CHESTERTON-Tales of the Long Bow
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Title: Tales of the Long Bow
Author: G. K. Chesterton
These tales concern the doing of things recognized as
impossible to do; impossible to believe; and, as the weary reader
may well cry aloud, impossible to read about. Did the narrator
merely say that they happened, without saying how they happened,
they could easily be classified with the cow who jumped over the moon
or the more introspective individual who jumped down his own throat.
In short, they are all tall stories; and though tall stories may also
be true stories, there is something in the very phrase appropriate
to such a topsy-turvydom; for the logician will presumably class
a tall story with a corpulent epigram or a long-legged essay.
It is only proper that such impossible incidents should begin
in the most prim and prosaic of all places, and apparently with
the most prim and prosaic of all human beings.
The place was a straight suburban road of strictly-fenced suburban
houses on the outskirts of a modern town. The time was about twenty
minutes to eleven on Sunday morning, when a procession of suburban
families in Sunday clothes were passing decorously up the road
to church. And the man was a very respectable retired military
man named Colonel Crane, who was also going to church, as he had
done every Sunday at the same hour for a long stretch of years.
There was no obvious difference between him and his neighbours,
except that he was a little less obvious. His house was only called
White Lodge, and was, therefore, less alluring to the romantic
passer-by than Rowanmere on the one side or Heatherbrae on the other.
He turned out spick and span for church as if for parade; but he
was much too well dressed to be pointed out as a well-dressed man.
He was quite handsome in a dry, sun-baked style; but his bleached
blond hair was a colourless sort that could look either light brown
or pale grey; and though his blue eyes were clear, they looked out
a little heavily under lowered lids. Colonel Crane was something of
a survival. He was not really old; indeed he was barely middle-aged;
and had gained his last distinctions in the great war. But a variety
of causes had kept him true to the traditional type of the old
professional soldier, as it had existed before 1914; when a small
parish would have only one colonel as it had only one curate.
It would be quite unjust to call him a dug-out; indeed, it would be
much truer to call him a dug-in. For he had remained in the traditions
as firmly and patiently as he had remained in the trenches.
He was simply a man who had no taste for changing his habits,
and had never worried about conventions enough to alter them.
One of his excellent habits was to go to church at eleven o'clock,
and he therefore went there; and did not know that there went
with him something of an old-world air and a passage in the history
of England.
As he came out of his front door, however, on that particular morning,
he was twisting a scrap of paper in his fingers and frowning with
somewhat unusual perplexity. Instead of walking straight to his
garden gate he walked once or twice up and down his front garden,
swinging his black walking-cane. The note had been handed to him
at breakfast, and it evidently called for some practical problem calling
for immediate solution. He stood a few minutes with his eye riveted
on a red daisy at the corner of the nearest flower-bed; and then
a new expression began to work in the muscles of his bronzed face,
giving a slightly grim hint of humour, of which few except his
intimates were aware. Folding up the paper and putting it into his
waistcoat pocket, he strolled round the house to the back garden,
behind which was the kitchen-garden, in which an old servant, a sort
of factotum or handy-man, named Archer, was acting as kitchen-gardener.
Archer was also a survival. Indeed, the two had survived together;
had survived a number of things that had killed a good many other people.
But though they had been together through the war that was also
a revolution, and had a complete confidence in each other, the man Archer
had never been able to lose the oppressive manners of a manservant.
He performed the duties of a gardener with the air of a butler.
He really performed the duties very well and enjoyed them very much;
perhaps he enjoyed them all the more because he was a clever Cockney,
to whom the country crafts were a new hobby. But somehow,
whenever he said, "I have put in the seeds, sir," it always
sounded like, "I have put the sherry on the table, sir"; and he
could not say "Shall I pull the carrots?" without seeming to say,
"Would you be requiring the claret?"
"I hope you're not working on Sunday," said the Colonel,
with a much more pleasant smile than most people got from him,
though he was always polite to everybody. "You're getting
too fond of these rural pursuits. You've become a rustic yokel."
"I was venturing to examine the cabbages, sir," replied the rustic
yokel, with a painful precision of articulation. "Their condition
yesterday evening did not strike me as satisfactory."
"Glad you didn't sit up with them," answered the Colonel.
"But it's lucky you're interested in cabbages. I want to talk
to you about cabbages."
"About cabbages, sir?" inquired the other respectfully.
But the Colonel did not appear to pursue the topic, for he was gazing
in sudden abstraction at another object in the vegetable plots in front
of him. The Colonel's garden, like the Colonel's house, hat, coat,
and demeanour, was well-appointed in an unobtrusive fashion; and in
the part of it devoted to flowers there dwelt something indefinable
that seemed older than the suburbs. The hedges, even, in being
as neat as Surbiton managed to look as mellow as Hampton Court,
as if their very artificiality belonged rather to Queen Anne than
Queen Victoria; and the stone-rimmed pond with a ring of irises somehow
looked like a classic pool and not merely an artificial puddle.
