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

“I suppose it’s one more of Hilary’s tricks,” remarked Hood; “but what is he going to do now?”

When the great monster was moving up the valley it paused over the inn of the Blue Boar, and something fell fluttering from it like a brightly coloured feather.

“People are coming down in parachutes,” said the Colonel shortly.

“They’re strange-looking people,” remarked his companion, peering under frowning brows, for the level light was dazzling to the eyes. “By George, they’re not people at all! They’re pigs!”

From that distance, the objects in question looked a little bit like angels in some brightly coloured Gothic picture, with the yellow sky instead of their golden background. Their parachutes looked like a gorgeous painted plumage. The more the two men on the ground stared at these strange objects, the more certain it seemed that they were indeed pigs; though it was impossible to say whether the pigs were dead or alive from that distance. The men looked down into the garden of the inn into which the feathered things were dropping, and they could see the figure of Joan Hardy standing in front of the old pig-sty, looking up into the sky.

“Extraordinary present for a young lady,” remarked Crane, “but I suppose when our mad young friend falls in love, he can only give impossible presents.”

The eyes of the more poetical Hood were full of larger visions, and he was hardly listening. But when the sentence ended he seemed to wake up from a trance and struck his hands together.

“Yes!” he cried in a new voice, “we always come back to that word!”

“Come back to what word?” asked his friend.

“‘Impossible,’” answered Owen Hood. “It’s the word that runs through his whole life, and our lives too for that matter. Don’t you see what he has done?”

“I see what he has done all right,” answered the Colonel, “but I’m not at all sure I understand what you want to say.”

“What we have seen is another impossible thing,” said Owen Hood; “a thing that the English language has made a challenge; a thing that a thousand songs and jokes and phrases have called impossible. We have seen pigs fly. [35]”

“It’s pretty extraordinary,” admitted Crane, “but it’s not as extraordinary as when thay are not allowed to walk.”

And they gathered their things and began to walk down from the high hill.

While they were walking, it was getting darker and darker, and soon they lost that sense of sitting right under the clouds. They almost felt like they had had a vision; and the voice of Crane came out of the dark like the voice of a person talking about a strange dream.

“The thing I can’t understand,” he said, “is how Hilary managed to DO all that by himself.”

“He really is a very wonderful fellow,” said Hood. “You told me he did incredible things in the War. And though now he uses his skills for these fanatical things now, it takes as much trouble to do one as the other.”

“It takes a lot more trouble to do it alone,” said Crane. “In the War we were organized.”

“You mean he must be more than an unusual person,” suggested Hood, “a sort of giant with a hundred hands or god with a hundred eyes. Well, a man will work terribly hard when he wants something very much; even a man who generally looks like a lazy poet. And I think I know what he wanted. He deserves to get it. It’s certainly his hour of triumph.”

“Mystery to me all the same,” said the Colonel frowning. “I wonder whether he’ll ever clear it up.”

Away on another part of the hill Hilary Pierce, who just landed, came towards Joan Hardy with uplifted arms.

“This is no time for false modesty,” he said. “It is the hour, and I come to you covered with glory —”

“You come covered with mud,” she said smiling, “and it’s that horrible red mud that takes so long to dry. It’s no use trying to brush it till —”

“I have completed the labours like Hercules [36],” he cried in lyric ecstasy. “I have finished the quest. I have made the Hampshire Pig as legendary as the Calydonian Boar [37]. They forbade me to bring it on foot, and I drove it in a car, disguised as a pug. They forbade me to bring it in a car, and I brought it in a train, disguised as an invalid. They forbade me to use a train, and I took the wings of the morning and rose to the sky by a secret and lonely way, the stubborn way of love. I have made my romance immortal. I have written your name upon the sky. What do you say to me now? I have turned a Pig into a Pegasus. I have done impossible things.”

“I know you have,” she said, “but somehow I can’t stop liking you for all that.”

“BUT you can’t stop liking me,” he repeated in a weak voice. “I have stormed heaven, but still I am not so bad. Hercules can be tolerated in spite of his Twelve Labours. St. George can be forgiven for killing the Dragon. Woman, is this the way I am treated in the hour of victory; and is this the graceful manner of the old world of tradition? What is your father doing? What does he say – about us?”

“My father says you are quite mad, of course,” she replied, “but he can’t stop liking you either. He says he doesn’t believe it is a good idea to marry someone from a different social class; but that if I must marry a gentleman he’d rather it was somebody like you.”

“Well, I’m glad I’m the good kind of gentleman, anyhow,” he answered. “But really this power of common sense is getting quite dangerous. Will nothing give you the appetite for a little unreality? What would you say, if I turned the world upside down and set my foot upon the sun and moon?”

“I would say,” replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, “that you needed somebody to look after you.”

He stared at her for a moment in an almost idiotic manner as if he had not fully understood; then he laughed uncontrollably, like a man who has found his glasses on his own forehead.

“What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an aeroplane,” he said, “especially when your flying ship is only a flying pig. The earth of the real peasants and the real pigs – don’t be offended; I say that as a compliment. What a thing is common sense, and how much better really than the poetry of Pegasus! And when there is everything else as well that makes the sky clean and the earth kind, beauty and bravery and this beautiful head – well, you are right enough, Joan. Will you take care of me?”

He had caught her by the hands; but she still laughed when she answered.

“Yes – I told you I couldn’t avoid it – but you really must let me go, Hilary. I can see your friends coming down from the hill.”

While she spoke, indeed, Colonel Crane and Owen Hood could be seen coming down the hill and passing through a line of elegant trees.

“Hello!” said Hilary Pierce cheerfully. “I want you to congratulate me. Joan thinks I’m an awful charlatan, and she is right; I am what has been called a happy chatlatan. At least you fellows may think my last escapade was not necessary, when I tell you the news. Well, I will confess.”

“What news do you mean?” asked the Colonel with curiosity.

Hilary Pierce grinned and made a gesture over his shoulder to the pigs covered with parachutes, to indicate his last and crowning adventure.

“The truth is,” he said laughing, “that was only a final firework to celebrate victory or failure, however you choose to call it. There isn’t any need to do so anymore, because the veto is removed.”

“Removed?” exclaimed Hood. “Why on earth is that? It’s a bit scary when madmen suddenly do normal things like that.”

“It wasn’t anything to do with the madmen,” answered Pierce quietly. “The real change was much higher up, or maybe lower down. Anyhow, it was in the world of the Big Business.”