“I think I will have a talk to our American friend Mr. Oates.”

  Whether from a sense of humour or a sense of justice, Lord Eden summoned Enoch Oates before the same special jury of three; or summoned them before him, as the case may be. For it was even more difficult than before to read the exact secret of Eden’s sympathies or intentions; he talked about a variety of indifferent subjects leading up to that of the letters, which he treated very lightly. Then he said quite suddenly:

  “Do you know anything about those letters, by the way?”

  The American presented his poker face to the company for some time without reply. Then he said:

  “And what makes you think I know anything about them?”

  “Because,” said Horace Hunter, breaking in with uncontrollable warmth, “we know you’re hand and glove with all those lunatics in the League of the Long Bow who are kicking up all this shindy.”

  “Well,” said Oates calmly, “I’ll never deny I like some of their ways. I like live wires myself; and, after all, they’re about the liveliest thing in this old country. And I’ll tell you more. I like people who take trouble; and, believe me, they do take trouble. You say they’re all nuts; but I reckon there really is method in their madness. They take trouble to keep those crazy vows of theirs. You spoke about the fellows who carried off the astronomer in an aeroplane. Well, I know Bellew Blair, the man who worked with Pierce in that stunt, and believe me he’s not a man to be sniffed at. He’s one of the finest experts in aeronautics in the country; and if he’s gone over to them, it means there’s something in their notion for a scientific intellect to take hold of. It was Blair that worked that pig stunt for Hilary Pierce; made a great gas-bag shaped like a sow and gave all the little pigs parachutes.”

  “Well, there you are,” cried Hunter. “Of all the lunacy—”

  “I remember Commander Blair in the War,” said the Prime Minister quietly. “Bellows Blair, they called him. He did expert work: some new scheme with dirigible balloons. But I was only going to ask Mr. Oates whether he happens to know where Welkin Castle is.”

  “Must be somewhere near here,” suggested Normantowers, “as the letters seem to come by hand.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Enoch Oates doubtfully. “I know a man living in Ely, who had one of those letters delivered by hand. And I know another near Land’s End who thought the letter must have come from somebody living near. As you say, they all seem to come by hand.”

  “By what hand?” asked the Prime Minister, with a queer, grim expression.

  “Mr. Oates,” said Lord Normantowers firmly, “where IS Welkin Castle?”

  “Why, it’s everywhere, in a manner of speaking,” said Mr. Oates reflectively. “It’s anywhere, anyhow. Gee — !” he broke off suddenly: “Why, as a matter of fact, it’s here!”

  “Ah,” said the Prime Minister quietly, “I thought we should see something if we watched here long enough! You didn’t think I kept you hanging about here only to ask Mr. Oates questions that I knew the answer to.”

  “What do you mean? Thought we would see what?”

  “Where the unstamped letters come from,” replied Lord Eden.

  Luminous and enormous, there heaved up above the garden trees something that looked at first like a coloured cloud; it was flushed with light such as lies on clouds opposite the sunset, a light at once warm and wan; and it shone like an opaque flame. But as it came closer it grew more and more incredible. It took on solid proportions and perspective, as if a cloud could brush and crush the dark tree-tops. It was something never seen before in the sky; it was a cubist cloud. Men gazing at such a sunset cloud-land often imagine they see castles and cities of an almost uncanny completeness. But there would be a possible point of completeness at which they would cry aloud, or perhaps shriek aloud, as at a sign in heaven; and that completeness had come. The big luminous object that sailed above the garden was outlined in battlements and turrets like a fairy castle; but with an architectural exactitude impossible in any cloudland. With the very look of it a phrase and a proverb leapt into the mind.

  “There, my lord!” cried Oates, suddenly lifting his nasal and drawling voice and pointing, “there’s that dream you told me about. There’s your castle in the air.”

  As the shadow of the flying thing travelled over the sun-lit lawn, they looked up and saw for the first time that the lower part of the edifice hung downwards like the car of a great balloon. They remembered the aeronautical tricks of Commander Blair and Captain Pierce and the model of the monstrous pig. As it passed over the table a white speck detached itself and dropped from the car. It was a letter.

  The next moment the white speck was followed by a shower that was like a snowstorm. Countless letters, leaflets, and scraps of paper were littered all over the lawn. The guests seemed to stand staring wildly in a wilderness of waste-paper; but the keen and experienced eyes of Lord Eden recognized the material which, in political elections, is somewhat satirically called “literature.”

  It took the twelve private secretaries some time to pick them all up and make the lawn neat and tidy again. On examination they proved to be mainly of two kinds: one a sort of electioneering pamphlet of the League of the Long Bow, and the other a somewhat airy fantasy about private property in air. The most important of the documents, which Lord Eden studied more attentively, though with a grim smile, began with the sentence in large letters:

  “An Englishman’s House Is No Longer His Castle On The Soil Of England. If It Is To Be His Castle, It Must Be A Castle In The Air.

