The Return of Don Quixote Read online

  He had hardly said a dozen words before it became apparent that he was talking in a tone that had been unusual in English politics. He had something to say that was of the final sort. He refused a tribunal; and in that there is something of the sort that always moves the deep element of epic poetry in a mob. For nothing can really be approved or applauded except finality. That is why all the ethics of evolution and expansive ideas of indefinite progress have never taken hold upon any human crowd.

  The new seat of government had set up a seat of judgment, or chamber of inquiry, for the settlement of the strike which Braintree led. It was a strike now largely confined to the Trade Unions of his own district; which were engaged in the manufacturing of dyes and paints, originally derived from Coal-Tar. The very genuine energy that supported the new government had grappled immediately with the industrial problem in question. It was probable that it would be settled on somewhat saner and simpler lines than those of the complicated compromises of the old professional politician. But it would be settled. That was what the new rulers very legitimately claimed. And that was what Braintree and the strikers very legitimately objected to.

  “For nearly a hundred, years,” he said, “they have thundered at us about our duty to respect the Constitution: the King and the House of Lords–and even the House of Commons. We had to respect that too. (Laughter.) We were to be perfect Constitutionalists. Yes, my friends, we were to be the only Constitutionalists. We were the quiet people, the loyal subjects, the people who took the King and the lords seriously. But they were to be free enough. Whenever the fancy took them to upset the Constitution, they were to be indulged in all the pleasures of revolution. They could in twenty-four hours turn the government of England upside down; and tell us that we were all not to be ruled by a Constitutional monarchy but by a fancy dress ball. Where is the King? Who is the King? I have heard he is a librarian interested in the Hittites. (Laughter.) And we are summoned before this revolutionary tribunal–(cheers)–to explain why we have for forty years, under intolerable provocation, failed to resort to revolution. (Loud cheers.) We do not mind their listening to their lunatic librarian if they like. We will leave this ancient traditional order of chivalry that is ten weeks old; we will respect the profound Conservative principles of continuity that never existed until the other day. But we will not listen to its judgment. We would not submit to lawful Toryism. We will not now submit to lawless Toryism. And if this Wardour Street curiosity shop sends us a message that we must attend its Court–our answer is in four words, ‘We will not come.’”

  Braintree had described Herne as a librarian interested in Hittites but he never failed, in public or private to recognise him as a leader of men much more interested in the resurrection of the Middle Ages. And yet it would have surprised Braintree very much to know how Herne was actually occupied at the moment the words were spoken. There was between them indeed that eternal cross purposes which arises between the two opposite types of truthful man. There was all the contrast between the man who knows from the start exactly what he stands for, whose circle of vision whether narrow or no, is intensely clear, who sees all external things as agreeing or disagreeing with it–and that other type which is conscious of everything before it is conscious of itself, which can devour libraries before realising into what mind they have been absorbed, which can create fairy lands in which its own figure is invisible or at least transparent. Braintree had known from the first, almost from the first quarrel in the long room at Seawood, the irony of his own irritated admiration. He had felt the paradox of his impossible romance. The pale and vivid face of Olive Ashley with its lift and poise and pointed chin had entered his world like a wedge, like the spear of something external and antagonistic. He had hated all her world all the more for not hating her.

  But with a man like Michael Herne the whole of this process worked backwards. He had hardly realised what personal romance was inspiring the impersonal romance of his historical revolution. He had had nothing but a sense of growing glory within; of a world that grew larger and loftier like an expanding sunrise or a rising tide; and which was yet of the same unconscious stuff as the day-dreams of his youth. He had had at first the feeling that a hobby had become a holiday. He had then had more and more feeling that the holiday had become a festival, in the sense of the solemn festival of a god. Only at the back of his mind did he assume that the god was a goddess. He was a man whose life had been almost wholly without personal relations. Therefore even when he was in fact growing from head to foot with a personal relation, he hardly knew that it was personal. He would have said in a sort of rapture that he was supported in his work by the most glorious friends that God had given to man. He would have spoken of them radiantly and collectively as if of a cloud of angels. And yet at any moment, even from the first, if Rosamund Severne had quarrelled with him and left that company, he would instantly have discovered his disease.

  And yet it happened, as such coincidences do happen, hardly half an hour after those two that had met as enemies, and continued as friends, and had parted as lovers. So soon after they had said their farewell amid the incongruous clatter of industrial politics, the man who had in some sense divided them, if only symbolically, discovered that a man is meant in this world to be something more than a symbol. He saw Rosamund standing on the high terrace of the lawn, and the whole earth changed around her.

  The news of Braintree’s defiance brought a certain doubt and depression to the more romantic group at Seawood but nothing but rage and fury to Rosamund Severne. She was the sort of woman inevitably irritated by strikes if only because they are delays. Waste of time was more vivid to her than loss of principle. Many have imagined that feminine politics would be merely pacifist or humanitarian or sentimental. The real danger of feminine politics is too much love of a masculine policy. There are a good many Rosamund Severnes in the world.

