Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 255
A little before sunset he arrived, with his light suitcase in hand, before the gate of the long riverside gardens of Willowood Place, one of the smaller seats of Sir Isaac Hook, the master of much shipping and many newspapers. He entered by the gate giving on the road, at the opposite side to the river, but there was a mixed quality in all that watery landscape which perpetually reminded a traveler that the river was near. White gleams of water would shine suddenly like swords or spears in the green thickets. And even in the garden itself, divided into courts and curtained with hedges and high garden trees, there hung everywhere in the air the music of water. The first of the green courts which he entered appeared to be a somewhat neglected croquet lawn, in which was a solitary young man playing croquet against himself. Yet he was not an enthusiast for the game, or even for the garden; and his sallow but well-featured face looked rather sullen than otherwise. He was only one of those young men who cannot support the burden of consciousness unless they are doing something, and whose conceptions of doing something are limited to a game of some kind. He was dark and well. dressed in a light holiday fashion, and Fisher recognized him at once as a young man named James Bullen, called, for some unknown reason, Bunker. He was the nephew of Sir Isaac; but, what was much more important at the moment, he was also the private secretary of the Prime Minister.
“Hullo, Bunker!” observed Horne Fisher. “You’re the sort of man I wanted to see. Has your chief come down yet?”
“He’s only staying for dinner,” replied Bullen, with his eye on the yellow ball. “He’s got a great speech to-morrow at Birmingham and he’s going straight through to-night. He’s motoring himself there; driving the car, I mean. It’s the one thing he’s really proud of.”
“You mean you’re staying here with your uncle, like a good boy?” replied Fisher. “But what will the Chief do at Birmingham without the epigrams whispered to him by his brilliant secretary?”
“Don’t you start ragging me,” said the young man called Bunker. “I’m only too glad not to go trailing after him. He doesn’t know a thing about maps or money or hotels or anything, and I have to dance about like a courier. As for my uncle, as I’m supposed to come into the estate, it’s only decent to be here sometimes.”
“Very proper,” replied the other. “Well, I shall see you later on,” and, crossing the lawn, he passed out through a gap in the hedge.
He was walking across the lawn toward the landing stage on the river, and still felt all around him, under the dome of golden evening, an Old World savor and reverberation in that riverhaunted garden. The next square of turf which he crossed seemed at first sight quite deserted, till he saw in the twilight of trees in one corner of it a hammock and in the hammock a man, reading a newspaper and swinging one leg over the edge of the net.
Him also he hailed by name, and the man slipped to the ground and strolled forward. It seemed fated that he should feel something of the past in the accidents of that place, for the figure might well have been an early-Victorian ghost revisiting the ghosts of the croquet hoops and mallets. It was the figure of an elderly man with long whiskers that looked almost fantastic, and a quaint and careful cut of collar and cravat. Having been a fashionable dandy forty years ago, he had managed to preserve the dandyism while ignoring the fashions. A white top-hat lay beside the Morning Post in the hammock behind him. This was the Duke of Westmoreland, the relic of a family really some centuries old; and the antiquity was not heraldry but history. Nobody knew better than Fisher how rare such noblemen are in fact, and how numerous in fiction. But whether the duke owed the general respect he enjoyed to the genuineness of his pedigree or to the fact that he owned a vast amount of very valuable property was a point about which Mr. Fisher’s opinion might have been more interesting to discover.
“You were looking so comfortable,” said Fisher, “that I thought you must be one of the servants. I’m looking for somebody to take this bag of mine; I haven’t brought a man down, as I came away in a hurry.”
“Nor have I, for that matter,” replied the duke, with some pride. “I never do. If there’s one animal alive I loathe it’s a valet. I learned to dress myself at an early age and was supposed to do it decently. I may be in my second childhood, but I’ve not go so far as being dressed like a child.”
“The Prime Minister hasn’t brought a valet; he’s brought a secretary instead,” observed Fisher. “Devilish inferior job. Didn’t I hear that Harker was down here?”
“He’s over there on the landing stage,” replied the duke, indifferently, and resumed the study of the Morning Post.
Fisher made his way beyond the last green wall of the garden on to a sort of towing path looking on the river and a wooden island opposite. There, indeed, he saw a lean, dark figure with a stoop almost like that of a vulture, a posture well known in the law courts as that of Sir John Harker, the Attorney-General. His face was lined with headwork, for alone among the three idlers in the garden he was a man who had made his own way; and round his bald brow and hollow temples clung dull red hair, quite flat, like plates of copper.
“I haven’t seen my host yet,” said Horne Fisher, in a slightly more serious tone than he had used to the others, “but I suppose I shall meet him at dinner.”
“You can see him now; but you can’t meet him,” answered Harker.
He nodded his head toward one end of the island opposite, and, looking steadily in the same direction, the other guest could see the dome of a bald head and the top of a fishing rod, both equally motionless, rising out of the tall undergrowth against the background of the stream beyond. The fisherman seemed to be seated against the stump of a tree and facing toward the other bank, so that his face could not be seen, but the shape of his head was unmistakable.
