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                         Chapter III

                    The Banner of Beacon


All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it
was everybody's birthday.  It is the fashion to talk of
institutions as cold and cramping things.  The truth is that
when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild
with freedom and invention, they always must, and they
always do, create institutions.  When men are weary they
fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they
invariably make rules.  This, which is true of all the
churches and republics of history, is also true of the most
trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow
romp.  We are never free until some institution frees us;
and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority.
Even the wild authority of the harlequin Smith was still
authority, because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy
regulations and conditions.  He filled every one with his
own half-lunatic life; but it was not expressed in
destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling
construction.  Each person with a hobby found it turning
into an institution.  Rosamund's songs seemed to coalesce
into a kind of opera; Michael's jests and paragraphs into a
magazine.  His pipe and her mandoline seemed between them to
make a sort of smoking concert.  The bashful and bewildered
Arthur Inglewood almost struggled against his own growing
importance.  He felt as if, in spite of him, his photographs
were turning into a picture gallery, and his bicycle into a
gymkhana.  But no one had any time to criticize these
impromptu estates and offices, for they followed each other
in wild succession like the topics of a rambling talker.
   Existence with such a man was an obstacle race made of
pleasant obstacles.  Out of any homely and trivial object he
could drag reels of exaggeration, like a conjurer.  Nothing
could be more shy and impersonal than poor Arthur's
photography.  Yet the preposterous Smith was seen assisting
him eagerly through sunny morning hours, and an indefensible
sequence described as "Moral Photography" began to unroll
about the boarding-house.  It was only a version of the old
photographer's joke which produces the same figure twice on
one plate, making a man play chess with himself, dine with
himself, and so on.  But these plates were more mystical and
ambitious -- as, "Miss Hunt forgets Herself," showing that
lady answering her own too rapturous recognition with a most
appalling stare of ignorance; or "Mr. Moon questions
Himself," in which Mr. Moon appeared as one driven to
madness under his own legal cross-examination, which was
conducted with a long forefinger and an air of ferocious
waggery.  One highly successful trilogy -- representing
Inglewood recognizing Inglewood, Inglewood prostrating
himself before Inglewood, and Inglewood severely beating
Inglewood with an umbrella -- Innocent Smith wanted to have
enlarged and put up in the hall, like a sort of fresco, with
the inscription, --

        "Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control --
         These three alone will make a man a prig."

                                                -- Tennyson.

   Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable
than the domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke.  But Innocent
had somehow blundered on the discovery that her thrifty
dressmaking went with a considerable feminine care for dress
-- the one feminine thing that had never failed her solitary
self-respect.  In consequence Smith pestered her with a
theory (which he really seemed to take seriously) that
ladies might combine economy with magnificence if they would
draw light chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust
them off again.  He set up "Smith's Lightning Dressmaking
Company," with two screens, a cardboard placard, and box of
bright soft crayons; and Miss Diana actually threw him an
abandoned black overall or working dress on which to
exercise the talents of a modiste.  He promptly produced for
her a garment aflame with red and gold sunflowers; she held
it up an instant to her shoulders, and looked like an
empress.  And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards
cleaning his bicycle (with his usual air of being
inextricably hidden in it), glanced up; and his hot face
grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing for one flash in the
doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green and
purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden in
the "Arabian Nights."  A pang too swift to be named pain or
pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier.
He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he
was ready to fall in love with anybody; but it was like
remembering a worship of some Babylonian princess in some
previous existence.  At his next glimpse of her (and he
caught himself awaiting it) the purple and green chalk was
dusted off, and she went by quickly in her working clothes.
   As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could
conceive her as actively resisting this invasion that had
turned her house upside down.  But among the most exact
observers it was seriously believed that she liked it.  For
she was one of those women who at bottom regard all men as
equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.
And it is doubtful if she really saw anything more eccentric
or inexplicable in Smith's chimney-pot picnics or crimson
sunflowers than she had in the chemicals of Inglewood or the
sardonic speeches of Moon.  Courtesy, on the other hand, is
a thing that anybody can understand, and Smith's manners
were as courteous as they were unconventional.  She said he
was "a real gentleman," by which she simply meant a
kind-hearted man, which is a very different thing.  She
would sit at the head of the table with fat, folded hands
and a fat, folded smile for hours and hours, while every one
else was talking at once.  At least, the only other
exception was Rosamund's companion, Mary Gray, whose silence
was of a much more eager sort.  Though she never spoke she
always looked as if she might speak any minute.  Perhaps
this is the very definition of a companion.  Innocent Smith
seemed to throw himself, as into other adventures, into the
adventure of making her talk.  He never succeeded, yet he
was never snubbed; if he achieved anything, it was only to
draw attention to this quiet figure, and to turn her, by
ever so little, from a modesty to a mystery.  But if she was
a riddle, every one recognized that she was a fresh and
unspoilt riddle, like the riddle of the sky and the woods in
spring.  Indeed, though she was rather older than the other
two girls, she had an early morning ardour, a fresh
earnestness of youth, which Rosamund seemed to have lost in
the mere spending of money, and Diana in the mere guarding
of it.  Smith looked at her again and again.  Her eyes and
mouth were set in her face the wrong way -- which was really
the right way.  She had the knack of saying everything with
her face: her silence was a sort of steady applause.
   But among the hilarious experiments of that holiday
(which seemed more like a week's holiday than a day's) one
experiment towers supreme, not because it was any sillier or
more successful than the others, but because out of this
particular folly flowed all of the odd events that were to
follow.  All the other practical jokes exploded of
themselves, and left vacancy; all the other fictions
returned upon themselves, and were finished like a song.
But the string of solid and startling events -- which were
to include a hansom cab, a detective, a pistol, and a
marriage licence -- were all made primarily possible by the
joke about the High Court of Beacon.
   It had originated, not with Innocent Smith, but with
Michael Moon.  He was in a strange glow and pressure of
spirits, and talked incessantly; yet he had never been more
sarcastic, and even inhuman.  He used his old useless
knowledge as a barrister to talk entertainingly of a
tribunal that was a parody on the pompous anomalies of
English law.  The High Court of Beacon, he declared, was a
splendid example of our free and sensible constitution.  It
had been founded by King John in defiance of the Magna
Carta, and now held absolute power over windmills, wine and
spirit licences, ladies travelling in Turkey, revision of
sentences for dog-stealing and parricide, as well as
anything whatever that happened in the town of Market
Bosworth.  The whole hundred and nine seneschals of the High
Court of Beacon met once in every four centuries; but in the
intervals (as Mr. Moon explained) the whole powers of the
institution were vested in Mrs. Duke.  Tossed about among
the rest of the company, however, the High Court did not
retain its historical and legal seriousness, but was used
somewhat unscrupulously in a riot of domestic detail.  If
somebody spilt the Worcester Sauce on the tablecloth, he was
quite sure it was a rite without which the sittings and
findings of the Court would be invalid; or if somebody
wanted a window to remain shut, he would suddenly remember
that none but the third son of the lord of the manor of
Penge had the right to open it.  They even went to the
length of making arrests and conducting criminal inquiries.
The proposed trial of Moses Gould for patriotism was rather
above the heads of the company, especially of the criminal;
but the trial of Inglewood on a charge of photographic
libel, and his triumphant acquittal upon a plea of insanity,
were admitted to be in the best traditions of the Court.
   But when Smith was in wild spirits he grew more and more
serious, not more and more flippant like Michael Moon.  This
proposal of a private court of justice, which Moon had
thrown off with the detachment of a political humourist,
Smith really caught hold of with the eagerness of an
abstract philosopher.  It was by far the best thing they
could do, he declared, to claim sovereign powers even for
the individual household.
   "You believe in Home Rule for Ireland; I believe in Home
Rule for homes," he cried eagerly to Michael.  "It would be
better if every father COULD kill his son, as with the old
Romans; it would be better, because nobody would be killed.