  “If There Seem To Be Something Unfamiliar And Even Fanciful In The Idea, We Reply That It Is Not Half So Fantastic To Own Your Own Houses In The Clouds As Not To Own Your Own Houses On The Earth.”

  Then followed a passage of somewhat less solid political value, in which the acute reader might trace the influence of the poetical Mr. Pierce rather than the scientific Mr. Blair. It began “They Have Stolen the Earth; We Will Divide the Sky.” But the writer followed this with a somewhat unconvincing claim to have trained rooks and swallows to hover in rows in the air to represent the hedges of “the blue meadows of the new realm,” and he was so obliging as to accompany the explanation with diagrams of space showing the exact ornithological boundaries in dotted lines. There were other equally scientific documents dealing with the treatment of clouds, the driving of birds to graze on insects, and so on. The whole of this section concluded with the great social and economic slogan: “Three Acres and a Crow.”

  But when Lord Eden read on, his attention appeared graver than this particular sort of social reconstruction would seem to warrant. The writer of the pamphlet resumed:

  “Do not be surprised if there seems to be something topsy-turvy in the above programme. That topsy-turvydom marks the whole of our politics. It may seem strange that the air which has always been public should become private, when the land which has always been private has become public. We answer that this is exactly how things really stand to-day in the matter of all publicity and privacy. Private things are indeed being made public. But public things are being kept private.

  “Thus we all had the pleasure of seeing in the papers a picture of Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., smiling in an ingratiating manner at his favourite cockatoo. We know this detail of his existence, which might seem a merely domestic one. But the fact that he is shortly to be paid thirty thousand pounds of public money, for continuing to live in his own house, is concealed with the utmost delicacy.

  “Similarly we have seen whole pages of an illustrated paper filled with glimpses of Lord Normantowers enjoying his honeymoon, which the papers in question are careful to describe as his Romance. Whatever it may be, an antiquated and fastidious taste might possibly be disposed to regard it as his own affair. But the fact that the taxpayer’s money, which is the taxpayer’s affair, is to be given him in enormous quantities, first for going out of his castle, and then for coming back into it — this little domestic detail is thought too trivial for the taxpayer to be told of it.

  “Or again, we are frequently informed that the hobby of Mr. Rosenbaum Low is improving the breed of Pekinese, and God knows they need it. But it would seem the sort of hobby that anybody might have without telling everybody else about it. On the other hand, the fact that Mr. Rosenbaum Low is being paid twice over for the same house, and keeping the house as well, is concealed from the public; along with the equally interesting fact that he is allowed to do these things chiefly because he lends money to the Prime Minister.”

  The Prime Minister smiled still more grimly and glanced in a light yet lingering fashion at some of the accompanying leaflets. They seemed to be in the form of electioneering leaflets, though not apparently connected with any particular election.

  “Vote for Crane. He Said He would Heat His Hat and Did It. Lord Normantowers said he would explain how people came to swallow his coronet; but he hasn’t done it yet.

  “Vote for Pierce. He Said Pigs Would Fly And They Did. Rosenbaum Low said a service of international aerial express trains would fly; and they didn’t. It was your money he made to fly.

  “Vote for the League of the Long Bow. They Are The Only Men Who Don’t Tell Lies.”

  The Prime Minister stood gazing after the vanishing cloud-castle, as it faded into the clouds, with a curious expression in his eyes. Whether it were better or worse for his soul, there was something in him that understood much that the muddled materialists around him could never understand.

  “Quite poetical, isn’t it?” he said drily. “Wasn’t it Victor Hugo or some French poet who said something about politics and the clouds?... The people say, `Bah, the poet is in the clouds. So is the thunderbolt.’”

  “Thunderbolts!” said Normantowers contemptuously. “What can these fools do but go about flinging fireworks?”

  “Quite so,” replied Eden; “but I’m afraid by this time they are flinging fireworks into a powder-magazine.”

  He continued to gaze into the sky with screwed-up eyes, though the object had become invisible.

  If his eye could really have followed the thing after which he gazed, he would have been surprised; if his unfathomable scepticism was still capable of surprise. It passed over woods and meadows like a sunset cloud towards the sunset, or a little to the north-west of it, like the fairy castle that was west of the moon. It left behind the green orchards and the red towers of Hereford and passed into bare places whose towers are mightier than any made by man, where they buttress the mighty wall of Wales. Far away in this wilderness of columned cliffs and clefts it found a cleft or hollow, along the floor of which ran a dark line that might have been a black river running through a rocky valley. But it was in fact a crack opening below into another abyss. The strange flying-ship followed the course of the winding fissure till it came to a place where the crack opened into a chasm, round like a cauldron and accidental as the knot in some colossal tree-trunk; through which it sank, entering the twilight of the tremendous cavern beneath. The abyss below was lit here and there with artificial lights, like fallen stars of the underworld, and bridged with wooden platforms and galleries, on which were wooden huts and huge packing-cases and many things somewhat suggestive of a munition dump. On the rocky walls were spread out various balloon coverings, some of them even more grotesque in outline than the castle. Some were in the shapes of animals; and on that primeval background looked like the last fossils, or possibly the first outlines of vast prehistoric creatures. Perhaps there was something suggestive in the fancy that in that underworld a new world was being created. The man who alighted from the flying castle recognized, almost as one recognizes a domestic pet, the outline of a highly primitive pig stretching like a large archaic drawing across the wall. For the young man was called Hilary Pierce, and had had previous dealings with the flying pig, though for that day he had been put in charge of the flying castle.

