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 all 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 best 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 ever were 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 pine-wood 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 setting 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 long
sausage-shaped Zeppelin body of it had been fantastically decorated
with hanging ears and legs, to complete that pantomimic resemblance.
“I suppose it’s some more of Hilary’s skylarking,” observed Hood; “but
what is he up to now?”
As the great aërial monster moved up the valley it paused over the inn
of the Blue Boar, and something fell fluttering from it like a brightly
coloured feather.
“People are coming down in parachutes,” said the Colonel shortly.
“They’re queer-looking people,” remarked his companion, peering under
frowning brows, for the level light was dazzling to the eyes. “By
George, they’re not people at all! They’re pigs!”
From that distance, the objects in question had something of the
appearance of cherubs in some gaily coloured Gothic picture, with the
yellow sky for their gold-leaf background. The parachute apparatus
from which they hung and hovered was designed and coloured with the
appearance of a great wheel of gorgeously painted plumage, looking
more gaudy than ever in the strong evening light that lay over all. The
more the two men in the quarry stared at these strange objects, the
more certain it seemed that they were indeed pigs; though whether the
pigs were dead or alive it was impossible at that distance to say. They
looked down into the garden of the inn into which the feathered things
were dropping, and they could see the figure of Joan Hardy standing in
front of the old pig-sty, with her bird-like head lifted, looking up
into the sky.
“Singular present for a young lady,” remarked Crane, “but I suppose
when our mad young friend does start love-making, he would be likely to
give impossible presents.”
The eyes of the more poetical Hood were full of larger visions, and he
hardly seemed to be listening. But as the sentence ended he seemed to
start from a trance and struck his hands together.
“Yes!” he cried in a new voice, “we always come back to that word!”
“Come back to what word?” asked his friend.
“‘Impossible,’” answered Owen Hood. “It’s the word that runs through
his whole life, and ours too for that matter. Don’t you see what he has
done?”
“I see what he has done all right,” answered the Colonel, “but I’m not
at all sure I see what you are driving at.”
“What we have seen is another impossible thing,” said Owen Hood; “a
thing that common speech has set up as a challenge; a thing that a
thousand rhymes and jokes and phrases have called impossible. We have
seen pigs fly.”
“It’s pretty extraordinary,” admitted Crane, “but it’s not so
extraordinary as their not being allowed to walk.”
And they gathered their travelling tackle together and began to descend
the steep hill.
In doing so, they descended into a deeper twilight between the stems of
the darkling trees; the walls of the valley began to close over them,
as it were, and they lost that sense of being in the upper air in a
radiant topsy-turvydom of clouds. It was almost as if they had really
had a vision; and the voice of Crane came abruptly out of the dusk,
almost like that of a doubter when he speaks of a dream.
“The thing I can’t understand,” he said abruptly, “is how Hilary
managed to _do_ all that by himself.”
“He really is a very wonderful fellow,” said Hood. “You told me
yourself he did wonders in the War. And though he turns it to these
fanatical ends now, it takes as much trouble to do one as the other.”
“Takes a devilish lot more trouble to do it alone,” said Crane. “In the
War there was a whole organization.”
“You mean he must be more than a remarkable person,” suggested Hood, “a
sort of giant with a hundred hands or god with a hundred eyes. Well, a
man will work frightfully hard when he wants something very much; even
a man who generally looks like a lounging minor poet. And I think I
know what it was he wanted. He deserves to get it. It’s certainly his
hour of triumph.”
“Mystery to me, all the same,” said the Colonel frowning. “Wonder
whether he’ll ever clear it up.” But that part of the mystery was not
to be cleared up until many other curious things had come to pass.
Away on another part of the slope Hilary Pierce, new lighted on the
earth like the herald Mercury, leapt down into a red hollow of the
quarry and came towards Joan Hardy with uplifted arms.
“This is no time for false modesty,” he said. “It is the hour, and I
come to you covered with glory----”
“You come covered with mud,” she said smiling, “and it’s that horrible
red mud that takes so long to dry. It’s no use trying to brush it
till----”
“I bring you the Golden Fleece, or at any rate the Golden Pig-Skin,” he
cried in lyric ecstasy. “I have endured the labours; I have achieved
the quest. I have made the Hampshire Hog as legendary as the Calydonian
Boar. They forbade me to drive it on foot, and I drove it in a car,
disguised as a pug. They forbade me to bring it in a car, and I brought
it in a railway-train, disguised as an invalid. They forbade me to use
a railway-train, and I took the wings of the morning and rose to the
uttermost parts of the air; by a way secret and pathless and lonely as
the wilful way of love. I have made my romance immortal. I have written
your name upon the sky. What do you say to me now? I have turned a Pig
into a Pegasus. I have done impossible things.”
