Title: The Club of Queer Trades
Author: Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Language: English
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THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES

by G. K. Chesterton



Chapter 1. The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown

Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Dore, must have had something
to do with the designing of the things called flats in England
and America. There is something entirely Gargantuan in the idea of
economising space by piling houses on top of each other, front doors
and all. And in the chaos and complexity of those perpendicular streets
anything may dwell or happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that
the inquirer may find the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be
thought at the first glance that the name would attract and startle the
passer-by, but nothing attracts or startles in these dim immense hives.
The passer-by is only looking for his own melancholy destination, the
Montenegro Shipping Agency or the London office of the Rutland Sentinel,
and passes through the twilight passages as one passes through the
twilight corridors of a dream. If the Thugs set up a Strangers’
Assassination Company in one of the great buildings in Norfolk Street,
and sent in a mild man in spectacles to answer inquiries, no inquiries
would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades reigns in a great edifice
hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils.

The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be,
is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which
the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate
must have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be
an entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given
in the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or
variation of an existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would
not admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men’s
furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their
trousers against being torn by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock
Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring speech
to the club on the occasion of the question being raised in the Stormby
Smith affair, said wittily and keenly) is the same. Secondly, the
trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its
inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose
to pass his days collecting broken sardine tins, unless he could drive
a roaring trade in them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when
one remembers what Professor Chick’s own new trade was, one doesn’t know
whether to laugh or cry.

The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing;
to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking
at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should
feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. That I should
have come at last upon so singular a body was, I may say without vanity,
not altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many
societies as possible: I may be said to collect clubs, and I have
accumulated a vast and fantastic variety of specimens ever since, in my
audacious youth, I collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps,
I may tell tales of some of the other bodies to which I have belonged.
I will recount the doings of the Dead Man’s Shoes Society (that
superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I will explain
the curious origin of the Cat and Christian, the name of which has been
so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last why the
Institute of Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League. Of the Ten
Teacups, of course I dare not say a word. The first of my revelations,
at any rate, shall be concerned with the Club of Queer Trades, which, as
I have said, was one of this class, one which I was almost bound to come
across sooner or later, because of my singular hobby. The wild youth of
the metropolis call me facetiously ‘The King of Clubs’. They also call
me ‘The Cherub’, in allusion to the roseate and youthful appearance I
have presented in my declining years. I only hope the spirits in the
better world have as good dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club
of Queer Trades has one very curious thing about it. The most curious
thing about it is that it was not discovered by me; it was discovered
by my friend Basil Grant, a star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely
stirred out of his attic.

Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least
unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he
would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because,
like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he
might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt
the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the
sunset clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs
of Lambeth. He was surrounded by a chaos of things that were in
odd contrast to the slums around him; old fantastic books, swords,
armour--the whole dust-hole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these
quixotic relics, appeared curiously keen and modern--a powerful, legal
face. And no one but I knew who he was.

Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and grotesque scene
that occurred in--, when one of the most acute and forcible of the
English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my own view of that
occurrence; but about the facts themselves there is no question at all.
For some months, indeed for some years, people had detected something
curious in the judge’s conduct. He seemed to have lost interest in the
law, in which he had been beyond expression brilliant and terrible as
a K.C., and to be occupied in giving personal and moral advice to the
people concerned. He talked more like a priest or a doctor, and a very
outspoken one at that. The first thrill was probably given when he said
to a man who had attempted a crime of passion: “I sentence you to
three years imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and God-given
conviction, that what you require is three months at the seaside.” He
accused criminals from the bench, not so much of their obvious legal
crimes, but of things that had never been heard of in a court of
justice, monstrous egoism, lack of humour, and morbidity deliberately
encouraged. Things came to a head in that celebrated diamond case in
which the Prime Minister himself, that brilliant patrician, had to come
forward, gracefully and reluctantly, to give evidence against his valet.
After the detailed life of the household had been thoroughly exhibited,
the judge requested the Premier again to step forward, which he did with
quiet dignity. The judge then said, in a sudden, grating voice: “Get a
new soul. That thing’s not fit for a dog. Get a new soul.” All this, of
course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was premonitory of that melancholy
and farcical day when his wits actually deserted him in open court.
It was a libel case between two very eminent and powerful financiers,
against both of whom charges of considerable defalcation were brought.
The case was long and complex; the advocates were long and eloquent; but
at last, after weeks of work and rhetoric, the time came for the great
judge to give a summing-up; and one of his celebrated masterpieces of
lucidity and pulverizing logic was eagerly looked for. He had spoken
very little during the prolonged affair, and he looked sad and lowering
at the end of it. He was silent for a few moments, and then burst into a
stentorian song. His remarks (as reported) were as follows:

“O Rowty-owty tiddly-owty Tiddly-owty tiddly-owty Highty-ighty
tiddly-ighty Tiddly-ighty ow.”

He then retired from public life and took the garret in Lambeth.

I was sitting there one evening, about six o’clock, over a glass of that
gorgeous Burgundy which he kept behind a pile of black-letter folios; he
was striding about the room, fingering, after a habit of his, one of the
great swords in his collection; the red glare of the strong fire struck
his square features and his fierce grey hair; his blue eyes were even
unusually full of dreams, and he had opened his mouth to speak dreamily,
when the door was flung open, and a pale, fiery man, with red hair and a
huge furred overcoat, swung himself panting into the room.

“Sorry to bother you, Basil,” he gasped. “I took a liberty--made an
appointment here with a man--a client--in five minutes--I beg your
pardon, sir,” and he gave me a bow of apology.

Basil smiled at me. “You didn’t know,” he said, “that I had a practical
brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does all there is
to be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at
everything. I remember him as a journalist, a house-agent, a naturalist,
an inventor, a publisher, a schoolmaster, a--what are you now, Rupert?”

“I am and have been for some time,” said Rupert, with some dignity, “a
private detective, and there’s my client.”

A loud rap at the door had cut him short, and, on permission being
given, the door was thrown sharply open and a stout, dapper man walked
swiftly into the room, set his silk hat with a clap on the table, and
said, “Good evening, gentlemen,” with a stress on the last syllable that
somehow marked him out as a martinet, military, literary and social.
He had a large head streaked with black and grey, and an abrupt black
moustache, which gave him a look of fierceness which was contradicted by
his sad sea-blue eyes.

