CHESTERTON-Tales of the Long Bow - THE ELUSIVE COMPANION OF PARSON WHITE
"Since the Colonel ate his hat the Lunatic Asylum has lacked a background."
The conscientious scribe cannot but be aware that the above sentence,
standing alone and without reference to previous matters, may not
entirely explain itself. Anyone trying the experiment of using
that sentence for practical social purposes; tossing that sentence
lightly as a greeting to a passer-by; sending that sentence as a
telegram to a total stranger; whispering that sentence hoarsely
into the ear of the nearest policeman, and so on, will find that its
insufficiency as a full and final statement is generally felt.
With no morbid curiosity, with no exaggerated appetite for omniscience,
men will want to know more about this statement before acting upon it.
And the only way of explaining it, and the unusual circumstances
in which it came to be said, is to pursue the doubling and devious
course of these narratives, and return to a date very much earlier,
when men now more than middle-aged were quite young.
It was in the days when the Colonel was not the Colonel, but only
Jimmy Crane, a restless youth tossed about by every wind of adventure,
but as yet as incapable of discipline as of dressing for dinner.
It was in days before Robert Owen Hood, the lawyer, had ever
begun to study the law and had only got so far as to abolish it;
coming down to the club every night with a new plan for a revolution
to turn all earthly tribunals upside down. It was in days before
Wilding White settled down as a country parson, returning to the creed
though not the conventions of his class and country; when he was
still ready to change his religion once a week, turning up sometimes
in the costume of a monk and sometimes of a mufti, and sometimes
in what he declared to be the original vestments of a Druid,
whose religion was shortly to be resumed by the whole British people.
It was in days when their young friend Hilary Pierce, the aviator,
was still anticipating aviation by flying a small kite. In short,
it was early in the lives even of the elders of the group that they
had founded a small social club, in which their long friendships
had flourished. The club had to have some sort of name, and the more
thoughtful and detached among them, who saw the club steadily
and saw it as a whole, considered the point with ripe reflection,
and finally called their little society the Lunatic Asylum.
"We might all stick straws in our hair for dinner, as the Romans
crowned themselves with roses for the banquet," observed Hood.
"It would correspond to dressing for dinner; I don't know what else
we could do to vary the vulgar society trick of all wearing the same
sort of white waistcoats."
"All wearing strait waistcoats, I suppose," said Crane.
"We might each dine separately in a padded cell, if it comes to that,"
said Hood; "but there seems to be something lacking in it considered
as a social evening."
Here Wilding White, who was then in a monastic phase, intervened eagerly.
He explained that in some monasteries a monk of particular
holiness was allowed to become a hermit in an inner cell,
and proposed a similar arrangement at the club. Hood, with his
more mellow rationalism, intervened with a milder amendment.
He suggested that a large padded chair should represent the
padded cell, and be reserved like a throne for the loftiest of the
lunatics.
"Do not," he said gently and earnestly, "do not let us be divided
by jealousies and petty ambitions. Do not let us dispute among
ourselves which shall be the dottiest in the domain of the dotty.
Perhaps one will appear worthier than us all, more manifestly
and magnificently weak in the head; for him let the padded throne
stand empty."
Jimmy Crane had said no more after his brief suggestion, but was pacing
the room like a polar bear, as he generally did when there came upon
him a periodical impulse to go off after things like polar bears.
He was the wildest of all those wild figures so far as the scale
of his adventures was concerned, constantly vanishing to the ends
of the earth nobody knew why, and turning up again nobody knew how.
He had a hobby, even in his youth, that made his outlook seem even
stranger than the bewildering successive philosophies of his friend White.
He had an enthusiasm for the myths of savages, and while White was
balancing the relative claims of Buddhism and Brahminism, Crane would
boldly declare his preference for the belief that a big fish ate
the sun every night, or that the whole cosmos was created by cutting
up a giant. Moreover, there was with all this something indefinable
but in some way more serious about Crane even in those days.
