Part 11

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 on 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 wondered 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.

“I have been thinking a good deal,” Hilary Pierce was saying, “about that astronomical fellow who is going to lecture in Bath to-night. It seemed to me somehow that he was a kindred spirit and that sooner or later we were bound to get mixed up with him--or he was bound to get mixed up with us. I don’t say it’s always very comfortable to get mixed up with us. I feel in my bones that there is going to be a big row soon. I feel as if I’d consulted an astrologer; as if Green were the Merlin of our Round Table. Anyhow, the astrologer has an interesting astronomical theory.”

“Why?” inquired Wilding White with some surprise. “What have you got to do with his theory?”

“Because,” answered the young man, “I understand his astronomical theory a good deal better than he thinks I do. And, let me tell you, his astronomical theory is an astronomical allegory.”

“An allegory?” repeated Crane. “What of?”

“An allegory of us,” said Pierce; “and, as with many an allegory, we’ve acted it without knowing it. I realized something about our history, when he was talking, that I don’t think I’d ever thought of before.”

“What in the world are you talking about?” demanded the Colonel.

“His theory,” said Pierce in a meditative manner, “has got something to do with moving objects being really stationary, and stationary objects being really moving. Well, you always talk of me as if I were a moving object.”

“Heartbreaking object sometimes,” assented the Colonel with cordial encouragement.

“I mean,” continued Pierce calmly, “that you talk of me as if I were always motoring too fast or flying too far. And what you say of me is pretty much what most people say of you. Most sane people think we all go a jolly lot too far. They think we’re a lot of lunatics out-running the constable or looping the loop, and always up to some new nonsense. But when you come to think of it, it’s we who always stay where we are, and the rest of the world that’s always moving and shifting and changing.”

“Yes,” said Owen Hood; “I begin to have some dim idea of what you are talking about.”

“In all our little adventures,” went on the other, “we have all of us taken up some definite position and stuck to it, however difficult it might be; that was the whole fun of it. But our critics did not stick to their own position--not even to their own conventional or conservative position. In each one of the stories it was they who were fickle, and we who were fixed. When the Colonel said he would eat his hat, he did it; when he found it meant wearing a preposterous hat, he wore it. But his neighbours didn’t even stick to their own conviction that the hat was preposterous. Fashion is too fluctuating and sensitive a thing; and before the end, half of them were wondering whether they oughtn’t to have hats of the same sort. In that affair of the Thames factory, Hood admired the old landscape and Hunter admired the old landlords. But Hunter didn’t go on admiring the old landlords; he deserted to the new landlords as soon as they got the land. His conservatism was too snobbish to conserve anything. I wanted to import pigs, and I went on importing pigs, though my methods of smuggling might land me to a mad-house. But Enoch Oates, the millionaire, didn’t go on importing pork; he went off at once on some new stunt, first on the booming of his purses, and afterwards on the admirable stunt of starting English farms. The business mind isn’t steadfast; even when it can be turned the right way, it’s too easy to turn. And everything has been like that, down to the little botheration about the elephant. The police began to prosecute Mr. White, but they soon dropped it when Hood showed them that he had some backing. Don’t you see that’s the moral of the whole thing? The modern world is materialistic, but it isn’t solid. It isn’t hard or stern or ruthless in pursuit of its purpose, or all the things that the newspapers and novels say it is; and sometimes actually praise it for being. Materialism isn’t like stone; it’s like mud, and liquid mud at that.”

“There’s something in what you say,” said Owen Hood, “and I should be inclined to add something to it. On a rough reckoning of the chances in modern England, I should say the situation is something like this. In that dubious and wavering atmosphere it is very unlikely there would ever be a revolution, or any very vital reform. But if there were, I believe on my soul that it might be successful. I believe everything else would be too weak and wobbly to stand up against it.”

“I suppose that means,” said the Colonel, “that you’re going to do something silly.”

“Silliest thing I can think of,” replied Pierce cheerfully. “I’m going to an astronomical lecture.”

