answered: ‘Yes, it is as mythical as the cow that jumped over the moon. But our myths come true.’

“The inexplicable and indeed incredible conclusion of the story was due to a new fact; the fact of the actual presence of the new peasantry. They had first come into complete possession of their new farms, by the deed of gift signed by Enoch Oates in the February of 19— and had thus been settled on the land a great many years when Lord Eden and his Cabinet finally committed themselves to the scheme of Land Nationalization by which their homesteads were to pass into official control. That curious and inexplicable thing, the spirit of the peasant, had made great strides in the interval. It was found that the Government could not move such people about from place to place, as it is possible to do with the urban poor in the reconstruction of streets or the destruction of slums. It was not a thing like moving pawns, but a thing like pulling up plants; and plants that had already struck their roots very deep. In short, the Government, which had already adopted a policy commonly called Socialist from motives that were in fact very conservative, found itself confronted with the same peasant resistance as brought the Bolshevist Government in Russia to a standstill. And when Lord Eden and his Cabinet put in motion the whole modern machinery of militarism and coercion to crush the little experiment, he found himself confronted with a rural rising such as has not been known in England since the Middle Ages.

“Ma se questo era vero per bazzecole come una mezza dozzina di Primi Ministri, era ancor più vero e più penoso nella pratica faccenda dei programmi e delle proposte di partito. L’intestazione di ogni programma di partito con la vecchia promessa ‘Ogni Uomo un Milionario’ era naturalmente divenuta meramente formale, come un motivo decorativo o un fregio. Ma non si può negare che l’uso universale di questa frase, unito all’altrettanto universale consapevolezza dell’ingiustizia di aspettarsi che un politico la mantenga, indebolì in qualche modo la forza delle parole negli affari politici. Sarebbe stato bene se gli statisti si fossero limitati a queste accolte e familiari formalità. Purtroppo, sotto la pressione della lotta che nacque dalla minacciosa organizzazione della Lega del Lungo Arco, cercarono di abbagliare i loro seguaci con nuove improbabilità invece di attenersi alle collaudate e fidate improbabilità che avevano reso loro egregi servigi nel passato.

“Fu così imprudente da parte di Lord Normantowers discostarsi tanto dai principi di temperanza di tutta una vita da promettere a tutti i suoi operai una bottiglia di champagne a ogni pasto, se avessero acconsentito a completare la fornitura di munizioni per soffocare la ribellione della Lega del Lungo Arco. Il grande filantropo aveva senza dubbio le più alte intenzioni, tanto nella sua avventata promessa quanto nel suo più ragionevole adempimento. Ma quando gli operai delle munizioni scoprirono che le bottiglie di champagne, benché accuratamente rivestite della più bella lamina d’oro, non contenevano in realtà nulla se non acqua igienicamente bollita, il risultato fu un improvviso e sensazionale sciopero, che paralizzò l’intera produzione di munizioni e condusse alle prime incredibili vittorie della Lega del Lungo Arco.

“Ne seguì di conseguenza una delle più stupefacenti guerre della storia umana—una guerra a senso unico. Una delle parti sarebbe stata insignificante se l’altra non fosse stata impotente. La minoranza non avrebbe potuto combattere a lungo; solo che la maggioranza non poteva combattere affatto. Prevaleva attraverso l’intero delle esistenti organizzazioni della società una diffidenza universale che le riduceva a una polvere di atomi sconnessi. A che serviva offrire agli uomini una paga più alta quando non credevano che l’avrebbero mai ricevuta, ma solo alludevano beffardi a Lord Normantowers e alla sua marca di champagne? A che serviva dire a ogni uomo che avrebbe avuto un premio, quando gli si era detto per vent’anni che sarebbe presto stato un milionario? A che serviva che il Primo Ministro impegnasse il suo onore con voce squillante su tribuna dopo tribuna, quando era già una beffa aperta che non fosse affatto il Primo Ministro? Il Governo votava tasse e non venivano pagate. Mobilitava eserciti e non si muovevano. Introduceva il modello di un nuovo cannone polverizza-tutto, e nessuno voleva costruirlo e nessuno voleva spararlo. Tutti ricordiamo la romantica crisi in cui né più né meno di un genio come il Professor Hake venne da Sir Horace Hunter, il Ministro dell’Organizzazione Sociale Scientifica, con un nuovo esplosivo capace di frantumare l’intera formazione geologica d’Europa e affondare queste isole nell’Atlantico, ma non riuscì a indurre il vetturino o alcuno degli impiegati ad aiutarlo a tirarlo giù dalla carrozza.

“Contro tutta quest’anarchia di promesse infrante la piccola organizzazione della Lega del Lungo Arco stava salda, leale e affidabile. Gli Arcieri del Lungo Arco erano divenuti popolari col soprannome di Bugiardi. Dappertutto la beffa o il motto si ripeteva come una canzone, ‘Solo i Bugiardi Dicono la Verità.’ Trovavano sempre più uomini disposti a lavorare e a combattere per loro, perché si sapeva che avrebbero pagato qualunque salario promettessero, e rifiutato di promettere qualsiasi cosa che non potessero eseguire. Il soprannome divenne un simbolo ironico di idealismo e dignità. Un uomo era fiero di essere un po’ preciso e persino pedante nella sua accuratezza e probità perché era un Bugiardo. L’intera di questa strana organizzazione aveva avuto origine in certe folli scommesse o sciocchi scherzi pratici a cui si era abbandonato un piccolo gruppo di eccentrici. Ma si erano vantati della logica, seppur piuttosto letterale, maniera in cui avevano adempiuto certi voti su elefanti bianchi o maiali volanti. Perciò, quando giunsero a rappresentare una politica di proprietà contadina, e furono resi capaci dal denaro di uno svitato americano di stabilirla in modo diffuso attraverso l’ovest dell’Inghilterra, presero il più serio compito con la stessa tenacia. Quando i loro nemici li schernivano col ‘mito dei tre acri e una mucca,’ rispondevano: ‘Sì, è tanto mitico quanto la mucca che saltò oltre la luna. Ma i nostri miti si avverano.’