It is idle to analyse how a man's soul and social type will somehow
soak into his surroundings; anyhow, the soul of Mr. Archer had sunk
into the kitchen-garden so as to give it a fine shade of difference.
He was after all a practical man, and the practice of his new trade
was much more of a real appetite with him than words would suggest.
Hence the kitchen-garden was not artificial, but autochthonous;
it really looked like the corner of a farm in the country; and all
sorts of practical devices were set up there. Strawberries were
netted-in against the birds; strings were stretched across with
feathers fluttering from them; and in the middle of the principal
bed stood an ancient and authentic scarecrow. Perhaps the only
incongruous intruder, capable of disputing with the scarecrow in his
rural reign, was the curious boundary-stone which marked the edge
of his domain; and which was, in fact, a shapeless South Sea idol,
planted there with no more appropriateness than a door-scraper. But
Colonel Crane would not have been so complete a type of the old
army man if he had not hidden somewhere a hobby connected with
his travels. His hobby had at one time been savage folklore;
and he had the relic of it on the edge of the kitchen-garden. At
the moment, however, he was not looking at the idol, but at the scarecrow.
"By the way, Archer," he said, "don't you think the scarecrow wants
a new hat?"
"I should hardly think it would be necessary, sir," said the
gardener gravely.
"But look here," said the Colonel, "you must consider the philosophy
of scarecrows. In theory, that is supposed to convince some rather
simple-minded bird that I am walking in my garden. That thing
with the unmentionable hat is Me. A trifle sketchy, perhaps.
Sort of impressionist portrait; but hardly likely to impress.
Man with a hat like that would never be really firm with a sparrow.
Conflict of wills, and all that, and I bet the sparrow would come
out on top. By the way, what's that stick tied on to it?"
"I believe, sir," said Archer, "that it is supposed to represent
a gun."
"Held at a highly unconvincing angle," observed Crane. "Man with
a hat like that would be sure to miss."
"Would you desire me to procure another hat?" inquired the patient Archer.
"No, no," answered his master carelessly. "As the poor fellow's got
such a rotten hat, I'll give him mine. Like the scene of St. Martin
and the beggar."
"Give him yours," repeated Archer respectfully, but faintly.
The Colonel took off his burnished top-hat and gravely placed
it on the head of the South Sea idol at his feet. It had a
queer effect of bringing the grotesque lump of stone to life,
as if a goblin in a top-hat was grinning at the garden.
"You think the hat shouldn't be quite new?" he inquired almost anxiously.
"Not done among the best scarecrows, perhaps. Well, let's see
what we can do to mellow it a little."
He whirled up his walking-stick over his head and laid a smacking
stroke across the silk hat, smashing it over the hollow eyes
of the idol.
"Softened with the touch of time now, I think," he remarked, holding out
the silken remnants to the gardener. "Put it on the scarecrow,
my friend; I don't want it. You can bear witness it's no use to me."
Archer obeyed like an automaton, an automaton with rather round eyes.
"We must hurry up," said the Colonel cheerfully. "I was early
for church, but I'm afraid I'm a bit late now."
"Did you propose to attend church without a hat, sir?" asked the other.
"Certainly not. Most irreverent," said the Colonel. "Nobody should
neglect to remove his hat on entering church. Well, if I haven't
got a hat, I shall neglect to remove it. Where is your reasoning
power this morning? No, no, just dig up one of your cabbages."
Once more the well-trained servant managed to repeat the word
"Cabbages" with his own strict accent; but in its constriction
there was a hint of strangulation.
"Yes, go and pull up a cabbage, there's a good fellow," said the Colonel.
"I must really be getting along; I believe I heard it strike eleven."
Mr. Archer moved heavily in the direction of a plot of cabbages,
which swelled with monstrous contours and many colours; objects, perhaps,
more worthy of the philosophic eye than is taken into account by
the more flippant of tongue. Vegetables are curious-looking things
and less commonplace than they sound. If we called a cabbage a cactus,
or some such queer name, we might see it as an equally queer thing.
These philosophical truths did the Colonel reveal by anticipating
the dubious Archer, and dragging a great, green cabbage with
its trailing root out of the earth. He then picked up a sort
of pruning-knife and cut short the long tail of the root;
scooped out the inside leaves so as to make a sort of hollow,
and gravely reversing it, placed it on his head. Napoleon and other
military princes have crowned themselves; and he, like the Caesars,
wore a wreath that was, after all, made of green leaves
or vegetation. Doubtless there are other comparisons that might
occur to any philosophical historian who should look at it in the abstract.
