The Burning Spear: Being the Experiences of Mr. John Lavender in the Time of War

And having rounded off his purpose with this lofty design, he went back to bed with his head lighter than a puff-ball.

XVII

ADDRESSES THE CLOUDS

On the morning following his resurrection Mr. Lavender set out very early for the celebrated flying ground without speaking of his intention to anyone. At the bottom of the hill he found to his annoyance that Blink had divined his purpose and was following. This, which compelled him to walk, greatly delayed his arrival. But chance now favoured him, for he found he was expected, and at once conducted to a machine which was about to rise. A taciturn young man, with a long jaw, and wings on his breast, was standing there gazing at it with an introspective eye.

“Ready, sir?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Mr. Lavender, enveloped to the eyes in a garment of fur and leather. “Will you kindly hold my dog?” he added, stroking Blink with the feeling that he was parting for ever with all that was most dear to him.

An attendant having taken hold of her by the collar, Mr. Lavender was heaved into the machine, where the young airman was already seated in front of him.

“Shall I feel sick?” asked Mr. Lavender.

“Probably,” said the young airman.

“That will not deter me, for the less material I become the better it will be.”

The young airman turned his head, and Mr. Lavender caught the surprised yellow of his eye.

“Hold on,” said the airman, “I’m going to touch her off.”

Mr. Lavender held on, and the machine moved but at this moment Blink, uttering a dismal howl, leapt forward, and, breaking from the attendant’s grasp, landed in the machine against Mr. Lavender’s chest.

“Stop! stop he cried!” my dog.

“Stuff her down,” said the unmoved airman, “between your legs. She’s not the first to go up and won’t be the last to come down.”

Mr. Lavender stuffed her down as best he could. “If we are to be killed,” he thought, “it will be together. Blink!” The faithful creature, who bitterly regretted her position now that the motion had begun, looked up with a darkened eye at Mr. Lavender, who was stopping his ears against the horrible noises which had now begun. He too, had become aware of the pit of his stomach; but this sensation soon passed away in the excitement he felt at getting away from the earth, for they were already at the height of a house, and rising rapidly.

“It is not at all like a little bird,” he thought, “but rather resembles a slow train on the surface of the sea, or a horse on a switchback merry-go-round. I feel, however, that my spirit will soon be free, for the earth is becoming like a board whereon a game is played by an unseen hand, and I am leaving it.” And craning his head out a little too far he felt his chin knock against his spine. Drawing it in with difficulty he concentrated his attention upon that purification of his spirit which was the object of his journey.

“I am now,” he thought, “in the transcendent ether. It should give me an amazing power of expression such as only the greatest writers and orators attain; and, divorced as I am rapidly becoming from all sordid reality, truth will appear to me like one of those stars towards which I am undoubtedly flying though I cannot as yet see it.”

Blink, who between his legs had hitherto been unconscious of their departure from the earth, now squirmed irresistibly up till her forepaws were on her master’s chest, and gazed lugubriously at the fearful prospect. Mr. Lavender clasped her convulsively. They were by now rapidly nearing a flock of heavenly sheep, which as they approached became ever more gigantic till they were transformed into monstrous snow-fleeces intersected by wide drifts of blue.

“Can it be that we are to adventure above them?” thought Mr. Lavender. “I hope not, for they seem to me fearful.” His alarm was soon appeased, for the machine began to take a level course a thousand feet, perhaps, below the clouds, whence little wraiths wandering out now and again dimmed Mr. Lavender’s vision and moistened his brow.

Blink having retired again between her master’s legs, a sense of security and exaltation was succeeding to the natural trepidation of Mr. Lavender’s mood. “I am now,” he thought, “lifted above all petty plots and passions on the wings of the morning. Soon will great thoughts begin to jostle in my head, and I shall see the truth of all things made clear at last.”

But the thoughts did not jostle, a curious lethargy began stealing over him instead, so that his head fell back, and his mouth fell open. This might have endured until he returned to earth had not the airman stopped the engines so that they drifted ruminantly in space below the clouds. With the cessation of the noise Mr. Lavender’s brain regained its activity, and he was enchanted to hear the voice of his pilot saying:

“How are you getting on, sir?”