There was much that was merely boyish about the blind impetuosity
of Wilding White, with his wild hair and eager aquiline face.
He was evidently one who might (as he said) learn the secret of Isis,
but would be quite incapable of keeping it to himself. The long,
legal face of Owen Hood had already learned to laugh at most things,
if not to laugh loudly. But in Crane there was something more hard
and militant like steel, and as he proved afterwards in the affair
of the hat, he could keep a secret even when it was a joke.
So that when he finally went off on a long tour round the world,
with the avowed intention of studying all the savages he could find,
nobody tried to stop him. He went off in a startlingly shabby suit,
with a faded sash instead of a waistcoat, and with no luggage
in particular, except a large revolver slung round him in a case like
a field-glass, and a big, green umbrella that he flourished resolutely
as he walked.
"Well, he'll come back a queerer figure than he went, I suppose,"
said Wilding White.
"He couldn't," answered Hood, the lawyer, shaking his head.
"I don't believe all the devil-worship in Africa could make him any
madder than he is."
"But he's going to America first, isn't he?" said the other.
"Yes," said Hood. "He's going to America, but not to see
the Americans. He would think the Americans very dull compared with
the American Indians. Possibly he will come back in feathers and
war-paint."
"He'll come back scalped, I suppose," said White hopefully.
"I suppose being scalped is all the rage in the best Red Indian society?"
"Then he's working round by the South Sea Islands," said Hood.
"They don't scalp people there; they only stew them in pots."
"He couldn't very well come back stewed," said White, musing.
"Does it strike you, Owen, that we should hardly be talking nonsense
like this if we hadn't a curious faith that a fellow like Crane
will know how to look after himself?"
"Yes," said Hood gravely. "I've got a very fixed fundamental
conviction that Crane will turn up again all right. But it's true
that he may look jolly queer after going FANTEE for all that time."
It became a sort of pastime at the club of the Lunatics to compete
in speculations about the guise in which the maddest of their
madmen would return, after being so long lost to civilization.
And grand preparations were made as for a sort of Walpurgis Night
of nonsense when it was known at last that he was really returning.
Hood had received letters from him occasionally, full of queer
mythologies, and then a rapid succession of telegrams from places
nearer and nearer home, culminating in the announcement that he would
appear in the club that night. It was about five minutes before
dinner-time that a sharp knock on the door announced his arrival.
"Bang all the gongs and the tom-toms," cried Wilding White.
"The Lord High Mumbo-Jumbo arrives riding on the nightmare."
"We had better bring out the throne of the King of the Maniacs,"
said Hood, laughing. "We may want it at last," and he turned towards
the big padded chair that still stood at the top of the table.
As he did so James Crane walked into the room. He was clad
in very neat and well-cut evening clothes, not too fashionable,
and a little formal. His hair was parted on one side, and his
moustache clipped rather close; he took a seat with a pleasant smile,
and began talking about the weather.
He was not allowed, however, to confine his conversation to
the weather. He had certainly succeeded in giving his old friends
the only sort of surprise that they really had not expected;
but they were too old friends for their friend to be able
to conceal from them the meaning of such a change. And it
was on that festive evening that Crane explained his position;
a position which he maintained in most things ever afterwards,
and one which is the original foundation of the affair that follows.
"I have lived with the men we call savages all over the world,"
he said simply, "and I have found out one truth about them.
And I tell you, my friends, you may talk about independence and
individual self-expression till you burst. But I've always found,
wherever I went, that the man who could really be trusted to keep
his word, and to fight, and to work for his family, was the man
who did a war-dance before the moon where the moon was worshipped,
and wore a nose-ring in his nose where nose-rings were worn. I have
had plenty of fun, and I won't interfere with anyone else having it.
But I believe I have seen what is the real making of mankind, and I
have come back to my tribe."
This was the first act of the drama which ended in the remarkable
appearance and disappearance of Mr. Enoch Oates, and it has been
necessary to narrate it briefly before passing on to the second act.
Ever since that time Crane had preserved at once his eccentric friends
and his own more formal customs. And there were many among the newer
members of the club who had never known him except as the Colonel,
the grizzled, military gentleman whose severe scheme of black
and white attire and strict politeness in small things formed
the one foil of sharp contrast to that many-coloured Bohemia.
One of these was Hilary Pierce, the young aviator; and much as he
liked the Colonel, he never quite understood him. He had never
known the old soldier in his volcanic youth, as had Hood and White,
and therefore never knew how much of the fire remained under the rock
or the snows. The singular affair of the hat, which has been narrated
to the too patient reader elsewhere, surprised him more than it did
the older men, who knew very well that the Colonel was not so old
as he looked. And the impression increased with all the incidents
which a fanatical love of truth has forced the chronicler to relate
in the same connexion; the incident of the river and of the pigs
and of the somewhat larger pet of Mr. Wilding White. There was
talk of renaming the Lunatic Asylum as the League of the Long Bow,
and of commemorating its performances in a permanent ritual.
The Colonel was induced to wear a crown of cabbage on state occasions,
and Pierce was gravely invited to bring his pigs with him to dine at
the club.
"You could easily bring a little pig in your large pocket," said Hood.
"I often wonder people do not have pigs as pets."
"A pig in a poke, in fact," said Pierce. "Well, so long as you
have the tact to avoid the indelicacy of having pork for dinner
that evening, I suppose I could bring my pig in my pocket."
"White'd find it rather a nuisance to bring his elephant
in his pocket," observed the Colonel.
Pierce glanced at him, and had again the feeling of incongruity at seeing
the ceremonial cabbage adorning his comparatively venerable head.
For the Colonel had just been married, and was rejuvenated in an
almost jaunty degree. Somehow the philosophical young man seemed
to miss something, and sighed. It was then that he made the remark
which is the pivot of this precise though laborious anecdote.
"Since the Colonel ate his hat," he said, "the Lunatic Asylum has
lacked a background."
"Damn your impudence," said the Colonel cheerfully. "Do you mean
to call me a background to my face?"
"A dark background," said Pierce soothingly. "Do not resent my
saying a dark background. I mean a grand, mysterious background
like that of night; a sublime and even starry background."
"Starry yourself," said Crane indignantly.
"It was against that background of ancient night," went on the young
man dreamily, "that the fantastic shapes and fiery colours of our
carnival could really be seen. So long as he came here with his black
coat and beautiful society manners there was a foil to our follies.
We were eccentric, but he was our centre. You cannot be eccentric
without a centre."
"I believe Hilary is quite right," said Owen Hood earnestly.
"I believe we have made a great mistake. We ought not to have
all gone mad at once. We ought to have taken it in turns
to go mad. Then I could have been shocked at his behaviour
on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and he could have been
shocked at my behaviour on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
But there is no moral value in going mad when nobody is shocked.
If Crane leaves off being shocked, what are we to do?"
"I know what we want," began Pierce excitedly.
"So do I," interrupted Hood. "We want a sane man."
"Not so easy to find nowadays," said the old soldier.
"Going to advertise?"
"I mean a stupid man," explained Owen Hood. "I mean a man who's
conventional all through, not a humbug like Crane. I mean,
I want a solid, serious, business man, a hard-headed, practical man
of affairs, a man to whom vast commercial interests are committed.
In a word, I want a fool; some beautiful, rounded, homogenous fool,
in whose blameless face, as in a round mirror, all our fancies
may really be reflected and renewed. I want a very successful man,
a very wealthy man, a man--"
"I know! I know!" cried young Pierce, almost waving his arms.
"Enoch Oates!"
"Who's Enoch Oates?" inquired White.
"Are the lords of the world so little known?" asked Hood.
"Enoch Oates is Pork, and nearly everything else; Enoch Oates
is turning civilization into one vast sausage-machine. Didn't
I ever tell you how Hilary ran into him over that pig affair?"