The people going to church certainly looked at it; but they did not
look at it in the abstract. To them it appeared singularly concrete;
and indeed incredibly solid. The inhabitants of Rowanmere and
Heatherbrae followed the Colonel as he strode almost jauntily up
the road, with feelings that no philosophy could for the moment meet.
There seemed to be nothing to be said, except that one of the most
respectable and respected of their neighbours, one who might even
be called in a quiet way a pattern of good form if not a leader
of fashion, was walking solemnly up to church with a cabbage
on the top of his head.
There was indeed no corporate action to meet the crisis. Their world was
not one in which a crowd can collect to shout, and still less to jeer.
No rotten eggs could be collected from their tidy breakfast-tables;
and they were not of the sort to throw cabbage-stalks at the cabbage.
Perhaps there was just that amount of truth in the pathetically
picturesque names on their front gates, names suggestive of
mountains and mighty lakes concealed somewhere on the premises.
It was true that in one sense such a house was a hermitage.
Each of these men lived alone and they could not be made into a mob.
For miles around there was not public house and no public opinion.
As the Colonel approached the church porch and prepared reverently to
remove his vegetarian headgear, he was hailed in a tone a little more
hearty than the humane civility that was the slender bond of that society.
He returned the greeting without embarrassment, and paused a moment
as the man who had spoken to him plunged into further speech.
He was a young doctor named Horace Hunter, tall, handsomely dressed,
and confident in manner; and though his features were rather plain
and his hair rather red, he was considered to have a certain fascination.
"Good morning, Colonel," said the doctor in his resounding tones,
"what a f--what a fine day it is."
Stars turned from their courses like comets, so to speak,
and the world swerved into wilder possibilities, at that crucial
moment when Dr. Hunter corrected himself and said, "What a fine day!"
instead of "What a funny hat!"
As to why he corrected himself, a true picture of what passed through
his mind might sound rather fanciful in itself. It would be less
than explicit to say he did so because of a long grey car waiting
outside the White Lodge. It might not be a complete explanation
to say it was due to a lady walking on stilts at a garden party.
Some obscurity might remain, even if we said that it had something
to do with a soft shirt and a nickname; nevertheless all these
things mingled in the medical gentleman's mind when he made his
hurried decision. Above all, it might or might not be sufficient
explanation to say that Horace Hunter was a very ambitious
young man, that the ring in his voice and the confidence in his
manner came from a very simple resolution to rise in the world,
and that the world in question was rather worldly.
He liked to be seen talking so confidently to Colonel Crane on that
Sunday parade. Crane was comparatively poor, but he knew People.
And people who knew People knew what People were doing now;
whereas people who didn't know People could only wonder what in the world
People would do next. A lady who came with the Duchess when she
opened the Bazaar had nodded to Crane and said, "Hullo, Stork,"
and the doctor had deduced that it was a sort of family joke and
not a momentary ornithological confusion. And it was the Duchess
who had started all that racing on stilts, which the Vernon-Smiths
had introduced at Heatherbrae. But it would have been devilish
awkward not to have known what Mrs. Vernon-Smith meant when she said,
"Of course you stilt." You never knew what they would start next.
He remembered how he himself had thought the first man in a soft
shirt-front was some funny fellow from nowhere; and then he had begun
to see others here and there, and had found that it was not a faux pas,
but a fashion. It was odd to imagine that he would ever begin
to see vegetable hats here and there, but you never could tell;
and he wasn't going to make the same mistake again. His first
medical impulse had been to add to the Colonel's fancy costume
with a strait-waistcoat. But Crane did not look like a lunatic,
and certainly did not look like a man playing a practical joke.
He had not the stiff and self-conscious solemnity of the joker.
He took it quite naturally. And one thing was certain: if it
really was the latest thing, the doctor must take it as naturally
as the Colonel did. So he said it was a fine day, and was gratified
to learn that there was no disagreement on that question.
The doctor's dilemma, if we may apply the phrase, had been the whole
neighbourhood's dilemma. The doctor's decision was also the whole
neighbourhood's decision. It was not so much that most of the good
people there shared in Hunter's serious social ambitions, but rather
that they were naturally prone to negative and cautious decisions.
They lived in a delicate dread of being interfered with; and they
were just enough to apply the principle by not interfering with
other people. They had also a subconscious sense that the mild
and respectable military gentleman would not be altogether an easy
person to interfere with. The consequence was that the Colonel
carried his monstrous green headgear about the streets of that suburb
for nearly a week, and nobody ever mentioned the subject to him.
It was about the end of that time (while the doctor had been scanning
the horizon for aristocrats crowned with cabbage, and, not seeing any,
was summoning his courage to speak) that the final interruption came;
and with the interruption the explanation.