“As regards the sensation,” Mr. Lavender replied, “it is marvellous, for after the first minute or two, during which the unwonted motion causes a certain inconvenience, one grasps at once the exhilaration and joy of this great adventure. To be in motion towards the spheres, and see the earth laid out like a chess-board below you; to feel the lithe creature beneath your body responding so freely to every call of its gallant young pilot; to be filled with the scream of the engines, as of an eagle at sport; to know that at the least aberration of the intrepid airman we should be dashed into a million pieces; all this is largely to experience an experience so unforgettable that one will never – er – er – forget it.”

“Gosh!” said the young airman.

“Yes,” pursued Mr. Lavender, who was now unconsciously reading himself in his morning’s paper, “one can only compare the emotion to that which the disembodied spirit might feel passing straight from earth to heaven. We saw at a great depth below us on a narrow white riband of road two crawling black specks, and knew that they were human beings, the same and no more than we had been before we left that great common place called Earth.”

“Gum!” said the young airman, as Lavender paused, “you’re getting it fine, sir! Where will it appear?”

“Those great fleecy beings the clouds,” went on Mr. Lavender, without taking on the interruption, “seemed to await our coming in the morning glory of their piled-up snows; and we, with the rarefied air in our lungs, felt that we must shout to them.” And so carried away was Mr. Lavender by his own style that he really did begin to address the clouds: “Ghosts of the sky, who creep cold about this wide blue air, we small adventuring mortals great-hearted salute you. Humbly proud of our daring have we come to sport with you and the winds of Ouranos, and, in the rapturous corridors between you, play hide-and seek, avoiding your glorious moisture with the dips and curves and skimming of our swallow flights – we, the little unconquerable Spirits of the Squirth!”

The surprise which Mr. Lavender felt at having uttered so peculiar a word, in the middle of such a flow of poetry reduced him to sudden silence.

“Golly!” said the airman with sudden alarm in his voice. “Hold tight!” And they began to shoot towards earth faster than they had risen. They came down, by what seemed a miracle to Mr. Lavender, who was still contemplative, precisely where they had gone up. A little group was collected there, and as they stepped out a voice said, “I beg your pardon,” in a tone so dry that it pierced even the fogged condition in which Mr. Lavender alighted. The gentleman who spoke had a dark moustache and thick white hair, and, except that he wore a monocle, and was perhaps three inches taller, bore a striking resemblance to himself.

“Thank you,” he replied, “certainly.”

“No,” said the gentleman, “not at all – on the contrary, Who the hell are you?”

“A public man,” said Mr. Lavender, surprised; “at least,” he added conscientiously, “I am not quite certain.”

“Well,” said the gentleman, “you’ve jolly well stolen my stunt.”

“Who, then, are you?” asked Mr. Lavender.

“I?” replied the gentleman, evidently intensely surprised that he was not known; “I – my name – ”

But at this moment Mr. Lavender’s attention was diverted by the sight of Blink making for the horizon, and crying out in a loud voice: “My dog!” he dropped the coat in which he was still enveloped and set off running after her at full speed, without having taken in the identity of the gentleman or disclosed his own. Blink, indeed, scenting another flight in the air, had made straight for the entrance of the enclosure, and finding a motor cab there with the door open had bolted into it, taking it for her master’s car. Mr. Lavender sprang in after her. At the shake which this imparted to the cab, the driver, who had been dozing, turned his head.

“Want to go back, sir?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Mr. Lavender, breathless; “London.”

XVIII

SEES TRUTH FACE TO FACE

“I fear,” thought Mr. Lavender, as they sped towards Town, “that I have inadvertently taken a joy-ride which belonged to that distinguished person with the eyeglass. No matter, my spirit is now bright for the adventure I have in hand. If only I knew where I could find the Unseen Power – but possibly its movements may be recorded in these journals.” And taking from his pocket his morning papers, which he had not yet had time to peruse, he buried himself in their contents. He was still deeply absorbed when the cab stopped and the driver knocked on the window. Mr. Lavender got out, followed by Blink, and was feeling in his pocket for the fare when an exclamation broke from the driver:

“Gorblimy! I’ve brought the wrong baby!”

And before Mr. Lavender had recovered from his surprise, he had whipped the car round and was speeding back towards the flying ground.