Basil immediately said to me, “Let us come into the next room, Gully,”
 and was moving towards the door, but the stranger said:

“Not at all. Friends remain. Assistance possibly.”

The moment I heard him speak I remembered who he was, a certain Major
Brown I had met years before in Basil’s society. I had forgotten
altogether the black dandified figure and the large solemn head, but I
remembered the peculiar speech, which consisted of only saying about a
quarter of each sentence, and that sharply, like the crack of a gun. I
do not know, it may have come from giving orders to troops.

Major Brown was a V.C., and an able and distinguished soldier, but he
was anything but a warlike person. Like many among the iron men who
recovered British India, he was a man with the natural beliefs and
tastes of an old maid. In his dress he was dapper and yet demure; in his
habits he was precise to the point of the exact adjustment of a tea-cup.
One enthusiasm he had, which was of the nature of a religion--the
cultivation of pansies. And when he talked about his collection, his
blue eyes glittered like a child’s at a new toy, the eyes that had
remained untroubled when the troops were roaring victory round Roberts
at Candahar.

“Well, Major,” said Rupert Grant, with a lordly heartiness, flinging
himself into a chair, “what is the matter with you?”

“Yellow pansies. Coal-cellar. P. G. Northover,” said the Major, with
righteous indignation.

We glanced at each other with inquisitiveness. Basil, who had his eyes
shut in his abstracted way, said simply:

“I beg your pardon.”

“Fact is. Street, you know, man, pansies. On wall. Death to me.
Something. Preposterous.”

We shook our heads gently. Bit by bit, and mainly by the seemingly
sleepy assistance of Basil Grant, we pieced together the Major’s
fragmentary, but excited narration. It would be infamous to submit the
reader to what we endured; therefore I will tell the story of Major
Brown in my own words. But the reader must imagine the scene. The eyes
of Basil closed as in a trance, after his habit, and the eyes of Rupert
and myself getting rounder and rounder as we listened to one of the
most astounding stories in the world, from the lips of the little man in
black, sitting bolt upright in his chair and talking like a telegram.

Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no means an
enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement on half-pay,
it was with delight that he took a small neat villa, very like a doll’s
house, and devoted the rest of his life to pansies and weak tea. The
thought that battles were over when he had once hung up his sword in
the little front hall (along with two patent stew-pots and a bad
water-colour), and betaken himself instead to wielding the rake in his
little sunlit garden, was to him like having come into a harbour in
heaven. He was Dutch-like and precise in his taste in gardening, and
had, perhaps, some tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was
one of those men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand
rather than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw
life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he would
not have believed, or even understood, any one who had told him that
within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined to be caught
in a whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as he had never seen or
dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat of battle.

One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his usual
faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional. In crossing
from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he happened to pass
along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie along the back-garden
walls of a row of mansions, and which in their empty and discoloured
appearance give one an odd sensation as of being behind the scenes of a
theatre. But mean and sulky as the scene might be in the eyes of most of
us, it was not altogether so in the Major’s, for along the coarse
gravel footway was coming a thing which was to him what the passing of
a religious procession is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with
fish-blue eyes and a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before
him a barrow, which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were
splendid specimens of almost every order, but the Major’s own favourite
pansies predominated. The Major stopped and fell into conversation, and
then into bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of collectors
and other mad men, that is to say, he carefully and with a sort of
anguish selected the best roots from the less excellent, praised some,
disparaged others, made a subtle scale ranging from a thrilling worth
and rarity to a degraded insignificance, and then bought them all. The
man was just pushing off his barrow when he stopped and came close to
the Major.

“I’ll tell you what, sir,” he said. “If you’re interested in them
things, you just get on to that wall.”

“On the wall!” cried the scandalised Major, whose conventional soul
quailed within him at the thought of such fantastic trespass.

“Finest show of yellow pansies in England in that there garden, sir,”
 hissed the tempter. “I’ll help you up, sir.”

How it happened no one will ever know but that positive enthusiasm of
the Major’s life triumphed over all its negative traditions, and with
an easy leap and swing that showed that he was in no need of physical
assistance, he stood on the wall at the end of the strange garden. The
second after, the flapping of the frock-coat at his knees made him feel
inexpressibly a fool. But the next instant all such trifling sentiments
were swallowed up by the most appalling shock of surprise the old
soldier had ever felt in all his bold and wandering existence. His eyes
fell upon the garden, and there across a large bed in the centre of the
lawn was a vast pattern of pansies; they were splendid flowers, but for
once it was not their horticultural aspects that Major Brown beheld, for
the pansies were arranged in gigantic capital letters so as to form the
sentence:

DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN

A kindly looking old man, with white whiskers, was watering them. Brown
looked sharply back at the road behind him; the man with the barrow had
suddenly vanished. Then he looked again at the lawn with its incredible
inscription. Another man might have thought he had gone mad, but Brown
did not. When romantic ladies gushed over his V.C. and his military
exploits, he sometimes felt himself to be a painfully prosaic person,
but by the same token he knew he was incurably sane. Another man, again,
might have thought himself a victim of a passing practical joke,
but Brown could not easily believe this. He knew from his own quaint
learning that the garden arrangement was an elaborate and expensive one;
he thought it extravagantly improbable that any one would pour out money
like water for a joke against him. Having no explanation whatever to
offer, he admitted the fact to himself, like a clear-headed man, and
waited as he would have done in the presence of a man with six legs.

At this moment the stout old man with white whiskers looked up, and
the watering can fell from his hand, shooting a swirl of water down the
gravel path.

“Who on earth are you?” he gasped, trembling violently.

“I am Major Brown,” said that individual, who was always cool in the
hour of action.

The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. At last he
stammered wildly, “Come down--come down here!”

“At your service,” said the Major, and alighted at a bound on the grass
beside him, without disarranging his silk hat.

The old man turned his broad back and set off at a sort of waddling run
towards the house, followed with swift steps by the Major. His guide
led him through the back passages of a gloomy, but gorgeously appointed
house, until they reached the door of the front room. Then the old man
turned with a face of apoplectic terror dimly showing in the twilight.

“For heaven’s sake,” he said, “don’t mention jackals.”

Then he threw open the door, releasing a burst of red lamplight, and ran
downstairs with a clatter.

The Major stepped into a rich, glowing room, full of red copper, and
peacock and purple hangings, hat in hand. He had the finest manners in
the world, and, though mystified, was not in the least embarrassed to
see that the only occupant was a lady, sitting by the window, looking
out.

“Madam,” he said, bowing simply, “I am Major Brown.”

“Sit down,” said the lady; but she did not turn her head.

She was a graceful, green-clad figure, with fiery red hair and a flavour
of Bedford Park. “You have come, I suppose,” she said mournfully, “to
tax me about the hateful title-deeds.”

“I have come, madam,” he said, “to know what is the matter. To know why
my name is written across your garden. Not amicably either.”

He spoke grimly, for the thing had hit him. It is impossible to describe
the effect produced on the mind by that quiet and sunny garden scene,
the frame for a stunning and brutal personality. The evening air was
still, and the grass was golden in the place where the little flowers he
studied cried to heaven for his blood.

“You know I must not turn round,” said the lady; “every afternoon till
the stroke of six I must keep my face turned to the street.”

Some queer and unusual inspiration made the prosaic soldier resolute to
accept these outrageous riddles without surprise.

“It is almost six,” he said; and even as he spoke the barbaric copper
clock upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the hour. At the sixth
the lady sprang up and turned on the Major one of the queerest and
yet most attractive faces he had ever seen in his life; open, and yet
tantalising, the face of an elf.

“That makes the third year I have waited,” she cried. “This is an
anniversary. The waiting almost makes one wish the frightful thing would
happen once and for all.”

And even as she spoke, a sudden rending cry broke the stillness. From
low down on the pavement of the dim street (it was already twilight) a
voice cried out with a raucous and merciless distinctness:

“Major Brown, Major Brown, where does the jackal dwell?”

Brown was decisive and silent in action. He strode to the front door
and looked out. There was no sign of life in the blue gloaming of the
street, where one or two lamps were beginning to light their lemon
sparks. On returning, he found the lady in green trembling.

“It is the end,” she cried, with shaking lips; “it may be death for both
of us. Whenever--”

But even as she spoke her speech was cloven by another hoarse
proclamation from the dark street, again horribly articulate.

“Major Brown, Major Brown, how did the jackal die?”

Brown dashed out of the door and down the steps, but again he was
frustrated; there was no figure in sight, and the street was far too
long and empty for the shouter to have run away. Even the rational
Major was a little shaken as he returned in a certain time to the
drawing-room. Scarcely had he done so than the terrific voice came:

“Major Brown, Major Brown, where did--”

Brown was in the street almost at a bound, and he was in time--in
time to see something which at first glance froze the blood. The cries
appeared to come from a decapitated head resting on the pavement.

The next moment the pale Major understood. It was the head of a man
thrust through the coal-hole in the street. The next moment, again,
it had vanished, and Major Brown turned to the lady. “Where’s your
coal-cellar?” he said, and stepped out into the passage.

She looked at him with wild grey eyes. “You will not go down,” she
cried, “alone, into the dark hole, with that beast?”

“Is this the way?” replied Brown, and descended the kitchen stairs three
at a time. He flung open the door of a black cavity and stepped in,
feeling in his pocket for matches. As his right hand was thus occupied,
a pair of great slimy hands came out of the darkness, hands clearly
belonging to a man of gigantic stature, and seized him by the back of
the head. They forced him down, down in the suffocating darkness, a
brutal image of destiny. But the Major’s head, though upside down, was
perfectly clear and intellectual. He gave quietly under the pressure
until he had slid down almost to his hands and knees. Then finding the
knees of the invisible monster within a foot of him, he simply put out
one of his long, bony, and skilful hands, and gripping the leg by a
muscle pulled it off the ground and laid the huge living man, with a
crash, along the floor. He strove to rise, but Brown was on top like a
cat. They rolled over and over. Big as the man was, he had evidently now
no desire but to escape; he made sprawls hither and thither to get past
the Major to the door, but that tenacious person had him hard by the
coat collar and hung with the other hand to a beam. At length there came
a strain in holding back this human bull, a strain under which Brown
expected his hand to rend and part from the arm. But something else
rent and parted; and the dim fat figure of the giant vanished out of the
cellar, leaving the torn coat in the Major’s hand; the only fruit of his
adventure and the only clue to the mystery. For when he went up and out
at the front door, the lady, the rich hangings, and the whole equipment
of the house had disappeared. It had only bare boards and whitewashed
walls.

“The lady was in the conspiracy, of course,” said Rupert, nodding. Major
Brown turned brick red. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “I think not.”

Rupert raised his eyebrows and looked at him for a moment, but said
nothing. When next he spoke he asked:

“Was there anything in the pockets of the coat?”

“There was sevenpence halfpenny in coppers and a threepenny-bit,” said
the Major carefully; “there was a cigarette-holder, a piece of string,
and this letter,” and he laid it on the table. It ran as follows:

Dear Mr Plover,

I am annoyed to hear that some delay has occurred in the arrangements re
Major Brown. Please see that he is attacked as per arrangement tomorrow
The coal-cellar, of course.

Yours faithfully, P. G. Northover.

Rupert Grant was leaning forward listening with hawk-like eyes. He cut
in:

“Is it dated from anywhere?”

“No--oh, yes!” replied Brown, glancing upon the paper; “14 Tanner’s
Court, North--”

Rupert sprang up and struck his hands together.

“Then why are we hanging here? Let’s get along. Basil, lend me your
revolver.”

Basil was staring into the embers like a man in a trance; and it was
some time before he answered:

“I don’t think you’ll need it.”

“Perhaps not,” said Rupert, getting into his fur coat. “One never knows.
But going down a dark court to see criminals--”

“Do you think they are criminals?” asked his brother.

Rupert laughed stoutly. “Giving orders to a subordinate to strangle a
harmless stranger in a coal-cellar may strike you as a very blameless
experiment, but--”

“Do you think they wanted to strangle the Major?” asked Basil, in the
same distant and monotonous voice.

“My dear fellow, you’ve been asleep. Look at the letter.”

