第21章 THE WRONG INCENDIARY(1)

I stood looking at the Coronation Procession--I mean the one in Beaconsfield;not the rather elephantine imitation of it which,I believe,had some success in London--and I was seriously impressed.Most of my life is passed in discovering with a deathly surprise that I was quite right.Never before have I realised how right I was in maintaining that the small area expresses the real patriotism:the smaller the field the taller the tower.There were things in our local procession that did not (one might even reverently say,could not)occur in the London procession.

One of the most prominent citizens in our procession (for instance)had his face blacked.Another rode on a pony which wore pink and blue trousers.I was not present at the Metropolitan affair,and therefore my assertion is subject to such correction as the eyewitness may always offer to the absentee.But I believe with some firmness that no such features occurred in the London pageant.

But it is not of the local celebration that I would speak,but of something that occurred before it.In the field beyond the end of my garden the materials for a bonfire had been heaped;a hill of every kind of rubbish and refuse and things that nobody wants;broken chairs,dead trees,rags,shavings,newspapers,new religions,in pamphlet form,reports of the Eugenic Congress,and so on.All this refuse,material and mental,it was our purpose to purify and change to holy flame on the day when the King was crowned.The following is an account of the rather strange thing that really happened.I do not know whether it was any sort of symbol;but I narrate it just as it befell.

In the middle of the night I woke up slowly and listened to what Isupposed to be the heavy crunching of a cart-wheel along a road of loose stones.Then it grew louder,and I thought somebody was shooting out cartloads of stones;then it seemed as if the shock was breaking big stones into pieces.Then I realised that under this sound there was also a strange,sleepy,almost inaudible roar;and that on top of it every now and then came pigmy pops like a battle of penny pistols.Then I knew what it was.I went to the window;and a great firelight flung across two meadows smote me where I stood."Oh,my holy aunt,"I thought,"they've mistaken the Coronation Day."And yet when I eyed the transfigured scene it did not seem exactly like a bonfire or any ritual illumination.It was too chaotic,and too close to the houses of the town.All one side of a cottage was painted pink with the giant brush of flame;the next side,by contrast,was painted as black as tar.Along the front of this ran a blackening rim or rampart edged with a restless red ribbon that danced and doubled and devoured like a scarlet snake;and beyond it was nothing but a deathly fulness of light.

I put on some clothes and went down the road;all the dull or startling noises in that din of burning growing louder and louder as I walked.The heaviest sound was that of an incessant cracking and crunching,as if some giant with teeth of stone was breaking up the bones of the world.Ihad not yet come within sight of the real heart and habitat of the fire;but the strong red light,like an unnatural midnight sunset,powdered the grayest grass with gold and flushed the few tall trees up to the last fingers of their foliage.Behind them the night was black and cavernous;and one could only trace faintly the ashen horizon beyond the dark and magic Wilton Woods.As I went,a workman on a bicycle shot a rood past me;then staggered from his machine and shouted to me to tell him where the fire was.I answered that I was going to see,but thought it was the cottages by the wood-yard.He said,"My God!"and vanished.