Oates was saying. “I saw I’d got on to something better than my old
regulation turnover of eighty-five thousand dollars on each branch. I
reckoned I should save a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in the
long run by scrapping the old plant, even if I had to drop another
thirty thousand dollars on new works, where I’d get the raw material
for a red cent. I saw right away that was the point to freeze on to;
that I just got a chance to sell something I didn’t need to buy;
something that could be sort of given away like old match-ends. I
figured out it would be better by a long chalk to let the other guys
rear the stock and sell me their refuse for next to nix, so I could get
ahead with turning it into the goods. So I started in right away and
got there at the first go-off with an increase of seven hundred and
fifty-one thousand dollars.”
“Seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars,” murmured Owen Hood.
“How soothing it all seems.”
“I reckon those mutts didn’t get on to what they were selling me,”
continued Mr. Oates, “or didn’t have the pep to use it that way
themselves; for though it was the sure-enough hot tip, it isn’t
everybody would have thought of it. When I was in pork, of course, I
wanted the other guys out; but just now I wasn’t putting anything on
pork, but only on just that part of a pig I wanted and they didn’t
want. By notifying all your pig farmers I was able to import nine
hundred and twenty-five thousand pigs’ ears this fall, and I guess I
can get consignments all winter.”
Hood had some little legal experience with long-winded commercial
witnesses, and he was listening by this time with a cocked eyebrow and
an attention much sharper than the dreamy ecstasy with which the poetic
Pierce was listening to the millionaire’s monologue, as if to the
wordless music of some ever-murmuring brook.
“Excuse me,” said Hood earnestly, “but did I understand you to say
pigs’ ears?”
“That is so, Mr. Hood,” said the American with great patience and
politeness. “I don’t know whether I gave you a sufficiently detailed
description for you to catch on to the proposition, but----”
“Well,” murmured Pierce wistfully, “it sounded to me like a detailed
description.”
“Pardon me,” said Hood, checking him with a frown. “I really want to
understand this proposition of Mr. Oates. Do I understand that you
bought pigs’ ears cheap, when the pigs were cut up for other purposes,
and that you thought you could use them for some purpose of your own?”
“Sure!” said Mr. Enoch Oates, nodding. “And my purpose was about the
biggest thing in fancy goods ever done in the States. In the publicity
line there’s nothing like saying you can do what folks say can’t
be done. Flying in the face of proverbs instead of providence, I
reckon. It catches on at once. We got to work, and got out the first
advertisement in no time; just a blank space with: ‘We Can Do It’ in
the middle. Got folks wondering for a week what it was.”
“I hope, sir,” said Pierce in a low voice, “that you will not carry
sound commercial principles so far as to keep us wondering for a week
what it was.”
“Well,” said Oates, “we found we could subject the pigskin and bristles
to a new gelat’nous process for making artificial silk, and we figured
that publicity would do the rest. We came out with the second set of
posters: ‘She Wants it Now.’... ‘The Most Wonderful Woman on Earth
is waiting by the Old Fireside, hoping you’ll bring her home a Pig’s
Whisper Purse.’”
“A purse!” gasped Hilary.
“I see you’re on the notion,” proceeded the unmoved American. “We
called ’em Pig’s Whisper Purses after the smartest and most popular
poster we ever had: ‘There was a Lady Loved a Swine.’ You know the
nursery rhyme, I guess; featured a slap-up princess whispering in a
pig’s ear. I tell you there isn’t a smart woman in the States now that
can do without one of our pig-silk purses, and all because it upsets
the proverb. Why, see here----”
Hilary Pierce had sprung wildly to his feet with a sort of stagger and
clutched at the American’s arm.
“Found! Found!” he cried hysterically. “Oh, sir, I implore you to take
the chair! Do, do take the chair!”
“Take the chair!” repeated the astonished millionaire, who was already
almost struggling in his grasp. “Really, gentlemen, I hadn’t supposed
the proceedings were so formal as to require a chairman, but in any
case----”
It could hardly be said, however, that the proceedings were formal.
Mr. Hilary Pierce had the appearance of forcibly dragging Mr. Enoch
Oates in the direction of the large padded arm-chair, that had always
stood empty at the top of the club table, uttering cries which, though
incoherent, appeared to be partly apologetic.
