CHESTERTON-Tales of the Long Bow - THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR
Mr. Robert Owen Hood came through his library that was lined with brown
leather volumes with a brown paper parcel in his hand; a flippant person
(such as his friend Mr. Pierce) might have said he was in a brown study.
He came out into the sunlight of his garden, however, where his
wife was arranging tea-things, for she was expecting visitors.
Even in the strong daylight he looked strangely little altered,
despite the long and catastrophic period that had passed since he
had met her in the Thames valley and managed really to set the Thames
on fire. That fire had since spread in space and time and become
a conflagration in which much of modern civilization had been consumed;
but in which (as its advocates alleged) English agriculture had been
saved and a new and more hopeful Chapter opened in English history.
His angular face was rather more lined and wrinkled, but his straight
shock of copper-coloured hair was as unchanged as if it had been
a copper-coloured wig. His wife Elizabeth was even less marked,
for she was younger; she had the same slightly nervous or short-sighted
look in the eyes that was like a humanizing touch to her beauty made
of ivory and gold. But though she was not old she had always been
a little old-fashioned; for she came of a forgotten aristocracy whose
women had moved with a certain gravity as well as grace about the old
country houses, before coronets were sold like cabbages or the Jews
lent money to the squires. But her husband was old-fashioned too;
though he had just taken part in a successful revolution and bore
a revolutionary name, he also had his prejudices; and one of them
was a weakness for his wife being a lady--especially that lady.
"Owen," she said, looking up from the tea-table with alarmed severity,
"you've been buying more old books."
"As it happens, these are particularly new books," he replied;
"but I suppose in one sense it's all ancient history now."
"What ancient history?" she asked. "Is it a History of Babylon
or prehistoric China?"
"It is a History of Us."
"I hope not," she said; "but what do you mean?"
"I mean it's a history of Our Revolution," said Owen Hood, "a true
and authentic account of the late glorious victories, as the old
broadsheets said. The Great War of 1914 started the fashion of
bringing out the history of events almost before they'd happened.
There were standard histories of that war while it was still going on.
Our little civil war is at least finished, thank God; and this is
the brand-new history of it. Written by a rather clever fellow,
detached but understanding and a little ironical on the right side.
Above all, he gives quite a good description of the Battle of
the Bows."
"I shouldn't call that our history," said Elizabeth quietly.
"I'm devoutly thankful that nobody can ever write our history or put
it in a book. Do you remember when you jumped into the water after
the flowers? I fancy it was then that you really set the Thames
on fire."
"With my red hair, no doubt," he replied; "but I don't think I did set
the Thames on fire. I think it was the Thames that set me on fire.
Only you were always the spirit of the stream and the goddess
of the valley."
"I hope I'm not quite so old as that," answered Elizabeth.
"Listen to this," cried her husband, turning over the pages
of the book. "'According to the general belief, which prevailed
until the recent success of the agrarian movement of the Long Bow,
it was overwhelmingly improbable that a revolutionary change could
be effected in England. The recent success of the agrarian protest--'"
"Do come out of that book," remonstrated his wife. "One of our
visitors has just arrived."
The visitor proved to be the Reverend Wilding White, a man who had
also played a prominent part in the recent triumph, a part that was
sometimes highly public and almost pontifical; but in private life he
had always a way of entering with his grey hair brushed or blown the wrong
way and his eagle face eager or indignant; and his conversation like
his correspondence came in a rush and was too explosive to be explanatory.
"I say," he cried, "I've come to talk to you about that idea,
you know--Enoch Oates wrote about it from America, and he's a jolly
good fellow and all that; but after all he does come from America,
and so he thinks it's quite easy. But you can see for yourself it
isn't quite so easy, what with Turks and all that. It's all very
well to talk about the Unites States--"
"Never you mind about the United States," said Hood easily; "I think
I'm rather in favour of the Heptarchy. You just listen to this;
the epic of our own Heptarchy, the story of our own dear little
domestic war. 'The recent success of the agrarian protest--'"
He was interrupted again by the arrival of two more guests;
by the silent entrance of Colonel Crane and the very noisy entrance
of Captain Pierce, who had brought his young wife with him from
the country, for they had established themselves in the ancestral
inn of the Blue Boar. White's wife was still in the country,
and Crane's having long been busy in her studio with war-posters,
was now equally busy with peace-posters.
Hood was one of those men whom books almost literally seize and swallow,
like monsters with leather or paper jaws. It was no exaggeration
to say he was deep in a book as an incautious traveller might be
deep in a swamp or some strange man-eating plant of the tropics;
only that the traveller was magnetized and did not even struggle.
