CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES
by
These fleeting sketches are all republished by kind permission
of the Editor of the DAILY NEWS, in which paper they appeared.
They amount to no more than a sort of sporadic diary--a diary
recording one day in twenty which happened to stick in the fancy--
the only kind of diary the author has ever been able to keep.
Even that diary he could only keep by keeping it in public,
for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the topics they
are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the
reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages,
it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post,
a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the
reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is,
never realised. He could not write an essay on such a post or
wall: he does not know what the post or wall mean. He could
not even write the synopsis of an essay; as "The Bed-Post; Its
Significance--Security Essential to Idea of Sleep--Night Felt
as Infinite--Need of Monumental Architecture," and so on.
He could not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards
window-blinds, even in the form of a summary. "The Window-Blind--
Its Analogy to the Curtain and Veil--Is Modesty Natural?
--Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun, etc., etc." None of us
think enough of these things on which the eye rests. But don't
let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us
exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run
across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be
ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or
a coloured cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what
follows; but anyone else may do it better, if anyone else will
only try.
Once upon a time there were two little boys who lived chiefly
in the front garden, because their villa was a model one.
The front garden was about the same size as the dinner table;
it consisted of four strips of gravel, a square of turf with some
mysterious pieces of cork standing up in the middle and one flower
bed with a row of red daisies. One morning while they were at play
in these romantic grounds, a passing individual, probably the milkman,
leaned over the railing and engaged them in philosophical conversation.
The boys, whom we will call Paul and Peter, were at least sharply
interested in his remarks. For the milkman (who was, I need say,
a fairy) did his duty in that state of life by offering them
in the regulation manner anything that they chose to ask for.
And Paul closed with the offer with a business-like abruptness,
explaining that he had long wished to be a giant that he might stride
across continents and oceans and visit Niagara or the Himalayas
in an afternoon dinner stroll. The milkman producing a wand from
his breast pocket, waved it in a hurried and perfunctory manner;
and in an instant the model villa with its front garden was like a
tiny doll's house at Paul's colossal feet. He went striding away
with his head above the clouds to visit Niagara and the Himalayas.
But when he came to the Himalayas, he found they were quite small
and silly-looking, like the little cork rockery in the garden; and when
he found Niagara it was no bigger than the tap turned on in the bathroom.
He wandered round the world for several minutes trying to find
something really large and finding everything small, till in sheer
boredom he lay down on four or five prairies and fell asleep.
Unfortunately his head was just outside the hut of an intellectual
backwoodsman who came out of it at that moment with an axe in one hand
and a book of Neo-Catholic Philosophy in the other. The man looked
at the book and then at the giant, and then at the book again.
And in the book it said, "It can be maintained that the evil
of pride consists in being out of proportion to the universe."
So the backwoodsman put down his book, took his axe and,
working eight hours a day for about a week, cut the giant's head off;
and there was an end of him.
Such is the severe yet salutary history of Paul. But Peter, oddly
enough, made exactly the opposite request; he said he had long
wished to be a pigmy about half an inch high; and of course he
immediately became one. When the transformation was over he found
himself in the midst of an immense plain, covered with a tall green
jungle and above which, at intervals, rose strange trees each with
a head like the sun in symbolic pictures, with gigantic rays of
silver and a huge heart of gold. Toward the middle of this prairie
stood up a mountain of such romantic and impossible shape, yet of
such stony height and dominance, that it looked like some incident
of the end of the world. And far away on the faint horizon he
could see the line of another forest, taller and yet more mystical,
of a terrible crimson colour, like a forest on fire for ever. He
set out on his adventures across that coloured plain; and he has
not come to the end of it yet.
Such is the story of Peter and Paul, which contains all the highest
qualities of a modern fairy tale, including that of being wholly unfit
for children; and indeed the motive with which I have introduced
it is not childish, but rather full of subtlety and reaction.
It is in fact the almost desperate motive of excusing or palliating
the pages that follow. Peter and Paul are the two primary influences
upon European literature to-day; and I may be permitted to put my own
preference in its most favourable shape, even if I can only do it
by what little girls call telling a story.