“I know you have,” she said, “but somehow I can’t help liking you for
all that.”
“_But_ you can’t help liking me,” he repeated in a hollow voice.
“I have stormed heaven, but still I am not so bad. Hercules can be
tolerated in spite of his Twelve Labours. St. George can be forgiven
for killing the Dragon. Woman, is this the way I am treated in the hour
of victory; and is this the graceful fashion of an older world? Have
you become a New Woman, by any chance? What has your father been doing?
What does he say--about us?”
“My father says you are quite mad, of course,” she replied, “but he
can’t help liking you either. He says he doesn’t believe in people
marrying out of their class; but that if I must marry a gentleman he’d
rather it was somebody like you, and not one of the new gentlemen.”
“Well, I’m glad I’m an old gentleman, anyhow,” he answered somewhat
mollified. “But really this prevalence of common sense is getting quite
dangerous. Will nothing rouse you all to a little unreality; to saying,
so to speak, ‘O, for the wings of a pig that I might flee away and be
at rest.’ What would you say if I turned the world upside-down and set
my foot upon the sun and moon?”
“I should say,” replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, “that you wanted
somebody to look after you.”
He stared at her for a moment in an almost abstracted fashion as
if he had not fully understood; then he laughed quite suddenly and
uncontrollably, like a man who has seen something very close to him
that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. So a man will fall
over something in a game of hiding-and-seeking, and get up shaken with
laughter.
“What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an
aeroplane,” he said, “especially when your flying ship is only a
flying pig. The earth of the real peasants and the real pigs--don’t be
offended; I assure you the confusion is a compliment. What a thing is
horse-sense, and how much finer really than the poetry of Pegasus! And
when there is everything else as well that makes the sky clean and the
earth kind, beauty and bravery and the lifting of the head--well, you
are right enough, Joan. Will you take care of me? Will you stop at home
and clip my pig’s wings?”
He had caught hold of her by the hands; but she still laughed as she
answered:
“Yes--I told you I couldn’t help--but you must really let go, Hilary.
I can see your friends coming down from the quarry.”
As she spoke, indeed, Colonel Crane and Owen Hood could be seen
descending the slope and passing through a screen of slender trees
towards them.
“Hullo!” said Hilary Pierce cheerfully. “I want you to congratulate
me. Joan thinks I’m an awful humbug, and right she is; I am what has
been called a happy hypocrite. At least you fellows may think I’ve been
guilty of a bit of a fake in this last affair, when I tell you the
news. Well, I will confess.”
“What news do you mean?” inquired the Colonel with curiosity.
Hilary Pierce grinned and made a gesture over his shoulder to the
litter of porcine parachutes, to indicate his last and crowning folly.
“The truth is,” he said laughing, “that was only a final firework
display to celebrate victory or failure, whichever you choose to call
it. There isn’t any need to do any more, because the veto is removed.”
“Removed?” exclaimed Hood. “Why on earth is that? It’s rather unnerving
when lunatics suddenly go sane like that.”
“It wasn’t anything to do with the lunatics,” answered Pierce quietly.
“The real change was much higher up, or rather lower down. Anyhow, it
was much farther at the back of things, where the Big Businesses are
settled by the big people.”
“What was the change?” asked the Colonel.
“Old Oates has gone into another business,” answered Pierce quietly.
“What on earth has old Oates to do with it?” asked Hood staring. “Do
you mean that Yankee mooning about over mediæval ruins?”
“Oh, I know,” said Pierce wearily, “I thought he had nothing to do
with it; I thought it was the Jews and vegetarians, and the rest; but
they’re very innocent instruments. The truth is that Enoch Oates is the
biggest pork-packer and importer in the world, and _he_ didn’t want
any competition from our cottagers. And what he says goes, as he would
express it. Now, thank God, he’s taken up another line.”
* * * * *
But if any indomitable reader wishes to know what was the new line
Mr. Oates pursued and why, it is to be feared that his only course
is to await and read patiently the story of the Exclusive Luxury of
Enoch Oates; and even before reaching that supreme test, he will have
to support the recital of The Elusive Companion of Parson White; for
these, as has been said, are tales of topsy-turvydom, and they often
work backwards.
