THE SONGS OF THE CAR CLUB
MORE than once as the car flew through black and silver fairylands of
fir wood and pine wood, Dalroy put his head out of the side window and
remonstrated with the chauffeur without effect. He was reduced at last
to asking him where he was going.
“I’m goin’ ’ome,” said the driver in an undecipherable voice. “I’m a
goin’ ’ome to my mar.”
“And where does she live?” asked Dalroy, with something more like
diffidence than he had ever shown before in his life.
“Wiles,” said the man, “but I ain’t seen ’er since I was born. But
she’ll do.”
“You must realise,” said Dalroy, with difficulty, “that you may be
arrested—it’s the man’s own car; and he’s left behind with nothing to
eat, so to speak.”
“’E’s got ’is dornkey,” grunted the man. “Let the stinker eat ’is
dornkey, with thistle sauce. ’E would if ’e was as ’ollow as I was.”
Humphrey Pump opened the glass window that separated him from the rear
part of the car, and turned to speak to his friend over his square elbow
and shoulder.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “he won’t stop for anything just yet. He’s as mad
as Moody’s aunt, as they say.”
“Do they say it?” asked the Captain, with a sort of anxiety. “They never
said it in Ithaca.”
“Honestly, I think you’d better leave him alone,” answered Pump, with
his sagacious face. “He’d just run us into a Scotch Express like Dandy
Mutton did, when they said he was driving carelessly. We can send the
car back to Ivywood somehow later on, and really, I don’t think it’ll do
the gentleman any harm to spend a night with a donkey. The donkey might
teach him something, I tell you.”
“It’s true he denied the Principle of Private Property,” said Dalroy,
reflectively, “but I fancy he was thinking of a plain house fixed on the
ground. A house on wheels, such as this, he might perhaps think a more
permanent possession. But I never understand it;” and again he passed a
weary palm across his open forehead. “Have you ever noticed, Hump, what
is really odd about those people?”
The car shot on amid the comfortable silence of Pump, and then the
Irishman said again:
“That poet in the pussy-cat clothes wasn’t half bad. Lord Ivywood isn’t
cruel; but he’s inhuman. But that man wasn’t inhuman. He was ignorant,
like most cultured fellows. But what’s odd about them is that they try
to be simple and never clear away a single thing that’s complicated. If
they have to choose between beef and pickles, they always abolish the
beef. If they have to choose between a meadow and a motor, they forbid
the meadow. Shall I tell you the secret? These men only surrender the
things that bind them to other men. Go and dine with a temperance
millionaire and you won’t find he’s abolished the _hors d’œuvres_ or the
five courses or even the coffee. What he’s abolished is the port and
sherry, because poor men like that as well as rich. Go a step farther,
and you won’t find he’s abolished the fine silver forks and spoons, but
he’s abolished the meat, because poor men like meat—when they can get
it. Go a step farther, and you won’t find he goes without gardens or
gorgeous rooms, which poor men can’t enjoy at all. But you will find he
boasts of early rising, because sleep is a thing poor men can still
enjoy. About the only thing they can still enjoy. Nobody ever heard of a
modern philanthropist giving up petrol or typewriting or troops of
servants. No, no! What he gives up must be some simple and universal
thing. He will give up beef or beer or sleep—because these pleasures
remind him that he is only a man.”
Humphrey Pump nodded, but still answered nothing; and the voice of the
sprawling Dalroy took one of its upward turns of a sort of soaring
flippancy; which commonly embodied itself in remembering some song he
had composed.
“Such,” he said, “was the case of the late Mr. Mandragon, so long
popular in English aristocratic society as a bluff and simple democrat
from the West, until he was unfortunately sand-bagged by six men whose
wives he had had shot by private detectives, on his incautiously landing
on American soil.
“Mr. Mandragon the Millionaire, he wouldn’t have wine or wife,
He couldn’t endure complexity; he lived the simple life;
He ordered his lunch by megaphone in manly, simple tones,
And used all his motors for canvassing voters, and twenty telephones;
Besides a dandy little machine,
Cunning and neat as ever was seen,
With a hundred pulleys and cranks between,
Made of iron and kept quite clean,
To hoist him out of his healthful bed on every day of his life,
And wash him and brush him and shave him and dress him to live the
Simple Life.
“Mr. Mandragon was most refined and quietly, neatly dressed,
Say all the American newspapers that know refinement best;
Quiet and neat the hair and hat, and the coat quiet and neat,
A trouser worn upon either leg, while boots adorned the feet;
And not, as anyone might expect,
A Tiger Skin, all striped and specked,
And a Peacock Hat with the tail erect,
A scarlet tunic with sunflowers decked—
That might have had a more marked effect,
And pleased the pride of a weaker man that yearned for wine or wife;
But fame and the flagon for Mr. Mandragon obscured the Simple Life.
