As he spoke Archer came in bearing a dish which he placed before his master. He had already served the others with the earlier courses, but he carried this one with the pomp of one bringing the boar’s head at Christmas. It consisted of a plain boiled cabbage.

  “I was challenged to do something,” went on Hood, “which my friend here declared to be impossible. In fact, any sane man would have declared it to be impossible. But I did it for all that. Only my friend, in the heat of rejecting and ridiculing the notion, made use of a hasty expression. I might almost say he made a rash vow.”

  “My exact words were,” said Colonel Crane solemnly: “`If you can do that, I’ll eat my hat.’”

  He leaned forward thoughtfully and began to eat it. Then he resumed in the same reflective way:

  “You see, all rash vows are verbal or nothing. There might be a debate about the logical and literary way in which my friend Hood fulfilled HIS rash vow. But I put it to myself in the same pedantic sort of way. It wasn’t possible to eat any hat that I wore. But it might be possible to wear a hat that I could eat. Articles of dress could hardly be used for diet; but articles of diet could really be used for dress. It seemed to me that I might fairly be said to have made it my hat, if I wore it systematically as a hat and had no other, putting up with all the disadvantages. Making a blasted fool of myself was the fair price to be paid for the vow or wager; for one ought always to lose something on a wager.”

  And he rose from the table with a gesture of apology.

  The girl stood up. “I think it’s perfectly splendid,” she said. “It’s as wild as one of those stories about looking for the Holy Grail.”

  The lawyer also had risen, rather abruptly, and stood stroking his long chin with his thumb and looking at his old friend under bent brows in a rather reflective manner.

  “Well, you’ve subpoena’d me as a witness all right,” he said, “and now, with the permission of the court, I’ll leave the witness-box. I’m afraid I must be going. I’ve got important business at home. Good-bye, Miss Smith.”

  The girl returned his farewell a little mechanically; and Crane seemed to recover from a similar trance as he stepped after the retreating figure of his friend.

  “I say, Owen,” he said hastily, “I’m sorry you’re leaving so early. Must you really go?”

  “Yes,” replied Owen Hood gravely. “My private affairs are quite real and practical, I assure you.” His grave mouth worked a little humourously at the corners as he added: “The truth is, I don’t think I mentioned it, but I’m thinking of getting married.”

  “Married!” repeated the Colonel, as if thunderstruck.

  “Thanks for your compliments and congratulations, old fellow,” said the satiric Mr. Hood. “Yes, it’s all been thought out. I’ve even decided whom I am going to marry. She knows about it herself. She has been warned.”

  “I really beg your pardon,” said the Colonel in great distress, “of course I congratulate you most heartily; and her even more heartily. Of course I’m delighted to hear it. The truth is, I was surprised... not so much in that way...”

  “Not so much in what way?” asked Hood. “I suppose you mean some would say I am on the way to be an old bachelor. But I’ve discovered it isn’t half so much a matter of years as of ways. Men like me get elderly more by choice than chance; and there’s much more choice and less chance in life than your modern fatalists make out. For such people fatalism falsifies even chronology. They’re not unmarried because they’re old. They’re old because they’re unmarried.”

  “Indeed you are mistaken,” said Crane earnestly. “As I say, I was surprised, but my surprise was not so rude as you think. It wasn’t that I thought there was anything unfitting about... somehow it was rather the other way... as if things could fit better than one thought... as if — but anyhow, little as I know about it, I really do congratulate you.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it before long,” replied his friend. “It’s enough to say just now that it was all bound up with my succeeding after all in doing — what I did. She was the inspiration, you know. I have done what is called an impossible thing; but believe me, she is really the impossible part of it.”

  “Well, I must not keep you from such an impossible engagement,” said Crane smiling. “Really, I’m confoundedly glad to hear about all this. Well, good-bye for the present.”

