Gilbert Chesterton - The Return of Don Quixote

“Don’t you know me?” asked Murrel. “Don’t you know my name? Well, perhaps you don’t know my real name.”

“What do you mean?” asked Herne.

“My name,” said the other, “is Sancho Panza.”

Twenty minutes later there passed from the lands of Lord Seawood a cortege eminently calculated to show how the grotesque dogs the footprints of the fantastic. For Mr. Douglas Murrel had by no means the intention of losing his faculty of enjoying the absurd with a complete gravity. The last stage of that exit was worth seeing, though only a few of the strayed revellers or rioters were there to see it. As soon as Murrel had obtained the post of squire for which he petitioned, he vanished behind an adjoining outhouse and reappeared perched on the top of his celebrated hansom cab and driving its crazy cab-horse. Bowing from his perch with the deference of a polished servant, he appeared to be inviting his new master to get into the cab. But there was to be one more crescendo or bathos and medley of the sublime and the ridiculous; for with one last impulse of outrageous solemnity, the knight-errant in green sprang astride of the cab-horse and signalled with his lifted spear.

Like a revelation of lightning, in the instant before annihilating laughter came down like night, those who saw it saw a vision and a memory, bright and brittle as an instant’s resurrection of the dead. The bones of the gaunt, high-featured face, the flame-like fork of the beard, the hollow and almost frantic eyes, were in a setting that startled with recognition; rigid above the saddle of Rosinante, tall and in tattered arms he lifted that vain lance that for three hundred years has taught us nothing but to laugh at the shaking of the spear. And behind him rose a vast yawning shadow like the very vision of that leviathan of laughter; the grotesque cab like the jaws of a derisive dragon pursuing him for ever, as the vast shadow of caricature pursues our desperate dignity and beauty, hanging above him for ever threatening like the wave of the world; and over all, the lesser and lighter human spirit, not unkindly, looking down on all that is most high.

And yet, though that towering and toppling appendage of absurdity was dragged behind him like an overwhelming load, for that instant of time it was erased and forgotten, in the force and appalling passion of his face.

It had been a day of amazement for many, in which their prophet who had come to bless had remained to curse and had at last gone away cursing. But of all those who were shocked at the judgment which had condemned them, perhaps not one had been more amazed than the man whom the judgment had justified. John Braintree stood staring throughout the whole process by which what seemed to him like laws of the Stone Age were dug up like stone hatchets and offered to him as weapons. Whatever else he had expected, whether feudal vindictiveness or chivalrous magnanimity, he had never dreamed of hearing his own cause supported as a piece of pure medievalism. So far as he could make out, he himself was much the most medieval person present. It made him feel very uncomfortable.

Then, as he stood rolling his eyes round the dissolution of that queer transformation scene, they alit on a special object; he stiffened, pulled himself together, gave a short laugh and strode across to where Olive was standing beside the empty throne. He put his hands on her shoulders and said: “It seems dear we are reconciled after all.”

She looked at him without moving and with a slow smile. “It is dreadful,” she said, “to think I should be glad of the quarrel that makes the–the reconciliation.”

“You will forgive me for feeling only the gladness and not the dreadfulness,” he answered. “People must be on my side if they are on his side–I mean if they are really on his side, like you.”

“I shall not find it so very difficult to be on your side,” she said. “I found it very difficult not to be. Especially when it was the losing side.”

“We shall jolly well see now,” he said, “whether it won’t be the winning side. This has put heart into all my people, I can tell you. I feel as if I’d renewed my youth like the eagle’s; only it isn’t Mr. Herne that has done that.”

She looked slightly embarrassed and then said doubtfully, “I suppose somebody else will inherit the organisation.”

“Organisation be blowed,” said Braintree. “You don’t suppose we were beaten by an organisation, do you? We were beaten by a man and by men who were ready to follow him. Do you think I care anything about the men who were ready to desert him? I said I wasn’t afraid of fourteenth century bows and battle-axes; I wasn’t; and I’m certainly not afraid of a fourteenth century battle-axe brandished by old Seawood. Oh yes, I suppose they’ll go on with the theatricals. We shall have the pleasure of hearing all about Sir Julian Archer, the brilliant Lord High Arbiter and universally popular King-at-Arms. But don’t you give us credit for being able to go smash through all that sort of thing like coloured paper? The soul is gone out of it; the soul is riding down the road a mile away.”

“Yes, I think you are right,” she said after a pause, “and not only because Michael Herne has been something like a great man. It’s more than that. Their pride has gone out of them; their youth and their innocence have gone out of them. They have heard the truth and they know it is true. And there’s one of them about whom I am very unhappy.”

He looked at her earnestly and said, “Well, of course I’m sorry for a lot of them in a way; but do you mean–”

“I mean Rosamund,” she answered lowering her voice. “I think it’s the most grim and grand and dreadful thing that ever happened to anybody; much worse than anything that ever happened to us.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

“Of course you don’t,” she replied.

He looked at her in a puzzled way; and she broke out with a kind of passion.

“Of course you don’t understand! I know it has been hard for you; and it has been hard enough for me. But we haven’t gone through what they have gone through–what she is going through. We parted because each of us believed the other was attacking something good; but we didn’t, thank God, ever have to attack each other. You didn’t have to stand up and abuse my father; and I didn’t have to sit silent and hear it. It wasn’t you who were directly individually cursing me and mine; it wasn’t you, of all men, whom I had to hear saying hateful things about my own home. I don’t know what I should have done. I think I should have simply died. What do you suppose she is doing?”

“I’m awfully sorry,” he answered, “but I really do not know exactly what you are talking about. Who is she? Do you mean Rosamund Severne?”

“Of course I mean Rosamund Severne,” she cried angrily, “and he would not even leave her name. How do you suppose I should have liked that? What are you staring at? Do you really mean that you don’t know that Rosamund and Michael Herne are in love with each other?”

“I don’t seem to know much,” he said, “but if that’s true of course I see what you mean.”

“I must go to see her,” said Olive, “and yet I hardly know even how to do that.”

She crossed the now deserted garden towards the house; and as she did so, something made her stand and gaze for a moment at the monument that stood on the lawn; the broken image standing on the dragon. And as she looked at it strange and new things came into her soul and her eyes. In the clear exalted intensity of her happiness and unhappiness, she seemed to be seeing it for the first time.