"He's the very man you want," cried Hilary Pierce enthusiastically.
"I know him, and I believe I can get him. Being a millionaire,
he's entirely ignorant. Being an American, he's entirely in earnest.
He's got just that sort of negative Nonconformist conscience of New
England that balances the positive money-getting of New York. If we
want to surprise anybody we'll surprise him. Let's ask Enoch Oates
to dinner."
"I won't have any practical jokes played on guests," said the Colonel.
"Of course not," replied Hood. "He'll be only too pleased to take
it seriously. Did you ever know an American who didn't like seeing
the Sights? And if you don't know you're a Sight with that cabbage
on your head, it's time an American tourist taught you."
"Besides, there's a difference," said Pierce. "I wouldn't ask
a fellow like that doctor, Horace Hunter--"
"Sir Horace Hunter," murmured Hood reverently.
"I wouldn't ask him, because I really think him a sneak and a snob,
and my invitation could only be meant as an insult. But Oates is not
a man I hate, nor is he hateful. That's the curious part of it.
He's a simple, sincere sort of fellow, according to his lights,
which are pretty dim. He's a thief and a robber of course,
but he doesn't know it. I'm asking him because he's different;
but I don't imagine he's at all sorry to be different. There's no harm
in giving a man a good dinner and letting him be a background without
knowing it."
When Mr. Enoch Oates in due course accepted the invitation and presented
himself at the club, many were reminded of that former occasion when
a stiff and conventional figure in evening dress had first appeared
like a rebuke to the revels. But in spite of the stiff sameness
of both those black and white costumes, there was a great deal
of difference between the old background and the new background.
Crane's good manners were of that casual kind that are rather
peculiarly English, and mark an aristocracy at its ease in the saddle.
Curiously enough, if the American had one point in common with a
Continental noble of ancient lineage (whom his daughter might have
married any day), it was that they would both be a little more on
the defensive, living in the midst of democracy. Mr. Oates was
perfectly polite, but there was something a little rigid about him.
He walked to his chair rather stiffly and sat down rather heavily.
He was a powerful, ponderous man with a large sallow face, a little
suggestive of a corpulent Red Indian. He had a ruminant eye,
and an equally ruminant manner of chewing an unlighted cigar.
These were signs that might well have gone with a habit of silence.
But they did not.
Mr. Oates's conversation might not be brilliant, but it was continuous.
Pierce and his friends had begun with some notion of dangling their
own escapades before him, like dancing dolls before a child; they had
told him something of the affair of the Colonel and his cabbage,
of the captain and his pigs, of the parson and his elephant;
but they soon found that their hearer had not come there merely
as a listener. What he thought of their romantic buffooneries
it would be hard to say; probably he did not understand them,
possibly he did not even hear them. Anyhow, his own monologue
went on. He was a leisurely speaker. They found themselves
revising much that they had heard about the snap and smartness and
hurry of American talk. He spoke without haste or embarrassment,
his eye boring into space, and he more than fulfilled Mr. Pierce's
hopes of somebody who would talk about business matters. His talk
was a mild torrent of facts and figures, especially figures.
In fact the background was doing all it could to contribute the
required undertone of common commercial life. The background was
justifying all their hopes that it would be practical and prosaic.
Only the background had rather the air of having become the foreground.
"When they put that up to me I saw it was the proposition," Mr. Oates
was saying. "I saw I'd got on to something better than my old
regulation turnover of eighty-five thousand dollars on each branch.
I reckoned I should save a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in
the long run by scrapping the old plant, even if I had to drop another
thirty thousand dollars on new works, where I'd get the raw material
for a red cent. I saw right away that was the point to freeze on to;
that I just got a chance to sell something I didn't need to buy;
something that could be sort of given away like old match-ends. I
figured out it would be better by a long chalk to let the other
guys rear the stock and sell me their refuse for next to nix,
so I could get ahead with turning it into the goods. So I started
in right away and got there at the first go off with an increase
of seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars."
"Seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars," murmured Owen Hood.
"How soothing it all seems."
"I reckon those mutts didn't get on to what they were selling me,"
continued Mr. Oates, "or didn't have the pep to use it that way themselves;
for though it was the sure-enough hot tip, it isn't everybody who
would have thought of it. When I was in pork, of course, I wanted
the other guys out; but just now I wasn't putting anything on pork,
but only on just that part of a pig I wanted and they didn't want.
By notifying all your pig farmers I was able to import nine hundred
and twenty-five thousand pigs' ears this fall, and I guess I can get
consignments all winter."
Hood had some little legal experience with long-winded commercial
witnesses, and he was listening by this time with a cocked eyebrow
and an attention much sharper than the dreamy ecstasy with which
the poetic Pierce was listening to the millionaire's monologue,
as if to the wordless music of some ever-murmuring brook.
"Excuse me," said Hood earnestly, "but did I understand you
to say pigs' ears?"
"That is so, Mr. Hood," said the American with great patience
and politeness. "I don't know whether I gave you a sufficiently
detailed description for you to catch on to the proposition, but--"
"Well," murmured Pierce wistfully, "it sounded to me like
a detailed description."
"Pardon me," said Hood, checking him with a frown. "I really want
to understand this proposition of Mr. Oates. Do I understand that you
bought pigs' ears cheap, when the pigs were cut up for other purposes,
and that you thought you could use them for some purpose of your own?"
"Sure!" said Mr. Enoch Oates, nodding. "And my purpose was
about the biggest thing in fancy goods ever done in the States.
In the publicity line there's nothing like saying you can do what
folks say can't be done. Flying in the face of proverbs instead
of providence, I reckon. It catches on at once. We got to work,
and got out the first advertisement in no time; just a blank space
with 'We Can Do It' in the middle. Got folks wondering for a week
what it was."
"I hope, sir," said Pierce in a low voice, "that you will not
carry sound commercial principles so far as to keep us wondering
for a week what it was."
"Well," said Oates, "we found we could subject the pigskin and
bristles to a new gelat'nous process for making artificial silk,
and we figured that publicity would do the rest. We came out
with the second set of posters: 'She Wants it Now'... 'The
Most Wonderful Woman on Earth is waiting by the Old Fireside,
hoping you'll bring her home a Pig's Whisper Purse.'"
"A purse!" gasped Hilary.
"I see you're on the notion," proceeded the unmoved American.
"We called 'em Pig's Whisper Purses after the smartest and most
popular poster we ever had: 'There was a Lady Loved a Swine.'
You know the nursery rhyme, I guess; featured a slap-up princess
whispering in a pig's ear. I tell you there isn't a smart woman
in the States now that can do without one of our pig-silk purses,
and all because it upsets the proverb. Why, see here--"
Hilary Pierce had sprung wildly to his feet with a sort of stagger
and clutched at the American's arm.
"Found! Found!" he cried hysterically. "Oh, sir, I implore you
to take the chair! Do, do take the chair!"
"Take the chair!" repeated the astonished millionaire, who was
already almost struggling in his grasp. "Really, gentlemen, I hadn't
supposed the proceedings were so formal as to require a chairman,
but in any case--"
It could hardly be said, however, that the proceedings were formal.
Mr. Hilary Pierce had the appearance of forcibly dragging Mr. Enoch
Oates in the direction of the large padded arm-chair, that had always
stood empty at the top of the club table, uttering cries which,
though incoherent, appeared to be partly apologetic.
"No offence," he gasped. "Hope no misunderstanding... HONORIS
CAUSA... you, you alone are worthy of that seat... the club has
found its king and justified its title at last."
Here the Colonel intervened and restored order. Mr. Oates departed
in peace; but Mr. Hilary Pierce was still simmering.
"And that is the end of our quiet, ordinary business man," he cried.
"Such is the behaviour of our monochrome and unobtrusive background."
His voice rose to a sort of wail. "And we thought we were dotty!
