TALES OF THE LONG BOW
TALES OF THE
LONG BOW
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
AUTHOR OF
“THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER
BROWN,” “HERETICS,” ETC.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1925
BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE UNPRESENTABLE APPEARANCE OF COLONEL CRANE 3
II THE IMPROBABLE SUCCESS OF MR. OWEN HOOD 39
III THE UNOBTRUSIVE TRAFFIC OF CAPTAIN PIERCE 81
IV THE ELUSIVE COMPANION OF PARSON WHITE 113
V THE EXCLUSIVE LUXURY OF ENOCH OATES 147
VI THE UNTHINKABLE THEORY OF PROFESSOR GREEN 177
VII THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR 211
VIII THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM OF THE LEAGUE OF THE LONG BOW 247
I
THE UNPRESENTABLE APPEARANCE OF COLONEL CRANE
TALES OF THE LONG BOW
I
THE UNPRESENTABLE APPEARANCE OF COLONEL CRANE
These tales concern the doing of things recognized as impossible to
do; impossible to believe; and, as the weary reader may well cry
aloud, impossible to read about. Did the narrator merely say that
they happened, without saying how they happened, they could easily
be classified with the cow who jumped over the moon and the more
introspective individual who jumped down his own throat. In short,
they are all tall stories; and though tall stories may also be true
stories, there is something in the very phrase appropriate to such a
topsy-turvydom; for the logician will presumably class a tall story
with a corpulent epigram or a long-legged essay. It is only proper that
such impossible incidents should begin in the most prim and prosaic of
all places, at the most prim and prosaic of all times, and apparently
with the most prim and prosaic of all human beings.
The place was a straight suburban road of strictly-fenced suburban
houses on the outskirts of a modern town. The time was about twenty
minutes to eleven on Sunday morning, when a procession of suburban
families in their Sunday clothes were passing decorously up the road
to church. And the man was a very respectable retired military man
named Colonel Crane, who was also going to church, as he had done
every Sunday at the same hour for a long stretch of years. There was
no obvious difference between him and his neighbours, except that he
was a little less obvious. His house was only called White Lodge and
was, therefore, less alluring to the romantic passer-by than Rowanmere
on the one side or Heatherbrae on the other. He turned out spick and
span for church as if for parade; but he was much too well dressed to
be pointed out as a well-dressed man. He was quite handsome in a dry,
sun-baked style; but his bleached blond hair was a colourless sort
that could look either light brown or pale grey; and though his blue
eyes were clear, they looked out a little heavily under lowered lids.
Colonel Crane was something of a survival. He was not really old;
indeed he was barely middle-aged; and had gained his last distinctions
in the great war. But a variety of causes had kept him true to the
traditional type of the old professional soldier, as it had existed
before 1914; when a small parish would have only one colonel as it
had only one curate. It would be quite unjust to call him a dug-out;
indeed, it would be much truer to call him a dug-in. For he had
remained in the traditions as firmly and patiently as he had remained
in the trenches. He was simply a man who happened to have no taste for
changing his habits, and had never worried about conventions enough to
alter them. One of his excellent habits was to go to church at eleven
o’clock, and he therefore went there; and did not know that there went
with him something of an old-world air and a passage in the history of
England.
As he came out of his front door, however, on that particular morning,
he was twisting a scrap of paper in his fingers and frowning with
somewhat unusual perplexity. Instead of walking straight to his garden
gate he walked once or twice up and down his front garden, swinging his
black walking-cane. The note had been handed in to him at breakfast,
and it evidently involved some practical problem calling for immediate
solution. He stood a few minutes with his eye riveted on a red daisy at
the corner of the nearest flower-bed; and then a new expression began
to work in the muscles of his bronzed face, giving a slightly grim hint
of humour, of which few except his intimates were aware. Folding up
the paper and putting it into his waistcoat pocket, he strolled round
the house to the back garden, behind which was the kitchen-garden, in
which an old servant, a sort of factotum or handyman, named Archer, was
acting as kitchen-gardener.
Archer also was a survival. Indeed, the two had survived together; had
survived a number of things that had killed a good many other people.
But though they had been together through the war that was also a
revolution, and had a complete confidence in each other, the man Archer
had never been able to lose the oppressive manners of a manservant. He
performed the duties of a gardener with the air of a butler. He really
performed the duties very well and enjoyed them very much; perhaps he
enjoyed them all the more because he was a clever Cockney, to whom the
country crafts were a new hobby. But somehow, whenever he said, “I have
put in the seeds, sir,” it always sounded like, “I have put the sherry
on the table, sir”; and he could not say, “Shall I pull the carrots?”
without seeming to say, “Would you be requiring the claret?”
“I hope you’re not working on Sunday,” said the Colonel, with a much
more pleasant smile than most people got from him, though he was always
polite to everybody. “You’re getting too fond of these rural pursuits.
You’ve become a rustic yokel.”
“I was venturing to examine the cabbages, sir,” replied the rustic
yokel, with a painful precision of articulation. “Their condition
yesterday evening did not strike me as satisfactory.”
“Glad you didn’t sit up with them,” answered the Colonel. “But it’s
lucky you’re interested in cabbages. I want to talk to you about
cabbages.”
