meeting of the Astronomical Society now holding its congress at Bath.
Professor Oliver Green, one of the most promising of the younger
astronomers, was set down in the syllabus to deliver a lecture on
‘Relativity in Relation to Planetary Motion.’ About an hour before
the lecture, however, the authorities received a telegram from
Professor Green, altering the subject of his address on the ground
that he had just discovered a new star, and wished immediately to
communicate his discovery to the scientific world. Great excitement
and keen anticipation prevailed at the meeting, but these feelings
changed to bewilderment as the lecture proceeded. The lecturer
announced without hesitation the existence of a new planet attached
to one of the fixed stars, but proceeded to describe its geological
formation and other features with a fantastic exactitude beyond
anything yet obtained by way of the spectrum or the telescope. He was
understood to say that it produced life in an extravagant form, in
towering objects which constantly doubled or divided themselves until
they ended in flat filaments, or tongues of a bright green colour. He
was proceeding to give a still more improbable description of a more
mobile but equally monstrous form of life, resting on four trunks
or columns which swung in rotation, and terminating in some curious
curved appendages, when a young man in the front row, whose demeanour
had shown an increasing levity, called out abruptly: ‘Why, that’s
a cow!’ To this the professor, abandoning abruptly all pretence of
scientific dignity, replied by shouting in a voice like thunder:
‘Yes, of course it’s a cow; and you fellows would never have noticed
a cow, even if she jumped over the moon!’ The unfortunate professor
then began to rave in the most incoherent manner, throwing his arms
about and shouting aloud that he and his fellow-scientists were all a
pack of noodles who had never looked at the world they were walking
on, which contained the most miraculous things. But the latter
part of his remarks, which appeared to be an entirely irrelevant
outburst in praise of the beauty of Woman, were interrupted by the
Chairman and the officials of the Congress, who called for medical
and constabulary interference. No less a person than Sir Horace
Hunter, who, although best known as a psycho-physiologist, has taken
all knowledge for his province and was present to show his interest
in astronomical progress, was able to certify on the spot that the
unfortunate Green was clearly suffering from dementia, which was
immediately corroborated by a local doctor, so that the unhappy man
might be removed without further scandal.
“At this point, however, a still more extraordinary development
took place. The young man in the front row, who had several times
interrupted the proceedings with irrelevant remarks, sprang to his
feet, and loudly declaring that Professor Green was the only sane
man in the Congress, rushed at the group surrounding him, violently
hurled Sir Horace Hunter from the platform, and with the assistance
of a friend and fellow-rioter, managed to recapture the lunatic from
the doctors and the police, and carry him outside the building.
Those pursuing the fugitives found themselves at first confronted
with a new mystery, in the form of their complete disappearance. It
has since been discovered that they actually escaped by aeroplane;
the young man, whose name is said to be Pierce, being a well-known
aviator formerly connected with the Flying Corps. The other
young man, who assisted him and acted as pilot, has not yet been
identified.”
Night closed and the stars stood out over Dale’s Farm; and the
telescope pointed at the stars in vain. Its giant lenses had vainly
mirrored the moon of which its owner had spoken in so vain a fashion;
but its owner did not return. Miss Dale was rather unaccountably
troubled by his absence, and mentioned it once or twice; after all, as
her family said, it was very natural that he should go to an hotel in
Bath for the night, especially if the revels of roystering astronomers
were long and late. “It’s no affair of ours,” said the farmer’s wife
cheerfully. “He is not a child.” But the farmer’s daughter was not
quite so sure on the point.
* * * * *
Next morning she rose even earlier than usual and went about her
ordinary tasks, which by some accident or other seemed to look more
ordinary than usual. In the blank morning hours, it was perhaps natural
that her mind should go back to the previous afternoon, when the
conduct of the astronomer could by no means be dismissed as ordinary.
“It’s all very well to say he’s not a child,” she said to herself.
“I wish I were as certain he’s not an idiot. If he goes to an hotel,
they’ll cheat him.”
The more angular and prosaic her own surroundings seemed in the
daylight, the more doubt she felt about the probable fate of the
moonstruck gentleman who looked at a blue moon through his blue
spectacles. She wondered whether his family or his friends were
generally responsible for his movements; for really he must be a
little dotty. She had never heard him talk about his family; and she
remembered a good many things he had talked about. She had never even
seen him talking to a friend, except once to Captain Pierce, when they
talked about astronomy. But the name of Captain Pierce linked itself up
rapidly with other and more relevant suggestions. Captain Pierce lived
at the Blue Boar on the other side of the down, having been married a
year or two before to the daughter of the innkeeper, who was an old
friend of the daughter of the farmer. They had been to the same school
in the neighbouring provincial town, and had once been, as the phrase
goes, inseparable. Perhaps friends ought to pass through the phase in
which they are inseparable to reach the phase in which they can safely
be separated.
