MANALIVE by G. K. Chesterton, a 1912 novel
Manalive
by G. K. Chesterton
First published 1912 by Thomas Nelson and Sons
First electronic edition MANALIV0 published 1993
by Jim Henry III
Second electronic edition MANALIV1 published 1994
by JIm Henry III
Table of Contents
Part I: The Enigmas of Innocent Smith
I. How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House [MAN-01.TXT]
II. The Luggage of an Optimist [MAN-02.TXT]
III. The Banner of Beacon [MAN-03.TXT]
IV. The Garden of the God [MAN-04.TXT]
V. The Allegorical Practical Joker [MAN-05.TXT]
Part II: The Explanations of Innocent Smith
I. The Eye of Death; or, the Murder Charge [MAN-06.TXT]
II. The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge [MAN-07.TXT]
III. The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge [MAN-08.TXT]
IV. The Wild Weddings; or, the Polygamy Charge [MAN-09.TXT]
V. How the Great Wind went from Beacon House [MAN-10.TXT]
Publisher's note [PUBNOTE.TXT]
Publisher's catalog [PUBLIST.TXT]
Order Form [ORDERFRM.TXT]
File description [FILE_ID.DIZ]
Part I
The Enigmas of Innocent Smith
Chapter I
How the Great Wind Came
to Beacon House
A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable
happiness, and tore eastward across England, trailing with
it the frosty scent of forests and the cold intoxication of
the sea. In a million holes and corners it refreshed a man
like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. In the
inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke
like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with some
professor's papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive,
or blowing out the candle by which a boy read "Treasure
Island" and wrapping him in roaring dark. But everywhere it
bore drama into undramatic lives, and carried the trump of
crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in a mean
backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the
clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if
she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and they
were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into
them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious she half
remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the
elves still dwelt in the homes of men. Many an unnoticed
girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the
hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she
might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind
rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a
balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint cloud far beyond,
and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode
heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or cleric,
plodding a telescopic road of poplars, thought for the
hundredth time that they were like the plumes of a hearse;
when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them
round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic
wings. There was in it something more inspired and
authoritative even than the old wind of the proverb; for
this was the good wind that blows nobody harm.
The flying blast struck London just where it scales the
northern heights, terrace above terrace, as precipitous as
Edinburgh. It was round about this place that some poet,
probably drunk, looked up astonished at all those streets
gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of glaciers and roped
mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it
has never been able to shake off. At some stage of those
heights a terrace of tall gray houses, mostly empty and
almost as desolate as the Grampians, curved round at the
western end, so that the last building, a boarding
establishment called "Beacon House," offered abruptly to the
sunset its high, narrow and towering termination, like the
prow of some deserted ship.
The ship, however, was not wholly deserted. The
proprietor of the boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of
those helpless persons upon whom fate wars in vain; she
smiled vaguely both before and after all her calamities; she
was too soft to be hurt. But by the aid (or rather under
the orders) of a strenuous niece she always kept the remains
of a clientele, mostly of young but listless folks. And
there were actually five inmates standing disconsolately
about the garden when the great gale broke at the base of
the terminal tower behind them, as the sea bursts against
the base of an outstanding cliff.
All day that hill of houses over London had been domed
and sealed up with cold cloud. Yet three men and two girls
had at last found even the gray and chilly garden more
tolerable than the black and cheerless interior. When the
wind came it split the sky and shouldered the cloudland left
and right, unbarring great clear furnaces of evening gold.
The burst of light released and the burst of air blowing
seemed to come almost simultaneously; and the wind
especially caught everything in a throttling violence. The
bright short grass lay all one way like brushed hair. Every
shrub in the garden tugged at its roots like a dog at the
collar, and strained every leaping leaf after the hunting
and exterminating element. Now and again a twig would snap
and fly like a bolt from an arbalist. The three men stood
stiffly and aslant against the wind, as if leaning against a
wall. The two ladies disappeared into the house; rather, to
speak truly, they were blown into the house. Their two
frocks, blue and white, looked like two big broken flowers,
driving and drifting upon the gale. Nor is such a poetic
fancy inappropriate, for there was something oddly romantic
about this inrush of air and light after a long, leaden and
unlifting day. Grass and garden trees seemed glittering
with something at once good and unnatural, like a fire from
fairyland. It seemed like a strange sunrise at the wrong
end of the day.
The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore a
white hat of the proportions of a parachute, which might
have wafted her away into the coloured clouds of evening.
She was their one splash of splendour, and irradiated wealth
in that impecunious place (staying there temporarily with a
friend), an heiress in a small way, by name Rosamund Hunt,
brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and rather
boisterous. On top of her wealth she was good-humoured and
rather good-looking; but she had not married, perhaps
because there was always a crowd of men round her. She was
not fast (though some might have called her vulgar), but she
gave irresolute youths an impression of being at once
popular and inaccessible. A man felt as if he had fallen in
love with Cleopatra, or as if he were asking for a great
actress at the stage door. Indeed, some theatrical spangles
seemed to cling about Miss Hunt: she played the guitar and
the mandoline; she always wanted charades; and with that
great rending of the sky by sun and storm, she felt a
girlish melodrama swell again within her. To the crashing
orchestration of the air the clouds rose like the curtain of
some long-expected pantomime.
Nor, oddly enough, was the girl in blue entirely
unimpressed by this apocalypse in a private garden; though
she was one of most prosaic and practical creatures alive.
She was, indeed, no other than the strenuous niece whose
strength alone upheld that mansion of decay. But as the
gale swung and swelled the blue and white skirts till they
took on the monstrous mushroom contours of Victorian
crinolines, a sunken memory stirred in her that was almost
romance -- a memory of a dusty volume of _Punch_ in an
aunt's house in infancy: pictures of crinoline hoops and
croquet hoops and some pretty story, of which perhaps they
were a part. This half-perceptible fragrance in her
thoughts faded almost instantly, and Diana Duke entered the
house even more promptly than her companion. Tall, slim,
aquiline, and dark, she seemed made for such swiftness. In
body she was of the breed of those birds and beasts that are
at once long and alert, like greyhounds or herons or even
like an innocent snake. The whole house revolved on her as
on a rod of steel. It would be wrong to say that she
commanded; for her own efficiency was so impatient that she
obeyed herself before any one else obeyed her. Before
electricians could mend a bell or locksmiths open a door,
before dentists could pluck a tooth or butlers draw a tight
cork, it was done already with the silent violence of her
slim hands. She was light; but there was nothing leaping
about her lightness. She spurned the ground, and she meant
to spurn it. People talk of the pathos and failure of plain
women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful
woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.
"It's enough to blow your head off," said the young woman
in white, going to the looking-glass.
The young woman in blue made no reply, but put away her
gardening gloves, and then went to the sideboard and began
to spread out an afternoon cloth for tea.
"Enough to blow your head off, I say," said Miss Rosamund
Hunt, with the unruffled cheeriness of one whose songs and
speeches had always been safe for an encore.
"Only your hat, I think," said Diana Duke; "but I dare
say that it sometimes more important."
Rosamund's face showed for an instant the offence of a
spoilt child, and then the humour of a very healthy person.
She broke into a laugh and said, "Well, it would have to be
a big wind to blow your head off."
There was another silence; and the sunset breaking more
and more from the sundering clouds, filled the room with
soft fire and painted the dull walls with ruby and gold.
"Somebody once told me," said Rosamund Hunt, "that it's
easier to keep one's head when one has lost one's heart."
"Oh, don't talk about such rubbish," said Diana with
savage sharpness.
Outside, the garden was clad in a golden splendour; but
the wind was still stiffly blowing, and the three men who
stood their ground might also have considered the problem of
hats and heads. And, indeed, their position, touching hats,
was somewhat typical of them. The tallest of the three
abode the blast in a high silk hat, which the wind seemed to
charge as vainly as that other sullen tower, the house
behind him. The second man tried to hold on a stiff straw
hat at all angles, and ultimately held it in his hand. The
third had no hat, and, by his attitude, seemed never to have
had one in his life. Perhaps this wind was a kind of fairy
wand to test men and women, for there was much of the three
men in this difference.
The man in the solid silk hat was the embodiment of
silkiness and solidity. He was a big, bland, bored and (as
some said) boring man, with flat fair hair and handsome
heavy features; a prosperous young doctor by the name of
Warner. But if his blondness and blandness seemed at first
a little fatuous, it is certain that he was no fool. If
Rosamund Hunt was the only person there with much money, he
was the only person who had as yet found any kind of fame.
His treatise on "The Probable Existence of Pain in the
Lowest Organisms" had been universally hailed by the
scientific world as at once solid and daring. In short, he
undoubtedly had brains; and perhaps it was not his fault if
they were the kind of brains that most men desire to analyze
with a poker.
The young man who put his hat off and on was a scientific
amateur in a small way, and worshipped the great Warner with
a solemn freshness. It was, in fact, at his invitation that
the distinguished doctor was present; for Warner lived in no
such ramshackle lodging-house, but in a professional palace
in Harley Street. This young man was really the youngest
and best looking of the three. But he was one of those
persons, both male and female, who seem doomed to be
good-looking and insignificant. Brown-haired,
high-coloured, and shy, he seemed to lose the delicacy of
his features in a sort of blur of brown and red as he stood
blushing and blinking against the wind. He was one of those
obvious unnoticeable people: every one knew that he was
Arthur Inglewood, unmarried, moral, decidedly intelligent,
living on a little money of his own, and hiding himself in
the two hobbies of photography and cycling. Everybody knew
him and forgot him; even as he stood there in the glare of
golden sunset there was something about him indistinct, like
one of his own red-brown amateur photographs.
The third man had no hat; he was lean, in light, vaguely
sporting clothes, and the large pipe in his mouth made him
look all the leaner. He had a long ironical face,
blue-black hair, the blue eyes of an Irishman, and the blue
chin of an actor. An Irishman he was, an actor he was not,
except in the old days of Miss Hunt's charades, being, as a
matter of fact, an obscure and flippant journalist named
Michael Moon. He had once been hazily supposed to be
reading for the Bar; but (as Warner would say with his
rather elephantine wit) it was mostly at another kind of bar
that his friends found him. Moon, however, did not drink,
nor even frequently get drunk; he simply was a gentleman who
liked low company. This was partly because company is
quieter than society: and if he enjoyed talking to a barmaid
(as apparently he did), it was chiefly because the barmaid
did the talking. Moreover he would often bring other talent
to assist her. He shared that strange trick of all men of
his type, intellectual and without ambition -- the trick of
going about with his mental inferiors. There was a small
resilient Jew named Moses Gould in the same boarding-house,
a little man whose negro vitality and vulgarity amused
Michael so much that he went round with him from bar to bar,
like the owner of a performing monkey.
The colossal clearance which the wind had made of that
cloudy sky grew clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber
seemed to open in heaven. One felt one might at last find
something lighter than light. In the fullness of this
silent effulgence all things collected their colours again:
the gray trunks turned silver, and the drab gravel gold.
One bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from one tree to
another, and his brown feathers were brushed with fire.
"Inglewood," said Michael Moon, with his blue eye on the
bird, "have you any friends?"
Dr. Warner mistook the person addressed, and turning a
broad beaming face, said, --
"Oh yes, I go out a great deal."
Michael Moon gave a tragic grin, and waited for his real
informant, who spoke a moment after in a voice curiously
cool, fresh and young, as coming out of that brown and even
dusty interior.
"Really," answered Inglewood, "I'm afraid I've lost touch
with my old friends. The greatest friend I ever had was at
school, a fellow named Smith. It's odd you should mention
it, because I was thinking of him to-day, though I haven't
seen him for seven or eight years. He was on the science
side with me at school -- a clever fellow though queer; and
he went up to Oxford when I went to Germany. The fact is,
it's rather a sad story. I often asked him to come and see
me, and when I heard nothing I made inquiries, you know. I
was shocked to learn that poor Smith had gone off his head.
The accounts were a bit cloudy, of course, some saying he
had recovered again; but they always say that. About a year
ago I got a telegram from him myself. The telegram, I'm
sorry to say, put the matter beyond a doubt."
"Quite so," assented Dr. Warner stolidly; "insanity is
generally incurable."
"So is sanity," said the Irishman, and studied him with a
dreary eye.
"Symptoms?" asked the doctor. "What was this telegram?"
"It's a shame to joke about such things," said Inglewood,
in his honest, embarrassed way; "the telegram was Smith's
illness, not Smith. The actual words were, `Man found alive
with two legs.'"
"Alive with two legs," repeated Michael, frowning.
"Perhaps a version of alive and kicking? I don't know much
about people out of their senses; but I suppose they ought
to be kicking."
"And people in their senses?" asked Warner, smiling.
"Oh, they ought to be kicked," said Michael with sudden
heartiness.
"The message is clearly insane," continued the
impenetrable Warner. "The best test is a reference to the
undeveloped normal type. Even a baby does not expect to
find a man with three legs."
"Three legs," said Michael Moon, "would be very
convenient in this wind."
A fresh eruption of the atmosphere had indeed almost
thrown them off their balance and broken the blackened trees
in the garden. Beyond, all sorts of accidental objects
could be seen scouring the wind-scoured sky -- straws,
sticks, rags, papers, and, in the distance, a disappearing
hat. Its disappearance, however, was not final; after an
interval of minutes they saw it again, much larger and
closer, a white panama, towering up into the heavens like a
balloon, staggering to and fro for an instant like a
stricken kite, and then settling in the centre of their own
lawn as falteringly as a fallen leaf.
"Somebody's lost a good hat," said Dr. Warner shortly.
Almost as he spoke, another object came over the garden
wall, flying after the fluttering panama. It was a big
green umbrella. After that came hurtling a huge yellow
Gladstone bag, and after that came a figure like a flying
wheel of legs, as in the shield of the Isle of Man.
But though for a flash it seemed to have five or six
legs, it alighted upon two, like the man in the queer
telegram. It took the form of a large light-haired man in
gay green holiday clothes. He had bright blonde hair that
the wind brushed back like a German's, a flushed eager face
like a cherub's, and a prominent pointing nose, a little
like a dog's. His head, however, was by no means cherubic
in the sense of being without a body. On the contrary, on
his vast shoulders and shape generally gigantesque, his head
looked oddly and unnaturally small. This gave rise to a
scientific theory (which his conduct fully supported) that
he was an idiot.
Inglewood had a politeness instinctive and yet awkward.
His life was full of arrested half gestures of assistance.
And even this prodigy of a big man in green, leaping the
wall like a bright green grasshopper, did not paralyze that
small altruism of his habits in such a matter as a lost
hat. He was stepping forward to recover the green
gentleman's head-gear, when he was struck rigid with a roar
like a bull's.
"Unsportsmanlike!" bellowed the big man. "Give it fair
play, give it fair play!" And he came after his own hat
quickly but cautiously, with burning eyes. The hat had
seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in ostentatious
langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again freshening and
rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of
a ~pas de quatre~. The eccentric went bounding after it
with kangaroo leaps and bursts of breathless speech, of
which it was not always easy to pick up the thread: "Fair
play, fair play... sport of kings... chase their crowns...
quite humane... tramontana... cardinals chase red hats...
old English hunting... started a hat in Bramber Combe... hat
at bay... mangled hounds... Got him!"
As the winds rose out of a roar into a shriek, he leapt
into the sky on his strong, fantastic legs, snatched at the
vanishing hat, missed it, and pitched sprawling face
foremost on the grass. The hat rose over him like a bird in
triumph. But its triumph was premature; for the lunatic,
flung forward on his hands, threw up his boots behind, waved
his two legs in the air like symbolic ensigns (so that they
thought again of the telegram), and actually caught the hat
with his feet. A prolonged and piercing yell of wind split
the welkin from end to end. The eyes of all the men were
blinded by the invisible blast, as by a strange, clear
cataract of transparency rushing between them and all
objects about them. But as the large man fell back in a
sitting posture and solemnly crowned himself with the hat,
Michael found, to his incredulous surprise, that he had been
holding his breath, like a man watching a duel.
While that tall wind was at the top of its sky-scraping
energy, another short cry was heard, beginning very
querulous, but ending very quick, swallowed in abrupt
silence. The shiny black cylinder of Dr. Warner's official
hat sailed off his head in the long, smooth parabola of an
airship, and in almost cresting a garden tree was caught in
the topmost branches. Another hat was gone. Those in that
garden felt themselves caught in an unaccustomed eddy of
things happening; no one seemed to know what would blow away
next. Before they could speculate, the cheering and
hallooing hat-hunter was already halfway up the tree,
swinging himself from fork to fork with his strong, bent,
grasshopper legs, and still giving forth his gasping,
mysterious comments.
"Tree of life... Ygdrasil... climb for centuries
perhaps... owls nesting in the hat... remotest generations
of owls... still usurpers... gone to heaven... man in the
moon wears it... brigand... not yours... belongs to
depressed medical man... in garden... give it up... give it
up!"
The tree swung and swept and thrashed to and fro in the
thundering wind like a thistle, and flamed in the full
sunshine like a bonfire. The green, fantastic human figure,
vivid against its autumn red and gold, was already among its
highest and craziest branches, which by bare luck did not
break with the weight of his big body. He was up there
among the last tossing leaves and the first twinkling stars
of evening, still talking to himself cheerfully,
reasoningly, half apologetically, in little gasps. He might
well be out of breath, for his whole preposterous raid had
gone with one rush; he had bounded the wall once like a
football, swept down the garden like a slide, and shot up
the tree like a rocket. The other three men seemed buried
under incident piled on incident -- a wild world where one
thing began before another thing left off. All three had
the first thought. The tree had been there for the five
years they had known the boarding-house. Each one of them
was active and strong. No one of them had even thought of
climbing it. Beyond that, Inglewood felt first the mere
fact of colour. The bright brisk leaves, the bleak blue
sky, the wild green arms and legs, reminded him irrationally
of something glowing in his infancy, something akin to a
gaudy man on a golden tree; perhaps it was only painted
monkey on a stick. Oddly enough, Michael Moon, though more
of a humourist, was touched on a tenderer nerve, half
remembered the old, young theatricals with Rosamund, and was
amused to find himself almost quoting Shakespeare --
"For valour. Is not love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?"
Even the immovable man of science had a bright,
bewildered sensation that the Time Machine had given a great
jerk, and gone forward with rather rattling rapidity.
He was not, however, wholly prepared for what happened
next. The man in green, riding the frail topmost bough like
a witch on a very risky broomstick, reached up and rent the
black hat from its airy nest of twigs. It had been broken
across a heavy bough in the first burst of its passage, a
tangle of branches had torn and scored and scratched it in
every direction, a clap of wind and foliage had flattened it
like a concertina; nor can it be said that the obliging
gentleman with the sharp nose showed any adequate tenderness
for its structure when he finally unhooked it from its
place. When he had found it, however, his proceedings were
by some counted singular. He waved it with a loud whoop of
triumph, and then immediately appeared to fall backwards off
the tree, to which, however, he remained attached by his
long strong legs, like a monkey swung by his tail. Hanging
thus head downwards above the unhelmed Warner, he gravely
proceeded to drop the battered silk cylinder upon his
brows. "Every man a king," explained the inverted
philosopher, "every hat (consequently) a crown. But this is
a crown out of heaven."
And he again attempted the coronation of Warner, who,
however, moved away with great abruptness from the hovering
diadem; not seeming, strangely enough, to wish for his
former decoration in its present state.
"Wrong, wrong!" cried the obliging person hilariously.
"Always wear uniform, even if it's shabby uniform!
Ritualists may always be untidy. Go to a dance with soot on
your shirt-front; but go with a shirt-front. Huntsman wears
old coat, but old pink coat. Wear a topper, even if it's
got no top. It's the symbol that counts, old cock. Take
your hat, because it is your hat after all; its nap rubbed
all off by the bark, dears, and its brim not the least bit
curled; but for old sakes' sake it is still, dears, the
nobbiest tile in the world."
Speaking thus, with a wild comfortableness, he settled or
smashed the shapeless silk hat over the face of the
disturbed physician, and fell on his feet among the other
men, still talking, beaming and breathless.
"Why don't they make more games out of wind?" he asked in
some excitement. "Kites are all right, but why should it
only be kites? Why, I thought of three other games for a
windy day while I was climbing that tree. Here's one of
them: you take a lot of pepper --"
"I think," interposed Moon, with a sardonic mildness,
"that your games are already sufficiently interesting. Are
you, may I ask, a professional acrobat on a tour, or a
travelling advertisement of Sunny Jim? How and why do you
display all this energy for clearing walls and climbing
trees in our melancholy, but at least rational, suburbs?"
The stranger, so far as so loud a person was capable of
it, appeared to grow confidential.
"Well, it's a trick of my own," he confessed candidly.
"I do it by having two legs."
Arthur Inglewood, who had sunk into the background of
this scene of folly, started and stared at the newcomer with
his short-sighted eyes screwed up and his high colour
slightly heightened.
"Why, I believe you're Smith," he cried with his fresh,
almost boyish voice; and then after an instant's stare, "and
yet I'm not sure."
"I have a card, I think," said the unknown, with baffling
solemnity -- "a card with my real name, my titles, offices,
and true purpose on this earth."
He drew out slowly from an upper waistcoat pocket a
scarlet card-case, and as slowly produced a very large
card. Even in the instant of its production, they fancied
it was of a queer shape, unlike the cards of ordinary
gentlemen. But it was there only for an instant; for as it
passed from his fingers to Arthur's, one or other slipped
his hold. The strident, tearing gale in that garden carried
away the stranger's card to join the wild waste paper of the
universe; and that great western wind shook the whole house
and passed.
Chapter II
The Luggage of an Optimist
We all remember the fairy tales of science in our infancy,
which played with the supposition that large animals could
jump in the proportion of small ones. If an elephant were
as strong as a grasshopper, he could (I suppose) spring
clean out of the Zoological Gardens and alight trumpeting
upon Primrose Hill. If a whale could leap from the water
like a trout, perhaps men might look up and see one soaring
above Yarmouth like the winged island of Laputa. Such
natural energy, though sublime, might certainly be
inconvenient, and much of this inconvenience attended the
gaiety and good intentions of the man in green. He was too
large for everything, because he was lively as well as
large. By a fortunate physical provision, most very
substantial creatures are also reposeful; and middle-class
boarding-houses in the lesser parts of London are not built
for a man as big as a bull and excitable as a kitten.
When Inglewood followed the stranger into the
boarding-house, he found him talking earnestly (and in his
own opinion privately) to the helpless Mrs. Duke. That fat,
faint lady could only goggle up like a dying fish at the
enormous new gentleman, who politely offered himself as a
lodger, with vast gestures of the wide white hat in one
hand, and the yellow Gladstone bag in the other.
Fortunately, Mrs. Duke's more efficient niece and partner
was there to complete the contract; for, indeed, all the
people of the house had somehow collected in the room. This
fact, in truth, was typical of the whole episode. The
visitor created an atmosphere of comic crisis; and from the
time he came into the house to the time he left it, he
somehow got the company to gather and even follow (though in
derision) as children gather and follow a Punch and Judy.
An hour ago, and for four years previously, these people had
avoided each other, even when they really liked each other.
They had slid in and out of dismal and deserted rooms in
search of particular newspapers or private needlework. Even
now they all came casually, as with varying interests; but
they all came. There was the embarrassed Inglewood, still a
sort of red shadow; there was the unembarrassed Warner, a
pallid but solid substance. There was Michael Moon offering
like a riddle the contrast of the horsy crudeness of his
clothes and the sombre sagacity of his visage. He was now
joined by his yet more comic crony, Moses Gould. Swaggering
on short legs with a prosperous purple tie, he was the
gayest of godless little dogs; but like a dog also in this,
that however he danced and wagged with delight, the two dark
eyes on each side of his protuberant nose glistened gloomily
like black buttons. There was Miss Rosamund Hunt, still
with the fine white hat framing her square, good-humoured
face, and still with her native air of being dressed for
some party that never came off. She also, like Mr. Moon,
had a new companion, new so far as this narrative goes, but
in reality an old friend and protegee. This was a slight
young woman in dark gray, and in no way notable but for a
load of dull red hair, of which the shape somehow gave her
pale face that triangular, almost peaked, appearance which
was given by the lowering headdress and deep rich ruff of
the Elizabethan beauties. Her surname seemed to be Gray,
and Miss Hunt called her Mary, in that indescribable tone
applied to an old dependent who has practically become a
friend. She wore a small silver cross on her very
business-like gray clothes, and was the only member of the
party who went to church. Last, but the reverse of least,
there as Diana Duke, studying the newcomer with eyes of
steel, and listening carefully to every idiotic word he
said. As for Mrs. Duke, she smiled up at him, but never
dreamed of listening to him. She had never really listened
to any one in her life; which, some said, was why she had
survived.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with her new guest's
concentration of courtesy upon herself; for no one ever
spoke seriously to her any more than she listened seriously
to any one. And she almost beamed as the stranger, with yet
wider and almost whirling gestures of explanation with his
huge hat and bag, apologized for having entered by the wall
instead of the front door. He was understood to put it down
to an unfortunate family tradition of neatness and care of
his clothes.
"My mother was rather strict about it, to tell the
truth," he said, lowering his voice, to Mrs. Duke. "She
never liked me to lose my cap at school. And when a man's
been taught to be tidy and neat it sticks to him."
Mrs. Duke weakly gasped that she was sure he must have
had a good mother; but her niece seemed inclined to probe
the matter further.
"You've got a funny idea of neatness," she said, "if it's
jumping garden walls and clambering up garden trees. A man
can't very well climb a tree tidily."
"He can clear a wall neatly," said Michael Moon; "I saw
him do it."
Smith seemed to be regarding the girl with genuine
astonishment. "My dear young lady," he said, "I was tidying
the tree. You don't want last year's hats there, do you,
any more than last year's leaves? The wind takes off the
leaves, but it couldn't manage the hat; that wind, I
suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day. Rum idea this is,
that tidiness is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness
is a toil for giants. You can't tidy anything without
untidying yourself; just look at my trousers. Don't you
know that? Haven't you ever had a spring cleaning?"
"Oh yes, sir," said Mrs. Duke, almost eagerly. "You will
find everything of that sort quite nice." For the first
time she had heard two words that she could understand.
Miss Diana Duke seemed to be studying the stranger with a
sort of spasm of calculation; then her black eyes snapped
with decision, and she said that he could have a particular
bedroom on the top floor if he liked: and the silent and
sensitive Inglewood, who had been on the rack through these
cross-purposes, eagerly offered to show him up to the room.
Smith went up the stairs four at a time, and when he bumped
his head against the ultimate ceiling, Inglewood had an odd
sensation that the tall house was much shorter than it used
to be.
Arthur Inglewood followed his old friend -- or his new
friend, for he did not very clearly know which he was. The
face looked very like his old schoolfellow's at one second
and very unlike at another. And when Inglewood broke
through his native politeness so far as to say suddenly, "Is
your name Smith?" he received only the unenlightening reply,
"Quite right; quite right. Very good. Excellent!" Which
appeared to Inglewood, on reflection, rather the speech of a
new-born babe accepting a name than of a grown-up man
admitting one.
Despite these doubts about identity, the hapless
Inglewood watched the other unpack, and stood about his
bedroom in all the impotent attitudes of the male friend.
Mr. Smith unpacked with the same kind of whirling accuracy
with which he climbed a tree -- throwing things out of his
bag as if they were rubbish, yet managing to distribute
quite a regular pattern all round him on the floor.
As he did so he continued to talk in the same somewhat
gasping manner (he had come upstairs four steps at a time,
but even without this his style of speech was breathless and
fragmentary), and his remarks were still a string of more or
less significant but often separate pictures.
"Like the day of judgement," he said, throwing a bottle
so that it somehow settled, rocking on its right end.
"People say vast universe... infinity and astronomy; not
sure... I think things are too close together... packed up;
for travelling... stars too close, really... why, the sun's
a star, too close to be seen properly; the earth's a star,
too close to be seen at all... too many pebbles on the
beach; ought all to be put in rings; too many blades of
grass to study... feathers on a bird make the brain reel;
wait till the big bag is unpacked... may all be put in our
right places then."
Here he stopped, literally for breath -- throwing a shirt
to the other end of the room, and then a bottle of ink so
that it fell quite neatly beyond it. Inglewood looked round
on this strange, half-symmetrical disorder with an
increasing doubt.
In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith's holiday
luggage, the less one could make anything of it. One
peculiarity of it was that almost everything seemed to be
there for the wrong reason; what is secondary with every one
else was primary with him. He would wrap up a pot or pan in
brown paper; and the unthinking assistant would discover
that the pot was valueless or even unnecessary, and that it
was the brown paper that was truly precious. He produced
two or three boxes of cigars, and explained with plain and
perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker, but that
cigar-box wood was by far the best for fretwork. He also
exhibited about six small bottles of wine, white and red,
and Inglewood, happening to note a Volnay which he knew to
be excellent, supposed at first that the stranger was an
epicure in vintages. He was therefore surprised to find
that the next bottle was a vile sham claret from the
colonies, which even colonials (to do them justice) do not
drink. It was only then that he observed that all six
bottles had those bright metallic seals of various tints,
and seemed to have been chosen solely because they have the
three primary and three secondary colours: red, blue, and
yellow; green, violet and orange. There grew upon Inglewood
an almost creepy sense of the real childishness of this
creature. For Smith was really, so far as human psychology
can be, innocent. He had the sensualities of innocence: he
loved the stickiness of gum, and he cut white wood greedily
as if he were cutting a cake. To this man wine was not a
doubtful thing to be defended or denounced; it was a
quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a shop
window. He talked dominantly and rushed the social
situation; but he was not asserting himself, like a superman
in a modern play. He was simply forgetting himself, like a
little boy at a party. He had somehow made a giant stride
from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in youth
when most of us grow old.
As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed the initials
I. S. printed on one side of it, and remembered that Smith
had been called Innocent Smith at school, though whether as
a formal Christian name or a moral description he could not
remember. He was just about to venture another question,
when there was a knock at the door, and the short figure of
Mr. Gould offered itself, with the melancholy Moon, standing
like his tall crooked shadow, behind him. They had drifted
up the stairs after the other two men with the wandering
gregariousness of the male.
"Hope there's no intrusion," said the beaming Moses with
a glow of good nature, but not the airiest tinge of apology.
"The truth is," said Michael Moon with comparative
courtesy, "we thought we might see if they had made you
comfortable. Miss Duke is rather --"
"I know," cried the stranger, looking up radiantly from
his bag; "magnificent, isn't she? Go close to her -- hear
military music going by, like Joan of Arc."
Inglewood stared and stared at the speaker like one who
has just heard a wild fairy tale, which nevertheless
contains one small and forgotten fact. For he remembered
how he had himself thought of Jeanne d'Arc years ago, when,
hardly more than a schoolboy, he had first come to the
boarding-house. Long since the pulverizing rationalism of
his friend Dr. Warner had crushed such youthful ignorances
and disproportionate dreams. Under the Warnerian scepticism
and science of hopeless human types, Inglewood had long come
to regard himself as a timid, insufficient, and "weak" type,
who would never marry; to regard Diana Duke as a
materialistic maidservant; and to regard his first fancy for
her as the small, dull farce of a collegian kissing his
landlady's daughter. And yet the phrase about military
music moved him queerly, as if he had heard those distant
drums.
"She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only
natural," said Moon, glancing round the rather dwarfish
room, with its wedge of slanted ceiling, like the conical
hood of a dwarf.
"Rather a small box for you, sir," said the waggish Mr.
Gould.
"Splendid room, though," answered Mr. Smith
enthusiastically, with his head inside his Gladstone bag.
"I love these pointed sorts of rooms, like Gothic. By the
way," he cried out, pointing in quite a startling way,
"where does that door lead to?"
"To certain death, I should say," answered Michael Moon,
staring up at a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the
sloping roof of the attic. "I don't think there's a loft
there; and I don't know what else it could lead to." Long
before he had finished his sentence the man with the strong
green legs had leapt at the door in the ceiling, swung
himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it, wrenched it open
after a struggle, and clambered through it. For a moment
they saw the two symbolic legs standing like a truncated
statue; then they vanished. Through the hole thus burst in
the roof appeared the empty and lucid sky of evening, with
one great many-coloured cloud sailing across it like a whole
county upside down.
"Hullo, you fellows!" came the far cry of Innocent Smith,
apparently from some remote pinnacle. "Come up here; and
bring some of my things to eat and drink. It's just the
spot for a picnic."
With a sudden impulse Michael snatched two of the small
wine bottles, one in each solid fist; and Arthur Inglewood,
as if mesmerized, groped for a biscuit tin and a big jar of
ginger. The enormous hand of Innocent Smith appearing
through the aperture, like a giant's in a fairy tale,
received these tributes and bore them off to the eyrie; then
they both hoisted themselves out of the window. They were
both athletic, and even gymnastic; Inglewood through his
concern for hygiene, and Moon through his concern for sport,
which was not quite so idle and inactive as that of the
average sportsman. Also they both had a light-headed
celestial sensation when the door was burst in the roof, as
if a door had been burst in the sky, and they could climb on
to the very roof of the universe. They were both men who
had long been unconsciously imprisoned in the commonplace,
though one took it comically, and the other seriously. They
were both men, nevertheless, in whom sentiment had never
died. But Mr. Moses Gould had an equal contempt for their
suicidal athletics and their subconscious transcendentalism,
and he stood and laughed at the thing with the shameless
rationality of another race.
When the singular Smith, astride of a chimney-pot, learnt
that Gould was not following, his infantile officiousness
and good nature forced him to dive back into the attic to
comfort or persuade; and Inglewood and Moon were left alone
on the long gray-green ridge of the slate roof, with their
feet against gutters and their backs against chimney-pots,
looking agnostically at each other. Their first feeling was
that they had come out into eternity, and that eternity was
very like topsy-turvydom. One definition occurred to both
of them -- that he had come out into the light of that lucid
and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun. The
sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven seemed deep
enough to hold all the gods. The round of the ether turned
from green to yellow gradually like a great unripe fruit.
All around the sunken sun it was like a lemon; round all the
east it was a sort of golden green, more suggestive of a
greengage; but the whole had still he emptiness of daylight
and none of the secrecy of dusk. Tumbled here and there
across this gold and pale green were shards and shattered
masses of inky purple cloud, which seemed falling towards
the earth in every kind of colossal perspective. One of
them really had the character of some many-mitred,
many-bearded, many-winged Assyrian image, huge head
downwards, hurled out of heaven -- a sort of false Jehovah,
who was perhaps Satan. All the other clouds had
preposterous pinnacled shapes, as if the god's palaces had
been flung after him.
And yet, while the empty heaven was full of silent
catastrophe, the height of human buildings above which they
sat held here and there a tiny trivial noise that was the
exact antithesis; and they heard some six streets below a
newsboy calling, and a bell bidding to chapel. They could
also hear talk out of the garden below; and realized that
the irrepressible Smith must have followed Gould downstairs,
for his eager and pleading accents could be heard, followed
by the half-humourous protests of Miss Duke and the full and
very youthful laughter of Rosamund Hunt. The air had that
cold kindness that comes after a storm. Michael Moon drank
it in with as serious a relish as he had drunk the little
bottle of cheap claret, which he had emptied almost at a
draught. Inglewood went on eating ginger very slowly and
with a solemnity unfathomable as the sky above him. There
was still enough stir in the freshness of the atmosphere to
make them almost fancy they could smell the garden soil and
the last roses of the autumn. Suddenly there came from the
darkening garden a silvery ping and pong which told them
that Rosamund had brought out the long-neglected mandoline.
After the first few notes there was more of the distant
bell-like laughter.
"Inglewood," said Michael Moon, "have you ever heard that
I am a blackguard?"
"I haven't heard it, and I don't believe it," answered
Inglewood, after an odd pause. "But I have heard you were
-- what they call rather wild."
"If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the
rumour," said Moon, with an extraordinary calm; "I am tame.
I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls. I
drink too much of the same kind of whisky at the same time
every night. I even drink about the same amount too much.
I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the same
damned women with mauve faces. I hear the same number of
dirty stories -- generally the same dirty stories. You may
reassure my friends, Inglewood, you see before you a person
whom civilization has thoroughly tamed."
Arthur Inglewood was staring with feelings that made him
nearly fall off the roof, for indeed the Irishman's face,
always sinister, was now almost demoniacal.
"Christ confound it!" cried out Moon, suddenly clutching
the empty claret bottle, "this is about the thinnest and
filthiest wine I ever uncorked, and it's the only drink I
have really enjoyed for nine years. I was never wild until
just ten minutes ago." And he sent the bottle whizzing, a
wheel of glass, far away beyond the garden into the road,
where, in the profound evening silence, they could even hear
it break and part upon the stones.
"Moon," said Arthur Inglewood, rather huskily, "you
mustn't be so bitter about it. Everyone has to take the
world as he finds it; of course one often finds it a bit
dull --"
"That fellow doesn't," said Michael decisively; "I mean
that fellow Smith. I have a fancy there's some method in
his madness. It looks as if he could turn into a sort of
wonderland any minute by taking one step out of the plain
road. Who would have thought of that trapdoor? Who would
have thought that this cursed colonial claret could taste
quite nice among the chimney-pots? Perhaps that is the real
key of fairyland. Perhaps Nosey Gould's beastly little
Empire Cigarettes ought only to be smoked on stilts, or
something of that sort. Perhaps Mrs. Duke's cold leg of
mutton would seem quite appetizing at the top of a tree.
Perhaps even my damned, dirty, monotonous drizzle of Old
Bill Whisky --"
"Don't be so rough on yourself," said Inglewood, in
serious distress. "The dullness isn't your fault or the
whisky's. Fellows who don't -- fellows like me I mean --
have just the same feeling that it's all rather flat and a
failure. But the world's made like that; it's all
survival. Some people are made to get on, like Warner; and
some people are made to stick quiet, like me. You can't
help your temperament. I know you're much cleverer than I
am; but you can't help having all the loose ways of a poor
literary chap, and I can't help having all the doubts and
helplessness of a small scientific chap, any more than a
fish can help floating or a fern help curling up. Humanity,
as Warner said so well in that lecture, really consists of
quite different tribes of animals all disguised as men."
In the dim garden below the buzz of talk was suddenly
broken by Miss Hunt's musical instrument banging with the
abruptness of artillery into a vulgar but spirited tune.
Rosamund's voice came up rich and strong in the words of
some fatuous, fashionable coon song: --
"Darkies sing a song on the old plantation,
Sing it as we sang it in days long since gone by."
Inglewood's brown eyes softened and saddened still more
as he continued his monologue of resignation to such a
rollicking and romantic tune. But the blue eyes of Michael
Moon brightened and hardened with a light that Inglewood did
not understand. Many centuries, and many villages and
valleys, would have been happier if Inglewood or Inglewood's
countrymen had ever understood that light, or guessed at the
first blink that it was the battle star of Ireland.
"Nothing can ever alter it; it's in the wheels of the
universe," went on Inglewood, in a low voice: "some men are
weak and some strong, and the only thing we can do is to
know that we are weak. I have been in love lots of times,
but I could not do anything, for I remembered my own
fickleness. I have formed opinions, but I haven't the cheek
to push them, because I've so often changed them. That's
the upshot, old fellow. We can't trust ourselves -- and we
can't help it."
Michael had risen to his feet, and stood poised in a
perilous position at the end of the roof, like some dark
statue hung above its gable. Behind him, huge clouds of an
almost impossible purple turned slowly topsy-turvy in the
silent anarchy of heaven. Their gyration made the dark
figure seem yet dizzier.
"Let us..." he said, and was suddenly silent.
"Let us what?" asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally
quick though somewhat more cautiously, for his friend seemed
to find some difficulty in speech.
"Let us go and do some of these things we can't do," said
Michael.
At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below
them the cockatoo hair and flushed face of Innocent Smith,
calling to them that they must come down as the "concert"
was in full swing, and Mr. Moses Gould was about to recite
"Young Lochinvar."
As they dropped into Innocent's attic they nearly tumbled
over its entertaining impedimenta again. Inglewood, staring
at the littered floor, thought instinctively of the littered
floor of a nursery. He was therefore the more moved, and
even shocked, when his eye fell on a large well-polished
American revolver.
"Hullo!" he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter
as men step back from a serpent; "are you afraid of
burglars? or when and why do you deal death out of that
machine gun?"
"Oh, that!" said Smith, throwing it a single glance; "I
deal life out of that," and he went bounding down the
stairs.
Chapter III
The Banner of Beacon
All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it
was everybody's birthday. It is the fashion to talk of
institutions as cold and cramping things. The truth is that
when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild
with freedom and invention, they always must, and they
always do, create institutions. When men are weary they
fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they
invariably make rules. This, which is true of all the
churches and republics of history, is also true of the most
trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow
romp. We are never free until some institution frees us;
and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority.
Even the wild authority of the harlequin Smith was still
authority, because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy
regulations and conditions. He filled every one with his
own half-lunatic life; but it was not expressed in
destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling
construction. Each person with a hobby found it turning
into an institution. Rosamund's songs seemed to coalesce
into a kind of opera; Michael's jests and paragraphs into a
magazine. His pipe and her mandoline seemed between them to
make a sort of smoking concert. The bashful and bewildered
Arthur Inglewood almost struggled against his own growing
importance. He felt as if, in spite of him, his photographs
were turning into a picture gallery, and his bicycle into a
gymkhana. But no one had any time to criticize these
impromptu estates and offices, for they followed each other
in wild succession like the topics of a rambling talker.
Existence with such a man was an obstacle race made of
pleasant obstacles. Out of any homely and trivial object he
could drag reels of exaggeration, like a conjurer. Nothing
could be more shy and impersonal than poor Arthur's
photography. Yet the preposterous Smith was seen assisting
him eagerly through sunny morning hours, and an indefensible
sequence described as "Moral Photography" began to unroll
about the boarding-house. It was only a version of the old
photographer's joke which produces the same figure twice on
one plate, making a man play chess with himself, dine with
himself, and so on. But these plates were more mystical and
ambitious -- as, "Miss Hunt forgets Herself," showing that
lady answering her own too rapturous recognition with a most
appalling stare of ignorance; or "Mr. Moon questions
Himself," in which Mr. Moon appeared as one driven to
madness under his own legal cross-examination, which was
conducted with a long forefinger and an air of ferocious
waggery. One highly successful trilogy -- representing
Inglewood recognizing Inglewood, Inglewood prostrating
himself before Inglewood, and Inglewood severely beating
Inglewood with an umbrella -- Innocent Smith wanted to have
enlarged and put up in the hall, like a sort of fresco, with
the inscription, --
"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control --
These three alone will make a man a prig."
-- Tennyson.
Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable
than the domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent
had somehow blundered on the discovery that her thrifty
dressmaking went with a considerable feminine care for dress
-- the one feminine thing that had never failed her solitary
self-respect. In consequence Smith pestered her with a
theory (which he really seemed to take seriously) that
ladies might combine economy with magnificence if they would
draw light chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust
them off again. He set up "Smith's Lightning Dressmaking
Company," with two screens, a cardboard placard, and box of
bright soft crayons; and Miss Diana actually threw him an
abandoned black overall or working dress on which to
exercise the talents of a modiste. He promptly produced for
her a garment aflame with red and gold sunflowers; she held
it up an instant to her shoulders, and looked like an
empress. And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards
cleaning his bicycle (with his usual air of being
inextricably hidden in it), glanced up; and his hot face
grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing for one flash in the
doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green and
purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden in
the "Arabian Nights." A pang too swift to be named pain or
pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier.
He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he
was ready to fall in love with anybody; but it was like
remembering a worship of some Babylonian princess in some
previous existence. At his next glimpse of her (and he
caught himself awaiting it) the purple and green chalk was
dusted off, and she went by quickly in her working clothes.
As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could
conceive her as actively resisting this invasion that had
turned her house upside down. But among the most exact
observers it was seriously believed that she liked it. For
she was one of those women who at bottom regard all men as
equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.
And it is doubtful if she really saw anything more eccentric
or inexplicable in Smith's chimney-pot picnics or crimson
sunflowers than she had in the chemicals of Inglewood or the
sardonic speeches of Moon. Courtesy, on the other hand, is
a thing that anybody can understand, and Smith's manners
were as courteous as they were unconventional. She said he
was "a real gentleman," by which she simply meant a
kind-hearted man, which is a very different thing. She
would sit at the head of the table with fat, folded hands
and a fat, folded smile for hours and hours, while every one
else was talking at once. At least, the only other
exception was Rosamund's companion, Mary Gray, whose silence
was of a much more eager sort. Though she never spoke she
always looked as if she might speak any minute. Perhaps
this is the very definition of a companion. Innocent Smith
seemed to throw himself, as into other adventures, into the
adventure of making her talk. He never succeeded, yet he
was never snubbed; if he achieved anything, it was only to
draw attention to this quiet figure, and to turn her, by
ever so little, from a modesty to a mystery. But if she was
a riddle, every one recognized that she was a fresh and
unspoilt riddle, like the riddle of the sky and the woods in
spring. Indeed, though she was rather older than the other
two girls, she had an early morning ardour, a fresh
earnestness of youth, which Rosamund seemed to have lost in
the mere spending of money, and Diana in the mere guarding
of it. Smith looked at her again and again. Her eyes and
mouth were set in her face the wrong way -- which was really
the right way. She had the knack of saying everything with
her face: her silence was a sort of steady applause.
But among the hilarious experiments of that holiday
(which seemed more like a week's holiday than a day's) one
experiment towers supreme, not because it was any sillier or
more successful than the others, but because out of this
particular folly flowed all of the odd events that were to
follow. All the other practical jokes exploded of
themselves, and left vacancy; all the other fictions
returned upon themselves, and were finished like a song.
But the string of solid and startling events -- which were
to include a hansom cab, a detective, a pistol, and a
marriage licence -- were all made primarily possible by the
joke about the High Court of Beacon.
It had originated, not with Innocent Smith, but with
Michael Moon. He was in a strange glow and pressure of
spirits, and talked incessantly; yet he had never been more
sarcastic, and even inhuman. He used his old useless
knowledge as a barrister to talk entertainingly of a
tribunal that was a parody on the pompous anomalies of
English law. The High Court of Beacon, he declared, was a
splendid example of our free and sensible constitution. It
had been founded by King John in defiance of the Magna
Carta, and now held absolute power over windmills, wine and
spirit licences, ladies travelling in Turkey, revision of
sentences for dog-stealing and parricide, as well as
anything whatever that happened in the town of Market
Bosworth. The whole hundred and nine seneschals of the High
Court of Beacon met once in every four centuries; but in the
intervals (as Mr. Moon explained) the whole powers of the
institution were vested in Mrs. Duke. Tossed about among
the rest of the company, however, the High Court did not
retain its historical and legal seriousness, but was used
somewhat unscrupulously in a riot of domestic detail. If
somebody spilt the Worcester Sauce on the tablecloth, he was
quite sure it was a rite without which the sittings and
findings of the Court would be invalid; or if somebody
wanted a window to remain shut, he would suddenly remember
that none but the third son of the lord of the manor of
Penge had the right to open it. They even went to the
length of making arrests and conducting criminal inquiries.
The proposed trial of Moses Gould for patriotism was rather
above the heads of the company, especially of the criminal;
but the trial of Inglewood on a charge of photographic
libel, and his triumphant acquittal upon a plea of insanity,
were admitted to be in the best traditions of the Court.
But when Smith was in wild spirits he grew more and more
serious, not more and more flippant like Michael Moon. This
proposal of a private court of justice, which Moon had
thrown off with the detachment of a political humourist,
Smith really caught hold of with the eagerness of an
abstract philosopher. It was by far the best thing they
could do, he declared, to claim sovereign powers even for
the individual household.
"You believe in Home Rule for Ireland; I believe in Home
Rule for homes," he cried eagerly to Michael. "It would be
better if every father COULD kill his son, as with the old
Romans; it would be better, because nobody would be killed.
Let's issue a Declaration of Independence from Beacon
House. We could grow enough greens in that garden to
support us, and when the tax-collector comes let's tell him
we're self-supporting, and play on him with the hose.
...Well, perhaps, as you say, we couldn't very well have a
hose, as that comes from the main; but we could sink a well
in this chalk, and a lot could be done with water-jugs...
Let this really be Beacon House. Let's light a bonfire of
independence on the roof, and see house after house
answering it across the valley of the Thames! Let us begin
the League of the Free Families! Away with Local
Government! A fig for Local Patriotism! Let every house be
a sovereign state as this is, and judge its own children by
its own law, as we do by the Court of Beacon. Let us cut
the painter, and begin to be happy together, as if we were
on a desert island."
"I know that desert island," said Michael Moon; "it only
exists in the `Swiss Family Robinson.' A man feels a
strange desire for some sort of vegetable milk, and crash
comes down some unexpected cocoa-nut from some undiscovered
monkey. A literary man feels inclined to pen a sonnet, and
at once an officious porcupine rushes out of a thicket and
shoots out one of his quills."
"Don't you say a word against the `Swiss Family
Robinson,'" cried Innocent with great warmth. "It mayn't be
exact science, but it's dead accurate philosophy. When
you're really shipwrecked, you do really find what you
want. When you're really on a desert island, you never find
it a desert. If we were really besieged in this garden,
we'd find a hundred English birds and English berries that
we never knew were here. If we were snowed up in this room,
we'd be the better for reading scores of books in that
bookcase that we don't even know are there; we'd have talks
with each other, good, terrible talks, that we shall go to
the grave without guessing; we'd find materials for
everything -- christening, marriage, or funeral; yes, even
for a coronation -- if we didn't decide to be a republic."
"A coronation on `Swiss Family' lines, I suppose," said
Michael, laughing. "Oh, I know you would find everything in
that atmosphere. If we wanted such a simple thing, for
instance, as a Coronation Canopy, we should walk down beyond
the geraniums and find the Canopy Tree in full bloom. If we
wanted such a trifle as a crown of gold, why, we should be
digging up dandelions, and we should find a gold mine under
the lawn. And when we wanted oil for the ceremony, why, I
suppose a great storm would wash everything on shore, and we
should find there was a Whale on the premises."
"And so there IS a whale on the premises for all you
know," asseverated Smith, striking the table with passion.
"I bet you've never examined the premises! I bet you've
never been round at the back as I was this morning -- for I
found the very thing you say could only grow on a tree.
There's an old sort of square tent up against the dustbin;
it's got three holes in the canvas, and a pole's broken, so
it's not much good as a tent, but as a Canopy --" And his
voice quite failed him to express its shining adequacy; then
he went on with controversial eagerness: "You see I take
every challenge as you make it. I believe every blessed
thing you say couldn't be here has been here all the time.
You say you want a whale washed up for oil. Why, there's
oil in that cruet-stand at your elbow; and I don't believe
anybody has touched it or thought of it for years. And as
for your gold crown, we're none of us wealthy here, but we
could collect enough ten-shilling bits from our own pockets
to string round a man's head for half an hour; or one of
Miss Hunt's gold bangles is nearly big enough to --"
The good-humoured Rosamund was almost choking with
laughter. "All is not gold that glitters," she said, "and
besides --"
"What a mistake that is!" cried Innocent Smith, leaping
up in great excitement. "All is gold that glitters --
especially now we are a Sovereign State. What's the good of
a Sovereign State if you can't define a sovereign? We can
make anything a precious metal, as men could in the morning
of the world. They didn't choose gold because it was rare;
your scientists can tell you twenty sorts of slime much
rarer. They chose gold because it was bright -- because it
was a thing hard to find, but pretty when you've found it.
You can't fight with golden swords or eat golden biscuits;
you can only look at it -- and you can look at it out here."
With one of his incalculable motions he sprang back and
burst open the doors into the garden. At the same time
also, with one of his gestures that never seemed at the
instant so unconventional as they were, he stretched out his
hand to Mary Gray, and led her out on to the lawn as if for
a dance.
The French windows, thus flung open, let in an evening
even lovelier than that of the day before. The west was
swimming with sanguine colours, and a sort of sleepy flame
lay along the lawn. The twisted shadows of the one or two
garden trees showed upon this sheen, not gray or black, as
in common daylight, but like arabesques written in vivid
violet ink on some page of Eastern gold. The sunset was one
of those festive and yet mysterious conflagrations in which
common things by their colours remind us of costly or
curious things. The slates upon the sloping roof burned
like the plumes of a vast peacock, in every mysterious blend
of blue and green. The red-brown bricks of the wall glowed
with all the October tints of strong ruby and tawny wines.
The sun seemed to set each object alight with a different
coloured flame, like a man lighting fireworks; and even
Innocent's hair, which was of a rather colourless fairness,
seemed to have a flame of pagan gold on it as he strode
across the lawn towards the one tall ridge of rockery.
"What would be the good of gold," he was saying, "if it
did not glitter? Why should we care for a black sovereign
any more than a black sun at noon? A black button would do
just as well. Don't you see that everything in this garden
looks like a jewel? And will you kindly tell me what the
deuce is the good of a jewel except that it looks like a
jewel? Leave off buying and selling, and start looking!
Open your eyes, and you'll wake up in the New Jerusalem.
"All is gold that glitters--
Tree and tower of brass;
Rolls the golden evening air
Down the golden grass.
Kick the cry to Jericho,
How yellow mud is sold,
All is gold that glitters,
For the glitter is the gold."
"And who wrote that?" asked Rosamund, amused.
"No one will ever write it," answered Smith, and cleared
the rockery with a flying leap.
"Really," said Rosamund to Michael Moon, "he ought to be
sent to an asylum. Don't you think so?"
"I beg your pardon," inquired Michael, rather sombrely;
his long, swarthy head was dark against the sunset, and,
either by accident or mood, he had the look of something
isolated and even hostile amid the social extravagance of
the garden.
"I only said Mr. Smith ought to go to an asylum,"
repeated the lady.
The lean face seemed to grow longer and longer, for Moon
was unmistakably sneering. "No," he said; "I don't think
it's at all necessary."
"What do you mean?" asked Rosamund quickly. "Why not?"
"Because he is in one now," answered Michael Moon, in a
quiet but ugly voice. "Why, didn't you know?"
"What?" cried the girl, and there was a break in her
voice; for the Irishman's face and voice were really almost
creepy. With his dark figure and dark sayings in all that
sunshine he looked like the devil in paradise.
"I'm sorry," he continued, with a sort of harsh
humility. "Of course we don't talk about it much... but I
thought we all really knew."
"Knew what?"
"Well," answered Moon, "that Beacon House is a certain
rather singular sort of house -- a house with the tiles
loose, shall we say? Innocent Smith is only the doctor that
visits us; hadn't you come when he called before? As most
of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be
extra cheery. Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious
eccentric thing to us. Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree
-- that's his bedside manner."
"You daren't say such a thing!" cried Rosamund in a
rage. "You daren't suggest that I --"
"Not more than I am," said Michael soothingly; "not more
than the rest of us. Haven't you ever noticed that Miss
Duke never sits still -- a notorious sign? Haven't you ever
observed that Inglewood is always washing his hands -- a
known mark of mental disease? I, of course, am a
dipsomaniac."
"I don't believe you," broke out his companion, not
without agitation. "I've heard you had some bad habits --"
"All habits are bad habits," said Michael, with deadly
calm. "Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving
in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating
circle of ideas; by being tamed. YOU went mad about money,
because you're an heiress."
"It's a lie," cried Rosamund furiously. "I never was
mean about money."
"You were worse," said Michael, in a low voice and yet
violently. "You thought that other people were. You
thought every man who came near you must be a
fortune-hunter; you would not let yourself go and be sane;
and now you're mad and I'm mad, and serve us right."
"You brute!" said Rosamund, quite white. "And is this
true?"
With the intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is
capable when his abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent
for some seconds, and then stepped back with an ironical
bow. "Not literally true, of course," he said; "only really
true. An allegory, shall we say? a social satire."
"And I hate and despise your satires," cried Rosamund
Hunt, letting loose her whole forcible female personality
like a cyclone, and speaking every word to wound. "I
despise it as I despise your rank tobacco, and your nasty,
loungy ways, and your snarling, and your Radicalism, and
your old clothes, and your potty little newspaper, and your
rotten failure at everything. I don't care whether you call
it snobbishness or not, I like life and success, and jolly
things to look at, and action. You won't frighten me with
Diogenes; I prefer Alexander."
"Victrix causa deae --" said Michael gloomily; and this
angered her more, as, not knowing what it meant, she
imagined it to be witty.
"Oh, I dare say you know Greek," she said, with cheerful
inaccuracy; "you haven't done much with that either." And
she crossed the garden, pursuing the vanished Innocent and
Mary.
In doing so she passed Inglewood, who was returning to
the house slowly, and with a thought-clouded brow. He was
one of those men who are quite clever, but quite the reverse
of quick. As he came back out of the sunset garden into the
twilight parlour, Diana Duke slipped swiftly to her feet and
began putting away the tea things. But it was not before
Inglewood had seen an instantaneous picture so unique that
he might well have snapshotted it with his everlasting
camera. For Diana had been sitting in front of her
unfinished work with her chin on her hand, looking straight
out of the window in pure thoughtless thought.
"You are busy," said Arthur, oddly embarrassed with what
he had seen, and wishing to ignore it.
"There's no time for dreaming in this world," answered
the young lady with her back to him.
"I have been thinking lately," said Inglewood in a low
voice, "that there's no time for waking up."
She did not reply, and he walked to the window and looked
out on the garden.
"I don't smoke or drink, you know," he said irrelevantly,
"because I think they're drugs. And yet I fancy all
hobbies, like my camera and bicycle, are drugs too. Getting
under a black hood, getting into a dark room -- getting into
a hole anyhow. Drugging myself with speed, and sunshine,
and fatigue, and fresh air. Pedalling the machine so fast
that I turn into a machine myself. That's the matter with
all of us. We're too busy to wake up."
"Well," said the girl solidly, "what is there to wake up
to?"
"There must be!" cried Inglewood, turning round in a
singular excitement -- "there must be something to wake up
to! All we do is preparations -- your cleanliness, and my
healthiness, and Warner's scientific appliances. We're
always preparing for something -- something that never comes
off. I ventilate the house, and you sweep the house; but
what is going to HAPPEN in the house?"
She was looking at him quietly, but with very bright
eyes, and seemed to be searching for some form of words
which she could not find.
Before she could speak the door burst open, and the
boisterous Rosamund Hunt, in her flamboyant white hat, boa,
and parasol, stood framed in the doorway. She was in a
breathing heat, and on her open face was an expression of
the most infantile astonishment.
"Well, here's a fine game!" she said, panting. "What am
I to do now, I wonder? I've wired for Dr. Warner; that's
all I can think of doing."
"What is the matter?" asked Diana, rather sharply, but
moving forward like one used to be called upon for
assistance.
"It's Mary," said the heiress, "my companion Mary Gray:
that cracked friend of yours called Smith has proposed to
her in the garden, after ten hours' acquaintance, and he
wants to go off with her now for a special licence."
Arthur Inglewood walked to the open French windows and
looked out on the garden, still golden with evening light.
Nothing moved there but a bird or two hopping and
twittering; but beyond the hedge and railings, in the road
outside the garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with the
yellow Gladstone bag on top of it.
Chapter IV
The Garden of the God
Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt
entrance and utterance of the other girl.
"Well," she said shortly, "I suppose Miss Gray can
decline him if she doesn't want to marry him."
"But she DOES want to marry him!" cried Rosamund in
exasperation. "She's a wild, wicked fool, and I won't be
parted from her."
"Perhaps," said Diana icily, "but I really don't see what
we can do."
"But the man's balmy, Diana," reasoned her friend
angrily. "I can't let my nice governess marry a man that's
balmy! You or somebody MUST stop it! -- Mr. Inglewood,
you're a man; go and tell them they simply can't."
"Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can," said
Inglewood, with a depressed air. "I have far less right of
intervention than Miss Duke, besides having, of course, far
less moral force than she."
"You haven't either of you got much," cried Rosamund, the
last stays of her formidable temper giving way; "I think
I'll go somewhere else for a little sense and pluck. I
think I know some one who will help me more than you do, at
any rate... he's a cantankerous beast, but he's a man, and
has a mind, and knows it..." And she flung out into the
garden, with cheeks aflame, and the parasol whirling like a
Catherine wheel.
She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree,
looking over the hedge; hunched like a bird of prey, with
his large pipe hanging down his long blue chin. The very
hardness of his expression pleased her, after the nonsense
of the new engagement and the shilly-shallying of her other
friends.
"I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon," she said frankly. "I
hated you for being a cynic; but I've been well punished,
for I want a cynic just now. I've had my fill of sentiment
-- I'm fed up with it. The world's gone mad, Mr. Moon --
all except the cynics, I think. That maniac Smith wants to
marry my old friend Mary, and she -- and she -- doesn't seem
to mind."
Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking,
she added smartly, "I'm not joking; that's Mr. Smith's cab
outside. He swears he'll take her off now to his aunt's,
and go for a special licence. Do give me some practical
advice, Mr. Moon."
Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his
hand for an instant reflectively, and then tossed it to the
other side of the garden. "My practical advice to you is
this," he said: "Let him go for his special licence, and ask
him to get another one for you and me."
"Is that one of your jokes?" asked the young lady. "Do
say what you really mean."
"I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business," said
Moon with ponderous precision -- "a plain, practical man: a
man of affairs; a man of facts and the daylight. He has let
down twenty ton of good building bricks suddenly on my head,
and I am glad to say they have woken me up. We went to
sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in this very
sunlight. We have had a little nap for five years or so,
but now we're going to be married, Rosamund, and I can't see
why that cab..."
"Really," said Rosamund stoutly, "I don't know what you
mean."
"What a lie! cried Michael, advancing on her with
brightening eyes. "I'm all for lies in an ordinary way; but
don't you see that to-night they won't do? We've wandered
into a world of facts, old girl. That grass growing, and
that sun going down, and that cab at the door, are facts.
You used to torment and excuse yourself by saying I was
after your money, and didn't really love you. But if I
stood here now and told you I didn't love you -- you
wouldn't believe me: for truth is in this garden to-night."
"Really, Mr. Moon..." said Rosamund, rather more faintly.
He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face.
"Is my name Moon?" he asked. "Is your name Hunt? On my
honour, they sound to me as quaint and as distant as Red
Indian names. It's as if your name was `Swim' and my name
was `Sunrise.' But our real names are Husband and Wife, as
they were when we fell asleep."
"It is no good," said Rosamund, with real tears in her
eyes; "one can never go back."
"I can go where I damn please," said Michael, "and I can
carry you on my shoulder."
"But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!"
cried the girl earnestly. "You could carry me off my feet,
I dare say, soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business
for all that. These things done in that romantic rush, like
Mr. Smith's, they -- they do attract women, I don't deny
it. As you say, we're all telling the truth to-night.
They've attracted poor Mary, for one. They attract me,
Michael. But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do
lead to long unhappiness and disappointment -- you've got
used to your drinks and things -- I shan't be pretty much
longer --"
"Imprudent marriages!" roared Michael. "And pray where
in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might
as well talk about prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled
round each other long enough, and are we any safer than
Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You never know a
husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you'll be
unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be
unhappy, like the mother that bore you? Disappointed! of
course we'll be disappointed. I, for one, don't expect till
I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute, for just
now I'm fifty thousand feet high -- a tower with all the
trumpets shouting."
"You see all this," said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity
in her solid face, "and do you really want to marry me?"
"My darling, what else is there to do?" reasoned the
Irishman. "What other occupation is there for an active man
on this earth, except to marry you? What's the alternative
to marriage, barring sleep? It's not liberty, Rosamund.
Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must
marry Man -- that is Me. The only third thing is to marry
yourself -- to live with yourself -- yourself, yourself,
yourself -- the only companion that is never satisfied --
and never satisfactory."
"Michael," said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, "if you
won't talk so much, I'll marry you."
"It's no time for talking," cried Michael Moon; "singing
is the only thing. Can't you find that mandoline of yours,
Rosamund?"
"Go and fetch it for me," said Rosamund, with crisp and
sharp authority.
The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second
astonished; then he shot away across the lawn, as if shod
with the feathered shoes out of the Greek fairy tale. He
cleared three yards and fifteen daisies at a leap, out of
mere bodily levity; but when he came within a yard or two of
the open parlour windows, his flying feet fell in their old
manner like lead; he twisted round and came back slowly,
whistling. The events of that enchanted evening were not at
an end.
Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a
glimpse a curious thing had happened, almost an instant
after the intemperate exit of Rosamund. It was something
which, occurring in that obscure parlour, seemed to Arthur
Inglewood like heaven and earth turning head over heels, the
sea being the ceiling and the stars the floor. No words can
express how it astonished him, as it astonishes all simple
men when it happens. Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems
separated from it only by a sheet of paper or a sheet of
steel. It indicates no surrender, far less any sympathy.
The most rigid and ruthless woman can begin to cry, just as
the most effeminate man can grow a beard. It is a separate
sexual power, and proves nothing one way or the other about
force of character. But to young men ignorant of women,
like Arthur Inglewood, to see Diana Duke crying was like
seeing a motor-car shedding tears of petrol.
He could never have given (even if his really manly
modesty had permitted it) any vaguest vision of what he did
when he saw that portent. He acted as men do when a theatre
catches fire -- very differently from how they would have
conceived themselves as acting, whether for better or
worse. He had a faint memory of certain half-stifled
explanations, that the heiress was the one really paying
guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs (in consequence)
would come; but after that he knew nothing of his own
conduct except by the protests it evoked.
"Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood -- leave me alone; that's
not the way to help."
"But I can help you," said Arthur, with grinding
certainty; "I can, I can, I can..."
"Why, you said," cried the girl, "that you were much
weaker than me."
"So I am weaker than you," said Arthur, in a voice that
went vibrating through everything, "but not just now."
"Let go my hands!" cried Diana. "I won't be bullied."
In one element he was much stronger than she -- the
matter of humour. This leapt up in him suddenly, and he
laughed, saying: "Well, you are mean. You know quite well
you'll bully me all the rest of my life. You might allow a
man the one minute of his life when he's allowed to bully."
It was as extraordinary for him to laugh as for her to
cry, and for the first time since her childhood Diana was
entirely off her guard.
"Do you mean you want to marry me?" she said.
"Why, there's a cab at the door!" cried Inglewood,
springing up with an unconscious energy and bursting open
the glass doors that led into the garden.
As he led her out by the hand they realized somehow for
the first time that the house and garden were on a steep
height over London. And yet, though they felt the place to
be uplifted, they felt it also to be secret: it was like
some round walled garden on the top of one of the turrets of
heaven.
Inglewood looked around dreamily, his brown eyes
devouring all sorts of details with a senseless delight. He
noticed for the first time that the railings of the gate
beyond the garden bushes were moulded like little spearheads
and painted blue. He noticed that one of the blue spears
was loosened in its place, and hung sideways; and this
almost made him laugh. He thought it somehow exquisitely
harmless and funny that the railing should be crooked; he
thought he should like to know how it happened, who did it,
and how the man was getting on.
When they were gone a few feet across that fiery grass
realized that they were not alone. Rosamund Hunt and the
eccentric Mr. Moon, both of whom they had last seen in the
blackest temper of detachment, were standing together on the
lawn. They were standing in quite an ordinary manner, and
yet they looked somehow like people in a book.
"Oh," said Diana, "what lovely air!"
"I know," called out Rosamund, with a pleasure so
positive that it rang out like a complaint. "It's just like
that horrid, beastly fizzy stuff they gave me that made me
feel happy."
"Oh, it isn't like anything but itself!" answered Diana,
breathing deeply. "Why, it's all cold, and yet it feels
like fire."
"Balmy is the word we use in Fleet Street," said Mr.
Moon. "Balmy -- especially on the crumpet." And he fanned
himself quite unnecessarily with his straw hat. They were
all full of little leaps and pulsations of objectless and
airy energy. Diana stirred and stretched her long arms
rigidly, as if crucified, in a sort of excruciating
restfulness; Michael stood still for long intervals, with
gathered muscles, then spun round like a teetotum, and stood
still again; Rosamund did not trip, for women never trip,
except when they fall on their noses, but she struck the
ground with her foot as she moved, as if to some inaudible
dance tune; and Inglewood, leaning quite quietly against a
tree, had unconsciously clutched a branch and shaken it with
a creative violence. Those giant gestures of Man, that made
the high statues and the strokes of war, tossed and
tormented all their limbs. Silently as they strolled and
stood they were bursting like batteries with an animal
magnetism.
"And now," cried Moon quite suddenly, stretching out a
hand on each side, "let's dance round that bush!"
"Why, what bush do you mean?" asked Rosamund, looking
round with a sort of radiant rudeness.
"The bush that isn't there," said Michael -- "the
Mulberry Bush."
They had taken each other's hands, half laughing and
quite ritually; and before they could disconnect again
Michael spun them all round, like a demon spinning the world
for a top. Diana felt, as the circle of the horizon flew
instantaneously around her, a far aerial sense of the ring
of heights beyond London and corners where she had climbed
as a child; she seemed almost to hear the rooks cawing about
the old pines on Highgate, or to see the glowworms gathering
and kindling in the woods of Box Hill.
The circle broke -- as all such perfect circles of levity
must break -- and sent its author, Michael, flying, as by
centrifugal force, far away against the blue rails of the
gate. When reeling there he suddenly raised shout after
shout of a new and quite dramatic character.
"Why, it's Warner!" he shouted, waving his arms. "It's
jolly old Warner -- with a new silk hat and the old silk
moustache!"
"Is that Dr. Warner?" cried Rosamund, bounding forward in
a burst of memory, amusement, and distress. "Oh, I'm so
sorry! Oh, do tell him it's all right!"
"Let's take hands and tell him," said Michael Moon. For
indeed, while they were talking, another hansom cab had
dashed up behind the one already waiting, and Dr. Herbert
Warner, leaving a companion in the cab, had carefully
deposited himself on the pavement.
Now, when you are an eminent physician and are wired for
by an heiress to come to a case of dangerous mania, and
when, as you come in through the garden to the house, the
heiress and her landlady and two of the gentlemen boarders
join hands and dance round you in a ring, calling out, "It's
all right! it's all right!" you are apt to be flustered and
even displeased. Dr. Warner was a placid but hardly a
placable person. The two things are by no means the same;
and even when Moon explained to him that he, Warner, with
his high hat and tall, solid figure, was just such a classic
column as OUGHT to be danced round by a ring of laughing
maidens on some old golden Greek seashore -- even then he
seemed to miss the point of the general rejoicing.
"Inglewood!" cried Dr. Warner, fixing his former disciple
with a stare, "are you mad?"
Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown hair, but he
answered, easily and quietly enough, "Not now. The truth
is, Warner, I've just made a rather important medical
discovery -- quite in your line."
"What do you mean?" asked the great doctor stiffly --
"what discovery?"
"I've discovered that health really is catching, like
disease," answered Arthur.
"Yes; sanity has broken out, and is spreading," said
Michael, performing a ~pas seul~ with a thoughtful
expression. "Twenty thousand more cases taken to the
hospitals; nurses employed night and day."
Dr. Warner studied Michael's grave face and lightly
moving legs with an unfathomed wonder. "And is THIS, may I
ask," he said, "the sanity that is spreading?"
"You must forgive me, Dr. Warner," cried Rosamund Hunt
heartily. "I know I've treated you badly; but indeed it was
all a mistake. I was in a frightfully bad temper when I
sent for you, but now it all seems like a dream -- and --
and Mr. Smith is the sweetest, most sensible, most
delightful old thing that ever existed, and he may marry any
one he likes -- except me."
"I should suggest Mrs. Duke," said Michael.
The gravity of Dr. Warner's face increased. He took a
slip of pink paper from his waistcoat pocket, with his pale
blue eyes quietly fixed on Rosamund's face all the time. He
spoke with a not inexcusable frigidity.
"Really, Miss Hunt," he said, "you are not yet very
reassuring. You sent me this wire only half an hour ago:
`Come at once, if possible, with another doctor. Man --
Innocent Smith -- gone mad on premises, and doing dreadful
things. Do you know anything of him?' I went round at once
to a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor who is also a
private detective and an authority on criminal lunacy; he
has come round with me, and is waiting in the cab. Now you
calmly tell me that this criminal madman is a highly sweet
and sane old thing, with accompaniments that set me
speculating on your own definitions of sanity. I hardly
comprehend the change."
"Oh, how can one explain a change in sun and moon and
everybody's soul?" cried Rosamund, in despair. "Must I
confess we had got so morbid as to think him mad merely
because he wanted to get married; and that we didn't even
know it was only because we wanted to get married
ourselves? We'll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor;
we're happy enough."
"Where is Mr. Smith?" asked Warner of Inglewood very
sharply.
Arthur started; he had forgotten all about the central
figure of their farce, who had not been visible for an hour
or more.
"I -- I think he's on the other side of the house, by the
dustbin," he said.
"He may be on the road to Russia," said Warner, "but he
must be found." And he strode away and disappeared round a
corner of the house by the sunflowers.
"I hope," said Rosamund, "he won't really interfere with
Mr. Smith."
"Interfere with the daisies!" said Michael with a snort.
"A man can't be locked up for falling in love -- at least I
hope not."
"No; I think even a doctor couldn't make a disease out of
him. He'd throw off the doctor like the disease, don't you
know? I believe it's a case of a sort of holy well. I
believe Innocent Smith is simply innocent, and that is why
he is so extraordinary."
It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly tracing circles in
the grass with the point of her white shoe.
"I think," said Inglewood, "that Smith is not
extraordinary at all. He's comic just because he's so
startlingly commonplace. Don't you know what it is to be in
all one family circle, with aunts and uncles, when a
schoolboy comes home for the holidays? That bag there on
the cab is only a schoolboy's hamper. This tree here in the
garden is only the sort of tree that any schoolboy would
have climbed. Yes, that's the thing that has haunted us all
about him, the thing we could never fit a word to. Whether
he is my old schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my old
schoolfellows. He is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwing
animal that we have all been."
"That is only you absurd boys," said Diana. "I don't
believe any girl was ever so silly, and I'm sure no girl was
ever so happy, except --" and she stopped.
"I will tell you the truth about Innocent Smith," said
Michael Moon in a low voice. "Dr. Warner has gone to look
for him in vain. He is not there. Haven't you noticed that
we never saw him since we found ourselves? He was an astral
baby born of all four of us; he was only our own youth
returned. Long before poor old Warner had clambered out of
his cab, the thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew
and light on this lawn. Once or twice more, by the mercy of
God, we may feel the thing, but the man we shall never see.
In a spring garden before breakfast we shall smell the smell
called Smith. In the snapping of brisk twigs in tiny fires
we shall hear a noise named Smith. Everything insatiable
and innocent in the grasses that gobble up the earth like
babies at a bun feast, in the white mornings that split the
sky as a boy splits up white firwood, we may feel for one
instant the presence of an impetuous purity; but his
innocence was too close to the unconsciousness of inanimate
things not to melt back at a mere touch into the mild hedges
and heavens; he--"
He was interrupted from behind the house by a bang like
that of a bomb. Almost at the same instant the stranger in
the cab sprang out of it, leaving it rocking upon the stones
of the road. He clutched the blue railings of the garden,
and peered eagerly over them in the direction of the noise.
He was a small, loose, yet alert man, very thin, with a face
that seemed made out of fish bones, and a silk hat quite as
rigid and resplendent as Warner's, but thrust back
recklessly on the hinder part of his head.
"Murder!" he shrieked, in a high and feminine but very
penetrating voice. "Stop that murderer there!"
Even as he shrieked a second shot shook the lower windows
of the house, and with the noise of it Dr. Herbert Warner
came flying round the corner like a leaping rabbit. Yet
before he had reached the group a third discharge had
deafened them, and they saw with their own eyes two spots of
white sky drilled through the second of the unhappy
Herbert's high hats. The next moment the fugitive physician
fell over a flowerpot, and came down on all fours, staring
like a cow. The hat with the two shot-holes in it rolled
upon the gravel path before him, and Innocent Smith came
round the corner like a railway train. He was looking twice
his proper size -- a giant clad in green, the big revolver
still smoking in his hand, his face sanguine and in shadow,
his eyes blazing like stars, and his yellow hair standing
out all ways like Struwelpeter's.
Though this startling scene hung but an instant in
stillness, Inglewood had time to feel once more what he had
felt when he saw the other lovers standing on the lawn --
the sensation of a certain cut and coloured clearness that
belongs rather to the things of art than to the things of
experience. The broken flowerpot with its red-hot
geraniums, the green bulk of Smith and the black bulk of
Warner, the blue-spiked railings behind, clutched by the
stranger's yellow vulture claws and peered over by his long
vulture neck, the silk hat on the gravel, and the little
cloudlet of smoke floating across the garden as innocently
as the puff of a cigarette -- all these seemed unnaturally
distinct and definite. They existed, like symbols, in an
ecstasy of separation. Indeed, every object grew more and
more particular and precious because the whole picture was
breaking up. Things look so bright just before they burst.
Long before his fancies had begun, let alone ceased,
Arthur had stepped across and taken one of Smith's arms.
Simultaneously the little stranger had run up the steps and
taken the other. Smith went into peals of laughter, and
surrendered his pistol with perfect willingness. Moon
raised the doctor to his feet, and then went and leaned
sullenly on the garden gate. The girls were quiet and
vigilant, as good women mostly are in instants of
catastrophe, but their faces showed that, somehow or other,
a light had been dashed out of their sky. The doctor
himself, when he had risen, collected his hat and wits, and
dusting himself down with an air of great disgust, turned to
them in brief apology. He was very white with his recent
panic, but he spoke with perfect self-control.
"You will excuse us, ladies," he said; "my friend and Mr.
Inglewood are both scientists in their several ways. I
think we had better all take Mr. Smith indoors, and
communicate with you later."
And under the guard of the three natural philosophers the
disarmed Smith was led tactfully into the house, still
roaring with laughter.
From time to time during the next twenty minutes his
distant boom of mirth could again be heard through the
half-open window; but there came no echo of the quiet voices
of the physicians. The girls walked about the garden
together, rubbing up each other's spirits as best they
might; Michael Moon still hung heavily against the gate.
Somewhere about the expiration of that time Dr. Warner came
out of the house again with a face less pale but even more
stern, and the little man with the fish-bone face advanced
gravely in his rear. And if the face of Warner in the
sunlight was that of a hanging judge, the face of the little
man behind was more like a death's-head.
"Miss Hunt," said Dr. Herbert Warner, "I only wish to
offer you my warm thanks and admiration. By your prompt
courage and wisdom in sending for us by wire this evening,
you have enabled us to capture and put out of mischief one
of the most cruel and terrible of the enemies of humanity --
a criminal whose plausibility and pitilessness have never
been before combined in flesh."
Rosamund looked across at him with a white, blank face
and blinking eyes. "What do you mean?" she asked. "You
can't mean Mr. Smith?"
"He has gone by many other names," said the doctor
gravely, "and not one he did not leave to be cursed behind
him. That man, Miss Hunt, has left a track of blood and
tears across the world. Whether he is mad as well as
wicked, we are trying, in the interests of science, to
discover. In any case, we shall have to take him before a
magistrate first, even if only on the road to a lunatic
asylum. But the lunatic asylum in which he is confined will
have to be sealed with wall within wall, and ringed with
guns like a fortress, or he will break out again to bring
forth carnage and darkness on the earth."
Rosamund looked at the two doctors, her face growing
paler and paler. Then her eyes strayed to Michael, who was
leaning on the gate; but he continued to lean on it without
moving, with his face turned away towards the darkening
road.
Chapter V
The Allegorical Practical Joker
The criminal specialist who had come with Dr. Warner was a
somewhat more urbane and even dapper figure on closer
inspection than he had appeared when clutching the railings
and craning his neck into the garden. He even looked
comparatively young when he took his hat off, having fair
hair parted in the middle and carefully curled on each side,
and lively movements, especially of the hands. He had a
dandified monocle slung round his neck by a broad black
ribbon, and a big bow tie, as if a big American moth had
alighted on him. His dress and gestures were bright enough
for a boy's; it was only when you looked at the fish-bone
face that you beheld something acrid and old. His manners
were excellent, though hardly English, and he had two
half-conscious tricks by which people who only met him once
remembered him. One was a trick of closing his eyes when he
wished to be particularly polite; the other was one of
lifting his joined thumb and forefinger in the air as if
holding a pinch of snuff, when he was hesitating or hovering
over a word. But hose who were longer in his company tended
to forget these oddities in the stream of his quaint and
solemn conversation and really singular views.
"Miss Hunt," said Dr. Warner, "this is Dr. Cyrus Pym."
Dr. Cyrus Pym shut his eyes during the introduction,
rather as if he were "playing fair" in some child's game,
and gave a prompt little bow, which somehow suddenly
revealed him as a citizen of the United States.
"Dr. Cyrus Pym," continued Warner (Dr. Pym shut his eyes
again), "is perhaps the first criminological expert of
America. We are very fortunate to be able to consult with
him in this extraordinary case --"
"I can't make head or tail of anything," said Rosamund.
"How can poor Mr. Smith be so dreadful as he is by your
account?"
"Or by your telegram," said Herbert Warner, smiling.
"Oh, you don't understand," cried the girl impatiently.
"Why, he's done us all more good than going to church."
"I think I can explain to the young lady," said Dr. Cyrus
Pym. "This criminal or maniac Smith is a very genius of
evil, and has a method of his own, a method of the most
daring ingenuity. He is popular wherever he goes, for he
invades every house as an uproarious child. People are
getting suspicious of all the respectable disguises for a
scoundrel; so he always uses the disguise of -- what shall I
say -- the Bohemian, the blameless Bohemian. He always
carries people off their feet. People are used to the mask
of conventional good conduct. He goes in for eccentric
good-nature. You expect a Don Juan to dress up as a solemn
and solid Spanish merchant; but you're not prepared when he
dresses up as Don Quixote. You expect a humbug to behave
like Sir Charles Grandison; because (with all respect, Miss
Hunt, for the deep, tear-moving tenderness of Samuel
Richardson) Sir Charles Grandison so often behaved like a
humbug. But no real red-blooded citizen is quite ready for
a humbug that models himself not on Sir Charles Grandison
but on Sir Roger de Coverly. Setting up to be a good man a
little cracked is a new criminal incognito, Miss Hunt. It's
been a great notion, and commonly successful; but its
success just makes it mighty cruel. I can forgive Dick
Turpin if he impersonates Dr. Busby; I can't forgive him
when he impersonates Dr. Johnson. The saint with a tile
loose is a bit too sacred, I guess, to be parodied."
"But how do you know," cried Rosamund desperately, "that
Mr. Smith is a known criminal?"
"I collated all the documents," said the American, "when
my friend Warner knocked me up on receipt of your cable. It
is my professional affair to know these facts, Miss Hunt;
and there's no more doubt about them than about the Bradshaw
down at the depot. This man has hitherto escaped the law,
through his admirable affectations of infancy or insanity.
But I myself, as a specialist, have privately authenticated
notes of some eighteen or twenty crimes attempted or
achieved in this manner. He comes to houses as he has to
this, and gets a grand popularity. He makes things go.
They do go; when he's gone the things are gone. Gone, Miss
Hunt, gone, a man's life or a man's spoons, or more often a
woman. I assure you I have all the memoranda."
"I have seen them," said Warner solidly, "I can assure
you that all this is correct."
"The most unmanly aspect, according to my feelings," went
on the American doctor, "is this perpetual deception of
innocent women by a wild simulation of innocence. From
almost every house where this great imaginative devil has
been, he has taken some poor girl away with him; some say
he's got a hypnotic eye with his other queer features, and
that they go like automata. What's become of all those poor
girls nobody knows. Murdered, I dare say; for we've lots of
instances, besides this one, of his turning his hand to
murder, though none ever brought him under the law. Anyhow,
our most modern methods of research can't find any trace of
the wretched women. It's when I think of them that I am
real moved, Miss Hunt. And I've really nothing else to say
just now except what Dr. Warner has said."
"Quite so," said Warner, with a smile that seemed moulded
in marble -- "that we all have to thank you very much for
that telegram."
The little Yankee scientist had been speaking with such
evident sincerity that one forgot the tricks of his voice
and manner -- the falling eyelids, the rising intonation,
and the poised finger and thumb -- which were at other times
a little comic. It was not so much that he was cleverer
than Warner; perhaps he was not so clever, though he was
more celebrated. But he had what Warner never had, a fresh
and unaffected seriousness -- the great American virtue of
simplicity. Rosamund knitted her brows and looked gloomily
toward the darkening house that contained the dark prodigy.
Broad daylight still endured; but it had already changed
from gold to silver, and was changing from silver to gray.
The long plumy shadows of the one or two trees in the garden
faded more and more upon a dead background of dusk. In the
sharpest and deepest shadow, which was the entrance to the
house by the big French windows, Rosamund could watch a
hurried consultation between Inglewood (who was still left
in charge of the mysterious captive) and Diana, who had
moved to his assistance from without. After a few sentences
and gestures they went inside, shutting the glass doors upon
the garden; and the garden seemed to grow grayer still.
The American gentleman named Pym seemed to be turning and
on the move in the same direction; but before he started he
spoke to Rosamund with a flash of that guileless tact which
redeemed much of his childish vanity, and with something of
that spontaneous poetry which made it difficult, pedantic as
he was, to call him a pedant.
"I'm vurry sorry, Miss Hunt," he said; "but Dr. Warner
and I, as two quali-FIED practitioners, had better take Mr.
Smith away in that cab, and the less said about it the
better. Don't you agitate yourself, Miss Hunt. You've just
got to think that we're taking away a monstrosity, something
that oughtn't to be at all -- something like one of those
gods in your Britannic Museum, all wings, and beards, and
legs, and eyes, and no shape. That's what Smith is, and you
shall soon be quit of him."
He had already taken a step towards the house, and Warner
was about to follow him, when the glass doors were opened
again and Diana Duke came out with more than her usual
quickness across the lawn. Her face was aquiver with worry
and excitement, and her dark earnest eyes fixed only on the
other girl.
"Rosamund," she cried in despair, "what shall I do with
her?"
"With her?" cried Miss Hunt, with a violent jump. "O
lord, he isn't a woman too, is he?"
"No, no, no," said Dr. Pym soothingly, as if in common
fairness. "A woman? no, really, he is not so bad as that."
"I mean your friend Mary Gray," retorted Diana with equal
tartness. "What on earth am I to do with her?"
"How can we tell her about Smith, you mean," answered
Rosamund, her face at once clouding and softening. "Yes, it
will be pretty painful."
"But I HAVE told her," exploded Diana, with more than her
congenital exasperation. "I have told her, and she doesn't
seem to mind. She still says she's going away with Smith in
that cab."
"But it's impossible!" ejaculated Rosamund. "Why, Mary
is really religious. She --"
She stopped in time to realize that Mary Gray was
comparatively close to her on the lawn. Her quiet companion
had come down very quietly into the garden, but dressed very
decisively for travel. She had a neat but very ancient blue
tam-o'-shanter on her head, and was pulling some rather
threadbare gray gloves on to her hands. Yet the two tints
fitted excellently with her heavy copper-coloured hair; the
more excellently for the touch of shabbiness: for a woman's
clothes never suit her so well as when they seem to suit her
by accident.
But in this case the woman had a quality yet more unique
and attractive. In such gray hours, when the sun is sunk
and the skies are already sad, it will often happen that one
reflection at some occasional angle will cause to linger the
last of the light. A scrap of window, a scrap of water, a
scrap of looking-glass, will be full of the fire that is
lost to all the rest of the earth. The quaint, almost
triangular face of Mary Gray was like some triangular piece
of mirror that could still repeat the splendour of hours
before. Mary, though she was always graceful, could never
have properly been called beautiful; and yet her happiness
amid all that misery was so beautiful as to make a man catch
his breath.
"O Diana," cried Rosamund in a lower voice and altering
her phrase; "but how did you tell her?"
"It is quite easy to tell her," answered Diana sombrely;
"it makes no impression at all."
"I'm afraid I've kept everything waiting," said Mary Gray
apologetically, "and now we must really say good-bye.
Innocent is taking me to his aunt's over at Hampstead, and
I'm afraid she goes to bed early."
Her words were quite casual and practical, but there was
a sort of sleepy light in her eyes that was more baffling
than darkness; she was like one speaking absently with her
eye on some very distant object.
"Mary, Mary," cried Rosamund, almost breaking down, "I'm
so sorry about it, but the thing can't be at all. We -- we
have found out all about Mr. Smith."
"All?" repeated Mary, with a low and curious intonation;
"why, that must be awfully exciting."
There was no noise for an instant and no motion except
that the silent Michael Moon, leaning on the gate, lifted
his head, as it might be to listen. Then Rosamund remaining
speechless, Dr. Pym came to her rescue in his definite way.
"To begin with," he said, "this man Smith is constantly
attempting murder. The Warden of Brakespeare College --"
"I know," said Mary, with a vague but radiant smile.
"Innocent told me."
"I can't say what he told you," replied Pym quickly, "but
I'm very much afraid it wasn't true. The plain truth is
that the man's stained with every known human crime. I
assure you I have all the documents. I have evidence of his
committing burglary, signed by a most eminent English
curate. I have --"
"Oh, but there were two curates," cried Mary, with a
certain gentle eagerness; "that was what made it so much
funnier."
The darkened glass doors of the house opened once more,
and Inglewood appeared for an instant, making a sort of
signal. The American doctor bowed, the English doctor did
not, but they both set out stolidly towards the house. No
one else moved, not even Michael hanging on the gate; but
the back of his head and shoulders had still an
indescribable indication that he was listening to every
word.
"But don't you understand, Mary," cried Rosamund in
despair; "don't you know that awful things have happened
even before our very eyes. I should have thought you would
have heard the revolver shots upstairs."
"Yes, I heard the shots," said Mary almost brightly; "but
I was busy packing just then. And Innocent had told me he
was going to shoot at Dr. Warner; so it wasn't worth while
to come down."
"Oh, I don't understand what you mean," cried Rosamund
Hunt, stamping, "but you must and shall understand what I
mean. I don't care how cruelly I put it, if only I can save
you. I mean that your Innocent Smith is the most awfully
wicked man in the world. He has sent bullets at lots of
other men and gone off in cabs with lots of other women.
And he seems to have killed the women too, for nobody can
find them."
"He is really rather naughty sometimes," said Mary Gray,
laughing softly as she buttoned her old gray gloves.
"Oh, this is really mesmerism, or something," said
Rosamund, and burst into tears.
At the same moment the two black-clad doctors appeared
out of the house with their great green-clad captive between
them. He made no resistance, but was still laughing in a
groggy and half-witted style. Arthur Inglewood followed in
the rear, a dark and red study in the last shades of
distress and shame. In this black, funereal, and painfully
realistic style the exit from Beacon House was made by a man
whose entrance a day before had been effected by the happy
leaping of a wall and the hilarious climbing of a tree. No
one moved of the groups in the garden except Mary Gray, who
stepped forward quite naturally, calling out, "Are you
ready, Innocent? Our cab's been waiting such a long time."
"Ladies and gentlemen," said Dr. Warner firmly, "I must
insist on asking this lady to stand aside. We shall have
trouble enough as it is, with the three of us in a cab."
"But it IS our cab," persisted Mary. "Why, there's
Innocent's yellow bag on the top of it."
"Stand aside," repeated Warner roughly. "And you, Mr.
Moon, please be so obliging as to move a moment. Come,
come! the sooner this ugly business is over the better --
and how can we open the gate if you will keep leaning on
it?"
Michael Moon looked at his long lean forefinger, and
seemed to consider and reconsider this argument. "Yes," he
said at last; "but how can I lean on this gate if you keep
on opening it?"
"Oh, get out of the way!" cried Warner, almost
good-humouredly. "You can lean on the gate any time."
"No," said Moon reflectively. "Seldom the time and the
place and the blue gate altogether; and it all depends
whether you come of an old country family. My ancestors
leaned on gates before any one had discovered how to open
them."
"Michael!" cried Arthur Inglewood in a kind of agony,
"are you going to get out of the way?"
"Why, no; I think not," said Michael, after some
meditation, and swung himself slowly round, so that he
confronted the company, while still, in a lounging attitude,
occupying the path.
"Hullo!" he called out suddenly; "what are you doing to
Mr. Smith?"
"Taking him away," answered Warner shortly, "to be
examined."
"Matriculation?" asked Moon brightly.
"By a magistrate," said the other curtly.
"And what other magistrate," cried Michael, raising his
voice, "dares to try what befell on this free soil, save
only the ancient and independent Dukes of Beacon? What
other court dares to try one of our company, save only the
High Court of Beacon? Have you forgotten that only this
afternoon we flew the flag of independence and severed
ourselves from all the nations of the earth?"
"Michael," cried Rosamund, wringing her hands, "how can
you stand there talking nonsense? Why, you saw the dreadful
thing yourself. You were there when he went mad. It was
you that helped the doctor up when he fell over the
flower-pot."
"And the High Court of Beacon," replied Moon with
hauteur, "has special powers in all cases concerning
lunatics, flower-pots, and doctors who fall down in
gardens. It's in our very first charter from Edward I: `Si
medicus quisquam in horto prostratus --'"
"Out of the way!" cried Warner with sudden fury, "or we
will force you out of it."
"What!" cried Michael Moon, with a cry of hilarious
fierceness. "Shall I die in defence of this sacred pale?
Will you paint these blue railings red with my gore?" and he
laid hold of one of the blue spikes behind him. As
Inglewood had noticed earlier in the evening, the railing
was loose and crooked at this place, and the painted iron
staff and spearhead came away in Michael's hand as he shook
it.
"See!" he cried, brandishing this broken javelin in the
air, "the very lances round Beacon Tower leap from their
places to defend it. Ah, in such a place and hour it is a
fine thing to die alone!" And in a voice like a drum he
rolled the noble lines of Ronsard --
"Ou pour l'honneur de Dieu, ou pour le droit de mon prince,
Navre, poitrine ouverte, au bord de mon province."
"Sakes alive!" said the American gentleman, almost in an
awed tone. Then he added, "Are there two maniacs here?"
"No; there are five," thundered Moon. "Smith and I are
the only sane people left."
"Michael!" cried Rosamund; "Michael, what does it mean?"
"It means bosh!" roared Michael, and slung his painted
spear hurtling to the other end of the garden. "It means
that doctors are bosh, and criminology is bosh, and
Americans are bosh -- much more bosh than our Court of
Beacon. It means, you fatheads, that Innocent Smith is no
more mad or bad than the bird on that tree."
"But, my dear Moon," began Inglewood in his modest
manner, "these gentlemen --"
"On the word of two doctors," exploded Moon again,
without listening to anybody else, "shut up in a private
hell on the word of two doctors! And such doctors! Oh, my
hat! Look at 'em! -- do just look at 'em! Would you read a
book, or buy a dog, or go to a hotel on the advice of twenty
such? My people came from Ireland, and were Catholics.
What would you say if I called a man wicked on the word of
two priests?"
"But it isn't only their word, Michael," reasoned
Rosamund; "they've got evidence too."
"Have you looked at it?" asked Moon.
"No," said Rosamund, with a sort of faint surprise;
"these gentlemen are in charge of it."
"And of everything else, it seems to me," said Michael.
"Why, you haven't even had the decency to consult Mrs.
Duke."
"Oh, that's no use," said Diana in an undertone to
Rosamund; "Auntie couldn't say `Bo!' to a goose."
"I am glad to hear it," answered Michael, "for with such
a flock of geese to say it to, the horrid expletive might be
constantly on her lips. For my part, I simply refuse to let
things be done in this light and airy style. I appeal to
Mrs. Duke -- it's her house."
"Mrs. Duke?" repeated Inglewood doubtfully.
"Yes, Mrs. Duke," said Michael firmly, "commonly called
the Iron Duke."
"If you ask Auntie," said Diana quietly, "she'll only be
for doing nothing at all. Her only idea is to hush things
up or to let things slide. That just suits her."
"Yes," replied Michael Moon; "and, as it happens, it just
suits all of us. You are impatient with your elders, Miss
Duke; but when you are as old yourself you will know what
Napoleon knew -- that half one's letters answer themselves
if you can only refrain from the fleshly appetite of
answering them."
He was still lounging in the same absurd attitude, with
his elbow on the grate, but his voice had altered abruptly
for the third time; just as it had changed from the mock
heroic to the humanly indignant, it now changed to the airy
incisiveness of a lawyer giving good legal advice.
"It isn't only your aunt who wants to keep this quiet if
she can," he said; "we all want to keep it quiet if we can.
Look at the large facts -- the big bones of the case. I
believe these scientific gentlemen have made a highly
scientific mistake. I believe Smith is as blameless as a
buttercup. I admit buttercups don't often let off loaded
pistols in private houses; I admit there is something
demanding explanation. But I am morally certain there's
some blunder, or some joke, or some allegory, or some
accident behind all this. Well, suppose I'm wrong. We've
disarmed him; we're five men to hold him; he may as well go
to a lock-up later on as now. But suppose there's even a
chance of my being right. Is it anybody's interest here to
wash this linen in public?
"Come, I'll take each of you in order. Once take Smith
outside that gate, and you take him into the front page of
the evening papers. I know; I've written the front page
myself. Miss Duke, do you or your aunt want a sort of
notice stuck up over your boarding-house -- `Doctors shot
here'? No, no -- doctors are rubbish, as I said; but you
don't want the rubbish shot here. Arthur, suppose I am
right, or suppose I am wrong. Smith has appeared as an old
schoolfellow of yours. Mark my words, if he's proved
guilty, the Organs of Public Opinion will say you introduced
him. If he's proved innocent, they will say you helped to
collar him. Rosamund, my dear, suppose I am right or
wrong. If he's proved guilty, they'll say you engaged your
companion to him. If he's proved innocent, they'll print
that telegram. I know the Organs, damn them."
He stopped an instant; for this rapid rationalism left
him more breathless than had either his theatrical or his
real denunciation. But he was plainly in earnest, as well
as positive and lucid; as was proved by his proceeding
quickly the moment he had found his breath.
"It is just the same," he cried, "with our medical
friends. You will say that Dr. Warner has a grievance. I
agree. But does he want specially to be snapshotted by all
the journalists ~prostratus in horto~? It was no fault of
his, but the scene was not very dignified even for him. He
must have justice; but does he want to ask for justice, not
only on his knees, but on his hands and knees? Does he want
to enter the court of justice on all fours? Doctors are not
allowed to advertise; and I'm sure no doctor wants to
advertise himself as looking like that. And even for our
American guest the interest is the same. Let us suppose
that he has conclusive documents. Let us assume that he has
revelations really worth reading. Well, in a legal inquiry
(or a medical inquiry, for that matter) ten to one he won't
be allowed to read them. He'll be tripped up every two or
three minutes with some tangle of old rules. A man can't
tell the truth in public nowadays. But he can still tell it
in private; he can tell it inside that house."
"It is quite true," said Dr. Cyrus Pym, who had listened
throughout the speech with a seriousness which only an
American could have retained through such a scene. "It is
quite true that I have been per-ceptibly less hampered in
private inquiries."
"Dr. Pym!" cried Warner in a sort of sudden anger. "Dr.
