Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 211
Joan walked back through the corridor of the music room, and restlessly resumed her seat in the room with the two lady secretaries.
“Well,” asked the red-haired and good-humoured Mrs. Mackintosh, without looking up from her work of scribbling, “have you discovered anything?”
For some moments Joan appeared to be in a blacker state of brooding than usual; then she said, in a candid and friendly tone, which somehow contrasted with her knit and swarthy brows— “No, really. At least I think I’ve only found out two things; and they are only things about myself. I’ve discovered that I do like heroism, but I don’t like hero worship.”
“Surely,” said Miss Browning, in the Girton manner, “the one always flows from the other.”
“I hope not,” said Joan.
“But what else can you do with the hero?” asked Mrs. Mackintosh, still without looking up from her writing, “except worship him?”
“You might crucify him,” said Joan, with a sudden return of savage restlessness, as she rose from her chair. “Things seem to happen then.”
“Aren’t you tired?” asked the Miss Browning who had the clever face.
“Yes,” said Joan, “and the worst sort of tiredness; when you don’t even know what you’re tired of. To tell the honest truth, I think I’m tired of this house.”
“It’s very old, of course, and parts of it are still dismal,” said Miss Browning, “but he has enormously improved it. The decoration, with the moon and stars, down in the wing with the turret is really—”
Away in the distant music room, Lady Enid, having found the music she preferred, was fingering its prelude on the piano. At the first few notes of it, Joan Brett stood up, like a tigress.
“Thanks—” she said, with a hoarse softness, “that’s it, of course! and that’s just what we all are! She’s found the right tune now.”
“What tune is it?” asked the wondering secretary.
“The tune of harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer and all kinds of music,” said Joan, softly and fiercely, “when we shall bow down and worship the Golden Image that Nebuchadnezzar the King has set up. Girls! Women! Do you know what this place is? Do you know why it is all doors within doors and lattice behind lattice; and everything is curtained and cushioned; and why the flowers that are so fragrant here are not the flowers of our hills?”
From the distant and slowly darkening music room, Enid Wimpole’s song came thin and clear:
“Less than the dust beneath thy chariot wheel,
Less than the rust that never stained thy sword—”
“Do you know what we are?” demanded Joan Brett, again. “We are a Harem.”
“Why, what can you mean?” cried the younger girl, in great agitation. “Why, Lord Ivywood has never—”
“I know he has never. I am not sure,” said Joan, “even whether he would ever. I shall never understand that man, nor will anybody else. But I tell you that is the spirit. That is what we are. And this room stinks of polygamy as certainly as it smells of tube-roses.”
“Why, Joan,” cried Lady Enid, entering the room like a well-bred ghost, “what on earth is the matter with you. You all look as white as sheets.”
Joan took no heed of her but went on with her own obstinate argument.
“And, besides,” she said, “if there’s one thing we do know about him it is that he believes on principle in doing things slowly. He calls it evolution and relativity and the expanding of an idea into larger ideas. How do we know he isn’t doing that slowly; getting us accustomed to living like this, so that it may be the less shock when he goes further — steeping us in the atmosphere before he actually introduces,” and she shuddered, “the institution. Is it any more calmly outrageous a scheme than any other of Ivywood’s schemes; than a sepoy commander-in-chief, or Misysra preaching in Westminster Abbey, or the destruction of all the inns in England? I will not wait and expand. I will not be evolved. I will not develop into something that is not me. My feet shall be outside these walls if I walk the roads for it afterward; or I will scream as I would scream trapped in any den by the Docks.”
She swept down the rooms toward the turret, with a sudden passion for solitude; but as she passed the astronomical wood-carving that had closed up the end of the old wing, Enid saw her strike it with her clinched hand.
It was in the turret that she had a strange experience. She was again, later on, using its isolation to worry out the best way of having it out with Philip, when he should return from his visit to London; for to tell old Lady Ivywood what was on her mind would be about as kind and useful as describing Chinese tortures to a baby. The evening was very quiet, of the pale grey sort, and all that side of Ivywood lay before her eyes, undisturbed. She was the more surprised when her dreaming took note of a sort of stirring in the grey-purple dusk of the bushes; of whisperings; and of many footsteps. Then the silence settled down again; and then it was startlingly broken by a big voice singing in the dark distance. It was accompanied by faint sounds that might have been from the fingering of some lute or viol:
“Lady, the light is dying in the skies,
Lady, and let us die when honour dies,
Your dear, dropped glove was like a gauntlet flung,
When you and I were young.
For something more than splendour stood; and ease was
not the only good
About the woods in Ivywood when you and I were young.
“Lady, the stars are falling pale and small,
Lady, we will not live if life be all
Forgetting those good stars in heaven hung
When all the world was young,
For more than gold was in a ring, and love was not a little
thing
Between the trees in Ivywood when all the world was
young.”
