“Oh, I’m all against the new rules,” answered the young man coolly. “I’ve been very much against them. In fact, I’ve already broken all those new laws and a few more. Could you let me look at that article for a moment?”
Hood handed it to him and he nodded, saying:
“Yes; I was arrested for that.”
“Arrested for what?”
“Arrested for being a rich and respectable old lady,” answered Hilary Pierce; “but I managed to escape that time. It was a fine sight to see the old lady jump over a hedge and run across a field.”
Hood looked at him under his low eye-brows and his mouth began to work.
“But what’s all this about the old lady having a pug or a pet or something?”
“Well, it was very nearly a pug,” said Pierce calmly. “I pointed out to everybody that it was, as it were, almost a pug. I asked if it was just to punish me for a small mistake in spelling.”
“I begin to understand,” said Hood. “You were again smuggling pigs down to your precious Blue Boar, and thought you could break the enemy lines in very rapid cars.”
“Yes,” replied the smuggler happily. “We were quite literally Road-Pigs. I thought at first about dressing the pigs up as millionaires and members of Parliament; but when you come to look close, there’s more difference than you would imagine. It was great fun when they forced me to take my pet out of all the shawls, and they found what a large pet it was.”
“And do I understand,” cut in the Colonel, “that it was something like that – with the other laws?”
“The other laws,” said Pierce, “are certainly irrational, but you do not altogether do them justice. You do not quite understand their motive. You do not fully realise their origins. I may say with modesty, I believe that I was their origin. I not only had the pleasure of breaking those laws, but the pleasure of making them.”
“More of your tricks, you mean,” said the Colonel; “but why don’t the newspapers say so?”
“The authorities don’t want them to,” answered Pierce. “The authorities won’t advertise me, you bet. I’ve got far too much popular support for that. When the real revolution happens, it won’t be mentioned in the newspapers.”
He paused a moment in meditation and then went on.
“When the police searched for my pug and found it was a pig, I started wondering how they could be stopped from doing it again. I thought that they might not want to touch a wild pig or a pug that bit them. So, of course, I travelled the next time with dreadfully dangerous animals in cages, warning everybody of the angriest tigers and panthers that were ever known. When they found out what the tigers really were, they didn’t want to make this information public, so they could only fall back on their own stupid idea of a total prohibition. Of course, it was the same with my other idea, about the sick people going to health resorts to be cured of various fashionable and aristocratic illnesses. The pigs spent some time as aristocrats and rich people in beautifully decorated railway carriages with hospital nurses to take care of them; while I stood outside and told the railway officials that the best treatment for the patients was rest, and they must not be disturbed for any reason.”
“What a liar you are!” exclaimed Hood in simple admiration.
“Not at all,” said Pierce with dignity. “It was quite true that they were going to be cured.”
Crane, who had been staring rather absentmindedly out of the window, slowly turned his head and said:“And how’s it going to end? Do you propose to go on doing all these impossible things?”
Pierce jumped on his feet with the same romantic enthusiasm that he had when he made his vow over the pig-sty.
“Impossible!” he cried. “You don’t know what you’re saying or how true it is. All I’ve done so far was possible and prosaic. But I will do an impossible thing. I will do something that is written in all books and poems as impossible – something that has become a proverb about impossible things. The war is not ended yet; and if you two fellows will position yourselves on the hill opposite the Blue Boar, next Thursday at sunset, you will see something so impossible and so self-evident that even the newspapers will find it hard to hide it.”
A week later two gentlemen of something more than middle age who had not altogether lost the appetite for adventure positioned themselves under the roof of pine on the top of the hill with all the preparations for a picnic. It was from that place, like from a window looking across the valley, that they saw what looked more like a vision; what looked indeed rather like the parody of an apocalypse. The sky in the west was the colour of a lemon, pale yellow and pale green, while one or two small clouds on the horizon were of a rose-red and even richer colours. But the settling sun itself was a cloudless fire, so that a brownish light lay over the whole landscape. The inn of the Blue Boar standing opposite looked almost like a house of gold. Owen Hood was looking in his dreamy manner, and said at last:
“There’s an apocalyptic sign in heaven for you to start with. It’s strange, but that cloud coming up the valley looks very much like a pig.”