IV
THE ELUSIVE COMPANION OF PARSON WHITE
IV
THE ELUSIVE COMPANION OF PARSON WHITE
In the scriptures and the chronicles of the League of the Long Bow, or
fellowship of foolish persons doing impossible things, it is recorded
that Owen Hood, the lawyer, and his friend Crane, the retired Colonel,
were partaking one afternoon of a sort of picnic on the river-island
that had been the first scene of a certain romantic incident in the
life of the former, the burden of reading about which has fallen upon
other readers in other days. Suffice it to say that the island had been
devoted by Mr. Hood to his hobby of angling, and that the meal then
in progress was a somewhat early interruption of the same leisurely
pursuit. The two old cronies had a third companion, who, though
considerably younger, was not only a companion but a friend. He was a
light-haired, lively young man, with rather a wild eye, known by the
name of Pierce, whose wedding to the daughter of the innkeeper of the
Blue Boar the others had only recently attended.
He was an aviator and given to many other forms of skylarking. The two
older men had eccentric tastes of their own; but there is always a
difference between the eccentricity of an elderly man who defies the
world and the enthusiasm of a younger man who hopes to alter it. The
old gentleman may be willing, in a sense, to stand on his head; but he
does not hope, as the boy does, to stand the world on its head. With
a young man like Hilary Pierce it was the world itself that was to be
turned upside-down; and that was a game at which his more grizzled
companions could only look on, as at a child they loved playing with a
big coloured balloon.
Perhaps it was this sense of a division by time, altering the tone,
though not the fact, of friendship, which sent the mind of one of the
older men back to the memory of an older friend. He remembered he had
had a letter that morning from the only contemporary of his who could
fitly have made a fourth to their party. Owen Hood drew the letter from
his pocket with a smile that wrinkled his long, humorous, cadaverous
face.
“By the way, I forgot to tell you,” he said, “I had a letter from White
yesterday.”
The bronzed visage of the Colonel was also seamed with the external
signs of a soundless chuckle.
“Read it yet?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied the lawyer; “the hieroglyphic was attacked with fresh
vigour after breakfast this morning, and the clouds and mysteries of
yesterday’s laborious hours seemed to be rolled away. Some portions of
the cuneiform still await an expert translation; but the sentences
themselves appear to be in the original English.”
“Very original English,” snorted Colonel Crane.
“Yes, our friend is an original character,” replied Hood. “Vanity
tempts me to hint that he is our friend because he has an original
taste in friends. That habit of his of putting the pronoun on the first
page and the noun on the next has brightened many winter evenings for
me. You haven’t met our friend White, have you?” he added to Pierce.
“That is a shock that still threatens you.”
“Why, what’s the matter with him?” inquired Pierce.
“Nothing,” observed Crane in his more staccato style. “Has a taste for
starting a letter with ‘Yours Truly’ and ending it with ‘Dear Sir’;
that’s all.”
“I should rather like to hear that letter,” observed the young man.
“So you shall,” answered Hood, “there’s nothing confidential in it;
and if there were, you wouldn’t find it out merely by reading it. The
Rev. Wilding White, called by some of his critics ‘Wild White,’ is
one of those country parsons, to be found in corners of the English
countryside, of whom their old college friends usually think in order
to wonder what the devil their parishoners think of them. As a matter
of fact, my dear Hilary, he was rather like you when he was your age;
and what in the world you would be like as a vicar in the Church of
England, aged fifty, might at first stagger the imagination; but the
problem might be solved by supposing you would be like him. But I only
hope you will have a more lucid style in letter-writing. The old boy is
always in such a state of excitement about something that it comes out
anyhow.”
It has been said elsewhere that these tales are, in some sense, of
necessity told tail-foremost, and certainly the letter of the Rev.
Wilding White was a document suited to such a scheme of narrative. It
was written in what had once been a good handwriting of the bolder
sort, but which had degenerated through excessive energy and haste into
an illegible scrawl. It appeared to run as follows:
“‘My dear Owen,--My mind is quite made up; though I know the sort of
legal long-winded things you will say against it; I know especially
one thing a leathery old lawyer like you is bound to say; but as a
matter of fact even you can’t say it in a case like this, because the
timber came from the other end of the county and had nothing whatever
to do with him or any of his flunkeys and sycophants. Besides, I did
it all myself with a little assistance I’ll tell you about later;
and even in these days I should be surprised to hear _that_ sort of
assistance could be anything but a man’s own affair. I defy you and
all your parchments to maintain that _it_ comes under the Game Laws.