He would fall suddenly silent in the middle of a sentence and go
on reading; or he would suddenly begin to read aloud with great passion,
arguing with somebody in the book without reference to anybody
in the room. Though not normally rude, he would drift through
other people's drawing-rooms towards other people's bookshelves
and disappear into them, so to speak, like a rusty family ghost.
He would travel a hundred miles to see a friend for an hour,
and then waste half an hour with his head in some odd volume he
never happened to have seen before. On all that side of him there
was a sort of almost creepy unconsciousness. His wife, who had
old-world notions of the graces of a hostess, sometimes had double
work to do.
"The recent success of the agrarian protest," began Hood cheerfully
as his wife rose swiftly to receive two more visitors. These were
Professor Green and Commander Bellew Blair; for a queer friendship
had long linked together the most practical and the most unpractical
of the brothers of the Long Bow. The friendship, as Pierce remarked,
was firmly rooted in the square root of minus infinity.
"How beautiful your garden is looking," said Blair to his hostess.
"One so seldom sees flower-beds like that now; but I shall always
think the old gardeners were right."
"Most things are old-fashioned here, I'm afraid," replied Elizabeth,
"but I always like them like that. And how are the children?"
"The recent success of the agrarian protest," remarked her husband
in a clear voice, "is doubtless--"
"Really," she said, laughing, "you are too ridiculous for anything.
Why in the world should you want to read out the history of the war
to the people who were in it, and know quite well already what
really happened?"
"I beg your pardon," said Colonel Crane. "Very improper to
contradict a lady, but indeed you are mistaken. The very last
thing the soldier generally knows is what has really happened.
Has to look at a newspaper next morning for the realistic description
of what never happened."
"Why, then you'd better go on reading, Hood," said Hilary Pierce.
"The Colonel wants to know whether he was killed in battle;
or whether there was any truth in that story that he was hanged
as a spy on the very tree he had climbed when running away as
a deserter."
"Should rather like to know what they make of it all," said the Colonel.
"After all, we were all too deep in it to see it. I mean see it
as a whole."
"If Owen once begins he won't stop for hours," said the lady.
"Perhaps," began Blair, "we had better--"
"The recent success of the agrarian protest," remarked Hood
in authoritative tones, "is doubtless to be attributed largely
to the economic advantage belonging to an agrarian population.
It can feed the town or refuse to feed the town; and this question
appeared quite early in the politics of the peasantry that had
arisen in the western counties. Nobody will forget the scene at
Paddington Station in the first days of the rebellion. Men who
had grown used to seeing on innumerable mornings the innumerable
ranks and rows of great milk-cans, looking leaden in a grey
and greasy light, found themselves faced with a blank, in which
those neglected things shone in the memory like stolen silver.
It was true, as Sir Horace Hunter eagerly pointed out when he was
put in command of the highly hygienic problem of the milk supply,
that there would be no difficulty about manufacturing the metal cans,
perhaps even of an improved pattern, with a rapidity and finish
of which the rustics of Somerset were quite incapable. He had long
been of the opinion, the learned doctor explained, that the shape
of the cans, especially the small cans left outside poor houses,
left much to be desired, and the whole process of standing these
small objects about in the basements of private houses was open
to grave objection in the matter of waste of space. The public,
however, showed an indifference to this new issue and a disposition
to go back on the old demand for milk; in which matter, they said,
there was an unfair advantage for the man who possessed a cow over
the man who only possessed a can. But the story that Hunter had
rivalled the agrarian slogan by proclaiming the policy of 'Three
Areas and a Can' was in all probability a flippant invention of his
enemies.
"These agrarian strikes had already occurred at intervals before they
culminated in the agrarian war. They were the result of the attempt
to enforce on the farmers certain general regulations and precautions
about their daily habit, dress and diet, which Sir Horace Hunter and
Professor Hake had found to be of great advantage in the large State
laboratories for the manufacture of poisons and destructive gases.
There was every reason to believe that the people, especially the
young people, of the village often evaded the regulation about the
gutta-percha masks, and the rule requiring the worker to paint himself
all over with an antiseptic gum; and the sending of inspectors from
London to see that these rules were enforced led to lamentable scenes
of violence. It would be an error, however, to attribute the whole
of this great social convulsion to any local agricultural dispute.