“About cabbages, sir?” inquired the other respectfully.
But the Colonel did not appear to pursue the topic, for he was gazing
in sudden abstraction at another object in the vegetable plots in
front of him. The Colonel’s garden, like the Colonel’s house, hat,
coat and demeanour, was well-appointed in an unobtrusive fashion; and
in the part of it devoted to flowers there dwelt something indefinable
that seemed older than the suburbs. The hedges, even, in being as
neat as Surbiton managed to look as mellow as Hampton Court, as if
their very artificiality belonged rather to Queen Anne than Queen
Victoria; and the stone-rimmed pond with a ring of irises somehow
looked like a classic pool and not merely an artificial puddle. It is
idle to analyse how a man’s soul and social type will somehow soak
into his surroundings; anyhow, the soul of Mr. Archer had sunk into
the kitchen-garden so as to give it a fine shade of difference. He
was after all a practical man, and the practice of his new trade was
much more of a real appetite with him than his words would suggest.
Hence the kitchen-garden was not artificial, but autochthonous; it
really looked like a corner of a farm in the country; and all sorts
of practical devices were set up there. Strawberries were netted-in
against the birds; strings were stretched across with feathers
fluttering from them; and in the middle of the principal bed stood
an ancient and authentic scarecrow. Perhaps the only incongruous
intruder, capable of disputing with the scarecrow his rural reign, was
the curious boundary-stone which marked the edge of his domain; and
which was, in fact, a shapeless South Sea idol, planted there with no
more appropriateness than a door-scraper. But Colonel Crane would not
have been so complete a type of the old army man if he had not hidden
somewhere a hobby connected with his travels. His hobby had at one time
been savage folklore; and he had the relic of it on the edge of the
kitchen-garden. At the moment, however, he was not looking at the idol,
but at the scarecrow.
“By the way, Archer,” he said, “don’t you think the scarecrow wants a
new hat?”
“I should hardly think it would be necessary, sir,” said the gardener
gravely.
“But look here,” said the Colonel, “you must consider the philosophy
of scarecrows. In theory, that is supposed to convince some rather
simple-minded bird that I am walking in my garden. That thing with
the unmentionable hat is Me. A trifle sketchy, perhaps. Sort of
impressionist portrait; but hardly likely to impress. Man with a hat
like that would never be really firm with a sparrow. Conflict of wills,
and all that, and I bet the sparrow would come out on top. By the way,
what’s that stick tied on to it?”
“I believe, sir,” said Archer, “that it is supposed to represent a gun.”
“Held at a highly unconvincing angle,” observed Crane. “Man with a hat
like that would be sure to miss.”
“Would you desire me to procure another hat?” inquired the patient
Archer.
“No, no,” answered his master carelessly. “As the poor fellow’s got
such a rotten hat, I’ll give him mine. Like the scene of St. Martin and
the beggar.”
“Give him yours,” repeated Archer respectfully, but faintly.
The Colonel took off his burnished top-hat and gravely placed it on
the head of the South Sea idol at his feet. It had a queer effect of
bringing the grotesque lump of stone to life, as if a goblin in a
top-hat was grinning at the garden.
“You think the hat shouldn’t be quite new?” he inquired almost
anxiously. “Not done among the best scarecrows, perhaps. Well, let’s
see what we can do to mellow it a little.”
He whirled up his walking-stick over his head and laid a smacking
stroke across the silk hat, smashing it over the hollow eyes of the
idol.
“Softened with the touch of time now, I think,” he remarked, holding
out the silken remnants to the gardener. “Put it on the scarecrow, my
friend; I don’t want it. You can bear witness it’s no use to me.”
Archer obeyed like an automaton, an automaton with rather round eyes.
“We must hurry up,” said the Colonel cheerfully, “I was early for
church, but I’m afraid I’m a bit late now.”
“Did you propose to attend church without a hat, sir?” asked the other.
“Certainly not. Most irreverent,” said the Colonel. “Nobody should
neglect to remove his hat on entering church. Well, if I haven’t got a
hat, I shall neglect to remove it. Where is your reasoning power this
morning? No, no, just dig up one of your cabbages.”
Once more the well-trained servant managed to repeat the word
“Cabbages” with his own strict accent; but in its constriction there
was a hint of strangulation.
“Yes, go and pull up a cabbage, there’s a good fellow,” said the
Colonel. “I must really be getting along; I believe I heard it strike
eleven.”
Mr. Archer moved heavily in the direction of the plot of cabbages,
which swelled with monstrous contours and many colours; objects,
perhaps, more worthy of the philosophic eye than is taken into account
by the more flippant tongue. Vegetables are curious-looking things and
less commonplace than they sound. If we called a cabbage a cactus, or
some such queer name, we might see it as an equally queer thing.
These philosophical truths did the Colonel reveal by anticipating the
dubious Archer, and dragging a great, green cabbage with its trailing
root out of the earth. He then picked up a sort of pruning-knife and
cut short the long tail of the root; scooped out the inside leaves so
as to make a sort of hollow, and gravely reversing it, placed it on
his head. Napoleon and other military princes have crowned themselves;
and he, like the Cæsars, wore a wreath that was, after all, made of
green leaves or vegetation. Doubtless there are other comparisons that
might occur to any philosophical historian who should look at it in the
abstract.
