Part 5

“Fellow-citizens, we meet upon the shore of the Thames, the Thames which is to Englishmen all that the Tiber ever was to Romans. We meet in a valley which has been almost as much the haunt of English poets as of English birds. Never was there an art so native to our island as our old national tradition of landscape-painting in water-colour; never was that water-colour so luminous or so delicate as when dedicated to these holy waters. It was in such a scene that one of the most exquisite of our elder poets repeated as a burden to his meditations the single line, ‘Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.’

“Rumours have been heard of some intention to trouble these waters; but we have been amply reassured. Names that now stand as high as those of our national poets and painters are a warrant that the stream is still as clear and pure and beneficent as of old. We all know the beautiful work that Mr. Bulton has done in the matter of filters. Dr. Hunter supports Mr. Bulton. I mean Mr. Bulton supports Dr. Hunter. I may also mention no less a man than Mr. Low. Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.

“But, then, for that matter, we all support Dr. Hunter. I myself have always found him quite supportable; I should say quite satisfactory. He is truly a progressive, and nothing gives me greater pleasure than to watch him progress. As somebody said, I lie awake at night; and in the silence of the whole universe, I seem to hear him climbing, climbing, climbing. All the numerous patients among whom he has laboured so successfully in this locality will join in a heartfelt expression of joy if he passes to the higher world of Westminster. I trust I shall not be misunderstood. Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.

“My only purpose to-night is to express that unanimity. There may have been times when I differed from Dr. Hunter; but I am glad to say that all that is passed, and I have now nothing but the most friendly feelings towards him, for reasons which I will not mention, though I have plenty to say. In token of this reconciliation I here solemnly cast from me this torch. As that firebrand is quenched in the cool crystal waters of that sacred stream, so shall all such feuds perish in the healing pool of universal peace.”

Before anybody knew what he was doing, he had whirled his flambeau in a flaming wheel round his head and sent it flying like a meteor out into the dim eddies of the river.

The next moment a short, sharp cry was uttered, and every face in that crowd was staring at the river. All the faces were visibly staring, for they were all lit up as by a ghastly firelight by a wide wan unnatural flame that leapt up from the very surface of the stream; a flame that the crowd watched as it might have watched a comet.

“There,” cried Owen Hood, turning suddenly on the girl and seizing her arm, as if demanding congratulations. “So much for old Crane’s prophecy!”

“Who in the world is Old Crane?” she asked, “and what did he prophesy? Is he something like Old Moore?”

“Only an old friend,” said Hood hastily, “only an old friend of mine. It’s what he said that’s so important. He didn’t like my moping about with books and a fishing-rod, and he said, standing on that very island, ‘You may know a lot; but I don’t think you’ll ever set the Thames on fire. I’ll eat my hat if you do.’”

But the story of how old Crane ate his hat is one upon which some readers at least can now look back as on labour and suffering bravely endured. And if it be possible for any of them to desire to know any more either about Mr. Crane or Mr. Hood, then must they gird themselves for the ordeal of reading the story of The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce, and their trials are for a time deferred.

III

THE UNOBTRUSIVE TRAFFIC OF CAPTAIN PIERCE

III

THE UNOBTRUSIVE TRAFFIC OF CAPTAIN PIERCE

Those acquainted with Colonel Crane and Mr. Owen Hood, the lawyer, may or may not be concerned to know that they partook of an early lunch of eggs and bacon and beer at the inn called the Blue Boar, which stands at the turn of a steep road scaling a wooded ridge in the West Country. Those unacquainted with them may be content to know that the Colonel was a sunburnt, neatly-dressed gentleman, who looked taciturn and was; while the lawyer was a more rusty red-haired gentleman with a long Napoleonic face, who looked taciturn and was rather talkative. Crane was fond of good cooking; and the cooking in that secluded inn was better than that of a Soho restaurant and immeasurably better than that of a fashionable restaurant. Hood was fond of the legends and less-known aspects of the English countryside; and that valley had a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment, as if the west wind had been snared in it and tamed into a summer air. Both had a healthy admiration for beauty, in ladies as well as landscapes; although (or more probably because) both were quite romantically attached to the wives they had married under rather romantic circumstances, which are related elsewhere for such as can wrestle with so steep a narrative. And the girl who waited on them, the daughter of the innkeeper, was herself a very agreeable thing to look at; she was of a slim and quiet sort with a head that moved like a brown bird, brightly and as it were unexpectedly. Her manners were full of unconscious dignity, for her father, old John Hardy, was the type of old innkeeper who had the status, if not of a gentleman, at least of a yeoman. He was not without education and ability; a grizzled man with a keen, stubborn face that might have belonged to Cobbett, whose _Register_ he still read on winters’ nights. Hardy was well known to Hood, who had the same sort of antiquarian taste in revolutions.