The Colonel had every appearance of having forgotten all about
the hat. He took it off and on like any other hat; he hung it
on the hat-peg in his narrow front hall where there was nothing
else but his sword hung on two hooks and an old brown map of
the seventeenth century. He handed it to Archer when that correct
character seemed to insist on his official right to hold it;
he did not insist on his official right to brush it, for fear it
should fall to pieces; but he occasionally gave it a cautious shake,
accompanied by a look of restrained distaste. But the Colonel
himself never had any appearance of either liking or disliking it.
The unconventional thing had already become one of his conventions--
the conventions which he never considered enough to violate.
It is probable, therefore, that what ultimately took place was as
much of a surprise to him as to anybody. Anyhow, the explanation,
or explosion, came in the following fashion.
Mr. Vernon-Smith, the mountaineer whose foot was on his native heath
at Heatherbrae, was a small, dapper gentleman with a big-bridged nose,
dark moustache, and dark eyes with a settled expression of anxiety,
though nobody knew what there was to be anxious about in his very solid
social existence. He was a friend of Dr. Hunter; one might almost
say a humble friend. For he had the negative snobbishness that could
only admire the positive and progressive snobbishness of that soaring
and social figure. A man like Dr. Hunter likes to have a man like
Mr. Smith, before whom he can pose as a perfect man of the world.
What appears more extraordinary, a man like Mr. Smith really likes
to have a man like Dr. Hunter to pose at him and swagger over him
and snub him. Anyhow, Vernon-Smith had ventured to hint that the new
hat of his neighbour Crane was not of a pattern familiar in every
fashion-plate. And Dr. Hunter, bursting with the secret of his own
original diplomacy, had snubbed the suggestion and snowed it under
with frosty scorn. With shrewd, resolute gestures, with large
allusive phrases, he had left on his friend's mind the impression
that the whole social world would dissolve if a word were said
on so delicate a topic. Mr. Vernon-Smith formed a general idea
that the Colonel would explode with a loud bang at the very vaguest
allusion to vegetables, or the most harmless adumbration or verbal
shadow of a hat. As usually happens in such cases, the words he
was forbidden to say repeated themselves perpetually in his mind
with the rhythmic pressure of a pulse. It was his temptation
at the moment to call all houses hats and all visitors vegetables.
When Crane came out of his front gate that morning he found his
neighbour Vernon-Smith standing outside, between the spreading
laburnum and the lamp-post, talking to a young lady, a distant
cousin of his family. This girl was an art student on her own--
a little too much on her own for the standards of Heatherbrae, and,
therefore (some would infer), yet further beyond those of White Lodge.
Her brown hair was bobbed, and the Colonel did not admire
bobbed hair. On the other hand, she had a rather attractive face,
with honest brown eyes a little too wide apart, which diminished
the impression of beauty but increased the impression of honesty.
She also had a very fresh and unaffected voice, and the Colonel
had often heard it calling out scores at tennis on the other side
of the garden wall. In some vague sort of way it made him feel old;
at least, he was not sure whether he felt older than he was,
or younger than he ought to be. It was not until they met under
the lamp-post that he knew her name was Audrey Smith; and he was
faintly thankful for the single monosyllable. Mr. Vernon-Smith
presented her, and very nearly said: "May I introduce my cabbage?"
instead of "my cousin."
The Colonel, with unaffected dullness, said it was a fine day;
and his neighbour, rallying from his last narrow escape,
continued the talk with animation. His manner, as when he poked
his big nose and beady black eyes into local meetings and committees,
was at once hesitating and emphatic.
"This young lady is going in for Art," he said; "a poor look-out,
isn't it? I expect we shall see her drawing in chalk on the paving
stones and expecting us to throw a penny into the--into a tray,
or something." Here he dodged another danger. "But of course,
she thinks she's going to be an R.A."
"I hope not," said the young woman hotly. "Pavement artists are
much more honest than most of the R.A.'s."
"I wish those friends of yours didn't give you such revolutionary
ideas," said Mr. Vernon-Smith. "My cousin knows the most
dreadful cranks, vegetarians and--and Socialists." He chanced it,
feeling that vegetarians were not quite the same as vegetables;
and he felt sure the Colonel would share his horror of Socialists.
"People who want to be equal, and all that. What I say is--
we're not equal and we never can be. As I always say to Audrey--
if all the property were divided to-morrow, it would go back into
the same hands. It's a law of nature, and if a man thinks he can
get round a law of nature, why, he's talking through his--I mean,
he's as mad as a--"
Recoiling from the omnipresent image, he groped madly in his mind
for the alternative of a March hare. But before he could find it,
the girl had cut in and completed his sentence. She smiled serenely,
and said in her clear and ringing tones:
"As mad as Colonel Crane's hatter."
