The Flying Inn | Page 2

perhaps by the Saracens after their victory in the Crusades.
He also seemed to think that Englishmen would soon return to this way
of thinking; and seemed to be urging the spread of teetotalism as an
evidence of it. The girl was the only person listening to him.
"Loo-ook," he said, wagging a curled brown finger, "loo-ook at your
own inns" (which he pronounced as "ince"). "Your inns of which you
write in your boo-ooks! Those inns were not poo-oot up in the
beginning to sell ze alcoholic Christian drink. They were put up to sell
ze non-alcoholic Islamic drinks. You can see this in the names of your
inns. They are eastern names, Asiatic names. You have a famous public

house to which your omnibuses go on the pilgrimage. It is called the
Elephant and Castle. That is not an English name. It is an Asiatic name.
You will say there are castles in England, and I will agree with you.
There is the Windsor Castle. But where," he cried sternly, shaking his
green umbrella at the girl in an angry oratorical triumph, "where is the
Windsor Elephant? I have searched all Windsor Park. No elephants."
The girl with the dark hair smiled, and began to think that this man was
better than any of the others. In accordance with the strange system of
concurrent religious endowment which prevails at watering-places, she
dropped a two shilling piece into the round copper tray beside him.
With honourable and disinterested eagerness, the old gentleman in the
red fez took no notice of this, but went on warmly, if obscurely, with
his argument.
"Then you have a place of drink in this town which you call The Bool!"
"We generally call it The Bull," said the interested young lady, with a
very melodious voice.
"You have a place of drink, which you call The Bool," he reiterated in a
sort of abstract fury, "and surely you see that this is all vary
ridiculous!"
"No, no!" said the girl, softly, and in deprecation.
"Why should there be a Bull?" he cried, prolonging the word in his own
way. "Why should there be a Bull in connection with a festive locality?
Who thinks about a Bull in gardens of delight? What need is there of a
Bull when we watch the tulip-tinted maidens dance or pour the
sparkling sherbert? You yourselves, my friends?" And he looked
around radiantly, as if addressing an enormous mob. "You yourselves
have a proverb, 'It is not calculated to promote prosperity to have a Bull
in a china shop.' Equally, my friends, it would not be calculated to
promote prosperity to have a Bull in a wine shop. All this is clear."
He stuck his umbrella upright in the sand and struck one finger against
another, like a man getting to business at last.

"It iss as clear as the sun at noon," he said solemnly. "It iss as clear as
the sun at noon that this word Bull, which is devoid of restful and
pleasurable associations, is but the corruption of another word, which
possesses restful and pleasurable associations. The word is not Bull; it
is the Bul-Bul!" His voice rose suddenly like a trumpet and he spread
abroad his hands like the fans of a tropic palm-tree.
After this great effect he was a little more subdued and leaned gravely
on his umbrella. "You will find the same trace of Asiatic nomenclature
in the names of all your English inns," he went on. "Nay, you will find
it, I am almost certain, in all your terms in any way connected with
your revelries and your reposes. Why, my good friends, the very name
of that insidious spirit by which you make strong your drinks is an
Arabic word: alcohol. It is obvious, is it not, that this is the Arabic
article 'Al,' as in Alhambra, as in Algebra; and we need not pause here
to pursue its many appearances in connection with your festive
institutions, as in your Alsop's beer, your Ally Sloper, and your partly
joyous institution of the Albert Memorial. Above all, in your greatest
feasting day--your Christmas day--which you so erroneously suppose
to be connected with your religion, what do you say then? Do you say
the names of the Christian Nations? Do you say, 'I will have a little
France. I will have a little Ireland. I will have a little Scotland. I will
have a little Spain?' No--o." And the noise of the negative seemed to
waggle as does the bleating of a sheep. "You say, 'I will have a little
Turkey,' which is your name for the Country of the Servant of the
Prophet!"
And once more he stretched out his arms sublimely to the east and west
and appealed to earth and