Tales of the Long Bow/Chapter 3
III
THE UNOBTRUSIVE TRAFFIC OF CAPTAIN PIERCE
III
THE UNOBTRUSIVE TRAFFIC 0F CAPTAIN PIERCE
Those acquainted with Colonel Crane and Mr. Owen Hood, the lawyer, may or may not be concerned to know that they partook of an early lunch of eggs and bacon and beer at the inn called the Blue Boar, which stands at the turn of a steep road scaling a wooded ridge in the West Country. Those unacquainted with them may be content to know that the Colonel was a sunburnt, neatly-dressed gentleman, who looked taciturn and was; while the lawyer was a more rusty red-haired gentleman with a long Napoleonic face, who looked taciturn and was rather talkative. Crane was fond of good cooking; and the cooking in that secluded inn was better than that of a Soho restaurant and immeasurably better than that of a fashionable restaurant. Hood was fond of the legends and less-known aspects of the English country-side; and that valley had a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment, as if the west wind had been snared in it and tamed into a summer air. Both had a healthy admiration for beauty, in ladies as well as landscapes; although (or more probably because) both were quite romantically attached to the wives they had married under rather romantic circumstances, which are related elsewhere for such as can wrestle with so steep a narrative. And the girl who waited on them, the daughter of the innkeeper, was herself a very agreeable thing to look at; she was of a slim and quiet sort with a head that moved like a brown bird, brightly and as it were unexpectedly. Her manners were full of unconscious dignity, for her father, old John Hardy, was the type of old innkeeper who had the status, if not of a gentleman, at least of a yeoman. He was not without education and ability; a grizzled man with a keen, stubborn face that might have belonged to Cobbett, whose Register he still read on winters' nights. Hardy was well known to Hood, who had the same sort of antiquarian taste in revolutions.
There was little sound in the valley or the brilliant void of sky; the notes of birds fell only intermittently; a faint sound of tapping came from the hills opposite where the wooded slope was broken here and there by the bare face of a quarry, and a distant aeroplane passed and re-passed, leaving a trail of faint thunder. The two men at lunch took no more notice of it than if it had been a buzzing fly; but an attentive study of the girl might have suggested that she was at least conscious of the fly. Occasionally she looked at it, when no one was looking at her; for the rest, she had rather a marked appearance of not looking at it.
"Good bacon you get here," remarked Colonel Crane.
"The best in England, and in the matter of breakfast England is the Earthly Paradise," replied Hood readily. "I can't think why we should descend to boast of the British Empire when we have bacon and eggs to boast of. They ought to be quartered on the Royal Arms: three pigs passant and three poached eggs on a chevron. It was bacon and eggs that gave all that morning glory to the great English poets; it must have been a man who had a breakfast like this who could rise with that giant gesture: 'Night's candles are burnt out; and jocund day———'"
"Bacon did write Shakespeare, in fact," said the Colonel.
"This sort of bacon did," answered the other laughing; then, noticing the girl within earshot, he added: "We are saying how good your bacon is, Miss Hardy."
"It is supposed to be very good," she said with legitimate pride, "but I am afraid you won't get much more of it. People aren't going to be allowed to keep pigs much longer."
"Not allowed to keep pigs!" ejaculated the Colonel in astonishment.
"By the old regulations they had to be away from the house, and we've got ground enough for that, though most of the cottagers hadn't. But now they say the law is evaded, and the county council are going to stop pig-keeping altogether."
"Silly swine," snorted the Colonel.
"The epithet is ill chosen," replied Hood. "Men are lower than swine when they do not appreciate swine. But really I don't know what the world's coming to. What will the next generation be like without proper pork? And, talking about the next generation, what has become of your young friend Pierce? He said he was coming down, but he can't have come by that train."
"I think Captain Pierce is up there, sir," said Joan Hardy in a correct voice, as she unobtrusively withdrew.
Her tone might have indicated that the gentleman was upstairs, but her momentary glance had been towards the blue emptiness of the sky. Long after she was gone, Owen Hood remained staring up into it, until he saw the aeroplane darting and wheeling like a swallow.