“Mr. Mandragon the Millionaire, I am happy to say, is dead.
He enjoyed a quiet funeral in a crematorium shed,
And he lies there fluffy and soft and grey and certainly quite refined,
When he might have rotted to flowers and fruit with Adam and all
mankind.
Or been eaten by bears that fancy blood,
Or burnt on a big tall tower of wood,
In a towering flame as a heathen should,
Or even sat with us here at food,
Merrily taking twopenny rum and cheese with a pocket knife,
But these were luxuries lost for him that lived for the Simple Life.”
Mr. Pump had made many attempts to arrest this song, but they were as
vain as all attempts to arrest the car. The angry chauffeur seemed,
indeed, rather inspired to further energy by the violent vocal noises
behind; and Pump again found it best to fall back on conversation.
“Well, Captain,” he said, amicably. “I can’t quite agree with you about
those things. Of course, you can trust foreigners too much as poor
Thompson did; but then you can go too far the other way. Aunt Sarah lost
a thousand pounds that way. I told her again and again he wasn’t a
nigger, but she wouldn’t believe me. And, of course, that was just the
kind of thing to offend an ambassador if he was an Austrian. It seems to
me, Captain, you aren’t quite fair to these foreign chaps. Take these
Americans, now! There were many Americans went by Pebblewick, you may
suppose. But in all the lot there was never a bad lot; never a nasty
American, nor a stupid American—nor, well, never an American that I
didn’t rather like.”
“I know,” said Dalroy, “you mean there was never an American who did not
appreciate ‘The Old Ship.’”
“I suppose I do mean that,” answered the inn-keeper, “and somehow, I
feel ‘The Old Ship’ might appreciate the American too.”
“You English are an extraordinary lot,” said the Irishman, with a sudden
and sombre quietude. “I sometimes feel you may pull through after all.”
After another silence he said, “You’re always right, Hump, and one
oughtn’t to think of Yankees like that. The rich are the scum of the
earth in every country. And a vast proportion of the real Americans are
among the most courteous, intelligent, self-respecting people in the
world. Some attribute this to the fact that a vast proportion of the
real Americans are Irishmen.”
Pump was still silent, and the Captain resumed in a moment.
“All the same,” he said, “it’s very hard for a man, especially a man of
a small country like me, to understand how it must feel to be an
American; especially in the matter of nationality. I shouldn’t like to
have to write the American National Anthem, but fortunately there is no
great probability of the commission being given. The shameful secret of
my inability to write an American patriotic song is one that will die
with me.”
“Well, what about an English one,” said Pump, sturdily. “You might do
worse, Captain.”
“English, you bloody tyrant,” said Patrick, indignantly. “I could no
more fancy a song by an Englishman than you could one by that dog.”
Mr. Humphrey Pump gravely took the paper from his pocket, on which he
had previously inscribed the sin and desolation of grocers, and felt in
another of his innumerable pockets for a pencil.
“Hullo,” cried Dalroy. “Are you going to have a shy at the Ballad of
Quoodle?”
Quoodle lifted his ears at his name. Mr. Pump smiled a slight and
embarrassed smile. He was secretly proud of Dalroy’s admiration for his
previous literary attempts and he had some natural knack for verse as a
game, as he had for all games; and his reading, though desultory, had
not been merely rustic or low.
“On condition,” he said, deprecatingly, “that you write a song for the
English.”
“Oh, very well,” said Patrick, with a huge sigh that really indicated
the very opposite of reluctance. “We must do something till the thing
stops, I suppose, and this seems a blameless parlour game. ‘Songs of the
Car Club.’ Sounds quite aristocratic.”
And he began to make marks with a pencil on the fly-leaf of a little
book he had in his pocket—Wilson’s _Noctes Ambrosianæ_. Every now and
then, however, he looked up and delayed his own composition by watching
Pump and the dog, whose proceedings amused him very much. For the owner
of “The Old Ship” sat sucking his pencil and looking at Mr. Quoodle with
eyes of fathomless attention. Every now and then he slightly scratched
his brown hair with the pencil, and wrote down a word. And the dog
Quoodle, with that curious canine power of either understanding or most
brazenly pretending to understand what is going on, sat erect with his
head at an angle, as if he were sitting for his portrait.
Hence it happened that though Pump’s poem was a little long, as are
often the poems of inexperienced poets, and though Dalroy’s poem was
very short (being much hurried toward the end) the long poem was
finished some time before the short one.
