THE INN FINDS WINGS
MR. HUMPHREY PUMP stood in front of his inn once more, the cleaned and
loaded gun still lay on the table, and the white sign of The Ship still
swung in the slight sea breeze over his head; but his leatherish
features were knotted over a new problem. He held two letters in his
hand, letters of a very different sort, but letters that pointed to the
same difficult problem. The first ran:
“DEAR HUMP—
“I’m so bothered that I simply must call you by the old name
again. You understand I’ve got to keep in with my people. Lord
Ivywood is a sort of cousin of mine, and for that and some other
reasons, my poor old mother would just die if I offended him.
You know her heart is weak; you know everything there is to know
in this county. Well, I only write to warn you that something is
going to be done against your dear old inn. I don’t know what
this Country’s coming to. Only a month or two ago I saw a shabby
old pantaloon on the beach with a green gamp, talking the
craziest stuff you ever heard in your life. Three weeks ago I
heard he was lecturing at Ethical Societies—whatever they
are—for a handsome salary. Well, when I was last at Ivywood—I
must go because Mamma likes it—there was the living lunatic
again, in evening dress, and talked about by people who really
_know_. I mean who know better.
“Lord Ivywood is entirely under his influence and thinks him the
greatest prophet the world has ever seen. And Lord Ivywood is
not a fool; one can’t help admiring him. Mamma, I think, wants
me to do more than admire him. I am telling you everything,
Hump, because I think perhaps this is the last honest letter I
shall ever write in the world. And I warn you seriously that
Lord Ivywood is _sincere_, which is perfectly terrible. He will
be the biggest English statesman, and he does really mean to
ruin—the old ships. If ever you see me here again taking part in
such work, I hope you may forgive me.
“Somebody we mentioned, whom I shall never see again, I leave to
your friendship. It is the second best thing I can give, and I
am not sure it may not be better than the first would have been.
Goodbye.
J. B.”
This letter seemed to distress Mr. Pump rather than puzzle him. It ran
as follows:
“SIR—
“The Committee of the Imperial Commission of Liquor Control is
directed to draw your attention to the fact that you have
disregarded the Committee’s communications under section 5A of
the Act for the Regulation of Places of Public Entertainment;
and that you are now under Section 47C of the Act amending the
Act for the Regulation of Places of Public Entertainment
aforesaid. The charges on which prosecution will be founded are
as follows:
(1) Violation of sub-section 23_f_ of the Act, which enacts
that no pictorial signs shall be exhibited before
premises of less than the ratable value of £2000 per
annum.
(2) Violation of sub-section 113_d_ of the Act, which enacts
that no liquor containing alcohol shall be sold in any
inn, hotel, tavern or public-house, except when demanded
under a medical certificate from one of the doctors
licensed by the State Medical Council, or in the
specially excepted cases of Claridge’s Hotel and the
Criterion Bar, where urgency has already been proved.
“As you have failed to acknowledge previous communications on
this subject, this is to warn you that legal steps will be taken
immediately,
“We are yours truly,
IVYWOOD, _President_.
J. LEVESON, _Secretary_.”
Mr. Humphrey Pump sat down at the table outside his inn and whistled in
a way which, combined with his little whiskers made him for the moment
seem literally like an ostler. Then, the very real wit and learning he
had returned slowly into his face and with his warm, brown eyes he
considered the cold, grey sea. There was not much to be got out of the
sea. Humphrey Pump might drown himself in the sea; which would be better
for Humphrey Pump than being finally separated from “The Old Ship.”
England might be sunk under the sea; which would be better for England
than never again having such places as “The Old Ship.” But these were
not serious remedies nor rationally attainable; and Pump could only feel
that the sea had simply warped him as it had warped his apple trees. The
sea was a dreary business altogether. There was only one figure walking
on the sands. It was only when the figure drew nearer and nearer and
grew to more than human size, that he sprang to his feet with a cry.
Also the level light of morning lit the man’s hair, and it was red.
The late King of Ithaca came casually and slowly up the slope of the
beach that led to “The Old Ship.” He had landed in a boat from a
battleship that could still be seen near the horizon, and he still wore
the astounding uniform of apple-green and silver which he had himself
invented as that of a navy that had never existed very much, and which
now did not exist at all. He had a straight naval sword at his side; for
the terms of his capitulation had never required him to surrender it;
and inside the uniform and beside the sword there was what there always
had been, a big and rather bewildered man with rough red hair, whose
misfortune was that he had good brains, but that his bodily strength and
bodily passions were a little too strong for his brains.
He had flung his crashing weight on the chair outside the inn before the
innkeeper could find words to express his astounded pleasure in seeing
him. His first words were “have you got any rum?”
Then, as if feeling that his attitude needed explanation, he added, “I
suppose I shall never be a sailor again after tonight. So I must have
rum.”
Humphrey Pump had a talent for friendship, and understood his old
friend. He went into the inn without a word; and came back idly pushing
or rolling with an alternate foot (as if he were playing football with
two footballs at once) two objects that rolled very easily. One was a
big keg or barrel of rum and the other a great solid drum of a cheese.
Among his thousand other technical tricks he had a way of tapping a cask
without a tap, or anything that could impair its revolutionary or
revolving qualities. He was feeling in his pocket for the instrument
with which he solved such questions, when his Irish friend suddenly sat
bolt upright, as one startled out of sleep, and spoke with his strongest
and most unusual brogue.
“Oh thank ye, Hump, a thousand times; and I don’t think I really want
something to drink at arl. Now I know I can have it, I don’t seem to
want it at arl. But hwhat I do want—” and he suddenly dashed his big
fist on the little table so that one of its legs leapt and nearly
snapped—“hwhat I do want is some sort of account of what’s happening in
this England of yours that shan’t be just obviously rubbish.”
“Ah,” said Pump, fingering the two letters thoughtfully. “And what do
you mean by rubbish?”
“I carl it rubbish” cried Patrick Dalroy, “when ye put the Koran into
the Bible and not the Apocrypha; and I carl it rubbish when a mad
parson’s allowed to propose to put a crescent on St. Paul’s Cathedral. I
know the Turks are our allies now, but they often were before, and I
never heard that Palmerston or Colin Campbell had any truck with such
trash.”
“Lord Ivywood is very enthusiastic, I know,” said Pump, with a
restrained amusement. “He was saying only the other day at the Flower
Show here that the time had come for a full unity between Christianity
and Islam.”
“Something called Chrislam perhaps,” said the Irishman, with a moody
eye. He was gazing across the grey and purple woodlands that stretched
below them at the back of the inn; and into which the steep, white road
swept downwards and disappeared. The steep road looked like the
beginning of an adventure; and he was an adventurer.
“But you exaggerate, you know,” went on Pump, polishing his gun, “about
the crescent on St. Paul’s. It wasn’t exactly that. What Dr. Moole
suggested, I think, was some sort of double emblem, you know, combining
cross and crescent.”
“And called the Crescent,” muttered Dalroy.
“And you can’t call Dr. Moole a parson either,” went on Mr. Humphrey
Pump, polishing industriously. “Why, they say he’s a sort of atheist, or
what they call an agnostic, like Squire Brunton who used to bite elm
trees by Marley. The grand folks have these fashions, Captain, but
they’ve never lasted long that I know of.”
“I think it’s serious this time,” said his friend, shaking his big red
head. “This is the last inn on this coast, and will soon be the last inn
in England. Do you remember the ‘Saracen’s Head’ in Plumsea, along the
shore there?”
“I know,” assented the innkeeper. “My aunt was there when he hanged his
mother; but it’s a charming place.”
“I passed there just now; and it has been destroyed,” said Dalroy.
“Destroyed by fire?” asked Pump, pausing in his gun-scrubbing.
“No,” said Dalroy, “destroyed by lemonade. They’ve taken away its
license or whatever you call it. I made a song about it, which I’ll sing
to you now!” And with an astounding air of suddenly revived spirits, he
roared in a voice like thunder the following verses, to a simple but
spirited tune of his own invention:
“The Saracen’s Head looks down the lane,
Where we shall never drink wine again;
For the wicked old Women who feel well-bred
Have turned to a tea-shop the Saracen’s Head.
“The Saracen’s Head out of Araby came,
King Richard riding in arms like flame,
And where he established his folk to be fed
He set up his spear—and the Saracen’s Head.
“But the Saracen’s Head outlived the Kings,
It thought and it thought of most horrible things;
Of Health and of Soap and of Standard Bread,
And of Saracen drinks at the Saracen’s Head.”
“Hullo!” cried Pump, with another low whistle. “Why here comes his
lordship. And I suppose that young man in the goggles is a Committee or
something.”
“Let him come,” said Dalroy, and continued in a yet more earthquake
bellow:
“So the Saracen’s Head fulfils its name,
They drink no wine—a ridiculous game—
And I shall wonder until I’m dead,
How it ever came into the Saracen’s Head.”
As the last echo of this lyrical roar rolled away among the apple-trees,
and down the steep, white road into the woods, Captain Dalroy leaned
back in his chair and nodded good humouredly to Lord Ivywood, who was
standing on the lawn with his usual cold air, but with slightly
compressed lips. Behind him was a dark young man with double eyeglasses
and a number of printed papers in his hand; presumably J. Leveson,
Secretary. In the road outside stood a group of three which struck Pump
as strangely incongruous, like a group in a three act farce. The first
was a police inspector in uniform; the second was a workman in a leather
apron, more or less like a carpenter, and the third was an old man in a
scarlet Turkish fez, but otherwise dressed in very fashionable English
clothes in which he did not seem very comfortable. He was explaining
something about the inn to the policeman and the carpenter, who appeared
to be restraining their amusement.
“Fine song that, my lord,” said Dalroy, with cheerful egotism. “I’ll
sing you another,” and he cleared his throat.
