THE REPUBLIC OF PEACEWAYS
IN a hamlet round about Windermere, let us say, or somewhere in
Wordsworth’s country, there could be found a cottage, in which could be
found a cottager. So far all is as it should be; and the visitor would
first be conscious of a hearty and even noisy elderly man, with an apple
face and a short white beard. This person would then loudly proffer to
the visitor the opportunity of seeing his father, a somewhat more
elderly man, with a somewhat longer white beard, but still “up and
about.” And these two together would then initiate the neophyte into the
joys of the society of a grandfather, who was more than a hundred years
old, and still very proud of the fact.
This miracle, it seemed, had been worked entirely on milk. The subject
of this diet the oldest of the three men continued to discuss in
enormous detail. For the rest, it might be said that his pleasures were
purely arithmetical. Some men count their years with dismay, and he
counted his with a juvenile vanity. Some men collect stamps or coins,
and he collected days. Newspaper men interviewed him about the historic
times through which he had lived, without eliciting anything whatever;
except that he had apparently taken to an exclusive milk diet at about
the age when most of us leave it off. Asked if he was alive in 1815, he
said that was the very year he found it wasn’t any milk, but must be
Mountain Milk, like Dr. Meadows says. Nor would his calculating creed of
life have allowed him to understand you if you had said that in a
meadowland oversea that lies before the city of Brussels, boys of his
old school in that year gained the love of the gods and died young.
It was the philanthropic Dr. Meadows, of course, who discovered this
deathless tribe, and erected on it the whole of his great dietetic
philosophy, to say nothing of the houses and dairies of Peaceways. He
attracted many pupils and backers among the wealthy and influential;
young men who were, so to speak, training for extreme old age, infant
old men, embryo nonagenarians. It would be an exaggeration to say that
they watched joyfully for the first white hair as Fascination Fledgeby
watched for his first whisker; but it is quite true to say that they
seemed to have scorned the beauty of woman and the feasting of friends
and, above all, the old idea of death with glory; in comparison with
this vision of the sports of second childhood.
Peaceways was in its essential plan much like what we call a Garden
City; a ring of buildings where the work people did their work, with a
pretty ornamental town in the centre, where they lived in the open
country outside. This was no doubt much healthier than the factory
system in the great towns and may have partly accounted for the serene
expression of Dr. Meadows and his friends, if any part of the credit can
be spared from the splendours of Mountain Milk. The place lay far from
the common highways of England, and its inhabitants were enabled to
enjoy their quiet skies and level woods almost undisturbed, and fully
absorb whatever may be valuable in the Meadows method and view; until
one day a small and very dirty motor drove into the middle of their
town. It stopped beside one of those triangular islets of grass that are
common at forked roads, and two men in goggles, one tall and the other
short, got out and stood on the central space of grass, as if they were
buffoons about to do tricks. As, indeed, they were.
Before entering the town they had stopped by a splendid mountain stream
quickening and thickening rapidly into a river; unhelmed and otherwise
eased themselves, eaten a little bread bought at Wyddington and drank
the water of the widening current which opened on the valley of
Peaceways.
“I’m beginning quite to like water,” said the taller of the two knights.
“I used to think it a most dangerous drink. In theory, of course, it
ought only to be given to people who are fainting. It’s really good for
them, much better than brandy. Besides, think of wasting good brandy on
people who are fainting! But I don’t go so far as I did; I shouldn’t
insist on a doctor’s prescription before I allow people water. That was
the too severe morality of youth; that was my innocence and goodness. I
thought that if I fell once, water-drinking might become a habit. But I
do see the good side of water now. How good it is when you’re really
thirsty, how it glitters and gurgles! How alive it is! After all, it’s
the best of drinks, after the other. As it says in the song:
“Feast on wine or fast on water,
And your honour shall stand sure;
God Almighty’s son and daughter,
He the valiant, she the pure.
If an angel out of heaven
Brings you other things to drink,
Thank him for his kind intentions,
Go and pour them down the sink.
“Tea is like the East he grows in,
A great yellow Mandarin,
With urbanity of manner,
And unconsciousness of sin;
All the women, like a harem,
At his pig-tail troop along,
And, like all the East he grows in,
He is Poison when he’s strong.
“Tea, although an Oriental,
Is a gentleman at least;
Cocoa is a cad and coward,
Cocoa is a vulgar beast;
Cocoa is a dull, disloyal,
Lying, crawling cad and clown,
And may very well be grateful
To the fool that takes him down.
“As for all the windy waters,
They were rained like trumpets down,
When good drink had been dishonoured
By the tipplers of the town.
When red wine had brought red ruin,
And the death-dance of our times,
Heaven sent us Soda Water
As a torment for our crimes.”
“Upon my soul, this water tastes quite nice. I wonder what vintage now?”
and he smacked his lips with solemnity. “It tastes just like the year
1881 tasted.”
“You can fancy anything in the tasting way,” returned his shorter
companion. “Mr. Jack, who was always up to his tricks, did serve plain
water in those little glasses they drink liqueurs out of, and everyone
swore it was a delicious liqueur, and wanted to know where they could
get it—all except old Admiral Guffin, who said it tasted too strong of
olives. But water’s much the best for our game, certainly.”
Patrick nodded, and then said:
“I doubt if I could do it, if it weren’t for the comfort of looking at
that,” and he kicked the rum-keg, “and feeling we shall have a good swig
at it some day. It feels like a fairy-tale, carrying that about—as if
rum were a pirate’s treasure, as if it were molten gold. Besides, we can
have such fun with it with other people—what was that joke I thought of
this morning? Oh, I remember! Where’s that milk-can of mine?”
For the next twenty minutes he was industriously occupied with his
milk-can and the cask; Pump watching him with an interest amounting to
anxiety. Lifting his head, however, at the end of that time, he knotted
his red brows and said, “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” asked the other traveller.
“That!” said Captain Patrick Dalroy, and pointed to a figure approaching
on the road parallel to the river, “I mean, what’s it for?”
The figure had a longish beard and very long hair falling far below its
shoulders. It had a serious and steadfast expression. It was dressed in
what the inexperienced Mr. Pump at first took to be its night-gown; but
afterward learned to be its complete goats’ hair tunic, unmixed even
with a thread of the destructive and deadly wool of the sheep. It had no
boots on its feet. It walked very swiftly to a particular turn of the
stream and then turned very sharply (since it had accomplished its
constitutional), and walked back toward the perfect town of Peaceways.
“I suppose it’s somebody from that milk place,” said Humphrey Pump,
indulgently. “They seem to be pretty mad.”
“I don’t mind that so much,” said Dalroy, “I’m mad myself sometimes. But
a madman has only one merit and last link with God. A madman is always
logical. Now what is the logical connection between living on milk and
wearing your hair long? Most of us lived on milk when we had no hair at
all. How do they connect it up? Are there any heads even for a synopsis?
Is it, say, ‘milk—water—shaving-water—shaving—hair?’ Is it
‘milk—kindness—unkindness—convicts—hair?’ What is the logical connection
between having too much hair and having far too few boots? What _can_ it
be? Is it ‘hair—hair-trunk—leather-trunk—leather-boots?’ Is it
‘hair—beard—oysters—seaside—paddling—no boots?’ Man is liable to
err—especially when every mistake he makes is called a movement—but why
should all the lunacies live together?”
“Because all the lunatics should live together,” said Humphrey, “and if
you’d seen what happened up at Crampton, with the farming-out idea,
you’d know. It’s all very well, Captain; but if people can prevent a
guest of great importance being buried up to the neck in farm manure,
they will. They will, really.” He coughed almost apologetically. He was
about to attempt a resumption of the conversation, when he saw his
companion slap the milk-can and keg back into the car, and get into it
himself. “You drive,” he said, “drive me where those things live; you
know, Hump.”
They did not, however, arrive in the civic centre of such things without
yet another delay. They left the river and followed the man with the
long hair and the goatskin frock; and he stopped as it happened at a
house on the outskirts of the village. The adventurers stopped also, out
of curiosity, and were at first relieved to see the man almost instantly
reappear, having transacted his business with a quickness that seemed
incredible. A second glance showed them it was not the man, but another
man dressed exactly like him. A few minutes more of inquisitive delay,
showed them many of the kilty and goatish sect going in and out of this
particular place, each clad in his innocent uniform.