“I am looking at the letter,” said the mad judge calmly; though, as a
matter of fact, he was looking at the fire. “I don’t think it’s the sort
of letter one criminal would write to another.”

“My dear boy, you are glorious,” cried Rupert, turning round, with
laughter in his blue bright eyes. “Your methods amaze me. Why, there
is the letter. It is written, and it does give orders for a crime. You
might as well say that the Nelson Column was not at all the sort of
thing that was likely to be set up in Trafalgar Square.”

Basil Grant shook all over with a sort of silent laughter, but did not
otherwise move.

“That’s rather good,” he said; “but, of course, logic like that’s not
what is really wanted. It’s a question of spiritual atmosphere. It’s not
a criminal letter.”

“It is. It’s a matter of fact,” cried the other in an agony of
reasonableness.

“Facts,” murmured Basil, like one mentioning some strange, far-off
animals, “how facts obscure the truth. I may be silly--in fact, I’m
off my head--but I never could believe in that man--what’s his name,
in those capital stories?--Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points to
something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing. Facts point in
all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree.
It’s only the life of the tree that has unity and goes up--only the
green blood that springs, like a fountain, at the stars.”

“But what the deuce else can the letter be but criminal?”

“We have eternity to stretch our legs in,” replied the mystic. “It can
be an infinity of things. I haven’t seen any of them--I’ve only seen the
letter. I look at that, and say it’s not criminal.”

“Then what’s the origin of it?”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

“Then why don’t you accept the ordinary explanation?”

Basil continued for a little to glare at the coals, and seemed
collecting his thoughts in a humble and even painful way. Then he said:

“Suppose you went out into the moonlight. Suppose you passed through
silent, silvery streets and squares until you came into an open and
deserted space, set with a few monuments, and you beheld one dressed as
a ballet girl dancing in the argent glimmer. And suppose you looked, and
saw it was a man disguised. And suppose you looked again, and saw it was
Lord Kitchener. What would you think?”

He paused a moment, and went on:

“You could not adopt the ordinary explanation. The ordinary explanation
of putting on singular clothes is that you look nice in them; you would
not think that Lord Kitchener dressed up like a ballet girl out of
ordinary personal vanity. You would think it much more likely that
he inherited a dancing madness from a great grandmother; or had been
hypnotised at a seance; or threatened by a secret society with death if
he refused the ordeal. With Baden-Powell, say, it might be a bet--but
not with Kitchener. I should know all that, because in my public days
I knew him quite well. So I know that letter quite well, and criminals
quite well. It’s not a criminal’s letter. It’s all atmospheres.” And he
closed his eyes and passed his hand over his forehead.

Rupert and the Major were regarding him with a mixture of respect and
pity. The former said,

“Well, I’m going, anyhow, and shall continue to think--until your
spiritual mystery turns up--that a man who sends a note recommending a
crime, that is, actually a crime that is actually carried out, at
least tentatively, is, in all probability, a little casual in his moral
tastes. Can I have that revolver?”

“Certainly,” said Basil, getting up. “But I am coming with you.” And he
flung an old cape or cloak round him, and took a sword-stick from the
corner.

“You!” said Rupert, with some surprise, “you scarcely ever leave your
hole to look at anything on the face of the earth.”

Basil fitted on a formidable old white hat.

“I scarcely ever,” he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance,
“hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do not understand at
once, without going to see it.”

And he led the way out into the purple night.

We four swung along the flaring Lambeth streets, across Westminster
Bridge, and along the Embankment in the direction of that part of Fleet
Street which contained Tanner’s Court. The erect, black figure of Major
Brown, seen from behind, was a quaint contrast to the hound-like stoop
and flapping mantle of young Rupert Grant, who adopted, with childlike
delight, all the dramatic poses of the detective of fiction. The finest
among his many fine qualities was his boyish appetite for the colour and
poetry of London. Basil, who walked behind, with his face turned blindly
to the stars, had the look of a somnambulist.

Rupert paused at the corner of Tanner’s Court, with a quiver of delight
at danger, and gripped Basil’s revolver in his great-coat pocket.

“Shall we go in now?” he asked.

“Not get police?” asked Major Brown, glancing sharply up and down the
street.

“I am not sure,” answered Rupert, knitting his brows. “Of course, it’s
quite clear, the thing’s all crooked. But there are three of us, and--”

“I shouldn’t get the police,” said Basil in a queer voice. Rupert
glanced at him and stared hard.

“Basil,” he cried, “you’re trembling. What’s the matter--are you
afraid?”

“Cold, perhaps,” said the Major, eyeing him. There was no doubt that he
was shaking.

At last, after a few moments’ scrutiny, Rupert broke into a curse.

“You’re laughing,” he cried. “I know that confounded, silent, shaky
laugh of yours. What the deuce is the amusement, Basil? Here we are, all
three of us, within a yard of a den of ruffians--”

“But I shouldn’t call the police,” said Basil. “We four heroes are quite
equal to a host,” and he continued to quake with his mysterious mirth.

Rupert turned with impatience and strode swiftly down the court, the
rest of us following. When he reached the door of No. 14 he turned
abruptly, the revolver glittering in his hand.

“Stand close,” he said in the voice of a commander. “The scoundrel may
be attempting an escape at this moment. We must fling open the door and
rush in.”

The four of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid, except for
the old judge and his convulsion of merriment.

“Now,” hissed Rupert Grant, turning his pale face and burning eyes
suddenly over his shoulder, “when I say ‘Four’, follow me with a rush.
If I say ‘Hold him’, pin the fellows down, whoever they are. If I say
‘Stop’, stop. I shall say that if there are more than three. If
they attack us I shall empty my revolver on them. Basil, have your
sword-stick ready. Now--one, two three, four!”

With the sound of the word the door burst open, and we fell into the
room like an invasion, only to stop dead.

The room, which was an ordinary and neatly appointed office, appeared,
at the first glance, to be empty. But on a second and more careful
glance, we saw seated behind a very large desk with pigeonholes and
drawers of bewildering multiplicity, a small man with a black waxed
moustache, and the air of a very average clerk, writing hard. He looked
up as we came to a standstill.

“Did you knock?” he asked pleasantly. “I am sorry if I did not hear.
What can I do for you?”

There was a doubtful pause, and then, by general consent, the Major
himself, the victim of the outrage, stepped forward.

