TO understand this story you will have to believe in the Greater
Gods--Love and Youth, for example, and Adventure and Coincidence; also
in the trusting heart of woman and the deceitful spirit of man. You will
have to reconcile yourself to the fact that though daily you go to
London by the nine-seven, returning by the five-fifteen, and have your
accustomed meals at eight, one, and half-past six, there are those who
take neither trains nor meals regularly. That, while nothing on earth
ever happens to you, there really are on earth people to whom things do
happen. Nor is the possibility of such happenings wholly a matter of the
independent income--the income for which you do not work. It is a matter
of the individual soul. I knew a man whose parents had placed him in
that paralyzing sort of situation which is symbolized by the regular
trains and the regular meals. It was quite a nice situation for some
people, a situation, too, in which one was certain to "get on." But the
man I knew had other dreams. He chucked his job, one fine Saturday
morning in May, went for a long walk, met a tinker and bought his
outfit--a wheel on wheels, a sort of barrow with a grindstone on it, and
a pot for putting fire in dangling underneath. This he wheeled
profitably through rural districts--so profitably that he was presently
able to buy a donkey and a cart, and to sell kettles as well as mend
them. He has since bought a gipsy tent; with these impediments--or
helps--he travels through the pleasant country. Things are always
happening to him. He has found a buried treasure; frustrated a burglary;
once he rescued a lady in distress; and another time he killed a man.
The background to these dramatic incidents is always the pleasant
background of quiet road, blossoming hedgerows and orchards, corn-fields
and meadows and lanes. He says this is the way to live. I will write
down his story some day, but this is not it. I only bring him in to
illustrate my point, which is that adventures do happen--to the
adventurous.
My friend the tinker has had, perhaps, more than his share of
adventures, but then his is the temperament that shoots, like a willing
needle, to the great magnet of melodrama. The temperamental needle of
Edward Basingstoke followed the magnet of romance. In a gayer, if less
comfortable, age he might have been a knight-errant, or, at least, the
sympathetic squire of a knight-errant. Had he been born in the days when
most people stayed at home and minded their own business he would have
insisted on going out and minding other people's. Living in the days of
aeroplanes, motors, telegraphy, and cinematographs, in a world noisy
with the nonsense of politics and the press, he told himself that the
ideal life was the life of the farmer who plowed and sowed and reaped,
tended his beasts and filled his barns, and went home from his clean,
quiet work to the open hearth whence the wood smoke curled up to heaven
like the smoke of an altar.
Destiny, in deep perversity, was making an engineer of him. He dreamed
his pastoral dreams in the deafening clangor of the shops at Crewe, but
not ten thousand hammers could beat out of his brain the faith that life
was really--little as one might suppose it, just looking at it from
Crewe--full of the most beautiful and delicate possibilities, and that,
somehow or other, people got from life what they chose to take. While he
was making up his mind what he should take, he went on learning his
trade. And Destiny seemed determined that he should learn nothing else.
What we call Destiny is really Chance--and so far from being immutable,
she is the veriest flirt and weathercock. She changed her mind about
Edward--or perhaps Death, who is stronger than she, insisted and
prevailed.
Just at the time when a faint dust was beginning to settle on his
dreams--the sort of dust that thickens and hardens into clay and you
grow cabbages in it--Death intervened to save him. It was his uncle who
died, and he left a will, and by that will certain property came to
Edward. When the news came he took a day to think of it, and he went to
the works as usual that afternoon and the next morning. But next day at
noon he laid down his tools and never took them up again. Instead he
took a ticket to Oxford, appeared at the rooms of his friend, whom he
surprised in slumber, and told his tale.
"And you're going to chuck the shop," said the friend, whose name was
Vernon Martingale, and his father a baronet.
"I have chucked the shop," said Edward. "I chucked it at Fate as you
might throw a stone at a dog. And that reminds me--I want a dog. Do you
know of a nice dog--intelligent, good manners, self-respecting, and
worthy?"
"Any particular breed?"
"Certainly not. These researches into family history are in the worst
possible taste. You don't love me for my pedigree. Why should I love my
dog for his?"
"I suppose you want some tea, anyhow," said Martingale.
So they had tea, and talked cricket.
"Any idea what you mean to do?" Martingale asked several times, and at
last Edward answered him.
"What I mean to do," he said, "is what I always meant to do. I mean to
be a farmer, and hunt, and shoot, and grow flowers. I think I shall
specialize on sunflowers. They're so satisfying."
"More than you are," said Vernon. "Mean to say you're going to buy a
farm and ruin yourself the moment you've got a few half-crowns to ruin
yourself with?"
"I am going to be a farmer," said Basingstoke, "but first I am going to
see life."
"Life? But you were always so. . . ."
"I mean _that_"--Edward indicated the sunshine outside--"not getting
drunk and being disreputable. I can't think why the deuce-dickens that
sort of beastliness is always called seeing life. As if life were all
gas, and wining, and electric light, and the things you don't talk about
before ladies. No, my boy, I'm going out into the unknown--not into the
night, because it happens to be afternoon--and I thought I'd just come
and clasp that hand and gaze once into those eyes before I set my foot
on the untrodden path of adventure. Farewell, Vernon of Martingale, good
knight and true! Who knows when we shall meet again?"
"_I_ don't, anyhow," said Vernon, "and that's why you're not going till
the day after to-morrow, and why I insist on knowing what you mean by
seeing life--and why you're going to stay till to-morrow, anyhow."
"Heaven forbid that I should criticize another man's tastes," Edward
sighed, "or deprive him of any innocent enjoyment. If you want me to
stay--well, I'll stay--till to-morrow. And as for what I mean by seeing
life--well, I should have thought even you would have understood that.
I'm going to get a stick, and a knapsack, and a dog, and a different
kind of hat, and some very large boots with nails, and a new suit, only
I shall wear it all night before I wear it all day. Oh, Vernon, can't
you guess my simple secret?"
"He calls a walking-tour seeing life!" Vernon pointed out. "And who's
going with you and where are you going? The Hartz Mountains?--the
Carpathians?--Margate?--Trouville? What?"
"The person who is going with me," said Edward, "is the dog whom we
haven't yet bought. Come along out and buy him. As to where I'm going, I
shall follow the most ancient of sign-posts--and I know that I can't go
wrong."
"You will follow--"
"My nose," Edward explained, kindly--
"That indicator of the place to be,
The Heaven-sent guide to beauty and to thee.
"Do you know, if you talk rot to the chaps at the works they try to
understand what you mean. Like Scotchmen, you know. They think they can
understand anything, no matter how shallow. Now I will say for you that
you know your limitations. Let's buy the dog, my son, and get a canoe."
They did. And the dog upset the canoe.