THE ENCHANTED MAN

When I arrived to see the performance of the Buckinghamshire Players, who acted Miss Gertrude Robins’s pot luck at Naphill a short time ago, it is the distressing, if scarcely surprising, truth that I entered very late.  This would have mattered little, I hope, to any one, but that late comers had to be forced into front seats.  For a real popular English audience always insists on crowding in the back part of the hall; and (as I have found in many an election) will endure the most unendurable taunts rather than come forward.  The English are a modest people; that is why they are entirely ruled and run by the few of them that happen to be immodest.  In theatrical affairs the fact is strangely notable; and in most playhouses we find the bored people in front and the eager people behind.

As far as the performance went I was quite the reverse of a bored person; but I may have been a boring person, especially as I was thus required to sit in the seats of the scornful.  It will be a happy day in the dramatic world when all ladies have to take off their hats and all critics have to take off their heads.  The people behind will have a chance then.  And as it happens, in this case, I had not so much taken off my head as lost it.  I had lost it on the road; on that strange journey that was the cause of my coming in late.  I have a troubled recollection of having seen a very good play and made a very bad speech; I have a cloudy recollection of talking to all sorts of nice people afterwards, but talking to them jerkily and with half a head, as a man talks when he has one eye on a clock.

And the truth is that I had one eye on an ancient and timeless clock, hung uselessly in heaven; whose very name has passed into a figure for such bemused folly.  In the true sense of an ancient phrase, I was moonstruck.  A lunar landscape a scene of winter moonlight had inexplicably got in between me and all other scenes.  If any one had asked me I could not have said what it was; I cannot say now.  Nothing had occurred to me; except the breakdown of a hired motor on the ridge of a hill.  It was not an adventure; it was a vision.

I had started in wintry twilight from my own door; and hired a small car that found its way across the hills towards Naphill.  But as night blackened and frost brightened and hardened it I found the way increasingly difficult; especially as the way was an incessant ascent.  Whenever we topped a road like a staircase it was only to turn into a yet steeper road like a ladder.

At last, when I began to fancy that I was spirally climbing the Tower of Babel in a dream, I was brought to fact by alarming noises, stoppage, and the driver saying that “it couldn’t be done.”  I got out of the car and suddenly forgot that I had ever been in it.