The causes must also be sought in the general state of society,
especially political society. The Earl of Eden was a statesman
of great skill by the old Parliamentary standards, but he was
already old when he launched his final defiance to the peasants
in the form of Land Nationalization; and the General Election
which was the result of this departure fell largely into the hands
of his lieutenants like Hunter and Low. It soon became apparent
that some of the illusions of the Eden epoch had worn rather thin.
It was found that the democracy could not always be intimidated
even by the threat of consulting them about the choice of a Government.
"Nor can it be denied that the General Election of 19-- was from
the first rendered somewhat unreal by certain legal fictions
which had long been spreading. There was a custom, originating in
the harmless and humane deception used upon excited maiden ladies
from the provinces, by which the private secretaries of the Prime
Minister would present themselves as that politician himself;
sometimes completing the innocent illusion by brushing their hair,
waxing their moustaches or wearing their eyeglasses in the manner
of their master. When this custom was extended to public platforms it
cannot be denied that it became more questionable. In the last days
of that venerable statesman it has been asserted that there were no
less than five Lloyd Georges touring the country at the same time,
and that the contemporary Chancellor of the Exchequer had appeared
simultaneously in three cities on the same night, while the original
of all these replicas, the popular and brilliant Chancellor himself,
was enjoying a well-earned rest by the Lake of Como. The incident
of two identical Lord Smiths appearing side by side on the same
platform (through a miscalculation of the party agents), though
received with good humour and honest merriment by the audience,
did but little good to the serious credit of parliamentary institutions.
There was of course a certain exaggeration in the suggestion
of the satirist that a whole column of identical Prime Ministers,
walking two and two like soldiers, marched out of Downing Street
every morning and distributed themselves to their various posts
like policemen; but such satires were popular and widely scattered,
especially by an active young gentleman who was the author of most
of them--Captain Hilary Pierce, late of the Flying Corps.
"But if this was true of such trifles as half a dozen of Prime Ministers,
it was even truer and more trying in the practical matter of party
programmes and proposals. The heading of each party programme
with the old promise 'Every Man a Millionaire' had of course become
merely formal, like a decorative pattern or border. But it cannot be
denied that the universal use of this phrase, combined with the equally
universal sense of the unfairness of expecting any politician to carry
it out, somewhat weakened the force of words in political affairs.
It would have been well if statesmen had confined themselves to these
accepted and familiar formalities. Unfortunately, under the stress
of the struggle which arose out of the menacing organization of
the League of the Long Bow, they sought to dazzle their followers
with new improbabilities instead of adhering to the tried
and trusty improbabilities that had done them yeoman service in the past.
"Thus it was unwise of Lord Normantowers, so far to depart from the
temperance principles of a lifetime as to promise all his workers a bottle
of champagne at every meal, if they would consent to complete the provision
of munitions for suppressing the League of the Long Bow rebellion.
The great philanthropist unquestionably had the highest intentions,
both in his rash promise and his more reasonable fulfilment.
But when the munitions-workers found that the champagne-bottles,
though carefully covered with the most beautiful gold-foil, contained
in fact nothing but hygienically boiled water, the result was a sudden
and sensational strike, which paralysed the whole output of munitions
and led to the first incredible victories of the League of the Long Bow.
"There followed in consequence one of the most amazing wars
of human history--a one-sided war. One side would have been
insignificant if the other had not been impotent. The minority could
not have fought for long; only the majority could not fight at all.
There prevailed through the whole of the existing organizations
of society a universal distrust that turned them into a dust
of disconnected atoms. What was the use of offering men higher
pay when they did not believe they would ever receive it, but only
alluded jeeringly to Lord Normantowers and his brand of champagne?
What was the use of telling every man that he would have a bonus,
when you had told him for twenty years that he would soon be
a millionaire? What was the good of the Prime Minister pledging
his honour in a ringing voice on platform after platform, when it
was already an open jest that it was not the Prime Minister at all?
The Government voted taxes and they were not paid. It mobilized
armies and they did not move. It introduced the pattern of a new
all-pulverizing gun, and nobody would make it and nobody would
fire it off. We all remember the romantic crisis when no less
a genius than Professor Hake came to Sir Horace Hunter, the Minister
of Scientific Social Organization, with a new explosive capable
of shattering the whole geological formation of Europe and sinking
these islands in the Atlantic, but was unable to induce the cabman
or any of the clerks to assist him in lifting it out of the cab.
"Against all this anarchy of broken promises the little organization
of the League of the Long Bow stood solid and loyal and dependable.
The Long Bowmen had become popular by the nickname of the Liars.
Everywhere the jest or catchword was repeated like a song,
'Only the Liars Tell the Truth.' They found more and more men
to work and fight for them, because it was known that they would
pay whatever wages they promised, and refuse to promise anything
that they could not perform. The nickname became an ironical symbol
of idealism and dignity. A man was proud of being a little precise
and even pedantic in his accuracy and probity because he was a Liar.
The whole of this strange organization had originated in certain
wild bets or foolish practical jokes indulged in by a small group
of eccentrics. But they had prided themselves on the logical,
if rather literal, fashion in which they had fulfilled certain
vows about white elephants or flying pigs. Hence, when they came
to stand for a policy of peasant proprietorship, and were enabled
by the money of an American crank to establish it in a widespread
fashion across the west of England, they took the more serious task
with the same tenacity. When their foes mocked them with 'the myth
of three acres and a cow,' they answered: 'Yes, it is as mythical
as the cow that jumped over the moon. But our myths come true.'
"The inexplicable and indeed incredible conclusion of the story was due
to a new fact; the fact of the actual presence of the new peasantry.
They had first come into complete possession of their new farms,
by the deed of gift signed by Enoch Oates in the February of 19--
and had thus been settled on the land a great many years when Lord
Eden and his Cabinet finally committed themselves to the scheme
of Land Nationalization by which their homesteads were to pass
into official control. That curious and inexplicable thing,
the spirit of the peasant, had made great strides in the interval.
It was found that the Government could not move such people about
from place to place, as it is possible to do with the urban poor
in the reconstruction of streets or the destruction of slums.
It was not a thing like moving pawns, but a thing like pulling
up plants; and plants that had already struck their roots very deep.
In short, the Government, which had already adopted a policy commonly
called Socialist from motives that were in fact very conservative,
found itself confronted with the same peasant resistance as brought
the Bolshevist Government in Russia to a standstill. And when Lord
Eden and his Cabinet put in motion the whole modern machinery of
militarism and coercion to crush the little experiment, he found himself
confronted with a rural rising such as has not been known in England
since the Middle Ages.
"It is said that the men of the Long Bow carried their mediaeval
symbolism so far as to wear Lincoln green as their uniform when they
retired to the woods in the manner of Robin Hood. It is certain
that they did employ the weapon after which they were named;
and curiously enough, as will be seen, by no means without effect.
But it must be clearly understood that when the new agrarian class took
to the woods like outlaws, they did not feel in the least like robbers.
They hardly even felt like rebels. From their point of view at least,
they were and long had been the lawful owners of their own fields,
and the officials who came to confiscate were the robbers.
Therefore when Lord Eden proclaimed Nationalization, they turned
out in thousands as their fathers would have gone out against pirates
or wolves.
"The Government acted with great promptitude. It instantly
voted 50,000 pounds to Mr. Rosenbaum Low, the expenditure of
which was wisely left to his discretion at so acute a crisis,
with no more than the understanding that he should take a thorough
general survey of the situation. He proved worthy of the trust;
and it was with the gravest consideration and sense of responsibility
that he selected Mr. Leonard Kramp, the brilliant young financier,
from all his other nephews to take command of the forces in the field.
In the field, however, fortune is well known to be somewhat
more incalculable; and all the intelligence and presence of mind
that had enabled Kramp to postpone the rush on the Potosi Bank
were not sufficient to balance the accidental possession by Crane
and Pierce of an elementary knowledge of strategy.
"Before considering the successes obtained by these commanders in
the rather rude fashion of warfare which they were forced to adopt,
it must be noted, of course, that even on their side there were also
scientific resources of a kind; and an effective if eccentric kind.
The scientific genius of Bellew Blair had equipped his side
with many secret processes affecting aviation and aeronautics,
and it is the peculiarity of this extraordinary man that his
secret processes really remained for a considerable time secret.
For he had not told them to anybody with any intention of making
any money out of them. This quixotic and visionary behaviour
contrasted sharply with the shrewd good sense of the great business
men who know that publicity is the soul of business. For some
time past they had successfully ignored the outworn sentimental
prejudice that had prevented soldiers and sailors from advertising
the best methods of defeating the enemy; and we can all recall
those brilliantly coloured announcements which used to brighten
so many hoardings in those days, 'Sink in Smith's Submarine;
Pleasure Trips for Patriots.' Or 'Duffin's Portable Dug-Out Makes
War a Luxury.' Advertisement cannot fail to effect its aim;
the name of an aeroplane that had been written on the sky in pink
and pea-green lights could not but become a symbol of the conquest
of the air; and the patriotic statesman, deeply considering
what sort of battleship might best defend his country's coasts,
was insensibly and subtly influenced by the number of times that he
had seen its name repeated on the steps of a moving staircase
at an Imperial Exhibition. Nor could there be any doubt about
the brilliant success that attended these scientific specialties
so long as their operations were confined to the market.
