THE RETURN OF DON QUIXOTE

Someday perhaps the story will be told of the adventures of the new Don Quixote and the new Sancho Panza, as they wandered about the winding roads of England. From the standpoint of the cold and satiric populace the story was rather that of the progress of the hansom cab, through scenes where hansom cabs very rarely figure. It was perhaps an unprecedented progress through forest glades and across desolate uplands; and as a method of travel chosen by a knight and his squire new even in the annals of chivalry. But some riotously romantic chronicler may yet give some account of how they attempted in various ways to use the vehicle for the defence and consolation of the oppressed. Of how they gave lifts to tramps and rides to children; of how they turned the cab into a coffee stall at Reading and into a tent on Salisbury Plain. Of how the cab figured as a bathing-machine in the dreadful affair at Worthing. Of how it was regarded by simple Calvinists of the Border as a perambulating pulpit, with a place below for the Precentor to sing and a place above for the minister to preach, which Mr. Douglas Murrel proceeded to do with great unction and edification. Of how Mr. Douglas Murrel organised a series of historical lectures by Mr. Herne from the top of the cab, and seconded them with comments and explanations, making the lecturing tour quite a financial success by methods perhaps not invariably respectful to the lecturer. But though there may have been moments when the squire fell short of a complete seriousness, it is probable on the whole that they did a great deal of good. They got into trouble with the police, in itself almost a sign of sanctity; they fought a number of people in private life, but mostly people who badly wanted fighting. And Herne at least was completely convinced of the serious social utility of this line of attack. A sadder and conceivably even a wiser man, he had many long talks with his friend, in which he never ceased to elaborate the Defence of Don Quixote and the necessity of his real return. One was especially memorable: which took place as they sat under a hedge in the high lanes of Sussex.

"They say I am behind the times," said Herne, "and living in the days that Don Quixote dreamed of. They seemed to forget that they themselves are at least three hundred years behind the times and living in the days when Cervantes dreamed of Don Quixote. They are still living in the Renaissance; in what Cervantes naturally regarded as the New Birth. But I say that a baby that is three hundred years old is already getting on in life. It is time he was born again."

"Is he to be born again," asked Murrel, "as a medieval knight-errant?"

"Why not?" asked the other, "if the Renaissance man was born again as an Ancient Greek? Cervantes thought that Romance was dying and that Reason might reasonably take its place. But I say that in our time Reason is dying, in that sense; and it is old age is really less respectable than the old romance. We want to recur to the more simple and direct attack. What we want now is somebody who does believe in tilting at giants."

"And who succeeds in tilting at windmills," answered Murrel.

"Have you ever reflected," said his friend, "what a good thing it would have been if he had smashed the windmills? From what I know now of medieval history, I should say his only mistake was in tilting at the mills instead of the millers. The miller was the middleman of the middle ages. He was the beginning of all the middlemen of the modern ages. His mills were the beginning of all the mills and manufactures that have darkened and degraded modern life. So that even Cervantes, in a way, chose an example against himself. And it's more so with the other examples. Don Quixote set free a lot of captives who were only convicts. Nowadays it's mostly those who have been beggared who are jailed and those who have robbed them who are free. I'm not sure the mistake would be quite so mistaken."

"Don't you think," asked Murrel, "that modern things are too complicated to be dealt with in such a simple way?"

"I think," replied Herne, "that modern things are too complicated to be dealt with except in a simple way."

He rose from his feet and strode to and fro on the road with all the dreamy energy of his prototype. He seemed trying to tear his real meaning out of himself.

"Don't you see," he cried, "that is the moral of the whole thing. All your machinery has become so inhuman that it has become natural. In becoming a second nature, it has become as remote and indifferent and cruel as nature. The Knight is once more riding in the forest. Only he is lost in the wheels instead of in the woods. You have made your dead system on so large a scale that you do not yourselves know how or where it will hit. That's the paradox! Things have grown incalculable by being calculated. You have tied men to tools so gigantic that they do not know on whom the strokes descend. You have justified the nightmare of Don Quixote. The mills really are giants."

"Is there any method in that case," demanded the other.

"Yes; and you found it," replied Herne. "You did not bother about systems, when you saw a mad doctor was madder than the madman. It is you who lead and I who follow. You are not Sancho Panza. You are the other."

He stretched out his hand with something of the old gesture.

"What I said on the judgment-seat I say again by the roadside. You are the only one of them born again. You are the knight that has returned."