Therefore it was that there was first produced for the world the song
more familiarly known as “No Noses,” or more correctly called “The Song
of Quoodle.” Part of it ran eventually thus:—
“They haven’t got no noses
The fallen sons of Eve,
Even the smell of roses
Is not what they supposes,
But more than mind discloses,
And more than men believe.
“They haven’t got no noses,
They cannot even tell
When door and darkness closes
The park a Jew encloses,
Where even the Law of Moses
Will let you steal a smell;
“The brilliant smell of water,
The brave smell of a stone,
The smell of dew and thunder
And old bones buried under,
Are things in which they blunder
And err, if left alone.
“The wind from winter forests,
The scent of scentless flowers,
The breath of bride’s adorning,
The smell of snare and warning,
The smell of Sunday morning,
God gave to us for ours.
* * * * *
“And Quoodle here discloses
All things that Quoodle can;
They haven’t got no noses,
They haven’t got no noses,
And goodness only knowses
The Noselessness of Man.”
This poem also shows traces of haste in its termination, and the present
editor (who has no aim save truth) is bound to confess that parts of it
were supplied in the criticisms of the Captain, and even enriched (in
later and livelier circumstances) by the Poet of the Birds himself. At
the actual moment the chief features of this realistic song about dogs
was a crashing chorus of “Bow-wow, wow,” begun by Mr. Patrick Dalroy;
but immediately imitated (much more successfully) by Mr. Quoodle. In the
face of all this Dalroy suffered some real difficulty in fulfilling the
bargain by reading out his much shorter poem about what he imagined an
Englishman might feel. Indeed there was something very rough and vague
in his very voice as he read it out; as of one who had not found the key
to his problem. The present compiler (who has no aim save truth) must
confess that the verses ran as follows:—
“St. George he was for England,
And before he killed the dragon
He drank a pint of English ale
Out of an English flagon.
For though he fast right readily
In hair-shirt or in mail,
It isn’t safe to give him cakes
Unless you give him ale.
St. George he was for England,
And right gallantly set free
The lady left for dragon’s meat
And tied up to a tree;
But since he stood for England
And knew what England means,
Unless you give him bacon,
You mustn’t give him beans.
“St. George he was for England,
And shall wear the shield he wore
When we go out in armour,
With the battle-cross before;
But though he is jolly company
And very pleased to dine,
It isn’t safe to give him nuts
Unless you give him wine.”
“Very philosophical song that,” said Dalroy, shaking his head solemnly,
“full of deep thought. I really think that is about the truth of the
matter, in the case of the Englishman. Your enemies say you’re stupid,
and you boast of being illogical—which is about the only thing you do
that really _is_ stupid. As if anybody ever made an Empire or anything
else by saying that two and two make five. Or as if anyone was ever the
stronger for _not_ understanding anything—if it were only tip-cat or
chemistry. But this _is_ true about you Hump. You English are supremely
an artistic people, and therefore you go by associations, as I said in
my song. You won’t have one thing without the other thing that goes with
it. And as you can’t imagine a village without a squire and parson, or a
college without port and old oak, you get the reputation of a
Conservative people. But it’s because you’re sensitive, Hump, not
because you’re stupid, that you won’t part with things. It’s lies, lies
and flattery they tell you, Hump, when they tell you you’re fond of
compromise. I tell ye, Hump, every real revolution is a compromise. D’ye
think Wolfe Tone or Charles Stuart Parnell never compromised? But it’s
just because you’re afraid of a compromise that you won’t have a
revolution. If you really overhauled ‘The Old Ship’—or Oxford—you’d have
to make up your mind what to take and what to leave, and it would break
your heart, Humphrey Pump.”
He stared in front of him with a red and ruminant face, and at length
added, somewhat more gloomily.
“This æsthetic way we have, Hump, has only two little disadvantages
which I will now explain to you. The first is exactly what has sent us
flying in this contraption. When the beautiful, smooth, harmonious thing
you’ve made is worked by a new type, in a new spirit, then I tell you it
would be better for you a thousand times to be living under the thousand
paper constitutions of Condorcet and Sieyès. When the English oligarchy
is run by an Englishman who hasn’t got an English mind—then you have
Lord Ivywood and all this nightmare, of which God could only guess the
end.”
The car had beaten some roods of dust behind it, and he ended still more
darkly:
“And the other disadvantage, my amiable æsthete, is this. If ever, in
blundering about the planet, you come on an island in the
Atlantic—Atlantis, let us say—which won’t accept _all_ your pretty
picture—to which you can’t give everything—_why_ you will probably
decide to give nothing. You will say in your hearts: ‘Perhaps they will
starve soon’; and you will become, for that island, the deafest and the
most evil of all the princes of the earth.”
