war,” answered Blair. “If it were really a war in the air, you could
have done it all by yourself. But in all wars of peasants defending
their farms and homes, women have been very much on the spot; as they
used to pour hot water out of the windows during the Irish evictions.
Look here, I’ll tell you a story. It’s relevant because it has a moral.
After all, it’s my turn, so to speak. You’ve told me the true story of
the Cow that Jumped over the Moon. It’s time I told you the true story
of the Castle in the Air.”
He smoked silently for a moment, and then said:
“You may have wondered how a very prosaic practical Scotch engineer
like myself ever came to make a thing like that pantomime palace over
there, as childish as a child’s coloured balloon. Well, the answer is
the same; because in certain circumstances a man may be different from
himself. At a certain period of the old war preparations, I was doing
some work for the government in a secluded part of the western coast
of Ireland. There were very few people for me to talk to; but one of
them was the daughter of a bankrupt squire named Malone; and I talked
to her a good deal. I was about as mechanical a mechanic as you could
dig out anywhere; grimy, grumpy, tinkering about with dirty machinery.
She was really like those princesses you read about in the Celtic
poems; with a red crown made of curling elf-locks like little flames,
and a pale elfin face that seemed somehow thin and luminous like
glass; and she could make you listen to silence like a song. It wasn’t
a pose with her, it was a poem; there are people like that, but very
few of them like her. I tried to keep my end up by telling her about
the wonders of science, and the great new architecture of the air. And
then Sheila used to say, ‘And what is the good of them to me, when you
_have_ built them. I can see a castle build itself without hands out of
gigantic rocks of clear jewels in the sky every night.’ And she would
point to where crimson or violet clouds hung in the green afterglow
over the great Atlantic.
“You would probably say I was mad, if you didn’t happen to have been
mad yourself. But I was wild with the idea that there was something
that she admired and that she thought science couldn’t do. I was as
morbid as a boy; I half thought she despised me; and I wanted half to
prove her wrong and half to do whatever she thought right. I resolved
my science should beat the clouds at their own game; and I laboured
till I’d actually made a sort of rainbow castle that would ride on
the air. I think at the back of my mind there was some sort of crazy
idea of carrying her off into the clouds she lived among, as if she
were literally an angel and ought to dwell on wings. It never quite
came to that, as you will hear, but as my experiments progressed my
romance progressed too. You won’t need any telling about that; I only
want to tell you the end of the story because of the moral. We made
arrangements to get married; and I had to leave a good many of the
arrangements to her, while I completed my great work. Then at last
it was ready and I came to seek her like a pagan god descending in a
cloud to carry a nymph up to Olympus. And I found she had already taken
a very solid little brick villa on the edge of a town, having got it
remarkably cheap and furnished it with most modern conveniences. And
when I talked to her about castles in the air, she laughed and said
her castle had come down to the ground. That is the moral. A woman,
especially an Irishwoman, is always uncommonly practical when it comes
to getting married. That is what I mean by saying it is never the cow
who jumps over the moon. It is the cow who stands firmly planted in the
middle of the three acres; and who always counts in any struggle of
the land. That is why there must be women in this story, especially
like those in your story and Pierce’s, women who come from the land.
When the world needs a Crusade for communal ideals, it is best waged by
men without ties, like the Franciscans. But when it comes to a fight
for private property--you can’t keep women out of that. You can’t have
the family farm without the family. You must have concrete Christian
marriage again: you can’t have solid small property with all this
vagabond polygamy: a harem that isn’t even a home.”
Green nodded and rose slowly to his feet, with his hands in his pockets.
“When it comes to a fight,” he said. “When I look at these enormous
underground preparations, it is not difficult to infer that you think
it will come to a fight.”
“I think it has come to a fight,” answered Blair. “Lord Eden has
decided that. And the others may not understand exactly what they are
doing; but he does.”
And Blair knocked out his pipe and stood up, to resume his work in that
mountain laboratory, at about the same time at which Lord Eden awoke
from his smiling meditations; and, lighting a cigarette, went languidly
indoors.
He did not attempt to explain what was in his mind to the men around
him. He was the only man there who understood that the England about
him was not the England that had surrounded his youth and supported
his leisure and luxury; that things were breaking up, first slowly and
then more and more swiftly, and that the things detaching themselves
were both good and evil. And one of them was this bald, broad and
menacing new fact: a peasantry. The class of small farmers already
existed, and might yet be found fighting for its farms like the same
class all over the world. It was no longer certain that the sweeping
social adjustments settled in that garden could be applied to the whole
English land. But the story of how far his doubts were justified,
and how far his whole project fared, is a part of the story of “The
Ultimate Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow,” after which the
exhausted and broken-spirited reader may find rest at last.
