the earl of eden had become prime minister for the third time, and his face and figure were therefore familiar in the political cartoons and even in the public streets. his yellow hair and lean and springy figure gave him a factitious air of youth; but his face on a closer study looked lined and wrinkled and gave almost a shock of decrepitude. he was in truth a man of great experience and dexterity in his own profession. he had just succeeded in routing the socialist party and overthrowing the socialist government, largely by the use of certain rhymed mottoes and maxims which he had himself invented with considerable amusement. his great slogan of “don’t nationalize but rationalize” was generally believed to have led him to victory. but at the moment when this story begins he had other things to think of. he had just received an urgent request for a consultation from three of his most prominent supporters—lord normantowers, sir horace hunter, o.b.e., the great advocate of scientific politics, and mr. r. low, the philanthropist. they were confronted[212] with a problem, and their problem concerned the sudden madness of an american millionaire.
the prime minister was not unacquainted with american millionaires, even those whose conduct suggested that they were hardly representative of a normal or national type. there was the great grigg, the millionaire inventor, who had pressed upon the war office a scheme for finishing the war at a blow; it consisted of electrocuting the kaiser by wireless telegraphy. there was mr. napper, of nebraska, whose negotiations for removing shakespeare’s cliff to america as a symbol of anglo-saxon unity were unaccountably frustrated by the firm refusal of the american republic to send us plymouth rock in exchange. and there was that charming and cultured bostonian, colonel hoopoe, whom all england welcomed in his crusade for purity and the league of the lily, until england discovered with considerable surprise that the american ambassador and all respectable americans flatly refused to meet the colonel, whose record at home was that of a very narrow escape from sing-sing.
but the problem of enoch oates, who had made his money in pork, was something profoundly different. as lord eden’s three supporters eagerly explained to him, seated round a garden-table at his beautiful country seat in somerset, mr. oates had done something that the maddest millionaire had[213] never thought of doing before. up to a certain point he had proceeded in a manner normal to such a foreigner. he had purchased amid general approval an estate covering about a quarter of a county; and it was expected that he would make it a field for some of those american experiments in temperance or eugenics for which the english agricultural populace offer a sort of virgin soil. instead of that, he suddenly went mad and made a present of his land to his tenants; so that by an unprecedented anomaly the farms became the property of the farmers. that an american millionaire should take away english things from england, english rents, english relics, english pictures, english cathedrals or cliffs of dover, was a natural operation to which everybody was by this time accustomed. but that an american millionaire should give english land to english people was an unwarrantable interference and tantamount to an alien enemy stirring up revolution. enoch oates had therefore been summoned to the council, and sat scowling at the table as if he were in the dock.
“results most deplorable already,” said sir horace hunter, in his rather loud voice. “give you an example, my lord; people of the name of dale in somerset took in a lunatic as a lodger. may have been a homicidal maniac for all i know; some do say he had a great cannon or culverin sticking out of his bedroom window. but with no responsible[214] management of the estate, no landlord, no lawyer, no educated person anywhere, there was nothing to prevent their letting the bedroom to a bengal tiger. anyhow, the man was mad, rushed raving on to the platform at the astronomical congress talking about lovely woman and the cow that jumped over the moon. that damned agitator pierce, who used to be in the flying corps, was in the hall, and made a riot and carried the crazy fellow off in an aeroplane. that’s the sort of thing you’ll have happening all over the place if these ignorant fellows are allowed to do just as they like.”
“it is quite true,” said lord normantowers. “i could give many other examples. they say that owen hood, another of these eccentrics, has actually bought one of these little farms and stuck it all round with absurd battlements and a moat and drawbridge, with the motto ‘the englishman’s house is his castle.’”
“i think,” said the prime minister quietly, “that however english the englishman may be, he will find his castle is a castle in spain; not to say a castle in the air. mr. oates,” he said, addressing very courteously the big brooding american at the other end of the table, “please do not imagine that i cannot sympathize with such romances, although they are only in the air. but i think in all sincerity that you will find they are unsuited to the english climate. et ego in arcadia, you know;[215] we have all had such dreams of all men piping in arcady. but after all, you have already paid the piper; and if you are wise, i think you can still call the tune.”
“gives me great gratification to say it’s too late,” growled oates. “i want them to learn to play and pay for themselves.”
