He did not wait for a reply, but walked out of the room after bowing quickly to the rest; and that was the end of the great conference on the question of fisherman’s rights and perhaps the end of the Thames and of the old aristocracy, with all its good and ill.
The general public never heard very much about it; at least until one catastrophic scene which followed. There was some weak echo of the question some months later, when Dr. Horace Hunter decided to go to Parliament. One or two questions were asked about his duties in relation to river pollution; but it was soon clear that no party actually wanted to push the question against the best opinions expressed by their opponents. The greatest living authority on hygiene, Professor Hake, had actually written to The Times (in the interests of science) to say that in such a hypothetical case as this, a medical man could only do what Dr. Hunter had done. It so happened that the most important business in that part of the Thames Valley, Sir Samuel Bliss, had himself, after some serious consideration of different policies, decided to Vote for Hunter. The great organizer’s own mind was rather abstract and philosophical in the matter; but it seems that his manager, a Mr. Low, had a more practical and pushing spirit. He warmly invited his employees to vote for Hunter, pointed out to them the many practical advantages they would gain if they voted for the doctor, and the even more practical disadvantages they might suffer if they didn’t. So it followed that the blue ribbons, which were the local badges of the Hunterians, were not only attached to the iron railings and wooden posts of the factory, but to various human figures, known as “hands,” which moved in it.
Hood took no interest in the election; but while it was proceeding he followed the matter a little further in another form. He was a lawyer, a lazy, but in some ways a good one; because he enjoyed studying and so he had originally learned the trade he had never used. More in protest than in hope, he once carried the matter into the Courts, defending his cause on the basis of a law of Henry the Third[19] against frightening the fish of the King’s servants in the Thames Valley. The judge complimented him on his erudition and logic, but rejected his appeal while demonstrating his own erudition and logic. His lordship argued that no test was provided to measure the degree of fear in the fish, or whether it was that serious fear which was important for the law. But the great judge pointed out the precedent of a law of Richard the Second[20] against certain witches who had frightened children; in which case the child “must return and of his own will testify to his fear.” It did not seem that any one of the fish in question had returned and gave any such testimony to any proper authority. So the judge chose in favour of the defendants. And when the learned judge happened to meet Sir Samuel Bliss at dinner that evening, he was congratulated on his clear judgement. Indeed, the great judge had really enjoyed the logic both of his own and Hood’s arguments; but the conclusion was inevitable. For our judges are not stopped by any old code; they are progressive, like Dr. Hunter, and make friends only with the progressive forces of the age, especially those they will probably meet at a dinner party.
But it was this short law case that led to something much more important for Mr. Owen Hood. He had just left the courts, and turned down the street that led in the direction of the station, he was walking in that direction in his usual brown coat. The streets were filled with faces; it struck him for the first time that there were thousands and thousands of people in the world. There were even more faces at the railway station, and then, when he looked at four or five of them, he saw one that was to him as incredible as the face of the dead.
She was coming out of the tea-room, carrying a handbag, just like anybody else. That mystical quality of his mind had fixed his sacred dream in its original colours. No detail could be changed without the vision dissolving. It was impossible for him that she could appear in anything but white or come out of anything but a wood. And he found himself turned upside-down by the fact that blue suited her as well as white. She did not come out of the wood, but even the teashops and the railway stations didn’t spoil the view.
She stopped in front of him and her pale, flying eyelids lifted from her blue-grey eyes.
“Why,” she said, “you are the boy that jumped in the river!”
“I’m no longer a boy,” answered Hood, “but I’m ready to jump in the river again.”
“Well, don’t jump on the railway-line,” she said, when he turned quickly in that direction.
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I was thinking of jumping into a railway-train. Do you mind if I jump into your train?”
“Well, I’m going to Birkstead,” she said with some doubt in her voice.
Mr. Owen Hood did not care one bit where she was going, because he had decided to go there, but he actually remembered a little station on that line that lay very near to where he was going, so he tumbled into the carriage. The landscapes shot by them while they sat looking in a dazed and almost foolish manner at each other. At last the girl felt how absurd it all was and smiled.
“I heard about you from a friend of yours,” she said; “he came to call on us soon after it happened. At least that was when he first came. You know Dr. Hunter, don’t you?”
“Yes,” replied Owen, a shadow coming over his shining hour. “Do you… Do you know him well?”
“I know him pretty well now,” said Miss Elizabeth Seymour.
The shadow on his spirit became darker; he suspected something quite suddenly, and the idea made him furious. Hunter, in Crane’s old phrase, was not a man who would let the grass grow under his feet. It was so like him to use the incident as an introduction to the Seymours. Things were always stepping-stones for Hunter, and the little rock in the river had been a stepping-stone to the country-house. But was the country-house a stepping-stone to something else? Suddenly Hood realized that all his anger had been very abstract anger. He had never hated a man before. At that moment the train stopped at the station of Cowford.
“I wish you’d get out here with me,” he said quickly, “only for a little – and it might be the last time. I want you to do something.”
She looked at him with a curious expression and said in a rather low voice, “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to come and pick bluebells,” he said.
She stepped out of the train, and they went up a country road without a word.
“I remember!” she said suddenly. “When you get to the top of this hill you see the wood where the bluebells were, and your little island beyond.”
“Come on and see it,” said Owen.
They stepped on the top of the hill and stood. Below them the black factory threw its yellowish smoke into the air; and where the wood had been there were now rows of little houses like boxes, built of dirty yellow brick.
Hood spoke. “And when you see the abomination of desolation sitting in the Holy of Holies[21] – isn’t that when the world is supposed to end? I want the world to end now – with you and me standing on a hill.”
She was staring at the place with parted lips and she was paler than usual; he knew she understood something monstrous and symbolic in the scene; yet her first remark was short and trivial. On the nearest of the yellow brick boxes she could see the cheap colours of different advertisements; and larger than the rest a blue poster proclaiming “Vote for Hunter.” With a final touch of hatred, Hood remembered that it was the last and most important day of the election. But the girl had already found her voice.
“Is that Dr. Hunter?” she asked with very usual curiosity; “is he standing for parliament?”
A load that lay on Hood’s mind like a rock suddenly rose like an eagle; and he felt as if the hill he stood on were higher than Everest. He understood well enough that SHE would have known well enough whether Hunter was standing, if —
if there had been anything like what he supposed. Suddenly, the weight wasn’t there anymore, and he lost his balance and said something quite indefensible.
“I thought you would know. I thought you and he were probably… well, the truth is I thought you were engaged, though I really don’t know why.”
“I can’t imagine why,” said Elizabeth Seymour. “I heard he was engaged to Sir Samuel’s daughter. They’ve got our old place now, you know.”
There was a silence and then Hood spoke suddenly in a loud and cheerful voice.
“Well, I say, ‘Vote for Hunter,’” he said cheerfully. “After all, why not vote for Hunter? Good old Hunter! I hope he’ll be a member of Parliament. I hope he’ll be Prime Minister. I hope he’ll be President of the World State. By George[22], he deserves to be Emperor of the Solar System.”
“But why,” she protested, “why should he deserve all that?”
“For not being engaged to you, of course,” he replied.
“Oh!” she said, and something of a secret shiver in her voice went through him like a silver bell.
Abruptly, all of a sudden, the rage of raillery seemed to have left his voice and his face, so that his Napoleonic profile looked earnest and eager and much younger, like the profile of the young Napoleon. His wide shoulders lost the slight stoop that books had given them, and his rather wild red hair fell away from his lifted head.
“There is one thing I must tell you about him,” he said, “and one thing you must hear about me. My friends tell me I am a drifter and a dreamer; that I let the grass grow under my feet; I must tell you at least how and why I once let it grow. Three days after that day near the river, I talked to Hunter; he was my doctor and he talked about it and you. Of course he knew nothing about either. But he is a practical man; a very practical man; he does not dream or drift. From the way he talked I knew he was thinking even then how this accident could be used; used for his purposes and perhaps for mine too (because he is good-natured; yes, he is quite good-natured). I think that if I had taken his hint and formed a sort of social partnership, I might have known you six years sooner, not as a memory, but – an acquaintance. And I could not do it. Judge me how you will, I could not bring myself to do it.
That is what is meant by being born with a bee in the bonnet[23], with an impediment in the speech, with a stumbling-block in the path. I could not bear to approach you by that door, with that gross and grinning lackey holding it open.
I could not bear that terrible snob to take so much space in my story or know so much of my secret. A revulsion I could never describe made me feel that the vision should remain my own even by remaining unfulfilled. It should not be vulgarized. That is what people mean when they say you are a failure in life. And when my best friend made a prophecy about me, and said there was something I should never do, I thought he was right.”
“Why, what do you mean?” she asked rather faintly, “what was it you would never do?”
“Never mind that now,” he said, with the shadow of a returning smile. “Rather strange things are moving in me just now, and who knows, maybe I will try something yet? But before all else, I must make clear for once what I am and for what I lived. There are men like me in the world; I am far from thinking they are the best or the most valuable; but they exist, to the irritation and surprise of all the clever people and the realists. There has been and there is only one thing for me; something that in the normal sense I never even knew. I walked about the world blind, with my eyes turned inside me, looking at you. For days after a night when I had dreamed of you, I was broken. I was like a man who had seen a ghost. I read over and over the solemn lines of the old poets, because only they were worthy of you. And when I saw you again by chance, I thought the world had already ended. It is like meeting you beyond the grave. It is too good to be true.”
“I do not think,” she answered in a low voice, “that life after death is too good to be true.”
When he looked at her a thrill went through him like a message too quick to be understood; and at the back of his mind something awoke that repeated again and again like a song the same words, “too good to be true.” There was always something distressing, even in her days of pride, about the short-sighted look of her half-closed eyes; but it was for other reasons that they were now blinking in the strong white sunlight, almost as if they were blind. They were blind and bright with tears:she gained control of her voice and it was steady.
“You talk about failures,” she said. “I suppose most people would call me a failure and all my people failures now – except those who would say we never failed, because we never had to try. Anyway, we’re all poor enough now. I don’t know whether you know that I teach music. I dare say we deserved to go. I dare say we were useless. Some of us tried to be harmless. But – but now I MUST say something, about some of us who tried rather hard to be harmless – in that way. The new rich people will tell you those ideals were aristocratic, and all that – well, it doesn’t matter what they say. They know quite as little about us as we about them. But to you, when you talk like that… what can I do, but tell you that you that if we were stiff, if we were cold, if we were careful and conservative, it was because deep down in our souls some of us DID believe that there might be loyalty and love like that, for which a woman can wait even to the end of the world. What is it to these people if we chose not to be drugged or distracted with anything less worthy? But it would be hard indeed if when I find it DOES exist after all… hard on you, harder on me, if when I have really found it at last…”
She stopped and couldn’t speak anymore. The silence caught and held her.
He took one stride forward as into the heart of a whirlwind; and they met on the top of that windy hill as if they had come from the ends of the earth.
“This is an epic,” he said, “and an epic demands actions, not words. I have lived with words too long.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you have turned me into a man of action,” he replied. “As long as you were in the past, nothing was better than the past. As long as you were only a dream, nothing was better than dreaming. But now I am going to do something that no man has ever done before.”
He turned towards the valley and raised his hand with a gesture, almost as if the hand was holding a sword.
“I am going to break the Prophecy,” he cried in a loud voice. “I am going to make fun of my evil star. Those who called me a failure will admit I have succeeded where all humanity has failed. The real hero is not he who is bold enough to fulfil the predictions, but he who is bold enough to make them false. And you will see how it happens tonight.”
“What in the world are you going to do?” she asked.
He laughed suddenly. “The first thing to do,” he cried, turning around with a new look of resolution and even cheerfulness on his face, “the very first thing to do is to Vote for Hunter. Or, at any rate, help to get him into Parliament.”
“But why in the world,” she asked wondering, “do you want so much to get Dr. Hunter into Parliament?”
