CHESTERTON-Tales of the Long Bow - LECTURER GOES MAD AND ESCAPES
The Earl of Eden had become Prime Minister for the third time,
and his face and figure were therefore familiar in the political
cartoons and even in the public streets. His yellow hair and lean
and springy figure gave him a factitious air of youth; but his face
on closer study looked lined and wrinkled and gave almost a shock
of decrepitude. He was in truth a man of great experience and
dexterity in his own profession. He had just succeeded in routing
the Socialist Party and overthrowing the Socialist Government,
largely by the use of certain rhymed mottoes and maxims which he
had himself invented with considerable amusement. His great slogan
of "Don't Nationalize but Rationalize" was generally believed to have
led him to victory. But at the moment when this story begins he
had other things to think of. He had just received an urgent request
for a consultation from three of his most prominent supporters--
Lord Normantowers, Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., the great advocate
of scientific politics, and Mr. R. Low, the philanthropist.
They were confronted with a problem, and their problem concerned
the sudden madness of an American millionaire.
The Prime Minister was not unacquainted with American millionaires,
even those whose conduct suggested that they were hardly representative
of a normal or national type. There was the great Grigg,
the millionaire inventor, who had pressed upon the War Office a scheme
for finishing the War at a blow; it consisted of electrocuting
the Kaiser by wireless telegraphy. There was Mr. Napper,
of Nebraska, whose negotiations for removing Shakespeare's Cliff
to America as a symbol of Anglo-Saxon unity were unaccountably
frustrated by the firm refusal of the American Republic to send
us Plymouth Rock in exchange. And there was that charming and
cultured Bostonian, Colonel Hoopoe, whom all England welcomed
in his crusade for Purity and the League of the Lily, until England
discovered with considerable surprise that the American Ambassador
and all respectable Americans flatly refused to meet the Colonel,
whose record at home was that of a very narrow escape from Sing-Sing.
But the problem of Enoch Oates, who had made his money in pork,
was something profoundly different. As Lord Eden's three supporters
eagerly explained to him, seated round a garden table at his
beautiful country seat in Somerset, Mr. Oates had done something
that the maddest millionaire had never thought of doing before.
Up to a certain point he had proceeded in a manner normal to such
a foreigner. He had purchased amid general approval an estate covering
about a quarter of a county; and it was expected that he would make
it a field for some of those American experiments in temperance
or eugenics for which the English agricultural populace offer a sort
of virgin soil. Instead of that, he suddenly went mad and made
a present of his land to his tenants; so that by an unprecedented
anomaly the farms became the property of the farmers. That an
American millionaire should take away English things from England,
English rent, English relics, English pictures, English cathedrals
or the cliffs of Dover, was a natural operation to which everybody
was by this time accustomed. But that an American millionaire
should give English land to English people was an unwarrantable
interference and tantamount to an alien enemy stirring up revolution.
Enoch Oates had therefore been summoned to the Council, and sat
scowling at the table as if he were in the dock.
"Results most deplorable already," said Sir Horace Hunter,
in his rather loud voice. "Give you an example, my lord; people of
the name of Dale in Somerset took in a lunatic as a lodger.
May have been a homicidal maniac for all I know; some do say he
had a great cannon or culverin sticking out of his bedroom window.
But with no responsible management of the estate, no landlord,
no lawyer, no educated person anywhere, there was nothing to prevent
their letting the bedroom to a Bengal tiger. Anyhow, the man was mad,
rushed raving on to the platform at the Astronomical Congress
talking about Lovely Woman and the cow that jumped over the moon.
That damned agitator Pierce, who used to be in the Flying Corps,
was in the hall, and made a riot and carried the crazy fellow off
in an aeroplane. That's the sort of thing you'll have happening all
over the place if these ignorant fellows are allowed to do just as
they like."
"It is quite true," said Lord Normantowers. "I could give many
other examples. They say that Owen Hood, another of these eccentrics,
has actually bought one of these little farms and stuck it all round
with absurd battlements and a moat and drawbridge, with the motto
'The Englishman's House is his Castle.'"
"I think," said the Prime Minister quietly, "that however English
the Englishman may be, he will find his castle is a castle in Spain;
not to say a castle in the air. Mr. Oates," he said, addressing very
courteously the big brooding American at the other end of the table,
"please do not imagine that I cannot sympathize with such romances,
although they are only in the air. But I think in all sincerity
that you will find they are unsuited to the English climate.
ET EGO IN ARCADIA, you know; we have all had such dreams of all men
piping in Arcady. But after all, you have already paid the piper;
and if you are wise, I think you can still call the tune."
"Gives me great gratification to say it's too late," growled Oates.
"I want them to learn to play and pay for themselves."
"But you want them to learn," said Lord Eden gently, "and I should
not be in too much of a hurry to call it too late. It seems
to me that the door is still open for a reasonable compromise;
I understand that the deed of gift, considered as a legal instrument,
is still the subject of some legal discussion and may well be
the subject of revision. I happened to be talking of it yesterday
with the law officers of the Crown; and I am sure that the least
hint that you yourself--"
"I take it to mean," said Mr. Oates with great deliberation,
"that you'll tell your lawyers it'll pay them to pick a hole
in the deal."
"That is what we call the bluff Western humour," said Lord Eden,
smiling, "but I only mean that we do a great deal in this
country by reconsideration and revision. We make mistakes
and unmake them. We have a phrase for it in our history books;
we call it the flexibility of an unwritten constitution."
"We have a phrase for it too," said the American reflectively.
"We call it graft."
"Really," cried Normantowers, a little bristly man, with sudden
shrillness, "I did not know you were so scrupulous in your own methods."
"Motht unthcrupulouth," said Mr. Low virtuously.
Enoch Oates rose slowly like an enormous leviathan rising to the surface
of the sea; his large sallow face had never changed in expression;
but he had the air of one drifting dreamily away.
"Wal," he said, "I dare say it's true I've done some graft in my time,
and a good many deals that weren't what you might call modelled on
the Sermon on the Mount. But if I smashed people, it was when they
were all out to smash me; and if some of 'em were poor, they were
the sort that were ready to shoot or knife or blow me to bits.
And I tell you, in my country the whole lot of you would be lynched
or tarred and feathered to-morrow, if you talked about lawyers taking
away people's land when once they'd got it. Maybe the English
climate's different, as you say; but I'm going to see it through.
As for you, Mr. Rosenbaum--"
"My name is Low," said the philanthropist. "I cannot thee why
anyone should object to uthing my name."
"Not on your life," said Mr. Oates affably. "Seems to be a pretty
appropriate name."
He drifted heavily from the room, and the four other men were left,
staring at a riddle.
"He's going on with it, or, rather, they're going on with it,"
groaned Horace Hunter. "And what the devil is to be done now?"
"It really looks as if he were right in calling it too late,"
said Lord Normantowers bitterly. "I can't think of anything to
be done."
"I can," said the Prime Minister. They all looked at him;
but none of them could read the indecipherable subtleties in his
old and wrinkled face under his youthful yellow hair.
"The resources of civilization are not exhausted," he said grimly.
"That's what the old governments used to say when they started
shooting people. Well, I could understand you gentlemen feeling
inclined to shoot people now. I suppose it seems to you that all
your own power in the State, which you wield with such public spirit
of course, all Sir Horace's health reforms, the Normantowers'
new estate, and so on, are all broken to bits, to rotten little bits
of rusticity. What's to become of a governing class if it doesn't
hold all the land, eh? Well, I'll tell you. I know the next move,
and the time has come to take it."
"But what is it?" demanded Sir Horace.
"The time has come," said the Prime Minister, "to Nationalize
the Land."
Sir Horace Hunter rose from his chair, opened his mouth, shut it,
and sat down again, all with what he himself might have called
a reflex action.
"But that is Socialism!" cried Lord Normantowers, his eyes standing
out of his head.
"True Socialism, don't you think?" mused the Prime Minister.
"Better call it True Socialism; just the sort of thing to be remembered
at elections. Theirs is Socialism, and ours is True Socialism."
"Do you really mean, my lord," cried Hunter in a heat of sincerity
stronger than the snobbery of a lifetime, "that you are going
to support the Bolshies?"
"No," said Eden, with the smile of a sphinx. "I mean the Bolshies
are going to support me. Idiots!"
After a silence, he added in a more wistful tone:
"Of course, as a matter of sentiment, it is a little sad. All our
fine old English castles and manors, the homes of the gentry... they
will become public property, like post offices, I suppose. When I
think of the happy hours I have myself passed at the Normantowers--"
He smiled across at the nobleman of that name and went on. "And Sir
Horace has now, I believe, the joy of living in Warbridge Castle--
fine old place. Dear me, yes, and I think Mr. Low has a castle,
though the name escapes me."
"Rosewood Castle," said Mr. Low rather sulkily.
"But I say," cried Sir Horace, rising, "what becomes of 'Don't
Nationalize but Rationalize'?"