The methods of Commander Blair were in comparison private, local,
obscure and lacking any general recognition; and by a strange irony
it was a positive advantage to this nameless and secretive crank
that he had never advertised his weapons until he used them.
He had paraded a number of merely fanciful balloons and fireworks
for a jest; but the secrets to which he attached importance he had
hidden in cracks of the Welsh mountains with a curious and callous
indifference to the principles of commercial distribution and display.
He could not in any case have conducted operations on so large
a scale, being deficient in that capital, the lack of which has
so often been fatal to inventors; and had made it useless for a man
to discover a machine unless he could also discover a millionaire.
But it cannot be denied that when his machine was brought into
operation it was always operative, even to the point of killing
the millionaire who might have financed it. For the millionaire had
so persistently cultivated the virtues of self-advertisement that it
was difficult for him to become suddenly unknown and undistinguished,
even in scenes of conflict where he most ardently desired to do so.
There was a movement on foot for treating all millionaires as
non-combatants, as being treasures belonging alike to all nations,
like the Cathedrals or the Parthenon. It is said that there
was even an alternative scheme for camouflaging the millionaire
by the pictorial methods that can disguise a gun as a part
of the landscape; and that Captain Pierce devoted much eloquence
to persuading Mr. Rosenbaum Low how much better it would be for all
parties if his face could be made to melt away into the middle
distance or take on the appearance of a blank wall or a wooden post."
"The extraordinary thing is," interrupted Pierce, who had been
listening eagerly, "that he said I was personal. Just at the moment
when I was trying to wave away all personal features that could
come between us, he actually said I was personal."
Hood went on reading as if nobody had spoken. "In truth the successes of
Blair's instruments revealed a fallacy in the common commercial argument.
We talk of a competition between two kinds of soap or two kinds of jam
or cocoa, but it is a competition in purchase and not in practice.
We do not make two men eat two kinds of jam and then observe which
wears the most radiant smile of satisfaction. We do not give two men
two kinds of cocoa and note which endures it with most resignation.
But we do use two guns directly against each other; and in the case
of Blair's methods the less advertised gun was the better.
Nevertheless his scientific genius could only cover a corner of the field;
and a great part of the war must be considered as a war in the open
country of a much more primitive and sometimes almost prehistoric kind.
"It is admitted of course by all students that the victories
of Crane and Pierce were gross violations of strategic science.
The victors themselves afterwards handsomely acknowledged the fact;
but it was then too late to repair the error. In order to understand
it, however, it is necessary to grasp the curious condition into
which so many elements of social life had sunk in the time just
preceding the outbreak. It was this strange social situation which
rendered the campaign a contradiction to so many sound military maxims.
"For instance, it is a recognized military maxim that armies
depend upon roads. But anyone who had noticed the conditions that
were already beginning to appear in the London streets as early
as 1924 will understand that a road was something less simple
and static than the Romans imagined. The Government had adopted
everywhere in their road-making the well-known material familiar
to us all from the advertisements by the name of "Nobumpo,"
thereby both insuring the comfort of travellers and rewarding
a faithful supporter by placing a large order with Mr. Hugg.
As several members of the Government themselves held shares in Nobumpo
their enthusiastic co-operation in the public work was assured.
But, as has no doubt been observed everywhere, it is one of the many
advantages of Nobumpo, as preserving that freshness of surface
so agreeable to the pedestrian, that the whole material can be
(and is) taken up and renewed every three months, for the comfort
of travellers and the profit and encouragement of trade. It so
happened that at the precise moment of the outbreak of hostilities
all the country roads, especially in the west, were as completely
out of use as if they had been the main thoroughfares of London.
This in itself tended to equalize the chances or even to increase them
in favour of a guerilla force, such as that which had disappeared
into the woods and was everywhere moving under cover of the trees.
Under modern conditions, it was found that by carefully avoiding
roads, it was still more or less possible to move from place to place.
"Again, another recognized military fact is the fact the bow is an
obsolete weapon. And nothing is more irritating to a finely balanced
taste than to be killed with an obsolete weapon, especially while
persistently pulling the trigger of an efficient weapon, without any
apparent effect. Such was the fate of the few unfortunate regiments
which ventured to advance into the forests and fell under showers
of arrows from trackless ambushes. For it must be remembered that the
conditions of this extraordinary campaign entirely reversed the normal
military rule about the essential military department of supply.
