The Long Bow
I find myself still sitting in front of the last book by Mr. H. G. Wells,
I say stunned with admiration, my family says sleepy with fatigue.
I still feel vaguely all the things in Mr. Wells's book which I
agree with; and I still feel vividly the one thing that I deny.
I deny that biology can destroy the sense of truth, which alone can
even desire biology. No truth which I find can deny that I am seeking
the truth. My mind cannot find anything which denies my mind...
But what is all this? This is no sort of talk for a genial essay.
Let us change the subject; let us have a romance or a fable
or a fairy tale.
Come, let us tell each other stories. There was once a king who
was very fond of listening to stories, like the king in the
Arabian Nights. The only difference was that, unlike that
cynical Oriental, this king believed all the stories that he
heard. It is hardly necessary to add that he lived in England.
His face had not the swarthy secrecy of the tyrant of the thousand tales;
on the contrary, his eyes were as big and innocent as two blue moons;
and when his yellow beard turned totally white he seemed to be
growing younger. Above him hung still his heavy sword and horn,
to remind men that he had been a tall hunter and warrior in his time:
indeed, with that rusted sword he had wrecked armies. But he was one
of those who will never know the world, even when they conquer it.
Besides his love of this old Chaucerian pastime of the telling of tales,
he was, like many old English kings, specially interested in the art
of the bow. He gathered round him great archers of the stature
of Ulysses and Robin Hood, and to four of these he gave the whole
government of his kingdom. They did not mind governing his kingdom;
but they were sometimes a little bored with the necessity
of telling him stories. None of their stories were true;
but the king believed all of them, and this became very depressing.
They created the most preposterous romances; and could not get
the credit of creating them. Their true ambition was sent empty away.
They were praised as archers; but they desired to be praised as poets.
They were trusted as men, but they would rather have been admired
as literary men.
At last, in an hour of desperation, they formed themselves into a club
or conspiracy with the object of inventing some story which even
the king could not swallow. They called it The League of the Long Bow;
thus attaching themselves by a double bond to their motherland of England,
which has been steadily celebrated since the Norman Conquest for its
heroic archery and for the extraordinary credulity of its people.
At last it seemed to the four archers that their hour had come.
The king commonly sat in a green curtained chamber, which opened by
four doors, and was surmounted by four turrets. Summoning his champions
to him on an April evening, he sent out each of them by a separate door,
telling him to return at morning with the tale of his journey.
Every champion bowed low, and, girding on great armour as for awful
adventures, retired to some part of the garden to think of a lie.
They did not want to think of a lie which would deceive the king;
any lie would do that. They wanted to think of a lie so outrageous
that it would not deceive him, and that was a serious matter.
The first archer who returned was a dark, quiet, clever fellow,
very dexterous in small matters of mechanics. He was more
interested in the science of the bow than in the sport of it.
Also he would only shoot at a mark, for he thought it cruel to kill
beasts and birds, and atrocious to kill men. When he left the king
he had gone out into the wood and tried all sorts of tiresome
experiments about the bending of branches and the impact of arrows;
when even he found it tiresome he returned to the house of the four
turrets and narrated his adventure. "Well," said the king,
"what have you been shooting?" "Arrows," answered the archer.
"So I suppose," said the king smiling; "but I mean, I mean what
wild things have you shot?" "I have shot nothing but arrows,"
answered the bowman obstinately. "When I went out on to the plain
I saw in a crescent the black army of the Tartars, the terrible
archers whose bows are of bended steel, and their bolts as big
as javelins. They spied me afar off, and the shower of their
arrows shut out the sun and made a rattling roof above me.
You know, I think it wrong to kill a bird, or worm, or even a Tartar.
But such is the precision and rapidity of perfect science that,
with my own arrows, I split every arrow as it came against me.
I struck every flying shaft as if it were a flying bird.
Therefore, Sire, I may say truly, that I shot nothing but arrows."
The king said, "I know how clever you engineers are with your fingers."
The archer said, "Oh," and went out.
The second archer, who had curly hair and was pale, poetical,
and rather effeminate, had merely gone out into the garden and stared
at the moon. When the moon had become too wide, blank, and watery,
even for his own wide, blank, and watery eyes, he came in again.
And when the king said "What have you been shooting?" he answered
with great volubility, "I have shot a man; not a man from Tartary,
not a man from Europe, Asia, Africa, or America; not a man on this
earth at all. I have shot the Man in the Moon." "Shot the Man
in the Moon?" repeated the king with something like a mild surprise.
"It is easy to prove it," said the archer with hysterical haste.
"Examine the moon through this particularly powerful telescope,
and you will no longer find any traces of a man there." The king
glued his big blue idiotic eye to the telescope for about ten minutes,
and then said, "You are right: as you have often pointed out,
scientific truth can only be tested by the senses. I believe you."
And the second archer went out, and being of a more emotional
temperament burst into tears.
The third archer was a savage, brooding sort of man with tangled
hair and dreamy eyes, and he came in without any preface, saying,
"I have lost all my arrows. They have turned into birds."
Then as he saw that they all stared at him, he said "Well,
you know everything changes on the earth; mud turns into marigolds,
eggs turn into chickens; one can even breed dogs into quite
different shapes. Well, I shot my arrows at the awful eagles
that clash their wings round the Himalayas; great golden eagles
as big as elephants, which snap the tall trees by perching on them.
My arrows fled so far over mountain and valley that they turned
slowly into fowls in their flight. See here," and he threw
down a dead bird and laid an arrow beside it. "Can't you see
they are the same structure. The straight shaft is the backbone;
the sharp point is the beak; the feather is the rudimentary plumage.
It is merely modification and evolution." After a silence the king
nodded gravely and said, "Yes; of course everything is evolution."
At this the third archer suddenly and violently left the room,
and was heard in some distant part of the building making extraordinary
noises either of sorrow or of mirth.
The fourth archer was a stunted man with a face as dead as wood,
but with wicked little eyes close together, and very much alive.
His comrades dissuaded him from going in because they said that they
had soared up into the seventh heaven of living lies, and that there
was literally nothing which the old man would not believe. The face
of the little archer became a little more wooden as he forced his way in,
and when he was inside he looked round with blinking bewilderment.
"Ha, the last," said the king heartily, "welcome back again!"
There was a long pause, and then the stunted archer said,
"What do you mean by 'again'? I have never been here before."
The king stared for a few seconds, and said, "I sent you out from
this room with the four doors last night." After another pause
the little man slowly shook his head. "I never saw you before,"
he said simply; "you never sent me out from anywhere. I only saw
your four turrets in the distance, and strayed in here by accident.
I was born in an island in the Greek Archipelago; I am by profession
an auctioneer, and my name is Punk." The king sat on his throne
for seven long instants like a statue; and then there awoke in his mild
and ancient eyes an awful thing; the complete conviction of untruth.
Every one has felt it who has found a child obstinately false.
He rose to his height and took down the heavy sword above him,
plucked it out naked, and then spoke. "I will believe your mad
tales about the exact machinery of arrows; for that is science.
I will believe your mad tales about traces of life in the moon;
for that is science. I will believe your mad tales about jellyfish
turning into gentlemen, and everything turning into anything;
for that is science. But I will not believe you when you tell me
what I know to be untrue. I will not believe you when you say that
you did not all set forth under my authority and out of my house.
The other three may conceivably have told the truth; but this
last man has certainly lied. Therefore I will kill him."
And with that the old and gentle king ran at the man with uplifted sword;
but he was arrested by the roar of happy laughter, which told
the world that there is, after all, something which an Englishman
will not swallow.
