Chapter III. The unobtrusive traffic of captain pierce

People who know the stories about Colonel Crane and Mr. Owen Hood, the lawyer, may or may not be interested to know that they had an early lunch of eggs and bacon and beer at the inn called the Blue Boar, which stands at the turn of a road in the Western part of England.

Crane was fond of good cooking; and the cooking in that lonely inn was better than in a fashionable restaurant. Hood was fond of the legends and less-known aspects of the English countryside. Both had a healthy admiration for beauty, in ladies as well as landscapes; although (or more probably because) both were quite romantically attached to the wives they had married under rather romantic circumstances.

And the girl who served them, the daughter of the innkeeper, was herself a very beautiful thing to look at; she was of a slim and quiet sort with a head that moved like a brown bird, brightly and usually unexpectedly. Her manners were full of unconscious dignity, because her father, old John Hardy, was the type of old innkeeper who had the status, if not of a gentleman, at least of an independent man. He was not without education and talents; a gray-haired man with a clever, stubborn face.

There was little sound in the valley or the sky; the notes of birds fell only from time to time; only a distant aeroplane passed and re-passed, leaving a trail of faint thunder. The two men at lunch paid no more attention to it than if it had been a buzzing fly; but the way the girl looked at it every few minutes might have suggested that she was at least conscious of the fly. She looked at it, when no one was looking at her; the rest of the time, she tried to look indifferent to it.

“Good bacon you get here,” remarked Colonel Crane.

“The best in England, and in the matter of breakfast England is the Earthly Paradise,” replied Hood readily. “I can’t think why we should boast of the British Empire when we have bacon and eggs to boast of. It was bacon and eggs that gave all that morning glory to the English poets; only a man who had a breakfast like this who could rise with that giant gesture:‘Night’s candles are burnt out; and jocund day…’”

Then, noticing the girl within earshot, he added:“We are saying how good your bacon is, Miss Hardy.”

“It is supposed to be very good,” she said with legitimate pride, “but I am afraid you won’t get much more of it. People aren’t going to be allowed to keep pigs much longer.”

“Not allowed to keep pigs!” cried the Colonel in astonishment.

“By the old regulations they had to be away from the house, and we’ve got ground enough for that, though most of the cottagers hadn’t. But now they say that some people are breaking the law, and the county council are going to stop pig-keeping altogether.”

“Stupid pigs,” snorted the Colonel.

“You should not call them that,” replied Hood. “Men are lower than swine when they do not appreciate pigs. But really I don’t know what the world’s coming to. What will the next generation be like without proper pork? And, talking about the next generation, what has become of our young friend Pierce? He said he was coming down, but he can’t have come by that train.”

“I think Captain Pierce is up there, sir,” said Joan Hardy in a correct voice, as she went away.

Her tone might have indicated that the gentleman was upstairs, but she looked for a second at the blue emptiness of the sky. Long after she was gone, Owen Hood remained staring up into it, until he saw the aeroplane darting and wheeling like a bird.

“Is that Hilary Pierce up there?” he asked, “doing tricks and behaving like a madman generally. What the devil is he doing?”

“Showing off,” said the Colonel shortly, and finished his beer.

“But why would he show off to us?” asked Hood.

“He jolly well wouldn’t,” replied the Colonel. “Showing off to the girl, of course.”

“A very good girl,” said Owen Hood gravely. “If there’s anything going on, you may be sure it’s all straight and serious.”

The Colonel blinked a little. “Well, times change,” he said. “I suppose I’m old-fashioned myself; but speaking as an old Tory, I must confess he might do worse.”

“Yes,” replied Hood, “and speaking as an old Radical, I should say he could hardly do better.”

While they were speaking the aviator had eventually landed on a flat field near the hill, and was now coming towards them. Hilary Pierce looked more like a poet than a professional aviator; and though he had distinguished himself in the war, he was very probably one of those whose natural dream was of conquering the air than conquering the enemy. His yellow hair was longer and more untidy than when he was in the army; and there was a touch of something irresponsible in his blue eye. He had a fighting spirit, however, as soon became clear.

He had paused to speak to Joan Hardy by the rather ruinous pig-sty in the corner, and when he came towards the breakfast-table he seemed transfigured as with flame.

“What’s all this infernal insane nonsense?” he demanded. “Who is so damned rude to tell the Hardys they mustn’t keep pigs? Look here, the time has come when we must fight against all this sort of thing. I’m going to do something desperate.”

“You’ve done enough desperate things for this morning,” said Hood. “I advise you to take a little desperate lunch. Sit down, please, and don’t stamp about like that.”

“No, but look here – ”

Pierce was interrupted by Joan Hardy, who appeared quietly at his elbow and said quietly to the company:“There’s a gentleman here who asks if he may speak to you.”

The gentleman himself stood some little way behind and looked polite but so stiff and motionless that it almost made you nervous. He was dressed in such a complete and correct version of English holiday suit that they were quite sure he was a foreigner. But they couldn’t choose a country in Europe where the man came from. His face was very tanned. But when he spoke, they could immediately understand where he was from because of his accent.

“Very sorry to interrupt, gentlemen,” he said, “but this young lady says you know everything about this area. I’ve walked around trying to find an ancient building or two, but it seems I don’t know how to look for them. If you’d be so kind as to tell me about the main architectural styles and historic places of this region, I’d be very much obliged.”

Since they were a little slow in recovering from their first surprise, he added patiently:

“My name is Enoch B. Oates, and I’m pretty well known in Michigan, but I’ve bought a little place near here; I’ve looked about this little planet and I’ve come to think the safest and brightest place for a man with a few dollars is the place of an aristocrat in your fine old feudal landscape. So the sooner I’m introduced to the mediaeval buildings the better.”

In Hilary Pierce the astonishment had given place to an enthusiasm bordering on ecstasy.

“Mediaeval buildings! Architectural styles!” he cried out. “You’ve come to the right place, Mr. Oates. I’ll show you an ancient building, a sacred building, in an architectural style of such antiquity that you’ll want to transport it to Michigan, as they tried to do with Glastonbury Abbey. You will be privileged to see an historic institution before you die or before all history is forgotten.”

He was walking towards the corner of the little kitchen-garden attached to the inn, waving his arm with wild gestures of encouragement; and the American was following him with the same stiff politeness, looking strangely like a robot.

“Look on our architectural style before it disappears,” cried Pierce dramatically, pointing to the pig-sty, which looked like a dirty combination of leaning and broken boards put together, though it was practical enough. “This, the most unmistakably historic of all mediaeval buildings, may soon be only a memory. But when this monument falls England will fall, and the world will shake.”

The American had what he himself might have described as a poker face; it was impossible to discover whether his words indicated extreme innocence or extreme irony.

“And would you say,” he asked, “that this monument is an example of the early mediaeval or Gothic architectural school?”

“I would hardly call it strictly Perpendicular,” answered Pierce, “but there is no doubt that it is Early English.”

“You would say it is historic, anyhow?” said Mr. Oates.

“I have every reason to believe,” affirmed Pierce solemnly, “that Gurth the Swineherd made use of this building. I have no doubt that it is in fact much older. The best authorities believe that the Prodigal Son stayed here for some time, and the pigs – those noble animals – gave him such excellent advice that he returned to his family. And now, Mr. Oates, they say that all this magnificent heritage should be destroyed. But it will not be. We will not so easily surrender to all the vandals and vulgar tyrants who would tear down our temples and our holy places.

The pig-sty will rise again in a magnificent resurrection – larger pig-stys, higher pig-stys will yet cover the land; the towers of more magnificent and more ideal pig-stys, in the most striking architectural styles, will again declare the victory of the holy pig over his unholy oppressors.”

“And meanwhile,” said Colonel Crane drily, “I think Mr. Oates had much better begin with the church down by the river. Very fine Norman foundations and traces of Roman brick. The priest understands his church, too, and would give Mr. Oates rather more reliable information than you do.”

A little while later, when Mr. Oates had gone on his way, the Colonel criticized his young friend.

“Bad form,” he said, “making fun of a foreigner asking for information.”

But Pierce turned on him with the same heat on his face.

“But I wasn’t making fun. I was quite serious.”

They stared at him steadily, and he laughed slightly but went on with undiminished fire.

“Symbolical perhaps but serious,” he said. “I may seem to have talked a bit wildly, but let me tell you the time has come to be wild. We’ve all been a lot too tame. I do mean, as much as I ever meant anything, to fight for the resurrection and the return of the pig; and it will yet return as a wild boar that will destroy his enemies.”

He looked up and his eye found the blue heraldic shape on the sign-board of the inn.

“And there is our wooden standard!” he cried, pointing in the same dramatic fashion. “We will go into battle under the standard of the Blue Boar.”

“Hurray, hurray, hurray,” said Crane politely, “and now come away and don’t spoil the speech. Owen wants to walk to the local old church, like Mr. Oates. I’m more interested in new things. Want to look at that machine of yours.”

