Гилберт Честертон: Английский с улыбкой. Охотничьи рассказы / Tales of the Long Bow

He looked up and his eye found the blue heraldic shape on the sign-board of the inn.

“And there is our wooden standard!” he cried, pointing in the same dramatic fashion. “We will go into battle under the standard of the Blue Boar.”

“Hurray, hurray, hurray,” said Crane politely, “and now come away and don’t spoil the speech. Owen wants to walk to the local old church, like Mr. Oates. I’m more interested in new things. Want to look at that machine of yours.”

They began to walk down the zig-zag road with hedges on both sides and flower-beds like a garden grown on a staircase, and at every corner Hood had to argue with the slow-walking young man.

“Don’t be forever looking back on the paradise of pigs,” he said, “or you’ll be turned into a pillar of salt [33], or maybe of mustard – as more appropriate to such meat. They won’t run away yet. There are other creatures formed by the Creator for man to see; there are other things made by man after the fashion of the creatures, including that great white bird on which you yourself flew among the birds.”

“Bird that lays rather dreadful eggs,” said Crane. “In the next war – Hey, where the hell has he gone?”

“Pigs, pigs,” said Hood sadly. “The overpowering charm which pigs have upon us at a certain time of life; when we dream about their snouts and their little curly tails…”

“Oh, stop it,” said the Colonel.

Indeed Mr. Hilary Pierce had vanished, turning under the corner of a hedge and running up a path, over a gate and across the corner of a hayfield, where a final cut through bursting bushes brought him on top of a low wall looking down at the pig-sty and Miss Joan Hardy, who was calmly walking away from it. He jumped down on to the path. The morning sun painted everything in clear colours like a children’s book.

“I felt I must speak to you before I went,” he said. “I’m going away, not exactly on active service, but on business – on very active business. I feel like the fellows did when they went to the war… and what they wanted to do first… I am aware that a proposal over a pig-sty is not as symbolical to some as to me, but really and truly… I don’t know whether I mentioned it, but you may be aware that I worship you.”

Joan Hardy was quite aware of it; but the world-old conventions of the countryside were like concentric castle-walls around her. There was in them the stiff beauty of old country dances and the slow and delicate needlework of a peasantry. Of all the ladies mentioned in this little book about modern-day knights, the most reserved and dignified was the one who was not a lady at all by birth.

She stood looking at him in silence, and he at her; and her head looked a little bit like that of a bird.

“Really, you seem in a terrible hurry,” she said. “I don’t want to be talked to in a rush like this.”

“I apologize,” he said. “I am in a rush, but I didn’t want you to be in a rush. I only wanted you to know. I haven’t done anything to deserve you, but I am going to try. I’m going off to work; I feel sure you believe in quiet steady work for a young man.”

“Are you going into the bank?” she asked innocently. “You said your uncle worked in a bank.”

“I hope all my conversation was not on that level,” he replied. And indeed he would have been surprised if he had known how exactly she remembered all such boring details he had ever mentioned about himself, and how little she knew in comparison about his theories and dreams, which he thought so much more important.

“Well,” he said with appealing frankness, “it would be a little bit too much to say I am going into a bank. I know a lot of more country-side and romantic professions that are really quite as safe as the bank. The truth is, I think of going into the bacon trade. I think I see an opportunity for a quick young man in the ham and pork business.”

“You mustn’t come here, then,” she answered. “It won’t be allowed here by that time. The neighbours would – ”

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, “I will be a commercial traveller. Oh, such a commercial traveler! As for not coming here, the thing seems quite impossible. You must at least let me write to you every hour or so. You must let me send you a few presents every morning.”

“I’m sure my father wouldn’t like you to send me presents,” she said gravely.

“Ask your father to wait,” said Pierce earnestly. “Ask him to wait till he’s seen the presents. You see, mine will be rather curious presents. I don’t think he’ll disapprove of them. I think he’ll approve of them. I think he’ll congratulate me on my simple tastes and adequate business principles. The truth is, dear Joan, I’ve committed myself to a rather important enterprise. You shouldn’t be frightened; I promise I won’t trouble you again till it succeeds. I will be content that you know it is for you I do it; and will continue to do it, even if I challenge the world.”

He jumped up on the wall again and stood there staring down at her in an almost irritated manner.

“That anybody should forbid YOU to keep pigs,” he cried. “That anybody should forbid YOU to do anything. That anybody should dispute YOUR right to keep pet crocodiles if you like! That is the unpardonable sin; that is the supreme blasphemy and crime against the nature of things, which must not go unpunished. You will have pigs, I say, if the skies fall and the whole world is in war.”

He disappeared like a flash behind the wall, and Joan went back in silence to the inn.

The first incident of the war did not seem very encouraging, though the hero of it seemed by no means discouraged by it. As it was reported in the police news section of various papers, Hilary Patrick Pierce, formerly of the Flying Corps, was arrested for driving pigs into the county of Bluntshire, against the law made for the sake of public health. It seemed he had almost as much trouble with the pigs as with the police; but he made a funny and elegant speech when he was arrested, to which the police and the pigs seemed to be equally indifferent. The incident was considered trivial and his punishment was very light; but after this occasion some of the authorities decided to finally establish the new rule.

The figure behind the new regulation was the famous hygienist, Sir Horace Hunter, who had begun life, as some readers may remember, as a successful doctor in the suburbs and had later distinguished himself as an officer of health in the Thames Valley. He was fully supported in extending the existing precautions against infection from the pig by other magistrates, Mr. Rosenbaum Low, millionaire and formerly manager of Bliss and Co., and the other the young Socialist, Mr. Amyas Minns. All of them agreed that the best way to finish all problems connected to drinking was total prohibition of alcohol, and the different problems linked with swine-fever were best solved by a simple regulation against pigs.

The next lunch at which the three friends met was in a rather different setting; because the Colonel had invited the other two to his club in London. It would have been almost impossible to be that sort of Colonel without having that sort of club. But as a matter of fact, he very seldom went there. On this occasion it was Owen Hood who arrived first and was escorted by a waiter to a table near a window overlooking the Green Park. Knowing Crane’s military punctuality, Hood thought that he might have mistaken the time; and while looking for the note of invitation in his pocket-book, he paused to re-read an article that he had cut out of the newspaper aside as a curiosity some days before. It was a paragraph headed “Old Ladies as Mad Motorists,” and ran as follows:

“An unprecedented number of cases of motorists exceeding the speed limit have lately occurred on the Bath Road and other western highways. The extraordinary thing about this case is that in so many cases the rule-breakers seemed to be old ladies of great wealth and respectability who declared they were merely taking their pugs [34]and other pet animals to get some fresh air. They said that the health of the animal required much more rapid transit through the air than that of a human being.”