  Colonel Crane stood watching the square shoulders and russet mane of his old friend, as they disappeared down the road, in a rather indescribable state of mind. As he turned hastily back towards his garden and his other guest, he was conscious of a change; things seemed different in some light-headed and illogical fashion. He could not himself trace the connexion; indeed, he did not know whether it was a connexion or a disconnexion. He was very far from being a fool; but his brains were of the sort that are directed outwards to things; the brains of the soldier or the scientific man; and he had no practice in analysing his own mind. He did not quite understand why the news about Owen Hood should give him that dazed sense of a difference in things in general. Doubtless he was very fond of Owen Hood; but he had been fond of other people who had got married without especially disturbing the atmosphere of his own back-garden. He even dimly felt that mere affection might have worked the other way; that it might have made him worry about Hood, and wonder whether Hood was making a fool of himself, or even feel suspicious or jealous of Mrs. Hood — if there had not been something else that made him feel quite the other way. He could not quite understand it; there seemed to be an increasing number of things that he could not understand. This world in which he himself wore garlands of green cabbage and in which his old friend the lawyer got married suddenly like a man going mad — this world was a new world, at once fresh and frightening, in which he could hardly understand the figures that were walking about, even his own. The flowers in the flower-pots had a new look about them, at once bright and nameless; and even the line of vegetables beyond could not altogether depress him with the memories of recent levity. Had he indeed been a prophet, or a visionary seeing the future, he might have seen that green line of cabbages extending infinitely like a green sea to the horizon. For he stood at the beginning of a story which was not to terminate until his incongruous cabbage had come to mean something that he had never meant by it. That green patch was to spread like a great green conflagration almost to the ends of the earth. But he was a practical person and the very reverse of a prophet; and like many other practical persons, he often did things without very clearly knowing what he was doing. He had the innocence of some patriarch or primitive hero in the morning of the world, founding more than he could himself realize of his legend and his line. Indeed he felt very much like someone in the morning of the world; but beyond that he could grasp nothing.

  Audrey Smith was standing not so very many yards away; for it was only for a few strides that he had followed his elder guest towards the gate. Yet her figure had fallen far enough back out of the foreground to take on the green framework of the garden; so that her dress might almost have been blue with a shade of distance. And when she spoke to him, even from that little way off, her voice took on inevitably a new suggestion of one calling out familiarly and from afar, as one calls to an old companion. It moved him in a disproportionate fashion, though all that she said was:

  “What became of your old hat?”

  “I lost it,” he replied gravely, “obviously I had to lose it. I believe the scarecrow found it.”

  “Oh, do let’s go and look at the scarecrow,” she cried.

  He led her without a word to the kitchen-garden and gravely explained each of its outstanding features; from the serious Mr. Archer resting on his spade to the grotesque South Sea Island god grinning at the corner of the plot. He spoke as with an increasing solemnity and verbosity, and all the time knew little or nothing of what he said.

  At last she cut into his monologue with an abstraction that was almost rude; yet her brown eyes were bright and her sympathy undisguised.

  “Don’t talk about it,” she cried with illogical enthusiasm. “It looks as if we were really right in the middle of the country. It’s as unique as the Garden of Eden. It’s simply the most delightful place—”

  It was at this moment, for some unaccountable reason, that the Colonel who had lost his hat suddenly proceeded to lose his head. Standing in that grotesque vegetable scenery, a black and stiff yet somehow stately figure, he proceeded in the most traditional manner to offer the lady everything he possessed, not forgetting the scarecrow or the cabbages; a half-humourous memory of which returned to him with the boomerang of bathos.

  “When I think of the encumbrances on the estate—” he concluded gloomily. “Well, there they are; a scarecrow and a cannibal fetish and a stupid man who has stuck in a rut of respectability and conventional ways.”

  “Very conventional,” she said, “especially in his taste in hats.”

  “That was the exception, I’m afraid,” he said earnestly. “You’d find those things very rare and most things very dull. I can’t help having fallen in love with you; but for all that we are in different worlds; and you belong in a younger world, which says what it thinks, and cannot see what most of our silences and scruples meant.”

