Read Ebook: Tales of the Long Bow by Chesterton G K Gilbert Keith

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 936 lines and 64679 words, and 19 pages

As the Colonel approached the church porch and prepared reverently to remove his vegetarian headgear, he was hailed in a tone a little more hearty than the humane civility that was the slender bond of that society. He returned the greeting without embarrassment, and paused a moment as the man who had spoken to him plunged into further speech. He was a young doctor named Horace Hunter, tall, handsomely dressed, and confident in manner; and though his features were rather plain and his hair rather red, he was considered to have a certain fascination.

Stars turned from their courses like comets, so to speak, and the world swerved into wilder possibilities, at that crucial moment when Dr. Hunter corrected himself and said, "What a fine day!" instead of "What a funny hat!"

As to why he corrected himself, a true picture of what passed through his mind might sound rather fanciful in itself. It would be less than explicit to say he did so because of a long grey car waiting outside the White Lodge. It might not be a complete explanation to say it was due to a lady walking on stilts at a garden party. Some obscurity might remain, even if we said that it had something to do with a soft shirt and a nickname; nevertheless all these things mingled in the medical gentleman's mind when he made his hurried decision. Above all, it might or might not be sufficient explanation to say that Horace Hunter was a very ambitious young man, that the ring in his voice and the confidence in his manner came from a very simple resolution to rise in the world, and that the world in question was rather worldly.

The doctor's dilemma, if we may apply the phrase, had been the whole neighbourhood's dilemma. The doctor's decision was also the whole neighbourhood's decision. It was not so much that most of the good people there shared in Hunter's serious social ambitions, but rather that they were naturally prone to negative and cautious decisions. They lived in a delicate dread of being interfered with; and they were just enough to apply the principle by not interfering with other people. They had also a subconscious sense that the mild and respectable military gentleman would not be altogether an easy person to interfere with. The consequence was that the Colonel carried his monstrous green headgear about the streets of that suburb for nearly a week, and nobody ever mentioned the subject to him. It was about the end of that time that the final interruption came; and with the interruption the explanation.

The Colonel had every appearance of having forgotten all about the hat. He took it off and on like any other hat; he hung it on the hat-peg in his narrow front hall where there was nothing else but his sword hung on two hooks and an old brown map of the seventeenth century. He handed it to Archer when that correct character seemed to insist on his official right to hold it; he did not insist on his official right to brush it, for fear it should fall to pieces; but he occasionally gave it a cautious shake, accompanied with a look of restrained distaste. But the Colonel himself never had any appearance of either liking or disliking it. The unconventional thing had already become one of his conventions--the conventions which he never considered enough to violate. It is probable, therefore, that what ultimately took place was as much of a surprise to him as to anybody. Anyhow, the explanation, or explosion, came in the following fashion.

Mr. Vernon-Smith, the mountaineer whose foot was on his native heath at Heatherbrae, was a small, dapper gentleman with a big-bridged nose, dark moustache, and dark eyes with a settled expression of anxiety, though nobody knew what there was to be anxious about in his very solid social existence. He was a friend of Dr. Hunter; one might almost say a humble friend. For he had the negative snobbishness that could only admire the positive and progressive snobbishness of that soaring and social figure. A man like Dr. Hunter likes to have a man like Mr. Smith, before whom he can pose as a perfect man of the world. What appears more extraordinary, a man like Mr. Smith really likes to have a man like Dr. Hunter to pose at him and swagger over him and snub him. Anyhow, Vernon-Smith had ventured to hint that the new hat of his neighbour Crane was not of a pattern familiar in every fashion-plate. And Dr. Hunter, bursting with the secret of his own original diplomacy, had snubbed the suggestion and snowed it under with frosty scorn. With shrewd, resolute gestures, with large allusive phrases, he had left on his friend's mind the impression that the whole social world would dissolve if a word were said on so delicate a topic. Mr. Vernon-Smith formed a general idea that the Colonel would explode with a loud bang at the very vaguest allusion to vegetables, or the most harmless adumbration or verbal shadow of a hat. As usually happens in such cases, the words he was forbidden to say repeated themselves perpetually in his mind with the rhythmic pressure of a pulse. It was his temptation at the moment to call all houses hats and all visitors vegetables.

When Crane came out of his front gate that morning he found his neighbour Vernon-Smith standing outside, between the spreading laburnum and the lamp-post, talking to a young lady, a distant cousin of his family. This girl was an art student on her own--a little too much on her own for the standards of Heatherbrae, and, therefore , yet further beyond those of White Lodge. Her brown hair was bobbed, and the Colonel did not admire bobbed hair. On the other hand, she had a rather attractive face, with honest brown eyes a little too wide apart, which diminished the impression of beauty but increased the impression of honesty. She also had a very fresh and unaffected voice, and the Colonel had often heard it calling out scores at tennis on the other side of the garden wall. In some vague sort of way it made him feel old; at least, he was not sure whether he felt older than he was, or younger than he ought to be. It was not until they met under the lamp-post that he knew her name was Audrey Smith; and he was faintly thankful for the single monosyllable. Mr. Vernon-Smith presented her, and very nearly said: "May I introduce my cabbage?" instead of "my cousin."

The Colonel, with unaffected dullness, said it was a fine day; and his neighbour, rallying from his last narrow escape, continued the talk with animation. His manner, as when he poked his big nose and beady black eyes into local meetings and committees, was at once hesitating and emphatic.

"This young lady is going in for Art," he said; "a poor look-out, isn't it? I expect we shall see her drawing in chalk on the paving-stones and expecting us to throw a penny into the--into a tray, or something." Here he dodged another danger. "But, of course, she thinks she is going to be an R.A."

"I hope not," said the young woman hotly. "Pavement artists are much more honest than most of the R.A.'s."

Recoiling from the omnipresent image, he groped madly in his mind for the alternative of a March hare. But before he could find it, the girl had cut in and completed his sentence. She smiled serenely, and said in her clear and ringing tones:

"As mad as Colonel Crane's hatter."

"I think you must be the bravest man in England," she said. "I don't mean anything about the war, or the D.S.O. and all that; I mean about this. Oh, yes, I do know a little about you, but there's one thing I don't know. Why do you do it?"

"I think it is you who are the bravest woman in England," he answered, "or, at any rate, the bravest person in these parts. I've walked about this town for a week, feeling like the last fool in creation, and expecting somebody to say something. And not a soul has said a word. They seem all to be afraid of saying the wrong thing."

"I think they're deadly," observed Miss Smith. "And if they don't have cabbages for hats, it's only because they have turnips for heads."

"No," said the Colonel gently; "I have many generous and friendly neighbours here, including your cousin. Believe me, there is a case for conventions, and the world is wiser than you know. You are too young not to be intolerant. But I can see you've got the fighting spirit; that is the best part of youth and intolerance. When you said that word just now, by Jove you looked like Britomart."

"She is the Militant Suffragette in the Faerie Queene, isn't she?" answered the girl. "I'm afraid I don't know my English literature as well as you do. You see, I'm an artist, or trying to be one; and some people say that narrows a person. But I can't help getting cross with all the varnished vulgarity they talk about everything--look at what he said about Socialism."

"It was a little superficial," said Crane with a smile.

"And that," she concluded, "is why I admire your hat, though I don't know why you wear it."

This trivial conversation had a curious effect on the Colonel. There went with it a sort of warmth and a sense of crisis that he had not known since the war. A sudden purpose formed itself in his mind, and he spoke like one stepping across a frontier.

"Why, of course I will," said the unconventional one heartily. "Thanks awfully."

The Colonel took an intense interest in the appointments of the luncheon next day. With subconscious surprise he found himself not only interested, but excited. Like many of his type, he took pleasure in doing such things well, and knew his way about in wine and cookery. But that would not alone explain his pleasure. For he knew that young women generally know very little about wine, and emancipated young women possibly least of all. And though he meant the cookery to be good, he knew that in one feature it would appear rather fantastic. Again, he was a good-natured gentleman who would always have liked young people to enjoy a luncheon party, as he would have liked a child to enjoy a Christmas tree. But there seemed no reason why he should be restless and expectant about it, as if he were the child himself. There was no reason why he should have a sort of happy insomnia, like a child on Christmas Eve. There was really no excuse for his pacing up and down the garden with his cigar, smoking furiously far into the night. For as he gazed at the purple irises and the grey pool in the faint moonshine, something in his feelings passed as if from the one tint to the other; he had a new and unexpected reaction. For the first time he really hated the masquerade he had made himself endure. He wished he could smash the cabbage as he had smashed the top-hat. He was little more than forty years old; but he had never realized how much there was of what was dried and faded about his flippancy, till he felt unexpectedly swelling within him the monstrous and solemn vanity of a young man. Sometimes he looked up at the picturesque, the too picturesque, outline of the villa next door, dark against the moonrise, and thought he heard faint voices in it, and something like a laugh.

The visitor who called on the Colonel next morning may have been an old friend, but he was certainly an odd contrast. He was a very abstracted, rather untidy man in a rusty knickerbocker suit; he had a long head with straight hair of the dark red called auburn, one or two wisps of which stood on end however he brushed it, and a long face, clean-shaven and heavy about the jaw and chin, which he had a way of sinking and settling squarely into his cravat. His name was Hood, and he was apparently a lawyer, though he had not come on strictly legal business. Anyhow, he exchanged greetings with Crane with a quiet warmth and gratification, smiled at the old manservant as if he were an old joke, and showed every sign of an appetite for his luncheon.

The appointed day was singularly warm and bright and everything in the garden seemed to glitter; the goblin god of the South Seas seemed really to grin; and the scarecrow really to have a new hat. The irises round the pool were swinging and flapping in a light breeze; and he remembered they were called "flags" and thought of purple banners going into battle.

She had come suddenly round the corner of the house. Her dress was of a dark but vivid blue, very plain and angular in outline, but not outrageously artistic; and in the morning light she looked less like a schoolgirl and more like a serious woman of twenty-five or thirty; a little older and a great deal more interesting. And something in this morning seriousness increased the reaction of the night before. One single wave of thanksgiving went up from Crane to think that at least his grotesque green hat was gone and done with for ever. He had worn it for a week without caring a curse for anybody; but during that ten minutes' trivial talk under the lamp-post, he felt as if he had suddenly grown donkey's ears in the street.

He had been induced by the sunny weather to have a little table laid for three in a sort of veranda open to the garden. When the three sat down to it, he looked across at the lady and said: "I fear I must exhibit myself as a crank; one of those cranks your cousin disapproves of, Miss Smith. I hope it won't spoil this little lunch for anybody else. But I am going to have a vegetarian meal."

"Are you?" she said. "I should never have said you looked like a vegetarian."

"Just lately I have only looked like a fool," he said dispassionately; "but I think I'd sooner look a fool than a vegetarian in the ordinary way. This is rather a special occasion. Perhaps my friend Hood had better begin; it's really his story more than mine."

"My name is Robert Owen Hood," said that gentleman, rather sardonically. "That's how improbable reminiscences often begin; but the only point now is that my old friend here insulted me horribly by calling me Robin Hood."

"I should have called it a compliment," answered Audrey Smith. "But why did he call you Robin Hood?"

"Because I drew the long bow," said the lawyer.

"But to do you justice," said the Colonel, "it seems that you hit the bull's-eye."

As he spoke Archer came in bearing a dish which he placed before his master. He had already served the others with the earlier courses, but he carried this one with the pomp of one bringing in the boar's head at Christmas. It consisted of a plain boiled cabbage.

"I was challenged to do something," went on Hood, "which my friend here declared to be impossible. In fact, any sane man would have declared it to be impossible. But I did it for all that. Only my friend, in the heat of rejecting and ridiculing the notion, made use of a hasty expression. I might almost say he made a rash vow."

"My exact words were," said Colonel Crane solemnly: "'If you can do that, I'll eat my hat.'"

He leaned forward thoughtfully and began to eat it. Then he resumed in the same reflective way:

And he rose from the table with a gesture of apology.

The girl stood up. "I think it's perfectly splendid," she said. "It's as wild as one of those stories about looking for the Holy Grail."

The lawyer also had risen, rather abruptly, and stood stroking his long chin with his thumb and looking at his old friend under bent brows in a rather reflective manner.

"Well, you've subpoena'd me as a witness all right," he said, "and now, with the permission of the court, I'll leave the witness-box. I'm afraid I must be going. I've got important business at home. Good-bye, Miss Smith."

The girl returned his farewell a little mechanically; and Crane seemed to recover suddenly from a similar trance as he stepped after the retreating figure of his friend.

"I say, Owen," he said hastily, "I'm sorry you're leaving so early. Must you really go?"

"Yes," replied Owen Hood gravely. "My private affairs are quite real and practical, I assure you." His grave mouth worked a little humorously at the corners as he added: "The truth is, I don't think I mentioned it, but I'm thinking of getting married."

"Married!" repeated the Colonel, as if thunderstruck.

"Thanks for your compliments and congratulations, old fellow," said the satiric Mr. Hood. "Yes, it's all been thought out. I've even decided whom I am going to marry. She knows about it herself. She has been warned."

"I really beg your pardon," said the Colonel in great distress, "of course I congratulate you most heartily; and her even more heartily. Of course I'm delighted to hear it. The truth is, I was surprised ... not so much in that way...."

"Not so much in what way?" asked Hood. "I suppose you mean some would say I am on the way to be an old bachelor. But I've discovered it isn't half so much a matter of years as of ways. Men like me get elderly more by choice than chance; and there's much more choice and less chance in life than your modern fatalists make out. For such people fatalism falsifies even chronology. They're not unmarried because they're old. They're old because they're unmarried."

"Indeed you are mistaken," said Crane earnestly. "As I say, I was surprised, but my surprise was not so rude as you think. It wasn't that I thought there was anything unfitting about ... somehow it was rather the other way ... as if things could fit better than one thought ... as if--but anyhow, little as I know about it, I really do congratulate you."

"I'll tell you all about it before long," replied his friend. "It's enough to say just now that it was all bound up with my succeeding after all in doing--what I did. She was the inspiration, you know. I have done what is called an impossible thing; but believe me, she is the really impossible part of it."

"Well, I must not keep you from such an impossible engagement," said Crane smiling. "Really, I'm confoundedly glad to hear about all this. Well, good-bye for the present."

Colonel Crane stood watching the square shoulders and russet mane of his old friend, as they disappeared down the road, in a rather indescribable state of mind. As he turned hastily back towards his garden and his other guest, he was conscious of a change; things seemed different in some lightheaded and illogical fashion. He could not himself trace the connexion; indeed, he did not know whether it was a connexion or a disconnexion. He was very far from being a fool; but his brains were of the sort that are directed outwards to things; the brains of the soldier or the scientific man; and he had no practice in analysing his own mind. He did not quite understand why the news about Owen Hood should give him that dazed sense of a difference in things in general. Doubtless he was very fond of Owen Hood; but he had been fond of other people who had got married without especially disturbing the atmosphere of his own back garden. He even dimly felt that mere affection might have worked the other way; that it might have made him worry about Hood, and wonder whether Hood was making a fool of himself, or even feel suspicious or jealous of Mrs. Hood--if there had not been something else that made him feel quite the other way. He could not quite understand it; there seemed to be an increasing number of things that he could not understand. This world in which he himself wore garlands of green cabbage and in which his old friend the lawyer got married suddenly like a man going mad--this world was a new world, at once fresh and frightening, in which he could hardly understand the figures that were walking about, even his own. The flowers in the flower-pots had a new look about them, at once bright and nameless; and even the line of vegetables beyond could not altogether depress him with the memories of recent levity. Had he indeed been a prophet, or a visionary seeing the future, he might have seen that green line of cabbages extending infinitely like a green sea to the horizon. For he stood at the beginning of a story which was not to terminate until his incongruous cabbage had come to mean something that he had never meant by it. That green patch was to spread like a great green conflagration almost to the ends of the earth. But he was a practical person and the very reverse of a prophet; and like many other practical persons, he often did things without very clearly knowing what he was doing. He had the innocence of some patriarch or primitive hero in the morning of the world, founding more than he could himself realize of his legend and his line. Indeed he felt very much like somebody in the morning of the world; but beyond that he could grasp nothing.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet