Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 268
“Oh, I have no time for this nonsense,” said Hunter, and he was turning to go, when Hood stepped in front of him and looked at him very steadily.
“You mustn’t call natural selection nonsense,” he said. “I know all about that, at any rate. I can’t tell whether liquids tipped off the shore will fall into the river, because I don’t understand hydraulics. I don’t know whether your machinery makes a hell of a noise every morning, for I’ve never studied acoustics. I don’t know whether it stinks or not, because I haven’t read your expert’s book on `The Nose.’ But I know all about adaptation to environment. I know that some of the lower organisms do really change with their changing conditions. I know there are creatures so low that they do survive by surrendering to every succession of mud and slime; and when things are slow they are slow, and when things are fast they are fast, and when things are filthy they are filthy. I thank you for convincing me of that.”
He did not wait for a reply, but walked out of the room after bowing curtly to the rest; and that was the end of the great conference on the question of riparian rights and perhaps the end of Thames Conservancy and of the old aristocracy, with all its good and ill.
The general public never heard very much about it; at least until one catastrophic scene which was to follow. There was some faint ripple of the question some months later, when Dr. Horace Hunter was standing for Parliament in that division. One or two questions were asked about his duties in relation to river pollution; but it was soon apparent that no party particularly wished to force the issue against the best opinions advanced on the other side. The greatest living authority on hygiene, Professor Hake, had actually written to The Times (in the interests of science) to say that in such a hypothetical case as that mentioned, a medical man could only do what Dr. Hunter had apparently done. It so happened that the chief captain of industry in that part of the Thames Valley, Sir Samuel Bliss, had himself, after gravely weighing the rival policies, decided to Vote for Hunter. The great organizer’s own mind was detached and philosophical in the matter; but it seems that his manager, a Mr. Low, was of the same politics and a more practical and pushful spirit; warmly urging the claims of Hunter on his work-people; pointing out the many practical advantages they would gain by voting for that physician, and the still more practical disadvantages they might suffer by not doing so. Hence it followed that the blue ribbons, which were the local badges of the Hunterians, were not only to be found attached to the iron railings and wooden posts of the factory, but to various human figures, known as “hands,” which moved to and fro in it.
Hood took no interest in the election; but while it was proceeding he followed the matter a little further in another form. He was a lawyer, a lazy, but in some ways a learned one; for, his tastes being studious, he had originally learned the trade he had never used. More in defiance than in hope, he once carried the matter into the Courts, pleading his own cause on the basis of a law of Henry the Third against frightening the fish of the King’s liege subjects in the Thames Valley. The judge, in giving judgement, complimented him on the ability and plausibility of his contention, but ultimately rejected it on grounds equally historic and remote. His lordship argued that no test seemed to be provided for ascertaining the degree of fear in the fish, or whether it amounted to that bodily fear of which the law took cognizance. But the learned judge pointed out the precedent of a law of Richard the Second against certain witches who had frightened children; which had been interpreted by so great an authority as Coke in the sense that the child “must return and of his own will testify to his fear.” It did not seem to be alleged that any one of the fish in question had returned and laid any such testimony before any proper authority; and he therefore gave judgement for the defendants. And when the learned judge happened to meet Lord Normantowers (as he was by this time) out at dinner that evening, he was gaily rallied and congratulated by that new nobleman on the lucidity and finality of his judgement. Indeed, the learned judge had really relished the logic both of his own and Hood’s contention; but the conclusion was what he would have come to in any case. For our judges are not hampered by any hide-bound code; they are progressive, like Dr. Hunter, and ally themselves on principle with the progressive forces of the age, especially those they are likely to meet out at dinner.
But it was this abortive law case that led up to something that altogether obliterated it in a blaze of glory, so far as Mr. Owen Hood was concerned. He had just left the courts, and turning down the streets that led in the direction of the station, he made his way thither in something of a brown study, as was his wont. The streets were filled with faces; it struck him for the first time that there were thousands and thousands of people in the world. There were more faces at the railway station, and then, when he had glanced idly at four or five of them, he saw one that was to him as incredible as the face of the dead.
