“Oh, no,” answered Dorian, “I’ve heard all about it since, and as you’re rather the persecuted3 party, so to speak, it wouldn’t be fair not to tell you that I don’t agree much with Ivywood about all this. I disagree with him; or rather, to speak medically, he disagrees with me. He has, ever since I woke up after an oyster4 supper and found myself in the House of Commons with policemen calling out, ‘Who goes home?’”
“Indeed,” inquired Dalroy, drawing his red bushy eyebrows5 together. “Do the officials in Parliament say, ‘Who goes home?’”
“Yes,” answered Wimpole, indifferently, “it’s a part of some old custom in the days when Members of Parliament might be attacked in the street.”
“Well,” inquired Patrick, in a rational tone, “why aren’t they attacked in the street?”
There was a silence. “It is a holy mystery,” said the Captain at last. “But, ‘Who goes home?’—that is uncommonly6 good.”
The Captain had received the poet into the car with all possible expressions of affability and satisfaction, but the poet, who was keen-sighted enough about people of his own sort, could not help thinking that the Captain was a little absent-minded. As they flew thundering through the mazes8 of South London (for Pump had crossed Westminster Bridge and was making for the Surrey hills), the big blue eyes of the big red-haired man rolled perpetually up and down the streets; and, after longer and longer silences, he found expression for his thoughts.
“Doesn’t it strike you that there are a very large number of chemists in London nowadays?”
“Are there?” asked Wimpole, carelessly. “Well, there certainly are two very close to each other just over there.”
“Yes, and both the same name,” replied Dalroy, “Crooke. And I saw the same Mr. Crooke chemicalizing round the corner. He seems to be a highly omnipresent deity10.”
“A large business, I suppose,” observed Dorian Wimpole.
“Too large for its profits, I should say,” said Dalroy. “What can people want with two chemists of the same sort within a few yards of each other? Do they put one leg into one shop and one into the other and have their corns done in both at once? Or, do they take an acid in one shop and an alkali in the next, and wait for the fizz? Or, do they take the poison in the first shop and the emetic11 in the second shop? It seems like carrying delicacy12 too far. It almost amounts to living a double life.”
“But, perhaps,” said Dorian, “he is an uproariously popular chemist, this Mr. Crooke. Perhaps there’s a rush on some specialty13 of his.”
“It seems to me,” said the Captain, “that there are certain limitations to such popularity in the case of a chemist. If a man sells very good tobacco, people may smoke more and more of it from sheer self-indulgence. But I never heard of anybody exceeding in cod-liver oil. Even castor-oil, I should say, is regarded with respect rather than true affection.”
After a few minutes of silence, he said, “Is it safe to stop here for an instant, Pump?”
“I think so,” replied Humphrey, “if you’ll promise me not to have any adventures in the shop.”
The motor car stopped before yet a fourth arsenal14 of Mr. Crooke and his pharmacy15, and Dalroy went in. Before Pump and his companion could exchange a word, the Captain came out again, with a curious expression on his countenance16, especially round the mouth.
“Mr. Wimpole,” said Dalroy, “will you give us the pleasure of dining with us this evening? Many would consider it an unceremonious invitation to an unconventional meal; and it may be necessary to eat it under a hedge or even up a tree; but you are a man of taste, and one does not apologise for Hump’s rum or Hump’s cheese to persons of taste. We will eat and drink of our best tonight. It is a banquet. I am not very certain whether you and I are friends or enemies, but at least there shall be peace tonight.”
“Friends, I hope,” said the poet, smiling, “but why peace especially tonight?”
“Because there will be war tomorrow,” answered Patrick Dalroy, “whichever side of it you may be on. I have just made a singular discovery.”
And he relapsed into his silence as they flew out of the fringe of London into the woods and hills beyond Croydon. Dalroy remained in the same mood of brooding, Dorian was brushed by the butterfly wing of that fleeting18 slumber19 that will come on a man hurried, through the air, after long lounging in hot drawing rooms; even the dog Quoodle was asleep at the bottom of the car. As for Humphrey Pump, he very seldom talked when he had anything else to do. Thus it happened that long landscapes and perspectives were shot past them like suddenly shifted slides, and long stretches of time elapsed before any of them spoke20 again. The sky was changing from the pale golds and greens of evening to the burning blue of a strong summer night, a night of strong stars. The walls of woodland that flew past them like long assegais, were mostly, at first, of the fenced and park-like sort; endless oblong blocks of black pinewood shut in by boxes of thin grey wood. But soon fences began to sink, and pinewoods to straggle, and roads to split and even to sprawl21. Half an hour later Dalroy had begun to realise something romantic and even faintly reminiscent in the roll of the country, and Humphrey Pump had long known he was on the marches of his native land.
So far as the difference could be defined by a detail, it seemed to consist not so much in the road rising as in the road perpetually winding22. It was more like a path; and even where it was abrupt23 or aimless, it seemed the more alive. They appeared to be ascending25 a big, dim hill that was built of a crowd of little hills with rounded tops; it was like a cluster of domes26. Among these domes the road climbed and curled in multitudinous curves and angles. It was almost impossible to believe that it could turn itself and round on itself so often without tying itself in a knot and choking.
“I say,” said Dalroy, breaking the silence suddenly, “this car will get giddy and fall down.”
“Perhaps,” said Dorian, beaming at him, “my car, as you may have noticed, was much steadier.”
Patrick laughed, but not without a shade of confusion. “I hope you got back your car all right,” he said. “This is really nothing for speed; but it’s an uncommonly good little climber, and it seems to have some climbing to do just now. And even more wandering.”