“This must be the temple and chapel,” muttered Patrick, “it must be here
they sacrifice a glass of milk to a cow, or whatever it is they do.
Well, the joke is pretty obvious, but we must wait for a lull in the
crowding of the congregation.”
When the last long-haired phantom had faded up the road, Dalroy sprang
from the car and drove the sign-board deep into the earth with savage
violence, and then very quietly knocked at the door.
The apparent owner of the place, of whom the two last of the long-haired
and bare-footed idealists were taking a rather hurried farewell, was a
man curiously ill-fitted for the part he seemed cast for in the only
possible plot.
Both Pump and Dalroy thought they had never seen a man look so sullen.
His face was of the rubicund sort that does not suggest jollity, but
merely a stagnant indigestion in the head. His mustache hung heavy and
dark, his brows yet heavier and darker. Dalroy had seen something of the
sort on the faces of defeated people disgracefully forced into
submission, but he could not make head or tail of it in connection with
the priggish perfections of Peaceways. It was all the odder because he
was manifestly prosperous; his clothes were smartly cut in something of
the sporting manner, and the inside of his house was at least four times
grander than the outside.
But what mystified them most was this, that he did not so much exhibit
the natural curiosity of a gentleman whose private house is entered by
strangers, but rather an embarrassed and restless expectation. During
Dalroy’s eager apologies and courteous inquiries about the direction and
accommodations of Peaceways, his eye (which was of the boiled gooseberry
order) perpetually wandered from them to the cupboard and then again to
the window, and at last he got up and went to look out into the road.
“Oh, yes, sir; very healthy place, Peaceways,” he said, peering through
the lattice. “Very ... dash it, what do they mean?... Very healthy
place. Of course they have their little ways.”
“Only drink pure milk, don’t they?” asked Dalroy.
The householder looked at him with a rather wild eye and grunted.
“Yes; so they say,” and he went again to the window.
“I’ve bought some of it,” said Patrick, patting his pet milk-can, which
he carried under his arm, as if unable to be separated from Dr.
Meadows’s discovery. “Have a glass of milk, sir.”
The man’s boiled eye began to bulge in anger—or some other emotion.
“What do you want?” he muttered, “are you ’tecs or what?”
“Agents and Distributors of the Meadows’ Mountain Milk,” said the
Captain, with simple pride, “taste it?”
The dazed householder took a glass of the blameless liquid and sipped
it; and the change on his face was extraordinary.
“Well, I’m jiggered,” he said, with a broad and rather coarse grin.
“That’s a queer dodge. You’re in the joke, I see.” Then he went again
restlessly to the window; and added, “but if we’re all friends, why the
blazes don’t the others come in? I’ve never known trade so slow before.”
“Who are the others?” asked Mr. Pump.
“Oh, the usual Peaceways people,” said the other. “They generally come
here before work. Dr. Meadows don’t work them for very long hours, that
wouldn’t be healthy or whatever he calls it; but he’s particular about
their being punctual. I’ve seen ’em running, with all their pure-minded
togs on, when the hooter gave the last call.”
Then he abruptly opened the front door and called out impatiently, but
not loudly:
“Come along in if you’re coming. You’ll give the show away if you play
the fool out there.”
Patrick looked out also and the view of the road outside was certainly
rather singular. He was used to crowds, large and small, collecting
outside houses which he had honoured with the sign of “The Old Ship,”
but they generally stared up at it in unaffected wonder and amusement.
But outside this open door, some twenty or thirty persons in what Pump
had called their night-gowns were moving to and fro like somnambulists,
apparently blind to the presence of the sign; looking at the other side
of the road, looking at the horizon, looking at the clouds of morning;
and only occasionally stopping to whisper to each other. But when the
owner of the house called to one of these ostentatiously abstracted
beings and asked him hoarsely what the devil was the matter, it was
natural for the milk-fed one to turn his feeble eye toward the sign. The
gooseberry eyes followed his, and the face to which they belonged was a
study in apoplectic astonishment.
“What the hell have you done to my house?” he demanded. “Of course they
can’t come in if this thing’s here.”
“I’ll take it down, if you like,” said Dalroy, stepping out and picking
it up like a flower from the front garden (to the amazement of the men
in the road, who thought they had strayed into a nursery fairy-tale),
“but I wish, in return, you’d give me some idea of what the blazes all
this means.”
“Wait till I’ve served these men,” replied his host.
The goat-garbed persons went very sheepishly (or goatishly) into the now
signless building, and were rapidly served with raw spirits, which Mr.
Pump suspected to be of no very superior quality. When the last goat was
gone, Captain Dalroy said:
“I mean that all this seems to me topsy-turvy. I understood that as the
law stands now, if there’s a sign they are allowed to drink and if there
isn’t they aren’t.”
“The Law!” said the man, in a voice thick with scorn. “Do you think
these poor brutes are afraid of the Law as they are of the Doctor?”
“Why should they be afraid of the Doctor?” asked Dalroy, innocently. “I
always heard that Peaceways was a self-governing republic.”
“Self-governing be damned,” was the illiberal reply. “Don’t he own all
the houses and could turn ’em out in a snow storm? Don’t ’e pay all the
wages and could starve ’em stiff in a month? The Law!” And he snorted. A
moment after he squared his elbows on the table and began to explain
more fully.
“I was a brewer about here and had the biggest brewery in these parts.
There were only two houses which didn’t belong to me, and the
magistrates took away their licenses after a time. Ten years ago you
could see Hugby’s Ales written beside every sign in the county. Then
came these cursed Radicals, and our leader, Lord Ivywood, must go over
to their side about it, and let this Doctor buy all the land under some
new law that there shan’t be any pubs at all. And so my business is
ruined so that he can sell his milk. Luckily I’d done pretty well before
and had some compensation, of course; and I still do a fair trade on the
Q.T., as you see. But of course that don’t amount to half the old one,
for they’re afraid of old Meadows finding out. Snuffling old blighter!”
And the gentleman with the good clothes spat on the carpet.
“I am a Radical myself,” said the Irishman, rather coldly, “for all
information on the Conservative party I must refer you to my friend, Mr.
Pump, who is, of course, in the inmost secrets of his leaders. But it
seems to me a very rum sort of Radicalism to eat and drink at the orders
of a master who is a madman, merely because he’s also a millionaire. O
Liberty, what very complicated and even unsatisfactory social
developments are committed in thy name! Why don’t they kick the old ass
round the town a bit? No boots? Is that why they’re allowed no boots?
Oh, roll him down hill in a milk can: he can’t object to that.”
“I don’t know,” said Pump, in his ruminant way, “Master Christian’s aunt
did, but ladies are more particular, of course.”
“Look here!” cried Dalroy, in some excitement, “if I stick up that sign
outside, and stay here to help, will you defy them? You’d be strictly
within the law, and any private coercion I can promise you they shall
repent. Plant the sign and sell the stuff openly like a man, and you may
stand in English history like a deliverer.”
Mr. Hugby, of Hugby’s Ales, only looked gloomily at the table. His was
not the sort of drinking nor the sort of drink-selling on which the
revolutionary sentiment flourishes.
“Well,” said the Captain, “will you come with me and say ‘Hear, hear!’
and ‘How true!’—‘What matchless eloquence!’ if I make a speech in the
marketplace? Come along! There’s room in our car.”
“Well, I’ll come with you, if you like,” replied Mr. Hugby, heavily.
“It’s true if yours is allowed we might get our trade back, too.” And
putting on a silk hat he followed the Captain and the innkeeper out to
their little car. The model village was not an appropriate background
for Mr. Hugby’s silk hat. Indeed, the hat somehow seemed to bring out by
contrast all that was fantastic in the place.
