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[248] 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.[249] 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.”
[250]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[251] 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[252] 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[253] 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[254] 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[255] 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[256] 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[257] 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[258] 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[259] 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[260] jumped over the moon. but our myths come true.’
“the inexplicable and indeed incredible conclusion of the story was due to a new fact; the fact of the actual presence of the new peasantry. they had first come into complete possession of their farms, by the deed of gift signed by enoch oates in the february of 19— and had thus been settled on the land for ten or twelve years when lord eden and his cabinet finally committed themselves to the scheme of land nationalization by which their homesteads were to pass into official control. that curious and inexplicable thing, the spirit of the peasant, had made great strides in the interval. it was found that the government could not move such people about from place to place, as it is possible to do with the urban poor in the reconstruction of streets or the destruction of slums. it was not a thing like moving pawns, but a thing like pulling up plants; and plants that had already struck their roots very deep. in short, the government, which had adopted a policy commonly called socialist from motives that were in fact very conservative, found themselves confronted with the same peasant resistance as brought the bolshevist government in russia to a standstill. and when lord eden and his cabinet put in motion the whole modern machinery of militarism and coercion to crush the little experiment, he found himself confronted with a rural[261] rising such as has not been known in england since the middle ages.
“it is said that the men of the long bow carried their mediæval symbolism so far as to wear lincoln green as their uniform when they retired to the woods in the manner of robin hood. it is certain that they did employ the weapon after which they were named; and curiously enough, as will be seen, by no means without effect. but it must be clearly understood that when the new agrarian class took to the woods like outlaws, they did not feel in the least like robbers. they hardly even felt like rebels. from their point of view at least, they were and had long been the lawful owners of their own fields, and the officials who came to confiscate were the robbers. therefore when lord eden proclaimed nationalization, they turned out in thousands as their fathers would have gone out against pirates or wolves.
“the government acted with great promptitude. it instantly voted £50,000 to mr. rosenbaum low, the expenditure of which was wisely left to his discretion at so acute a crisis, with no more than the understanding that he should take a thorough general survey of the situation. he proved worthy of the trust; and it was with the gravest consideration and sense of responsibility that he selected mr. leonard kramp, the brilliant young financier, from all his other nephews to take command of the forces in[262] the field. in the field, however, fortune is well known to be somewhat more incalculable; and all the intelligence and presence of mind that had enabled kramp to postpone the rush on the potosi bank were not sufficient to balance the accidental possession by crane and pierce of an elementary knowledge of strategy.
“before considering the successes obtained by these commanders in the rather rude fashion of warfare which they were forced to adopt, it must be noted, of course, that even on their side there were also scientific resources of a kind; and an effective if eccentric kind. the scientific genius of bellew blair had equipped his side with many secret processes affecting aviation and aeronautics, and it is the peculiarity of this extraordinary man that his secret processes really remained for a considerable time secret. for he had not told them to anybody with any intention of making any money out of them. this quixotic and visionary behaviour contrasted sharply with the shrewd good sense of the great business men who knew that publicity is the soul of business. for some time past they had successfully ignored the outworn sentimental prejudice that had prevented soldiers and sailors from advertising the best methods of defeating the enemy; and we can all recall those brilliantly coloured announcements which used to brighten so many hoardings in those days, ‘sink in smith’s submarine;[263] pleasure trips for patriots.’ or ‘duffin’s portable dug-out makes war a luxury.’ advertisement cannot fail to effect its aim; the name of an aeroplane that had been written on the sky in pink and pea-green lights could not but become a symbol of the conquest of the air; and the patriotic statesman, deeply considering what sort of battleship might best defend his country’s coasts, was insensibly and subtly influenced by the number of times that he had seen its name repeated on the steps of a moving staircase at an imperial exhibition. nor could there be any doubt about the brilliant success that attended these scientific specialities so long as their operations were confined to the market. the methods of commander blair were in comparison private, local, obscure and lacking any general recognition; and by a strange irony it was a positive advantage to this nameless and secretive crank that he had never advertised his weapons until he used them. he had paraded a number of merely fanciful balloons and fireworks for a jest; but the secrets to which he attached importance he had hidden in cracks of the welsh mountains with a curious and callous indifference to the principles of commercial distribution and display. he could not in any case have conducted operations on a large scale, being deficient in that capital, the lack of which has so often been fatal to inventors; and had made it useless for a man to discover a machine unless he could also[264] discover a millionaire. but it cannot be denied that when his machine was brought into operation it was always operative, even to the point of killing the millionaire who might have financed it. for the millionaire had so persistently cultivated the virtues of self-advertisement that it was difficult for him to become suddenly unknown and undistinguished, even in scenes of conflict where he most ardently desired to do so. there was a movement on foot for treating all millionaires as non-combatants, as being treasures belonging alike to all nations, like the cathedrals or the parthenon. it is said that there was even an alternative scheme for camouflaging the millionaire by the pictorial methods that can disguise a gun as a part of the landscape; and that captain pierce devoted much eloquence to persuading mr. rosenbaum low how much better it would be for all parties if his face could be made to melt away into the middle distance or take on the appearance of a blank wall or a wooden post.”
