Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 340
“What waste! If you had thrown away the cigar and left the match burning — that would, at least, have been an ordinary, natural gesture. But to throw away the match and leave the cigar burning — what madness, what paradox, what perversity! Do you not remember in your holy childhood what a fairy transformation-scene it was to strike one of those little sticks of wood? And now you can buy boxes of them for twopence, bushels of them for a shilling, as if you were walking in a palace of fireworks. And then you will pay more to stick an ugly brown weed in your mouth and smell it!”
“Well,” said the Traveller, humouring his lunatic, “the flame only lasts for a minute.”
“It has lasted for ten thousand years,” said the Stranger. “It will last till the planet freezes. It is your trumpery tobacco that has only lasted a few centuries among civilised men. And even then it depends on the fire. Fire has run through every religion; history has been a procession with torches; could it ever be a procession of cigars? What would be the good of a whole forest of cigars without the first spark of fire?”
“A smoker’s inferno, I suppose,” answered the other; “but some American millionaires chew unlighted cigars.”
“I said among civilised men,” said the Stranger; “but believe me, you have to choose between the old civilisation that can make fire and the new that can only manufacture cigars... Excuse me if I hold that match for a moment.”
He took the flaming stump and held it tight, until his fingers seemed to shrink and blister with the heat.
“Should one not suffer a little,” he asked calmly, “for having seen such glory?”
Perhaps the Traveller was a little relieved when he got out.
A Picture Of Tuesday
Oscar Plumtree was a rising artist, who painted his general impressions of his intimate friends, and belonged to a sketching club which met every Tuesday. He was a small square man with masses of black hair, and stood with his hands in his pockets, a little too conscious that his head was against a green curtain.
“How decorative Plumtree is,” said Noel Starwood, symbolist, to Patrick Staunton, realist. “I never noticed that his colour was so arbitrary. But, like all the works of God, you have to see him twenty times before you see him for the first time.”
“If you can suggest any course likely to result in seeing him for the last time,” said Staunton, lighting a pipe, “I shall be more gratified. So he looks decorative, does he?”
“So flat,” murmured Starwood, dreamily. “So admirably flat. He looks as if he had just come out of a panel by Albert Moor.”
“Yes,” said Staunton; “I wish he’d go back again.”
Patrick Staunton was a large young man with a handsome passive face, that looked blasé but was only sleepy. He was very young, it is true, but not quite young enough to have grown weary of the world. He was, in fact, the average young man, with the average young man’s two admirable qualities, a sense of humour and an aversion to egoists. This was why he disliked Plumtree. Noel Starwood, a slight, fiery- haired, fiery-tinted type, like a high-spirited girl, was a visionary, the painter of a series of ‘Seven Dreams of Adam before the Creation of Eve.’ He did not dislike Plumtree. He said it was the great test and trial of true Christian philosophy not to dislike Plumtree.
He moved off, and another member came up to Staunton.
“Do you know it is Plumtree’s turn to give out a subject for the sketches?” he said. “These subject days are generally rather a lark. Do you remember the first time Starwood was asked for one? There was a silence, and then such a gentle, plaintive little voice said, ‘The Resurrection of Cain.’ But then he’s a mystic, don’t you know, and pities the Devil.”
“Well, well,” said Staunton charitably. “I heard Plumtree was going to the devil the other day and since then I rather pitied the devil myself.”
“But the joke of the thing is,” continued the other, “that Plumtree is for ever telling us that the artistic mind cares no more for the subject of a picture, than for its weight in avoirdupois. He was immensely proud of his last picture, because three eminent art-critics looked at it the wrong way up.”
A small crowd had already gathered round Plumtree, and were pressing him for a subject.
“What do you want with a subject?” he said, contemptuously. “I don’t want a subject, I want a picture. Won’t anything do?”
“The primal enigma, Anything,” said Starwood thoughtfully. “A fine conception. Something bizarre, hasty, fantastic. Some wild, low shape of life, to symbolise the germ-fact, the indestructible minimum, the everlasting Yea. After all, it is but a superficial philosophy which is founded on the existence of everything. The deeper philosophy is founded on the existence of anything.”
