secret about very practical public characters like that lady. It
sounds a paradox; but those practical people are often more morbid
than theoretical people. They are capable of acting; but they are also
capable of brooding when they are not acting. Their very stoicism makes
too sentimental a secret of their sentimentalism. They misunderstand
those they love; and make a mystery of the misunderstanding. They
suffer in silence; a horrid habit. In short, they can do everything;
but they don’t know how to do nothing. Theorists, happy people who do
nothing, like our friend Pierce----”
“Look here,” cried the indignant Pierce. “I should like to know what
the devil you mean? I’ve broken more law than you ever read in your
life. If this psychological lecture is the new lucidity, give me Mr.
White.”
“Oh, very well,” replied Hood, “if you prefer his text to my
exposition, he describes the same situation as follows: ‘I ought to
be grateful, being perfectly happy after all this muddle; I suppose
one ought to be careful about nomenclature; but it never even occurred
to me that her nose would be out of joint. Rather funny to be talking
about noses, isn’t it, for I suppose really it was her rival’s nose
that figured most prominently. Think of having a rival with a nose like
that to turn up at you! Talk about a spire pointing to the stars----’”
“I think,” said Crane, interposing mildly, “that it would be better if
you resumed your duties as official interpreter. What was it that you
were going to say about the lady who brooded over misunderstandings?”
“I was going to say,” replied the lawyer, “that when I first came upon
that crowd in the village, and saw that tall figure and dark strong
face dominating it in the old way, my mind went back to a score of
things I remembered about her in the past. Though we have not met for
ten years, I knew from the first glimpse of her face that she had
been worrying, in a powerful secretive sort of way; worrying about
something she didn’t understand and would not inquire about. I remember
long ago, when she was an ordinary fox-hunting squire’s daughter and
White was one of Sydney Smith’s wild curates, how she sulked for two
months over a mistake about a post-card that could have been explained
in two minutes. At least it could have been explained by anybody
except White. But you will understand that if he tried to explain the
post-card on another post-card, the results may not have been luminous,
let alone radiant.”
“But what has all this to do with noses?” inquired Pierce.
“Don’t you understand yet?” asked Hood with a smile. “Don’t you know
who was the rival with a long nose?”
He paused a moment and then continued, “It occurred to me as soon as I
had guessed at the nature of the nose which may certainly be called the
main feature of the story. An elusive, flexible and insinuating nose,
the serpent of their Eden. Well, they seem to have returned to their
Eden now; and I have no doubt it will be all right; for it is when
people are separated that these sort of secrets spring up between them.
After all, it was a mystery to us and we cannot be surprised if it was
a mystery to her.”
“A good deal of this is still rather a mystery to me,” remarked Pierce,
“though I admit it is getting a little clearer. You mean that the point
that has just been cleared up is----”
“The point about Snowdrop,” replied Hood. “We thought of a pony, and a
monkey, and a baby, and a good many other things that Snowdrop might
possibly be. But we never thought of the interpretation which was the
first to occur to the lady.”
There was a silence, and then Crane laughed in an internal fashion.
“Well, I don’t blame her,” he said. “One could hardly expect a lady of
any delicacy to deduce an elephant.”
“It’s an extraordinary business, when you come to think of it,” said
Pierce. “Where did he get the elephant?”
“He says something about that too,” said Hood referring to the letter.
“He says, ‘I may be a quarrelsome fellow. But quarrels sometimes
do good. And though it wasn’t actually one of Captain Pierce’s
caravans----’”
“No hang it all!” cried Pierce. “This is really too much! To see one’s
own name entangled in such hieroglyphics--it reminds me of seeing it in
a Dutch paper during the war; and wondering whether all the other words
were terms of abuse.”
“I think I can explain,” answered Hood patiently. “I assure you the
reverend gentleman is not taking liberties with your name in a merely
irresponsible spirit. As I told you before, he is strictly truthful
when you get at the facts, though they may be difficult to get at.
Curiously enough, there really is a connexion. I sometimes think there
is a connexion beyond coincidence running through all our adventures; a
purpose in these unconscious practical jokes. It seems rather eccentric
to make friends with a white elephant----”
“Rather eccentric to make friends with us,” said the Colonel. “We are a
set of white elephants.”