"I suppose," replied Eden lightly, "it will have to be 'Don't
Rationalize but Nationalize.' It comes to the same thing.
Besides, we can easily get a new motto of some sort. For instance,
we, after all, are the patriotic party, the national party.
What about 'Let the Nationalists Nationalize'?"
"Well, all I can say is--" began Normantowers explosively.
"Compensation, there will be compensation, of course," said the Prime
Minister soothingly; "a great deal can be done with compensation.
If you will all turn up here this day week, say at four o'clock, I
think I can lay all the plans before you."
When they did turn up next week and were shown again into the Prime
Minister's sunny garden, they found that the plans were, indeed,
laid before them; for the table that stood on the sunny lawn was
covered with large and small maps and a mass of official documents.
Mr. Eustace Pym, one of the Prime Minister's numerous private secretaries,
was hovering over them, and the Prime Minister himself was sitting
at the head of the table studying one of them with an intelligent frown.
"I thought you'd like to hear the terms of the arrangements,"
he said. "I'm afraid we must all make sacrifices in the cause
of progress."
"Oh, progress be ----" cried Normantowers, losing patience.
"I want to know if you really mean that my estate--"
"It comes under the department of Castle and Abbey Estates in
Section Four," said Lord Eden, referring to the paper before him.
"By the provisions of the new Bill the public control in such
cases will be vested in the Lord-Lieutenant of the County.
In the particular case of your castle--let me see--why, yes, of course,
you are Lord Lieutenant of that county."
Little Lord Normantowers was staring, with his stiff hair all
standing on end; but a new look was dawning in his shrewd though
small-featured face.
"The case of Warbridge Castle is different," said the Prime Minister.
"It happens unfortunately to stand in a district desolated
by all the recent troubles about swine-fever, touching which the
Health Comptroller" (here he bowed to Sir Horace Hunter) "has shown
such admirable activity. It has been necessary to place the whole
of this district in the hands of the Health Comptroller, that he
may study any traces of swine-fever that may be found in the Castle,
the Cathedral, the Vicarage, and so on. So much for that case,
which stands somewhat apart; the others are mostly normal.
Rosenbaum Castle--I should say Rosewood Castle--being of a later date,
comes under Section Five, and the appointment of a permanent
Castle Custodian is left to the discretion of the Government.
In this case the Government has decided to appoint Mr. Rosewood Low
to the post, in recognition of his local services to social science
and economics. In all these cases, of course, due compensation
will be paid to the present owners of the estates, and ample
salaries and expenses of entertainment paid to the new officials,
that the places may be kept up in a manner worthy of their historical
and national character."
He paused, as if for cheers, and Sir Horace was vaguely irritated
into saying: "But look here, my castle--"
"Damn it all!" said the Prime Minister, with his first flash of
impatience and sincerity. "Can't you see you'll get twice as much
as before? First you'll be compensated for losing your castle,
and then you'll be paid for keeping it."
"My lord," said Lord Normantowers humbly, "I apologize for anything
I may have said or suggested. I ought to have known I stood
in the presence of a great English statesman."
"Oh, it's easy enough," said Lord Eden frankly. "Look how easily
we remained in the saddle, in spite of democratic elections; how we
managed to dominate the Commons as well as the Lords. It'll be
the same with what they call Socialism. We shall still be there;
only we shall be called bureaucrats instead of aristocrats."
"I see it all now!" cried Hunter, "and by Heaven, it'll be the end
of all this confounded demagogy of Three Acres and a Cow."
"I think so," said the Prime Minister with a smile; and began
to fold up the maps.
As he was folding up the last and largest, he suddenly stopped
and said:
"Hallo!"
A letter was lying in the middle of the table; a letter in a
sealed envelope, and one which he evidently did not recognize
as any part of his paper paraphernalia.
"Where did this letter come from?" he asked rather sharply.
"Did you put it here, Eustace?"
"No," said Mr. Pym staring. "I never saw it before. It didn't
come with your letters this morning."
"It didn't come by post at all," said Lord Eden; "and none of the
servants brought it in. How the devil did it get out here in the garden?"
He ripped it open with his finger and remained for some time staring
in mystification at its contents.
"Welkin Castle,
Sept. 4th, 19--.
"Dear Lord Eden,--As I understand you are making public provision
for the future disposal of our historic national castles,
such as Warbridge Castle, I should much appreciate any information
about your intentions touching Welkin Castle, my own estate,
as it would enable me to make my own arrangements.--Yours very truly,
"Welkyn of Welkin."