"Is that Hilary Pierce up there? "he inquired, "looping the loop and playing the lunatic generally. What the devil is he doing?"
"Showing off," said the Colonel shortly, and drained his pewter mug.
"But why should he show off to us? "asked Hood.
"He jolly well wouldn't," replied the Colonel. "Showing off to the girl, of course." Then after a pause he added: "A very nice girl."
"A very good girl," said Owen Hood gravely. "If there's anything going on, you may be sure it's all straight and serious."
The Colonel blinked a little. "Well, times change," he said. "I suppose I'm old-fashioned myself; but speaking as an old Tory, I must confess he might do worse."
"Yes," replied Hood, "and speaking as an old Radical, I should say he could hardly do better."
While they were speaking the erratic aviator had eventually swept earthwards towards a flat field at the foot of the slope, and was now coming towards them. Hilary Pierce had rather the look of a poet than a professional aviator; and though he had distinguished himself in the war, he was very probably one of those whose natural dream was rather of conquering the air than conquering the enemy. His yellow hair was longer and more untidy than when he was in the army; and there was a touch of something irresponsible in his roving blue eye. He had a vein of pugnacity in him, however, as was soon apparent. He had paused to speak to Joan Hardy by the rather tumble-down pig-sty in the corner, and when he came towards the breakfast-table he seemed transfigured as with flame.
"What's all this infernal insane foolery?" he demanded. "Who has the damned impudence to tell the Hardys they mustn't keep pigs? Look here, the time is come when we must burst up all this sort of thing. I'm going to do something desperate."
"You've been doing desperate things enough for this morning," said Hood. "I advise you to take a little desperate luncheon. Do sit down, there's a good fellow, and don't stamp about like that."
"No, but look here———"
Pierce was interrupted by Joan Hardy, who appeared quietly at his elbow and said demurely to the company: "There's a gentleman here who asks if he may be pardoned for speaking to you."
The gentleman in question stood some little way behind in a posture that was polite but so stiff and motionless as almost to affect the nerves. He was clad in so complete and correct a version of English light holiday attire that they felt quite certain he was a foreigner. But their imaginations ranged the Continent in vain in the attempt to imagine what sort of foreigner. By the immobility of his almost moonlike face, with its faintly bilious tinge, he might almost have been a Chinaman. But when he spoke, they could instantly locate the alien accent.
"Very much distressed to butt in, gentlemen," he said, "but this young lady allows you are first-class academic authorities on the sights of this locality. I've been mouching around trying to hit the trail of an antiquity or two, but I don't seem to know the way to pick it up. If you'd be so kind as to put me wise about the principal architectural styles and historic items of this section, I'd be under a great obligation."
As they were a little slow in recovering from their first surprise, he added patiently:
"My name is Enoch B. Oates, and I'm pretty well known in Michigan, but I've bought a little place near here; I've looked about this little planet and I've come to think the safest and brightest place for a man with a few dollars is the place of a squire in your fine old feudal landscape. So the sooner I'm introduced to the more mellow mediæval buildings the better."
In Hilary Pierce the astonishment had given place to an ardour bordering on ecstasy.
"Mediæval buildings! Architectural styles!" he cried enthusiastically. "You've come to the right shop, Mr. Oates. I'll show you an ancient building, a sacred building, in an architectural style of such sublime antiquity that you'll want to cart it all away to Michigan, as they tried to do with Glastonbury Abbey. You shall be privileged to see one historic institution before you die or before all history is forgotten."
He was walking towards the corner of the little kitchen—garden attached to the inn, waving his arms with wild gestures of encouragement; and the American was following him with the same stiff politeness, looking weirdly like an automaton.
"Look on our architectural style before it perishes." cried Pierce dramatically, pointing to the pig-sty, which looked a rather ramshackle affair of leaning and broken boards hung loosely together, though in practice it was practical enough. "This, the most unmistakably mellow of all mediæval buildings, may soon be only a memory. But when this edifice falls England will fall, and the world will shake with the shock of doom."
The American had what he himself might have described as a poker face; it was impossible to discover whether his utterances indicated the extreme of innocence or of irony.
