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Audrey Smith was standing not so very many yards away, because he had followed his elder guest for only a few steps towards the gate. Yet her figure had fallen back far enough to be surrounded by the green framework of the garden. Her dress looked almost blue with a shade of distance. And when she spoke to him, even from that little way off, her voice sounded to him like the voice of someone shouting familiarly and from afar, like you call to an old friend. It made him emotional in a disproportionate way, though all that she said was:
“What became of your old hat?”
“I lost it,” he answered gravely, “obviously I had to lose it. I believe the scarecrow found it.”
“Oh, let’s go and look at the scarecrow, please,” she cried.
He led her without a word to the kitchen-garden and gravely explained each of its outstanding features; from the serious Mr. Archer resting on his spade to the grotesque Oceanic island god grinning at the corner of the plot. He spoke more and more solemnly and used too many words, and all the time knew little or nothing of what he said.
At last she cut into his monologue so suddenly that it was almost rude; yet her brown eyes were bright and her sympathy undisguised.
“Don’t talk about it,” she cried with illogical enthusiasm. “It looks as if we were really right in the middle of the country. It’s as unique as the Garden of Eden. It’s simply the most delightful place – ”
It was at this moment, for some unknown reason, that the Colonel who had lost his hat suddenly decided to lose his head. Standing in that grotesque vegetable scenery, a black and stiff yet somehow majestic figure, he offered the lady in the most traditional manner everything he had, not forgetting the scarecrow or the cabbages.
“When I think of the people who live on this piece of land – ” he concluded. “Well, there they are; a scarecrow and a cannibal fetish and a stupid man who is stuck on a road of respectability and conventional ways.”
“Very conventional,” she said, “especially in his taste in hats.”
“That was the exception, I’m afraid,” he said honestly. “You’d find those things very rare and most things very boring. I couldn’t avoid falling in love with you; but we still are in different worlds; and you belong in a younger world, which says what it thinks, and cannot see what most of our silences meant.”
“I suppose we are very rude,” she said thoughtfully, “and you must certainly excuse me if I do say what I think.”
“I deserve no better,” he replied mournfully.
“Well, I think I must be in love with you too,” she replied calmly. “I don’t see what time has to do with being fond of people. You are the most original person I ever knew.”
“My dear, my dear,” he protested almost brokenly, “I fear you are making a mistake. Whatever else I am, I never wanted to be original.”
“You must remember,” she replied, “that I have known very many people who did decide to be original. Any Art School is full of them; and there are any number among those socialist and vegetarian friends of mine you were talking about. It would be no problem for them to wear cabbages on their heads, of course. Any one of them would be capable of getting inside a pumpkin if he could. Any one of them might appear in public dressed entirely in salad leaves. But that’s just it. They go with the stream. They do those things because those things are done; because they are done in their own Bohemian society. Unconventionality is their convention. I don’t mind it myself; I think it’s great fun; but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know real strength or independence when I see it. All that is just formless; but the really strong man is one who can create a convention and then break it. When a man like you can suddenly do a thing like that, after twenty years of habit, for the sake of his word, then somehow you really feel that man is a man and master of his fate.”
“I doubt if I am master of my fate,” replied Crane, “and I do not know whether I ceased to be yesterday or two minutes ago.”
He stood there for a moment like a knight in heavy armour. Indeed, the old image is appropriate here in more ways than one. The new world within him was so alien from the whole habit in which he lived, even from the way he walked and gestures he made every day for countless days, that his spirit had to fight before it broke its shell. But it was also true that even if he could have done what every man wishes to do at such a moment, something supreme and satisfying, it would have been something in a way formal or it would not have satisfied him.
He was one of those to whom it is natural to be ceremonial. Even the music in his mind, too deep and distant for him to catch and sing, was the music of old and ritual dance and not for a party. And it was not an accident that he had built step by step around him that garden of the grey stone fountain and the hedge. He bent suddenly and kissed her hand.
“I like that,” she said. “You also need a wig and a sword.”