“the extraordinary thing is,” interrupted pierce, who had been listening eagerly, “that he said i was personal. just at the moment when i was trying to make him most impersonal, when i was trying to wave away all personal features that could come between us, he actually said i was personal.”
hood went on reading as if nobody had spoken. “in truth the successes of blair’s instruments revealed a fallacy in the common commercial argument.[265] we talk of a competition between two kinds of soap or two kinds of jam or cocoa, but it is a competition in purchase and not in practice. we do not make two men eat two kinds of jam and then observe which wears the most radiant smile of satisfaction. we do not give two men two kinds of cocoa and note which endures it with most resignation. but we do use two guns directly against each other; and in the case of blair’s methods the less advertised gun was the better. nevertheless his scientific genius could only cover a corner of the field; and a great part of the war must be considered as a war in the open country of a much more primitive and sometimes almost prehistoric kind.
“it is admitted of course by all students that the victories of crane and pierce were gross violations of strategic science. the victors themselves afterwards handsomely acknowledged the fact; but it was then too late to repair the error. in order to understand it, however, it is necessary to grasp the curious condition into which so many elements of social life had sunk in the time just preceding the outbreak. it was this strange social situation which rendered the campaign a contradiction to so many sound military maxims.
“for instance, it is a recognized military maxim that armies depend upon roads. but anyone who had noticed the conditions that were already beginning to appear in the london streets as early as 1924[266] will understand that a road was something less simple and static than the romans imagined. the government had adopted everywhere in their road-making the well-known material familiar to us all from the advertisements by the name of ‘nobumpo,’ thereby both insuring the comfort of travellers and rewarding a faithful supporter by placing a large order with mr. hugg. as several members of the government themselves held shares in ‘nobumpo’ their enthusiastic co-operation in the public work was assured. but, as has no doubt been observed everywhere, it is one of the many advantages of ‘nobumpo,’ as preserving that freshness of surface so agreeable to the pedestrian, that the whole material can be (and is) taken up and renewed every three months, for the comfort of travellers and the profit and encouragement of trade. it so happened that at the precise moment of the outbreak of hostilities all the country roads, especially in the west, were as completely out of use as if they had been the main thoroughfares of london. this in itself tended to equalize the chances or even to increase them in favour of a guerilla force, such as that which had disappeared into the woods and was everywhere moving under the cover of the trees. under modern conditions, it was found that by carefully avoiding roads, it was still more or less possible to move from place to place.
