TO W. R. TITTERTON MY DEAR TITTERTON, This parable for social reformers, as you know, was planned and partly written long before the War; so that touching some things, from Fascism to nigger dances, it was a quite unintentional prophecy. It was your too generous confidence that dragged it from its dusty drawer; whether the world has any reason to thank you I doubt; but I have so many reasons for thanking you, and recognising all you have done for our cause, that I dedicate this book to you. Yours always, G. K. CHESTERTON
CHAPTER I
A HOLE IN THE CASTE
The end of the longest room at Seawood Abbey was full of light; for the walls were almost made of windows and it projected upon a terraced part of the garden above the park on an almost cloudless morning. Murrel, called Monkey for some reason that everybody had forgotten, and Olive Ashley were taking advantage of the light to occupy themselves with painting; though she was painting on a very small scale and he on a very large one. She was laying out peculiar pigments very carefully, in imitation of the flat jewellery of medieval illumination, for which she had a great enthusiasm, as part of a rather vague notion of a historic past. He, on the other hand, was highly modern, and was occupied with several pails full of very crude colours and with brushes which reached the stature of brooms. With these he was laying about him on large sheets of lath and canvas, which were to act as scenery in some private theatricals then in preparation. They could not paint, either of them; nor did they imagine that they could. But she was in some sense trying to do so; and he was not.
“It’s all very well for you to talk about discords,” he was saying somewhat defensively, for she was a critical lady, “but your style of painting narrows the mind. After all, scene-painting is only illumination seen through a microscope.”
“I hate microscopes,” she observed briefly.
“Well, you look as if you wanted one, poring over that stuff,” replied her companion, “in fact I fancy I have seen people screwing a great thing in their eye while they did it. I hope you won’t go so far as that: it wouldn’t suit your style at all.”
This was true enough, no doubt, for she was a small, slight girl, with dark delicate features of the kind called regular; and her dark green dress, which was aesthetic but the reverse of Bohemian, had something akin to the small severities of her task. There was something a shade old maidish about her gestures, although she was very young. It was noticeable that though the room was strewn with papers and dusters and the flamboyant failures of Mr. Murrel’s art, her own flat colour-box, with its case and minor accessories, were placed about her with protective neatness. She was not one of those for whom is written the paper of warnings sometimes sold with paint-boxes; and it had never been necessary to adjure her not to put the brush in the mouth.
“What I mean,” she said, resuming the subject of microscopes, “is that all your science and modern stuff has only made things ugly, and people ugly as well. I don’t want to look down a microscope any more than down a drain. You only see a lot of horrid little things crawling about. I don’t want to look down at all. That’s why I like all this old Gothic painting and building; in Gothic all the lines go upwards, right up to the very spire that points to heaven.”
“It’s rude to the point,” said Murrel, “and I think they might have given us credit for noticing the sky.”