that timeless clock of all lunatics, which was so bright in the sky that night, may really have had some elfin luck about it, like a silver penny. not only had it initiated mr. hibbs into the mysteries of dionysius, and mr. bullrose into the arboreal habits of his ancestors, but one night of it made a very considerable and rather valuable change in mr. dorian wimpole, the poet of the birds. he was a man neither foolish nor evil, any more than shelley; only a man made sterile by living in a world of indirectness and insincerity, with words rather than with things. he had not had the smallest intention of starving his chauffeur; he did not realize that there was worse spiritual murder in merely forgetting him. but as hour after hour passed over him, alone with the donkey and the moon, he went through a raging and shifting series of frames of mind, such as his cultured friends would have described as moods.
the first mood, i regret to say, was one of black and grinding hatred. he had no notion of the chauffeur’s grievance, and could only suppose he had been bribed or intimidated by the demonic donkey-torturers. but mr. wimpole was much more capable at that moment of torturing a chauffeur than mr. pump had ever been of torturing a donkey; for no sane man can hate an animal. he kicked the stones in the road, sending them flying into the forest, and wished that each one of them was a chauffeur. the bracken by the roadside he tore up by the roots, as representing the hair of the chauffeur, to which it bore no resemblance. he hit with his fist such trees, as, i suppose, seemed in form and expression most reminiscent of the chauffeur; but desisted from this, finding that in this apparently one-sided contest the tree had rather the best of it. but the whole wood and the whole world had become a kind of omnipresent and pantheistic chauffeur, and he hit at him everywhere.
the thoughtful reader will realise that mr. wimpole had already taken a considerable upward stride in what he would have called the cosmic scale. the next best thing to really loving a fellow creature is really hating him: especially when he is a poorer man separated from you otherwise by mere social stiffness. the desire to murder him is at least an acknowledgment that he is alive. many a man has owed the first white gleams of the dawn of democracy in his soul to a desire to find a stick and beat the butler. and we have it on the unimpeachable local authority of mr. humphrey pump that squire merriman chased his librarian through three villages with a horse-pistol; and was a radical ever after.
his rage also did him good merely as a relief, and he soon passed into a second and more positive mood of meditation.
“the damnable monkeys go on like this,” he muttered, “and then they call a donkey one of the lower animals. ride on a donkey would he? i’d like to see the donkey riding on him for a bit. good old man.”
the patient ass turned mild eyes on him when he patted it, and dorian wimpole discovered, with a sort of subconscious surprise, that he really was fond of the donkey. deeper still in his subliminal self he knew that he had never been fond of an animal before. his poems about fantastic creatures had been quite sincere, and quite cold. when he said he loved a shark, he meant he saw no reason for hating a shark, which was right enough. there is no reason for hating a shark, however much reason there may be for avoiding one. there is no harm in a craken if you keep it in a tank—or in a sonnet.
but he also realised that his love of creatures had been turned round and was working from the other end. the donkey was a companion, and not a monstrosity. it was dear because it was near, not because it was distant. the oyster had attracted him because it was utterly unlike a man; unless it be counted a touch of masculine vanity to grow a beard. the fancy is no idler than that he had himself used, in suggesting a sort of feminine vanity in the permanence of a pearl. but in that maddening vigil among the mystic pines, he found himself more and more drawn toward the donkey, because it was more like a man than anything else around him; because it had eyes to see, and ears to hear—and the latter even unduly developed.
“he that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” he said, scratching those grey hairy flappers with affection. “haven’t you lifted your ears toward heaven? and will you be the first to hear the last trumpet?”
the ass rubbed his nose against him with what seemed almost like a human caress. and dorian caught himself wondering how a caress from an oyster could be managed. everything else around him was beautiful, but inhuman. only in the first glory of anger could he really trace in a tall pine-tree the features of an ex-taxi-cabman from kennington. trees and ferns had no living ears that they could wag nor mild eyes that they could move. he patted the donkey again.
but the donkey had reconciled him to the landscape, and in his third mood he began to realize how beautiful it was. on a second study, he was not sure it was so inhuman. rather he felt that its beauty at least was half human; that the aureole of the sinking moon behind the woods was chiefly lovely because it was like the tender-coloured aureole of an early saint; and that the young trees were, after all, noble because they held up their heads like virgins. cloudily there crowded into his mind ideas with which it was imperfectly familiar, especially an idea which he had heard called “the image of god.” it seemed to him more and more that all these things, from the donkey to the very docks and ferns by the roadside, were dignified and sanctified by their partial resemblance to something else. it was as if they were baby drawings: the wild, crude sketches of nature in her first sketch-books of stone.
he had flung himself on a pile of pine-needles to enjoy the gathering darkness of the pinewoods as the moon sank behind them. there is nothing more deep and wonderful than really impenetrable pinewoods where the nearer trees show against the more shadowy; a tracery of silver upon grey and of grey upon black.
it was, by this time, in pure pleasure and idleness that he picked up a pine-needle to philosophise about it.
