“Yes,” interrupted the excitable White, “and do you know what he said to me when I first said it?”

  “What who said when you said what?” asked Hood patiently.

  “I mean that fellow Hunter,” replied the clergyman. “That varnished society doctor turned politician. Do you know what he said when I told him we would get our bows from God?”

  Owen Hood paused in the act of lighting a cigar.

  “Yes,” he said grimly. “I believe I can tell you exactly what he said. I’ve watched him off and on for twenty years. I bet he began by saying: `I don’t profess to be a religious man.’”

  “Right, quite right,” cried the cleric bounding upon his chair in a joyous manner, “that’s exactly how he began. `I don’t profess to be a religious man, but I trust I have some reverence and good taste. I don’t drag religion into politics.’ And I said: `No, I don’t think you do.’”

  A moment after, he bounded, as it were, in a new direction. “And that reminds me of what I came about,” he cried. “Enoch Oates, your American friend, drags religion into politics all right; only it’s a rather American sort of religion. He’s talking about a United States of Europe and wants to introduce you to a Lithuanian Prophet. It seems this Lithuanian party has started a movement for a Universal Peasant Republic or World State of Workers on the Land; but at present he’s only got as far as Lithuania. But he seems inclined to pick up England on the way, after the unexpected success of the English agrarian party.”

  “What’s the good of talking to me about a World State,” growled Hood. “Didn’t I say I preferred a Heptarchy?”

  “Don’t you understand?” interrupted Hilary Pierce excitedly. “What can we have to do with international republics? We can turn England upside down if we like; but it’s England that we like, whichever way up. Why, our very names and phrases, the very bets and jokes in which the whole thing began, will never be translated. It takes an Englishman to eat his hat; I never heard of a Spaniard threatening to eat his sombrero, or a Chinaman to chew his pigtail. You can only set the Thames on fire; you cannot set the Tiber or the Ganges on fire, because the habit of speech has never been heard of. What’s the good of talking about white elephants in countries where they are only white elephants? Go and say to a Frenchman, `Pour mon chateau, je le trouve un elephant blanc’ and he will send two Parisian alienists to look at you seriously, like a man who says that his motor-car is a green giraffe. There is no point in telling Czecho-Slovakian pigs to fly, or Jugo-Slavonic cows to jump over the moon. Why, the unhappy Lithuanian would be bewildered to the point of madness by our very name. There is no reason to suppose that he and his countrymen talk about a long bowman when they mean a liar. We talk about tall stories, but a tall story may mean a true story in colloquial Lithuanian.”

  “Tall stories are true stories sometimes, I hope,” said Colonel Crane, “and people don’t believe ‘em. But people’ll say that was a very tall story about the tall trees throwing darts and stones. Afraid it’ll come to be a bit of a joke.”

  “All our battles began as jokes and they will end as jokes,” said Owen Hood, staring at the smoke of his cigar as it threaded its way towards the sky in grey and silver arabesque. “They will linger only as faintly laughable legends, if they linger at all; they may pass an hour or two or fill an empty page; and even the man who tells them will not take them seriously. It will all end in smoke like the smoke I am looking at; in eddying and topsy-turvy patterns hovering for a moment in the air. And I wonder how many, who may smile or yawn over them, will realize that where there was smoke there was fire.”

  There was a silence; then Colonel Crane stood up, a solitary figure in his severe and formal clothes, and gravely said farewell to his hostess. With the failing afternoon light he knew that his own wife, who was a well-known artist, would be abandoning her studio work, and he always looked forward to a talk with her before dinner, which was often a more social function. Nevertheless, as he approached his old home a whim induced him to delay the meeting for a few minutes and to walk round to his old kitchen garden, where his old servant Archer was still leaning on a spade, as in the days before the Flood.

  So he stood for a moment amid a changing world, exactly as he had stood on that distant Sunday morning at the beginning of all these things. The South Sea idol still stood at the corner; the scarecrow still wore the hat that he had sacrificed; the cabbages still looked green and solid like the cabbage he had once dug up, digging up so much along with it.

