VEGETARIANISM IN THE FOREST
HUMPHREY PUMP’S cooking of a fungus in an old frying-pan (which he had
found on the beach) was extremely typical of him. He was, indeed,
without any pretence of book-learning, a certain kind of scientific man
that science has really been unfortunate in losing. He was the
old-fashioned English Naturalist like Gilbert White or even Isaac
Walton, who learned things not academically like an American Professor,
but actually, like an American Indian. And every truth a man has found
out as a man of science is always subtly different from any truth he has
found out as a man, because a man’s family, friends, habits and social
type have always got well under way before he has thoroughly learned the
theory of anything. For instance, any eminent botanist at a _Soirée_ of
the Royal Society could tell you, of course, that other edible fungi
exist, as well as mushrooms and truffles. But long before he was a
botanist, still less an eminent botanist, he had begun, so to speak, on
a basis of mushrooms and truffles. He felt, in a vague way, that these
were really edible, that mushrooms were a moderate luxury, proper to the
middle classes, while truffles were a much more expensive luxury, more
suitable to the Smart Set. But the old English Naturalists, of whom
Isaac Walton was perhaps the first, and Humphrey Pump perhaps the last,
had in many cases really begun at the other end, and found by experience
(often most disastrous experience) that some fungi are wholesome and
some are not; but the wholesome ones are, on a whole, the majority. So a
man like Pump was no more afraid of a fungus as such than he was of an
animal as such. He no more started with the supposition that a grey or
purple growth on a stone must be a poisonous growth than he started with
the supposition that the dog who came to him out of the wood must be a
mad dog. Most of them he knew; those he did not know he treated with
rational caution, but to him, as a whole race, these weird-hued and
one-legged goblins of the forests were creatures friendly to man.
“You see,” he said to his friend the Captain, “eating vegetables isn’t
half bad, so long as you know what vegetables there are and eat all of
them that you can. But there are two ways where it goes wrong among the
gentry. First, they’ve never had to eat a carrot or a potato because it
was all there was in the house; so they’ve never learnt how to be really
hungry for carrots, as that donkey might be. They only know the
vegetables that are meant to help the meat. They know you take duck and
peas; and when they turn vegetarian they can only think of the peas
without the duck. They know you take lobster in a salad; and when they
turn vegetarian they can only think of the salad without the lobster.
But the other reason is worse. There’s plenty of good people even round
here, and still more in the north, who get meat very seldom. But then,
when they do get it, they gobble it up like good ’uns. But the trouble
with the gentry is different. The trouble is, the same sort of gentry
that don’t want to eat meat don’t really want to eat anything. The man
called a Vegetarian who goes to Ivywood House is generally like a cow
trying to live on a blade of grass a day. You and I, Captain, have
pretty well been vegetarians for some time, so as not to break into the
cheese, and we haven’t found it so difficult, because we eat as much as
we can.”
“It’s not so difficult as being teetotallers,” answered Dalroy, “so as
not to break into the cask. But I’ll never deny that I feel the better
for that, too, on the whole. But only because I could leave off being
one whenever I chose. And, now I come to think of it,” he cried, with
one of his odd returns of animal energy, “if I’m to be a vegetarian why
shouldn’t I drink? Why shouldn’t I have a purely vegetarian drink? Why
shouldn’t I take vegetables in their highest form, so to speak? The
modest vegetarians ought obviously to stick to wine or beer, plain
vegetarian drinks, instead of filling their goblets with the blood of
bulls and elephants, as all conventional meat-eaters do, I suppose. What
is the matter?”
“Nothing,” answered Pump. “I was looking out for somebody who generally
turns up about this time. But I think I’m fast.”
“I should never have thought so from the look of you,” answered the
Captain, “but what I’m saying is that the drinking of decent fermented
liquor is just simply the triumph of vegetarianism. Why, it’s an
inspiring idea! I could write a sort of song about it. As, for instance—
“You will find me drinking rum
Like a sailor in a slum,
You will find me drinking beer like a Bavarian;
You will find me drinking gin
In the lowest kind of inn,
Because I am a rigid Vegetarian.”
Why, it’s a vista of verbal felicity and spiritual edification! It has I
don’t know how many hundred aspects! Let’s see; how could the second
verse go? Something like—
“So I cleared the inn of wine,
And I tried to climb the Sign;
And I tried to hail the constable as ‘Marion’;
But he said I couldn’t speak,
And he bowled me to the Beak,
Because I was a Happy Vegetarian.”
I really think something instructive to the human race may come out of
all this.... Hullo! Is that what you were looking for?”
The quadruped Quoodle came in out of the woods a whole minute later than
the usual time and took his seat beside Humphrey’s left foot with a
preoccupied air.
“Good old boy,” said the Captain. “You seem to have taken quite a fancy
to us. I doubt, Hump, if he’s properly looked after up at the house. I
particularly don’t want to talk against Ivywood, Hump. I don’t want his
soul to be able in all eternity to accuse my soul of a mean detraction.
I want to be fair to him, because I hate him like hell, and he has taken
from me all for which I lived. But I don’t think, with all this in my
mind, I don’t think I say anything beyond what he would own himself (for
his brain is clear) when I say that he could never understand an animal.
And so he could never understand the animal side of a man. He doesn’t
know to this day, Hump, that your sight and hearing are sixty times
quicker than his. He doesn’t know that I have a better circulation. That
explains the extraordinary people he picks up and acts with; he never
looks at them as you and I look at that dog. There was a fellow calling
himself Gluck who was (mainly by Ivywood’s influence, I believe) his
colleague on the Turkish Conferences, being supposed to represent
Germany. My dear Hump, he was a man that a great gentleman like Ivywood
ought not to have touched with a barge-pole. It’s not the race he was—if
it was one race—it’s the Sort he was. A coarse, common, Levantine nark
and eavesdropper—but you mustn’t lose your temper, Hump. I implore you,
Hump, to control this tendency to lose your temper when talking at any
length about such people. Have recourse, Hump, to that consoling system
of versification which I have already explained to you.
“Oh I knew a Doctor Gluck,
And his nose it had a hook,
And his attitudes were anything but Aryan;
So I gave him all the pork
That I had, upon a fork;
Because I am myself a Vegetarian.”
“If you are,” said Humphrey Pump, “you’d better come and eat some
vegetables. The White Hat can be eaten cold—or raw, for that matter. But
Bloodspots wants some cooking.”
“You are right, Hump,” said Dalroy, seating himself with every
appearance of speechless greed. “I will be silent. As the poet says—
“I am silent in the Club,
I am silent in the pub,
I am silent on a bally peak in Darien;
For I stuff away for life,
Shoving peas in with a knife,
Because I am at heart a Vegetarian.”
He fell to his food with great gusto, dispatched a good deal of it in a
very short time, threw a glance of gloomy envy at the cask, and then
sprang to his feet again. He caught up the inn-sign from where it leant
against the Pantomime Cottage, and planted it like a pike in the ground
beside him. Then he began to sing again, in an even louder voice than
before.
“O, Lord Ivywood may lop,
And his privilege is sylvan and riparian;
And is also free to top,
But——.”
“Do you know,” said Hump, also finishing his lunch, “that I’m rather
tired of that particular tune?”
“Tired, is it?” said the indignant Irishman, “then I’ll sing you a
longer song, to an even worse tune, about more and more vegetarians, and
you shall see me dance as well; and I will dance till you burst into
tears and offer me the half of your kingdom; and I shall ask for Mr.
Leveson’s head on the frying-pan. For this, let me tell you, is a song
of oriental origin, celebrating the caprices of an ancient Babylonian
Sultan and should be performed in palaces of ivory with palm trees and a
bulbul accompaniment.”
And he began to bellow another and older lyric of his own on
vegetarianism.
“Nebuchadnezzar, the King of the Jews,
Suffered from new and original views,
He crawled on his hands and knees it’s said,
With grass in his mouth and a crown on his head,
With a wowtyiddly, etc.
“Those in traditional paths that trod,
Thought the thing was a curse from God;
But a Pioneer men always abuse,
Like Nebuchadnezzar the King of the Jews.”
Dalroy, as he sang this, actually began to dance about like a ballet
girl, an enormous and ridiculous figure in the sunlight, waving the
wooden sign around his head. Quoodle opened his eyes and pricked up his
ears and seemed much interested in these extraordinary evolutions.
Suddenly, with one of those startling changes that will transfigure the
most sedentary dogs, Quoodle decided that the dance was a game, and
began to bark and bound round the performer, sometimes leaping so far
into the air as almost to threaten the man’s throat. But, though the
sailor naturally knew less about dogs than the countryman, he knew
enough about them (as about many other things) not to be afraid, and the
voice he sang with might have drowned the baying of a pack.
“Black Lord Foulon the Frenchmen slew,
Thought it a Futurist thing to do;
He offered them grass instead of bread,
So they stuffed him with grass when they cut off his head.
With a wowtyiddly, etc.
“For the pride of his soul he perished then,
But of course it is always of Pride that men
A Man in Advance of his Age accuse
Like Nebuchadnezzar the King of the Jews.
“Simeon Scudder of Styx, in Maine,
Thought of the thing and was at it again;
He gave good grass and water in pails
To a thousand Irishmen hammering rails,
With a wowtyiddly, etc.
“Appetites differ, and tied to a stake,
He was tarred and feathered for Conscience Sake;
But stoning the prophets is ancient news,
Like Nebuchadnezzar the King of the Jews.”
In an abandon, unusual even for him, he had danced his way down through
the thistles into the jungle of weeds risen round the sunken Chapel. And
the dog, now fully convinced that it was not only a game but an
expedition, perhaps a hunting expedition, ran barking in front of him,
along the path that his own dog’s paws had already burst through the
tangle. Before Patrick Dalroy well knew what he was doing, or even
remembered that he still carried the ridiculous signboard in his hand,
he found himself outside the open porch of a sort of narrow tower at the
angle of a building which, to the best of his recollection, he had never
seen before. Quoodle instantly ran up four or five steps in the dark
staircase inside, and then, lifting his ears again, looked back for his
companion.
There is, perhaps, such a thing as asking too much of a man. If there
is, it was asking too much of Patrick Dalroy to ask him not to accept so
eccentric an invitation. Hurriedly plunging his unwieldy wooden ensign
upright in the thick of thistles and grass, he bent his gigantic neck
and shoulders to enter the porch, and proceeded to climb the stairs. It
was quite dark, and it was only after at least two twists of the stone
spiral that he saw light ahead of him, and then it was a sort of rent in
the wall that seemed to him as ragged as the mouth of a Cornish cave. It
was also so low that he had some difficulty in squeezing his bulk
through it, but the dog had jumped through with an air of familiarity,
and once more looked back to see him follow.
If he had found himself inside any ordinary domestic interior, he would
instantly have repented his escapade and gone back. But he found himself
in surroundings which he had never seen before, or even, in one sense,
believed possible.
His first feeling was that he was walking in the most sealed and secret
suite of apartments in the castle of a dream. All the chambers had that
air of perpetually opening inwards which is the soul of the Arabian
Nights. And the ornament was of the same tradition; gorgeous and
flamboyant, yet featureless and stiff. A purple mansion seemed to be
built inside a green mansion and a golden mansion inside that. And the
quaintly cut doorways or fretted lattices all had wavy lines like a
dancing sea, and for some reason (sea-sickness for all he knew) this
gave him a feeling as if the place were beautiful but faintly evil: as
if it were bored and twisted for the fallen palace of the Worm.
But he had also another sensation which he could not analyze; for it
reminded him of being a fly on the ceiling or the wall. Was it the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon coming back to his imagination; or the Castle
East of the Sun and West of the Moon? Then he remembered that in some
boyish illness he had stared at a rather Moorish sort of wall paper,
which was like rows and rows of brightly coloured corridors, empty and
going on forever. And he remembered that a fly was walking along one of
the parallel lines; and it seemed to his childish fancy that the
corridors were all dead in front of the fly, but all came to life as he
passed.
“By George!” he cried, “I wonder whether that’s the real truth about
East and West! That the gorgeous East offers everything needed for
adventures except the man to enjoy them. It would explain the tradition
of the Crusades uncommonly well. Perhaps that’s what God meant by Europe
and Asia. We dress the characters and they paint the scenery. Well,
anyhow, three of the least Asiatic things in the world are lost in this
endless Asiatic palace—a good dog, a straight sword, and an Irishman.”
But as he went down this telescope of tropical colours he really felt
something of that hard fatalistic freedom of the heroes (or should we
say villains?) in the Arabian Nights. He was prepared for any
impossibility. He would hardly have been surprised if from under the lid
of one of the porcelain pots standing in a corner had come a serpentine
string of blue or yellow smoke, as if some wizard’s oil were within. He
would hardly have been surprised if from under the curtains or closed
doors had crawled out a snakey track of blood, or if a dumb negro
dressed in white had come out with a bow string, having done his work.
He would not have been surprised if he had walked suddenly into the
still chamber of some Sultan asleep, whom to wake was a death in
torments. And yet he was very much more surprised by what he did see,
and when he saw it, he was certain at last that he was only wandering in
the labyrinth of his own brain. For what he saw was what was really in
the core of all his dreams.
What he saw, indeed, was more appropriate to that inmost eastern chamber
than anything he had imagined. On a divan of blood-red and orange
cushions lay a startlingly beautiful woman, with a skin almost swarthy
enough for an Arab’s, and who might well have been the Princess proper
to such an Arabian tale. But in truth it was not her appropriateness to
the scene, but rather her inappropriateness, that made his heart bound.
It was not her strangeness but her familiarity that made his big feet
suddenly stop.
The dog ran on yet more rapidly, and the princess on the sofa welcomed
him warmly, lifting him on his short hind legs. Then she looked up, and
seemed turned to stone.
“Bismillah,” said the oriental traveller, affably, “may your shadow
never grow less—or more, as the ladies would say. The Commander of the
Faithful has deputed his least competent slave to bring you back a dog.
Owing to temporary delay in collecting the fifteen largest diamonds in
the moon, he has been compelled to send the animal without any collar.
Those responsible for the delay will instantly be beaten to death with
the tails of dragons—”
The frightful shock, which had not yet left the lady’s face, brought him
back to responsible speech.
“In short,” he said, “in the name of the Prophet, dog. I say, Joan, I
wish this wasn’t a dream.”
“It isn’t,” said the girl, speaking for the first time, “and I don’t
know yet whether I wish it was.”
“Well,” argued the dreamer, rationally, “what are you, anytime, if
you’re not a dream—or a vision? And what are all these rooms, if they
aren’t a dream—or rather a nightmare?”
“This is the new wing of Ivywood House,” said the lady addressed as
Joan, speaking with great difficulty. “Lord Ivywood has fitted them up
in the eastern style; he is inside conducting a most interesting debate
in defence of Eastern Vegetarianism. I only came out because the room
was rather hot.”
“Vegetarian!” cried Dalroy, with abrupt and rather unreasonable
exasperation. “That table seems to fall a bit short of Vegetarianism.”
And he pointed to one of the long, narrow tables, laid somewhere in
almost all the central rooms, and loaded with elaborate cold meats and
expensive wines.
“He must be liberal-minded,” cried Joan, who seemed to be on the verge
of something, possibly temper. “He can’t expect people suddenly to begin
being Vegetarians when they’ve never been before.”
“It has been done,” said Dalroy, tranquilly, walking across to look at
the table. “I say, your ascetical friends seem to have made a pretty
good hole in the champagne. You may not believe it, Joan, but I haven’t
touched what you call alcohol for a month.”
With which words he filled with champagne a large tumbler intended for
claret cup and swallowed it at a draught.
Lady Joan Brett stood up straight but trembling.
“Now that’s really wrong, Pat,” she cried. “Oh, don’t be silly—you know
I don’t care about the alcohol or all that. But you’re in the man’s
house, uninvited, and he doesn’t know. That wasn’t like you.”
“He shall know, all right,” said the large man, quietly. “I know the
exact price of a tumbler of that champagne.”
And he scribbled some words in pencil on the back of a bill of fare on
the table, and then carefully laid three shillings on top of it.
“And there you do Phillip the worst wrong of all,” cried Lady Joan,
flaming white. “You know as well as I do, anyhow, that he would not take
your money.”
Patrick Dalroy stood looking at her for some seconds with an expression
on his broad and unusually open face which she found utterly puzzling.
“Curiously enough,” he observed, at last, and with absolutely even
temper, “curiously enough, it is you who are doing Phillip Ivywood a
wrong. I think him quite capable of breaking England or Creation. But I
do honestly think he would never break his word. And what is more, I
think the more arbitrary and literal his word had been, the more he
would keep it. You will never understand a man like that, till you
understand that he can have devotion to a definition; even a new
definition. He can really feel about an amendment to an Act of
Parliament, inserted at the last moment, as you feel about England or
your mother.”
“Oh, don’t philosophise,” cried Joan suddenly. “Can’t you see this has
been a shock?”
“I only want you to see the point,” he replied. “Lord Ivywood clearly
told me, with his own careful lips, that I might go in and pay for
fermented liquor in any place displaying a public sign outside. And he
won’t go back on that definition or on any definition. If he finds me
here, he may quite possibly put me in prison on some other charge, as a
thief or a vagabond, or what not. But he will not grudge the champagne.
And he will accept the three shillings. And I shall honour him for his
glorious consistency.”
“I don’t understand,” said Joan, “one word of what you are talking
about. Which way did you come? How can I get you away? You don’t seem to
grasp that you’re in Ivywood House.”
“You see there’s a new name outside the gate,” observed Patrick,
conversationally, and led the lady to the end of the corridor by which
he had entered and into its ultimate turret chamber.
Following his indications, Lady Joan peered a little over the edge of
the window where hung the brilliant purple bird in its brilliant golden
cage. Almost immediately below, outside the entrance to the half-closed
stairway, stood a wooden tavern sign, as solid and still as if it had
been there for centuries.
“All back at the sign of ‘The Old Ship,’ you see,” said the Captain.
“Can I offer you anything in a ladylike way?”
There was a vast impudence in the slight, hospitable movement of his
hand, that disturbed Lady Joan’s features with an emotion other than any
that she desired to show.
“Well!” cried Patrick, with a wild geniality, “I’ve made you laugh
again, my dear.”
He caught her to him as in a whirlwind, and then vanished from the fairy
turret like a blast, leaving her standing with her hand up to her wild
black hair.
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