Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 276
“Yes,” said Colonel Crane, “I should like to see the farm.”
“There’s a lot of fuss about it, too; there’s the devil of a row,” went on the young man, in very high spirits. “Lots of big combines and things are trying to crush the small farmers with all sorts of tricks; they even complain of interference by an American. You can imagine how much Rosenbaum Low and Goldstein and Guggenheimer must be distressed by the notion of a foreigner interfering in England. I want to know how a foreigner could interfere less than by giving back their land to the English people and clearing out. They all put it on to me; and right they are. I regard Oates as my property; my convert; captive of my bow and spear.”
“Captive of your long bow, I imagine,” said the Colonel. “I bet you told him a good many things that nobody but a shrewd business man would have been innocent enough to believe.”
“If I use the long bow,” replied Pierce with dignity, “it is a weapon with heroic memories proper to a yeoman of England. With what more fitting weapon could we try to establish a yeomanry?”
“There is something over there,” said Colonel quietly, “that looks to me rather like another sort of weapon.”
They had by this time come in full sight of the farm buildings which crowned the long slope; and beyond a kitchen-garden and an orchard rose a thatched roof with a row of old-fashioned lattice windows under it; the window at the end standing open. And out of this window at the edge of the block of building protruded a big black object, rigid and apparently cylindrical, thrust out above the garden and dark against the morning daylight.
“A gun!” cried Pierce involuntarily; “looks just like a howitzer; or is it an anti-aircraft gun?”
“Anti-airman gun, no doubt,” said Crane; “they heard you were coming down and took precautions.”
“But what the devil can he want with a gun?” muttered Pierce, peering at the dark outline.
“And who the devil is HE, if it comes to that?” said the Colonel.
“Why, that window,” explained Pierce, “that’s the window of the room they’ve let to a paying guest, I know. Man of the name of Green, I understand; rather a recluse, and I suppose some sort of crank.”
“Not an anti-armament crank, anyhow,” said the Colonel.
“By George!” said Pierce, whistling softly. “I wonder whether things really have moved faster than we could fancy! I wonder whether it’s a revolution or a civil war beginning after all. I suppose we are an army ourselves; I represent the Air Force and you represent the infantry.”
“You represent the infants,” answered the Colonel. “You’re too young for this world; you and your revolutions! As a matter of fact, it isn’t a gun, though it does look rather like one. I see now what it is.”
“And what in the world is it?” asked his friend.
“It’s a telescope,” said Crane. “One of those very big telescopes they usually have in observatories.”
“Couldn’t be partly a gun and partly a telescope?” pleaded Pierce, reluctant to abandon his first fancy. “I’ve often seen the phrase `shooting stars,’ but perhaps I’ve got the grammar and sense of it wrong. The young man lodging with the farmer may be following one of the local sports — the local substitute for duck-shooting!”
“What in the world are you talking about?” growled the other.
“Their lodger may be shooting the stars,” explained Pierce.
“Hope their lodger isn’t shooting the moon,” said the flippant Crane.
As they spoke there came towards them, through the green and twinkling twilight of the orchard, a young woman with copper-coloured hair and a square and rather striking face, whom Pierce saluted respectfully as the daughter of the house. He was very punctilious upon the point that these new peasant farmers must be treated like small squires and not like tenants or serfs.
“I see your friend Mr. Green has got his telescope out,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said the girl. “They say Mr. Green is a great astronomer.”
“I doubt if you ought to call me `sir,’” said Pierce reflectively. “It suggests rather the forgotten feudalism than the new equality. Perhaps you might oblige me by saying `Yes, citizen,’ then we could continue our talk about Citizen Green on an equal footing. By the way, pardon me, let me present Citizen Crane.”
Citizen Crane bowed politely to the young woman without any apparent enthusiasm for his new title; but Pierce went on.
“Rather rum to call ourselves citizens when we’re all so glad to be out of the city. We really want some term suitable to rural equality. The Socialists have spoilt `Comrade’; you can’t be a comrade without a Liberty tie and a pointed beard. Morris had a good notion of one man calling another Neighbour. That sounds a little more rustic. I suppose,” he added wistfully to the girl, “I suppose I could not induce you to call me Gaffer?”
“Unless I’m mistaken,” observed Crane, “that’s your astronomer wandering about in the garden. Thinks he’s a botanist, perhaps. Appropriate to the name of Green.”
“Oh, he often wanders in the garden and down to the meadow and the cowsheds,” said the young woman. “He talks to himself a good deal, explaining a great theory he’s got. He explains it to everybody he meets, too. Sometimes he explains it to me when I’m milking the cow.”
“Perhaps you can explain it to us?” said Pierce.
“Not so bad as that,” she said, laughing. “It’s something like that Fourth Dimension they talk about. But I’ve no doubt he’ll explain it to you if you meet him.”
“Not for me,” said Pierce. “I’m a simple peasant proprietor and ask nothing but Three Dimensions and a Cow.”