“Joan might know something about it,” she said to herself. “At least
her husband might know.”
She turned back into the kitchen and began to rout things out for
breakfast; when she had done everything she could think of doing for
a family that had not yet put in an appearance, she went out again
into the garden and found herself at the same gate, staring at the
steep wooded hill that lay between the farm and the valley of the Blue
Boar. She thought of harnessing the pony; and then went walking rather
restlessly along the road over the hill.
On the map it was only a few miles to the Blue Boar; and she was easily
capable of walking ten times the distance. But maps, like many other
scientific documents, are very inaccurate. The ridge that ran between
the two valleys was, relatively to that rolling plain, as definite as
a range of mountains. The path through the dark wood that lay just
beyond the farm began like a lane and then seemed to go up like a
ladder. By the time she had scaled it, under its continuous canopy of
low spreading trees, she had the sensation of having walked for a long
time. And when the ascent ended with a gap in the trees and a blank
space of sky, she looked over the edge like one looking into another
world.
* * * * *
Mr. Enoch Oates, in his more expansive moments, had been known to
allude to what he called God’s Great Prairies. Mr. Rosenbaum Low,
having come to London from, or through, Johannesburg, often referred
in his imperialistic speeches to the “illimitable veldt.” But neither
the American prairie nor the African veldt really looks any larger, or
could look any larger, than a wide English vale seen from a low English
hill. Nothing can be more distant than the distance; the horizon or
the line drawn by heaven across the vision of man. Nothing is so
illimitable as that limit. Within our narrow island there is a whole
series of such infinities; as if the island itself could contain seven
seas. As she looked out over that new landscape, the soul seemed to be
slaked and satisfied with immensity and, by a paradox, to be filled
at last with emptiness. All things seemed not only great but growing
in greatness. She could fancy that the tall trees standing up in the
sunlight grew taller while she looked at them. The sun was rising and
it seemed as if the whole world rose with it. Even the dome of heaven
seemed to be lifting slowly; as if the very sky were a skirt drawn up
and disappearing into the altitudes of light.
The vast hollow below her was coloured as variously as a map in an
atlas. Fields of grass or grain or red earth seemed so far away that
they might have been the empires and kingdoms of a world newly created.
But she could already see on the brow of a hill above the pine-woods
the pale scar of the quarry and below it the glittering twist in the
river where stood the inn of the Blue Boar. As she drew nearer and
nearer to it she could see more and more clearly a green triangular
field with tiny black dots, which were little black pigs; and another
smaller dot, which was a child. Something like a wind behind her or
within her, that had driven her over the hills, seemed to sweep all the
long lines of that landslide of a landscape, so that they pointed to
that spot.
As the path dropped to the level and she began to walk by farms and
villages, the storm in her mind began to settle and she recovered the
reasonable prudence with which she had pottered about her own farm.
She even felt some responsibility and embarrassment about troubling
her friend by coming on so vague an errand. But she told herself
convincingly enough that after all she was justified. One would not
normally be alarmed about a strayed lodger as if he were a lion escaped
from a menagerie. But she had after all very good reason for regarding
this lion as rather a fearful wildfowl. His way of talking had been so
eccentric that everybody for miles round would have agreed, if they
had heard him, that he had a tile loose. She was very glad they had
not heard him; but their imaginary opinion fortified her own. They had
a duty in common humanity; they could not let a poor gentleman of
doubtful sanity disappear without further inquiry.
She entered the inn with a firm step and hailed her friend with
something of that hearty cheerfulness that is so unpopular in the early
riser. She was rather younger and by nature rather more exuberant than
Joan; and Joan had already felt the drag and concentration of children.
But Joan had not lost her rather steely sense of humour, and she heard
the main facts of her friend’s difficulty with a vigilant smile.
“We should rather like to know what has happened,” said the visitor
with vague carelessness. “If anything unpleasant had happened, people
might even blame us, when we knew he was like that.”
“Like what?” asked Joan smiling.
“Why, a bit off, I suppose we must say,” answered the other. “The
things he said to me about cows and trees and having found a new star
were really----”
“Well, it’s rather lucky you came to me,” said Joan quietly. “For I
don’t believe you’d have found anybody else on the face of the earth
who knows exactly where he is now.”