Douglas Murrel was abruptly and horribly abashed.

That compliment was perhaps the only thing that could have stung him into speech upon certain matters; for under all this tomfoolery he had something more than the reticence of his breed. As it was, he looked uncomfortable and said: "Look here, you mustn't give me credit like that. I'm not on as Galahad in this scene. I hope I'd have done my best for the old Honkey; but I did like that girl; I liked her rather a lot."

"Did you tell her so?" asked Herne in his obvious manner.

"I couldn't very well," replied the other, "just when she was under sort of an obligation to me."

"My dear Murrel," cried Herne with impulsive simplicity, "this is quite quixotic!"

Murrel sprang to his feet and sent up a single shout of laughter.

"You have made the best joke in three hundred years," he said.

"I don't see it," said Herne thoughtfully. "Is it generally considered possible to make a joke and not to see it? But in the matter of what you said, don't you think there might be a statute of limitations allowing you a fresh start? Would you like to go downdown to the west again?"

Murrel's brow seemed knotted with a new embarrassment. "The truth is I rather avoided the neighbourhoodand the subject. I thought that you"

"I know what you mean," said Herne. "For a long time I could hardly look out of a window facing that way. I wanted to turn my back on the west wind; and the sunsets burned me like red-hot irons. But a man gets calmer as the years go by, even if he doesn't get more cheerful. I don't think I could go to the house itself; but I would really be glad to hear the news aboutanybody."

"Oh if we go there," said Murrel cheerfully, "I'll undertake to go in and enquire."

"Do you mean," asked Herne almost timidly, "go intoSeawood Abbey?"

"Yes," answered Murrel shortly. "I daresay we're in the same boat. I might find the other house a little harder."

They completed the rest of their programme by a tacit, not to say taciturn agreement; and so it fell out that, before they had exchanged many more words, they had actually come within sight of all that for so long they had not seen and had avoided seeing; the evening sun on the high lawns of Seawood and the steep Gothic roofs among the trees.

Certainly they needed no words of explanation when Michael Herne halted and looked across at his friend, as if bidding him go on. Murrel nodded and went quickly with his light and agile step up the steep woodland path and over the stile and dropped into the avenue leading up to the main gateway. The gardens seemed much as they were of old, but rather neater and in some nameless fashion quieter; but the great gate, that had always stood open, was shut.

Monkey was no mystic; but this fact affected him with a mournful thrill that had in it something of mysticism. That incongruous element increased upon him in some indescribable subconscious way as he approached the great doors and, for the first time in his life, knocked on them and rang a great iron bell. He felt rather as if he were in a dream; and yet as if he were near to some more strange awakening. But queer as were his unformed anticipations, they were not so queer as what he found.

About half an hour afterwards he came out of the great doorway, which was closed after him, climbed the stile and came quietly down the lane to his friend; but even while he was still approaching, his friend felt that there was something odd about his quietude. He sat down on the bank and ruminated for a moment; then he said: "An extraordinary thing has happened to Seawood Abbey. It has not been exactly burned to the ground, because somehow it seems to be still there, and looking rather more well-preserved than before. It has not been, in any material or meteorological sense struck by lightning from heaven. And yet I am not sure . . . anyhow a most stunning and crashing catastrophe has fallen on that Abbey."

"What do you mean? What has happened to the Abbey?"

"It has become an Abbey," said Murrel gravely.

"What do you mean?" cried the other, leaning forward with sudden eagerness.

"I mean what I say. It has become an Abbey. I have just been talking to the Abbot. He told me a good deal of the news, in spite of his monastic seclusion; for he knows a number of our old friends."

"You mean it is a monastery. What news did he give you?"

"He was full of Society Snippets," said Murrel in his melancholy voice. "It all began with Lord Seawood dying about a year ago. The property went to hishis heiress, who it seems has 'gone over' as the saying is. She's become a Catholic; and a very extraordinary sort of Catholic too. She has given up all this vast property to my friend the Abbot and his merry men; and gone down to work as a nurse in some Catholic settlement or other down in the Docks; Limehouse, I think, where Chinamen strangle their daughters according to the Twelve Immortal Principles."

The pale librarian had sprung up with all the energy of knight-errantry; but his look was turned away from the towers of Seawood.

"I hardly understand it yet," he said, "but it is all different. It is difficult but it is different. It is difficult because it seems strange to . . ."

