crowned the long slope; and beyond a kitchen-garden and an orchard
rose a thatched roof with a row of old-fashioned lattice windows under
it; the window at the end standing open. And out of this window at the
edge of the block of building protruded a big black object, rigid and
apparently cylindrical, thrust out above the garden and dark against
the morning daylight.
“A gun!” cried Pierce involuntarily; “looks just like a howitzer; or is
it an anti-aircraft gun?”
“Anti-airman gun, no doubt,” said Crane; “they heard you were coming
down and took precautions.”
“But what the devil can he want with a gun?” muttered Pierce, peering
at the dark outline.
“And who the devil is _he_, if it comes to that?” said the Colonel.
“Why, that window,” explained Pierce. “That’s the window of the room
they’ve let to a paying guest, I know. Man of the name of Green, I
understand; rather a recluse, and I suppose some sort of crank.”
“Not an anti-armament crank, anyhow,” said the Colonel.
“By George,” said Pierce, whistling softly, “I wonder whether things
really have moved faster than we could fancy! I wonder whether it’s a
revolution or a civil war beginning after all. I suppose we are an army
ourselves; I represent the Air Force and you represent the infantry.”
“You represent the infants,” answered the Colonel. “You’re too young
for this world; you and your revolutions! As a matter of fact, it isn’t
a gun, though it does look rather like one. I see now what it is.”
“And what in the world is it?” asked his friend.
“It’s a telescope,” said Crane. “One of those very big telescopes they
usually have in observatories.”
“Couldn’t be partly a gun and partly a telescope?” pleaded Pierce,
reluctant to abandon his first fancy. “I’ve often seen the phrase
‘shooting stars,’ but perhaps I’ve got the grammar and sense of it
wrong. The young man lodging with the farmer may be following one of
the local sports--the local substitute for duck-shooting!”
“What in the world are you talking about?” growled the other.
“Their lodger may be shooting the stars,” explained Pierce.
“Hope their lodger isn’t shooting the moon,” said the flippant Crane.
As they spoke there came towards them through the green and twinkling
twilight of the orchard a young woman with copper-coloured hair and a
square and rather striking face, whom Pierce saluted respectfully as
the daughter of the house. He was very punctilious upon the point that
these new peasant farmers must be treated like small squires and not
like tenants or serfs.
“I see your friend Mr. Green has got his telescope out,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said the girl. “They say Mr. Green is a great astronomer.”
“I doubt if you ought to call me ‘sir,’” said Pierce reflectively. “It
suggests rather the forgotten feudalism than the new equality. Perhaps
you might oblige me by saying ‘Yes, citizen,’ then we could continue
our talk about Citizen Green on an equal footing. By the way, pardon
me, let me present Citizen Crane.”
Citizen Crane bowed politely to the young woman without any apparent
enthusiasm for his new title; but Pierce went on:
“Rather rum to call ourselves citizens when we’re all so glad to be
out of the city. We really want some term suitable to rural equality.
The Socialists have spoilt ‘Comrade’; you can’t be a comrade without
a Liberty tie and a pointed beard. Morris had a good notion of one
man calling another Neighbour. That sounds a little more rustic. I
suppose,” he added wistfully to the girl, “I suppose, I could not
induce you to call me Gaffer?”
“Unless I’m mistaken,” observed Crane, “that’s your astronomer
wandering about in the garden. Think’s he’s a botanist, perhaps.
Appropriate to the name of Green.”
“Oh, he often wanders in the garden and down to the meadow and the
cowsheds,” said the young woman. “He talks to himself a good deal,
explaining a great theory he’s got. He explains it to everybody he
meets, too. Sometimes he explains it to me when I’m milking the cow.”
“Perhaps you can explain it to us?” said Pierce.
“Not so bad as that,” she said, laughing. “It’s something like that
Fourth Dimension they talk about. But I’ve no doubt he’ll explain it to
you if you meet him.”
“Not for me,” said Pierce. “I’m a simple peasant proprietor and ask
nothing but Three Dimensions and a Cow.”
“Cow’s the Fourth Dimension, I suppose,” said Crane.
“I must go and attend to the Fourth Dimension,” she said with a smile.
“Peasants all live by patchwork, running two or three side-shows,”
observed Pierce. “Curious sort of livestock on the farm. Think of
people living on a cow and chickens and an astronomer.”
As he spoke the astronomer approached along the path by which the girl
had just passed. His eyes were covered with huge horn spectacles of a
dim blue colour; for he was warned to save his eyesight for his starry
vigils. This gave a misleading look of morbidity to a face that was
naturally frank and healthy; and the figure, though stooping, was
stalwart. He was very absent-minded. Every now and then he looked at
the ground and frowned as if he did not like it.
Oliver Green was a very young professor, but a very old young man.
He had passed from science as the hobby of a schoolboy to science as
the ambition of a middle-aged man without any intermediate holiday of
youth. Moreover, his monomania had been fixed and frozen by success; at
least by a considerable success for a man of his years. He was already
a fellow of the chief learned societies connected with his subject,
when there grew up in his mind the grand, universal, all-sufficing
Theory which had come to fill the whole of his life as the daylight
fills the day. If we attempted the exposition of that theory here, it
is doubtful whether the result would resemble daylight. Professor Green
was always ready to prove it; but if we were to set out the proof in
this place, the next four or five pages would be covered with closely
printed columns of figures brightened here and there by geometrical
designs, such as seldom form part of the text of a romantic story.
Suffice it to say that the theory had something to do with Relativity
and the reversal of the relations between the stationary and the
moving object. Pierce, the aviator, who had passed much of his time
on moving objects not without the occasional anticipation of bumping
into stationary objects, talked to Green a little on the subject.
Being interested in scientific aviation, he was nearer to the abstract
sciences than were his friends, Crane with his hobby of folklore or
Hood with his love of classic literature or Wilding White with his
reading of the mystics. But the young aviator frankly admitted that
Professor Green soared high into the heavens of the Higher Mathematics,
far beyond the flight of his little aeroplane.
The professor had begun, as he always began, by saying that it was
quite easy to explain; which was doubtless true, as he was always
explaining it. But he often ended by affirming fallaciously that it was
quite easy to understand, and it would be an exaggeration to say that
it was always understood. Anyhow, he was just about to read his great
paper on his great theory at the great Astronomical Congress that was
to be held that year at Bath; which was one reason why he had pitched
his astronomical camp, or emplaced his astronomical gun, in the house
of Farmer Dale on the hills of Somerset. Mr. Enoch Oates could not
but feel the lingering hesitation of the landlord when he heard that
his protégés the Dales were about to admit an unknown stranger into
their household. But Pierce sternly reminded him that this paternal
attitude was a thing of the past and that a free peasant was free to
let lodging to a homicidal maniac if he liked. Nevertheless, Pierce
was rather relieved to find the maniac was only an astronomer; but
it would have been all the same if he had been an astrologer. Before
coming to the farm, the astronomer had set up his telescope in much
dingier places--in lodgings in Bloomsbury and the grimy buildings of a
Midland University. He thought he was, and to a great extent he was,
indifferent to his surroundings. But for all that the air and colour of
those country surroundings were slowly and strangely sinking into him.
“The idea is simplicity itself,” he said earnestly, when Pierce rallied
him about the theory. “It is only the proof that is, of course, a
trifle technical. Put in a very crude and popular shape, it depends on
the mathematical formula for the inversion of the sphere.”
“What we call turning the world upside-down,” said Pierce. “I’m all in
favour of it.”
“Everyone knows the idea of relativity applied to motion,” went on the
professor. “When you run out of a village in a motor-car, you might say
that the village runs away from you.”
“The village does run away when Pierce is out motoring,” remarked
Crane. “Anyhow, the villagers do. But he generally prefers to frighten
them with an aeroplane.”
“Indeed?” said the astronomer with some interest. “An aeroplane
would make an even better working model. Compare the movement of an
aeroplane with what we call merely for convenience the fixity of the
fixed stars.”
“I dare say they got a bit unfixed when Pierce bumped into them,” said
the Colonel.
Professor Green sighed in a sad but patient spirit. He could not help
being a little disappointed even with the most intelligent outsiders
with whom he conversed. Their remarks were pointed but hardly to the
point. He felt more and more that he really preferred those who made
no remarks. The flowers and the trees made no remarks; they stood in
rows and allowed him to lecture to them for hours on the fallacies of
accepted astronomy. The cow made no remarks. The girl who milked the
cow made no remarks; or, if she did, they were pleasant and kindly
remarks, not intended to be clever. He drifted, as he had done many
times before, in the direction of the cow.
The young woman who milked the cow was not in the common connotation
what is meant by milkmaid. Margery Dale was the daughter of a
substantial farmer already respected in that county. She had been to
school and learnt various polite things before she came back to the
farm and continued to do the thousand things that she could have taught
the schoolmasters. And something of this proportion or disproportion
of knowledge was dawning on Professor Green, as he stood staring at
the cow and talking, often in a sort of soliloquy. For he had a rather
similar sensation of a great many other things growing up thickly like
a jungle round his own particular being; impressions and implications
from all the girl’s easy actions and varied avocations. Perhaps he
began to have a dim suspicion that he was the schoolmaster who was
being taught.
