I rode at the head of the caravan, and the mules and ponies that carried the loads followed at my heels. But one of the ponies, unused perhaps to a pack, was very wild. It had savage eyes. Every now and then it bolted wildly among the mules, hitting them with its packs; then the leading mule headed it off, round it into the long grass at the side of the road, and stopped it. They both stood still for a moment and then the mule led the pony quietly back to its place in the file. It walked along quite contentedly. It had had its scamper and for a little while at all events was prepared to behave reasonably. The idea in the mulish brain of the pack-leader was as clear and distinct as any idea of Descartes. In the train was peace, order and happiness. To walk with your nose at the tail of the mule in front of you and to know that the nose of the mule behind you was at your tail, was virtue. Like some philosophers the mule knew that the only liberty was the power to do right; any other power was only licence. Theirs was not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.
But presently I came face to face with a buffalo standing stock still in the middle of the road. Now I knew that the Shan buffalo had none of that dislike of my colour that makes white men give the Chinese buffalo a wide berth, but I was not certain whether this particular animal had a very exact notion of nationality, and since his horns were enormous and his eyes far from friendly I thought it prudent to make a slight detour: whereupon the whole file, though neither mules nor muleteers could have had my reason for anxiety, followed me into the elephant grass. I could not but reflect that an undue observance of the law may put you to a good deal of unnecessary trouble.
With abundant leisure before me and nothing to distract, I had promised myself to think out on this journey various things that had been on my mind for a long time. There were a number of subjects, error and evil, space, time, chance and mutability, which I felt I should really come to some conclusion about. I had a great deal to say to myself about art and life, but my ideas were higgledy-piggledy like the objects in an old junk shop and I did not know where to put my hands on them when I wanted them. They were in corners of my mind, like oddments stowed away at the back of a chest of drawers, and I only just knew they were there. Some of them hadn't been taken out and brushed for so long that it was a disgrace, the new and the old were all jumbled together, and some were of no use any more and might just as well be thrown on the dust heap, and some (like a pair of Queen Anne spoons long forgotten that with the four a dealer has just found you in an auction room make up the half dozen) would fit very well with new ones. It would be pleasant to have everything cleaned and dusted, neatly put away on shelves, ordered and catalogued so that I knew what my stock consisted of. I resolved that while I rode through the country I would have a regular spring-cleaning of all my ideas. But the pack-leader had round his neck a raucous bell and it clanged so loudly that my reflections were very much disturbed. It was like a muffin bell and it made me think of Sunday afternoon in the London of my youth, with its empty streets and its grey, cold and melancholy sky. I put the spurs to my pony so that I might trot on and escape the dreary sound, but as soon as I began to do so the leader trotted too and the whole cavalcade trotted after him; I galloped and in a moment mules and ponies, their packs jangling and bumping, were galloping helter-skelter after me, and the muffin bell rattled madly at my heels as though it were knelling the death agonies of all the muffin-makers in London. I gave it up as a bad job and settled down again to walk; the train slowed down and just behind me the pack-leader shuffled up and down the empty, respectable street offering muffins for tea, muffins and crumpets. I could not put two thoughts together. I resigned myself at least for that day to make no attempt at serious meditation and instead, to pass the time, invented Blenkinsop.
There can be nothing so gratifying to an author as to arouse the respect and esteem of the reader. Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured. There was once a man called Blenkinsop. He had no talent, but he wrote a book in which his earnestness and his sincerity, his thoughtfulness and his integrity were so evident that, although it was quite unreadable, no one could fail to be impressed by it. Reviewers were unable to get through it, but could not but recognise the author's high aim and purity of purpose. They praised it with such an enthusiastic unanimity that all the people who flatter themselves they are in the movement felt bound to have it on their tables. The critic of The London Mercury said that he would have liked to have written it himself. This was the highest praise he knew. Mr. Blenkinsop deplored the grammar but accepted the compliment. Mrs. Woolf paid it a generous tribute at Bloomsbury, Mr. Osbert Sitwell admired it in Chelsea and Mr. Arnold Bennett was judicious about it in Cadogan Square. Smart women of easy morals bought it so that people should not think they had no mind above the Embassy Club and banting. The poets who go to luncheon parties talked of it exactly as though they had read it from cover to cover. It was bought in the great provincial towns where the virtuous young are gathered together at high tea to improve their minds. Mr. Hugh Walpole wrote a preface to the American edition. The booksellers placed it in piles in their shop windows with a photograph of the author on one side and a card with long extracts from the more important reviews on the other. In short the vogue of the book was so great that its publisher said that if it did not stop selling soon he would have to read it himself. Mr. Blenkinsop became a celebrity. He was asked to its annual dinner by the Lyceum Club.
Now it happened that just about the time when Mr. Blenkinsop's book reached this dizzy height of success, the Prime Minister's secretary presented the Prime Minister with the list of birthday honours. This high dignitary of the Crown looked at it with misgiving.
"A pretty mangy lot," he said. "The public will raise a stink about this."
The secretary was a democrat.
"Who cares?" he said. "Let the public go and boil itself."
"Couldn't we do something for arts and letters?" suggested the Prime Minister.
The secretary remarked that almost all the R.A.'s were knights already and those that were kicked up the devil of a row if any others were knighted.
"The more the merrier, I should have thought," said the Prime Minister flippantly.
"Not at all," answered the secretary. "The more titled R.A.'s there are the less is their financial value."
"I see," said the Prime Minister. "But are there no authors in England?"
"I will inquire," replied the secretary, who had been at Balliol.
He asked at the National Liberal Club and was told that there were Sir Hall Caine and Sir James Barrie. But honours had already been heaped upon them so freely that there seemed nothing more to offer them than the Garter and it was evident that the Lord Mayor of London would be very much put out if they were offered that. The Prime Minister was, however, insistent and his secretary was in a quandary. But one day when he was being shaved his barber asked him if he had read Blenkinsop's book.
"I'm not much of a reader meself," he said, "but our Miss Burroughs, she done your nails last time you was here, sir, she says it's simply divine."
The Primer Minister's secretary was a man who made it his business to be abreast of the current movements in art and literature, and he was well aware that Blenkinsop's book was a sound piece of work. In honouring him the State should honour itself and the public might swallow without a wry face the baronetcies and peerages that rewarded services of a less obvious character. But he could afford to take no risks and so sent for the manicurist.
"Have you read it?" he asked her point blank.
"No, sir, I haven't exactly what you might call read it, but all the gentlemen who talked about it when I'm doing their nails say it's absolutely priceless."
The result of this conversation was that the secretary placed Blenkinsop's name before the Prime Minister and told him of his book.
"What do you think about it yourself?" asked the great man.
"I haven't read it, I don't read books," replied the secretary frigidly, "but there's nothing about it that I don't know."
Blenkinsop was offered a K.C.V.O.
"We may just as well do the thing well if we're going to do it at all," said the Prime Minister.
But Blenkinsop, true to his character, begged to be allowed to refuse the distinction. Here was a pretty kettle of fish! The Prime Minister's secretary was at his wit's end. But the Prime Minister was a man of determination. When he had once made up his mind to do a thing he would allow no obstacle to stand in his way. He discovered the solution in a flash of his fertile brain and literature after all found a place in the birthday honours. A viscounty was conferred on the Editor of Bradshaw's Railway Time Tables.
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