“As a matter of fact,” said the lawyer, “this particular last prank of
the parson really did arise out of the last prank of our friend Pierce.”
“Me!” said Pierce in surprise. “Have I been producing elephants without
knowing it?”
“Yes,” replied Hood. “You remember when you were smuggling pigs in
defiance of the regulations, you indulged (I regret to say) in a
deception of putting them in cages and pretending you were travelling
with a menagerie of dangerous animals. The consequence was, you
remember, that the authorities forbade menageries altogether. Our
friend White took up the case of a travelling circus being stopped in
his town as a case of gross oppression; and when they had to break it
up, he took over the elephant.”
“Sort of small payment for his services, I suppose,” said Crane.
“Curious idea, taking a tip in the form of an elephant.”
“He might not have done it if he’d known what it involved,” said Hood.
“As I say, he was a quarrelsome fellow, with all his good points.”
There was a silence, and then Pierce said in a musing manner: “It’s odd
it should be the sequel of my little pig adventure. A sort of reversal
of the _parturiunt montes_; I put in a little pig and it brought forth
an elephant.”
“It will bring forth more monsters yet,” said Owen Hood. “We have not
seen all the sequels of your adventures as a swineherd.”
But touching the other monsters or monstrous events so produced, the
reader has already been warned--nay, threatened--that they are involved
in the narrative called the Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates, and for
the moment the threat must hang like thunder in the air.
V
THE EXCLUSIVE LUXURY OF ENOCH OATES
V
THE EXCLUSIVE LUXURY OF ENOCH OATES
“Since the Colonel ate his hat the Lunatic Asylum has lacked a
background.”
The conscientious scribe cannot but be aware that the above sentence
standing alone and without reference to previous matters, may not
entirely explain itself. Anyone trying the experiment of using that
sentence for practical social purposes; tossing that sentence lightly
as a greeting to a passer-by; sending that sentence as a telegram to a
total stranger; whispering that sentence hoarsely into the ear of the
nearest policeman, and so on, will find that its insufficiency as a
full and final statement is generally felt. With no morbid curiosity,
with no exaggerated appetite for omniscience, men will want to know
more about this statement before acting upon it. And the only way of
explaining it, and the unusual circumstances in which it came to be
said, is to pursue the doubling and devious course of these narratives,
and return to a date very much earlier, when men now more than
middle-aged were quite young.
It was in the days when the Colonel was not the Colonel, but only Jimmy
Crane, a restless youth tossed about by every wind of adventure, but
as yet as incapable of discipline as of dressing for dinner. It was
in days before Robert Owen Hood, the lawyer, had ever begun to study
the Law and had only got so far as to abolish it; coming down to the
club every night with a new plan for a revolution to turn all earthly
tribunals upside-down. It was in days before Wilding White settled down
as a country parson, returning to the creed though not the conventions
of his class and country; when he was still ready to change his
religion once a week, turning up sometimes in the costume of a monk
and sometimes of a mufti, and sometimes in what he declared to be the
original vestments of a Druid, whose religion was shortly to be resumed
by the whole British people. It was in days when their young friend
Hilary Pierce, the aviator, was still anticipating aviation by flying
a small kite. In short, it was early in the lives even of the elders
of the group that they had founded a small social club, in which their
long friendships had flourished. The club had to have some sort of
name, and the more thoughtful and detached among them, who saw the club
steadily and saw it whole, considered the point with ripe reflection,
and finally called their little society the Lunatic Asylum.
“We might all stick straws in our hair for dinner, as the Romans
crowned themselves with roses for the banquet,” observed Hood. “It
would correspond to dressing for dinner; I don’t know what else we
could do to vary the vulgar society trick of all wearing the same sort
of white waistcoats.”
“All wearing strait-waistcoats, I suppose,” said Crane.
“We might each dine separately in a padded cell, if it comes to that,”
said Hood; “but there seems to be something lacking in it considered as
a social evening.”
Here Wilding White, who was then in a monastic phase, intervened
eagerly. He explained that in some monasteries a monk of peculiar
holiness was allowed to become a hermit in an inner cell, and proposed
a similar arrangement at the club. Hood, with his more mellow
rationalism, intervened with a milder amendment. He suggested that a
large padded chair should represent the padded cell, and be reserved
like a throne for the loftiest of the lunatics.
