The Flying Inn

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  “What on earth do you want?” asked Wimpole of the policeman.

  His innocent and startled face, and perhaps other things about his appearance, evidently caused the Inspector to waver.

  “Well, it’s about this ’ere donkey, sir,” he said.

  “Do you think I stole it?” cried the indignant aristocrat. “Well, of all the mad worlds! A pack of thieves steal my Limousine, I save their damned donkey’s life at the risk of my own–and I’m run in for stealing.”

  The clothes of the indignant aristocrat probably spoke louder than his tongue; the officer dropped his hand, and after consulting some papers in his hand, walked across to consult with the unkempt gentleman in the car.

  “That seems to be a similar cart and donkey,” Dorian heard him saying, “but the clothes don’t seem to fit your description of the men you saw.”

  Now, Mr. Hibbs had extremely vague and wild recollections of the men he saw; he could not even tell what he had done and what he had merely dreamed. If he had spoken sincerely, he would have described a sort of green nightmare of forests, in which he found himself in the power of an ogre about twelve feet high, with scarlet flames for hair and dressed rather like Robin Hood. But a long course of what is known as “keeping the party together” had made it as unnatural to him to tell anyone (even himself) what he really thought about anything, as it would have been to spit–or to sing. He had at present only three motives and strong resolves: (1) not to admit that he had been drunk; (2) not to let anyone escape whom Lord Ivywood might possibly want to question; and (3) not to lose his reputation for sagacity and tact.

  “This party has a brown velvet suit, you see, and a fur overcoat,” the Inspector continued, “and in the notes I have from you, you say the man wore a uniform.”

  “When we say uniform,” said Mr. Hibbs, frowning intellectually, “when we say uniform, of course–we must distinguish some of our friends who don’t quite see eye to eye with us, you know,” and he smiled with tender leniency, “some of our friends wouldn’t like it called a uniform perhaps. But–of course–well, it wasn’t a police uniform, for instance. Ha! Ha!”

  “I should hope not,” said the official, shortly.

  “So–in a way–however,” said Hibbs, clutching his verbal talisman at last, “it might be brown velvet in the dark.”

  The Inspector replied to this helpful suggestion with some wonder. “But it was a moon, like limelight,” he protested.

  “Yars, yars,” cried Hibbs, in a high tone that can only be described as a hasty drawl. “Yars–discolours everything of course. The flowers and things–”

  “But look here,” said the Inspector, “you said the principal man’s hair was red.”

  “A blond type! A blond type!” said Hibbs, waving his hand with a solemn lightness. “Reddish, yellowish, brownish sort of hair, you know.” Then he shook his head and said with the heaviest solemnity the word was capable of carrying, “Teutonic, purely Teutonic.”

  The Inspector began to feel some wonder that, even in the confusion following on Lord Ivywood’s fall, he had been put under the guidance of this particular guide. The truth was that Leveson, once more masking his own fears under his usual parade of hurry, had found Hibbs at a table by an open window, with wild hair and sleepy eyes, picking himself up with some sort of medicine. Finding him already fairly clear-headed in a dreary way, he had not scrupled to use the remains of his bewilderment to despatch him with the police in the first pursuit. Even the mind of a semi-recovered drunkard, he thought, could be trusted to recognise anyone so unmistakable as the Captain.

  But, though the diplomatist’s debauch was barely over, his strange, soft fear and cunning were awake. He felt fairly certain the man in the fur coat had something to do with the mystery, as men with fur coats do not commonly wander about with donkeys. He was afraid of offending Lord Ivywood, and at the same time, afraid of exposing himself to a policeman.

  “You have large discretion,” he said, gravely. “Very right you should have large discretion in the interests of the public. I think you would be quite authorised, for the present, in preventing the man’s escape.”

  “And the other man?” inquired the officer, with knitted brow. “Do you suppose he has escaped?”

  “The other man,” repeated Hibbs However, regarding the distant windmill through half-closed lids, as if this were a new fine shade introduced into an already delicate question.

  “Well, hang it all,” said the police officer, “you must know whether there were two men or one.”

  Gradually it dawned, in a grey dawn of horror, over the brain of Hibbs that this was what he specially couldn’t know. He had always heard, and read in comic papers, that a drunken man “sees double” and beholds two lamp-posts, one of which is (as the Higher Critic would have said) purely subjective. For all he knew (being a mere novice) inebriation might produce the impression of the two men of his dream-like adventure, when in truth there had only been one.

  “Two men, you know–one man,” he said with a sort of moody carelessness. “Well we can go into their numbers later; they can’t have a very large following.” Here he shook his head very firmly. “Quite impossible. And as the late Lord Goschen used to say, ‘You can prove anything by statistics.’”

  And here came an interruption from the other side of the road.

  “And how long am I to wait here for you and your Goschens, you silly goat,” were the intemperate wood-notes issuing from the Poet of the Birds. “I’m shot if I’ll stand this! Come along, donkey, and let’s pray for a better adventure next time. These are very inferior specimens of your own race.”

  And seizing the bridle of the ass again, he strode past them swiftly, and almost as if urging the animal to a gallop.