The people going to church certainly looked at it; but they did not
look at it in the abstract. To them it appeared singularly concrete;
and indeed incredibly solid. The inhabitants of Rowanmere and
Heatherbrae followed the Colonel as he strode almost jauntily up the
road, with feelings that no philosophy could for the moment meet.
There seemed to be nothing to be said, except that one of the most
respectable and respected of their neighbours, one who might even
be called in a quiet way a pattern of good form if not a leader of
fashion, was walking solemnly up to church with a cabbage on the top of
his head.
There was indeed no corporate action to meet the crisis. Their
world was not one in which a crowd can collect to shout, and still
less to jeer. No rotten eggs could be collected from their tidy
breakfast-tables; and they were not of the sort to throw cabbage-stalks
at the cabbage. Perhaps there was just that amount of truth in the
pathetically picturesque names on their front gates, names suggestive
of mountains and mighty lakes concealed somewhere on the premises. It
was true that in one sense such a house was a hermitage. Each of these
men lived alone and they could not be made into a mob. For miles around
there was no public house and no public opinion.
As the Colonel approached the church porch and prepared reverently
to remove his vegetarian headgear, he was hailed in a tone a little
more hearty than the humane civility that was the slender bond of that
society. He returned the greeting without embarrassment, and paused a
moment as the man who had spoken to him plunged into further speech. He
was a young doctor named Horace Hunter, tall, handsomely dressed, and
confident in manner; and though his features were rather plain and his
hair rather red, he was considered to have a certain fascination.
“Good morning, Colonel,” said the doctor in his resounding tones, “what
a f---- what a fine day it is.”
Stars turned from their courses like comets, so to speak, and the
world swerved into wilder possibilities, at that crucial moment when
Dr. Hunter corrected himself and said, “What a fine day!” instead of
“What a funny hat!”
As to why he corrected himself, a true picture of what passed through
his mind might sound rather fanciful in itself. It would be less than
explicit to say he did so because of a long grey car waiting outside
the White Lodge. It might not be a complete explanation to say it was
due to a lady walking on stilts at a garden party. Some obscurity might
remain, even if we said that it had something to do with a soft shirt
and a nickname; nevertheless all these things mingled in the medical
gentleman’s mind when he made his hurried decision. Above all, it might
or might not be sufficient explanation to say that Horace Hunter was a
very ambitious young man, that the ring in his voice and the confidence
in his manner came from a very simple resolution to rise in the world,
and that the world in question was rather worldly.
He liked to be seen talking so confidently to Colonel Crane on that
Sunday parade. Crane was comparatively poor, but he knew People. And
people who knew People knew what People were doing now; whereas people
who didn’t know People could only wonder what in the world People
would do next. A lady who came with the Duchess when she opened the
Bazaar had nodded to Crane and said, “Hullo, Stork,” and the doctor
had deduced that it was a sort of family joke and not a momentary
ornithological confusion. And it was the Duchess who had started all
that racing on stilts, which the Vernon-Smiths had introduced at
Heatherbrae. But it would have been devilish awkward not to have known
what Mrs. Vernon-Smith meant when she said, “Of course you stilt.” You
never knew what they would start next. He remembered how he himself
had thought the first man in a soft shirtfront was some funny fellow
from nowhere; and then he had begun to see others here and there, and
had found that it was not a _faux pas_, but a fashion. It was odd to
imagine he would ever begin to see vegetable hats here and there, but
you never could tell; and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake
again. His first medical impulse had been to add to the Colonel’s fancy
costume with a strait-waistcoat. But Crane did not look like a lunatic,
and certainly did not look like a man playing a practical joke. He had
not the stiff and self-conscious solemnity of the joker. He took it
quite naturally. And one thing was certain: if it really was the latest
thing, the doctor must take it as naturally as the Colonel did. So he
said it was a fine day, and was gratified to learn that there was no
disagreement on that question.
The doctor’s dilemma, if we may apply the phrase, had been the whole
neighbourhood’s dilemma. The doctor’s decision was also the whole
neighbourhood’s decision. It was not so much that most of the good
people there shared in Hunter’s serious social ambitions, but rather
that they were naturally prone to negative and cautious decisions. They
lived in a delicate dread of being interfered with; and they were just
enough to apply the principle by not interfering with other people.
They had also a subconscious sense that the mild and respectable
military gentleman would not be altogether an easy person to interfere
with. The consequence was that the Colonel carried his monstrous green
headgear about the streets of that suburb for nearly a week, and nobody
ever mentioned the subject to him. It was about the end of that time
(while the doctor had been scanning the horizon for aristocrats crowned
with cabbage, and, not seeing any, was summoning his natural impudence
to speak) that the final interruption came; and with the interruption
the explanation.
The Colonel had every appearance of having forgotten all about the hat.
He took it off and on like any other hat; he hung it on the hat-peg
in his narrow front hall where there was nothing else but his sword
hung on two hooks and an old brown map of the seventeenth century. He
handed it to Archer when that correct character seemed to insist on his
official right to hold it; he did not insist on his official right to
brush it, for fear it should fall to pieces; but he occasionally gave
it a cautious shake, accompanied with a look of restrained distaste.