Let's issue a Declaration of Independence from Beacon
House.  We could grow enough greens in that garden to
support us, and when the tax-collector comes let's tell him
we're self-supporting, and play on him with the hose.
...Well, perhaps, as you say, we couldn't very well have a
hose, as that comes from the main; but we could sink a well
in this chalk, and a lot could be done with water-jugs...
Let this really be Beacon House.  Let's light a bonfire of
independence on the roof, and see house after house
answering it across the valley of the Thames!  Let us begin
the League of the Free Families!  Away with Local
Government!  A fig for Local Patriotism!  Let every house be
a sovereign state as this is, and judge its own children by
its own law, as we do by the Court of Beacon.  Let us cut
the painter, and begin to be happy together, as if we were
on a desert island."
   "I know that desert island," said Michael Moon; "it only
exists in the `Swiss Family Robinson.'  A man feels a
strange desire for some sort of vegetable milk, and crash
comes down some unexpected cocoa-nut from some undiscovered
monkey.  A literary man feels inclined to pen a sonnet, and
at once an officious porcupine rushes out of a thicket and
shoots out one of his quills."
   "Don't you say a word against the `Swiss Family
Robinson,'" cried Innocent with great warmth.  "It mayn't be
exact science, but it's dead accurate philosophy.  When
you're really shipwrecked, you do really find what you
want.  When you're really on a desert island, you never find
it a desert.  If we were really besieged in this garden,
we'd find a hundred English birds and English berries that
we never knew were here.  If we were snowed up in this room,
we'd be the better for reading scores of books in that
bookcase that we don't even know are there; we'd have talks
with each other, good, terrible talks, that we shall go to
the grave without guessing; we'd find materials for
everything -- christening, marriage, or funeral; yes, even
for a coronation -- if we didn't decide to be a republic."
   "A coronation on `Swiss Family' lines, I suppose," said
Michael, laughing.  "Oh, I know you would find everything in
that atmosphere.  If we wanted such a simple thing, for
instance, as a Coronation Canopy, we should walk down beyond
the geraniums and find the Canopy Tree in full bloom.  If we
wanted such a trifle as a crown of gold, why, we should be
digging up dandelions, and we should find a gold mine under
the lawn.  And when we wanted oil for the ceremony, why, I
suppose a great storm would wash everything on shore, and we
should find there was a Whale on the premises."
   "And so there IS a whale on the premises for all you
know," asseverated Smith, striking the table with passion.
"I bet you've never examined the premises!  I bet you've
never been round at the back as I was this morning -- for I
found the very thing you say could only grow on a tree.
There's an old sort of square tent up against the dustbin;
it's got three holes in the canvas, and a pole's broken, so
it's not much good as a tent, but as a Canopy --"  And his
voice quite failed him to express its shining adequacy; then
he went on with controversial eagerness: "You see I take
every challenge as you make it.  I believe every blessed
thing you say couldn't be here has been here all the time.
You say you want a whale washed up for oil.  Why, there's
oil in that cruet-stand at your elbow; and I don't believe
anybody has touched it or thought of it for years.  And as
for your gold crown, we're none of us wealthy here, but we
could collect enough ten-shilling bits from our own pockets
to string round a man's head for half an hour; or one of
Miss Hunt's gold bangles is nearly big enough to --"
   The good-humoured Rosamund was almost choking with
laughter.  "All is not gold that glitters," she said, "and
besides --"
   "What a mistake that is!" cried Innocent Smith, leaping
up in great excitement.  "All is gold that glitters --
especially now we are a Sovereign State.  What's the good of
a Sovereign State if you can't define a sovereign?  We can
make anything a precious metal, as men could in the morning
of the world.  They didn't choose gold because it was rare;
your scientists can tell you twenty sorts of slime much
rarer.  They chose gold because it was bright -- because it
was a thing hard to find, but pretty when you've found it.
You can't fight with golden swords or eat golden biscuits;
you can only look at it -- and you can look at it out here."