"It seems strange," asserted Murrel, "to go down to Limehouse and ask a Chinese strangler for The Honourable Rosamund Severne. But I ought to tell you on the authority of the Abbot, that she declares that her name is not Rosamund Severne. I understand you may find her if you enquire for Miss Smith."

And at that once more did lunacy strike the librarian of Seawood like lightning out of heaven; and leaping over a hedge he went racing eastwards towards a pinewood that lay across his path, which might be presumed to be on the outskirts of Limehouse and offer opportunities for enquiring after Miss Smith.

It was rather more than three months later that the lunatics' progress came to its appointed end, and this story with it. Its pace had changed from capering to something more like plodding and to threading the labyrinths of the lowest quarters of Limehouse. But it ended one night when a sort of green fog of dusk hung like the fumes of some drug of witchcraft, as he turned down a crack of narrow street, at the corner of which hung a painted paper lantern. A little further down the dim defile glowed another lantern; which looked less Chinese; and when he came close to it he saw it was a leaden cage fitted with large fragments of coloured glass, the rude outline showing a figure of St. Francis with a burning red angel behind him. Somehow this childish transparency seemed like a password and a signal of all that he had once sought to do on a great scale or Olive Ashley on a small one; and yet with some secret and vivid difference; that the lamp was lit from within.

So much was that great thirst for colour, which had filled his life, fed as from a goblet of flame, by that trivial sign and in this sordid place, that it scarcely surprised him to find himself in her presence, who stood crowned in his dreams as in the melodrama and the tragedy of other days. A straight dark dress hung on her from neck to heel, but it was of a normal pattern; and her red hair still looked like a crown.

With that queer awkward promptitude, that belonged to him alone, he said his simplest thought in plain words, "You are a nurse and not a nun."

She smiled. "You don't know much about nuns if you think that is the natural ending of a storya story like ours. Believe me, there's nothing in that sentimental notion that being a nun is a second best."

"Do you really mean," he said and then stopped.

"I mean," she said, "that I never quite left off thinking that I might have the luck to be the second best. I suppose it's the sort of thing that has been said a good many times. . . . I think I have always thought you would find me."

After a momentary pause she went on: "We need not remember about that old quarrel; I think it was always something much better and much worse than a quarrel. My father was less to blame than you thought him; more to blame than I thought him; but it is neither you nor I that are to judge. But it was not he who did the real wrong of which all these wrongs have sprung."

"I know what you mean," he replied. "I had rather begun to think so myself, the more I read of history. But in all that history there is nothing so noble as you and what you have done. You are the greatest of historical characters; and the learned may come to call you a legend."

"It was Olive who understood it first," she said gravely. "She is so much quicker than I am and saw it all in a flash; a flash of moonlight, as she said. I could only go away and think things out slowly and stupidly by myself; but I got there at last."

"Do you mean," asked Michael slowly, "that Olive Ashley also hasgot there?"

"Yes," she replied, "and the odd thing is that John Braintree doesn't seem to mind a bit. At least a good many people would think it odd; they are married now and they seem to agree about almost everything. I wonder how much there really was for good people to disagree about in those quarrelsome old times."

"I know," he answered. "Everybody seems to be married. And it has made me feel pretty lost and lonely in the last month or so."

"Even Monkey is married, I hear," she said. "It seems like the end of the world. But perhaps its the beginning of the world. One thing you may be sure of, though lots of people would laugh at it. Whenever Monks come back, marriages will come back."

"He went back to that seaside town and married Dr. Hendry's daughter," explained Michael Herne rather vaguely. "We parted by a sort of silent consent at Seawood Abbey and he went west and I east. I had to go and look for you alone: and I was very much alone."

"You say 'was,'" she said with a smile; and they suddenly moved towards each other and met as they had met in the garden long agoin a silence full of many things; a silence which he broke by saying suddenly, in his abrupt and awkward way: "I suppose I am a heretic."

"We will see about all that," she said with a serene magnificence.

Herne's thoughts abruptly and absently went back to the old tangled talk between himself and Archer about the Albigensian heresy and what need to follow conversion from it; he stood a moment with his wits wool gathering. Then in that narrow street of the coloured lantern a new and astonishing thing happened; something that never had happened in all the topsy turvey happenings of his historical career. Michael Herne laughed. For the first time in his life he seriously saw a joke and deliberately made it. It is typical of him that his one joke was one which nobody else could see, or would probably ever understand.

"I say . . . iit in matrimonium. "