or may not be concerned to know that they partook of an early lunch
of eggs and bacon and beer at the inn called the Blue Boar, which
stands at the turn of a steep road scaling a wooded ridge in the West
Country. Those unacquainted with them may be content to know that the
Colonel was a sunburnt, neatly-dressed gentleman, who looked taciturn
and was; while the lawyer was a more rusty red-haired gentleman with
a long Napoleonic face, who looked taciturn and was rather talkative.
Crane was fond of good cooking; and the cooking in that secluded inn
was better than that of a Soho restaurant and immeasurably better than
that of a fashionable restaurant. Hood was fond of the legends and
less-known aspects of the English countryside; and that valley had
a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment, as if the west wind
had been snared in it and tamed into a summer air. Both had a healthy
admiration for beauty, in ladies as well as landscapes; although (or
more probably because) both were quite romantically attached to the
wives they had married under rather romantic circumstances, which are
related elsewhere for such as can wrestle with so steep a narrative.
And the girl who waited on them, the daughter of the innkeeper, was
herself a very agreeable thing to look at; she was of a slim and quiet
sort with a head that moved like a brown bird, brightly and as it
were unexpectedly. Her manners were full of unconscious dignity, for
her father, old John Hardy, was the type of old innkeeper who had the
status, if not of a gentleman, at least of a yeoman. He was not without
education and ability; a grizzled man with a keen, stubborn face that
might have belonged to Cobbett, whose _Register_ he still read on
winters’ nights. Hardy was well known to Hood, who had the same sort of
antiquarian taste in revolutions.
There was little sound in the valley or the brilliant void of sky;
the notes of birds fell only intermittently; a faint sound of tapping
came from the hills opposite where the wooded slope was broken here
and there by the bare face of a quarry, and a distant aeroplane passed
and re-passed, leaving a trail of faint thunder. The two men at lunch
took no more notice of it than if it had been a buzzing fly; but an
attentive study of the girl might have suggested that she was at least
conscious of the fly. Occasionally she looked at it, when no one was
looking at her; for the rest, she had rather a marked appearance of
not looking at it.
“Good bacon you get here,” remarked Colonel Crane.
“The best in England, and in the matter of breakfast England is the
Earthly Paradise,” replied Hood readily. “I can’t think why we should
descend to boast of the British Empire when we have bacon and eggs to
boast of. They ought to be quartered on the Royal Arms: three pigs
passant and three poached eggs on a chevron. It was bacon and eggs that
gave all that morning glory to the great English poets; it must have
been a man who had a breakfast like this who could rise with that giant
gesture: ‘Night’s candles are burnt out; and jocund day----’”
“Bacon did write Shakespeare, in fact,” said the Colonel.
“This sort of bacon did,” answered the other laughing; then, noticing
the girl within earshot, he added: “We are saying how good your bacon
is, Miss Hardy.”
“It is supposed to be very good,” she said with legitimate pride, “but
I am afraid you won’t get much more of it. People aren’t going to be
allowed to keep pigs much longer.”
“Not allowed to keep pigs!” ejaculated the Colonel in astonishment.
“By the old regulations they had to be away from the house, and we’ve
got ground enough for that, though most of the cottagers hadn’t. But
now they say the law is evaded, and the county council are going to
stop pig-keeping altogether.”
“Silly swine,” snorted the Colonel.
“The epithet is ill-chosen,” replied Hood. “Men are lower than swine
when they do not appreciate swine. But really I don’t know what the
world’s coming to. What will the next generation be like without proper
pork? And, talking about the next generation, what has become of your
young friend Pierce? He said he was coming down, but he can’t have come
by that train.”
“I think Captain Pierce is up there, sir,” said Joan Hardy in a correct
voice, as she unobtrusively withdrew.
Her tone might have indicated that the gentleman was upstairs, but her
momentary glance had been towards the blue emptiness of the sky. Long
after she was gone, Owen Hood remained staring up into it, until he saw
the aeroplane darting and wheeling like a swallow.
“Is that Hilary Pierce up there?” he inquired, “looping the loop and
playing the lunatic generally. What the devil is he doing?”
“Showing off,” said the Colonel shortly, and drained his pewter mug.
“But why should he show off to us?” asked Hood.
“He jolly well wouldn’t,” replied the Colonel. “Showing off to the
girl, of course.” Then after a pause he added: “A very nice girl.”