“Well, we won’t have that,” said Plumtree, abruptly. “You fellows don’t seem to understand that art—”
Staunton cut him short hastily. “I say, Plumtree, I asked for bread and you gave me a piece of india-rubber. Thanks. You were saying that the subject—”
“Oh, take anything you like: what does the subject matter? What’s the day of the week? Tuesday; very well.” He turned to the throng and said in a clear voice, “The subject for the sketches will be Tuesday.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Staunton politely.
“Tuesday,” repeated Plumtree. “A picture of — Tuesday.”
Patrick Staunton lifted his full six feet two from the bench, and formally announced that he was relegated to a state of spiritual reprobation.
Only four members of the club exhibited sketches on this singular subject. The group consisted of Plumtree, Staunton and Starwood, and one Middleton, who had before him a lucrative career in virtue of an inexhaustible output of corpulent and comic monks.
The uncovering of his picture was received with loud cheers and laughter. It represented six monastic gentlemen of revolting joviality tossing pancakes. Thus it suggested Shrove Tuesday. Plumtree’s was an admirable little suggestion of gaslight in early morning. It might just as well be Tuesday morning as any other morning.
Staunton annoyed him very much by elaborately describing the noble thoughts that the picture suggested to him. His own was a study of his mother’s at-home day, which occurred on Tuesday, in which he introduced all the uncles who had told him things for his own good.
Starwood’s picture was the largest. When it was unveiled it seemed to fill the room. It was a dark picture, dark with an intricate density of profound colours, a complex scheme of sombre and subtle harmonies, a kind of gorgeous twilight. Plumtree, who was far too good an artist to let cynicism rob him of the gift of wonder, followed the labyrinth of colour keenly and slowly.
Suddenly he gave a little cry and stepped back.
The whole was a huge human figure. Grey and gigantic, it rose with its back to the spectator. As far as the vast outline could be traced, he had one hand heaved above his head, driving up a load of waters, while below, his feet moved upon a solemn, infinite sea. It was a dark picture, but when grasped, it blinded like a sun.
Above it was written ‘Tuesday,’ and below, ‘And God divided the waters that were under the firmament from the waters that were above the firmament: and the evening and the morning were the second day.’
There was a long silence, and Staunton was heard damning himself softly.
“It is certainly very good,” he said, “like creation. But why did you reckon Tuesday the second instead of the third day of the Jewish week?”
“I had to reckon from my own seventh day: the day of praise, the day of saying ‘It is good,’ or I could not have felt it a reality.”
“Do you seriously mean that you, yourself, look at the days of the week in that way?”
“The week is the colossal epic of creation,” cried Starwood excitedly. “Why are there not rituals for every day? The Day of the Creation of Light, why is it not honoured with mystic illuminations? The Day of the Waters, why is it not the day of awful cleansings and sacred immersions—”
“Do you Transcendentalists only wash once a week?” asked Staunton.
“The Day of the Earth — what a fire of flowers and fruit; the Day of Birds, what a blaze of decorative plumage; the Day of Beasts, what a—”
“What a deed lot of nonsense,” said Middleton, who was getting a trifle tired of all this. “If it comes to religion, and quotations from the Bible, what is there for us, Staunton? Can you think of a text for an at-home day?”
Staunton suggested, “And Job lifted up his voice and cursed his day.”
But Plumtree was staring at the picture of Tuesday.