But the Colonel himself never had any appearance of either liking
or disliking it. The unconventional thing had already become one of
his conventions--the conventions which he never considered enough to
violate. It is probable, therefore, that what ultimately took place was
as much of a surprise to him as to anybody. Anyhow, the explanation, or
explosion, came in the following fashion.
Mr. Vernon-Smith, the mountaineer whose foot was on his native heath
at Heatherbrae, was a small, dapper gentleman with a big-bridged nose,
dark moustache, and dark eyes with a settled expression of anxiety,
though nobody knew what there was to be anxious about in his very
solid social existence. He was a friend of Dr. Hunter; one might
almost say a humble friend. For he had the negative snobbishness that
could only admire the positive and progressive snobbishness of that
soaring and social figure. A man like Dr. Hunter likes to have a
man like Mr. Smith, before whom he can pose as a perfect man of the
world. What appears more extraordinary, a man like Mr. Smith really
likes to have a man like Dr. Hunter to pose at him and swagger over
him and snub him. Anyhow, Vernon-Smith had ventured to hint that the
new hat of his neighbour Crane was not of a pattern familiar in every
fashion-plate. And Dr. Hunter, bursting with the secret of his own
original diplomacy, had snubbed the suggestion and snowed it under
with frosty scorn. With shrewd, resolute gestures, with large allusive
phrases, he had left on his friend’s mind the impression that the whole
social world would dissolve if a word were said on so delicate a topic.
Mr. Vernon-Smith formed a general idea that the Colonel would explode
with a loud bang at the very vaguest allusion to vegetables, or the
most harmless adumbration or verbal shadow of a hat. As usually happens
in such cases, the words he was forbidden to say repeated themselves
perpetually in his mind with the rhythmic pressure of a pulse. It was
his temptation at the moment to call all houses hats and all visitors
vegetables.
When Crane came out of his front gate that morning he found his
neighbour Vernon-Smith standing outside, between the spreading laburnum
and the lamp-post, talking to a young lady, a distant cousin of his
family. This girl was an art student on her own--a little too much on
her own for the standards of Heatherbrae, and, therefore (some would
infer), yet further beyond those of White Lodge. Her brown hair was
bobbed, and the Colonel did not admire bobbed hair. On the other hand,
she had a rather attractive face, with honest brown eyes a little too
wide apart, which diminished the impression of beauty but increased the
impression of honesty. She also had a very fresh and unaffected voice,
and the Colonel had often heard it calling out scores at tennis on the
other side of the garden wall. In some vague sort of way it made him
feel old; at least, he was not sure whether he felt older than he was,
or younger than he ought to be. It was not until they met under the
lamp-post that he knew her name was Audrey Smith; and he was faintly
thankful for the single monosyllable. Mr. Vernon-Smith presented her,
and very nearly said: “May I introduce my cabbage?” instead of “my
cousin.”
The Colonel, with unaffected dullness, said it was a fine day; and his
neighbour, rallying from his last narrow escape, continued the talk
with animation. His manner, as when he poked his big nose and beady
black eyes into local meetings and committees, was at once hesitating
and emphatic.
“This young lady is going in for Art,” he said; “a poor look-out, isn’t
it? I expect we shall see her drawing in chalk on the paving-stones and
expecting us to throw a penny into the--into a tray, or something.”
Here he dodged another danger. “But, of course, she thinks she is going
to be an R.A.”
“I hope not,” said the young woman hotly. “Pavement artists are much
more honest than most of the R.A.’s.”
“I wish those friends of yours didn’t give you such revolutionary
ideas,” said Mr. Vernon-Smith. “My cousin knows the most dreadful
cranks, vegetarians and--and Socialists.” He chanced it, feeling that
vegetarians were not quite the same as vegetables; and he felt sure
the Colonel would share his horror of Socialists. “People who want us
to be equal, and all that. What I say is--we’re not equal and we never
can be. As I always say to Audrey--if all the property were divided
to-morrow, it would go back into the same hands. It’s a law of nature,
and if a man thinks he can get round a law of nature, why, he’s talking
through his--I mean, he’s as mad as a----”
Recoiling from the omnipresent image, he groped madly in his mind for
the alternative of a March hare. But before he could find it, the girl
had cut in and completed his sentence. She smiled serenely, and said in
her clear and ringing tones:
“As mad as Colonel Crane’s hatter.”
It is not unjust to Mr. Vernon-Smith to say that he fled as from a
dynamite explosion. It would be unjust to say that he deserted a lady
in distress, for she did not look in the least like a distressed lady,
and he himself was a very distressed gentleman. He attempted to wave
her indoors with some wild pretext, and eventually vanished there
himself with an equally random apology. But the other two took no
notice of him; they continued to confront each other, and both were
smiling.
“I think you must be the bravest man in England,” she said. “I don’t
mean anything about the war, or the D.S.O. and all that; I mean about
this. Oh, yes, I do know a little about you, but there’s one thing I
don’t know. Why do you do it?”
“I think it is you who are the bravest woman in England,” he answered,
“or, at any rate, the bravest person in these parts. I’ve walked about
this town for a week, feeling like the last fool in creation, and
expecting somebody to say something. And not a soul has said a word.
