“What who said when you said what?� asked Hood patiently.
“I mean that fellow Hunter,� replied the clergyman. “That varnished society doctor turned politician. Do you know what he said when I told him we would get our bows from God?�
Owen Hood paused in the act of lighting a cigar.
“Yes,� he said grimly. “I believe I can tell you exactly what he said. I’ve watched him off and on for twenty years. I bet he began by saying: ‘I don’t profess to be a religious man.’�
“Right, quite right,� cried the cleric bounding upon his chair in a joyous manner, “that’s exactly how he began. ‘I don’t profess to be a religious man, but I trust I have some reverence and good taste. I don’t drag religion into politics.’ And I said: ‘No, I don’t think you do.’�
A moment after, he bounded, as it were, in a new direction. “And that reminds me of what I came about,� he cried. “Enoch Oates, your American friend, drags religion into politics all right; only it’s a rather American sort of religion. He’s talking about a United States of Europe and wants to introduce you to a Lithuanian Prophet. It seems this Lithuanian party has started a movement for a Universal Peasant Republic or World State of Workers on the Land; but at present he’s only got as far as Lithuania. But he seems inclined to pick up England on the way, after the unexpected success of the English agrarian party.�
“What’s the good of talking to me about a World State,� growled Hood. “Didn’t I say I preferred a Heptarchy?�
“Don’t you understand?� interrupted Hilary Pierce excitedly. “What can we have to do with international republics? We can turn England upside-down if we like; but it’s England that we like, whichever way up. Why, our very names and phrases, the very bets and jokes in which the whole thing began, will never be translated. It takes an Englishman to eat his hat; I never heard of a Spaniard threatening to eat his sombrero, or a Chinaman to chew his pigtail. You can only set the Thames on fire; you cannot set the Tiber or the Ganges on fire, because the habit of speech has never been heard of. What’s the good of talking about white elephants in countries where they are only white elephants? Go and say to a Frenchman, ‘Pour mon château, je le trouve un elephant blanc’ and he will send two Parisian alienists to look at you seriously, like a man who says that his motor-car is a green giraffe. There is no point in telling Czecho-Slovakian pigs to fly, or Jugo-Slavonic cows to jump over the moon. Why, the unhappy Lithuanian would be bewildered to the point of madness by our very name. There is no reason to suppose that he and his countrymen talk about a Long Bowman when they mean a liar. We talk about tall stories, but a tall story may mean a true story in colloquial Lithuanian.�
“Tall stories are true stories sometimes, I hope,� said Colonel Crane, “and people don’t believe ’em. But people’ll say that was a very tall story about the tall trees throwing darts and stones. Afraid it’ll come to be a bit of a joke.�
“All our battles began as jokes and they will end as jokes,� said Owen Hood, staring at the smoke of his cigar as it threaded its way towards the sky in grey and silver arabesque. “They will linger only as faintly laughable legends, if they linger at all; they may pass an idle hour or fill an empty page; and even the man who tells them will not take them seriously. It will all end in smoke like the smoke I am looking at; in eddying and topsy-turvy patterns hovering for a moment in the air. And I wonder how many, who may smile or yawn over them, will realize that where there was smoke there was fire?