  “I suppose we are very rude,” she said thoughtfully, “and you must certainly excuse me if I do say what I think.”

  “I deserve no better,” he replied mournfully.

  “Well, I think I must be in love with you too,” she replied calmly. “I don’t see what time has to do with being fond of people. You are the most original person I ever knew.”

  “My dear, my dear,” he protested almost brokenly, “I fear you are making a mistake. Whatever else I am, I never set up to be original.”

  “You must remember,” she replied, “that I have known a good many people who did set up to be original. An Art School swarms with them; and there are any number among those socialist and vegetarian friends of mine you were talking about. They would think nothing of wearing cabbages on their heads, of course. Any one of them would be capable of getting inside a pumpkin if he could. Any one of them might appear in public dressed entirely in watercress. But that’s just it. They might well wear watercress for they are water-creatures; they go with the stream. They do those things because those things are done; because they are done in their own Bohemian set. Unconventionality is their convention. I don’t mind it myself; I think it’s great fun; but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know real strength or independence when I see it. All that is just molten and formless; but the really strong man is one who can make a mould and then break it. When a man like you can suddenly do a thing like that, after twenty years of habit, for the sake of his word, then somehow one really does feel that man is man and master of his fate.”

  “I doubt if I am master of my fate,” replied Crane, “and I do not know whether I ceased to be yesterday or two minutes ago.”

  He stood there for a moment like a man in heavy armour. Indeed, the antiquated image is not inappropriate in more ways than one. The new world within him was so alien from the whole habit in which he lived, from the very gait and gestures of his daily life, conducted through countless days, that his spirit had striven before it broke its shell. But it was also true that even if he could have done what every man wishes to do at such a moment, something supreme and satisfying, it would have been something in a sense formal or it would not have satisfied him. he was one of those to whom it is natural to be ceremonial. Even the music in his mind, too deep and distant for him to catch and echo, was the music of old and ritual dance and not of revelry; and it was not for nothing that he had built gradually about him that garden of the grey stone fountain and the great hedge of yew. He bent suddenly and kissed her hand.

  “I like that,” she said. “You ought to have powdered hair and a sword.”

  “I apologize,” he said gravely, “no modern man is worthy of you. But indeed I fear, in every sense I am not a very modern man.”

  “You must never wear that hat again,” she said, indicating the battered original topper.

  “To tell the truth,” he observed mildly, “I had not any intention of resuming that one.”

  “Silly,” she said briefly, “I don’t mean that hat; I mean that sort of hat. As a matter of fact, there couldn’t be a finer hat than the cabbage.”

  “My dear—” he protested; but she was looking at him quite seriously.

  “I told you I was an artist, and didn’t know much about literature,” she said. “Well, do you know, it really does make a difference. Literary people let words get between them and things. We do at least look at the things and not the names of the things. You think a cabbage is comic because the name sound comic and even vulgar; something between `cab’ and `garbage,’ I suppose. But a cabbage isn’t really comic or vulgar. You wouldn’t think so if you simply had to paint it. Haven’t you seen Dutch and Flemish galleries, and don’t you know what great men painted cabbages? What they saw was certain lines and colours; very wonderful lines and colours.”

  “It may be all very well in a picture,” he began doubtfully.

  She suddenly laughed aloud.

  “You idiot,” she cried; “don’t you know you looked perfectly splendid? The curves were like a great turban of leaves and the root rose like the spike of a helmet; it was rather like the turbaned helmets on some of Rembrandt’s figures, with the face like bronze in the shadows of green and purple. That’s the sort of thing artists can see, who keep their eyes and heads clear of words! And then you want to apologize for not wearing that stupid stove-pipe covered with blacking, when you went about wearing a coloured crown like a king. And you were like a king in this country; for they were all afraid of you.”

  As he continued a faint protest, her laughter took on a more mischievous side. “If you’d stuck to it a little longer, I swear they’d all have been wearing vegetables for hats. I swear I saw my cousin the other day standing with a sort of trowel, and looking irresolutely at a cabbage.”

  Then, after a pause, she said with a beautiful irrelevancy:

  “What was it Mr. Hood did that you said he couldn’t do?”

  But these are tales of topsy-turvydom even in the sense that they have to be told tail-foremost. And he who would know the answer to that question must deliver himself up to the intolerable tedium of reading the story of The Improbable Success of Mr. Owen Hood, and an interval must be allowed him before such torments are renewed.

  The Improbable Success of Mr. Owen Hood

  Heroes who have endured the heavy labour of reading to the end the story of The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane are aware that his achievement was the first of a series of feats counted impossible, like the quests of the Arthurian knights. For the purpose of this tale, in which the Colonel is but a secondary figure, it is enough to say that he was long known and respected, before his last escapade, as a respectable and retired military man in a residential part of Surrey, with a sunburnt complexion and an interest in savage mythology. As a fact, however, he had gathered the sunburn and the savage myths some time before he had managed to collect the respectability and the suburban myths. In his early youth he had been a traveller of the adventurous and even restless sort; and he only concerns this story because he was a member of a sort of club or clique of young men whose adventurousness verged on extravagance. They were all eccentrics of one kind or another, some professing extreme revolutionary and some extreme reactionary opinions, and some both. Among the latter may be classed Mr. Robert Owen Hood, the somewhat unlegal lawyer who is the hero of this tale.

  Robert Owen Hood was Crane’s most intimate and incongruous friend. Hood was from the first as sedentary as Crane was adventurous. Hood was to the end as casual as Crane was conventional. The prefix of Robert Owen was a relic of a vague revolutionary tradition in his family; but he inherited along with it a little money that allowed him to neglect the law and to cultivate a taste for liberty and for drifting and dreaming in lost corners of the country, especially in the little hills between the Severn and the Thames. In the upper reaches of the latter river is an islet in which he especially loved to sit fishing, a shabby but not commonplace figure clad in grey, with a mane of rust-coloured hair and a long face with a large chin, rather like Napoleon. Beside him, on the occasion now in question, stood the striking contrast of his alert military friend in full travelling kit; being on the point of starting for one of his odysseys in the South Seas.

  “Well,” demanded the impatient traveller in a tone of remonstrance, “have you caught anything?”

  “You once asked me,” replied the angler placidly, “what I meant by calling you a materialist. That is what I meant by calling you a materialist.”

  “If one must be a materialist or a madman,” snorted the soldier, “give me materialism.”

  “On the contrary,” replied his friend, “your fad is far madder than mine. And I doubt if it’s any more fruitful. The moment men like you see a man sitting by a river with a rod, they are insanely impelled to ask him what he has caught. But when you go off to shoot big game, as you call it, nobody ask you what you have caught. Nobody expects you to bring home a hippopotamus for supper. Nobody has ever seen you walking up Pall Mall, followed respectfully by a captive giraffe. Your bag of elephants, though enormous, seems singularly unobtrusive; left in the cloak-room, no doubt. Personally, I doubt if you ever catch anything. It’s all decorously hidden in desert sand and doubt and distance. But what I catch is something far more elusive, and as slippery as any fish. It is the soul of England.”

  “I should think you’d catch a cold if not a fish,” answered Crane, “sitting dangling your feet in a pool like that. I like to move about a little more. Dreaming is all very well in its way.”

  At this point a symbolic cloud ought to have come across the sun, and a certain shadow of mystery and silence must rest for a moment upon the narrative. For it was at this moment that James Crane, being blind with inspiration, uttered his celebrated Prophecy, upon which this improbable narrative turns. As was commonly the case with men uttering omens, he was utterly unconscious of anything ominous about what he said. A moment after he would probably not know that he had said it. A moment after, it was as if a cloud of strange shape had indeed passed from the face of the sun.