‘Many things don’t work in here,’ he said. ‘One day a man brought in a Lee-Metford, and that wouldn’t work.’
‘The laws of science are universal in their application. It must be the water in the moat that has injured the machinery. In normal conditions everything works. Science and the spirit of emulation – those are the forces that have made us what we are.’
I had to break off and acknowledge the pleasant greetings of people whom we passed. Some of them were singing, some talking, some engaged in gardening, hay-making, or other rudimentary industries. They all seemed happy; and I might have been happy too, if I could have forgotten that the place led nowhere.
I was startled by a young man who came sprinting across our path, took a little fence in fine style, and went tearing over a ploughed field till – he plunged into a lake, across which he began to swim. Here was true energy, and I exclaimed: ‘A cross-country race! Where are the others?’
‘There are no others,’ my companion replied; and, later on, when we passed some long grass from which came the voice of a girl singing exquisitely to herself, he said again: ‘There are no others.’ I was bewildered at the waste in production, and murmured to myself, ‘What does it all mean?’
He said: ‘It means nothing but itself – and he repeated the words slowly, as if I were a child.
‘I understand,’ I said quietly, ‘but I do not agree. Every achievement is worthless unless it is a link in the chain of development. And I must not trespass on your kindness any longer. I must get back somehow to the road, and have my pedometer mended.’
‘First, you must see the gates,’ he replied, ‘for we have gates, though we never use them.’
I yielded politely, and before long we reached the moat again, at a point where it was spanned by a bridge. Over the bridge was a big gate, as white as ivory, which was fitted into a gap in the boundary hedge. The gate opened outwards, and I exclaimed in amazement, for from it ran a road – just such a road as I had left – dusty under foot, with brown crackling hedges on either side as far as the eye could reach.
‘That’s my road!’ I cried.
He shut the gate and said: ‘But not your part of the road. It is through this gate that humanity went out countless ages ago, when it was first seized with the desire to walk.’
I denied this, observing that the part of the road I myself had left was not more than two miles off. But with the obstinacy of his years he repeated: ‘It is the same road. This is the beginning, and though it seems to run straight away from us, it doubles so often, that it is never far from our boundary and sometimes touches it.’ He stooped down by the moat and traced on its moist margin an absurd figure like a maze. As we walked back through the meadows, I tried to convince him of his mistake.
‘The road sometimes doubles, to be sure, but that is part of our discipline. Who can doubt that its general tendency is onward? To what goal we know not – it may be to some mountain where we shall touch the sky, it may be over precipices into the sea. But that it goes forward – who can doubt that? It is the thought of that that makes us strive to excel, each in his own way, and gives us an impetus which is lacking with you. Now that man who passed us – it’s true that he ran well, and jumped well, and swam well; but we have men who can run better, and men who can jump better, and who can swim better. Specialization has produced results which would surprise you. Similarly, that girl——’
Here I interrupted myself to exclaim: ‘Good gracious me! I could have sworn it was Miss Eliza Dimbleby over there, with her feet in the fountain!’
He believed that it was.
‘Impossible! I left her on the road, and she is due to lecture this evening at Tunbridge Wells. Why, her train leaves Cannon Street in – of course my watch has stopped like everything else. She is the last person to be here.’
‘People always are astonished at meeting each other. All kinds come through the hedge, and come at all times – when they are drawing ahead in the race, when they are lagging behind, when they are left for dead. I often stand near the boundary listening to the sounds of the road – you know what they are – and wonder if anyone will turn aside. It is my great happiness to help someone out of the moat, as I helped you. For our country fills up slowly, though it was meant for all mankind.’
‘Mankind have other aims,’ I said gently, for I thought him well-meaning; ‘and I must join them.’ I bade him good evening, for the sun was declining, and I wished to be on the road by nightfall. To my alarm, he caught hold of me, crying: ‘You are not to go yet!’ I tried to shake him off, for we had no interests in common, and his civility was becoming irksome to me. But for all my struggles the tiresome old man would not let go; and, as wrestling is not my speciality, I was obliged to follow him.