The Two Taverns
In the country of Old King Cole, the founder of the Colchester Oyster Feast, and therefore a distinguished diner-out, there were two partners who owned an inn called The Sun and Moon. One of them called Giles was rather loud and boastful, and the other called Miles rather silent and sarcastic; so that they soon quarrelled and set up opposition signs. That of Giles was called optimistically The Rising Sun, and that of Miles more modestly The Half Moon. There had been some dispute about the one barrel of sound wine they possessed; but at last it was drawn off into two smaller barrels in exactly equal quantities. It so happened that King Cole, with his celebrated Violin Orchestra and all his royal retinue, came riding from Colchester to the little village of London. He came first to the inn of The Rising Sun, with its beautiful groves of bushes festooned with coloured lights forming the legend: “Rising Sun Ruby Wine is the Best.” Mr. Giles received the monarch with prostrations of hospitality, and took occasion to observe that the Ruby Wine sold at his establishment was the Best Wine in the World. And indeed the potentate had occasion to note that a similar opinion was inscribed on the flag flying from the turret, on the large blue bow decorating the dog, and that even the sardines and other hors d’oeuvres were arranged in patterns expressive of the same thought. When therefore the exuberant Giles had broken out for the sixth or seventh time into cries of admiring anticipation, touching the wine he intended to serve, the King, familiar by this time with the sentiment, suggested with some sharpness that the wine should be produced. His annoyance must be his excuse for the curious perversity which led him, even when the wine was produced, to say that he did not think so much of it after all. It must be remembered that he was a gentleman of the old school.
Leaving The Rising Sun, he resolved to push on to London, as there was evidently no other first-class hotel on the road; nothing but a shabby and unpretentious tavern called The Half Moon. At this, however, he consented to pause for a moment, his thirst having been greatly increased by the curious cookery of the superior hostel. “I am afraid,” said Miles, the melancholy innkeeper, with an air of depression, “that there is really nothing in the house that is in the least fit to be offered to Your Majesty. We have a little cheap wine, but I fear you will think it the worst wine you ever drank in your life.”
“Not at all, not at all,” said the King breezily. I assure you I know how to rough it.” And he proceeded to give Miles somewhat misleading accounts of all he had gone through in his campaigns against the King of Chelmsford. And when the wine was served to him, he drank it with quite a roistering gesture and banged the goblet on the table, crying: “Blessed St. Julian, what uncommonly decent drink one can get in these little out- of-the-way places! Really, this stuff is quite excellent! I have indeed fallen on my feet.”
This was not quite a correct figure of speech; he went on drinking the wine, and even attempted to dance with the village maidens; but it was not always on his feet that he fell.
The Taming of the Nightmare
Little Jack Horner sat in the corner — so far the traditional surroundings of the nursery hero correspond with those in which we find him for the purposes of the story, but there being no Christmas pie in the neighbourhood, he was unable to give vent to the joyful, if somewhat egotistical, sentiment which is recorded of him elsewhere. He sat in a corner, under the window, listening to the weird moaning of the night-wind without, now tapping at the door like a wayfarer, now whistling in the chimney like a sweep, now seeming to wander, darkly muttering, like some mysterious wild thing in the copse around the cottage, now rushing like some vast monster over the roof with a hoarse roar rising to a piping shriek as it died away. Then came violent rattling at the window above him, which grew louder and fiercer till Jack expected the glass to fly to pieces, and the next moment he fancied he could hear a hoarse voice, muffled by coming through the window say, “Let me in, why can’t you let me in?” The vague, mystified awe that he had felt at the thousand suggestive voices of the wind changed into weird terror, and he cowered beneath the window striving not to look round, but compelled to turn by the horrible fascination of the presence of something behind him. He turned, threw open the window and looked out into the night. At first he could see nothing but the darkness, but the next moment he made out a broad, weird, goblin face with goggle eyes and a broad, queer hat, peering in through the window. “You’re wanted,” said the creature who appeared to be some species of watchman, in a muffled voice. “What for, Sir?” gasped Jack faintly. “You,” said the goblin, “are commissioned by the local Board of Good Fairies to find the Mare’s Nest. The Grey Mare, who built her nest in the suburbs of Creation, where people don’t so much mind what they do, has a large family, all mares and all grey, except one, the youngest, who is as black as night, and as weird. And she is called the Nightmare. Her you must catch and tame and saddle and bridle, and she is the only steed you shall ever ride.”
