The Flying Inn by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Author:Gilbert Keith Chesterton [Chesterton, Gilbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_classic
Publisher: John Lane Company
Published: 1914-03-19T05:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER XV

THE SONGS OF THE CAR CLUB

MORE than once as the car flew through black and silver fairylands of fir wood and pine wood, Dalroy put his head out of the side window and remonstrated with the chauffeur without effect. He was reduced at last to asking him where he was going.

“I’m goin’ ’ome,” said the driver in an undecipherable voice. “I’m a goin’ ’ome to my mar.”

“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,” grunted 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 Scotch 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 fixed 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 inhuman. 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 pickles, 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 bind them to other men. Go and dine with a temperance millionaire and you won’t find he’s abolished the hors d’oeuvres 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.

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