The earth and the sky were already beginning to be enriched with
evening; the blue was already almost a glow like apple-green behind the
line of branching apple trees; against it the bulk of the farm stood in
a darker outline, and for the first time he realized something quaint
or queer added to that outline by his own big telescope stuck up like a
gun pointed at the moon. Somehow it looked, he could not tell why, like
the beginning of a story. The hollyhocks also looked incredibly tall.
To see what he would have called “flowers” so tall as that seemed like
seeing a daisy or a dandelion as large as a lamp-post. He was positive
there was nothing exactly like it in Bloomsbury. These tall flowers
also looked like the beginning of a story--the story of Jack and the
Beanstalk. Though he knew little enough of what influences were slowly
sinking into him, he felt something apt in the last memory. Whatever
was moving within him was something very far back, something that came
before reading and writing. He had some dream, as from a previous
life, of dark streaks of field under stormy clouds of summer and the
sense that the flowers to be found there were things like gems. He was
in that country home that every cockney child feels he has always had
and never visited.
“I have to read my paper to-night,” he said abruptly. “I really ought
to be thinking about it.”
“I do hope it will be a success,” said the girl; “but I rather thought
you were always thinking about it.”
“Well, I was--generally,” he said in a rather dazed fashion; and indeed
it was probably the first time that he had ever found himself fully
conscious of not thinking about it. Of what he was thinking about he
was by no means fully conscious.
“I suppose you have to be awfully clever even to understand it,”
observed Margery Dale conversationally.
“I don’t know,” he said, slightly stirred to the defensive. “I’m sure I
could make you see--I don’t mean you aren’t clever, of course; I mean
I’m quite sure you’re clever enough to see--to see anything.”
“Only some sorts of things, I’m afraid,” she said, smiling. “I’m sure
your theory has got nothing to do with cows and milking-stools.”
“It’s got to do with anything,” he said eagerly; “with everything,
in fact. It would be just as easy to prove it from stools and cows
as anything else. It’s really quite simple. Reversing the usual
mathematical formula, it’s possible to reach the same results in
reality by treating motion as a fixed point and stability as a form of
motion. You were told that the earth goes round the sun and the moon
goes round the earth. Well, in my formula, we first treat it as if the
sun went round the earth----”
She looked up radiantly. “I always _thought_ it looked like that,” she
said emphatically.
“And you will, of course, see for yourself,” he continued triumphantly,
“that by the same logical inversion we must suppose the earth to be
going round the moon.”
The radiant face showed a shadow of doubt and she said “Oh!”
“But any of the things you mention, the milking-stool or the cow
or what not, would serve the same purpose, since they are objects
generally regarded as stationary.”
He looked up vaguely at the moon which was steadily brightening as vast
shadows spread over the sky.
“Well, take those things you talk of,” he went on, moved by a
meaningless unrest and tremor. “You see the moon rise behind the woods
over there and sweep in a great curve through the sky and seem to set
again beyond the hill. But it would be just as easy to preserve the
same mathematical relations by regarding the moon as the centre of the
circle and the curve described by some such object as the cow----”
She threw her head back and looked at him, with eyes blazing with
laughter that was not in any way mockery, but a childish delight at the
crowning coincidence of a fairy-tale.
“Splendid!” she cried. “So the cow really does jump over the moon!”
Green put up his hand to his hair; and after a short silence said
suddenly, like a man recalling a recondite Greek quotation:
“Why, I’ve heard that somewhere. There was something else--‘The little
dog laughed----’”
Then something happened, which was in the world of ideas much more
dramatic than the fact that the little dog laughed. The professor of
astronomy laughed. If the world of things had corresponded to the world
of ideas, the leaves of the apple tree might have curled up in fear
or the birds dropped out of the sky. It was rather as if the cow had
laughed.
Following on that curt and uncouth noise was a silence; and then
the hand he had raised to his head abruptly rent off his big blue
spectacles and showed his staring blue eyes. He looked boyish and even
babyish.
“I wondered whether you always wore them,” she said. “I should think
they made that moon of yours look blue. Isn’t there a proverb or
something about a thing happening once in a blue moon?”
He threw the great goggles on the ground and broke them.
“Good gracious,” she exclaimed, “you seem to have taken quite a
dislike to them all of a sudden. I thought you were going to wear them
till--well, till all is blue, as they say.”
He shook his head. “All is beautiful,” he said. “You are beautiful.”
The young woman was normally very lucid and decisive in dealing with
gentlemen who made remarks of that kind, especially when she concluded
that the gentlemen were not gentlemen. But for some reason in this case
it never occurred to her that she needed defence; possibly because
the other party seemed more defenceless than indefensible. She said
nothing. But the other party said a great deal, and his remarks did not
grow more rational. At that moment, far away in their inn-parlour in
the neighbouring town, Hood and Crane and the fellowship of the Long
Bow were actually discussing with considerable interest the meaning and
possibilities of the new astronomical theory. In Bath the lecture-hall
was being prepared for the exposition of the theory. The theorist had
forgotten all about it.
“I have been thinking a good deal,” Hilary Pierce was saying, “about
that astronomical fellow who is going to lecture in Bath to-night. It
seemed to me somehow that he was a kindred spirit and that sooner or
later we were bound to get mixed up with him--or he was bound to get
mixed up with us. I don’t say it’s always very comfortable to get mixed
up with us. I feel in my bones that there is going to be a big row
soon. I feel as if I’d consulted an astrologer; as if Green were the
Merlin of our Round Table. Anyhow, the astrologer has an interesting
astronomical theory.”
“Why?” inquired Wilding White with some surprise. “What have you got to
do with his theory?”
“Because,” answered the young man, “I understand his astronomical
theory a good deal better than he thinks I do. And, let me tell you,
his astronomical theory is an astronomical allegory.”
“An allegory?” repeated Crane. “What of?”
“An allegory of us,” said Pierce; “and, as with many an allegory, we’ve
acted it without knowing it. I realized something about our history,
when he was talking, that I don’t think I’d ever thought of before.”
“What in the world are you talking about?” demanded the Colonel.
“His theory,” said Pierce in a meditative manner, “has got something to
do with moving objects being really stationary, and stationary objects
being really moving. Well, you always talk of me as if I were a moving
object.”
“Heartbreaking object sometimes,” assented the Colonel with cordial
encouragement.
“I mean,” continued Pierce calmly, “that you talk of me as if I were
always motoring too fast or flying too far. And what you say of me is
pretty much what most people say of you. Most sane people think we all
go a jolly lot too far. They think we’re a lot of lunatics out-running
the constable or looping the loop, and always up to some new nonsense.
But when you come to think of it, it’s we who always stay where we
are, and the rest of the world that’s always moving and shifting and
changing.”
“Yes,” said Owen Hood; “I begin to have some dim idea of what you are
talking about.”
“In all our little adventures,” went on the other, “we have all of us
taken up some definite position and stuck to it, however difficult
it might be; that was the whole fun of it. But our critics did not
stick to their own position--not even to their own conventional or
conservative position. In each one of the stories it was they who
were fickle, and we who were fixed. When the Colonel said he would
eat his hat, he did it; when he found it meant wearing a preposterous
hat, he wore it. But his neighbours didn’t even stick to their own
conviction that the hat was preposterous. Fashion is too fluctuating
and sensitive a thing; and before the end, half of them were wondering
whether they oughtn’t to have hats of the same sort. In that affair of
the Thames factory, Hood admired the old landscape and Hunter admired
the old landlords. But Hunter didn’t go on admiring the old landlords;
he deserted to the new landlords as soon as they got the land. His
conservatism was too snobbish to conserve anything. I wanted to import
pigs, and I went on importing pigs, though my methods of smuggling
might land me to a mad-house. But Enoch Oates, the millionaire, didn’t
go on importing pork; he went off at once on some new stunt, first on
the booming of his purses, and afterwards on the admirable stunt of
starting English farms. The business mind isn’t steadfast; even when it
can be turned the right way, it’s too easy to turn. And everything has
been like that, down to the little botheration about the elephant. The
police began to prosecute Mr. White, but they soon dropped it when Hood
showed them that he had some backing. Don’t you see that’s the moral
of the whole thing? The modern world is materialistic, but it isn’t
solid. It isn’t hard or stern or ruthless in pursuit of its purpose, or
all the things that the newspapers and novels say it is; and sometimes
actually praise it for being. Materialism isn’t like stone; it’s like
mud, and liquid mud at that.”
“There’s something in what you say,” said Owen Hood, “and I should be
inclined to add something to it. On a rough reckoning of the chances in
modern England, I should say the situation is something like this. In
that dubious and wavering atmosphere it is very unlikely there would
ever be a revolution, or any very vital reform. But if there were, I
believe on my soul that it might be successful. I believe everything
else would be too weak and wobbly to stand up against it.”
“I suppose that means,” said the Colonel, “that you’re going to do
something silly.”
“Silliest thing I can think of,” replied Pierce cheerfully. “I’m going
to an astronomical lecture.”
The degree of silliness involved in the experiment can be most
compactly and clearly stated in the newspaper report, at which the
friends of the experimentalists found themselves gazing with more than
their usual bewilderment on the following morning. The Colonel, sitting
at his club with his favourite daily paper spread out before him, was
regarding with a grave wonder a paragraph that began with the following
head-lines:
“AMAZING SCENE AT SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS
“LECTURER GOES MAD AND ESCAPES