“And who are you, Sir?” asked the boy in some wonder.
“I am the Wind,” answered the Spirit. “I fill the ears of men with a thousand voices, but never before have mortal eyes seen me. I go where I list and sing what song I please. I alone can guide you to the land of the Mare’s Nest. Catch hold of my cloak.”
A deep, solemn fear at his heart made Jack lay hold of the mantle obediently, the Wind turned with a whistle, and the next moment Jack was jerked bodily out of the window and carried away far over the house-tops under the midnight sky, hanging on behind to the vast, wild coat-tails of the guide. They left the city, with its roofs and chimney-pots, behind, and passed on over fields and lanes, over glens and ravines, on over dim, barren wildernesses. For hours they flew, leaving the bats and owls behind, till they came to a low, lonely wall, beside which there was a dilapidated notice board, looking the other way, stating that trespassers would be prosecuted, by order of somebody, no one quite knew who.
And beyond the wall there appeared to be nothing but mist and moonshine. And the Wind turned and said gravely, “Can’t go any farther, Sir, not my beat. But that’s your way.” And jerking his head in the direction of the mysterious land over the wall, he moved away. And Jack clambered over the wall and entered the borderland of Creation. Before he had gone very far he came to a drop in the barren moors, which showed him the broad pale face of the moon, ten times as large as usual, and dark against it the lank melancholy figure of what looked like an overgrown calf. He came nearer, and had to violently pull the large animal’s tail before he consented to take the least notice of his presence. Then he slowly swung round, a large, pale, overgrown head, with round rolling eyes, and looked abstractedly at the wayfarer. “Can you tell me, where is the Mare’s Nest?” asked Jack.
The Calf eyed him wistfully for a moment, and then replied in a melancholy voice, with what appeared to be an impromptu rhyme of doubtful relevancy:
“Oh, my limbs are very feeble,
My head is very big,
My ears are round, O do not, pray
Mistake me for a pig.”
“Well, who wants to?” said the exasperated Horner. “I only want to be directed.”
The Calf lifted his eyes to the moon a moment and then sang plaintively:
“This Calf was the Mooncalf, the Cow was the Moon, She died from effects of a popular tune, And now in her glory she shines in the sky; Oh, never had Calf such a mother as I.”
And so sweet and pathetic for the moment was the upward look of the poor monster that Jack was quite touched and forgot his own business and just stroked the lean ribs of the Mooncalf. And after a long pause there rose again from the creature the wild queer songs of worship:
“I forget all the creatures that taunt and despise,
When through the dark night-mists my mother doth rise,
She is tender and kind and she shines the night long
On her lunatic child as he sings her his song.
I was dropped on the dim earth to wander alone,
And save this pale monster no child she hath known.
Without like on the earth, without sister or brother,
I sit here and sing to my mystical mother.”
And he sat there and sang for the remainder of the interview and as Jack, slowly and almost reluctantly, made his way onward over the dark moors, he could still hear the plaintive songs of the poetic Mooncalf rising, a solitary hum upon that gloomy waste, to the white moon overhead.
And he went on until he came to what appeared to be a low garden wall, along which he ran until he came to where it sloped down a little to a small wooden gate, and looking through he saw a strange spectacle. The whole of the sloping downs beyond, as far almost as to the horizon, were apparently cultivated like a gigantic kitchen garden, on which grew enormous turnips, almost entirely above ground, with round goblin eyes, that glimmered in ranks like gas-lamps lining all the slopes under the night-sky. And above these armies of goblin turnips on the hill was a little thatched cottage, apparently belonging to the Gardener. Presently, as he stood there, staring at this singular back-garden, one or two of the round, glowing eyes suddenly went out, and a dull, gibbering moan came out of the darkness. The next moment the door of the cottage opened and a tall, bony figure with a turned-down broad hat and a demoniac-looking rake came out of the cottage and, rolling round a pair of eyes as bright and glowing as theirs, requested to know what was the matter.