"And would you say," he asked, "that this monument exemplifies the mediæval or Gothic architectural school?"
"I should hardly call it strictly Perpendicular," answered Pierce, "but there is no doubt that it is Early English."
"You would say it is antique, anyhow?" observed Mr. Oates.
"I have every reason to believe," affirmed Pierce solemnly, "that Gurth the Swineherd made use of this identical building. I have no doubt it is in fact far older. The best authorities believe that the Prodigal Son stayed here for some time, and the pigs—those noble and much maligned animals—gave him such excellent advice that he returned to his family. And now, Mr. Oates, they say that all that magnificent heritage is to be swept away. But it shall not be. We shall not so easily submit to all the vandals and vulgar tyrants who would thus tear down our temples and our holy places. The pig-sty shall rise again in a magnificent resurrection—larger pig-stys, loftier pig-stys, shall yet cover the land; the towers and domes and spires of statelier and more ideal pig-stys, in the most striking architectural styles, shall again declare the victory of the holy hog over his unholy oppressors."
"And meanwhile," said Colonel Crane drily, "I think Mr. Oates had much better begin with the church down by the river. Very fine Norman foundations and traces of the Roman brick. The vicar understands his church, too, and would give Mr. Oates rather more reliable information than you do."
A little while later, when Mr. Oates had passed on his Way, the Colonel curtly reproved his young friend.
"Bad form," he said, "making fun of a foreigner asking for information."
But Pierce turned on him with the same heat on his face.
"But I wasn't making fun. I was quite serious."
They stared at him steadily, and he laughed slightly but went on with undiminished fire.
"Symbolical perhaps but serious," he said. "I may seem to have been talking a bit wildly, but let me tell you the time has come to be wild. We've all been a lot too tame. I do mean, as much as I ever meant anything, to fight for the resurrection and the return of the pig; and he shall yet return as a wild boar that will rend the hunters."
He looked up and his eye caught the blue heraldic shape on the sign-board of the inn.
"And there is our wooden ensign!" he cried, pointing in the same dramatic fashion. "We will go into battle under the banner of the Blue Boar."
"Loud and prolonged cheers," said Crane politely, "and now come away and don't spoil the peroration. Owen wants to potter about the local antiquities, like Mr. Oates. I'm more interested in novelties. Want to look at that machine of yours."
They began to descend the zigzag pebbled path fenced and embanked with hedges and flower-beds like a garden grown on a staircase, and at every corner Hood had to remonstrate with the loitering youth.
"Don't be for ever gazing back on the paradise of pigs," he said, "or you'll be turned to a pillar of salt, or possibly of mustard as more appropriate to such meat. They won't run away yet. There are other creatures formed by the Creator for the contemplation of man; there are other things made by man after the pattern of the creatures, from the great White Horses of Wessex to that great white bird on which you yourself flew among the birds. Fine subject for a poem of the first and last things."
"Bird that lays rather dreadful eggs," said Crane. "In the next war——— Why, where the deuce has he gone?"
"Pigs, pigs," said Hood sadly. "The overpowering charm which pigs exercise upon us at a certain time of life; when we hear their trotters in our dreams and their little curly tails twine about us like the tendrils of the vine———"
"Oh, bosh," said the Colonel.
For indeed Mr. Hilary Pierce had vanished in a somewhat startling manner, ducking under the corner of a hedge and darting up a steeper path, over a gate and across the corner of a hayfield, where a final bound through bursting bushes bought him on top of a low wall looking down at the pig-sty and Miss Joan Hardy, who was calmly walking away from it. He sprang down on to the path; the morning sun picked out everything in clear colours like a child's toy-book; and standing with his hands spread out and his wisps of yellow hair brushed in all directions by the bushes, he recalled an undignified memory of Shock—Headed Peter.
"I felt I must speak to you before I went," he said. "I'm going away, not exactly on active service, but on business—on very active business. I feel like the fellows did when they went to the war . . . and what they wanted to do first. . . . I am aware that a proposal over a pig-sty is not so symbolical to some as to me, but really and truly . . . I don't know whether I mentioned it, but you may be aware that I worship you."