VIII
THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM OF THE LEAGUE OF THE LONG BOW
VIII
THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM OF THE LEAGUE OF THE LONG BOW
Mr. Robert Owen Hood came through his library that was lined with brown
leather volumes with a brown paper parcel in his hand; a flippant
person (such as his friend Mr. Pierce) might have said he was in a
brown study. He came out into the sunlight of his garden, however,
where his wife was arranging tea-things, for she was expecting
visitors. Even in the strong daylight he looked strangely little
altered, despite the long and catastrophic period that had passed since
he met her in the Thames Valley and managed really to set the Thames
on fire. That fire had since spread in space and time and become a
conflagration in which much of modern civilization had been consumed;
but in which (as its advocates alleged) English agriculture had been
saved and a new and more hopeful chapter opened in English history.
His angular face was rather more lined and wrinkled, but his straight
shock of copper-coloured hair was as unchanged as if it had been a
copper-coloured wig. His wife Elizabeth was even less marked, for she
was younger; she had the same slightly nervous or short-sighted look
in the eyes that was like a humanizing touch to her beauty made of
ivory and gold. But though she was not old she had always been a little
old-fashioned; for she came of a forgotten aristocracy whose women had
moved with a certain gravity as well as grace about the old country
houses, before coronets were sold like cabbages or the Jews lent money
to the squires. But her husband was old-fashioned too; though he had
just taken part in a successful revolution and bore a revolutionary
name, he also had his prejudices; and one of them was a weakness for
his wife being a lady--especially that lady.
“Owen,” she said, looking up from the tea-table with alarmed severity,
“you’ve been buying more old books.”
“As it happens, these are particularly new books,” he replied; “but I
suppose in one sense it’s all ancient history now.”
“What ancient history?” she asked. “Is it a History of Babylon or
prehistoric China?”
“It is a History of Us.”
“I hope not,” she said; “but what do you mean?”
“I mean it’s a history of Our Revolution,” said Owen Hood, “a true
and authentic account of the late glorious victories, as the old
broadsheets said. The Great War of 1914 started the fashion of bringing
out the history of events almost before they’d happened. There were
standard histories of that war while it was still going on. Our little
civil war is at least finished, thank God; and this is the brand-new
history of it. Written by a rather clever fellow, detached but
understanding and a little ironical on the right side. Above all, he
gives quite a good description of the Battle of the Bows.”
“I shouldn’t call that our history,” said Elizabeth quietly. “I’m
devoutly thankful that nobody can ever write our history or put it in a
book. Do you remember when you jumped into the water after the flowers?
I fancy it was then that you really set the Thames on fire.”
“With my red hair, no doubt,” he replied, “but I don’t think I did set
the Thames on fire. I think it was the Thames that set me on fire. Only
you were always the spirit of the stream and the goddess of the valley.”
“I hope I’m not quite so old as that,” answered Elizabeth.
“Listen to this,” cried her husband, turning over the pages of the
book. “‘According to the general belief, which prevailed until the
recent success of the agrarian movement of the Long Bow, it was
overwhelmingly improbable that a revolutionary change could be effected
in England. The recent success of the agrarian protest----’”
“Do come out of that book,” remonstrated his wife. “One of our visitors
has just arrived.”
The visitor proved to be the Reverend Wilding White, a man who had
also played a prominent part in the recent triumph, a part that was
sometimes highly public and almost pontifical; but in private life he
had always a way of entering with his grey hair brushed or blown the
wrong way and his eagle face eager or indignant; and his conversation
like his correspondence came in a rush and was too explosive to be
explanatory.
“I say,” he cried, “I’ve come to talk to you about that idea, you
know--Enoch Oates wrote about it from America and he’s a jolly good
fellow and all that; but after all he does come from America and so he
thinks it’s quite easy. But you can see for yourself it isn’t quite so
easy, what with Turks and all that. It’s all very well to talk about
the United States----”
“Never you mind about the United States,” said Hood easily; “I think
I’m rather in favour of the Heptarchy. You just listen to this; the
epic of our own Heptarchy, the story of our own dear little domestic
war. ‘The recent success of the agrarian protest----’”
He was interrupted again by the arrival of two more guests; by the
silent entrance of Colonel Crane and the very noisy entrance of Captain
Pierce, who had brought his young wife with him from the country,
for they had established themselves in the ancestral inn of the Blue
Boar. White’s wife was still in the country, and Crane’s having long
been busy in her studio with war-posters, was now equally busy with
peace-posters.