It was true that I could have never found alone the place where I came in, and I hoped that, when I had seen the other sights about which he was worrying, he would take me back to it. But I was determined not to sleep in the country, for I mistrusted it, and the people too, for all their friendliness. Hungry though I was, I would not join them in their evening meals of milk and fruit, and, when they gave me flowers, I flung them away as soon as I could do so unobserved. Already they were lying down for the night like cattle – some out on the bare hillside, others in groups under the beeches. In the light of an orange sunset I hurried on with my unwelcome guide, dead tired, faint for want of food, but murmuring indomitably: ‘Give me life, with its struggles and victories, with its failures and hatreds, with its deep moral meaning and its unknown goal!’
At last we came to a place where the encircling moat was spanned by another bridge, and where another gate interrupted the line of the boundary hedge. It was different from the first gate; for it was half transparent like horn, and opened inwards. But through it, in the waning light, I saw again just such a road as I had left – monotonous, dusty, with brown crackling hedges on either side, as far as the eye could reach.
I was strangely disquieted at the sight, which seemed to deprive me of all self-control. A man was passing us, returning for the night to the hills, with a scythe over his shoulder and a can of some liquid in his hand. I forgot the destiny of our race. I forgot the road that lay before my eyes, and I sprang at him, wrenched the can out of his hand, and began to drink.
It was nothing stronger than beer, but in my exhausted state it overcame me in a moment. As in a dream, I saw the old man shut the gate, and heard him say: ‘This is where your road ends, and through this gate humanity – all that is left of it – will come in to us.’
Though my senses were sinking into oblivion, they seemed to expand ere they reached it. They perceived the magic song of nightingales, and the odour of invisible hay, and stars piercing the fading sky. The man whose beer I had stolen lowered me down gently to sleep off its effects, and, as he did so, I saw that he was my brother.
THE CELESTIAL OMNIBUS
I
The boy who resided at Agathox Lodge, 28, Buckingham Park Road, Surbiton, had often been puzzled by the old sign-post that stood almost opposite. He asked his mother about it, and she replied that it was a joke, and not a very nice one, which had been made many years back by some naughty young men, and that the police ought to remove it. For there were two strange things about this sign-post: firstly, it pointed up a blank alley, and, secondly, it had painted on it, in faded characters, the words, ‘To Heaven.’
‘What kind of young men were they?’ he asked.
‘I think your father told me that one of them wrote verses, and was expelled from the University and came to grief in other ways. Still, it was a long time ago. You must ask your father about it. He will say the same as I do, that it was put up as a joke.’
‘So it doesn’t mean anything at all?’
She sent him upstairs to put on his best things, for the Bonses were coming to tea, and he was to hand the cake-stand.
It struck him, as he wrenched on his tightening trousers, that he might do worse than ask Mr Bons about t
he sign-post. His father, though very kind, always laughed at him – shrieked with laughter whenever he or any other child asked a question or spoke. But Mr Bons was serious as well as kind. He had a beautiful house and lent one books, he was a church-warden, and a candidate for the County Council; he had donated to the Free Library enormously, he presided over the Literary Society, and had Members of Parliament to stop with him – in short, he was probably the wisest person alive.
Yet even Mr Bons could only say that the sign-post was a joke – the joke of a person named Shelley.
‘Of course’!’ cried the mother; ‘I told you so, dear. That was the name.’
‘Had you never heard of Shelley?’ asked Mr Bons.
‘No,’ said the boy, and hung his head.
‘But is there no Shelley in the house?’
‘Why, yes!’ exclaimed the lady, in much agitation. ‘Dear Mr Bons, we aren’t such Philistines as that. Two at the least. One a wedding present, and the other, smaller print, in one of the spare rooms.’
‘I believe we have seven Shelleys,’ said Mr Bons, with a slow smile. Then he brushed the cake crumbs off his stomach and, together with his daughter, rose to go.