Pym! you aren't surely going to admit --"
"Smith may be mad," went on the melancholy Moon in a
monologue that seemed as heavy as a hatchet, "but there was
something after all in what he said about Home Rule for
every home. Yes, there is something, when all's said and
done, in the High Court of Beacon. It is really true that
human beings might often get some sort of domestic justice
where just now they can only get legal injustice -- oh, I am
a lawyer too, and I know that as well. It is true that
there's too much official and indirect power. Often and
often the thing a whole nation can't settle is just the
thing a family could settle. Scores of young criminals have
been fined and sent to jail when they ought to have been
thrashed and sent to bed. Scores of men, I am sure, have
had a lifetime at Hanwell when they only wanted a week at
Brighton. There IS something in Smith's notion of domestic
self-government; and I propose that we put it in practice.
You have the prisoner; you have the documents. Come, we are
a company of free, white, Christian people, such as might be
besieged in a town or cast up on a desert island. Let us do
this thing ourselves. Let us go into that house there and
sit down and find out with our own eyes and ears whether
this thing is true or not; whether this Smith is a man or a
monster. If we can't do a little thing like that, what
right have we to put crosses on ballot papers?"
Inglewood and Pym exchanged a glance; and Warner, who was
no fool, saw in that glance that Moon was gaining ground.
The motives that led Arthur to think of surrender were
indeed very different from those which affected Dr. Cyrus
Pym. All Arthur's instincts were on the side of privacy and
polite settlement; he was very English and would often
endure wrongs rather than right them by scenes and serious
rhetoric. To play at once the buffoon and the
knight-errant, like his Irish friend, would have been
absolute torture to him; but even the semi-official part he
had played that afternoon was very painful. He was not
likely to be reluctant if any one could convince him that
his duty was to let sleeping dogs lie.
On the other hand, Cyrus Pym belonged to a country in
which things are possible that seem crazy to the English.
Regulations and authorities exactly like one of Innocent's
pranks or one of Michael's satires really exist, propped by
placid policemen and imposed on bustling business men. Pym
knew whole States which are vast and yet secret and
fanciful; each is as big as a nation yet as private as a
lost village, and as unexpected as an apple-pie bed. States
where no man may have a cigarette, States where any man may
have ten wives, very strict prohibition States, very lax
divorce States -- all these large local vagaries had
prepared Cyrus Pym's mind for small local vagaries in a
smaller country. Infinitely more remote from England than
any Russian or Italian, utterly incapable even of conceiving
what English conventions are, he could not see the social
impossibility of the Court of Beacon. It is firmly believed
by those who shared the experiment, that to the very end Pym
believed in that phantasmal court and supposed it to be some
Britannic institution.
Towards the synod thus somewhat at a standstill there
approached through the growing haze and gloaming a short
dark figure with a walk apparently founded on the imperfect
repression of a negro breakdown. Something at once in the
familiarity and the incongruity of this being moved Michael
to even heartier outbursts of a healthy and humane
flippancy.
"Why, here's little Nosey Gould," he exclaimed. "Isn't
the mere sight of him enough to banish all your morbid
reflections?"
"Really," replied Dr. Warner," I really fail to see how
Mr. Gould affects the question; and I once more demand --"
"Hello! what's the funeral, gents?" inquired the newcomer
with the air of an uproarious umpire. "Doctor demandin'
something? Always the way at a boarding-house, you know.
Always lots of demand. No supply."
As delicately and impartially as he could, Michael
restated his position, and indicated generally that Smith
had been guilty of certain dangerous and dubious acts, and
that there had even arisen an allegation that he was insane.
"Well, of course he is," said Moses Gould equably; "it
don't need old 'Olmes to see that. The 'awk-like face of
'Olmes," he added with abstract relish, "showed a shide of
disappointment, the sleuth-like Gould 'avin' got there
before 'im."
"If he is mad," began Inglewood.
"Well," said Moses, "when a cove gets out on the tiles
the first night there's generally a tile loose."
"You never objected before," said Diana Duke rather
stiffly, "and you're generally pretty free with your
complaints."
"I don't compline of him," said Moses magnanimously, "the
poor chap's 'armless enough; you might tie 'im up in the
garden her and 'e'd make noises at the burglars."
"Moses," said Moon with solemn fervour, "you are the
incarnation of Common Sense. You think Mr. Innocent is
mad. Let me introduce you to the incarnation of Scientific
Theory. He also thinks Mr. Innocent is mad. -- Doctor, this
is my friend Mr. Gould. -- Moses, this is the celebrated Dr.
Pym." The celebrated Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes and
bowed. He also murmured his national war-cry in a low
voice, which sounded like "Pleased to meet you."
"Now you two people," said Michael cheerfully, "who both
think our poor friend mad, shall jolly well go into that
house over there and prove him mad. What could be more
powerful than the combination of Scientific Theory with
Common Sense? United you stand; divided you fall. I will
not be so uncivil as to suggest that Dr. Pym has no common
sense; I confine myself to recording the chronological
accident that he has not shown us any so far. I take the
freedom of an old friend in staking my shirt that Moses has
no scientific theory. Yet against this strong coalition I
am ready to appear, armed with nothing but an intuition --
which is American for a guess."
"Distinguished by Mr. Gould's assistance," said Pym,
opening his eyes suddenly. "I gather that though he and I
are identical in primary di-agnosis there is yet between us
something that cannot be called a disagreement, something
which we may perhaps call a --" He put the points of thumb
and forefinger together, spreading the other fingers
exquisitely in the air, and seemed to be waiting for
somebody else to tell him what to say.
"Catchin' flies?" inquired the affable Moses.
"A divergence," said Dr. Pym, with a refined sigh of
relief; "a divergence. Granted that the man in question is
deranged, he would not necessarily be all that science
requires in a homicidal maniac --"
"Has it occurred to you," observed Moon, who was leaning
on the gate again, and did not turn round, "that if he were
a homicidal maniac he might have killed us all here while we
were talking."
Something exploded silently underneath all their minds,
like sealed dynamite in some forgotten cellars. They all
remembered for the first time for some hour or two that the
monster of whom they were talking was standing quite
silently among them. They had left him in the garden like a
garden statue; there might have been a dolphin coiling round
his legs, or a fountain pouring out of his mouth, for all
the notice they had taken of Innocent Smith. He stood with
his crest of blonde, blown hair thrust somewhat forward, his
fresh-coloured, rather short-sighted face looking patiently
downwards at nothing in particular, his huge shoulders
humped, and his hands in his trousers pockets. So far as
they could guess he had not moved at all. His green coat
might have been cut out of the green turf on which he
stood. In his shadow Pym had expounded and Rosamund
expostulated, Michael had ranted and Moses had ragged. He
had remained like a thing graven; the god of the garden. A
sparrow had perched on one of his heavy shoulders; and then,
after correcting its costume of feathers, had flown away.
"Why," cried Michael, with a shout of laughter, "the
Court of Beacon has opened -- and shut up again too. You
all know now I am right. Your buried common sense has told
you just what my buried common sense has told me. Smith
might have fired off a hundred cannons instead of a pistol,
and you would still know he was harmless as I know he is
harmless. Back we all go to the house and clear a room for
discussion. For the High Court of Beacon, which has already
arrived at its decision, is just about to begin its
inquiry."
"Just a goin' to begin!" cried little Mr. Moses in an
extraordinary sort of disinterested excitement, like that of
an animal during music or a thunderstorm. "Follow on to the
'Igh Court of Eggs and Bacon; 'ave a kipper from the old
firm! 'Is Lordship complimented Mr. Gould on the 'igh
professional delicacy 'e had shown, and which was worthy of
the best traditions of the Saloon Bar -- and three of Scotch
hot, miss! Oh, chase me, girls!"
The girls betraying no temptation to chase him, he went
away in a sort of waddling dance of pure excitement; and had
made a circuit of the garden before he reappeared,
breathless but still beaming. Moon had known his man when
he realized that no people presented to Moses Gould could be
quite serious, even if they were quite furious. The glass
doors stood open on the side nearest to Mr. Moses Gould; and
as the feet of that festive idiot were evidently turned in
the same direction, everybody else went that way with the
unanimity of some uproarious procession. Only Diana Duke
retained enough rigidity to say the thing that had been
boiling at her fierce feminine lips for the last few hours.
Under the shadow of tragedy she had kept it back as
unsympathetic. "In that case," she said sharply, "these
cabs can be sent away."
"Well, Innocent must have his bag, you know," said Mary
with a smile. "I dare say the cabman would get it down for
us."
"I'll get the bag," said Smith, speaking for the first
time in hours; his voice sounded remote and rude, like the
voice of a statue.
Those who had so long danced and disputed round his
immobility were left breathless by his precipitance. With a
run and spring he was out of the garden into the street;
with a spring and one quivering kick he was actually on the
roof of the cab. The cabman happened to be standing by the
horse's head, having just removed its emptied nose-bag.
Smith seemed for an instant to be rolling about on the cab's
back in the embraces of his own Gladstone bag. The next
instant, however, he had rolled, as if by a royal luck, into
the high seat behind, and with a shriek of piercing and
appalling suddenness had sent the horse flying and
scampering far away down the street.
His evanescence was so violent and swift, that this time
it was all the other people who were turned into garden
statues. Mr. Moses Gould, however, being ill-adapted both
physically and morally for the purposes of permanent
sculpture, came to life some time before the rest, and,
turning to Moon, remarked, like a man starting chattily with
a stranger on an omnibus, "Tile loose, eh? Cab loose
anyhow." There followed a fatal silence; and then Dr.
Warner said, with a sneer like a club of stone, --
"This is what comes of the Court of Beacon, Mr. Moon.
You have let loose a maniac on the whole metropolis."
Beacon House stood, as has been said, at the end of a
long crescent of continuous houses. The little garden that
shut it in ran out into a sharp point like a green cape
pushed out into the sea of two streets. Smith and his cab
shot up one side of the triangle, and certainly most of
those standing inside of it never expected to see him
again. At the apex, however, he turned the horse sharply
round and drove with equal violence up the other side of the
garden, visible to all the group. With a common impulse the
little crowd ran across the lawn as if to stop him, but they
soon had reason to duck and recoil. Even as he vanished up
street for the second time, he let the big yellow bag fly
from his hand, so that it fell in the centre of the garden,
scattering the company like a bomb, and nearly damaging Dr.
Warner's hat for the third time. Long before they had
collected themselves, the cab had shot away with a shriek
that went into a whisper.
"Well," said Michael Moon, with a very queer note in his
voice; "you may as well all go inside anyhow; it's getting
rather dark and cold. We've got two relics of Mr. Smith at
least; his fiancee and his trunk."
"Why do you want us to go inside?" asked Arthur
Inglewood, in whose red brow and rough brown hair
botheration seemed to have reached its limit.
"I want the rest to go in," said Michael in a clear
voice, "because I want the whole of this garden in which to
talk to you."
There was an atmosphere of irrational doubt; it was
really getting colder, and a night wind had begun to wave
the one or two trees in the twilight. Dr. Warner, however,
spoke in a voice devoid of indecision.
"I refuse to listen to any such proposal," he said; "you
have lost this ruffian, and I must find him."
"I don't ask you to listen to any proposal," answered
Moon quietly; "I only ask you to listen."
He made a silencing movement with his hand, and
immediately the whistling noise that had been lost in the
dark streets on one side of the house could be heard from
quite a new quarter on the other side. Through the
night-maze of streets the noise increased with incredible
rapidity, and the next moment the flying hoofs and flashing
wheels had swept up to the blue-railed gate at which they
originally stood. Mr. Smith got down from his perch with
an air of absent-mindedness, and coming back into the garden
stood in the same elephantine attitude as before.
"Get inside! get inside!" cried Moon hilariously, with
the air of one shooing a company of cats. "Come, come, be
quick about it! Didn't I tell you I wanted to talk to
Inglewood?"
How they were all really driven into the house again it
would have been difficult afterwards to say. They had
reached the point of being exhausted with incongruities, as
people at a farce are ill with laughing, and the brisk
growth of the storm among the trees seemed like a final
gesture of things in general. Inglewood lingered behind
them, saying with a certain amicable exasperation, "I say,
do you really want to speak to me?"
"I do," said Michael, "very much."
Nigh had come as it generally does, quicker than the
twilight had seemed to promise. While the human eye still
felt the sky as light gray, a very large and lustrous moon
appearing abruptly above a bulk of roofs and trees, proved
by contrast that the sky was already a very dark gray
indeed. A drift of barren leaves across the lawn, a drift
of riven clouds across the sky, seemed to be lifted on the
same strong and yet laborious wind.
"Arthur," said Michael, "I began with an intuition; but
now I am sure. You and I are going to defend this friend of
yours before the blessed Court of Beacon, and to clear him
too -- clear him both of crime and lunacy. Just listen to
me while I preach to you for a bit." They walked up and
down the darkening garden together as Michael Moon went on.
"Can you," asked Michael, "shut your eyes and see some of
those queer old hieroglyphics they stuck up on white walls
in the old hot countries. How stiff they were in shape and
yet how gaudy in colour. Think of some alphabet of
arbitrary figures picked out in black and red, or white and
green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould's
ancestors staring at it, and try to think why the people put
it up at all."
Inglewood's first instinct was to think that his
perplexing friend had really gone off his head at last;
there seemed so reckless a flight of irrelevancy from the
tropic-pictured walls he was asked to imagine to the gray,
wind-swept, and somewhat chilly suburban garden in which he
was actually kicking his heels. How he could be more happy
in one by imagining the other he could not conceive. Both
(in themselves) were unpleasant.
"Why does everybody repeat riddles," went on Moon
abruptly, "even if they've forgotten the answers? Riddles
are easy to remember because they are hard to guess. So
were those stiff old symbols in black, red, or green easy to
remember because they had been hard to guess. Their colours
were plain. Their shapes were plain. Everything was plain
except the meaning."
Inglewood was about to open his mouth in an amiable
protest, but Moon went on, plunging quicker and quicker up
and down the garden and smoking faster and faster. "Dances,
too," he said; "dances were not frivolous. Dances were
harder to understand than inscriptions and texts. The old
dances were stiff, ceremonial, highly coloured but silent.
Have you noticed anything odd about Smith?"
"Well, really," cried Inglewood, left behind in a
collapse of humour, "have I noticed anything else?"
"Have you noticed this about him," asked Moon, with
unshaken persistency, "that he has done so much and said so
little? When first he came he talked, but in a gasping,
irregular sort of way, as if he wasn't used to it. All he
really did was actions -- painting red flowers on black
gowns or throwing yellow bags on to the grass. I tell you
that big green figure is figurative -- like any green figure
capering on some white Eastern wall."
"My dear Michael," cried Inglewood, in a rising
irritation which increased with the rising wind, "you are
getting absurdly fanciful."
"I think of what has just happened," said Michael
steadily. "The man has not spoken for hours; and yet he has
been speaking all the time. He fired three shots from a
six-shooter and then gave it up to us, when he might have
shot us dead in our boots. How could he express his trust
in us better than that? He wanted to be tried by us. How
could he have shown it better than by standing quite still
and letting us discuss it? He wanted to show that he stood
there willingly, and could escape if he liked. How could he
have shown it better than by escaping in the cab and coming
back again? Innocent Smith is not a madman -- he is a
ritualist. He wants to express himself, not with his
tongue, but with his arms and legs -- with my body I thee
worship, as it says in the marriage service. I begin to
understand the old plays and pageants. I see why the mutes
at a funeral were mute. I see why the mummers were mum.
They MEANT something; and Smith means something too. All
other jokes have to be noisy -- like little Nosey Gould's
jokes, for instance. The only silent jokes are the
practical jokes. Poor Smith, properly considered, is an
allegorical practical joker. What he has really done in
this house has been as frantic as a war-dance, but as silent
as a picture."
"I suppose you mean," said the other dubiously, "that we
have got to find out what all these crimes meant, as if they
were so many coloured picture-puzzles. But even supposing
that they do mean something -- why, Lord bless my soul! --"
Taking the turn of the garden quite naturally, he had
lifted his eyes to the moon, by this time risen big and
luminous, and had seen a huge, half-human figure sitting on
the garden wall. It was outlined so sharply against the
moon that for the first flash it was hard to be certain even
that it was human: the hunched shoulders and outstanding
hair had rather the air of a colossal cat. It resembled a
cat also in the fact that when first startled it sprang up
and ran with easy activity along the top of the wall. As it
ran, however, its heavy shoulders and small stooping head
rather suggested a baboon. The instant it came within reach
of a tree it made an ape-like leap and was lost in the
branches. The gale, which by this time was shaking every
shrub in the garden, made the identification yet more
difficult, since it melted the moving limbs of the fugitive
in the multitudinous moving limbs of the tree.
"Who is there?" shouted Arthur. "Who are you? Are you
Innocent?"
"Not quite," answered an obscure voice among the leaves.
"I cheated you once about a penknife."
The wind in the garden had gathered strength, and was
throwing the tree backwards and forwards with the man in the
thick of it, just as it had on the gay and golden afternoon
when he had first arrived.
"But are you Smith?" asked Inglewood, as in an agony.
"Very nearly," said the voice out of the tossing tree.
"But you must have some real names," shrieked Inglewood
in despair. "You must call yourself something."
"Call myself something," thundered the obscure voice,
shaking the tree so that all its ten thousand leaves seemed
to be talking at once. "I call myself Roland Oliver Isaiah
Charlemagne Arthur Hildebrand Homer Danton Michaelangelo
Shakespeare Brakespeare --"
"But, manalive!" began Inglewood in exasperation.
"That's right! that's right!" came with a roar out of the
rocking tree; "that's my real name." And he broke a branch,
and one or two autumn leaves fluttered away across the moon.
Part II
The Explanations of Innocent Smith
Chapter I
The Eye of Death;
or, the Murder Charge
The dining-room of the Dukes had been set out for the Court
of Beacon with a certain impromptu pomposity that seemed
somehow to increase its cosiness. The big room was, as it
were, cut up into small rooms, with walls only waist high --
the sort of separation that children make when they are
playing at shops. This had been done by Moses Gould and
Michael Moon (the two most active members of this remarkable
inquiry) with the ordinary furniture of the place. At one
end of the long mahogany table was set the one enormous
garden chair, which was surmounted by the old torn tent or
umbrella which Smith himself had suggested as a coronation
canopy. Inside this erection could be perceived the dumpy
form of Mrs. Duke, with cushions and a form of countenance
that already threatened slumber. At the other end sat the
accused Smith, in a kind of dock; for he was carefully
fenced in with a quadrilateral of light bedroom chairs, any
of which he could have tossed out the window with his big
toe. He had been provided with pens and paper, out of the
latter of which he made paper boats, paper darts, and paper
dolls contentedly through the whole proceedings. He never
spoke or even looked up, but seemed as unconscious as a
child on the floor of an empty nursery.
On a row of chairs raised high on the top of a long
settee sat the three young ladies with their backs up
against the window, and Mary Gray in the middle; it was
something between a jury box and the stall of the Queen of
Beauty at a tournament. Down the centre of the long table
Moon had built a low barrier out of eight bound volumes of
"Good Words" to express the moral wall that divided the
conflicting parties. On the right side sat the two
advocates of the prosecution, Dr. Pym and Mr. Gould; behind,
a barricade of books and documents, chiefly (in the case of
Dr. Pym) solid volumes of criminology. On the other side,
Moon and Inglewood, for the defence, were also fortified
with books and papers; but as these included several old
yellow volumes by Ouida and Wilkie Collins, the hand of Mr.
Moon seemed to have been somewhat careless and
comprehensive. As for the victim and prosecutor, Dr.
Warner, Moon wanted at first to have him kept entirely
behind a high screen in the court, urging the indelicacy of
his appearance in court, but privately assuring him of an
unofficial permission to peep over the top now and then.
Dr. Warner, however, failed to rise to the chivalry of such
a course, and after some little disturbance and discussion
he was accommodated with a seat on the right side of the
table in a line with his legal advisers.
It was before this solidly-established tribunal that Dr.
Cyrus Pym, after passing a hand through the honey-coloured
hair over each ear, rose to open the case. His statement
was clear and even restrained, and such flights of imagery
as occurred in it only attracted attention by a certain
indescribable abruptness, not uncommon in the flowers of
American speech.
He planted the points of his ten frail fingers on the
mahogany, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth. "The time
has gone by," he said, "when murder could be regarded as a
moral and individual act, important perhaps to the murderer,
perhaps to the murdered. Science has profoundly..." here he
paused, poising his compressed finger and thumb in the air
as if he were holding an elusive idea very tight by its
tail, then he screwed up his eyes and said "modified," and
let it go -- "has profoundly Modified our view of death. In
superstitious ages it was regarded as the termination of
life, catastrophic, and even tragic, and was often
surrounded with solemnity. Brighter days, however, have
dawned, and we now see death as universal and inevitable, as
part of that great soul-stirring and heart-upholding average
which we call for convenience the order of nature. In the
same way we have come to consider murder socially. Rising
above the mere private feelings of a man while being
forcibly deprived of life, we are privileged to behold
murder as a mighty whole, to see the rich rotation of the
cosmos, bringing, as it brings the golden harvests and the
golden-bearded harvesters, the return for ever of the
slayers and the slain."
He looked down, somewhat affected with his own eloquence,
coughed slightly, putting up four of his pointed fingers
with the excellent manners of Boston, and continued: "There
is but one result of this happier and humaner outlook which
concerns the wretched man before us. It is that thoroughly
elucidated by a Milwaukee doctor, our great secret-guessing
Sonnenschein, in his great work, `The Destructive Type.' We
do not denounce Smith as a murderer, but rather as a
murderous man. The type is such that its very life -- I
might say its very health -- is in killing. Some hold that
it is not properly an aberration, but a newer and even a
higher creature. My dear old friend Dr. Bulger, who kept
ferrets --" (here Moon suddenly ejaculated a loud "hurrah!"
but so instantaneously resumed his tragic expression that
Mrs. Duke looked everywhere else for the origin of the
sound); Dr. Pym continued somewhat sternly -- "who, in the
interests of knowledge, kept ferrets, felt that the
creature's ferocity is not utilitarian, but absolutely an
end in itself. However this may be with ferrets, it is
certainly so with the prisoner. In his other iniquities you
may find the cunning of the maniac; but his acts of blood
have almost the simplicity of sanity. But it is the awful
sanity of the sun and the elements -- a cruel, an evil
sanity. As soon stay the iris-leapt cataracts of our virgin
West as stay the natural force that sends him forth to
slay. No environment, however scientific, could have
softened him. Place that man in the silver-silent purity of
the palest cloister, and there will be some deed of violence
done with the crozier or the alb. Rear him in a happy
nursery, amid our brave-browed Anglo-Saxon infancy, and he
will find some way to strangle with the skipping-rope or
brain with the brick. Circumstances may be favourable,
training may be admirable, hopes may be high, but the huge
elemental hunger of Innocent Smith for blood will in its
appointed season burst like a well-timed bomb."
Arthur Inglewood glanced curiously for an instant at the
huge creature at the foot of the table, who was fitting a
paper figure with a cocked hat, and then looked back at Dr.
Pym, who was concluding in a quieter tone.
"It only remains for us," he said, "to bring forward
actual evidence of his previous attempts. By an agreement
already made with the Court and the leaders of the defence,
we are permitted to put in evidence authentic letters from
witnesses to these scenes, which the defence is free to
examine. Out of several cases of such outrages we have
decided to select one -- the clearest and most scandalous.
I will therefore, without further delay, call on my junior,
Mr. Gould, to read two letters -- one from the Sub-Warden
and the other from the porter of Brakespeare College, in
Cambridge University."
Gould jumped up with a jerk like a jack-in-the-box, an
academic-looking paper in his hand and a fever of importance
on his face. He began in a loud, high, cockney voice that
was as abrupt as a cock-crow: --
"Sir, -- Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College,
Cambridge --"
"Lord have mercy on us," muttered Moon, making a backward
movement as men do when a gun goes off.
"Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge,"
proclaimed the uncompromising Moses, "and I can endorse the
description you give of the conduct of the un'appy Smith.
It was not alone my unfortunate duty to rebuke many of the
lesser violences of his undergraduate period, but I was
actually a witness to the last iniquity which terminated
that period. Hi happened to passing under the house of my
friend the Warden of Brikespeare, which is semi-detached
from the College and connected with it by two or three very
ancient arches or props, like bridges, across a small strip
of water connected with the river. To my grive astonishment
I be'eld my eminent friend suspended in mid-air and clinging
to one of these pieces of masonry, his appearance and
attitude indicatin' that he suffered from the grivest
apprehensions. After a short time I heard two very loud
shots, and distinctly perceived the unfortunate
undergraduate Smith leaning far out of the Warden's window
and aiming at the Warden repeatedly with a revolver. Upon
seeing me, Smith burst into a loud laugh (in which
impertinence was mingled with insanity), and appeared to
desist. I sent the college porter for a ladder, and he
succeeded in detaching the Warden from his painful
position. Smith was sent down. The photograph I enclose is
from the group of the University Rifle Club prizemen, and
represents him as he was when at the College. -- Hi am, your
obedient servant, Amos Boulter."
"The other letter," continued Gould in a glow of triumph,
"is from the porter, and won't take long to read.
"Dear Sir, -- It is quite true that I am the porter of
Brikespeare College, and that I 'elped the Warden down when
the young man was shooting at him, as Mr. Boulter has said
in his letter. The young man who was shooting was Mr.
Smith, the same that is in the photograph Mr. Boulter sends.
-- Yours respectfully, Samuel Barker."
Gould handed the two letters across to Moon, who examined
them. But for the vocal divergences in the matter of h's
and a's, the Sub-Warden's letter was exactly as Gould had
rendered it; and both that and the porter's letter were
plainly genuine. Moon handed them to Inglewood, who handed
them back in silence to Moses Gould.
"So far as this first charge of continual attempted
murder is concerned," said Dr. Pym, standing up for the last
time, "that is my case."
Michael Moon rose for the defence with an air of
depression which gave little hope at the outset to the
sympathizers with the prisoner. He did not, he said,
propose to follow the doctor into the abstract questions.
"I do not know enough to be an agnostic," he said, rather
wearily, "and I can only master the known and admitted
elements in such controversies. As for science and
religion, the known and admitted facts are few and plain
enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the
doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference
between science and religion there's ever been, or will be.
Yet these new discoveries touch me, somehow," he said,
looking down sorrowfully at his boots. "They remind me of a
dear old great-aunt of mine who used to enjoy them in her
youth. It brings tears to my eyes. I can see the old
bucket by the garden fence and the line of shimmering
poplars behind --"
"Hi! here, stop the 'bus a bit," cried Mr. Moses Gould,
rising in a sort of perspiration. "We want to give the
defence a fair run -- like gents, you know; but any gent
would draw the line at shimmering poplars."
"Well, hang it all," said Moon, in an injured manner, "if
Dr. Pym may have an old friend with ferrets, why mayn't I
have an old aunt with poplars?"
"I am sure," said Mrs. Duke, bridling, with something
almost like a shaky authority, "Mr. Moon may have what aunts
he likes."
"Why, as to liking her," began Moon, "I -- but perhaps,
as you say, she is scarcely the core of the question. I
repeat that I do not mean to follow the abstract
speculations. For, indeed, my answer to Dr. Pym is simple
and severely concrete. Dr. Pym has only treated one side of
the psychology of murder. If it is true that there is a
kind of man who has a natural tendency to murder, is it not
equally true" -- here he lowered his voice and spoke with a
crushing quietude and earnestness -- "is it not equally
true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency
to get murdered? Is it not at least a hypothesis holding
the field that Dr. Warner is such a man? I do not speak
without the book, any more than my learned friend. The
whole matter is expounded in Dr. Moonenschein's monumental
work, `The Destructible Doctor,' with diagrams, showing the
various ways in which such a person as Dr. Warner may be
resolved into his elements. In the light of these facts --"
"Hi, stop the 'bus! stop the 'bus!" cried Moses, jumping
up and down and gesticulating in great excitement. "My
principal's got something to say! My principal wants to do
a bit of talkin'."
Dr. Pym was indeed on his feet, looking pallid and rather
vicious. "I have strictly CON-fined myself," he said
nasally, "to books to which immediate reference can be
made. I have Sonnenschein's `Destructive Type' here on the
table, if the defence wish to see it. Where is this
wonderful work on Destructability Mr. Moon is talking
about? Does it exist? Can he produce it?"
"Produce it!" cried the Irishman with a rich scorn.
"I'll produce it in a week if you'll pay for the ink and
paper."
"Would it have much authority?" asked Pym, sitting down.
"Oh, authority!" said Moon lightly; "that depends on a
fellow's religion."
Dr. Pym jumped up again. "Our authority is based on
masses of accurate detail," he said. "It deals with a
region in which things can be handled and tested. My
opponent will at least admit that death is a fact of
experience."
"Not of mine," said Moon mournfully, shaking his head.
"I've never experienced such a thing in all my life."
"Well, really," said Dr. Pym, and sat down sharply amid a
crackle of papers.
"So we see," resumed Moon, in the same melancholy voice,
"that a man like Dr. Warner is, in the mysterious workings
of evolution, doomed to such attacks. My client's
onslaught, even if it occurred, was not unique. I have in
my hand letters from more than one acquaintance of Dr.
Warner whom that remarkable man has affected in the same
way. Following the example of my learned friends I will
read only two of them. The first is from an honest and
laborious matron living off the Harrow Road.
"Mr. Moon, Sir, -- Yes, I did throw a sorsepan at him.
Wot then? It was all I had to throw, all the soft things
being porned, and if your Docter Warner doesn't like having
sorsepans thrown at him, don't let him wear his hat in a
respectable woman's parler, and tell him to leave orf
smiling or tell us the joke. -- Yours respectfully,
Hannah Miles.
"The other letter is from a physician of some note in
Dublin, with whom Dr. Warner was once engaged in
consultation. He writes as follows: --
"Dear Sir, -- The incident to which you refer is one
which I regret, and which, moreover, I have never been able
to explain. My own branch of medicine is not mental; and I
should be glad to have the view of a mental specialist on my
singular momentary and indeed almost automatic action. To
say that I `pulled Dr. Warner's nose,' is, however,
inaccurate in a respect that strikes me as important. That
I punched his nose I must cheerfully admit (I need not say
with what regret); but pulling seems to me to imply a
precision of handling and an exactitude of objective with
which I cannot reproach myself. In comparison with this,
the act of punching was an outward, instantaneous, and even
natural gesture. -- Believe me, yours faithfully,
Burton Lestrange.
"I have numberless other letters," continued Moon, "all
bearing witness to this widespread feeling about my eminent
friend; and I therefore think that Dr. Pym should have
admitted this side of the question into his survey. We are
in the presence, as Dr. Pym so truly says, of a natural
force. As soon stay the cataracts of the London water-works
as stay the great tendency of Dr. Warner to be assassinated
by somebody. Place that man in a Quakers' meeting, among
the most peaceful of Christians, and he will immediately be
beaten to death with sticks of chocolate. Place him among
the angels of the New Jerusalem, and he will be stoned to
death with precious stones. Circumstances may be beautiful
and wonderful, the average may be heart-upholding, the
harvester may be golden-bearded, the doctor may be
secret-guessing, the cataract may be iris-leapt, the
Anglo-Saxon infant may be brave-browed, but against and
above all these prodigies the grand simple tendency of Dr.
Warner to get murdered will still pursue its way until it
happily and triumphantly succeeds at last."
He pronounced this peroration with an appearance of
strong emotion. But even stronger emotions were manifesting
themselves on the other side of the table. Dr. Warner had
leaned his large body quite across the little figure of
Moses Gould and was talking in excited whispers to Dr. Pym.
That expert nodded a great many times and finally started to
to his feet with a sincere expression of sternness.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he cried indignantly, "as my
colleague has said, we should be delighted to give any
latitude to the defence -- if there were a defence. But Mr.
Moon seems to think he is there to make jokes -- very good
jokes I dare say, but not at all adapted to assist his
client. He picks holes in science. He picks holes in my
client's social popularity. He picks holes in my literary
style, which doesn't seem to suit his high-toned European
taste. But how does this picking of holes affect the
issue? This Smith has picked two holes in my client's hat,
and with an inch better aim would have picked two holes in
his head. All the jokes in the world won't unpick those
holes or be any use for the defence."
Inglewood looked down in some embarrassment, as if shaken
by the evident fairness of this, but Moon still gazed at his
opponent in a dreamy way. "The defence?" he said vaguely --
"oh, I haven't begun that yet."
"You certainly have not," said Pym warmly, amid a murmur
of applause from his side, which the other side found it
impossible to answer. "Perhaps, if you have any defence,
which has been doubtful from the very beginning --"
"While you're standing up," said Moon, in the same almost
sleepy style, "perhaps I might ask you a question."
"A question? Certainly," said Pym stiffly. "It was
distinctly arranged between us that as we could not
cross-examine the witnesses, we might vicariously
cross-examine each other. We are in a position to invite
all such inquiry."
"I think you said," observed Moon absently, "that none of
the prisoner's shots really hit the doctor."
"For the cause of science," cried the complacent Pym,
"fortunately not."
"Yet they were fired from a few feet away."
"Yes; about four feet."
"And no shots hit the Warden, though they were fired
quite close to him too?" asked Moon.
"That is so," said the witness gravely.