“The roads certainly seem to be very irregular,” said Dorian, reflectively.
“Well,” cried Patrick, with a queer kind of impatience28, “you’re English and I’m not. You ought to know why the road winds about like this. Why, the Saints deliver us!” he cried, “it’s one of the wrongs of Ireland that she can’t understand England. England won’t understand herself, England won’t tell us why these roads go wriggling29 about. Englishmen won’t tell us! You won’t tell us!”
“Don’t be too sure,” said Dorian, with a quiet irony30.
Dalroy, with an irony far from quiet, emitted a loud yell of victory.
“Right,” he shouted. “More songs of the car club! We’re all poets here, I hope. Each shall write something about why the road jerks about so much. So much as this, for example,” he added, as the whole vehicle nearly rolled over in a ditch.
For, indeed, Pump appeared to be attacking such inclines as are more suitable for a goat than a small motor-car. This may have been exaggerated in the emotions of his companions, who had both, for different reasons, seen much of mere2 flat country lately. The sensation was like a combination of trying to get into the middle of the maze7 at Hampton Court, and climbing the spiral staircase to the Belfry at Bruges.
“This is the right way to Roundabout,” said Dalroy, cheerfully, “charming place; salubrious spot. You can’t miss it. First to the left and right and straight on round the corner and back again. That’ll do for my poem. Get on, you slackers; why aren’t you writing your poems?”
“I’ll try one if you like,” said Dorian, treating his flattered egotism lightly. “But it’s too dark to write; and getting darker.”
Indeed they had come under a shadow between them and the stars, like the brim of a giant’s hat; only through the holes and rents in which the summer stars could now look down on them. The hill, like a cluster of domes, though smooth and even bare in its lower contours was topped with a tangle31 of spanning trees that sat above them like a bird brooding over its nest. The wood was larger and vaguer than the clump32 that is the crown of the hill at Chanctonbury, but was rather like it and held much the same high and romantic position. The next moment they were in the wood itself, and winding in and out among the trees by a ribbon of paths. The emerald twilight33 between the stems, combined with the dragon-like contortions34 of the great grey roots of the beeches35, had a suggestion of monsters and the deep sea; especially as a long litter of crimson36 and copper-coloured fungi37, which might well have been the more gorgeous types of anemone38 or jelly-fish, reddened the ground like a sunset dropped from the sky. And yet, contradictorily39 enough, they had also a strong sense of being high up; and even near to heaven; and the brilliant summer stars that stared through the chinks of the leafy roof might almost have been white starry40 blossoms on the trees of the wood.
But though they had entered the wood as if it were a house, their strongest sensation still was the rotatory; it seemed as if that high green house went round and round like a revolving41 lighthouse or the whiz-gig temple in the old pantomimes. The stars seemed to circle over their heads; and Dorian felt almost certain he had seen the same beech-tree twice.
At length they came to a central place where the hill rose in a sort of cone42 in the thick of its trees, lifting its trees with it. Here Pump stopped the car, and clambering up the slope, came to the crawling colossal43 roots of a very large but very low beech-tree. It spread out to the four quarters of heaven more in the manner of an octopus44 than a tree, and within its low crown of branches there was a kind of hollow, like a cup, into which Mr. Humphrey Pump, of “The Old Ship,” Pebblewick, suddenly and entirely45 disappeared.
When he appeared it was with a kind of rope ladder, which he politely hung over the side for his companions to ascend24 by, but the Captain preferred to swing himself onto one of the octopine branches with a whirl of large wild legs worthy46 of a chimpanzee. When they were established there, each propped47 in the hollow against a branch, almost as comfortably as in an arm chair, Humphrey himself descended48 once more and began to take out their simple stores. The dog was still asleep in the car.
“An old haunt of yours, Hump, I suppose,” said the Captain. “You seem quite at home.”
“I am at home,” answered Pump, with gravity, “at the sign of ‘The Old Ship.’” And he stuck the old blue and red sign-board erect49 among the toadstools, as if inviting50 the passer-by to climb the trees for a drink.
The tree just topped the mound51 or clump of trees, and from it they could see the whole champaign of the country they had passed, with the silver roads roaming about in it like rivers. They were so exalted52 they could almost fancy the stars would burn them.
“Those roads remind me of the songs you’ve all promised,” said Dalroy at last. “Let’s have some supper, Hump, and then recite.”
Humphrey had hung one of the motor lanterns onto a branch above him, and proceeded by the light of it to tap the keg of rum and hand round the cheese.
“What an extraordinary thing,” exclaimed Dorian Wimpole, suddenly. “Why, I’m quite comfortable! Such a thing has never happened before, I should imagine. And how holy this cheese tastes.”
“It has gone on a pilgrimage,” answered Dalroy, “or rather a Crusade. It’s a heroic, a fighting cheese. ‘Cheese of all Cheeses, Cheeses of all the world,’ as my compatriot, Mr. Yeats, says to the Something-or-other of Battle. It’s almost impossible that this cheese can have come out of such a coward as a cow. I suppose,” he added, wistfully, “I suppose it wouldn’t do to explain that in this case Hump had milked the bull. That would be classed by scientists among Irish legends—those that have the Celtic glamour53 and all that. No, I think this cheese must have come from that Dun Cow of Dunsmore Heath, who had horns bigger than elephant’s tusks54, and who was so ferocious55 that one of the greatest of the old heroes of chivalry56 was required to do battle with it. The rum’s good, too. I’ve earned this glass of rum—earned it by
Join or Log In!
You need to log in to continue reading