第17章 THE ENCHANTED MAN(1)

When I arrived to see the performance of the Buckinghamshire Players,who acted Miss Gertrude Robins's POT LUCK at Naphill a short time ago,it is the distressing,if scarcely surprising,truth that I entered very late.

This would have mattered little,I hope,to any one,but that late comers had to be forced into front seats.For a real popular English audience always insists on crowding in the back part of the hall;and (as I have found in many an election)will endure the most unendurable taunts rather than come forward.The English are a modest people;that is why they are entirely ruled and run by the few of them that happen to be immodest.In theatrical affairs the fact is strangely notable;and in most playhouses we find the bored people in front and the eager people behind.

As far as the performance went I was quite the reverse of a bored person;but I may have been a boring person,especially as I was thus required to sit in the seats of the scornful.It will be a happy day in the dramatic world when all ladies have to take off their hats and all critics have to take off their heads.The people behind will have a chance then.And as it happens,in this case,I had not so much taken off my head as lost it.

I had lost it on the road;on that strange journey that was the cause of my coming in late.I have a troubled recollection of having seen a very good play and made a very bad speech;I have a cloudy recollection of talking to all sorts of nice people afterwards,but talking to them jerkily and with half a head,as a man talks when he has one eye on a clock.

And the truth is that I had one eye on an ancient and timeless clock,hung uselessly in heaven;whose very name has passed into a figure for such bemused folly.In the true sense of an ancient phrase,I was moonstruck.A lunar landscape a scene of winter moonlight had inexplicably got in between me and all other scenes.If any one had asked me I could not have said what it was;I cannot say now.Nothing had occurred to me;except the breakdown of a hired motor on the ridge of a hill.It was not an adventure;it was a vision.

I had started in wintry twilight from my own door;and hired a small car that found its way across the hills towards Naphill.But as night blackened and frost brightened and hardened it I found the way increasingly difficult;especially as the way was an incessant ascent.

Whenever we topped a road like a staircase it was only to turn into a yet steeper road like a ladder.

At last,when I began to fancy that I was spirally climbing the Tower of Babel in a dream,I was brought to fact by alarming noises,stoppage,and the driver saying that "it couldn't be done."I got out of the car and suddenly forgot that I had ever been in it.

From the edge of that abrupt steep I saw something indescribable,which Iam now going to describe.When Mr.Joseph Chamberlain delivered his great patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch parts of South Africa,he made use of the expression "the illimitable veldt."The word "veldt"is Dutch,and the word "illimitable"is Double Dutch.

But the meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave him a sense of largeness and dreariness which he had never found in England.