“No offence,” he gasped. “Hope no misunderstanding ... _Honoris causa_
... you, you alone are worthy of that seat ... the club has found its
king and justified its title at last.”
Here the Colonel intervened and restored order. Mr. Oates departed in
peace; but Mr. Hilary Pierce was still simmering.
“And that is the end of our quiet, ordinary business man,” he cried.
“Such is the behaviour of our monochrome and unobtrusive background.”
His voice rose to a sort of wail. “And we thought we were dotty! We
deluded ourselves with the hope that we were pretty well off our
chump! Lord have mercy on us! American big business rises to a raving
idiocy compared with which we are as sane as the beasts of the field.
The modern commercial world is far madder than anything we can do to
satirize it.”
“Well,” said the Colonel good-humouredly, “we’ve done some rather
ridiculous things ourselves.”
“Yes, yes,” cried Pierce excitedly, “but we did them to make ourselves
ridiculous. That unspeakable man is wholly, serenely serious. He thinks
those maniacal monkey tricks are the normal life of man. Your argument
really answers itself. We did the maddest things we could think of,
meaning them to look mad. But they were nothing like so mad as what a
modern business man does in the way of business.”
“Perhaps it’s the American business man,” said White, “who’s too keen
to see the humour of it.”
“Nonsense,” said Crane. “Millions of Americans have a splendid sense of
humour.”
“Then how fortunate are we,” said Pierce reverently, “through whose
lives this rare, this ineffable, this divine being has passed.”
“Passed away for ever, I suppose,” said Hood with a sigh. “I fear the
Colonel must be our only background once more.”
Colonel Crane was frowning thoughtfully, and at the last words his
frown deepened to disapproval. He puffed at his smouldering cigar and
then, removing it, said abruptly:
“I suppose you fellows have forgotten how I came to be a background? I
mean, why I rather approve of people being backgrounds.”
“I remember something you said a long time ago,” replied Hood. “Hilary
must have been in long-clothes at that time.”
“I said I had found out something by going round the world,” said
Crane. “You young people think I am an old Tory; but remember I am
also an old traveller. Well, it’s part of the same thing. I’m a
traditionalist because I’m a traveller. I told you when I came back to
the club that I’d come back to the tribe. I told you that in all the
tribes of the world, the best man was the man true to his tribe. I told
you the best man was the man who wore a nose-ring where nose-rings were
worn.”
“I remember,” said Owen Hood.
“No, you forget,” said Crane rather gruffly. “You forget it when you
talk about Enoch Oates the American. I’m no politician, thank God,
and I shall look on with detachment if you dynamite him for being a
millionaire. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t think half so much of
money as old Normantowers, who thinks it’s too sacred to talk about.
But you’re not dynamiting him for being a millionaire. You’re simply
laughing at him for being an American. You’re laughing at him for being
national and normal, for being a good citizen, a good tribesman, for
wearing a nose-ring where nose-rings are worn.”
“I say ... Kuklux, you know,” remonstrated Wilding White in his hazy
way. “Americans wouldn’t be flattered----”
“Do you suppose you haven’t got a nose-ring?” cried Crane so sharply
that the clergyman started from his trance and made a mechanical
gesture as if to feel for that feature. “Do you suppose a man like you
doesn’t carry his nationality as plain as the nose on his face? Do you
think a man as hopelessly English as you are wouldn’t be laughed at in
America? You can’t be a good Englishman without being a good joke. The
better Englishman you are the more of a joke you are; but still it’s
better to be better. Nose-rings are funny to people who don’t wear ’em.
Nations are funny to people who don’t belong to ’em. But it’s better
to wear a nose-ring than to be a cosmopolitan crank who cuts off his
nose to spite his face.”
This being by far the longest speech the Colonel had ever delivered
since the day he returned from his tropical travels long ago, his old
friends looked at him with a certain curiosity; even his old friends
hardly understood how much he had been roused in defence of a guest and
of his own deep delicacies about the point of hospitality. He went on
with undiminished warmth:
“Well, it’s like that with poor Oates. He has, as we see it, certain
disproportions, certain insensibilities, certain prejudices that stand
out in our eyes like deformities. They offend you; they offend me,
possibly rather more than they do you. You young revolutionists think
you’re very liberal and universal; but the only result is that you’re
narrow and national without knowing it. We old fogeys know our tastes
are narrow and national; but we know they are only tastes. And we know,
at any rate I know, that Oates is far more likely to be an honest man,
a good husband and a good father, because he stinks of the rankest
hickory patch in the Middle West, than if he were some fashionable New
Yorker pretending to be an English aristocrat or playing the æsthete in
Florence.”