Hood was one of those men whom books almost literally seize and
swallow, like monsters with leather or paper jaws. It was no
exaggeration to say he was deep in a book as an incautious traveller
might be deep in a swamp or some strange man-eating plant of the
tropics; only that the traveller was magnetized and did not even
struggle. He would fall suddenly silent in the middle of a sentence
and go on reading; or he would suddenly begin to read aloud with great
passion, arguing with somebody in the book without any reference to
anybody in the room. Though not normally rude, he would drift through
other people’s drawing-rooms towards other people’s bookshelves and
disappear into them, so to speak, like a rusty family ghost. He would
travel a hundred miles to see a friend for an hour, and then waste half
an hour with his head in some odd volume he never happened to have
seen before. On all that side of him there was a sort of almost creepy
unconsciousness. His wife, who had old-world notions of the graces of a
hostess, sometimes had double work to do.
“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” began Hood cheerfully
as his wife rose swiftly to receive two more visitors. These were
Professor Green and Commander Bellew Blair; for a queer friendship had
long linked together the most practical and the most unpractical of
the brothers of the Long Bow. The friendship, as Pierce remarked, was
firmly rooted in the square root of minus infinity.
“How beautiful your garden is looking,” said Blair to his hostess. “One
so seldom sees flower-beds like that now; but I shall always think the
old gardeners were right.”
“Most things are old-fashioned here, I’m afraid,” replied Elizabeth,
“but I always like them like that. And how are the children?”
“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” remarked her husband in a
clear voice, “is doubtless----”
“Really,” she said, laughing, “you are too ridiculous for anything.
Why in the world should you want to read out the history of the war
to the people who were in it, and know quite well already what really
happened?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Colonel Crane. “Very improper to contradict
a lady, but indeed you are mistaken. The very last thing the soldier
generally knows is what has really happened. Has to look at a newspaper
next morning for the realistic description of what never happened.”
“Why, then you’d better go on reading, Hood,” said Hilary Pierce. “The
Colonel wants to know whether he was killed in battle; or whether there
was any truth in that story that he was hanged as a spy on the very
tree he had climbed when running away as a deserter.”
“Should rather like to know what they make of it all,” said the
Colonel. “After all, we were all too deep in it to see it. I mean see
it as a whole.”
“If Owen once begins he won’t stop for hours,” said the lady.
“Perhaps,” began Blair, “we had better----”
“The recent success of the agrarian protest,” remarked Hood in
authoritative tones, “is doubtless to be attributed largely to the
economic advantage belonging to an agrarian population. It can feed the
town or refuse to feed the town; and this question appeared early in
the politics of the peasantry that had arisen in the western counties.
Nobody will forget the scene at Paddington Station in the first days of
the rebellion. Men who had grown used to seeing on innumerable mornings
the innumerable ranks and rows of great milk-cans, looking leaden in a
grey and greasy light, found themselves faced with a blank, in which
those neglected things shone in the memory like stolen silver. It was
true, as Sir Horace Hunter eagerly pointed out when he was put in
command of the highly hygienic problem of the milk supply, that there
would be no difficulty about manufacturing the metal cans, perhaps
even of an improved pattern, with a rapidity and finish of which the
rustics of Somerset were quite incapable. He had long been of opinion,
the learned doctor explained, that the shape of the cans, especially
the small cans left outside poor houses, left much to be desired,
and the whole process of standing these small objects about in the
basements of private houses was open to grave objection in the matter
of waste of space. The public, however, showed an indifference to this
new issue and a disposition to go back on the old demand for milk; in
which matter, they said, there was an unfair advantage for the man who
possessed a cow over the man who only possessed a can. But the story
that Hunter had rivalled the agrarian slogan by proclaiming the policy
of ‘Three Areas and a Can’ was in all probability a flippant invention
of his enemies.
“These agrarian strikes had already occurred at intervals before they
culminated in the agrarian war. They were the result of the attempt
to enforce on the farmers certain general regulations and precautions
about their daily habit, dress and diet, which Sir Horace Hunter and
Professor Hake had found to be of great advantage in the large State
laboratories for the manufacture of poisons and destructive gases.
There was every reason to believe that the people, especially the
young people, of the village often evaded the regulation about the
gutta-percha masks, and the rule requiring the worker to paint himself
all over with an antiseptic gum: and the sending of inspectors from
London to see that these rules were enforced led to lamentable scenes
of violence. It would be an error, however, to attribute the whole of
this great social convulsion to any local agricultural dispute. The
causes must also be sought in the general state of society, especially
political society. The Earl of Eden was a statesman of great skill
by the old Parliamentary standards, but he was already old when he
launched his final defiance to the peasants in the form of Land
Nationalization; and the General Election which was the result of this
departure fell largely into the hands of his lieutenants like Hunter
and Low. It soon became apparent that some of the illusions of the Eden
epoch had worn rather thin. It was found that the democracy could not
always be intimidated even by the threat of consulting them about the
choice of a Government.
