“I’m goin’ ’ome,” said the driver in an undecipherable voice. “I’m a goin’ ’ome to my mar3.”
“And where does she live?” asked Dalroy, with something more like diffidence than he had ever shown before in his life.
“Wiles,” said the man, “but I ain’t seen ’er since I was born. But she’ll do.”
“You must realise,” said Dalroy, with difficulty, “that you may be arrested—it’s the man’s own car; and he’s left behind with nothing to eat, so to speak.”
“’E’s got ’is dornkey,” grunted4 the man. “Let the stinker eat ’is dornkey, with thistle sauce. ’E would if ’e was as ’ollow as I was.”
Humphrey Pump opened the glass window that separated him from the rear part of the car, and turned to speak to his friend over his square elbow and shoulder.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “he won’t stop for anything just yet. He’s as mad as Moody’s aunt, as they say.”
“Do they say it?” asked the Captain, with a sort of anxiety. “They never said it in Ithaca.”
“Honestly, I think you’d better leave him alone,” answered Pump, with his sagacious face. “He’d just run us into a Scotch5 Express like Dandy Mutton did, when they said he was driving carelessly. We can send the car back to Ivywood somehow later on, and really, I don’t think it’ll do the gentleman any harm to spend a night with a donkey. The donkey might teach him something, I tell you.”
“It’s true he denied the Principle of Private Property,” said Dalroy, reflectively, “but I fancy he was thinking of a plain house fixed6 on the ground. A house on wheels, such as this, he might perhaps think a more permanent possession. But I never understand it;” and again he passed a weary palm across his open forehead. “Have you ever noticed, Hump, what is really odd about those people?”
The car shot on amid the comfortable silence of Pump, and then the Irishman said again:
“That poet in the pussy-cat clothes wasn’t half bad. Lord Ivywood isn’t cruel; but he’s inhuman7. But that man wasn’t inhuman. He was ignorant, like most cultured fellows. But what’s odd about them is that they try to be simple and never clear away a single thing that’s complicated. If they have to choose between beef and pickles8, they always abolish the beef. If they have to choose between a meadow and a motor, they forbid the meadow. Shall I tell you the secret? These men only surrender the things that bind9 them to other men. Go and dine with a temperance millionaire and you won’t find he’s abolished the hors d’œuvres or the five courses or even the coffee. What he’s abolished is the port and sherry, because poor men like that as well as rich. Go a step farther, and you won’t find he’s abolished the fine silver forks and spoons, but he’s abolished the meat, because poor men like meat—when they can get it. Go a step farther, and you won’t find he goes without gardens or gorgeous rooms, which poor men can’t enjoy at all. But you will find he boasts of early rising, because sleep is a thing poor men can still enjoy. About the only thing they can still enjoy. Nobody ever heard of a modern philanthropist giving up petrol or typewriting or troops of servants. No, no! What he gives up must be some simple and universal thing. He will give up beef or beer or sleep—because these pleasures remind him that he is only a man.”
Humphrey Pump nodded, but still answered nothing; and the voice of the sprawling11 Dalroy took one of its upward turns of a sort of soaring flippancy12; which commonly embodied13 itself in remembering some song he had composed.
“Such,” he said, “was the case of the late Mr. Mandragon, so long popular in English aristocratic society as a bluff14 and simple democrat15 from the West, until he was unfortunately sand-bagged by six men whose wives he had had shot by private detectives, on his incautiously landing on American soil.
“Mr. Mandragon the Millionaire, he wouldn’t have wine or wife,
He couldn’t endure complexity16; he lived the simple life;
He ordered his lunch by megaphone in manly17, simple tones,
And used all his motors for canvassing18 voters, and twenty telephones;
Besides a dandy little machine,
Cunning and neat as ever was seen,
With a hundred pulleys and cranks between,
Made of iron and kept quite clean,
To hoist19 him out of his healthful bed on every day of his life,
And wash him and brush him and shave him and dress him to live the Simple Life.
“Mr. Mandragon was most refined and quietly, neatly20 dressed,
Say all the American newspapers that know refinement21 best;
Quiet and neat the hair and hat, and the coat quiet and neat,
A trouser worn upon either leg, while boots adorned22 the feet;
And not, as anyone might expect,
A Tiger Skin, all striped and specked,
And a Peacock Hat with the tail erect23,
A scarlet24 tunic25 with sunflowers decked—
That might have had a more marked effect,
And pleased the pride of a weaker man that yearned26 for wine or wife;
But fame and the flagon for Mr. Mandragon obscured the Simple Life.
“Mr. Mandragon the Millionaire, I am happy to say, is dead.
He enjoyed a quiet funeral in a crematorium shed,
And he lies there fluffy27 and soft and grey and certainly quite refined,
When he might have rotted to flowers and fruit with Adam and all mankind.
Or been eaten by bears that fancy blood,
Or burnt on a big tall tower of wood,
In a towering flame as a heathen should,
Or even sat with us here at food,
Merrily taking twopenny rum and cheese with a pocket knife,
But these were luxuries lost for him that lived for the Simple Life.”
Mr. Pump had made many attempts to arrest this song, but they were as vain as all attempts to arrest the car. The angry chauffeur seemed, indeed, rather inspired to further energy by the violent vocal28 noises behind; and Pump again found it best to fall back on conversation.
“Well, Captain,” he said, amicably29. “I can’t quite agree with you about those things. Of course, you can trust foreigners too much as poor Thompson did; but then you can go too far the other way. Aunt Sarah lost a thousand pounds that way. I told her again and again he wasn’t a nigger, but she wouldn’t believe me. And, of course, that was just the kind of thing to offend an ambassador if he was an Austrian. It seems to me, Captain, you aren’t quite fair to these foreign chaps. Take these Americans, now! There were many Americans went by Pebblewick, you may suppose. But in all the lot there was never a bad lot; never a nasty American, nor a stupid American—nor, well, never an American that I didn’t rather like.”
“I know,” said Dalroy, “you mean there was never an American who did not appreciate ‘The Old Ship.’”
“I suppose I do mean that,” answered the inn-keeper, “and somehow, I feel ‘The Old Ship’ might appreciate the American too.”
“You English are an extraordinary lot,” said the Irishman, with a sudden and sombre quietude. “I sometimes feel you may pull through after all.”
After another silence he said, “You’re always right, Hump, and one oughtn’t to think of Yankees like that. The rich are the scum of the earth in every country. And a vast proportion of the real Americans are among the most courteous30, intelligent, self-respecting people in the world. Some attribute this to the fact that a vast proportion of the real Americans are Irishmen.”
Pump was still silent, and the Captain resumed in a moment.
“All the same,” he said, “it’s very hard for a man, especially a man of a small country like me, to understand how it must feel to be an American; especially in the matter of nationality. I shouldn’t like to have to write the American National Anthem31, but fortunately there is no great probability of the commission being given. The shameful32 secret of my inability to write an American patriotic33 song is one that will die with me.”
“Well, what about an English one,” said Pump, sturdily. “You might do worse, Captain.”
“English, you bloody34 tyrant35,” said Patrick, indignantly. “I could no more fancy a song by an Englishman than you could one by that dog.”
Mr. Humphrey Pump gravely took the paper from his pocket, on which he had previously36 inscribed37 the sin and desolation of grocers, and felt in another of his innumerable pockets for a pencil.
“Hullo,” cried Dalroy. “Are you going to have a shy at the Ballad38 of Quoodle?”
Quoodle lifted his ears at his name. Mr. Pump smiled a slight and embarrassed smile. He was secretly proud of Dalroy’s admiration39 for his previous literary attempts and he had some natural knack40 for verse as a game, as he had for all games; and his reading, though desultory41, had not been merely rustic42 or low.
“On condition,” he said, deprecatingly, “that you write a song for the English.”
“Oh, very well,” said Patrick, with a huge sigh that really indicated the very opposite of reluctance43. “We must do something till the thing stops, I suppose, and this seems a blameless parlour game. ‘Songs of the Car Club.’ Sounds quite aristocratic.”
And he began to make marks with a pencil on the fly-leaf of a little book he had in his pocket—Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianæ. Every now and then, however, he looked up and delayed his own composition by watching Pump and the dog, whose proceedings44 amused him very much. For the owner of “The Old Ship” sat sucking his pencil and looking at Mr. Quoodle with eyes of fathomless45 attention. Every now and then he slightly scratched his brown hair with the pencil, and wrote down a word. And the dog Quoodle, with that curious canine46
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CHAPTER XVI THE SEVEN MOODS OF DORIAN
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