Hilary Pierce had sprung wildly to his feet with a sort of stagger and clutched at the American’s arm.

  “Found! Found!” he cried hysterically. “Oh, sir, I implore you to take the chair! Do, do take the chair!”

  “Take the chair!” repeated the astonished millionaire, who was already almost struggling in his grasp. “Really, gentlemen, I hadn’t supposed the proceedings were so formal as to require a chairman, but in any case—”

  It could hardly be said, however, that the proceedings were formal. Mr. Hilary Pierce had the appearance of forcibly dragging Mr. Enoch Oates in the direction of the large padded arm-chair, that had always stood empty at the top of the club table, uttering cries which, though incoherent, appeared to be partly apologetic.

  “No offence,” he gasped. “Hope no misunderstanding... ~Honoris causa~... you, you alone are worthy of that seat... the club has found its king and justified its title at last.”

  Here the Colonel intervened and restored order. Mr. Oates departed in peace; but Mr. Hilary Pierce was still simmering.

  “And that is the end of our quiet, ordinary business man,” he cried. “Such is the behaviour of our monochrome and unobtrusive background.” His voice rose to a sort of wail. “And we thought we were dotty! We deluded ourselves with the hope that we were pretty well off our chump! Lord have mercy on us! American big business rises to a raving idiocy compared with which we are as sane as the beasts of the field. The modern commercial world is far madder than anything we can do to satirize it.”

  “Well,” said the Colonel good-humouredly, “we’ve done some rather ridiculous things ourselves.”

  “Yes, yes,” cried Pierce excitedly, “but we did them to make ourselves ridiculous. That unspeakable man is wholly, serenely serious. He thinks those maniacal monkey tricks are the normal life of man. Your argument really answers itself. We did the maddest things we could think of, meaning them to look mad. But they were nothing like so mad as what a modern business man does in the way of business.”

  “Perhaps it’s the American business man,” said White, “who’s too keen to see the humour of it.”

  “Nonsense,” said Crane. “Millions of Americans have a splendid sense of humour.”

  “Then how fortunate are we,” said Pierce reverently, “through whose lives this rare, this ineffable, this divine being has passed.”

  “Passed away for ever, I suppose,” said Hood with a sigh. “I fear the Colonel must be our only background once more.”

  Colonel Crane was frowning thoughtfully, and at the last words his frown deepened to disapproval. He puffed at his smouldering cigar and then, removing it, said abruptly:

  “I suppose you fellows have forgotten how I came to be a background? I mean, why I rather approve of people being backgrounds.”

  “I remember something you said a long time ago,” replied Hood. “Hilary must have been in long-clothes at that time.”

  “I said I had found out something by going round the world,” said Crane. “You young people think I am an old Tory; but remember I am also an old traveller. Well, it’s part of the same thing. I’m a traditionalist because I’m a traveller. I told you when I came back to the club that I’d come back to the tribe. I told you the best man was the man who wore a nose-ring where nose-rings were worn.”

  “I remember,” said Owen Hood.

  “No, you forget,” said Crane rather gruffly. “You forget it when you talk about Enoch Oates the American. I’m no politician, thank God, and I shall look on with detachment if you dynamite him for being a millionaire. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t think half so much of money as old Normantowers, who thinks it’s too sacred to talk about. But you’re not dynamiting him for being a millionaire. You’re simply laughing at him for being an American. You’re laughing at him for being national and normal, for being a good citizen, a good tribesman, for wearing a nose-ring where nose-rings are worn.

  “I say... Kuklux, you know,” remonstrated Wilding White in his hazy way. “Americans wouldn’t be flattered—”

  “Do you suppose you haven’t got a nose-ring?” cried Crane so sharply that the clergyman started from his trance and made a mechanical gesture as if to feel for that feature. “Do you suppose a man like you doesn’t carry his nationality as plain as the nose on his face? Do you think a man as hopelessly English as you are wouldn’t be laughed at in America? You can’t be a good Englishman without being a good joke. The better Englishman you are the more of a joke you are; but still it’s better to be better. Nose-rings are funny to people who don’t wear ‘em. Nations are funny to people who don’t belong to ‘em. But it’s better to wear a nose-ring than to be a cosmopolitan crank who cuts off his nose to spite his face.”

  This being by far the longest speech the Colonel had ever delivered since the day he returned from his tropical travels long ago, his old friend looked at him with a certain curiosity; even his old friends hardly understood how much he had been roused in defence of a guest and of his own deep delicacies about the point of hospitality. He went on with undiminished warmth:

  “Well, it’s like that with poor Oates. He has, as we see it, certain disproportions, certain insensibilities, certain prejudices that stand out in our eyes like deformities. They offend you; they offend me, possibly rather more than they do you. You young revolutionists think you’re very liberal and universal; but the only result is that you’re narrow and national without knowing it. We old fogeys know our tastes are narrow and national; but we know they are only tastes. And we know, at any rate I know, that Oates is far more likely to be an honest man, a good husband and a good father, because he stinks of the rankest hickory patch in the Middle West, than if he were some fashionable New Yorker pretending to be an English aristocrat or playing the aesthete in Florence.”

  “Don’t say a good husband,” pleaded Pierce with a faint shudder. “It reminds me of the grand slap-up advertisement of the Pig’s Whisper. How do you feel about that, my dear Colonel? The Most Wonderful Woman on Earth Waiting by the Old Fireside—”

  “It makes my flesh creep,” replied Crane. “It chills me to the spine. I feel I would rather die than have anything to do with it. But that has nothing to do with my point. I don’t belong to the tribe who wear nose-rings; nor to the tribe who talk through their noses.”

  “Well, aren’t you a little thankful for that?” asked White.

  “I’m thankful I can be fair in spite of it,” answered Crane. “When I put a cabbage on my head, I didn’t expect people not to stare at it. And I know that each one of us in a foreign land is a foreigner, and a thing to be stared at.”

  “What I don’t understand about him,” said Hood, “is the sort of things he doesn’t mind having stared at. How can people tolerate all that vulgar, reeking, gushing commercial cant everywhere? How can a man talk about the Old Fireside? It’s obscene. The police ought to interfere.”

  “And that’s just where you’re wrong,” said the Colonel. “It’s vulgar enough and mad enough and obscene enough if you like. But it’s not cant. I have travelled amongst these wild tribes, for years on end; and I tell you emphatically it is not cant. And if you want to know, just ask your extraordinary American friend about his own wife and his own relatively Old Fireside. He won’t mind. That’s the extraordinary part of it.”

  “What does all this really mean, Colonel?” asked Hilary Pierce.

  “It means, my boy,” answered the Colonel, “that I think you owe our guest an apology.”

  So it came about that there was an epilogue, as there had been a prologue, to the drama of the entrance and exit of Mr. Enoch B. Oates; an epilogue which in its turn became a prologue to the later dramas of the League of the Long Bow. For the words of the Colonel had a certain influence on the Captain, and the actions of the Captain had a certain influence on the American millionaire; and so the whole machinery of events was started afresh by that last movement over the nuts and wine, when Colonel Crane had stirred moodily in his seat and taken his cigar out of his mouth.

  Hilary Pierce was an amiable and even excessively optimistic young man by temperament, in spite of his pugnacity; he would really have been the last man in the world to wish to hurt the feelings of a harmless stranger; and he had a deep and almost secret respect for the opinions of the older soldier. So, finding himself soon afterwards passing the great gilded gateways of the highly American hotel that was the London residence of the American, he paused a moment in hesitation and then went in and gave his name to various overpowering officials in uniforms that might have been those of the German General Staff. He was relieved when the large American came out to meet him with a simple and lumbering affability, and offered his large limp hand as if there had never been a shadow of misunderstanding. It was somehow borne in upon Pierce that his own rather intoxicated behaviour that evening had merely been noted down along with the architectural styles and the mellow mediaevalism of the pig-sty, as part of the fantasies of a feudal land. All the antics of the Lunatic Asylum had left the American traveller with the impression that similar parlour games were probably being played that evening in all the parlours of England. Perhaps there was something, after all, in Crane’s suggestion that every nation assumes that every other nation is a sort of mild madhouse.

  Mr. Enoch Oates received his guest with great hospitality and pressed on him cocktails of various occult names and strange colours, though he himself partook of nothing but a regimen of tepid milk.

  Pierce fell into the confidence of Mr. Enoch Oates with a silent swiftness that made his brain reel with bewilderment. He was staggered like a man who had fallen suddenly through fifteen floors of a sky-scraper and found himself in somebody’s bedroom. At the lightest hint of the sort of thing to which Colonel Crane had alluded, the American opened himself with an expansiveness that was like some gigantic embrace. All the interminable tables of figures and calculations in dollars had for the moment disappeared; yet Oates was talking in the same easy and natural nasal drawl, very leisurely and a little monotonous, as he said:

  “I’m married to the best and brightest woman God ever made, and I tell you it’s her and God between them that have made me, and I reckon she had the hardest part of it. We had nothing but a few sticks when I started; and it was the way she stood by that gave me the heart to risk even those on my own judgement of how things were going in the Street. I counted on a rise in Pork, and if it hadn’t risen I’d have been broke and I dare say in the jug. But she’s just wonderful. You should see her.”

  He produced her photograph with a paralysing promptitude; it represented a very regal lady dressed up to the nines, probably for the occasion, with very brilliant eyes and an elaborate load of light hair.

  “`I believe in your star, Enoch,’ she said; `you stick to Pork,’” said Oates, with tender reminiscence, “and so we saw it through.”

  Pierce, who had been speculating with involuntary irreverence on the extreme difficulty of conducting a love-affair or a sentimental conversation in which one party had to address the other as Enoch, felt quite ashamed of his cynicism when the Star of Pork shone with such radiance in the eyes of his new friend.

  “It was a terrible time, but I stuck to Pork, sometimes feeling she could see clearer than I could; and of course she was right, and I’ve never known her wrong. Then came my great chance of making the combination and freezing out competition; and I was able to give her the sort of things she ought to have and let her take the lead as she should. I don’t care for society much myself; but I’m often glad on a late night at the office to ring her up and hear she’s enjoying it.”

  He spoke with a ponderous simplicity that seemed to disarm and crush the criticism of a more subtle civilization. It was one of those things that are easily seen to be absurd; but even after they are seen to be absurd, they are still there. It may be, after all, that that is the definition of the great things.

  “I reckon that’s what people mean by the romance of business,” continued Oates, “and though my business got bigger and bigger, it made me feel kinda pleased there had been a romance at the heart of it. It had to get bigger, because we wanted to make the combination water-tight all over the world. I guess I had to fix things up a bit with your politicians. But Congress men are alike all the world over, and it didn’t trouble me any.”

  There was a not uncommon conviction among those acquainted with Captain Hilary Pierce that that ingenious young man was cracked. He did a great many things to justify the impression; and in one sense certainly had never shown any reluctance to make a fool of himself. But if he was a lunatic, he was none the less a very English lunatic. And the notion of talking about his most intimate affections, suddenly, to a foreigner in a hotel, merely because the conversation had taken that turn, was something that he found quite terrifying. And yet an instinct, an impulse running through all these developments, told him that a moment had come and that he must seize some opportunity that he hardly understood.

  “Look here,” he said rather awkwardly, “I want to tell you something.”

  He looked down at the table as he continued.

  “You said just now you were married to the best woman in the world. Well, curiously enough, so am I. It’s a coincidence that often happens. But it’s a still more curious coincidence that, in our own quiet way, we went in for Pork too. She kept pigs at the back of the little country inn where I met her; and at one time it looked as if the pigs might have to be given up. Perhaps the inn as well. Perhaps the wedding as well. We were quite poor, as poor as you were when you started; and to the poor those extra modes of livelihood are often life. We might have been ruined; and the reason was, I gather, that you had gone in for Pork. But after all ours was the real pork; pork that walked about on legs. We made the bed for the pigs and filled the inside of the pig; you only bought and sold the name of the pig. You didn’t go to business with a live little pig under your arm or walk down Wall Street followed by a herd of swine. It was a phantom pig, the ghost of a pig, that was able to kill our real pig and perhaps us as well. Can you really justify the way in which your romance nearly ruined our romance? Don’t you think there must be something wrong somewhere?”

  “Well,” said Oates after a very long silence, “that’s a mighty big question and will take a lot of discussing.”

  But the end to which their discussion led must be left to reveal itself when the prostrate reader has recovered sufficient strength to support the story of The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green, which those who would endure to the end may read at some later date.

  The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green

  If the present passage in the chronicles of the Long Bow seem but a side issue, an interlude and an idyll, a mere romantic episode lacking that larger structural achievement which gives solidity and hard actuality to the other stories, the reader is requested not to be hasty in his condemnation; for in the little love-story of Mr. Oliver Green is to be found, as in a parable, the beginning of the final apotheosis and last judgement of all these things.

  It may well begin on a morning when the sunlight came late but brilliant, under the lifting of great clouds from a great grey sweep of wolds that grew purple as they dipped again into distance. Much of that mighty shape was striped and scored with ploughed fields, but a rude path ran across it, along which two figures could be seen in full stride outlined against the morning sky.

  They were both tall; but beyond the fact that they had both once been professional soldiers, of rather different types and times, they had very little in common. By their ages they might almost have been father and son; and this would not have been contradicted by the fact that the younger appeared to be talking all the time, in a high, confident and almost crowing voice, while the elder only now and then put in a word. But they were not father and son; strangely enough they were really talking and walking together because they were friends. Those who know only too well their proceedings as narrated elsewhere would have recognized Colonel Crane, once of the Coldstream Guards, and Captain Pierce, late of the Flying Corps.

  The young man appeared to be talking triumphantly about a great American capitalist whom he professed to have persuaded to see the error of his ways. He talked rather as if he had been slumming.

  “I’m very proud of it, I can tell you,” he said. “Anybody can produce a penitent murderer. It’s something to produce a penitent millionaire. And I do believe that poor Enoch Oates has seen the light (thanks to my conversations at lunch); since I talked to him, Oates is another and a better man.”

  “Sown his wild oats, in fact,” remarked Crane.

  “Well,” replied the other. “In a sense they were very quiet oats. Almost what you might call Quaker Oats. He was a Puritan and a Prohibitionist and a Pacifist and an Internationalist; in short, everything that is in darkness and the shadow of death. But what you said about him was quite right. His heart’s in the right place. It’s on his sleeve. That’s why I preached the gospel to the noble savage and made him a convert.”

  “But what did you convert him to?” inquired the other.

  “Private property,” replied Pierce promptly. “Being a millionaire he had never heard of it. But when I explained the first elementary idea of it in a simple form, he was quite taken with the notion. I pointed out that he might abandon robbery on a large scale and create property on a small scale. He felt it was very revolutionary, but he admitted it was right. Well, you know, he’d bought this big English estate out here. He was going to play the philanthropist, and have a model estate with all the regular trimmings; heads hygienically shaved by machinery every morning; and the cottagers admitted once a month into their own front gardens and told to keep off the grass. But I said to him: `If you’re going to give things to people, why not give ‘em? If you give your friend a plant in a pot, you don’t send him an inspector from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vegetables to see he waters it properly. If you give your friend a box of cigars, you don’t make him write a monthly report of how many he smokes a day. Can’t you be a little generous with your generosity? Why don’t you use your money to make free men instead of to make slaves? Why don’t you give your tenants their land and have done with it, or let ’em have it very cheap?’ And he’s done it; he’s really done it. He’s created hundreds of small proprietors, and changed the whole of this countryside. That’s why I want you to come up and see one of the small farms.”