  Unfortunately this disdainful dash for liberty was precisely what was wanting to weigh down the rocking intelligence of the Inspector on the wrong side. If Wimpole had stood still a minute or two longer, the official, who was no fool, might have ended in disbelieving Hibbs’s story altogether. As it was, there was a scuffle, not without blows on both sides, and eventually the Honourable Dorian Wimpole, donkey and all, was marched off to the village, in which there was a Police Station; in which was a temporary cell; in which a Sixth Mood was experienced.

  His complaints, however, were at once so clamorous and so convincing, and his coat was so unquestionably covered with fur, that after some questioning and cross purposes they agreed to take him in the afternoon to Ivywood House, where there was a magistrate incapacitated by a shot only recently extracted from his leg.

  They found Lord Ivywood lying on a purple ottoman, in the midst of his Chinese puzzle of oriental apartments. He continued to look away as they entered, as if expecting, with Roman calm, the entrance of a recognised enemy. But Lady Enid Wimpole, who was attending to the wants of the invalid, gave a sharp cry of astonishment; and the next moment the three cousins were looking at each other. One could almost have guessed they were cousins, all being (as Mr. Hibbs subtly put it) a blond type. But two of the blond types expressed amazement, and one blond type merely rage.

  “I am sorry, Dorian,” said Ivywood, when he had heard the whole story. “These fanatics are capable of anything, I fear, and you very rightly resent their stealing your car–”

  “You are wrong, Philip,” answered the poet, emphatically. “I do not even faintly resent their stealing my car. What I do resent is the continued existence on God’s earth of this Fool” (pointing to the serious Hibbs) “and of that Fool” (pointing to the Inspector) “and–yes, by thunder, of that Fool, too” (and he pointed straight at Lord Ivywood). “And I tell you frankly, Philip, if there really are, as you say, two men who are bent on smashing your schemes and making your life a hell–I am very happy to put my car at their disposal. And now I’m off.”

  “You’ll stop to dinner?” inquired Ivywood, with frigid forgiveness.

  “No, thanks,” said the disappearing bard, “I’m going up to town.”

  The
Seventh Mood of Dorian Wimpole had a grand finale at the Cafe Royal, and consisted largely of oysters.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE POET IN PARLIAMENT

  DURING the singular entrance and exit of Dorian Wimpole, M.P., J.P., etc., Lady Joan was looking out of the magic casements of that turret room which was now literally, and not only poetically, the last limit of Ivywood House. The old broken hole and black staircase up which the lost dog Quoodle used to come and go, had long ago been sealed up and cemented with a wall of exquisite Eastern workmanship. All through the patterns Lord Ivywood had preserved and repeated the principle that no animal shape must appear. But, like all lucid dogmatists, he perceived all the liberties his dogma allowed him. And he had irradiated this remote end of Ivywood with sun and moon and solar and starry systems, with the Milky Way for a dado and a few comets for comic relief. The thing was well done of its kind (as were all the things that Philip Ivywood got done for him); and if all the windows of the turret were closed with their peacock curtains, a poet with anything like a Hibbsian appreciation of the family champagne might almost fancy he was looking out across the sea on a night crowded with stars. And (what was yet more important) even Misysra (that exact thinker) could not call the moon a live animal without falling into idolatry.

  But Joan, looking out of real windows on a real sky and sea, thought no more about the astronomical wall-paper than about any other wall-paper. She was asking herself in sullen emotionalism, and for the thousandth time, a question she had never been able to decide. It was the final choice between an ambition and a memory. And there was this heavy weight in the scale: that the ambition would probably materialise, and the memory probably wouldn’t. It has been the same weight in the same scale a million times since Satan became the prince of this world. But the evening stars were strengthening over the old sea-shore, and they also wanted weighing like diamonds.

  As once before at the same stage of brooding, she heard behind her the swish of Lady Enid’s skirts, that never came so fast save for serious cause.

  “Joan! Please do come! Nobody but you, I do believe, could move him.” Joan looked at Lady Enid and realised that the lady was close on crying. She turned a trifle pale and asked quietly for the question. “Philip says he’s going to London now, with that leg and all,” cried Enid, “and he won’t let us say a word.”

  “But how did it all happen?” asked Joan.

  Lady Enid Wimpole was quite incapable of explaining how it all happened, so the task must for the moment devolve on the author. The simple fact was that Ivywood in the course of turning over magazines on his sofa, happened to look at a paper from the Midlands.

  “The Turkish news,” said Mr. Leveson, rather nervously, “is on the other side of the page.”

  But Lord Ivywood continued to look at the side of the paper that did not contain the Turkish news, with the same dignity of lowered eyelids and unconscious brow with which he had looked at the Captain’s message when Joan found him by the turret.