“again, another recognized military fact is the fact[267] that the bow is an obsolete weapon. and nothing is more irritating to a finely balanced taste than to be killed with an obsolete weapon, especially while persistently pulling the trigger of an efficient weapon, without any apparent effect. such was the fate of the few unfortunate regiments which ventured to advance into the forests and fell under showers of arrows from trackless ambushes. for it must be remembered that the conditions of this extraordinary campaign entirely reversed the normal military rule about the essential military department of supply. mechanical communications theoretically accelerate supply, while the supply of a force cut loose and living on the country is soon exhausted. but the mechanical factor also depends upon a moral factor. ammunition would on normal occasions have been produced with unequalled rapidity by poole’s process and brought up with unrivalled speed in blinker’s cars; but not at the moment when riotous employees were engaged in dipping poole repeatedly in a large vat at the factory or in the quieter conditions of the countryside, where various tramps were acquiring squatters’ rights in blinker’s cars, accidentally delayed upon their journey. everywhere the same thing happened; just as the great manufacturer failed to keep his promise to the workers who produced munitions, so the petty officials driving the lorries had failed to keep their promise to loafers and vagrants who had helped them out of temporary[268] difficulties; and the whole system of supply broke down upon a broken word. on the other hand, the supply of the outlaws was in a sense almost infinite. with the woodcutters and the blacksmiths on their side, they could produce their own rude mediæval weapons everywhere. it was in vain that professor hake delivered a series of popular lectures, proving to the lower classes that in the long run it would be to their economic advantage to be killed in battle. captain pierce is reported to have said: ‘i believe the professor is a botanist as well as an economist; but as a botanist he has not yet discovered that guns do not grow on trees. bows and arrows do.’
“but the incident which history will have most difficulty in explaining, and which it may perhaps refer to the region of myth or romance, is the crowning victory commonly called the battle of the bows. it was indeed originally called ‘the battle of the bows of god’; in reference to some strangely fantastic boast, equally strangely fulfilled, that is said to have been uttered by the celebrated parson white, a sort of popular chaplain who seems to have been the friar tuck of this new band of robin hood. coming on a sort of embassy to sir horace hunter, this clergyman is said to have threatened the government with something like a miracle. when rallied about the archaic sport of the long bow, he replied: ‘yes, we have long bows and we shall have longer[269] bows; the longest bows the world has ever seen; bows taller than houses; bows given to us by god himself and big enough for his gigantic angels.’
“the whole business of this battle, historic and decisive as it was, is covered with some obscurity, like that cloud of storm that hung heavy upon the daybreak of that gloomy november day. had anyone been present with the government forces who was well acquainted with the western valley in which they were operating, such a person could not have failed to notice that the very landscape looked different; looked new and abnormal. dimly as it could be traced through the morning twilight, the very line of the woodland against the sky would have shown him a new shape; a deformity like a hump. but the plans had all been laid out in london long before in imitation of that foresight, fixity of purpose, and final success that will always be associated with the last german emperor. it was enough for them that there was a wood of some sort marked on the map, and they advanced towards it, low and crouching as its entrance appeared to be.
“then something happened, which even those who saw it and survived cannot describe. the dark trees seemed to spring up to twice their height as in a nightmare. in the half-dark the whole wood seemed to rise from the earth like a rush of birds and then to turn over in mid-air and come towards[270] the invaders like a roaring wave. some such dim and dizzy sight they saw; but many of them at least saw little enough afterwards. simultaneously with the turning of this wheel of waving trees, rocks seemed to rain down out of heaven; beams and stones and shafts and missiles of all kinds, flattening out the advancing force as under a pavement produced by a shower of paving-stones. it is asserted that some of the countrymen cunning in woodcraft, in the service of the long bow, had contrived to fit up a tree as a colossal catapult; calculating how to bend back the boughs and sometimes even the trunks to the breaking-point, and gaining a huge and living resilience with their release. if this story is true, it is certainly an appropriate conclusion to the career of the long bow and a rather curious fulfilment of the visionary vaunt of parson white when he said that the bows would be big enough for giants, and that the maker of the bows was god.”
“yes,” interrupted the excitable white, “and do you know what he said to me when i first said it?”
“what who said when you said what?” asked hood patiently.
“i mean that fellow hunter,” replied the clergyman. “that varnished society doctor turned politician. do you know what he said when i told him we would get our bows from god?”
owen hood paused in the act of lighting a cigar.
“yes,” he said grimly. “i believe i can tell you[271] exactly what he said. i’ve watched him off and on for twenty years. i bet he began by saying: ‘i don’t profess to be a religious man.’”