  “Queer thing,” he said, “how true it is what Hilary once said about acting an allegory without knowing it. Never had a notion of what I was doing when I picked up a cabbage and wore it for a wager. Damned awkward position, but I never dreamed I was being martyred for a symbol. And the right symbol, too, for I’ve lived to see Britannia crowned with cabbage. All very well to say Britannia ruled the waves; it was the land she couldn’t rule, her own land, and it was heaving like earthquakes. But while there’s cabbage there’s hope. Archer, my friend, this is the moral: any country that tries to do without cabbages is done for. And even in war you often fight as much with cabbages as cannon-balls.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Archer respectfully; “would you be wanting another cabbage now, sir?”

  Colonel Crane repressed a slight shudder. “No, thank you; no, thank you,” he said hastily. Then he muttered as he turned away: “I don’t mind revolutions so much, but I wouldn’t go through that again.”

  And he passed swiftly round his house, of which the windows began to show the glow of kindled lamps, and went in to his wife.

  Archer was left alone in the garden, tidying up after his work and shifting the potted shrubs; a dark and solitary figure as sunset and twilight sank all around the enclosure like soft curtains of grey with a border of purple; and the windows, as yet uncurtained and full of lamplight, painted patterns of gold on the lawns and flagged walks without. It was perhaps appropriate that he should remain alone and apart; for he alone in all these changes had remained quite unchanged. It was perhaps fitting that his figure should stand in a dark outline against the darkening scene; for the mystery of his immutable respectability remains more of a riddle than all the riot of the rest. No revolution could revolutionize Mr. Archer. Attempts had been made to provide so excellent a gardener with a garden of his own; with a farm of his own, in accordance with the popular policy of the hour. But he would not adapt himself to the new world; nor would he hasten to die out, as was his duty on evolutionary principles. He was merely a survival; but he showed a perplexing disposition to survive.

  Suddenly the lonely gardener realized that he was not alone. A face had appeared above the hedge, gazing at him with blue eyes dreaming yet burning; a face with something of the tint and profile of Shelley. It was impossible that Mr. Archer should have heard of such a person as Shelley: fortunately he recognized the visitor as a friend of his master.

  “Forgive me if I am mistaken, Citizen Archer,” said Hilary Pierce with pathetic eagerness, “but it seems to me that you are not swept along with the movement; that a man of your abilities has been allowed to stand apart, as it were, from the campaign of the Long Bow. And yet how strange! Are you not Archer? Does not your very name rise up and reproach you? Ought you not to have shot more arrows or told more tarradiddles than all the rest? Or is there perhaps a more elemental mystery behind your immobility, like that of a statue in the garden? Are you indeed the god of the garden, more beautiful than this South Sea idol and more respectable than Priapus? Are you in no mortal sense an Archer? Are you perhaps Apollo, serving this military Admetus; successfully, yes, successfully, hiding your radiance from me?” He paused for a reply, and then lowered his voice as he resumed: “Or are you not rather that other Archer whose shafts are not shafts of death but of life and fruitfulness; whose arrows plant themselves like little flowering trees; like the little shrubs you are planting in this garden? Are you he that gives the sunstroke not in the head but the heart; and have you stricken each of us in turn with the romance that has awakened us for the revolution? For without that spirit of fruitfulness and the promise of the family, these visions would indeed be vain. Are you in truth the God of Love; and has your arrow stung and startled each of us into telling his story? I will not call you Cupid,” he said with a slight air of deprecation or apology, “I will not call you Cupid, Mr. Archer, for I conceive you as no pagan deity, but rather as that image clarified and spiritualized to a symbol almost Christian, as he might have appeared to Chaucer or to Botticelli. Nay, it was you that, clad in no heathen colours, but rather in mediaeval heraldry, blew a blast on his golden trumpet when Beatrice saluted Dante on the bridge. Are you indeed that Archer, O Archer, and did you give each one of us his Vita Nuova?”

  “No, sir,” said Mr. Archer.