“Do not,” he said gently and earnestly, “do not let us be divided by
jealousies and petty ambitions. Do not let us dispute among ourselves
which shall be dottiest in the domain of the dotty. Perhaps one will
appear worthier than us all, more manifestly and magnificently weak in
the head; for him let the padded throne stand empty.”
Jimmy Crane had said no more after his brief suggestion, but was
pacing the room like a polar bear, as he generally did when there came
upon him a periodical impulse to go off after things like polar bears.
He was the wildest of all those wild figures so far as the scale of
his adventures was concerned, constantly vanishing to the ends of the
earth nobody knew why, and turning up again nobody knew how. He had a
hobby, even in his youth, that made his outlook seem even stranger than
the bewildering successive philosophies of his friend White. He had
an enthusiasm for the myths of savages, and while White was balancing
the relative claims of Buddhism and Brahmanism, Crane would boldly
declare his preference for the belief that a big fish ate the sun every
night, or that the whole cosmos was created by cutting up a giant.
Moreover, there was with all this something indefinable but in some
way more serious about Crane even in these days. There was much that
was merely boyish about the blind impetuosity of Wilding White, with
his wild hair and eager aquiline face. He was evidently one who might
(as he said) learn the secret of Isis, but would be quite incapable of
keeping it to himself. The long, legal face of Owen Hood had already
learned to laugh at most things, if not to laugh loudly. But in Crane
there was something more hard and militant like steel, and as he proved
afterwards in the affair of the hat, he could keep a secret even when
it was a joke. So that when he finally went off on a long tour round
the world, with the avowed intention of studying all the savages he
could find, nobody tried to stop him. He went off in a startlingly
shabby suit, with a faded sash instead of a waistcoat, and with no
luggage in particular, except a large revolver slung round him in a
case like a field-glass, and a big, green umbrella that he flourished
resolutely as he walked.
“Well, he’ll come back a queerer figure than he went, I suppose,” said
Wilding White.
“He couldn’t,” answered Hood, the lawyer, shaking his head. “I don’t
believe all the devil-worship in Africa could make him any madder than
he is.”
“But he’s going to America first, isn’t he?” said the other.
“Yes,” said Hood. “He’s going to America, but not to see the Americans.
He would think the Americans very dull compared with the American
Indians. Possibly he will come back in feathers and war-paint.”
“He’ll come back scalped, I suppose,” said White hopefully. “I suppose
being scalped is all the rage in the best Red Indian society?”
“Then he’s working round by the South Sea Islands,” said Hood. “They
don’t scalp people there; they only stew them in pots.”
“He couldn’t very well come back stewed,” said White, musing. “Does it
strike you, Owen, that we should hardly be talking nonsense like this
if we hadn’t a curious faith that a fellow like Crane will know how to
look after himself?”
“Yes,” said Hood gravely. “I’ve got a very fixed fundamental conviction
that Crane will turn up again all right. But it’s true that he may look
jolly queer after going _fantee_ for all that time.”
It became a sort of pastime at the club of the Lunatics to compete
in speculations about the guise in which the maddest of their madmen
would return, after being so long lost to civilization. And grand
preparations were made as for a sort of Walpurgis Night of nonsense
when it was known at last that he was really returning. Hood had
received letters from him occasionally, full of queer mythologies, and
then a rapid succession of telegrams from places nearer and nearer
home, culminating in the announcement that he would appear in the club
that night. It was about five minutes before dinnertime that a sharp
knock on the door announced his arrival.
“Bang all the gongs and the tom-toms,” cried Wilding White. “The Lord
High Mumbo-Jumbo arrives riding on the nightmare.”
“We had better bring out the throne of the King of the Maniacs,” said
Hood, laughing. “We may want it at last,” and he turned towards the big
padded chair that still stood at the top of the table.
As he did so James Crane walked into the room. He was clad in very
neat and well-cut evening clothes, not too fashionable, and a little
formal. His hair was parted on one side, and his moustache clipped
rather close; he took a seat with a pleasant smile, and began talking
about the weather.