We deluded ourselves with the hope that we were pretty well off our chump!
Lord have mercy on us! American big business rises to a raving idiocy
compared with which we are as sane as the beasts of the field.
The modern commercial world is far madder than anything we can do to
satirize it."
"Well," said the Colonel good-humouredly, "we've done some rather
ridiculous things ourselves."
"Yes, yes," cried Pierce excitedly, "but we did them to make
ourselves ridiculous. That unspeakable man is wholly, serenely serious.
He thinks those maniacal monkey tricks are the normal life of man.
Your argument really answers itself. We did the maddest things we
could think of, meaning them to look mad. But they were nothing
like so mad as what a modern business man does in the way of business."
"Perhaps it's the American business man," said White, "who's too
keen to see the humour of it."
"Nonsense," said Crane. "Millions of Americans have a splendid
sense of humour."
"Then how fortunate are we," said Pierce reverently, "through whose
lives this rare, this ineffable, this divine being has passed."
"Passed away for ever, I suppose," said Hood with a sigh.
"I fear the Colonel must be our only background once more."
Colonel Crane was frowning thoughtfully, and at the last words
his frown deepened to disapproval. He puffed at his smouldering
cigar and then, removing it, said abruptly:
"I suppose you fellows have forgotten how I came to be a background?
I mean, why I rather approve of people being backgrounds."
"I remember something you said a long time ago," replied Hood.
"Hilary must have been in long-clothes at that time."
"I said I had found out something by going round the world,"
said Crane. "You young people think I am an old Tory; but remember
I am also an old traveller. Well, it's part of the same thing.
I'm a traditionalist because I'm a traveller. I told you when I
came back to the club that I'd come back to the tribe. I told you
the best man was the man who wore a nose-ring where nose-rings
were worn."
"I remember," said Owen Hood.
"No, you forget," said Crane rather gruffly. "You forget it
when you talk about Enoch Oates the American. I'm no politician,
thank God, and I shall look on with detachment if you dynamite him
for being a millionaire. As a matter of fact, he doesn't think half
so much of money as old Normantowers, who thinks it's too sacred to
talk about. But you're not dynamiting him for being a millionaire.
You're simply laughing at him for being an American. You're laughing
at him for being national and normal, for being a good citizen,
a good tribesman, for wearing a nose-ring where nose-rings are worn.
"I say... Kuklux, you know," remonstrated Wilding White in his
hazy way. "Americans wouldn't be flattered--"
"Do you suppose you haven't got a nose-ring?" cried Crane so sharply
that the clergyman started from his trance and made a mechanical
gesture as if to feel for that feature. "Do you suppose a man like
you doesn't carry his nationality as plain as the nose on his face?
Do you think a man as hopelessly English as you are wouldn't be
laughed at in America? You can't be a good Englishman without
being a good joke. The better Englishman you are the more of a
joke you are; but still it's better to be better. Nose-rings are
funny to people who don't wear 'em. Nations are funny to people
who don't belong to 'em. But it's better to wear a nose-ring than
to be a cosmopolitan crank who cuts off his nose to spite his face."
This being by far the longest speech the Colonel had ever delivered
since the day he returned from his tropical travels long ago, his old
friend looked at him with a certain curiosity; even his old friends
hardly understood how much he had been roused in defence of a guest
and of his own deep delicacies about the point of hospitality.
He went on with undiminished warmth:
"Well, it's like that with poor Oates. He has, as we see it,
certain disproportions, certain insensibilities, certain prejudices
that stand out in our eyes like deformities. They offend you;
they offend me, possibly rather more than they do you. You young
revolutionists think you're very liberal and universal; but
the only result is that you're narrow and national without
knowing it. We old fogeys know our tastes are narrow and national;
but we know they are only tastes. And we know, at any rate I know,
that Oates is far more likely to be an honest man, a good husband
and a good father, because he stinks of the rankest hickory patch
in the Middle West, than if he were some fashionable New Yorker
pretending to be an English aristocrat or playing the aesthete
in Florence."