“And where is he?”
“Well, he’s not on the face of the earth,” said Joan Hardy.
“You don’t mean he’s--dead?” asked the other in an unnatural voice.
“I mean he’s up in the air,” said Joan, “or, what is often much the
same thing, he is with my husband. Hilary rescued him when they were
just going to nab him, and carried him off in an aeroplane. He says
they’d better hide in the clouds for a bit. You know the way he talks;
of course, they do come down every now and then when it’s safe.”
“Escaped! Nabbed him! Safe!” ejaculated the other young woman with
round eyes. “What in the world does it all mean?”
“Well,” replied her friend, “he seems to have said the same sort of
things that he said to you to a whole roomful of scientific men at
Bath. And, of course, the scientific men all said he was mad; I suppose
that’s what scientific men are for. So they were just going to take him
away to an asylum, when Hilary----”
The farmer’s daughter rose in a glory of rage that might have seemed to
lift the roof, as the great sunrise had seemed to lift the sky.
“Take him away!” she cried. “How dare they talk about such things?
How dare they say he is mad? It’s they who must be mad to say such
stuff! Why, he’s got more brains in his boots than they have in all
their silly old bald heads knocked together--and I’d like to knock ’em
together! Why, they’d all smash like egg-shells, and he’s got a head
like cast-iron. Don’t you know he’s beaten all the old duffers at their
own business, of stars and things? I expect they’re all jealous; it’s
just what I should have expected of them.”
The fact that she was entirely unacquainted with the names, and
possibly the existence, of these natural philosophers did not arrest
the vigorous word-painting with which she completed their portraits.
“Nasty spiteful old men with whiskers,” she said, “all bunched together
like so many spiders and weaving dirty cobwebs to catch their betters;
of course, it’s all a conspiracy. Just because they’re all mad and hate
anybody who’s quite sane.”
“So you think he’s quite sane?” asked her hostess gravely.
“Sane? What do you mean? Of course he’s quite sane,” retorted Margery
Dale.
With a mountainous magnanimity Joan was silent. Then after a pause she
said:
“Well, Hilary has taken his case in hand and your friend’s safe for
the present; Hilary generally brings things off, however queer they
sound. And I don’t mind telling you in confidence that he’s bringing
that and a good many other things off, rather big things, just now. You
can’t keep him from fighting whatever you do; and he seems to be out
just now to fight everybody. So I shouldn’t wonder if you saw all your
old gentleman’s heads knocked together after all. There are rather big
preparations going on; that friend of his named Blair is for ever going
and coming with his balloons and things; and I believe something will
happen soon on a pretty large scale, perhaps all over England.”
“Will it?” asked Miss Dale in an absent-minded manner (for she was
sadly deficient in civic and political sense). “Is that your Tommy out
there?”
And they talked about the child and then about a hundred entirely
trivial things; for they understood each other perfectly.
And if there are still things the reader fails to understand, if (as
seems almost incredible) there are things that he wishes to understand,
then it can only be at the heavy price of studying the story of the
Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair; and with that, it is
comforting to know, the story of all these things will be drawing near
its explanation and its end.
VII
THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR
VII
THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR
The Earl of Eden had become Prime Minister for the third time, and
his face and figure were therefore familiar in the political cartoons
and even in the public streets. His yellow hair and lean and springy
figure gave him a factitious air of youth; but his face on a closer
study looked lined and wrinkled and gave almost a shock of decrepitude.
He was in truth a man of great experience and dexterity in his own
profession. He had just succeeded in routing the Socialist Party
and overthrowing the Socialist Government, largely by the use of
certain rhymed mottoes and maxims which he had himself invented with
considerable amusement. His great slogan of “Don’t Nationalize but
Rationalize” was generally believed to have led him to victory. But at
the moment when this story begins he had other things to think of. He
had just received an urgent request for a consultation from three of
his most prominent supporters--Lord Normantowers, Sir Horace Hunter,
O.B.E., the great advocate of scientific politics, and Mr. R. Low, the
philanthropist. They were confronted with a problem, and their problem
concerned the sudden madness of an American millionaire.