It was a superb morning, some hours after sunrise. The edges of the sky
touching the ring of dim woods and distant hills were still jewelled
with the tiny transparent clouds of daybreak, delicate red and green or
yellow. But above the vault of Heaven rose through turquoise into a
torrid and solid blue in which the other clouds, the colossal cumuli,
tumbled about like a celestial pillow-fight. The bulk of the houses were
as white as the clouds, so that it looked (to use another simile) as if
some of the whitewashed cottages were flying and falling about the sky.
But most of the white houses were picked out here and there with bright
colours, here an ornament in orange or there a stripe of lemon yellow,
as if by the brush of a baby giant. The houses had no thatching
(thatching is not hygienic) but were mostly covered with a sort of
peacock green tiles bought cheap at a Preraphaelite Bazaar; or, less
frequently, by some still more esoteric sort of terra cotta bricks. The
houses were not English, nor homelike, nor suited to the landscape; for
the houses had not been built by free men for themselves, but at the
fancy of a whimsical lord. But considered as a sort of elfin city in a
pantomime it was a really picturesque background for pantomimic
proceedings.
I fear Mr. Dalroy’s proceedings from the first rather deserved that
name. To begin with, he left the sign, the cask, and the keg all wrapped
and concealed in the car, but removed all the wraps of his own disguise,
and stood on the central patch of grass in that green uniform that
looked all the more insolent for being as ragged as the grass. Even that
was less ragged than his red hair, which no red jungle of the East could
imitate. Then he took out, almost tenderly, the large milk-can, and
deposited it, almost reverently, on the island of turf. Then he stood
beside it, like Napoleon beside a gun, with an expression of tremendous
seriousness and even severity. Then he drew his sword, and with that
flashing weapon, as with a flail, lashed and thrashed the echoing metal
can till the din was deafening, and Mr. Hugby hastily got out of the car
and withdrew to a slight distance, stopping his ears. Mr. Pump sat
solidly at the steering wheel, well knowing it might be necessary to
start in some haste.
“Gather, gather, gather, Peaceways,” shouted Patrick, still banging on
the can and lamenting the difficulties of adapting “Macgregor’s
Gathering” to the name and occasion, “We’re landless, _landless_,
landless, Peaceways!”
Two or three of the goat-clad, recognising Mr. Hugby with a guilty look,
drew near with great caution, and the Captain shouted at them as if they
were an army covering Salisbury Plain.
“Citizens,” he roared, saying anything that came into his head, “try the
only original unadulterated Mountain Milk, for which alone Mahomet came
to the mountain. The original milk of the land flowing with milk and
honey; the high quality of which could alone have popularised so
unappetising a combination. Try our milk! None others are genuine! Who
can do without milk. Even whales can’t do without milk. If any lady or
gentleman keeps a favourite whale at home, now’s their chance! The early
whale catches the milk. Just look at our milk! If you say you can’t look
at the milk, because it’s in the can—well, look at the can! You must
look at the can! You simply must! When Duty whispers low ‘Thou Must!’”
he bellowed at the top of his voice in a highly impromptu peroration,
“When Duty whispers low ‘Thou Must,’ the Youth replies, ‘I can!’” And
with the word “Can” he hit the can with a shocking and shattering noise,
like a peal of demoniac bells of steel.
This introductory speech is open to criticism from those who regard it
as intended for the study rather than the stage. The present chronicler
(who has no aim save truth) is bound to record that for its own
unscrupulous purpose it was extremely successful: a great mass of the
citizens of Peaceways having been attracted by the noise of one man
shouting like a crowd. There are crowds who do not care to revolt; but
there are no crowds who do not like someone else to do it for them; a
fact which the safest oligarchs may be wise to learn.
But Dalroy’s ultimate triumph (I regret to say) consisted in actually
handing to a few of the foremost of his audience some samples of his
blameless beverage. The fact was certainly striking. Some were paralysed
with surprise. Some were abruptly broken double with laughter. Many
chuckled. Some cheered. All looked radiantly toward the eccentric
orator.
And yet the radiance died quietly and suddenly from their faces. And
only because one little old man had joined the group; a little old man
in white linen with a white pointed beard and a white powder-puff of
hair like thistledown: a man whom almost every man present could have
killed with the left arm.
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