Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 345
“The spirit of aristocracy is essentially opposed to the greed of the industrial cities. Yet in France there are actually one or two nobles so vile as to drive coal and gas trades, and drive them hard.”
The Duke of Windsor looked at the carpet.
The Duke of Aylesbury went and looked out of the window. At length the latter said: “That’s rather stiff, you know. One has to look after one’s own business in town, as well.”
“Do not say it,” cried the little Frenchman, starting up. “I tell you all Europe is one fight between business and honour. If we do not fight for honour, who will? What other right have we poor two- legged sinners to titles and quartered shields except that we staggeringly support some idea of giving things which cannot be demanded and avoiding things which cannot be punished? Our only claim is to be a wall across Christendom against the Jew pedlars and pawnbrokers, against the Goldsteins and the—”
The Duke of Aylesbury swung round with his hands in his pockets.
“Oh, I say,” he said, “you’ve been readin’ Lloyd George. Nobody but dirty Radicals can say a word against Goldstein.”
“I certainly cannot permit,” said the elder Duke, rising rather shakily, “the respected name of Lord Goldstein—”
He intended to be impressive, but there was something in the Frenchman’s eye that is not so easily impressed; there shone there that steel which is the mind of France.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I think I have all the details now. You have ruled England for four hundred years. By your own account you have not made the countryside endurable to men. By your own account you have helped the victory of vulgarity and smoke. And by your own account you are hand and glove with those very money- grubbers and adventurers whom gentlemen have no other business but to keep at bay. I do not know what your people will do; but my people would kill you.”
Some seconds afterwards he had left the Duke’s house, and some hours afterwards the Duke’s estate.
The Roots of the World
Once upon a time a little boy lived in a garden in which he was permitted to pick the flowers but forbidden to pull them up by the roots. There was, however, one particular plant, insignificant, somewhat thorny, with a small, star-like flower, which he very much wanted to pull up by the roots. His tutors and guardians, who lived in the house with him, were worthy, formal people, and they gave him reasons why he should not pull it up. They were silly reasons as a rule. But none of the reasons against doing the thing was quite so silly as the little boy’s reason for wanting to do it; for his reason was that Truth demanded that he should pull the thing up by the roots to see how it was growing. Still it was a sleepy, thoughtless kind of house, and nobody gave him the real answer to his argument, which was that it would kill the plant, and that there is no more Truth about a dead plant than about a live one. So one dark night, when clouds sealed the moon like a secret too good or too bad to be told, the little boy came down the old creaking stairs of his farmhouse and crept into the garden in his nightgown. He told himself repeatedly that there was no more reason against his pulling this plant off the garden than against his knocking off a thistle-top idly in a lane. Yet the darkness which he had chosen contradicted him, and also his own throbbing pulse, for he told himself continually that next morning he might be crucified as the blasphemer who had torn up the sacred tree.
Perhaps he might have been so crucified if he had so torn it up. I cannot say. But he did not tear it up; and it was not for want of trying. For when he laid hold of the little plant in the garden he tugged and tugged, and found the thing held as if clamped to the earth with iron. And when he strained himself a third time there came a frightful noise behind him, and either nerves or (which he would have denied) conscience made him leap back and stagger and stare around. The house he lived in was a mere bulk of blackness against a sky almost as black. Yet after staring long he saw that the very outline had grown unfamiliar, for the great chimney of the kitchen had fallen crooked and calamitous. Desperately he gave another pull at the plant, and heard far off the roof of the stables fall in and the horses shriek and plunge. Then he ran into the house and rolled himself in the bedclothes. Next morning found the kitchen ruined, the day’s food destroyed, two horses dead, and three broken loose and lost. But the boy still kept a furious curiosity, and a little while after, when a fog from the sea had hidden house and garden, he dragged again at the roots of the indestructable plant. He hung on to it like a boy on the rope of a tug of war, but it did not give. Only through the grey sea- fog came choking and panic-stricken cries; they cried that the King’s castle had fallen, that the towers guarding the coast were gone; that half the great sea-city had split away and slid into the sea. Then the boy was frightened for a little while, and said no more about the plant, but when he had come to a strong and careless manhood, and the destruction in the district had been repaired, he said openly before the people, “Let us have done with the riddle of this irrational weed. In the name of Truth let us drag it up.” And he gathered a great company of strong men, like an army to meet invaders, and they all laid hold of the little plant and they tugged night and day. And the Great Wall fell down in China for forty miles. And the Pyramids were split up into jagged stones. And the Eiffel Tower in Paris went over like a ninepin, killing half the Parisians; and the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour fell forward suddenly and smashed the American fleet; and St. Paul’s Cathedral killed all the journalists in Fleet Street, and Japan had a record series of earthquakes and then sank into the sea. Some have declared that these last two incidents were not calamities properly so called; but into that I will not enter. The point was that when they had tugged for about twenty-four hours the strong men of that country had pulled down about half of the civilized world, but had not pulled up the plant. I will not weary the reader with the full facts of this realistic story, with how they used first elephants and then steam-engines to tear up the flower, and how the only result was that the flower stuck fast, but that the moon began to be agitated and even the sun was a bit dicky. At last the human race interfered, as it always does at last, by means of a revolution. But long before that the boy, or man, who is the hero of this tale, had thrown up the business, merely saying to his pastors and masters, “You gave me a number of elaborate and idle reasons why I should not pull up this shrub. Why did you not give me the two good reasons; first, that I can’t; second, that I should damage everything else if I ever tried it on?”
Chivalry Begins At Home
Mr. William Hicks of West Kensington rose from breakfast, giving the morning paper a flourish as if it were a flag. A new light was in his eyes; he had been fired by the appeal of Mr. Mitchell-Hedges and his demand for a return of the old English spirit of adventure, as shown by explorers and pioneers. A moment’s reflection showed him that adventure was difficult for a clerk with a small salary; for it seemed to cost a good deal to “fit out” an expedition. Adventure, which would seem to be the cheapest thing, is really the most expensive. And then a second and more reasonable reflection occurred to him. The essential of the explorer’s appeal was to energy and courage, to seeking peril and experience, not latitude and longitude. After all, an adventurous life can be lived anywhere, so long as there is danger and an honourable cause.
His next-door neighbour, who had furnished his house on the hire system, had indeed paid the whole of the highly profiteering price in instalments, save for a few shillings, and had then lost everything, both the money and the furniture, and been practically ruined. The neighbour was ready enough to say it was a swindle, as it was. None the less was he somewhat surprised at the appearance of Mr. Hicks climbing by moonlight over the garden wall, with a mask, a pistol, a jemmy and a rope-ladder and a proposal to recover the furniture from the neighbouring warehouse by burglary. Mr. Hicks was surprised by the sudden cooling of the spirit of adventure in the victim of oppression; for, as he pointed out, the cause was more just than that against any savage tribe and the peril defied far greater than that of lions.
Mr. Hicks was arrested by the police when halfway down a rope with the third bedroom chair in his teeth. Seldom, he admitted, had he felt so much the thrill of adventure. He received a short sentence as a first offender; a defect that he at once set about to correct. Proceeding to the mansion of a usurer, he fought with three footmen and a butler on the way to deliver his denunciation and was eventually arrested again for demanding money with threats. But he was so stubborn and pertinacious in his course that it seemed more safe and scientific to convict him of being feeble-minded. Finding himself shut up in an asylum with several people as sane as himself, he raised a mutiny, put all the doctors into strait waistcoats and fled to London. He resolved to attack head-quarters, and by climbing on the roof of Downing Street and coining down the chimney, he presented himself before a Cabinet Minister, a pleasant, rather humorous-looking man, smoking a pipe-after dinner. Indeed his reception was so disarmingly genial that he found himself speaking warmly in his own defence: “What does it mean?” he demanded. “You all praise courage and adventure; all your novels are full of it; all your newspapers urge us to it, saying the pioneers are the only patriots. Why do you praise all these adventurers in distant lands?”
“Precisely,” said the politician with a smile. “In distant lands. Don’t you think you’ve answered your own question, Mr. Hicks? Or must you be let in to a little more of the secret? My dear sir, adventure is a great thing, a glorious thing; and why? Because it kills off adventurous people. Empire-Building at the ends of the earth is splendid, and why? Because it keeps all adventurers out of the country — just like undesirable aliens. Patriots — yes, indeed; have you never understood the pathos of those lovely lines: ‘True patriots they, for be it understood they left their country for their country’s good.’”
The statesman’s smile was rather subtle: and Mr. Hicks left the house thoughtfully, not by the chimney but the door.
The Sword Of Wood
Down in the little village of Grayling-Abbot, in Somerset, men did not know that the world we live in had begun. They did not know that all we have come to call ‘modern’ had silently entered England, and changed the air of it. Well, they did not know it very clearly even in London: though one or two shrewd men like my Lord Clarendon, and perhaps Prince Rupert, with his chemicals and his sad eyes, may have had a glimmer of it.
On the contrary, by the theory of the thing, the old world had returned. Christmas could be kept again; the terrible army was disbanded; the swarthy young man with the sour, humorous face, who had been cheered from Dover to Whitehall, brought back in him the blood of kings. Every one was saying (especially in Grayling-Abbot) that now it would be Merry England again. But the swarthy young man knew better. The Merry Monarch knew he was not meant to make Merry England. If he treated his own life as a comedy, it was for a philosophical reason; because comedy is the only poetry of compromise. And he was a compromise; and he knew it. Therefore he turned, like Prince Rupert, to the chemicals; and played with the little toys that were to become the terrible engines of modern science. So he might have played with tiger-cubs, so long as they were as small as his spaniels.
But down in Grayling-Abbot it was much easier to believe that old England had been restored, because it had never, in any serious sense, been disturbed. The fierce religious quarrels of the seventeenth century had only stirred that rustic neighbourhood to occasional panics of witch-burning. And these, though much rarer in the medieval society, were not inconsistent with it. The squire, Sir Guy Griffin, was famous as a fighter quite in the medieval style. Though he had commanded a troop under Newcastle in the Civil Wars with conspicuous success, the local legend of his bodily prowess eclipsed any national chronicle of his military capacity. Through two or three counties round Grayling-Abbot, his reputation for swordsmanship had quite eclipsed his reputation for generalship. So, in the Middle Ages, it happened that Coeur-de-Lion’s hand could keep his head: it happened that Bruce’s hand could keep his head. And in both cases the head has suffered unfairly from the glorification of the hand.
The same almost unbroken medieval tradition even clung round the young schoolmaster, Dennis Tryon, who was just locking up his little school for the last time; having been transferred to a private post at Sir Guy’s own house, to teach Sir Guy’s six hulking sons, who had learned their father’s skill with the sword, and hitherto declined to learn anything else. In numberless and nameless ways, Tryon expressed the old traditions. He was not a Puritan, yet he wore black clothes because he might have been a priest. Though he had learned to fence and dance at College, like Milton, he was plainly dressed and weaponless; because the vague legend remained that a student was a sort of clerk, and a clerk was a sort of clergyman. He wore his brown hair long, like a Cavalier. But as it was his own hair, it was long and straight: while the Cavaliers were already beginning to wear other people’s hair, which was long and curly. In that strict brown frame, his face had the boyish, frank, rather round appearance that may be seen in old miniatures of Falkland or the Duke of Monmouth. His favourite authors were George Herbert and Sir Thomas Browne; and he was very young.
He was addressing a last word to a last pupil, who happened to be lingering outside the school — a minute boy of seven, playing with one of those wooden swords, made of two lengths of lath nailed across each other, which boys have played with in all centuries.
“Jeremy Bunt,” said Tyron, with a rather melancholy playfulness, “your sword is, as it seems to me, much an improvement on most we have lately looked on. I observe its end is something blunt; doubtless for that gallant reason that led Orlando to blunt his sword when fighting the lady, whose name, in the ingenious romance, escapes me. Let it suffice you, little one. It will kill the Giants, like Master Jack’s sword of sharpness, at least as well as the swords of a standing army ever will. If you be minded to save the Lady Angelica from the ogre, it will turn the dragon to stone as quick as any sword of steel would do. And, oh, Jeremy, if the fable be false, the moral is not false. If a little boy be good and brave, he should be great, and he may be. If he be bad and base, he should be beaten with a staff” — here Tryon tapped him very softly on the shoulders with a long black walking-cane that was commonly his only ferule— “but in either way, to my thinking, your sword is as good as any other. Only, dear Jeremy” — and he bent over the child swiftly, with a sudden tenderness— “always remember your kind of sword is stronger if one holds it by the wrong end.”
He reversed the little sword in the child’s hand, making it a wooden cross, and then went striding up the road like the wind, leaving the staring boy behind.
When he became conscious that human feet were following him, he knew they could not possibly be the feet of the boy. He looked round; and Jeremy was still hovering in the distance; but the rush of feet came from a far different cause.
A young lady was hurrying by close under the high hedge that was nearly as old as the Plantagenets. Her costume was like his own, in the sense that it had the quietude of the Puritan with the cut of the Cavalier. Her dress was as dark as Barebones could have asked; but the ringlets under her hood were yellow and curly, for the same reason that his own hair was brown and straight: because they were her own. Nothing else was notable about her, except that she was pretty and seemed rather in a hurry; and that her delicate profile was pointed resolutely up the road. The face was a little pale.
Tryon turned again to look back on his tracks; and this time saw another figure more formidable than Jeremy with the wooden sword.
A tall, swaggering figure, almost black against the sunlight, was coming down the road with a rapidity that almost amounted to a run. He had a wide hat with feathers, and long, luxuriant hair, in the latest London manner; but it was not any such feathers or flourishes that arrested Tryon’s attention. He had seen old Sir Guy Griffin, who still wore his wild, white hair half-way down his back, to show (very unnecessarily) that he was not a Puritan. He had seen Sir Guy stick in his hat the most startling cock’s feathers, but that was because he had no other feathers. But Tryon knew at a glance that Sir Guy would never have come forward in such extraordinary attitudes. The tall, fantastic man actually drew his sword as he rushed forward; and offered it like a lance to be splintered as from the end of a long tilting-yard. Such frolics may have happened a hundred times round the ‘Cock’ of Buckingham and Dorset. But it was an action utterly unknown to the gentry round Grayling-Abbot, when they settled affairs of honour.
While he was still looking up the road at the advancing figure, he found himself breathlessly addressed by the escaping girl.
“You must not fight him,” she said, “he has beaten everybody. He has beaten even Sir Guy, and all his sons.” She cast her eyes about him and cried out in horror: “And where is your sword?”
“With my spurs, mistress,” replied the schoolmaster, in the best style of Ariosto. “I have to win them both.”
She looked at him rather wildly and said: “But he has never been beaten in swordsmanship.”
Tryon, with a smile, made a salute with his black walking-stick. “A man with no sword,” he said, “can never be beaten in swordsmanship.”
The girl stood for one moment staring at him as if, even in that scene of scurry and chase, time were suspended for a flash. Then she seemed to leap again like a hunted thing and plunged on: and it was only some hundred yards higher up the road that she again halted, hesitated, and looked back. In much the same manner Master Jeremy Bunt, who had not the faintest intention of deserting the delightful school in which he was no longer required to do any work, actually ran forward. Perhaps their curiosity ought to be excused. For they were certainly looking at the most astounding duel the world had ever seen. It was the duel of the naked sword and the walking-stick: probably the only merely defensive battle ever fought on this earth.