He was not allowed, however, to confine his conversation to the
weather. He had certainly succeeded in giving his old friends the only
sort of surprise that they really had not expected; but they were
too old friends for their friend to be able to conceal from them the
meaning of such a change. And it was on that festive evening that Crane
explained his position; a position which he maintained in most things
ever afterwards, and one which is the original foundation of the affair
that follows.
“I have lived with the men we call savages all over the world,” he said
simply, “and I have found out one truth about them. And I tell you, my
friends, you may talk about independence and individual self-expression
till you burst. But I’ve always found, wherever I went, that the man
who could really be trusted to keep his word, and to fight, and to
work for his family, was the man who did a war-dance before the moon
where the moon was worshipped, and wore a nose-ring in his nose where
nose-rings were worn. I have had plenty of fun, and I won’t interfere
with anyone else having it. But I believe I have seen what is the real
making of mankind, and I have come back to my tribe.”
This was the first act of the drama which ended in the remarkable
appearance and disappearance of Mr. Enoch Oates, and it has been
necessary to narrate it briefly before passing on to the second act.
Ever since that time Crane had preserved at once his eccentric friends
and his own more formal customs. And there were many among the newer
members of the club who had never known him except as the Colonel,
the grizzled, military gentleman whose severe scheme of black and
white attire and strict politeness in small things formed the one foil
of sharp contrast to that many-coloured Bohemia. One of these was
Hilary Pierce, the young aviator; and much as he liked the Colonel, he
never quite understood him. He had never known the old soldier in his
volcanic youth, as had Hood and White, and therefore never knew how
much of the fire remained under the rock or the snows. The singular
affair of the hat, which has been narrated to the too patient reader
elsewhere, surprised him more than it did the older men, who knew very
well that the Colonel was not so old as he looked. And the impression
increased with all the incidents which a fanatical love of truth has
forced the chronicler to relate in the same connexion; the incident of
the river and of the pigs and of the somewhat larger pet of Mr. Wilding
White. There was talk of renaming the Lunatic Asylum as the League of
the Long Bow, and of commemorating its performances in a permanent
ritual. The Colonel was induced to wear a crown of cabbage on state
occasions, and Pierce was gravely invited to bring his pigs with him to
dine at the club.
“You could easily bring a little pig in your large pocket,” said Hood.
“I often wonder people do not have pigs as pets.”
“A pig in a poke, in fact,” said Pierce. “Well, so long as you have the
tact to avoid the indelicacy of having pork for dinner that evening, I
suppose I could bring my pig in my pocket.”
“White’d find it rather a nuisance to bring his elephant in his
pocket,” observed the Colonel.
Pierce glanced at him, and had again the feeling of incongruity at
seeing the ceremonial cabbage adorning his comparatively venerable
head. For the Colonel had just been married, and was rejuvenated in an
almost jaunty degree. Somehow the philosophical young man seemed to
miss something, and sighed. It was then that he made the remark which
is the pivot of this precise though laborious anecdote.
“Since the Colonel ate his hat,” he said, “the Lunatic Asylum has
lacked a background.”
“Damn your impudence,” said the Colonel cheerfully. “Do you mean to
call me a background to my face?”
“A dark background,” said Pierce soothingly. “Do not resent my saying
a dark background. I mean a grand, mysterious background like that of
night; a sublime and even starry background.”
“Starry yourself,” said Crane indignantly.
“It was against that background of ancient night,” went on the young
man dreamily, “that the fantastic shapes and fiery colours of our
carnival could really be seen. So long as he came here with his black
coat and beautiful society manners there was a foil to our follies. We
were eccentric, but he was our centre. You cannot be eccentric without
a centre.”
“I believe Hilary is quite right,” said Owen Hood earnestly. “I believe
we have made a great mistake. We ought not to have all gone mad at
once. We ought to have taken it in turns to go mad. Then I could have
been shocked at his behaviour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and
he could have been shocked at my behaviour on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and
Saturdays. But there is no moral value in going mad when nobody is
shocked. If Crane leaves off being shocked, what are we to do?”
“I know what we want,” began Pierce excitedly.
“So do I,” interrupted Hood. “We want a sane man.”
“Not so easy to find nowadays,” said the old soldier. “Going to
advertise?”