Mechanical communications theoretically accelerate supply, while the supply
of a force cut loose and living on the country is soon exhausted.
But the mechanical factor also depends upon a moral factor.
Ammunition would on normal occasions have been produced with unequalled
rapidity by Poole's Process and brought up with unrivalled speed
in Blinker's Cars; but not at the moment when riotous employees were
engaged in dipping Poole repeatedly in a large vat at the factory;
or in the quieter conditions of the country-side, where various
tramps were acquiring squatter's rights in Blinker's Cars,
accidentally delayed upon their journey. Everywhere the same
thing happened; just as the great manufacturer failed to keep his
promise to the workers who produced munitions, so the petty officials
driving the lorries had failed to keep their promises to loafers
and vagrants who had helped them out of temporary difficulties;
and the whole system of supply broke down upon a broken word.
On the other hand, the supply of the outlaws was in a sense
almost infinite. With the woodcutters and the blacksmiths on their side,
they could produce their own rude mediaeval weapons everywhere.
It was in vain that Professor Hake delivered a series of popular
lectures, proving to the lower classes that in the long run it
would be to their economic advantage to be killed in battle.
Captain Pierce is reported to have said: 'I believe the Professor is
a botanist as well as an economist; but as a botanist he has not yet
discovered that guns and arrows do not grow on trees. Bows and arrows do.'
"But the incident which history will have most difficulty in explaining,
and which it may perhaps refer to the region of myth or romance,
is the crowning victory commonly called the Battle of the Bows.
It was indeed originally called 'The Battle of the Bows of God';
in reference to some strangely fantastic boast, equally strangely
fulfilled, that is said to have been uttered by the celebrated Parson
White, a sort of popular chaplain who seems to have been the Friar Tuck
of this new band of Robin Hood. Coming on a sort of embassy to Sir
Horace Hunter, this clergyman is said to have threatened the Government
with something like a miracle. When rallied about the archaic
sport of the long bow, he replied: 'Yes, we have long bows and we
shall have longer bows; the longest bows the world has ever seen;
bows taller than houses; bows given to us by God Himself and big
enough for His gigantic angels.'
"The whole business of this battle, historic and decisive as
it was, is covered with some obscurity, like that cloud of storm
that hung heavy upon the daybreak of that gloomy November day.
Had anyone been present with the Government forces who was well
acquainted with the western valley in which they were operating,
such a person could not have failed to notice that the very landscape
looked different; looked new and abnormal. Dimly as it could be
traced through the morning twilight, the very line of the woodland
against the sky would have shown him a new shape; a deformity like
a hump. But the plans had all been laid out in London long before,
in imitation of that foresight, fixity of purpose, and final success
that will always be associated with the last German Emperor.
It was enough for them that there was a wood of some sort marked
on the map, and they advanced toward it, low and crouching as its
entrance appeared to be.
"Then something happened, which even those who saw it and survived
cannot describe. The dark trees seemed to spring up to twice
their height as in a nightmare. In the half-dark the whole wood
seemed to rise from the earth like a rush of birds and then to turn
over in mid-air and come towards the invaders like a roaring wave.
Some such dim and dizzy sight they saw; but many of them at least saw
little enough afterwards. Simultaneously with the turning of this
wheel of waving trees, rocks seemed to rain down out of heaven;
beams and stones and shafts and missiles of all kinds, flattening out
the advancing force as under a pavement produced by a shower of
paving-stones. It is asserted that some of the countrymen cunning
in woodcraft, in the service of the Long Bow, had contrived to fit
up a tree as a colossal catapult; calculating how to bend back
the boughs and sometimes even the trunks to the breaking-point,
and gaining a huge and living resilience with their release.
If this story is true, it is certainly an appropriate conclusion
to the career of the Long Bow and a rather curious fulfilment
of the visionary vaunt of Parson White, when he said that the bows
would be big enough for giants, and that the maker of the bows
was God."
"Yes," interrupted the excitable White, "and do you know what he
said to me when I first said it?"
"What who said when you said what?" asked Hood patiently.
"I mean that fellow Hunter," replied the clergyman. "That varnished
society doctor turned politician. Do you know what he said when I
told him we would get our bows from God?"
Owen Hood paused in the act of lighting a cigar.
"Yes," he said grimly. "I believe I can tell you exactly
what he said. I've watched him off and on for twenty years.
I bet he began by saying: 'I don't profess to be a religious man.'"