"Who is Welkyn?" asked the puzzled politician; "he writes as if he knew
me; but I can't recall him at the moment. And where is Welkin Castle?
We must look at the maps again."
But though they looked at the maps for hours, and searched Burke,
Debrett, "Who's Who," the atlas, and every other work of reference,
they could come upon no trace of that firm but polite country gentleman.
Lord Eden was a little worried, because he knew that curiously
important people could exist in a corner in this country, and suddenly
emerge from their corner to make trouble. He knew it was very
important that his own governing class should stand with him in this
great public change (and private understanding), and that no rich
eccentric should be left out or offended. But although he was worried
to that extent, it is probable that his worry would soon have faded
from his mind if it had not been for something that happened some days
later.
Going out into the same garden to the same table, with the more agreeable
purpose of taking tea there, he was amazed to find another letter,
though this was lying not on the table but on the turf just beside it.
It was unstamped like the other and addressed in the same handwriting;
but its tone was more stern.
"Welkin Castle,
Oct. 6th, 19--.
"My Lord,--As you seem to have decided to continue your sweeping
scheme of confiscation, as in the case of Warbridge Castle,
without the slightest reference to the historic and even heroic
claims of Welkin Castle, I can only inform you that I shall defend
the fortress of my fathers to the death. Moreover, I have decided
to make a protest of a more public kind; and when you next hear
from me it will be in the form of a general appeal to the justice
of the English people.
Yours truly,
Welkyn of Welkin."
The historic and even heroic traditions of Welkin Castle kept a
dozen of the Prime Minister's private secretaries busy for a week,
looking up encyclopaedias and chronicles and books of history.
But the Prime Minister himself was more worried about another problem.
How did these mysterious letters get into the house, or rather into
the garden? None of them came by post and none of the servants knew
anything about them. Moreover, the Prime Minister, in an unobtrusive
way, was very carefully guarded. Prime Ministers always are.
But he had been especially protected ever since the Vegetarians
a few years before had gone about killing everybody who believed
in killing animals. There were always plain-clothes policemen at
every entrance of his house and garden. And from their testimony
it would appear certain that the letter could not have got into
the garden; but for the trifling fact that it was lying there on
the garden-table. Lord Eden cogitated in a grim fashion for some time;
then he said as he rose from his chair:
"I think I will have a talk to our American friend Mr. Oates."
Whether from a sense of humour or a sense of justice, Lord Eden
summoned Enoch Oates before the same special jury of three;
or summoned them before him, as the case may be. For it was even more
difficult than before to read the exact secret of Eden's sympathies
or intentions; he talked about a variety of indifferent subjects
leading up to that of the letters, which he treated very lightly.
Then he said quite suddenly:
"Do you know anything about those letters, by the way?"
The American presented his poker face to the company for some time
without reply. Then he said:
"And what makes you think I know anything about them?"
"Because," said Horace Hunter, breaking in with uncontrollable warmth,
"we know you're hand and glove with all those lunatics in the League
of the Long Bow who are kicking up all this shindy."
"Well," said Oates calmly, "I'll never deny I like some of their ways.
I like live wires myself; and, after all, they're about the liveliest
thing in this old country. And I'll tell you more. I like people
who take trouble; and, believe me, they do take trouble. You say
they're all nuts; but I reckon there really is method in their madness.
They take trouble to keep those crazy vows of theirs. You spoke
about the fellows who carried off the astronomer in an aeroplane.
Well, I know Bellew Blair, the man who worked with Pierce
in that stunt, and believe me he's not a man to be sniffed at.
He's one of the finest experts in aeronautics in the country;
and if he's gone over to them, it means there's something in their
notion for a scientific intellect to take hold of. It was Blair
that worked that pig stunt for Hilary Pierce; made a great gas-bag
shaped like a sow and gave all the little pigs parachutes."
"Well, there you are," cried Hunter. "Of all the lunacy--"
"I remember Commander Blair in the War," said the Prime Minister
quietly. "Bellows Blair, they called him. He did expert work:
some new scheme with dirigible balloons. But I was only going
to ask Mr. Oates whether he happens to know where Welkin Castle is."
"Must be somewhere near here," suggested Normantowers,
"as the letters seem to come by hand."
"Well, I don't know," said Enoch Oates doubtfully. "I know a man
living in Ely, who had one of those letters delivered by hand.
And I know another near Land's End who thought the letter must have
come from somebody living near. As you say, they all seem to come
by hand."
"By what hand?" asked the Prime Minister, with a queer, grim expression.
