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there must be something wrong somewhere?"
"Well," said Oates after a very long silence, "that's a mighty big
question and will take a lot of discussing."
But the end to which their discussion led must be left to reveal
itself when the prostrate reader has recovered sufficient strength
to support the story of The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green,
which those who would endure to the end may read at some later date.
Chapter VI
THE UNTHINKABLE THEORY OF PROFESSOR GREEN
If the present passage in the chronicles of the Long Bow seem but
a side issue, an interlude and an idyll, a mere romantic episode
lacking that larger structural achievement which gives solidity
and hard actuality to the other stories, the reader is requested
not to be hasty in his condemnation; for in the little love-story
of Mr. Oliver Green is to be found, as in a parable, the beginning
of the final apotheosis and last judgement of all these things.
It may well begin on a morning when the sunlight came late
but brilliant, under the lifting of great clouds from a great grey
sweep of wolds that grew purple as they dipped again into distance.
Much of that mighty shape was striped and scored with ploughed fields,
but a rude path ran across it, along which two figures could
be seen in full stride outlined against the morning sky.
They were both tall; but beyond the fact that they had both once
been professional soldiers, of rather different types and times,
they had very little in common. By their ages they might almost
have been father and son; and this would not have been contradicted
by the fact that the younger appeared to be talking all the time,
in a high, confident and almost crowing voice, while the elder
only now and then put in a word. But they were not father and son;
strangely enough they were really talking and walking together
because they were friends. Those who know only too well their
proceedings as narrated elsewhere would have recognized Colonel Crane,
once of the Coldstream Guards, and Captain Pierce, late of the
Flying Corps.
The young man appeared to be talking triumphantly about a great
American capitalist whom he professed to have persuaded to see
the error of his ways. He talked rather as if he had been slumming.
"I'm very proud of it, I can tell you," he said. "Anybody can
produce a penitent murderer. It's something to produce a
penitent millionaire. And I do believe that poor Enoch Oates
has seen the light (thanks to my conversations at lunch);
since I talked to him, Oates is another and a better man."
"Sown his wild oats, in fact," remarked Crane.
"Well," replied the other. "In a sense they were very quiet oats.
Almost what you might call Quaker Oats. He was a Puritan and a
Prohibitionist and a Pacifist and an Internationalist; in short,
everything that is in darkness and the shadow of death. But what you
said about him was quite right. His heart's in the right place.
It's on his sleeve. That's why I preached the gospel to the noble
savage and made him a convert."
"But what did you convert him to?" inquired the other.
"Private property," replied Pierce promptly. "Being a millionaire
he had never heard of it. But when I explained the first elementary
idea of it in a simple form, he was quite taken with the notion.
I pointed out that he might abandon robbery on a large scale and
create property on a small scale. He felt it was very revolutionary,
but he admitted it was right. Well, you know, he'd bought this big
English estate out here. He was going to play the philanthropist,
and have a model estate with all the regular trimmings; heads hygienically
shaved by machinery every morning; and the cottagers admitted once
a month into their own front gardens and told to keep off the grass.
But I said to him: 'If you're going to give things to people,
why not give 'em? If you give your friend a plant in a pot,
you don't send him an inspector from the Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Vegetables to see he waters it properly. If you give
your friend a box of cigars, you don't make him write a monthly
report of how many he smokes a day. Can't you be a little generous
with your generosity? Why don't you use your money to make free
men instead of to make slaves? Why don't you give your tenants
their land and have done with it, or let 'em have it very cheap?'
And he's done it; he's really done it. He's created hundreds
of small proprietors, and changed the whole of this countryside.
That's why I want you to come up and see one of the small farms."
"Yes," said Colonel Crane, "I should like to see the farm."
"There's a lot of fuss about it, too; there's the devil of a row,"
went on the young man, in very high spirits. "Lots of big combines
and things are trying to crush the small farmers with all sorts
of tricks; they even complain of interference by an American.
You can imagine how much Rosenbaum Low and Goldstein and Guggenheimer
must be distressed by the notion of a foreigner interfering in England.
I want to know how a foreigner could interfere less than by giving
back their land to the English people and clearing out. They all put
it on to me; and right they are. I regard Oates as my property;
my convert; captive of my bow and spear."
"Captive of your long bow, I imagine," said the Colonel. "I bet
you told him a good many things that nobody but a shrewd business
man would have been innocent enough to believe."
"If I use the long bow," replied Pierce with dignity, "it is
a weapon with heroic memories proper to a yeoman of England.
With what more fitting weapon could we try to establish a yeomanry?"
"There is something over there," said Colonel quietly, "that looks
to me rather like another sort of weapon."
They had by this time come in full sight of the farm buildings
which crowned the long slope; and beyond a kitchen-garden
and an orchard rose a thatched roof with a row of old-fashioned
lattice windows under it; the window at the end standing open.
And out of this window at the edge of the block of building
protruded a big black object, rigid and apparently cylindrical,
thrust out above the garden and dark against the morning daylight.
"A gun!" cried Pierce involuntarily; "looks just like a howitzer;
or is it an anti-aircraft gun?"
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