  * * * * * * * * *

  Thus does the chronicler of the League of the Long Bow come to the end of his singularly unproductive and unprofitable labours, without, perhaps, having yet come to the beginning. The reader may have once hoped, perhaps, that the story would be like the universe; which when it ends, will explain why it ever began. But the reader has long since been sleeping, after the toils and trials of his part in the affair; and the writer is too tactful to ask at how early a stage of his story-telling that generally satisfactory solution of all our troubles was found. He knows not if the sleep has been undisturbed, or in that sleep what dreams may come, if there has been cast upon it any shadow of the shapes of his own very private and comfortable nightmare; turrets clad with the wings of morning or temples marching over dim meadows as living monsters, or swine plumed like cherubim or forests bent like bows, or a fiery river winding through a dark land. Images are in their nature indefensible, if they miss the imagination of another; and the foolish scribe of the Long Bow will not commit the last folly of defending his dreams. He at least has drawn a bow at a venture and shot an arrow into the air; and he has no intention of looking for it in oaks, all over the neighbourhood, or expecting to find it still sticking in a mortal and murderous manner in the heart of a friend. His is only a toy bow; and when a boy shoots with such a bow, it is generally very difficult to find the arrow — or the boy.

  THE POET AND THE LUNATICS

  This collection of eight short stories was first published in 1929 and the tales concern the adventures of Gabriel Gale, an eccentric poet. He uses his gift of ‘madness of insight’ to solve or prevent crimes committed by madmen. Chesterton clearly suggests the similarities between lunacy and sanity in these short stories.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  THE FANTASTIC FRIENDS

  THE YELLOW BIRD

  THE SHADOW OF THE SHARK

  THE CRIME OF GABRIEL GALE

  THE FINGER OF STONE

  THE HOUSE OF THE PEACOCK

  THE PURPLE JEWEL

  THE ASYLUM OF ADVENTURE

  THE FANTASTIC FRIENDS

  THE inn called the Rising Sun had an exterior rather suggesting the title of the Setting Sun. It stood in a narrow triangle of garden, more grey than green, with broken-down hedges mingling with the melancholy reeds of a river; with a few dark and dank arbours, of which the roofs and the seats had alike collapsed; and a dingy dried-up fountain, with a weather-stained water-nymph and no water. The house itself seemed rather devoured by ivy than decorated with it; as if its old bones of brown brick were slowly broken by the dragon coils of that gigantic parasite. On the other side it looked on a lonely road leading across the hills down to a ford across the river; now largely disused since the building of a bridge lower down. Outside the door was a wooden bench and table, and above it a wooden sign, much darkened, with the gold of the sun’s disc faded to a brown; and under the sign stood the inn-keeper, gazing gloomily up the road. His hair was black and flat, and his face, of a congested purple, had all the sombreness, if not all the beauty, of sunset.

  The only person in the place who exhibited any liveliness was the person who was leaving it. He was the first and last customer for many months; a solitary swallow who had conspicuously failed to make a summer; and the swallow was now flitting. He was a medical man on a holiday; young, and of an agreeable ugliness, with a humorous hatchet face and red hair; and the cat-like activity of his movements contrasted with the stagnant inertia of the inn by the ford. He was strapping up his own bag on the table under the sign; and neither his host, who stood a yard off, nor the single servant, who moved heavily and obscurely within, offered to help him; possibly through sulkiness, possibly merely through dreaminess and disuse.

  The long silence, idle or busy, was broken for the first time by two sharp and explosive sounds. The first was the abrupt bursting of the strap which the doctor was tightening round the bag on the table; and the second was the loud and cheerful “Damn!” which was his comment upon it.

  “Here’s a pretty go,” observed the medical gentleman, who went by the name of Garth; “I shall have to tie it up with something. Have you got a cord or a rope or anything?”

  The melancholy inn-keeper turned very slowly and went indoors, coming out presently with a length of dusty rope in a loop like a halter, probably for tethering a donkey or a calf.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” he said; “I’m pretty well at the end of my own tether anyhow.”