“L’inspiegabile e in verità incredibile conclusione della storia fu dovuta a un fatto nuovo; il fatto dell’effettiva presenza del nuovo contadinato. Erano dapprima entrati in completo possesso delle loro nuove fattorie, per l’atto di donazione firmato da Enoch Oates nel febbraio del 19— ed erano così stati insediati sulla terra da moltissimi anni quando Lord Eden e il suo Gabinetto si impegnarono infine nel progetto di Nazionalizzazione della Terra, per il quale le loro fattorie dovevano passare al controllo ufficiale. Quella curiosa e inspiegabile cosa, lo spirito del contadino, aveva fatto grandi passi in quell’intervallo. Si scoprì che il Governo non poteva spostare tali persone da luogo a luogo, come è possibile fare coi poveri urbani nella ricostruzione delle strade o nella demolizione delle baraccopoli. Non era una cosa come muovere pedine, ma una cosa come strappare piante; e piante che avevano già affondato le radici molto profonde. In breve, il Governo, che aveva già adottato una politica comunemente detta Socialista per motivi che erano di fatto assai conservatori, si trovò di fronte alla stessa resistenza contadina che portò il Governo bolscevico in Russia a una stasi. E quando Lord Eden e il suo Gabinetto misero in moto l’intero moderno macchinario del militarismo e della coercizione per schiacciare il piccolo esperimento, si trovò di fronte a una sollevazione rurale quale non si era vista in Inghilterra dal Medioevo.

“It is said that the men of the Long Bow carried their mediaeval symbolism so far as to wear Lincoln green as their uniform when they retired to the woods in the manner of Robin Hood. It is certain that they did employ the weapon after which they were named; and curiously enough, as will be seen, by no means without effect. But it must be clearly understood that when the new agrarian class took to the woods like outlaws, they did not feel in the least like robbers. They hardly even felt like rebels. From their point of view at least, they were and long had been the lawful owners of their own fields, and the officials who came to confiscate were the robbers. Therefore when Lord Eden proclaimed Nationalization, they turned out in thousands as their fathers would have gone out against pirates or wolves.

“The Government acted with great promptitude. It instantly voted 50,000 pounds to Mr. Rosenbaum Low, the expenditure of which was wisely left to his discretion at so acute a crisis, with no more than the understanding that he should take a thorough general survey of the situation. He proved worthy of the trust; and it was with the gravest consideration and sense of responsibility that he selected Mr. Leonard Kramp, the brilliant young financier, from all his other nephews to take command of the forces in the field. In the field, however, fortune is well known to be somewhat more incalculable; and all the intelligence and presence of mind that had enabled Kramp to postpone the rush on the Potosi Bank were not sufficient to balance the accidental possession by Crane and Pierce of an elementary knowledge of strategy.

“Before considering the successes obtained by these commanders in the rather rude fashion of warfare which they were forced to adopt, it must be noted, of course, that even on their side there were also scientific resources of a kind; and an effective if eccentric kind. The scientific genius of Bellew Blair had equipped his side with many secret processes affecting aviation and aeronautics, and it is the peculiarity of this extraordinary man that his secret processes really remained for a considerable time secret. For he had not told them to anybody with any intention of making any money out of them. This quixotic and visionary behaviour contrasted sharply with the shrewd good sense of the great business men who know that publicity is the soul of business. For some time past they had successfully ignored the outworn sentimental prejudice that had prevented soldiers and sailors from advertising the best methods of defeating the enemy; and we can all recall those brilliantly coloured announcements which used to brighten so many hoardings in those days, ‘Sink in Smith’s Submarine; Pleasure Trips for Patriots.’ Or ‘Duffin’s Portable Dug-Out Makes War a Luxury.’ Advertisement cannot fail to effect its aim; the name of an aeroplane that had been written on the sky in pink and pea-green lights could not but become a symbol of the conquest of the air; and the patriotic statesman, deeply considering what sort of battleship might best defend his country’s coasts, was insensibly and subtly influenced by the number of times that he had seen its name repeated on the steps of a moving staircase at an Imperial Exhibition. Nor could there be any doubt about the brilliant success that attended these scientific specialties so long as their operations were confined to the market. The methods of Commander Blair were in comparison private, local, obscure and lacking any general recognition; and by a strange irony it was a positive advantage to this nameless and secretive crank that he had never advertised his weapons until he used them. He had paraded a number of merely fanciful balloons and fireworks for a jest; but the secrets to which he attached importance he had hidden in cracks of the Welsh mountains with a curious and callous indifference to the principles of commercial distribution and display. He could not in any case have conducted operations on so large a scale, being deficient in that capital, the lack of which has so often been fatal to inventors; and had made it useless for a man to discover a machine unless he could also discover a millionaire. But it cannot be denied that when his machine was brought into operation it was always operative, even to the point of killing the millionaire who might have financed it. For the millionaire had so persistently cultivated the virtues of self-advertisement that it was difficult for him to become suddenly unknown and undistinguished, even in scenes of conflict where he most ardently desired to do so. There was a movement on foot for treating all millionaires as non-combatants, as being treasures belonging alike to all nations, like the Cathedrals or the Parthenon. It is said that there was even an alternative scheme for camouflaging the millionaire by the pictorial methods that can disguise a gun as a part of the landscape; and that Captain Pierce devoted much eloquence to persuading Mr. Rosenbaum Low how much better it would be for all parties if his face could be made to melt away into the middle distance or take on the appearance of a blank wall or a wooden post.”

“The extraordinary thing is,” interrupted Pierce, who had been listening eagerly, “that he said I was personal. Just at the moment when I was trying to wave away all personal features that could come between us, he actually said I was personal.”

Hood went on reading as if nobody had spoken. “In truth the successes of Blair’s instruments revealed a fallacy in the common commercial argument. We talk of a competition between two kinds of soap or two kinds of jam or cocoa, but it is a competition in purchase and not in practice. We do not make two men eat two kinds of jam and then observe which wears the most radiant smile of satisfaction. We do not give two men two kinds of cocoa and note which endures it with most resignation. But we do use two guns directly against each other; and in the case of Blair’s methods the less advertised gun was the better. Nevertheless his scientific genius could only cover a corner of the field; and a great part of the war must be considered as a war in the open country of a much more primitive and sometimes almost prehistoric kind.

“Si dice che gli uomini del Lungo Arco spingessero il loro medievale simbolismo fino a indossare il verde di Lincoln come divisa quando si ritiravano nei boschi alla maniera di Robin Hood. È certo che impiegarono l’arma da cui presero il nome; e, cosa abbastanza curiosa, come si vedrà, tutt’altro che senza effetto. Ma bisogna capire chiaramente che quando la nuova classe agraria si diede ai boschi come fuorilegge, non si sentiva minimamente come ladri. Non si sentiva nemmeno come ribelli. Dal loro punto di vista, almeno, erano e da lungo tempo erano stati i legittimi proprietari dei loro stessi campi, e gli ufficiali che venivano a confiscare erano i ladri. Perciò quando Lord Eden proclamò la Nazionalizzazione, uscirono a migliaia come i loro padri sarebbero usciti contro i pirati o i lupi.