The letter was in his hand, and he looked unusually grim.

“Is your name P. G. Northover?” he asked.

“That is my name,” replied the other, smiling.

“I think,” said Major Brown, with an increase in the dark glow of his
face, “that this letter was written by you.” And with a loud clap he
struck open the letter on the desk with his clenched fist. The man
called Northover looked at it with unaffected interest and merely
nodded.

“Well, sir,” said the Major, breathing hard, “what about that?”

“What about it, precisely,” said the man with the moustache.

“I am Major Brown,” said that gentleman sternly.

Northover bowed. “Pleased to meet you, sir. What have you to say to me?”

“Say!” cried the Major, loosing a sudden tempest; “why, I want this
confounded thing settled. I want--”

“Certainly, sir,” said Northover, jumping up with a slight elevation of
the eyebrows. “Will you take a chair for a moment.” And he pressed
an electric bell just above him, which thrilled and tinkled in a room
beyond. The Major put his hand on the back of the chair offered him, but
stood chafing and beating the floor with his polished boot.

The next moment an inner glass door was opened, and a fair, weedy, young
man, in a frock-coat, entered from within.

“Mr Hopson,” said Northover, “this is Major Brown. Will you please
finish that thing for him I gave you this morning and bring it in?”

“Yes, sir,” said Mr Hopson, and vanished like lightning.

“You will excuse me, gentlemen,” said the egregious Northover, with his
radiant smile, “if I continue to work until Mr Hopson is ready. I have
some books that must be cleared up before I get away on my holiday
tomorrow. And we all like a whiff of the country, don’t we? Ha! ha!”

The criminal took up his pen with a childlike laugh, and a silence
ensued; a placid and busy silence on the part of Mr P. G. Northover; a
raging silence on the part of everybody else.

At length the scratching of Northover’s pen in the stillness was mingled
with a knock at the door, almost simultaneous with the turning of the
handle, and Mr Hopson came in again with the same silent rapidity,
placed a paper before his principal, and disappeared again.

The man at the desk pulled and twisted his spiky moustache for a few
moments as he ran his eye up and down the paper presented to him.
He took up his pen, with a slight, instantaneous frown, and altered
something, muttering--“Careless.” Then he read it again with the same
impenetrable reflectiveness, and finally handed it to the frantic Brown,
whose hand was beating the devil’s tattoo on the back of the chair.

“I think you will find that all right, Major,” he said briefly.

The Major looked at it; whether he found it all right or not will appear
later, but he found it like this:

  Major Brown to P. G. Northover.                                    L s. d.
   January 1, to account rendered                                    5  6 0
   May 9, to potting and embedding of zoo pansies                    2  0 0
   To cost of trolley with flowers                                   0 15 0
   To hiring of man with trolley                                     0  5 0
   To hire of house and garden for one day                           1  0 0
   To furnishing of room in peacock curtains, copper ornaments, etc. 3  0 0
   To salary of Miss Jameson                                         1  0 0
   To salary of Mr Plover                                            1  0 0
                                                                 ----------
                                                             Total L14  6 0
  A Remittance will oblige.

“What,” said Brown, after a dead pause, and with eyes that seemed slowly
rising out of his head, “What in heaven’s name is this?”

“What is it?” repeated Northover, cocking his eyebrow with amusement.
“It’s your account, of course.”

“My account!” The Major’s ideas appeared to be in a vague stampede. “My
account! And what have I got to do with it?”

“Well,” said Northover, laughing outright, “naturally I prefer you to
pay it.”

The Major’s hand was still resting on the back of the chair as the words
came. He scarcely stirred otherwise, but he lifted the chair bodily into
the air with one hand and hurled it at Northover’s head.

The legs crashed against the desk, so that Northover only got a blow on
the elbow as he sprang up with clenched fists, only to be seized by the
united rush of the rest of us. The chair had fallen clattering on the
empty floor.

“Let me go, you scamps,” he shouted. “Let me--”

“Stand still,” cried Rupert authoritatively. “Major Brown’s action is
excusable. The abominable crime you have attempted--”

“A customer has a perfect right,” said Northover hotly, “to question an
alleged overcharge, but, confound it all, not to throw furniture.”

“What, in God’s name, do you mean by your customers and overcharges?”
 shrieked Major Brown, whose keen feminine nature, steady in pain
or danger, became almost hysterical in the presence of a long and
exasperating mystery. “Who are you? I’ve never seen you or your insolent
tomfool bills. I know one of your cursed brutes tried to choke me--”

“Mad,” said Northover, gazing blankly round; “all of them mad. I didn’t
know they travelled in quartettes.”

“Enough of this prevarication,” said Rupert; “your crimes are
discovered. A policeman is stationed at the corner of the court. Though
only a private detective myself, I will take the responsibility of
telling you that anything you say--”

“Mad,” repeated Northover, with a weary air.

And at this moment, for the first time, there struck in among them the
strange, sleepy voice of Basil Grant.

“Major Brown,” he said, “may I ask you a question?”

The Major turned his head with an increased bewilderment.

“You?” he cried; “certainly, Mr Grant.”

“Can you tell me,” said the mystic, with sunken head and lowering brow,
as he traced a pattern in the dust with his sword-stick, “can you tell
me what was the name of the man who lived in your house before you?”

The unhappy Major was only faintly more disturbed by this last and
futile irrelevancy, and he answered vaguely:

“Yes, I think so; a man named Gurney something--a name with a
hyphen--Gurney-Brown; that was it.”

“And when did the house change hands?” said Basil, looking up sharply.
His strange eyes were burning brilliantly.

“I came in last month,” said the Major.

And at the mere word the criminal Northover suddenly fell into his great
office chair and shouted with a volleying laughter.

“Oh! it’s too perfect--it’s too exquisite,” he gasped, beating the arms
with his fists. He was laughing deafeningly; Basil Grant was laughing
voicelessly; and the rest of us only felt that our heads were like
weathercocks in a whirlwind.

“Confound it, Basil,” said Rupert, stamping. “If you don’t want me to go
mad and blow your metaphysical brains out, tell me what all this means.”

Northover rose.