“Like a whale,” said Colonel Crane, yawning slightly; but when he turned his eyes in that direction, he saw that the object in question was too solid for a cloud.
“That’s not a cloud,” he said, “it’s a Zeppelin or something.”
The solid shape grew larger and larger; and as it became more obvious it became more incredible.
“Saints and angels!” cried Hood suddenly. “Why, it IS a pig!”
“It’s shaped like a pig all right,” said the Colonel quickly; and indeed as the great balloon came closer and closer, they could see that the long sausage-shaped Zeppelin body of it had been fantastically decorated with hanging ears and legs, to complete that pantomimic resemblance.
“I suppose it’s one more of Hilary’s tricks,” remarked Hood; “but what is he going to do now?”
When the great monster was moving up the valley it paused over the inn of the Blue Boar, and something fell fluttering from it like a brightly coloured feather.
“People are coming down in parachutes,” said the Colonel shortly.
“They’re strange-looking people,” remarked his companion, peering under frowning brows, for the level light was dazzling to the eyes. “By George, they’re not people at all! They’re pigs!”
From that distance, the objects in question looked a little bit like angels in some brightly coloured Gothic picture, with the yellow sky instead of their golden background. Their parachutes looked like a gorgeous painted plumage. The more the two men on the ground stared at these strange objects, the more certain it seemed that they were indeed pigs; though it was impossible to say whether the pigs were dead or alive from that distance. The men looked down into the garden of the inn into which the feathered things were dropping, and they could see the figure of Joan Hardy standing in front of the old pig-sty, looking up into the sky.
“Extraordinary present for a young lady,” remarked Crane, “but I suppose when our mad young friend falls in love, he can only give impossible presents.”
The eyes of the more poetical Hood were full of larger visions, and he was hardly listening. But when the sentence ended he seemed to wake up from a trance and struck his hands together.
“Yes!” he cried in a new voice, “we always come back to that word!”
“Come back to what word?” asked his friend.
“‘Impossible,’” answered Owen Hood. “It’s the word that runs through his whole life, and our lives too for that matter. Don’t you see what he has done?”
“I see what he has done all right,” answered the Colonel, “but I’m not at all sure I understand what you want to say.”
“What we have seen is another impossible thing,” said Owen Hood; “a thing that the English language has made a challenge; a thing that a thousand songs and jokes and phrases have called impossible. We have seen pigs fly.[35]”
“It’s pretty extraordinary,” admitted Crane, “but it’s not as extraordinary as when thay are not allowed to walk.”
And they gathered their things and began to walk down from the high hill.
While they were walking, it was getting darker and darker, and soon they lost that sense of sitting right under the clouds. They almost felt like they had had a vision; and the voice of Crane came out of the dark like the voice of a person talking about a strange dream.
“The thing I can’t understand,” he said, “is how Hilary managed to DO all that by himself.”
“He really is a very wonderful fellow,” said Hood. “You told me he did incredible things in the War. And though now he uses his skills for these fanatical things now, it takes as much trouble to do one as the other.”
“It takes a lot more trouble to do it alone,” said Crane. “In the War we were organized.”
“You mean he must be more than an unusual person,” suggested Hood, “a sort of giant with a hundred hands or god with a hundred eyes. Well, a man will work terribly hard when he wants something very much; even a man who generally looks like a lazy poet. And I think I know what he wanted. He deserves to get it. It’s certainly his hour of triumph.”
“Mystery to me all the same,” said the Colonel frowning. “I wonder whether he’ll ever clear it up.”
Away on another part of the hill Hilary Pierce, who just landed, came towards Joan Hardy with uplifted arms.
“This is no time for false modesty,” he said. “It is the hour, and I come to you covered with glory —”
“You come covered with mud,” she said smiling, “and it’s that horrible red mud that takes so long to dry. It’s no use trying to brush it till —”
“I have completed the labours like Hercules[36],” he cried in lyric ecstasy. “I have finished the quest. I have made the Hampshire Pig as legendary as the Calydonian Boar[37]. They forbade me to bring it on foot, and I drove it in a car, disguised as a pug. They forbade me to bring it in a car, and I brought it in a train, disguised as an invalid. They forbade me to use a train, and I took the wings of the morning and rose to the sky by a secret and lonely way, the stubborn way of love. I have made my romance immortal. I have written your name upon the sky. What do you say to me now? I have turned a Pig into a Pegasus. I have done impossible things.”