"Don't say a good husband," pleaded Pierce with a faint shudder.
"It reminds me of the grand slap-up advertisement of the Pig's Whisper.
How do you feel about that, my dear Colonel? The Most Wonderful Woman
on Earth Waiting by the Old Fireside--"
"It makes my flesh creep," replied Crane. "It chills me to the spine.
I feel I would rather die than have anything to do with it.
But that has nothing to do with my point. I don't belong to the tribe
who wear nose-rings; nor to the tribe who talk through their noses."
"Well, aren't you a little thankful for that?" asked White.
"I'm thankful I can be fair in spite of it," answered Crane. "When I
put a cabbage on my head, I didn't expect people not to stare at it.
And I know that each one of us in a foreign land is a foreigner,
and a thing to be stared at."
"What I don't understand about him," said Hood, "is the sort of
things he doesn't mind having stared at. How can people tolerate
all that vulgar, reeking, gushing commercial cant everywhere?
How can a man talk about the Old Fireside? It's obscene.
The police ought to interfere."
"And that's just where you're wrong," said the Colonel.
"It's vulgar enough and mad enough and obscene enough if you like.
But it's not cant. I have travelled amongst these wild tribes,
for years on end; and I tell you emphatically it is not cant.
And if you want to know, just ask your extraordinary American friend
about his own wife and his own relatively Old Fireside. He won't mind.
That's the extraordinary part of it."
"What does all this really mean, Colonel?" asked Hilary Pierce.
"It means, my boy," answered the Colonel, "that I think you owe
our guest an apology."
So it came about that there was an epilogue, as there had been
a prologue, to the drama of the entrance and exit of Mr. Enoch
B. Oates; an epilogue which in its turn became a prologue to
the later dramas of the League of the Long Bow. For the words of
the Colonel had a certain influence on the Captain, and the actions
of the Captain had a certain influence on the American millionaire;
and so the whole machinery of events was started afresh by
that last movement over the nuts and wine, when Colonel Crane
had stirred moodily in his seat and taken his cigar out of his mouth.
Hilary Pierce was an amiable and even excessively optimistic young
man by temperament, in spite of his pugnacity; he would really
have been the last man in the world to wish to hurt the feelings
of a harmless stranger; and he had a deep and almost secret respect
for the opinions of the older soldier. So, finding himself
soon afterwards passing the great gilded gateways of the highly
American hotel that was the London residence of the American,
he paused a moment in hesitation and then went in and gave his name
to various overpowering officials in uniforms that might have been
those of the German General Staff. He was relieved when the large
American came out to meet him with a simple and lumbering affability,
and offered his large limp hand as if there had never been a shadow
of misunderstanding. It was somehow borne in upon Pierce that his
own rather intoxicated behaviour that evening had merely been noted
down along with the architectural styles and the mellow mediaevalism
of the pig-sty, as part of the fantasies of a feudal land.
All the antics of the Lunatic Asylum had left the American
traveller with the impression that similar parlour games were
probably being played that evening in all the parlours of England.
Perhaps there was something, after all, in Crane's suggestion that
every nation assumes that every other nation is a sort of mild madhouse.
Mr. Enoch Oates received his guest with great hospitality and pressed
on him cocktails of various occult names and strange colours,
though he himself partook of nothing but a regimen of tepid milk.
Pierce fell into the confidence of Mr. Enoch Oates with a silent
swiftness that made his brain reel with bewilderment. He was
staggered like a man who had fallen suddenly through fifteen
floors of a sky-scraper and found himself in somebody's bedroom.
At the lightest hint of the sort of thing to which Colonel Crane
had alluded, the American opened himself with an expansiveness
that was like some gigantic embrace. All the interminable tables
of figures and calculations in dollars had for the moment disappeared;
yet Oates was talking in the same easy and natural nasal drawl,
very leisurely and a little monotonous, as he said:
"I'm married to the best and brightest woman God ever made, and I
tell you it's her and God between them that have made me, and I
reckon she had the hardest part of it. We had nothing but a few
sticks when I started; and it was the way she stood by that gave
me the heart to risk even those on my own judgement of how things
were going in the Street. I counted on a rise in Pork, and if it
hadn't risen I'd have been broke and I dare say in the jug.
But she's just wonderful. You should see her."
He produced her photograph with a paralysing promptitude; it represented
a very regal lady dressed up to the nines, probably for the occasion,
with very brilliant eyes and an elaborate load of light hair.
"'I believe in your star, Enoch,' she said; 'you stick to Pork,'"
said Oates, with tender reminiscence, "and so we saw it through."
Pierce, who had been speculating with involuntary irreverence on
the extreme difficulty of conducting a love-affair or a sentimental
conversation in which one party had to address the other as Enoch,
felt quite ashamed of his cynicism when the Star of Pork shone
with such radiance in the eyes of his new friend.
"It was a terrible time, but I stuck to Pork, sometimes feeling
she could see clearer than I could; and of course she was right,
and I've never known her wrong. Then came my great chance of making
the combination and freezing out competition; and I was able
to give her the sort of things she ought to have and let her take
the lead as she should. I don't care for society much myself;
but I'm often glad on a late night at the office to ring her up
and hear she's enjoying it."
He spoke with a ponderous simplicity that seemed to disarm and crush
the criticism of a more subtle civilization. It was one of those
things that are easily seen to be absurd; but even after they are
seen to be absurd, they are still there. It may be, after all,
that that is the definition of the great things.
"I reckon that's what people mean by the romance of business,"
continued Oates, "and though my business got bigger and bigger, it made
me feel kinda pleased there had been a romance at the heart of it.
It had to get bigger, because we wanted to make the combination
water-tight all over the world. I guess I had to fix things up a bit
with your politicians. But Congress men are alike all the world over,
and it didn't trouble me any."
There was a not uncommon conviction among those acquainted with
Captain Hilary Pierce that that ingenious young man was cracked.
He did a great many things to justify the impression; and in one sense
certainly had never shown any reluctance to make a fool of himself.
But if he was a lunatic, he was none the less a very English lunatic.
And the notion of talking about his most intimate affections,
suddenly, to a foreigner in a hotel, merely because the conversation
had taken that turn, was something that he found quite terrifying.
And yet an instinct, an impulse running through all these developments,
told him that a moment had come and that he must seize some opportunity
that he hardly understood.
"Look here," he said rather awkwardly, "I want to tell you something."
He looked down at the table as he continued.
"You said just now you were married to the best woman in the world.
Well, curiously enough, so am I. It's a coincidence that often happens.
But it's a still more curious coincidence that, in our own quiet way,
we went in for Pork too. She kept pigs at the back of the little
country inn where I met her; and at one time it looked as if the pigs
might have to be given up. Perhaps the inn as well. Perhaps the wedding
as well. We were quite poor, as poor as you were when you started;
and to the poor those extra modes of livelihood are often life.
We might have been ruined; and the reason was, I gather, that you
had gone in for Pork. But after all ours was the real pork;
pork that walked about on legs. We made the bed for the pigs
and filled the inside of the pig; you only bought and sold the name
of the pig. You didn't go to business with a live little pig under
your arm or walk down Wall Street followed by a herd of swine.
It was a phantom pig, the ghost of a pig, that was able to kill
our real pig and perhaps us as well. Can you really justify the way
in which your romance nearly ruined our romance? Don't you think
there must be something wrong somewhere?"
"Well," said Oates after a very long silence, "that's a mighty big
question and will take a lot of discussing."
But the end to which their discussion led must be left to reveal
itself when the prostrate reader has recovered sufficient strength
to support the story of The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green,
which those who would endure to the end may read at some later date.
CHESTERTON-Tales of the Long Bow - THE ELUSIVE COMPANION OF PARSON WHITE