“think of sitting on needles!” he said. “yet, i suppose this is the sort of needle that eve, in the old legend, used in eden. aye, and the old legend was right, too! think of sitting on all the needles in london! think of sitting on all the needles in sheffield! think of sitting on any needles, except on all the needles of paradise! oh, yes, the old legend was right enough. the very needles of god are softer than the carpets of men.”
he took a pleasure in watching the weird little forest animals creeping out from under the green curtains of the wood. he reminded himself that in the old legend they had been as tame as the ass, as well as being as comic. he thought of adam naming the animals, and said to a beetle, “i should call you budger.”
the slugs gave him great entertainment, and so did the worms. he felt a new and realistic interest in them which he had not known before; it was, indeed, the interest that a man feels in a mouse in a dungeon; the interest of any man tied by the leg and forced to see the fascination of small things. creatures of the wormy kind, especially, crept out at very long intervals; yet he found himself waiting patiently for hours for the pleasure of their acquaintance. one of them rather specially arrested his eye, because it was a little longer than most worms and seemed to be turning its head in the direction of the donkey’s left foreleg. also, it had a head to turn, which most worms have not.
dorian wimpole did not know much about exact natural history, except what he had once got up very thoroughly from an encyclopedia for the purposes of a sympathetic vilanelle. but as this information was entirely concerned with the conjectural causes of laughter in the hyena, it was not directly helpful in this case. but though he did not know much natural history, he knew some. he knew enough to know that a worm ought not to have a head, and especially not a squared and flattened head, shaped like a spade or a chisel. he knew enough to know that a creeping thing with a head of that pattern survives in the english country sides, though it is not common. in short, he knew enough to step across the road and set a sharp and savage boot-heel on the neck and spine of the creature, breaking it into three black bits that writhed once more before they stiffened.
then he gave out a great explosive sigh. the donkey, whose leg had been in such danger, looked at the dead adder with eyes that had never lost their moony mildness. even dorian, himself, looked at it for a long time, and with feelings he could neither arrest nor understand, before he remembered that he had been comparing the little wood to eden.
“and even in eden,” he said at last; and then the words of fitzgerald failed upon his lips.
and while he was warring with such words and thoughts, something happened about him and behind him; something he had written about a hundred times and read about a thousand; something he had never seen in his life. it flung faintly across the broad foliage a wan and pearly light far more mysterious than the lost moonshine. it seemed to enter through all the doors and windows of the woodland, pale and silent but confident, like men that keep a tryst; soon its white robes had threads of gold and scarlet: and the name of it was morning.
for some time past, loud and in vain, all the birds had been singing to the poet of the birds. but when that minstrel actually saw broad daylight breaking over wood and road, the effect on him was somewhat curious. he stood staring at it in gaping astonishment, until it had fulfilled the fulness of its shining fate; and the pine-cones and the curling ferns and the live donkey and the dead viper were almost as distinct as they could be at noon, or in a preraphaelite picture. and then the fourth mood fell upon him like a bolt from the blue, and he strode across and took the donkey’s bridle, as if to lead it along.
“damn it all,” he cried, in a voice as cheerful as the cockcrow that rang recently from the remote village, “it’s not everybody who’s killed a snake.” then he added, reflectively, “i bet dr. gluck never did. come along, donkey, let’s have some adventures.”
the finding and fighting of positive evil is the beginning of all fun—and even of all farce. all the wild woodland looked jolly now the snake was killed. it was one of the fallacies of his literary clique to refer all natural emotions to literary names, but it might not untruly be said that he had passed out of the mood of maeterlinck into the mood of whitman, and out of the mood of whitman into the mood of stevenson. he had not been a hypocrite when he asked for gilded birds of asia or purple polypi out of the southern seas; he was not a hypocrite now, when he asked for mere comic adventures along a common english road. it was his misfortune and not his fault if his first adventure was his last; and was much too comic to laugh at.