“He doesn’t like to be disturbed when he’s fishing,” continued Harker. “It’s a sort of fad of his to eat nothing but fish, and he’s very proud of catching his own. Of course he’s all for simplicity, like so many of these millionaires. He likes to come in saying he’s worked for his daily bread like a laborer.”
“Does he explain how he blows all the glass and stuffs all the upholstery,” asked Fisher, “and makes all the silver forks, and grows all the grapes and peaches, and designs all the patterns on the carpets? I’ve always heard he was a busy man.”
“I don’t think he mentioned it,” answered the lawyer. “What is the meaning of this social satire?”
“Well, I am a trifle tired,” said Fisher, “of the Simple Life and the Strenuous Life as lived by our little set. We’re all really dependent in nearly everything, and we all make a fuss about being independent in something. The Prime Minister prides himself on doing without a chauffeur, but he can’t do without a factotum and Jack-of-all-trades; and poor old Bunker has to play the part of a universal genius, which God knows he was never meant for. The duke prides himself on doing without a valet, but, for all that, he must give a lot of people an infernal lot of trouble to collect such extraordinary old clothes as he wears. He must have them looked up in the British Museum or excavated out of the tombs. That white hat alone must require a sort of expedition fitted out to find it, like the North Pole. And here we have old Hook pretending to produce his own fish when he couldn’t produce his own fish knives or fish forks to eat it with. He may be simple about simple things like food, but you bet he’s luxurious about luxurious things, especially little things. I don’t include you; you’ve worked too hard to enjoy playing at work.”
“I sometimes think,” said Harker, “that you conceal a horrid secret of being useful sometimes. Haven’t you come down here to see Number One before he goes on to Birmingham?”
Horne Fisher answered, in a lower voice: “Yes; and I hope to be lucky enough to catch him before dinner. He’s got to see Sir Isaac about something just afterward.”
“Hullo!” exclaimed Harker. “Sir Isaac’s finished his fishing. I know he prides himself on getting up at sunrise and going in at sunset.”
The old man on the island had indeed risen to his feet, facing round and showing a bush of gray beard with rather small, sunken features, but fierce eyebrows and keen, choleric eyes. Carefully carrying his fishing tackle, he was already making his way back to the mainland across a bridge of flat stepping-stones a little way down the shallow stream; then he veered round, coming toward his guests and civilly saluting them. There were several fish in his basket and he was in a good temper.
“Yes,” he said, acknowledging Fisher’s polite expression of surprise, “I get up before anybody else in the house, I think. The early bird catches the worm.”
“Unfortunately,” said Harker, “it is the early fish that catches the worm.”
“But the early man catches the fish,” replied the old man, gruffly.
“But from what I hear, Sir Isaac, you are the late man, too,” interposed Fisher. “You must do with very little sleep.”
“I never had much time for sleeping,” answered Hook, “and I shall have to be the late man to-night, anyhow. The Prime Minister wants to have a talk, he tells me, and, all things considered, I think we’d better be dressing for dinner.”
Dinner passed off that evening without a word of politics and little enough but ceremonial trifles. The Prime Minister, Lord Merivale, who was a long, slim man with curly gray hair, was gravely complimentary to his host about his success as a fisherman and the skill and patience he displayed; the conversation flowed like the shallow stream through the stepping-stones.
“It wants patience to wait for them, no doubt,” said Sir Isaac, “and skill to play them, but I’m generally pretty lucky at it.”
“Does a big fish ever break the line and get away?” inquired the politician, with respectful interest.
“Not the sort of line I use,” answered Hook, with satisfaction. “I rather specialize in tackle, as a matter of fact. If he were strong enough to do that, he’d be strong enough to pull me into the river.”
“A great loss to the community,” said the Prime Minister, bowing.
Fisher had listened to all these futilities with inward impatience, waiting for his own opportunity, and when the host rose he sprang to his feet with an alertness he rarely showed. He managed to catch Lord Merivale before Sir Isaac bore him off for the final interview. He had only a few words to say, but he wanted to get them said.
He said, in a low voice as he opened the door for the Premier, “I have seen Montmirail; he says that unless we protest immediately on behalf of Denmark, Sweden will certainly seize the ports.”
Lord Merivale nodded. “I’m just going to hear what Hook has to say about it,” he said.
“I imagine,” said Fisher, with a faint smile, “that there is very little doubt what he will say about it.”
Merivale did not answer, but lounged gracefully toward the library, whither his host had already preceded him. The rest drifted toward the billiard room, Fisher merely remarking to the lawyer: “They won’t be long. We know they’re practically in agreement.”
“Hook entirely supports the Prime Minister,” assented Harker.
“Or the Prime Minister entirely supports Hook,” said Horne Fisher, and began idly to knock the balls about on the billiard table.