Joan Hardy was quite aware of it; but the conventionalities in her case were like concentric castle-walls; the world-old conventions of the countryside. There was in them the stiff beauty of old country dances and the slow and delicate needlework of a peasantry. Of all the ladies whose figures must be faintly traced in the tapestry of these frivolous tales of chivalry, the most reticent and dignified was the one who was not in the worldly sense a lady at all.
She stood looking at him in silence, and he at her; as the lift of her head had some general suggestion of a bird, the line of her profile had a delicate suggestion of a falcon, and her face was of the fine tint that has no name, unless we could talk of a bright brown.
"Really, you seem in a terrible hurry," she said. "I don't want to be talked to in a rush like this."
"I apologize," he said. "I can't help being in a rush, but I didn't want you to be in a rush. I only wanted you to know. I haven't done anything to deserve you, but I am going to try, I'm going off to work; I feel sure you believe in quiet steady work for a young man."
"Are you going into the bank?" she asked innocently. "You said your uncle was in a bank."
"I hope all my conversation was not on that level," he replied. And indeed he would have been surprised if he had known how exactly she remembered all such dull details he had ever mentioned about himself, and how little she knew in comparison about his theories and fancies, which he thought so much more important.
"Well," he said with engaging frankness, "it would be an exaggeration to say I am going into a bank; though of course there are banks and banks. Why, I know a bank whereon the wild thyme—I beg your pardon, I mean I know a lot of more rural and romantic occupations that are really quite as safe as the bank. The truth is, I think of going into the bacon trade. I think I see an opening for a brisk young man in the ham and pork business. When you see me next I shall be travelling in pork; an impenetrable disguise."
"You mustn't come here, then," she answered. "It won't be allowed here by that time. The neighbours would———"
"Fear not," he said, "I should be a commercial traveller. Oh, such a very commercial traveller. And as for not coming here, the thing seems quite unthinkable. You must at least let me write to you every hour or so. You must let me send you a few presents every morning."
"I'm sure my father wouldn't like you to send me presents," she said gravely.
"Ask your father to wait," said Pierce earnestly. "Ask him to wait till he's seen the presents. You see, mine will be rather curious presents. I don't think he'll disapprove of them. I think he'll approve of them. I think he'll congratulate me on my simple tastes and sound business principles. The truth is, dear Joan, I've committed myself to a rather important enterprise. You needn't be frightened; I promise I won't trouble you again till it succeeds. I will be content that you know it is for you I do it; and shall continue to do it, if I defy the world." He sprang up on the wall again and stood there staring down at her almost indignantly.
"That anybody should forbid you to keep pigs," 'he cried. "That anybody should forbid you to do anything. That anybody should dispute your right to keep pet crocodiles if you like! That is the unpardonable sin; that is the supreme blasphemy and crime against the nature of things, which shall not go unavenged. You shall have pigs, I say, if the skies fall and the whole world is whelmed in war."
He disappeared like a flash behind the high bank and the wall, and Joan went back in silence to the inn.
The first incident of the war did not seem superficially encouraging, though the hero of it seemed by no means discouraged by it. As reported in the police news of various papers, Hilary Patrick Pierce, formerly of the Flying Corps, was arrested for driving pigs into the county of Bluntshire, in contravention of the regulations made for the public health. He seemed to have had almost as much trouble with the pigs as with the police; but he made a witty and eloquent speech on being arrested, to which the police and the pigs appeared to be equally unresponsive. The incident was considered trivial and his punishment was trifling; but the occasion was valued by some of the authorities as giving an opportunity for the final elucidation and establishment of the new rule.
For this purpose it was fortunate that the principal magistrate of the bench was no less a person than the celebrated hygienist, Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., M.D., who had begun life, as some may remember, as a successful suburban doctor and had likewise distinguished himself as an officer of health in the Thames Valley. To him indeed had been largely due the logical extension of the existing precautions against infection from the pig; though he was fully supported by his fellow magistrates, one being Mr. Rosenbaum Low, millionaire and formerly manager of Bliss and Co., and the other the young Socialist, Mr. Amyas Minns, famous for his exposition of Shaw on the Simple Life, who sat on the bench as a Labour alderman. All concurred in the argument of Sir Horace, that just as all the difficulties and doubtful cases raised by the practice of moderate drinking had been simplified by the solution of Prohibition, so the various quarrels and evasions about swine-fever were best met by a straightforward and simple regulation against swine. In the very improper remarks which he offered after the trial, the prisoner appears to have said that as his three judges were a Jew, a vegetarian and a quack doctor on the make, he was not surprised that they did not appreciate pork.
The next luncheon at which the three friends met was in a sufficiently different setting; for the Colonel had invited the other two to his club in London. It would have been almost impossible to have been that sort of Colonel without having that sort of club. But as a matter of fact, he very seldom went there. On this occasion it was Owen Hood who arrived first and was by instructions escorted by a waiter to a table in a bow window overlooking the Green Park. Knowing Crane's military punctuality, Hood fancied that he might have mistaken the time; and while looking for the note of invitation in his pocket-book, he paused for a moment upon a newspaper cutting that he had put aside as a curiosity some days before. It was a paragraph headed "Old Ladies as Mad Motorists," and ran as follows:
"An unprecedented number of cases of motorists exceeding the speed limit have lately occurred on the Bath Road and other western highways. The extraordinary feature of the case is that in so large a number of cases the offenders appeared to be old ladies of great wealth and respectability who professed to be merely taking their pugs and other pet animals for an airing. They professed that the health of the animal required much more rapid transit through the air than is the case with human beings."
He was gazing at this extract with as much perplexity as on his first perusal, when the Colonel entered with a newspaper in his hand.
"I say," he said, "I think it is getting rather ridiculous. I'm not a revolutionist like you; quite the reverse. But all these rules and regulations are getting beyond all rational discipline. A little while ago they started forbidding all travelling menageries; not, mind you, stipulating for proper conditions for the animals, but forbidding them altogether for some nonsense about the safety of the public. There was a travelling circus stopped near Acton and another on the road to Reading. Crowds of village boys must never see a lion in their lives, because once in fifty years a lion has escaped and been caught again. But that's nothing to what has happened since. Now, if you please, there is such mortal fear of infection that we are to leave the sick to suffer, just as if we were savages. You know those new hospital trains that were started to take patients from the hospitals down to the health resorts. Well, they're not to run after all, it seems, lest by merely taking an invalid of any sort through the open country we should poison the four winds of heaven. If this nonsense goes on, I shall go as mad as Hilary himself."
Hilary Pierce had arrived during this conversation and sat listening to it with a rather curious smile. Somehow the more Hood looked at that smile the more it puzzled him; it puzzled him as much as the newspaper cutting in his hand. He caught himself looking from one to the other, and Pierce smiled in a still more irritating manner.
"You don't look so fierce and fanatical as when we last met, my young friend," observed Owen Hood. "Have you got tired of pigs and police courts? These coercion acts the Colonel's talking about would have roused you to lift the roof off once."
"Oh, I'm all against the new rules," answered the young man coolly. "I've been very much against them; what you might call up against them. In fact, I've already broken all those new laws and a few more. Could you let me look at that cutting for a moment?"
Hood handed it to him and he nodded, saying:
"Yes; I was arrested for that."
"Arrested for what?"
"Arrested for being a rich and respectable old lady," answered Hilary Pierce; "but I managed to escape that time. It was a fine sight to see the old lady clear a hedge and skedaddle across a meadow."
Hood looked at him under bended brows and his mouth began to work.
"But what's all this about the old lady having a pug or a pet or something? "y
"Well, it was very nearly a pug," said Pierce in a dispassionate manner. "I pointed out to everybody that it was, as it were, an approximate pug. I asked if it was just to punish me for a small mistake in spelling."
"I begin to understand," said Hood. "You were again smuggling swine down to your precious Blue Boar, and thought you could rush the frontier in very rapid cars."