“Il Governo agì con grande prontezza. Votò all’istante 50.000 sterline al signor Rosenbaum Low, la cui spesa fu saggiamente lasciata alla sua discrezione in una crisi così acuta, con nient’altro che l’intesa che egli desse un’approfondita ricognizione generale della situazione. Si dimostrò degno della fiducia; e fu con la più grave considerazione e senso di responsabilità che egli scelse il signor Leonard Kramp, il brillante giovane finanziere, fra tutti i suoi altri nipoti per assumere il comando delle forze sul campo. Sul campo, tuttavia, la fortuna è ben nota per essere alquanto più incalcolabile; e tutta l’intelligenza e la presenza di spirito che avevano permesso a Kramp di rinviare l’assalto alla Banca Potosi non bastarono a bilanciare l’accidentale possesso da parte di Crane e Pierce di una elementare conoscenza di strategia.

“Prima di considerare i successi ottenuti da questi comandanti nel modo di guerra piuttosto rozzo che furono costretti ad adottare, va notato, naturalmente, che anche dalla loro parte c’erano risorse scientifiche di un certo tipo; e di tipo efficace se eccentrico. Il genio scientifico di Bellew Blair aveva dotato la sua parte di molti procedimenti segreti riguardanti l’aviazione e l’aeronautica, ed è la peculiarità di quest’uomo straordinario che i suoi procedimenti segreti rimasero davvero per un considerevole tempo segreti. Poiché non li aveva rivelati a nessuno con l’intenzione di ricavarne del denaro. Questo comportamento chisciottesco e visionario contrastava nettamente con l’astuto buonsenso dei grandi uomini d’affari che sanno che la pubblicità è l’anima del commercio. Per qualche tempo avevano ignorato con successo lo stantio pregiudizio sentimentale che aveva impedito a soldati e marinai di pubblicizzare i migliori metodi per sconfiggere il nemico; e possiamo tutti ricordare quei brillanti annunci colorati che solevano ravvivare tanti steccati in quei giorni, ‘Affonda nel Sottomarino di Smith; Gite di Piacere per Patrioti.’ Oppure ‘Il Riparo Portatile di Duffin Rende la Guerra un Lusso.’ La pubblicità non può mancare di raggiungere il suo scopo; il nome di un aeroplano scritto in cielo in luci rosa e verde-pisello non poteva che divenire un simbolo della conquista dell’aria; e lo statista patriottico, riflettendo profondamente su quale tipo di corazzata potesse meglio difendere le coste del suo paese, era insensibilmente e sottilmente influenzato dal numero di volte che aveva visto il suo nome ripetuto sugli scalini di una scala mobile a un’Esposizione Imperiale. Né poteva esserci alcun dubbio sul brillante successo che accompagnava queste specialità scientifiche finché le loro operazioni erano confinate al mercato. I metodi del Comandante Blair erano al confronto privati, locali, oscuri e privi di qualsiasi riconoscimento generale; e per una strana ironia fu un positivo vantaggio per questo anonimo e riservato svitato che egli non avesse mai pubblicizzato le sue armi finché non le usò. Aveva sfoggiato per gioco una serie di palloni e fuochi d’artificio meramente fantasiosi; ma i segreti a cui attribuiva importanza li aveva nascosti nelle fenditure delle montagne gallesi con una curiosa e insensibile indifferenza ai principi della distribuzione e dell’esibizione commerciale. In ogni caso non avrebbe potuto condurre operazioni su così larga scala, difettando di quel capitale, la cui mancanza è stata così spesso fatale agli inventori; e aveva reso inutile per un uomo scoprire una macchina a meno che non potesse scoprire anche un milionario. Ma non si può negare che quando la sua macchina veniva messa in azione era sempre operativa, persino al punto di uccidere il milionario che avrebbe potuto finanziarla. Poiché il milionario aveva così ostinatamente coltivato le virtù dell’auto-réclame che gli era difficile divenire d’improvviso ignoto e indistinto, persino in scene di conflitto dove più ardentemente desiderava esserlo. C’era un movimento in corso per trattare tutti i milionari come non-combattenti, essendo tesori appartenenti in egual misura a tutte le nazioni, come le Cattedrali o il Partenone. Si dice che ci fosse persino un progetto alternativo per camuffare il milionario coi metodi pittorici che possono mascherare un cannone come parte del paesaggio; e che il Capitano Pierce dedicasse molta eloquenza a persuadere il signor Rosenbaum Low di quanto sarebbe stato meglio per tutte le parti se il suo viso potesse essere fatto dissolvere nella media distanza o assumere l’aspetto di un muro nudo o di un palo di legno.”

“La cosa straordinaria è,” interruppe Pierce, che aveva ascoltato con avidità, “che disse che io ero personale. Proprio nel momento in cui cercavo di scacciare tutte le caratteristiche personali che potessero frapporsi tra noi, mi disse davvero che io ero personale.”

Hood continuò a leggere come se nessuno avesse parlato. “In Verità i successi degli strumenti di Blair rivelavano una fallacia nel comune argomento commerciale. Parliamo di una concorrenza tra due tipi di sapone o due tipi di marmellata o cacao, ma è una concorrenza nell’acquisto e non nella pratica. Non facciamo mangiare a due uomini due tipi di marmellata e poi osserviamo chi sfoggia il più radioso sorriso di soddisfazione. Non diamo a due uomini due tipi di cacao e notiamo chi lo sopporta con più rassegnazione. Ma usiamo bensì due cannoni direttamente l’uno contro l’altro; e nel caso dei metodi di Blair il cannone meno pubblicizzato era il migliore. Nondimeno il suo genio scientifico poteva coprire solo un angolo del campo; e gran parte della guerra va considerata come una guerra nell’aperta campagna di un tipo assai più primitivo e talora quasi preistorico.

“It is admitted of course by all students that the victories of Crane and Pierce were gross violations of strategic science. The victors themselves afterwards handsomely acknowledged the fact; but it was then too late to repair the error. In order to understand it, however, it is necessary to grasp the curious condition into which so many elements of social life had sunk in the time just preceding the outbreak. It was this strange social situation which rendered the campaign a contradiction to so many sound military maxims.

“For instance, it is a recognized military maxim that armies depend upon roads. But anyone who had noticed the conditions that were already beginning to appear in the London streets as early as 1924 will understand that a road was something less simple and static than the Romans imagined. The Government had adopted everywhere in their road-making the well-known material familiar to us all from the advertisements by the name of “Nobumpo,” thereby both insuring the comfort of travellers and rewarding a faithful supporter by placing a large order with Mr. Hugg. As several members of the Government themselves held shares in Nobumpo their enthusiastic co-operation in the public work was assured. But, as has no doubt been observed everywhere, it is one of the many advantages of Nobumpo, as preserving that freshness of surface so agreeable to the pedestrian, that the whole material can be (and is) taken up and renewed every three months, for the comfort of travellers and the profit and encouragement of trade. It so happened that at the precise moment of the outbreak of hostilities all the country roads, especially in the west, were as completely out of use as if they had been the main thoroughfares of London. This in itself tended to equalize the chances or even to increase them in favour of a guerilla force, such as that which had disappeared into the woods and was everywhere moving under cover of the trees. Under modern conditions, it was found that by carefully avoiding roads, it was still more or less possible to move from place to place.

“Again, another recognized military fact is the fact the bow is an obsolete weapon. And nothing is more irritating to a finely balanced taste than to be killed with an obsolete weapon, especially while persistently pulling the trigger of an efficient weapon, without any apparent effect. Such was the fate of the few unfortunate regiments which ventured to advance into the forests and fell under showers of arrows from trackless ambushes. For it must be remembered that the conditions of this extraordinary campaign entirely reversed the normal military rule about the essential military department of supply. Mechanical communications theoretically accelerate supply, while the supply of a force cut loose and living on the country is soon exhausted. But the mechanical factor also depends upon a moral factor. Ammunition would on normal occasions have been produced with unequalled rapidity by Poole’s Process and brought up with unrivalled speed in Blinker’s Cars; but not at the moment when riotous employees were engaged in dipping Poole repeatedly in a large vat at the factory; or in the quieter conditions of the country-side, where various tramps were acquiring squatter’s rights in Blinker’s Cars, accidentally delayed upon their journey. Everywhere the same thing happened; just as the great manufacturer failed to keep his promise to the workers who produced munitions, so the petty officials driving the lorries had failed to keep their promises to loafers and vagrants who had helped them out of temporary difficulties; and the whole system of supply broke down upon a broken word. On the other hand, the supply of the outlaws was in a sense almost infinite. With the woodcutters and the blacksmiths on their side, they could produce their own rude mediaeval weapons everywhere. It was in vain that Professor Hake delivered a series of popular lectures, proving to the lower classes that in the long run it would be to their economic advantage to be killed in battle. Captain Pierce is reported to have said: ‘I believe the Professor is a botanist as well as an economist; but as a botanist he has not yet discovered that guns and arrows do not grow on trees. Bows and arrows do.’

“But the incident which history will have most difficulty in explaining, and which it may perhaps refer to the region of myth or romance, is the crowning victory commonly called the Battle of the Bows. It was indeed originally called ‘The Battle of the Bows of God’; in reference to some strangely fantastic boast, equally strangely fulfilled, that is said to have been uttered by the celebrated Parson White, a sort of popular chaplain who seems to have been the Friar Tuck of this new band of Robin Hood. Coming on a sort of embassy to Sir Horace Hunter, this clergyman is said to have threatened the Government with something like a miracle. When rallied about the archaic sport of the long bow, he replied: ‘Yes, we have long bows and we shall have longer bows; the longest bows the world has ever seen; bows taller than houses; bows given to us by God Himself and big enough for His gigantic angels.’

“The whole business of this battle, historic and decisive as it was, is covered with some obscurity, like that cloud of storm that hung heavy upon the daybreak of that gloomy November day. Had anyone been present with the Government forces who was well acquainted with the western valley in which they were operating, such a person could not have failed to notice that the very landscape looked different; looked new and abnormal. Dimly as it could be traced through the morning twilight, the very line of the woodland against the sky would have shown him a new shape; a deformity like a hump. But the plans had all been laid out in London long before, in imitation of that foresight, fixity of purpose, and final success that will always be associated with the last German Emperor. It was enough for them that there was a wood of some sort marked on the map, and they advanced toward it, low and crouching as its entrance appeared to be.

“È ammesso naturalmente da tutti gli studiosi che le vittorie di Crane e Pierce furono grossolane violazioni della scienza strategica. Gli stessi vincitori in seguito riconobbero cavallerescamente il fatto; ma era ormai troppo tardi per riparare l’errore. Per comprenderlo, tuttavia, è necessario afferrare la curiosa condizione in cui erano sprofondati tanti elementi della vita sociale nel tempo appena precedente lo scoppio. Fu questa strana situazione sociale a rendere la campagna una contraddizione a tante sane massime militari.

“Per esempio, è una massima militare riconosciuta che gli eserciti dipendono dalle strade. Ma chiunque avesse notato le condizioni che già cominciavano ad apparire nelle vie di Londra fin dal 1924 capirà che una strada era qualcosa di meno semplice e statico di quanto i Romani immaginassero. Il Governo aveva adottato dappertutto nella sua costruzione di strade il ben noto materiale a noi tutti familiare dalle pubblicità col nome di “Nobumpo,” assicurando così sia il comfort dei viaggiatori sia ricompensando un fedele sostenitore col piazzare un grosso ordine presso il signor Hugg. Poiché parecchi membri del Governo stessi possedevano azioni della Nobumpo, la loro entusiastica cooperazione all’opera pubblica era assicurata. Ma, come si è senza dubbio osservato dappertutto, è uno dei molti vantaggi del Nobumpo, nel preservare quella freschezza di superficie così gradevole al pedone, che l’intero materiale può essere (ed è) rimosso e rinnovato ogni tre mesi, per il comfort dei viaggiatori e il profitto e l’incoraggiamento del commercio. Accadde che nel preciso momento dello scoppio delle ostilità tutte le strade di campagna, specialmente nell’ovest, fossero tanto fuori uso quanto se fossero state le arterie principali di Londra. Ciò di per sé tendeva a pareggiare le probabilità o persino ad aumentarle a favore di una forza di guerriglia, come quella che era scomparsa nei boschi e si muoveva dappertutto al riparo degli alberi. Nelle condizioni moderne, si scoprì che, evitando accuratamente le strade, era ancora più o meno possibile spostarsi da luogo a luogo.

“Di nuovo, un altro fatto militare riconosciuto è il fatto che l’arco è un’ arma obsoleta. E nulla è più irritante per un gusto finemente equilibrato che essere ucciso con un’arma obsoleta, specialmente mentre si tira ostinatamente il grilletto di un’arma efficiente, senza alcun effetto apparente. Tale fu il destino dei pochi sfortunati reggimenti che si arrischiarono ad avanzare nelle foreste e caddero sotto rovesci di frecce da agguati senza tracce. Poiché va ricordato che le condizioni di questa straordinaria campagna capovolsero interamente la normale regola militare sull’essenziale reparto militare dell’approvvigionamento. Le comunicazioni meccaniche in teoria accelerano l’approvvigionamento, mentre l’approvvigionamento di una forza svincolata e che vive sul territorio si esaurisce presto. Ma il fattore meccanico dipende anche da un fattore morale. Le munizioni sarebbero normalmente state prodotte con impareggiabile rapidità dal Procedimento di Poole e portate su con impareggiabile Velocità nelle Auto di Blinker; ma non nel momento in cui operai in tumulto erano impegnati a immergere ripetutamente Poole in un grande tino alla fabbrica; o nelle più quiete condizioni della campagna, dove vari vagabondi acquisivano diritti d’occupazione sulle Auto di Blinker, accidentalmente ritardate nel loro viaggio. Dappertutto la stessa cosa accadde; proprio come il grande industriale non riuscì a mantenere la sua promessa agli operai che producevano munizioni, così i piccoli funzionari alla guida dei camion non riuscirono a mantenere le loro promesse ai fannulloni e ai vagabondi che li avevano aiutati a uscire da difficoltà temporanee; e l’intero sistema di approvvigionamento crollò su una parola infranta. D’altra parte, l’approvvigionamento dei fuorilegge era in un certo senso quasi infinito. Coi taglialegna e i fabbri dalla loro parte, potevano produrre le loro rozze armi medievali dappertutto. Fu invano che il Professor Hake tenne una serie di conferenze popolari, dimostrando alle classi inferiori che alla lunga sarebbe stato a loro vantaggio economico essere uccisi in battaglia. Il Capitano Pierce avrebbe detto, si riferisce: ‘Credo che il Professore sia un botanico oltre che un economista; ma come botanico non ha ancora scoperto che i cannoni e le frecce non crescono sugli alberi. Gli archi e le frecce sì.’