"I think," said Moon, suppressing a slight yawn, "that
your Sub-Warden mentioned that Smith was one of the
University's record men for shooting."
"Why, as to that --" began Pym, after an instant of
stillness.
"A second question," continued Moon, comparatively
curtly. "You said there were other cases of the accused
trying to kill people. Why have you not got evidence of
them?"
The American planted the points of his fingers on the
table again. "In those cases," he said precisely, "there
was no evidence from outsiders, as in the Cambridge case,
but only the evidence of the actual victims."
"Why didn't you get their evidence?"
"In the case of the actual victims," said Pym, "there was
some difficulty and reluctance, and --"
"Do you mean," asked Moon, "that none of the actual
victims would appear against the prisoner?"
"That would be exaggerative," began the other.
"A third question," said Moon, so sharply that every one
jumped. "You've got the evidence of the Sub-Warden who
heard some shots; where's the evidence of the Warden himself
who was shot at? The Warden of Brakespeare lives, a
prosperous gentleman."
"We did ask for a statement from him," said Pym a little
nervously; "but it was so eccentrically expressed that we
suppressed it out of deference to an old gentleman whose
past services to science have been great."
Moon leaned forward. "You mean, I suppose," he said,
"that his statement was favourable to the prisoner."
"It might be understood so," replied the American doctor;
"but, really, it was difficult to understand at all. In
fact, we sent it back to him."
"You have no longer, then, any statement signed by the
Warden of Brakespeare."
"No."
"I only ask," said Michael quietly, "because we have. To
conclude my case I will ask my junior, Mr. Inglewood, to
read a statement of the true story -- a statement attested
as true by the signature of the Warden himself."
Arthur Inglewood rose with several papers in his hand,
and though he looked somewhat refined and self-effacing, as
he always did, the spectators were surprised to feel that
his presence was, upon the whole, more efficient and
sufficing than his leader's. He was, in truth, one of those
modest men who cannot speak until they are told to speak;
and then can speak well. Moon was entirely the opposite.
His own impudences amused him in private, but they slightly
embarrassed him in public; he felt a fool while he was
speaking, whereas Inglewood felt a fool only because he
could not speak. The moment he had anything to say he could
speak; and the moment he could speak, speaking seemed quite
natural. Nothing in this universe seemed quite natural to
Michael Moon.
"As my colleague has just explained," said Inglewood,
"there are two enigmas or inconsistencies on which we base
the defence. The first is a plain physical fact. By the
admission of everybody, by the very evidence adduced by the
prosecution, it is clear that the accused was celebrated as
a specially good shot. Yet on both the occasions complained
of he shot from a distance of four or five feet, and shot at
him four or five times, and never hit him once. That is the
first startling circumstance on which we base our argument.
The second, as my colleague has urged, is the curious fact
that we cannot find a single victim of these alleged
outrages to speak for himself. Subordinates speak for him.
Porters climb up ladders to him. But he himself is silent.
Ladies and gentlemen, I propose to explain on the spot both
the riddle of the shots and the riddle of the silence. I
will first of all read the covering letter in which the true
account of the Cambridge incident is contained, and then
that document itself. When you have heard both, there will
be no doubt about your decision. The covering letter runs
as follows: --
"Dear Sir, -- The following is a very exact and even
vivid account of the incident as it really happened at
Brakespeare College. We, the undersigned, do not see any
particular reason why we should refer it to any isolated
authorship. The truth is, it has been a composite
production; and we have even had some difference of opinion
about the adjectives. But every word of it is true. -- We
are, yours faithfully,
"Wilfred Emerson Eames,
"Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
"Innocent Smith.
"The enclosed statement," continued Inglewood, "runs as
follows: --
"A celebrated English university backs so abruptly on the
river, that it has, so to speak, to be propped up and
patched with all sorts of bridges and semi-detached
buildings. The river splits itself into several small
streams and canals, so that in one or two corners the place
has almost the look of Venice. It was so especially in the
case with which we are concerned, in which a few flying
buttresses or airy ribs of stone sprang across a strip of
water to connect Brakespeare College with the house of the
Warden of Brakespeare.
"The country around these colleges is flat; but it does
not seem flat when one is thus in the midst of the
colleges. For in these flat fens there are always wandering
lakes and lingering rivers of water. And these always
change what might have been a scheme of horizontal lines
into a scheme of vertical lines. Wherever there is water
the height of high buildings is doubled, and a British brick
house becomes a Babylonian tower. In that shining unshaken
surface the houses hang head downwards exactly to their
highest or lowest chimney. The coral-coloured cloud seen in
that abyss is as far below the world as its original appears
above it. Every scrap of water is not only a window but a
skylight. Earth splits under men's feet into precipitous
aerial perspectives, into which a bird could as easily wing
its way as --"
Dr. Cyrus Pym rose in protest. The documents he had put
in evidence had been confined to cold affirmation of fact.
The defence, in a general way, had an indubitable right to
put their case in their own way, but all this landscape
gardening seemed to him (Dr. Cyrus Pym) to be not up to the
business. "Will the leader of the defence tell me," he
asked, "how it can possibly affect this case, that a cloud
was cor'l-coloured, or that a bird could have winged itself
anywhere?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Michael, lifting himself lazily;
"you see, you don't know yet what our defence is. Till you
know that, don't you see, anything may be relevant. Why,
suppose," he said suddenly, as if an idea had struck him,
"suppose we wanted to prove the old Warden colour-blind.
Suppose he was shot by a black man with white hair, when he
thought he was being shot by a white man with yellow hair!
To ascertain if that cloud was really and truly coral-
coloured might be of the most massive importance."
He paused with a seriousness which was hardly generally
shared, and continued with the same fluency: "Or suppose we
wanted to maintain that the Warden committed suicide -- that
he just got Smith to hold the pistol as Brutus's slave held
the sword. Why, it would make all the difference whether
the Warden could see himself plain in still water. Still
water has made hundreds of suicides: one sees oneself so
very -- well, so very plain."
"Do you, perhaps," inquired Pym with austere irony,
"maintain that your client was a bird of some sort -- say, a
flamingo?"
"In the matter of his being a flamingo," said Moon with
sudden severity, "my client reserves his defence."
No one quite knowing what to make of this, Mr. Moon
resumed his seat with an air of great sternness, and
Inglewood resumed the reading of his document: --
"There is something pleasing to a mystic in such a land
of mirrors. For a mystic is one who holds that two worlds
are better than one. In the highest sense, indeed, all
thought is reflection.
"This is the real truth, in the saying that second
thoughts are best. Animals have no second thoughts; man
alone is able to see his own thought double, as a drunkard
sees a lamp-post; man alone is able to see his own thought
upside down as one sees a house in a puddle. This
duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat) the
inmost thing of human philosophy. There is a mystical, even
a monstrous truth, in the statement that two heads are
better than one. But they ought both to grow on the same
body.'"
"I know it's a little transcendental at first,"
interposed Inglewood, beaming round with a broad apology,
"but you see this document was written in collaboration by a
don and a --"
"Drunkard, eh?" suggested Moses Gould, beginning to enjoy
himself.
"I rather think," proceeded Inglewood with an unruffled
and critical air, "that this part was written by the don. I
merely warn the Court that the statement, though indubitably
accurate, bears here and there the trace of coming from two
authors."
"In that case," said Dr. Pym, leaning back and sniffing,
"I cannot agree with them that two heads are better than
one."
"The undersigned persons think it needless to touch on a
kindred problem so often discussed at committees for
University Reform: the question of whether dons see double
because they are drunk, or get drunk because they see
double. It is enough for them (the undersigned persons) if
they are able to pursue their own peculiar and profitable
theme -- which is puddles. What (the undersigned persons
ask themselves) is a puddle? A puddle repeats infinity, and
is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a
puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.
The two great historic universities of England have all this
large and level and reflective brilliance. Nevertheless,
or, rather, on the other hand, they are puddles -- puddles,
puddles, puddles, puddles. The undersigned persons ask you
to excuse an emphasis inseparable from strong conviction."
Inglewood ignored a somewhat wild expression on the faces
of some present, and continued with eminent cheerfulness: --
"Such were the thoughts that failed to cross the mind of
the undergraduate Smith as he picked his way among the
stripes of canal and the glittering rainy gutters into which
the water broke up round the back of Brakespeare College.
Had these thoughts crossed his mind he would have been much
happier than he was. Unfortunately he did not know that his
puzzles were puddles. He did not know that the academic
mind reflects infinity and is full of light by the simple
process of being shallow and standing still. In his case,
therefore, there was something solemn, and even evil about
the infinity implied. It was half-way through a starry
night of bewildering brilliancy; stars were both above and
below. To young Smith's sullen fancy the skies below seemed
even hollower than the skies above; he had a horrible idea
that if he counted the stars he would find one too many in
the pool.
"In crossing the little paths and bridges he felt like
one stepping on the black and slender ribs of some cosmic
Eiffel Tower. For to him, and nearly all the educated youth
of that epoch, the stars were cruel things. Though they
glowed in the great dome every night, they were an enormous
and ugly secret; they uncovered the nakedness of nature;
they were a glimpse of the iron wheels and pulleys behind
the scenes. For the young men of that sad time thought that
the god always came from the machine. They did not know
that in reality the machine only comes from the god. In
short, they were all pessimists, and starlight was atrocious
to them -- atrocious because it was true. All their
universe was black with white spots.
"Smith looked up with relief from the glittering pools
below to the glittering skies and the great black bulk of
the college. The only light other than stars glowed through
one peacock-green curtain in the upper part of the building,
marking where Dr. Emerson Eames always worked till morning
and received his friends and favourite pupils at any hour of
the night. Indeed, it was to his rooms that the melancholy
Smith was bound. Smith had been at Dr. Eames's lecture for
the first half of the morning, and at pistol practice and
fencing in a saloon for the second half. He had been
sculling madly for the first half of the afternoon and
thinking idly (and still more madly) for the second half.
He had gone to a supper where he was uproarious, and on to a
debating club where he was perfectly insufferable, and the
melancholy Smith was melancholy still. Then, as he was
going home to his diggings he remembered the eccentricity of
his friend and master, the Warden of Brakespeare, and
resolved desperately to turn in to that gentleman's private
house.
"Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his
throne in philosophy and metaphysics was of international
eminence; the university could hardly have afforded to lose
him, and, moreover, a don has only to continue any of his
bad habits long enough to make them a part of the British
Constitution. The bad habits of Emerson Eames were to sit
up all night and to be a student of Schopenhauer.
Personally, he was a lean, lounging sort of man, with a
blond pointed beard, not so very much older than his pupil
Smith in the matter of mere years, but older by centuries in
the two essential respects of having a European reputation
and a bald head.
"`I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,'
said Smith, who was nothing to the eye except a very big man
trying to make himself small, `because I am coming to the
conclusion that existence is really too rotten. I know all
the arguments of the thinkers that think otherwise --
bishops, and agnostics, and those sort of people. And
knowing you were the greatest living authority on the
pessimist thinkers --'
"`All thinkers,' said Eames, `are pessimist thinkers.'
"After a patch of pause, not the first -- for this
depressing conversation had gone on for some hours with
alternations of cynicism and silence -- the Warden continued
with his air of weary brilliancy: `It's all a question of
wrong calculation. The most flies into the candle because
he doesn't happen to know that the game is not worth the
candle. The wasp gets into the jam in hearty and hopeful
efforts to get the jam into him. In the same way the vulgar
people want to enjoy life just as they want to enjoy gin --
because they are too stupid to see that they are paying too
big a price for it. That they never find happiness -- that
they don't even know how to look for it -- is proved by the
paralyzing clumsiness and ugliness of everything they do.
Their discordant colours are cries of pain. Look at the
brick villas beyond the college on this side of the river.
There's one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go and
look at it!'
"`Of course,' he went on dreamily, `one or two men see
the sober fact a long way off -- they go mad. Do you notice
that maniacs mostly try either to destroy other things, or
(if they are thoughtful) to destroy themselves? The madman
is the man behind the scenes, like the man that wanders
about the coulisse of a theater. He has only opened the
wrong door and come into the right place. He sees things at
the right angle. But the common world --'
"`Oh, hang the common world!' said the sullen Smith,
letting his fist fall on the table in an idle despair.
"`Let's give it a bad name first,' said the Professor
calmly, `and then hang it. A puppy with hydrophobia would
probably struggle for life while we killed it; but if we
were kind we should kill it. So an omniscient god would put
us out of our pain. He would strike us dead.'
"`Why doesn't he strike us dead?' asked the undergraduate
abstractedly, plunging his hands into his pockets.
"`He is dead himself,' said the philosopher; `that is
where he is really enviable.'
"`To any one who thinks,' proceeded Eames, `the pleasures
of life, trivial and soon tasteless, are bribes to bring us
into a torture chamber. We all see that for any thinking
man mere extinction is the... What are you doing?... Are you
mad?... Put that thing down.'
"Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head
over his shoulder, and had found himself looking into a
small round black hole, rimmed by a six-sided circlet of
steel, with a sort of spike standing up on the top. It
fixed him like an iron eye. Through those eternal instants
during which the reason is stunned he did not even know what
it was. Then he saw behind it the chambered barrel and
cocked hammer of a revolver, and behind that the flushed and
rather heavy face of Smith, apparently quite unchanged, or
even more mild than before.
"`I'll help you out of your hole, old man,' said Smith,
with rough tenderness. `I'll put the puppy out of his
pain.'
"Emerson Eames retreated towards the window. `Do you
mean to kill me?' he cried.
"`It's not a thing I'd do for every one,' said Smith with
emotion; `but you and I seem to have got so intimate
to-night, somehow. I know all your troubles now, and the
only cure, old chap.'
"`Put that thing down,' shouted the Warden.
"`It'll soon be over, you know,' said Smith with the air
of a sympathetic dentist. And as the Warden made a run for
the window and balcony, his benefactor followed him with a
firm step and a compassionate expression.
"Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and
white of early daybreak had already come. One of them,
however, had emotions calculated to swallow up surprise.
Brakespeare College was one of the few that retained real
traces of Gothic ornament, and just beneath Dr. Eames's
balcony there ran out what had perhaps been a flying
buttress, still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts and
devils, but blinded with mosses and washed out with rains.
With an ungainly and most courageous leap, Eames sprang out
on this antique bridge, as the only possible mode of escape
from the maniac. He sat astride of it, still in his
academic gown, dangling his long thin legs, and considering
further chances of flight. The whitening daylight opened
under as well as over him that impression of vertical
infinity already remarked about the little lakes round
Brakespeare. Looking down and seeing the spires and
chimneys pendent in the pools, they felt alone in space.
They felt as if they were peering over the edge from the
North Pole and seeing the South Pole below.
"`Hang the world, we said,' observed Smith, `and the
world is hanged. "He has hanged the world upon nothing,"
says the Bible. Do you like being hanged upon nothing? I'm
going to be hanged upon something myself. I'm going to
swing for you... Dear, tender old phrase,' he murmured;
`never true till this moment. I am going to swing for you.
For you, dear friend. For your sake. At your express
desire.'
"`Help!' cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; `help!'
"`The puppy struggles,' said the undergraduate, with an
eye of pity, `the poor puppy struggles. How fortunate it is
that I am wiser and kinder than he,' and he sighted his
weapon so as exactly to cover the upper part of Eames's bald
head.
"`Smith,' said the philosopher with a sudden change to a
sort of ghastly lucidity, `I shall go mad.'
"`And so look at things from the right angle,' observed
Smith, sighing gently. `Ah, but madness is only a
palliative at best, a drug. The only cure is an operation
-- an operation that is always successful: death.'
"As he spoke the sun rose. It seemed to put colour into
everything, with the rapidity of a lightning artist. A
fleet of little clouds sailing across the sky changed from
pigeon-gray to pink. All over the little academic town the
tops of different buildings took on different tints: here
the sun would pick out the green enamel on a pinnacle, there
the scarlet tiles of a villa; here the copper ornament on
some artistic shop, and there the sea-blue slates of some
old and steep church roof. All these coloured crests seemed
to have something oddly individual and significant about
them, like crests of famous knights pointed out in a pageant
or a battlefield: they each arrested the eye, especially the
rolling eye of Emerson Eames as he looked round on the
morning and accepted it as his last. Through a narrow chink
between a black timber tavern and a big gray college he
could see a clock with gilt hands which the sunshine set on
fire. He stared at it as though hypnotized; and suddenly
the clock began to strike, as if in personal reply. As if
at a signal, clock after clock took up the cry: all the
churches awoke like chickens at cockcrow. The birds were
already noisy in the trees behind the college. The sun
rose, gathering glory that seemed too full for the deep
skies to hold, and the shallow waters beneath them seemed
golden and brimming and deep enough for the thirst of the
gods. Just round the corner of the College, and visible
from his crazy perch, were the brightest specks on that
bright landscape, the villa with the spotted blinds which he
had made his text that night. He wondered for the first
time what people lived in them.
"Suddenly he called out with mere querulous authority, as
he might have called to a student to shut a door.
"`Let me come off this place,' he cried; `I can't bear
it.'
"`I rather doubt if it will bear you,' said Smith
critically; `but before you break your neck, or I blow out
your brains, or let you back into this room (on which
complex points I am undecided), I want the metaphysical
point cleared up. Do I understand that you want to get back
to life?'
"`I'd give anything to get back,' replied the unhappy
professor.
"`Give anything!' cried Smith; `then, blast your
impudence, give us a song!'
"`What song do you mean?' demanded the exasperated Eames;
`what song?'
"`A hymn, I think, would be most appropriate,' answered
the other gravely. `I'll let you off if you'll repeat after
me the words --
"`I thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth have smiled,
And perched me on this curious place,
A happy English child.'
"Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly complied, his
persecutor abruptly told him to hold his hands up in the
air. Vaguely connecting this proceeding with the usual
conduct of brigands and bushrangers, Mr. Eames held them up,
very stiffly, but without marked surprise. A bird alighting
on his stone seat took no more notice of him than of a comic
statue.
"`You are now engaged in public worship,' remarked Smith
severely, `and before I have done with you, you shall thank
God for the very ducks on the pond.'
"`The celebrated pessimist half articulately expressed
his perfect readiness to thank God for the ducks on the
pond.
"`Not forgetting the drakes,' said Smith sternly. (Eames
weakly conceded the drakes.) `Not forgetting anything,
please. You shall thank heaven for churches and chapels and
villas and vulgar people and puddles and pots and pans and
sticks and rags and bones and spotted blinds.'
"`All right, all right,' repeated the victim in despair;
`sticks and rags and bones and blinds.'
"`Spotted blinds, I think we said,' remarked Smith with a
roguish ruthlessness, and wagging the pistol-barrel at him
like a long metallic finger.
"`Spotted blinds,' said Emerson Eames faintly.
"`You can't say fairer than that,' admitted the younger
man, `and now I'll just tell you this to wind up with. If
you really were what you profess to be, I don't see that it
would matter to snail or seraph if you broke your impious
stiff neck and dashed out all your drivelling devil-
worshipping brains. But in strict biographical fact you are
a very nice fellow, addicted to talking putrid nonsense, and
I love you like a brother. I shall therefore fire off all
my cartridges round your head so as not to hit you (I am a
good shot, you may be glad to hear), and then we will go in
and have some breakfast.'
"He then let off two barrels in the air, which the
Professor endured with singular firmness, and then said,
`But don't fire them all off.'
"`Why not' asked the other buoyantly.
"`Keep them,' answered his companion, `for the next man
you meet who talks as we were talking.'
"It was at this moment that Smith, looking down,
perceived apoplectic terror upon the face of the Sub-Warden,
and heard the refined shriek with which he summoned the
porter and the ladder.
"It took Dr. Eames some little time to disentangle
himself from the ladder, and some little time longer to
disentangle himself from the Sub-Warden. But as soon as he
could do so unobtrusively, he rejoined his companion in the
late extraordinary scene. He was astonished to find the
gigantic Smith heavily shaken, and sitting with his shaggy
head on his hands. When addressed, he lifted a very pale
face.
"`Why, what is the matter?' asked Eames, whose own nerves
had by this time twittered themselves quiet, like the
morning birds.
"`I must ask your indulgence,' said Smith, rather
brokenly. `I must ask you to realize that I have just had
an escape from death.'
"`YOU have had an escape from death?' repeated the
Professor in not unpardonable irritation. `Well, of all the
cheek --'
"`Oh, don't you understand, don't you understand?' cried
the pale young man impatiently. `I had to do it, Eames; I
had to prove you wrong or die. When a man's young, he
nearly always has some one whom he thinks the top-water mark
of the mind of man -- some one who knows all about it, if
anybody knows.
"`Well, you were that to me; you spoke with authority,
and not as the scribes. Nobody could comfort me if YOU said
there was no comfort. If you really thought there was
nothing anywhere, it was because you had been there to see.
Don't you see that I HAD to prove you didn't really mean it?
-- or else drown myself in the canal.'
"`Well,' said Eames hesitatingly, `I think perhaps you
confuse --'
"`Oh, don't tell me that!' cried Smith with the sudden
clairvoyance of mental pain; `don't tell me that I confuse
enjoyment of existence with the Will to Live! That's
German, and German is High Dutch, and High Dutch is Double
Dutch. The thing I saw shining in your eyes when you
dangled on that bridge was enjoyment of life and not "the
Will to Live." What you knew when you sat on that damned
gargoyle was that the world, when all is said and done, is a
wonderful and beautiful place; I know it, because I knew it
at the same minute. I saw the gray clouds turn pink, and
the little gilt clock in the crack between the houses. It
was THOSE things you hated leaving, not Life, whatever that
is. Eames, we've been to the brink of death together; won't
you admit I am right?'
"`Yes, said Eames very slowly, `I think you are right.
You shall have a First!'
"`Right!' cried Smith, springing up reanimated. `I've
passed with honours, and now let me go and see about being
sent down.'
"`You needn't be sent down,' said Eames with the quiet
confidence of twelve years of intrigue. `Everything with us
comes from the man on top to the people just round him: I am
the man on top, and I shall tell the people round me the
truth.'
"The massive Mr. Smith rose and went firmly to the
window, but he spoke with equal firmness. `I must be sent
down,' he said, `and the people must not be told the truth.'
"`And why not' asked the other.
"`Because I mean to follow your advice,' answered the
massive youth, `I mean to keep the remaining shots for
people in the shameful state you and I were in last night --
I wish we could even plead drunkenness. I mean to keep
those bullets for pessimists -- pills for pale people. And
in this way I want to walk the world like a wonderful
surprise -- to float as idly as the thistledown, and come as
silently as the sunrise; not to be expected any more than
the thunderbolt, not to be recalled any more than the dying
breeze. I don't want people to anticipate me as a
well-known practical joke. I want both my gifts to come
virgin and violent, the death and the life after death. I
am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man.
But I shall not use it to kill him -- only to bring him to
life. I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at
the feast.'
"`You could scarcely be called a skeleton,' said Dr.
Eames, smiling.
"`That comes of being so much at the feast,' answered the
massive youth. `No skeleton can keep his figure if he is
always dining out. But that is not quite what I meant: what
I mean is that I caught a kind of glimpse of the meaning of
death and all that -- the skull and cross-bones, the
~memento mori~. It isn't only meant to remind us of a
future life, but to remind us of a present life too. With
our weak spirits we should grow old in eternity if we were
not kept young by death. Providence has to cut immortality
into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and butter into
fingers.'
"Then he added suddenly in a voice of unnatural
actuality, `But I know something now, Eames. I knew it when
the clouds turned pink.'
"`What do you mean?' asked Eames. `What did you know?'
"`I knew for the first time that murder is really wrong.'
"He gripped Dr. Eames's hand and groped his way somewhat
unsteadily to the door. Before he had vanished through it
he had added, `It's very dangerous, though, when a man
thinks for a split second that he understands death.'
"Dr. Eames remained in repose and rumination some hours
after his late assailant had left. Then he rose, took his
hat and umbrella, and went for a brisk if rotatory walk.
Several times, however, he stood outside the villa with the
spotted blinds, studying them intently with his head
slightly on one side. Some took him for a lunatic and some
for an intending purchaser. He is not yet sure that the two
characters would be widely different.
"The above narrative has been constructed on a principle
which is, in the opinion of the undersigned persons, new in
the art of letters. Each of the two actors is described as
he appeared to the other. But the undersigned persons
absolutely guarantee the exactitude of the story; and if
their version of the thing be questioned, they, the
undersigned persons, would deucedly well like to know who
does know about it if they don't.
"The undersigned persons will now adjourn to `The Spotted
Dog' for beer. Farewell.
"(Signed) James Emerson Eames,
"Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
"Innocent Smith."
Chapter II
The Two Curates;
or, the Burglary Charge
Arthur Inglewood handed the document he had just read to the
leaders of the prosecution, who examined it with their heads
together. Both the Jew and the American were of sensitive
and excitable stocks, and they revealed by the jumpings and
bumpings of the black head and the yellow that nothing could
be done in the way of denial of the document. The letter
from the Warden was as authentic as the letter from the
Sub-Warden, however regrettably different in dignity and
social tone.
"Very few words," said Inglewood, "are required to
conclude our case in this matter. Surely it is now plain
that our client carried his pistol about with the eccentric
but innocent purpose of giving a wholesome scare to those
whom he regarded as blasphemers. In each case the scare was
so wholesome that the victim himself has dated from it as
from a new birth. Smith, so far from being a madman, is
rather a mad doctor -- he walks the world curing frenzies
and not distributing them. That is the answer to the two
unanswerable questions which I put to the prosecutors. That
is why they dared not produce a line by any one who had
actually confronted the pistol. All who had actually
confronted the pistol confessed that they had profited by
it. That was why Smith, though a good shot, never hit
anybody. He never hit anybody because he was a good shot.
His mind was as clear of murder as his hands are of blood.
This, I say, is the only possible explanation of these facts
and of all the other facts. No one can possibly explain the
Warden's conduct except by believing the Warden's story.
Even Dr. Pym, who is a very factory of ingenious theories,
could find no other theory to cover the case."
"There are promising per-spectives in hypnotism and dual
personality," said Dr. Cyrus Pym dreamily; "the science of
criminology is in its infancy, and --"
"Infancy!" cried Moon, jerking his red pencil in the air
with a gesture of enlightenment; "why, that explains it!"
"I repeat," proceeded Inglewood, "that neither Dr. Pym
nor any one else can account on any other theory but ours
for the Warden's signature, for the shots missed and the
witnesses missing."
The little Yankee had slipped to his feet with some
return of a cock-fighting coolness. "The defence," he said,
"omits a coldly colossal fact. They say we produce none of
the actual victims. Wal, here is one victim -- England's
celebrated and stricken Warner. I reckon he is pretty well
produced. And they suggest that all the outrages were
followed by reconciliation. Wal, there's no flies on
England's Warner; and he isn't reconciliated much."
"My learned friend," said Moon, getting elaborately to
his feet, "must remember that the science of shooting Dr.
Warner is in its infancy. Dr. Warner would strike the
idlest eye as one specially difficult to startle into any
recognition of the glory of God. We admit that our client,
in this one instance, failed, and that the operation was not
successful. But I am empowered to offer, on behalf of my
client, a proposal for operating on Dr. Warner again, at his
earliest convenience, and without further fees."
"'Ang it all, Michael," cried Gould, quite serious for
the first time in his life, "you might give us a bit of
bally sense for a chinge."
"What was Dr. Warner talking about just before the first
shot?" asked Moon sharply.
"The creature," said Dr. Warner superciliously, "asked
me, with characteristic rationality, whether it was my
birthday."
"And you answered, with characteristic swank," cried
Moon, shooting out a long lean finger, as rigid and
arresting as the pistol of Smith, "that you didn't keep your
birthday."
"Something like that," assented the doctor.
"Then," continued Moon, "he asked you why not, and you
said it was because you didn't see that birth was anything
to rejoice over. Agreed? Now is there any one who doubts
that our tale is true?"
There was a cold crash of stillness in the room; and Moon
said, "Pax populi vox Dei; it is the silence of the people
that is the voice of God. Or in Dr. Pym's more civilized
language, it is up to him to open the next charge. On this
we claim an acquittal."
It was about an hour later. Dr. Cyrus Pym had remained
for an unprecedented time with his eyes closed and his thumb
and finger in the air. It almost seemed as if he had been
"struck so," as the nurses say; and in the deathly silence
Michael Moon felt forced to relieve the strain with some
remark. For the last half-hour or so the eminent
criminologist had been explaining that science took the same
view of offences against property as id did of offences
against life. "Most murder," he had said, "is a variation
of homicidal mania, and in the same way most theft is a
version of kleptomania. I cannot entertain any doubt that
my learned friends opposite adequately con-ceive how this
must involve a scheme of punishment more tol'rant and humane
than the cruel methods of ancient codes. They will
doubtless exhibit consciousness of a chasm so eminently
yawning, so thought-arresting, so --" It was here that he
paused and indulged in the delicate gesture to which
allusion has been made; and Michael could bear it no longer.
"Yes, yes," he said impatiently, "we admit the chasm.
The old cruel codes accused a man of theft and sent him to
prison for ten years. The tolerant and humane ticket
accuses him of nothing and sends him to prison for ever. We
pass the chasm."
It was characteristic of the eminent Pym, in one of his
trances of verbal fastidiousness, that he went on,
unconscious not only of his opponent's interruption, but
even of his own pause.
"So stock-improving," continued Dr. Cyrus Pym, "so
fraught with real high hopes of the future. Science
therefore regards thieves, in the abstract, just as it
regards murderers. It regards them not as sinners to be
punished for an arbitrary period, but as patients to be
detained and cared for," (his first two digits closed again
as he hesitated) -- "in short, for the required period. But
there is something special in the case we investigate here.
Kleptomania commonly con-joins itself --"
"I beg pardon," said Michael; "I did not ask just now
because, to tell the truth, I really though Dr. Pym, though
seemingly vertical, was enjoying well-earned slumber, with a
pinch in his fingers of scentless and delicate dust. But
now that things are moving a little more, there is something
I should really like to know. I have hung on Dr. Pym's
lips, of course, with an interest that it were weak to call
rapture, but I have so far been unable to form any
conjecture about what the accused, in the present instance,
is supposed to have been and gone and done."
"If Mr. Moon will have patience," said Pym with dignity,
"he will find that this was the very point to which my
exposition was di-rected. Kleptomania, I say, exhibits
itself as a kind of physical attraction to certain defined
materials; and it has been held (by no less a man than
Harris) that this is the ultimate explanation of the strict
specialism and vurry narrow professional outlook of most
criminals. One will have an irresistible physical impulsion
towards pearl sleeve-links, while he passes over the most
elegant and celebrated diamond sleeve-links, placed about in
the most con-spicuous locations. Another will impede his
flight with no less than forty-seven buttoned boots, while
elastic-sided boots leave him cold, and even sarcastic. The
specialism of the criminal, I repeat, is a mark rather of
insanity than of any brightness of business habits; but
there is one kind of depredator to whom this principle is at
first sight hard to apply. I allude to our fellow-citizen
the housebreaker.
"It has been maintained by some of our boldest young
truth-seekers, that the eye of a burglar beyond the
back-garden wall could hardly be caught and hypnotized by a
fork that is insulated in a locked box under the butler's
bed. They have thrown down the gauntlet to American science
on this point. They declare that diamond links are not left
about in conspicuous locations in the haunts of the lower
classes, as they were in the great test experiment of
Calypso College. We hope this experiment here will be an
answer to that young ringing challenge, and will bring the
burglar once more into line and union with his fellow
criminals."
Moon, whose face had gone through every phase of black
bewilderment for five minutes past, suddenly lifted his hand
and struck the table in explosive enlightenment.
"Oh, I see!" he cried; "you mean that Smith is a
burglar."
"I thought I made it quite ad'quately lucid," said Mr.
Pym, folding up his eyelids. It was typical of this
topsy-turvy private trial that all the eloquent extras, all
the rhetoric or digression on either side, was exasperating
and unintelligible to the other. Moon could not make head
or tail of the solemnity of a new civilization. Pym could
not make head or tail of the gaiety of an old one.
"All the cases in which Smith has figured as an
expropriator," continued the American doctor, "are cases of
burglary. Pursuing the same course as in the previous case,
we select the indubitable instance from the rest, and we
take the most correct cast-iron evidence. I will now call
on my colleague, Mr. Gould, to read a letter we have
received from the earnest, unspotted Canon of Durham, Canon
Hawkins."
Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual alacrity to read
the letter from the earnest and unspotted Hawkins. Moses
Gould could imitate a farmyard well, Sir Henry Irving not so
well, Marie Lloyd to a point of excellence, and the new
motor horns in a manner that put him upon the platform of
great artists. But his imitation of a Canon of Durham was
not convincing; indeed, the sense of the letter was so much
obscured by the extraordinary leaps and gasps of his
pronunciation that it is perhaps better to print it here as
Moon read it when, a little later, it was handed across the
table.
"Dear Sir, -- I can scarcely feel surprise that the
incident you mention, private as it was, should have
filtered through our omnivorous journals to the mere
populace; for the position I have since attained makes me, I
conceive, a public character, and this was certainly the
most extraordinary incident in a not uneventful and perhaps
not an unimportant career. I am by no means without
experience in scenes of civil tumult. I have faced many a
political crisis in the old Primrose League days at Herne
Bay, and, before I broke with the wilder set, have spent
many a night at the Christian Social Union. But this other
experience was quite inconceivable. I can only describe it
as the letting loose of a place which it is not for me, as a
clergyman, to mention.