“but you want them to learn,” said lord eden gently, “and i should not be in too much of a hurry to call it too late. it seems to me that the door is still open for a reasonable compromise; i understand that the deed of gift, considered as a legal instrument, is still the subject of some legal discussion and may well be subject to revision. i happened to be talking of it yesterday with the law officers of the crown; and i am sure that the least hint that you yourself——”
“i take it you mean,” said mr. oates with great deliberation, “that you’ll tell your lawyers it’ll pay them to pick a hole in the deal.”
“that is what we call the bluff western humour,” said lord eden, smiling, “but i only mean that we do a great deal in this country by reconsideration and revision. we make mistakes and unmake them. we have a phrase for it in our history books; we call it the flexibility of an unwritten constitution.”
“we have a phrase for it too,” said the american reflectively. “we call it graft.”
“really,” cried normantowers, a little bristly[216] man, with sudden shrillness, “i did not know you were so scrupulous in your own methods.”
“motht unthcrupulouth,” said mr. low virtuously.
enoch oates rose slowly like an enormous leviathan rising to the surface of the sea; his large sallow face had never changed in expression; but he had the air of one drifting dreamily away.
“wal,” he said, “i dare say it’s true i’ve done some graft in my time, and a good many deals that weren’t what you might call modelled on the sermon on the mount. but if i smashed people, it was when they were all out to smash me; and if some of ’em were poor, they were the sort that were ready to shoot or knife or blow me to bits. and i tell you, in my country the whole lot of you would be liable to be lynched or tarred and feathered to-morrow, if you talked about lawyers taking away people’s land when once they’d got it. maybe the english climate’s different, as you say; but i’m going to see it through. as for you, mr. rosenbaum——”
“my name is low,” said the philanthropist. “i cannot thee why anyone should object to uthing my name.”
“not on your life,” said mr. oates affably. “seems to me a pretty appropriate name.”
he drifted heavily from the room, and the four other men were left, staring at a riddle.
[217]“he’s going on with it, or, rather, they’re going on with it,” groaned horace hunter. “and what the devil is to be done now?”
“it really looks as if he were right in calling it too late,” said lord normantowers bitterly. “i can’t think of anything to be done.”
“i can,” said the prime minister. they all looked at him; but none of them could read the undecipherable subtleties in his old and wrinkled face under his youthful yellow hair.
“the resources of civilization are not exhausted,” he said grimly. “that’s what the old governments used to say when they started shooting people. well, i could understand you gentlemen feeling inclined to shoot people now. i suppose it seems to you that all your power in the state, which you wield with such public spirit of course; all sir horace’s health reforms, the normantowers’s new estate, and so on, are all broken to bits, to rotten little bits of rusticity. what’s to become of a governing class if it doesn’t hold all the land, eh? well, i’ll tell you. i know the next move, and the time has come to take it.”
“but what is it?” demanded sir horace.
“the time has come,” said the prime minister, “to nationalize the land.”
sir horace hunter rose from his chair, opened his mouth, shut it, and sat down again, all with what he himself might have called a reflex action.
[218]“but that is socialism!” cried lord normantowers, his eyes standing out of his head.
“true socialism, don’t you think?” mused the prime minister. “better call it true socialism; just the sort of thing to be remembered at elections. theirs is socialism, and ours is true socialism.”
“do you really mean, my lord,” cried hunter in a heat of sincerity stronger than the snobbery of a lifetime, “that you are going to support the bolshies?”
“no,” said eden, with the smile of a sphinx. “i mean the bolshies are going to support me. idiots!”
after a silence, he added in a more wistful tone:
“of course, as a matter of sentiment, it is a little sad. all our fine old english castles and manors, the homes of the gentry ... they will become public property, like post offices, i suppose. when i think of the happy hours i have myself passed at normantowers—” he smiled across at the nobleman of that name and went on. “and sir horace has now, i believe, the joy of living in warbridge castle—fine old place. dear me, yes, and i think mr. low has a castle, though the name escapes me.”
“rosewood castle,” said mr. low rather sulkily.
“but i say,” cried sir horace, rising, “what becomes of ‘don’t nationalize but rationalize’?”