There was little sound in the valley or the brilliant void of sky; the notes of birds fell only intermittently; a faint sound of tapping came from the hills opposite where the wooded slope was broken here and there by the bare face of a quarry, and a distant aeroplane passed and re-passed, leaving a trail of faint thunder. The two men at lunch took no more notice of it than if it had been a buzzing fly; but an attentive study of the girl might have suggested that she was at least conscious of the fly. Occasionally she looked at it, when no one was looking at her; for the rest, she had rather a marked appearance of not looking at it.

“Good bacon you get here,” remarked Colonel Crane.

“The best in England, and in the matter of breakfast England is the Earthly Paradise,” replied Hood readily. “I can’t think why we should descend to boast of the British Empire when we have bacon and eggs to boast of. They ought to be quartered on the Royal Arms: three pigs passant and three poached eggs on a chevron. It was bacon and eggs that gave all that morning glory to the great English poets; it must have been a man who had a breakfast like this who could rise with that giant gesture: ‘Night’s candles are burnt out; and jocund day----’”

“Bacon did write Shakespeare, in fact,” said the Colonel.

“This sort of bacon did,” answered the other laughing; then, noticing the girl within earshot, he added: “We are saying how good your bacon is, Miss Hardy.”

“It is supposed to be very good,” she said with legitimate pride, “but I am afraid you won’t get much more of it. People aren’t going to be allowed to keep pigs much longer.”

“Not allowed to keep pigs!” ejaculated the Colonel in astonishment.

“By the old regulations they had to be away from the house, and we’ve got ground enough for that, though most of the cottagers hadn’t. But now they say the law is evaded, and the county council are going to stop pig-keeping altogether.”

“Silly swine,” snorted the Colonel.

“The epithet is ill-chosen,” replied Hood. “Men are lower than swine when they do not appreciate swine. But really I don’t know what the world’s coming to. What will the next generation be like without proper pork? And, talking about the next generation, what has become of your young friend Pierce? He said he was coming down, but he can’t have come by that train.”

“I think Captain Pierce is up there, sir,” said Joan Hardy in a correct voice, as she unobtrusively withdrew.

Her tone might have indicated that the gentleman was upstairs, but her momentary glance had been towards the blue emptiness of the sky. Long after she was gone, Owen Hood remained staring up into it, until he saw the aeroplane darting and wheeling like a swallow.

“Is that Hilary Pierce up there?” he inquired, “looping the loop and playing the lunatic generally. What the devil is he doing?”

“Showing off,” said the Colonel shortly, and drained his pewter mug.

“But why should he show off to us?” asked Hood.

“He jolly well wouldn’t,” replied the Colonel. “Showing off to the girl, of course.” Then after a pause he added: “A very nice girl.”

“A very good girl,” said Owen Hood gravely. “If there’s anything going on, you may be sure it’s all straight and serious.”

The Colonel blinked a little. “Well, times change,” he said. “I suppose I’m old-fashioned myself; but speaking as an old Tory, I must confess he might do worse.”

“Yes,” replied Hood, “and speaking as an old Radical, I should say he could hardly do better.”