   With one of his incalculable motions he sprang back and
burst open the doors into the garden.  At the same time
also, with one of his gestures that never seemed at the
instant so unconventional as they were, he stretched out his
hand to Mary Gray, and led her out on to the lawn as if for
a dance.
   The French windows, thus flung open, let in an evening
even lovelier than that of the day before.  The west was
swimming with sanguine colours, and a sort of sleepy flame
lay along the lawn.  The twisted shadows of the one or two
garden trees showed upon this sheen, not gray or black, as
in common daylight, but like arabesques written in vivid
violet ink on some page of Eastern gold.  The sunset was one
of those festive and yet mysterious conflagrations in which
common things by their colours remind us of costly or
curious things.  The slates upon the sloping roof burned
like the plumes of a vast peacock, in every mysterious blend
of blue and green.  The red-brown bricks of the wall glowed
with all the October tints of strong ruby and tawny wines.
The sun seemed to set each object alight with a different
coloured flame, like a man lighting fireworks; and even
Innocent's hair, which was of a rather colourless fairness,
seemed to have a flame of pagan gold on it as he strode
across the lawn towards the one tall ridge of rockery.
   "What would be the good of gold," he was saying, "if it
did not glitter?  Why should we care for a black sovereign
any more than a black sun at noon?  A black button would do
just as well.  Don't you see that everything in this garden
looks like a jewel?  And will you kindly tell me what the
deuce is the good of a jewel except that it looks like a
jewel?  Leave off buying and selling, and start looking!
Open your eyes, and you'll wake up in the New Jerusalem.

        "All is gold that glitters--
           Tree and tower of brass;
         Rolls the golden evening air
           Down the golden grass.
         Kick the cry to Jericho,
           How yellow mud is sold,
         All is gold that glitters,
           For the glitter is the gold."

   "And who wrote that?" asked Rosamund, amused.
   "No one will ever write it," answered Smith, and cleared
the rockery with a flying leap.
   "Really," said Rosamund to Michael Moon, "he ought to be
sent to an asylum.  Don't you think so?"
   "I beg your pardon," inquired Michael, rather sombrely;
his long, swarthy head was dark against the sunset, and,
either by accident or mood, he had the look of something
isolated and even hostile amid the social extravagance of
the garden.
   "I only said Mr. Smith ought to go to an asylum,"
repeated the lady.
   The lean face seemed to grow longer and longer, for Moon
was unmistakably sneering.  "No," he said; "I don't think
it's at all necessary."
   "What do you mean?" asked Rosamund quickly.  "Why not?"
   "Because he is in one now," answered Michael Moon, in a
quiet but ugly voice.  "Why, didn't you know?"
   "What?" cried the girl, and there was a break in her
voice; for the Irishman's face and voice were really almost
creepy.  With his dark figure and dark sayings in all that
sunshine he looked like the devil in paradise.
   "I'm sorry," he continued, with a sort of harsh
humility.  "Of course we don't talk about it much... but I
thought we all really knew."
   "Knew what?"
   "Well," answered Moon, "that Beacon House is a certain
rather singular sort of house -- a house with the tiles
loose, shall we say?  Innocent Smith is only the doctor that
visits us; hadn't you come when he called before?  As most
of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be
extra cheery.  Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious
eccentric thing to us.  Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree
-- that's his bedside manner."
   "You daren't say such a thing!" cried Rosamund in a
rage.  "You daren't suggest that I --"
   "Not more than I am," said Michael soothingly; "not more
than the rest of us.  Haven't you ever noticed that Miss
Duke never sits still -- a notorious sign?  Haven't you ever
observed that Inglewood is always washing his hands -- a
known mark of mental disease?  I, of course, am a
dipsomaniac."
   "I don't believe you," broke out his companion, not
without agitation.  "I've heard you had some bad habits --"
   "All habits are bad habits," said Michael, with deadly
calm.  "Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving
in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating
circle of ideas; by being tamed.  YOU went mad about money,
because you're an heiress."
   "It's a lie," cried Rosamund furiously.  "I never was
mean about money."