“i suppose,” replied eden lightly, “it will have[219] to be ‘don’t rationalize but nationalize.’ it comes to the same thing. besides, we can easily get a new motto of some sort. for instance, we, after all, are the patriotic party, the national party. what about ‘let the nationalists nationalize’?”
“well, all i can say is—” began normantowers explosively.
“compensation, there will be compensation, of course,” said the prime minister soothingly; “a great deal can be done with compensation. if you will all turn up here this day week, say at four o’clock, i think i can lay all the plans before you.”
when they did turn up next week and were shown again into the prime minister’s sunny garden, they found that the plans were, indeed, laid before them; for the table that stood on the sunny lawn was covered with large and small maps and a mass of official documents. mr. eustace pym, one of the prime minister’s numerous private secretaries, was hovering over them, and the prime minister himself was sitting at the head of the table studying one of them with an intelligent frown.
“i thought you’d like to hear the terms of the arrangements,” he said. “i’m afraid we must all make sacrifices in the cause of progress.”
“oh, progress be——” cried normantowers, losing patience. “i want to know if you really mean that my estate——”
“it comes under the department of castle and[220] abbey estates in section four,” said lord eden, referring to the paper before him. “by the provisions of the new bill the public control in such cases will be vested in the lord-lieutenant of the county. in the particular case of your castle—let me see—why, yes, of course, you are lord-lieutenant of that county.”
little lord normantowers was staring, with his stiff hair all standing on end; but a new look was dawning in his shrewd though small-featured face.
“the case of warbridge castle is different,” said the prime minister. “it happens unfortunately to stand in a district desolated by all the recent troubles about swine-fever, touching which the health controller” (here he bowed to sir horace hunter) “has shown such admirable activity. it has been necessary to place the whole of this district in the hands of the health controller, that he may study any traces of swine-fever that may be found in the castle, the cathedral, the vicarage, and so on. so much for that case, which stands somewhat apart; the others are mostly normal. rosenbaum castle—i should say rosewood castle—being of a later date, comes under section five, and the appointment of a permanent castle custodian is left to the discretion of the government. in this case the government has decided to appoint[221] mr. rosewood low to the post, in recognition of his local services to social science and economics. in all these cases, of course, due compensation will be paid to the present owners of the estates, and ample salaries and expenses of entertainment paid to the new officials, that the places may be kept up in a manner worthy of their historical and national character.”
he paused, as if for cheers, and sir horace was vaguely irritated into saying: “but look here, my castle——”
“damn it all!” said the prime minister, with his first flash of impatience and sincerity. “can’t you see you’ll get twice as much as before? first you’ll be compensated for losing your castle, and then you’ll be paid for keeping it.”
“my lord,” said lord normantowers humbly, “i apologize for anything i may have said or suggested. i ought to have known i stood in the presence of a great english statesman.”
“oh, it’s easy enough,” said lord eden frankly. “look how easily we remained in the saddle, in spite of democratic elections; how we managed to dominate the commons as well as the lords. it’ll be the same with what they call socialism. we shall still be there; only we shall be called bureaucrats instead of aristocrats.”
“i see it all now!” cried hunter, “and by heaven,[222] it’ll be the end of all this confounded demagogy of three acres and a cow.”
“i think so,” said the prime minister with a smile; and began to fold up the large maps.
as he was folding up the last and largest, he suddenly stopped and said:
“hallo!”
a letter was lying in the middle of the table; a letter in a sealed envelope, and one which he evidently did not recognize as any part of his paper paraphernalia.
“where did this letter come from?” he asked rather sharply. “did you put it here, eustace?”
“no,” said mr. pym staring. “i never saw it before. it didn’t come with your letters this morning.”
“it didn’t come by post at all,” said lord eden; “and none of the servants brought it in. how the devil did it get out here in the garden?”
he ripped it open with his finger and remained for some time staring in mystification at its contents.
welkin castle,
sept. 4th, 19—.
“dear lord eden,—as i understand you are making public provision for the future disposal of our historic national castles, such as warbridge castle, i should much appreciate any information about your intentions touching welkin[223] castle, my own estate, as it would enable me to make my own arrangements.—yours very truly,
“welkyn of welkin.”