The Prime Minister was not unacquainted with American millionaires,
even those whose conduct suggested that they were hardly representative
of a normal or national type. There was the great Grigg, the
millionaire inventor, who had pressed upon the War Office a scheme
for finishing the War at a blow; it consisted of electrocuting the
Kaiser by wireless telegraphy. There was Mr. Napper, of Nebraska, whose
negotiations for removing Shakespeare’s Cliff to America as a symbol of
Anglo-Saxon unity were unaccountably frustrated by the firm refusal of
the American Republic to send us Plymouth Rock in exchange. And there
was that charming and cultured Bostonian, Colonel Hoopoe, whom all
England welcomed in his crusade for Purity and the League of the Lily,
until England discovered with considerable surprise that the American
Ambassador and all respectable Americans flatly refused to meet the
Colonel, whose record at home was that of a very narrow escape from
Sing-Sing.
But the problem of Enoch Oates, who had made his money in pork, was
something profoundly different. As Lord Eden’s three supporters eagerly
explained to him, seated round a garden-table at his beautiful country
seat in Somerset, Mr. Oates had done something that the maddest
millionaire had never thought of doing before. Up to a certain point
he had proceeded in a manner normal to such a foreigner. He had
purchased amid general approval an estate covering about a quarter of
a county; and it was expected that he would make it a field for some
of those American experiments in temperance or eugenics for which the
English agricultural populace offer a sort of virgin soil. Instead
of that, he suddenly went mad and made a present of his land to his
tenants; so that by an unprecedented anomaly the farms became the
property of the farmers. That an American millionaire should take
away English things from England, English rents, English relics,
English pictures, English cathedrals or cliffs of Dover, was a natural
operation to which everybody was by this time accustomed. But that an
American millionaire should give English land to English people was an
unwarrantable interference and tantamount to an alien enemy stirring up
revolution. Enoch Oates had therefore been summoned to the Council, and
sat scowling at the table as if he were in the dock.
“Results most deplorable already,” said Sir Horace Hunter, in his
rather loud voice. “Give you an example, my lord; people of the name
of Dale in Somerset took in a lunatic as a lodger. May have been a
homicidal maniac for all I know; some do say he had a great cannon or
culverin sticking out of his bedroom window. But with no responsible
management of the estate, no landlord, no lawyer, no educated person
anywhere, there was nothing to prevent their letting the bedroom to a
Bengal tiger. Anyhow, the man was mad, rushed raving on to the platform
at the Astronomical Congress talking about Lovely Woman and the cow
that jumped over the moon. That damned agitator Pierce, who used to be
in the Flying Corps, was in the hall, and made a riot and carried the
crazy fellow off in an aeroplane. That’s the sort of thing you’ll have
happening all over the place if these ignorant fellows are allowed to
do just as they like.”
“It is quite true,” said Lord Normantowers. “I could give many other
examples. They say that Owen Hood, another of these eccentrics, has
actually bought one of these little farms and stuck it all round with
absurd battlements and a moat and drawbridge, with the motto ‘The
Englishman’s House is his Castle.’”
“I think,” said the Prime Minister quietly, “that however English
the Englishman may be, he will find his castle is a castle in Spain;
not to say a castle in the air. Mr. Oates,” he said, addressing very
courteously the big brooding American at the other end of the table,
“please do not imagine that I cannot sympathize with such romances,
although they are only in the air. But I think in all sincerity that
you will find they are unsuited to the English climate. _Et ego in
Arcadia_, you know; we have all had such dreams of all men piping in
Arcady. But after all, you have already paid the piper; and if you are
wise, I think you can still call the tune.”
“Gives me great gratification to say it’s too late,” growled Oates. “I
want them to learn to play and pay for themselves.”
“But you want them to learn,” said Lord Eden gently, “and I should not
be in too much of a hurry to call it too late. It seems to me that the
door is still open for a reasonable compromise; I understand that the
deed of gift, considered as a legal instrument, is still the subject of
some legal discussion and may well be subject to revision. I happened
to be talking of it yesterday with the law officers of the Crown; and I
am sure that the least hint that you yourself----”
“I take it you mean,” said Mr. Oates with great deliberation, “that
you’ll tell your lawyers it’ll pay them to pick a hole in the deal.”
“That is what we call the bluff Western humour,” said Lord Eden,
smiling, “but I only mean that we do a great deal in this country by
reconsideration and revision. We make mistakes and unmake them. We have
a phrase for it in our history books; we call it the flexibility of an
unwritten constitution.”
“We have a phrase for it too,” said the American reflectively. “We call
it graft.”
“Really,” cried Normantowers, a little bristly man, with sudden
shrillness, “I did not know you were so scrupulous in your own methods.”
“Motht unthcrupulouth,” said Mr. Low virtuously.
