Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 352
Then he told her; but it was an effort, and he felt for the first time that he was living in two worlds. As he walked where the town opened into a country road, he had suddenly realised that he was happy. His cure was complete. The disease of disdain for common things no longer devoured his brain, and yet his appreciation of the common was no nearer to the vulgar. Indeed, the common things around him, the stones in the road, the weeds in the ditch, stood out with a distinctness that was the reverse of flat. It was as if he had felt the third dimension for the first time. It reminded him of something his friend has said about religion, as compared with the mere herding both of Capitalism and Communism. “There is a delicacy about the Day of Judgment.” It was at least supposed to deal with individuals. “Yes, that is it,” he said to himself. “They used to say in the sight of God we are all distinguished. We may be damned; but, damn it all, we’re distinguished.”
He was wandering away into the nondescript landscape outside the wooden town, dotted with frame-houses and the thin trees of those plains, now lit up with the delicate clarity of the Indian summer. A born critic, born in a world where criticism is rare, he had often felt something frail and collapsible about the frame-houses of his country; as if they would fold up flat like a portable stage; something of the nomadism of a travelling show. But in his new normal mood it pleased him — not so much that they should shut as that they could open — as a child is pleased when a hinged toy opens like a telescope. Then something happened which showed sharply how very new was the mood, and even how very abnormal was the normality. He caught sight of a string stretched across a backyard, with some coloured clothes hanging on it; some of them seemed to be blouses or pinafores such as artists wear; some pyjamas of a garish cut and pattern. Before he had begun to browse in that great library of his literary correspondence, he would have felt the sight as the most unsightly sort of commonplace. A woman hanging out the washing would have been something on a level with the Comic Strip in the loathsome local paper. But at this queer moment of his life he actually liked it. The headless figures of the shirts, the dancing legs of the pantaloons looked like giant marionettes acting a pantomime in the sunlight of Italy; the stripes and patches of crude colour had the note of carnival. He thought inconsequently of the double fate of the word “Pantaloon.” A very strenuous young woman was struggling with the line; and her copper hair in the sun gave a touch that brought to life the colours of a blue and green frock fluttering behind her. The garments on the line were puffed out by the wind into preposterous shapes of hollow solidity; and just at that moment a very big one, looking like a complete suit of yellow, broke from its peg and went careering across the bushes towards him, like some fat yellow buffoon dancing across the countryside. He made one wild leap and caught the runaway, which collapsed like a balloon and then hung like a rag; and, bounding across the grass plots and pathways, solemnly handed it to the young woman, who was already laughing.
“Oh, thank you very much,” she said, “that’s Uncle Bill. He’s supposed to be an artist and likes yellow. Used to have to do with something called the Yellow Book.”
“The Yellow Peril, I should think,” said Crake, “but artists are proverbially liable to abscond.”
“So all my business uncles tell me,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand either sort. They would never condescend to run after the washing.”
“I wish they ran after anything so clean,” replied Crake. “In the business and politics I’ve seen — Well, there isn’t any washing, only whitewashing.”
She was looking at him in an unembarrassed manner, slightly amused; she had a square, open face which would have been even conventionally handsome if her wide, blue eyes had not been a shade too far apart; everything else about her expressed only the strength and strenuous bodily vigour of her first attitude; and she had one trick that is only found in people who are physically almost perfect. When she was not darting and dashing about she stood absolutely still.
His eyes strayed towards the little wooden house to which the yard was attached; and she answered his unspoken question without losing her steady smile.
“No, I’m not the Hired Help; I rather doubt if I’m a Help at all. But the rest of the family’s out.”
“Ah, of course,” he said, “the yellow gentleman is your uncle.”
“The Scarlet Woman is my aunt,” she said, indicating another garment. “She has gone to hear a Hindoo who lectures on Health- Spirals and the Super-Gland.”
“I know him,” said Crake gloomily, “he deepens your inner life and gives you tips about Wall Street.”
“The peacock blue and green contraption is my sister,” she went on. “She’s gone to the Purple Possum, the celebrated playground of the New Youth. All very brilliant, I believe, and prides itself especially on being Frank. What did you say?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Crake, who had involuntarily murmured, “Oh, boy, I’m Little Frankie.”
“Uncle goes to a speakeasy; but it’s supposed to be one for artists. It’s all too intellectual for me. Will you come inside?”
“Intellectuals haven’t intellect enough to boil an egg,” he said as he went inside. “I’m all for the eggs.”
And as he went in through the sheds and sculleries and kitchen, bowing his head a little, something was whispering in his ear: “You will not return; you will not come back free; you are going into a new world; a little, real world. You are going to live in a dolls’ house; and you will come out a doll.”
And the change that was already in his heart made him answer with a challenge: “What a fool Ibsen was,” he muttered. “What could be jollier than living in a dolls’ house?”