“Don’t say a good husband,” pleaded Pierce with a faint shudder. “It
reminds me of the grand slap-up advertisement of the Pig’s Whisper.
How do you feel about that, my dear Colonel? The Most Wonderful Woman
on Earth Waiting by the Old Fireside----”
“It makes my flesh creep,” replied Crane. “It chills me to the spine.
I feel I would rather die than have anything to do with it. But that
has nothing to do with my point. I don’t belong to the tribe who wear
nose-rings; nor to the tribe who talk through their noses.”
“Well, aren’t you a little thankful for that?” asked White.
“I’m thankful I can be fair in spite of it,” answered Crane. “When I
put a cabbage on my head, I didn’t expect people not to stare at it.
And I know that each one of us in a foreign land is a foreigner, and a
thing to be stared at.”
“What I don’t understand about him,” said Hood, “is the sort of things
he doesn’t mind having stared at. How can people tolerate all that
vulgar, reeking, gushing commercial cant everywhere? How can a man talk
about the Old Fireside? It’s obscene. The police ought to interfere.”
“And that’s just where you’re wrong,” said the Colonel. “It’s vulgar
enough and mad enough and obscene enough if you like. But it’s not
cant. I have travelled amongst these wild tribes, for years on end; and
I tell you emphatically it is not cant. And if you want to know, just
ask your extraordinary American friend about his own wife and his own
relatively Old Fireside. He won’t mind. That’s the extraordinary part
of it.”
“What does all this really mean, Colonel?” asked Hilary Pierce.
“It means, my boy,” answered the Colonel, “that I think you owe our
guest an apology.”
* * * * *
So it came about that there was an epilogue, as there had been a
prologue, to the drama of the entrance and exit of Mr. Enoch B. Oates;
an epilogue which in its turn became a prologue to the later dramas of
the League of the Long Bow. For the words of the Colonel had a certain
influence on the Captain, and the actions of the Captain had a certain
influence on the American millionaire; and so the whole machinery of
events was started afresh by that last movement over the nuts and wine,
when Colonel Crane had stirred moodily in his seat and taken his cigar
out of his mouth.
Hilary Pierce was an aimable and even excessively optimistic young man
by temperament, in spite of his pugnacity; he would really have been
the last man in the world to wish to hurt the feelings of a harmless
stranger; and he had a deep and almost secret respect for the opinions
of the older soldier. So, finding himself soon afterwards passing
the great gilded gateways of the highly American hotel that was the
London residence of the American, he paused a moment in hesitation
and then went in and gave his name to various overpowering officials
in uniforms that might have been those of the German General Staff.
He was relieved when the large American came out to meet him with a
simple and lumbering affability, and offered his large limp hand as if
there had never been a shadow of misunderstanding. It was somehow borne
in upon Pierce that his own rather intoxicated behaviour that evening
had merely been noted down along with the architectural styles and
the mellow mediævalism of the pig-sty, as part of the fantasies of a
feudal land. All the antics of the Lunatic Asylum had left the American
traveller with the impression that similar parlour games were probably
being played that evening in all the parlours of England. Perhaps there
was something, after all, in Crane’s suggestion that every nation
assumes that every other nation is a sort of mild mad-house.
Mr. Enoch Oates received his guest with great hospitality and pressed
on him cocktails of various occult names and strange colours, though he
himself partook of nothing but a regimen of tepid milk.
