Chapter V: Part 5

“When they put that up to me I saw it was the proposition,” Mr. Oates was saying. “I saw I’d got on to something better than my old regulation turnover of eighty-five thousand dollars on each branch. I reckoned I should save a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in the long run by scrapping the old plant, even if I had to drop another thirty thousand dollars on new works, where I’d get the raw material for a red cent. I saw right away that was the point to freeze on to; that I just got a chance to sell something I didn’t need to buy; something that could be sort of given away like old match-ends. I figured out it would be better by a long chalk to let the other guys rear the stock and sell me their refuse for next to nix, so I could get ahead with turning it into the goods. So I started in right away and got there at the first go-off with an increase of seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars.”

“Seven hundred and fifty-one thousand dollars,” murmured Owen Hood. “How soothing it all seems.”

“I reckon those mutts didn’t get on to what they were selling me,” continued Mr. Oates, “or didn’t have the pep to use it that way themselves; for though it was the sure-enough hot tip, it isn’t everybody would have thought of it. When I was in pork, of course, I wanted the other guys out; but just now I wasn’t putting anything on pork, but only on just that part of a pig I wanted and they didn’t want. By notifying all your pig farmers I was able to import nine hundred and twenty-five thousand pigs’ ears this fall, and I guess I can get consignments all winter.”

Hood had some little legal experience with long-winded commercial witnesses, and he was listening by this time with a cocked eyebrow and an attention much sharper than the dreamy ecstasy with which the poetic Pierce was listening to the millionaire’s monologue, as if to the wordless music of some ever-murmuring brook.

“Excuse me,” said Hood earnestly, “but did I understand you to say pigs’ ears?”

“That is so, Mr. Hood,” said the American with great patience and politeness. “I don’t know whether I gave you a sufficiently detailed description for you to catch on to the proposition, but----”

“Well,” murmured Pierce wistfully, “it sounded to me like a detailed description.”

“Pardon me,” said Hood, checking him with a frown. “I really want to understand this proposition of Mr. Oates. Do I understand that you bought pigs’ ears cheap, when the pigs were cut up for other purposes, and that you thought you could use them for some purpose of your own?”

“Sure!” said Mr. Enoch Oates, nodding. “And my purpose was about the biggest thing in fancy goods ever done in the States. In the publicity line there’s nothing like saying you can do what folks say can’t be done. Flying in the face of proverbs instead of providence, I reckon. It catches on at once. We got to work, and got out the first advertisement in no time; just a blank space with: ‘We Can Do It’ in the middle. Got folks wondering for a week what it was.”

“I hope, sir,” said Pierce in a low voice, “that you will not carry sound commercial principles so far as to keep us wondering for a week what it was.”

“Well,” said Oates, “we found we could subject the pigskin and bristles to a new gelat’nous process for making artificial silk, and we figured that publicity would do the rest. We came out with the second set of posters: ‘She Wants it Now.’... ‘The Most Wonderful Woman on Earth is waiting by the Old Fireside, hoping you’ll bring her home a Pig’s Whisper Purse.’”

“A purse!” gasped Hilary.

“I see you’re on the notion,” proceeded the unmoved American. “We called ’em Pig’s Whisper Purses after the smartest and most popular poster we ever had: ‘There was a Lady Loved a Swine.’ You know the nursery rhyme, I guess; featured a slap-up princess whispering in a pig’s ear. I tell you there isn’t a smart woman in the States now that can do without one of our pig-silk purses, and all because it upsets the proverb. Why, see here----”

Hilary Pierce had sprung wildly to his feet with a sort of stagger and clutched at the American’s arm.

“Found! Found!” he cried hysterically. “Oh, sir, I implore you to take the chair! Do, do take the chair!”

“Take the chair!” repeated the astonished millionaire, who was already almost struggling in his grasp. “Really, gentlemen, I hadn’t supposed the proceedings were so formal as to require a chairman, but in any case----”

It could hardly be said, however, that the proceedings were formal. Mr. Hilary Pierce had the appearance of forcibly dragging Mr. Enoch Oates in the direction of the large padded arm-chair, that had always stood empty at the top of the club table, uttering cries which, though incoherent, appeared to be partly apologetic.

“No offence,” he gasped. “Hope no misunderstanding ... _Honoris causa_ ... you, you alone are worthy of that seat ... the club has found its king and justified its title at last.”

Here the Colonel intervened and restored order. Mr. Oates departed in peace; but Mr. Hilary Pierce was still simmering.

“And that is the end of our quiet, ordinary business man,” he cried. “Such is the behaviour of our monochrome and unobtrusive background.” His voice rose to a sort of wail. “And we thought we were dotty! We deluded ourselves with the hope that we were pretty well off our chump! Lord have mercy on us! American big business rises to a raving idiocy compared with which we are as sane as the beasts of the field. The modern commercial world is far madder than anything we can do to satirize it.”

“Well,” said the Colonel good-humouredly, “we’ve done some rather ridiculous things ourselves.”

“Yes, yes,” cried Pierce excitedly, “but we did them to make ourselves ridiculous. That unspeakable man is wholly, serenely serious. He thinks those maniacal monkey tricks are the normal life of man. Your argument really answers itself. We did the maddest things we could think of, meaning them to look mad. But they were nothing like so mad as what a modern business man does in the way of business.”

“Perhaps it’s the American business man,” said White, “who’s too keen to see the humour of it.”

“Nonsense,” said Crane. “Millions of Americans have a splendid sense of humour.”

“Then how fortunate are we,” said Pierce reverently, “through whose lives this rare, this ineffable, this divine being has passed.”

“Passed away for ever, I suppose,” said Hood with a sigh. “I fear the Colonel must be our only background once more.”

Colonel Crane was frowning thoughtfully, and at the last words his frown deepened to disapproval. He puffed at his smouldering cigar and then, removing it, said abruptly:

“I suppose you fellows have forgotten how I came to be a background? I mean, why I rather approve of people being backgrounds.”

“I remember something you said a long time ago,” replied Hood. “Hilary must have been in long-clothes at that time.”

“I said I had found out something by going round the world,” said Crane. “You young people think I am an old Tory; but remember I am also an old traveller. Well, it’s part of the same thing. I’m a traditionalist because I’m a traveller. I told you when I came back to the club that I’d come back to the tribe. I told you that in all the tribes of the world, the best man was the man true to his tribe. I told you the best man was the man who wore a nose-ring where nose-rings were worn.”

“I remember,” said Owen Hood.

“No, you forget,” said Crane rather gruffly. “You forget it when you talk about Enoch Oates the American. I’m no politician, thank God, and I shall look on with detachment if you dynamite him for being a millionaire. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t think half so much of money as old Normantowers, who thinks it’s too sacred to talk about. But you’re not dynamiting him for being a millionaire. You’re simply laughing at him for being an American. You’re laughing at him for being national and normal, for being a good citizen, a good tribesman, for wearing a nose-ring where nose-rings are worn.”

“I say ... Kuklux, you know,” remonstrated Wilding White in his hazy way. “Americans wouldn’t be flattered----”

“Do you suppose you haven’t got a nose-ring?” cried Crane so sharply that the clergyman started from his trance and made a mechanical gesture as if to feel for that feature. “Do you suppose a man like you doesn’t carry his nationality as plain as the nose on his face? Do you think a man as hopelessly English as you are wouldn’t be laughed at in America? You can’t be a good Englishman without being a good joke. The better Englishman you are the more of a joke you are; but still it’s better to be better. Nose-rings are funny to people who don’t wear ’em. Nations are funny to people who don’t belong to ’em. But it’s better to wear a nose-ring than to be a cosmopolitan crank who cuts off his nose to spite his face.”

This being by far the longest speech the Colonel had ever delivered since the day he returned from his tropical travels long ago, his old friends looked at him with a certain curiosity; even his old friends hardly understood how much he had been roused in defence of a guest and of his own deep delicacies about the point of hospitality. He went on with undiminished warmth:

“Well, it’s like that with poor Oates. He has, as we see it, certain disproportions, certain insensibilities, certain prejudices that stand out in our eyes like deformities. They offend you; they offend me, possibly rather more than they do you. You young revolutionists think you’re very liberal and universal; but the only result is that you’re narrow and national without knowing it. We old fogeys know our tastes are narrow and national; but we know they are only tastes. And we know, at any rate I know, that Oates is far more likely to be an honest man, a good husband and a good father, because he stinks of the rankest hickory patch in the Middle West, than if he were some fashionable New Yorker pretending to be an English aristocrat or playing the æsthete in Florence.”

“Don’t say a good husband,” pleaded Pierce with a faint shudder. “It reminds me of the grand slap-up advertisement of the Pig’s Whisper. How do you feel about that, my dear Colonel? The Most Wonderful Woman on Earth Waiting by the Old Fireside----”

“It makes my flesh creep,” replied Crane. “It chills me to the spine. I feel I would rather die than have anything to do with it. But that has nothing to do with my point. I don’t belong to the tribe who wear nose-rings; nor to the tribe who talk through their noses.”

“Well, aren’t you a little thankful for that?” asked White.

“I’m thankful I can be fair in spite of it,” answered Crane. “When I put a cabbage on my head, I didn’t expect people not to stare at it. And I know that each one of us in a foreign land is a foreigner, and a thing to be stared at.”

“What I don’t understand about him,” said Hood, “is the sort of things he doesn’t mind having stared at. How can people tolerate all that vulgar, reeking, gushing commercial cant everywhere? How can a man talk about the Old Fireside? It’s obscene. The police ought to interfere.”

“And that’s just where you’re wrong,” said the Colonel. “It’s vulgar enough and mad enough and obscene enough if you like. But it’s not cant. I have travelled amongst these wild tribes, for years on end; and I tell you emphatically it is not cant. And if you want to know, just ask your extraordinary American friend about his own wife and his own relatively Old Fireside. He won’t mind. That’s the extraordinary part of it.”

“What does all this really mean, Colonel?” asked Hilary Pierce.

“It means, my boy,” answered the Colonel, “that I think you owe our guest an apology.”

* * * * *

So it came about that there was an epilogue, as there had been a prologue, to the drama of the entrance and exit of Mr. Enoch B. Oates; an epilogue which in its turn became a prologue to the later dramas of the League of the Long Bow. For the words of the Colonel had a certain influence on the Captain, and the actions of the Captain had a certain influence on the American millionaire; and so the whole machinery of events was started afresh by that last movement over the nuts and wine, when Colonel Crane had stirred moodily in his seat and taken his cigar out of his mouth.

Hilary Pierce was an aimable and even excessively optimistic young man by temperament, in spite of his pugnacity; he would really have been the last man in the world to wish to hurt the feelings of a harmless stranger; and he had a deep and almost secret respect for the opinions of the older soldier. So, finding himself soon afterwards passing the great gilded gateways of the highly American hotel that was the London residence of the American, he paused a moment in hesitation and then went in and gave his name to various overpowering officials in uniforms that might have been those of the German General Staff. He was relieved when the large American came out to meet him with a simple and lumbering affability, and offered his large limp hand as if there had never been a shadow of misunderstanding. It was somehow borne in upon Pierce that his own rather intoxicated behaviour that evening had merely been noted down along with the architectural styles and the mellow mediævalism of the pig-sty, as part of the fantasies of a feudal land. All the antics of the Lunatic Asylum had left the American traveller with the impression that similar parlour games were probably being played that evening in all the parlours of England. Perhaps there was something, after all, in Crane’s suggestion that every nation assumes that every other nation is a sort of mild mad-house.

Mr. Enoch Oates received his guest with great hospitality and pressed on him cocktails of various occult names and strange colours, though he himself partook of nothing but a regimen of tepid milk.

Pierce fell into the confidence of Mr. Enoch Oates with a silent swiftness that made his brain reel with bewilderment. He was staggered like a man who had fallen suddenly through fifteen floors of a sky-scraper and found himself in somebody’s bedroom. At the lightest hint of the sort of thing to which Crane had alluded, the American opened himself with an expansiveness that was like some gigantic embrace. All the interminable tables of figures and calculations in dollars had for the moment disappeared; yet Oates was talking in the same easy and natural nasal drawl, very leisurely and a little monotonous, as he said:

“I’m married to the best and brightest woman God ever made, and I tell you it’s her and God between them that have made me, and I reckon she had the hardest part of it. We had nothing but a few sticks when I started; and it was the way she stood by that gave me the heart to risk even those on my own judgment of how things were going in the Street. I counted on a rise in Pork, and if it hadn’t risen I’d have been broke and I dare say in the jug. But she’s just wonderful. You should see her.”

He produced her photograph with a paralysing promptitude; it represented a very regal lady dressed up to the nines, probably for the occasion, with very brilliant eyes and an elaborate load of light hair.

“‘I believe in your star, Enoch,’ she said; ‘you stick to Pork,’” said Oates, with tender reminiscence, “and so we saw it through.”

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!”

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.”