“Upon my soul, this water tastes quite nice. I wonder what vintage now?” and he smacked his lips with solemnity. “It tastes just like the year 1881 tasted.”
“You can fancy anything in the tasting way,” returned his shorter companion. “Mr. Jack, who was always up to his tricks, did serve plain water in those little glasses they drink liqueurs out of, and everyone swore it was a delicious liqueur, and wanted to know where they could get it–all except old Admiral Guffin, who said it tasted too strong of olives. But water’s much the best for our game, certainly.”
Patrick nodded, and then said:
“I doubt if I could do it, if it weren’t for the comfort of looking at that,” and he kicked the rum-keg, “and feeling we shall have a good swig at it some day. It feels like a fairy-tale, carrying that about–as if rum were a pirate’s treasure, as if it were molten gold. Besides, we can have such fun with it with other people –what was that joke I thought of this morning? Oh, I remember! Where’s that milk can of mine?”
For the next twenty minutes he was industriously occupied with his milk can and the cask; Pump watching him with an interest amounting to anxiety. Lifting his head, however, at the end of that time, he knotted his red brows and said, “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” asked the other traveller.
“That!” said Captain Patrick Dalroy, and pointed to a figure approaching on the road parallel to the river, “I mean, what’s it for?”
The figure had a longish beard and very long hair falling far below its shoulders. It had a serious and steadfast expression. It was dressed in what the inexperienced Mr. Pump at first took to be its nightgown; but afterward learned to be its complete goats’ hair tunic, unmixed even with a thread of the destructive and deadly wool of the sheep. It had no boots on its feet. It walked very swiftly to a particular turn of the stream and then turned very sharply (since it had accomplished its constitutional), and walked back toward the perfect town of Peaceways.
“I suppose it’s somebody from that milk place,” said Humphrey Pump, indulgently. “They seem to be pretty mad.”
“I don’t mind that so much,” said Dalroy, “I’m mad myself sometimes. But a madman has only one merit and last link with God. A madman is always logical. Now what is the logical connection between living on milk and wearing your hair long? Most of us lived on milk when we had no hair at all. How do they connect it up? Are there any heads even for a synopsis? Is it, say, ‘milk–water–shaving-water– shaving–hair?’ Is it ‘milk–kindness–unkindness–convicts–hair?’ What is the logical connection between having too much hair and having far too few boots? What can it be? Is it ‘hair–hair-trunk– leather-trunk–leather-boots?’ Is it ‘hair–beard–oysters– seaside–paddling–no boots?’ Man is liable to err–especially when every mistake he makes is called a movement–but why should all the lunacies live together?”
“Because all the lunatics should live together,” said, Humphrey, “and if you’d seen what happened up at Crampton, with the farming-out idea, you’d know. It’s all very well, Captain; but if people can prevent a guest of great importance being buried up to the neck in farm manure, they will. They will, really.” He coughed almost apologetically. He was about to attempt a resumption of the conversation, when he saw his companion slap the milk can and keg back into the car, and get into it himself. “You drive,” he said, “drive me where those things live; you know, Hump.”
They did not, however, arrive in the civic centre of such things without yet another delay. They left the river and followed the man with the long hair and the goatskin frock; and he stopped as it happened at a house on the outskirts of the village. The adventurers stopped also, out of curiosity, and were at first relieved to see the man almost instantly reappear, having transacted his business with a quickness that seemed incredible. A second glance showed them it was not the man, but another man dressed exactly like him. A few minutes more of inquisitive delay, showed them many of the kilty and goatish sect going in and out of this particular place, each clad in his innocent uniform.
“This must be the temple and chapel,” muttered Patrick, “it must be here they sacrifice a glass of milk to a cow, or whatever it is they do. Well, the joke is pretty obvious, but we must wait for a lull in the crowding of the congregation.”
When the last long-haired phantom had faded up the road, Dalroy sprang from the car and drove the sign-board deep into the earth with savage violence, and then very quietly knocked at the door.
The apparent owner of the place, of whom the two last of the long-haired and bare-footed idealists were taking a rather hurried farewell, was a man curiously ill-fitted for the part he seemed cast for in the only possible plot.
Both Pump and Dalroy thought they had never seen a man look so sullen. His face was of the rubicund sort that does not suggest jollity, but merely a stagnant indigestion in the head. His mustache hung heavy and dark, his brows yet heavier and darker. Dalroy had seen something of the sort on the faces of defeated people disgracefully forced into submission, but he could not make head or tail of it in connection with the priggish perfections of Peaceways. It was all the odder because he was manifestly prosperous; his clothes were smartly cut in something of the sporting manner, and the inside of his house was at least four times grander than the outside.
But what mystified them most was this, that he did not so much exhibit the natural curiosity of a gentleman whose private house is entered by strangers, but rather an embarrassed and restless expectation. During Dalroy’s eager apologies and courteous inquiries about the direction and accommodations of Peaceways, his eye (which was of the boiled gooseberry order) perpetually wandered from them to the cupboard and then again to the window, and at last he got up and went to look out into the road.
“Oh, yes, sir; very healthy place, Peaceways,” he said, peering through the lattice. “Very … dash it, what do they mean? … Very healthy place. Of course they have their little ways.”
“Only drink pure milk, don’t they?” asked Dalroy.
The householder looked at him with a rather wild eye and grunted.
“Yes; so they say,” and he went again to the window.
“I’ve bought some of it,” said Patrick, patting his pet milk can, which he carried under his arm, as if unable to be separated from Dr. Meadows’s discovery. “Have a glass of milk, sir.”
The man’s boiled eye began to bulge in anger–or some other emotion.
“What do you want?” he muttered, “are you ’tecs or what?”
“Agents and Distributors of the Meadows’s Mountain Milk,” said the Captain, with simple pride, “taste it?”
The dazed householder took a glass of the blameless liquid and sipped it; and the change on his face was extraordinary.
“Well, I’m jiggered,” he said, with a broad and rather coarse grin. “That’s a queer dodge. You’re in the joke, I see.” Then he went again restlessly to the window; and added, “but if we’re all friends, why the blazes don’t the others come in? I’ve never known trade so slow before.”
“Who are the others?” asked Mr. Pump.
“Oh, the usual Peaceways people,” said the other. “They generally come here before work. Dr. Meadows don’t work them for very long hours, that wouldn’t be healthy or whatever he calls it; but he’s particular about their being punctual. I’ve seen ’em running, with all their pure-minded togs on, when the hooter gave the last call.”
Then he abruptly opened the front door and called out impatiently, but not loudly:
“Come along in if you’re coming. You’ll give the show away if you play the fool out there.”
Patrick looked out also and the view of the road outside was certainly rather singular. He was used to crowds, large and small, collecting outside houses which he had honoured with the sign of “The Old Ship,” but they generally stared up at it in unaffected wonder and amusement. But outside this open door, some twenty or thirty persons in what Pump had called their night-gowns were moving to and fro like somnambulists, apparently blind to the presence of the sign; looking at the other side of the road, looking at the horizon, looking at the clouds of morning; and only occasionally stopping to whisper to each other. But when the owner of the house called to one of these ostentatiously abstracted beings and asked him hoarsely what the devil was the matter, it was natural for the milk-fed one to turn his feeble eye toward the sign. The gooseberry eyes followed his, and the face to which they belonged was a study in apoplectic astonishment.