While they were speaking the erratic aviator had eventually swept earthwards towards a flat field at the foot of the slope, and was now coming towards them. Hilary Pierce had rather the look of a poet than a professional aviator; and though he had distinguished himself in the war, he was very probably one of those whose natural dream was rather of conquering the air than conquering the enemy. His yellow hair was longer and more untidy than when he was in the army; and there was a touch of something irresponsible in his roving blue eye. He had a vein of pugnacity in him, however, as was soon apparent. He had paused to speak to Joan Hardy by the rather tumble-down pig-sty in the corner, and when he came towards the breakfast-table he seemed transfigured as with flame.

“What’s all this infernal insane foolery?” he demanded. “Who has the damned impudence to tell the Hardys they mustn’t keep pigs? Look here, the time is come when we must burst up all this sort of thing. I’m going to do something desperate.”

“You’ve been doing desperate things enough for this morning,” said Hood. “I advise you to take a little desperate luncheon. Do sit down, there’s a good fellow, and don’t stamp about like that.”

“No, but look here----”

Pierce was interrupted by Joan Hardy, who appeared quietly at his elbow and said demurely to the company: “There’s a gentleman here who asks if he may be pardoned for speaking to you.”

The gentleman in question stood some little way behind in a posture that was polite but so stiff and motionless as almost to affect the nerves. He was clad in so complete and correct a version of English light holiday attire that they felt quite certain he was a foreigner. But their imaginations ranged the Continent in vain in the attempt to imagine what sort of foreigner. By the immobility of his almost moonlike face, with its faintly bilious tinge, he might almost have been a Chinaman. But when he spoke, they could instantly locate the alien accent.

“Very much distressed to butt in, gentlemen,” he said, “but this young lady allows you are first-class academic authorities on the sights of this locality. I’ve been mouching around trying to hit the trail of an antiquity or two, but I don’t seem to know the way to pick it up. If you’d be so kind as to put me wise about the principal architectural styles and historic items of this section, I’d be under a great obligation.”

As they were a little slow in recovering from their first surprise, he added patiently:

“My name is Enoch B. Oates, and I’m pretty well known in Michigan, but I’ve bought a little place near here; I’ve looked about this little planet and I’ve come to think the safest and brightest place for a man with a few dollars is the place of a squire in your fine old feudal landscape. So the sooner I’m introduced to the more mellow mediæval buildings the better.”

In Hilary Pierce the astonishment had given place to an ardour bordering on ecstasy.

“Mediæval buildings! Architectural styles!” he cried enthusiastically. “You’ve come to the right shop, Mr. Oates. I’ll show you an ancient building, a sacred building, in an architectural style of such sublime antiquity that you’ll want to cart it all away to Michigan, as they tried to do with Glastonbury Abbey. You shall be privileged to see one historic institution before you die or before all history is forgotten.”

He was walking towards the corner of the little kitchen-garden attached to the inn, waving his arms with wild gestures of encouragement; and the American was following him with the same stiff politeness, looking weirdly like an automaton.

“Look on our architectural style before it perishes,” cried Pierce dramatically, pointing to the pig-sty, which looked a rather ramshackle affair of leaning and broken boards hung loosely together, though in practice it was practical enough. “This, the most unmistakably mellow of all mediæval buildings, may soon be only a memory. But when this edifice falls England will fall, and the world will shake with the shock of doom.”

The American had what he himself might have described as a poker face; it was impossible to discover whether his utterances indicated the extreme of innocence or of irony.

“And would you say,” he asked, “that this monument exemplifies the mediæval or Gothic architectural school?”

“I should hardly call it strictly Perpendicular,” answered Pierce, “but there is no doubt that it is Early English.”

“You would say it is antique, anyhow?” observed Mr. Oates.

“I have every reason to believe,” affirmed Pierce solemnly, “that Gurth the Swineherd made use of this identical building. I have no doubt it is in fact far older. The best authorities believe that the Prodigal Son stayed here for some time, and the pigs--those noble and much maligned animals--gave him such excellent advice that he returned to his family. And now, Mr. Oates, they say that all that magnificent heritage is to be swept away. But it shall not be. We shall not so easily submit to all the vandals and vulgar tyrants who would thus tear down our temples and our holy places. The pig-sty shall rise again in a magnificent resurrection--larger pig-stys, loftier pig-stys, shall yet cover the land; the towers and domes and spires of statelier and more ideal pig-stys, in the most striking architectural styles, shall again declare the victory of the holy hog over his unholy oppressors.”

“And meanwhile,” said Colonel Crane drily, “I think Mr. Oates had much better begin with the church down by the river. Very fine Norman foundations and traces of the Roman brick. The vicar understands his church, too, and would give Mr. Oates rather more reliable information than you do.”

A little while later, when Mr. Oates had passed on his way, the Colonel curtly reproved his young friend.

“Bad form,” he said, “making fun of a foreigner asking for information.”

But Pierce turned on him with the same heat on his face.

“But I wasn’t making fun. I was quite serious.”

They stared at him steadily, and he laughed slightly but went on with undiminished fire.

“Symbolical perhaps but serious,” he said. “I may seem to have been talking a bit wildly, but let me tell you the time has come to be wild. We’ve all been a lot too tame. I do mean, as much as I ever meant anything, to fight for the resurrection and the return of the pig; and he shall yet return as a wild boar that will rend the hunters.”

He looked up and his eye caught the blue heraldic shape on the sign-board of the inn.

“And there is our wooden ensign!” he cried, pointing in the same dramatic fashion. “We will go into battle under the banner of the Blue Boar.”

“Loud and prolonged cheers,” said Crane politely, “and now come away and don’t spoil the peroration. Owen wants to potter about the local antiquities, like Mr. Oates. I’m more interested in novelties. Want to look at that machine of yours.”

They began to descend the zig-zag pebbled path fenced and embanked with hedges and flower-beds like a garden grown on a staircase, and at every corner Hood had to remonstrate with the loitering youth.

“Don’t be for ever gazing back on the paradise of pigs,” he said, “or you’ll be turned to a pillar of salt, or possibly of mustard as more appropriate to such meat. They won’t run away yet. There are other creatures formed by the Creator for the contemplation of man; there are other things made by man after the pattern of the creatures, from the great White Horses of Wessex to that great white bird on which you yourself flew among the birds. Fine subject for a poem of the first and last things.”

“Bird that lays rather dreadful eggs,” said Crane. “In the next war---- Why, where the deuce has he gone?”

“Pigs, pigs,” said Hood sadly. “The overpowering charm which pigs exercise upon us at a certain time of life; when we hear their trotters in our dreams and their little curly tails twine about us like the tendrils of the vine----”

“Oh, bosh,” said the Colonel.

For indeed Mr. Hilary Pierce had vanished in a somewhat startling manner, ducking under the corner of a hedge and darting up a steeper path, over a gate and across the corner of a hayfield, where a final bound through bursting bushes brought him on top of a low wall looking down at the pig-sty and Miss Joan Hardy, who was calmly walking away from it. He sprang down on to the path; the morning sun picked out everything in clear colours like a child’s toy-book; and standing with his hands spread out and his wisps of yellow hair brushed in all directions by the bushes, he recalled an undignified memory of Shock-Headed Peter.

“I felt I must speak to you before I went,” he said. “I’m going away, not exactly on active service, but on business--on very active business. I feel like the fellows did when they went to the war ... and what they wanted to do first.... I am aware that a proposal over a pig-sty is not so symbolical to some as to me, but really and truly ... I don’t know whether I mentioned it, but you may be aware that I worship you.”

Joan Hardy was quite aware of it; but the conventionalities in her case were like concentric castle-walls; the world-old conventions of the countryside. There was in them the stiff beauty of old country dances and the slow and delicate needlework of a peasantry. Of all the ladies whose figures must be faintly traced in the tapestry of these frivolous tales of chivalry, the most reticent and dignified was the one who was not in the worldly sense a lady at all.

She stood looking at him in silence, and he at her; as the lift of her head had some general suggestion of a bird, the line of her profile had a delicate suggestion of a falcon, and her face was of the fine tint that has no name, unless we could talk of a bright brown.

“Really, you seem in a terrible hurry,” she said. “I don’t want to be talked to in a rush like this.”