“who is welkyn?” asked the puzzled politician; “he writes as if he knew me; but i can’t recall him at the moment. and where is welkin castle? we must look at the maps again.”
but though they looked at the maps for hours, and searched burke, debrett, “who’s who,” the atlas and every other work of reference, they could come upon no trace of that firm but polite country gentleman.
lord eden was a little worried, because he knew that curiously important people could exist in a corner in this country, and suddenly emerge from their corner to make trouble. he knew it was very important that his own governing class should stand in with him in this great public change (and private understanding), and that no rich eccentric should be left out and offended. but although he was worried to that extent, it is probable that his worry would soon have faded from his mind if it had not been for something that happened some days later.
going out into the same garden to the same table, with the more agreeable purpose of taking tea there, he was amazed to find another letter, though this was lying not on the table but on the turf just beside it. it was unstamped like the other and addressed[224] in the same handwriting; but its tone was more stern.
welkin castle,
oct. 6th, 19—.
“my lord,—as you seem to have decided to continue your sweeping scheme of confiscation, as in the case of warbridge castle, without the slightest reference to the historic and even heroic claims and traditions of welkin castle, i can only inform you that i shall defend the fortress of my fathers to the death. moreover, i have decided to make a protest of a more public kind; and when you next hear from me it will be in the form of a general appeal to the justice of the english people.—yours truly,
“welkyn of welkin.”
the historic and even heroic traditions of welkin castle kept a dozen of the prime minister’s private secretaries busy for a week, looking up encyclopædias and chronicles and books of history. but the prime minister himself was more worried about another problem. how did these mysterious letters get into the house, or rather into the garden? none of them came by post and none of the servants knew anything whatever about them. moreover, the prime minister, in an unobtrusive way, was very carefully guarded. prime ministers always[225] are, but he had been especially protected ever since the vegetarians a few years before had gone about killing everybody who believed in killing animals. there were always plain-clothes policemen at every entrance of his house and garden. and from their testimony it would appear certain that the letter could not have got into the garden; but for the trifling fact that it was lying there on the garden-table. lord eden cogitated in a grim fashion for some time; then he said as he rose from his chair:
“i think i will have a talk to our american friend mr. oates.”
whether from a sense of humour or a sense of justice, lord eden summoned enoch oates before the same special jury of three; or summoned them before him, as the case may be. for it was even more difficult than before to read the exact secret of eden’s sympathies or intentions; he talked about a variety of indifferent subjects leading up to that of the letters, which he treated very lightly. then he said quite suddenly:
“do you know anything about those letters, by the way?”
the american presented his poker face to the company for some time without reply. then he said:
“and what makes you think i know anything about them?”
[226]“because,” said horace hunter, breaking in with uncontrollable warmth, “we know you’re hand and glove with all those lunatics in the league of the long bow who are kicking up all this shindy.”
“well,” said oates calmly, “i’ll never deny i like some of their ways. i like live wires myself; and, after all, they’re about the liveliest thing in this old country. and i’ll tell you more. i like people who take trouble; and, believe me, they do take trouble. you say they’re all nuts; but i reckon there really is method in their madness. they take trouble to keep those crazy vows of theirs. you spoke about the fellows who carried off the astronomer in an aeroplane. well, i know bellew blair, the man who worked with pierce in that stunt, and believe me he’s not a man to be sniffed at. he’s one of the first experts in aeronautics in the country; and if he’s gone over to them, it means there’s something in their notion for a scientific intellect to take hold of. it was blair that worked that pig’s stunt for hilary pierce; made a great gasbag shaped like a sow and gave all the little pigs parachutes.”
“well, there you are,” cried hunter. “of all the lunacy——”
“i remember commander blair in the war,” said the prime minister quietly. “bellows blair, they called him. he did excellent expert work. some new scheme with dirigible balloons. but i[227] was only going to ask mr. oates whether he happens to know where welkin castle is.”
“must be somewhere near here,” suggested normantowers, “as the letters seem to come by hand.”
“well, i don’t know,” said enoch oates doubtfully. “i know a man living in ely, who had one of those letters delivered by hand. and i know another near land’s end who thought the letter must have come from somebody living near. as you say, they all seem to come by hand.”
“by what hand?” asked the prime minister, with a queer, grim expression.
“mr. oates,” said lord normantowers firmly, “where is welkin castle?”
