The Essential G. K. Chesterton

by G. K. Chesterton

  "What would be the good of gold," he was saying, "if it did not glitter? Why should we care for a black sovereign any more than for a black sun at noon? A black button would do just as well. Don't you see that everything in this garden looks like a jewel? And will you kindly tell me what the deuce is the good of a jewel except that it looks like a jewel? Leave off buying and selling, and start looking! Open your eyes, and you'll wake up in the New Jerusalem.

  "All is gold that glitters-- Tree and tower of brass; Rolls the golden evening air Down the golden grass. Kick the cry to Jericho, How yellow mud is sold; All is gold that glitters, For the glitter is the gold."

  "And who wrote that?" asked Rosamund, amused.

  "No one will ever write it," answered Smith, and cleared the rockery with a flying leap.

  "Really," said Rosamund to Michael Moon, "he ought to be sent to an asylum. Don't you think so?"

  "I beg your pardon," inquired Michael, rather sombrely; his long, swarthy head was dark against the sunset, and, either by accident or mood, he had the look of something isolated and even hostile amid the social extravagance of the garden.

  "I only said Mr. Smith ought to go to an asylum," repeated the lady.

  The lean face seemed to grow longer and longer, for Moon was unmistakably sneering. "No," he said; "I don't think it's at all necessary."

  "What do you mean?" asked Rosamund quickly. "Why not?"

  "Because he is in one now," answered Michael Moon, in a quiet but ugly voice. "Why, didn't you know?"

  "What?" cried the girl, and there was a break in her voice; for the Irishman's face and voice were really almost creepy. With his dark figure and dark sayings in all that sunshine he looked like the devil in paradise.

  "I'm sorry," he continued, with a sort of harsh humility. "Of course we don't talk about it much... but I thought we all really knew."

  "Knew what?"

  "Well," answered Moon, "that Beacon House is a certain rather singular sort of house--a house with the tiles loose, shall we say? Innocent Smith is only the doctor that visits us; hadn't you come when he called before? As most of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be extra cheery. Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious eccentric thing to us. Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree--that's his bedside manner."

  "You daren't say such a thing!" cried Rosamund in a rage. "You daren't suggest that I--"

  "Not more than I am," said Michael soothingly; "not more than the rest of us. Haven't you ever noticed that Miss Duke never sits still--a notorious sign? Haven't you ever observed that Inglewood is always washing his hands-- a known mark of mental disease? I, of course, am a dipsomaniac."

  "I don't believe you," broke out his companion, not without agitation. "I've heard you had some bad habits--"

  "All habits are bad habits," said Michael, with deadly calm. "Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed. YOU went mad about money, because you're an heiress."

  "It's a lie," cried Rosamund furiously. "I never was mean about money."

  "You were worse," said Michael, in a low voice and yet violently. "You thought that other people were. You thought every man who came near you must be a fortune-hunter; you would not let yourself go and be sane; and now you're mad and I'm mad, and serve us right."

  "You brute!" said Rosamund, quite white. "And is this true?"

  With the intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is capable when his abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent for some seconds, and then stepped back with an ironical bow. "Not literally true, of course," he said; "only really true. An allegory, shall we say? a social satire."

  "And I hate and despise your satires," cried Rosamund Hunt, letting loose her whole forcible female personality like a cyclone, and speaking every word to wound. "I despise it as I despise your rank tobacco, and your nasty, loungy ways, and your snarling, and your Radicalism, and your old clothes, and your potty little newspaper, and your rotten failure at everything. I don't care whether you call it snobbishness or not, I like life and success, and jolly things to look at, and action. You won't frighten me with Diogenes; I prefer Alexander."

  "Victrix causa deae--" said Michael gloomily; and this angered her more, as, not knowing what it meant, she imagined it to be witty.

  "Oh, I dare say you know Greek," she said, with cheerful inaccuracy; "you haven't done much with that either." And she crossed the garden, pursuing the vanished Innocent and Mary.