I need scarcely say that I am the pigmy. The only excuse for the scraps
that follow is that they show what can be achieved with a commonplace
existence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration. The other
great literary theory, that which is roughly represented in England
by Mr. Rudyard Kipling, is that we moderns are to regain the primal zest
by sprawling all over the world growing used to travel and geographical
variety, being at home everywhere, that is being at home nowhere.
Let it be granted that a man in a frock coat is a heartrending sight;
and the two alternative methods still remain. Mr. Kipling's school
advises us to go to Central Africa in order to find a man without
a frock coat. The school to which I belong suggests that we should
stare steadily at the man until we see the man inside the frock coat.
If we stare at him long enough he may even be moved to take off his coat
to us; and that is a far greater compliment than his taking off his hat.
In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely
on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures;
force them to give up their meaning and fulfil their mysterious purpose.
The purpose of the Kipling literature is to show how many extraordinary
things a man may see if he is active and strides from continent
to continent like the giant in my tale. But the object of my school
is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man
may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.
For this purpose I have taken the laziest person of my acquaintance, that
is myself; and made an idle diary of such odd things as I have fallen over
by accident, in walking in a very limited area at a very indolent pace.
If anyone says that these are very small affairs talked about in very
big language, I can only gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke.
If anyone says that I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess
with pride that it is so. I can imagine no more successful and productive
form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills.
But I would add this not unimportant fact, that molehills are mountains;
one has only to become a pigmy like Peter to discover that.
I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering,
in getting to the top of everything and overlooking everything.
Satan was the most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took
Jesus to the top of an exceeding high mountain and showed
him all the kingdoms of the earth. But the joy of Satan
in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in
beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects
at his feet. It is from the valley that things look large;
it is from the level that things look high; I am a child
of the level and have no need of that celebrated Alpine guide.
I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help;
but I will not lift up my carcass to the hills, unless it is
absolutely necessary. Everything is in an attitude of mind;
and at this moment I am in a comfortable attitude.
I will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle
on me like flies. There are plenty of them, I assure you.
The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only
for want of wonder.
I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer
holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing
nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up
a walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pocket.
I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house,
belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village),
and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any
brown paper. She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she
mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper.
She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must
be wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to do;
indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental capacity.
Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of toughness and
endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only wanted to draw
pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least;
and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question, not of
tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively
irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw
she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper, apparently supposing
that I did my notes and correspondence on old brown paper wrappers
from motives of economy.
I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I
not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness
in paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods,
or in beer, or in the peat-streams of the North. Brown paper
represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation,
and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points
of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green,
like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness.
All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman; and I put the brown
paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and possibly other things.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical
are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife,
for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword.
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things
in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age
of the great epics is past.
. . . . .
With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper,
I went out on to the great downs. I crawled across those colossal
contours that express the best quality of England, because they
are at the same time soft and strong. The smoothness of them
has the same meaning as the smoothness of great cart-horses,
or the smoothness of the beech-tree; it declares in the teeth
of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful.
As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly
as any of its cottages, but for power it was like an earthquake.
The villages in the immense valley were safe, one could see,
for centuries; yet the lifting of the whole land was like
the lifting of one enormous wave to wash them all away.
I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place
to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going
to sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim,
and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right,
and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green,
and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright
colours on brown paper. They are much better worth drawing than Nature;
also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching
by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it;
but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew
the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me
in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had
seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts. But
though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape,
it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out
of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the
old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care
very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.
They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills;
but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much
less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They
painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding
snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields
of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets.
The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live
green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten
skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went
in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.
. . . . .
But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began
to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a
most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets,
but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted
with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art
of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential.
I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the
wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this,
that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is
a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as
black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses;
when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three
defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity,
for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of
religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence
of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and
separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean
not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a
plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or
not seen.
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means
something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in
many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost
said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age
has realised this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume.
For if it were really true that white was a blank and colourless
thing, negative and non-committal, then white would be used instead
of black and grey for the funeral dress of this pessimistic period.
We should see city gentlemen in frock coats of spotless silver
linen, with top hats as white as wonderful arum lilies. Which is
not the case.
Meanwhile, I could not find my chalk.
. . . . .
I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town
nearer than Chichester at which it was even remotely probable
that there would be such a thing as an artist's colourman.
And yet, without white, my absurd little pictures would be as
pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it.
I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedients.
Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and again,
so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a
man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass.
Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some
salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on
an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made
entirely out of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until
it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece off the rock I sat on;
it did not mark so well as the shop chalks do; but it gave the
effect. And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realising that
this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition
and a civilisation; it is something even more admirable. It is a
piece of chalk.
All this talk of a railway mystery has sent my mind back to a
loose memory. I will not merely say that this story is true:
because, as you will soon see, it is all truth and no story.
It has no explanation and no conclusion; it is, like most of the other
things we encounter in life, a fragment of something else which
would be intensely exciting if it were not too large to be seen.
For the perplexity of life arises from there being too many
interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any
of them; what we call its triviality is really the tag-ends
of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten
thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon.
My experience was a fragment of this nature, and it is, at any rate,
not fictitious. Not only am I not making up the incidents
(what there were of them), but I am not making up the atmosphere
of the landscape, which were the whole horror of the thing.
I remember them vividly, and they were as I shall now describe.
. . . . .
About noon of an ashen autumn day some years ago I was standing
outside the station at Oxford intending to take the train to London.
And for some reason, out of idleness or the emptiness of my mind
or the emptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice
fell upon me that I would not go by that train at all, but would step
out on the road and walk at least some part of the way to London.
I do not know if other people are made like me in this matter;
but to me it is always dreary weather, what may be called
useless weather, that slings into life a sense of action and romance.
On bright blue days I do not want anything to happen; the world
is complete and beautiful, a thing for contemplation. I no more
ask for adventures under that turquoise dome than I ask for
adventures in church. But when the background of man's life is
a grey background, then, in the name of man's sacred supremacy,
I desire to paint on it in fire and gore. When the heavens fail
man refuses to fail; when the sky seems to have written on it, in
letters of lead and pale silver, the decree that nothing shall
happen, then the immortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises
up and decrees that something shall happen, if it be only the
slaughter of a policeman. But this is a digressive way of stating
what I have said already--that the bleak sky awoke in me a hunger
for some change of plans, that the monotonous weather seemed to
render unbearable the use of the monotonous train, and that I set
out into the country lanes, out of the town of Oxford. It was,
perhaps, at that moment that a strange curse came upon me out of
the city and the sky, whereby it was decreed that years afterwards
I should, in an article in the DAILY NEWS, talk about Sir George
Trevelyan in connection with Oxford, when I knew perfectly well
that he went to Cambridge.
As I crossed the country everything was ghostly and colourless.
The fields that should have been green were as grey as the skies;
the tree-tops that should have been green were as grey as the clouds
and as cloudy. And when I had walked for some hours the evening
was closing in. A sickly sunset clung weakly to the horizon,
as if pale with reluctance to leave the world in the dark.
And as it faded more and more the skies seemed to come closer and
to threaten. The clouds which had been merely sullen became swollen;
and then they loosened and let down the dark curtains of the rain.
The rain was blinding and seemed to beat like blows from an enemy
at close quarters; the skies seemed bending over and bawling
in my ears. I walked on many more miles before I met a man,
and in that distance my mind had been made up; and when I met
him I asked him if anywhere in the neighbourhood I could pick up
the train for Paddington. He directed me to a small silent station
(I cannot even remember the name of it) which stood well away
from the road and looked as lonely as a hut on the Andes.
I do not think I have ever seen such a type of time and sadness
and scepticism and everything devilish as that station was:
it looked as if it had always been raining there ever since
the creation of the world. The water streamed from the soaking
wood of it as if it were not water at all, but some loathsome
liquid corruption of the wood itself; as if the solid station
were eternally falling to pieces and pouring away in filth.
It took me nearly ten minutes to find a man in the station.
When I did he was a dull one, and when I asked him if there was
a train to Paddington his answer was sleepy and vague. As far as I
understood him, he said there would be a train in half an hour.
I sat down and lit a cigar and waited, watching the last tail
of the tattered sunset and listening to the everlasting rain.