“why, it’s everywhere, in a manner of speaking,” said mr. oates reflectively. “it’s anywhere, anyhow. gee—!” he broke off suddenly: “why, as a matter of fact, it’s here!”
“ah,” said the prime minister quietly, “i thought we should see something if we watched here long enough! you didn’t think i kept you hanging about here only to ask mr. oates questions that i knew the answer to.”
“what do you mean? thought we would see what?”
“where the unstamped letters come from,” replied lord eden.
luminous and enormous, there heaved up above the garden trees something that looked at first like[228] a coloured cloud; it was flushed with light such as lies on clouds opposite the sunset, a light at once warm and wan; and it shone like an opaque flame. but as it came closer it grew more and more incredible. it took on solid proportions and perspective, as if a cloud could brush and crush the dark tree-tops. it was something never seen before in the sky; it was a cubist cloud. men gazing at such a sunset cloudland often imagine they see castles and cities of an almost uncanny completeness. but there would be a possible point of completeness at which they would cry aloud, or perhaps shriek aloud, as at a sign in heaven; and that completeness had come. the big luminous object that sailed above the garden was outlined in battlements and turrets like a fairy castle; but with an architectural exactitude impossible in any cloudland. with the very look of it a phrase and a proverb leapt into the mind.
“there, my lord!” cried oates, suddenly lifting his nasal and drawling voice and pointing, “there’s that dream you told me about. there’s your castle in the air.”
as the shadow of the flying thing travelled over the sun-lit lawn, they looked up and saw for the first time that the lower part of the edifice hung downwards like the car of a great balloon. they remembered the aeronautical tricks of commander[229] blair and captain pierce and the model of the monstrous pig. as it passed over the table a white speck detached itself and dropped from the car. it was a letter.
the next moment the white speck was followed by a shower that was like a snowstorm. countless letters, leaflets, and scraps of paper were littered all over the lawn. the guests seemed to stand staring wildly in a wilderness of waste-paper; but the keen and experienced eyes of lord eden recognized the material which, in political elections, is somewhat satirically called “literature.”
it took the twelve private secretaries some time to pick them all up and make the lawn neat and tidy again. on examination they proved to be mainly of two kinds: one a sort of electioneering pamphlet of the league of the long bow, and the other a somewhat airy fantasy about private property in air. the most important of the documents, which lord eden studied more attentively, though with a grim smile, began with the sentence in large letters:
“an englishman’s house is no longer his castle on the soil of england. if it is to be his castle, it must be a castle in the air.
“if there seem to be something unfamiliar and even fanciful in the idea, we reply that[230] it is not half so fantastic to own your own houses in the clouds as not to own your own houses on the earth.”
then followed a passage of somewhat less solid political value, in which the acute reader might trace the influence of the poetical mr. pierce rather than the scientific mr. blair. it began “they have stolen the earth; we will divide the sky.” but the writer followed this with a somewhat unconvincing claim to have trained rooks and swallows to hover in rows in the air to represent the hedges of “the blue meadows of the new realm,” and he was so obliging as to accompany the explanation with diagrams of space showing these exact ornithological boundaries in dotted lines. there were other equally scientific documents dealing with the treatment of clouds, the driving of birds to graze on insects, and so on. the whole of this section concluded with the great social and economic slogan: “three acres and a crow.”
but when lord eden read on, his attention appeared graver than this particular sort of social reconstruction would seem to warrant. the writer of the pamphlet resumed:
“do not be surprised if there seems to be something topsy-turvy in the above programme. that topsy-turvydom marks the whole of our politics.[231] it may seem strange that the air which has always been public should become private, when the land which has always been private has become public. we answer that this is exactly how things really stand to-day in the matter of all publicity and privacy. private things are indeed being made public. but public things are being kept private.
“thus we all had the pleasure of seeing in the papers a picture of sir horace hunter, o.b.e., smiling in an ingratiating manner at his favourite cockatoo. we know this detail of his existence, which might seem a merely domestic one. but the fact that he is shortly to be paid thirty thousand pounds of public money, for continuing to live in his own house, is concealed with the utmost delicacy.
