Audrey Smith was standing not so very many yards away, because he had followed his elder guest for only a few steps towards the gate. Yet her figure had fallen back far enough to be surrounded by the green framework of the garden. Her dress looked almost blue with a shade of distance. And when she spoke to him, even from that little way off, her voice sounded to him like the voice of someone shouting familiarly and from afar, like you call to an old friend. It made him emotional in a disproportionate way, though all that she said was:
“What became of your old hat?”
“I lost it,” he answered gravely, “obviously I had to lose it. I believe the scarecrow found it.”
“Oh, let’s go and look at the scarecrow, please,” she cried.
He led her without a word to the kitchen-garden and gravely explained each of its outstanding features; from the serious Mr. Archer resting on his spade to the grotesque Oceanic island god grinning at the corner of the plot. He spoke more and more solemnly and used too many words, and all the time knew little or nothing of what he said.
At last she cut into his monologue so suddenly that it was almost rude; yet her brown eyes were bright and her sympathy undisguised.
“Don’t talk about it,” she cried with illogical enthusiasm. “It looks as if we were really right in the middle of the country. It’s as unique as the Garden of Eden. It’s simply the most delightful place – ”
It was at this moment, for some unknown reason, that the Colonel who had lost his hat suddenly decided to lose his head. Standing in that grotesque vegetable scenery, a black and stiff yet somehow majestic figure, he offered the lady in the most traditional manner everything he had, not forgetting the scarecrow or the cabbages.
“When I think of the people who live on this piece of land – ” he concluded. “Well, there they are; a scarecrow and a cannibal fetish and a stupid man who is stuck on a road of respectability and conventional ways.”
“Very conventional,” she said, “especially in his taste in hats.”
“That was the exception, I’m afraid,” he said honestly. “You’d find those things very rare and most things very boring. I couldn’t avoid falling in love with you; but we still are in different worlds; and you belong in a younger world, which says what it thinks, and cannot see what most of our silences meant.”
“I suppose we are very rude,” she said thoughtfully, “and you must certainly excuse me if I do say what I think.”
“I deserve no better,” he replied mournfully.
“Well, I think I must be in love with you too,” she replied calmly. “I don’t see what time has to do with being fond of people. You are the most original person I ever knew.”
“My dear, my dear,” he protested almost brokenly, “I fear you are making a mistake. Whatever else I am, I never wanted to be original.”
“You must remember,” she replied, “that I have known very many people who did decide to be original. Any Art School is full of them; and there are any number among those socialist and vegetarian friends of mine you were talking about. It would be no problem for them to wear cabbages on their heads, of course. Any one of them would be capable of getting inside a pumpkin if he could. Any one of them might appear in public dressed entirely in salad leaves. But that’s just it. They go with the stream. They do those things because those things are done; because they are done in their own Bohemian society. Unconventionality is their convention. I don’t mind it myself; I think it’s great fun; but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know real strength or independence when I see it. All that is just formless; but the really strong man is one who can create a convention and then break it. When a man like you can suddenly do a thing like that, after twenty years of habit, for the sake of his word, then somehow you really feel that man is a man and master of his fate.”
“I doubt if I am master of my fate,” replied Crane, “and I do not know whether I ceased to be yesterday or two minutes ago.”
He stood there for a moment like a knight in heavy armour. Indeed, the old image is appropriate here in more ways than one. The new world within him was so alien from the whole habit in which he lived, even from the way he walked and gestures he made every day for countless days, that his spirit had to fight before it broke its shell. But it was also true that even if he could have done what every man wishes to do at such a moment, something supreme and satisfying, it would have been something in a way formal or it would not have satisfied him.
He was one of those to whom it is natural to be ceremonial. Even the music in his mind, too deep and distant for him to catch and sing, was the music of old and ritual dance and not for a party. And it was not an accident that he had built step by step around him that garden of the grey stone fountain and the hedge. He bent suddenly and kissed her hand.
“I like that,” she said. “You also need a wig and a sword.”
“I apologize,” he said gravely, “no modern man is worthy of you. But indeed I fear, in every sense I am not a very modern man.”
“You must never wear that hat again,” she said, pointing at the crushed original top-hat.
“To tell the truth,” he remarked calmly, “I had no intention of returning to that one.”
“Silly,” she said, “I don’t mean that hat; I mean that sort of hat. As a matter of fact, there couldn’t be a finer hat than the cabbage.”
“My dear – ” he protested; but she was looking at him quite seriously.
“I am an artist, and don’t know much about literature,” she said. “Well, do you know, it really does make a difference. People who love literature often let words get between them and things. We at least look at the things and not the names of the things. You think a cabbage is funny because the name sounds funny and even vulgar; something between ‘cab’ and ‘garbage,’ I suppose. But a cabbage isn’t really funny or vulgar. You wouldn’t think that way if you simply had to paint it. Haven’t you seen Dutch and Flemish galleries, and don’t you know what great men painted cabbages? What they saw was certain lines and colours; very wonderful lines and colours.”
“It may be all very well in a picture,” he began doubtfully.
She suddenly laughed aloud.
“You idiot,” she cried; “don’t you know you looked perfectly splendid? The curves were like a great turban of leaves and the root rose like the top of a helmet; it was rather like the turbaned helmets on some of Rembrandt’s figures, with the face like bronze in the shadows of green and purple. That’s the sort of thing artists can see, who keep their eyes and heads clear of words! And then you want to apologize for not wearing that stupid black pipe, when you went about wearing a coloured crown like a king. And you were like a king in this country – they were all afraid of you.”