The degree of silliness involved in the experiment can be most compactly and clearly stated in the newspaper report, at which the friends of the experimentalists found themselves gazing with more than their usual bewilderment on the following morning. The Colonel, sitting at his club with his favourite daily paper spread out before him, was regarding with a grave wonder a paragraph that began with the following head-lines:

“AMAZING SCENE AT SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS

“LECTURER GOES MAD AND ESCAPES

“A scene equally distressing and astonishing took place at the third meeting of the Astronomical Society now holding its congress at Bath. Professor Oliver Green, one of the most promising of the younger astronomers, was set down in the syllabus to deliver a lecture on ‘Relativity in Relation to Planetary Motion.’ About an hour before the lecture, however, the authorities received a telegram from Professor Green, altering the subject of his address on the ground that he had just discovered a new star, and wished immediately to communicate his discovery to the scientific world. Great excitement and keen anticipation prevailed at the meeting, but these feelings changed to bewilderment as the lecture proceeded. The lecturer announced without hesitation the existence of a new planet attached to one of the fixed stars, but proceeded to describe its geological formation and other features with a fantastic exactitude beyond anything yet obtained by way of the spectrum or the telescope. He was understood to say that it produced life in an extravagant form, in towering objects which constantly doubled or divided themselves until they ended in flat filaments, or tongues of a bright green colour. He was proceeding to give a still more improbable description of a more mobile but equally monstrous form of life, resting on four trunks or columns which swung in rotation, and terminating in some curious curved appendages, when a young man in the front row, whose demeanour had shown an increasing levity, called out abruptly: ‘Why, that’s a cow!’ To this the professor, abandoning abruptly all pretence of scientific dignity, replied by shouting in a voice like thunder: ‘Yes, of course it’s a cow; and you fellows would never have noticed a cow, even if she jumped over the moon!’ The unfortunate professor then began to rave in the most incoherent manner, throwing his arms about and shouting aloud that he and his fellow-scientists were all a pack of noodles who had never looked at the world they were walking on, which contained the most miraculous things. But the latter part of his remarks, which appeared to be an entirely irrelevant outburst in praise of the beauty of Woman, were interrupted by the Chairman and the officials of the Congress, who called for medical and constabulary interference. No less a person than Sir Horace Hunter, who, although best known as a psycho-physiologist, has taken all knowledge for his province and was present to show his interest in astronomical progress, was able to certify on the spot that the unfortunate Green was clearly suffering from dementia, which was immediately corroborated by a local doctor, so that the unhappy man might be removed without further scandal.

“At this point, however, a still more extraordinary development took place. The young man in the front row, who had several times interrupted the proceedings with irrelevant remarks, sprang to his feet, and loudly declaring that Professor Green was the only sane man in the Congress, rushed at the group surrounding him, violently hurled Sir Horace Hunter from the platform, and with the assistance of a friend and fellow-rioter, managed to recapture the lunatic from the doctors and the police, and carry him outside the building. Those pursuing the fugitives found themselves at first confronted with a new mystery, in the form of their complete disappearance. It has since been discovered that they actually escaped by aeroplane; the young man, whose name is said to be Pierce, being a well-known aviator formerly connected with the Flying Corps. The other young man, who assisted him and acted as pilot, has not yet been identified.”

Night closed and the stars stood out over Dale’s Farm; and the telescope pointed at the stars in vain. Its giant lenses had vainly mirrored the moon of which its owner had spoken in so vain a fashion; but its owner did not return. Miss Dale was rather unaccountably troubled by his absence, and mentioned it once or twice; after all, as her family said, it was very natural that he should go to an hotel in Bath for the night, especially if the revels of roystering astronomers were long and late. “It’s no affair of ours,” said the farmer’s wife cheerfully. “He is not a child.” But the farmer’s daughter was not quite so sure on the point.

* * * * *

Next morning she rose even earlier than usual and went about her ordinary tasks, which by some accident or other seemed to look more ordinary than usual. In the blank morning hours, it was perhaps natural that her mind should go back to the previous afternoon, when the conduct of the astronomer could by no means be dismissed as ordinary.

“It’s all very well to say he’s not a child,” she said to herself. “I wish I were as certain he’s not an idiot. If he goes to an hotel, they’ll cheat him.”