The boy, obeying a wink from his mother, saw them all the way to the garden gate, and when they had gone he did not at once return to the house, but gazed for a little up and down Buckingham Park Road.
His parents lived at the right end of it. After No. 39 the quality of the houses dropped very suddenly, and 64 had not even a separate servants’ entrance. But at the present moment the whole road looked rather pretty, for the sun had just set in splendour, and the inequalities of rent were drowned in a saffron afterglow. Small birds twittered, and the breadwinners’ train shrieked musically down through the cutting – that wonderful cutting which has drawn to itself the whole beauty out of Surbiton, and clad itself, like any Alpine valley, with the glory of the fir and the silver birch and the primrose. It was this cutting that had first stirred – desires within the boy – desires for something just a little different, he knew not what, desires that would return whenever things were sunlit, as they were this evening, running up and down inside him, up and down, up and down, till he would feel quite unusual all over, and as likely as not would want to cry. This evening he was even sillier, for he slipped across the road towards the sign-post and began to run up the blank alley.
The alley runs between high walls – the walls of the gardens of ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘Belle Vista’ respectively. It smells a little all the way, and is scarcely twenty yards long, including the turn at the end. So not unnaturally the boy soon came to a standstill. ‘I’d like to kick that Shelley,’ he exclaimed, and glanced idly at a piece of paper which was pasted on the wall. Rather an odd piece of paper, and he read it carefully before he turned back. This is what he read:
S. AND C.R.C.C.
Alteration in Service.
Owing to lack of patronage the Company are regretfully compelled to suspend the hourly service, and to retain only the
Sunrise and Sunset Omnibuses,
which will run as usual. It is to be hoped that the public will patronize an arrangement which is intended for their convenience. As an extra inducement, the Company will, for the first time, now issue
Return Tickets!
(available one day only), which may be obtained of the driver. Passengers are again reminded that no tickets are issued at the other end, and that no complaints in this connection will receive consideration from the Company. Nor will the Company be responsible for any negligence or stupidity on the part of Passengers, nor for Hail-storms, Lightning, Loss of Tickets, nor for any Act of God.
For the Direction.
Now he had never seen this notice before, nor could he imagine where the omnibus went to. S. of course was for Surbiton, and R.C.C. meant Road Car Company. But what was the meaning of the other C.? Coombe and Maiden, perhaps, or possibly ‘City’. Yet it could not hope to compete with the South-Western. The whole thing, the boy reflected, was run on hopelessly unbusiness-like lines. Why no tickets from the other end? And what an hour to start! Then he realized that unless the notice was a hoax, an omnibus must have been starting just as he was wishing the Bonses goodbye. He peered at the ground through the gathering dusk, and there he saw what might or might not be the marks of wheels. Yet nothing had come out of the alley. And he had never seen an omnibus at any time in the Buckingham Park Road. No: it must be a hoax, like the sign-posts, like the fairy tales, like the dreams upon which he would wake suddenly in the night. And with a sigh he stepped from the alley – right into the arms of his father.
Oh, how his father laughed! ‘Poor, poor Popsey!’ he cried. ‘Diddums! Diddums! Diddums think he’d walky-palky up to Evvink!’ And his mother, also convulsed with laughter, appeared on the steps of Agathox Lodge. ‘Don’t, Bob!’ she gasped. ‘Don’t be so naughty! Oh you’ll kill me! Oh, leave the boy alone!’
But all that evening the joke was kept up. The father implored to be taken too. Was it a very tiring walk? Need one wipe one’s shoes on the door-mat? And the boy went to bed feeling faint and sore, and thankful for only one thing – that he had not said a word about the omnibus. It was a hoax, yet through his dreams it grew more and more real, and the streets of Surbiton, through which he saw it driving, seemed instead to become hoaxes and shadows. And very early in the morning he woke with a cry, for he had had a glimpse of its destination.