“similarly we have seen whole pages of an illustrated paper filled with glimpses of lord normantowers enjoying his honeymoon, which the papers in question are careful to describe as his romance. whatever it may be, an antiquated and fastidious taste might possibly be disposed to regard it as his own affair. but the fact that the taxpayer’s money, which is the taxpayer’s affair, is to be given him in enormous quantities, first for going out of his castle, and then for coming back into it—this little domestic detail is thought too trivial for the taxpayer to be told of it.
“or again, we are frequently informed that the hobby of mr. rosenbaum low is improving the[232] breed of pekinese, and god knows they need it. but it would seem the sort of hobby that anybody might have without telling everybody else about it. on the other hand, the fact that mr. rosenbaum low is being paid twice over for the same house, and keeping the house as well, is concealed from the public; along with the equally interesting fact that he is allowed to do these things chiefly because he lends money to the prime minister.”
the prime minister smiled still more grimly and glanced in a light yet lingering fashion at some of the accompanying leaflets. they seemed to be in the form of electioneering leaflets, though not apparently connected with any particular election.
“vote for crane. he said he would eat his hat and did it. lord normantowers said he would explain how people came to swallow his coronet; but he hasn’t done it yet.
“vote for pierce. he said pigs would fly and they did. rosenbaum low said a service of international aërial express trains would fly; and they didn’t. it was your money he made to fly.
“vote for the league of the long bow. they are the only men who don’t tell lies.”
the prime minister stood gazing after the vanishing cloud-castle, as it faded into the clouds, with a curious expression in his eyes. whether it were[233] better or worse for his soul, there was something in him that understood much that the muddled materialists around him could never understand.
“quite poetical, isn’t it?” he said drily. “wasn’t it victor hugo or some french poet who said something about politics and the clouds?... the people say, ‘bah, the poet is in the clouds. so is the thunderbolt.’”
“thunderbolts!” said normantowers contemptuously. “what can those fools do but go about flinging fireworks?”
“quite so,” replied eden; “but i’m afraid by this time they are flinging fireworks into a powder magazine.”
he continued to gaze into the sky with screwed-up eyes, though the object had become invisible.
if his eye could really have followed the thing after which he gazed, he would have been surprised; if his unfathomable scepticism was still capable of surprise. it passed over woods and meadows like a sunset cloud towards the sunset, or a little to the north-west of it, like the fairy castle that was west of the moon. it left behind the green orchards and the red towers of hereford and passed into bare places whose towers are mightier than any made by man, where they buttress the mighty wall of wales. far away in this wilderness of columned cliffs and clefts it found a cleft or hollow, along the floor of which ran a dark line that might have been a black[234] river running through a rocky valley. but it was in fact a crack opening below into another abyss. the strange flying ship followed the course of the winding fissure till it came to a place where the crack opened into a chasm, round like a cauldron and accidental as the knot in some colossal tree-trunk; through which it sank, entering the twilight of the tremendous cavern beneath. the abyss below was lit here and there with artificial lights, like fallen stars of the underworld, and bridged with wooden platforms and galleries, on which were wooden huts and huge packing-cases and many things somewhat suggestive of a munition dump. on the rocky walls were spread out various balloon coverings, some of them of even more grotesque outline than the castle. some were in the shapes of animals; and on that primeval background looked like the last fossils, or possibly the first outlines of vast prehistoric creatures. perhaps there was something suggestive in the fancy that in that underworld a new world was being created. the man who alighted from the flying castle recognized, almost as one recognizes a domestic pet, the outline of a highly primitive pig stretching like a large archaic drawing across the wall. for the young man was called hilary pierce, and had had previous dealings with the flying pig, though for that day he had been put in charge of the flying castle.
on the platform on which he alighted stood a table[235] covered with papers, with almost more papers than lord eden’s table. but these papers were covered almost entirely with figures and numbers and mathematical symbols. two men were bending over the table, discussing and occasionally disputing. in the taller of the two the scientific world might have recognized professor green, whom it was seeking everywhere like the missing link, to incarcerate him in the interests of science. in the shorter and sturdier figure a very few people might have recognized bellew blair, the organizing brain of the english revolution.
“i haven’t come to stay,” explained pierce hastily. “i’m going on in a minute.”
“why shouldn’t you stay?” asked blair, in the act of lighting a pipe.
“i don’t want your little talk interrupted. still less, far, far less, do i want it uninterrupted. i mean while i’m here. a little of your scientific conversation goes a long way with me; i know what you’re like when you’re really chatty. professor green will say in his satirical way ‘9920.05,’ to which you will reply with quiet humour ‘75.007.’ this will be too good an opening for a witty fellow like the professor, who will instantly retort ‘982.09.’ not in the best taste perhaps, but a great temptation in the heat of debate.”
“commander blair,” said the professor, “is very kind to let me share his calculations.”
[236]“lucky for me,” said blair. “i’d have done ten times more with a mathematician like you.”
“well,” said pierce casually, “as you are so much immersed in mathematics, i’ll leave you. as a matter of fact, i had a message for professor green, about miss dale at the house where he was lodging; but we mustn’t interrupt scientific studies for a little thing like that.”
green’s head came up from the papers with great abruptness.
“message!” he cried eagerly. “what message? is it really for me?”
“8282.003,” replied pierce coldly.
“don’t be offended,” said blair. “give the professor his message and then go if you like.”
“it’s only that she came over to see my wife to find out where you had gone to,” said pierce. “i told her, so far as it’s possible to tell anybody. that’s all,” he added, but rather with the air of one saying “it ought to be enough.”
apparently it was, for green, who was once more looking down upon the precious papers, crumpled one of them in his clenched hand unconsciously, like a man suddenly controlling his feelings.
“well, i’m off,” said pierce cheerfully; “got to visit the other dumps.”
“stop a minute,” said blair, as the other turned away. “haven’t you any sort of public news as[237] well as private news? how are things going in the political world?”
“expressed in mathematical formula,” replied pierce over his shoulder, “the political news is mp squared plus lsd over u equals l. l let loose. l upon earth, my boy.”
and he climbed again into his castle of the air.
oliver green stood staring at the crumpled paper and suddenly began to straighten it out.
“mr. blair,” he said, “i’m terribly ashamed of myself. when i see you living here like a hermit in the mountains and scrawling your calculations, so to speak, on the rocks of the wilderness, devoted to your great abstract idea, vowed to a great cause, it makes me feel very small to have entangled you and your friends in my small affairs. of course, the affair isn’t at all small to me; but it must seem very small to you.”
“i don’t know very precisely,” answered blair, “what was the nature of the affair. but that is emphatically your affair. for the rest, i assure you we’re delighted to have you, apart from your valuable services as a calculating machine.”
bellew blair, the last and, in the worldly sense, by far the ablest of the recruits of the long bow, was a man in early middle age, square built, but neat in figure and light on his feet, clad in a suit of leather. he mostly moved about so quickly that his[238] figure made more impression than his face; but when he sat down smoking, in one of his rare moments of leisure, as now, it could be remarked that his face was rather calm than vivacious; a short square face with a short resolute nose, but reflective eyes much lighter than his close black hair.
“it’s quite homeric,” he added, “the two armies fighting for the body of an astronomer. you would be a sort of a symbol anyhow, since they started that insanity of calling you insane. nobody has any business to bother you about the personal side of the matter.”
green seemed to be ruminating, and the last phrase awoke him to a decision. he began to talk. quite straightforwardly, though with a certain schoolboy awkwardness, he proceeded to tell his friend the whole of his uncouth love story—the overturning of his spiritual world to the tune the old cow died of, or rather danced to.
“and i’ve let you in for hiding me like a murderer,” he concluded. “for the sake of something that must seem to you, not even like a cow jumping over the moon, but more like a calf falling over the milking-stool. perhaps people vowed to a great work like this ought to leave all that sort of thing behind them.”
“well, i don’t see anything to be ashamed of,” said blair, “and in this case i don’t agree with what you say about leaving those things behind. of some[239] sorts of work it’s true; but not this. shall i tell you a secret?”
“if you don’t mind.”
“the cow never does jump over the moon,” said blair gravely. “it’s one of the sports of the bulls of the herd.”
“i’m afraid i don’t know what you mean,” said the professor.
