“Will it?” asked Miss Dale in an absent-minded manner (for she was sadly deficient in civic and political sense). “Is that your Tommy out there?”

  And they talked about the child and then about a hundred entirely trivial things; for they understood each other perfectly.

  And if there are still things the reader fails to understand, if (as seems almost incredible) there are things that he wishes to understand, then it can only be at the heavy price of studying the story of the Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair; and with that, it is comforting to know, the story of all these things will be drawing near its explanation and its end.

  The Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair

  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 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 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 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 rent, English relics, English pictures, English cathedrals or the 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 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; 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 the subject of 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 to 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 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 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 be a pretty appropriate name.”

  He drifted heavily from the room, and the four other men were left, staring at a riddle.

  “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 indecipherable 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 own power in the State, which you wield with such public spirit of course, all Sir Horace’s health reforms, the Normantowers’ 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.

  “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 the 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 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 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 Comptroller” (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 Comptroller, 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 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, 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 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 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 with him in this great public change (and private understanding), and that no rich eccentric should be left out or 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 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 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 encyclopaedias 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 about them. Moreover, the Prime Minister, in an unobtrusive way, was very carefully guarded. Prime Ministers always 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: