“Dear Hump—
“I’m so bothered that I simply must call you by the old name again. You understand I’ve got to keep in with my people. Lord Ivywood is a sort of cousin of mine, and for that and some other reasons, my poor old mother would just die if I offended him. You know her heart is weak; you know everything there is to know in this county. Well, I only write to warn you that something is going to be done against your dear old inn. I don’t know what this Country’s coming to. Only a month or two ago I saw a shabby old pantaloon on the beach with a green gamp, talking the craziest stuff you ever heard in your life. Three weeks ago I heard he was lecturing at Ethical2 Societies—whatever they are—for a handsome salary. Well, when I was last at Ivywood—I must go because Mamma likes it—there was the living lunatic again, in evening dress, and talked about by people who really know. I mean who know better.
“Lord Ivywood is entirely3 under his influence and thinks him the greatest prophet the world has ever seen. And Lord Ivywood is not a fool; one can’t help admiring him. Mamma, I think, wants me to do more than admire him. I am telling you everything, Hump, because I think perhaps this is the last honest letter I shall ever write in the world. And I warn you seriously that Lord Ivywood is sincere, which is perfectly4 terrible. He will be the biggest English statesman, and he does really mean to ruin—the old ships. If ever you see me here again taking part in such work, I hope you may forgive me.
“Somebody we mentioned, whom I shall never see again, I leave to your friendship. It is the second best thing I can give, and I am not sure it may not be better than the first would have been. Goodbye.
J. B.”
“Sir—
“The Committee of the Imperial Commission of Liquor Control is directed to draw your attention to the fact that you have disregarded the Committee’s communications under section 5A of the Act for the Regulation of Places of Public Entertainment; and that you are now under Section 47C of the Act amending6 the Act for the Regulation of Places of Public Entertainment aforesaid. The charges on which prosecution7 will be founded are as follows:
(1) Violation8 of sub-section 23f of the Act, which enacts9 that no pictorial10 signs shall be exhibited before premises11 of less than the ratable value of £2000 per annum.
(2) Violation of sub-section 113d of the Act, which enacts that no liquor containing alcohol shall be sold in any inn, hotel, tavern12 or public-house, except when demanded under a medical certificate from one of the doctors licensed13 by the State Medical Council, or in the specially15 excepted cases of Claridge’s Hotel and the Criterion Bar, where urgency has already been proved.
“As you have failed to acknowledge previous communications on this subject, this is to warn you that legal steps will be taken immediately,
“We are yours truly,
Ivywood, President.
J. Leveson, Secretary.”
Mr. Humphrey Pump sat down at the table outside his inn and whistled in a way which, combined with his little whiskers made him for the moment seem literally16 like an ostler. Then, the very real wit and learning he had returned slowly into his face and with his warm, brown eyes he considered the cold, grey sea. There was not much to be got out of the sea. Humphrey Pump might drown himself in the sea; which would be better for Humphrey Pump than being finally separated from “The Old Ship.” England might be sunk under the sea; which would be better for England than never again having such places as “The Old Ship.” But these were not serious remedies nor rationally attainable17; and Pump could only feel that the sea had simply warped18 him as it had warped his apple trees. The sea was a dreary19 business altogether. There was only one figure walking on the sands. It was only when the figure drew nearer and nearer and grew to more than human size, that he sprang to his feet with a cry. Also the level light of morning lit the man’s hair, and it was red.
The late King of Ithaca came casually20 and slowly up the slope of the beach that led to “The Old Ship.” He had landed in a boat from a battleship that could still be seen near the horizon, and he still wore the astounding21 uniform of apple-green and silver which he had himself invented as that of a navy that had never existed very much, and which now did not exist at all. He had a straight naval22 sword at his side; for the terms of his capitulation had never required him to surrender it; and inside the uniform and beside the sword there was what there always had been, a big and rather bewildered man with rough red hair, whose misfortune was that he had good brains, but that his bodily strength and bodily passions were a little too strong for his brains.
He had flung his crashing weight on the chair outside the inn before the innkeeper could find words to express his astounded24 pleasure in seeing him. His first words were “have you got any rum?”
Then, as if feeling that his attitude needed explanation, he added, “I suppose I shall never be a sailor again after tonight. So I must have rum.”
Humphrey Pump had a talent for friendship, and understood his old friend. He went into the inn without a word; and came back idly pushing or rolling with an alternate foot (as if he were playing football with two footballs at once) two objects that rolled very easily. One was a big keg or barrel of rum and the other a great solid drum of a cheese. Among his thousand other technical tricks he had a way of tapping a cask without a tap, or anything that could impair25 its revolutionary or revolving26 qualities. He was feeling in his pocket for the instrument with which he solved such questions, when his Irish friend suddenly sat bolt upright, as one startled out of sleep, and spoke27 with his strongest and most unusual brogue.
“Oh thank ye, Hump, a thousand times; and I don’t think I really want something to drink at arl. Now I know I can have it, I don’t seem to want it at arl. But hwhat I do want—” and he suddenly dashed his big fist on the little table so that one of its legs leapt and nearly snapped—“hwhat I do want is some sort of account of what’s happening in this England of yours that shan’t be just obviously rubbish.”
“Ah,” said Pump, fingering the two letters thoughtfully. “And what do you mean by rubbish?”
“I carl it rubbish” cried Patrick Dalroy, “when ye put the Koran into the Bible and not the Apocrypha29; and I carl it rubbish when a mad parson’s allowed to propose to put a crescent on St. Paul’s Cathedral. I know the Turks are our allies now, but they often were before, and I never heard that Palmerston or Colin Campbell had any truck with such trash.”
“Lord Ivywood is very enthusiastic, I know,” said Pump, with a restrained amusement. “He was saying only the other day at the Flower Show here that the time had come for a full unity30 between Christianity and Islam.”
“Something called Chrislam perhaps,” said the Irishman, with a moody31 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 downwards32 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 emblem33, you know, combining cross and crescent.”
“And called the Crescent,” muttered Dalroy.
“And you can’t call Dr. Moole a parson either,” went on Mr. Humphrey Pump, polishing industriously34. “Why, they say he’s a sort of atheist35, or what they call an agnostic, like Squire36 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,” assented37 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 license14 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 tune23 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 goggles38 is a Committee or something.”
“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 standing40 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 farce41. The first was a police inspector42 in uniform; the second was a workman in a leather apron43, more or less like a carpenter, and the third was an old man in a scarlet44 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 mere45 date of this inn brings it within the statute46 of 1909; it was erected47 when my great grandfather was Lord of the Manor48 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 livelihood49.”
“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 accrue50 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 fully28 explained,” said Lord Ivywood, putting on his elderly eyeglasses, “that the purpose of the Act is largely to protect the savings51 of the more humble52 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 exempt53 for Parliamentary or other public reasons, and that the provocative54 and demoralising display on inn signs be strictly55 forbidden except in the cases thus specially exempted56: the absence of such temptations will, in our opinion, do much to improve the precarious57 financial conditions of the working class.’ That disposes, I think, of any such suggestion as Mr. Pump’s, that our inevitable58 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 oratorical59 turns), “what better proof could we desire of the insidiousness60 of the sleepy poison we denounce, what better evidence could we offer of the civic61 corruption62 that we seek to cure, than the very fact that good and worthy63 men of established repute in the county can, by living in such places as these, become so stagnant64 and sodden65 and unsocial, whether through the fumes66 of wine or through meditations67 as maudlin68 about the past, that they consider the case solely69 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 fermented70 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 wrangling71 about the Captain’s locus72 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 temperately73. “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 descending74 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 smote75 him flat across face and chest with the wooden sign-board, so as to send him flying into the ditch on the other side of the road. Then turning on the man in the fez he poked76 him with the end of the pole so sharply in his new white waistcoat and watch-chain as to cause him to sit down suddenly in the road, looking very serious and thoughtful.
The dark secretary made a movement of rescue, but Humphrey Pump, with a cry, caught up his gun from the table and pointed it at him, which so alarmed J. Leveson, Secretary, as to cause him almost to double up with his emotions. The next moment Pump, with his gun under his arm, was scampering77 down the hill after the Captain, who was scampering after the barrel and the cheese.
Before the policeman had struggled out of the ditch, they had all disappeared into the darkness of the forest. Lord Ivywood who had remained firm through the scene, without a sign of fear or impatience78 (or, I will add, amusement), held up his hand and stopped the policeman in his pursuit.
“We should only make ourselves and the law ridiculous,” he said, “by pursuing those ludicrous rowdies now. They can’t escape or do any real harm in the state of modern communications. What is far more important, gentlemen, is to destroy their stores and their base. Under the Act of 1911 we have a right to confiscate79 and destroy any property in an inn where the law has been violated.”
And he stood for hours on the lawn, watching the smashing of bottles and the breaking up of casks and feeding on fanatical pleasure: the pleasure his strange, cold, courageous80 nature could not get from food or wine or woman.
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1
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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ethical
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| adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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6
amending
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| 改良，修改，修订( amend的现在分词 )； 改良，修改，修订( amend的第三人称单数 )( amends的现在分词 ) | |
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prosecution
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| n.起诉，告发，检举，执行，经营 | |
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violation
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| n.违反(行为)，违背(行为)，侵犯 | |
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enacts
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| 制定（法律），通过（法案）( enact的第三人称单数 ) | |
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pictorial
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| adj.绘画的；图片的；n．画报 | |
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premises
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| n.建筑物，房屋 | |
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tavern
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| n.小旅馆，客栈；小酒店 | |
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licensed
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| adj.得到许可的v.许可，颁发执照(license的过去式和过去分词) | |
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license
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| n.执照，许可证，特许；v.许可，特许 | |
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15
specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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attainable
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| a.可达到的，可获得的 | |
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warped
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| adj.反常的；乖戾的；（变）弯曲的；变形的v.弄弯，变歪( warp的过去式和过去分词 )；使（行为等）不合情理，使乖戾， | |
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19
dreary
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| adj.令人沮丧的，沉闷的，单调乏味的 | |
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casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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astounding
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| adj.使人震惊的vt.使震惊，使大吃一惊astound的现在分词) | |
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naval
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| adj.海军的，军舰的，船的 | |
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tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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astounded
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| v.使震惊(astound的过去式和过去分词)；愕然；愕；惊讶 | |
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impair
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| v.损害，损伤；削弱，减少 | |
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revolving
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| adj.旋转的，轮转式的；循环的v.（使）旋转( revolve的现在分词 )；细想 | |
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27
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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28
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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apocrypha
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| n.伪经，伪书 | |
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30
unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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moody
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| adj.心情不稳的，易怒的，喜怒无常的 | |
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downwards
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| adj./adv.向下的（地），下行的（地） | |
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emblem
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| n.象征，标志；徽章 | |
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industriously
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atheist
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| n.无神论者 | |
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squire
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| n.护卫, 侍从, 乡绅 | |
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assented
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| 同意，赞成( assent的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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goggles
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| n.护目镜 | |
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bellow
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| v.吼叫，怒吼；大声发出，大声喝道 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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farce
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| n.闹剧，笑剧，滑稽戏；胡闹 | |
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42
inspector
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| n.检查员，监察员，视察员 | |
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apron
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| n.围裙；工作裙 | |
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scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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45
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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statute
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| n.成文法，法令，法规；章程，规则，条例 | |
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47
ERECTED
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| adj. 直立的，竖立的，笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立，建立 | |
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48
manor
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| n.庄园，领地 | |
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49
livelihood
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| n.生计，谋生之道 | |
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50
accrue
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| v.(利息等)增大，增多 | |
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51
savings
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| n.存款，储蓄 | |
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52
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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53
exempt
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| adj.免除的；v.使免除；n.免税者，被免除义务者 | |
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54
provocative
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| adj.挑衅的，煽动的，刺激的，挑逗的 | |
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55
strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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56
exempted
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| 使免除[豁免]( exempt的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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precarious
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| adj.不安定的，靠不住的；根据不足的 | |
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58
inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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59
oratorical
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| adj.演说的，雄辩的 | |
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60
insidiousness
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| 潜伏，阴险； 隐袭性 | |
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61
civic
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| adj.城市的，都市的，市民的，公民的 | |
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62
corruption
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| n.腐败，堕落，贪污 | |
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63
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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64
stagnant
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| adj.不流动的，停滞的，不景气的 | |
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sodden
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| adj.浑身湿透的；v.使浸透；使呆头呆脑 | |
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66
fumes
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| n.(强烈而刺激的)气味，气体 | |
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67
meditations
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| 默想( meditation的名词复数 )； 默念； 沉思； 冥想 | |
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68
maudlin
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| adj.感情脆弱的，爱哭的 | |
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69
solely
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| adv.仅仅，唯一地 | |
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70
fermented
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| v.（使）发酵( ferment的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）激动；骚动；骚扰 | |
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71
wrangling
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| v.争吵，争论，口角( wrangle的现在分词 ) | |
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72
locus
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| n.中心 | |
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73
temperately
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| adv.节制地，适度地 | |
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74
descending
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| n. 下行 adj. 下降的 | |
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75
smote
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| v.猛打，重击，打击( smite的过去式 ) | |
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76
poked
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| v.伸出( poke的过去式和过去分词 )；戳出；拨弄；与（某人）性交 | |
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77
scampering
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| v.蹦蹦跳跳地跑，惊惶奔跑( scamper的现在分词 ) | |
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78
impatience
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| n.不耐烦，急躁 | |
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79
confiscate
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| v.没收(私人财产)，把…充公 | |
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80
courageous
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| adj.勇敢的，有胆量的 | |
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