“I mean a stupid man,” explained Owen Hood. “I mean a man who’s
conventional all through, not a humbug like Crane. I mean, I want a
solid, serious business man, a hard-headed, practical man of affairs, a
man to whom vast commercial interests are committed. In a word, I want
a fool; some beautiful, rounded, homogeneous fool, in whose blameless
face, as in a round mirror, all our fancies may really be reflected and
renewed. I want a very successful man, a very wealthy man, a man----”
“I know! I know!” cried young Pierce, almost waving his arms. “Enoch
Oates!”
“Who’s Enoch Oates?” inquired White.
“Are the lords of the world so little known?” asked Hood.
“Enoch Oates is Pork, and nearly everything else; Enoch Oates is
turning civilization into one vast sausage-machine. Didn’t I ever tell
you how Hilary ran into him over that pig affair?”
“He’s the very man you want,” cried Hilary Pierce enthusiastically.
“I know him, and I believe I can get him. Being a millionaire, he’s
entirely ignorant. Being an American, he’s entirely in earnest. He’s
got just that sort of negative Nonconformist conscience of New England
that balances the positive money-getting of New York. If we want to
surprise anybody we’ll surprise him. Let’s ask Enoch Oates to dinner.”
“I won’t have any practical jokes played on guests,” said the Colonel.
“Of course not,” replied Hood. “He’ll be only too pleased to take it
seriously. Did you ever know an American who didn’t like seeing the
Sights? And if you don’t know you’re a Sight with that cabbage on your
head, it’s time an American tourist taught you.”
“Besides, there’s a difference,” said Pierce. “I wouldn’t ask a fellow
like that doctor, Horace Hunter----”
“Sir Horace Hunter,” murmured Hood reverently.
“I wouldn’t ask him, because I really think him a sneak and a snob,
and my invitation could only be meant as an insult. But Oates is not
a man I hate, nor is he hateful. That’s the curious part of it. He’s
a simple, sincere sort of fellow, according to his lights, which are
pretty dim. He’s a thief and a robber of course, but he doesn’t know
it. I’m asking him because he’s different; but I don’t imagine he’s
at all sorry to be different. There’s no harm in giving a man a good
dinner and letting him be a background without knowing it.”
When Mr. Enoch Oates in due course accepted the invitation and
presented himself at the club, many were reminded of that former
occasion when a stiff and conventional figure in evening dress had
first appeared like a rebuke to the revels. But in spite of the
stiff sameness of both those black and white costumes, there was
a great deal of difference between the old background and the new
background. Crane’s good manners were of that casual kind that are
rather peculiarly English, and mark an aristocracy at its ease in the
saddle. Curiously enough, if the American had one point in common with
a Continental noble of ancient lineage (whom his daughter might have
married any day), it was that they would both be a little more on the
defensive, living in the midst of democracy. Mr. Oates was perfectly
polite, but there was something a little rigid about him. He walked
to his chair rather stiffly and sat down rather heavily. He was a
powerful, ponderous man with a large sallow face, a little suggestive
of a corpulent Red Indian. He had a ruminant eye, and equally ruminant
manner of chewing an unlighted cigar. These were signs that might well
have gone with a habit of silence. But they did not.
Mr. Oates’s conversation might not be brilliant, but it was continuous.
Pierce and his friends had begun with some notion of dangling their
own escapades before him like dancing dolls before a child; they had
told him something of the affair of the Colonel and his cabbage, of
the captain and his pigs, of the parson and his elephants; but they
soon found that their hearer had not come there merely as a listener.
What he thought of their romantic buffooneries it would be hard to
say; probably he did not understand them, possibly he did not even
hear them. Anyhow, his own monologue went on. He was a leisurely
speaker. They found themselves revising much that they had heard about
the snap and smartness and hurry of American talk. He spoke without
haste or embarrassment, his eye boring into space, and he more than
fulfilled Mr. Pierce’s hopes of somebody who would talk about business
matters. His talk was a mild torrent of facts and figures, especially
figures. In fact the background was doing all it could to contribute
the required undertone of common commercial life. The background was
justifying all their hopes that it would be practical and prosaic. Only
the background had rather the air of having become the foreground.