   "You were worse," said Michael, in a low voice and yet
violently.  "You thought that other people were.  You
thought every man who came near you must be a
fortune-hunter; you would not let yourself go and be sane;
and now you're mad and I'm mad, and serve us right."
   "You brute!" said Rosamund, quite white.  "And is this
true?"
   With the intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is
capable when his abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent
for some seconds, and then stepped back with an ironical
bow.  "Not literally true, of course," he said; "only really
true.  An allegory, shall we say? a social satire."
   "And I hate and despise your satires," cried Rosamund
Hunt, letting loose her whole forcible female personality
like a cyclone, and speaking every word to wound.  "I
despise it as I despise your rank tobacco, and your nasty,
loungy ways, and your snarling, and your Radicalism, and
your old clothes, and your potty little newspaper, and your
rotten failure at everything.  I don't care whether you call
it snobbishness or not, I like life and success, and jolly
things to look at, and action.  You won't frighten me with
Diogenes; I prefer Alexander."
   "Victrix causa deae --" said Michael gloomily; and this
angered her more, as, not knowing what it meant, she
imagined it to be witty.
   "Oh, I dare say you know Greek," she said, with cheerful
inaccuracy; "you haven't done much with that either."  And
she crossed the garden, pursuing the vanished Innocent and
Mary.
   In doing so she passed Inglewood, who was returning to
the house slowly, and with a thought-clouded brow.  He was
one of those men who are quite clever, but quite the reverse
of quick.  As he came back out of the sunset garden into the
twilight parlour, Diana Duke slipped swiftly to her feet and
began putting away the tea things.  But it was not before
Inglewood had seen an instantaneous picture so unique that
he might well have snapshotted it with his everlasting
camera.  For Diana had been sitting in front of her
unfinished work with her chin on her hand, looking straight
out of the window in pure thoughtless thought.
   "You are busy," said Arthur, oddly embarrassed with what
he had seen, and wishing to ignore it.
   "There's no time for dreaming in this world," answered
the young lady with her back to him.
   "I have been thinking lately," said Inglewood in a low
voice, "that there's no time for waking up."
   She did not reply, and he walked to the window and looked
out on the garden.
   "I don't smoke or drink, you know," he said irrelevantly,
"because I think they're drugs.  And yet I fancy all
hobbies, like my camera and bicycle, are drugs too.  Getting
under a black hood, getting into a dark room -- getting into
a hole anyhow.  Drugging myself with speed, and sunshine,
and fatigue, and fresh air.  Pedalling the machine so fast
that I turn into a machine myself.  That's the matter with
all of us.  We're too busy to wake up."
   "Well," said the girl solidly, "what is there to wake up
to?"
   "There must be!" cried Inglewood, turning round in a
singular excitement -- "there must be something to wake up
to!  All we do is preparations -- your cleanliness, and my
healthiness, and Warner's scientific appliances.  We're
always preparing for something -- something that never comes
off.  I ventilate the house, and you sweep the house; but
what is going to HAPPEN in the house?"
   She was looking at him quietly, but with very bright
eyes, and seemed to be searching for some form of words
which she could not find.
   Before she could speak the door burst open, and the
boisterous Rosamund Hunt, in her flamboyant white hat, boa,
and parasol, stood framed in the doorway.  She was in a
breathing heat, and on her open face was an expression of
the most infantile astonishment.
   "Well, here's a fine game!" she said, panting.  "What am
I to do now, I wonder?  I've wired for Dr. Warner; that's
all I can think of doing."
   "What is the matter?" asked Diana, rather sharply, but
moving forward like one used to be called upon for
assistance.
   "It's Mary," said the heiress, "my companion Mary Gray:
that cracked friend of yours called Smith has proposed to
her in the garden, after ten hours' acquaintance, and he
wants to go off with her now for a special licence."
   Arthur Inglewood walked to the open French windows and
looked out on the garden, still golden with evening light.
Nothing moved there but a bird or two hopping and
twittering; but beyond the hedge and railings, in the road
outside the garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with the
yellow Gladstone bag on top of it.