It is not unjust to Mr. Vernon-Smith to say that he fled as from
a dynamite explosion. It would be unjust to say that he deserted
a lady in distress, for she did not look in the least like a
distressed lady, and he himself was a very distressed gentleman.
He attempted to wave her indoors with some wild pretext,
and eventually vanished there himself with an equally random apology.
But the other two took no notice of him; they continued to confront
each other, and both were smiling.
"I think you must be the bravest man in England," she said.
"I don't mean anything about the war, or the D.S.O. and all that;
I mean about this. Oh, yes, I do know a little about this,
but there's one thing I don't know. Why do you do it?"
"I think it is you who are the bravest woman in England," he answered,
"or, at any rate, the bravest person in these parts. I've walked
about this town for a week, feeling like the last fool in creation,
and expecting somebody to say something. And not a soul has said
a word. They all seem to be afraid of saying the wrong thing."
"I think they're deadly," observed Miss Smith. "And if they
don't have cabbages for hats, it's only because they have turnips
for heads."
"No," said the Colonel gently; "I have many generous and friendly
neighbours here, including your cousin. Believe me, there is
a case for conventions, and the world is wiser than you know.
You are too young not to be intolerant. But I can see you've got
the fighting spirit; that is the best part of youth and intolerance.
When you said that word just now, by Jove you looked like Britomart."
"She is the Militant Suffragette in the Faerie Queene, isn't she?"
answered the girl. "I'm afraid I don't know my English literature
so well as you do. You see, I'm an artist, or trying to be one;
and some people say that narrows a person. But I can't help getting
cross with all the varnished vulgarity they talk about everything--
look at what he said about Socialism."
"It was a little superficial," said Crane with a smile.
"And that," she concluded, "is why I admire your hat, though I
don't know why you wear it."
This trivial conversation had a curious effect on the Colonel.
There went with it a sort of warmth and a sense of crisis that he had
not known since the war. A sudden purpose formed itself in his mind,
and he spoke like one stepping across a frontier.
"Miss Smith," he said, "I wonder if I might ask you to pay me
a further compliment. It may be unconventional, but I believe you
do not stand on these conventions. An old friend of mine will
be calling on me shortly, to wind up the rather unusual business
or ceremonial of which you have chanced to see a part. If you
would do me the honour to lunch with me to-morrow at half-past one,
the true story of the cabbage awaits you. I promise that you shall hear
the real reason. I might even say I promise you shall SEE the real
reason."
"Why, of course I will," said the unconventional one heartily.
"Thanks awfully."
The Colonel took an intense interest in the appointments of the
luncheon next day. With subconscious surprise he found himself
not only interested, but excited. Like many of his type, he took
a pleasure in doing such things well, and knew his way about in wine
and cookery. But that would not alone explain his pleasure.
For he knew that young women generally know very little about wine,
and emancipated young women possibly least of all. And though he
meant the cookery to be good, he knew that in one feature it would
appear rather fantastic. Again, he was a good-natured gentleman
who would always have liked young people to enjoy a luncheon party,
as he would have liked a child to enjoy a Christmas tree. But there
seemed no reason why he should have a sort of happy insomnia,
like a child on Christmas Eve. There was really no excuse for his
pacing up and down the garden with his cigar, smoking furiously far
into the night. For as he gazed at the purple irises and the grey pool
in the faint moonshine, something in his feelings passed as if from
the one tint to the other; he had a new and unexpected reaction.
For the first time he really hated the masquerade he had made
himself endure. He wished he could smash the cabbage as he had
smashed the top-hat. He was little more than forty years old;
but he had never realized how much there was of what was dried
and faded about his flippancy, till he felt unexpectedly swelling
within him the monstrous and solemn vanity of a young man.
Sometimes he looked up at the picturesque, the too picturesque,
outline of the house next door, dark against the moonrise, and thought
he heard faint voices in it, and something like a laugh.
The visitor who called on the Colonel next morning may have been
an old friend, but he was certainly an odd contrast. He was a
very abstracted, rather untidy man in a rusty knickerbocker suit;
he had a long head with straight hair of the dark red called auburn,
one or two wisps of which stood on end however he brushed it,
and a long face, clean-shaven and heavy about the jaw and chin,
which he had a way of sinking and settling squarely into his cravat.
His name was Hood, and he was apparently a lawyer, though he had not
come on strictly legal business. Anyhow, he exchanged greetings
with Crane with a quiet warmth and gratification, smiled at the old
manservant as if he were an old joke, and showed every sign of an
appetite for his luncheon.
The appointed day was singularly warm and bright and everything
in the garden seemed to glitter; the goblin god of the South Seas
seemed really to grin; and the scarecrow really to have a new hat.