It may have been in half an hour or less, but a train came rather
slowly into the station. It was an unnaturally dark train;
I could not see a light anywhere in the long black body of it;
and I could not see any guard running beside it. I was reduced
to walking up to the engine and calling out to the stoker to ask
if the train was going to London. "Well--yes, sir," he said, with
an unaccountable kind of reluctance. "It is going to London;
but----" It was just starting, and I jumped into the first
carriage; it was pitch dark. I sat there smoking and wondering,
as we steamed through the continually darkening landscape, lined
with desolate poplars, until we slowed down and stopped,
irrationally, in the middle of a field. I heard a heavy noise as
of some one clambering off the train, and a dark, ragged head
suddenly put itself into my window. "Excuse me, sir," said the
stoker, "but I think, perhaps--well, perhaps you ought to know--
there's a dead man in this train."
. . . . .
Had I been a true artist, a person of exquisite susceptibilities
and nothing else, I should have been bound, no doubt, to be
finally overwhelmed with this sensational touch, and to have
insisted on getting out and walking. As it was, I regret to
say, I expressed myself politely, but firmly, to the effect that
I didn't care particularly if the train took me to Paddington.
But when the train had started with its unknown burden I did do
one thing, and do it quite instinctively, without stopping to
think, or to think more than a flash. I threw away my cigar.
Something that is as old as man and has to do with all mourning
and ceremonial told me to do it. There was something
unnecessarily horrible, it seemed to me, in the idea of there
being only two men in that train, and one of them dead and the
other smoking a cigar. And as the red and gold of the butt end
of it faded like a funeral torch trampled out at some symbolic
moment of a procession, I realised how immortal ritual is. I
realised (what is the origin and essence of all ritual) that in
the presence of those sacred riddles about which we can say
nothing it is more decent merely to do something. And I realised
that ritual will always mean throwing away something; DESTROYING
our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
When the train panted at last into Paddington Station I sprang
out of it with a suddenly released curiosity. There was a barrier
and officials guarding the rear part of the train; no one was
allowed to press towards it. They were guarding and hiding
something; perhaps death in some too shocking form, perhaps
something like the Merstham matter, so mixed up with human mystery
and wickedness that the land has to give it a sort of sanctity;
perhaps something worse than either. I went out gladly enough into
the streets and saw the lamps shining on the laughing faces. Nor
have I ever known from that day to this into what strange story I
wandered or what frightful thing was my companion in the dark.
We have all met the man who says that some odd things have
happened to him, but that he does not really believe that they
were supernatural. My own position is the opposite of this.
I believe in the supernatural as a matter of intellect and reason,
not as a matter of personal experience. I do not see ghosts;
I only see their inherent probability. But it is entirely
a matter of the mere intelligence, not even of the motions;
my nerves and body are altogether of this earth, very earthy.
But upon people of this temperament one weird incident will often
leave a peculiar impression. And the weirdest circumstance
that ever occurred to me occurred a little while ago. It consisted
in nothing less than my playing a game, and playing it quite well
for some seventeen consecutive minutes. The ghost of my grandfather
would have astonished me less.
On one of these blue and burning afternoons I found myself, to my
inexpressible astonishment, playing a game called croquet. I had
imagined that it belonged to the epoch of Leach and Anthony Trollope,
and I had neglected to provide myself with those very long and
luxuriant side whiskers which are really essential to such a scene.
I played it with a man whom we will call Parkinson, and with whom I had
a semi-philosophical argument which lasted through the entire contest.
It is deeply implanted in my mind that I had the best of the argument;
but it is certain and beyond dispute that I had the worst of the game.
"Oh, Parkinson, Parkinson!" I cried, patting him affectionately
on the head with a mallet, "how far you really are from the pure
love of the sport--you who can play. It is only we who play badly
who love the Game itself. You love glory; you love applause;
you love the earthquake voice of victory; you do not love croquet.
You do not love croquet until you love being beaten at croquet.
It is we the bunglers who adore the occupation in the abstract.
It is we to whom it is art for art's sake. If we may see the face
of Croquet herself (if I may so express myself) we are content to
see her face turned upon us in anger. Our play is called amateurish;
and we wear proudly the name of amateur, for amateurs is but the
French for Lovers. We accept all adventures from our Lady, the most
disastrous or the most dreary. We wait outside her iron gates (I
allude to the hoops), vainly essaying to enter. Our devoted balls,
impetuous and full of chivalry, will not be confined within
the pedantic boundaries of the mere croquet ground. Our balls seek
honour in the ends of the earth; they turn up in the flower-beds
and the conservatory; they are to be found in the front garden
and the next street. No, Parkinson! The good painter has skill.