It was already daybreak, and Pump, who knew the English boundaries
almost by intuition, could tell even through the twilight that the tail
of the little town they were leaving behind was of a new sort, the sort
to be seen in the western border. The chauffeur’s phrase about his
mother might merely have been a music-hall joke; but certainly he had
driven darkly in that direction.
White morning lay about the grey stoney streets like spilt milk. A few
proletarian early risers, wearier at morning than most men at night,
seemed merely of opinion that it was no use crying over it. The two or
three last houses, which looked almost too tired to stand upright,
seemed to have moved the Captain into another sleepy explosion.
“There are two kinds of idealists, as everybody knows—or must have
thought of. There are those who idealize the real and those who
(precious seldom) realize the ideal. Artistic and poetical people like
the English generally idealize the real. This I have expressed in a
song, which—”
“No, really,” protested the innkeeper, “really now, Captain—”
“This I have expressed in a song,” repeated Dalroy, in an adamantine
manner, “which I will now sing with every circumstance of leisure,
loudness, or any other—”
He stopped because the flying universe seemed to stop. Charging
hedgerows came to a halt, as if challenged by the bugle. The racing
forests stood rigid. The last few tottering houses stood suddenly at
attention. For a noise like a pistol-shot from the car itself had
stopped all that race, as a pistol-shot might start any other.
The driver clambered out very slowly, and stood about in various tragic
attitudes round the car. He opened an unsuspected number of doors and
windows in the car, and touched things and twisted things and felt
things.
“I must back as best I can to that there garrige, sir,” he said, in a
heavy and husky tone they had not heard from him before.
Then he looked round on the long woods and the last houses, and seemed
to gnaw his lip, like a great general who has made a great mistake. His
brow seemed as black as ever, yet his voice, when he spoke again, had
fallen many further degrees toward its dull and daily tone.
“Yer see, this is a bit bad,” he said. “It’ll be a beastly job even at
the best plices, if I’m gettin’ back at all.”
“Getting back,” repeated Dalroy, opening the blue eyes of a bull. “Back
where?”
“Well, yer see,” said the chauffeur, reasonably, “I was bloody keen to
show ’im it was me drove the car and not ’im. By a bit o’ bad luck, I
done damage to ’is car. Well—if _you_ can stick in ’is car—”
Captain Patrick Dalroy sprang out of the car so rapidly that he almost
reeled and slipped upon the road. The dog sprang after him, barking
furiously.
“Hump,” said Patrick, quietly. “I’ve found out everything about you. I
know what always bothered me about the Englishman.”
Then, after an instant’s silence, he said, “That Frenchman was right who
said (I forget how he put it) that you march to Trafalgar Square to rid
yourself of your temper; not to rid yourself of your tyrant. Our friend
was quite ready to rebel, rushing away. To rebel sitting still was too
much for him. Do you read _Punch_? I am sure you do. Pump and _Punch_
must be almost the only survivors of the Victorian Age. Do you remember
an old joke in an excellent picture, representing two ragged Irishmen
with guns, waiting behind a stone wall to shoot a landlord? One of the
Irishmen says the landlord is late, and adds, ‘I hope no accident’s
happened to the poor gintleman.’ Well, it’s all perfectly true; I knew
that Irishman intimately, but I want to tell you a secret about him. He
was an Englishman.”
The chauffeur had backed with breathless care to the entrance of the
garage, which was next door to a milkman’s or merely separated from it
by a black and lean lane, looking no larger than the crack of a door. It
must, however, have been larger than it looked, because Captain Dalroy
disappeared down it.
He seemed to have beckoned the driver after him; at any rate that
functionary instantly followed. The functionary came out again in an
almost guilty haste, touching his cap and stuffing loose papers into his
pocket. Then the functionary returned yet again from what he called the
“garrige,” carrying larger and looser things over his arm.
All this did Mr. Humphrey Pump observe, not without interest. The place,
remote as it was, was evidently a _rendez-vous_ for motorists. Otherwise
a very tall motorist, throttled and masked in the most impenetrable
degree, would hardly have strolled up to speak to him. Still less would
the tall motorist have handed him a similar horrid disguise of wraps and
goggles, in a bundle over his arm. Least of all would any motorist,
however tall, have said to him from behind the cap and goggles, “Put on
these things, Hump, and then we’ll go into the milk shop. I’m waiting
for the car. Which car, my seeker after truth? Why the car I’m going to
buy for you to drive.”
The remorseful chauffeur, after many adventures, did actually find his
way back to the little moonlit wood where he had left his master and the
donkey. But his master and the donkey had vanished.
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