“No,” said the other, “no. It is just a game. In England we not only like to play games, but to see them played.”
It was then that the stranger noticed Blackheath. “Ah, now I have you!” he cried. “Here is another field and another crowd; but this is surely a battle. See how they dash at each other. And yes, look, one of them has had his head cut off and the other kicks it. Splendid!”
“No,” said the other, “that is no head, that is a ball. Just a ball. It is a game, like the others.”
He groaned. “Then I cannot see,” he said at last, “how England won her victories and became supreme.”
“Ah,” said the other, “at the time that England was winning her victories and climbing into supremacy, the ball was not her master.”
Four Fables
I.—The Stopped Clock
Once upon a time there was a discredited politician whose nostrums no longer took any one in. And being thrown out of office he wandered about, seeking, like many men before him, for comfort and consolation among his inferiors. These, however, failing him, he passed on to the lower animals, and from them to the inanimate, until he came one day to a clock which, the works having been removed, consisted only of a case, a face, and two hands.
“Ha,” said the politician, as he stood before it, “at last I have found something beyond question and argument more useless than myself. For you, my friend, are done. I, at any rate, still have life and movement. I can speak and act; I have a function still to perform in the world; whereas you are a mockery and a sham.”