[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
own reflection in the winding river, they could see that the long
sausage-shaped Zeppelin body of it had been fantastically decorated
with hanging ears and legs, to complete that pantomimic resemblance.
"I suppose it's some more of Hilary's skylarking," observed Hood;
"but what is he up to now?"
As the great aerial monster moved up the valley it paused over
the inn of the Blue Boar, and something fell fluttering from it
like a brightly coloured feather.
"People are coming down in parachutes," said the Colonel shortly.
"They're queer-looking people," remarked his companion, peering under
frowning brows, for the level light was dazzling to the eyes.
"By George, they're not people at all! They're pigs!"
From that distance, the objects in question had something of
the appearance of cherubs in some gaily coloured Gothic picture,
with the yellow sky for their gold-leaf background. The parachute
apparatus from which they hung and hovered was designed and coloured
with the appearance of a great wheel of gorgeously painted plumage,
looking more gaudy than ever in the strong evening light
that lay over all. The more the two men in the quarry stared
at these strange objects, the more certain it seemed that they
were indeed pigs; though whether the pigs were dead or alive it
was impossible at that distance to say. They looked down into
the garden of the inn into which the feathered things were dropping,
and they could see the figure of Joan Hardy standing in front
of the old pig-sty, with her bird-like head lifted, looking up into
the sky.
"Singular present for a young lady," remarked Crane, "but I suppose
when our mad young friend does start love-making, he would be likely
to give impossible presents."
The eyes of the more poetical Hood were full of larger visions,
and he hardly seemed to be listening. But as the sentence ended he
seemed to start from a trance and struck his hands together.
"Yes!" he cried in a new voice, "we always come back to that word!"
"Come back to what word?" asked his friend.
"'Impossible,'" answered Owen Hood. "It's the word that runs
through his whole life, and ours too for that matter. Don't you
see what he has done?"
"I see what he has done all right," answered the Colonel, "but I'm
not at all sure I see what you're driving at."
"What we have seen is another impossible thing," said Owen Hood;
"a thing that common speech has set up as a challenge; a thing that
a thousand rhymes and jokes and phrases have called impossible.
We have seen pigs fly."
"It's pretty extraordinary," admitted Crane, "but it's not
so extraordinary as their not being allowed to walk."
And they gathered their travelling tackle together and began
to descend the steep hill.
In doing so, they descended into a deeper twilight between the stems
of the darkling trees; the walls of the valley began to close over them,
as it were, and they lost that sense of being in the upper air
in a radiant topsy-turvydom of clouds. It was almost as if they
had really had a vision; and the voice of Crane came abruptly out
of the dusk, almost like that of a doubter when he speaks of a dream.
"The thing I can't understand," he said abruptly, "is how Hilary
managed to DO all that by himself."
"He really is a very wonderful fellow," said Hood. "You told me
yourself he did wonders in the War. And though he turns it to these
fanatical ends now, it takes as much trouble to do one as the other."
"Takes a devilish lot more trouble to do it alone," said Crane.
"In the War there was a whole organization."
"You mean he must be more than a remarkable person," suggested Hood,
"a sort of giant with a hundred hands or god with a hundred eyes.
Well, a man will work frightfully hard when he wants something
very much; even a man who generally looks like a lounging minor poet.
And I think I know what it was he wanted. He deserves to get it.
It's certainly his hour of triumph."
"Mystery to me all the same," said the Colonel frowning.
"Wonder whether he'll ever clear it up." But that part of the mystery
was not to be cleared up until many other curious things had come to pass.
Away on another part of the slope Hilary Pierce, new lighted upon
the earth like the herald Mercury, leapt down into a red hollow
of the quarry and came towards Joan Hardy with uplifted arms.
"This is no time for false modesty," he said. "It is the hour,
and I come to you covered with glory--"
"You come covered with mud," she said smiling, "and it's that
horrible red mud that takes so long to dry. It's no use trying
to brush it till--"
"I bring you the Golden Fleece, or at any rate the Golden Pig-Skin,"
he cried in lyric ecstasy. "I have endured the labours; I have
achieved the quest. I have made the Hampshire Hog as legendary
as the Calydonian Boar. They forbade me to drive it on foot,
and I drove it in a car, disguised as a pug. They forbade me to
bring it in a car, and I brought it in a railway-train, disguised
as an invalid. They forbade me to use a railway-train, and I took
to the wings of the morning and rose to the uttermost parts of the air;
by a way secret and pathless and lonely as the wilful way of love.
I have made my romance immortal. I have made my romance immortal.
I have written your name upon the sky. What do you say to me now?
I have turned a Pig into a Pegasus. I have done impossible things."
"I know you have," she said, "but somehow I can't help liking you
for all that."
"BUT you can't help liking me," he repeated in a hollow voice.
"I have stormed heaven, but still I am not so bad. Hercules can
be tolerated in spite of his Twelve Labours. St. George can
be forgiven for killing the Dragon. Woman, is this the way I am
treated in the hour of victory; and is this the graceful fashion
of an older world? Have you become a New Woman, by any chance?
What has your father been doing? What does he say--about us?"
"My father says you are quite mad, of course," she replied, "but he
can't help liking you either. He says he doesn't believe in people
marrying out of their class; but that if I must marry a gentleman
he'd rather it was somebody like you, and not one of the new gentlemen."
"Well, I'm glad I'm an old gentleman, any how," he answered
somewhat mollified. "But really this prevalence of common
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]