“Nor can it be denied that the General Election of 19-- was from the
first rendered somewhat unreal by certain legal fictions which had long
been spreading. There was a custom, originating in the harmless and
humane deception used upon excited maiden ladies from the provinces,
by which the private secretaries of the Prime Minister would present
themselves as that politician himself; sometimes completing the
innocent illusion by brushing their hair, waxing their moustaches or
wearing their eye-glasses in the manner of their master. When this
custom was extended to public platforms it cannot be denied that it
became more questionable. In the last days of that venerable statesman
it has been asserted that there were no less than five Lloyd Georges
touring the country at the same time, and that the contemporary
Chancellor of the Exchequer had appeared simultaneously in three cities
on the same night, while the original of all these replicas, the
popular and brilliant Chancellor himself, was enjoying a well-earned
rest by the Lake of Como. The incident of the two identical Lord Smiths
appearing side by side on the same platform (through a miscalculation
of the party agents), though received with good-humour and honest
merriment by the audience, did but little good to the serious credit of
parliamentary institutions. There was of course a certain exaggeration
in the suggestion of the satirist that a whole column of identical
Prime Ministers, walking two and two like soldiers, marched out of
Downing Street every morning and distributed themselves to their
various posts like policemen; but such satires were popular and widely
scattered, especially by an active young gentleman who was the author
of most of them--Captain Hilary Pierce, late of the Flying Corps.
“But if this was true of such trifles as a half a dozen of Prime
Ministers, it was even truer and more trying in the practical matter
of party programmes and proposals. The heading of each party programme
with the old promise ‘Every Man a Millionaire’ had of course become
merely formal, like a decorative pattern or border. But it cannot
be denied that the universal use of this phrase, combined with the
equally universal sense of the unfairness of expecting any politician
to carry it out, somewhat weakened the force of words in political
affairs. It would have been well if statesmen had confined themselves
to these accepted and familiar formalities. Unfortunately, under the
stress of the struggle which arose out of the menacing organization
of the League of the Long Bow, they sought to dazzle their followers
with new improbabilities instead of adhering to the tried and trusty
improbabilities that had done them yeoman service in the past.
“Thus it was unwise of Lord Normantowers so far to depart from
the temperance principles of a lifetime as to promise all his
workers a bottle of champagne each at every meal, if they would
consent to complete the provision of munitions for suppressing
the Long Bow rebellion. The great philanthropist unquestionably
had the highest intentions, both in his rash promise and his more
reasonable fulfilment. But when the munition-workers found that the
champagne-bottles, though carefully covered with the most beautiful
gold-foil, contained in fact nothing but hygienically boiled water, the
result was a sudden and sensational strike, which paralysed the whole
output of munitions and led to the first incredible victories of the
League of the Long Bow.
“There followed in consequence one of the most amazing wars of human
history--a one-sided war. One side would have been insignificant if
the other had not been impotent. The minority could not have fought
for long; only the majority could not fight at all. There prevailed
through the whole of the existing organizations of society a universal
distrust that turned them into a dust of disconnected atoms. What was
the use of offering men higher pay when they did not believe they would
ever receive it, but only alluded jeeringly to Lord Normantowers and
his brand of champagne? What was the use of telling every man that he
would have a bonus, when you had told him for twenty years that he
would soon be a millionaire? What was the good of the Prime Minister
pledging his honour in a ringing voice on platform after platform,
when it was already an open jest that it was not the Prime Minister at
all? The Government voted taxes and they were not paid. It mobilized
armies and they did not move. It introduced the pattern of a new
all-pulverizing gun, and nobody would make it and nobody would fire it
off. We all remember the romantic crisis when no less a genius than
Professor Hake came to Sir Horace Hunter, the Minister of Scientific
Social Organization, with a new explosive capable of shattering the
whole geological formation of Europe and sinking these islands in the
Atlantic, but was unable to induce the cabman or any of the clerks to
assist him in lifting it out of the cab.
“Against all this anarchy of broken promises the little organization
of the Long Bow stood solid and loyal and dependable. The Long Bowmen
had become popular by the nickname of the Liars. Everywhere the jest or
catch-word was repeated like a song, ‘Only the Liars Tell the Truth.’
They found more and more men to work and fight for them, because it
was known that they would pay whatever wages they promised, and refuse
to promise anything that they could not perform. The nickname became
an ironical symbol of idealism and dignity. A man was proud of being a
little precise and even pedantic in his accuracy and probity because
he was a Liar. The whole of this strange organization had originated
in certain wild bets or foolish practical jokes indulged in by a small
group of eccentrics. But they had prided themselves on the logical, if
rather literal, fashion in which they had fulfilled certain vows about
white elephants or flying pigs. Hence, when they came to stand for a
policy of peasant proprietorship, and were enabled by the money of an
American crank to establish it in a widespread fashion across the west
of England, they took the more serious task with the same tenacity.
When their foes mocked them with ‘the myth of three acres and a cow,’
they answered: ‘Yes, it is as mythical as the cow that jumped over the
moon. But our myths come true.’