She was coming casually out of the tea-room, carrying a handbag, just like anybody else. That mystical perversity of his mind, which had insisted on sealing up the sacred memory like something hardly to be sought in mere curiosity, had fixed it in its original colours and setting, like something of which no detail could be changed without the vision dissolving. He would have conceived it almost impossible that she could appear in anything but white or out of anything but a wood. And he found himself turned topsy-turvy by an old and common incredulity of men in his condition; being startled by the coincidence that blue suited her as well as white; and that in what he remembered of that woodland there was something else; something to be said even for teashops and railway stations.
She stopped in front of him and her pale, fluttering eyelids lifted from her blue-grey eyes.
“Why,” she said, “you are the boy that jumped in the river!”
“I’m no longer a boy,” answered Hood, “but I’m ready to jump in the river again.”
“Well, don’t jump on the railway-line,” she said, as he turned with a swiftness suggestive of something of the kind.
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I was thinking of jumping into a railway-train. Do you mind if I jump into your railway-train?”
“Well, I’m going to Birkstead,” she said rather doubtfully.
Mr. Owen Hood did not in the least care where she was going, as he had resolved to go there; but as a matter of fact, he remembered a wayside station on that line that lay very near to what he had in view; so he tumbled into the carriage if possible with more alacrity; and landscapes shot by them as they sat looking in a dazed and almost foolish fashion at each other. At last the girl smiled with a sense of the absurdity of the thing.
“I heard about you from a friend of yours,” she said; “he came to call on us soon after it happened; at least that was when he first came. You know Dr. Hunter, don’t you?”
“Yes,” replied Owen, a shadow coming over his shining hour. “Do you — do you know him well?”
“I know him pretty well now,” said Miss Elizabeth Seymour.
The shadow on his spirit blackened swiftly; he suspected something quite suddenly and savagely. Hunter, in Crane’s old phrase, was not a man who let the grass grow under his feet. It was so like him to have somehow used the incident as an introduction to the Seymours. Things were always stepping-stones for Hunter, and the little rock in the river had been a stepping-stone to the country-house. But was the country-house a stepping-stone to something else? Suddenly Hood realized that all his angers had been very abstracted angers. He had never hated a man before.
At that moment the train stopped at the station of Cowford.
“I wish you’d get out here with me,” he said abruptly, “only for a little — and it might be the last time. I want you to do something.”
She looked at him with a curious expression and said in a rather low voice, “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to come and pick bluebells,” he said harshly.
She stepped out of the train, and they went up a winding country road without a word.
“I remember!” she said suddenly. “When you get to the top of this hill you see the wood where the bluebells were, and your little island beyond.”
“Come on and see it,” said Owen.
They stepped on the crest of the hill and stood. Below them the black factory belched its livid smoke into the air; and where the wood had been were rows of little houses like boxes, built of dirty yellow brick.
Hood spoke. “And when you shall see the abomination of desolation sitting in the Holy of Holies — isn’t that when the world is supposed to end? I wish the world would end now; with you and me standing on a hill.”
She was staring at the place with parted lips and more than her ordinary pallor; he knew she understood something monstrous and symbolic in the scene; yet her first remark was jerky and trivial. On the nearest of the yellow brick boxes were visible the cheap colours of various advertisements; and larger than the rest a blue poster proclaiming “Vote for Hunter.” With a final touch of bathos, Hood remembered that it was the last and most sensational day of the election. But the girl had already found her voice.
“Is that Dr. Hunter?” she asked with commonplace curiosity; “is he standing for parliament?”
A load that lay on Hood’s mind like a rock suddenly rose like an eagle; and he felt as if the hill he stood on were higher than Everest. By the insight of his own insanity, he knew well enough that SHE would have known well enough whether Hunter was standing, if — if there had been anything like what he supposed. The removal of the steadying weight staggered him, and he had said something quite indefensible.