“right, quite right,” cried the cleric bounding upon his chair in a joyous manner, “that’s exactly how he began. ‘i don’t profess to be a religious man, but i trust i have some reverence and good taste. i don’t drag religion into politics.’ and i said: ‘no, i don’t think you do.’”
a moment after, he bounded, as it were, in a new direction. “and that reminds me of what i came about,” he cried. “enoch oates, your american friend, drags religion into politics all right; only it’s a rather american sort of religion. he’s talking about a united states of europe and wants to introduce you to a lithuanian prophet. it seems this lithuanian party has started a movement for a universal peasant republic or world state of workers on the land; but at present he’s only got as far as lithuania. but he seems inclined to pick up england on the way, after the unexpected success of the english agrarian party.”
“what’s the good of talking to me about a world state,” growled hood. “didn’t i say i preferred a heptarchy?”
“don’t you understand?” interrupted hilary pierce excitedly. “what can we have to do with international republics? we can turn england upside-down if we like; but it’s england that we like,[272] whichever way up. why, our very names and phrases, the very bets and jokes in which the whole thing began, will never be translated. it takes an englishman to eat his hat; i never heard of a spaniard threatening to eat his sombrero, or a chinaman to chew his pigtail. you can only set the thames on fire; you cannot set the tiber or the ganges on fire, because the habit of speech has never been heard of. what’s the good of talking about white elephants in countries where they are only white elephants? go and say to a frenchman, ‘pour mon château, je le trouve un elephant blanc’ and he will send two parisian alienists to look at you seriously, like a man who says that his motor-car is a green giraffe. there is no point in telling czecho-slovakian pigs to fly, or jugo-slavonic cows to jump over the moon. why, the unhappy lithuanian would be bewildered to the point of madness by our very name. there is no reason to suppose that he and his countrymen talk about a long bowman when they mean a liar. we talk about tall stories, but a tall story may mean a true story in colloquial lithuanian.”
“tall stories are true stories sometimes, i hope,” said colonel crane, “and people don’t believe ’em. but people’ll say that was a very tall story about the tall trees throwing darts and stones. afraid it’ll come to be a bit of a joke.”
“all our battles began as jokes and they will end[273] as jokes,” said owen hood, staring at the smoke of his cigar as it threaded its way towards the sky in grey and silver arabesque. “they will linger only as faintly laughable legends, if they linger at all; they may pass an idle hour or fill an empty page; and even the man who tells them will not take them seriously. it will all end in smoke like the smoke i am looking at; in eddying and topsy-turvy patterns hovering for a moment in the air. and i wonder how many, who may smile or yawn over them, will realize that where there was smoke there was fire?”
there was a silence; then colonel crane stood up, a solitary figure in his severe and formal clothes, and gravely said farewell to his hostess. with the failing afternoon light he knew that his own wife, who was a well-known artist, would be abandoning her studio work, and he always looked forward to a talk with her before dinner, which was often a more social function. nevertheless, as he approached his old home a whim induced him to delay the meeting for a few minutes and to walk around to his old kitchen-garden, where his old servant archer was still leaning on a spade, as in the days before the flood.
so he stood for a moment amid a changing world exactly as he had stood on that distant sunday morning at the beginning of all these things. the south sea idol still stood at the corner; the scarecrow still wore the hat that he had sacrificed; the cabbages[274] still looked green and solid like the cabbage he had once dug up, digging up so much along with it.
“queer thing,” he said, “how true it is what hilary once said about acting an allegory without knowing it. never had a notion of what i was doing when i picked up a cabbage and wore it for a wager. damned awkward position, but i never dreamed i was being martyred for a symbol. and the right symbol too, for i’ve lived to see britannia crowned with cabbage. all very well to say britannia ruled the waves; it was the land she couldn’t rule, her own land, and it was heaving like earthquakes. but while there’s cabbage there’s hope. archer, my friend, this is the moral: any country that tries to do without cabbages is done for. and even in war you often fight as much with cabbages as cannon balls.”