“Permit me, sir, to explain,” he said. “And, first of all, permit me to
apologize to you, Major Brown, for a most abominable and unpardonable
blunder, which has caused you menace and inconvenience, in which, if you
will allow me to say so, you have behaved with astonishing courage and
dignity. Of course you need not trouble about the bill. We will stand
the loss.” And, tearing the paper across, he flung the halves into the
waste-paper basket and bowed.

Poor Brown’s face was still a picture of distraction. “But I don’t even
begin to understand,” he cried. “What bill? what blunder? what loss?”

Mr P. G. Northover advanced in the centre of the room, thoughtfully, and
with a great deal of unconscious dignity. On closer consideration,
there were apparent about him other things beside a screwed moustache,
especially a lean, sallow face, hawk-like, and not without a careworn
intelligence. Then he looked up abruptly.

“Do you know where you are, Major?” he said.

“God knows I don’t,” said the warrior, with fervour.

“You are standing,” replied Northover, “in the office of the Adventure
and Romance Agency, Limited.”

“And what’s that?” blankly inquired Brown.

The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his
dark eyes on the other’s face.

“Major,” said he, “did you ever, as you walked along the empty street
upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to
happen--something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: ‘Something
pernicious and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life;
something unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its
anchorage, and driving free.’ Did you ever feel that?”

“Certainly not,” said the Major shortly.

“Then I must explain with more elaboration,” said Mr Northover, with a
sigh. “The Adventure and Romance Agency has been started to meet a great
modern desire. On every side, in conversation and in literature, we hear
of the desire for a larger theatre of events for something to waylay us
and lead us splendidly astray. Now the man who feels this desire for
a varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and
Romance Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes
to surround him with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his
front door, an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot
against his life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he
receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately
in a vortex of incidents. A very picturesque and moving story is first
written by one of the staff of distinguished novelists who are at
present hard at work in the adjoining room. Yours, Major Brown (designed
by our Mr Grigsby), I consider peculiarly forcible and pointed; it is
almost a pity you did not see the end of it. I need scarcely explain
further the monstrous mistake. Your predecessor in your present house,
Mr Gurney-Brown, was a subscriber to our agency, and our foolish clerks,
ignoring alike the dignity of the hyphen and the glory of military rank,
positively imagined that Major Brown and Mr Gurney-Brown were the same
person. Thus you were suddenly hurled into the middle of another man’s
story.”

“How on earth does the thing work?” asked Rupert Grant, with bright and
fascinated eyes.

“We believe that we are doing a noble work,” said Northover warmly. “It
has continually struck us that there is no element in modern life that
is more lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all
artistic existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into
fairyland, he reads a book; if he wishes to dash into the thick of
battle, he reads a book; if he wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a
book; if he wishes to slide down the banisters, he reads a book. We
give him these visions, but we give him exercise at the same time, the
necessity of leaping from wall to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen,
of running down long streets from pursuers--all healthy and pleasant
exercises. We give him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin
Hood or the Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the
splendid sky. We give him back his childhood, that godlike time when we
can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and
dream.”

Basil gazed at him curiously. The most singular psychological discovery
had been reserved to the end, for as the little business man ceased
speaking he had the blazing eyes of a fanatic.

Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity and good
humour.

“Of course; awfully dense, sir,” he said. “No doubt at all, the scheme
excellent. But I don’t think--” He paused a moment, and looked dreamily
out of the window. “I don’t think you will find me in it. Somehow, when
one’s seen--seen the thing itself, you know--blood and men screaming,
one feels about having a little house and a little hobby; in the Bible,
you know, ‘There remaineth a rest’.”

Northover bowed. Then after a pause he said:

“Gentlemen, may I offer you my card. If any of the rest of you desire,
at any time, to communicate with me, despite Major Brown’s view of the
matter--”

“I should be obliged for your card, sir,” said the Major, in his abrupt
but courteous voice. “Pay for chair.”

The agent of Romance and Adventure handed his card, laughing.

It ran, “P. G. Northover, B.A., C.Q.T., Adventure and Romance Agency, 14
Tanner’s Court, Fleet Street.”

“What on earth is ‘C.QT.’?” asked Rupert Grant, looking over the Major’s
shoulder.

“Don’t you know?” returned Northover. “Haven’t you ever heard of the
Club of Queer Trades?”

“There seems to be a confounded lot of funny things we haven’t heard
of,” said the little Major reflectively. “What’s this one?”

“The Club of Queer Trades is a society consisting exclusively of people
who have invented some new and curious way of making money. I was one of
the earliest members.”

“You deserve to be,” said Basil, taking up his great white hat, with a
smile, and speaking for the last time that evening.

When they had passed out the Adventure and Romance agent wore a queer
smile, as he trod down the fire and locked up his desk. “A fine chap,
that Major; when one hasn’t a touch of the poet one stands some chance
of being a poem. But to think of such a clockwork little creature of all
people getting into the nets of one of Grigsby’s tales,” and he laughed
out aloud in the silence.

Just as the laugh echoed away, there came a sharp knock at the door. An
owlish head, with dark moustaches, was thrust in, with deprecating and
somewhat absurd inquiry.

“What! back again, Major?” cried Northover in surprise. “What can I do
for you?”

The Major shuffled feverishly into the room.

“It’s horribly absurd,” he said. “Something must have got started in
me that I never knew before. But upon my soul I feel the most desperate
desire to know the end of it all.”

“The end of it all?”

“Yes,” said the Major. “‘Jackals’, and the title-deeds, and ‘Death to
Major Brown’.”

The agent’s face grew grave, but his eyes were amused.

“I am terribly sorry, Major,” said he, “but what you ask is impossible.
I don’t know any one I would sooner oblige than you; but the rules
of the agency are strict. The Adventures are confidential; you are an
outsider; I am not allowed to let you know an inch more than I can help.
I do hope you understand--”

“There is no one,” said Brown, “who understands discipline better than I
do. Thank you very much. Good night.”

And the little man withdrew for the last time.

He married Miss Jameson, the lady with the red hair and the green
garments. She was an actress, employed (with many others) by the Romance
Agency; and her marriage with the prim old veteran caused some stir in
her languid and intellectualized set. She always replied very quietly
that she had met scores of men who acted splendidly in the charades
provided for them by Northover, but that she had only met one man who
went down into a coal-cellar when he really thought it contained a
murderer.