already the wan morning had warmed into a pale blue and was spotted with those little plump pink clouds which must surely have been the origin of the story that pigs might fly. the insects of the grass chattered so cheerfully that every green tongue seemed to be talking. the skyline on every side was broken only by objects that encouraged such swashbucklering comedy. there was a windmill that chaucer’s miller might have inhabited or cervantes’ champion charged. there was an old leaden church spire that might have been climbed by robert clive. away toward pebblewick and the sea, there were the two broken stumps of wood which humphrey pump declares to this day to have been the stands for an unsuccessful children’s swing; but which tourists always accept as the remains of the antique gallows. in the gaiety of such surroundings, it is small wonder if dorian and the donkey stepped briskly along the road. the very donkey reminded him of sancho panza.
he did not wake out of this boisterous reverie of the white road and the wind till a motor horn had first hooted and then howled, till the ground had shaken with the shock of a stoppage, and till a human hand fell heavily and tightly on his shoulder. he looked up and saw the complete costume of a police inspector. he did not worry about the face. and there fell on him the fifth, or unexpected mood, which is called by the vulgar astonishment.
in despair he looked at the motor car itself that had anchored so abruptly under the opposite hedge. the man at the steering wheel was so erect and unresponsive that dorian felt sure he was feasting his eyes on yet another policeman. but on the seat behind was a very different figure, a figure that baffled him all the more because he felt certain he had seen it somewhere. the figure was long and slim, with sloping shoulders, and the costume, which was untidy, yet contrived to give the impression that it was tidy on other occasions. the individual had bright yellow hair, one lock of which stuck straight up and was exalted, like the little horn in his favorite scriptures. another tuft of it, in a bright but blinding manner, fell across and obscured the left optic, as in literal fulfilment of the parable of a beam in the eye. the eyes, with or without beams in them, looked a little bewildered, and the individual was always nervously resettling his necktie. for the individual went by the name of hibbs, and had only recently recovered from experiences wholly new to him.
“what on earth do you want?” asked wimpole of the policeman.
his innocent and startled face, and perhaps other things about his appearance, evidently caused the inspector to waver.
“well, it’s about this ’ere donkey, sir,” he said.
“do you think i stole it?” cried the indignant aristocrat. “well, of all the mad worlds! a pack of thieves steal my limousine, i save their damned donkey’s life at the risk of my own—and i’m run in for stealing.”
the clothes of the indignant aristocrat probably spoke louder than his tongue; the officer dropped his hand, and after consulting some papers in his hand, walked across to consult with the unkempt gentleman in the car.
“that seems to be a similar cart and donkey,” dorian heard him saying, “but the clothes don’t seem to fit your description of the men you saw.”
now, mr. hibbs had extremely vague and wild recollections of the men he saw; he could not even tell what he had done and what he had merely dreamed. if he had spoken sincerely, he would have described a sort of green nightmare of forests, in which he found himself in the power of an ogre about twelve feet high, with scarlet flames for hair and dressed rather like robin hood. but a long course of what is known as “keeping the party together” had made it as unnatural to him to tell anyone (even himself) what he really thought about anything, as it would have been to spit—or to sing. he had at present only three motives and strong resolves: (1) not to admit that he had been drunk; (2) not to let anyone escape whom lord ivywood might possibly want to question; and (3) not to lose his reputation for sagacity and tact.
“this party has a brown velvet suit, you see, and a fur overcoat,” the inspector continued, “and in the notes i have from you, you say the man wore a uniform.”
“when we say uniform,” said mr. hibbs, frowning intellectually, “when we say uniform, of course—we must distinguish some of our friends who don’t quite see eye to eye with us, you know,” and he smiled with tender leniency, “some of our friends wouldn’t like it called a uniform perhaps. but—of course—well, it wasn’t a police uniform, for instance. ha! ha!”
“i should hope not,” said the official, shortly.
“so—in a way—however,” said hibbs, clutching his verbal talisman at last, “it might be brown velvet in the dark.”
the inspector replied to this helpful suggestion with some wonder. “but it was a moon, like limelight,” he protested.
“yars, yars,” cried hibbs, in a high tone that can only be described as a hasty drawl. “yars—discolours everything of course. the flowers and things—”
“but look here,” said the inspector, “you said the principal man’s hair was red.”