"Right, quite right," cried the cleric bounding upon his chair in a
joyous manner, "that's exactly how he began. 'I don't profess to be
a religious man, but I trust I have some reverence and good taste.
I don't drag religion into politics.' And I said: 'No, I don't
think you do.'"
A moment after, he bounded, as it were, in a new direction.
"And that reminds me of what I came about," he cried. "Enoch Oates,
your American friend, drags religion into politics all right; only it's
a rather American sort of religion. He's talking about a United
States of Europe and wants to introduce you to a Lithuanian Prophet.
It seems this Lithuanian party has started a movement for a
Universal Peasant Republic or World State of Workers on the Land;
but at present he's only got as far as Lithuania. But he seems
inclined to pick up England on the way, after the unexpected success
of the English agrarian party."
"What's the good of talking to me about a World State," growled Hood.
"Didn't I say I preferred a Heptarchy?"
"Don't you understand?" interrupted Hilary Pierce excitedly.
"What can we have to do with international republics? We can
turn England upside down if we like; but it's England that
we like, whichever way up. Why, our very names and phrases,
the very bets and jokes in which the whole thing began,
will never be translated. It takes an Englishman to eat his hat;
I never heard of a Spaniard threatening to eat his sombrero,
or a Chinaman to chew his pigtail. You can only set the Thames
on fire; you cannot set the Tiber or the Ganges on fire,
because the habit of speech has never been heard of. What's
the good of talking about white elephants in countries where
they are only white elephants? Go and say to a Frenchman,
'Pour mon chateau, je le trouve un elephant blanc' and he
will send two Parisian alienists to look at you seriously,
like a man who says that his motor-car is a green giraffe.
There is no point in telling Czecho-Slovakian pigs to fly,
or Jugo-Slavonic cows to jump over the moon. Why, the unhappy
Lithuanian would be bewildered to the point of madness by our
very name. There is no reason to suppose that he and his
countrymen talk about a long bowman when they mean a liar.
We talk about tall stories, but a tall story may mean a true
story in colloquial Lithuanian."
"Tall stories are true stories sometimes, I hope," said Colonel Crane,
"and people don't believe 'em. But people'll say that was a
very tall story about the tall trees throwing darts and stones.
Afraid it'll come to be a bit of a joke."
"All our battles began as jokes and they will end as jokes,"
said Owen Hood, staring at the smoke of his cigar as it threaded
its way towards the sky in grey and silver arabesque. "They will
linger only as faintly laughable legends, if they linger at all;
they may pass an hour or two or fill an empty page; and even the man
who tells them will not take them seriously. It will all end
in smoke like the smoke I am looking at; in eddying and topsy-turvy
patterns hovering for a moment in the air. And I wonder how many,
who may smile or yawn over them, will realize that where there was
smoke there was fire."
There was a silence; then Colonel Crane stood up, a solitary figure in his
severe and formal clothes, and gravely said farewell to his hostess.
With the failing afternoon light he knew that his own wife,
who was a well-known artist, would be abandoning her studio work,
and he always looked forward to a talk with her before dinner,
which was often a more social function. Nevertheless, as he
approached his old home a whim induced him to delay the meeting
for a few minutes and to walk round to his old kitchen garden,
where his old servant Archer was still leaning on a spade,
as in the days before the Flood.
So he stood for a moment amid a changing world, exactly as he
had stood on that distant Sunday morning at the beginning of all
these things. The South Sea idol still stood at the corner;
the scarecrow still wore the hat that he had sacrificed; the cabbages
still looked green and solid like the cabbage he had once dug up,
digging up so much along with it.
"Queer thing," he said, "how true it is what Hilary once said about
acting an allegory without knowing it. Never had a notion of what I
was doing when I picked up a cabbage and wore it for a wager.
Damned awkward position, but I never dreamed I was being martyred
for a symbol. And the right symbol, too, for I've lived to see
Britannia crowned with cabbage. All very well to say Britannia
ruled the waves; it was the land she couldn't rule, her own land,
and it was heaving like earthquakes. But while there's cabbage
there's hope. Archer, my friend, this is the moral: any country
that tries to do without cabbages is done for. And even in war you
often fight as much with cabbages as cannon-balls."
"Yes, sir," said Archer respectfully; "would you be wanting another
cabbage now, sir?"
Colonel Crane repressed a slight shudder. "No, thank you; no, thank you,"
he said hastily. Then he muttered as he turned away: "I don't
mind revolutions so much, but I wouldn't go through that again."
And he passed swiftly round his house, of which the windows began
to show the glow of kindled lamps, and went in to his wife.