“A very good girl,” said Owen Hood gravely. “If there’s anything going
on, you may be sure it’s all straight and serious.”
The Colonel blinked a little. “Well, times change,” he said. “I suppose
I’m old-fashioned myself; but speaking as an old Tory, I must confess
he might do worse.”
“Yes,” replied Hood, “and speaking as an old Radical, I should say he
could hardly do better.”
While they were speaking the erratic aviator had eventually swept
earthwards towards a flat field at the foot of the slope, and was now
coming towards them. Hilary Pierce had rather the look of a poet than
a professional aviator; and though he had distinguished himself in the
war, he was very probably one of those whose natural dream was rather
of conquering the air than conquering the enemy. His yellow hair was
longer and more untidy than when he was in the army; and there was a
touch of something irresponsible in his roving blue eye. He had a vein
of pugnacity in him, however, as was soon apparent. He had paused to
speak to Joan Hardy by the rather tumble-down pig-sty in the corner,
and when he came towards the breakfast-table he seemed transfigured as
with flame.
“What’s all this infernal insane foolery?” he demanded. “Who has the
damned impudence to tell the Hardys they mustn’t keep pigs? Look here,
the time is come when we must burst up all this sort of thing. I’m
going to do something desperate.”
“You’ve been doing desperate things enough for this morning,” said
Hood. “I advise you to take a little desperate luncheon. Do sit down,
there’s a good fellow, and don’t stamp about like that.”
“No, but look here----”
Pierce was interrupted by Joan Hardy, who appeared quietly at his elbow
and said demurely to the company: “There’s a gentleman here who asks if
he may be pardoned for speaking to you.”
The gentleman in question stood some little way behind in a posture
that was polite but so stiff and motionless as almost to affect the
nerves. He was clad in so complete and correct a version of English
light holiday attire that they felt quite certain he was a foreigner.
But their imaginations ranged the Continent in vain in the attempt
to imagine what sort of foreigner. By the immobility of his almost
moonlike face, with its faintly bilious tinge, he might almost have
been a Chinaman. But when he spoke, they could instantly locate the
alien accent.
“Very much distressed to butt in, gentlemen,” he said, “but this young
lady allows you are first-class academic authorities on the sights of
this locality. I’ve been mouching around trying to hit the trail of an
antiquity or two, but I don’t seem to know the way to pick it up. If
you’d be so kind as to put me wise about the principal architectural
styles and historic items of this section, I’d be under a great
obligation.”
As they were a little slow in recovering from their first surprise, he
added patiently:
“My name is Enoch B. Oates, and I’m pretty well known in Michigan, but
I’ve bought a little place near here; I’ve looked about this little
planet and I’ve come to think the safest and brightest place for a man
with a few dollars is the place of a squire in your fine old feudal
landscape. So the sooner I’m introduced to the more mellow mediæval
buildings the better.”
In Hilary Pierce the astonishment had given place to an ardour
bordering on ecstasy.
“Mediæval buildings! Architectural styles!” he cried enthusiastically.
“You’ve come to the right shop, Mr. Oates. I’ll show you an ancient
building, a sacred building, in an architectural style of such sublime
antiquity that you’ll want to cart it all away to Michigan, as they
tried to do with Glastonbury Abbey. You shall be privileged to see one
historic institution before you die or before all history is forgotten.”
He was walking towards the corner of the little kitchen-garden attached
to the inn, waving his arms with wild gestures of encouragement; and
the American was following him with the same stiff politeness, looking
weirdly like an automaton.
“Look on our architectural style before it perishes,” cried Pierce
dramatically, pointing to the pig-sty, which looked a rather ramshackle
affair of leaning and broken boards hung loosely together, though in
practice it was practical enough. “This, the most unmistakably mellow
of all mediæval buildings, may soon be only a memory. But when this
edifice falls England will fall, and the world will shake with the
shock of doom.”
The American had what he himself might have described as a poker face;
it was impossible to discover whether his utterances indicated the
extreme of innocence or of irony.
“And would you say,” he asked, “that this monument exemplifies the
mediæval or Gothic architectural school?”
“I should hardly call it strictly Perpendicular,” answered Pierce, “but
there is no doubt that it is Early English.”
“You would say it is antique, anyhow?” observed Mr. Oates.
“I have every reason to believe,” affirmed Pierce solemnly, “that Gurth
the Swineherd made use of this identical building. I have no doubt it
is in fact far older. The best authorities believe that the Prodigal
Son stayed here for some time, and the pigs--those noble and much
maligned animals--gave him such excellent advice that he returned to
his family. And now, Mr. Oates, they say that all that magnificent
heritage is to be swept away. But it shall not be. We shall not so
easily submit to all the vandals and vulgar tyrants who would thus tear
down our temples and our holy places. The pig-sty shall rise again in a
magnificent resurrection--larger pig-stys, loftier pig-stys, shall yet
cover the land; the towers and domes and spires of statelier and more
ideal pig-stys, in the most striking architectural styles, shall again
declare the victory of the holy hog over his unholy oppressors.”
“And meanwhile,” said Colonel Crane drily, “I think Mr. Oates had
much better begin with the church down by the river. Very fine Norman
foundations and traces of the Roman brick. The vicar understands his
church, too, and would give Mr. Oates rather more reliable information
than you do.”
A little while later, when Mr. Oates had passed on his way, the Colonel
curtly reproved his young friend.
“Bad form,” he said, “making fun of a foreigner asking for information.”
But Pierce turned on him with the same heat on his face.
“But I wasn’t making fun. I was quite serious.”
They stared at him steadily, and he laughed slightly but went on with
undiminished fire.
“Symbolical perhaps but serious,” he said. “I may seem to have been
talking a bit wildly, but let me tell you the time has come to be wild.
We’ve all been a lot too tame. I do mean, as much as I ever meant
anything, to fight for the resurrection and the return of the pig; and
he shall yet return as a wild boar that will rend the hunters.”
He looked up and his eye caught the blue heraldic shape on the
sign-board of the inn.
“And there is our wooden ensign!” he cried, pointing in the same
dramatic fashion. “We will go into battle under the banner of the Blue
Boar.”
“Loud and prolonged cheers,” said Crane politely, “and now come away
and don’t spoil the peroration. Owen wants to potter about the local
antiquities, like Mr. Oates. I’m more interested in novelties. Want to
look at that machine of yours.”
They began to descend the zig-zag pebbled path fenced and embanked with
hedges and flower-beds like a garden grown on a staircase, and at every
corner Hood had to remonstrate with the loitering youth.
“Don’t be for ever gazing back on the paradise of pigs,” he said, “or
you’ll be turned to a pillar of salt, or possibly of mustard as more
appropriate to such meat. They won’t run away yet. There are other
creatures formed by the Creator for the contemplation of man; there are
other things made by man after the pattern of the creatures, from the
great White Horses of Wessex to that great white bird on which you
yourself flew among the birds. Fine subject for a poem of the first and
last things.”
“Bird that lays rather dreadful eggs,” said Crane. “In the next war----
Why, where the deuce has he gone?”
“Pigs, pigs,” said Hood sadly. “The overpowering charm which pigs
exercise upon us at a certain time of life; when we hear their trotters
in our dreams and their little curly tails twine about us like the
tendrils of the vine----”
“Oh, bosh,” said the Colonel.
For indeed Mr. Hilary Pierce had vanished in a somewhat startling
manner, ducking under the corner of a hedge and darting up a steeper
path, over a gate and across the corner of a hayfield, where a final
bound through bursting bushes brought him on top of a low wall looking
down at the pig-sty and Miss Joan Hardy, who was calmly walking away
from it. He sprang down on to the path; the morning sun picked out
everything in clear colours like a child’s toy-book; and standing
with his hands spread out and his wisps of yellow hair brushed in
all directions by the bushes, he recalled an undignified memory of
Shock-Headed Peter.
“I felt I must speak to you before I went,” he said. “I’m going
away, not exactly on active service, but on business--on very active
business. I feel like the fellows did when they went to the war ...
and what they wanted to do first.... I am aware that a proposal over
a pig-sty is not so symbolical to some as to me, but really and truly
... I don’t know whether I mentioned it, but you may be aware that I
worship you.”
Joan Hardy was quite aware of it; but the conventionalities in her case
were like concentric castle-walls; the world-old conventions of the
countryside. There was in them the stiff beauty of old country dances
and the slow and delicate needlework of a peasantry. Of all the ladies
whose figures must be faintly traced in the tapestry of these frivolous
tales of chivalry, the most reticent and dignified was the one who was
not in the worldly sense a lady at all.