They seem all to be afraid of saying the wrong thing.”
“I think they’re deadly,” observed Miss Smith. “And if they don’t have
cabbages for hats, it’s only because they have turnips for heads.”
“No,” said the Colonel gently; “I have many generous and friendly
neighbours here, including your cousin. Believe me, there is a case for
conventions, and the world is wiser than you know. You are too young
not to be intolerant. But I can see you’ve got the fighting spirit;
that is the best part of youth and intolerance. When you said that word
just now, by Jove you looked like Britomart.”
“She is the Militant Suffragette in the Faerie Queene, isn’t she?”
answered the girl. “I’m afraid I don’t know my English literature as
well as you do. You see, I’m an artist, or trying to be one; and some
people say that narrows a person. But I can’t help getting cross with
all the varnished vulgarity they talk about everything--look at what
he said about Socialism.”
“It was a little superficial,” said Crane with a smile.
“And that,” she concluded, “is why I admire your hat, though I don’t
know why you wear it.”
This trivial conversation had a curious effect on the Colonel. There
went with it a sort of warmth and a sense of crisis that he had not
known since the war. A sudden purpose formed itself in his mind, and he
spoke like one stepping across a frontier.
“Miss Smith,” he said, “I wonder if I might ask you to pay me a further
compliment. It may be unconventional, but I believe you do not stand on
these conventions. An old friend of mine will be calling on me shortly,
to wind up the rather unusual business or ceremonial of which you have
chanced to see a part. If you would do me the honour to lunch with me
to-morrow at half-past one, the true story of the cabbage awaits you. I
promise that you shall hear the real reason. I might even say I promise
you shall _see_ the real reason.”
“Why, of course I will,” said the unconventional one heartily. “Thanks
awfully.”
The Colonel took an intense interest in the appointments of the
luncheon next day. With subconscious surprise he found himself not only
interested, but excited. Like many of his type, he took pleasure in
doing such things well, and knew his way about in wine and cookery. But
that would not alone explain his pleasure. For he knew that young women
generally know very little about wine, and emancipated young women
possibly least of all. And though he meant the cookery to be good, he
knew that in one feature it would appear rather fantastic. Again, he
was a good-natured gentleman who would always have liked young people
to enjoy a luncheon party, as he would have liked a child to enjoy a
Christmas tree. But there seemed no reason why he should be restless
and expectant about it, as if he were the child himself. There was no
reason why he should have a sort of happy insomnia, like a child on
Christmas Eve. There was really no excuse for his pacing up and down
the garden with his cigar, smoking furiously far into the night. For as
he gazed at the purple irises and the grey pool in the faint moonshine,
something in his feelings passed as if from the one tint to the other;
he had a new and unexpected reaction. For the first time he really
hated the masquerade he had made himself endure. He wished he could
smash the cabbage as he had smashed the top-hat. He was little more
than forty years old; but he had never realized how much there was of
what was dried and faded about his flippancy, till he felt unexpectedly
swelling within him the monstrous and solemn vanity of a young man.
Sometimes he looked up at the picturesque, the too picturesque, outline
of the villa next door, dark against the moonrise, and thought he heard
faint voices in it, and something like a laugh.
The visitor who called on the Colonel next morning may have been an old
friend, but he was certainly an odd contrast. He was a very abstracted,
rather untidy man in a rusty knickerbocker suit; he had a long head
with straight hair of the dark red called auburn, one or two wisps of
which stood on end however he brushed it, and a long face, clean-shaven
and heavy about the jaw and chin, which he had a way of sinking and
settling squarely into his cravat. His name was Hood, and he was
apparently a lawyer, though he had not come on strictly legal business.
Anyhow, he exchanged greetings with Crane with a quiet warmth and
gratification, smiled at the old manservant as if he were an old joke,
and showed every sign of an appetite for his luncheon.
The appointed day was singularly warm and bright and everything in
the garden seemed to glitter; the goblin god of the South Seas seemed
really to grin; and the scarecrow really to have a new hat. The irises
round the pool were swinging and flapping in a light breeze; and he
remembered they were called “flags” and thought of purple banners going
into battle.
She had come suddenly round the corner of the house. Her dress was
of a dark but vivid blue, very plain and angular in outline, but not
outrageously artistic; and in the morning light she looked less like
a schoolgirl and more like a serious woman of twenty-five or thirty;
a little older and a great deal more interesting. And something in
this morning seriousness increased the reaction of the night before.
One single wave of thanksgiving went up from Crane to think that at
least his grotesque green hat was gone and done with for ever. He had
worn it for a week without caring a curse for anybody; but during that
ten minutes’ trivial talk under the lamp-post, he felt as if he had
suddenly grown donkey’s ears in the street.
He had been induced by the sunny weather to have a little table laid
for three in a sort of veranda open to the garden. When the three sat
down to it, he looked across at the lady and said: “I fear I must
exhibit myself as a crank; one of those cranks your cousin disapproves
of, Miss Smith. I hope it won’t spoil this little lunch for anybody
else. But I am going to have a vegetarian meal.”
“Are you?” she said. “I should never have said you looked like a
vegetarian.”