“I apologize,” he said gravely, “no modern man is worthy of you. But indeed I fear, in every sense I am not a very modern man.”
“You must never wear that hat again,” she said, pointing at the crushed original top-hat.
“To tell the truth,” he remarked calmly, “I had no intention of returning to that one.”
“Silly,” she said, “I don’t mean that hat; I mean that sort of hat. As a matter of fact, there couldn’t be a finer hat than the cabbage.”
“My dear – ” he protested; but she was looking at him quite seriously.
“I am an artist, and don’t know much about literature,” she said. “Well, do you know, it really does make a difference. People who love literature often let words get between them and things. We at least look at the things and not the names of the things. You think a cabbage is funny because the name sounds funny and even vulgar; something between ‘cab’ and ‘garbage,’ I suppose. But a cabbage isn’t really funny or vulgar. You wouldn’t think that way if you simply had to paint it. Haven’t you seen Dutch and Flemish galleries, and don’t you know what great men painted cabbages? What they saw was certain lines and colours; very wonderful lines and colours.”
“It may be all very well in a picture,” he began doubtfully.
She suddenly laughed aloud.
“You idiot,” she cried; “don’t you know you looked perfectly splendid? The curves were like a great turban of leaves and the root rose like the top of a helmet; it was rather like the turbaned helmets on some of Rembrandt’s figures, with the face like bronze in the shadows of green and purple. That’s the sort of thing artists can see, who keep their eyes and heads clear of words! And then you want to apologize for not wearing that stupid black pipe, when you went about wearing a coloured crown like a king. And you were like a king in this country – they were all afraid of you.”
He continued a faint protest, and she laughed louder. “If you’d stuck to it a little longer, I swear they’d all have started wearing vegetables for hats. I swear I saw my cousin the other day standing with some sort of a garden instrument and looking indecisively at a cabbage.”
Then, after a pause, she said with a beautiful irrelevancy:“What was it Mr. Hood did that you said he couldn’t do?”
But these are upside-down stories, so they have to be told back to front. And if the reader wants to know the answer, the next story awaits him.
Chapter II. The improbable success of mr. Owen hood
Heroes who have managed to read to the end the story of The Unpresentable Appearance of Colonel Crane know that his achievement was the first of a series of things, which we call impossible, like the quests of the Arthurian knights. For the purpose of this story it is enough to say that he was long known and respected, before his last escapade, as a retired military man in Surrey, with a tanned face and an interest in the mythology of Oceania. As a fact, however, he had gathered the tan and the Oceanic myths some time before he had managed to collect the respectability and the suburban myths. In his early youth he had been a restless traveler. He belonged to a club of young men, who were all eccentrics of one kind or another. Some had extreme revolutionary and some extreme reactionary opinions, and some both. Mr. Robert Owen Hood, who is the hero of this story, belonged to the last group.
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.
He shared Hood’s admiration for the local landscape, and said it was so beautiful because of how the family looked after Marley Court.
“It’s land-owners like that,” he said, “who have created England. The Radicals can say whatever they want; but where would we be without the land-owners?”
“Oh, I’m all in favour of land-owners,” said Hood in a tired voice. “I like them so much I would like more of them. More and more land-owners. Hundreds and thousands of them.”
We cannot be sure that Dr. Hunter quite understood his enthusiasm, or even his meaning; but Hood had reason later to remember this little conversation; as far as he was in a mood to remember any conversations except one.
All through the years when he felt his first youth was passing, and even when he seemed to be drifting towards middle age, he haunted that valley like a ghost, waiting for something that never came again. It is by no means certain, that he even expected it to come again. Somehow it seemed too like a miracle for that. Only this place had become the temple of the miracle; and he felt that if anything ever did happen there, he must be there to see. And so it came about that he was there to see when things did happen; and rather strange things had happened before the end.
One morning he saw an extraordinary thing. That indeed would not have seemed extraordinary to most people; but it was quite apocalyptic to him. A dusty man came out of the woods carrying what looked like dusty pieces of wood, and built on the bank what turned out to be a sort of a very large wooden notice-board. The message in enormous letters said:“To Be Sold,” with remarks in smaller letters about the land and the name of the land agents. For the first time in years Owen Hood stood up in his place and left his fishing, and shouted questions across the river. The man answered with the greatest patience and good-humour; but it is probable that he went away convinced that he had been talking to a madman who escaped from a hospital.
That was the beginning of what was for Owen Hood a nightmare. The change came slowly, year after year, but it seemed to him that he was helpless and paralysed, exactly like a man is paralysed in an actual nightmare. He laughed with an almost horrible laughter to think that a man in a modern society is supposed to be master of his fate and free to follow his pleasures; when he had not power to prevent the daylight he looks on from being darkened, or the air he breathes from being turned to poison, or the silence that is his full possession from being shaken with the cacophony of hell. There was something, he thought grimly, in Dr. Hunter’s simple admiration for agricultural aristocracy. There was something in quite primitive and even barbarous aristocracy. Feudal lords fought every day of the week; they put collars round the necks of some serfs; they occasionally hanged a few of them by the neck. But they did not wage war day and night against the five senses of man.
There had appeared first on the river-bank small wooden buildings, for workmen who seemed to be occupied in putting up bigger wooden buildings. To the last moment, when the factory was finished, it was not easy for the traditional eye to see what was temporary and what was permanent.
It did not look as if any of it could be permanent. Anyway the structure grew and grew until there stood on the river bank a great black block of buildings with a tall brick factory chimney, from which a stream of smoke rose into the silent sky. A heap of some sort of rubbish lay on the bank of the river; and an iron piece, red with rust, fell on the spot where the girl stood when she brought bluebells out of the wood.
He did not leave his island. He loved the country and he loved to sit still, but he was not the son of an old revolutionary for nothing. It was not for nothing that his father had called him Robert Owen or that his friends had sometimes called him Robin Hood. Sometimes, indeed, he felt so sad that he was almost thinking about suicide, but more often he marched up and down like a soldier, happy to see the tall wild-flowers waving on the banks like flags so close to what he hated, and muttering, “Hang out the banners on the outward wall.”[17] He had already, when the land of Marley Court was divided for building, taken some steps to establish himself on the island. He had built a sort of hut there, in which it was possible to picnic for long periods.
One morning when dawn was still bright behind the dark factory something like a growing ribbon of a different colour and material crept out upon the satin water of the river. It was a thin ribbon of some liquid that did not mix with the water, but lay on top of it wavering like a worm. Owen Hood watched it as a man watches a snake. It looked like a snake, with mixed colours not without some beauty. But to him it was a very symbolic snake; like the snake that destroyed Eden. A few days afterward there were ten snakes covering the surface; little oily rivers that moved on the river but did not mix with it. Later there came darker liquids with no pretensions to beauty, black and brown flakes of grease that floated heavily.
It was highly characteristic of Hood that until the last moment he was unsure what the factory was for. So he didn’t know what kind of chemicals were flowing into the river. He saw that they were mostly of the oily sort and floated on the water in flakes and lumps. A big part of it was something like petrol, which was used perhaps not for power but as material. He had heard a rumour in the village that the factory produced some kind of hair-dye. It smelled rather like a soap factory. As far as he understood, the factory’s product was a combination of hair-dye and soap, some kind of new and very hygienic cosmetics. These things had become even more fashionable since Professor Hake had written his book proving that cosmetics were of all things the most hygienic. And Hood had seen many of the fields of his childhood now decorated with large notice-boards with a phrase “Why Grow Old?” and a portrait of a young woman grinning in a strange manner. The name on the notices was Bliss, and he understood that it all was connected with the great factory.
He decided to learn a little more than this. He began to make inquiries and complaints, and participated in a correspondence which ended in an actual interview with some of the most important people involved in this matter. The correspondence had gone on for a long time before it even came near to anything as natural as that. Indeed, the correspondence for a long time was entirely on his side. The big businesses are not businesslike at all – just like the Government departments. They are not any more effective and their manners are much worse. But in the end he had his interview, and with a sense of bitter amusement he came face to face with four people who he wanted to meet.
One was Sir Samuel Bliss. He was a small, quick man like a ferret, with grey beard and hair, and active or even nervous movements. The second was his manager, Mr. Low, a strong, dark man with a thick nose and thick rings, who stared at strangers with a curious heavy suspicion. It is believed that he expected to be attacked. The third man was a surprise, because he was no other than his old friend Dr. Horace Hunter, as healthy and cheerful as ever, but even better dressed (now he had a great official appointment as medical inspector of the sanitary conditions of the district). But the fourth man was the greatest surprise of all. Their conference was honoured by so great a figure in the scientific world as Professor Hake himself, who had revolutionized the modern mind with his new discoveries about the importance of hair-dye for a healthy lifestyle. When Hood realized who he was, a light of understanding came upon his long face.
On this occasion the Professor developed an even more interesting theory. He was a big, blond man with blinking eyes and a bull neck; and doubtless there was more in him than met the eye, which is usual with great men. He spoke last, and he spoke about his theory as if it were the final truth. The manager had already stated that it was quite impossible that a large amount of petrol had escaped, because only a small amount was used in the factory. Sir Samuel had explained, in an irritated manner, that he had built several parks for the public, and that the dormitories of his work-people were decorated in the simplest and best taste, and nobody could accuse him of vandalism or not caring for beauty and all that. Then it was that Professor Hake explained the theory of the Protective Screen. Even if it were possible, he said, for some thin film of petrol to appear on the water, because it would not mix with the water, the water would actually be kept in a clearer condition. It would become a protective screen; like a plastic package upon some preserved food.
“That is a very interesting view,” remarked Hood; “I suppose you will write another book about that?”
“I think we should feel privileged,” remarked Bliss, “because we are the first people to hear of the discovery, before our expert has published it for everybody else.”
“Yes,” said Hood, “your expert is very expert, isn’t he – in writing books?”
Sir Samuel Bliss’s face became angry. “I trust,” he said, “you do not doubt that our expert is an expert.”
“I have no doubt of your expert,” answered Hood gravely. “I do not doubt either that he is expert or that he is yours.”
“Really, gentlemen,” cried Bliss in protest, “I think no one can say such things about a man in Professor Hake’s position – ”
“Not at all, not at all,” said Hood in a friendly manner, “I’m sure it’s a very comfortable position.”
The Professor blinked at him, but a light burned in the eyes under the heavy eyelids.
“If you come here talking like that – “he began, when Hood cut off his speech by speaking across him to somebody else, with a cheerful rudeness that felt like a kick.
“And what do you say, my dear doctor?” he said to Hunter. “You used to be almost as romantic as myself about the beauty of this place. Do you remember how much you admired the landlords for keeping the place quiet; and how you said the old families preserved the beauty of old England?”
There was a silence, and then the young doctor spoke.
“Well, it doesn’t mean I can’t believe in progress. That’s your problem, Hood; you don’t believe in progress. We must move with the times, and somebody always has to suffer. Besides, the river-water is not so important nowadays. Even the Thames is not so important. When we have the new law, people will have to use the Bulton Filter in any case.”
“I see,” said Hood calmly, “You first make the water dirty for money, and then you try to look good when you force people to clean it themselves.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Hunter angrily.
“Well, I was thinking at the moment,” said Hood. “I was thinking about Mr. Bulton. The man who owns the filters. I was wondering whether he might join us. We seem such a happy family party.”
“I cannot see why we should continue this impossible conversation,” said Sir Samuel.
“Don’t call the poor Professor’s theory impossible,” protested Hood. “A little unusual, perhaps. And as for the doctor’s view, surely there’s nothing impossible in that. You don’t think the chemicals will poison all the fish I catch, do you, Doctor?”
“No, of course not,” replied Hunter quickly.
“They will adapt themselves by natural selection,” said Hood dreamily. “They will develop organs suitable to an oily environment – will learn to love petrol.”
“Oh, I have no time for this nonsense,” said Hunter, and he was turning to go, when Hood stepped in front of him and looked at him very steadily.
“You mustn’t call natural selection nonsense,” he said. “I know all about that, at any rate. I can’t tell whether liquids that are spilt on the shore will fall into the river, because I don’t understand hydraulics. I don’t know whether your machinery makes a hellish noise every morning, because I’ve never studied acoustics[18]. I don’t know whether it stinks or not, because I haven’t read your expert’s book on ‘The Nose’. But I know all about adaptation to environment. I know that some of the lower organisms do really change with their changing conditions. I know there are creatures so low that they do survive by surrendering to every kind of mud; and when things are slow they are slow, and when things are fast they are fast, and when things are filthy they are filthy. Thank you for convincing me of that.”
He did not wait for a reply, but walked out of the room after bowing quickly to the rest; and that was the end of the great conference on the question of fisherman’s rights and perhaps the end of the Thames and of the old aristocracy, with all its good and ill.
The general public never heard very much about it; at least until one catastrophic scene which followed. There was some weak echo of the question some months later, when Dr. Horace Hunter decided to go to Parliament. One or two questions were asked about his duties in relation to river pollution; but it was soon clear that no party actually wanted to push the question against the best opinions expressed by their opponents. The greatest living authority on hygiene, Professor Hake, had actually written to The Times (in the interests of science) to say that in such a hypothetical case as this, a medical man could only do what Dr. Hunter had done. It so happened that the most important business in that part of the Thames Valley, Sir Samuel Bliss, had himself, after some serious consideration of different policies, decided to Vote for Hunter. The great organizer’s own mind was rather abstract and philosophical in the matter; but it seems that his manager, a Mr. Low, had a more practical and pushing spirit. He warmly invited his employees to vote for Hunter, pointed out to them the many practical advantages they would gain if they voted for the doctor, and the even more practical disadvantages they might suffer if they didn’t. So it followed that the blue ribbons, which were the local badges of the Hunterians, were not only attached to the iron railings and wooden posts of the factory, but to various human figures, known as “hands,” which moved in it.
Hood took no interest in the election; but while it was proceeding he followed the matter a little further in another form. He was a lawyer, a lazy, but in some ways a good one; because he enjoyed studying and so he had originally learned the trade he had never used. More in protest than in hope, he once carried the matter into the Courts, defending his cause on the basis of a law of Henry the Third[19] against frightening the fish of the King’s servants in the Thames Valley. The judge complimented him on his erudition and logic, but rejected his appeal while demonstrating his own erudition and logic. His lordship argued that no test was provided to measure the degree of fear in the fish, or whether it was that serious fear which was important for the law. But the great judge pointed out the precedent of a law of Richard the Second[20] against certain witches who had frightened children; in which case the child “must return and of his own will testify to his fear.” It did not seem that any one of the fish in question had returned and gave any such testimony to any proper authority. So the judge chose in favour of the defendants. And when the learned judge happened to meet Sir Samuel Bliss at dinner that evening, he was congratulated on his clear judgement. Indeed, the great judge had really enjoyed the logic both of his own and Hood’s arguments; but the conclusion was inevitable. For our judges are not stopped by any old code; they are progressive, like Dr. Hunter, and make friends only with the progressive forces of the age, especially those they will probably meet at a dinner party.
But it was this short law case that led to something much more important for Mr. Owen Hood. He had just left the courts, and turned down the street that led in the direction of the station, he was walking in that direction in his usual brown coat. The streets were filled with faces; it struck him for the first time that there were thousands and thousands of people in the world. There were even more faces at the railway station, and then, when he looked at four or five of them, he saw one that was to him as incredible as the face of the dead.
She was coming out of the tea-room, carrying a handbag, just like anybody else. That mystical quality of his mind had fixed his sacred dream in its original colours. No detail could be changed without the vision dissolving. It was impossible for him that she could appear in anything but white or come out of anything but a wood. And he found himself turned upside-down by the fact that blue suited her as well as white. She did not come out of the wood, but even the teashops and the railway stations didn’t spoil the view.
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