"It occurred in the days when I was, for a short period,
a curate at Hoxton; and the other curate, then my colleague,
induced me to attend a meeting which he described, I must
say profanely described, as calculated to promote the
kingdom of God. I found, on the contrary, that it consisted
entirely of men in corduroys and greasy clothes whose
manners were coarse and their opinions extreme.
"Of my colleague in question I wish to speak with the
fullest respect and friendliness, and I will therefore say
little. No one can be more convinced than I of the evil of
politic in the pulpit; and I never offer my congregation any
advice about voting except in cases in which I feel strongly
that they are likely to make an erroneous selection. But,
while I do not mean to touch at all upon political or social
problems, I must say that for a clergyman to countenance,
even in jest, such discredited nostrums of dissipated
demagogues as Socialism or Radicalism partakes of the
character of the betrayal of a sacred trust. Far be it from
me to say a word against the Reverend Raymond Percy, the
colleague in question. He was brilliant, I suppose, and to
some apparently fascinating; but a clergyman who talks like
a Socialist, wears his hair like a pianist, and behaves like
an intoxicated person, will never rise in his profession, or
even obtain the admiration of the good and wise. Nor is it
for me to utter my personal judgements of the appearance of
the people in the hall. Yet a glance round the room,
revealing ranks of debased and envious faces --"
"Adopting," said Moon explosively, for he was getting
restive -- "adopting the reverend gentleman's favourite
figure of logic, may I say that while tortures would not
tear from me a whisper about his intellect, he is a blasted
old jackass."
"Really!" said Dr. Pym; "I protest."
"You must keep quiet, Michael," said Inglewood; "they
have a right to read their story."
"Chair! Chair! Chair!" cried Gould, rolling about
exuberantly in his own; and Pym glanced for a moment towards
the canopy which covered all the authority of the Court of
Beacon.
"Oh, don't wake the old lady," said Moon, lowering his
voice in a moody good-humour. "I apologize. I won't
interrupt again."
Before the little eddy of interruption was ended the
reading of the clergyman's letter was already continuing.
"The proceedings opened with a speech from my colleague,
of which I will say nothing. It was deplorable. Many of
the audience were Irish, and showed the weakness of that
impetuous people. When gathered together into gangs and
conspiracies they seem to lose altogether that lovable good-
nature and readiness to accept anything one tells them which
distinguishes them as individuals."
With a slight start, Michael rose to his feet, bowed
solemnly, and sat down again.
"These persons, if not silent, were at least applausive
during the speech of Mr. Percy. He descended to their level
with witticisms about rent and a reserve of labour.
Confiscation, expropriation, arbitration, and such words
with which I cannot soil my lips, recurred constantly. Some
hours afterward the storm broke. I had been addressing the
meeting for some time, pointing out the lack of thrift in
the working classes, their insufficient attendance at
evening service, their neglect of the Harvest Festival, and
of many other things that might materially help them to
improve their lot. It was, I think, about this time that an
extraordinary interruption occurred. An enormous, powerful
man, partly concealed with white plaster, arose in the
middle of the hall, and offered (in a loud, roaring voice,
like a bull's) some observations which seemed to be in a
foreign language. Mr. Raymond Percy, my colleague,
descended to his level by entering into a duel of repartee,
in which he appeared to be the victor. The meeting began to
behave more respectfully for a little; yet before I had said
twelve sentences more the rush was made for the platform.
The enormous plasterer, in particular, plunged towards us,
shaking the earth like an elephant; and I really do not know
what would have happened if a man equally large, but not
quite so ill-dressed, had not jumped up also and held him
away. This other big man shouted a sort of speech to the
mob as he was shoving them back. I don't know what he said,
but, what with shouting and shoving and such horseplay, he
got us out at a back door, while the wretched people went
roaring down another passage.
"Then follows the truly extraordinary part of my story.
When he had got us outside, in a mean backyard of blistered
grass leading into a lane with a very lonely-looking lamp-
post, this giant addressed me as follows: `You are well out
of that, sir; now you'd better come along with me. I want
you to help me in an act of social justice, such as we've
all been talking about. Come along!' And turning his big
back abruptly, he led us down the lean old lane with the one
lean old lamp-post, we scarcely knowing what to do but to
follow him. He had certainly helped us in a most difficult
situation, and, as a gentleman, I could not treat such a
benefactor with suspicion without grave grounds. Such also
was the view of my Socialistic colleague, who (with all his
dreadful talk of arbitration) is a gentleman also. In fact,
he comes of the Staffordshire Percies, a branch of the old
house, and has the black hair and pale, clear-cut face of
the whole family. I cannot but refer it to vanity that he
should heighten his personal advantages with black velvet or
a red cross of considerable ostentation, and certainly --
but I digress.
"A fog was coming up the street, and that last lost lamp-
post faded behind us in a way that certainly depressed the
mind. The large man in front of us looked larger and larger
in the haze. He did not turn round, but he said with his
huge back to us, `All that talking's no good; we want a
little practical Socialism.'
"`I quite agree,' said Percy; `but I always like to
understand things in theory before I put them into
practice.'
"`Oh, you just leave that to me,' said the practical
Socialist, or whatever he was, with the most terrifying
vagueness. `I have a way with me. I'm a Permeator.'
"`I could not imagine what he meant, but my companion
laughed, so I was sufficiently reassured to continue the
unaccountable journey for the present. It led us through
most singular ways; out of the lane, where we were already
rather cramped, into a paved passage, at the end of which we
passed through a wooden gate left open. We then found
ourselves, in the increasing darkness and vapour, crossing
what appeared to be a beaten path across a kitchen garden.
I called out to the enormous person going on in front, but
he answered obscurely that it was a short cut.
"I was just repeating my very natural doubt to my
clerical companion when I was brought up against a short
ladder, apparently leading to a higher level of road. My
thoughtless companion ran up it so quickly that I could not
do otherwise than follow as best I could. The path on which
I then planted my feet was quite unprecedentedly narrow. I
had never had to walk along a thoroughfare so exiguous.
Along one side of it grew what, in the dark and density of
air, I first took to be some short, strong thicket of
shrubs. Then I saw that they were not short shrubs; they
were the tops of tall trees. I, an English gentleman and
clergyman of the Church of England -- I was walking along
the top of a garden wall like a tom cat.
"I am glad to say that I stopped within my first five
steps, and let loose my just reprobation, balancing myself
as best I could all the time.
"`It's a right-of-way,"' declared my indefensible
informant. `It's closed to traffic once in a hundred
years.'
"`Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy!' I called out; `you are not going
on with this blackguard?'
"`Why, I think so,' answered my unhappy colleague
flippantly. `I think you and I are bigger blackguards than
he is, whatever he is.'
"`I am a burglar,' explained the big creature quite
calmly. `I am a member of the Fabian Society. I take back
the wealth stolen by the capitalist, not by sweeping civil
war and revolution, but by reform fitted to the special
occasion -- here a little and there a little. Do you see
that fifth house along the terrace with the flat roof? I'm
permeating that one to-night.'
"`Whether this is a crime or a joke,' I cried, `I desire
to be quit of it.'
"`The ladder is just behind you,' answered the creature
with horrible courtesy; `and, before you go, do let me give
you my card.'
"If I had had the presence of mind to show any proper
spirit I should have flung it away, though any adequate
gesture of the kind would have gravely affected my
equilibrium upon the wall. As it was, in the wildness of
the moment, I put it in my waistcoat pocket, and, picking my
way back by wall and ladder, landed in the respectable
streets once more. Not before, however, I had seen with my
own eyes the two awful and lamentable facts -- that the
burglar was climbing up a slanting roof towards the
chimneys, and that Raymond Percy (a priest of God and, what
was worse, a gentleman) was crawling up after him. I have
never seen either of them since that day.
"In consequence of this soul-searching experience I
severed my connection with the wild set. I am far from
saying that every member of the Christian Social Union must
necessarily be a burglar. I have no right to bring any such
charge. But it gave me a hint of what such courses may lead
to in many cases; and I saw them no more.
"I have only to add that the photograph you enclose,
taken by a Mr. Inglewood, is undoubtedly that of the burglar
in question. When I got home that night I looked at his
card, and he was inscribed there under the name of Innocent
Smith. -- Yours faithfully,
"John Clement Hawkins."
Moon merely went through the form of glancing at the
paper. He knew that the prosecutors could not have invented
so heavy a document; that Moses Gould (for one) could no
more write like a canon than he could read like one. After
handing it back he rose to open the defence on the burglary
charge.
"We wish," said Michael, "to give all reasonable
facilities to the prosecution; especially as it will save
the time of the whole court. The latter object I shall once
again pursue by passing over all those points of theory
which are so dear to Dr. Pym. I know how they are made.
Perjury is a variety of aphasia, leading a man to say one
thing instead of another. Forgery is a kind of writer's
cramp, forcing a man to write his uncle's name instead of
his own. Piracy on the high seas is probably a form of
sea-sickness. But it is unnecessary for us to inquire into
the causes of a fact which we deny. Innocent Smith never
did commit burglary at all.
"I should like to claim the power permitted by our
previous arrangement, and ask the prosecution two or three
questions."
Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate a courteous
assent.
"In the first place," continued Moon, "have you the date
of Canon Hawkins's last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing
up the walls and roofs?"
"Ho, yuss!" called out Gould smartly. "November
thirteen, eighteen ninety-one."
"Have you," continued Moon, "identified the houses in
Hoxton up which they climbed?"
"Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out of the highroad,"
answered Gould with the same clockwork readiness.
"Well," said Michael, cocking an eyebrow at him, "was
there any burglary in that terrace that night? Surely you
could find that out."
"There may well have been," said the doctor primly, after
a pause, "an unsuccessful one that led to no legalities."
"Another question," proceeded Michael. "Canon Hawkins,
in his blood-and-thunder boyish way, left off at the
exciting moment. Why don't you produce the evidence of the
other clergyman, who actually followed the burglar and
presumably was present at the crime?"
Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of his fingers on the
table, as he did when he was specially confident of the
clearness of his reply.
"We have entirely failed," he said, "to track the other
clergyman, who seems to have melted into the ether after
Canon Hawkins had seen him as-cending the gutters and the
leads. I am fully aware that this may strike many as
sing'lar; yet, upon reflection, I think it will appear
pretty natural to a bright thinker. This Mr. Raymond Percy
is admittedly, by the canon's evidence, a minister of
eccentric ways. His con-nection with England's proudest and
fairest does not seemingly prevent a taste for the society
of the real low-down. On the other hand, the prisoner Smith
is, by general agreement, a man of irr'sistible
fascination. I entertain no doubt that Smith led the
Revered Percy into the crime and forced him to hide his head
in the real crim'nal class. That would fully account for
his non-appearance, and the failure of all attempts to trace
him."
"It is impossible, then, to trace him?" asked Moon.
"Impossible," repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes.
"You are sure it's impossible?"
"Oh dry up, Michael," cried Gould, irritably. "We'd 'ave
found 'im if we could, for you bet 'e saw the burglary.
Don't YOU start looking for 'im. Look for your own 'ead in
the dustbin. You'll find that -- after a bit," and his
voice died away in grumbling.
"Arthur," directed Michael Moon, sitting down, "kindly
read Mr. Raymond Percy's letter to the court."
"Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said, to shorten the
proceedings as much as possible," began Inglewood, "I will
not read the first part of the letter sent to us. It is
only fair to the prosecution to admit the account given by
the second clergyman fully ratifies, as far as the facts are
concerned, that given by the first clergyman. We concede,
then, the canon's story so far as it goes. This must
necessarily be valuable to the prosecutor and also
convenient to the court. I begin Mr. Percy's letter, then,
at the point when all three men were standing on the garden
wall: --
"As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my
own mind not to waver. A cloud of wrath was on my brain,
like the cloud of copper fog on the houses and gardens
round. My decision was violent and simple; yet the thoughts
that led up to it were so complicated and contradictory that
I could not retrace them now. I knew Hawkins was a kind,
innocent gentleman; and I would have given ten pounds for
the pleasure of kicking him down the road. That God should
allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that -- rose
against me like a towering blasphemy.
"At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather
badly; and artists love to be limited. I liked the church
as a pretty pattern; discipline was mere decoration. I
delighted in mere divisions of time; I liked eating fish on
Friday. But then I like fish; and the fast was made for men
who like meat. Then I came to Hoxton and found men who had
fasted for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish
because they could not get meat -- and fish-bones when they
could not get fish. As too many British officers treat the
army as a review, so I had treated the Church Militant as if
it were the Church Pageant. Hoxton cures that. Then I
realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant
had not been a pageant, but a riot -- and a suppressed
riot. There, still living patiently in Hoxton, were the
people to whom the tremendous promises had been made. In
the face of that I had to become a revolutionary if I was to
continue to be religious. In Hoxton one cannot be a
conservative without being also an atheist -- and a
pessimist. Nobody but the devil could want to conserve
Hoxton.
"On the top of all this comes Hawkins. If he had cursed
all the Hoxton men, excommunicated them, and told them they
were going to hell, I should have rather admired him. If he
had ordered them all to be burned in the market-place, I
should still have had that patience that all good Christians
have with the wrongs inflicted on other people. But there
is no priestcraft about Hawkins -- nor any other kind of
craft. He is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he
is of being a carpenter or a cabman or a gardener or a
plasterer. He is a perfect gentleman; that is his
complaint. He does not impose his creed, but simply his
class. He never said a word of religion in the whole of his
damnable address. He simply said all the things his
brother, the major, would have said. A voice from heaven
assures me that he has a brother, and that this brother is a
major.
"When this helpless aristocrat had praised cleanliness in
the body and convention in the soul to people who could
hardly keep body and soul together, the stampede against our
platform began. I took part in his undeserved rescue, I
followed his obscure deliverer, until (as I have said) we
stood together on the wall above the dim gardens, already
clouding with fog. Then I looked at the curate and at the
burglar, and decided, in a spasm of inspiration, that the
burglar was the better man of the two. The burglar seemed
quite as kind and human as the curate was -- and he was also
brave and self-reliant, which the curate was not. I knew
there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belong to it
myself; I knew there was not so very much in the lower
class, for I had lived with it a long time. Many old texts
about the despised and persecuted came back to my mind, and
I thought that the saints might well be hidden in the
criminal class. About the time Hawkins let himself down the
ladder I was crawling up a low, sloping, blue-slate roof
after the large man, who went leaping in front of me like a
gorilla.
"This upward scramble was short, and we soon found
ourselves tramping along a broad road of flat roofs, broader
than many big thoroughfares, with chimney-pots here and
there that seemed in the haze as bulky as small forts. The
asphyxiation of the fog seemed to increase the somewhat
swollen and morbid anger under which my brain and body
laboured. The sky and all those things that are commonly
clear seemed overpowered by sinister spirits. Tall spectres
with turbans of vapour seemed to stand higher than sun or
moon, eclipsing both. I thought dimly of illustrations to
the `Arabian Nights' on brown paper with rich but sombre
tints, showing genii gathering round the Seal of Solomon.
By the way, what was the Seal of Solomon? Nothing to do
with sealing-wax really, I suppose; but my muddled fancy
felt the thick clouds as being of that heavy and clinging
substance, of strong opaque colour, poured out of boiling
pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.
"The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that
discoloured look of pea-soup or coffee brown of which
Londoners commonly speak. But the scene grew subtler with
familiarity. We stood above the average of the housetops
and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in great
cities creates the strange thing called fog. Beneath us
rose a forest of chimney-pots. And there stood in every
chimney-pot, as if it were a flower-pot, a brief shrub or a
tall tree of coloured vapour. The colours of the smoke were
various; for some chimneys were from firesides and some from
factories, and some again from mere rubbish heaps. And yet,
though the tints were all varied, they all seemed unnatural,
like fumes from a witch's pot. It was as if the shameful
and ugly shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up
each its separate spurt of steam, coloured according to the
fish or flesh consumed. Here, aglow from underneath, were
dark red clouds, such as might drift from dark jars of
sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray,
like the long hair of witches steeped in the hell-broth. In
another place the smoke was of an awful opaque ivory yellow,
such as might be the disembodiment of one of their old,
leprous, waxen images. But right across it ran a line of
bright, sinister, sulphurous green, as clear and crooked as
Arabic --"
Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the
'bus. He was understood to suggest that the reader should
shorten the proceedings by leaving out all the adjectives.
Mrs. Duke, who had woken up, observed that she was sure it
was all very nice, and the decision was duly noted down by
Moses with a blue, and by Michael with a red, pencil.
Inglewood then resumed the reading of the document.
"Then I read the writing of the smoke. Smoke was like
the modern city that makes it; it is not always dull or
ugly, but it is always wicked and vain.
"Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry
all colours, but it could leave nothing but a stain. It was
our weakness and not our strength that put a rich refuse in
the sky. These were the rivers of our vanity pouring into
the void. We had taken the sacred circle of the whirlwind,
and looked down on it, and seen it as a whirlpool. And then
we had used it as a sink. It was a good symbol of the
mutiny in my own mind. Only our worst things were going to
heaven. Only our criminals could still ascend like angels.
"As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide
stopped by one of the big chimney-pots that stood at the
regular intervals like lamp-posts along that uplifted and
aerial highway. He put his heavy hand upon it, and for the
moment I thought he was merely leaning on it, tired with his
steep scramble along the terrace. So far as I could guess
from the abysses, full of fog on either side, and the veiled
lights of red brown and old gold glowing through them now
and again, we were on the top of one of those long,
consecutive, and genteel rows of houses which are still to
be found lifting their heads above poorer districts, the
remains of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative
builders. Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted,
or tenanted only by such small clans of the poor as gather
also in the old emptied palaces of Italy. Indeed, some time
later, when the fog had lifted a little, I discovered that
we were walking round a semi-circle of crescent which fell
away below us into one flat square or wide street below
another, like a giant stairway, in a manner not unknown in
the eccentric building of London, and looking like the last
ledges of the land. But a cloud sealed the giant stairway
as yet.
"My speculation about the sullen skyscape, however, were
interrupted by something as unexpected as the moon fallen
from the sky. Instead of my burglar lifting his hand from
the chimney he leaned on, he leaned on it a little more
heavily, and the whole chimney-pot turned over like the
opening top of an inkstand. I remembered the short ladder
leaning against the low wall and felt sure he had arranged
his criminal approach long before.
"The collapse of the big chimney-pot ought to have been
the culmination of my chaotic feelings; but, to tell the
truth, it produced a sudden sense of comedy and even of
comfort. I could not recall what connected this abrupt bit
of housebreaking with some quaint but still kindly fancies.
Then I remembered the delightful and uproarious scenes of
roofs and chimneys in the harlequinades of my childhood, and
was darkly and quite irrationally comforted by a sense of
unsubstantiality in the scene, as if the houses were of lath
and paint and pasteboard, and were only meant to be tumbled
in and out of by policemen and pantaloons. The law-breaking
of my companion seemed not only seriously excusable, but
even comically excusable. Who were all these pompous
preposterous people with their footmen and their
foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots and their chimney-pot
hats, that they should prevent a poor clown from getting
sausages if he wanted them? One would suppose that property
was a serious thing. I had reached, as it were, a higher
level of that mountain of vapourous visions, the heaven of a
higher levity.
"My guide had jumped down into the dark cavity revealed
by the displaced chimney-pot. He must have landed at a
level considerably lower, for, tall as he was, nothing but
his weirdly tousled head remained visible. Something again
far off, and yet familiar, pleased me about this way of
invading the houses of men. I thought of little
chimney-sweeps, and `The Water Babies;' but I decided that
it was not that. Then I remembered what it was that made me
connect such topsy-turvy trespass with ideas quite opposite
to the idea of crime. Christmas Eve, of course, and Santa
Claus coming down the chimney.
"Almost at the same instant the hairy head disappeared
into the black hole; but I heard a voice calling to me from
below. A second or two afterwards, the hairy head
reappeared; it was dark against the more fiery part of the
fog, and nothing could be spelt of its expression, but its
voice called on me to follow with that enthusiastic
impatience proper only among old friends. I jumped into the
gulf, and as blindly as Curtius, for I was still thinking of
Santa Claus and the traditional virtue of such vertical
entrance.
"In every well-appointed gentleman's house, I reflected,
there was the front door for the gentlemen, and the side
door for the tradesmen; but there was also the top door for
the gods. The chimney is, so to speak, the underground
passage between earth and heaven. By this starry tunnel
Santa Claus manages -- like the skylark -- to be true to the
kindred points of heaven and home. Nay, owing to certain
conventions, and a widely distributed lack of courage for
climbing, this door was, perhaps, little used. But Santa
Claus's door was really the front door: it was the door
fronting the universe.
"I thought this as I groped my way across the black
garret, or loft below the roof, and scrambled down the squat
ladder that let us down into a yet larger loft below. Yet
it was not till I was half-way down the ladder that I
suddenly stood still, and thought for an instant of
retracing all my steps, as my companion had retraced them
from the beginning of the garden wall. The name of Santa
Claus had suddenly brought me back to my senses. I
remembered why Santa Clause came, and why he was welcome.
"I was brought up in the propertied classes, and with all
their horror of offences against property. I had heard all
the regular denunciations of robbery, both right and wrong;
I had read the Ten Commandments in church a thousand times.
And then and there, at the age of thirty-four, half-way down
a ladder in a dark room in the bodily act of burglary, I saw
suddenly for the first time that theft, after all, is really
wrong.
"It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed
the strangely soft footsteps of my huge companion across the
lower and larger loft, till he knelt down on a part of the
bare flooring and, after a few fumbling efforts, lifted a
sort of trapdoor. This released a light from below, and we
found ourselves looking down into a lamp-lit sitting room,
of the sort that in large houses often leads out of a
bedroom, and is an adjunct to it. Light thus breaking from
beneath our feet like a soundless explosion, showed that the
trapdoor just lifted was clogged with dust and rust, and had
doubtless been long disused until the advent of my
enterprising friend. But I did not look at this long, for
the sight of the shining room underneath us had an almost
unnatural attractiveness. To enter a modern interior at so
strange an angle, by so forgotten a door, was an epoch in
one's psychology. It was like having found a fourth
dimension.
"My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so
suddenly and soundlessly, that I could do nothing but follow
him; though, for lack of practice in crime, I was by no
means soundless. Before the echo of my boots had died away,
the big burglar had gone quickly to the door, half opened
it, and stood looking down the staircase and listening.
Then, leaving the door still half open, he came back into
the middle of the room, and ran his roving blue eye round
its furniture and ornament. The room was comfortably lined
with books in that rich and human way that makes the walls
seem alive; it was a deep and full, but slovenly, bookcase,
of the sort that is constantly ransacked for the purposes of
reading in bed. One of those stunted German stoves that
look like red goblins stood in a corner, and a sideboard of
walnut wood with closed doors in its lower part. There were
three windows, high but narrow. After another glance round,
my housebreaker plucked the walnut doors open and rummaged
inside. He found nothing there, apparently, except an
extremely handsome cut-glass decanter, containing what
looked like port. Somehow the sight of the thief returning
with this ridiculous little luxury in his hand woke within
me once more all the revelation and revulsion I had felt
above.
"`Don't do it!' I cried quite incoherently, `Santa
Claus --'
"`Ah,' said the burglar, as he put the decanter on the
table and stood looking at me, `you've thought about that,
too.'
"`I can't express a millionth part of what I've thought
of,' I cried, `but it's something like this... oh, can't you
see it? Why are children not afraid of Santa Claus, though
he comes like a thief in the night? He is permitted
secrecy, trespass, almost treachery -- because there are
more toys where he has been. What should we feel if there
were less? Down what chimney from hell would come the
goblin that should take away the children's balls and dolls
while they slept? Could a Greek tragedy be more gray and
cruel than that daybreak and awakening? Dog-stealer,
horse-stealer, man-stealer -- can you think of anything so
base as a toy-stealer?'
"The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from
his pocket and laid it on the table beside the decanter, but
still kept his blue reflective eyes fixed on my face.
"`Man!' I said, `all stealing is toy-stealing. That's
why it's really wrong. The goods of the unhappy children of
men should be respected because of their worthlessness. I
know Naboth's vineyard is as painted as Noah's Ark. I know
Nathan's ewe-lamb is really a woolly baa-lamb on a wooden
stand. That is why I could not take them away. I did not
mind so much, as long as I thought of men's things as their
valuables; but I dare not put a hand upon their vanities.'
"After a moment I added abruptly, `Only saints and sages
ought to be robbed. They may be stripped and pillaged; but
not the poor little worldly people of the things that are
their poor little pride.'
"He set out two wineglasses from the cupboard, filled
them both, and lifted one of them with a salutation towards
his lips.
"`Don't do it!' I cried. `It might be the last bottle of
some rotten vintage or other. The master of this house may
be quite proud of it. Don't you see there's something
sacred in the silliness of such things?'
"`It's not the last bottle,' answered my criminal calmly;
`there's plenty more in the cellar.'
"`You know the house, then?' I said.
"`Too well,' he answered, with a sadness so strange as to
have something eerie about it. `I am always trying to
forget what I know -- and to find what I don't know.' He
drained his glass. `Besides,' he added, `it will do him
good.'
"`What will do him good?'
"`The wine I'm drinking,' said the strange person.
"`Does he drink too much, then?' I inquired.
"`No,' he answered; `not unless I do.'
"`Do you mean,' I demanded, `that the owner of this house
approves of all you do?'
"`God forbid,' he answered; `but he has to do the same.'
"The dead face of the fog looking in at all three windows
unreasonable increased a sense of riddle, and even terror,
about this tall, narrow house we had entered out of the
sky. I had once more the notion about the gigantic genii --
I fancied that enormous Egyptian faces, of the dead reds and
yellows of Egypt, were staring in at each window of our
little lamp-lit room as at a lighted stage of marionettes.
My companion went on playing with the pistol in front of
him, and talking with the same rather creepy
confidentialness.
"`I am always trying to find him -- to catch him
unawares. I come in through skylights and trapdoors to find
him; but whenever I find him -- he is doing what I am
doing.'
"I sprang to my feet with a thrill of fear. `There is
some one coming,' I cried, and my cry had something of a
shriek in it.
"Not from the stairs below, but along the passage from
the inner bedchamber (which seemed somehow to make it more
alarming), footsteps were coming nearer. I am quite unable
to say what mystery, or monster, or double, I expected to
see when the door was pushed open from within. I am only
quite certain that I did not expect to see what I did see.
"Framed in the open doorway stood, with an air of great
serenity, a rather tall young woman, definitely though
indefinably artistic -- her dress the colour of spring and
her hair of autumn leaves, with a face which, though still
comparatively young, conveyed experience as well as
intelligence. All she said was, `I didn't hear you come
in.'
"`I came in another way,' said the Permeator, somewhat
vaguely. `I'd left my latchkey at home.'
"I got to my feet in a mixture of politeness and mania.
`I'm really very sorry,' I cried. `I know my position is
irregular. Would you be so obliging as to tell me whose
house this is.?'
"`Mine,' said the burglar. `May I present you to my
wife?'
"I doubtfully, and somewhat slowly, resumed my seat; and
I did not get out of it till nearly morning. Mrs. Smith
(such was the prosaic name of this far from prosaic
household) lingered a little, talking slightly and
pleasantly. She left on my mind the impression of a certain
odd mixture of shyness and sharpness; as if she knew the
world well, but was still a little harmlessly afraid of it.
Perhaps the possession of so jumpy and incalculable a
husband had left her a little nervous. Anyhow, when she had
retired to the inner chamber once more, that extraordinary
man poured forth his apologia and autobiography over the
dwindling wine.
"He had been sent to Cambridge with a view to a
mathematical and scientific, rather than a classical or
literary, career. A starless nihilism was then the
philosophy of the schools; and it bred in him a war between
the members and the spirit, but one in which the members
were right. While his brain accepted the black creed, his
very body rebelled against it. As he put it, his right hand
taught him terrible things. As the authorities of Cambridge
University put it, unfortunately, it had taken the form of
his right hand flourishing a loaded firearm in the very face
of a distinguished don, and driving him to climb out of the
window and cling to a waterspout. He had done it solely
because the poor don had professed in theory a preference
for non-existence. For this very unacademic type of
argument he had been sent down. Vomiting as he was with
revulsion, from the pessimism that had quailed under his
pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic of the joy of
life. He cut across all the associations of serious-minded
men. He was gay, but by no means careless. His practical
jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones. Though not an
optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that life is all
beer and skittles, he did really seem to maintain that beer
and skittles are the most serious part of it. `What is more
immortal,' he would cry, `than love and war? Type of all
desire and joy -- beer. Type of all battle and conquest --
skittles.'
"There was something in him of what the old world called
the solemnity of revels -- when they spoke of `solemnizing'
a mere masquerade or wedding banquet. Nevertheless he was
not a mere pagan any more than he was a mere practical
joker. His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of
faith, in itself mystical, and even childlike and Christian.
"`I don't deny,' he said, `that there should be priests
to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that
at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another
kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that
they are not dead yet. The intellectuals among whom I moved
were not even alive enough to fear death. They hadn't blood
enough in them to be cowards. Until a pistol barrel was
poked under their very noses they never even knew they had
been born. For ages looking up an eternal perspective it
might be true that life is a learning to die. But for these
little white rats it was just as true that death was their
only chance of learning to live.'
"His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test;
that he felt it continually slipping from himself as much as
from others. He had the same pistol for himself, as Brutus
said of the dagger. He continually ran preposterous risks
of high precipice or headlong speed to keep alive the mere
conviction that he was alive. He treasured up trivial and
yet insane details that had once reminded him of the awful
subconscious reality. When the don had hung on the stone
gutter, the sight of his long dangling legs, vibrating in
the void like wings, somehow awoke the naked satire of the
old definition of man as a two-legged animal without
feathers. The wretched professor had been brought into
peril by his head, which he had so elaborately cultivated,
and only saved by his legs, which he had treated with
coldness and neglect. Smith could think of no other way of
announcing or recording this, except to send a telegram to
an old school friend (by this time a total stranger) to say
that he had just seen a man with two legs; and that the man
was alive.
"The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars
like a rocket when he suddenly fell in love. He happened to
be shooting a high and very headlong weir in a canoe, by way
of proving to himself that he was alive; and he soon found
himself involved in some doubt about the continuance of the
fact. What was worse, he found he had equally jeopardized a
harmless lady alone in a rowing-boat, and one who had
provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation.
He apologized in wild gasps through all his wild wet labours
to bring her to the shore, and when he had done so at last,
he seems to have proposed to her on the bank. Anyhow, with
the same impetuosity with which he had nearly murdered her,
he completely married her; and she was the lady in green to
whom I had recently and `good-night.'
"They had settled down in these high narrow houses near
Highbury. Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word. One
could strictly say that Smith was married, that he was very
happily married, that he not only did not care for any woman
but his wife, but did not seem to care for any place but his
home; but perhaps one could hardly say that he had settled
down. `I am a very domestic fellow,' he explained with
gravity, `and have often come in through a broken window
rather than be late for tea.'
"He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling
asleep. He lost his wife a series of excellent servants by
knocking at the door as a total stranger, and asking if Mr.
Smith lived there and what kind of a man he was. The London
general servant is not used to the master indulging in such
transcendental ironies. And it was found impossible to
explain to her that he did it in order to feel the same
interest in his own affairs that he always felt in other
people's.
"`I know there's a fellow called Smith,' he said in his
rather weird way, `living in one of the tall houses in this
terrace. I know he is really happy, and yet I can never
catch him at it.'
"Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a
kind of paralyzed politeness, like a young stranger struck
with love at first sight. Sometimes he would extend this
poetic fear to the very furniture; would seem to apologize
to the chair he sat on, and climb the staircase as
cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the sense of
their skeleton of reality. Every stair is a ladder and
every stool a leg, he said. And at other times he would
play the stranger exactly in the opposite sense, and would
enter by another way, so as to feel like a thief and a
robber. He would break and violate his own home, as he had
done with me that night. It was near morning before I could
tear myself from this queer confidence of the Man Who Would
Not Die, and as I shook hands with him on the doorstep the
last load of fog was lifting, and rifts of daylight revealed
the stairway of irregular street levels that looked like the
end of the world.
"It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a
night with a maniac. What other term, it will be said,
could be applied to such a being? A man who reminds himself
that he is married by pretending not to be married! A man
who tries to covet his own goods instead of his
neighbour's! On this I have but one word to say, and I feel
it of my honour to say it, though no one understands. I
believe the maniac was one of those who do not merely come,
but are sent; sent like a great gale upon ships by Him who
made His angels winds and His messengers a flaming fire.
This, at least, I know for certain. Whether such men have
laughed or wept, we have laughed at their laughter as much
as at their weeping. Whether they cursed or blessed the
world, they have never fitted it. It is true that men have
shrunk from the sting of a great satirist as if from the
sting of an adder. But it is equally true that men flee
from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of
a bear. Nothing brings down more curses than a real
benediction. For the goodness of good things, like the
badness of bad things, is a prodigy past speech; it is to be
pictured rather than spoken. We shall have gone deeper than
the deeps of heaven and grown older than the oldest angels
before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations, the
everlasting violence of that double passion with which God
hates and loves the world. -- I am, yours faithfully,
"Raymond Percy."
"Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly!" said Mr. Moses Gould.
The instant he had spoken all the rest knew they had been
in an almost religious state of submission and assent.
Something had bound them all together; something in the
sacred tradition of the last two words of the letter;
something also in the touching and boyish embarrassment with
which Inglewood had read them -- for he had all the
thin-skinned reverence of the agnostic. Moses Gould was as
good a fellow in his way as ever lived; far kinder to his
family than more refined men of pleasure, simple and
steadfast in his admirations, a thoroughly wholesome animal
and a thoroughly genuine character. But wherever there is
conflict, crises come in which any soul, personal or racial,
unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its
hundred faces. English reverence, Irish mysticism, American
idealism, looked up and saw on the face of Moses a certain
smile. It was that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which has
been the tocsin for many a cruel riot in Russian villages or
mediaeval towns.
"Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly!" said Moses Gould.
Finding that this was not well received, he explained
further, exuberance deepening on his dark exuberant
features.
"Always fun to see a bloke swallow a wasp when 'e's
corfin' up a fly," he said pleasantly. "Don't you see
you've bunged up old Smith anyhow. If this parson's tale's
O. K. -- why, Smith is 'ot. 'E's pretty 'ot. We find him
elopin' with Miss Gray (best respects!) in a cab. Well,
what abart this Mrs. Smith the curate talks of, with her
blarsted shyness -- transmigogrified into a blighted
sharpness? Miss Gray ain't been very sharp, but I reckon
she'll be pretty shy."
"Don't be a brute," growled Michael Moon.
None could lift their eyes to look at Mary; but Inglewood
sent a glance along the table at Innocent Smith. He was
still bowed above his paper toys, and a wrinkle was on his
forehead that might have been worry or shame. He carefully
plucked out one corner of a complicated paper ship and
tucked it in elsewhere; then the wrinkle vanished and he
looked relieved.
Chapter III
The Round Road;
or, the Desertion Charge
Pym rose with sincere embarrassment; for he was an American,
and his respect for ladies was real, and not at all
scientific.
"Ignoring," he said, "the delicate and considerable
knightly protests that have been called forth by my
colleague's native sense of oration, and apologizing to all
for whom our wild search for truth seems unsuitable to the
grand ruins of a feudal land, I still think my colleague's
question by no means devoid of rel'vancy. The last charge
against the accused was one of burglary; the next charge on
the paper is of bigamy and desertion. It does without
question appear that the defence, in aspiring to rebut the
last charge, have really admitted the next. Either Innocent
Smith is still under a charge of attempted burglary, or else
that is exploded; but he is pretty well fixed for attempted
bigamy. It all depends on what view we take of the alleged
letter from Curate Percy. Under these conditions I feel
justified in claiming my right to questions. May I ask how
the defence got hold of the letter from Curate Percy? Did
it come direct from the prisoner?"
"We have had nothing direct from the prisoner," said Moon
quietly. "The few documents which the defence guarantees
came to us from another quarter."
"From what quarter?" asked Dr. Pym.
"If you insist," answered Moon, "we had them from Miss
Gray.
Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his eyes, and,
instead, opened them very wide.
"Do you really mean to say," he said, "that Miss Gray was
in possession of this document testifying to a previous Mrs.
Smith?"
"Quite so," said Inglewood, and sat down.
The doctor said something about infatuation in a low and
painful voice, and then with visible difficulty continued
his opening remarks.
"Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed by Curate
Percy's narrative is only too crushingly confirmed by other
and shocking documents in our own possession. Of these the
principal and most certain is the testimony of Innocent
Smith's gardener, who was present at the most dramatic and
eye-opening of his many acts of marital infidelity. Mr.
Gould, the gardener, please."
Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness, arose to
present the gardener. That functionary explained that he
had served Mr. and Mrs. Innocent Smith when they had a
little house on the edge of Croydon. From the gardener's
tale, with its many small allusions, Inglewood grew certain
he had seen the place. It was one of those corners of town
or country that one does not forget, for it looked like a
frontier. The garden hung very high above the lane, and its
end was steep and sharp, like a fortress. Beyond was a roll
of real country, with a white path sprawling across it, and
the roots, boles, and branches of great gray trees writhing
and twisting against the sky. But as if to assert that the
lane itself was suburban, were sharply relieved against that
gray and tossing upland a lamp-post painted a peculiar
yellow-green and a red pillar-box that stood exactly at the
corner. Inglewood was sure of the place; he had passed it
twenty times in his constitutionals on the bicycle; he had
always dimly felt it was a place where something might
occur. But it gave him quite a shiver to feel that the face
of his frightful friend or enemy Smith might at any time
have appeared over the garden bushes above. The gardener's
account, unlike the curate's, was quite free from decorative
adjectives, however many he may have uttered privately while
writing it. He simply said that on a particular morning Mr.
Smith came out and began to play about with a rake, as he
often did. Sometimes he would tickle the nose of his eldest
child (he had two children); sometimes he would hook the
rake on to the branch of a tree, and hoist himself up with
horrible gymnastic jerks, like those of a giant frog in its
final agony. Never, apparently, did he think of putting the
rake to any of its proper uses, and the gardener, in
consequence, treated his actions with coldness and brevity.
But the gardener was certain that on one particular morning
in October he (the gardener) had come round the corner of
the house carrying the hose, had seen Mr. Smith standing on
the lawn in a striped red and white jacket (which might have
been his smoking-jacket, but was quite as like a part of his
pyjamas), and had heard him then and there call out to his
wife, who was looking out of the bedroom window on to the
garden, these decisive and very loud expressions --
"I won't stay here any longer. I've got another wife and
much better children a long way from here. My other wife's
got redder hair than yours, and my other garden's got a much
finer situation; and I'm going off to them."
With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far
up into the sky, higher than many could have shot an arrow,
and caught it again. Then he cleared the hedge at a leap,
and alighted on his feet down in the lane below, and set off
up the road without even a hat. Much of the picture was
doubtless supplied by Inglewood's accidental memory of the
place. He could see with his mind's eye that big
bare-headed figure with the ragged rake swaggering up the
crooked woodland road, and leaving lamp-post and pillar-box
behind. But the gardener, on his own account, was quite
prepared to swear to the public confession of bigamy, to the
temporary disappearance of the rake in the sky, and the
final disappearance of the man up the road. Moreover, being
a local man, he could swear that, beyond some local rumours
that Smith had embarked on the south-eastern coast, nothing
was known of him again.
This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by
Michael Moon in the few but clear phrases in which he opened
the defence upon the third charge. So far from denying that
Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared upon the
Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own
account. "I hope you are not so insular," he said, "that
you will not respect the word of a French innkeeper as much
as that of an English gardener. By Mr. Inglewood's favour
we will hear the French innkeeper."
Before the company had decided the delicate point
Inglewood was already reading the account in question. It
was in French. It seemed to them to run something like
this: --
"Sir, -- Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin's Cafe on the sea-
front at Gras, rather north of Dunquerque. I am willing to
write all I know of the stranger out of the sea.
"I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets. A man of
sense looks for beauty in things deliberately intended to be
beautiful, such as a trim flower-bed or an ivory statuette.
One does not permit beauty to pervade one's whole life, just
as one does not pave all the roads with ivory or cover all
the fields with geraniums. My faith, but we should miss the
onions!
"But whether I read things backwards through my memory,
or whether there are indeed atmospheres of psychology which
the eye of science cannot as yet pierce, it is the
humiliating fact that on that particular evening I felt like
a poet -- like any little rascal of a poet who drinks
absinthe in the mad Montmartre.
"Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green
and bitter and poisonous. I had never known it look
unfamiliar before. In the sky was that early and stormy
darkness that is so depressing to the mind, and the wind
blew shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk where
they sell the newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the
shore. There I saw a fishing-boat with a brown sail
standing in silently from the sea. It was already quite
close, and out of it clambered a man of monstrous stature,
who came wading to shore with the water not up to his knees,
though it would have reached the hips of many men. He
leaned on a long rake or forked pole, which looked like a
trident, and made him look like a Triton. Wet as he was,
and with strips of seaweed clinging to him, he walked across
to my cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside, asked for
cherry brandy, a liqueur which I keep, but is seldom
demanded. Then the monster, with great politeness, invited
me to partake of a vermouth before my dinner, and we fell
into conversation. He had apparently crossed from Kent by a
small boat got at a private bargain because of some odd
fancy he had for passing promptly in an easterly direction,
and not waiting for any of the official boats. He was, he
somewhat vaguely explained, looking for a house. When I
naturally asked where the house was, he answered that he did
not know: it was on an island; it was somewhere to the east;
or, as he expressed it with a hazy and yet impatient
gesture, `over there.'
"I asked him how, if he did not know the place, he would
know it when he saw it. Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy,
and became alarmingly minute. He gave a description of the
house detailed enough for an auctioneer. I have forgotten
nearly all the details except the last two, which were that
the lamp-post was painted green, and that there was a red
pillar-box at the corner.
"`A red pillar-box!' I cried in astonishment. `Why, the
place must be in England!'
"`I had forgotten,' he said, nodding heavily. `That is
the island's name.'
"`But, nom du nom,' I cried testily, `you've just come
from England, my boy.'
"`They SAID it was England,' said my imbecile,
conspiratorially. `They said it was Kent. But those
Kentish men are such liars one can't believe anything they
say.'
"`Monsieur,' I said, `you must pardon me. I am elderly,
and the ~fumisteries~ of the young men are beyond me. I go
by common sense, or, at the largest, by that extension of
applied common sense called science.'
"`Science!' cried the stranger. `There is only one good
thing science ever discovered -- a good thing, good tidings
of great joy -- that the world is round.'
"I told him with civility that his words conveyed no
impression to my intelligence. `I mean,' he said, `that
going right round the world is the shortest way to where you
are already.'
"`Is it not even shorter,' I asked, `to stop where you
are?'
"`No, no, no!' he cried emphatically. `That way is long
and very weary. At the end of the world, at the back of the
dawn, I shall find the wife I really married and the house
that is really mine. And that house will have a greener
lamp-post and a redder pillar-box. Do you,' he asked with a
sudden intensity, `do you never want to rush out of your
house in order to find it?'
"`No, I think not,' I replied; `reason tells a man from
the first to adapt his desires to the probable supply of
life. I remain here, content to fulfil the life of man.
All my interests are here, and most of my friends, and --'
"`And yet,' he cried, starting to his almost terrific
height, `you made the French Revolution!'
"`Pardon me," I said, `I am not quite so elderly. A
relative perhaps.'
"`I mean your sort did!' exclaimed this personage. `Yes,
your damned smug, settled, sensible sort made the French
Revolution. Oh! I know some say it was no good, and you're
just back where you were before. Why, blast it all, that's
just where we all want to be -- back where we were before!
That is revolution -- going right round. Every revolution,
like every repentance, is a return.'
"He was so excited that I waited till he had taken his
seat again, and then said something indifferent and
soothing; but he struck the tiny table with his colossal
fist and went on.
"`I am going to have a revolution, not a French
Revolution, but an English Revolution. God has given to
each tribe its own type of mutiny. The Frenchmen march
against the citadel of the city together; the Englishman
marches to the outskirts of the city, and alone. But I am
going to turn the world upside down too. I'm going to turn
myself upside down. I'm going to walk upside down in the
cursed upsidedownland of the Antipodes, where trees and men
hang head downward in the sky. But my revolution, like
yours, like the earth's, will end up in the holy, happy
place -- the celestial, incredible place -- the place where
we were before.'
"With these remarks, which can scarcely be reconciled
with reason, he leapt from the seat and strode away into the
twilight, swinging his pole and leaving behind him an
excessive payment, which also pointed to some loss of mental
balance. This is all I know of the episode of the man
landed from the fishing-boat, and I hope it may serve the
interests of justice. -- Accept, Sir, the assurances of the
very high consideration, with which I have the honour to be
your obedient servant,
"Jules Durobin."
"The next document in our dossier," continued Inglewood,
"comes from the town of Crazok, in the central plains of
Russia, and runs as follows: --
"Sir, -- My name is Paul Nickolaiovitch: I am the
stationmaster at the station near Crazok. The great trains
go by across the plains taking people to China, but very few
people get down at the platform where I have to watch. This
makes my life rather lonely, and I am thrown back much upon
the books I have. But I cannot discuss these very much with
my neighbours, for enlightened ideas have not spread in this
part of Russia so much as in other parts. Many of the
peasants round here have never heard of Bernard Shaw.
"I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread Liberal ideas;
but since the failure of the revolution this has been even
more difficult. The revolutionists committed many acts
contrary to the pure principles of humanitarianism, with
which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books, they were ill
acquainted. I did not approve of these cruel acts, though
provoked by the tyranny of the government; but now there is
a tendency to reproach all Intelligents with the memory of
them. This is very unfortunate for Intelligents.
"It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a
few trains came through at long intervals, that I stood one
day watching a train that had come in. Only one person got
out of the train, far away up at the other end of it, for it
was a very long train. It was evening, with a cold,
greenish sky. A little snow had fallen, but not enough to
whiten the plain, which stretched away a sort of sad purple
in all directions, save where the flat tops of some distant
tablelands caught the evening light like lakes. As the
solitary man came stamping along on the thin snow by the
train he grew larger and larger; I thought I had never seen
so large a man. But he looked even taller than he was, I
think, because his shoulders were very big and his head
comparatively little. From the big shoulders hung a
tattered old jacket, striped dull red and dirty white, very
thin for the winter, and one hand rested on a huge pole such
as peasants rake in weeds with to burn them.
"Before he had traversed the full length of the train he
was entangled in one of those knots of rowdies that were the
embers of the extinct revolution, though they mostly
disgraced themselves upon the government side. I was just
moving to his assistance, when he whirled up his rake and
laid out right and left with such energy that he came
through them without scathe and strode right up to me,
leaving them staggered and really astonished.
"Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt an assertion of
his aim, he could only say rather dubiously in French that
he wanted a house.
"`There are not many houses to be had round here,' I
answered in the same language, `the district has been very
disturbed. A revolution, as you know, has recently been
suppressed. Any further building --'
"`Oh! I don't mean that,' he cried; `I mean a real house
-- a live house. It really is a live house, for it runs
away from me.'
"`I am ashamed to say that something in his phrase or
gesture moved me profoundly. We Russians are brought up in
an atmosphere of folk-lore, and its unfortunate effects can
still be seen in the bright colours of the children's dolls
and of the ikons. For an instant the idea of a house
running away from a man gave me pleasure, for the
enlightenment of man moves slowly.
"`Have you no other house of your own?' I asked.
"`I have left it,' he said very sadly. `It was not the
house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife
was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.'
"`And so,' I said with sympathy, `you walked straight out
of the front door, like a masculine Nora.'
"`Nora?' he inquired politely, apparently supposing it to
be a Russian word.
"`I mean Nora in "The Doll's House,"' I replied.
"At this he looked very much astonished, and I knew he
was an Englishman; for Englishmen always think that Russians
study nothing but `ukases.'
"`"The Doll's House"!' he cried vehemently; `why, that is
just where Ibsen was so wrong! Why, the whole aim of a
house is to be a doll's house. Don't you remember, when you
were a child, how those little windows WERE windows, while
the big windows weren't. A child has a doll's house, and
shrieks when a front door opens inwards. A banker has a
real house, yet how numerous are the bankers who fail to
emit the faintest shriek when their real front doors open
inwards.'
"Something from the folk-lore of my infancy still kept me
foolishly silent; and before I could speak, the Englishman
had leaned over and was saying in a sort of loud whisper, `I
have found out how to make a big thing small. I have found
out how to turn a house into a doll's house. Get a long way
off it: God lets us turn all things into toys by his great
gift of distance. Once let me see my old brick house
standing up quite little against the horizon, and I shall
want to go back to it again. I shall see the funny little
toy lamp-post painted green outside the gate, and all the
dear little people like dolls looking out of the window.
For the windows really open in my doll's house.'
"`But why?' I asked, `should you wish to return to that
particular doll's house? Having taken, like Nora, the bold
step against convention, having made yourself in the
conventional sense disreputable, having dared to be free,
why should you not take advantage of your freedom? As the
greatest modern writers have pointed out, what you called
your marriage was only your mood. You have a right to leave
it all behind, like the clippings of your hair or the
parings of your nails. Having once escaped, you have the
world before you. Though the words may seem strange to you,
you are free in Russia.'
"He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the
plains, where the only moving thing was the long and
labouring trail of smoke out of the railway engine, violet
in tint, volcanic in outline, the one hot and heavy cloud of
that cold clear evening of pale green.
"`Yes,' he said with a huge sigh, `I am free in Russia.
You are right. I could really walk into that town over
there and have love all over again, and perhaps marry some
beautiful woman and begin again, and nobody could ever find
me. Yes, you have certainly convinced me of something.'
"His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled
to ask him what he meant, and of what exactly I had
convinced him.
"`You have convinced me,' he said with the same dreamy
eye, `why it is really wicked and dangerous for a man to run
away from his wife.'
"`And why is it dangerous?' I inquired.
"`Why, because nobody can find him,' answered this odd
person, `and we all want to be found.'
"`The most original modern thinkers,' I remarked, `Ibsen,
Gorki, Nietzsche, Shaw, would all say rather that what we
want most is to be lost: to find ourselves in untrodden
paths, and to do unprecedented things: to break with the
past and belong to the future.'
"He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and
looked round on what was, I confess, a somewhat desolate
scene -- the dark purple plains, the neglected railroad, the
few ragged knots of the malcontents. `I shall not find the
house here,' he said. `It is still eastward -- further and
further eastward.'
"Then he turned upon me with something like fury, and
struck the foot of his pole upon the frozen earth.
"`And if I do go back to my country,' he cried, `I may be
locked up in a madhouse before I reach my own house. I have
been a bit unconventional in my time! Why, Nietzsche stood
in a row of ramrods in the silly old Prussian army, and Shaw
takes temperance beverages in the suburbs; but the things I
do are unprecedented things. This round road I am treading
is an untrodden path. I do believe in breaking out; I am a
revolutionist. But don't you see that all these real leaps
and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back
to Eden -- to something we have had, to something at least
we have heard of? Don't you see one only breaks the fence
or shoots the moon in order to get HOME?'
"`No,' I answered after due reflection, `I don't think I
should accept that.'
"`Ah,' he said with a sort of a sigh, `then you have
explained a second thing to me.'
"`What do you mean?' I asked; `what thing?'
"`Why your revolution has failed,' he said; and walking
across quite suddenly to the train he got into it just as it
was steaming away at last. And I saw the long snaky tail of
it disappear along the darkening flats.
"I saw no more of him. But though his views were adverse
to the best advanced thought, he struck me as an interesting
person: I should like to find out if he has produced any
literary works. -- Yours, etc.,
"Paul Nickolaiovitch."
There was something in this odd set of glimpses into
foreign lives which kept the absurd tribunal quieter than it
had hitherto been, and it was again without interruption
that Inglewood opened another paper upon his pile. "The
Court will be indulgent," he said, "if the next note lacks
the special ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is
ceremonious enough in its own way: --
"The Celestial Principles are permanent: Greeting. -- I
am Wong-Hi, and I tend the temple of all the ancestors of my
family in the forest of Fu. The man that broke through the
sky and came to me said that it must be very dull, but I
showed him the wrongness of his thought. I am indeed in one
place, for my uncle took me to this temple when I was a boy,
and in this I shall doubtless die. But if a man remain in
one place he shall see that the place changes. The pagoda
of my temple stands up silently out of all the trees, like a
yellow pagoda above many green pagodas. But the skies are
sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes green like
jade, and sometimes red like garnet. But the night is
always ebony and always returns, said the Emperor Ho.
"The sky-breaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had
hardly seen any stirring in the tops of the green trees over
which I look as over a sea, when I go to the top of the
temple at morning. And yet when he came, it was as if an
elephant had strayed from the armies of the great kings of
India. For palms snapped, and bamboos broke, and there came
forth in the sunshine before the temple one taller than the
sons of men.
"Strips of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a
carnival, and he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it
like the teeth of a dragon. His face was white and
discomposed, after the fashion of the foreigners, so that
they look like dead men filled with devils; and he spoke our
speech brokenly.
"He said to me, `This is only a temple; I am trying to
find a house.' And then he told me with indelicate haste
that the lamp outside his house was green, and that there
was a red post at the corner of it.
"`I have not seen your house or any houses,' I answered.
`I dwell in this temple and serve the gods.'
"`Do you believe in the gods?' he asked with hunger in
his eyes, like the hunger of dogs. And this seemed to me a
strange question to ask, for what should a man do except
what men have done?
"`My Lord,' I said, `it must be good for men to hold up
their hands even if the skies are empty. For if there are
gods, they will be pleased, and if there are none, then
there are none to be displeased. Sometimes the skies are
gold and sometimes porphyry and sometimes ebony, but the
trees and the temple stand still under all. So the great
Confucius taught us that if we do always the same things
with our hands and our feet as do the wise beasts and birds,
with our heads we may think many things: yes, my Lord, and
doubt many things. So long as men offer rice at the right
season, and kindle lanterns at the right hour, it matters
little whether there be gods or no. For these things are
not to appease gods, but to appease men.'
"He came yet closer to me, so that he seemed enormous;
yet his look was very gentle.
"`Break your temple,' he said, `and your gods will be
freed.'
"And I, smiling at his simplicity, answered: `And so, if
there be no gods, I shall have nothing but a broken temple.'
"And at this, that giant from whom the light of reason
was withheld threw out his mighty arms and asked me to
forgive him. And when I asked him for what he should be
forgiven he answered: `For being right.'
"`Your idols and emperors are so old and wise and
satisfying,' he cried, `it is a shame that they should be
wrong. We are so vulgar and violent, we have done you so
many iniquities -- it is a shame that we should be right
after all.'
"And I, still enduring his harmlessness, asked him why he
thought that he and his people were right.
"And he answered: `We are right because we are bound
where men should be bound, and free where men should be
free. We are right because we doubt and destroy laws and
customs -- but we do not doubt our own right to destroy
them. For you live by customs, but we by creeds. Behold
me! In my country I am called Smip. My country is
abandoned, my name is defiled, because I pursue across the
world what really belongs to me. You are steadfast as the
trees because you do not believe. I am as fickle as the
tempest because I do believe. I do believe in my own house,
which I shall find again. And at the last remaineth the
green lantern and the red post.'
"I said to him: `At the last remaineth only wisdom.'
"But even as I said the word he uttered a horrible shout,
and rushing forward disappeared among the trees. I have not
seen this man again nor any other man. The virtues of the
wise are of fine brass.
"Wong-Hi."
"The next letter I have to read," proceeded Arthur
Inglewood, "will probably make clear the nature of our
client's curious but innocent experiment. It is dated from
a mountain village in California, and runs as follows: --
"Sir, -- A person answering to the rather extraordinary
description required certainly went, some time ago, over the
high pass of the Sierras on which I live and of which I am
probably the sole stationary inhabitant. I keep a
rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than a hut, on the very top
of this specially steep and threatening pass. My name is
Louis Hara, and the very name may puzzle you about my
nationality. Well, it puzzles me a great deal. When one
has been for fifteen years without society it is hard to
have patriotism; and where there is not even a hamlet it is
difficult to invent a nation. My father was an Irishman of
the fiercest and most free-shooting of the old Californian
kind. My mother was a Spaniard, proud of descent from the
old Spanish families round San Francisco, yet accused for
all that of some admixture of Red Indian blood. I was well
educated and fond of music and books. But, like many other
hybrids, I was too good or too bad for the world; and after
attempting many things I was glad enough to get a sufficient
though a lonely living in this little cabaret in the
mountains. In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of a
savage. Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a
Red Indian, I wore in hot summers nothing but a pair of
leather trousers, with a great straw hat as big as a parasol
to defend me from the sun. I had a bowie knife at my belt
and a long gun under my arm; and I dare say I produced a
pretty wild impression on the few peaceable travellers that
could climb up to my place. But I promise you I never
looked as mad as that man did. Compared with him I was
Fifth Avenue.
"I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras
has an odd effect on the mind; one tends to think of those
lonely rocks not as peaks coming to a point, but rather as
pillars holding up heaven itself. Straight cliffs sail up
and away beyond the hope of the eagles; cliffs so tall that
they seem to attract the stars and collect them as sea-crags
collect a mere glitter of phosphorous. These terraces and
towers of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the
end of the world. Rather they seem to be its awful
beginning: its huge foundations. We could almost fancy the
mountain branching out above us like a tree of stone, and
carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum. For
just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far, so the
stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near.
The spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at
the earth than planets circling placidly about it.
"All this may have driven me mad: I am not sure. I know
there is one angle of the road down the pass where the rock
leans out a little, and on windy nights I seem to hear it
clashing overhead with other rocks -- yes, city against city
and citadel against citadel, far up into the night. It was
on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the
pass. Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up
the pass. But I had never seen one like this one before.
"He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated
garden rake, all bearded and bedraggled with grasses, so
that it looked like the ensign of some old barbarian tribe.
His hair, which was as long and rank as the grass, hung down
below his huge shoulders; and such clothes as clung about
him were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he had
the air of being dressed like an Indian in feathers or
autumn leaves. The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it was,
he used sometimes as an alpenstock, sometimes (I was told)
as a weapon. I do not know why he should have used it as a
weapon, for he had, and afterwards showed me, an excellent
six-shooter in his pocket. `But THAT,' he said, `I use only
for peaceful purposes.' I have no notion what he meant.
"He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank
some wine from the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy
over it like one who had travelled long among alien, cruel
things and found at last something that he knew. Then he
sat staring rather foolishly at the rude lantern of lead and
coloured glass that hangs over my door. It is old, but of
no value; my grandmother gave it me long ago: she was
devout, and it happens that the glass is painted with a
crude picture of Bethlehem and the Wise Men and the Star.
He seemed so mesmerized with the transparent glow of Our
Lady's blue gown and the big gold star behind, that he led
me also to look at the thing, which I had not done for
fourteen years.
"Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked
out eastward where the road fell away below us. The sunset
sky was a vault of rich violet, fading away into mauve and
silver round the edges of the dark mountain ampitheatre; and
between us and the ravine below rose up out of the deeps and
went up into the heights the straight solitary rock we call
Green Finger. Of a queer volcanic colour, and wrinkled all
over with what looks undecipherable writing, it hung there
like a Babylonian pillar or needle.
"The man silently stretched out his rake in that
direction, and before he spoke I knew what he meant. Beyond
the great green rock in the purple sky hung a single star.
"`A star in the east,' he said in a strange hoarse voice
like one of our ancient eagles'. `The wise men followed the
star and found the house. But if I followed the star,
should I find the house?'
"`It depends perhaps,' I said, smiling, `on whether you
are a wise man.' I refrained from adding that he certainly
didn't look it.
"`You may judge for yourself,' he answered. `I am a man
who left his own house because he could no longer bear to be
away from it.'
"`It certainly sounds paradoxical,' I said.
"`I heard my wife and children talking and saw them
moving about the room,' he continued, `and all the time I
knew they were walking and talking in another house
thousands of miles away, under the light of different skies,
and beyond the series of the seas. I loved them with a
devouring love, because they seemed not only distant but
unattainable. Never did human creatures seem so dear and so
desirable: but I seemed like a cold ghost. I loved them
intolerably; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet
for a testimony. Nay, I did more. I spurned the world
under my feet so that it swung full circle like a
treadmill.'
"`Do you really mean,' I cried, `that you have come right
round the world? Your speech is English, yet you are coming
from the west.'
"`My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,' he replied
sadly. `I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an
exile.'
"Something in the word `pilgrim' awoke down in the roots
of my ruinous experience memories of what my fathers had
felt about the world, and of something from whence I came.
I looked again at the little pictured lantern at which I had
not looked for fourteen years.
"`My grandmother,' I said in a low tone, `would have said
that we were all in exile, and that no earthly house could
cure the holy home-sickness that forbids us rest.'
"He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle
drift out beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.
"Then he said, `I think your grandmother was right,' and
stood up leaning on his grassy pole. `I think that must be
the reason,' he said -- `the secret of this life of man, so
ecstatic and so unappeased. But I think there is more to be
said. I think God has given us the love of special places,
of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.'
"`I dare say,' I said. `What reason?'
"`Because otherwise,' he said, pointing his pole out at
the sky and the abyss, `we might worship that.'
"`What do you mean?' I demanded.
"`Eternity,' he said in his harsh voice, `the largest of
the idols -- the mightiest of the rivals of God.'
"`You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,' I
suggested.
"`I mean,' he said with increasing vehemence, `that if
there be a house for me in heaven it will either have a
green lamp-post and a hedge, or something quite as positive
and personal as a green lamp-post and a hedge. I mean that
God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things
however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be
a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries,
that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something
and not anything. And I would not be so very much surprised
if the house in heaven had a real green lamp-post after
all.'
"With which he shouldered his pole and went striding down
the perilous paths below, and left me alone with the
eagles. But since he went a fever of homelessness will
often shake me. I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud
cabins I have never seen; and I wonder whether America will
endure. -- Yours faithfully,
"Louis Hara."
After a short silence Inglewood said: "And, finally, we
desire to put in as evidence the following document: --
"This is to say that I am Ruth Davis, and have been
housemaid to Mrs. I. Smith at `The Laurels' in Croydon for
the last six months. When I came the lady was alone, with
two children; she was not a widow, but her husband was
away. She was left with plenty of money and did not seem
disturbed about him, though she often hoped he would be back
soon. She said he was rather eccentric and a little change
did him good. One evening last week I was bringing the
tea-things out on to the lawn when I nearly dropped them.
The end of a long rake was suddenly stuck over the hedge,
and planted like a jumping-pole; and over the hedge, just
like a monkey on a stick, came a huge, horrible man, all
hairy and ragged like Robinson Crusoe. I screamed out, but
my mistress didn't even get out of her chair, but smiled and
said he wanted shaving. Then he sat down quite calmly at
the garden table and took a cup of tea, and then I realized
that this must be Mr. Smith himself. He has stopped here
ever since and does not really give much trouble, though I
sometimes fancy he is a little weak in his head.
"Ruth Davis.
"P.S. -- I forgot to say that he looked round at the
garden and said, very loud and strong: `Oh, what a lovely
place you've got;' just as if he'd never seen it before."
The room had been growing dark and drowsy; the afternoon
sun sent one heavy shaft of powdered gold across it, which
fell with an intangible solemnity upon the empty seat of
Mary Gray, for the younger women had left the court before
the more recent of the investigations. Mrs. Duke was still
asleep, and Innocent Smith, looking like a huge hunchback in
the twilight, was bending closer and closer to his paper
toys. But the five men really engaged in the controversy,
and concerned not to convince the tribunal but to convince
each other, still sat round the table like the Committee of
Public Safety.
Suddenly Moses Gould banged one big scientific book on
top of another, cocked his little legs up against the table,
tipped his chair backwards so far as to be in direct danger
of falling over, emitted a startling and prolonged whistle
like a steam engine, and asserted that it was all his eye.
When asked by Moon what was all his eye, he banged down
behind the books again and answered with considerable
excitement, throwing his papers about. "All those fairy-
tales you've been reading out," he said. "Oh! don't talk to
me! I ain't littery and that, but I know fairy-tales when I
hear 'em. I got a bit stumped in some of the philosophical
bits and felt inclined to go out for a B. and S. But we're
living in West 'Ampstead and not in 'Ell; and the long and
the short of it is that some things 'appen and some things
don't 'appen. Those are the things that don't 'appen."
"I thought," said Moon gravely, "that we quite clearly
explained --"
"Oh yes, old chap, you quite clearly explained," assented
Mr. Gould with extraordinary volubility. "You'd explain an
elephant off the doorstep, you would. I ain't a clever chap
like you; but I ain't a born natural, Michael Moon, and when
there's an elephant on my doorstep I don't listen to no
explanations. `It's got a trunk,' I says. -- `My trunk,'
you says: `I'm fond of travellin', and a change does me
good.' -- `But the blasted thing's got tusks,' I says. --
`Don't look a gift 'orse in the mouth,' you says, `but thank
the goodness and the graice that on your birth 'as smiled.'
-- `But it's nearly as big as the 'ouse,' I says. -- `That's
the bloomin' perspective,' you says, `and the sacred magic
of distance.' -- `Why, the elephant's trumpetin' like the
Day of Judgement,' I says. -- `That's your own conscience
a-talking to you, Moses Gould,' you says in a grive and
tender voice. Well, I 'ave got a conscience as much as
you. I don't believe most of the things they tell you in
church on Sundays; and I don't believe these 'ere things any
more because you goes on about 'em as if you was in church.
I believe an elephant's a great big ugly dingerous beast --
and I believe Smith's another."
"Do you mean to say," asked Inglewood, "that you still
doubt the evidence of exculpation we have brought forward?"
"Yes, I do still doubt it," said Gould warmly. "It's all
a bit too far-fetched, and some of it a bit too far off.
'Ow can we test all those tales? 'Ow can we drop in and buy
the `Pink 'Un' at the railway station at Kosky Wosky or
whatever it was? 'Ow can we go and do a gargle at the
saloon-bar on top of the Sierra Mountains? But anybody can
go and see Bunting's boarding-house at Worthing."
