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