“What’s all this infernal insane nonsense?” he demanded. “Who is so damned rude to tell the Hardys they mustn’t keep pigs? Look here, the time has come when we must fight against all this sort of thing. I’m going to do something desperate.”
“You’ve done enough desperate things for this morning,” said Hood. “I advise you to take a little desperate lunch. Sit down, please, 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 quietly to the company:“There’s a gentleman here who asks if he may speak to you.”
The gentleman himself stood some little way behind and looked polite but so stiff and motionless that it almost made you nervous. He was dressed in such a complete and correct version of English holiday suit that they were quite sure he was a foreigner. But they couldn’t choose a country in Europe where the man came from. His face was very tanned. But when he spoke, they could immediately understand where he was from because of his accent.
“Very sorry to interrupt, gentlemen,” he said, “but this young lady says you know everything about this area. I’ve walked around trying to find an ancient building or two, but it seems I don’t know how to look for them. If you’d be so kind as to tell me about the main architectural styles and historic places of this region, I’d be very much obliged.”
Since 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 an aristocrat in your fine old feudal landscape. So the sooner I’m introduced to the mediaeval buildings the better.”
In Hilary Pierce the astonishment had given place to an enthusiasm bordering on ecstasy.
“Mediaeval buildings! Architectural styles!” he cried out. “You’ve come to the right place, Mr. Oates. I’ll show you an ancient building, a sacred building, in an architectural style of such antiquity that you’ll want to transport it to Michigan, as they tried to do with Glastonbury Abbey[29]. You will be privileged to see an 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 arm with wild gestures of encouragement; and the American was following him with the same stiff politeness, looking strangely like a robot.
“Look on our architectural style before it disappears,” cried Pierce dramatically, pointing to the pig-sty, which looked like a dirty combination of leaning and broken boards put together, though it was practical enough. “This, the most unmistakably historic of all mediaeval buildings, may soon be only a memory. But when this monument falls England will fall, and the world will shake.”
The American had what he himself might have described as a poker face; it was impossible to discover whether his words indicated extreme innocence or extreme irony.
“And would you say,” he asked, “that this monument is an example of the early mediaeval or Gothic architectural school?”
“I would hardly call it strictly Perpendicular,” answered Pierce, “but there is no doubt that it is Early English[30].”
“You would say it is historic, anyhow?” said Mr. Oates.
“I have every reason to believe,” affirmed Pierce solemnly, “that Gurth the Swineherd[31] made use of this building. I have no doubt that it is in fact much older. The best authorities believe that the Prodigal Son[32] stayed here for some time, and the pigs – those noble animals – gave him such excellent advice that he returned to his family. And now, Mr. Oates, they say that all this magnificent heritage should be destroyed. But it will not be. We will not so easily surrender to all the vandals and vulgar tyrants who would tear down our temples and our holy places.
The pig-sty will rise again in a magnificent resurrection – larger pig-stys, higher pig-stys will yet cover the land; the towers of more magnificent and more ideal pig-stys, in the most striking architectural styles, will again declare the victory of the holy pig 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 Roman brick. The priest understands his church, too, and would give Mr. Oates rather more reliable information than you do.”
A little while later, when Mr. Oates had gone on his way, the Colonel criticized 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 talked 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 it will yet return as a wild boar that will destroy his enemies.”
He looked up and his eye found the blue heraldic shape on the sign-board of the inn.
“And there is our wooden standard!” he cried, pointing in the same dramatic fashion. “We will go into battle under the standard of the Blue Boar.”
“Hurray, hurray, hurray,” said Crane politely, “and now come away and don’t spoil the speech. Owen wants to walk to the local old church, like Mr. Oates. I’m more interested in new things. Want to look at that machine of yours.”
They began to walk down the zig-zag road with hedges on both sides and flower-beds like a garden grown on a staircase, and at every corner Hood had to argue with the slow-walking young man.
“Don’t be forever looking back on the paradise of pigs,” he said, “or you’ll be turned into a pillar of salt[33], or maybe of mustard – as more appropriate to such meat. They won’t run away yet. There are other creatures formed by the Creator for man to see; there are other things made by man after the fashion of the creatures, including that great white bird on which you yourself flew among the birds.”
“Bird that lays rather dreadful eggs,” said Crane. “In the next war – Hey, where the hell has he gone?”
“Pigs, pigs,” said Hood sadly. “The overpowering charm which pigs have upon us at a certain time of life; when we dream about their snouts and their little curly tails…”
“Oh, stop it,” said the Colonel.
Indeed Mr. Hilary Pierce had vanished, turning under the corner of a hedge and running up a path, over a gate and across the corner of a hayfield, where a final cut 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 jumped down on to the path. The morning sun painted everything in clear colours like a children’s book.