“Cow’s the Fourth Dimension, I suppose,” said Crane.
“I must go and attend to the Fourth Dimension,” she said with a smile.
“Peasants all live by patchwork, running two or three side-shows,” observed Pierce. “Curious sort of livestock on the farm. Think of people living on a cow and chickens and an astronomer.”
As he spoke the astronomer approached along the path by which the girl had just passed. His eyes were covered with huge horn spectacles of a dim blue colour; for he was warned to save his eyesight for his starry vigils. This gave a misleading look of morbidity to a face that was naturally frank and healthy; and the figure, though stooping, was stalwart. He was very absent-minded. Every now and then he looked at the ground and frowned as if he did not like it.
Oliver Green was a very young professor, but a very old young man. He had passed from science as the hobby of a schoolboy to science as the ambition of a middle-aged man, without any intermediate holiday of youth. Moreover, his monomania had been fixed and frozen by success; at least by a considerable success for a man of his years. He was already a fellow of the chief learned societies connected with his subject, when there grew up in his mind the grand, universal, all-sufficing Theory which had come to fill the whole of his life as the daylight fills the day. If we attempted the exposition of that theory here, it is doubtful whether the result would resemble daylight. Professor Green was always ready to prove it; but if we were to set out the proof in this place, the next four or five pages would be covered with closely printed columns of figures, brightened here and there by geometrical designs, such as seldom form part of the text of a romantic story. Suffice it to say that the theory had something to do with Relativity and the reversal of the relations between the stationary and the moving object. Pierce, the aviator, who had passed much of his time on moving objects not without the occasional anticipation of bumping into stationary objects, talked to Green a little on the subject. Being interested in scientific aviation, he was nearer to the abstract sciences than were his friends, Crane with his hobby of folk-lore or Hood with his love of classic literature or Wilding White with his reading of the mystics. But the young aviator frankly admitted that Professor Green soared high into the heavens of the Higher Mathematics, far beyond the flight of his little aeroplane.
The Professor had begun, as he always began, by saying that it was quite easy to explain; which was doubtless true, as he was always explaining it. But he often ended by affirming fallaciously that it was quite easy to understand, and it would be an exaggeration to say that it was always understood. Anyhow, he was just about to read his great paper on his great theory at the great Astronomical Congress that was to be held that year at Bath; which was one reason why he had pitched his astronomical camp, or emplaced his astronomical gun, in the house of Farmer Dale on the hills of Somerset. Mr. Enoch Oates could not but feel the lingering hesitation of the landlord when he heard that his proteges the Dales were about to admit an unknown stranger into their household. But Pierce sternly reminded him that this paternal attitude was a thing of the past and that a free peasant was free to let lodgings to a homicidal maniac if he liked. Nevertheless, Pierce was rather relieved to find the maniac was only an astronomer; but it would have been all the same if he had been an astrologer. Before coming to the farm, the astronomer had set up his telescope in much dingier places — in lodgings in Bloomsbury and the grimy buildings of a Midland University. He thought he was, and to a great extent he was, indifferent to his surroundings. But for all that the air and colour of those country surroundings were slowly and strangely sinking into him.
“The idea is simplicity itself,” he said earnestly, when Pierce rallied him about the theory. “It is only the proof that is, of course, a trifle technical. Put in a very crude and popular shape, it depends on the mathematical formula for the inversion of the sphere.”
“What we call turning the world upside down,” said Pierce. “I’m all in favour of it.”
“Everyone knows the idea of relativity applied to motion,” went on the Professor. “When you run out of a village in a motor-car, you might say that the village runs away from you.”
“The village does run away when Pierce is out motoring,” remarked Crane. “Anyhow, the villagers do. But he generally prefers to frighten them with an aeroplane.”
“Indeed?” said the astronomer with some interest. “An aeroplane would make an even better working model. Compare the movement of an aeroplane with what we call merely for convenience the fixity of the fixed stars.”
“I dare say they got a bit unfixed when Pierce bumped into them,” said the Colonel.
Professor Green sighed in a sad but patient spirit. He could not help being a little disappointed even with the most intelligent outsiders with whom he conversed. Their remarks were pointed but hardly to the point. He felt more and more that he really preferred those who made no remarks. The flowers and the trees made no remarks; they stood in rows and allowed him to lecture to them for hours on the fallacies of accepted astronomy. The cow made no remarks. The girl who milked the cow made no remarks; or, if she did, they were pleasant and kindly remarks, not intended to be clever. He drifted, as he had done many times before, in the direction of the cow.
The young woman who milked the cow was not in the common connotation what is meant by a milkmaid. Margery Dale was the daughter of a substantial farmer already respected in that county. She had been to school and learnt various polite things before she came back to the farm and continued to do the thousand things that she could have taught the schoolmasters. And something of this proportion or disproportion of knowledge was dawning on Professor Green, as he stood staring at the cow and talking, often in a sort of soliloquy. For he had a rather similar sensation of a great many other things growing up thickly like a jungle round his own particular thing; impressions and implications from all the girl’s easy actions and varied avocations. Perhaps he began to have a dim suspicion that he was the schoolmaster who was being taught.