The irises round the pool were swinging and flapping in a light breeze;
and he remembered they were called "flags" and thought of purple
banners going into battle.
She had come suddenly round the corner of the house. Her dress was
of a dark but vivid blue, very plain and angular in outline, but not
outrageously artistic; and in the morning light she looked less like
a schoolgirl and more like a serious woman of twenty-five or thirty;
a little older and a great deal more interesting. And something in
this morning seriousness increased the reaction of the night before.
One single wave of thanksgiving went up from Crane to think that at
least his grotesque green hat was gone and done with for ever.
He had worn it for a week without caring a curse for anybody;
but during that ten minutes' trivial talk under the lamp-post, he
felt as if he had suddenly grown donkey's ears in the street.
He had been induced by the sunny weather to have a little
table laid for three in a sort of veranda open to the garden.
When the three sat down to it, he looked across at the lady and said:
"I fear I must exhibit myself as a crank; one of those cranks your
cousin disapproves of, Miss Smith. I hope it won't spoil this little
lunch than for anybody else. But I am going to have a vegetarian meal."
"Are you?" she said. "I should never have said you looked like
a vegetarian."
"Just lately I have only looked like a fool," he said dispassionately;
"but I think I'd sooner look a fool than a vegetarian in the
ordinary way. This is rather a special occasion. Perhaps my
friend Hood had better begin; it's really his story more than mine."
"My name is Robert Owen Hood," said that gentleman, rather sardonically.
"That's how improbable reminiscences often begin; but the only point
now is that my old friend here insulted me horribly by calling
me Robin Hood."
"I should have called it a compliment," answered Audrey Smith.
"Buy why did he call you Robin Hood?"
"Because I drew the long bow," said the lawyer.
"But to do you justice," said the Colonel, "it seems that you hit
the bull's eye."
As he spoke Archer came in bearing a dish which he placed before
his master. He had already served the others with the earlier courses,
but he carried this one with the pomp of one bringing the boar's
head at Christmas. It consisted of a plain boiled cabbage.
"I was challenged to do something," went on Hood, "which my friend
here declared to be impossible. In fact, any sane man would
have declared it to be impossible. But I did it for all that.
Only my friend, in the heat of rejecting and ridiculing the notion,
made use of a hasty expression. I might almost say he made a
rash vow."
"My exact words were," said Colonel Crane solemnly: "'If you can
do that, I'll eat my hat.'"
He leaned forward thoughtfully and began to eat it. Then he resumed
in the same reflective way:
"You see, all rash vows are verbal or nothing. There might be a
debate about the logical and literary way in which my friend Hood
fulfilled HIS rash vow. But I put it to myself in the same pedantic
sort of way. It wasn't possible to eat any hat that I wore.
But it might be possible to wear a hat that I could eat.
Articles of dress could hardly be used for diet; but articles of
diet could really be used for dress. It seemed to me that I might
fairly be said to have made it my hat, if I wore it systematically
as a hat and had no other, putting up with all the disadvantages.
Making a blasted fool of myself was the fair price to be paid for
the vow or wager; for one ought always to lose something on a wager."
And he rose from the table with a gesture of apology.
The girl stood up. "I think it's perfectly splendid," she said.
"It's as wild as one of those stories about looking for the Holy Grail."
The lawyer also had risen, rather abruptly, and stood stroking
his long chin with his thumb and looking at his old friend under
bent brows in a rather reflective manner.
"Well, you've subpoena'd me as a witness all right," he said, "and now,
with the permission of the court, I'll leave the witness-box. I'm
afraid I must be going. I've got important business at home.
Good-bye, Miss Smith."
The girl returned his farewell a little mechanically; and Crane
seemed to recover from a similar trance as he stepped after
the retreating figure of his friend.
"I say, Owen," he said hastily, "I'm sorry you're leaving so early.
Must you really go?"
"Yes," replied Owen Hood gravely. "My private affairs are quite
real and practical, I assure you." His grave mouth worked a little
humourously at the corners as he added: "The truth is, I don't
think I mentioned it, but I'm thinking of getting married."
"Married!" repeated the Colonel, as if thunderstruck.
"Thanks for your compliments and congratulations, old fellow,"
said the satiric Mr. Hood. "Yes, it's all been thought out.
I've even decided whom I am going to marry. She knows about it herself.
She has been warned."
"I really beg your pardon," said the Colonel in great distress,
"of course I congratulate you most heartily; and her even more heartily.
Of course I'm delighted to hear it. The truth is, I was surprised...
not so much in that way..."
"Not so much in what way?" asked Hood. "I suppose you mean
some would say I am on the way to be an old bachelor. But I've
discovered it isn't half so much a matter of years as of ways.
Men like me get elderly more by choice than chance; and there's
much more choice and less chance in life than your modern fatalists
make out. For such people fatalism falsifies even chronology.