Moon regarded him with an expression of real or assumed
surprise.
"Any one," continued Gould, "can call on Mr. Trip."
"It is a comforting thought," replied Michael with
restraint; "but why should any one call on Mr. Trip?"
"For just exactly the sime reason," cried the excited
Moses, hammering on the table with both hands, "for just
exactly the sime reason that he should communicate with
Messrs. 'Anbury and Bootle of Paternoster Row and with Miss
Gridley's 'igh class Academy at 'Endon, and with old Lady
Bullingdon who lives at Penge."
"Again, to go at once to the moral roots of life," said
Michael, "why is it among the duties of man to communicate
with old Lady Bullingdon who lives at Penge?"
"It ain't one of the duties of man," said Gould, "nor one
of his pleasures, either, I can tell you. She takes the
crumpet, does Lady Bullingdon at Penge. But it's one of the
duties of a prosecutor pursuin' the innocent, blameless
butterfly career of your friend Smith, and it's the sime
with all the others I mentioned."
"But why do you bring in these people here?" asked
Inglewood.
"Why! Because we've got proof enough to sink a
steamboat," roared Moses; "because I've got the papers in my
very 'and; because your precious Innocent is a blackguard
and 'ome smasher, and these are the 'omes he's smashed. I
don't set up for a 'oly man; but I wouldn't 'ave all those
poor girls on my conscience for something. And I think a
chap that's capable of deserting and perhaps killing 'em all
is about capable of cracking a crib or shootin' an old
schoolmaster -- so I don't care much about the other yarns
one way or another."
"I think," said Dr. Cyrus Pym with a refined cough, "that
we are approaching this matter rather irregularly. This is
really the fourth charge on the charge sheet, and perhaps I
had better put it before you in an ordered and scientific
manner."
Nothing but a faint groan from Michael broke the silence
of the darkening room.
Chapter IV
The Wild Weddings;
or, the Polygamy Charge
"A modern man," said Dr. Cyrus Pym, "must, if he be
thoughtful, approach the problem of marriage with some
caution. Marriage is a stage -- doubtless a suitable stage
-- in the long advance of mankind towards a goal which we
cannot as yet conceive; which we are not, perhaps, as yet
fitted even to desire. What, gentlemen, is now the ethical
position of marriage? Have we outlived it?"
"Outlived it?" broke out Moon; "why, nobody's ever
survived it! Look at all the people married since Adam and
Eve -- and all as dead as mutton."
"This is no doubt an inter-pellation joc'lar in its
character," said Dr. Pym frigidly. "I cannot tell what may
be Mr. Moon's matured and ethical view of marriage --"
"I can tell," said Michael savagely, out of the gloom.
"Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour
should decline."
"Michael," said Arthur Inglewood in a low voice, "you
MUST keep quiet."
"Mr. Moon," said Pym with exquisite good temper,
"probably regards the institution in a more antiquated
manner. Probably he would make it stringent and uniform.
He would treat divorce in some great soul of steel -- the
divorce of a Julius Caesar or of a Salt Ring Robinson --
exactly as he would treat some no-account tramp or labourer
who scoots from his wife. Science has views broader and
more humane. Just as murder for the scientist is a thirst
for absolute destruction, just as theft for the scientist is
a hunger for monotonous acquisition, so polygamy for the
scientist is an extreme development of the instinct for
variety. A man thus afflicted is incapable of constancy.
Doubtless there is a physical cause for this flitting from
flower to flower -- as there is, doubtless, for the
intermittent groaning which appears to afflict Mr. Moon at
the present moment. Our own world-scorning Winterbottom has
even dared to say, `For a certain rare and fine physical
type free polygamy is but the realization of the variety of
females, as comradeship is the realization of the variety of
males.' In any case, the type that tends to variety is
recognized by all authoritative inquirers. Such a type, if
the widower of a negress, does in many ascertained cases
espouse ~en seconde noces~ an albino; such a type, when
freed from the gigantic embraces of a female Patagonian,
will often evolve from its own imaginative instinct the
consoling figure of an Eskimo. To such a type there can be
no doubt that the prisoner belongs. If blind doom and
unbearable temptation constitute any slight excuse for a
man, there is no doubt that he has these excuses.
"Earlier in the inquiry the defence showed real chivalric
ideality in admitting half of our story without further
dispute. We should like to acknowledge and imitate so
eminently large-hearted a style by conceding also that the
story told by Curate Percy about the canoe, the weir, and
the young wife seems to be substantially true. Apparently
Smith did marry a young woman he had nearly run down in a
boat; it only remains to be considered whether it would not
have been kinder of him to have murdered her instead of
marrying her. In confirmation of this fact I can now
con-cede to the defence an unquestionable record of such a
marriage."
So saying, he handed across to Michael a cutting from the
"Maidenhead Gazette" which distinctly recorded the marriage
of the daughter of a "coach," a tutor well known in the
place, to Mr. Innocent Smith, late of Brakespeare College,
Cambridge.
When Dr. Pym resumed it was realized that his face had
grown at once both tragic and triumphant.
"I pause upon this pre-liminary fact," he said seriously,
"because this fact alone would give us the victory, were we
aspiring after victory and not after truth. As far as the
personal and domestic problem holds us, that problem is
solved. Dr. Warner and I entered this house at an instant
of highly emotional diff'culty. England's Warner has
entered many houses to save human kind from sickness; this
time he entered to save an innocent lady from a walking
pestilence. Smith was just about to carry away a young girl
from this house; his cab and bag were at the very door. He
had told her she was going to await the marriage license at
the house of his aunt. That aunt," continued Cyrus Pym, his
face darkening grandly -- "that visionary aunt had been the
dancing will-o'-the-wisp who had led many a high-souled
maiden to her doom. Into how many virginal ears has he
whispered that holy word? When he said `aunt' there glowed
about her all the merriment and high morality of the
Anglo-Saxon home. Kettles began to hum, pussy cats to purr,
in that very wild cab that was being driven to destruction."
Inglewood looked up, to find, to his astonishment (as
many another denizen of the eastern hemisphere has found),
that the American was not only perfectly serious, but was
really eloquent and affecting -- when the difference of the
hemispheres was adjusted.
"It is therefore atrociously evident that the man Smith
has at least represented himself to one innocent female of
this house as an eligible bachelor, being, in fact, a
married man. I agree with my colleague, Mr. Gould, that no
other crime could approximate to this. As to whether what
our ancestors called purity has any ultimate ethical value
indeed, science hesitates with a high, proud hesitation.
But what hesitation can there be about the baseness of a
citizen who ventures, by brutal experiments upon living
females, to anticipate the verdict of science on such a
point?
"The woman mentioned by Curate Percy as living with Smith
in Highbury may or may not be the same as the lady he
married in Maidenhead. If one short sweet spell of
constancy and heart repose interrupted the plunging torrent
of his profligate life, we will not deprive him of that long
past possibility. After that conjectural date, alas, he
seems to have plunged deeper and deeper into the shaking
quagmires of infidelity and shame."
Dr. Pym closed his eyes, but the unfortunate fact that
there was no more light left this familiar signal without
its full and proper moral effect. After a pause, which
almost partook of the character of prayer, he continued.
"The first instance of the accused's repeated and
irregular nuptials," he exclaimed, "comes from Lady
Bullingdon, who expresses herself with the high haughtiness
which must be excused in those who look out upon all mankind
from the turrets of a Norman and ancestral keep. The
communication she has sent to us runs as follows: --
"Lady Bullingdon recalls the painful incident to which
reference is made, and has no desire to deal with it in
detail. The girl Polly Green was a perfectly adequate
dressmaker, and lived in the village for about two years.
Her unattached condition was bad for her as well as for the
general morality of the village. Lady Bullingdon,
therefore, allowed it to be understood that she favoured the
marriage of the young woman. The villagers, naturally
wishing to oblige Lady Bullingdon, came forward in several
cases; and all would have been well had it not been for the
deplorable eccentricity or depravity of the girl Green
herself. Lady Bullingdon supposes that where there is a
village there must be a village idiot, and in her village,
it seems, there was one of these wretched creatures. Lady
Bullingdon only saw him once, and she is quite aware that it
is really difficult to distinguish between actual idiots and
the ordinary heavy type of the rural lower classes. She
noticed, however, the startling smallness of his head in
comparison to the rest of his body; and, indeed, the fact of
his having appeared upon election day wearing the rosette of
both the two opposing parties appears to Lady Bullingdon to
put the matter quite beyond doubt. Lady Bullingdon was
astounded to learn that this afflicted being had put himself
forward as one of the suitors of the girl in question. Lady
Bullingdon's nephew interviewed the wretch upon the point,
telling him that he was a `donkey' to dream of such a thing,
and actually received, along with an imbecile grin, the
answer that donkeys generally go after carrots. But Lady
Bullingdon was yet further amazed to find the unhappy girl
inclined to accept this monstrous proposal, though she was
actually asked in marriage by Garth, the undertaker, a man
in a far superior position to her own. Lady Bullingdon
could not, of course, countenance such an arrangement for a
moment, and the two unhappy persons escaped for a
clandestine marriage. Lady Bullingdon cannot exactly recall
the man's name, but thinks it was Smith. He was always
called in the village the Innocent. Later, Lady Bullingdon
believes he murdered Green in a mental outbreak."
"The next communication," proceeded Pym, "is more
conspicuous for brevity, but I am of the opinion that it
will adequately convey the upshot. It is dated from the
offices of Messrs. Hanbury and Bootle, publishers, and is as
follows: --
"Sir, -- Yrs. rcd. and conts. noted. Rumour re
typewriter possibly refers to a Miss Blake or similar name,
left here nine years ago to marry an organ-grinder. Case
was undoubtedly curious, and attracted police attention.
Girl worked excellently till about Oct. 1907, when
apparently went mad. Record was written at the time, part
of which I enclose. -- Yrs., etc., W. Trip."
"The fuller statement runs as follows: --
"On October 12 a letter was sent from this office to
Messrs. Bernard and Juke, bookbinders. Opened by Mr. Juke,
it was found to contain the following: `Sir, our Mr. Trip
will call at 3, as we wish to know whether it is really
decided 00000073bb!!!!!xy.' To this Mr. Juke, a person of a
playful mind, returned the answer: `Sir, after consulting
all the members of the firm, I am in a position to give it
as my most decided opinion that it is not really decided
that 00000073bb!!!!!xy. Yrs., etc.,
`J. Juke.'
"On receiving this extraordinary reply, our Mr. Trip
asked for the original letter sent from him, and found that
the typewriter had indeed substituted these demented
hieroglyphics for the sentences really dictated to her. Our
Mr. Trip interviewed the girl, fearing that she was in an
unbalanced state, and was not much reassured when she merely
remarked that she always went like that when she heard the
barrel organ. Becoming yet more hysterical and extravagant,
she made a series of most improbable statements -- as, that
she was engaged to the barrel-organ man, that he was in the
habit of serenading her on that instrument, that she was in
the habit of playing back to him upon the typewriter (in the
style of King Richard and Blondel), and that the organ man's
musical ear was so exquisite and his adoration of herself so
ardent that he could detect the note of the different
letters on the machine, and was enraptured by them as by a
melody. To all these statements of course our Mr. Trip and
the rest of us only paid that sort of assent that is paid to
persons who must as quickly as possible be put in the charge
of their relations. But on our conducting the lady
downstairs, her story received the most startling and even
exasperating confirmation; for the organ-grinder, an
enormous man with a small head and manifestly a
fellow-lunatic, had pushed his barrel organ in at the office
doors like a battering-ram, and was boisterously demanding
his alleged fiancee. When I myself came on the scene he was
flinging his great, ape-like arms about and reciting a poem
to her. But we were used to lunatics coming and reciting
poems in our office, and we were not quite prepared for what
followed. The actual verse he uttered began, I think,
`O vivid, inviolate head,
Ringed --'
but he never got any further. Mr. Trip made a sharp
movement towards him, and the next moment the giant picked
up the poor lady typewriter like a doll, sat her on top of
the organ, ran it with a crash out of the office doors, and
raced away down the street like a flying wheelbarrow. I put
the police upon the matter; but no trace of the amazing pair
could be found. I was sorry myself; for the lady was not
only pleasant but unusually cultivated for her position. As
I am leaving the service of Messrs. Hanbury and Bootle, I
put these things in a record and leave it with them.
"(Signed) Aubrey Clarke,
Publishers' reader."
"And the last document," said Dr. Pym complacently, "is
from one of those high-souled women who have in this age
introduced your English girlhood to hockey, the higher
mathematics, and every form of ideality.
"Dear Sir (she writes), -- I have no objection to telling
you the facts about the absurd incident you mention; though
I would ask you to communicate them with some caution, for
such things, however entertaining in the abstract, are not
always auxiliary to the success of a girls' school. The
truth is this: I wanted some one to deliver a lecture on a
philological or historical question -- a lecture which,
while containing solid educational matter, should be a
little more popular and entertaining than usual, as it was
the last lecture of the term. I remembered that a Mr. Smith
of Cambridge had written somewhere or other an amusing essay
about his own somewhat ubiquitous name -- an essay which
showed considerable real knowledge of genealogy and
topography. I wrote to him, asking if he would come and
give us a bright address upon English surnames; and he did.
It was very bright, almost too bright. To put the matter
otherwise, by the time that he was halfway through it became
apparent to the other mistresses and myself that the man was
totally and entirely off his head. He began rationally
enough by dealing with the two departments of place names
and trade names, and he said (quite rightly, I dare say)
that the loss of all significance in names was an instance
of the deadening of civilization. But then he went on
calmly to maintain that every man who had a place name ought
to go to live in that place, and that every man who had a
trade name ought instantly to adopt that trade; that people
named after colours should always dress in those colours,
and that people named after trees or plants (such as Beech
or Rose) ought to surround and decorate themselves with
these vegetables. In a slight discussion that arose
afterwards among the elder girls the difficulties of the
proposal were clearly, and even eagerly, pointed out. It
was urged, for instance, by Miss Younghusband that it was
substantially impossible for her to play the part assigned
to her; Miss Mann was in a similar dilemma, from which no
modern views on the sexes could apparently extricate her;
and some young ladies, whose surnames happened to be Low,
Coward, and Craven, were quite enthusiastic against the
idea. But all this happened afterwards. What happened at
the crucial moment was that the lecturer produced several
horseshoes and a large iron hammer from his bag, announced
his immediate intention of setting up a smithy in the
neighbourhood, and called on every one to rise in the same
cause as for a heroic revolution. The other mistresses and
I attempted to stop the wretched man, but I must confess
that by an accident this very intercession produced the
worst explosion of his insanity. He was waving the hammer,
and wildly demanding the names of everybody; and it so
happened that Miss Brown, one of the younger teachers, was
wearing a brown dress -- a reddish-brown dress that went
quietly enough with the warmer colour of her hair, as well
she knew. She was a nice girl, and nice girls do know about
those things. But when our maniac discovered that we really
had a Miss Brown who WAS brown, his ~idee fixe~ blew up like
a powder magazine, and there, in the presence of all the
mistresses and girls, he publicly proposed to the lady in
the red-brown dress. You can imagine the effect of such a
scene at a girls' school. At least, if you fail to imagine
it, I certainly fail to describe it.
"Of course, the anarchy died down in a week or two, and I
can think of it now as a joke. There was only one curious
detail, which I will tell you, as you say your inquiry is
vital; but I should desire you to consider it a little more
confidential than the rest. Miss Brown, who was an
excellent girl in every way, did quite suddenly and
surreptitiously leave us only a day or two afterwards. I
should never have thought that her head would be the one to
be really turned by so absurd an excitement. -- Believe me,
yours faithfully,
"Ada Gridley."
"I think," said Pym, with a really convincing simplicity
and seriousness, "that these letters speak for themselves."
Mr. Moon rose for the last time in a darkness that gave
no hint of whether his native gravity was mixed with his
native irony.
"Throughout this inquiry," he said, "but especially in
this its closing phase, the prosecution has perpetually
relied upon one argument; I mean the fact that no one knows
what has become of all the unhappy women apparently seduced
by Smith. There is no sort of proof that they were
murdered, but that implication is perpetually made when the
question is asked as to how they died. Now I am not
interested in how they died, or when they died, or whether
they died. But I am interested in another analogous
question -- that of how they were born, and when they were
born, and whether they were born. Do not misunderstand me.
I do not dispute the existence of these women, or the
veracity of those who have witnessed to them. I merely
remark on the notable fact that only one of these victims,
the Maidenhead girl, is described as having any home or
parents. All the rest are boarders or birds of passage -- a
guest, a solitary dressmaker, a bachelor-girl doing
typewriting. Lady Bullingdon, looking from her turrets,
which she bought from the Whartons with the old
soap-boiler's money when she jumped at marrying an
unsuccessful gentleman from Ulster -- Lady Bullingdon,
looking out from those turrets, did really see an object
which she describes as Green. Mr. Trip, of Hanbury and
Bootle, really did have a typewriter betrothed to Smith.
Miss Gridley, though idealistic, is absolutely honest. She
did house, feed, and teach a young woman whom Smith
succeeded in decoying away. We admit that all these women
really lived. But we still ask whether they were ever
born?"
"Oh, crikey!" said Moses Gould, stifled with amusement.
"There could hardly," interposed Pym with a quiet smile,
"be a better instance of the neglect of true scientific
processes. The scientist, when once convinced of the fact
of vitality and consciousness, would infer from these the
previous processes of generation."
"If these gals," said Gould impatiently -- "if these gals
were all alive (all alive O!) I'd chance a fiver they were
all born."
"You'd lose your fiver," said Michael, speaking gravely
out of the gloom. "All those admirable ladies were alive.
They were more alive for having come into contact with
Smith. They were all quite definitely alive, but only one
of them was ever born."
"Are you asking us to believe --" began Dr. Pym.
"I am asking you a second question," said Moon sternly.
"Can the court now sitting throw any light on a truly
singular circumstance? Dr. Pym, in his interesting lecture
on what are called, I believe, the relations of the sexes,
said that Smith was the slave of a lust for variety which
would lead a man first to a negress and then to an albino,
first to a Patagonian giantess and then to a tiny Eskimo.
But is there any evidence of such variety here? Is there
any trace of a gigantic Patagonian in the story? Was the
typewriter an Eskimo? So picturesque a circumstance would
not surely have escaped remark. Was Lady Bullingdon's
dressmaker a negress? A voice in my bosom answers, `No!'
Lady Bullingdon, I am sure, would think a negress so
conspicuous as to be almost Socialistic, and would feel
something a little rakish even about an albino.
"But was there in Smith's taste any such variety as the
learned doctor describes? So far as our slight materials
go, the very opposite seems to be the case. We have only
one actual description of any of the prisoner's wives -- the
short but highly poetic account by the aesthetic curate.
`Her dress was the colour of spring, and her hair of autumn
leaves.' Autumn leaves, of course, are of various colours,
some of which would be rather startling in hair (green, for
instance); but I think such an expression would be most
naturally used of the shades from red-brown to red,
especially as ladies with their coppery-coloured hair do
frequently wear light artistic greens. Now when we come to
the next wife, we find the eccentric lover, when told he is
a donkey, answering that donkeys always go after carrots; a
remark which Lady Bullingdon evidently regarded as pointless
and part of the natural table-talk of a village idiot, but
which has an obvious meaning if we suppose that Polly's hair
was red. Passing to the next wife, the one he took from the
girls' school, we find Miss Gridley noticing that the
schoolgirl in question wore `a reddish-brown dress, that
went quietly enough with the warmer colour of her hair.' In
other words, the colour of the girl's hair was something
redder than red-brown. Lastly, the romantic organ-grinder
declaimed in the office some poetry that only got as far as
the words, --
`O vivid, inviolate head,
Ringed --'
But I think that a wide study of the worst modern poets will
enable us to guess that `ringed with a glory of red,' or
`ringed with its passionate red,' was the line that rhymed
to `head.' In this case once more, therefore, there is good
reason to suppose that Smith fell in love with a girl with
some sort of auburn or darkish-red hair -- rather," he said,
looking down at the table, "rather like Miss Gray's hair."
Cyrus Pym was leaning forward with lowered eyelids, ready
with one of his more pedantic interpellations; but Moses
Gould suddenly struck his forefinger on his nose, with an
expression of extreme astonishment and intelligence in his
brilliant eyes.
"Mr. Moon's contention at present," interposed Pym, "is
not, even if veracious, inconsistent with the
lunatico-criminal view of I. Smith, which we have nailed to
the mast. Science has long anticipated such a
complication. An incurable attraction to a particular type
of physical woman is one of the commonest of criminal
per-versities, and when not considered narrowly, but in the
light of induction and evolution --"
"At this late stage," said Michael Moon very quietly, "I
may perhaps relieve myself of a simple emotion that has been
pressing me throughout the proceedings, by saying that
induction and evolution may go and boil themselves. The
Missing Link and all that is well enough for kids, but I'm
talking about things we know. All we know of the Missing
Link is that he is missing -- and he won't be missed
either. I know all about his human head and his horrid
tail; they belong to a very old game called `Heads I win,
tails you lose.' If you do find a fellow's bones, it proves
he lived a long while ago; if you don't find his bones, it
proves how long ago he lived. That is the game you've been
playing with this Smith affair. Because Smith's head is
small for his shoulders you call him microcephalous; if it
had been large, you'd have called it water-on-the-brain. As
long as poor old Smith's seraglio seemed pretty various,
variety was the sign of madness: now, because it's turning
out to be a bit monochrome -- now monotony is the sign of
madness. I suffer from all the disadvantages of being a
grown-up person, and I'm jolly well going to get some of the
advantages too; and with all politeness I propose not to be
bullied with long words instead of short reasons, or
consider your business a triumphant progress merely because
you're always finding out that you were wrong. Having
relieved myself of these feelings, I have merely to add that
I regard Dr. Pym as an ornament to the world far more
beautiful than the Parthenon, or the monument on Bunker's
Hill, and that I propose to resume and conclude my remarks
on the many marriages of Mr. Innocent Smith.
"Besides this red hair, thee is another unifying thread
that runs through these scattered incidents. There is
something very peculiar and suggestive about the names of
these women. Mr. Trip, you will remember, said he thought
the typewriter's name was Blake, but could not remember
exactly. I suggest that it might have been Black, and in
that case we have a curious series: Miss Green in Lady
Bullingdon's village; Miss Brown at the Hendon School; Miss
Black at the publishers. A chord of colours, as it were,
which ends up with Miss Gray at Beacon House, West
Hampstead."
Amid a dead silence Moon continued his exposition. "What
is the meaning of this queer coincidence about colours?
Personally I cannot doubt for a moment that these names are
purely arbitrary names, assumed as part of some general
scheme or joke. I think it very probably that they were
taken from a series of costumes -- that Polly Green only
meant Polly (or Mary) when in green, and that Mary Gray only
means Mary (or Polly) when in gray. This would explain --"
Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and almost pallid. "Do
you actually mean to suggest --" he cried.
"Yes," said Michael; "I do mean to suggest that.
Innocent Smith has had many wooings, and many weddings for
all I know; but he has had only one wife. She was sitting
on that chair an hour ago, and is now talking to Miss Duke
in the garden.
"Yes, Innocent Smith has behaved here, as he has on
hundreds of other occasions, upon a plain and perfectly
blameless principle. It is odd and extravagant in the
modern world, but not more than any other principle plainly
applied in the modern world would be. His principle can be
quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still
alive. He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock
to the intellect, that he is still a man alive, walking on
two legs about the world. For this reason he fires bullets
at his best friends; for this reason he arranges ladders and
collapsible chimneys to steal his own property; for this
reason he goes plodding round a whole planet to get back to
his own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit
of taking the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty,
and leaving her about (so to speak) at schools,
boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might
recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic
elopement. He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of
his bride to keep alive the sense of her perpetual value,
and the perils that should be run for her sake.
"So far his motives are clear enough; but perhaps his
convictions are not quite so clear. I think Innocent Smith
has an idea at the bottom of all this. I am by no means
sure that I believe it myself, but I am quite sure that it
is worth a man's uttering and defending.
"The idea that Smith is attacking is this. Living in an
entangled civilization, we have come to think certain things
wrong which are not wrong at all. We have come to think
outbreak and exuberance, banging and barging, rotting and
wrecking, wrong. In themselves they are not merely
pardonable; they are unimpeachable. There is nothing wicked
about firing off a pistol even at a friend, so long as you
do not mean to hit him and know you won't. It is no more
wrong than throwing a pebble at the sea -- less, for you do
occasionally hit the sea. There is nothing wrong in bashing
down a chimney-pot and breaking through a roof, so long as
you are not injuring the life or property of other men. It
is no more wrong to choose to enter a house from the top
than to choose to open a packing-case from the bottom.
There is nothing wicked about walking round the world and
coming back to your own house; it is no more wicked than
walking round the garden and coming back to your own house.
And there is nothing wicked about picking up your wife here,
there, and everywhere, if, forsaking all others, you keep
only to her so long as you both shall live. It is as
innocent as playing a game of hide-and-seek in the garden.
You associate such acts with blackguardism by a mere
snobbish association, as you think there is something
vaguely vile about going (or being seen going) into a
pawnbroker's or a public-house. You think there is
something squalid and commonplace about such a connection.
You are mistaken.
"This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that
he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has
broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.
It is as if a man were found gambling wildly in a gambling
hell, and you found that he only played for trouser
buttons. It is as if you found a man making a clandestine
appointment with a lady at a Covent Garden ball, and then
you found it was his grandmother. Everything is ugly and
discreditable, except the facts; everything is wrong about
him, except that he has done no wrong.
"It will then be asked, `Why does Innocent Smith
continued far into his middle age a farcical existence, that
exposes him to so many false charges?' To this I merely
answer that he does it because he really is happy, because
he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and
alive. He is so young that climbing garden trees and
playing silly practical jokes are still to him what they
once were to us all. And if you ask me yet again why he
alone among men should be fed with such inexhaustible
follies, I have a very simple answer to that, though it is
one that will not be approved.
"There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don't
like it. If Innocent is happy, it is because he IS
innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just
because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he
does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is
still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is
just because he does not want to steal, because he does not
covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick
(oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own
goods. It is just because he does not want to commit
adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just
because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.
If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a
woman, he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a
love-letter was like a song -- at least, not a comic song."
"Do not imagine, please, that any such attitude is easy
to me or appeals in any particular way to my sympathies. I
am an Irishman, and a certain sorrow is in my bones, bred
either of the persecutions of my creed, or of my creed
itself. Speaking singly, I feel as if a man was tied to
tragedy, and there was no way out of the trap of old age and
doubt. But if there is a way out, then, by Christ and St.
Patrick, this is the way out. If one could keep as happy as
a child or a dog, it would be by being as innocent as a
child, or as sinless as a dog. Barely and brutally to be
good -- that may be the road, and he may have found it.
Well, well, well, I see a look of skepticism on the face of
my old friend Moses. Mr. Gould does not believe that being
perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry."
"No," said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity;
"I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects
would make a man merry."
"Well," said Michael quietly, "will you tell me one
thing? Which of us has ever tried it?"
A silence ensued, rather like the silence of some long
geological epoch which awaits the emergence of some
unexpected type; for there rose at last in the stillness a
massive figure that the other men had almost completely
forgotten.
"Well, gentlemen," said Dr. Warner cheerfully, "I've been
pretty well entertained with all this pointless and
incompetent tomfoolery for a couple of days; but it seems to
be wearing rather thin, and I'm engaged for a city dinner.
Among the hundred flowers of futility on both sides I was
unable to detect any sort of reason why a lunatic should be
allowed to shoot me in the back garden."
He had settled his silk hat on his head and gone out
sailing placidly to the garden gate, while the almost
wailing voice of Pym still followed him: "But really the
bullet missed you by several feet." And another voice
added: "The bullet missed him by several years."
There was a long and mainly unmeaning silence, and then
Moon said suddenly, "We have been sitting with a ghost. Dr.
Herbert Warner died years ago."
Chapter V
How the Great Wind Went
from Beacon House
Mary was walking between Diana and Rosamund slowly up and
down the garden; they were silent, and the sun had set.
Such spaces of daylight as remained open in the west were of
a warm-tinted white, which can be compared to nothing but a
cream cheese; and the lines of plumy cloud that ran across
them had a soft but vivid violet bloom, like a violet
smoke. All the rest of the scene swept and faded away into
a dove-like gray, and seemed to melt and mount into Mary's
dark-gray figure until she seemed clothed with the garden
and the skies. There was something in these last quiet
colours that gave her a setting and a supremacy; and the
twilight, which concealed Diana's statelier figure and
Rosamund's braver array, exhibited and emphasized her,
leaving her the lady of the garden, and alone.
When they spoke at last it was evident that a
conversation long fallen silent was being suddenly revived.
"But where is your husband taking you?" asked Diana in
her practical voice.
"To an aunt," said Mary; "that's just the joke. There
really is an aunt, and we left the children with her when I
arranged to be turned out of the other boarding-house down
the road. We never take more than a week of this kind of
holiday, but sometimes we take two of them together."
"Does the aunt mind much?" asked Rosamund innocently.
"Of course, I dare say it's very narrow-minded and -- what's
that other word? -- you know, what Goliath was -- but I've
known many aunts who would think it -- well, silly."
"Silly?" cried Mary with great heartiness. "Oh, my
Sunday hat! I should think it was silly! But what do you
expect? He really is a good man, and it might have been
snakes or something."
"Snakes?" inquired Rosamund, with a slightly puzzled
interest.
"Uncle Harry kept snakes, and said they loved him,"
replied Mary with perfect simplicity. "Auntie let him have
them in his pockets, but not in the bedroom."
"And you --" began Diana, knitting her dark brows a
little.
"Oh, I do as auntie did," said Mary; "as long as we're
not away from the children more than a fortnight together I
play the game. He calls me `Manalive;' and you must write
it all one word, or he's quite flustered."
"But if men want things like that," began Diana.
"Oh, what's the good of talking about men?" cried Mary
impatiently; "why, one might as well be a lady novelist or
some horrid thing. There aren't any men. There are no such
people. There's a man; and whoever he is he's quite
different."
"So there is no safety," said Diana in a low voice.
"Oh, I don't know," answered Mary, lightly enough;
"there's only two things generally true of them. At certain
curious times they're just fit to take care of us, and
they're never fit to take care of themselves."
"There is a gale getting up," said Rosamund suddenly.
"Look at those trees over there, a long way off, and the
clouds going quicker."
"I know what you're thinking about," said Mary; "and
don't you be silly fools. Don't you listen to the lady
novelists. You go down the king's highway; for God's truth,
it is God's. Yes, my dear Michael will often be extremely
untidy. Arthur Inglewood will be worse -- he'll be tidy.
But what else are all the trees and clouds for, you silly
kittens?"
"The clouds and trees are all waving about," said
Rosamund. "There is a storm coming, and it makes me feel
quite excited, somehow. Michael is really rather like a
storm: he frightens me and makes me happy."
"Don't you be frightened," said Mary. "All over, these
men have one advantage; they are the sort that go out."
A sudden thrust of wind through the trees drifted the
dying leaves along the path, and they could hear the far-off
trees roaring faintly.
"I mean," said Mary, "they are the kind that look
outwards and get interested in the world. It doesn't matter
a bit whether it's arguing, or bicycling, or breaking down
the ends of the earth as poor old Innocent does. Stick to
the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand
the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window
and tries to understand you. When poor old Adam had gone
out gardening (Arthur will go out gardening), the other sort
came along and wormed himself in, nasty old snake."
"You agree with your aunt," said Rosamund, smiling: "no
snakes in the bedroom."
"I didn't agree with my aunt very much," replied Mary
simply, "but I think she was right to let Uncle Harry
collect dragons and griffins, so long as it got him out of
the house."
Almost at the same moment lights sprang up inside the
darkened house, turning the two glass doors into the garden
into gates of beaten gold. The golden gates were burst
open, and the enormous Smith, who had sat like a clumsy
statue for so many hours, came flying and turning
cart-wheels down the lawn and shouting, "Acquitted!
acquitted!" Echoing the cry, Michael scampered across the
lawn to Rosamund and wildly swung her into a few steps of
what was supposed to be a waltz. But the company knew
Innocent and Michael by this time, and their extravagances
were gaily taken for granted; it was far more extraordinary
that Arthur Inglewood walked straight up to Diana and kissed
her as if it had been his sister's birthday. Even Dr. Pym,
though he refrained from dancing, looked on with real
benevolence; for indeed the whole of the absurd revelation
had disturbed him less than the others; he half supposed
that such irresponsible tribunals and insane discussions
were part of the mediaeval mummeries of the Old Land.
While the tempest tore the sky as with trumpets, window
after window was lighted up in the house within; and before
the company, broken with laughter and the buffeting of the
wind, had groped their way to the house again, they saw that
the great apish figure of Innocent Smith had clambered out
of his own attic window, and roaring again and again,
"Beacon House!" whirled round his head a huge log or trunk
from the wood fire below, of which the river of crimson
flame and purple smoke drove out on the deafening air.
He was evidently enough to have been seen from three
counties; but when the wind died down, and the party, at the
top of their evening's merriment, looked again for Mary and
for him, they were not to be found.
The End
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