  “You seem a bit depressed,” observed Dr. Garth; “you probably want a tonic. Perhaps this medicine chest burst open to give you one.”

  “Prussic acid is the kind of tonic I feel inclined for,” answered the landlord of the Rising Sun.

  “I never recommend it,” observed the doctor cheerfully. “It’s very pleasant at the moment, no doubt; but I never feel I can guarantee a complete recovery afterwards. But you certainly seem down in the mouth; you didn’t even brighten up when I indulged in such an eccentricity as paying my bill.”

  “Much obliged to you, sir,” observed the other gruffly, “but it would want a lot more bills to keep this rotten old show from going to pot. It was a good business once, when the right-of-way was open beyond the river, and everybody used this ford. But the last squire shut up the path somehow; and now everything goes by the new bridge a mile away. Nobody comes this way; and, saving your presence, I don’t know why anybody should.”

  “Well, they say the new squire is nearly bankrupt himself,” observed Dr. Garth. “So history brings its revenges. Westermaine’s his name, isn’t it? I’m told there’s a brother and sister living in the big house over there, with precious little to live on. I suppose the whole countryside’s rather gone downhill. But you’re wrong about nobody coming here,” he added suddenly, “for there are two men coming over the hill now.”

  The road ran across the valley at right angles to the river; beyond the ford the forgotten right-of-way could be traced more faintly up the slope to where the ruined gate that marked Westermaine Abbey stood dark against clouds of a pallor that was faintly lurid, as with a hint of storm. But on the other side of the valley the sky was clear; and the early afternoon seemed as bright and brisk as morning. And on this side, where the white road curved over the hill, two figures were advancing, which seemed, even when they were hardly more than dots in the distance, to be markedly dissimilar.

  As they came nearer to the inn, the contrast increased, and was accentuated by the very fact of their air of mutual familiarity; as if they were almost walking arm in arm. One was comparatively short and very sturdy; the other unusually tall and slender. They were both fair; but the blond hair of the shorter man was neatly parted and smoothly plastered down; while that of the other stood up in erratic wisps and tufts that looked fantastic. The shorter man had a full square face sharpened by a very pointed nose, and a pair of bright, bird-like eyes, that made it look like a small beak. There was something of the cock sparrow about him; and, indeed, he seemed more of a town bird than a country bird. His clothes were as neat and commonplace as a clerk’s; and he carried a business-like little bag as if he was going up to the City; while his tall companion had bundled on his back a loose knapsack, and what was evidently the paraphernalia of a painter. He had a long, slightly cadaverous face, with absent-minded eyes; but the chin beneath jutted forward, almost as if it had formed an unconscious resolution of its own, of which the blank blue eyes were still unaware. They were both young; and they both walked without hats, probably through the heat of walking; for the one held a hard straw hat in his hand, and the other had a loose grey felt stuffed anyhow into his knapsack.

  They came to a halt before the inn; and the shorter man said jovially to his companion, “Here’s a field for your efforts, anyhow.”

  Then he called out with breezy civility to the inn-keeper, asking him to bring out two pots of ale; and when that gloomy character had disappeared into his gloomy place of entertainment, he turned to the doctor with the same radiant loquacity:

  “My friend’s a painter,” he explained, “but rather a special sort of painter. You might call him a house-painter; but he’s not quite what most people mean by one. It may surprise you, sir, but he’s an R.A., and not the stuffy sort that sometimes suggests, either. One of the first among the young geniuses, and exhibits at all their cranky galleries. But his whole aim and glory in life is to go about repainting inn-signs. There; you don’t meet a genius with that little fancy every day. What’s the name of this pub?”

  And he stood on tiptoe, craning and peering at the blackened sign with an extraordinary contained vivacity in his curiosity.

  “The Rising Sun,” he commented, turning eagerly again to his silent friend. “That’s what you would call an omen, after what you were saying this morning about reviving the real inns. My friend is very poetical; and he said it would make a sunrise all over England.”