Gilbert Chesterton: The Flying Inn

A lady with so clever a face could not but laugh faintly; but she continued on a determined theme, “The Prophet said, you know, that all real love had in it an element of fate. And I am sure that is his view, too. People cluster round a centre as little stars do round a star; because a star is a magnet. You are never wrong when destiny blows behind you like a great big wind; and I think many things have been judged unfairly that way. It’s all very well to talk about the infant marriages in India.”

“Miss Browning,” said Joan, “are you interested in the infant marriages in India?”

“Well–” said Miss Browning.

“Is your sister interested in them? I’ll run and ask her,” cried Joan, plunging across the room to where Mrs. Mackintosh was sitting at a table scribbling secretarial notes.

“Well,” said Mrs. Mackintosh, turning up a rich-haired, resolute head, more handsome than her sister’s, “I believe the Indian way is the best. When people are left to themselves in early youth, any of them might marry anything. We might have married a nigger or a fish-wife or–a criminal.”

“Now, Mrs. Mackintosh,” said Joan, with black-browed severity, “you well know you would never have married a fish-wife. Where is Enid?” she ended suddenly.

“Lady Enid,” said Miss Browning, “is looking out music in the music room, I think.”

Joan walked swiftly through several long salons, and found her fair-haired and pallid relative actually at the piano.

“Enid,” cried Joan, “you know I’ve always been fond of you. For God’s sake tell me what is the matter with this house? I admire Philip as everybody does. But what is the matter with the house? Why do all these rooms and gardens seem to be shutting me in and in and in? Why does everything look more and more the same? Why does everybody say the same thing? Oh, I don’t often talk metaphysics; but there is a purpose in this. That’s the only way of putting it; there is a purpose. And I don’t know what it is.”

Lady Enid Wimpole played a preliminary bar or two on the piano. Then she said,

“Nor do I, Joan. I don’t indeed. I know exactly what you mean. But it’s just because there is a purpose that I have faith in him and trust him.” She began softly to play a ballad tune of the Rhineland; and perhaps the music suggested her next remark. “Suppose you were looking at some of the last reaches of the Rhine, where it flows–”

“Enid!” cried Joan, “if you say ‘into the North Sea,’ I shall scream. Scream, do you hear, louder than all the peacocks together.”

“Well,” expostulated Lady Enid, looking up rather wildly, “The Rhine does flow into the North Sea, doesn’t it?”

“I dare say,” said Joan, recklessly, “but the Rhine might have flowed into the Round Pond, before you would have known or cared, until–”

“Until what?” asked Enid; and her music suddenly ceased. “Until something happened that I cannot understand,” said Joan, moving away.

“ You are something I cannot understand,” said Enid Wimpole. “But I will play something else, if this annoys you.” And she fingered the music again with an eye to choice.

Joan walked back through the corridor of the music room, and restlessly resumed her seat in the room with the two lady secretaries.

“Well,” asked the red-haired and good-humoured Mrs. Mackintosh, without looking up from her work of scribbling, “have you discovered anything?”

For some moments Joan appeared to be in a blacker state of brooding than usual; then she said, in a candid and friendly tone, which somehow contrasted with her knit and swarthy brows– “No, really. At least I think I’ve only found out two things; and they are only things about myself. I’ve discovered that I do like heroism, but I don’t like hero worship.”

“Surely,” said Miss Browning, in the Girton manner, “the one always flows from the other.”

“I hope not,” said Joan.

“But what else can you do with the hero?” asked Mrs. Mackintosh, still without looking up from her writing, “except worship him?”

“You might crucify him,” said Joan, with a sudden return of savage restlessness, as she rose from her chair. “Things seem to happen then.”

“Aren’t you tired?” asked the Miss Browning who had the clever face.

“Yes,” said Joan, “and the worst sort of tiredness; when you don’t even know what you’re tired of. To tell the honest truth, I think I’m tired of this house.”

“It’s very old, of course, and parts of it are still dismal,” said Miss Browning, “but he has enormously improved it. The decoration, with the moon and stars, down in the wing with the turret is really–”

Away in the distant music room, Lady Enid, having found the music she preferred, was fingering its prelude on the piano. At the first few notes of it, Joan Brett stood up, like a tigress.

“Thanks–” she said, with a hoarse softness, “that’s it, of course! and that’s just what we all are! She’s found the right tune now.”

“What tune is it?” asked the wondering secretary.

“The tune of harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer and all kinds of music,” said Joan, softly and fiercely, “when we shall bow down and worship the Golden Image that Nebuchadnezzar the King has set up. Girls! Women! Do you know what this place is? Do you know why it is all doors within doors and lattice behind lattice; and everything is curtained and cushioned; and why the flowers that are so fragrant here are not the flowers of our hills?”

From the distant and slowly darkening music room, Enid Wimpole’s song came thin and clear:

“Do you know what we are?” demanded Joan Brett, again. “We are a Harem.”

“Why, what can you mean?” cried the younger girl, in great agitation. “Why, Lord Ivywood has never–”

“I know he has never. I am not sure,” said Joan, “even whether he would ever. I shall never understand that man, nor will anybody else. But I tell you that is the spirit. That is what we are . And this room stinks of polygamy as certainly as it smells of tube-roses.”

“Why, Joan,” cried Lady Enid, entering the room like a well-bred ghost, “what on earth is the matter with you. You all look as white as sheets.”

Joan took no heed of her but went on with her own obstinate argument.

“And, besides,” she said, “if there’s one thing we do know about him it is that he believes on principle in doing things slowly. He calls it evolution and relativity and the expanding of an idea into larger ideas. How do we know he isn’t doing that slowly; getting us accustomed to living like this, so that it may be the less shock when he goes further–steeping us in the atmosphere before he actually introduces,” and she shuddered, “the institution. Is it any more calmly outrageous a scheme than any other of Ivywood’s schemes; than a sepoy commander-in-chief, or Misysra preaching in Westminster Abbey, or the destruction of all the inns in England? I will not wait and expand. I will not be evolved. I will not develop into something that is not me. My feet shall be outside these walls if I walk the roads for it afterward; or I will scream as I would scream trapped in any den by the Docks.”

She swept down the rooms toward the turret, with a sudden passion for solitude; but as she passed the astronomical wood-carving that had closed up the end of the old wing, Enid saw her strike it with her clinched hand.

It was in the turret that she had a strange experience. She was again, later on, using its isolation to worry out the best way of having it out with Philip, when he should return from his visit to London; for to tell old Lady Ivywood what was on her mind would be about as kind and useful as describing Chinese tortures to a baby. The evening was very quiet, of the pale grey sort, and all that side of Ivywood lay before her eyes, undisturbed. She was the more surprised when her dreaming took note of a sort of stirring in the grey-purple dusk of the bushes; of whisperings; and of many footsteps. Then the silence settled down again; and then it was startlingly broken by a big voice singing in the dark distance. It was accompanied by faint sounds that might have been from the fingering of some lute or viol: