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Title: Tales of the Long Bow
Author: G. K. Chesterton
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eBook No.:  0400321.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted: December 2001
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Title:      Tales of the Long Bow
Author:     G. K. Chesterton





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 than the suburbs.  The hedges, even, in being
as neat as Surbiton managed to look as mellow as Hampton Court,
as if their very artificiality belonged rather to Queen Anne than
Queen Victoria; and the stone-rimmed pond with a ring of irises somehow
looked like a classic pool and not merely an artificial puddle.
It is idle to analyse how a man's soul and social type will somehow
soak into his surroundings; anyhow, the soul of Mr. Archer had sunk
into the kitchen-garden so as to give it a fine shade of difference.
He was after all a practical man, and the practice of his new trade
was much more of a real appetite with him than 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 with a big-bridged nose,
dark moustache, and dark eyes with a settled expression of anxiety,
though nobody knew what there was to be anxious about in his very solid
social existence.  He was a friend of Dr. Hunter; one might almost
say a humble friend.  For he had the negative snobbishness that could
only admire the positive and progressive snobbishness of that soaring
and social figure.  A man like Dr. Hunter likes to have a man like
Mr. Smith, before whom he can pose as a perfect man of the world.
What appears more extraordinary, a man like Mr. Smith really likes
to have a man like Dr. Hunter to pose at him and swagger over him
and snub him.  Anyhow, Vernon-Smith had ventured to hint that the new
hat of his neighbour Crane was not of a pattern familiar in every
fashion-plate. And Dr. Hunter, bursting with the secret of his own
original diplomacy, had snubbed the suggestion and snowed it under
with frosty scorn.  With shrewd, resolute gestures, with large
allusive phrases, he had left on his friend's mind the impression
that the whole social world would dissolve if a word were said
on so delicate a topic.  Mr. Vernon-Smith formed a general idea
that the Colonel would explode with a loud bang at the very vaguest
allusion to vegetables, or the most harmless adumbration or verbal
shadow of a hat.  As usually happens in such cases, the words he
was forbidden to say repeated themselves perpetually in his mind
with the rhythmic pressure of a pulse.  It was his temptation
at the moment to call all houses hats and all visitors vegetables.

When Crane came out of his front gate that morning he found his
neighbour Vernon-Smith standing outside, between the spreading
laburnum and the lamp-post, talking to a young lady, a distant
cousin of his family.  This girl was an art student on her own--
a little too much on her own for the standards of Heatherbrae, and,
therefore (some would infer), yet further beyond those of White Lodge.
Her brown hair was bobbed, and the Colonel did not admire
bobbed hair.  On the other hand, she had a rather attractive face,
with honest brown eyes a little too wide apart, which diminished
the impression of beauty but increased the impression of honesty.
She also had a very fresh and unaffected voice, and the Colonel
had often heard it calling out scores at tennis on the other side
of the garden wall.  In some vague sort of way it made him feel old;
at least, he was not sure whether he felt older than he was,
or younger than he ought to be.  It was not until they met under
the lamp-post that he knew her name was Audrey Smith; and he was
faintly thankful for the single monosyllable.  Mr. Vernon-Smith
presented her, and very nearly said:  "May I introduce my cabbage?"
instead of "my cousin."

The Colonel, with unaffected dullness, said it was a fine day;
and his neighbour, rallying from his last narrow escape,
continued the talk with animation.  His manner, as when he poked
his big nose and beady black eyes into local meetings and committees,
was at once hesitating and emphatic.

"This young lady is going in for Art," he said; "a poor look-out,
isn't it?  I expect we shall see her drawing in chalk on the paving
stones and expecting us to throw a penny into the--into a tray,
or something."  Here he dodged another danger.  "But of course,
she thinks she'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 sounds comic and
even vulgar; something between 'cab' and 'garbage,' I suppose.
But a cabbage isn't really comic or vulgar.  You wouldn't think
so if you simply had to paint it.  Haven't you seen Dutch and
Flemish galleries, and don't you know what great men painted cabbages?
What they saw was certain lines and colours; very wonderful lines
and colours."

"It may be all very well in a picture," he began doubtfully.

She suddenly laughed aloud.