“I apologize,” he said. “I can’t help being in a rush, but I didn’t want you to be in a rush. I only wanted you to know. I haven’t done anything to deserve you, but I am going to try. I’m going off to work; I feel sure you believe in quiet steady work for a young man.”

“Are you going into the bank?” she asked innocently. “You said your uncle was in a bank.”

“I hope all my conversation was not on that level,” he replied. And indeed he would have been surprised if he had known how exactly she remembered all such dull details he had ever mentioned about himself, and how little she knew in comparison about his theories and fancies, which he thought so much more important.

“Well,” he said with engaging frankness, “it would be an exaggeration to say I am going into a bank; though of course there are banks and banks. Why, I know a bank whereon the wild thyme--I beg your pardon, I mean I know a lot of more rural and romantic occupations that are really quite as safe as the bank. The truth is, I think of going into the bacon trade. I think I see an opening for a brisk young man in the ham and pork business. When you see me next I shall be travelling in pork; an impenetrable disguise.”

“You mustn’t come here, then,” she answered. “It won’t be allowed here by that time. The neighbours would----”

“Fear not,” he said, “I should be a commercial traveller. Oh, such a very commercial traveller. And as for not coming here, the thing seems quite unthinkable. You must at least let me write to you every hour or so. You must let me send you a few presents every morning.”

“I’m sure my father wouldn’t like you to send me presents,” she said gravely.

“Ask your father to wait,” said Pierce earnestly. “Ask him to wait till he’s seen the presents. You see, mine will be rather curious presents. I don’t think he’ll disapprove of them. I think he’ll approve of them. I think he’ll congratulate me on my simple tastes and sound business principles. The truth is, dear Joan, I’ve committed myself to a rather important enterprise. You needn’t be frightened; I promise I won’t trouble you again till it succeeds. I will be content that you know it is for you I do it; and shall continue to do it, if I defy the world.” He sprang up on the wall again and stood there staring down at her almost indignantly.

“That anybody should forbid _you_ to keep pigs,” he cried. “That anybody should forbid _you_ to do anything. That anybody should dispute _your_ right to keep pet crocodiles if you like! That is the unpardonable sin; that is the supreme blasphemy and crime against the nature of things, which shall not go unavenged. You shall have pigs, I say, if the skies fall and the whole world is whelmed in war.”

He disappeared like a flash behind the high bank and the wall, and Joan went back in silence to the inn.

The first incident of the war did not seem superficially encouraging, though the hero of it seemed by no means discouraged by it. As reported in the police news of various papers, Hilary Patrick Pierce, formerly of the Flying Corps, was arrested for driving pigs into the county of Bluntshire, in contravention of the regulations made for the public health. He seemed to have had almost as much trouble with the pigs as with the police; but he made a witty and eloquent speech on being arrested, to which the police and the pigs appeared to be equally unresponsive. The incident was considered trivial and his punishment was trifling; but the occasion was valued by some of the authorities as giving an opportunity for the final elucidation and establishment of the new rule.

For this purpose it was fortunate that the principal magistrate of the bench was no less a person than the celebrated hygienist, Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., M.D., who had begun life, as some may remember, as a successful suburban doctor and had likewise distinguished himself as an officer of health in the Thames Valley. To him indeed had been largely due the logical extension of the existing precautions against infection from the pig; though he was fully supported by his fellow magistrates, one being Mr. Rosenbaum Low, millionaire and formerly manager of Bliss and Co., and the other the young Socialist, Mr. Amyas Minns, famous for his exposition of Shaw on the Simple Life, who sat on the bench as a Labour alderman. All concurred in the argument of Sir Horace, that just as all the difficulties and doubtful cases raised by the practice of moderate drinking had been simplified by the solution of Prohibition, so the various quarrels and evasions about swine-fever were best met by a straightforward and simple regulation against swine. In the very improper remarks which he offered after the trial, the prisoner appears to have said that as his three judges were a Jew, a vegetarian and a quack doctor on the make, he was not surprised that they did not appreciate pork.