“I thought you would know. I thought you and he were probably — well, the truth is I thought you were engaged, though I really don’t know why.”
“I can’t imagine why,” said Elizabeth Seymour. “I heard he was engaged to Lord Normantower’s daughter. They’ve got our old place now, you know.”
There was a silence and then Hood spoke suddenly in a loud and cheerful voice.
“Well, what I say is, `Vote for Hunter,’” he said heartily. “After all, why not vote for Hunter? Good old Hunter! I hope he’ll be a member of Parliament. I hope he’ll be Prime Minister. I hope he’ll be President of the World State that Wells talks about. By George, he deserves to be Emperor of the Solar System.”
“But why,” she protested, “why should he deserve all that?”
“For not being engaged to you, of course,” he replied.
“Oh!” she said, and something of a secret shiver in her voice went through him like a silver bell.
Abruptly, all of a sudden, the rage of raillery seemed to have left his voice and his face, so that his Napoleonic profile looked earnest and eager and much younger, like the profile of the young Napoleon. His wide shoulders lost the slight stoop that books had given them, and his rather wild red hair fell away from his lifted head.
“There is one thing I must tell you about him,” he said, “and one thing you must hear about me. My friends tell me I am a drifter and a dreamer; that I let the grass grow under my feet; I must tell you at least how and why I once let it grow. Three days after that day by the river, I talked to Hunter; he was attending me and he talked about it and you. Of course he knew nothing about either. But he is a practical man; a very practical man; he does not dream or drift. From the way he talked I knew he was considering even then how the accident could be turned to account; to his account and perhaps to mine too; for he is good-natured; yes, he is quite good-natured. I think that if I had taken his hint and formed a sort of social partnership, I might have known you six years sooner, not as a memory, but — an acquaintance. And I could not do it. Judge me how you will, I could not bring myself to do it. That is what is meant by being born with a bee in the bonnet, with an impediment in the speech, with a stumbling-block in the path, with a skulky scruple in the soul. I could not bear to approach you by that door, with that gross and grinning flunky holding it open. I could not bear that suffocatingly substantial snob to bulk so big in my story or know so much of my secret. A revulsion I could never utter made me feel that the vision should remain my own even by remaining unfulfilled; but it should not be vulgarized. That is what is meant by being a failure in life. And when my best friend made a prophecy about me, and said there was something I should never do, I thought he was right.”
“Why, what do you mean?” she asked rather faintly, “what was it you would never do?”
“Never mind that now,” he said, with the shadow of a returning smile. “Rather strange things are stirring in me just now, and who knows but I may attempt something yet? But before all else, I must make clear for once what I am and for what I lived. There are men like me in the world; I am far from thinking they are the best or the most valuable; but they exist, to confound all the clever people and the realists and the new novelists. There has been and there is only one thing for me; something that in the normal sense I never even knew. I walked about the world blind, with my eyes turned inward, looking at you. For days after a night when I had dreamed of you, I was broken; like a man who had seen a ghost. I read over and over the great and grave lines of the old poets, because they alone were worthy of you. And when I saw you again by chance, I thought the world had already ended; and it was that return and tryst beyond the grave that is too good to be true.”
“I do not think,” said answered in a low voice, “that the belief is too good to be true.”
As he looked at her a thrill went through him like a message too swift to be understood; and at the back of his mind something awoke that repeated again and again like a song the same words, “too good to be true.” There was always something pathetic, even in her days of pride, about the short-sighted look of her half-closed eyes; but it was for other reasons that they were now blinking in the strong white sunlight, almost as if they were blind. They were blind and bright with tears: she mastered her voice and it was steady.