They began to walk down the zig-zag road with hedges on both sides and flower-beds like a garden grown on a staircase, and at every corner Hood had to argue with the slow-walking young man.

“Don’t be forever looking back on the paradise of pigs,” he said, “or you’ll be turned into a pillar of salt, or maybe of mustard – as more appropriate to such meat. They won’t run away yet. There are other creatures formed by the Creator for man to see; there are other things made by man after the fashion of the creatures, including that great white bird on which you yourself flew among the birds.”

“Bird that lays rather dreadful eggs,” said Crane. “In the next war – Hey, where the hell has he gone?”

“Pigs, pigs,” said Hood sadly. “The overpowering charm which pigs have upon us at a certain time of life; when we dream about their snouts and their little curly tails…”

“Oh, stop it,” said the Colonel.

Indeed Mr. Hilary Pierce had vanished, turning under the corner of a hedge and running up a path, over a gate and across the corner of a hayfield, where a final cut through bursting bushes brought him on top of a low wall looking down at the pig-sty and Miss Joan Hardy, who was calmly walking away from it. He jumped down on to the path. The morning sun painted everything in clear colours like a children’s book.

“I felt I must speak to you before I went,” he said. “I’m going away, not exactly on active service, but on business – on very active business. I feel like the fellows did when they went to the war… and what they wanted to do first… I am aware that a proposal over a pig-sty is not as symbolical to some as to me, but really and truly… I don’t know whether I mentioned it, but you may be aware that I worship you.”

Joan Hardy was quite aware of it; but the world-old conventions of the countryside were like concentric castle-walls around her. There was in them the stiff beauty of old country dances and the slow and delicate needlework of a peasantry. Of all the ladies mentioned in this little book about modern-day knights, the most reserved and dignified was the one who was not a lady at all by birth.

She stood looking at him in silence, and he at her; and her head looked a little bit like that of a bird.

“Really, you seem in a terrible hurry,” she said. “I don’t want to be talked to in a rush like this.”

“I apologize,” he said. “I am in a rush, but I didn’t want you to be in a rush. I only wanted you to know. I haven’t done anything to deserve you, but I am going to try. I’m going off to work; I feel sure you believe in quiet steady work for a young man.”

“Are you going into the bank?” she asked innocently. “You said your uncle worked in a bank.”

“I hope all my conversation was not on that level,” he replied. And indeed he would have been surprised if he had known how exactly she remembered all such boring details he had ever mentioned about himself, and how little she knew in comparison about his theories and dreams, which he thought so much more important.

“Well,” he said with appealing frankness, “it would be a little bit too much to say I am going into a bank. I know a lot of more country-side and romantic professions that are really quite as safe as the bank. The truth is, I think of going into the bacon trade. I think I see an opportunity for a quick young man in the ham and pork business.”

“You mustn’t come here, then,” she answered. “It won’t be allowed here by that time. The neighbours would – ”

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, “I will be a commercial traveller. Oh, such a commercial traveler! As for not coming here, the thing seems quite impossible. You must at least let me write to you every hour or so. You must let me send you a few presents every morning.”

“I’m sure my father wouldn’t like you to send me presents,” she said gravely.

“Ask your father to wait,” said Pierce earnestly. “Ask him to wait till he’s seen the presents. You see, mine will be rather curious presents. I don’t think he’ll disapprove of them. I think he’ll approve of them. I think he’ll congratulate me on my simple tastes and adequate business principles. The truth is, dear Joan, I’ve committed myself to a rather important enterprise. You shouldn’t be frightened; I promise I won’t trouble you again till it succeeds. I will be content that you know it is for you I do it; and will continue to do it, even if I challenge the world.”

He jumped up on the wall again and stood there staring down at her in an almost irritated manner.

“That anybody should forbid YOU to keep pigs,” he cried. “That anybody should forbid YOU to do anything. That anybody should dispute YOUR right to keep pet crocodiles if you like! That is the unpardonable sin; that is the supreme blasphemy and crime against the nature of things, which must not go unpunished. You will have pigs, I say, if the skies fall and the whole world is in war.”

He disappeared like a flash behind the wall, and Joan went back in silence to the inn.

The first incident of the war did not seem very encouraging, though the hero of it seemed by no means discouraged by it. As it was reported in the police news section of various papers, Hilary Patrick Pierce, formerly of the Flying Corps, was arrested for driving pigs into the county of Bluntshire, against the law made for the sake of public health. It seemed he had almost as much trouble with the pigs as with the police; but he made a funny and elegant speech when he was arrested, to which the police and the pigs seemed to be equally indifferent. The incident was considered trivial and his punishment was very light; but after this occasion some of the authorities decided to finally establish the new rule.

The figure behind the new regulation was the famous hygienist, Sir Horace Hunter, who had begun life, as some readers may remember, as a successful doctor in the suburbs and had later distinguished himself as an officer of health in the Thames Valley. He was fully supported in extending the existing precautions against infection from the pig by other magistrates, Mr. Rosenbaum Low, millionaire and formerly manager of Bliss and Co., and the other the young Socialist, Mr. Amyas Minns. All of them agreed that the best way to finish all problems connected to drinking was total prohibition of alcohol, and the different problems linked with swine-fever were best solved by a simple regulation against pigs.

The next lunch at which the three friends met was in a rather different setting; because the Colonel had invited the other two to his club in London. It would have been almost impossible to be that sort of Colonel without having that sort of club. But as a matter of fact, he very seldom went there. On this occasion it was Owen Hood who arrived first and was escorted by a waiter to a table near a window overlooking the Green Park. Knowing Crane’s military punctuality, Hood thought that he might have mistaken the time; and while looking for the note of invitation in his pocket-book, he paused to re-read an article that he had cut out of the newspaper aside as a curiosity some days before. It was a paragraph headed “Old Ladies as Mad Motorists,” and ran as follows:

“An unprecedented number of cases of motorists exceeding the speed limit have lately occurred on the Bath Road and other western highways. The extraordinary thing about this case is that in so many cases the rule-breakers seemed to be old ladies of great wealth and respectability who declared they were merely taking their pugs and other pet animals to get some fresh air. They said that the health of the animal required much more rapid transit through the air than that of a human being.”

He was looking at this article and with as much surprise as when he had first read it, when the Colonel entered with a newspaper in his hand.

“I say,” he said, “I think it is getting rather ridiculous. I’m not a revolutionist like you; quite the opposite. But all these rules and regulations are getting beyond all rational explanation. A little while ago they started forbidding all travelling circuses; not, as you might think, demanding proper conditions for the animals, but forbidding them altogether for some nonsense about the safety of the public. There was a travelling circus stopped near Acton and another on the road to Reading. Crowds of village boys must never see a lion in their lives, because once in fifty years a lion has escaped and been caught again. But that’s nothing compared to what has happened since. Now there is such mortal fear of infection that we should leave the sick to suffer, just as if we were barbarians. You know those new hospital trains that were started to take patients from the hospitals down to the health resorts. Well, they will not run after all, it seems, because by merely taking an invalid of any sort through the open country we could poison the four winds of heaven. If this nonsense goes on, I will go as mad as Hilary himself.”

Hilary Pierce had arrived during this conversation and sat listening to it with a rather curious smile. Somehow the more Hood looked at that smile the more it puzzled him; it puzzled him as much as the newspaper article in his hand. He caught himself looking from one to the other, and Pierce smiled in a still more irritating manner.

“You don’t look so fierce and fanatical as when we last met, my young friend,” remarked Owen Hood. “Have you got tired of pigs and police-courts? These new laws the Colonel’s talking about would have roused you to lift the roof off at once.”

“Oh, I’m all against the new rules,” answered the young man coolly. “I’ve been very much against them. In fact, I’ve already broken all those new laws and a few more. Could you let me look at that article for a moment?”

Hood handed it to him and he nodded, saying:

“Yes; I was arrested for that.”

“Arrested for what?”

“Arrested for being a rich and respectable old lady,” answered Hilary Pierce; “but I managed to escape that time. It was a fine sight to see the old lady jump over a hedge and run across a field.”

Hood looked at him under his low eye-brows and his mouth began to work.

“But what’s all this about the old lady having a pug or a pet or something?”

“Well, it was very nearly a pug,” said Pierce calmly. “I pointed out to everybody that it was, as it were, almost a pug. I asked if it was just to punish me for a small mistake in spelling.”

“I begin to understand,” said Hood. “You were again smuggling pigs down to your precious Blue Boar, and thought you could break the enemy lines in very rapid cars.”

“Yes,” replied the smuggler happily. “We were quite literally Road-Pigs. I thought at first about dressing the pigs up as millionaires and members of Parliament; but when you come to look close, there’s more difference than you would imagine. It was great fun when they forced me to take my pet out of all the shawls, and they found what a large pet it was.”

“And do I understand,” cut in the Colonel, “that it was something like that – with the other laws?”

“The other laws,” said Pierce, “are certainly irrational, but you do not altogether do them justice. You do not quite understand their motive. You do not fully realise their origins. I may say with modesty, I believe that I was their origin. I not only had the pleasure of breaking those laws, but the pleasure of making them.”

“More of your tricks, you mean,” said the Colonel; “but why don’t the newspapers say so?”

“The authorities don’t want them to,” answered Pierce. “The authorities won’t advertise me, you bet. I’ve got far too much popular support for that. When the real revolution happens, it won’t be mentioned in the newspapers.”

He paused a moment in meditation and then went on.

“When the police searched for my pug and found it was a pig, I started wondering how they could be stopped from doing it again. I thought that they might not want to touch a wild pig or a pug that bit them. So, of course, I travelled the next time with dreadfully dangerous animals in cages, warning everybody of the angriest tigers and panthers that were ever known. When they found out what the tigers really were, they didn’t want to make this information public, so they could only fall back on their own stupid idea of a total prohibition. Of course, it was the same with my other idea, about the sick people going to health resorts to be cured of various fashionable and aristocratic illnesses. The pigs spent some time as aristocrats and rich people in beautifully decorated railway carriages with hospital nurses to take care of them; while I stood outside and told the railway officials that the best treatment for the patients was rest, and they must not be disturbed for any reason.”

“What a liar you are!” exclaimed Hood in simple admiration.

“Not at all,” said Pierce with dignity. “It was quite true that they were going to be cured.”

Crane, who had been staring rather absentmindedly out of the window, slowly turned his head and said:“And how’s it going to end? Do you propose to go on doing all these impossible things?”

Pierce jumped on his feet with the same romantic enthusiasm that he had when he made his vow over the pig-sty.

“Impossible!” he cried. “You don’t know what you’re saying or how true it is. All I’ve done so far was possible and prosaic. But I will do an impossible thing. I will do something that is written in all books and poems as impossible – something that has become a proverb about impossible things. The war is not ended yet; and if you two fellows will position yourselves on the hill opposite the Blue Boar, next Thursday at sunset, you will see something so impossible and so self-evident that even the newspapers will find it hard to hide it.”

A week later two gentlemen of something more than middle age who had not altogether lost the appetite for adventure positioned themselves under the roof of pine on the top of the hill with all the preparations for a picnic. It was from that place, like from a window looking across the valley, that they saw what looked more like a vision; what looked indeed rather like the parody of an apocalypse. The sky in the west was the colour of a lemon, pale yellow and pale green, while one or two small clouds on the horizon were of a rose-red and even richer colours. But the settling sun itself was a cloudless fire, so that a brownish light lay over the whole landscape. The inn of the Blue Boar standing opposite looked almost like a house of gold. Owen Hood was looking in his dreamy manner, and said at last:

“There’s an apocalyptic sign in heaven for you to start with. It’s strange, but that cloud coming up the valley looks very much like a pig.”

“Like a whale,” said Colonel Crane, yawning slightly; but when he turned his eyes in that direction, he saw that the object in question was too solid for a cloud.

“That’s not a cloud,” he said, “it’s a Zeppelin or something.”

The solid shape grew larger and larger; and as it became more obvious it became more incredible.

“Saints and angels!” cried Hood suddenly. “Why, it IS a pig!”

“It’s shaped like a pig all right,” said the Colonel quickly; and indeed as the great balloon came closer and closer, they could see that the long sausage-shaped Zeppelin body of it had been fantastically decorated with hanging ears and legs, to complete that pantomimic resemblance.

“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.”

“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,” he cried in lyric ecstasy. “I have finished the quest. I have made the Hampshire Pig as legendary as the Calydonian Boar. 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.”

“What was the change?” asked the Colonel.

“Old Oates has gone into another business,” answered Pierce quietly.

“What on earth has old Oates got to do with it?” asked Hood staring. “Do you mean that American who came to see the mediaeval churches?”

“Oh, I know,” said Pierce in a tired voice, “I thought he had nothing to do with it; I thought it was the vegetarians, and the rest; but they’re very innocent instruments. The truth is that Enoch Oates is the biggest exporter of pigs in the world, and HE didn’t want any competition from our farmers. And what he wants happens, as he would say. Now, thank God, he’s moved into another business.”

But if the reader wishes to know what was the new line of business Mr. Oates followed and why, he will have to wait for the story of the Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates. These stories are about the world upside down, and they should be told backwards.