“i mean that women can’t be kept out of this war, because it’s a land war,” answered blair. “if it were really a war in the air, you could have done it all by yourself. but in all wars of peasants defending their farms and homes, women have been very much on the spot; as they used to pour hot water out of the windows during the irish evictions. look here, i’ll tell you a story. it’s relevant because it has a moral. after all, it’s my turn, so to speak. you’ve told me the true story of the cow that jumped over the moon. it’s time i told you the true story of the castle in the air.”
he smoked silently for a moment, and then said:
“you may have wondered how a very prosaic practical scotch engineer like myself ever came to make a thing like that pantomime palace over there, as childish as a child’s coloured balloon. well, the answer is the same; because in certain circumstances a man may be different from himself. at a certain period of the old war preparations, i was doing some[240] work for the government in a secluded part of the western coast of ireland. there were very few people for me to talk to; but one of them was the daughter of a bankrupt squire named malone; and i talked to her a good deal. i was about as mechanical a mechanic as you could dig out anywhere; grimy, grumpy, tinkering about with dirty machinery. she was really like those princesses you read about in the celtic poems; with a red crown made of curling elf-locks like little flames, and a pale elfin face that seemed somehow thin and luminous like glass; and she could make you listen to silence like a song. it wasn’t a pose with her, it was a poem; there are people like that, but very few of them like her. i tried to keep my end up by telling her about the wonders of science, and the great new architecture of the air. and then sheila used to say, ‘and what is the good of them to me, when you have built them. i can see a castle build itself without hands out of gigantic rocks of clear jewels in the sky every night.’ and she would point to where crimson or violet clouds hung in the green afterglow over the great atlantic.
“you would probably say i was mad, if you didn’t happen to have been mad yourself. but i was wild with the idea that there was something that she admired and that she thought science couldn’t do. i was as morbid as a boy; i half thought she despised me; and i wanted half to prove her wrong and half[241] to do whatever she thought right. i resolved my science should beat the clouds at their own game; and i laboured till i’d actually made a sort of rainbow castle that would ride on the air. i think at the back of my mind there was some sort of crazy idea of carrying her off into the clouds she lived among, as if she were literally an angel and ought to dwell on wings. it never quite came to that, as you will hear, but as my experiments progressed my romance progressed too. you won’t need any telling about that; i only want to tell you the end of the story because of the moral. we made arrangements to get married; and i had to leave a good many of the arrangements to her, while i completed my great work. then at last it was ready and i came to seek her like a pagan god descending in a cloud to carry a nymph up to olympus. and i found she had already taken a very solid little brick villa on the edge of a town, having got it remarkably cheap and furnished it with most modern conveniences. and when i talked to her about castles in the air, she laughed and said her castle had come down to the ground. that is the moral. a woman, especially an irishwoman, is always uncommonly practical when it comes to getting married. that is what i mean by saying it is never the cow who jumps over the moon. it is the cow who stands firmly planted in the middle of the three acres; and who always counts in any struggle of the land.[242] that is why there must be women in this story, especially like those in your story and pierce’s, women who come from the land. when the world needs a crusade for communal ideals, it is best waged by men without ties, like the franciscans. but when it comes to a fight for private property—you can’t keep women out of that. you can’t have the family farm without the family. you must have concrete christian marriage again: you can’t have solid small property with all this vagabond polygamy: a harem that isn’t even a home.”
green nodded and rose slowly to his feet, with his hands in his pockets.
“when it comes to a fight,” he said. “when i look at these enormous underground preparations, it is not difficult to infer that you think it will come to a fight.”
“i think it has come to a fight,” answered blair. “lord eden has decided that. and the others may not understand exactly what they are doing; but he does.”
and blair knocked out his pipe and stood up, to resume his work in that mountain laboratory, at about the same time at which lord eden awoke from his smiling meditations; and, lighting a cigarette, went languidly indoors.
he did not attempt to explain what was in his mind to the men around him. he was the only man there who understood that the england about him was not[243] the england that had surrounded his youth and supported his leisure and luxury; that things were breaking up, first slowly and then more and more swiftly, and that the things detaching themselves were both good and evil. and one of them was this bald, broad and menacing new fact: a peasantry. the class of small farmers already existed, and might yet be found fighting for its farms like the same class all over the world. it was no longer certain that the sweeping social adjustments settled in that garden could be applied to the whole english land. but the story of how far his doubts were justified, and how far his whole project fared, is a part of the story of “the ultimate ultimatum of the league of the long bow,” after which the exhausted and broken-spirited reader may find rest at last.