The Major and she are living as happily as birds, in an absurd villa,
and the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is unchanged--except,
perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full of feminine
unselfishness as the Major is by nature, he falls into a trance of
abstraction. Then his wife recognizes with a concealed smile, by
the blind look in his blue eyes, that he is wondering what were the
title-deeds, and why he was not allowed to mention jackals. But, like so
many old soldiers, Brown is religious, and believes that he will realize
the rest of those purple adventures in a better world.



Chapter 2. The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation

Basil Grant and I were talking one day in what is perhaps the most
perfect place for talking on earth--the top of a tolerably deserted
tramcar. To talk on the top of a hill is superb, but to talk on the top
of a flying hill is a fairy tale.

The vast blank space of North London was flying by; the very pace gave
us a sense of its immensity and its meanness. It was, as it were, a base
infinitude, a squalid eternity, and we felt the real horror of the poor
parts of London, the horror that is so totally missed and misrepresented
by the sensational novelists who depict it as being a matter of narrow
streets, filthy houses, criminals and maniacs, and dens of vice. In a
narrow street, in a den of vice, you do not expect civilization, you
do not expect order. But the horror of this was the fact that there was
civilization, that there was order, but that civilisation only showed
its morbidity, and order only its monotony. No one would say, in going
through a criminal slum, “I see no statues. I notice no cathedrals.” But
here there were public buildings; only they were mostly lunatic asylums.
Here there were statues; only they were mostly statues of railway
engineers and philanthropists--two dingy classes of men united by their
common contempt for the people. Here there were churches; only they were
the churches of dim and erratic sects, Agapemonites or Irvingites. Here,
above all, there were broad roads and vast crossings and tramway lines
and hospitals and all the real marks of civilization. But though one
never knew, in one sense, what one would see next, there was one thing
we knew we should not see--anything really great, central, of the
first class, anything that humanity had adored. And with revulsion
indescribable our emotions returned, I think, to those really close and
crooked entries, to those really mean streets, to those genuine slums
which lie round the Thames and the City, in which nevertheless a real
possibility remains that at any chance corner the great cross of the
great cathedral of Wren may strike down the street like a thunderbolt.

“But you must always remember also,” said Grant to me, in his heavy
abstracted way, when I had urged this view, “that the very vileness of
the life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the victory
of the human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they have to live
in something worse than barbarism. They have to live in a fourth-rate
civilization. But yet I am practically certain that the majority of
people here are good people. And being good is an adventure far more
violent and daring than sailing round the world. Besides--”

“Go on,” I said.

No answer came.

“Go on,” I said, looking up.

The big blue eyes of Basil Grant were standing out of his head and he
was paying no attention to me. He was staring over the side of the tram.

“What is the matter?” I asked, peering over also.

“It is very odd,” said Grant at last, grimly, “that I should have been
caught out like this at the very moment of my optimism. I said all these
people were good, and there is the wickedest man in England.”

“Where?” I asked, leaning over further, “where?”

“Oh, I was right enough,” he went on, in that strange continuous and
sleepy tone which always angered his hearers at acute moments, “I was
right enough when I said all these people were good. They are heroes;
they are saints. Now and then they may perhaps steal a spoon or two;
they may beat a wife or two with the poker. But they are saints all the
same; they are angels; they are robed in white; they are clad with wings
and haloes--at any rate compared to that man.”

“Which man?” I cried again, and then my eye caught the figure at which
Basil’s bull’s eyes were glaring.

He was a slim, smooth person, passing very quickly among the quickly
passing crowd, but though there was nothing about him sufficient to
attract a startled notice, there was quite enough to demand a curious
consideration when once that notice was attracted. He wore a black
top-hat, but there was enough in it of those strange curves whereby the
decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the top-hat into something
as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase. His hair, which was largely grey, was
curled with the instinct of one who appreciated the gradual beauty of
grey and silver. The rest of his face was oval and, I thought, rather
Oriental; he had two black tufts of moustache.

“What has he done?” I asked.

“I am not sure of the details,” said Grant, “but his besetting sin is
a desire to intrigue to the disadvantage of others. Probably he has
adopted some imposture or other to effect his plan.”

“What plan?” I asked. “If you know all about him, why don’t you tell me
why he is the wickedest man in England? What is his name?”

Basil Grant stared at me for some moments.

“I think you’ve made a mistake in my meaning,” he said. “I don’t know
his name. I never saw him before in my life.”

“Never saw him before!” I cried, with a kind of anger; “then what in
heaven’s name do you mean by saying that he is the wickedest man in
England?”

“I meant what I said,” said Basil Grant calmly. “The moment I saw
that man, I saw all these people stricken with a sudden and splendid
innocence. I saw that while all ordinary poor men in the streets were
being themselves, he was not being himself. I saw that all the men in
these slums, cadgers, pickpockets, hooligans, are all, in the deepest
sense, trying to be good. And I saw that that man was trying to be
evil.”

“But if you never saw him before--” I began.

“In God’s name, look at his face,” cried out Basil in a voice that
startled the driver. “Look at the eyebrows. They mean that infernal
pride which made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven when he
was one of the first angels in it. Look at his moustaches, they are so
grown as to insult humanity. In the name of the sacred heavens look at
his hair. In the name of God and the stars, look at his hat.”

I stirred uncomfortably.

“But, after all,” I said, “this is very fanciful--perfectly absurd. Look
at the mere facts. You have never seen the man before, you--”

“Oh, the mere facts,” he cried out in a kind of despair. “The mere
facts! Do you really admit--are you still so sunk in superstitions, so
clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts? Do
you not trust an immediate impression?”

“Well, an immediate impression may be,” I said, “a little less practical
than facts.”

“Bosh,” he said. “On what else is the whole world run but immediate
impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of
this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual
impressions and atmospheres. Why do you refuse or accept a clerk? Do you
measure his skull? Do you read up his physiological state in a handbook?
Do you go upon facts at all? Not a scrap. You accept a clerk who may
save your business--you refuse a clerk that may rob your till, entirely
upon those immediate mystical impressions under the pressure of which
I pronounce, with a perfect sense of certainty and sincerity, that that
man walking in that street beside us is a humbug and a villain of some
kind.”