And when he went through the dark interior and saw at last the light from the front windows, it was not the dead daylight he had left behind; for those windows looked on to the strange streets of some other star; he was in love.
A few days afterwards, with his head full of these new things, that capered in many colours like the headless puppets in the sun, he came back suddenly into the cool shadow of that older friendship in which he had lived so long. He opened the letter, which went straight to the point, silently and from within, as was her strange habit.
“You understood my first letter at once; when most men would have thought I was mad. You will understand that this is my last letter quite as easily. You will not think any of the vulgar things: jealousy or the fear that somebody else will be jealous. You could not be vulgar; at first you had almost nothing except not being vulgar. You began with nothing but a hatred; but I knew your hatred was noble, and I know your love would be noble. No; it is not that sort of obvious difficulty at all. We must end here because we have gone round the whole world and thought as far as thinking will go. That is not conceit; it is not a question of knowing everything now, but of being ready to understand anybody at any time. You would not melt into a Regular Guy; you did not dry up into a Superman; and after that you will become a man and understand all men. We must end now, because of all those who have thus understood all things, from the cedar to the hyssop, hardly any (not even Solomon himself) have resisted the temptation to say a last word, to sum it all up, and to say, Vanity of Vanities. Let us, let me at least, resist the temptation, and say, not Vanitas, but only Vale...Farewell.”
John Crake sat down and wrote a long and earnest and delicate letter of thanks, surveying all the thousand things that he had gained in that voyage round the world with that invisible companion. Then he sprang up like a spring released and rushed down the road like a boy freed from school; all the noises of nature seemed to be shouting and cheering him on, for he felt for the first time that he had a body, and it was racing to outstrip his sole.
Before that autumn had turned to winter he was married to Mary Wendover, the lady of the clothes-line; and it is typical of the tail foremost or back-door fashion of his introduction that he never knew her name was Wendover until about a month after he knew it was Mary. She was apparently a guest in the house of her relative; but the guest seemed to do all the work while the hosts pursued self- development. “Very self-development,” said Crake, “but I think, as usual, the Cinderella was the favourite of the fairies.” And indeed she seemed to show a more artistic ardour for pots and pans than they did for arts; as if the teapot were indeed a familiar goblin or the broom a benevolent witch’s broomstick. After their marriage her creative concentration increased; and Crake, remembering his own chance words of encouragement, felt it natural to be infected with the same fury of efficiency. He wanted to deal with things directly, with his own hands, as she did; and he announced one day that he had sold out his business and was going to work a farm he had about ten miles from the city. She only laughed, and said: “I thought you were already doing business with realities.”
“Why,” he cried, “that is out of my celebrated disgraceful speech. I didn’t know....”
“You must have known ladies are allowed to overhear Bisons eating,” she said.
“Well, it shows how little I knew in those days. Business men do business with unrealities. Only with unrealities. With rubber forests nobody has seen or ivory from elephants who might be fabulous like unicorns. I want to cut down a real tree and ride a real horse and be real.”
Indeed, there was a reality in their very romance; and their common passion went back to its romantic origin. Slight as had been the gesture of their introduction, it had been active and abrupt. What he had seen had been a woman wrestling with a rope; and what she had seen had been a man bounding over a bush; and all their love and life went with that gallop of bodily vigour and the high gestures of the mastery of man.
It was about three years later, and, save for the noise of two children in the old farmhouse, a man would have said that their whole life was unchanged. He still rode his horses round the farm, and his body was still young enough to find automatic exultation in the exercise; she still practised a hundred arts and crafts under the name of housekeeping, and would have let loose a violent scorn against anyone who called it drudgery. They both enjoyed to the full the pleasure of doing things well, and there are few pleasures more enduring; and yet a more subtle critic might have said that things were changed. But John Crake could only think of one critic who would have been subtle enough to say it.
Perhaps it was a proof that things were changed that he had thought of that subtle critic at all. But he did now recall that cooler background of friendship, and told himself that she would have understood. Above all, she would not have misunderstood. She would not have been cheap, and supposed that he was merely tired of his wife. In reality, he was not tired in the least. He felt that he wanted her and he had missed her, in spite of having married her. Moreover, there grew upon him a dull pain in the feeling that his wife herself had become sad and estranged. He had seen her staring out of the window on bright summer days; and her face was sadder for the sunlight. Her plunging practicality was often interrupted by her sudden stillness. She liked more and more to be alone. John Crake was no fool, and would have thought nothing of these moods if they had occurred in a moody person. If she had been of the sentimental sort it would not have distressed him much even if he had thought (as he was sometimes inclined to think) that they were somehow connected with personal memories, and even with personal memories of another person. He was shrewd enough to know that romances do very little harm to the romantic. The sort of person for whom lost loves or faded fancies can be stirred by music or turned into minor poetry is generally the sort of person who can indulge them without much danger to the solid loyalties of life. But Mary Crake was not particularly romantic; and certainly the very reverse of sentimental. She had a passion for the practical, for translating thoughts into things. She would no more desire to have a romance without turning it into a reality than to have a recipe without turning it into a dish. She could no more have lived on dreams than she could have dined on a cookery book. Ever since he had seen her wrestling with a clothes-line like an Amazon lassooing a wild horse, he had been affected by her powerful impatience and directness of design. People of that sort do not brood for pleasure. If she was brooding, she was suffering.