It is the bad painter who loves his art. The good musician
loves being a musician, the bad musician loves music. With such a
pure and hopeless passion do I worship croquet. I love the game
itself. I love the parallelogram of grass marked out with chalk or
tape, as if its limits were the frontiers of my sacred Fatherland,
the four seas of Britain. I love the mere swing of the mallets, and
the click of the balls is music. The four colours are to me
sacramental and symbolic, like the red of martyrdom, or the white
of Easter Day. You lose all this, my poor Parkinson. You have to
solace yourself for the absence of this vision by the paltry
consolation of being able to go through hoops and to hit the stick."
And I waved my mallet in the air with a graceful gaiety.
"Don't be too sorry for me," said Parkinson, with his simple sarcasm.
"I shall get over it in time. But it seems to me that the more
a man likes a game the better he would want to play it. Granted that
the pleasure in the thing itself comes first, does not the pleasure
of success come naturally and inevitably afterwards? Or, take your
own simile of the Knight and his Lady-love. I admit the gentleman
does first and foremost want to be in the lady's presence. But I
never yet heard of a gentleman who wanted to look an utter ass when
he was there."
"Perhaps not; though he generally looks it," I replied. "But the truth
is that there is a fallacy in the simile, although it was my own. The
happiness at which the lover is aiming is an infinite happiness, which
can be extended without limit. The more he is loved, normally speaking,
the jollier he will be. It is definitely true that the stronger the
love of both lovers, the stronger will be the happiness. But it is not
true that the stronger the play of both croquet players the stronger
will be the game. It is logically possible--(follow me closely here,
Parkinson!)--it is logically possible, to play croquet too well to
enjoy it at all. If you could put this blue ball through that distant
hoop as easily as you could pick it up with your hand, then you would
not put it through that hoop any more than you pick it up with your
hand; it would not be worth doing. If you could play unerringly you
would not play at all. The moment the game is perfect the game
disappears."
"I do not think, however," said Parkinson, "that you are in any
immediate danger of effecting that sort of destruction. I do not
think your croquet will vanish through its own faultless excellence.
You are safe for the present."
I again caressed him with the mallet, knocked a ball about, wired myself,
and resumed the thread of my discourse.
The long, warm evening had been gradually closing in, and by this
time it was almost twilight. By the time I had delivered four
more fundamental principles, and my companion had gone through five
more hoops, the dusk was verging upon dark.
"We shall have to give this up," said Parkinson, as he missed
a ball almost for the first time, "I can't see a thing."
"Nor can I," I answered, "and it is a comfort to reflect that I
could not hit anything if I saw it."
With that I struck a ball smartly, and sent it away into the darkness
towards where the shadowy figure of Parkinson moved in the hot haze.
Parkinson immediately uttered a loud and dramatic cry. The situation,
indeed, called for it. I had hit the right ball.
Stunned with astonishment, I crossed the gloomy ground, and hit my ball
again. It went through a hoop. I could not see the hoop; but it was
the right hoop. I shuddered from head to foot.
Words were wholly inadequate, so I slouched heavily after that
impossible ball. Again I hit it away into the night, in what I
supposed was the vague direction of the quite invisible stick.
And in the dead silence I heard the stick rattle as the ball
struck it heavily.
I threw down my mallet. "I can't stand this," I said. "My ball has
gone right three times. These things are not of this world."
"Pick your mallet up ," said Parkinson, "have another go."
"I tell you I daren't. If I made another hoop like that I should see
all the devils dancing there on the blessed grass."
"Why devils?" asked Parkinson; "they may be only fairies making fun of
you. They are sending you the 'Perfect Game,' which is no game."
I looked about me. The garden was full of a burning darkness,
in which the faint glimmers had the look of fire. I stepped across
the grass as if it burnt me, picked up the mallet, and hit the ball
somewhere--somewhere where another ball might be. I heard the dull
click of the balls touching, and ran into the house like one pursued.
CHESTERTON-THE TRENDEDOUS TRIFLES