“Just lately I have only looked like a fool,” he said dispassionately;
“but I think I’d sooner look a fool than a vegetarian in the ordinary
way. This is rather a special occasion. Perhaps my friend Hood had
better begin; it’s really his story more than mine.”
“My name is Robert Owen Hood,” said that gentleman, rather
sardonically. “That’s how improbable reminiscences often begin; but
the only point now is that my old friend here insulted me horribly by
calling me Robin Hood.”
“I should have called it a compliment,” answered Audrey Smith. “But why
did he call you Robin Hood?”
“Because I drew the long bow,” said the lawyer.
“But to do you justice,” said the Colonel, “it seems that you hit the
bull’s-eye.”
As he spoke Archer came in bearing a dish which he placed before his
master. He had already served the others with the earlier courses, but
he carried this one with the pomp of one bringing in the boar’s head at
Christmas. It consisted of a plain boiled cabbage.
“I was challenged to do something,” went on Hood, “which my friend here
declared to be impossible. In fact, any sane man would have declared
it to be impossible. But I did it for all that. Only my friend, in
the heat of rejecting and ridiculing the notion, made use of a hasty
expression. I might almost say he made a rash vow.”
“My exact words were,” said Colonel Crane solemnly: “‘If you can do
that, I’ll eat my hat.’”
He leaned forward thoughtfully and began to eat it. Then he resumed in
the same reflective way:
“You see, all rash vows are verbal or nothing. There might be a debate
about the logical and literal way in which my friend Hood fulfilled
_his_ rash vow. But I put it to myself in the same pedantic sort of
way. It wasn’t possible to eat any hat that I wore. But it might be
possible to wear a hat that I could eat. Articles of dress could hardly
be used for diet; but articles of diet could really be used for dress.
It seemed to me that I might fairly be said to have made it my hat, if
I wore it systematically as a hat and had no other, putting up with all
the disadvantages. Making a blasted fool of myself was the fair price
to be paid for the vow or wager; for one ought always to lose something
on a wager.”
And he rose from the table with a gesture of apology.
The girl stood up. “I think it’s perfectly splendid,” she said. “It’s
as wild as one of those stories about looking for the Holy Grail.”
The lawyer also had risen, rather abruptly, and stood stroking his long
chin with his thumb and looking at his old friend under bent brows in a
rather reflective manner.
“Well, you’ve subpœna’d me as a witness all right,” he said, “and now,
with the permission of the court, I’ll leave the witness-box. I’m
afraid I must be going. I’ve got important business at home. Good-bye,
Miss Smith.”
The girl returned his farewell a little mechanically; and Crane seemed
to recover suddenly from a similar trance as he stepped after the
retreating figure of his friend.
“I say, Owen,” he said hastily, “I’m sorry you’re leaving so early.
Must you really go?”
“Yes,” replied Owen Hood gravely. “My private affairs are quite
real and practical, I assure you.” His grave mouth worked a little
humorously at the corners as he added: “The truth is, I don’t think I
mentioned it, but I’m thinking of getting married.”
“Married!” repeated the Colonel, as if thunderstruck.
“Thanks for your compliments and congratulations, old fellow,” said the
satiric Mr. Hood. “Yes, it’s all been thought out. I’ve even decided
whom I am going to marry. She knows about it herself. She has been
warned.”
“I really beg your pardon,” said the Colonel in great distress, “of
course I congratulate you most heartily; and her even more heartily. Of
course I’m delighted to hear it. The truth is, I was surprised ... not
so much in that way....”
“Not so much in what way?” asked Hood. “I suppose you mean some would
say I am on the way to be an old bachelor. But I’ve discovered it isn’t
half so much a matter of years as of ways. Men like me get elderly
more by choice than chance; and there’s much more choice and less
chance in life than your modern fatalists make out. For such people
fatalism falsifies even chronology. They’re not unmarried because
they’re old. They’re old because they’re unmarried.”
“Indeed you are mistaken,” said Crane earnestly. “As I say, I was
surprised, but my surprise was not so rude as you think. It wasn’t that
I thought there was anything unfitting about ... somehow it was rather
the other way ... as if things could fit better than one thought ...
as if--but anyhow, little as I know about it, I really do congratulate
you.”
“I’ll tell you all about it before long,” replied his friend. “It’s
enough to say just now that it was all bound up with my succeeding
after all in doing--what I did. She was the inspiration, you know. I
have done what is called an impossible thing; but believe me, she is
the really impossible part of it.”
“Well, I must not keep you from such an impossible engagement,” said
Crane smiling. “Really, I’m confoundedly glad to hear about all this.
Well, good-bye for the present.”