“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 as 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 world-old conventions of the countryside were like concentric castle-walls around her. There was in them the stiff beauty of old country dances and the slow and delicate needlework of a peasantry. Of all the ladies mentioned in this little book about modern-day knights, the most reserved and dignified was the one who was not a lady at all by birth.
She stood looking at him in silence, and he at her; and her head looked a little bit like that of a bird.
“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 am 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 worked 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 boring details he had ever mentioned about himself, and how little she knew in comparison about his theories and dreams, which he thought so much more important.
“Well,” he said with appealing frankness, “it would be a little bit too much to say I am going into a bank. I know a lot of more country-side and romantic professions 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 opportunity for a quick young man in the ham and pork business.”
“You mustn’t come here, then,” she answered. “It won’t be allowed here by that time. The neighbours would – ”
“Don’t be afraid,” he said, “I will be a commercial traveller. Oh, such a commercial traveler! As for not coming here, the thing seems quite impossible. 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 adequate business principles. The truth is, dear Joan, I’ve committed myself to a rather important enterprise. You shouldn’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 will continue to do it, even if I challenge the world.”
He jumped up on the wall again and stood there staring down at her in an almost irritated manner.
“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 must not go unpunished. You will have pigs, I say, if the skies fall and the whole world is in war.”
He disappeared like a flash behind the wall, and Joan went back in silence to the inn.
The first incident of the war did not seem very encouraging, though the hero of it seemed by no means discouraged by it. As it was reported in the police news section of various papers, Hilary Patrick Pierce, formerly of the Flying Corps, was arrested for driving pigs into the county of Bluntshire, against the law made for the sake of public health. It seemed he had almost as much trouble with the pigs as with the police; but he made a funny and elegant speech when he was arrested, to which the police and the pigs seemed to be equally indifferent. The incident was considered trivial and his punishment was very light; but after this occasion some of the authorities decided to finally establish the new rule.
The figure behind the new regulation was the famous hygienist, Sir Horace Hunter, who had begun life, as some readers may remember, as a successful doctor in the suburbs and had later distinguished himself as an officer of health in the Thames Valley. He was fully supported in extending the existing precautions against infection from the pig by other magistrates, Mr. Rosenbaum Low, millionaire and formerly manager of Bliss and Co., and the other the young Socialist, Mr. Amyas Minns. All of them agreed that the best way to finish all problems connected to drinking was total prohibition of alcohol, and the different problems linked with swine-fever were best solved by a simple regulation against pigs.
The next lunch at which the three friends met was in a rather different setting; because the Colonel had invited the other two to his club in London. It would have been almost impossible to be that sort of Colonel without having that sort of club. But as a matter of fact, he very seldom went there. On this occasion it was Owen Hood who arrived first and was escorted by a waiter to a table near a window overlooking the Green Park. Knowing Crane’s military punctuality, Hood thought that he might have mistaken the time; and while looking for the note of invitation in his pocket-book, he paused to re-read an article that he had cut out of the newspaper aside as a curiosity some days before. It was a paragraph headed “Old Ladies as Mad Motorists,” and ran as follows:
“An unprecedented number of cases of motorists exceeding the speed limit have lately occurred on the Bath Road and other western highways. The extraordinary thing about this case is that in so many cases the rule-breakers seemed to be old ladies of great wealth and respectability who declared they were merely taking their pugs[34] and other pet animals to get some fresh air. They said that the health of the animal required much more rapid transit through the air than that of a human being.”
He was looking at this article and with as much surprise as when he had first read it, when the Colonel entered with a newspaper in his hand.
“I say,” he said, “I think it is getting rather ridiculous. I’m not a revolutionist like you; quite the opposite. But all these rules and regulations are getting beyond all rational explanation. A little while ago they started forbidding all travelling circuses; not, as you might think, demanding proper conditions for the animals, but forbidding them altogether for some nonsense about the safety of the public. There was a travelling circus stopped near Acton and another on the road to Reading. Crowds of village boys must never see a lion in their lives, because once in fifty years a lion has escaped and been caught again. But that’s nothing compared to what has happened since. Now there is such mortal fear of infection that we should leave the sick to suffer, just as if we were barbarians. You know those new hospital trains that were started to take patients from the hospitals down to the health resorts. Well, they will not run after all, it seems, because by merely taking an invalid of any sort through the open country we could poison the four winds of heaven. If this nonsense goes on, I will go as mad as Hilary himself.”
Hilary Pierce had arrived during this conversation and sat listening to it with a rather curious smile. Somehow the more Hood looked at that smile the more it puzzled him; it puzzled him as much as the newspaper article in his hand. He caught himself looking from one to the other, and Pierce smiled in a still more irritating manner.
“You don’t look so fierce and fanatical as when we last met, my young friend,” remarked Owen Hood. “Have you got tired of pigs and police-courts? These new laws the Colonel’s talking about would have roused you to lift the roof off at once.”