They're not unmarried because they're old. They're old because
they're unmarried."
"Indeed you are mistaken," said Crane earnestly. "As I say,
I was surprised, but my surprise was not so rude as you think.
It wasn't that I thought there was anything unfitting about...
somehow it was rather the other way... as if things could fit better
than one thought... as if--but anyhow, little as I know about it,
I really do congratulate you."
"I'll tell you all about it before long," replied his friend.
"It's enough to say just now that it was all bound up with my succeeding
after all in doing--what I did. She was the inspiration, you know.
I have done what is called an impossible thing; but believe me,
she is really the impossible part of it."
"Well, I must not keep you from such an impossible engagement,"
said Crane smiling. "Really, I'm confoundedly glad to hear about
all this. Well, good-bye for the present."
Colonel Crane stood watching the square shoulders and russet mane
of his old friend, as they disappeared down the road, in a rather
indescribable state of mind. As he turned hastily back towards
his garden and his other guest, he was conscious of a change;
things seemed different in some light-headed and illogical fashion.
He could not himself trace the connexion; indeed, he did not know
whether it was a connexion or a disconnexion. He was very far from
being a fool; but his brains were of the sort that are directed
outwards to things; the brains of the soldier or the scientific man;
and he had no practice in analysing his own mind. He did not
quite understand why the news about Owen Hood should give him that
dazed sense of a difference in things in general. Doubtless he
was very fond of Owen Hood; but he had been fond of other people
who had got married without especially disturbing the atmosphere
of his own back-garden. He even dimly felt that mere affection
might have worked the other way; that it might have made him worry
about Hood, and wonder whether Hood was making a fool of himself,
or even feel suspicious or jealous of Mrs. Hood--if there had
not been something else that made him feel quite the other way.
He could not quite understand it; there seemed to be an increasing
number of things that he could not understand. This world in which he
himself wore garlands of green cabbage and in which his old friend
the lawyer got married suddenly like a man going mad--this world
was a new world, at once fresh and frightening, in which he could
hardly understand the figures that were walking about, even his own.
The flowers in the flower-pots had a new look about them, at once
bright and nameless; and even the line of vegetables beyond could
not altogether depress him with the memories of recent levity.
Had he indeed been a prophet, or a visionary seeing the future,
he might have seen that green line of cabbages extending infinitely
like a green sea to the horizon. For he stood at the beginning
of a story which was not to terminate until his incongruous
cabbage had come to mean something that he had never meant by it.
That green patch was to spread like a great green conflagration
almost to the ends of the earth. But he was a practical person and
the very reverse of a prophet; and like many other practical persons,
he often did things without very clearly knowing what he was doing.
He had the innocence of some patriarch or primitive hero in
the morning of the world, founding more than he could himself
realize of his legend and his line. Indeed he felt very much
like someone in the morning of the world; but beyond that he could
grasp nothing.
Audrey Smith was standing not so very many yards away; for it
was only for a few strides that he had followed his elder guest
towards the gate. Yet her figure had fallen far enough back out
of the foreground to take on the green framework of the garden;
so that her dress might almost have been blue with a shade of distance.
And when she spoke to him, even from that little way off, her voice
took on inevitably a new suggestion of one calling out familiarly
and from afar, as one calls to an old companion. It moved him
in a disproportionate fashion, though all that she said was:
"What became of your old hat?"
"I lost it," he replied gravely, "obviously I had to lose it.
I believe the scarecrow found it."
"Oh, do let's go and look at the scarecrow," she cried.
He led her without a word to the kitchen-garden and gravely explained
each of its outstanding features; from the serious Mr. Archer
resting on his spade to the grotesque South Sea Island god grinning
at the corner of the plot. He spoke as with an increasing solemnity
and verbosity, and all the time knew little or nothing of what he said.
At last she cut into his monologue with an abstraction that was
almost rude; yet her brown eyes were bright and her sympathy undisguised.
"Don't talk about it," she cried with illogical enthusiasm.
"It looks as if we were really right in the middle of the country.
It's as unique as the Garden of Eden. It's simply the most
delightful place--"
It was at this moment, for some unaccountable reason, that the
Colonel who had lost his hat suddenly proceeded to lose his head.
Standing in that grotesque vegetable scenery, a black and stiff
yet somehow stately figure, he proceeded in the most traditional
manner to offer the lady everything he possessed, not forgetting
the scarecrow or the cabbages; a half-humourous memory of which
returned to him with the boomerang of bathos.
"When I think of the encumbrances on the estate--" he concluded gloomily.
"Well, there they are; a scarecrow and a cannibal fetish and a stupid
man who has stuck in a rut of respectability and conventional ways."
"Very conventional," she said, "especially in his taste in hats."