“Mr. Pump,” said Lord Ivywood, in his bell-like and beautiful voice, “I
thought I would come in person, if only to make it clear that every
indulgence has been shown you. The mere date of this inn brings it
within the statute of 1909; it was erected when my great grandfather was
Lord of the Manor here, though I believe it then bore a different name,
and——”
“Ah, my lord,” broke in Pump with a sigh, “I’d rather deal with your
great grandfather, I would, though he married a hundred negresses
instead of one, than see a gentleman of your family taking away a poor
man’s livelihood.”
“The act is specially designed in the interests of the relief of
poverty,” proceeded Lord Ivywood, in an unruffled manner, “and its final
advantages will accrue to all citizens alike.” He turned for an instant
to the dark secretary, saying, “You have that second report?” and
received a folded paper in answer.
“It is here fully explained,” said Lord Ivywood, putting on his elderly
eyeglasses, “that the purpose of the Act is largely to protect the
savings of the more humble and necessitous classes. I find in paragraph
three, ‘we strongly advise that the deleterious element of alcohol be
made illegal save in such few places as the Government may specially
exempt for Parliamentary or other public reasons, and that the
provocative and demoralising display on inn signs be strictly forbidden
except in the cases thus specially exempted: the absence of such
temptations will, in our opinion, do much to improve the precarious
financial conditions of the working class.’ That disposes, I think, of
any such suggestion as Mr. Pump’s, that our inevitable acts of social
reform are in any sense oppressive. To Mr. Pump’s prejudice it may
appear for the moment to bear hardly upon him; but” (and here Lord
Ivywood’s voice took one of its moving oratorical turns), “what better
proof could we desire of the insidiousness of the sleepy poison we
denounce, what better evidence could we offer of the civic corruption
that we seek to cure, than the very fact that good and worthy men of
established repute in the county can, by living in such places as these,
become so stagnant and sodden and unsocial, whether through the fumes of
wine or through meditations as maudlin about the past, that they
consider the case solely as their own case, and laugh at the long agony
of the poor.”
Captain Dalroy had been studying Ivywood with a very bright blue eye;
and he spoke now much more quietly than he generally did.
“Excuse me one moment, my lord,” he said. “But there was one point in
your important explanation which I am not sure I have got right. Do I
understand you to say that, though sign-boards are to be generally
abolished, yet where, if anywhere, they are retained, the right to sell
fermented liquor will be retained also? In other words, though an
Englishman may at last find only one inn-sign left in England, yet if
the place has an inn-sign, it will also have your gracious permission to
be really an inn?”
Lord Ivywood had an admirable command of temper, which had helped him
much in his career as a statesman. He did not waste time in wrangling
about the Captain’s _locus standi_ in the matter. He replied quite
simply,
“Yes, Your statement of the facts is correct.”
“Whenever I find an inn-sign permitted by the police, I may go in and
ask for a glass of beer—also permitted by the police.”
“If you find any such, yes,” answered Ivywood, quite temperately. “But
we hope soon to have removed them altogether.”
Captain Patrick Dalroy rose enormously from his seat with a sort of
stretch and yawn.
“Well, Hump,” he said to his friend, “the best thing, it seems to me, is
to take the important things with us.”
With two sight-staggering kicks he sent the keg of rum and the round
cheese flying over the fence, in such a direction that they bounded on
the descending road and rolled more and more rapidly down toward the
dark woods into which the path disappeared. Then he gripped the pole of
the inn-sign, shook it twice and plucked it out of the turf like a tuft
of grass.
It had all happened before anyone could move, but as he strode out into
the road the policeman ran forward. Dalroy smote him flat across face
and chest with the wooden sign-board, so as to send him flying into the
ditch on the other side of the road. Then turning on the man in the fez
he poked him with the end of the pole so sharply in his new white
waistcoat and watch-chain as to cause him to sit down suddenly in the
road, looking very serious and thoughtful.
The dark secretary made a movement of rescue, but Humphrey Pump, with a
cry, caught up his gun from the table and pointed it at him, which so
alarmed J. Leveson, Secretary, as to cause him almost to double up with
his emotions. The next moment Pump, with his gun under his arm, was
scampering down the hill after the Captain, who was scampering after the
barrel and the cheese.
Before the policeman had struggled out of the ditch, they had all
disappeared into the darkness of the forest. Lord Ivywood who had
remained firm through the scene, without a sign of fear or impatience
(or, I will add, amusement), held up his hand and stopped the policeman
in his pursuit.
“We should only make ourselves and the law ridiculous,” he said, “by
pursuing those ludicrous rowdies now. They can’t escape or do any real
harm in the state of modern communications. What is far more important,
gentlemen, is to destroy their stores and their base. Under the Act of
1911 we have a right to confiscate and destroy any property in an inn
where the law has been violated.”
And he stood for hours on the lawn, watching the smashing of bottles and
the breaking up of casks and feeding on fanatical pleasure: the pleasure
his strange, cold, courageous nature could not get from food or wine or
woman.
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