The more angular and prosaic her own surroundings seemed in the daylight, the more doubt she felt about the probable fate of the moonstruck gentleman who looked at a blue moon through his blue spectacles. She wondered whether his family or his friends were generally responsible for his movements; for really he must be a little dotty. She had never heard him talk about his family; and she remembered a good many things he had talked about. She had never even seen him talking to a friend, except once to Captain Pierce, when they talked about astronomy. But the name of Captain Pierce linked itself up rapidly with other and more relevant suggestions. Captain Pierce lived at the Blue Boar on the other side of the down, having been married a year or two before to the daughter of the innkeeper, who was an old friend of the daughter of the farmer. They had been to the same school in the neighbouring provincial town, and had once been, as the phrase goes, inseparable. Perhaps friends ought to pass through the phase in which they are inseparable to reach the phase in which they can safely be separated.

“Joan might know something about it,” she said to herself. “At least her husband might know.”

She turned back into the kitchen and began to rout things out for breakfast; when she had done everything she could think of doing for a family that had not yet put in an appearance, she went out again into the garden and found herself at the same gate, staring at the steep wooded hill that lay between the farm and the valley of the Blue Boar. She thought of harnessing the pony; and then went walking rather restlessly along the road over the hill.

On the map it was only a few miles to the Blue Boar; and she was easily capable of walking ten times the distance. But maps, like many other scientific documents, are very inaccurate. The ridge that ran between the two valleys was, relatively to that rolling plain, as definite as a range of mountains. The path through the dark wood that lay just beyond the farm began like a lane and then seemed to go up like a ladder. By the time she had scaled it, under its continuous canopy of low spreading trees, she had the sensation of having walked for a long time. And when the ascent ended with a gap in the trees and a blank space of sky, she looked over the edge like one looking into another world.

* * * * *

Mr. Enoch Oates, in his more expansive moments, had been known to allude to what he called God’s Great Prairies. Mr. Rosenbaum Low, having come to London from, or through, Johannesburg, often referred in his imperialistic speeches to the “illimitable veldt.” But neither the American prairie nor the African veldt really looks any larger, or could look any larger, than a wide English vale seen from a low English hill. Nothing can be more distant than the distance; the horizon or the line drawn by heaven across the vision of man. Nothing is so illimitable as that limit. Within our narrow island there is a whole series of such infinities; as if the island itself could contain seven seas. As she looked out over that new landscape, the soul seemed to be slaked and satisfied with immensity and, by a paradox, to be filled at last with emptiness. All things seemed not only great but growing in greatness. She could fancy that the tall trees standing up in the sunlight grew taller while she looked at them. The sun was rising and it seemed as if the whole world rose with it. Even the dome of heaven seemed to be lifting slowly; as if the very sky were a skirt drawn up and disappearing into the altitudes of light.

The vast hollow below her was coloured as variously as a map in an atlas. Fields of grass or grain or red earth seemed so far away that they might have been the empires and kingdoms of a world newly created. But she could already see on the brow of a hill above the pine-woods the pale scar of the quarry and below it the glittering twist in the river where stood the inn of the Blue Boar. As she drew nearer and nearer to it she could see more and more clearly a green triangular field with tiny black dots, which were little black pigs; and another smaller dot, which was a child. Something like a wind behind her or within her, that had driven her over the hills, seemed to sweep all the long lines of that landslide of a landscape, so that they pointed to that spot.

As the path dropped to the level and she began to walk by farms and villages, the storm in her mind began to settle and she recovered the reasonable prudence with which she had pottered about her own farm. She even felt some responsibility and embarrassment about troubling her friend by coming on so vague an errand. But she told herself convincingly enough that after all she was justified. One would not normally be alarmed about a strayed lodger as if he were a lion escaped from a menagerie. But she had after all very good reason for regarding this lion as rather a fearful wildfowl. His way of talking had been so eccentric that everybody for miles round would have agreed, if they had heard him, that he had a tile loose. She was very glad they had not heard him; but their imaginary opinion fortified her own. They had a duty in common humanity; they could not let a poor gentleman of doubtful sanity disappear without further inquiry.

She entered the inn with a firm step and hailed her friend with something of that hearty cheerfulness that is so unpopular in the early riser. She was rather younger and by nature rather more exuberant than Joan; and Joan had already felt the drag and concentration of children. But Joan had not lost her rather steely sense of humour, and she heard the main facts of her friend’s difficulty with a vigilant smile.

“We should rather like to know what has happened,” said the visitor with vague carelessness. “If anything unpleasant had happened, people might even blame us, when we knew he was like that.”

