Gilbert Chesterton - The Return of Don Quixote

“Well,” asked Rosamund regarding him with round eyes.

“I should feel as if I were in fancy dress,” he said. Rosamund was less impatient than might have been expected.

“Do you mean,” she asked very slowly, as if she were thinking things out, “that you find you feel more natural in those things?”

“Why, of course,” he cried with a sort of delight. “Why, they are more natural. Lots of things are really more natural, though I’ve never had them in my life. It’s natural to hold your head up, but I never did it before. I used to put my hands in my trousers’ pockets and somehow that seems to mean standing always with a sort of a stoop. Now I put my hands in my belt and it makes me feel ten inches taller. Why, look at this spear.”

He had a habit of walking about with the boar-spear which King Richard had carried in his capacity of forester; and he now planted the staff in the grass to bring it to her attention, though it was very literally as plain as a pike-staff.

“The minute you begin to carry a thing of this sort,” he cried, “you realise at once why men generally used to carry long poles of one sort or another; spears or pikes or pilgrims’ staffs, or pastoral staffs. You can hold them at arm’s length and then throw your head back as if it wore a crest. You have to lean down to the little modern walking-sticks in order to lean on them; as if you were leaning on a crutch, and so you are. The whole of this world of ours is leaning on a crutch, because it is a cripple.”

Then he stopped abruptly and looked at her with a sort of sudden timidity.

“But you . . . I was just thinking you ought to walk about with a sceptre like a spear . . . but, of course . . . if you really disapprove of it all–.”

“I’m not sure,” she answered in her slow and slightly perplexed manner, which contrasted occasionally with her usual voluble efficiency, “I’m not perfectly sure I do disapprove of it.”

He seemed to experience a silent shock of relief, not perhaps very easy to explain. But indeed this was the element in his demeanour which is least easily explained. For all his lifted head and leonine demeanour in moments of abstraction, for all the fixity of his attitude or antic, he had not any air of impudence or even, in the ordinary sense, of defiance. He was simply embarrassed, or rather paralysed, in the presence of his own old clothes. In short he had precisely the same attitude about getting out of his green costume that he had once had about getting into it.

When Rosamund had swept in her swift way across the lawn to the little group where Herne was arguing with Braintree, everyone in the world, including the two distracted disputants, would have expected her to dash into nothing the whole nonsensical dispute. She might have been expected to tell the librarian to run and change his clothes at once, like a naughty little boy who had fallen in a pond. But the quaint and almost fabulous creatures called human souls do not always, or perhaps even often, do what is expected of them. If any sensible person can be supposed to have foreseen all this crazy tale, he would have had no doubt about which of the two women involved would have been more impatient with its craziness. The sensible man would have said that Olive Ashley, with her hobby of medievalism, would have understood even a rather mad medievalist; whereas anyone so modern as her red-haired friend would not even have stopped to ask whether it was medievalism, in face of the obvious fact that it was madness. But then no sensible man would ever have believed that it would happen at all.

In any case the sensible man would have been wrong, as he often is. Olive always had her own dreams: but Rosamund’s heart hungered after two things, simplification and action. Her thinking was slow; so she liked simplicity. Her impulses were swift; so she liked action.

Rosamund Severne in a bodily sense was born worthy of a crown; and even in a biographical sense under the shadow of a coronet. It was her fate to move against a magnificent background of river and terraced hills and the ruins of a historic place, and the medieval masquerade she had assumed seemed altogether fitted to her presence. To the visionary eyes of the librarian, she appeared to be equally a princess in that costume or in a more conventional one. But these accidents of birth and even of beauty are very misleading in psychology. If Mr. Herne had possessed more knowledge of the world, he would have recognised a type to be seen in very different surroundings. The great green valley and the great grey abbey house would have faded from his sight and he would have seen in their place desks and typewriters and rows of very dull works of reference. He would have seen in that square face and those grave and honest eyes a type that is very modern and very variously distributed in the modern world. That young woman is to be found in many places where she is wanted to support the wavering unworldliness of men like Mr. Herne. As Secretary to the Submarine Colonisation Company, she explains firmly to a long procession of inquirers that there is room in the sea for more men that ever went into it. As Lady Manager of the Elastic Pavements Society, she knows the whole case for this essential reform, and can show how it eliminates the necessity for better boots or a country life. The movement for proving that “Paradise Lost” was written by Charles II owes its wide popularity entirely to her energy and efficiency. The arrangement by which the tops of top-hats can be lifted with a string, for purposes of ventilation, would never have reached its present universal success, if there had not been one sane person in the office. In all these positions she has the same powerful simplicity and the same sincerity in following out one idea at a time. In all these positions she is very conscientious and very unscrupulous.

It was characteristic of Rosamund that she had always been not only bewildered but wearied by the broadmindedness, or rather the indiscriminate intellectual hospitality of a man like Douglas Murrel. To her it appeared mere vagueness and emptiness and absence of object. She could never comprehend how he could be at once an intimate friend of Olive and her medievalism and of Braintree and his Bolshevism. She wanted somebody who would do something; and Murrel absolutely refused to do anything. But when somebody was really ready to do something, she was so pleased that she rather neglected to criticise what it was that he was going to do.

Quite suddenly, and perhaps accidentally, there had become clear to her very single eye something like a ray of light that she could follow; something that she could understand. Doubtless she understood it better because it was linked up in a loose fashion with the traditions that she had been taught from childhood to preserve. She had never bothered about her father’s taste in heraldry; she had not even seen very much of her father. But just as she was glad that her father was there, she was glad the heraldry was there. People who have that sort of historical support always remember it, if only in their subconsciousness. Anyhow, the obvious inference was incorrect, and people soon began to say that she was actually encouraging the librarian in his capacity of lunatic.

It is almost needless to say that the daughter of Lord Seawood moved about trailing clouds of glory in the form of crowds of young men. She had indeed a threefold claim to that sort of popularity. She was an heiress; but it is due to them to say that many of the more chivalrous admired her not because she was an heiress but because she was beautiful. She was beautiful, but it is due to her to say that many of the more rational admired her not because she was a beauty but because she was a good sort; and more especially what they called a good sport. It followed, therefore that where she led many would follow, even if she led them a dance quite different from the dances then in fashion. Thus there grew up, half in jest and yet more and more in earnest, a new fashionable “medievalism”; a chase in which all the young men followed the lady who followed the librarian. And because there was a certain candour of calf-love about it, of the moon-calf who is not ashamed to cry for the moon, it had something in it of the sincerity of youth and springtime. It was a romance as well as a rag. The young men became in a manner poets, if very minor poets. With the help of Herne as a scholar and Rosamund as a vigorous stage-manager, they filled their lines with emblems and ensigns and processions, even more defiant of modernity than the theatrical dress which they had dropped and Herne had retained. The young men were especially fascinated by the notion of reviving the use of the bow; possibly with a subconscious memory of the arrows of the god of love. Perhaps it was some foolish association of Valentine’s that started the game of sending arrows as messengers of welcome or of war.