"You idiot," she cried; "don't you know you looked perfectly splendid?
The curves were like a great turban of leaves and the root rose
like the spike of a helmet; it was rather like the turbaned
helmets on some of Rembrandt's figures, with the face like bronze
in the shadows of green and purple.  That's the sort of thing
artists can see, who keep their eyes and heads clear of words!
And then you want to apologize for not wearing that stupid 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 asks you what you have caught.
Nobody expects you to bring home a hippopotamus for supper.
Nobody has ever seen you walking up Pall Mall, followed respectfully
by a captive giraffe.  Your bag of elephants, though enormous,
seems singularly unobtrusive; left in the cloak-room, no doubt.
Personally, I doubt if you ever catch anything.  It's all decorously
hidden in desert sand and 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 of vandalism or not caring
for beauty and all that.  Then it was that Professor Hake explained
the theory of the Protective Screen.  Even if it were possible,
he said, for some thin film of petrol to appear on the water,
as it would not mix with the water the latter would actually be
kept in a clearer condition.  It would act, as it were, as a Cap;
as does the gelatinous Cap upon certain preserved foods.

"That is a very interesting view," observed Hood; "I suppose you
will write another book about that?"

"I think we are all the more privileged," remarked Bliss, "in hearing
of the discovery in this personal fashion, before our expert has
laid it before the public."

"Yes," said Hood, "your expert is very expert, isn't he--
in writing books?"

Sir Samuel Bliss stiffened in all his bristles.  "I trust," he said,
"you are not implying any doubt that our expert is an expert."

"I have no doubt of your expert," answered Hood gravely.
"I do not doubt either that he is expert or that he is yours."

"Really, gentlemen," cried Bliss in a sort of radiance of protest,
"I think such an insinuation about a man in Professor Hake's position--"

"Not at all, not at all," said Hood soothingly, "I'm sure it's
a most comfortable position."

The Professor blinked at him, but a light burned in the eyeballs
under the heavy eyelids.

"If you come here talking like that--" he began, when Hood cut off
his speech by speaking across him to somebody else, with a cheerful
rudeness that was like a kick in its contempt.

"And what do you say, my dear doctor?" he observed, addressing Hunter.
"You used to be almost as romantic as myself about the amenities
of this place.  Do you remember how much you admired the landlords
for keeping the place quiet and select; and how you said the old
families preserved the beauty of old England?"

There was a silence, and then the young doctor spoke.

"Well, it doesn't follow a fellow can't believe in progress.
That's what's the matter with you, Hood; you don't believe in progress.
We must move with the times; and somebody always has to suffer.
Besides, it doesn't matter so much about river-water nowadays.
It doesn't even matter so much about the main water-supply. When
the new Bill is passed, people will be obliged to use the Bulton
Filter in any case."

"I see," said Hood reflectively, "You first make a mess of the water
for money, and then make a virtue of forcing people to clean
it themselves."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Hunter angrily.

"Well, I was thinking at the moment," said Hood in his rather cryptic way.
"I was thinking about Mr. Bulton.  The man who owns the filters.
I was wondering whether he might join us.  We seem such a happy
family party."

"I cannot see the use of prolonging this preposterous conversation,"
said Sir Samuel.

"Don't call the poor Professor's theory preposterous," remonstrated Hood.
"A little fanciful, perhaps.  And as for the doctor's view,
surely there's nothing preposterous in that.  You don't think
the chemicals will poison all the fish I catch, do you, Doctor?"

"No, of course not," replied Hunter curtly.

"They will adapt themselves by natural selection," said Hood dreamily.
"They will develop organs suitable to an oily environment--
will learn to love petrol."

"Oh, I have no time for this nonsense," said Hunter, and 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," she answered in a low voice, "that the belief
is too good to be true."

As he looked at her a thrill went through him like a message
too swift to be understood; and at the back of his mind something
awoke that repeated again and again like a song the same words,
"too good to be true."  There was always something pathetic,
even in her days of pride, about the short-sighted look of her
half-closed eyes; but it was for other reasons that they were now
blinking in the strong white sunlight, almost as if they were blind.
They were blind and bright with tears:  she mastered her voice
and it was steady.

"You talk about failures," she said.  "I suppose most people would call
me a failure and all my people failures now; except those who would say
we never failed, because we never had to try.  Anyhow, we're all poor
enough now; I don't know whether you know that I'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.

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

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

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

"He jolly well wouldn't," replied the Colonel.  "Showing off
to the girl, of course."

"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.
Artists have remarked that a cloud has perspective like anything else;
but the perspective of the cloud coming up the valley was
curiously solid.

"That's not a cloud," he said sharply, "it's a Zeppelin or something."

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

"Saints and angels!" cried Hood suddenly.  "Why, it IS a pig!"

"It's shaped like a pig all right," said the Colonel curtly; and indeed
as the great balloon-like form bulked bigger and bigger above its
own reflection in the winding river, they could see that the l