Part 10

Pierce, who had been speculating with involuntary irreverence on the extreme difficulty of conducting a love-affair or a sentimental conversation in which one party had to address the other as Enoch, felt quite ashamed of his cynicism when the Star of Pork shone with such radiance in the eyes of his new friend.

“It was a terrible time, but I stuck to Pork, sometimes feeling she could see clearer than I could; and of course she was right, and I’ve never known her wrong. Then came my great chance of making the combination and freezing out competition; and I was able to give her the sort of things she ought to have and let her take the lead as she should. I don’t care for society much myself; but I’m often glad on a late night at the office to ring her up and hear she’s enjoying it.”

He spoke with a ponderous simplicity that seemed to disarm and crush the criticism of a more subtle civilization. It was one of those things that are easily seen to be absurd; but even after they are seen to be absurd, they are still there. It may be, after all, that that is the definition of the great things.

“I reckon that’s what people mean by the romance of business,” continued Oates, “and though my business got bigger and bigger, it made me feel kinda pleased there had been a romance at the heart of it. It had to get bigger, because we wanted to make the combination water-tight all over the world. I guess I had to fix things up a bit with your politicians. But Congress men are alike all the world over, and it didn’t trouble me any.”

There was a not uncommon conviction among those acquainted with Captain Hilary Pierce that that ingenious young man was cracked. He did a great many things to justify the impression; and in one sense certainly had never shown any reluctance to make a fool of himself. But if he was a lunatic, he was none the less a very English lunatic. And the notion of talking about his most intimate affections, suddenly, to a foreigner in an hotel, merely because the conversation had taken that turn, was something that he found quite terrifying. And yet an instinct, an impulse running through all these developments, told him that a moment had come and that he must seize some opportunity that he hardly understood.

“Look here,” he said rather awkwardly, “I want to tell you something.”

He looked down at the table as he continued.

“You said just now you were married to the best woman in the world. Well, curiously enough, so am I. It’s a coincidence that often happens. But it’s a still more curious coincidence that, in our own quiet way, we went in for Pork too. She kept pigs at the back of the little country inn where I met her; and at one time it looked as if the pigs might have to be given up. Perhaps the inn as well. Perhaps the wedding as well. We were quite poor, as poor as you were when you started; and to the poor those extra modes of livelihood are often life. We might have been ruined; and the reason was, I gather, that you had gone in for Pork. But after all ours was the real pork; pork that walked about on legs. We made the bed for the pig and filled the inside of the pig; you only bought and sold the name of the pig. You didn’t go to business with a live little pig under your arm or walk down Wall Street followed by a herd of swine. It was a phantom pig, the ghost of a pig, that was able to kill our real pig and perhaps us as well. Can you really justify the way in which your romance nearly ruined our romance? Don’t you think there must be something wrong somewhere?”

“Well,” said Oates after a very long silence, “that’s a mighty big question and will take a lot of discussing.”

But the end to which their discussion led must be left to reveal itself when the prostrate reader has recovered sufficient strength to support the story of The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green, which those who would endure to the end may read at some later date.

VI

THE UNTHINKABLE THEORY OF PROFESSOR GREEN

VI

THE UNTHINKABLE THEORY OF PROFESSOR GREEN

If the present passage in the chronicles of the Long Bow seems but a side issue, an interlude and an idyll, a mere romantic episode lacking that larger structural achievement which gives solidity and hard actuality to the other stories, the reader is requested not to be hasty in his condemnation; for in the little love story of Mr. Oliver Green is to be found, as in a parable, the beginning of the final apotheosis and last judgment of all these things.

It may well begin on a morning when the sunlight came late but brilliant, under the lifting of great clouds from a great grey sweep of wolds that grew purple as they dipped again into distance. Much of that mighty slope was striped and scored with ploughed fields, but a rude path ran across it, along which two figures could be seen in full stride outlined against the morning sky.

They were both tall; but beyond the fact that they had both once been professional soldiers, of rather different types and times, they had very little in common. By their ages they might almost have been father and son; and this would not have been contradicted by the fact that the younger appeared to be talking all the time, in a high, confident and almost crowing voice, while the elder only now and then put in a word. But they were not father and son; strangely enough they were really talking and walking together because they were friends. Those who know only too well their proceedings as narrated elsewhere would have recognized Colonel Crane, once of the Coldstream Guards, and Captain Pierce, late of the Flying Corps.

The young man appeared to be talking triumphantly about a great American capitalist whom he professed to have persuaded to see the error of his ways. He talked rather as if he had been slumming.

“I’m very proud of it, I can tell you,” he said. “Anybody can produce a penitent murderer. It’s something to produce a penitent millionaire. And I do believe that poor Enoch Oates has seen the light (thanks to my conversations at lunch); since I talked to him, Oates is another and a better man.”

“Sown his wild oats, in fact,” remarked Crane.

“Well,” replied the other. “In a sense they were very quiet oats. Almost what you might call Quaker Oats. He was a Puritan and a Prohibitionist and a Pacifist and an Internationalist; in short, everything that is in darkness and the shadow of death. But what you said about him was quite right. His heart’s in the right place. It’s on his sleeve. That’s why I preached the gospel to the noble savage and made him a convert.”

“But what did you convert him to?” inquired the other.

“Private property,” replied Pierce promptly. “Being a millionaire he had never heard of it. But when I explained the first elementary idea of it in a simple form, he was quite taken with the notion. I pointed out that he might abandon robbery on a large scale and create property on a small scale. He felt it was very revolutionary, but he admitted it was right. Well, you know he’d bought this big English estate out here. He was going to play the philanthropist, and have a model estate with all the regular trimmings; heads hygienically shaved by machinery every morning; and the cottagers admitted once a month into their own front gardens and told to keep off the grass. But I said to him: ‘If you’re going to give things to people, why not give ’em? If you give your friend a plant in a pot, you don’t send him an inspector from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vegetables to see he waters it properly. If you give your friend a box of cigars, you don’t make him write a monthly report of how many he smokes a day. Can’t you be a little generous with your generosity? Why don’t you use your money to make free men instead of to make slaves? Why don’t you give your tenants their land and have done with it, or let ’em have it very cheap?’ And he’s done it; he’s really done it. He’s created hundreds of small proprietors, and changed the whole of this countryside. That’s why I want you to come up and see one of the small farms.”

“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 Crane 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. Think’s 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 folklore 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 protégés 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 lodging 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 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 being; 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 such object 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!”