"That was the exception, I'm afraid," he said earnestly.
"You'd find those things very rare and most things very dull.
I can't help having fallen in love with you; but for all that we
are in different worlds; and you belong in a younger world,
which says what it thinks, and cannot see what most of our silences
and scruples meant."
"I suppose we are very rude," she said thoughtfully, "and you must
certainly excuse me if I do say what I think."
"I deserve no better," he replied mournfully.
"Well, I think I must be in love with you too," she replied calmly.
"I don't see what time has to do with being fond of people.
You are the most original person I ever knew."
"My dear, my dear," he protested almost brokenly, "I fear you are
making a mistake. Whatever else I am, I never set up to be original."
"You must remember," she replied, "that I have known a good many
people who did set up to be original. An Art School swarms with them;
and there are any number among those socialist and vegetarian friends
of mine you were talking about. They would think nothing of wearing
cabbages on their heads, of course. Any one of them would be capable
of getting inside a pumpkin if he could. Any one of them might appear
in public dressed entirely in watercress. But that's just it.
They might well wear watercress for they are water-creatures;
they go with the stream. They do those things because those things
are done; because they are done in their own Bohemian set.
Unconventionality is their convention. I don't mind it myself;
I think it's great fun; but that doesn't mean that I don't know real
strength or independence when I see it. All that is just molten
and formless; but the really strong man is one who can make a mould
and then break it. When a man like you can suddenly do a thing
like that, after twenty years of habit, for the sake of his word,
then somehow one really does feel that man is man and master of
his fate."
"I doubt if I am master of my fate," replied Crane, "and I do not
know whether I ceased to be yesterday or two minutes ago."
He stood there for a moment like a man in heavy armour. Indeed,
the antiquated image is not inappropriate in more ways than one.
The new world within him was so alien from the whole habit in
which he lived, from the very gait and gestures of his daily life,
conducted through countless days, that his spirit had striven
before it broke its shell. But it was also true that even if he
could have done what every man wishes to do at such a moment,
something supreme and satisfying, it would have been something
in a sense formal or it would not have satisfied him.
He was one of those to whom it is natural to be ceremonial.
Even the music in his mind, too deep and distant for him to catch
and echo, was the music of old and ritual dance and not of revelry;
and it was not for nothing that he had built gradually about him
that garden of the grey stone fountain and the great hedge of yew.
He bent suddenly and kissed her hand.
"I like that," she said. "You ought to have powdered hair and a sword."
"I apologize," he said gravely, "no modern man is worthy of you.
But indeed I fear, in every sense I am not a very modern man."
"You must never wear that hat again," she said, indicating the
battered original topper.
"To tell the truth," he observed mildly, "I had not any intention
of resuming that one."
"Silly," she said briefly, "I don't mean that hat; I mean that sort
of hat. As a matter of fact, there couldn't be a finer hat than
the cabbage."
"My dear--" he protested; but she was looking at him quite seriously.
"I told you I was an artist, and didn't know much about literature,"
she said. "Well, do you know, it really does make a difference.
Literary people let words get between them and things. We do
at least look at the things and not the names of the things.
You think a cabbage is comic because the name sounds comic and
even vulgar; something between 'cab' and 'garbage,' I suppose.
But a cabbage isn't really comic or vulgar. You wouldn't think
so if you simply had to paint it. Haven't you seen Dutch and
Flemish galleries, and don't you know what great men painted cabbages?
What they saw was certain lines and colours; very wonderful lines
and colours."
"It may be all very well in a picture," he began doubtfully.
She suddenly laughed aloud.
"You idiot," she cried; "don't you know you looked perfectly splendid?
The curves were like a great turban of leaves and the root rose
like the spike of a helmet; it was rather like the turbaned
helmets on some of Rembrandt's figures, with the face like bronze
in the shadows of green and purple. That's the sort of thing
artists can see, who keep their eyes and heads clear of words!
And then you want to apologize for not wearing that stupid stove-pipe
covered with blacking, when you went about wearing a coloured
crown like a king. And you were like a king in this country;
for they were all afraid of you."
As he continued a faint protest, her laughter took on a more
mischievous side. "If you'd stuck to it a little longer,
I swear they'd all have been wearing vegetables for hats.
I swear I saw my cousin the other day standing with a sort of trowel,
and looking irresolutely at a cabbage."
Then, after a pause, she said with a beautiful irrelevancy:
"What was it Mr. Hood did that you said he couldn't do?"
But these are tales of topsy-turvydom even in the sense that they
have to be told tail-foremost. And he who would know the answer
to that question must deliver himself up to the intolerable tedium
of reading the story of The Improbable Success of Mr. Owen Hood,
and an interval must be allowed him before such torments are renewed.
CHESTERTON-Tales of the Long Bow