was challenged to do something,” continued Hood, “which my friend here declared to be impossible. In fact, any sane man would have declared it to be impossible. But I did it all the same. Only my friend, in the heat of rejecting and mocking the idea, used an expression he didn’t think about. I might almost say he made a rash vow[11].”
“My exact words were,” said Colonel Crane solemnly, “‘If you can do that, I’ll eat my hat.’”
He leaned forward thoughtfully and began to eat it. Then he continued in the same meditative way:
“You see, all rash vows are literal or nothing. There might be a debate about the logical and literary way in which my friend Hood fulfilled HIS rash vow. But I accepted it as a challenge in the same pedantic sort of way. It wasn’t possible to eat any hat that I wore. But it could be possible to wear a hat that I could eat. Parts of dress could hardly be used for diet; but parts of diet could really be used for dress. It seemed to me that it could become my hat, if I wore it systematically as a hat and had no other, putting up with all the disadvantages. Making a fool of myself was the fair price to be paid for the vow or bet; because you should always lose something on a bet.”
And he rose from the table with a gesture of apology.
The girl stood up. “I think it’s perfectly splendid,” she said. “It’s as wild as one of those stories about looking for the Holy Grail.[12]”
The lawyer also had risen, rather quickly, and stood touching his long chin with his thumb and looking at his old friend under bent brows in a rather meditative manner.
“Well, you’ve made me a witness all right,” he said, “and now, with the permission of the court, I’ll leave the witness-box. I’m afraid I must be going. I’ve got important business at home. Good-bye, Miss Smith.”
The girl answered a little mechanically; and Crane seemed to recover from a similar trance, when he stepped after the retreating figure of his friend.
“I say, Owen,” he said quickly, “I’m sorry you’re leaving so early. Do you really have to go?”
“Yes,” replied Owen Hood gravely. “My private affairs are quite real and practical, I assure you.” His grave mouth showed some signs of a smile at the corners when he added:“The truth is, I don’t think I mentioned it, but I’m thinking of getting married.”
“Married!” repeated the Colonel, as if struck by a lightning.
“Thanks for your compliments and congratulations, old fellow,” said the satiric Mr. Hood. “Yes, it’s all been thought through. I’ve even decided who I am going to marry. She knows about it herself. She has been warned.”
“I am really sorry,” said the Colonel in great distress, “of course I congratulate you from my heart; and her even more so. Of course I’m very happy to hear it. The truth is, I was surprised… not so much in that way…”
“Not so much in what way?” asked Hood. “I suppose you mean some would say I was on the way to be an old bachelor. But I’ve discovered it isn’t half so much a question of years as of habits. Men like me get elderly more by choice than chance; and there’s much more choice and less chance in life than your modern fatalists believe. For such people fatalism changes even chronology. They’re not unmarried because they’re old. They’re old because they’re unmarried.”
“Indeed you are mistaken,” said Crane earnestly. “As I say, I was surprised, but my surprise was not as rude as you think. It wasn’t that I thought there was anything wrong about… somehow it was rather the other way… as if things could fit better than one thought… as if – but anyhow, as little as I know about it, I really do congratulate you.”
“I’ll tell you all about it before long,” replied his friend. “It’s enough to say just now that it was all connected with my succeeding after all in doing – what I did. She was the inspiration, you know. I have done what is called an impossible thing; but believe me, she is really the impossible part of it.”
“Well, I must not keep you from such an impossible engagement,” said Crane smiling. “Really, I’m awfully glad to hear about all this. Well, good-bye for now.”
Colonel Crane stood watching the square shoulders and dark red hair of his old friend, when they disappeared down the road, in a rather indescribable state of mind. When he turned quickly back towards his garden and his other guest, he noticed something had changed. Things seemed different in some light-headed and illogical manner. He could not himself understand what had happened; indeed, he did not know whether it happened inside or outside. He was very far from being a fool; but his brains were of the sort that are directed outwards to things, the brains of the soldier or the scientific man, and he had no practice in analysing his own mind. He did not quite understand why the news about Owen Hood should give him that strange sense of a difference in things in general. Without a doubt, he was very fond of Owen Hood; but he had been fond of other people who had got married without especially disturbing the atmosphere of his own back-garden. He even thought that his feelings on their own might have worked the other way; that they might have made him worry about Hood, and wonder whether Hood was making a fool of himself, or even feel suspicious or jealous of Mrs. Hood – something else made him feel quite the other way. He could not quite understand it; there seemed to be an increasing number of things that he could not understand. This world in which he himself wore pieces of green cabbage and in which his old friend the lawyer got married suddenly like a man going mad – this world was a new world, at once fresh and frightening, in which he could hardly understand the figures that were walking about, even his own. The flowers in the flower-beds looked differently, at once bright and nameless; and even the line of vegetables beyond could not altogether depress him with the memories of his last escapade. Indeed he felt very much like someone in the morning of the world; but beyond that he could understand nothing.
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.
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