  On the page covered merely with casual, provincial happenings was a paragraph, “Echo of Pebblewick Mystery. Reported Reappearance of the Vanishing Inn.” Underneath was printed, in smaller letters:

  “An almost incredible report from Wyddington announces that the mysterious ‘Sign of the Old Ship’ has once more been seen in this country; though it has long been relegated by scientific investigators to the limbo of old rustic superstitions. According to the local version, Mr. Simmons, a dairyman of Wyddington, was serving in his shop when two motorists entered, one of them asking for a glass of milk. They were in the most impenetrable motoring panoply, with darkened goggles and waterproof collars turned up, so that nothing can be recalled of them personally, except that one was a person of unusual stature. In a few moments, this latter individual went out of the shop again and returned with a miserable specimen out of the street, one of the tattered loafers that linger about our most prosperous towns, tramping the streets all night and even begging in defiance of the police. The filth and disease of the creature were so squalid that Mr. Simmons at first refused to serve him with the glass of milk which the taller motorist wished to provide for him. At length, however, Mr. Simmons consented, and was immediately astonished by an incident against which he certainly had a more assured right to protest.

  “The taller motorist, saying to the loafer, ‘but, man, you’re blue in the face,’ made a species of signs to the smaller motorist, who thereupon appears to have pierced a sort of cylindrical trunk or chest that seemed to be his only luggage, and drawn from it a few drops of a yellow liquid which he deliberately dropped into the ragged creature’s milk. It was afterward discovered to be rum, and the protests of Mr. Simmons may be imagined. The tall motorist, however, warmly defended his action, having apparently some wild idea that he was doing an act of kindness. ‘Why, I found the man nearly fainting,’ he said. ‘If you’d picked him off a raft, he couldn’t be more collapsed with cold and sickness; and if you’d picked him off a raft you’d have given him rum–yes, by St. Patrick, if you were a bloody pirate and made him walk the plank afterward.’ Mr. Simmons replied with dignity, that he did not know how it was with rafts, and could not permit such language in his shop. He added that he would lay himself open to a police prosecution if he permitted the consumption of alcohol in his shop; since he did not display a sign. The motorist then made the amazing reply, ‘But you do display a sign, you jolly old man. Did you think I couldn’t find my way to the sign of The Old Ship, you sly boots?’ Mr. Simmons was now fully convinced of the intoxication of his visitors, and refusing a glass of rum rather boisterously offered him, went outside his shop to look round for a policeman. To his surprise he found the officer engaged in dispersing a considerable crowd, which was staring up at some object behind him. On looking round (he states in his deposition) he ‘saw what was undoubtedly one of the low tavern signs at one time common in England.’ He was wholly unable to explain its presence outside his premises, and as it undoubtedly legalised the motorist’s action, the police declined to move in the matter.

  “Later. The two motorists have apparently left the town, unmolested, in a small second-hand two-seater. There is no clue to their destination, except it be indicated by a single incident. It appears that when they were waiting for the second glass of milk, one of them drew attention to a milk can of a shape seemingly unfamiliar to him, which was, of course, the Mountain Milk now so much recommended by doctors. The taller motorist (who seemed in every way strangely ignorant of modern science and social life) asked his companion where it came from, receiving, of course, the reply that it is manufactured in the model village of Peaceways, under the personal superintendence of its distinguished and philanthropic inventor, Dr. Meadows. Upon this the taller person, who appeared highly irresponsible, actually bought the whole can; observing, as he tucked it under his arm, that it would help him to remember the address.

  “Later. Our readers will be glad to hear that the legend of ‘The Old Ship’ sign has once more yielded to the wholesome scepticism of science. Our representative reached Wyddington after the practical jokers, or whatever they were, had left; but he searched the whole frontage of Mr. Simmons’s shop, and we are in a position to assure the public that there is no trace of the alleged sign.”

  Lord Ivywood laid down the newspaper and looked at the rich and serpentine embroideries on the wall with the expression that a great general might have if he saw a chance of really ruining his enemy, if he would also ruin all his previous plan of campaign. His pallid and classic profile was as immovable as a cameo; but anyone who had known him at all would have known that his brain was going like a motor car that has broken the speed limit long ago.

  Then he turned his head and said, “Please tell Hicks to bring round the long blue car in half an hour; it can be fitted up for a sofa. And ask the gardener to cut a pole of about four feet nine inches, and put a cross-piece for a crutch. I’m going up to London to-night.”

  Mr. Lev
eson’s lower jaw literally fell with astonishment.

  “The Doctor said three weeks,” he said. “If I may ask it, where are you going?”

  “St. Stephens, Westminster,” answered Ivywood.

  “Surely,” said Mr. Leveson, “I could take a message.”

  “You could take a message,” assented Ivywood, “I’m afraid they would not allow you to make a speech.”

  It was a moment or two afterward that Enid Wimpole had come into the room, and striven in vain to shake his decision. Then it was that Joan had been brought out of the turret and saw Philip standing, sustained upon a crutch of garden timber; and admired him as she had never admired him before. While he was being helped downstairs, while he was being propped in the car with such limited comfort as was possible, she did really feel in him something worthy of his ancient roots, worthy of such hills and of such a sea. For she felt God’s wind from nowhere which is called the Will; and is man’s only excuse upon this earth. In the small toot of the starting motor she could hear a hundred trumpets, such as might have called her ancestors and his to the glories of the Third Crusade.