The Flying Inn. Гилберт Кит Честертон

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ come for a full unity between Christianity and Islam."

      "Something called Chrislam perhaps," said the Irishman, with a moody eye. He was gazing across the grey and purple woodlands that stretched below them at the back of the inn; and into which the steep, white road swept downwards and disappeared. The steep road looked like the beginning of an adventure; and he was an adventurer.

      "But you exaggerate, you know," went on Pump, polishing his gun, "about the crescent on St. Paul's. It wasn't exactly that. What Dr. Moole suggested, I think, was some sort of double emblem, you know, combining cross and crescent."

      "And carled the Crescent," muttered Dalroy.

      "And you can't call Dr. Moole a parson either," went on Mr. Humphrey Pump, polishing industriously. "Why, they say he's a sort of atheist, or what they call an agnostic, like Squire Brunton who used to bite elm trees by Marley. The grand folks have these fashions, Captain, but they've never lasted long that I know of."

      "I think it's serious this time," said his friend, shaking his big red head. "This is the last inn on this coast, and will soon be the last inn in England. Do you remember the 'Saracen's Head' in Plumsea, along the shore there?"

      "I know," assented the innkeeper. "My aunt was there when he hanged his mother; but it's a charming place."

      "I passed there just now; and it has been destroyed," said Dalroy.

      "Destroyed by fire?" asked Pump, pausing in his gun-scrubbing.

      "No," said Dalroy, "destroyed by lemonade. They've taken away its license or whatever you call it. I made a song about it, which I'll sing to you now!" And with an astounding air of suddenly revived spirits, he roared in a voice like thunder the following verses, to a simple but spirited tune of his own invention:

      "The Saracen's Head looks down the lane, Where we shall never drink wine again; For the wicked old Women who feel well-bred Have turned to a tea-shop the Saracen's Head."The Saracen's Head out of Araby came, King Richard riding in arms like flame, And where he established his folk to be fed He set up his spear--and the Saracen's Head."But the Saracen's Head outlived the Kings, It thought and it thought of most horrible things; Of Health and of Soap and of Standard Bread, And of Saracen drinks at the Saracen's Head."

      "Hullo!" cried Pump, with another low whistle. "Why here comes his lordship. And I suppose that young man in the goggles is a Committee or something."

      "Let him come," said Dalroy, and continued in a yet more earthquake bellow:

      "So the Saracen's Head fulfils its name, They drink no wine--a ridiculous game-- And I shall wonder until I'm dead, How it ever came into the Saracen's Head."

      As the last echo of this lyrical roar rolled away among the apple-trees, and down the steep, white road into the woods, Captain Dalroy leaned back in his chair and nodded good humouredly to Lord Ivywood, who was standing on the lawn with his usual cold air, but with slightly compressed lips. Behind him was a dark young man with double eyeglasses and a number of printed papers in his hand; presumably J. Leveson, Secretary. In the road outside stood a group of three which struck Pump as strangely incongruous, like a group in a three act farce. The first was a police inspector in uniform; the second was a workman in a leather apron, more or less like a carpenter, and the third was an old man in a scarlet Turkish fez, but otherwise dressed in very fashionable English clothes in which he did not seem very comfortable. He was explaining something about the inn to the policeman and the carpenter, who appeared to be restraining their amusement.

      "Fine song that, my lord," said Dalroy, with cheerful egotism. "I'll sing you another," and he cleared his throat.

      "Mr. Pump," said Lord Ivywood, in his bell-like and beautiful voice, "I thought I would come in person, if only to make it clear that every indulgence has been shown you. The mere date of this inn brings it within the statute of 1909; it was erected when my great grandfather was Lord of the Manor here, though I believe it then bore a different name, and--"

      "Ah, my lord," broke in Pump with a sigh, "I'd rather deal with your great grandfather, I would, though he married a hundred negresses instead of one, than see a gentleman of your family taking away a poor man's livelihood."

      "The act is specially designed in the interests of the relief of poverty," proceeded Lord Ivywood, in an unruffled manner, "and its final advantages will accrue to all citizens alike." He turned for an instant to the dark secretary, saying, "You have that second report?" and received a folded paper in answer.

      "It is here fully explained," said Lord Ivywood, putting on his elderly eyeglasses, "that the purpose of the Act is largely to protect the savings of the more humble and necessitous classes. I find in paragraph three, 'we strongly advise that the deleterious element of alcohol be made illegal save in such few places as the Government may specially exempt for Parliamentary or other public reasons, and that the provocative and demoralising display on inn signs be strictly forbidden except in the cases thus specially exempted: the absence of such temptations will, in our opinion, do much to improve the precarious financial conditions of the working class.' That disposes, I think, of any such suggestion as Mr. Pump's, that our inevitable acts of social reform are in any sense oppressive. To Mr. Pump's prejudice it may appear for the moment to bear hardly upon him; but" (and here Lord Ivywood's voice took one of its moving oratorical turns), "what better proof could we desire of the insidiousness of the sleepy poison we denounce, what better evidence could we offer of the civic corruption that we seek to cure, than the very fact that good and worthy men of established repute in the county can, by living in such places as these, become so stagnant and sodden and unsocial, whether through the fumes of wine or through meditations as maudlin about the past, that they consider the case solely as their own case, and laugh at the long agony of the poor."

      Captain Dalroy had been studying Ivywood with a very bright blue eye; and he spoke now much more quietly than he generally did.

      "Excuse me one moment, my lord," he said. "But there was one point in your important explanation which I am not sure I have got right. Do I understand you to say that, though sign-boards are to be generally abolished, yet where, if anywhere, they are retained, the right to sell fermented liquor will be retained also? In other words, though an Englishman may at last find only one inn-sign left in England, yet if the place has an inn-sign, it will also have your gracious permission to be really an inn?"

      Lord Ivywood had an admirable command of temper, which had helped him much in his career as a statesman. He did not waste time in wrangling about the Captain's _locus standi_ in the matter. He replied quite simply,

      "Yes, Your statement of the facts is correct."

      "Whenever I find an inn-sign permitted by the police, I may go in and ask for a glass of beer--also permitted by the police."

      "If you find any such, yes," answered Ivywood, quite temperately. "But we hope soon to have removed them altogether."

      Captain Patrick Dalroy rose enormously from his seat with a sort of stretch and yawn.

      "Well, Hump," he said to his friend, "the best thing, it seems to me, is to take the important things with us."

      With two sight-staggering kicks he sent the keg of rum and the round cheese flying over the fence, in such a direction that they bounded on the descending road and rolled more and more rapidly down toward the dark woods into which the path disappeared. Then he gripped the pole of the inn-sign, shook it twice and plucked it out of the turf like a tuft of grass.

      It had all happened before anyone could move, but as he strode out into the road the policeman ran forward. Dalroy smote him flat across СКАЧАТЬ