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

Robert Owen Hood was Crane’s closest friend, but he had a very different personality. Hood was from the first as stable as Crane was adventurous. Hood was to the end informal as Crane was conventional. The double name of Robert Owen came from a revolutionary tradition in his family; but he inherited together with it a little money that allowed him to forget about the law and to cultivate a taste for liberty and for walking and dreaming in lost corners of the country. There was a small island in the Thames in which he especially loved to sit fishing – a shabby but not typical figure dressed in grey, with red hair and a long face with a large chin, rather like Napoleon. On this occasion his quick military friend was standing near him in his uniform, which created a striking contrast. Colonel Crane was going to leave on one of his odysseys in the South Seas.

“Well,” asked the impatient traveller, “have you caught anything?”

“You once asked me,” replied the fisherman calmly, “what I meant by calling you a materialist. That is what I meant by calling you a materialist.”

“If one must be a materialist or a madman,” said the soldier, “give me materialism.”

“On the contrary,” replied his friend, “your hobby is much madder than mine. And I doubt that it’s any more fruitful. The moment men like you see a man sitting by a river, they just have to ask him what he has caught. But when you go off to hunt for big animals in Africa, nobody asks you what you have caught. Nobody expects you to bring home a hippopotamus for supper. Nobody has ever seen you walking up Pall Mall, followed respectfully by a giraffe you captured. Personally, I doubt that you ever catch anything. It’s all hidden in desert sand and doubt and distance. But what I hunt for is something much more hard to catch, and as slippery as any fish. It is the soul of England.”

“I think you’ll catch a cold if not a fish,” answered Crane, “sitting with your feet in water like that. I like to move about a little more. Dreaming is not for me.”

At this point a symbolic cloud should come across the sun and some shadow of mystery and silence must cover for a moment the heroes of our story. Because it was at this moment that James Crane, blind with inspiration, pronounced his famous Prophecy, which is central to this story. As usual with men who make prophecies, he had no idea he just made one. A moment after he would probably not know that he had said it at all.

The prophecy took the form of a proverb. At the right moment the readers will see, what proverb. Actually, the conversation for a big part consisted of proverbs, which is natural for men like Hood, whose hearts are with that old English country life from which all the proverbs came. But it was Crane who said:

“It’s all very well to be fond of England, but a man who wants to help England mustn’t let the grass grow under his feet [13].”

“And that’s just what I want to do,” answered Hood. “That’s exactly what even your poor tired people in big cities really want to do. When a sad little clerk walks down Poverty Street, wouldn’t he really be delighted if he could look down and see the grass growing under his feet – like a magic green carpet in the middle of the pavement? It would be like a fairy-tale.”

“Well, but he wouldn’t sit like a stone as you do,” replied the other. “A man might let the grass grow under his feet without actually letting the ivy grow up his legs [14]. That sounds like a fairy-tale, too, if you like, but there’s no proverb to recommend it.”

“Oh, there are proverbs on my side, if you come to that,” answered Hood laughing. “I might remind you about the rolling stone that gathers no moss. [15]”

“Well, who wants to gather moss except a few strange old ladies?” asked Crane. “Yes, I’m a rolling stone, I suppose; and I go rolling round the earth as the earth goes rolling round the sun. But I’ll tell you what; there’s only one kind of stone that does really gather moss.”

“And what is that, my dear geologist?”

“A gravestone,” said Crane.

There was a silence, and Hood sat looking with his owlish face at the water in which the dark woods were mirrored. At last he said:

“Moss isn’t the only thing found on that. Sometimes there is the word ‘Resurgam’ [16].”

“Well, I hope you will,” said Crane with a smile. “But the trumpet will have to be pretty loud to wake you up. It’s my opinion you’ll be too late for the Day of Judgement.”

“I could say,” remarked Hood, “that it would be better for you if you were. But it is not a nice way to say goodbye. Are you really leaving today?”

“Yes, tonight,” replied his friend. “Are you sure you won’t come with me to the Cannibal Islands?”

“I prefer my own island,” said Mr. Owen Hood.

When his friend had gone he continued to look absent-mindedly at the calm upside-down world of the green mirror of water. He did not change his position and hardly moved his head. This might be partly explained by the quiet habits of a fisherman; but to tell you the truth, it was not easy to discover whether the solitary lawyer really wanted to catch any fish. He would often carry a book by Isaac Walton in his pocket, because he had a love of the old English literature as of the old English landscape.

But the truth is that Owen Hood had not been quite candid with his friend about the spell that held him to that particular little island in the Upper Thames. If he had said (as he was quite capable of saying) that he expected to catch the whale that swallowed Jonah, or even the great sea-serpent, his expressions would have been only symbolical. But they would have been the symbol of something as unique and unattainable. For Mr. Owen Hood was really fishing for something that very few fishermen ever catch; and that was a dream of his boyhood, of something that had happened on that lonely spot long ago.

Years before, when he was a very young man, he had sat fishing on that island one evening when the twilight changed to dark. The birds were coming down to the ground and there was no noise except the quiet noises of the river. Suddenly, and without a sound, as if in a dream, a girl came out of the woods on the other side. She spoke to him across the river, asking him he hardly knew what, which he answered he hardly knew how. She was dressed in white and carried a bunch of bluebells in her hand; her golden hair was low on her forehead; she was very pale, and her eyelids moved constantly as if she were nervous. He felt stupid. But he must have managed to speak civilly, because she stayed; and he must have said something to amuse her, because she laughed. Then followed the incident he could never analyse, though he understood himself well. Making a gesture towards something, she dropped her blue flowers in the water. He didn’t know what sort of storm was in his head, but it seemed to him that legendary things were happening, as in an epic of the gods. All visible things were only small signs. Before he realized what was happening he was standing dripping on the other bank; because he had splashed in somehow and saved the bunch as if it were a drowning baby. Of all the things she said he could recall one sentence, that he repeated constantly in his mind:“You’ll catch a cold and die.”

He only caught the cold and not the death; but even the idea of death did not seem out of place somehow. The doctor, to whom he had to give some sort of explanation of his decision to dive, was very interested in the story (or the part that he heard) because he liked to write down the pedigrees of the aristocratic families and to understand the relationships of the best houses in the neighbourhood. By some complicated process of deduction he discovered that the lady must be Miss Elizabeth Seymour from Marley Court. The doctor spoke about these things with respectful admiration; he was a rising young doctor named Hunter, afterwards a neighbour of Colonel Crane.