“How awkward!” thought Mr. Lavender, who was extremely nice in money matters; “what shall I do now?” And he looked around him. There, as it were by a miracle, was the office of a great journal, whence obviously his distinguished colleague had set forth to the flying grounds, and to which he had been returned in error by the faithful driver.

Perceiving in all this the finger of Providence, Mr. Lavender walked in. Those who have followed his experiences so far will readily understand how no one could look on Mr. Lavender without perceiving him to be a man of extreme mark, and no surprise need be felt when he was informed that the Personage he sought was on the point of visiting Brighton to open a hospital, and might yet be overtaken at Victoria Station.

With a beating heart he took up the trail in another taxi-cab, and, arriving at Victoria, purchased tickets for himself and Blink, and inquired for the Brighton train.

“Hurry up!” replied the official. Mr. Lavender ran, searching the carriage windows for any indication of his objective. The whistle had been blown, and he was in despair, when his eye caught the label “Reserved” on a first-class window, and looking in he saw a single person evidently of the highest consequence smoking a cigar, surrounded by papers. Without a moment’s hesitation he opened the door, and, preceded by Blink, leaped in. “This carriage is reserved, sir,” said the Personage, as the train moved out.

“I know,” said Mr. Lavender, who had fallen on to the edge of the seat opposite; “and only the urgency of my business would have caused me to violate the sanctity of your retreat, for, believe me, I have the instincts if not the habits of a gentleman.”

The Personage, who had made a move of his hand as if to bring the train to a standstill, abandoning his design, replaced his cigar, and contemplated Mr. Lavender from above it.

The latter remained silent, returning that remarkable stare, while Blink withdrew beneath the seat and pressed her chin to the ground, savouring the sensation of a new motion.

“Yes,” he thought, “those eyes have an almost superhuman force and cunning. They are the eyes of a spider in the centre of a great web. They seem to draw me.”

“You are undoubtedly the Unseen Power, sir,” he said suddenly, “and I have reached the heart of the mystery. From your own lips I shall soon know whether I am a puppet or a public man.”

The Personage, who by his movements was clearly under the impression that he had to do with a lunatic, sat forward with his hands on his knees ready to rise at a moment’s notice; he kept his cigar in his mouth, however, and an enforced smile on the folds of his face.

“What can I do for you, sir?” he said.

“Will you have a cigar?”

“No, thank you,” replied Mr. Lavender, “I must keep the eyes of my spirit clear, and come to the point. Do you rule this country or do you not? For it is largely on the answer to this that my future depends. In telling others what to do am I speaking as my conscience or as your conscience dictates; and, further, if indeed I am speaking as your conscience dictates, have you a conscience?”

The Personage, who had evidently made up his mind to humour the intruder, flipped the ash off his cigar.

“Well, sir, he said, I don’t know who the devil you may be, but my conscience is certainly as good as yours.”

“That,” returned Mr. Lavender with a sigh, “is a great relief, for whether you rule the country or not, you are undoubtedly the source from which I, together with the majority of my countrymen, derive our inspirations. You are the fountainhead at which we draw and drink. And to know that your waters are pure, unstained by taint of personal prejudice and the love of power, will fortify us considerably. Am I to assume, then, that above all passion and pettiness, you are an impersonal force whose innumerable daily editions reflect nothing but abstract truth, and are in no way the servants of a preconceived and personal view of the situation?”

“You want to know too much, don’t you think?” said the Personage with a smile.

“How can that be, sir?” asked Mr. Lavender: “If you are indeed the invisible king swaying the currents of national life, and turning its tides at will, it is essential that we should believe in you; and before we can believe in you must we not know all about you?”

“By Jove, sir,” replied the Personage, “that strikes me as being contrary to all the rules of religion. I thought faith was the ticket.”

By this answer Mr. Lavender was so impressed that he sat for a moment in silence, with his eyebrow working up and down.

“Sir,” he said at last, “you have given me a new thought. If you are right, to disbelieve in you and the acts which you perform, or rather the editions which you issue, is blasphemy.”

“I should think so,” said the Personage, emitting a long whiff of smoke. “Hadn’t that ever occurred to you before?”

“No,” replied Mr. Lavender, naively, “for I have never yet disbelieved anything in those journals.”

The Personage coughed heartily.

“I have always regarded them,” went on Mr. Lavender, “as I myself should wish to be regarded, ‘without fear and without reproach.’ For that is, as I understand it, the principle on which a gentleman must live, ever believing of others what he would wish believed of himself. With the exception of Germans,” he added hastily.

“Naturally,” returned the Personage. “And I’ll defy you to find anything in them which disagrees with that formula. Everything they print refers to Germans if not directly then obliquely. Germans are the ‘idee fixe’, and without an ‘idee fixe’, as you know, there’s no such thing as religion. Do you get me?”

“Yes, indeed,” cried Mr. Lavender, enthused, for the whole matter now seemed to him to fall into coherence, and, what was more, to coincide with his preconceptions, so that he had no longer any doubts. “You, sir – the Unseen Power – are but the crystallized embodiment of the national sentiment in time of war; in serving you, and fulfilling the ideas which you concrete in your journals, we public men are servants of the general animus, which in its turn serves the blind and burning instinct of justice. This is eminently satisfactory to me, who would wish no better fate than to be a humble lackey in that house.” He had no sooner, however, spoken those words than Joe Petty’s remarks about Public Opinion came back to him, and he added: “But are you really the general animus, or are you only the animus of Mayors, that is the question?”

The personage seemed to follow this thought with difficulty. “What’s that?” he said.

Mr. Lavender ran his hands through his hair.

“And turns,” he said, “on what is the unit of national feeling and intelligence? Is it or is it not a Mayor?”

The Personage smiled. “Well, what do you think?” he said. “Haven’t you ever heard them after dinner? There’s no question about it. Make your mind easy if that’s your only trouble.”

Mr. Lavender, greatly cheered by the genial certainty in this answer, said: “I thank you, sir. I shall go back and refute that common scoffer, that caster of doubts. I have seen the Truth face, to face, and am greatly encouraged to further public effort. With many apologies I can now get out,” he added, as the train stopped at South Croydon. “Blink!” And, followed by his dog, he stepped from the train.

The Personage, who was indeed no other than the private secretary of the private secretary of It whom Mr. Lavender had designated as the Truth watched him from the window.

“Well, that WAS a treat, dear papa!” he murmured to himself, emitting a sigh of smoke after his retreating interlocutor.

XIX

IS IN PERIL OF THE STREET

On the Sunday following this interview with the Truth Mr. Lavender, who ever found the day of rest irksome to his strenuous spirit, left his house after an early supper. It, had been raining all day, but the sinking sun had now emerged and struck its level light into the tree tops from a still cloudy distance. Followed by Blink, he threaded the puddled waste which lies to the west of the Spaniard’s Road, nor was it long before the wild beauty of the scene infected his spirit, and he stood still to admire the world spread out. The smoke rack of misted rain was still drifting above the sunset radiance in an apple-green sky; and behind Mr. Lavender, as he gazed at those clouds symbolical of the world’s unrest, a group of tall, dark pine-trees, wild and witch-like, had collected as if in audience of his cosmic mood. He formed a striking group for a painter, with the west wind flinging back his white hair, and fluttering his dark moustache along his cheeks, while Blink, a little in front of him, pointed at the prospect and emitted barks whose vigour tossed her charming head now to this side now to that.

“How beautiful is this earth!” thought Mr. Lavender, “and how simple to be good and happy thereon. Yet must we journey ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end to find justice and liberty. There are dark powers like lions ever in the path. Yes,” he continued, turning round to the pinetrees, who were creaking slightly in the wind, “hate and oppression, greed, lust, and ambition! There you stand malevolently regarding me. Out upon you, dark witches of evil! If I had but an axe I would lay you lower than the dust.” But the poor pine-trees paid no attention save to creak a little louder. And so incensed was Mr. Lavender by this insensibility on the part of those which his own words had made him perceive were the powers of darkness that he would very likely have barked his knuckles on them if Blink by her impatience had not induced him to resume his walk and mount on to the noble rampart of the Spaniard’s Road.

Along this he wandered and down the hill with the countless ghosts and shadows of his brain, liberating the world in fancy from all the hindrances which beset the paths of public men, till dark fell, and he was compelled to turn towards home. Closely attended by the now sobered Blink he had reached the Tube Station when he perceived in the inky war-time dusk that a woman was following him. Dimly aware that she was tall and graceful he hurried to avoid her, but before long could but note that she was walking parallel and turning her face towards him. Her gloved hand seemed to make a beckoning movement, and perceiving at once that he was the object of that predatory instinct which he knew from the many letters and protests in his journals to be one of the most distressing features of the War, he would have broken into a run if he had not been travelling up-hill; being deprived of this means of escape, his public nature prevailed, and he saw that it was his duty to confront the woman, and strike a blow at, the national evil stalking beside him. But he was in a difficulty, for his natural delicacy towards women seemed to preclude him from treating her as if she were what she evidently was, while his sense of duty – urged him with equal force to do so.

A whiff of delicious scent determined him. “Madam,” he said, without looking in her face, which, indeed, was not visible – so great was the darkness, “it is useless to pursue one who not only has the greatest veneration for women but regards you as a public danger at a time when all the energies of the country should be devoted to the defeat of our common enemies.”

The woman, uttering a sound like a laugh, edged towards him, and Mr. Lavender edged away, so that they proceeded up the street crabwise, with Blink adhering jealously to her master’s heels.

“Do you know,” said Mr. Lavender, with all the delicacy in his power, “how terribly subversive of the national effort it is to employ your beauty and your grace to snare and slacken the sinews of our glorious youth? The mystery of a woman’s glance in times like these should be used solely to beckon our heroes on to death in the field. But you, madam, than whom no one indeed has a more mysterious glance, have turned it to ends which, in the words of a great public man, profane the temple of our – our – ”

Mr. Lavender stopped, for his delicacy would not allow him even in so vital a cause to call bodies bodies. The woman here edged so close that he bolted across her in affright, and began to slant back towards the opposite side of the street.

“Madam,” he said, “you must have perceived by now that I am, alas! not privileged by age to be one of the defenders of my country; and though I am prepared to yield to you, if by so doing I can save some young hero from his fate, I wish you to clearly understand that only my sense of duty as a public man would induce me to do any such thing.” At this he turned his eyes dreadfully upon her graceful form still sidling towards him, and, conscious again of that delightful scent, felt a swooning sensation which made him lean against a lamp-post. “Spare me, madam,” he said in a faint voice, “for my country’s sake I am ready to do anything, but I must tell you that I worship another of your sex from afar, and if you are a woman you will not seek to make me besmirch that adoration or imperil my chivalry.”

So saying, he threw his arms round the lamppost and closed his eyes, expecting every moment to be drawn away against his will into a life of vice.

A well-known voice, strangled to the pitch almost of inaudibility, said in his ear:

“Oh, Don Pickwixote, Don Pickwixote, you will be the death of me!”

Electrified, Mr. Lavender opened his eyes, and in the dull orange rays of the heavily shaded lamp he saw beside him no other than the writhing, choking figure of Aurora herself. Shocked beyond measure by the mistake he had made, Mr. Lavender threw up his hands and bolted past her through the gateway of his garden; nor did he cease running till he had reached his bedroom and got under the bed, so terribly was he upset. There, in the company of Blink, he spent perhaps the most shame-stricken hours of his existence, cursing the memory of all those bishops and novelists who had caused him to believe that every woman in a dark street was a danger to the State; nor could the persuasion of Mrs. Petty or Joe induce him to come out, so that in despair they were compelled to leave him to pass the night in this penitential position, which he did without even taking out his teeth.

XX

RECEIVES A REVELATION

Fully a week elapsed before Mr. Lavender recovered from the effects of the night which he had spent under his bed and again took his normal interest in the course of national affairs. That which at length tore him from his torpid condition and refixed his imagination was an article in one of, his journals on the League of Nations, which caused him suddenly to perceive that this was the most important subject of the day. Carefully extracting the address of the society who had the matter in hand, he determined to go down forthwith and learn from their own lips how he could best induce everybody to join them in their noble undertaking. Shutting every window, therefore and locking Blink carefully into his study, he set forth and took the Tube to Charing Cross.