Tales of the Long Bow
by G. K. Chesterton
First published 1925 by Cassell and Company, Ltd.
Electronic Edition 1993 by Jim Henry III
Contents
I. The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane
II. The Improbable Success of Mr. Owen Hood
III. The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce
IV. The Elusive Companion of Parson White
V. The Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates
VI. The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green
VII. The Unprecedented Architecture of Commander Blair
VIII. The Ultimate Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow
Chapter I
The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane
These tales concern the doing of things recognized as
impossible to do; impossible to believe; and, as the weary reader
may well cry aloud, impossible to read about. Did the narrator
merely say that they happened, without saying how they happened,
they could easily be classified with the cow who jumped over the moon
or the more introspective individual who jumped down his own throat.
In short, they are all tall stories; and though tall stories may also
be true stories, there is something in the very phrase appropriate
to such a topsy-turvydom; for the logician will presumably class
a tall story with a corpulent epigram or a long-legged essay.
It is only proper that such impossible incidents should begin
in the most prim and prosaic of all places, and apparently with
the most prim and prosaic of all human beings.
The place was a straight suburban road of strictly-fenced suburban
houses on the outskirts of a modern town. The time was about twenty
minutes to eleven on Sunday morning, when a procession of suburban
families in Sunday clothes were passing decorously up the road
to church. And the man was a very respectable retired military
man named Colonel Crane, who was also going to church, as he had
done every Sunday at the same hour for a long stretch of years.
There was no obvious difference between him and his neighbours,
except that he was a little less obvious. His house was only called
White Lodge, and was, therefore, less alluring to the romantic
passer-by than Rowanmere on the one side or Heatherbrae on the other.
He turned out spick and span for church as if for parade; but he
was much too well dressed to be pointed out as a well-dressed man.
He was quite handsome in a dry, sun-baked style; but his bleached
blond hair was a colourless sort that could look either light brown
or pale grey; and though his blue eyes were clear, they looked out
a little heavily under lowered lids. Colonel Crane was something of
a survival. He was not really old; indeed he was barely middle-aged;
and had gained his last distinctions in the great war. But a variety
of causes had kept him true to the traditional type of the old
professional soldier, as it had existed before 1914; when a small
parish would have only one colonel as it had only one curate.
It would be quite unjust to call him a dug-out; indeed, it would be
much truer to call him a dug-in. For he had remained in the traditions
as firmly and patiently as he had remained in the trenches.
He was simply a man who had no taste for changing his habits,
and had never worried about conventions enough to alter them.
One of his excellent habits was to go to church at eleven o'clock,
and he therefore went there; and did not know that there went
with him something of an old-world air and a passage in the history
of England.
As he came out of his front door, however, on that particular morning,
he was twisting a scrap of paper in his fingers and frowning with
somewhat unusual perplexity. Instead of walking straight to his
garden gate he walked once or twice up and down his front garden,
swinging his black walking-cane. The note had been handed to him
at breakfast, and it evidently called for some practical problem calling
for immediate solution. He stood a few minutes with his eye riveted
on a red daisy at the corner of the nearest flower-bed; and then
a new expression began to work in the muscles of his bronzed face,
giving a slightly grim hint of humour, of which few except his
intimates were aware. Folding up the paper and putting it into his
waistcoat pocket, he strolled round the house to the back garden,
behind which was the kitchen-garden, in which an old servant, a sort
of factotum or handy-man, named Archer, was acting as kitchen-gardener.
Archer was also a survival. Indeed, the two had survived together;
had survived a number of things that had killed a good many other people.
But though they had been together through the war that was also
a revolution, and had a complete confidence in each other, the man Archer
had never been able to lose the oppressive manners of a manservant.
He performed the duties of a gardener with the air of a butler.
He really performed the duties very well and enjoyed them very much;
perhaps he enjoyed them all the more because he was a clever Cockney,
to whom the country crafts were a new hobby. But somehow,
whenever he said, "I have put in the seeds, sir," it always
sounded like, "I have put the sherry on the table, sir"; and he
could not say "Shall I pull the carrots?" without seeming to say,
"Would you be requiring the claret?"
"I hope you're not working on Sunday," said the Colonel,
with a much more pleasant smile than most people got from him,
though he was always polite to everybody. "You're getting
too fond of these rural pursuits. You've become a rustic yokel."
"I was venturing to examine the cabbages, sir," replied the rustic
yokel, with a painful precision of articulation. "Their condition
yesterday evening did not strike me as satisfactory."
"Glad you didn't sit up with them," answered the Colonel.
"But it's lucky you're interested in cabbages. I want to talk
to you about cabbages."
"About cabbages, sir?" inquired the other respectfully.
But the Colonel did not appear to pursue the topic, for he was gazing
in sudden abstraction at another object in the vegetable plots in front
of him. The Colonel's garden, like the Colonel's house, hat, coat,
and demeanour, was well-appointed in an unobtrusive fashion; and in
the part of it devoted to flowers there dwelt something indefinable
that seemed older that the suburbs. The hedges, even, in being
as neat as Surbiton managed to look as mellow as Hampton Court,
as if their very artificiality belonged rather to Queen Anne than
Queen Victoria; and the stone-rimmed pond with a ring of irises somehow
looked like a classic pool and not merely an artificial puddle.
It is idle to analyse how a man's soul and social type will somehow
soak into his surroundings; anyhow, the soul of Mr. Archer had sunk
into the kitchen-garden so as to give it a fine shade of difference.
He was after all a practical man, and the practice of his new trade
was much more of a real appetite with him than words would suggest.
Hence the kitchen-garden was not artificial, but autochthonous;
it really looked like the corner of a farm in the country; and all
sorts of practical devices were set up there. Strawberries were
netted-in against the birds; strings were stretched across with
feathers fluttering from them; and in the middle of the principal
bed stood an ancient and authentic scarecrow. Perhaps the only
incongruous intruder, capable of disputing with the scarecrow in his
rural reign, was the curious boundary-stone which marked the edge
of his domain; and which was, in fact, a shapeless South Sea idol,
planted there with no more appropriateness than a door-scraper. But
Colonel Crane would not have been so complete a type of the old
army man if he had not hidden somewhere a hobby connected with
his travels. His hobby had at one time been savage folklore;
and he had the relic of it on the edge of the kitchen-garden. At
the moment, however, he was not looking at the idol, but at the scarecrow.
"By the way, Archer," he said, "don't you think the scarecrow wants
a new hat?"
"I should hardly think it would be necessary, sir," said the
gardener gravely.
"But look here," said the Colonel, "you must consider the philosophy
of scarecrows. In theory, that is supposed to convince some rather
simple-minded bird that I am walking in my garden. That thing
with the unmentionable hat is Me. A trifle sketchy, perhaps.
Sort of impressionist portrait; but hardly likely to impress.
Man with a hat like that would never be really firm with a sparrow.
Conflict of wills, and all that, and I bet the sparrow would come
out on top. By the way, what's that stick tied on to it?"
"I believe, sir," said Archer, "that it is supposed to represent
a gun."
"Held at a highly unconvincing angle," observed Crane. "Man with
a hat like that would be sure to miss."
"Would you desire me to procure another hat?" inquired the patient Archer.
"No, no," answered his master carelessly. "As the poor fellow's got
such a rotten hat, I'll give him mine. Like the scene of St. Martin
and the beggar."
"Give him yours," repeated Archer respectfully, but faintly.
The Colonel took off his burnished top-hat and gravely placed
it on the head of the South Sea idol at his feet. It had a
queer effect of bringing the grotesque lump of stone to life,
as if a goblin in a top-hat was grinning at the garden.
"You think the hat shouldn't be quite new?" he inquired almost anxiously.
"Not done among the best scarecrows, perhaps. Well, let's see
what we can do to mellow it a little."
He whirled up his walking-stick over his head and laid a smacking
stroke across the silk hat, smashing it over the hollow eyes
of the idol.
"Softened with the touch of time now, I think," he remarked, holding out
the silken remnants to the gardener. "Put it on the scarecrow,
my friend; I don't want it. You can bear witness it's no use to me."
Archer obeyed like an automaton, an automaton with rather round eyes.
"We must hurry up," said the Colonel cheerfully. "I was early
for church, but I'm afraid I'm a bit late now."
"Did you propose to attend church without a hat, sir?" asked the other.
"Certainly not. Most irreverent," said the Colonel. "Nobody should
neglect to remove his hat on entering church. Well, if I haven't
got a hat, I shall neglect to remove it. Where is your reasoning
power this morning? No, no, just dig up one of your cabbages."
Once more the well-trained servant managed to repeat the word
"Cabbages" with his own strict accent; but in its constriction
there was a hint of strangulation.
"Yes, go and pull up a cabbage, there's a good fellow," said the Colonel.
"I must really be getting along; I believe I heard it strike eleven."
Mr. Archer moved heavily in the direction of a plot of cabbages,
which swelled with monstrous contours and many colours; objects, perhaps,
more worthy of the philosophic eye than is taken into account by
the more flippant of tongue. Vegetables are curious-looking things
and less commonplace than they sound. If we called a cabbage a cactus,
or some such queer name, we might see it as an equally queer thing.
These philosophical truths did the Colonel reveal by anticipating
the dubious Archer, and dragging a great, green cabbage with
its trailing root out of the earth. He then picked up a sort
of pruning-knife and cut short the long tail of the root;
scooped out the inside leaves so as to make a sort of hollow,
and gravely reversing it, placed it on his head. Napoleon and other
military princes have crowned themselves; and he, like the Caesars,
wore a wreath that was, after all, made of green leaves
or vegetation. Doubtless there are other comparisons that might
occur to any philosophical historian who should look at it in the abstract.
The people going to church certainly looked at it; but they did not
look at it in the abstract. To them it appeared singularly concrete;
and indeed incredibly solid. The inhabitants of Rowanmere and
Heatherbrae followed the Colonel as he strode almost jauntily up
the road, with feelings that no philosophy could for the moment meet.