“I know you have,” she said, “but somehow I can’t stop liking you for all that.”
“BUT you can’t stop liking me,” he repeated in a weak voice. “I have stormed heaven, but still I am not so bad. Hercules can be tolerated in spite of his Twelve Labours. St. George can be forgiven for killing the Dragon. Woman, is this the way I am treated in the hour of victory; and is this the graceful manner of the old world of tradition? What is your father doing? What does he say – about us?”
“My father says you are quite mad, of course,” she replied, “but he can’t stop liking you either. He says he doesn’t believe it is a good idea to marry someone from a different social class; but that if I must marry a gentleman he’d rather it was somebody like you.”
“Well, I’m glad I’m the good kind of gentleman, anyhow,” he answered. “But really this power of common sense is getting quite dangerous. Will nothing give you the appetite for a little unreality? What would you say, if I turned the world upside down and set my foot upon the sun and moon?”
“I would say,” replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, “that you needed somebody to look after you.”
He stared at her for a moment in an almost idiotic manner as if he had not fully understood; then he laughed uncontrollably, like a man who has found his glasses on his own forehead.
“What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an aeroplane,” he said, “especially when your flying ship is only a flying pig. The earth of the real peasants and the real pigs – don’t be offended; I say that as a compliment. What a thing is common sense, and how much better really than the poetry of Pegasus! And when there is everything else as well that makes the sky clean and the earth kind, beauty and bravery and this beautiful head – well, you are right enough, Joan. Will you take care of me?”
He had caught her by the hands; but she still laughed when she answered.
“Yes – I told you I couldn’t avoid it – but you really must let me go, Hilary. I can see your friends coming down from the hill.”
While she spoke, indeed, Colonel Crane and Owen Hood could be seen coming down the hill and passing through a line of elegant trees.
“Hello!” said Hilary Pierce cheerfully. “I want you to congratulate me. Joan thinks I’m an awful charlatan, and she is right; I am what has been called a happy chatlatan. At least you fellows may think my last escapade was not necessary, when I tell you the news. Well, I will confess.”
“What news do you mean?” asked the Colonel with curiosity.
Hilary Pierce grinned and made a gesture over his shoulder to the pigs covered with parachutes, to indicate his last and crowning adventure.
“The truth is,” he said laughing, “that was only a final firework to celebrate victory or failure, however you choose to call it. There isn’t any need to do so anymore, because the veto is removed.”
“Removed?” exclaimed Hood. “Why on earth is that? It’s a bit scary when madmen suddenly do normal things like that.”
“It wasn’t anything to do with the madmen,” answered Pierce quietly. “The real change was much higher up, or maybe lower down. Anyhow, it was in the world of the Big Business.”
“What was the change?” asked the Colonel.
“Old Oates has gone into another business,” answered Pierce quietly.
“What on earth has old Oates got to do with it?” asked Hood staring. “Do you mean that American who came to see the mediaeval churches?”
“Oh, I know,” said Pierce in a tired voice, “I thought he had nothing to do with it; I thought it was the vegetarians, and the rest; but they’re very innocent instruments. The truth is that Enoch Oates is the biggest exporter of pigs in the world, and HE didn’t want any competition from our farmers. And what he wants happens, as he would say. Now, thank God, he’s moved into another business.”
But if the reader wishes to know what was the new line of business Mr. Oates followed and why, he will have to wait for the story of the Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates. These stories are about the world upside down, and they should be told backwards.
A
abruptly [ə′brʌptlɪ] вдруг, внезапно
absent-minded [æbs(ə)nt′maɪndɪd] рассеянный
active service [′æktɪv ′sɜ:vɪs] служба в армии
adequate [′ædɪkwət] адекватный
advantage [əd′vɑ:ntɪʤ] преимущество
adventurous [əd′venʧ(ə)rəs] предприимчивый, ищущий приключений
advise [əd′vaɪz] советовать
allusion [ə′lu:ʒ(ə)n] намёк, аллюзия