He struck a match, and its light fell not only on his watch but also on his calendar, so that he knew it to be half-an-hour to sunrise. It was pitch dark, for the fog had come down from London in the night, and all Surbiton was wrapped in its embraces. Yet he sprang out and dressed himself, for he was determined to settle once for all which was real: the omnibus or the streets. ‘I shall be a fool one way or the other,’ he thought, ‘until I know.’ Soon he was shivering in the road under the gas lamp that guarded the entrance to the alley.
To enter the alley itself required some courage. Not only was it horribly dark, but he now realized that it was an impossible terminus for an omnibus. If it had not been for a policeman, whom he heard approaching through the fog, he would never have made the attempt. The next moment he had made the attempt and failed. Nothing. Nothing but a blank alley and a very silly boy gaping at its dirty floor. It was a hoax. ‘I’ll tell papa and mamma,’ he decided. ‘I deserve it. I deserve that they should know. I am too silly to be alive.’ And he went back to the gate of Agathox Lodge.
There he remembered that his watch was fast. The sun was not risen; it would not rise for two minutes. ‘Give the bus every chance,’ he thought cynically, and returned into the alley.
But the omnibus was there.
II
It had two horses, whose sides were still smoking from their journey, and its two great lamps shone through the fog against the alley’s walls, changing their cobwebs and moss into tissues of fairyland. The driver was huddled up in a cape. He faced the blank wall, and how he had managed to drive in so neatly and so silently was one of the many things that the boy never discovered. Nor could he imagine how ever he would drive out.
‘Please,’ his voice quavered through the foul brown air, ‘Please, is that an omnibus?’
‘Omnibus est,’ said the driver, without turning round. There was a moment’s silence. The policeman passed, coughing, by the entrance of the alley. The boy crouched in the shadow, for he did not want to be found out. He was pretty sure, too, that it was a Pirate; nothing else, he reasoned, would go from such odd places and at such odd hours.
‘About when do you start?’ He tried to sound nonchalant.
‘At sunrise.’
‘How far do you go?’
‘The whole way.’
‘And can I have a return ticket which will bring me all the way back?’
‘You can.’
‘Do you know, I half think I’ll come.’ The driver made no answer. The sun must have risen, for he unhitched the brake. And scarcely had the boy jumped in b
efore the omnibus was off.
How? Did it turn? There was no room. Did it go forward? There was a blank wall. Yet it was moving – moving at a stately pace through the fog, which had turned from brown to yellow. The thought of warm bed and warmer breakfast made the boy feel faint. He wished he had not come. His parents would not have approved. He would have gone back to them if the weather had not made it impossible. The solitude was terrible; he was the only passenger. And the omnibus, though well-built, was cold and somewhat musty. He drew his coat round him, and in so doing chanced to feel his pocket. It was empty. He had forgotten his purse.
‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Stop!’ And then, being of a polite disposition, he glanced up at the painted notice-board so that he might call the driver by name. ‘Mr Browne! stop; O, do please stop!’
Mr Browne did not stop, but he opened a little window and looked in at the boy. His face was a surprise, so kind it was and modest.
‘Mr Browne, I’ve left my purse behind. I’ve not got a penny. I can’t pay for the ticket. Will you take my watch please? I am in the most awful hole.’
‘Tickets on this line,’ said the driver, ‘whether single or return, can be purchased by coinage from no terrene mint. And a chronometer, though it had solaced the vigils of Charlemagne, or measured the slumbers of Laura, can acquire by no mutation the, doublecake that charms the fangless Cerberus of Heaven!’ So saying, he handed in the necessary ticket, and, while the boy said ‘Thank you’, continued: ‘Titular pretensions, I know it well, are vanity. Yet they merit no censure when uttered on a laughing lip, and in an homonymous world are in some sort useful, since they do serve to distinguish one Jack from his fellow. Remember me therefore, as Sir Thomas Browne.’
‘Are you a Sir? Oh, sorry!’ He had heard of these gentlemen drivers. ‘It is good of you about the ticket. But if you go on at this rate, however does your bus pay?’
The New Collected Short Stories Page 5