"Yes," replied the smuggler placidly. "We were quite literally Road-Hogs. I thought at first of dressing the pigs up as millionaires and members of Parliament; but when you come to look close, there's more difference than you would imagine to be possible. It was great fun when they forced me to take my pet out of the wrapping of shawls, and they found what a large pet it was."
"And do I understand," cut in the Colonel, "that it was something like that—with the other laws?"
"The other laws," said Pierce, "are certainly arbitrary, but perhaps you do not altogether do them justice. You do not quite appreciate their motive. You do not fully allow for their origin. I may say, I trust with all modesty, that I was their origin. I not only had the pleasure of breaking those laws, but the pleasure of making them."
"More of your tricks, you mean," said the Colonel; "but why don't the papers say so?"
"The authorities don't want 'em to," answered Pierce. "The authorities won't advertise me, you bet. I've got far too much popular backing for that. When the real revolution happens, it won't be mentioned in the newspapers."
He paused a moment in meditation and then went on.
"When the police searched for my pug and found it was a pig, I started wondering how they could best be stopped from doing it again. It occurred to me they might be shy of a wild pig or a pug that bit them. So, of course, I travelled the next time with dreadfully dangerous animals in cages, warning everybody of the fiercest tigers and panthers that ever were known. When they found it out and didn't want to let it out, they could only fall back on their own tomfoolery of a prohibition wholesale. Of course, it was the same with my other stunt, about the sick people going to health resorts to be cured of various fashionable and refined maladies. The pigs had a dignified, possibly a rather dull time, in elaborately curtained railway carriages with hospital nurses to wait on them; while I stood outside and assured the railway officials that the cure was a rest cure, and the invalids must on no account be disturbed."
"What a liar you are!" exclaimed Hood in simple admiration.
"Not at all," said Pierce with dignity. "It was quite true that they were going to be cured."
Crane, who had been gazing rather abstractedly out of the window, slowly turned his head and said abruptly: "And how's it going to end? Do you propose to go on doing all these impossible things?"
Pierce sprang to his feet with a resurrection of all the romantic abandon of his vow over the pig-sty.
"Impossible! "he cried. "You don't know what you're saying or how true it is. All I've done so far was possible and prosaic. But I will do an impossible thing. I will do something that is written in all books and rhymes as impossible—something that has passed into a proverb of the impossible. The war is not ended yet; and if you two fellows will post yourselves in the quarry opposite the Blue Boar, on Thursday week at sunset, you will see something so impossible and so self-evident that even the organs of public information will find it hard to hide it."
It was in that part of the steep fall of pine-wood where the quarry made a sort of ledge under a roof of pine that two gentlemen of something more than middle age who had not altogether lost the appetite of adventure posted themselves with all the preparations due to a picnic or a practical joke. It was from that place, as from a window looking across the valley, that they saw what seemed more like a vision; what seemed indeed rather like the parody of an apocalypse. The large clearance of the western sky was of a luminous lemon tint, as of pale yellow fading to pale green, while one or two loose clouds on the horizon were of a rose-red and yet richer colours. But the setting sun itself was a cloudless fire, so that a tawny light lay over the whole landscape; and the inn of the Blue Boar standing opposite looked almost like a house of gold. Owen Hood was gazing in his dreamy fashion, and said at last:
"There's an apocalyptic sign in heaven for you to start with. It's a queer thing, but that cloud coming up the valley is uncommonly like the shape of a pig."
"Very like a whale," said Colonel Crane, yawning slightly; but when he turned his eyes in that direction, the eyes were keener. Artists have remarked that a cloud has perspective like anything else; but the perspective of the cloud coming up the valley was curiously solid.
"That's not a cloud," he said sharply, "it's a Zeppelin or something."
The solid shape grew larger and larger; and as it grew more obvious it grew more incredible.
"Saints and angels!" cried Hood suddenly. "Why, it is a pig!"
"It's shaped like a pig all right," said the Colonel curtly; and indeed as the great balloon-like form bulked bigger and bigger above its own reflection in the winding river, they could see that the long sausage-shaped Zeppelin body of it had been fantastically decorated with hanging ears and legs, to complete that pantomimic resemblance.
"I suppose it's some more of Hilary's sky-larking," observed Hood; "but what is he up to now?"
As the great aerial monster moved up the valley it paused over the inn of the Blue Boar, and something fell fluttering from it like a brightly coloured feather.
"People are coming down in parachutes," said the Colonel shortly.
"They're queer-looking people," remarked his companion, peeping under frowning brows, for the level light was dazzling to the eyes. "By George, they're not people at all! They're pigs!"
From-that distance, the objects in question had something of the appearance of cherubs in some gaily coloured Gothic picture, with the yellow sky for their gold-leaf background. The parachute apparatus from which they hung and hovered was designed and coloured with the appearance of a great wheel of gorgeously painted plumage, looking more gaudy than ever in the strong evening light that lay over all. The more the two men in the quarry stared at these strange objects, the more certain it seemed that they were indeed pigs; though whether the pigs were dead or alive it was impossible at that distance to say. They looked down into the garden of the inn into which the leathered things were dropping, and they could see the figure of Joan Hardy standing in front of the old pig-sty, with her bird-like head lifted, looking up into the sky.
"Singular present for a young lady," remarked Crane, "but I suppose when our mad young friend does start love-making, he would be likely to give impossible presents."
The eyes of the more poetical Hood were full of larger visions, and he hardly seemed to be listening. But as the sentence ended he seemed to start from a trance and struck his hands together.
"Yes!" he cried in a new voice, "we always come back to that word!"
"Come back to what word?" asked his friend.
"'Impossible,'" answered Owen Hood. "It's the word that runs through his whole life, and ours too for that matter. Don't you see what he has done?"
"I see what he has done all right," answered the Colonel, "but I'm not at all sure I see what you are driving at."
"What we have seen is another impossible thing," said Owen Hood; "a thing that common speech has set up as a challenge; a thing that a thousand rhymes and jokes and phrases have called impossible. We have seen pigs fly."
"It's pretty extraordinary," admitted Crane, "but it's not so extraordinary as their not being allowed to walk."
And they gathered their travelling tackle together and began to descend the steep hill.
In doing so, they descended into a deeper twilight between the stems of the darkling trees; the walls of the valley began to close over them, as it were, and they lost that sense of being in the upper air in a radiant topsy-turvydom of clouds. It was almost as if they had really had a vision; and the voice of Crane came abruptly out of the dusk, almost like that of a doubter when he speaks of a dream.
"The thing I can't understand," he said abruptly, "is how Hilary managed to do all that by himself."
"He really is a very wonderful fellow," said Hood. "You told me yourself he did wonders in the War. And though he turns it to these fanatical ends now, it takes as much trouble to do one as the other."
"Takes a devilish lot more trouble to do it alone," said Crane. "In the War there was a whole organization."
"You mean he must be more than a remarkable person," suggested Hood, "a sort of giant with a hundred hands or god with a hundred eyes. Well, a man will work frightfully hard when he wants something very much; even a man who generally looks like a lounging minor poet. And I think I know what it was he wanted. He deserves to get it. It's certainly his hour of triumph."
"Mystery to me, all the same," said the Colonel frowning. "Wonder whether he'll ever clear it up." But that part of the mystery was not to be cleared up until many other curious things had come to pass.
Away on another part of the slope Hilary Pierce, new lighted on the earth like the herald Mercury, leapt down into a red hollow of the quarry and came towards Joan Hardy with uplifted arms.
"This is no time for false modesty," he said. "It is the hour, and I come to you covered with glory———"
"You come covered with mud," she said smiling, "and its that horrible red mud that takes so long to dry. It's no use trying to brush it till———"
"I bring you the Golden Fleece, or at any rate the Golden Pig-Skin," he cried in lyric ecstasy. "I have endured the labours; I have achieved the quest. I have made the Hampshire Hog as legendary as the Calydonian Boar. They forbade me to drive it on foot, and I drove it in a car, disguised as a pug. They forbade me to bring it in a car, and I brought it in a railway-train, disguised as an invalid. They forbade me to use a railway-train, and I took the wings of the morning and rose to the uttermost parts of the air; by a way secret and pathless and lonely as the wilful way of love. I have made my romance immortal. I have written your name upon the sky. What do you say to me now? I have turned a Pig into a Pegasus. I have done impossible things."
"I know you have," she said, "but somehow I can't help liking you for all that."
"But you can't help liking me," he repeated in a hollow voice. "I have stormed heaven, but still I am not so bad. Hercules can be tolerated in spite of his Twelve Labours. St. George can be forgiven for killing the Dragon. Woman, is this the way I am treated in the hour of victory; and is this the graceful fashion of an older world? Have you become a New Woman, by any ichance? What has your father been doing? What does he say–about us?"
"My father says you are quite mad, of course," she replied, "but he can't help liking you either. He says he doesn't believe in people marrying out of their class; but that if I must marry a gentleman he'd rather it was somebody like you, and not one of the new gentlemen."
"Well, I'm glad I'm an old gentleman, any how," he answered somewhat mollified. "But really this prevalence of common sense is getting quite dangerous. Will nothing rouse you all to a little unreality; to saying, so to speak, 'O, for the wings of a pig that I might flee away and be at rest.' What would you say if I turned the world upside down and set my foot upon the sun and moon?"
"I should say," replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, "that you wanted somebody to look after you."
He stared at her for a moment in an almost abstracted fashion as if he had not fully understood; then he laughed quite suddenly and uncontrollably, like a man who has seen something very close to him that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. So a man will fall over something in a game of hiding-and-seeking, and get up shaken with laughter.
"What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an aeroplane," he said, "especially when your flying ship is only a flying pig. The earth of the real peasants and the real pigs—don't be offended; I assure you the confusion is a compliment. What a thing is horse-sense, and how much finer really than the poetry of Pegasus! And when there is everything else as well that makes the sky clean and the earth kind, beauty and bravery and the lifting of the head—well, you are right enough, Joan. Will you take care of me? Will you stop at home and clip my pig's wings?"
He had caught hold of her by the hands; but she still laughed as she answered:
"Yes—I told you I couldn't help—but you must really let go, Hilary. I can see your friends coming down from the quarry."
As she spoke, indeed, Colonel Crane and Owen Hood could be seen descending the slope and passing through a screen of slender trees towards them.
"Hullo!" said Hilary Pierce cheerfully. "I want you to congratulate me. Joan thinks I'm an awful humbug, and right she is; I am what has been called a happy hypocrite. At least you fellows may think I've been guilty of a bit of a fake in this last affair, when I tell you the news. Well, I will confess."
"What news do you mean? "inquired the Colonel with curiosity.
Hilary Pierce grinned and made a gesture over his shoulder to the litter of porcine parachutes, to indicate his last and crowning folly.
"The truth is," he said laughing, "that was only a final firework display to celebrate victory or failure, whichever, you choose to call it. There isn't any need to do any more, because the veto is removed."
"Removed?" exclaimed Hood. "Why on earth is that? It's rather unnerving when lunatics suddenly go sane like that."
"It wasn't anything to do with the lunatics," answered Pierce quietly. "The real change was much higher up, or rather lower down. Anyhow, it was much farther at the back of things, where the Big Businesses are settled by the big people."
"What was the change?" asked the Colonel.
"Old Oates has gone into another business," answered Pierce quietly.
"What on earth has old Oates to do with it?" asked Hood staring. "Do you mean that Yankee mooning about over mediæval ruins?"
"Oh, I know," said Pierce wearily, "I thought he had nothing to do with it; I thought it was the Jews and vegetarians, and the rest; but they're very innocent instruments. The truth is that Enoch Oates is the biggest pork-packer and importer in the world, and he didn't want any competition from our cottagers. And what he says goes, as he would express it. Now, thank God, he's taken up another line."
But if any indomitable reader wishes to know what was the new line Mr. Oates pursued and why, it is to be feared that his only course is to await and read patiently the story of the Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates; and even before reaching that supreme test, he will have to support the recital of The Elusive Companion of Parson White; for these, as has been said, are tales of topsy-turvydom, and they often work backwards.