The earth and the sky were already beginning to be enriched with evening; the blue was already almost a glow like apple-green behind the line of branching apple-trees; against it the bulk of the farm stood in a darker outline, and for the first time he realized something quaint or queer added to that outline by his own big telescope stuck up like a gun pointed at the moon. Somehow it looked, he could not tell why, like the beginning of a story. The hollyhocks also looked incredibly tall. To see what he would have called “flowers” so tall as that seemed like seeing a daisy or a dandelion as large as a lamp-post. He was positive there was nothing exactly like it in Bloomsbury. These tall flowers also looked like the beginning of a story — the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. Though he knew little enough of what influences were slowly sinking into him, he felt something apt in the last memory. Whatever was moving within him was something very far back, something that came before reading and writing. He had some dream, as from a previous life, of dark streaks of field under stormy clouds of summer and the sense that the flowers to be found there were things like gems. He was in that country home that every cockney child feels he has always had and never visited.
“I have to read my paper to-night,” he said abruptly. “I really ought to be thinking about it.”
“I do hope it will be a success,” said the girl; “but I rather thought you were always thinking about it.”
“Well, I was — generally,” he said in a rather dazed fashion; and indeed it was probably the first time that he had ever found himself fully conscious of not thinking about it. Of what he was thinking about he was by no means fully conscious.
“I suppose you have to be awfully clever even to understand it,” observed Margery Dale conversationally.
“I don’t know,” he said, slightly stirred to the defensive. “I’m sure I could make you see — I don’t mean you aren’t clever, of course; I mean I’m quite sure you’re clever enough to see — to see anything.”
“Only some sorts of things, I’m afraid,” she said, smiling. “I’m sure your theory has got nothing to do with cows and milking-stools.”
“It’s got to do with anything,” he said eagerly; “with everything, in fact. It would be just as easy to prove it from stools and cows as anything else. It’s really quite simple. Reversing the usual mathematical formula, it’s possible to reach the same results in reality by treating motion as a fixed point and stability as a form of motion. You were told that the earth goes round the sun, and the moon goes round the earth. Well, in my formula, we first treat it as if the sun went round the earth—”
She looked up radiantly. “I always THOUGHT it looked like that,” she said emphatically.
“And you will, of course, see for yourself,” he continued triumphantly, “that by the same logical inversion we must suppose the earth to be going round the moon.”
The radiant face showed a shadow of doubt and she said “Oh!”
“But any of the things you mention, the milking-stool or the cow or what not, would serve the same purpose, since they are objects generally regarded as stationary.”
He looked up vaguely at the moon which was steadily brightening as vast shadows spread over the sky.
“Well, take those things you talk of,” he went on, moved by a meaningless unrest and tremor. “You see the moon rise behind the woods over there and sweep in a great curve through the sky and seem to set again beyond the hill. But it would be just as easy to preserve the same mathematical relations by regarding the moon as the centre of the circle and the curve described by some object such as the cow—”
She threw her head back and looked at him, with eyes blazing with laughter that was not in any way mockery, but a childish delight at the crowning coincidence of a fairy-tale.
“Splendid!” she cried. “So the cow really does jump over the moon!”
Green put up his hand to his hair; and after a short silence said suddenly, like a man recalling a recondite Greek quotation:
“Why, I’ve heard that somewhere. There was something else — `The little dog laughed—’”
Then something happened, which was in the world of ideas much more dramatic than the fact that the little dog laughed. The professor of astronomy laughed. If the world of things had corresponded to the world of ideas, the leaves of the apple tree might have curled up in fear or the birds dropped out of the sky. It was rather as if the cow had laughed.
Following that curt and uncouth noise was a silence; and then the hand he had raised to his head abruptly rent off his big blue spectacles and showed his staring blue eyes. He looked boyish and even babyish.
“I wonder whether you always wore them,” she said. “I should think they made that moon of yours look blue. Isn’t there a proverb or something about a thing happening once in a blue moon?”
He threw the great goggles on the ground and broke them.
“Good gracious!” she exclaimed, “you seem to have taken quite a dislike to them all of a sudden. I thought you were going to wear them till — well, till all is blue, as they say.”
He shook his head. “All is beautiful,” he said. “You are beautiful.”
The young woman was normally very lucid and decisive in dealing with gentlemen who made remarks of that kind, especially when she concluded that the gentlemen were not gentlemen. But for some reason in this case it never occurred to her that she needed defence; possibly because the other party seemed more defenceless than indefensible. She said nothing. But the other party said a great deal, and his remarks did not grow more rational. At that moment, far away in their inn-parlour in the neighbouring town, Hood and Crane and the fellowship of the Long Bow were actually discussing with considerable interest the meaning and possibilities of the new astronomical theory. In Bath the lecture-hall was being prepared for the exposition of the theory. The theorist had forgotten all about it.