"Mr. Oates," said Lord Normantowers firmly, "where IS Welkin Castle?"
"Why, it's everywhere, in a manner of speaking," said Mr. Oates
reflectively. "It's anywhere, anyhow. Gee--!" he broke off suddenly:
"Why, as a matter of fact, it's here!"
"Ah," said the Prime Minister quietly, "I thought we should see
something if we watched here long enough! You didn't think I kept
you hanging about here only to ask Mr. Oates questions that I knew
the answer to."
"What do you mean? Thought we would see what?"
"Where the unstamped letters come from," replied Lord Eden.
Luminous and enormous, there heaved up above the garden trees
something that looked at first like a coloured cloud; it was
flushed with light such as lies on clouds opposite the sunset,
a light at once warm and wan; and it shone like an opaque flame.
But as it came closer it grew more and more incredible. It took on
solid proportions and perspective, as if a cloud could brush and crush
the dark tree-tops. It was something never seen before in the sky;
it was a cubist cloud. Men gazing at such a sunset cloud-land often
imagine they see castles and cities of an almost uncanny completeness.
But there would be a possible point of completeness at which they
would cry aloud, or perhaps shriek aloud, as at a sign in heaven;
and that completeness had come. The big luminous object that sailed
above the garden was outlined in battlements and turrets like a
fairy castle; but with an architectural exactitude impossible
in any cloudland. With the very look of it a phrase and a proverb
leapt into the mind.
"There, my lord!" cried Oates, suddenly lifting his nasal and
drawling voice and pointing, "there's that dream you told me about.
There's your castle in the air."
As the shadow of the flying thing travelled over the sun-lit lawn,
they looked up and saw for the first time that the lower part
of the edifice hung downwards like the car of a great balloon.
They remembered the aeronautical tricks of Commander Blair and Captain
Pierce and the model of the monstrous pig. As it passed over
the table a white speck detached itself and dropped from the car.
It was a letter.
The next moment the white speck was followed by a shower that
was like a snowstorm. Countless letters, leaflets, and scraps
of paper were littered all over the lawn. The guests seemed to
stand staring wildly in a wilderness of waste-paper; but the keen
and experienced eyes of Lord Eden recognized the material which,
in political elections, is somewhat satirically called "literature."
It took the twelve private secretaries some time to pick them all up
and make the lawn neat and tidy again. On examination they proved
to be mainly of two kinds: one a sort of electioneering pamphlet
of the League of the Long Bow, and the other a somewhat airy fantasy
about private property in air. The most important of the documents,
which Lord Eden studied more attentively, though with a grim smile,
began with the sentence in large letters:
"An Englishman's House Is No Longer His Castle On The Soil Of England.
If It Is To Be His Castle, It Must Be A Castle In The Air.
"If There Seem To Be Something Unfamiliar And Even Fanciful In
The Idea, We Reply That It Is Not Half So Fantastic To Own Your Own
Houses In The Clouds As Not To Own Your Own Houses On The Earth."
Then followed a passage of somewhat less solid political value,
in which the acute reader might trace the influence of the poetical
Mr. Pierce rather than the scientific Mr. Blair. It began "They
Have Stolen the Earth; We Will Divide the Sky." But the writer
followed this with a somewhat unconvincing claim to have trained rooks
and swallows to hover in rows in the air to represent the hedges
of "the blue meadows of the new realm," and he was so obliging
as to accompany the explanation with diagrams of space showing
the exact ornithological boundaries in dotted lines. There were other
equally scientific documents dealing with the treatment of clouds,
the driving of birds to graze on insects, and so on. The whole
of this section concluded with the great social and economic slogan:
"Three Acres and a Crow."
But when Lord Eden read on, his attention appeared graver than this
particular sort of social reconstruction would seem to warrant.
The writer of the pamphlet resumed:
"Do not be surprised if there seems to be something topsy-turvy
in the above programme. That topsy-turvydom marks the whole of
our politics. It may seem strange that the air which has always been
public should become private, when the land which has always been
private has become public. We answer that this is exactly how things
really stand to-day in the matter of all publicity and privacy.
Private things are indeed being made public. But public things
are being kept private.
"Thus we all had the pleasure of seeing in the papers a picture
of Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., smiling in an ingratiating manner
at his favourite cockatoo. We know this detail of his existence,
which might seem a merely domestic one. But the fact that he is shortly
to be paid thirty thousand pounds of public money, for continuing
to live in his own house, is concealed with the utmost delicacy.
