“Well, I must not keep you from such an impossible engagement,” said Crane smiling. “Really, I’m awfully glad to hear about all this. Well, good-bye for now.”
Colonel Crane stood watching the square shoulders and dark red hair of his old friend, when they disappeared down the road, in a rather indescribable state of mind. When he turned quickly back towards his garden and his other guest, he noticed something had changed. Things seemed different in some light-headed and illogical manner. He could not himself understand what had happened; indeed, he did not know whether it happened inside or outside. He was very far from being a fool; but his brains were of the sort that are directed outwards to things, the brains of the soldier or the scientific man, and he had no practice in analysing his own mind. He did not quite understand why the news about Owen Hood should give him that strange sense of a difference in things in general. Without a doubt, he was very fond of Owen Hood; but he had been fond of other people who had got married without especially disturbing the atmosphere of his own back-garden. He even thought that his feelings on their own might have worked the other way; that they might have made him worry about Hood, and wonder whether Hood was making a fool of himself, or even feel suspicious or jealous of Mrs. Hood – something else made him feel quite the other way. He could not quite understand it; there seemed to be an increasing number of things that he could not understand. This world in which he himself wore pieces of green cabbage and in which his old friend the lawyer got married suddenly like a man going mad – this world was a new world, at once fresh and frightening, in which he could hardly understand the figures that were walking about, even his own. The flowers in the flower-beds looked differently, at once bright and nameless; and even the line of vegetables beyond could not altogether depress him with the memories of his last escapade. Indeed he felt very much like someone in the morning of the world; but beyond that he could understand nothing.
Audrey Smith was standing not so very many yards away, because he had followed his elder guest for only a few steps towards the gate. Yet her figure had fallen back far enough to be surrounded by the green framework of the garden. Her dress looked almost blue with a shade of distance. And when she spoke to him, even from that little way off, her voice sounded to him like the voice of someone shouting familiarly and from afar, like you call to an old friend. It made him emotional in a disproportionate way, though all that she said was:
“What became of your old hat?”
“I lost it,” he answered gravely, “obviously I had to lose it. I believe the scarecrow found it.”
“Oh, let’s go and look at the scarecrow, please,” she cried.
He led her without a word to the kitchen-garden and gravely explained each of its outstanding features; from the serious Mr. Archer resting on his spade to the grotesque Oceanic island god grinning at the corner of the plot. He spoke more and more solemnly and used too many words, and all the time knew little or nothing of what he said.
At last she cut into his monologue so suddenly that it was almost rude; yet her brown eyes were bright and her sympathy undisguised.
“Don’t talk about it,” she cried with illogical enthusiasm. “It looks as if we were really right in the middle of the country. It’s as unique as the Garden of Eden. It’s simply the most delightful place – ”
It was at this moment, for some unknown reason, that the Colonel who had lost his hat suddenly decided to lose his head. Standing in that grotesque vegetable scenery, a black and stiff yet somehow majestic figure, he offered the lady in the most traditional manner everything he had, not forgetting the scarecrow or the cabbages.
“When I think of the people who live on this piece of land – ” he concluded. “Well, there they are; a scarecrow and a cannibal fetish and a stupid man who is stuck on a road of respectability and conventional ways.”
“Very conventional,” she said, “especially in his taste in hats.”
“That was the exception, I’m afraid,” he said honestly. “You’d find those things very rare and most things very boring. I couldn’t avoid falling in love with you; but we still are in different worlds; and you belong in a younger world, which says what it thinks, and cannot see what most of our silences meant.”
“I suppose we are very rude,” she said thoughtfully, “and you must certainly excuse me if I do say what I think.”
“I deserve no better,” he replied mournfully.
“Well, I think I must be in love with you too,” she replied calmly. “I don’t see what time has to do with being fond of people. You are the most original person I ever knew.”
“My dear, my dear,” he protested almost brokenly, “I fear you are making a mistake. Whatever else I am, I never wanted to be original.”
