He did not attempt to explain what was in his mind to the men around him. He was the only man there who understood that the England about him was not the England that had surrounded his youth and supported his leisure and luxury; that things were breaking up, first slowly and then more and more swiftly, and that the things detaching themselves were both good and evil. And one of them was this bald, broad and menacing new fact: a peasantry. The class of small farmers already existed, and might yet be found fighting for its farms like the same class all over the world. It was no longer certain that the sweeping social adjustments settled in that garden could be applied to the whole English land. But the story of how far his doubts were justified, and how far his whole project fared, is a part of the story of “The Ultimate Ultimatum of the League of the Long Bow,� after which the exhausted and broken-spirited reader may find rest at last.
VIII
THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM OF THE
LEAGUE OF THE LONG BOW
VIII
THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM OF THE
LEAGUE OF THE LONG BOW
MR. ROBERT OWEN HOOD came through his library that was lined with brown leather volumes with a brown paper parcel in his hand; a flippant person (such as his friend Mr. Pierce) might have said he was in a brown study. He came out into the sunlight of his garden, however, where his wife was arranging tea-things, for she was expecting visitors. Even in the strong daylight he looked strangely little altered, despite the long and catastrophic period that had passed since he met her in the Thames Valley and managed really to set the Thames on fire. That fire had since spread in space and time and become a conflagration in which much of modern civilization had been consumed; but in which (as its advocates alleged) English agriculture had been saved and a new and more hopeful chapter opened in English history. His angular face was rather more lined and wrinkled, but his straight shock of copper-coloured hair was as unchanged as if it had been a copper-coloured wig. His wife Elizabeth was even less marked, for she was younger; she had the same slightly nervous or short-sighted look in the eyes that was like a humanizing touch to her beauty made of ivory and gold. But though she was not old she had always been a little old-fashioned; for she came of a forgotten aristocracy whose women had moved with a certain gravity as well as grace about the old country houses, before coronets were sold like cabbages or the Jews lent money to the squires. But her husband was old-fashioned too; though he had just taken part in a successful revolution and bore a revolutionary name, he also had his prejudices; and one of them was a weakness for his wife being a lady—especially that lady.
“Owen,� she said, looking up from the tea-table with alarmed severity, “you’ve been buying more old books.�
“As it happens, these are particularly new books,� he replied; “but I suppose in one sense it’s all ancient history now.�
“What ancient history?� she asked. “Is it a History of Babylon or prehistoric China?�
“It is a History of Us.�
“I hope not,� she said; “but what do you mean?�
“I mean it’s a history of Our Revolution,� said Owen Hood, “a true and authentic account of the late glorious victories, as the old broadsheets said. The Great War of 1914 started the fashion of bringing out the history of events almost before they’d happened. There were standard histories of that war while it was still going on. Our little civil war is at least finished, thank God; and this is the brand-new history of it. Written by a rather clever fellow, detached but understanding and a little ironical on the right side. Above all, he gives quite a good description of the Battle of the Bows.