“Ma l’episodio che la storia avrà più difficoltà a spiegare, e che forse potrà riferire alla regione del mito o del romanzo, è la vittoria culminante comunemente chiamata la Battaglia degli Archi. Fu invero originariamente chiamata ‘La Battaglia degli Archi di Dio’; in riferimento a una qualche stranamente fantastica millanteria, altrettanto stranamente adempiuta, che si dice sia stata pronunciata dal celebre Parroco White, una sorta di cappellano popolare che pare sia stato il Frate Tuck di questa nuova banda di Robin Hood. Venuto in una sorta di ambasciata da Sir Horace Hunter, questo ecclesiastico si dice abbia minacciato il Governo con qualcosa di simile a un miracolo. Quando fu punzecchiato sull’arcaico sport del lungo arco, rispose: ‘Sì, abbiamo lunghi archi e ne avremo di più lunghi; i più lunghi archi che il mondo abbia mai visto; archi più alti delle case; archi datici da Dio stesso e abbastanza grandi per i Suoi giganteschi angeli.’

“L’intera faccenda di questa battaglia, storica e decisiva com’ era, è coperta di una certa oscurità, come quella nube di tempesta che pesava greve sull’alba di quel cupo giorno di novembre. Se qualcuno fosse stato presente con le forze del Governo che fosse stato bene al corrente della valle occidentale in cui operavano, una tale persona non avrebbe potuto mancare di notare che il paesaggio stesso appariva diverso; appariva nuovo e anomalo. Per quanto fioca potesse tracciarsi attraverso il crepuscolo del mattino, la linea stessa del bosco contro il cielo gli avrebbe mostrato una nuova forma; una deformità come una gobba. Ma i piani erano stati tutti tracciati a Londra molto tempo prima, a imitazione di quella preveggenza, fermezza di proposito e finale successo che sarà sempre associata all’ultimo Imperatore tedesco. Bastava loro che ci fosse un bosco di qualche sorta segnato sulla mappa, e avanzarono verso di esso, bassi e curvi come ne appariva l’ingresso.

“Then something happened, which even those who saw it and survived cannot describe. The dark trees seemed to spring up to twice their height as in a nightmare. In the half-dark the whole wood seemed to rise from the earth like a rush of birds and then to turn over in mid-air and come towards the invaders like a roaring wave. Some such dim and dizzy sight they saw; but many of them at least saw little enough afterwards. Simultaneously with the turning of this wheel of waving trees, rocks seemed to rain down out of heaven; beams and stones and shafts and missiles of all kinds, flattening out the advancing force as under a pavement produced by a shower of paving-stones. It is asserted that some of the countrymen cunning in woodcraft, in the service of the Long Bow, had contrived to fit up a tree as a colossal catapult; calculating how to bend back the boughs and sometimes even the trunks to the breaking-point, and gaining a huge and living resilience with their release. If this story is true, it is certainly an appropriate conclusion to the career of the Long Bow and a rather curious fulfilment of the visionary vaunt of Parson White, when he said that the bows would be big enough for giants, and that the maker of the bows was God.”

“Yes,” interrupted the excitable White, “and do you know what he said to me when I first said it?”

“What who said when you said what?” asked Hood patiently.

“I mean that fellow Hunter,” replied the clergyman. “That varnished society doctor turned politician. Do you know what he said when I told him we would get our bows from God?”

Owen Hood paused in the act of lighting a cigar.

“Yes,” he said grimly. “I believe I can tell you exactly what he said. I’ve watched him off and on for twenty years. I bet he began by saying: ‘I don’t profess to be a religious man.’”

“Right, quite right,” cried the cleric bounding upon his chair in a joyous manner, “that’s exactly how he began. ‘I don’t profess to be a religious man, but I trust I have some reverence and good taste. I don’t drag religion into politics.’ And I said: ‘No, I don’t think you do.’”

A moment after, he bounded, as it were, in a new direction. “And that reminds me of what I came about,” he cried. “Enoch Oates, your American friend, drags religion into politics all right; only it’s a rather American sort of religion. He’s talking about a United States of Europe and wants to introduce you to a Lithuanian Prophet. It seems this Lithuanian party has started a movement for a Universal Peasant Republic or World State of Workers on the Land; but at present he’s only got as far as Lithuania. But he seems inclined to pick up England on the way, after the unexpected success of the English agrarian party.”

“What’s the good of talking to me about a World State,” growled Hood. “Didn’t I say I preferred a Heptarchy?”

“Don’t you understand?” interrupted Hilary Pierce excitedly. “What can we have to do with international republics? We can turn England upside down if we like; but it’s England that we like, whichever way up. Why, our very names and phrases, the very bets and jokes in which the whole thing began, will never be translated. It takes an Englishman to eat his hat; I never heard of a Spaniard threatening to eat his sombrero, or a Chinaman to chew his pigtail. You can only set the Thames on fire; you cannot set the Tiber or the Ganges on fire, because the habit of speech has never been heard of. What’s the good of talking about white elephants in countries where they are only white elephants? Go and say to a Frenchman, ‘Pour mon chateau, je le trouve un elephant blanc’ and he will send two Parisian alienists to look at you seriously, like a man who says that his motor-car is a green giraffe. There is no point in telling Czecho-Slovakian pigs to fly, or Jugo-Slavonic cows to jump over the moon. Why, the unhappy Lithuanian would be bewildered to the point of madness by our very name. There is no reason to suppose that he and his countrymen talk about a long bowman when they mean a liar. We talk about tall stories, but a tall story may mean a true story in colloquial Lithuanian.”

“Tall stories are true stories sometimes, I hope,” said Colonel Crane, “and people don’t believe ‘em. But people’ll say that was a very tall story about the tall trees throwing darts and stones. Afraid it’ll come to be a bit of a joke.”

“All our battles began as jokes and they will end as jokes,” said Owen Hood, staring at the smoke of his cigar as it threaded its way towards the sky in grey and silver arabesque. “They will linger only as faintly laughable legends, if they linger at all; they may pass an hour or two or fill an empty page; and even the man who tells them will not take them seriously. It will all end in smoke like the smoke I am looking at; in eddying and topsy-turvy patterns hovering for a moment in the air. And I wonder how many, who may smile or yawn over them, will realize that where there was smoke there was fire.”

There was a silence; then Colonel Crane stood up, a solitary figure in his severe and formal clothes, and gravely said farewell to his hostess. With the failing afternoon light he knew that his own wife, who was a well-known artist, would be abandoning her studio work, and he always looked forward to a talk with her before dinner, which was often a more social function. Nevertheless, as he approached his old home a whim induced him to delay the meeting for a few minutes and to walk round to his old kitchen garden, where his old servant Archer was still leaning on a spade, as in the days before the Flood.

So he stood for a moment amid a changing world, exactly as he had stood on that distant Sunday morning at the beginning of all these things. The South Sea idol still stood at the corner; the scarecrow still wore the hat that he had sacrificed; the cabbages still looked green and solid like the cabbage he had once dug up, digging up so much along with it.

«Poi accadde qualcosa che nemmeno coloro che lo videro e sopravvissero poterono descrivere. Gli alberi scuri sembrarono crescere fino a raddoppiare la loro altezza come in un incubo. Nel crepuscolo, tutto il bosco sembrò sollevarsi dalla terra come uno stormo di uccelli e poi rovesciarsi a mezz’aria per venire incontro agli invasori come una rabbiosa onda. Fu questa la visione confusa e vertiginosa che videro; ma molti di loro, almeno, non ne videro molto altro in seguito. Contemporaneamente alla rotazione di questa ruota di alberi agitati, sembrò che le rocce piovenssero dal cielo; travi e pietre e dardi e proiettili di ogni genere, schiacciando la forza in avanzata come sotto un marciapiede prodotto da una pioggia di selci. Si afferma che alcuni dei contadini esperti nella caccia, al servizio dell’Arco Lungo, avessero escogitato di adattare un albero come una gigantesca catapulta; calcolando come piegare i rami e talvolta anche i tronchi fino al punto di rottura, ottenendo così una enorme e vivace elasticità con il loro rilascio. Se questa storia è vera, essa rappresenta certamente un epilogo appropriato alla carriera dell’Arco Lungo e un adempimento piuttosto curioso della visionaria fanfaronata del Parroco White, quando disse che gli archi sarebbero stati abbastanza grandi per i giganti e che il fabbricante degli archi era Dio.»

«Sì», interruppe l’agitato White, «e sapete cosa mi ha detto quando gliel’ho detto per la prima volta?»

«Chi ha detto cosa quando lei ha detto che cosa?» chiese pazientemente Hood.

«Intendo quel tale Hunter», rispose il clero, «quel dottore di società laccato diventato politico. Sapete cosa ha detto quando gli ho comunicato che avremmo ottenuto i nostri archi da Dio?»

Owen Hood si fermò nel gesto di accendere un sigaro.

“Sì”, disse con amarezza, “credo di poterle dire esattamente cosa ha detto. L’ho osservato di tanto in tanto per venti anni. Scommetto che ha cominciato dicendo: «Non pretendo di essere un uomo religioso».”

«Esatto, proprio esatto», gridò il chierico saltando sulla sedia in modo gioioso, «è esattamente così che ha cominciato. “Non pretendo di essere un uomo religioso, ma spero di avere un po’ di riverenza e buon gusto. Non trascino la religione nella politica”. E io dissi: “No, non credo lo faccia”».

Un attimo dopo, saltò come diremmo in una nuova direzione. “E questo mi ricorda per cosa sono venuto,” esclamò. “Enoch Oates, il tuo amico americano, trascina la religione nella politica alla grande; solo che è una religione piuttosto all’americana. Sta parlando di un’Unione delle Nazioni Europee e vuole presentarvi un profeta lituano. Sembra che questo partito lituano abbia dato inizio a un movimento per una Repubblica Universale dei Contadini o Stato Mondiale degli Operai della Terra; ma al momento non è arrivato oltre la Lituania. Ma sembra propenso ad aggiungere l’Inghilterra lungo il cammino, dopo l’inatteso successo del partito agrario inglese.”

«A che serve parlarmi di uno Stato Mondiale», brontolò Hood. «Non ho forse detto che preferivo un’Eptarchia?»

“Non capite?” interruppe Hilary Pierce con entusiasmo. “Cosa c’entriamo noi con le repubbliche internazionali? Possiamo sconvolgere l’Inghilterra se ci piace; ma è l’Inghilterra che ci piace, in qualsiasi modo sia. Perché, i nostri stessi nomi e frasi, le stesse scommesse e battute con cui tutto è cominciato, non saranno mai tradotti. Ci vuole un Inglese per mangiarsi il cappello; non ho mai sentito di uno Spagnolo che minacci di mangiarsi il suo sombrero, o di un Cinese che si morda la treccia. Potete solo mettere sul fuoco il Tamigi; non potete mettere sul fuoco il Tevere o il Gange, perché l’abitudine del parlare non è mai stata sentita. A che serve parlare di elefanti bianchi in paesi dove sono solo elefanti bianchi? Andate a dire a un Francese, ‘Pour mon chateau, je le trouve un elephant blanc’ e lui manderà due alienisti parigini a guardarvi seriamente, come uno che dice che la sua automobile è una giraffa verde. Non ha senso dire ai maiali cecoslovacchi di volare, o alle mucche jugoslave di saltare sulla luna. Perché, il povero lituano sarebbe disorientato fino alla mattia dal nostro stesso nome. Non c’è ragione di supporre che lui e i suoi concittadini parlino di un arciere quando intendono un bugiardo. Parliamo di storie esagerate, ma una storia esagerata può voler dire una storia vera in lituano colloquiale.”

«Le storie stravaganti sono talvolta vere, spero», disse il colonnello Crane, «e la gente non ci crede. Ma la gente dirà che quella dei grandi alberi che lanciano dardi e pietre è una storia davvero incredibile. Temo che finirà per diventare un po’ uno scherzo».

“Tutte le nostre battaglie sono cominciate come scherzi e finiranno come scherzi”, disse Owen Hood, fissando il fumo del suo sigaro mentre si snodava verso il cielo in arabeschi grigi e argentati. “Rimarranno solo come leggende vagamente ridicole, se rimarranno; potranno passare un’ora o due o riempire una pagina vuota; e anche l’uomo che le racconta non le prenderà sul serio. Tutto finirà in fumo come il fumo che sto guardando; in vortici e disegni sottosopra che fluttuano per un momento nell’aria. E mi chiedo quanti, che forse sorridono o sbadigliano ascoltandole, si renderanno conto che dove c’è fumo c’è fuoco.”

Ci fu un silenzio; poi il colonnello Crane si alzò, figura solitaria nei suoi abiti severi e formali, e salutò gravemente la padrona di casa. Con la luce del pomeriggio che declinava sapeva che sua moglie, che era una artista nota, avrebbe abbandonato il suo lavoro in studio e lui sempre attendeva con impazienza un discorso con lei prima di cena, che spesso era una funzione più sociale. Tuttavia, mentre si avvicinava alla sua vecchia casa un capriccio lo indusse a ritardare l’incontro di qualche minuto e a fare il giro del suo vecchio orto, dove il suo vecchio servitore Archer era ancora appoggiato su una vanga, come ai giorni prima del Diluvio.

Così rimase per un momento in mezzo a un mondo che cambiava, esattamente come era rimasto quella lontana mattina di domenica all’inizio di tutte queste cose. L’idolo del Mare del Sud stava ancora all’angolo; il fantoccio indossava ancora il cappello che lui aveva sacrificato; i cavoli sembravano ancora verdi e solidi come il cavolo che una volta aveva dissotterrato, portando alla luce così tante altre cose insieme a esso.

“Queer thing,” he said, “how true it is what Hilary once said about acting an allegory without knowing it. Never had a notion of what I was doing when I picked up a cabbage and wore it for a wager. Damned awkward position, but I never dreamed I was being martyred for a symbol. And the right symbol, too, for I’ve lived to see Britannia crowned with cabbage. All very well to say Britannia ruled the waves; it was the land she couldn’t rule, her own land, and it was heaving like earthquakes. But while there’s cabbage there’s hope. Archer, my friend, this is the moral: any country that tries to do without cabbages is done for. And even in war you often fight as much with cabbages as cannon-balls.”

“Yes, sir,” said Archer respectfully; “would you be wanting another cabbage now, sir?”

Colonel Crane repressed a slight shudder. “No, thank you; no, thank you,” he said hastily. Then he muttered as he turned away: “I don’t mind revolutions so much, but I wouldn’t go through that again.”

And he passed swiftly round his house, of which the windows began to show the glow of kindled lamps, and went in to his wife.

Archer was left alone in the garden, tidying up after his work and shifting the potted shrubs; a dark and solitary figure as sunset and twilight sank all around the enclosure like soft curtains of grey with a border of purple; and the windows, as yet uncurtained and full of lamplight, painted patterns of gold on the lawns and flagged walks without. It was perhaps appropriate that he should remain alone and apart; for he alone in all these changes had remained quite unchanged. It was perhaps fitting that his figure should stand in a dark outline against the darkening scene; for the mystery of his immutable respectability remains more of a riddle than all the riot of the rest. No revolution could revolutionize Mr. Archer. Attempts had been made to provide so excellent a gardener with a garden of his own; with a farm of his own, in accordance with the popular policy of the hour. But he would not adapt himself to the new world; nor would he hasten to die out, as was his duty on evolutionary principles. He was merely a survival; but he showed a perplexing disposition to survive.

Suddenly the lonely gardener realized that he was not alone. A face had appeared above the hedge, gazing at him with blue eyes dreaming yet burning; a face with something of the tint and profile of Shelley. It was impossible that Mr. Archer should have heard of such a person as Shelley: fortunately he recognized the visitor as a friend of his master.

“Forgive me if I am mistaken, Citizen Archer,” said Hilary Pierce with pathetic eagerness, “but it seems to me that you are not swept along with the movement; that a man of your abilities has been allowed to stand apart, as it were, from the campaign of the Long Bow. And yet how strange! Are you not Archer? Does not your very name rise up and reproach you? Ought you not to have shot more arrows or told more tarradiddles than all the rest? Or is there perhaps a more elemental mystery behind your immobility, like that of a statue in the garden? Are you indeed the god of the garden, more beautiful than this South Sea idol and more respectable than Priapus? Are you in no mortal sense an Archer? Are you perhaps Apollo, serving this military Admetus; successfully, yes, successfully, hiding your radiance from me?” He paused for a reply, and then lowered his voice as he resumed: “Or are you not rather that other Archer whose shafts are not shafts of death but of life and fruitfulness; whose arrows plant themselves like little flowering trees; like the little shrubs you are planting in this garden? Are you he that gives the sunstroke not in the head but the heart; and have you stricken each of us in turn with the romance that has awakened us for the revolution? For without that spirit of fruitfulness and the promise of the family, these visions would indeed be vain. Are you in truth the God of Love; and has your arrow stung and startled each of us into telling his story? I will not call you Cupid,” he said with a slight air of deprecation or apology, “I will not call you Cupid, Mr. Archer, for I conceive you as no pagan deity, but rather as that image clarified and spiritualized to a symbol almost Christian, as he might have appeared to Chaucer or to Botticelli. Nay, it was you that, clad in no heathen colours, but rather in mediaeval heraldry, blew a blast on his golden trumpet when Beatrice saluted Dante on the bridge. Are you indeed that Archer, O Archer, and did you give each one of us his Vita Nuova?”

“No, sir,” said Mr. Archer.

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Thus does the chronicler of the League of the Long Bow come to the end of his singularly unproductive and unprofitable labours, without, perhaps, having yet come to the beginning. The reader may have once hoped, perhaps, that the story would be like the universe; which when it ends, will explain why it ever began. But the reader has long since been sleeping, after the toils and trials of his part in the affair; and the writer is too tactful to ask at how early a stage of his story-telling that generally satisfactory solution of all our troubles was found. He knows not if the sleep has been undisturbed, or in that sleep what dreams may come, if there has been cast upon it any shadow of the shapes of his own very private and comfortable nightmare; turrets clad with the wings of morning or temples marching over dim meadows as living monsters, or swine plumed like cherubim or forests bent like bows, or a fiery river winding through a dark land. Images are in their nature indefensible, if they miss the imagination of another; and the foolish scribe of the Long Bow will not commit the last folly of defending his dreams. He at least has drawn a bow at a venture and shot an arrow into the air; and he has no intention of looking for it in oaks, all over the neighbourhood, or expecting to find it still sticking in a mortal and murderous manner in the heart of a friend. His is only a toy bow; and when a boy shoots with such a bow, it is generally very difficult to find the arrow—or the boy.

