“You are overloading that animal, and it is forfeited. And you must come with me to the police station.”
Humphrey Pump, who was very considerate to animals, and had always tried to be considerate to gentlemen, in spite of having put a bullet into one of their legs, was simply too astounded and distressed to make any answer at all. He moved a step or two backward and stared with brown, blinking eyes at the poet, the donkey, the cask, the cheese, and the sign-board lying in the road.
But Captain Dalroy, with the quicker recovery of his national temperament, swept the poet and magistrate a vast fantastic bow and said with agreeable impudence, “interested in donkeys, no doubt?”
“I am interested in all things men forget,” answered the poet, with a fine touch of pride, “but mostly in those like this, that are most easily forgotten.”
Somehow from those two first sentences Pump realised that these two eccentric aristocrats had unconsciously recognised each other. The fact that it was unconscious seemed, somehow, to exclude him all the more. He stirred a little the moonlit dust of the road with his rather dilapidated boots and eventually strolled across to speak to the chauffeur.
“Is the next police station far from here?” he asked.
The chauffeur answered with one syllable of which the nearest literal rendering is “dno.” Other spellings have been attempted, but the sentiment expressed is that of agnosticism.
But something of special brutality of abbreviation made the shrewd, and therefore sensitive, Mr. Pump look at the man’s face. And he saw it was not only the moonlight that made it white.
With that dumb delicacy that was so English in him, Pump looked at the man again, and saw he was leaning heavily on the car with one arm, and saw that the arm was shaking. He understood his countrymen enough to know that whatever he said he must say in a careless manner.
“I hope it’s nearer to your place. You must be a bit done up.”
“Oh hell!” said the driver and spat on the road.
Pump was sympathetically silent, and Mr. Wimpole’s chauffeur broke out incoherently, as if in another place.
“Blarsted beauties o’ dibrike and no breakfast. Blarsted lunch Hivywood and no lunch. Blarsted black everlastin’ hours artside while ’e ’as ’is cike an’ champine. And then it’s a dornkey.”
“You don’t mean to say,” said Pump in a very serious voice, “that you’ve had no food today?”
“Ow no!” replied the cockney, with the irony of the deathbed. “Ow, of course not.”
Pump strolled back into the road again, picked up the cheese in his left hand, and landed it on the seat beside the driver. Then his right hand went to one of his large loose equivocal pockets, and the blade of a big jack-knife caught and recaught the steady splendours of the moon.
The driver stared for several instants at the cheese, with the knife shaking in his hand. Then he began to hack it, and in that white witchlike light the happiness of his face was almost horrible.
Pump was wise in all such things, and knew that just as a little food will sometimes prevent sheer intoxication, so a little stimulant will sometimes prevent sudden and dangerous indigestion. It was practically impossible to make the man stop eating cheese. It was far better to give him a very little of the rum, especially as it was very good rum, and better than anything he could find in any of the public-houses that were still permitted. He walked across the road again and picked up the small cask, which he put on the other side of the cheese and from which he filled, in his own manner, the little cup he carried in his pocket.
But at the sight of this the cockney’s eyes lit at once with terror and desire.
“But yer cawnt do it,” he whispered hoarsely, “its the pleece. It’s gile for that, with no doctor’s letter nor sign-board nor nothink.”
Mr. Humphrey Pump made yet another march back into the road. When he got there he hesitated for the first time, but it was quite clear from the attitude of the two insane aristocrats who were arguing and posturing in the road that they would notice nothing except each other. He picked the loose post off the road and brought it to the car, humorously propping it erect in the aperture between keg and cheese.
The little glass of rum was wavering in the poor chauffeur’s hand exactly as the big knife had done, but when he looked up and actually saw the wooden sign above him, he seemed not so much to pluck up his courage, but rather to drag up some forgotten courage from the foundations of some unfathomable sea. It was indeed the forgotten courage of the people.
He looked once at the bleak, black pinewoods around him and took the mouthful of golden liquid at a gulp, as if it were a fairy potion. He sat silent; and then, very slowly, a sort of stony glitter began to come into his eyes. The brown and vigilant eyes of Humphrey Pump were studying him with some anxiety or even fear. He did look rather like a man enchanted or turned to stone. But he spoke very suddenly.
“The blighter!” he said. “I’ll give ’im ’ell. I’ll give ’im bleeding ’ell. I’ll give ’im somethink wot ’e don’t expect.”
“What do you mean?” asked the inn-keeper.
“Why,” answered the chauffeur, with abrupt composure, “I’ll give ’im a little dornkey.”
Mr. Pump looked troubled. “Do you think,” he observed, affecting to speak lightly, “that he’s fit to be trusted even with a little donkey?”
“Ow, yes,” said the man. “He’s very amiable with donkeys, and donkeys we is to be amiable with ’im.”
Pump still looked at him doubtfully, appearing or affecting not to follow his meaning. Then he looked equally anxiously across at the other two men; but they were still talking. Different as they were in every other way, they were of the sort who forget everything, class, quarrel, time, place and physical facts in front of them, in the lust of lucid explanation and equal argument.
Thus, when the Captain began by lightly alluding to the fact that after all it was his donkey, since he had bought it from a tinker for a just price, the police station practically vanished from Wimpole’s mind–and I fear the donkey-cart also. Nothing remained but the necessity of dissipating the superstition of personal property.
“I own nothing,” said the poet, waving his hands outward, “I own nothing save in the sense that I own everything. All depends whether wealth or power be used for or against the higher purposes of the cosmos.”
“Indeed,” replied Dalroy, “and how does your motor car serve the higher purposes of the cosmos?”
“It helps me,” said Mr. Wimpole, with honourable simplicity, “to produce my poems.”
“And if it could be used for some higher purpose (if such a thing could be), if some new purpose had come into the cosmos’s head by accident,” inquired the other, “I suppose it would cease to be your property.”
“Certainly,” replied the dignified Dorian. “I should not complain. Nor have you any title to complain when the donkey ceases to be yours when you depress it in the cosmic scale.”
“What makes you think,” asked Dalroy, “that I wanted to depress it?”
“It is my firm belief,” replied Dorian Wimpole, sternly, “that you wanted to ride on it” (for indeed the Captain had once repeated his playful gesture of putting his large leg across). “Is not that so?”
“No,” answered the Captain, innocently, “I never ride on a donkey. I’m afraid of it.”
“Afraid of a donkey!” cried Wimpole, incredulously.
“Afraid of an historical comparison,” said Dalroy.
There was a short pause, and Wimpole said coolly enough, “Oh, well, we’ve outlived those comparisons.”
“Easily,” answered the Irish Captain. “It is wonderful how easily one outlives someone else’s crucifixion.”