“You must remember,” she replied, “that I have known very many people who did decide to be original. Any Art School is full of them; and there are any number among those socialist and vegetarian friends of mine you were talking about. It would be no problem for them to wear cabbages on their heads, of course. Any one of them would be capable of getting inside a pumpkin if he could. Any one of them might appear in public dressed entirely in salad leaves. But that’s just it. They go with the stream. They do those things because those things are done; because they are done in their own Bohemian society. Unconventionality is their convention. I don’t mind it myself; I think it’s great fun; but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know real strength or independence when I see it. All that is just formless; but the really strong man is one who can create a convention and then break it. When a man like you can suddenly do a thing like that, after twenty years of habit, for the sake of his word, then somehow you really feel that man is a man and master of his fate.”
“I doubt if I am master of my fate,” replied Crane, “and I do not know whether I ceased to be yesterday or two minutes ago.”
He stood there for a moment like a knight in heavy armour. Indeed, the old image is appropriate here in more ways than one. The new world within him was so alien from the whole habit in which he lived, even from the way he walked and gestures he made every day for countless days, that his spirit had to fight before it broke its shell. But it was also true that even if he could have done what every man wishes to do at such a moment, something supreme and satisfying, it would have been something in a way formal or it would not have satisfied him.
He was one of those to whom it is natural to be ceremonial. Even the music in his mind, too deep and distant for him to catch and sing, was the music of old and ritual dance and not for a party. And it was not an accident that he had built step by step around him that garden of the grey stone fountain and the hedge. He bent suddenly and kissed her hand.
“I like that,” she said. “You also need a wig and a sword.”
“I apologize,” he said gravely, “no modern man is worthy of you. But indeed I fear, in every sense I am not a very modern man.”
“You must never wear that hat again,” she said, pointing at the crushed original top-hat.
“To tell the truth,” he remarked calmly, “I had no intention of returning to that one.”
“Silly,” she said, “I don’t mean that hat; I mean that sort of hat. As a matter of fact, there couldn’t be a finer hat than the cabbage.”
“My dear – ” he protested; but she was looking at him quite seriously.
“I am an artist, and don’t know much about literature,” she said. “Well, do you know, it really does make a difference. People who love literature often let words get between them and things. We at least look at the things and not the names of the things. You think a cabbage is funny because the name sounds funny and even vulgar; something between ‘cab’ and ‘garbage,’ I suppose. But a cabbage isn’t really funny or vulgar. You wouldn’t think that way if you simply had to paint it. Haven’t you seen Dutch and Flemish galleries, and don’t you know what great men painted cabbages? What they saw was certain lines and colours; very wonderful lines and colours.”
“It may be all very well in a picture,” he began doubtfully.
She suddenly laughed aloud.
“You idiot,” she cried; “don’t you know you looked perfectly splendid? The curves were like a great turban of leaves and the root rose like the top of a helmet; it was rather like the turbaned helmets on some of Rembrandt’s figures, with the face like bronze in the shadows of green and purple. That’s the sort of thing artists can see, who keep their eyes and heads clear of words! And then you want to apologize for not wearing that stupid black pipe, when you went about wearing a coloured crown like a king. And you were like a king in this country – they were all afraid of you.”
He continued a faint protest, and she laughed louder. “If you’d stuck to it a little longer, I swear they’d all have started wearing vegetables for hats. I swear I saw my cousin the other day standing with some sort of a garden instrument and looking indecisively at a cabbage.”
Then, after a pause, she said with a beautiful irrelevancy:“What was it Mr. Hood did that you said he couldn’t do?”
But these are upside-down stories, so they have to be told back to front. And if the reader wants to know the answer, the next story awaits him.
Chapter II. The improbable success of mr. Owen hood
Heroes who have managed to read to the end the story of The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane know that his achievement was the first of a series of things, which we call impossible, like the quests of the Arthurian knights. For the purpose of this story it is enough to say that he was long known and respected, before his last escapade, as a retired military man in Surrey, with a tanned face and an interest in the mythology of Oceania. As a fact, however, he had gathered the tan and the Oceanic myths some time before he had managed to collect the respectability and the suburban myths. In his early youth he had been a restless traveler. He belonged to a club of young men, who were all eccentrics of one kind or another. Some had extreme revolutionary and some extreme reactionary opinions, and some both. Mr. Robert Owen Hood, who is the hero of this story, belonged to the last group.
Robert Owen Hood was Crane’s closest friend, but he had a very different personality. Hood was from the first as stable as Crane was adventurous. Hood was to the end informal as Crane was conventional. The double name of Robert Owen came from a revolutionary tradition in his family; but he inherited together with it a little money that allowed him to forget about the law and to cultivate a taste for liberty and for walking and dreaming in lost corners of the country. There was a small island in the Thames in which he especially loved to sit fishing – a shabby but not typical figure dressed in grey, with red hair and a long face with a large chin, rather like Napoleon. On this occasion his quick military friend was standing near him in his uniform, which created a striking contrast. Colonel Crane was going to leave on one of his odysseys in the South Seas.
“Well,” asked the impatient traveller, “have you caught anything?”
“You once asked me,” replied the fisherman calmly, “what I meant by calling you a materialist. That is what I meant by calling you a materialist.”
“If one must be a materialist or a madman,” said the soldier, “give me materialism.”
“On the contrary,” replied his friend, “your hobby is much madder than mine. And I doubt that it’s any more fruitful. The moment men like you see a man sitting by a river, they just have to ask him what he has caught. But when you go off to hunt for big animals in Africa, nobody asks you what you have caught. Nobody expects you to bring home a hippopotamus for supper. Nobody has ever seen you walking up Pall Mall, followed respectfully by a giraffe you captured. Personally, I doubt that you ever catch anything. It’s all hidden in desert sand and doubt and distance. But what I hunt for is something much more hard to catch, and as slippery as any fish. It is the soul of England.”
“I think you’ll catch a cold if not a fish,” answered Crane, “sitting with your feet in water like that. I like to move about a little more. Dreaming is not for me.”
At this point a symbolic cloud should come across the sun and some shadow of mystery and silence must cover for a moment the heroes of our story. Because it was at this moment that James Crane, blind with inspiration, pronounced his famous Prophecy, which is central to this story. As usual with men who make prophecies, he had no idea he just made one. A moment after he would probably not know that he had said it at all.
The prophecy took the form of a proverb. At the right moment the readers will see, what proverb. Actually, the conversation for a big part consisted of proverbs, which is natural for men like Hood, whose hearts are with that old English country life from which all the proverbs came. But it was Crane who said:
“It’s all very well to be fond of England, but a man who wants to help England mustn’t let the grass grow under his feet[13].”
“And that’s just what I want to do,” answered Hood. “That’s exactly what even your poor tired people in big cities really want to do. When a sad little clerk walks down Poverty Street, wouldn’t he really be delighted if he could look down and see the grass growing under his feet – like a magic green carpet in the middle of the pavement? It would be like a fairy-tale.”
“Well, but he wouldn’t sit like a stone as you do,” replied the other. “A man might let the grass grow under his feet without actually letting the ivy grow up his legs[14]. That sounds like a fairy-tale, too, if you like, but there’s no proverb to recommend it.”
“Oh, there are proverbs on my side, if you come to that,” answered Hood laughing. “I might remind you about the rolling stone that gathers no moss.[15]”
“Well, who wants to gather moss except a few strange old ladies?” asked Crane. “Yes, I’m a rolling stone, I suppose; and I go rolling round the earth as the earth goes rolling round the sun. But I’ll tell you what; there’s only one kind of stone that does really gather moss.”
“And what is that, my dear geologist?”
“A gravestone,” said Crane.
There was a silence, and Hood sat looking with his owlish face at the water in which the dark woods were mirrored. At last he said:
“Moss isn’t the only thing found on that. Sometimes there is the word ‘Resurgam’[16].”
“Well, I hope you will,” said Crane with a smile. “But the trumpet will have to be pretty loud to wake you up. It’s my opinion you’ll be too late for the Day of Judgement.”
“I could say,” remarked Hood, “that it would be better for you if you were. But it is not a nice way to say goodbye. Are you really leaving today?”
“Yes, tonight,” replied his friend. “Are you sure you won’t come with me to the Cannibal Islands?”
“I prefer my own island,” said Mr. Owen Hood.
When his friend had gone he continued to look absent-mindedly at the calm upside-down world of the green mirror of water. He did not change his position and hardly moved his head. This might be partly explained by the quiet habits of a fisherman; but to tell you the truth, it was not easy to discover whether the solitary lawyer really wanted to catch any fish. He would often carry a book by Isaac Walton in his pocket, because he had a love of the old English literature as of the old English landscape.