«Strana cosa,» disse, «com’è vero quel che una volta disse Hilary sul recitare un’allegoria senza saperlo. Non avevo la minima idea di ciò che stavo facendo quando raccolsi un cavolo e me lo posi in capo per una scommessa. Posizione dannatamente scomoda, ma non mi sarei mai sognato d’essere martirizzato per un simbolo. E il simbolo giusto, per giunta, perché ho vissuto abbastanza da vedere Britannia incoronata di cavolo. Sta tutto molto bene dire che Britannia domina i flutti; era la terra che non riusciva a dominare, la sua stessa terra, e si sollevava come per terremoti. Ma finché c’è cavolo c’è speranza. Archer, amico mio, la morale è questa: qualunque paese che tenti di fare a meno dei cavoli è finito. E persino in guerra spesso si combatte tanto coi cavoli quanto con le palle di cannone.»

«Sì, signore,» disse Archer rispettosamente; «desidererebbe un altro cavolo adesso, signore?»

Il colonnello Crane represse un lieve fremito. «No, grazie; no, grazie,» disse in fretta. Poi mormorò mentre si voltava: «Non mi dispiacciono tanto le rivoluzioni, ma non vorrei ripassare per quella faccenda.»

E girò rapidamente attorno alla sua casa, le cui finestre cominciavano a mostrare il bagliore delle lampade accese, ed entrò dalla moglie.

Archer rimase solo nel giardino, mettendo in ordine dopo il suo lavoro e spostando gli arbusti in vaso; una figura scura e solitaria mentre il tramonto e il crepuscolo calavano tutt’intorno al recinto come morbide cortine di grigio con un orlo di porpora; e le finestre, ancora senza tende e piene di luce di lampada, dipingevano disegni d’oro sui prati e sui vialetti lastricati là fuori. Era forse appropriato che egli restasse solo e in disparte; poiché egli solo in tutti questi mutamenti era rimasto del tutto immutato. Era forse conveniente che la sua figura si stagliasse in un profilo scuro contro la scena che si oscurava; poiché il mistero della sua immutabile rispettabilità resta più un enigma di tutto il tumulto del resto. Nessuna rivoluzione poteva rivoluzionare il signor Archer. Erano stati fatti tentativi di provvedere a un giardiniere così eccellente un giardino tutto suo; una fattoria tutta sua, in accordo con la politica popolare del momento. Ma egli non voleva adattarsi al nuovo mondo; né voleva affrettarsi a estinguersi, come era suo dovere secondo i principi evoluzionistici. Egli era soltanto una sopravvivenza; ma mostrava una sconcertante disposizione a sopravvivere.

D’improvviso il solitario giardiniere si accorse di non essere solo. Un volto era apparso sopra la siepe, fissandolo con occhi azzurri sognanti eppure ardenti; un volto con qualcosa della tinta e del profilo di Shelley. Era impossibile che il signor Archer avesse mai sentito parlare di una persona come Shelley: per fortuna riconobbe il visitatore come un amico del suo padrone.

«Perdonatemi se mi sbaglio, Cittadino Archer,» disse Hilary Pierce con patetico ardore, «ma mi sembra che voi non siate trascinato dal movimento; che a un uomo delle vostre capacità sia stato consentito di restare in disparte, per così dire, dalla campagna dell’Arco Lungo. Eppure com’è strano! Non siete forse Archer? Non si leva forse il vostro stesso nome a rimproverarvi? Non avreste dovuto scoccare più frecce o raccontare più frottole di tutti gli altri? O si cela forse un mistero più elementare dietro la vostra immobilità, come quello di una statua nel giardino? Siete voi davvero il dio del giardino, più bello di questo idolo dei Mari del Sud e più rispettabile di Priapo? Non siete voi in nessun senso mortale un Arciere? Siete forse Apollo, al servizio di questo militare Admeto; con successo, sì, con successo, celandomi il vostro splendore?» Si fermò in attesa di una risposta, poi abbassò la voce riprendendo: «O non siete piuttosto quell’altro Arciere le cui saette non sono saette di morte ma di vita e fecondità; le cui frecce si piantano come alberelli in fiore; come i piccoli arbusti che voi state piantando in questo giardino? Siete voi colui che dà l’insolazione non alla testa ma al cuore; e avete colpito ciascuno di noi a sua volta con quel romanticismo che ci ha destati per la rivoluzione? Poiché senza quello spirito di fecondità e la promessa della famiglia, queste visioni sarebbero davvero vane. Siete voi in verità il Dio dell’Amore; e la vostra freccia ha punto e trasalire fatto ciascuno di noi fino a raccontare la propria storia? Non vi chiamerò Cupido,» disse con una lieve aria di riprovazione o di scusa, «non vi chiamerò Cupido, signor Archer, poiché io vi concepisco non come una divinità pagana, ma piuttosto come quell’immagine chiarita e spiritualizzata in un simbolo quasi cristiano, come poteva apparire a Chaucer o a Botticelli. Anzi, foste voi che, vestito non di colori pagani, ma piuttosto d’araldica medievale, soffiaste uno squillo nella vostra tromba d’oro quando Beatrice salutò Dante sul ponte. Siete voi davvero quell’Arciere, o Arciere, e deste voi a ciascuno di noi la sua Vita Nuova?»

«No, signore,» disse il signor Archer.

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Così il cronista della Lega dell’Arco Lungo giunge al termine delle sue fatiche singolarmente improduttive e infruttuose, senza, forse, essere ancora giunto all’inizio. Il lettore avrà forse un tempo sperato che la storia fosse come l’universo; il quale, quando finisce, spiegherà perché mai cominciò. Ma il lettore già da tempo si è addormentato, dopo le pene e le prove della sua parte nella faccenda; e lo scrittore è troppo delicato per chiedere a quale stadio tanto precoce del suo narrare fu trovata quella soluzione generalmente soddisfacente di tutti i nostri guai. Egli non sa se il sonno sia stato indisturbato, o in quel sonno quali sogni possano venire, se sia stata gettata su di esso alcun’ombra delle forme del suo stesso privatissimo e comodo incubo; torri rivestite delle ali del mattino o templi che marciano su prati indistinti come mostri viventi, o porci impennacchiati come cherubini o foreste piegate come archi, o un fiammeggiante fiume serpeggiante attraverso una terra oscura. Le immagini sono per loro natura indifendibili, se mancano l’immaginazione di un altro; e lo sciocco scriba dell’Arco Lungo non commetterà l’ultima follia di difendere i suoi sogni. Egli almeno ha teso un arco a caso e scoccato una freccia nell’ aria; e non ha alcuna intenzione di andarla a cercare fra le querce, per tutto il vicinato, né di aspettarsi di trovarla ancora conficcata in modo mortale e micidiale nel cuore di un amico. Il suo è soltanto un arco giocattolo; e quando un fanciullo tira con un tale arco, è di solito assai difficile trovare la freccia — o il fanciullo.