"Similarly we have seen whole pages of an illustrated paper
filled with glimpses of Lord Normantowers enjoying his honeymoon,
which the papers in question are careful to describe as his Romance.
Whatever it may be, an antiquated and fastidious taste might
possibly be disposed to regard it as his own affair. But the fact
that the taxpayer's money, which is the taxpayer's affair, is to be
given him in enormous quantities, first for going out of his castle,
and then for coming back into it--this little domestic detail
is thought too trivial for the taxpayer to be told of it.
"Or again, we are frequently informed that the hobby of Mr. Rosenbaum
Low is improving the breed of Pekinese, and God knows they need it.
But it would seem the sort of hobby that anybody might have without
telling everybody else about it. On the other hand, the fact
that Mr. Rosenbaum Low is being paid twice over for the same house,
and keeping the house as well, is concealed from the public;
along with the equally interesting fact that he is allowed to do
these things chiefly because he lends money to the Prime Minister."
The Prime Minister smiled still more grimly and glanced in a light
yet lingering fashion at some of the accompanying leaflets.
They seemed to be in the form of electioneering leaflets, though not
apparently connected with any particular election.
"Vote for Crane. He Said He would Heat His Hat and Did It.
Lord Normantowers said he would explain how people came to swallow
his coronet; but he hasn't done it yet.
"Vote for Pierce. He Said Pigs Would Fly And They Did. Rosenbaum Low
said a service of international aerial express trains would fly;
and they didn't. It was your money he made to fly.
"Vote for the League of the Long Bow. They Are The Only Men Who
Don't Tell Lies."
The Prime Minister stood gazing after the vanishing cloud-castle,
as it faded into the clouds, with a curious expression in his eyes.
Whether it were better or worse for his soul, there was something
in him that understood much that the muddled materialists around him
could never understand.
"Quite poetical, isn't it?" he said drily. "Wasn't it Victor
Hugo or some French poet who said something about politics and
the clouds?... The people say, 'Bah, the poet is in the clouds.
So is the thunderbolt.'"
"Thunderbolts!" said Normantowers contemptuously. "What can
these fools do but go about flinging fireworks?"
"Quite so," replied Eden; "but I'm afraid by this time they are
flinging fireworks into a powder-magazine."
He continued to gaze into the sky with screwed-up eyes,
though the object had become invisible.
If his eye could really have followed the thing after which he gazed,
he would have been surprised; if his unfathomable scepticism was
still capable of surprise. It passed over woods and meadows like
a sunset cloud towards the sunset, or a little to the north-west
of it, like the fairy castle that was west of the moon. It left
behind the green orchards and the red towers of Hereford and passed
into bare places whose towers are mightier than any made by man,
where they buttress the mighty wall of Wales. Far away in this
wilderness of columned cliffs and clefts it found a cleft or hollow,
along the floor of which ran a dark line that might have been
a black river running through a rocky valley. But it was in fact
a crack opening below into another abyss. The strange flying-ship
followed the course of the winding fissure till it came to a place
where the crack opened into a chasm, round like a cauldron and
accidental as the knot in some colossal tree-trunk; through which
it sank, entering the twilight of the tremendous cavern beneath.
The abyss below was lit here and there with artificial lights,
like fallen stars of the underworld, and bridged with wooden
platforms and galleries, on which were wooden huts and huge
packing-cases and many things somewhat suggestive of a munition dump.
On the rocky walls were spread out various balloon coverings,
some of them even more grotesque in outline than the castle.
Some were in the shapes of animals; and on that primeval background
looked like the last fossils, or possibly the first outlines of vast
prehistoric creatures. Perhaps there was something suggestive
in the fancy that in that underworld a new world was being created.
The man who alighted from the flying castle recognized, almost as
one recognizes a domestic pet, the outline of a highly primitive
pig stretching like a large archaic drawing across the wall.
For the young man was called Hilary Pierce, and had had previous
dealings with the flying pig, though for that day he had been put in
charge of the flying castle.
On the platform on which he alighted stood a table covered
with papers, with almost more papers than Lord Eden's table.
But these papers were covered almost entirely with figures and numbers
and mathematical symbols. Two men were bending over the table,
discussing and occasionally disputing. In the taller of the two
the scientific world might have recognized Professor Green,
whom it was seeking everywhere like the Missing Link, to incarcerate
him in the interests of science. In the shorter and sturdier
figure a very few people might have recognized Bellew Blair,
the organizing brain of the English Revolution.
"I haven't come to stay," explained Pierce hastily. "I'm going
on in a minute."