  She could get no relief from her impatience from the tone of the men around her, though most of them were in principle far more prejudiced against Braintree than she was. But they did not seem to react as one should react to a challenge. Her father told her at some length the real essentials of the situation, which he would have no difficulty in placing before the malcontents in due course. But as his remarks affected even his own daughter with a sensation of faint fatigue, she could hardly persuade herself that they would affect his mortal enemies to an emotional repentance. Lord Eden was more brief but not much more brisk in his comments. He said that time would show; and expressed doubt about the ultimate economic resources of the revolt. Whether designedly or no, he said nothing about the new organisation of society which he himself had helped to establish. For all of them it seemed as if a shadow had fallen across all that shining array. Beyond the park, beyond the gates of their chivalric paradise, the modern monster, the great black factory town, lay snorting up its smoke in defiance and derision.

  “They’re all so slack about it,” Rosamund confided to Monkey, that universal confidant. “Can’t you do something to get a move on? And after all our flag-waving and blowing of trumpets.”

  “Well,” said Murrel dubiously, “all that has what they call a moral effect; only some people call it bluff. If it goes swinging along and everybody falls in with it, the thing works; and it often does. You can try your luck in rallying everybody to a flag. But you don’t fight with a flag.”

  “Do you realise what this man Braintree has done,” she cried indignantly. “He has dared us all. He has dared the King-at-Arms and the King.”

  “Well,” replied Murrel in a detached manner, “I don’t quite see what the devil else he could do. If I were in his place–”

  “But you’re not in his place,” she cried vehemently, “you’re not in the place of any rebel or rioter. Don’t you ever think, Douglas, that it is time you were in your own place.”

  Murrel smiled rather wearily. “I admit,” he said, “that I happen to be able to see two sides of a question. And I suppose you’d say its done by walkin
g round and round it.”

  “I say,” she said rising in wrath, “that I never met a man who saw both sides of a question without wanting to clout him on both sides of the head.”

  Presumably lest she should yield to this impulse, she departed in a storm, and swept up the long lawns and terraces towards the old raised garden in which the play of Blondel the Troubadour had once been performed. And the coincidence came back to her with something of a pang of memory; for in that green deserted theatre stood one green deserted figure in forester’s costume, with a mane of light hair and a lifted leonine head, looking across the valley towards the smoking town.

  For a moment she stood as if caught in a mesh of memories merely elfin and fantastic; as if she had loved and lost something unreal; the music and emotion of the theatricals revisited her and lulled her lust for action; but in a moment she had brushed it away like a cobweb and spoke in her own firm voice.

  “You know your revolutionists have sent their reply. I hear they will not come to the Court.”

  He looked round slowly in his rather short-sighted fashion; only the pause before he spoke expressed the change in his feelings on hearing the voice that hailed him.

  “Yes, I have received their message,” he said mildly. “It was addressed to me. They certainly state their position clearly; but they will come to the Court all right.”

  “They will come!” she repeated in some excitement. “Do you mean that Braintree has yielded?”

  “They will come, yes,” he repeated, nodding. “Braintree has not yielded; indeed I did not expect him to do so. To tell the truth, I rather respect him for not doing so. He is a very courageous and consistent man; and it is always so much pleasanter to have an opponent of that kind.”

  “But I don’t understand,” she cried. “What do you mean by saying they won’t yield but they will come?”

  “The new constitution,” he explained, “provides for the situation, as I suppose most constitutions do. It’s rather like what we used to call a subpoena. I don’t know how many men I shall want with me; but I suppose some of the Hundreds may have to turn out.”

  “What!” she cried. “You don’t mean that you are going to fetch them to the Court!”

  “Oh yes, the law is quite clear on that point,” he answered. “And as the law makes me the executive officer, I have really no will in the matter.”

  “You seem to have more will than anybody else I’ve come across yet,” she said. “You should hear Monkey!”

  “Of course,” he said in his pedantic way, “what I state is a purpose and not a prediction. I cannot answer for what anyone else will do or will succeed in doing. But they will come here or I shall not come.”

  His meticulous phraseology suddenly thrilled through her thoughts as she understood what he meant.

  “You mean there will be fighting,” she said.

  “There certainly will be on our side if there is on theirs,” he answered.

  “You are the only man in this house,” cried Rosamund and found herself suddenly trembling from head to foot.

  It seemed as if his stiff attitude was staggered so that he lost control of himself quite unexpectedly. He uttered a sort of cry.

  “You must not say that to me; I am weak; and weakest of all now, when I should try to be strong.”

  “You are not weak at all,” she said, recovering her firm voice.

  “I am mad,” he said. “I love you.”

  She was dumb. He caught both her hands and his arms thrilled up to the shoulders as with an electric shock.

  “What am I doing and saying?” he cried harshly. “I–to you to whom so many men must have said it. What will you say?”

  She remained leaning forward and looking steadily into his face.

  “I say what I said,” she answered. “You are the only man.”

  “Your eyes blind me,” he said.

  They spoke no more; but the great land about them and above spoke for them as it rose in the mighty terraces towards the colossal corner-stones of the mountains; and the great wind of West England that rocked the tops of its royal trees; and all that vast valley of Avalon that has seen the muster of heroes and the meeting of immortal lovers, was full of a movement as of the trampling horses and the trumpets, when the kings go forth to battle and queens rule in their stead.

  So they stood for a moment on the top of the world and in the highest place of our human fortune, almost at the moment when Olive and John Braintree in the dark and smoky town were taking their sad farewell. And no man could have guessed that the sad farewell was soon to be followed with fuller reconciliation and understanding; but that over the two coloured and shining figures, on the shoulder of the golden down, hung a dark cloud of sundering and division and doom.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE JUDGMENT OF THE KING

  Lord Seawood and Lord Eden were seated in their favourite summer-house on the lawn, the same into which the arrow had once entered like the first shaft of a new sunrise; and to judge by their faces they were doubtful whether the sun were not in eclipse. Lord Eden’s rigidity of expression might indeed have many meanings; but old Seawood was shaking his head in an openly disconsolate manner.

  “If they had availed themselves of my intervention,” he said. “I could I think have made clear the impossibility of their position; a position quite unparalleled in the whole of my public life. The restoration of our fine old historical forms must have the profound sympathy of every cultivated man; but it is against all precedent that they should use these forms for the practical suppression of material menace. What would Peel have said, had it been proposed to use only the antiquated halberds of a few Beefeaters in the Tower instead of the excellent and effective Constabulary which he had the genius and imagination to conceive? What would Palmerston have said, had anyone suggested to him that the Mace lying on the table of Parliament could be used as a club with which to quell a riot in Parliament Square? Impossible as it is for us to project upon the future the actions of the mighty dead of the past, I conceive it as likely that he would have made it the subject of a jest. But men in the present generation are devoid of humour.”

  “Our friend the King-at-Arms is devoid of humour all right,” drawled Eden. “I sometimes wonder whether he is not the happier for it.”

  “There,” said the other nobleman with firmness. “I cannot agree. Our English humour, such as that to be found in the best pages of Punch is–.”

  At this moment a footman appeared silently and abruptly in the entrance of the hut, murmured some ritual words and handed a note to his master. The reading of it changed his master’s dolorous expression to one of unaffected astonishment.

  “God bless my soul,” said Lord Seawood; and remained gazing at the paper in his hand.

  For upon that paper was scrawled in a large and bold hand a message destined in the next few days to change the whole face of England; as nothing for centuries had ever been changed by a battle upon English soil.

  “Either our young friend is really suffering from delusions,” he said at last, “or else–”

  “Or else,” said Lord Eden gazing at the roof of the summer-house, “he has surrounded and taken the town of Milldyke, captured the Bolshevist headquarters and is bringing the leaders here to the trial.”

  “This is most remarkable,” said the other nobleman. “Were you informed of this before?”

  “I was not informed of it at all,” answered Eden, “but in any case I thought it highly probable.”

  “Curious,” repeated Seawood, “and I thought it so highly improbable; so highly improbable as to merge itself in what we call the impossible. That a mere stage army of that description–why I thought all educated and enlightened people were aware that such weapons are quite obsolete.”

  “That,” answered Eden, “is because educated and enlightened people never think. Your enlightened man is always taking away the number he first thought of. It seems to be a sign of education first
to take a thing for granted and then to forget to see if it is still there. Weapons are a very good working example. The man says he won’t go on wearing a sword because it is no longer any good against a gun. Then he throws away all the guns as relics of barbarism; and then he is surprised when a barbarian sticks him through with a sword. You say that pikes and halberds are not weapons against modern conditions. I say pikes are excellent weapons against no pikes. You say it is all antiquated medieval armament. But I put my money on men who make medieval armament against men who only disapprove of modern armament. And what have any of these political parties ever done about armament except profess to disapprove of it? They renounce it and neglect it and never think of the part it played in political history; and yet they go about with a vague security as if they were girt about with invisible guns that would go off at the first hint of danger. They’re doing what they always do; mixing up their Utopia that never comes with their old Victorian security that’s already gone. I for one am not at all surprised that a pack of pantomime halberdiers can poke them off the stage. I’ve always thought a coup d’etat could be effected with very small forces against people who won’t learn to use the force they’ve got. But I never had the moral courage to do it myself; it needs somebody very different from our sort.”

  “Perhaps,” remarked the other aristocrat, “it was due to our being, to quite a very recent political formula, too proud to fight.”

  “Yes,” replied the old statesman. “It is the humble who fight.”

  “I am not sure that I quite follow your meaning,” said Lord Seawood.

  “I mean I am too wicked to fight,” said Lord Eden. “It is the innocent who kill and burn and break the peace. It is children who rush and smash and knock each other about and of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

  It is not certain that even then his venerable Victorian companion was wholly and lucidly of one mind with him; but there was no more to be got out of him on the subject; and he remained with a face of flint looking up the long path towards the gates of the park. And indeed that road and that entrance were already shaken with the tumult and triumph of which he spoke; and the songs of young men who come back from battle.