There seemed to be nothing to be said, except that one of the most
respectable and respected of their neighbours, one who might even
be called in a quiet way a pattern of good form if not a leader
of fashion, was walking solemnly up to church with a cabbage
on the top of his head.
There was indeed no corporate action to meet the crisis. Their world was
not one in which a crowd can collect to shout, and still less to jeer.
No rotten eggs could be collected from their tidy breakfast-tables;
and they were not of the sort to throw cabbage-stalks at the cabbage.
Perhaps there was just that amount of truth in the pathetically
picturesque names on their front gates, names suggestive of
mountains and mighty lakes concealed somewhere on the premises.
It was true that in one sense such a house was a hermitage.
Each of these men lived alone and they could not be made into a mob.
For miles around there was not public house and no public opinion.
As the Colonel approached the church porch and prepared reverently to remove
his vegetarian headgear, he was hailed in a tone a little more hearty
than the humane civility that was the slender bond of that society.
He returned the greeting without embarrassment, and paused a moment
as the man who had spoken to him plunged into further speech.
He was a young doctor named Horace Hunter, tall, handsomely dressed,
and confident in manner; and though his features were rather plain
and his hair rather red, he was considered to have a certain fascination.
"Good morning, Colonel," said the doctor in his resounding tones,
"what a f--what a fine day it is."
Stars turned from their courses like comets, so to speak,
and the world swerved into wilder possibilities, at that crucial
moment when Dr. Hunter corrected himself and said, "What a fine day!"
instead of "What a funny hat!"
As to why he corrected himself, a true picture of what passed through
his mind might sound rather fanciful in itself. It would be less
than explicit to say he did so because of a long grey car waiting
outside the White Lodge. It might not be a complete explanation
to say it was due to a lady walking on stilts at a garden party.
Some obscurity might remain, even if we said that it had something
to do with a soft shirt and a nickname; nevertheless all these
things mingled in the medical gentleman's mind when he made his
hurried decision. Above all, it might or might not be sufficient
explanation to say that Horace Hunter was a very ambitious
young man, that the ring in his voice and the confidence in his
manner came from a very simple resolution to rise in the world,
and that the world in question was rather worldly.
He liked to be seen talking so confidently to Colonel Crane on that
Sunday parade. Crane was comparatively poor, but he knew People.
And people who knew People knew what People were doing now;
whereas people who didn't know People could only wonder what in the world
People would do next. A lady who came with the Duchess when she
opened the Bazaar had nodded to Crane and said, "Hullo, Stork,"
and the doctor had deduced that it was a sort of family joke and
not a momentary ornithological confusion. And it was the Duchess
who had started all that racing on stilts, which the Vernon-Smiths
had introduced at Heatherbrae. But it would have been devilish
awkward not to have known what Mrs. Vernon-Smith meant when she said,
"Of course you stilt." You never knew what they would start next.
He remembered how he himself had thought the first man in a soft
shirt-front was some funny fellow from nowhere; and then he had begun
to see others here and there, and had found that it was not a faux pas,
but a fashion. It was odd to imagine that he would ever begin
to see vegetable hats here and there, but you never could tell;
and he wasn't going to make the same mistake again. His first
medical impulse had been to add to the Colonel's fancy costume
with a strait-waistcoat. But Crane did not look like a lunatic,
and certainly did not look like a man playing a practical joke.
He had not the stiff and self-conscious solemnity of the joker.
He took it quite naturally. And one thing was certain: if it
really was the latest thing, the doctor must take it as naturally
as the Colonel did. So he said it was a fine day, and was gratified
to learn that there was no disagreement on that question.
The doctor's dilemma, if we may apply the phrase, had been the whole
neighbourhood's dilemma. The doctor's decision was also the whole
neighbourhood's decision. It was not so much that most of the good
people there shared in Hunter's serious social ambitions, but rather
that they were naturally prone to negative and cautious decisions.
They lived in a delicate dread of being interfered with; and they
were just enough to apply the principle by not interfering with
other people. They had also a subconscious sense that the mild
and respectable military gentleman would not be altogether an easy
person to interfere with. The consequence was that the Colonel
carried his monstrous green headgear about the streets of that suburb
for nearly a week, and nobody ever mentioned the subject to him.
It was about the end of that time (while the doctor had been scanning
the horizon for aristocrats crowned with cabbage, and, not seeing any,
was summoning his courage to speak) that the final interruption came;
and with the interruption the explanation.
The Colonel had every appearance of having forgotten all about
the hat. He took it off and on like any other hat; he hung it
on the hat-peg in his narrow front hall where there was nothing
else but his sword hung on two hooks and an old brown map of
the seventeenth century. He handed it to Archer when that correct
character seemed to insist on his official right to hold it;
he did not insist on his official right to brush it, for fear it
should fall to pieces; but he occasionally gave it a cautious shake,
accompanied by a look of restrained distaste. But the Colonel
himself never had any appearance of either liking or disliking it.
The unconventional thing had already become one of his conventions--
the conventions which he never considered enough to violate.
It is probable, therefore, that what ultimately took place was as
...
PanavPaul