Enoch Oates rose slowly like an enormous leviathan rising to the
surface of the sea; his large sallow face had never changed in
expression; but he had the air of one drifting dreamily away.
“Wal,” he said, “I dare say it’s true I’ve done some graft in my time,
and a good many deals that weren’t what you might call modelled on the
Sermon on the Mount. But if I smashed people, it was when they were
all out to smash me; and if some of ’em were poor, they were the sort
that were ready to shoot or knife or blow me to bits. And I tell you,
in my country the whole lot of you would be liable to be lynched or
tarred and feathered to-morrow, if you talked about lawyers taking away
people’s land when once they’d got it. Maybe the English climate’s
different, as you say; but I’m going to see it through. As for you, Mr.
Rosenbaum----”
“My name is Low,” said the philanthropist. “I cannot thee why anyone
should object to uthing my name.”
“Not on your life,” said Mr. Oates affably. “Seems to me a pretty
appropriate name.”
He drifted heavily from the room, and the four other men were left,
staring at a riddle.
“He’s going on with it, or, rather, they’re going on with it,” groaned
Horace Hunter. “And what the devil is to be done now?”
“It really looks as if he were right in calling it too late,” said Lord
Normantowers bitterly. “I can’t think of anything to be done.”
“I can,” said the Prime Minister. They all looked at him; but none of
them could read the undecipherable subtleties in his old and wrinkled
face under his youthful yellow hair.
“The resources of civilization are not exhausted,” he said grimly.
“That’s what the old governments used to say when they started shooting
people. Well, I could understand you gentlemen feeling inclined to
shoot people now. I suppose it seems to you that all your power in
the State, which you wield with such public spirit of course; all Sir
Horace’s health reforms, the Normantowers’s new estate, and so on,
are all broken to bits, to rotten little bits of rusticity. What’s to
become of a governing class if it doesn’t hold all the land, eh? Well,
I’ll tell you. I know the next move, and the time has come to take it.”
“But what is it?” demanded Sir Horace.
“The time has come,” said the Prime Minister, “to Nationalize the Land.”
Sir Horace Hunter rose from his chair, opened his mouth, shut it, and
sat down again, all with what he himself might have called a reflex
action.
“But that is Socialism!” cried Lord Normantowers, his eyes standing out
of his head.
“True Socialism, don’t you think?” mused the Prime Minister. “Better
call it True Socialism; just the sort of thing to be remembered at
elections. Theirs is Socialism, and ours is True Socialism.”
“Do you really mean, my lord,” cried Hunter in a heat of sincerity
stronger than the snobbery of a lifetime, “that you are going to
support the Bolshies?”
“No,” said Eden, with the smile of a sphinx. “I mean the Bolshies are
going to support me. Idiots!”
After a silence, he added in a more wistful tone:
“Of course, as a matter of sentiment, it is a little sad. All our fine
old English castles and manors, the homes of the gentry ... they will
become public property, like post offices, I suppose. When I think
of the happy hours I have myself passed at Normantowers--” He smiled
across at the nobleman of that name and went on. “And Sir Horace has
now, I believe, the joy of living in Warbridge Castle--fine old place.
Dear me, yes, and I think Mr. Low has a castle, though the name escapes
me.”
“Rosewood Castle,” said Mr. Low rather sulkily.
“But I say,” cried Sir Horace, rising, “what becomes of ‘Don’t
Nationalize but Rationalize’?”
“I suppose,” replied Eden lightly, “it will have to be ‘Don’t
Rationalize but Nationalize.’ It comes to the same thing. Besides,
we can easily get a new motto of some sort. For instance, we, after
all, are the patriotic party, the national party. What about ‘Let the
Nationalists Nationalize’?”
“Well, all I can say is--” began Normantowers explosively.
“Compensation, there will be compensation, of course,” said the Prime
Minister soothingly; “a great deal can be done with compensation. If
you will all turn up here this day week, say at four o’clock, I think I
can lay all the plans before you.”
When they did turn up next week and were shown again into the Prime
Minister’s sunny garden, they found that the plans were, indeed, laid
before them; for the table that stood on the sunny lawn was covered
with large and small maps and a mass of official documents. Mr. Eustace
Pym, one of the Prime Minister’s numerous private secretaries, was
hovering over them, and the Prime Minister himself was sitting at the
head of the table studying one of them with an intelligent frown.
“I thought you’d like to hear the terms of the arrangements,” he said.
“I’m afraid we must all make sacrifices in the cause of progress.”
“Oh, progress be----” cried Normantowers, losing patience. “I want to
know if you really mean that my estate----”