"Why shouldn't you stay?" asked Blair, in the act of lighting a pipe.
"I don't want your talk interrupted. Still less, far, far less,
do I want it uninterrupted. I mean while I'm here. A little
of your scientific conversation goes a long way with me; I know
what you're like when you're really chatty. Professor Green will say
in his satirical way '9920.05,' to which you will reply with quiet
humour '75.007.' This will be too good an opening for a witty
fellow like the Professor, who will instantly retort '982.09.' Not
in the best taste perhaps, but a great temptation in the heat of debate."
"Commander Blair," said the Professor, "is very kind to let me
share his calculations."
"Lucky for me," said Blair. "I'd have done ten times more with
a mathematician like you."
"Well," said Pierce casually, "as you are so much immersed
in mathematics, I'll leave you. As a matter of fact, I had a message
for Professor Green, about Miss Dale at the house where he was lodging;
but we mustn't interrupt scientific studies for a little thing like that."
Green's head came up from the papers with great abruptness.
"Message!" he cried eagerly. "What message? Is it really for me?"
"8282.003," replied Pierce coldly.
"Don't be offended," said Blair. "Give the Professor his message
and then go if you like."
"It's only that she came over to see my wife to find out where you
had gone to," said Pierce. "I told her, so far as it's possible
to tell anybody. That's all," he added, but rather with the air
of one saying, "it ought to be enough."
Apparently it was, for Green, who was once more looking down
upon the precious papers, crumpled one of them in his clenched
hand unconsciously, like a man suddenly controlling his feelings.
"Well, I'm off," said Pierce cheerfully; "got to visit the other dumps."
"Stop a minute," said Blair, as the other turned away.
"Haven't you any sort of public news as well as private news?
How are things going in the political world?"
"Expressed in mathematical formula," replied Pierce over his shoulder,
"the political news is MP squared plus LSD over U equals L. L
let loose. L upon earth, my boy."
And he climbed again into his castle of the air.
Oliver Green stood staring at the crumbled paper and suddenly began
to straighten it out.
"Mr. Blair," he said, "I am terribly ashamed of myself. When I
see you living here like a hermit in the mountains and scrawling
your calculations, so to speak, on the rocks of the wilderness,
devoted to your great abstract idea, vowed to a great cause,
it makes me feel very small to have entangled you and your friends
in my small affairs. Of course, the affair isn't at all small to me;
but it must seem very small to you."
"I don't know very precisely," answered Blair, "what was the nature
of the affair. But that is emphatically your affair. For the rest,
I assure you we're delighted to have you, apart from your valuable
services as a calculating machine."
Bellew Blair, the last and, in the worldly sense, by far the ablest
of the recruits of the Long Bow, was a man in early middle age,
square built, but neat in figure and light on his feet, clad in a
suit of leather. He mostly moved about so quickly that his figure
made more impression than his face; but when he sat down smoking,
in one of his rare moments of leisure, as now, it could be remarked
that his face was rather calm than vivacious; a short square face
with a short resolute nose, but reflective eyes much lighter than
his close black hair.
"It's quite Homeric," he added, "the two armies fighting for
the body of an astronomer. You would be a sort of symbol anyhow,
since they started that insanity of calling you insane. Nobody has
any business to bother you about the personal side of the matter."
Green seemed to be ruminating, and the last phrase awoke him
to a decision. He began to talk. Quite straightforwardly,
though with a certain schoolboy awkwardness, he proceeded to tell
his friend the whole of his uncouth love-story--the overturning
of his spiritual world to the tune the old cow died of, or rather
danced to.
"And I've let you in for hiding me like a murderer," he concluded.
"For the sake of something that must seem to you, not even like
a cow jumping over the moon, but more like a calf falling over
the milking-stool. Perhaps people vowed to a great work like this
ought to leave all that sort of thing behind them."
"Well, I don't see anything to be ashamed of," said Blair,
"and in this case I don't agree with what you say about leaving
those things behind. Of some sorts of work it's true; but not this.
Shall I tell you a secret?"
"If you don't mind."
"The cow never does jump over the moon," said Blair gravely.
"It's one of the sports of the bulls of the herd."
"I'm afraid I don't know what you mean," said the Professor.
"I mean that women can't be kept out of this war, because it's
a land war," answered Blair. "If it were really a war in the air,
you could have done it all by yourself. But in all wars of peasants
defending their farms and homes, women have been very much on
the spot; as they used to pour hot water out of windows during
the Irish evictions. Look here, I'll tell you a story. It's relevant
because it has a moral. After all, it's my turn, so to speak.