  In doing so she passed Inglewood, who was returning to the house slowly, and with a thought-clouded brow. He was one of those men who are quite clever, but quite the reverse of quick. As he came back out of the sunset garden into the twilight parlour, Diana Duke slipped swiftly to her feet and began putting away the tea things. But it was not before Inglewood had seen an instantaneous picture so unique that he might well have snapshotted it with his everlasting camera. For Diana had been sitting in front of her unfinished work with her chin on her hand, looking straight out of the window in pure thoughtless thought.

  "You are busy," said Arthur, oddly embarrassed with what he had seen, and wishing to ignore it.

  "There's no time for dreaming in this world," answered the young lady with her back to him.

  "I have been thinking lately," said Inglewood in a low voice, "that there's no time for waking up."

  She did not reply, and he walked to the window and looked out on the garden.

  "I don't smoke or drink, you know," he said irrelevantly, "because I think they're drugs. And yet I fancy all hobbies, like my camera and bicycle, are drugs too. Getting under a black hood, getting into a dark room--getting into a hole anyhow. Drugging myself with speed, and sunshine, and fatigue, and fresh air. Pedalling the machine so fast that I turn into a machine myself. That's the matter with all of us. We're too busy to wake up."

  "Well," said the girl solidly, "what is there to wake up to?"

  "There must be!" cried Inglewood, turning round in a singular excitement--"there must be something to wake up to! All we do is preparations--your cleanliness, and my healthiness, and Warner's scientific appliances. We're always preparing for something--something that never comes off. I ventilate the house, and you sweep the house; but what is going to HAPPEN in the house?"

  She was looking at him quietly, but with very bright eyes, and seemed to be searching for some form of words which she could not find.

  Before she could speak the door burst open, and the boisterous Rosamund Hunt, in her flamboyant white hat, boa, and parasol, stood framed in the doorway. She was in a breathing heat, and on her open face was an expression of the most infantile astonishment.

  "Well, here's a fine game!" she said, panting. "What am I to do now, I wonder? I've wired for Dr. Warner; that's all I can think of doing."

  "What is the matter?" asked Diana, rather sharply, but moving forward like one used to be called upon for assistance.

  "It's Mary," said the heiress, "my companion Mary Gray: that cracked friend of yours called Smith has proposed to her in the garden, after ten hours' acquaintance, and he wants to go off with her now for a special licence."

  Arthur Inglewood walked to the open French windows and looked out on the garden, still golden with evening light. Nothing moved there but a bird or two hopping and twittering; but beyond the hedge and railings, in the road outside the garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with the yellow Gladstone bag on top of it.

  Chapter IV

  The Garden of the God

  Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt entrance and utterance of the other girl.

  "Well," she said shortly, "I suppose Miss Gray can decline him if she doesn't want to marry him."

  "But she DOES want to marry him!" cried Rosamund in exasperation. "She's a wild, wicked fool, and I won't be parted from her."

  "Perhaps," said Diana icily, "but I really don't see what we can do."

  "But the man's balmy, Diana," reasoned her fri
end angrily. "I can't let my nice governess marry a man that's balmy! You or somebody MUST stop it!--Mr. Inglewood, you're a man; go and tell them they simply can't."

  "Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can," said Inglewood, with a depressed air. "I have far less right of intervention than Miss Duke, besides having, of course, far less moral force than she."

  "You haven't either of you got much," cried Rosamund, the last stays of her formidable temper giving way; "I think I'll go somewhere else for a little sense and pluck. I think I know some one who will help me more than you do, at any rate... he's a cantankerous beast, but he's a man, and has a mind, and knows it..." And she flung out into the garden, with cheeks aflame, and the parasol whirling like a Catherine wheel.

  She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree, looking over the hedge; hunched like a bird of prey, with his large pipe hanging down his long blue chin. The very hardness of his expression pleased her, after the nonsense of the new engagement and the shilly-shallying of her other friends.

  "I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon," she said frankly. "I hated you for being a cynic; but I've been well punished, for I want a cynic just now. I've had my fill of sentiment--I'm fed up with it. The world's gone mad, Mr. Moon--all except the cynics, I think. That maniac Smith wants to marry my old friend Mary, and she-- and she--doesn't seem to mind."

  Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking, she added smartly, "I'm not joking; that's Mr. Smith's cab outside. He swears he'll take her off now to his aunt's, and go for a special licence. Do give me some practical advice, Mr. Moon."

  Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his hand for an instant reflectively, and then tossed it to the other side of the garden. "My practical advice to you is this," he said: "Let him go for his special licence, and ask him to get another one for you and me."

  "Is that one of your jokes?" asked the young lady. "Do say what you really mean."

  "I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business," said Moon with ponderous precision--"a plain, practical man: a man of affairs; a man of facts and the daylight. He has let down twenty ton of good building bricks suddenly on my head, and I am glad to say they have woken me up. We went to sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in this very sunlight. We have had a little nap for five years or so, but now we're going to be married, Rosamund, and I can't see why that cab..."

  "Really," said Rosamund stoutly, "I don't know what you mean."

  "What a lie!" cried Michael, advancing on her with brightening eyes. "I'm all for lies in an ordinary way; but don't you see that to-night they won't do? We've wandered into a world of facts, old girl. That grass growing, and that sun going down, and that cab at the door, are facts. You used to torment and excuse yourself by saying I was after your money, and didn't really love you. But if I stood here now and told you I didn't love you--you wouldn't believe me: for truth is in this garden to-night."

  "Really, Mr. Moon..." said Rosamund, rather more faintly.

  He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face. "Is my name Moon?" he asked. "Is your name Hunt? On my honour, they sound to me as quaint and as distant as Red Indian names. It's as if your name was `Swim' and my name was `Sunrise.' But our real names are Husband and Wife, as they were when we fell asleep."

  "It is no good," said Rosamund, with real tears in her eyes; "one can never go back."

  "I can go where I damn please," said Michael, "and I can carry you on my shoulder."

  "But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!" cried the girl earnestly. "You could carry me off my feet, I dare say, soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that. These things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith's, they-- they do attract women, I don't deny it. As you say, we're all telling the truth to-night. They've attracted poor Mary, for one. They attract me, Michael. But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment-- you've got used to your drinks and things--I shan't be pretty much longer--"

  "Imprudent marriages!" roared Michael. "And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we'll be disappointed. I, for one, don't expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute-- a tower with all the trumpets shouting."

  "You see all this," said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face, "and do you really want to marry me?"

  "My darling, what else is there to do?" reasoned the Irishman. "What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to marry you? What's the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It's not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must marry Man--that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself-- yourself, yourself, yourself--the only companion that is never satisfied-- and never satisfactory."

  "Michael," said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, "if you won't talk so much, I'll marry you."

  "It's no time for talking," cried Michael Moon; "singing is the only thing. Can't you find that mandoline of yours, Rosamund?"

  "Go and fetch it for me," said Rosamund, with crisp and sharp authority.

  The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second astonished; then he shot away across the lawn, as if shod with the feathered shoes out of the Greek fairy tale. He cleared three yards and fifteen daisies at a leap, out of mere bodily levity; but when he came within a yard or two of the open parlour windows, his flying feet fell in their old manner like lead; he twisted round and came back slowly, whistling. The events of that enchanted evening were not at an end.

  Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a glimpse a curious thing had happened, almost an instant after the intemperate exit of Rosamund. It was something which, occurring in that obscure parlour, seemed to Arthur Inglewood like heaven and earth turning head over heels, the sea being the ceiling and the stars the floor. No words can express how it astonished him, as it astonishes all simple men when it happens. Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems separated from it only by a sheet of paper or a sheet of steel. It indicates no surrender, far less any sympathy. The most rigid and ruthless woman can begin to cry, just as the most effeminate man can grow a beard. It is a separate sexual power, and proves nothing one way or the other about force of character. But to young men ignorant of women, like Arthur Inglewood, to see Diana Duke crying was like seeing a motor-car shedding tears of petrol.

  He could never have given (even if his really manly modesty had permitted it) any vaguest vision of what he did when he saw that portent. He acted as men do when a theatre catches fire--very differently from how they would have conceived themselves as acting, whether for better or worse. He had a faint memory of certain half-stifled explanations, that the heiress was the one really paying guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs (in consequence) would come; but after that he knew nothing of his own conduct except by the protests it evoked.

  "Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood--leave me alone; that's not the way to help."

  "But I can help you," said Arthur, with grinding certainty; "I can, I can, I can..."