Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 271
“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. Artist 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 skylarking,” 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, peering 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 feathered 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’re 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 upon 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 it’s 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 to 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 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 chance? 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 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 shaken up 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 really must 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 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 so 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 got to do with it?” asked Hood staring. “Do you mean that Yankee mooning about over mediaeval 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 patiently read 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.
The Elusive Companion of Parson White
In the scriptures and the chronicles of the League of the Long Bow, or fellowship of foolish persons doing impossible things, it is recorded that Owen Hood, the lawyer, and his friend Crane, the retired Colonel, were partaking one afternoon of a sort of picnic on the river-island that had been the first scene of a certain romantic incident in the life of the former, the burden of reading about which has fallen upon the readers in other days. Suffice it to say that the island had been devoted by Mr. Hood to his hobby of angling, and that the meal then in progress was a somewhat early interruption of the same leisurely pursuit. The two old cronies had a third companion, who, though considerably younger, was not only a companion but a friend. He was a light-haired, lively young man, with rather a wild eye, known by the name of Pierce, whose wedding to the daughter of the innkeeper of the Blue Boar the others had only recently attended.
He was an aviator and given to many other forms of skylarking. The two older men had eccentric tastes of their own; but there is always a difference between the eccentricity of an elderly man who defies the world and the enthusiasm of a younger man who hopes to alter it. The old gentleman may be willing, in a sense, to stand on his head; but he does not hope, as the boy does, to stand the world on its head. With a young man like Hilary Pierce it was the world itself that was to be turned upside-down; and that was a game at which his more grizzled companions could only look on, as at a child they loved playing with a big coloured balloon.
Perhaps it was this sense of a division by time, altering the tone, though not the fact, of friendship, which sent the mind of one of the older men back to the memory of an older friend. He remembered that he had had a letter that morning from the only contemporary of his who could fitly have made a fourth to their party. Owen Hood drew the letter from his pocket with a smile that wrinkled his long, humourous, cadaverous face.
“By the way, I forgot to tell you,” he said, “I had a letter from White yesterday.”
The bronzed visage of the Colonel was also seamed with the external signs of a soundless chuckle.
“Read it yet?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied the lawyer; “the hieroglyphic was attacked with fresh vigour after breakfast this morning, and the clouds and mysteries of yesterday’s labours seemed to be rolled away. Some portions of the cuneiform still await an expert translation; but the sentences themselves appear to be in the original English.”
“Very original English,” snorted Colonel Crane.
“Yes, our friend is an original character,” replied Hood. “Vanity tempts me to hint that he is our friend because he has an original taste in friends. The habit of his of putting the pronoun on the first page and the noun on the next has brightened many winter evenings for me. You haven’t met our friend White, have you?” he added to Pierce. “That is a shock that still threatens you.”
“Why, what’s the matter with him?” inquired Pierce.
“Nothing,” observed Crane in his more staccato style. “Has a taste for starting a letter with `Yours Truly’ and ending it with `Dear Sir’; that’s all.”
“I should rather like to hear that letter,” observed the young man.
“So you shall,” answered Hood, “there’s nothing confidential in it; and if there were, you wouldn’t find it out merely by reading it. The Rev. Wilding White, called by some of his critics `Wild White,’ is one of those country parsons, to be found in corners of the English countryside, of whom their old college friends usually think in order to wonder what the devil their parishioners think of them. As a matter of fact, my dear Hilary, he was rather like you when he was your age; and what in the world you would be like as a vicar in the Church of England, aged fifty, might at first stagger the imagination; but the problem might be solved by supposing you would be like him. But I only hope you will have a more lucid style in letter-writing. The old boy is always in such a state of excitement about something that it comes out anyhow.”
It has been said elsewhere that these tales are, in some sense, of necessity told tail-foremost, and certainly the letter of the Rev. Wilding White was a document suited to such a scheme of narrative. It was written in what had once been a good hand-writing of the bolder sort, but which had degenerated through excessive energy and haste into an illegible scrawl. It appeared to run as follows:
“`My dear Owen, — My mind is quite made up; though I know the sort of legal long-winded things you will say against it; I know especially one thing a leathery old lawyer like you is bound to say; but as a matter of fact even you can’t say it in a case like this, because the timber came from the other end of the county and had nothing whatever to do with him or any of his flunkeys and sycophants. Besides, I did it all myself with a little assistance I’ll tell you about later; and even in these days I should be surprised to hear THAT sort of assistance could be anything but a man’s own affair. I defy you and all your parchments to maintain that IT comes under the Game Laws. You won’t mind me talking like this; I know jolly well you’d think you were acting as a friend; but I think the time has come to speak plainly.’”
“Quite right,” said the Colonel.
“Yes,” said young Pierce, with a rather vague expression, “I’m glad he feels that the time has come to speak plainly.”
“Quite so,” observed the lawyer dryly; “he continues as follows:”
“`I’ve got a lot to tell you about the new arrangement, which works much better even than I hoped. I was afraid at first it would really be an encumbrance, as you know it’s always supposed to be. But there are more things, and all the rest of it, and God fulfils himself, and so on and so on. It gives one quite a weird Asiatic feeling sometimes.’”
“Yes,” said the Colonel, “it does.”
“What does?” asked Pierce, sitting up suddenly, like one who can bear no more.
“You are not used to the epistolary method,” said Hood indulgently; “you haven’t got into the swing of the style. It goes on:”
“`Of course, he’s a big pot down here, and all sorts of skunks are afraid of him and pretend to boycott me. Nobody could expect anything else of those pineapple people, but I confess I was surprised at Parkinson. Sally of course is as sound as ever; but she goes to Scotland a good deal and you can’t blame her. Sometimes I’m left pretty severely alone, but I’m not downhearted; you’ll probably laugh if I tell you that Snowdrop is really a very intelligent companion.’”
“I confess I am long past laughter,” said Hilary Pierce sadly; “but I rather wish I knew who Snowdrop is.”
“Child, I suppose,” said the Colonel shortly.