You won’t mind me talking like this; I know jolly well you’d think
you were acting as a friend; but I think the time has come to speak
plainly.’”
“Quite right,” said the Colonel.
“Yes,” said young Pierce, with a rather vague expression, “I’m glad he
feels that the time has come to speak plainly.”
“Quite so,” observed the lawyer drily; “he continues as follows:
“‘I’ve got a lot to tell you about the new arrangement, which works
much better even than I hoped. I was afraid at first it would really
be an encumbrance, as you know it’s always supposed to be. But there
are more things, and all the rest of it, and God fulfils himself,
and so on and so on. It gives one quite a weird Asiatic feeling
sometimes.’”
“Yes,” said the Colonel, “it does.”
“What does?” asked Pierce, sitting up suddenly, like one who can bear
no more.
“You are not used to the epistolary method,” said Hood indulgently;
“you haven’t got into the swing of the style. It goes on:
“‘Of course, he’s a big pot down here, and all sorts of skunks
are afraid of him and pretend to boycott me. Nobody could expect
anything else of those pineapple people, but I confess I was
surprised at Parkinson. Sally of course is as sound as ever; but she
goes to Scotland a good deal and you can’t blame her. Sometimes I’m
left pretty severely alone, but I’m not downhearted; you’ll probably
laugh if I tell you that Snowdrop is really a very intelligent
companion.’”
“I confess I am long past laughter,” said Hilary Pierce sadly; “but I
rather wish I knew who Snowdrop is.”
“Child, I suppose,” said the Colonel shortly.
“Yes; I suppose it must be a child,” said Pierce. “Has he any children?”
“No,” said the Colonel. “Bachelor.”
“I believe he was in love with a lady in those parts and never married
in consequence,” said Hood. “It would be quite on the lines of fiction
and film-drama if Snowdrop were the daughter of the lady, when she had
married Another. But there seems to be something more about Snowdrop,
that little sunbeam in the house:
“‘Snowdrop tries to enter into our ways, as they always do; but,
of course, it would be a little awkward if she played tricks. How
alarmed they would all be if she took it into her head to walk about
on two legs, like everybody else.’”
“Nonsense!” ejaculated Colonel Crane. “Can’t be a child--talking about
it walking about on two legs.”
“After all,” said Pierce thoughtfully, “a little girl does walk about
on two legs.”
“Bit startling if she walked about on three,” said Crane.
“If my learned brother will allow me,” said Hood, in his forensic
manner, “would he describe the fact of a little girl walking on two
legs as alarming?”
“A little girl is always alarming,” replied Pierce.
“I’ve come to the conclusion myself,” went on Hood, “that Snowdrop
must be a pony. It seems a likely enough name for a pony. I thought at
first it was a dog or a cat but alarming seems a strong word even for
a dog or a cat sitting up to beg. But a pony on its hind legs might be
a little alarming, especially when you’re riding it. Only I can’t fit
this view in with the next sentence: ‘I’ve taught her to reach down the
things I want.’”
“Lord!” cried Pierce. “It’s a monkey!”
“That,” replied Hood, “had occurred to me as possibly explaining the
weird Asiatic atmosphere. But a monkey on two legs is even less unusual
than a dog on two legs. Moreover, the reference to Asiatic mystery
seems really to refer to something else and not to any animal at all.
For he ends up by saying: ‘I feel now as if my mind were moving in much
larger and more ancient spaces of time or eternity; and as if what I
thought at first was an oriental atmosphere was only an atmosphere of
the orient in the sense of dayspring and the dawn. It has nothing to do
with the stagnant occultism of decayed Indian cults; it is something
that unites a real innocence with the immensities, a power as of the
mountains with the purity of snow. This vision does not violate my own
religion, but rather reinforces it; but I cannot help feeling that I
have larger views. I hope in two senses to preach liberty in these
parts. So I may live to falsify the proverb after all.’
“That,” added Hood, folding up the letter, “is the only sentence in the
whole thing that conveys anything to my mind. As it happens, we have
all three of us lived to falsify proverbs.”
Hilary Pierce had risen to his feet with the restless action that went
best with his alert figure. “Yes,” he said; “I suppose we can all
three of us say we have lived for adventures, or had some curious ones
anyhow. And to tell you the truth, the adventure feeling has come on me
very strong this very minute. I’ve got the detective fever about that
parson of yours. I should like to get at the meaning of that letter, as
if it were a cipher about buried treasure.”