You've told me the true story of the Cow that Jumped over the Moon.
It's time I told you the true story of the Castle in the Air."
He smoked silently for a moment, and then said:
"You may have wondered how a very prosaic practical Scotch
engineer like myself ever came to make a thing like that pantomime
palace over there, as childish as a child's coloured balloon.
Well, the answer is the same; because in certain circumstances
a man may be very different from himself. At a certain period of
the old war preparations, I was doing some work for the government
in a secluded part of the western coast of Ireland. There were
very few people for me to talk to; but one of them was the daughter
of a bankrupt squire named Malone; and I talked to her a good deal.
I was about as mechanical a mechanic as you could dig out anywhere;
grimy, grumpy, tinkering about with dirty machinery. She was
really like those princesses you read about in the Celtic poems;
with a red crown made of curling elf-locks like little flames,
and a pale elfin face that seemed somehow thin and luminous
like glass; and she could make you listen to silence like a song.
It wasn't a pose with her, it was a poem; there are people like that,
but very few of them like her. I tried to keep up my end by telling
her about the wonders of science, and the great new architecture
of the air. And then Sheila used to say, 'And what is the good
of them to me, when you HAVE built them. I can see a castle
build itself without hands out of gigantic rocks of clear jewels
in the sky every night.' And she would point to where crimson
or violet clouds hung in the green after-glow over the great Atlantic.
"You would probably say I was mad, if you didn't happen to have
been mad yourself. But I was wild with the idea that there was
something she admired and that she thought science couldn't do.
I was as morbid as a boy; I half thought she despised me; and I wanted
half to prove her wrong and half to do whatever she thought right.
I resolved my science should beat the clouds at their own game; and I
laboured till I'd actually made a sort of rainbow castle that would
ride on the air. I think at the back of my mind there was some sort
of crazy idea of carrying her off into the clouds she lived among,
as if she were literally an angel and ought to dwell on wings. It never
quite came to that, as you will hear, but as my experiments progressed
my romance progressed too. You won't need any telling about that;
I only want to tell you the end of the story because of the moral.
We made arrangements to get married; and I had to leave a good
many of the arrangements to her, while I completed my great work.
Then at last it was ready and I came to seek her like a pagan
god descending in a cloud to carry a nymph up to Olympus.
And I found she had already taken a very solid little brick villa
on the edge of a town, having got it remarkably cheap and furnished
it with most modern conveniences. And when I talked to her about
castles in the air, she laughed and said her castle had come down to
the ground. That is the moral. A woman, especially an Irishwoman,
is always uncommonly practical when it comes to getting married.
That is what I meant by saying it is never the cow who jumps over
the moon. It is the cow who stands firmly planted in the middle of
the three acres; and who always counts in any struggle of the land.
That is why there must be women in this story, especially like
those in your story and Pierce's, women who come from the land.
When the world needs a Crusade for communal ideals, it is best
waged by men without ties, like the Franciscans. But when it comes
to a fight for private property--you can't keep women out of that.
You can't have the family farm without the family. You must have
concrete Christian marriage again: you can't have solid small
property with all this vagabond polygamy; a harem that isn't even
a home."
Green nodded and rose slowly to his feet, with his hands in his pockets.
"When it comes to a fight," he said. "When I look at these enormous
underground preparations, it is not difficult to infer that you
think it will come to a fight."
"I think it has come to a fight," answered Blair. "Lord Eden has
decided that. And the others may not understand exactly what they
are doing; but he does."
And Blair knocked out his pipe and stood up, to resume his work
in that mountain laboratory, at about the same time at which Lord
Eden awoke from his smiling meditations; and, lighting a cigarette,
went languidly indoors.
He did not attempt to explain what was in his mind to the men
around him. He was the only man there who understood that the England
about him was not the England that had surrounded his youth and
supported his leisure and luxury; that things were breaking up,
first slowly and then more and more swiftly, and that the things
detaching themselves were both good and evil. And one of them
was this bald, broad and menacing new fact; a peasantry.
The class of small farmers already existed, and might yet be found
fighting for its farms like the same class all over the world.
It was no longer certain that the sweeping social adjustments
settled in that garden could be applied to the whole English land.
But the story of how far his doubts were justified, and how far
his whole project fared, is a part of the story of The Ultimate
Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow, after which the exhausted
and broken-spirited reader may find rest at last.
CHESTERTON-Tales of the Long Bow - LECTURER GOES MAD AND ESCAPES