“You talk about failures,” she said. “I suppose most people would call me a failure and all my people failures now; except those who would say we never failed, because we never had to try. Anyhow, we’re all poor enough now; I don’t know whether you know that I’ve been teaching music. I dare say we deserved to go. I dare say we were useless. Some of us tried to be harmless. But — but now I MUST say something, about some of us who tried rather hard to be harmless — in that way. The new people will tell you those ideals were Victorian and Tennysonian, and all the rest of it — well, it doesn’t matter what they say. They know quite as little about us as we about them. But to you, when you talk like that... what can I do, but tell you that you that if we were stiff, if we were cold, if we were careful and conservative, it was because deep down in our souls some of us DID believe that there might be loyalty and love like that, for which a woman might well wait even to the end of the world. What is it to these people if we chose not to be drugged or distracted with anything less worthy? But it would be hard indeed if when I find it DOES exist after all... hard on you, harder on me, if when I had really found it at last...” The catch in her voice came again and silence caught and held her.
He took one stride forward as into the heart of a whirlwind; and they met on the top of that windy hill as if they had come from the ends of the earth.
“This is an epic,” he said, “which is rather an action than a word. I have lived with words too long.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you have turned me into a man of action,” he replied. “So long as you were in the past, nothing was better than the past. So long as you were only a dream, nothing was better than dreaming. But now I am going to do something that no man has ever done before.”
He turned towards the valley and flung out his hand with a gesture, almost as if the hand had held a sword.
“I am going to break the Prophecy,” he cried in a loud voice. “I am going to defy the omens of my doom and make fun of my evil star. Those who called me a failure shall own I have succeeded where all humanity has failed. The real hero is not he who is bold enough to fulfil the predictions, but he who is bold enough to falsify them. And you shall see one falsified to-night.”
“What in the world are you going to do?” she asked.
He laughed suddenly. “The first thing to do,” he cried, swinging round with a new air of resolution and even cheerfulness, “the very first thing to do is to Vote for Hunter. Or, at any rate, help to get him into Parliament.”
“But why in the world,” she asked wondering, “should you want so much to get Dr. Hunter into Parliament?”
“Well, one must do something,” he said with an appearance of good sense, “to celebrate the occasion. We must do something; and after all he must go somewhere, poor devil. You will say, why not throw him into the river? It would relieve the feelings and make a splash. But I’m going to make something much bigger than a splash. Besides, I don’t want him in my nice river. I’d much rather pick him up and throw him all the way to Westminster. Much more sensible and suitable. Obviously there ought to be a brass band and a torchlight procession somewhere to-night; and why shouldn’t he have a bit of the fun?”
He stopped suddenly as if surprised at his own words; for indeed his own phrase had fallen, for him, with the significance of a falling star.
“Of course!” he muttered. “A torchlight procession! I’ve been feeling that what I wanted was trumpets and what I really want is torches. Yes, I believe it could be done! Yes, the hour is come! By stars and blazes, I will give him a torchlight procession!”
He had been almost dancing with excitement on the top of the ridge; now he suddenly went bounding down the slope beyond, calling to the girl to follow, as carelessly as if they had been two children playing at hide and seek. Strangely enough, perhaps, she did follow; more strangely still when we consider the extravagant scenes through which she allowed herself to be led. They were scenes more insanely incongruous with all her sensitive and even secretive dignity than if she had been changing hats with a costermonger on a Bank Holiday. For there the world would only be loud with vulgarity, and here it was also loud with lies. She could never have described that Saturnalia of a political election; but she did dimly feel the double impression of a harlequinade at the end of a pantomime and of Hood’s phrase about the end of the world. It was as if a Bank Holiday could also be a Day of Judgement. But as the farce could no longer offend her, so the tragedy could no longer terrify. She went through it all with a wan smile, which perhaps nobody in the world would have known her well enough to interpret. It was not in the normal sense excitement; yet it was something much more positive than patience. In a sense perhaps, more than ever before in her lonely life, she was walled up in her ivory tower; but it was all alight within, as if it were lit up with candles or lined with gold.
