“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 been talking 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 he shall yet return as a wild boar that will rend the hunters.�
He looked up and his eye caught the blue heraldic shape on the sign-board of the inn.
“And there is our wooden ensign!� he cried, pointing in the same dramatic fashion. “We will go into battle under the banner of the Blue Boar.�
“Loud and prolonged cheers,� said Crane politely, “and now come away and don’t spoil the peroration. Owen wants to potter about the local antiquities, like Mr. Oates. I’m more interested in novelties. Want to look at that machine of yours.�
They began to descend the zig-zag pebbled path fenced and embanked with hedges and flower-beds like a garden grown on a staircase, and at every corner Hood had to remonstrate with the loitering youth.
“Don’t be for ever gazing back on the paradise of pigs,� he said, “or you’ll be turned to a pillar of salt, or possibly of mustard as more appropriate to such meat. They won’t run away yet. There are other creatures formed by the Creator for the contemplation of man; there are other things made by man after the pattern of the creatures, from the great White Horses of Wessex to that great white bird on which you yourself flew among the birds. Fine subject for a poem of the first and last things.