“Like what?” asked Joan smiling.

“Why, a bit off, I suppose we must say,” answered the other. “The things he said to me about cows and trees and having found a new star were really----”

“Well, it’s rather lucky you came to me,” said Joan quietly. “For I don’t believe you’d have found anybody else on the face of the earth who knows exactly where he is now.”

“And where is he?”

“Well, he’s not on the face of the earth,” said Joan Hardy.

“You don’t mean he’s--dead?” asked the other in an unnatural voice.

“I mean he’s up in the air,” said Joan, “or, what is often much the same thing, he is with my husband. Hilary rescued him when they were just going to nab him, and carried him off in an aeroplane. He says they’d better hide in the clouds for a bit. You know the way he talks; of course, they do come down every now and then when it’s safe.”

“Escaped! Nabbed him! Safe!” ejaculated the other young woman with round eyes. “What in the world does it all mean?”

“Well,” replied her friend, “he seems to have said the same sort of things that he said to you to a whole roomful of scientific men at Bath. And, of course, the scientific men all said he was mad; I suppose that’s what scientific men are for. So they were just going to take him away to an asylum, when Hilary----”

The farmer’s daughter rose in a glory of rage that might have seemed to lift the roof, as the great sunrise had seemed to lift the sky.

“Take him away!” she cried. “How dare they talk about such things? How dare they say he is mad? It’s they who must be mad to say such stuff! Why, he’s got more brains in his boots than they have in all their silly old bald heads knocked together--and I’d like to knock ’em together! Why, they’d all smash like egg-shells, and he’s got a head like cast-iron. Don’t you know he’s beaten all the old duffers at their own business, of stars and things? I expect they’re all jealous; it’s just what I should have expected of them.”

The fact that she was entirely unacquainted with the names, and possibly the existence, of these natural philosophers did not arrest the vigorous word-painting with which she completed their portraits. “Nasty spiteful old men with whiskers,” she said, “all bunched together like so many spiders and weaving dirty cobwebs to catch their betters; of course, it’s all a conspiracy. Just because they’re all mad and hate anybody who’s quite sane.”

“So you think he’s quite sane?” asked her hostess gravely.

“Sane? What do you mean? Of course he’s quite sane,” retorted Margery Dale.

With a mountainous magnanimity Joan was silent. Then after a pause she said:

“Well, Hilary has taken his case in hand and your friend’s safe for the present; Hilary generally brings things off, however queer they sound. And I don’t mind telling you in confidence that he’s bringing that and a good many other things off, rather big things, just now. You can’t keep him from fighting whatever you do; and he seems to be out just now to fight everybody. So I shouldn’t wonder if you saw all your old gentleman’s heads knocked together after all. There are rather big preparations going on; that friend of his named Blair is for ever going and coming with his balloons and things; and I believe something will happen soon on a pretty large scale, perhaps all over England.”

“Will it?” asked Miss Dale in an absent-minded manner (for she was sadly deficient in civic and political sense). “Is that your Tommy out there?”

And they talked about the child and then about a hundred entirely trivial things; for they understood each other perfectly.

And if there are still things the reader fails to understand, if (as seems almost incredible) there are things that he wishes to understand, then it can only be at the heavy price of studying the story of the Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair; and with that, it is comforting to know, the story of all these things will be drawing near its explanation and its end.

VII

THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR

VII

THE UNPRECEDENTED ARCHITECTURE OF COMMANDER BLAIR

The Earl of Eden had become Prime Minister for the third time, and his face and figure were therefore familiar in the political cartoons and even in the public streets. His yellow hair and lean and springy figure gave him a factitious air of youth; but his face on a closer study looked lined and wrinkled and gave almost a shock of decrepitude. He was in truth a man of great experience and dexterity in his own profession. He had just succeeded in routing the Socialist Party and overthrowing the Socialist Government, largely by the use of certain rhymed mottoes and maxims which he had himself invented with considerable amusement. His great slogan of “Don’t Nationalize but Rationalize” was generally believed to have led him to victory. But at the moment when this story begins he had other things to think of. He had just received an urgent request for a consultation from three of his most prominent supporters--Lord Normantowers, Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., the great advocate of scientific politics, and Mr. R. Low, the philanthropist. They were confronted with a problem, and their problem concerned the sudden madness of an American millionaire.