Horne Fisher came down next morning in a late and leisurely fashion, as was his reprehensible habit; he had evidently no appetite for catching worms. But the other guests seemed to have felt a similar indifference, and they helped themselves to breakfast from the sideboard at intervals during the hours verging upon lunch. So that it was not many hours later when the first sensation of that strange day came upon them. It came in the form of a young man with light hair and a candid expression, who came sculling down the river and disembarked at the landing stage. It was, in fact, no other than Mr. Harold March, whose journey had begun far away up the river in the earliest hours of that day. He arrived late in the afternoon, having stopped for tea in a large riverside town, and he had a pink evening paper sticking out of his pocket. He fell on the riverside garden like a quiet and well-behaved thunderbolt, but he was a thunderbolt without knowing it.
The first exchange of salutations and introductions was commonplace enough, and consisted, indeed, of the inevitable repetition of excuses for the eccentric seclusion of the host. He had gone fishing again, of course, and must not be disturbed till the appointed hour, though he sat within a stone’s throw of where they stood.
“You see it’s his only hobby,” observed Harker, apologetically, “and, after all, it’s his own house; and he’s very hospitable in other ways.”
“I’m rather afraid,” said Fisher, in a lower voice, “that it’s becoming more of a mania than a hobby. I know how it is when a man of that age begins to collect things, if it’s only collecting those rotten little river fish. You remember Talbot’s uncle with his toothpicks, and poor old Buzzy and the waste of cigar ashes. Hook has done a lot of big things in his time — the great deal in the Swedish timber trade and the Peace Conference at Chicago — but I doubt whether he cares now for any of those big things as he cares for those little fish.”
“Oh, come, come,” protested the Attorney-General. “You’ll make Mr. March think he has come to call on a lunatic. Believe me, Hook only does it for fun, like any other sport, only he’s of the kind that takes his fun sadly. But I bet if there were big news about timber or shipping, he would drop his fun and his fish all right.”
“Well, I wonder,” said Horne Fisher, looking sleepily at the island in the river.
“By the way, is there any news of anything?” asked Harker of Harold March. “I see you’ve got an evening paper; one of those enterprising evening papers that come out in the morning.”
“The beginning of Lord Merivale’s Birmingham speech,” replied March, handing him the paper. “It’s only a paragraph, but it seems to me rather good.”
Harker took the paper, flapped and refolded it, and looked at the “Stop Press” news. It was, as March had said, only a paragraph. But it was a paragraph that had a peculiar effect on Sir John Harker. His lowering brows lifted with a flicker and his eyes blinked, and for a moment his leathery jaw was loosened. He looked in some odd fashion like a very old man. Then, hardening his voice and handing the paper to Fisher without a tremor, he simply said:
“Well, here’s a chance for the bet. You’ve got your big news to disturb the old man’s fishing.”
Horne Fisher was looking at the paper, and over his more languid and less expressive features a change also seemed to pass. Even that little paragraph had two or three large headlines, and his eye encountered, “Sensational Warning to Sweden,” and, “We Shall Protest.”
“What the devil—” he said, and his words softened first to a whisper and then a whistle.
“We must tell old Hook at once, or he’ll never forgive us,” said Harker. “He’ll probably want to see Number One instantly, though it may be too late now. I’m going across to him at once. I bet I’ll make him forget his fish, anyhow.” And, turning his back, he made his way hurriedly along the riverside to the causeway of flat stones.
March was staring at Fisher, in amazement at the effect his pink paper had produced.
“What does it all mean?” he cried. “I always supposed we should protest in defense of the Danish ports, for their sakes and our own. What is all this botheration about Sir Isaac and the rest of you? Do you think it bad news?”
“Bad news!” repeated Fisher, with a sort of soft emphasis beyond expression.
“Is it as bad as all that?” asked his friend, at last.
“As bad as all that?” repeated Fisher. “Why of course it’s as good as it can be. It’s great news. It’s glorious news! That’s where the devil of it comes in, to knock us all silly. It’s admirable. It’s inestimable. It is also quite incredible.”
He gazed again at the gray and green colors of the island and the river, and his rather dreary eye traveled slowly round to the hedges and the lawns.
“I felt this garden was a sort of dream,” he said, “and I suppose I must be dreaming. But there is grass growing and water moving; and something impossible has happened.”
Even as he spoke the dark figure with a stoop like a vulture appeared in the gap of the hedge just above him.
“You have won your bet,” said Harker, in a harsh and almost croaking voice. “The old fool cares for nothing but fishing. He cursed me and told me he would talk no politics.”
“I thought it might be so,” said Fisher, modestly. “What are you going to do next?”
“I shall use the old idiot’s telephone, anyhow,” replied the lawyer. “I must find out exactly what has happened. I’ve got to speak for the Government myself to-morrow.” And he hurried away toward the house.
In the silence that followed, a very bewildering silence so far as March was concerned, they saw the quaint figure of the Duke of Westmoreland, with his white hat and whiskers, approaching them across the garden. Fisher instantly stepped toward him with the pink paper in his hand, and, with a few words, pointed out the apocalyptic paragraph. The duke, who had been walking slowly, stood quite still, and for some seconds he looked like a tailor’s dummy standing and staring outside some antiquated shop. Then March heard his voice, and it was high and almost hysterical:
“But he must see it; he must be made to understand. It cannot have been put to him properly.” Then, with a certain recovery of fullness and even pomposity in the voice, “I shall go and tell him myself.”