  On the platform on which he alighted stood a table covered with papers, with almost more papers than Lord Eden’s table. But these papers were covered almost entirely with figures and numbers and mathematical symbols. Two men were bending over the table, discussing and occasionally disputing. In the taller of the two the scientific world might have recognized Professor Green, whom it was seeking everywhere like the Missing Link, to incarcerate him in the interests of science. In the shorter and sturdier figure a very few people might have recognized Bellew Blair, the organizing brain of the English Revolution.

  “I haven’t come to stay,” explained Pierce hastily. “I’m going on in a minute.”

  “Why shouldn’t you stay?” asked Blair, in the act of lighting a pipe.

  “I don’t want your talk interrupted. Still less, far, far less, do I want it uninterrupted. I mean while I’m here. A little of your scientific conversation goes a long way with me; I know what you’re like when you’re really chatty. Professor Green will say in his satirical way `9920.05,’ to which you will reply with quiet humour `75.007.’ This will be too good an opening for a witty fellow like the Professor, who will instantly retort `982.09.’ Not in the best taste perhaps, but a great temptation in the heat of debate.”

  “Commander Blair,” said the Professor, “is very kind to let me share his calculations.”

  “Lucky for me,” said Blair. “I’d have done ten times more with a mathematician like you.”

  “Well,” said Pierce casually, “as you are so much immersed in mathematics, I’ll leave you. As a matter of fact, I had a message for Professor Green, about Miss Dale at the house where he was lodging; but we mustn’t interrupt scientific studies for a little thing like that.”

  Green’s head came up from the papers with great abruptness.

  “Message!” he cried eagerly. “What message? Is it really for me?”

  “8282.003,” replied Pierce coldly.

  “Don’t be offended,” said Blair. “Give the Professor his message and then go if you like.”

  “It’s only that she came over to see my wife to find out where you had gone to,” said Pierce. “I told her, so far as it’s possible to tell anybody. That’s all,” he added, but rather with the air of one saying, “it ought to be enough.”

  Apparently it was, for Green, who was once more looking down upon the precious papers, crumpled one of them in his clenched hand unconsciously, like a man suddenly controlling his feelings.

  “Well, I’m off,” said Pierce cheerfully; “got to visit the other dumps.”

  “Stop a minute,” said Blair, as the other turned away. “Haven’t you any sort of public news as well as private news? How are things going in the political world?”

  “Expressed in mathematical formula,” replied Pierce over his shoulder, “the political news is MP squared plus LSD over U equals L. L let loose. L upon earth, my boy.”

  And he climbed again into his castle of the air.

  Oliver Green stood staring at the crumbled paper and suddenly began to straighten it out.

  “Mr. Blair,” he said, “I am terribly ashamed of myself. When I see you living here like a hermit in the mountains and scrawling your calculations, so to speak, on the rocks of the wilderness, devoted to your great abstract idea, vowed to a great cause, it makes me feel very small to have entangled you and your friends in my small affairs. Of course, the affair isn’t at all small to me; but it must seem very small to you.”

  “I don’t know very precisely,” answered Blair, “what was the nature of the affair. But that is emphatically your affair. For the rest, I assure you we’re delighted to have you, apart from your valuable services as a calculating machine.”

  Bellew Blair, the last and, in the worldly sense, by far the ablest of the recruits of the Long Bow, was a man in early middle age, square built, but neat in figure and light on his feet, clad in a suit of leather. He mostly moved about so quickly that his figure made more impression than his face; but when he sat down smoking, in one of his rare moments of leisure, as now, it could be remarked that his face was rather calm than vivacious; a short square face with a short resolute nose, but reflective eyes much lighter than his close black hair.

  “It’s quite Homeric,” he added, “the two armies fighting for the body of an astronomer. You would be a sort of symbol anyhow, since they started that insanity of calling you insane. Nobody has any business to bother you about the personal side of the matter.”

  Green seemed to be ruminating, and the last phrase awoke him to a decision. He began to talk. Quite straightforwardly, though with a certain schoolboy awkwardness, he proceeded to tell his friend the whole of his uncouth love-story — the overturning of his spiritual world to the tune the old cow died of, or rather danced to.

  “And I’ve let you in for hiding me like a murderer,” he concluded. “For the sake of something that must seem to you, not even like a cow jumping over the moon, but more like a calf falling over the milking-stool. Perhaps people vowed to a great work like this ought to leave all that sort of thing behind them.”

  “Well, I don’t see anything to be ashamed of,” said Blair, “and in this case I don’t agree with what you say about leaving those things behind. Of some sorts of work it’s true; but not this. Shall I tell you a secret?”