Colonel Crane stood watching the square shoulders and russet mane
of his old friend, as they disappeared down the road, in a rather
indescribable state of mind. As he turned hastily back towards his
garden and his other guest, he was conscious of a change; things
seemed different in some lightheaded and illogical fashion. He could
not himself trace the connexion; indeed, he did not know whether it was
a connexion or a disconnexion. He was very far from being a fool; but
his brains were of the sort that are directed outwards to things; the
brains of the soldier or the scientific man; and he had no practice
in analysing his own mind. He did not quite understand why the news
about Owen Hood should give him that dazed sense of a difference in
things in general. Doubtless he was very fond of Owen Hood; but he
had been fond of other people who had got married without especially
disturbing the atmosphere of his own back garden. He even dimly felt
that mere affection might have worked the other way; that it might have
made him worry about Hood, and wonder whether Hood was making a fool
of himself, or even feel suspicious or jealous of Mrs. Hood--if there
had not been something else that made him feel quite the other way. He
could not quite understand it; there seemed to be an increasing number
of things that he could not understand. This world in which he himself
wore garlands of green cabbage and in which his old friend the lawyer
got married suddenly like a man going mad--this world was a new world,
at once fresh and frightening, in which he could hardly understand
the figures that were walking about, even his own. The flowers in the
flower-pots had a new look about them, at once bright and nameless;
and even the line of vegetables beyond could not altogether depress him
with the memories of recent levity. Had he indeed been a prophet, or
a visionary seeing the future, he might have seen that green line of
cabbages extending infinitely like a green sea to the horizon. For he
stood at the beginning of a story which was not to terminate until his
incongruous cabbage had come to mean something that he had never meant
by it. That green patch was to spread like a great green conflagration
almost to the ends of the earth. But he was a practical person and the
very reverse of a prophet; and like many other practical persons, he
often did things without very clearly knowing what he was doing. He had
the innocence of some patriarch or primitive hero in the morning of the
world, founding more than he could himself realize of his legend and
his line. Indeed he felt very much like somebody in the morning of the
world; but beyond that he could grasp nothing.
Audrey Smith was standing not so very many yards away; for it was only
for a few strides that he had followed his elder guest towards the
gate. Yet her figure had fallen far enough back out of the foreground
to take on the green framework of the garden; so that her dress might
almost have been blue with a shade of distance. And when she spoke to
him, even from that little way off, her voice took on inevitably a new
suggestion of one calling out familiarly and from afar, as one calls
to an old companion. It moved him in a disproportionate fashion, though
all that she said was:
“What became of your old hat?”
“I lost it,” he replied gravely, “obviously I had to lose it. I believe
the scarecrow found it.”
“Oh, do let’s go and look at the scarecrow,” she cried.
He led her without a word to the kitchen-garden and gravely explained
each of its outstanding features; from the serious Mr. Archer resting
on his spade to the grotesque South Sea Island god grinning at the
corner of the plot. He spoke as with an increasing solemnity and
verbosity, and all the time knew little or nothing of what he said.
At last she cut into his monologue with an abstraction that was almost
rude; yet her brown eyes were bright and her sympathy undisguised.
“Don’t talk about it,” she cried with illogical enthusiasm. “It looks
as if we were really right in the middle of the country. It’s as unique
as the Garden of Eden. It’s simply the most delightful place----”
It was at this moment, for some unaccountable reason, that the Colonel
who had lost his hat suddenly proceeded to lose his head. Standing in
that grotesque vegetable scenery, a black and stiff yet somehow stately
figure, he proceeded in the most traditional manner to offer the lady
everything he possessed, not forgetting the scarecrow or the cabbages;
a half-humorous memory of which returned to him with the boomerang of
bathos.
“When I think of the encumbrances on the estate--” he concluded
gloomily. “Well, there they are; a scarecrow and a cannibal fetish and
a stupid man who has stuck in a rut of respectability and conventional
ways.”
“Very conventional,” she said, “especially in his taste in hats.”
“That was the exception, I’m afraid,” he said earnestly. “You’d find
those things very rare and most things very dull. I can’t help having
fallen in love with you; but for all that we are in different worlds;
and you belong to a younger world, which says what it thinks, and
cannot see what most of our silences and our scruples meant.”
“I suppose we are very rude,” she said thoughtfully, “and you must
certainly excuse me if I do say what I think.”
“I deserve no better,” he replied mournfully.
“Well, I think I must be in love with you too,” she replied calmly. “I
don’t see what time has to do with being fond of people. You are the
most original person I ever knew.”
“My dear, my dear,” he protested almost brokenly, “I fear you are
making a mistake. Whatever else I am, I never set up to be original.”
“You must remember,” she replied, “that I have known a good many people
who did set up to be original. An Art School swarms with them; and
there are any number among those socialist and vegetarian friends
of mine you were talking about. They would think nothing of wearing
cabbages on their heads, of course. Any one of them would be capable of
getting inside a pumpkin if he could. Any one of them might appear in
public dressed entirely in watercress. But that’s just it. They might
well wear watercress for they are water-creatures; they go with the
stream. They do those things because those things are done; because
they are done in their own Bohemian set. Unconventionality is their
convention. I don’t mind it myself; I think it’s great fun; but that
doesn’t mean that I don’t know real strength or independence when I see
it. All that is just molten and formless; but the really strong man is
one who can make a mould and then break it. When a man like you can
suddenly do a thing like that, after twenty years of habit, for the
sake of his word, then somehow one really does feel that man is man and
master of his fate.”
“I doubt if I am master of my fate,” replied Crane, “and I do not know
whether I ceased to be yesterday or two minutes ago.”
He stood there for a moment like a man in heavy armour. Indeed, the
antiquated image is not inappropriate in more ways than one. The new
world within him was so alien from the whole habit in which he lived,
from the very gait and gestures of his daily life, conducted through
countless days, that his spirit had striven before it broke its shell.
But it was also true that even if he could have done what every man
wishes to do at such a moment, something supreme and satisfying, it
would have been something in a sense formal or it would not have
satisfied him. He was one of those to whom it is natural to be
ceremonial. Even the music in his mind, too deep and distant for him
to catch or echo, was the music of old and ritual dances and not of
revelry; and it was not for nothing that he had built gradually about
him that garden of the grey stone fountain and the great hedge of yew.
He bent suddenly and kissed her hand.
“I like that,” she said. “You ought to have powdered hair and a sword.”
“I apologize,” he said gravely, “no modern man is worthy of you. But
indeed I fear, in every sense I am not a very modern man.”
“You must never wear that hat again,” she said, indicating the battered
original topper.
“To tell the truth,” he observed mildly, “I had not any attention of
resuming that one.”
“Silly,” she said briefly, “I don’t mean that hat; I mean that sort
of hat. As a matter of fact, there couldn’t be a finer hat than the
cabbage.”
“My dear--” he protested; but she was looking at him quite seriously.
“I told you I was an artist, and didn’t know much about literature,”
she said. “Well, do you know, it really does make a difference.
Literary people let words get between them and things. We do at least
look at the things and not the names of the things. You think a cabbage
is comic because the name sounds comic and even vulgar; something
between ‘cab’ and ‘garbage,’ I suppose. But a cabbage isn’t really
comic or vulgar. You wouldn’t think so if you simply had to paint
it. Haven’t you seen Dutch and Flemish galleries, and don’t you know
what great men painted cabbages? What they saw was certain lines and
colours; very wonderful lines and colours.”
“It may be all very well in a picture,” he began doubtfully.
She suddenly laughed aloud.
“You idiot,” she cried; “don’t you know you looked perfectly splendid?
The curves were like a great turban of leaves and the root rose like
the spike of a helmet; it was rather like the turbaned helmets on some
of Rembrandt’s figures, with the face like bronze in the shadows of
green and purple. That’s the sort of thing artists can see, who keep
their eyes and heads clear of words! And then you want to apologize for
not wearing that stupid stovepipe covered with blacking, when you went
about wearing a coloured crown like a king. And you were like a king in
this country; for they were all afraid of you.”
As he continued a faint protest, her laughter took on a more
mischievous shade. “If you’d stuck to it a little longer, I swear
they’d all have been wearing vegetables for hats. I swear I saw my
cousin the other day standing with a sort of trowel, and looking
irresolutely at a cabbage.”
Then, after a pause, she said with a beautiful irrelevancy:
“What was it Mr. Hood did that you said he couldn’t do?”
But these are tales of topsy-turvydom even in the sense that they have
to be told tail-foremost. And he who would know the answer to that
question must deliver himself up to the intolerable tedium of reading
the story of The Improbable Success of Mr. Owen Hood, and an interval
must be allowed him before such torments are renewed.
II
THE IMPROBABLE SUCCESS OF MR. OWEN HOOD
II
THE IMPROBABLE SUCCESS OF MR. OWEN HOOD
Heroes who have endured the heavy labour of reading to the end the
story of The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane are aware that
his achievement was the first of a series of feats counted impossible,
like the quests of the Arthurian knights. For the purpose of this tale,
in which the Colonel is but a secondary figure, it is enough to say
that he was long known and respected, before his last escapade, as a
respectable and retired military man in a residential part of Surrey,
with a sunburnt complexion and an interest in savage mythology. As
a fact, however, he had gathered the sunburn and the savage myths
some time before he had managed to collect the respectability and the
suburban residence. In his early youth he had been a traveller of the
adventurous and even restless sort; and he only concerns this story
because he was a member of a sort of club or clique of young men whose
adventurousness verged on extravagance. They were all eccentrics of one
kind or another, some professing extreme revolutionary and some extreme
reactionary opinions, and some both. Among the latter may be classed
Mr. Robert Owen Hood, the somewhat unlegal lawyer who is the hero of
this tale.
Robert Owen Hood was Crane’s most intimate and incongruous friend. Hood
was from the first as sedentary as Crane was adventurous. Hood was to
the end as casual as Crane was conventional. The prefix of Robert Owen
was a relic of a vague revolutionary tradition in his family; but he
inherited along with it a little money that allowed him to neglect the
law and cultivate a taste for liberty and for drifting and dreaming in
lost corners of the country, especially in the little hills between
the Severn and the Thames. In the upper reaches of the latter river is
an islet in which he loved especially to sit fishing, a shabby but not
commonplace figure clad in grey, with a mane of rust-coloured hair and
a long face with a large chin, rather like Napoleon. Beside him, on
the occasion now in question, stood the striking contrast of his alert
military friend in full travelling kit; being on the point of starting
for one of his odysseys in the South Seas.
“Well,” demanded the impatient traveller in a tone of remonstrance,
“have you caught anything?”
“You once asked me,” replied the angler placidly, “what I meant by
calling you a materialist. That is what I meant by calling you a
materialist.”
“If one must be a materialist or a madman,” snorted the soldier, “give
me materialism.”