The singing ceased; and the bustle in the bushes could hardly be called more than a whisper. But sounds of the same sort and somewhat louder seemed wafted round corners from other sides of the house; and the whole night seemed full of something that was alive, but was more than a single man.
She heard a cry behind her, and Enid rushed into the room as white as one of the lilies.
“What awful thing is happening?” she cried. “The courtyard is full of men shouting, and there are torches everywhere and—”
Joan heard a tramp of men marching and heard, afar off, another song, sung on a more derisive note, something like —
“But Ivywood, Lord Ivywood,
He rots the tree as ivy would.”
“I think,” said Joan, thoughtfully, “it is the End of the World.”
“But where are the police?” wailed her cousin. “They don’t seem to be anywhere about since they wore those fezzes. We shall be murdered or—”
Three thundering and measured blows shook the decorative wood panelling at the end of the wing; as if admittance were demanded with the club of a giant. Enid remembered that she had thought Joan’s little blow energetic, and shuddered. Both the girls stared at the stars and moons and suns blazoned on that sacred wall that leapt and shuddered under the strokes of the doom.
Then the sun fell from Heaven, and the moon and stars dropped down and were scattered about the Persian carpet; and by the opening of the end of the world, Patrick Dalroy came in, carrying a mandolin.
Chapter XXV: The Finding of the Superman
“I’VE brought you a little dog,” said Mr. Dalroy, introducing the rampant Quoodle. “I had him brought down here in a large hamper labelled ‘Explosives,’ a title which appears to have been well selected.”
He had bowed to Lady Enid on entering and taken Joan’s hand with the least suggestion that he wanted to do something else with it; but he resolutely resumed his conversation, which was on the subject of dogs.
“People who bring back dogs,” he said, “are always under a cloud of suspicion. Sometimes it is hideously hinted that the citizen who brings the dog back with him is identical with the citizen who took the dog away with him. In my case, of course, such conduct is inconceivable. But the returners of dogs, that prosperous and increasing class, are also accused,” he went on, looking straight at Joan, with blank blue eyes, “of coming back for a Reward. There is more truth in this charge.”
Then, with a change of manner more extraordinary than any revolution, even the revolution that was roaring round the house, he took her hand again and kissed it, saying, with a confounding seriousness,
“I know at least that you will pray for my soul.”
“You had better pray for mine, if I have one,” answered Joan, “but why now?”
“Because,” said Patrick, “you will hear from outside, you may even see from that turret window something which in brute fact has never been seen in England since Poor Monmouth’s army went down. In spirit and in truth it has not happened since Saladin and Coeur de Lion crashed together. I only add one thing, and that you know already. I have lived loving you and I shall die loving you. It is the only dimension of the Universe in which I have not wandered and gone astray. I leave the dog to guard you;” and he disappeared down the old broken staircase.
Lady Enid was much mystified that no popular pursuit assailed this stair or invaded the house. But Lady Joan knew better. She had gone, on the suggestion she most cared about, into the turret room and looked out of its many windows on to the abandoned copse and tunnel, which were now fenced off with high walls, the boundary of the mysterious property next door. Across that high barrier she could not even see the tunnel, and barely the tops of the tallest trees which hid its entrance from sight. But in an instant she knew that Dalroy was not hurling his forces on Ivywood at all, but on the house and estate beyond it.
And then followed a sight that was not an experience but rather a revolving vision. She could never describe it afterward, nor could any of those involved in so violent and mystical a wheel. She had seen a huge wall of a breaker wash all over the parade at Pebblewick; and wondered that so huge a hammer could be made merely of water. She had never had a notion of what it is like when it is made of men.
The palisade, put up by the new landlord in front of the old tangled ground by the tunnel, she had long regarded as something as settled and ordinary as one of the walls of the drawing room. It swung and split and sprang into a thousand pieces under the mere blow of human bodies bursting with rage; and the great wave crested the obstacle more clearly than she had ever seen any great wave crest the parade. Only, when the fence was broken, she saw behind it something that robbed her of reason; so that she seemed to be living in all ages and all lands at once. She never could describe the vision afterward; but she always denied it was a dream. She said it was worse; it was something more real than reality. It was a line of real soldiers, which is always a magnificent sight. But they might have been the soldiers of Hannibal or of Attila, they might have been dug up from the cemeteries of Sidon and Babylon, for all Joan had to do with them. There, encamped in English meadows, with a hawthorn-tree in front of them and three beeches behind, was something that has never been in camp nearer than some leagues south of Paris, since that Carolus called The Hammer broke it backward at Tours.
There flew the green standard of that great faith and strong civilization which has so often almost entered the great cities of the West; which long encircled Vienna, which was barely barred from Paris; but which had never before been seen in arms on the soil of England. At one end of the line stood Philip Ivywood, in a uniform of his own special creation, a compromise between the Sepoy and the Turkish uniform. The compromise worked more and more wildly in Joan’s mind. If any impression remained it was merely that England had conquered India and Turkey had conquered England. Then she saw that Ivywood, for all his uniform, was not the Commander of these forces, for an old man, with a great scar on his face, which was not a European face, set himself in the front of the battle, as if it had been a battle in the old epics, and crossed swords with Patrick Dalroy. He had come to return the scar upon his forehead; and he returned it with many wounds, though at last it was he who sank under the sword thrust. He fell on his face; and Dalroy looked at him with something that is much more great than pity. Blood was flowing from Patrick’s wrist and forehead, but he made a salute with his sword. As he was doing so, the corpse, as it appeared, laboriously lifted a face, with feeble eyelids. And, seeming to understand the quarters of the sky by instinct, Oman Pasha dragged himself a foot or so to the left; and fell with his face toward Mecca.
After that the turret turned round and round about Joan and she knew not whether the things she saw were history or prophecy. Something in that last fact of being crushed by the weapons of brown men and yellow, secretly entrenched in English meadows, had made the English what they had not been for centuries. The hawthorn-tree was twisted and broken, as it was at the Battle of Ashdown, when Alfred led his first charge against the Danes. The beech-trees were splashed up to their lowest branches with the mingling of brave heathen and brave Christian blood. She knew no more than that when a column of the Christian rebels, led by Humphrey of the Sign of the Ship, burst through the choked and forgotten tunnel and took the Turkish regiment in the rear, it was the end.
That violent and revolving vision became something beyond the human voice or human ear. She could not intelligently hear even the shots and shouts round the last magnificent rally of the Turks. It was natural, therefore, that she should not hear the words Lord Ivywood addressed to his next-door neighbour, a Turkish officer, or rather to himself. But his words were:
“I have gone where God has never dared to go. I am above the silly supermen as they are above mere men. Where I walk in the Heavens, no man has walked before me; and I am alone in a garden. All this passing about me is like the lonely plucking of garden flowers. I will have this blossom, I will have that.”
The sentence ended so suddenly that the officer looked at him, as if expecting him to speak. But he did not speak.
But Patrick and Joan, wandering together in a world made warm and fresh again, as it can be for few in a world that calls courage frenzy and love superstition, feeling every branching tree as a friend with arms open for the man, or every sweeping slope as a great train trailing behind the woman, did one day climb up to the little white cottage that was now the home of the Superman.
He sat playing with a pale, reposeful face, with scraps of flower and weed put before him on a wooden table. He did not notice them, nor anything else around him; scarcely even Enid Wimpole, who attended to all his wants.
“He is perfectly happy,” she said quietly.
Joan, with the glow on her dark face, could not prevent herself from replying, “And we are so happy.”
“Yes,” said Enid, “but his happiness will last,” and she wept.
“I understand,” said Joan, and kissed her cousin, not without tears of her own.
THE RETURN OF DON QUIXOTE
First published in 1927, Chesterton’s last novel concerns the adventures of Michael Herne, a gentle and modest librarian. When asked to play a king in a medieval play, Michael reluctantly agrees. Nevertheless, after the play is over, strange things begin to happen. Michael refuses to change back into his everyday clothes and other actors find it impossible to return to their real character. Set in the early 20th Century, this is the intriguing story of the rise of a new Don Quixote who introduces a medieval government into the world of modern business.
The first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
Chesterton, close to the time of publication
TO
W. R. TITTERTON
MY DEAR TITTERTON,
This parable for social reformers, as you know, was planned and partly written long before the War; so that touching some things, from Fascism to nigger dances, it was a quite unintentional prophecy. It was your too generous confidence that dragged it from its dusty drawer; whether the world has any reason to thank you I doubt; but I have so many reasons for thanking you, and recognising all you have done for our cause, that I dedicate this book to you.
Yours always,
G. K. CHESTERTON
CHAPTER I
A HOLE IN THE CASTE
The end of the longest room at Seawood Abbey was full of light; for the walls were almost made of windows and it projected upon a terraced part of the garden above the park on an almost cloudless morning. Murrel, called Monkey for some reason that everybody had forgotten, and Olive Ashley were taking advantage of the light to occupy themselves with painting; though she was painting on a very small scale and he on a very large one. She was laying out peculiar pigments very carefully, in imitation of the flat jewellery of medieval illumination, for which she had a great enthusiasm, as part of a rather vague notion of a historic past. He, on the other hand, was highly modern, and was occupied with several pails full of very crude colours and with brushes which reached the stature of brooms. With these he was laying about him on large sheets of lath and canvas, which were to act as scenery in some private theatricals then in preparation. They could not paint, either of them; nor did they imagine that they could. But she was in some sense trying to do so; and he was not.
“It’s all very well for you to talk about discords,” he was saying somewhat defensively, for she was a critical lady, “but your style of painting narrows the mind. After all, scene-painting is only illumination seen through a microscope.”