She stood looking at him in silence, and he at her; as the lift of her
head had some general suggestion of a bird, the line of her profile had
a delicate suggestion of a falcon, and her face was of the fine tint
that has no name, unless we could talk of a bright brown.
“Really, you seem in a terrible hurry,” she said. “I don’t want to be
talked to in a rush like this.”
“I apologize,” he said. “I can’t help being in a rush, but I didn’t
want you to be in a rush. I only wanted you to know. I haven’t done
anything to deserve you, but I am going to try. I’m going off to work;
I feel sure you believe in quiet steady work for a young man.”
“Are you going into the bank?” she asked innocently. “You said your
uncle was in a bank.”
“I hope all my conversation was not on that level,” he replied. And
indeed he would have been surprised if he had known how exactly she
remembered all such dull details he had ever mentioned about himself,
and how little she knew in comparison about his theories and fancies,
which he thought so much more important.
“Well,” he said with engaging frankness, “it would be an exaggeration
to say I am going into a bank; though of course there are banks and
banks. Why, I know a bank whereon the wild thyme--I beg your pardon,
I mean I know a lot of more rural and romantic occupations that are
really quite as safe as the bank. The truth is, I think of going into
the bacon trade. I think I see an opening for a brisk young man in the
ham and pork business. When you see me next I shall be travelling in
pork; an impenetrable disguise.”
“You mustn’t come here, then,” she answered. “It won’t be allowed here
by that time. The neighbours would----”
“Fear not,” he said, “I should be a commercial traveller. Oh, such a
very commercial traveller. And as for not coming here, the thing seems
quite unthinkable. You must at least let me write to you every hour or
so. You must let me send you a few presents every morning.”
“I’m sure my father wouldn’t like you to send me presents,” she said
gravely.
“Ask your father to wait,” said Pierce earnestly. “Ask him to wait till
he’s seen the presents. You see, mine will be rather curious presents.
I don’t think he’ll disapprove of them. I think he’ll approve of them.
I think he’ll congratulate me on my simple tastes and sound business
principles. The truth is, dear Joan, I’ve committed myself to a rather
important enterprise. You needn’t be frightened; I promise I won’t
trouble you again till it succeeds. I will be content that you know it
is for you I do it; and shall continue to do it, if I defy the world.”
He sprang up on the wall again and stood there staring down at her
almost indignantly.
“That anybody should forbid _you_ to keep pigs,” he cried. “That
anybody should forbid _you_ to do anything. That anybody should
dispute _your_ right to keep pet crocodiles if you like! That is the
unpardonable sin; that is the supreme blasphemy and crime against the
nature of things, which shall not go unavenged. You shall have pigs, I
say, if the skies fall and the whole world is whelmed in war.”
He disappeared like a flash behind the high bank and the wall, and Joan
went back in silence to the inn.
The first incident of the war did not seem superficially encouraging,
though the hero of it seemed by no means discouraged by it. As
reported in the police news of various papers, Hilary Patrick Pierce,
formerly of the Flying Corps, was arrested for driving pigs into the
county of Bluntshire, in contravention of the regulations made for the
public health. He seemed to have had almost as much trouble with the
pigs as with the police; but he made a witty and eloquent speech on
being arrested, to which the police and the pigs appeared to be equally
unresponsive. The incident was considered trivial and his punishment
was trifling; but the occasion was valued by some of the authorities as
giving an opportunity for the final elucidation and establishment of
the new rule.
For this purpose it was fortunate that the principal magistrate of the
bench was no less a person than the celebrated hygienist, Sir Horace
Hunter, O.B.E., M.D., who had begun life, as some may remember, as
a successful suburban doctor and had likewise distinguished himself
as an officer of health in the Thames Valley. To him indeed had been
largely due the logical extension of the existing precautions against
infection from the pig; though he was fully supported by his fellow
magistrates, one being Mr. Rosenbaum Low, millionaire and formerly
manager of Bliss and Co., and the other the young Socialist, Mr. Amyas
Minns, famous for his exposition of Shaw on the Simple Life, who sat on
the bench as a Labour alderman. All concurred in the argument of Sir
Horace, that just as all the difficulties and doubtful cases raised by
the practice of moderate drinking had been simplified by the solution
of Prohibition, so the various quarrels and evasions about swine-fever
were best met by a straightforward and simple regulation against swine.
In the very improper remarks which he offered after the trial, the
prisoner appears to have said that as his three judges were a Jew, a
vegetarian and a quack doctor on the make, he was not surprised that
they did not appreciate pork.
The next luncheon at which the three friends met was in a sufficiently
different setting; for the Colonel had invited the other two to his
club in London. It would have been almost impossible to have been that
sort of Colonel without having that sort of club. But as a matter of
fact, he very seldom went there. On this occasion it was Owen Hood who
arrived first and was by instructions escorted by a waiter to a table
in a bow window overlooking the Green Park. Knowing Crane’s military
punctuality, Hood fancied that he might have mistaken the time; and
while looking for the note of invitation in his pocket-book, he paused
for a moment upon a newspaper cutting that he had put aside as a
curiosity some days before. It was a paragraph headed “Old Ladies as
Mad Motorists,” and ran as follows:
“An unprecedented number of cases of motorists exceeding the speed
limit have lately occurred on the Bath Road and other western
highways. The extraordinary feature of the case is that in so large a
number of cases the offenders appeared to be old ladies of great
wealth and respectability who professed to be merely taking their pugs
and other pet animals for an airing. They professed that the health of
the animal required much more rapid transit through the air than is
the case with human beings.”
He was gazing at this extract with as much perplexity as on his first
perusal, when the Colonel entered with a newspaper in his hand.
“I say,” he said, “I think it is getting rather ridiculous. I’m not
a revolutionist like you; quite the reverse. But all these rules and
regulations are getting beyond all rational discipline. A little while
ago they started forbidding all travelling menageries; not, mind you,
stipulating for proper conditions for the animals, but forbidding them
altogether for some nonsense about the safety of the public. There
was a travelling circus stopped near Acton and another on the road to
Reading. Crowds of village boys must never see a lion in their lives,
because once in fifty years a lion has escaped and been caught again.
But that’s nothing to what has happened since. Now, if you please,
there is such mortal fear of infection that we are to leave the sick
to suffer, just as if we were savages. You know those new hospital
trains that were started to take patients from the hospitals down to
the health resorts. Well, they’re not to run after all, it seems, lest
by merely taking an invalid of any sort through the open country we
should poison the four winds of heaven. If this nonsense goes on, I
shall go as mad as Hilary himself.”
Hilary Pierce had arrived during this conversation and sat listening to
it with a rather curious smile. Somehow the more Hood looked at that
smile the more it puzzled him; it puzzled him as much as the newspaper
cutting in his hand. He caught himself looking from one to the other,
and Pierce smiled in a still more irritating manner.
“You don’t look so fierce and fanatical as when we last met, my young
friend,” observed Owen Hood. “Have you got tired of pigs and police
courts? These coercion acts the Colonel’s talking about would have
roused you to lift the roof off once.”
“Oh, I’m all against the new rules,” answered the young man coolly.
“I’ve been very much against them; what you might call up against them.
In fact, I’ve already broken all those new laws and a few more. Could
you let me look at that cutting for a moment?”
Hood handed it to him and he nodded, saying:
“Yes; I was arrested for that.”
“Arrested for what?”
“Arrested for being a rich and respectable old lady,” answered Hilary
Pierce; “but I managed to escape that time. It was a fine sight to see
the old lady clear a hedge and skedaddle across a meadow.”
Hood looked at him under bended brows and his mouth began to work.
“But what’s all this about the old lady having a pug or a pet or
something?”
“Well, it was very nearly a pug,” said Pierce in a dispassionate
manner. “I pointed out to everybody that it was, as it were, an
approximate pug. I asked if it was just to punish me for a small
mistake in spelling.”
“I begin to understand,” said Hood. “You were again smuggling swine
down to your precious Blue Boar, and thought you could rush the
frontier in very rapid cars.”
“Yes,” replied the smuggler placidly. “We were quite literally
Road-Hogs. I thought at first of dressing the pigs up as millionaires
and members of Parliament; but when you come to look close, there’s
more difference than you would imagine to be possible. It was great fun
when they forced me to take my pet out of the wrapping of shawls, and
they found what a large pet it was.”
“And do I understand,” cut in the Colonel, “that it was something like
that--with the other laws?”