Archer was left alone in the garden, tidying up after his work and shifting
the potted shrubs; a dark and solitary figure as sunset and twilight
sank all around the enclosure like soft curtains of grey with a border
of purple; and the windows, as yet uncurtained and full of lamplight,
painted patterns of gold on the lawns and flagged walks without.
It was perhaps appropriate that he should remain alone and apart;
for he alone in all these changes had remained quite unchanged.
It was perhaps fitting that his figure should stand in a dark outline
against the darkening scene; for the mystery of his immutable
respectability remains more of a riddle than all the riot of the rest.
No revolution could revolutionize Mr. Archer. Attempts had been
made to provide so excellent a gardener with a garden of his own;
with a farm of his own, in accordance with the popular policy of
the hour. But he would not adapt himself to the new world; nor would
he hasten to die out, as was his duty on evolutionary principles.
He was merely a survival; but he showed a perplexing disposition
to survive.
Suddenly the lonely gardener realized that he was not alone.
A face had appeared above the hedge, gazing at him with blue eyes
dreaming yet burning; a face with something of the tint and profile
of Shelley. It was impossible that Mr. Archer should have heard
of such a person as Shelley: fortunately he recognized the visitor
as a friend of his master.
"Forgive me if I am mistaken, Citizen Archer," said Hilary Pierce
with pathetic eagerness, "but it seems to me that you are not
swept along with the movement; that a man of your abilities
has been allowed to stand apart, as it were, from the campaign
of the Long Bow. And yet how strange! Are you not Archer?
Does not your very name rise up and reproach you? Ought you
not to have shot more arrows or told more tarradiddles than all
the rest? Or is there perhaps a more elemental mystery behind
your immobility, like that of a statue in the garden? Are you
indeed the god of the garden, more beautiful than this South Sea
idol and more respectable than Priapus? Are you in no mortal sense
an Archer? Are you perhaps Apollo, serving this military Admetus;
successfully, yes, successfully, hiding your radiance from me?"
He paused for a reply, and then lowered his voice as he resumed:
"Or are you not rather that other Archer whose shafts are not
shafts of death but of life and fruitfulness; whose arrows plant
themselves like little flowering trees; like the little shrubs you
are planting in this garden? Are you he that gives the sunstroke
not in the head but the heart; and have you stricken each of us
in turn with the romance that has awakened us for the revolution?
For without that spirit of fruitfulness and the promise of the family,
these visions would indeed be vain. Are you in truth the God of Love;
and has your arrow stung and startled each of us into telling
his story? I will not call you Cupid," he said with a slight air
of deprecation or apology, "I will not call you Cupid, Mr. Archer,
for I conceive you as no pagan deity, but rather as that image
clarified and spiritualized to a symbol almost Christian, as he might
have appeared to Chaucer or to Botticelli. Nay, it was you that,
clad in no heathen colours, but rather in mediaeval heraldry,
blew a blast on his golden trumpet when Beatrice saluted Dante on
the bridge. Are you indeed that Archer, O Archer, and did you give
each one of us his Vita Nuova?"
"No, sir," said Mr. Archer.
* * * * *
Thus does the chronicler of the League of the Long Bow come to
the end of his singularly unproductive and unprofitable labours,
without, perhaps, having yet come to the beginning. The reader may
have once hoped, perhaps, that the story would be like the universe;
which when it ends, will explain why it ever began. But the reader
has long since been sleeping, after the toils and trials of his part
in the affair; and the writer is too tactful to ask at how early
a stage of his story-telling that generally satisfactory solution
of all our troubles was found. He knows not if the sleep has
been undisturbed, or in that sleep what dreams may come, if there has
been cast upon it any shadow of the shapes of his own very private
and comfortable nightmare; turrets clad with the wings of morning
or temples marching over dim meadows as living monsters, or swine
plumed like cherubim or forests bent like bows, or a fiery river
winding through a dark land. Images are in their nature indefensible,
if they miss the imagination of another; and the foolish scribe of
the Long Bow will not commit the last folly of defending his dreams.
He at least has drawn a bow at a venture and shot an arrow into
the air; and he has no intention of looking for it in oaks,
all over the neighbourhood, or expecting to find it still sticking
in a mortal and murderous manner in the heart of a friend.
His is only a toy bow; and when a boy shoots with such a bow,
it is generally very difficult to find the arrow--or the boy.
End of this Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
Tales of the Long Bow by G. K. Chesterton
CHESTERTON-Tales of the Long Bow - THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR