“The cow never does jump over the moon,� said Blair gravely. “It’s one of the sports of the bulls of the herd.�
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,� said the Professor.
“I mean that women can’t be kept out of this war, because it’s a land war,� answered Blair. “If it were really a war in the air, you could have done it all by yourself. But in all wars of peasants defending their farms and homes, women have been very much on the spot; as they used to pour hot water out of the windows during the Irish evictions. Look here, I’ll tell you a story. It’s relevant because it has a moral. After all, it’s my turn, so to speak. You’ve told me the true story of the Cow that Jumped over the Moon. It’s time I told you the true story of the Castle in the Air.�
He smoked silently for a moment, and then said:
“You may have wondered how a very prosaic practical Scotch engineer like myself ever came to make a thing like that pantomime palace over there, as childish as a child’s coloured balloon. Well, the answer is the same; because in certain circumstances a man may be different from himself. At a certain period of the old war preparations, I was doing some work for the government in a secluded part of the western coast of Ireland. There were very few people for me to talk to; but one of them was the daughter of a bankrupt squire named Malone; and I talked to her a good deal. I was about as mechanical a mechanic as you could dig out anywhere; grimy, grumpy, tinkering about with dirty machinery. She was really like those princesses you read about in the Celtic poems; with a red crown made of curling elf-locks like little flames, and a pale elfin face that seemed somehow thin and luminous like glass; and she could make you listen to silence like a song. It wasn’t a pose with her, it was a poem; there are people like that, but very few of them like her. I tried to keep my end up by telling her about the wonders of science, and the great new architecture of the air. And then Sheila used to say, ‘And what is the good of them to me, when you have built them. I can see a castle build itself without hands out of gigantic rocks of clear jewels in the sky every night.’ And she would point to where crimson or violet clouds hung in the green afterglow over the great Atlantic.
“You would probably say I was mad, if you didn’t happen to have been mad yourself. But I was wild with the idea that there was something that she admired and that she thought science couldn’t do. I was as morbid as a boy; I half thought she despised me; and I wanted half to prove her wrong and half to do whatever she thought right. I resolved my science should beat the clouds at their own game; and I laboured till I’d actually made a sort of rainbow castle that would ride on the air. I think at the back of my mind there was some sort of crazy idea of carrying her off into the clouds she lived among, as if she were literally an angel and ought to dwell on wings. It never quite came to that, as you will hear, but as my experiments progressed my romance progressed too. You won’t need any telling about that; I only want to tell you the end of the story because of the moral. We made arrangements to get married; and I had to leave a good many of the arrangements to her, while I completed my great work. Then at last it was ready and I came to seek her like a pagan god descending in a cloud to carry a nymph up to Olympus. And I found she had already taken a very solid little brick villa on the edge of a town, having got it remarkably cheap and furnished it with most modern conveniences. And when I talked to her about castles in the air, she laughed and said her castle had come down to the ground. That is the moral. A woman, especially an Irishwoman, is always uncommonly practical when it comes to getting married. That is what I mean by saying it is never the cow who jumps over the moon. It is the cow who stands firmly planted in the middle of the three acres; and who always counts in any struggle of the land. That is why there must be women in this story, especially like those in your story and Pierce’s, women who come from the land. When the world needs a Crusade for communal ideals, it is best waged by men without ties, like the Franciscans. But when it comes to a fight for private property—you can’t keep women out of that. You can’t have the family farm without the family. You must have concrete Christian marriage again: you can’t have solid small property with all this vagabond polygamy: a harem that isn’t even a home.�
Green nodded and rose slowly to his feet, with his hands in his pockets.
“When it comes to a fight,� he said. “When I look at these enormous underground preparations, it is not difficult to infer that you think it will come to a fight.�
“I think it has come to a fight,� answered Blair. “Lord Eden has decided that. And the others may not understand exactly what they are doing; but he does.�
And Blair knocked out his pipe and stood up, to resume his work in that mountain laboratory, at about the same time at which Lord Eden awoke from his smiling meditations; and, lighting a cigarette, went languidly indoors.