Pierce fell into the confidence of Mr. Enoch Oates with a silent
swiftness that made his brain reel with bewilderment. He was staggered
like a man who had fallen suddenly through fifteen floors of a
sky-scraper and found himself in somebody’s bedroom. At the lightest
hint of the sort of thing to which Crane had alluded, the American
opened himself with an expansiveness that was like some gigantic
embrace. All the interminable tables of figures and calculations in
dollars had for the moment disappeared; yet Oates was talking in
the same easy and natural nasal drawl, very leisurely and a little
monotonous, as he said:
“I’m married to the best and brightest woman God ever made, and I tell
you it’s her and God between them that have made me, and I reckon she
had the hardest part of it. We had nothing but a few sticks when I
started; and it was the way she stood by that gave me the heart to risk
even those on my own judgment of how things were going in the Street. I
counted on a rise in Pork, and if it hadn’t risen I’d have been broke
and I dare say in the jug. But she’s just wonderful. You should see
her.”
He produced her photograph with a paralysing promptitude; it
represented a very regal lady dressed up to the nines, probably for the
occasion, with very brilliant eyes and an elaborate load of light hair.
“‘I believe in your star, Enoch,’ she said; ‘you stick to Pork,’” said
Oates, with tender reminiscence, “and so we saw it through.”
Pierce, who had been speculating with involuntary irreverence on
the extreme difficulty of conducting a love-affair or a sentimental
conversation in which one party had to address the other as Enoch,
felt quite ashamed of his cynicism when the Star of Pork shone with
such radiance in the eyes of his new friend.
“It was a terrible time, but I stuck to Pork, sometimes feeling she
could see clearer than I could; and of course she was right, and
I’ve never known her wrong. Then came my great chance of making the
combination and freezing out competition; and I was able to give her
the sort of things she ought to have and let her take the lead as she
should. I don’t care for society much myself; but I’m often glad on a
late night at the office to ring her up and hear she’s enjoying it.”
He spoke with a ponderous simplicity that seemed to disarm and crush
the criticism of a more subtle civilization. It was one of those things
that are easily seen to be absurd; but even after they are seen to be
absurd, they are still there. It may be, after all, that that is the
definition of the great things.
“I reckon that’s what people mean by the romance of business,”
continued Oates, “and though my business got bigger and bigger, it
made me feel kinda pleased there had been a romance at the heart of
it. It had to get bigger, because we wanted to make the combination
water-tight all over the world. I guess I had to fix things up a bit
with your politicians. But Congress men are alike all the world over,
and it didn’t trouble me any.”
There was a not uncommon conviction among those acquainted with Captain
Hilary Pierce that that ingenious young man was cracked. He did a great
many things to justify the impression; and in one sense certainly had
never shown any reluctance to make a fool of himself. But if he was a
lunatic, he was none the less a very English lunatic. And the notion of
talking about his most intimate affections, suddenly, to a foreigner
in an hotel, merely because the conversation had taken that turn,
was something that he found quite terrifying. And yet an instinct,
an impulse running through all these developments, told him that a
moment had come and that he must seize some opportunity that he hardly
understood.
“Look here,” he said rather awkwardly, “I want to tell you something.”
He looked down at the table as he continued.
“You said just now you were married to the best woman in the world.
Well, curiously enough, so am I. It’s a coincidence that often happens.
But it’s a still more curious coincidence that, in our own quiet way,
we went in for Pork too. She kept pigs at the back of the little
country inn where I met her; and at one time it looked as if the pigs
might have to be given up. Perhaps the inn as well. Perhaps the wedding
as well. We were quite poor, as poor as you were when you started; and
to the poor those extra modes of livelihood are often life. We might
have been ruined; and the reason was, I gather, that you had gone in
for Pork. But after all ours was the real pork; pork that walked about
on legs. We made the bed for the pig and filled the inside of the pig;
you only bought and sold the name of the pig. You didn’t go to business
with a live little pig under your arm or walk down Wall Street followed
by a herd of swine. It was a phantom pig, the ghost of a pig, that
was able to kill our real pig and perhaps us as well. Can you really
justify the way in which your romance nearly ruined our romance? Don’t
you think there must be something wrong somewhere?”
“Well,” said Oates after a very long silence, “that’s a mighty big
question and will take a lot of discussing.”
But the end to which their discussion led must be left to reveal itself
when the prostrate reader has recovered sufficient strength to support
the story of The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green, which those who
would endure to the end may read at some later date.
VI
THE UNTHINKABLE THEORY OF PROFESSOR GREEN
VI
THE UNTHINKABLE THEORY OF PROFESSOR GREEN
If the present passage in the chronicles of the Long Bow seems but a
side issue, an interlude and an idyll, a mere romantic episode lacking
that larger structural achievement which gives solidity and hard
actuality to the other stories, the reader is requested not to be hasty
in his condemnation; for in the little love story of Mr. Oliver Green
is to be found, as in a parable, the beginning of the final apotheosis
and last judgment of all these things.
It may well begin on a morning when the sunlight came late but
brilliant, under the lifting of great clouds from a great grey sweep
of wolds that grew purple as they dipped again into distance. Much of
that mighty slope was striped and scored with ploughed fields, but a
rude path ran across it, along which two figures could be seen in full
stride outlined against the morning sky.
They were both tall; but beyond the fact that they had both once been
professional soldiers, of rather different types and times, they had
very little in common. By their ages they might almost have been father
and son; and this would not have been contradicted by the fact that
the younger appeared to be talking all the time, in a high, confident
and almost crowing voice, while the elder only now and then put in a
word. But they were not father and son; strangely enough they were
really talking and walking together because they were friends. Those
who know only too well their proceedings as narrated elsewhere would
have recognized Colonel Crane, once of the Coldstream Guards, and
Captain Pierce, late of the Flying Corps.
The young man appeared to be talking triumphantly about a great
American capitalist whom he professed to have persuaded to see the
error of his ways. He talked rather as if he had been slumming.
“I’m very proud of it, I can tell you,” he said. “Anybody can produce
a penitent murderer. It’s something to produce a penitent millionaire.
And I do believe that poor Enoch Oates has seen the light (thanks to my
conversations at lunch); since I talked to him, Oates is another and a
better man.”
“Sown his wild oats, in fact,” remarked Crane.
“Well,” replied the other. “In a sense they were very quiet oats.
Almost what you might call Quaker Oats. He was a Puritan and a
Prohibitionist and a Pacifist and an Internationalist; in short,
everything that is in darkness and the shadow of death. But what you
said about him was quite right. His heart’s in the right place. It’s on
his sleeve. That’s why I preached the gospel to the noble savage and
made him a convert.”
“But what did you convert him to?” inquired the other.
“Private property,” replied Pierce promptly. “Being a millionaire he
had never heard of it. But when I explained the first elementary idea
of it in a simple form, he was quite taken with the notion. I pointed
out that he might abandon robbery on a large scale and create property
on a small scale. He felt it was very revolutionary, but he admitted
it was right. Well, you know he’d bought this big English estate out
here. He was going to play the philanthropist, and have a model estate
with all the regular trimmings; heads hygienically shaved by machinery
every morning; and the cottagers admitted once a month into their own
front gardens and told to keep off the grass. But I said to him: ‘If
you’re going to give things to people, why not give ’em? If you give
your friend a plant in a pot, you don’t send him an inspector from the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vegetables to see he waters
it properly. If you give your friend a box of cigars, you don’t make
him write a monthly report of how many he smokes a day. Can’t you be
a little generous with your generosity? Why don’t you use your money
to make free men instead of to make slaves? Why don’t you give your
tenants their land and have done with it, or let ’em have it very
cheap?’ And he’s done it; he’s really done it. He’s created hundreds of
small proprietors, and changed the whole of this countryside. That’s
why I want you to come up and see one of the small farms.”
“Yes,” said Colonel Crane, “I should like to see the farm.”
“There’s a lot of fuss about it, too; there’s the devil of a row,”
went on the young man, in very high spirits. “Lots of big combines and
things are trying to crush the small farmers with all sorts of tricks;
they even complain of interference by an American. You can imagine how
much Rosenbaum Low and Goldstein and Guggenheimer must be distressed by
the notion of a foreigner interfering in England. I want to know how a
foreigner could interfere less than by giving back their land to the
English people and clearing out. They all put it on to me; and right
they are. I regard Oates as my property; my convert; captive of my bow
and spear.”
“Captive of your Long Bow, I imagine,” said the Colonel. “I bet you
told him a good many things that nobody but a shrewd business man would
have been innocent enough to believe.”
“If I use the Long Bow,” replied Pierce with dignity, “it is a weapon
with heroic memories proper to a yeoman of England. With what more
fitting weapon could we try to establish a yeomanry?”
“There is something over there,” said Crane quietly, “that looks to me
rather like another sort of weapon.”