“yes, sir,” said archer respectfully; “would you be wanting another cabbage now, sir?”
colonel crane repressed a slight shudder. “no, thank you; no, thank you,” he said hastily. then he muttered as he turned away: “i don’t mind revolutions so much, but i wouldn’t go through that again.”
and he passed swiftly round his house, of which the windows began to show the glow of kindled lamps, and went in to his wife.
archer was left alone in the garden, tidying up after his work and shifting the potted shrubs; a[275] dark and solitary figure as sunset and twilight sank all around the enclosure like soft curtains of grey with a border of purple; and the windows, as yet uncurtained and full of lamplight, painted patterns of gold on the lawns and flagged walks without. it was perhaps appropriate that he should remain alone and apart; for he alone in all these changes had remained quite unchanged. it was perhaps fitting that his figure should stand in a dark outline against the darkening scene; for the mystery of his immutable respectability remains more of a riddle than all the riot of the rest. no revolution could revolutionize mr. archer. attempts had been made to provide so excellent a gardener with a garden of his own; with a farm of his own, in accordance with the popular policy of the hour. but he would not adapt himself to the new world; nor would he hasten to die out, as was his duty on evolutionary principles. he was merely a survival; but he showed a perplexing disposition to survive.
suddenly the lonely gardener realized that he was not alone. a face had appeared above the hedge, gazing at him with blue eyes dreaming yet burning; a face with something of the tint and profile of shelley. it was impossible that mr. archer should have heard of such a person as shelley: fortunately he recognized the visitor as a friend of his master.
“forgive me if i am mistaken, citizen archer,” said hilary pierce with pathetic earnestness, “but it[276] seems to me that you are not swept along with the movement; that a man of your abilities has been allowed to stand apart, as it were, from the campaign of the long bow. and yet how strange! are you not archer? does not your very name rise up and reproach you? ought you not to have shot more arrows or told more tarradiddles than all the rest? or is there perhaps a more elemental mystery behind your immobility, like that of a statue in the garden? are you indeed the god of the garden, more beautiful than this south sea idol and more respectable than priapus? are you in no mortal sense an archer? are you perhaps apollo, serving this military admetus; successfully, yes, successfully, hiding your radiance from me?” he paused for a reply, and then lowered his voice as he resumed: “or are you not rather that other archer whose shafts are not shafts of death but of life and fruitfulness; whose arrows plant themselves like little flowering trees; like the little shrubs you are planting in this garden? are you he that gives the sunstroke not in the head but the heart; and have you stricken each of us in turn with the romance that has awakened us for the revolution? for without that spirit of fruitfulness and the promise of the family, these visions would indeed be vain. are you in truth the god of love; and has your arrow stung and startled each of us into telling his story? i will not call you cupid,” he said with a slight air of deprecation or apology,[277] “i will not call you cupid, mr. archer, for i conceive you as no pagan deity, but rather as that image clarified and spiritualized to a symbol almost christian, as he might have appeared to chaucer or to botticelli. nay, it was you that, clad in no heathen colours, but rather in mediæval heraldry, blew a blast on his golden trumpet when beatrice saluted dante on the bridge. are you indeed that archer, o archer, and did you give each one of us his vita nuova?”
“no, sir,” said mr. archer.
thus does the chronicler of the league of the long bow come to the end of his singularly unproductive and unprofitable labours, without, perhaps, having yet come to the beginning. the reader may have once hoped, perhaps, that the story would be like the universe; which when it ends, will explain why it ever began. but the reader has long been sleeping, after the toils and trials of his part in the affair; and the writer is too tactful to ask at how early a stage of his story-telling that generally satisfactory solution of all our troubles was found. he knows not if the sleep has been undisturbed, or in that sleep what dreams may come, if there has been cast upon it any shadow of the shapes in his own very private and comfortable nightmare; turrets clad with the wings of morning or temples marching[278] over dim meadows as living monsters, or swine plumed like cherubim or forests bent like bows, or a fiery river winding through a dark land. images are in their nature indefensible, if they miss the imagination of another; and the foolish scribe of the long bow will not commit the last folly of defending his dreams. he at least has drawn a bow at a venture and shot an arrow into the air; and he has no intention of looking for it in oaks, all over the neighbourhood, or expecting to find it still sticking in a mortal and murderous manner in the heart of a friend. his is only a toy bow; and when a boy shoots with such a bow, it is generally very difficult to find the arrow—or the boy.