“a blond type! a blond type!” said hibbs, waving his hand with a solemn lightness. “reddish, yellowish, brownish sort of hair, you know.” then he shook his head and said with the heaviest solemnity the word was capable of carrying, “teutonic, purely teutonic.”
the inspector began to feel some wonder that, even in the confusion following on lord ivywood’s fall, he had been put under the guidance of this particular guide. the truth was that leveson, once more masking his own fears under his usual parade of hurry, had found hibbs at a table by an open window, with wild hair and sleepy eyes, picking himself up with some sort of medicine. finding him already fairly clear-headed in a dreary way, he had not scrupled to use the remains of his bewilderment to despatch him with the police in the first pursuit. even the mind of a semi-recovered drunkard, he thought, could be trusted to recognise anyone so unmistakable as the captain.
but, though the diplomatist’s debauch was barely over, his strange, soft fear and cunning were awake. he felt fairly certain the man in the fur coat had something to do with the mystery, as men with fur coats do not commonly wander about with donkeys. he was afraid of offending lord ivywood, and at the same time, afraid of exposing himself to a policeman.
“you have large discretion,” he said, gravely. “very right you should have large discretion in the interests of the public. i think you would be quite authorised, for the present, in preventing the man’s escape.”
“and the other man?” inquired the officer, with knitted brow. “do you suppose he has escaped?”
“the other man,” repeated hibbs. however, regarding the distant windmill through half-closed lids, as if this were a new fine shade introduced into an already delicate question.
“well, hang it all,” said the police officer, “you must know whether there were two men or one.”
gradually it dawned, in a grey dawn of horror, over the brain of hibbs that this was what he specially couldn’t know. he had always heard, and read in comic papers, that a drunken man “sees double” and beholds two lamp-posts, one of which is (as the higher critic would have said) purely subjective. for all he knew (being a mere novice) inebriation might produce the impression of the two men of his dream-like adventure, when in truth there had only been one.
“two men, you know—one man,” he said with a sort of moody carelessness. “well we can go into their numbers later; they can’t have a very large following.” here he shook his head very firmly. “quite impossible. and as the late lord goschen used to say, ‘you can prove anything by statistics.’”
and here came an interruption from the other side of the road.
“and how long am i to wait here for you and your goschens, you silly goat,” were the intemperate wood-notes issuing from the poet of the birds. “i’m shot if i’ll stand this! come along, donkey, and let’s pray for a better adventure next time. these are very inferior specimens of your own race.”
and seizing the bridle of the ass again, he strode past them swiftly, and almost as if urging the animal to a gallop.
unfortunately this disdainful dash for liberty was precisely what was wanting to weigh down the rocking intelligence of the inspector on the wrong side. if wimpole had stood still a minute or two longer, the official, who was no fool, might have ended in disbelieving hibbs’s story altogether. as it was, there was a scuffle, not without blows on both sides, and eventually the honourable dorian wimpole, donkey and all, was marched off to the village, in which there was a police station; in which was a temporary cell; in which a sixth mood was experienced.
his complaints, however, were at once so clamorous and so convincing, and his coat was so unquestionably covered with fur, that after some questioning and cross purposes they agreed to take him in the afternoon to ivywood house, where there was a magistrate incapacitated by a shot only recently extracted from his leg.
they found lord ivywood lying on a purple ottoman, in the midst of his chinese puzzle of oriental apartments. he continued to look away as they entered, as if expecting, with roman calm, the entrance of a recognised enemy. but lady enid wimpole, who was attending to the wants of the invalid, gave a sharp cry of astonishment; and the next moment the three cousins were looking at each other. one could almost have guessed they were cousins, all being (as mr. hibbs subtly put it) a blond type. but two of the blond types expressed amazement, and one blond type merely rage.
“i am sorry, dorian,” said ivywood, when he had heard the whole story. “these fanatics are capable of anything, i fear, and you very rightly resent their stealing your car—”
“you are wrong, phillip,” answered the poet, emphatically. “i do not even faintly resent their stealing my car. what i do resent is the continued existence on god’s earth of this fool” (pointing to the serious hibbs) “and of that fool” (pointing to the inspector) “and—yes, by thunder, of that fool, too” (and he pointed straight at lord ivywood). “and i tell you frankly, phillip, if there really are, as you say, two men who are bent on smashing your schemes and making your life a hell—i am very happy to put my car at their disposal. and now i’m off.”
“you’ll stop to dinner?” inquired ivywood, with frigid forgiveness.
“no, thanks,” said the disappearing bard, “i’m going up to town.”
the seventh mood of dorian wimpole had a grand finale at the café royal, and consisted largely of oysters.