He, in his turn, brooded long upon that brooding; pacing up and down the long verandah into which was extended the wide porch of the American farmhouse. All round him was that dreary plain that is the incongruous background of that cheery people, and one straight American road ran up to the very steps of his own porch, a road lined with lean, spidery trees. The road ended with the farm, and it seemed to his sullen eye like the road of destiny, that leads so straight to achievement and disappointment. With an abrupt movement, he turned his back upon it, went into his study, and sat down at his desk. Before he had risen from it he had broken the silence of four years, and written to that long-lost friend and counsellor who had never had a name.
He came out again upon the porch, with his sealed and stamped letter in his hand, and saw that the long road between the thin trees had a black object upon it, the dark angular figure of a man, with a hat tilted over his eyes, so as to show nothing but a sour grin. It was Jackson Drill, the bootlegger; and Crake had an instant overwhelming sense of repugnance. There had been a time when they were the two cynics of Bison City, and seemed to be in a sort of sympathy in their lack of sympathy. It measured the distance that Crake had really travelled along that road of destiny, that the distant sight of Drill was like the sight of a black scorpion. He had long felt that that sort of pessimism was mere poison. The hand that held the letter made an involuntary movement, as if not wishing even the externals of such an understanding to be exposed to such a misunderstanding. The movement, of course, produced the very effect it was meant to avoid.
“Very confidential correspondence, I suppose,” said Drill. “Three years after marriage is about the time they start. In fact, old man, I fear it isn’t the only confidential correspondence in the house.”
Crake said in a very low and restrained voice: “What the devil in hell do you mean?”
Drill laughed with disagreeable agreeableness; for Americans are not afraid to be familiar with their wealthier employers, so far as language is concerned. “Well,” he said, “if you have your private correspondence, why shouldn’t she? By all accounts, she used to have letters, even in the old days, that you didn’t see. That you weren’t meant to see.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Crake, thoughtfully, and hit the man a crack on his crooked mouth that sent him from the top of the steps to the bottom, and left him spread-eagled on the flat road below. Then Crake turned and entered his own house in so towering a passion that it might have shaken the topmost chimneys and brought them down.
His wife was sitting with her back to him at a writing-desk, reading an old faded letter, and, though he could not see her face, he knew when he first heard her voice that she had been in tears; a terrible and portentous thing in her case.
“Who is that letter from?” he asked, with his voice on a dead level.
She rose and faced him, and her low voice rang out:
“Who are you to talk about letters?” she said. “Who is that letter for?”
Then, after a deadly silence, she added, almost grimly:
“Give me that letter.”
“Why should I?” he answered, frowning at her.
“Oh,” she replied, almost lightly, “only because it is addressed to-me.”
And with that he looked across at the old letter she was reading, and saw that it was one of those that he had sent to the same address.
There are thirty-seven morals to this story; but one of them is that it is he who has really gone round the whole world who is anxious to come home; that the end of wisdom is the beginning of life; and that God Himself bowed down to enter a narrow door, in the hour when the Word was made flesh.
UNCOLLECTED SHORT STORIES
CONTENTS
THE SHOP OF GHOSTS
TELEGRAPH POLES
THE TREES OF PRIDE
FOR LOVERS ONLY
THE DISADVANTAGE OF HAVING TWO HEADS
THE SHOP OF GHOSTS
1909
Nearly all the best and most precious things in the universe you can get for a halfpenny. I make an exception, of course, of the sun, the moon, the earth, people, stars, thunderstorms, and such trifles. You can get them for nothing. Also I make an exception of another thing, which I am not allowed to mention in this paper, and of which the lowest price is a penny halfpenny. But the general principle will be at once apparent. In the street behind me, for instance, you can now get a ride on an electric tram for a halfpenny. To be on an electric tram is to be on a flying castle in a fairy tale. You can get quite a large number of brightly coloured sweets for a halfpenny. Also you can get the chance of reading this article for a halfpenny; along, of course, with other and irrelevant matter.
But if you want to see what a vast and bewildering array of valuable things you can get at a halfpenny each you should do as I was doing last night. I was gluing my nose against the glass of a very small and dimly lit toy shop in one of the greyest and leanest of the streets of Battersea. But dim as was that square of light, it was filled (as a child once said to me) with all the colours God ever made. Those toys of the poor were like the children who buy them; they were all dirty; but they were all bright. For my part, I think brightness more important than cleanliness; since the first is of the soul, and the second of the body. You must excuse me; I am a democrat; I know I am out of fashion in the modern world.