“You always put things well,” I said, “but, of course, such things
cannot immediately be put to the test.”

Basil sprang up straight and swayed with the swaying car.

“Let us get off and follow him,” he said. “I bet you five pounds it will
turn out as I say.”

And with a scuttle, a jump, and a run, we were off the car.

The man with the curved silver hair and the curved Eastern face walked
along for some time, his long splendid frock-coat flying behind him.
Then he swung sharply out of the great glaring road and disappeared down
an ill-lit alley. We swung silently after him.

“This is an odd turning for a man of that kind to take,” I said.

“A man of what kind?” asked my friend.

“Well,” I said, “a man with that kind of expression and those boots. I
thought it rather odd, to tell the truth, that he should be in this part
of the world at all.”

“Ah, yes,” said Basil, and said no more.

We tramped on, looking steadily in front of us. The elegant figure, like
the figure of a black swan, was silhouetted suddenly against the
glare of intermittent gaslight and then swallowed again in night. The
intervals between the lights were long, and a fog was thickening the
whole city. Our pace, therefore, had become swift and mechanical between
the lamp-posts; but Basil came to a standstill suddenly like a reined
horse; I stopped also. We had almost run into the man. A great part of
the solid darkness in front of us was the darkness of his body.

At first I thought he had turned to face us. But though we were hardly a
yard off he did not realize that we were there. He tapped four times on
a very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed street. A gleam of gas
cut the darkness as it opened slowly. We listened intently, but the
interview was short and simple and inexplicable as an interview could
be. Our exquisite friend handed in what looked like a paper or a card
and said:

“At once. Take a cab.”

A heavy, deep voice from inside said:

“Right you are.”

And with a click we were in the blackness again, and striding after the
striding stranger through a labyrinth of London lanes, the lights just
helping us. It was only five o’clock, but winter and the fog had made it
like midnight.

“This is really an extraordinary walk for the patent-leather boots,” I
repeated.

“I don’t know,” said Basil humbly. “It leads to Berkeley Square.”

As I tramped on I strained my eyes through the dusky atmosphere and
tried to make out the direction described. For some ten minutes I
wondered and doubted; at the end of that I saw that my friend was right.
We were coming to the great dreary spaces of fashionable London--more
dreary, one must admit, even than the dreary plebeian spaces.

“This is very extraordinary!” said Basil Grant, as we turned into
Berkeley Square.

“What is extraordinary?” I asked. “I thought you said it was quite
natural.”

“I do not wonder,” answered Basil, “at his walking through nasty
streets; I do not wonder at his going to Berkeley Square. But I do
wonder at his going to the house of a very good man.”

“What very good man?” I asked with exasperation.

“The operation of time is a singular one,” he said with his
imperturbable irrelevancy. “It is not a true statement of the case to
say that I have forgotten my career when I was a judge and a public man.
I remember it all vividly, but it is like remembering some novel. But
fifteen years ago I knew this square as well as Lord Rosebery does, and
a confounded long sight better than that man who is going up the steps
of old Beaumont’s house.”

“Who is old Beaumont?” I asked irritably.

“A perfectly good fellow. Lord Beaumont of Foxwood--don’t you know his
name? He is a man of transparent sincerity, a nobleman who does more
work than a navvy, a socialist, an anarchist, I don’t know what;
anyhow, he’s a philosopher and philanthropist. I admit he has the slight
disadvantage of being, beyond all question, off his head. He has that
real disadvantage which has arisen out of the modern worship of progress
and novelty; and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance. If
you went to him and proposed to eat your grandmother, he would agree
with you, so long as you put it on hygienic and public grounds, as a
cheap alternative to cremation. So long as you progress fast enough it
seems a matter of indifference to him whether you are progressing to the
stars or the devil. So his house is filled with an endless succession
of literary and political fashions; men who wear long hair because it is
romantic; men who wear short hair because it is medical; men who walk on
their feet only to exercise their hands; and men who walk on their hands
for fear of tiring their feet. But though the inhabitants of his salons
are generally fools, like himself, they are almost always, like himself,
good men. I am really surprised to see a criminal enter there.”

“My good fellow,” I said firmly, striking my foot on the pavement, “the
truth of this affair is very simple. To use your own eloquent language,
you have the ‘slight disadvantage’ of being off your head. You see a
total stranger in a public street; you choose to start certain theories
about his eyebrows. You then treat him as a burglar because he enters an
honest man’s door. The thing is too monstrous. Admit that it is, Basil,
and come home with me. Though these people are still having tea, yet
with the distance we have to go, we shall be late for dinner.”

Basil’s eyes were shining in the twilight like lamps.

“I thought,” he said, “that I had outlived vanity.”

“What do you want now?” I cried.

“I want,” he cried out, “what a girl wants when she wears her new frock;
I want what a boy wants when he goes in for a clanging match with a
monitor--I want to show somebody what a fine fellow I am. I am as right
about that man as I am about your having a hat on your head. You say
it cannot be tested. I say it can. I will take you to see my old friend
Beaumont. He is a delightful man to know.”

“Do you really mean--?” I began.

“I will apologize,” he said calmly, “for our not being dressed for a
call,” and walking across the vast misty square, he walked up the dark
stone steps and rang at the bell.

A severe servant in black and white opened the door to us: on receiving
my friend’s name his manner passed in a flash from astonishment to
respect. We were ushered into the house very quickly, but not so quickly
but that our host, a white-haired man with a fiery face, came out
quickly to meet us.

“My dear fellow,” he cried, shaking Basil’s hand again and again,
“I have not seen you for years. Have you been--er--” he said, rather
wildly, “have you been in the country?”

“Not for all that time,” answered Basil, smiling. “I have long given
up my official position, my dear Philip, and have been living in a
deliberate retirement. I hope I do not come at an inopportune moment.”

“An inopportune moment,” cried the ardent gentleman. “You come at the
most opportune moment I could imagine. Do you know who is here?”

“I do not,” answered Grant, with gravity. Even as he spoke a roar of
laughter came from the inner room.

“Basil,” said Lord Beaumont solemnly, “I have Wimpole here.”

“And who is Wimpole?”

“Basil,” cried the other, “you must have been in the country. You must
have been in the antipodes. You must have been in the moon. Who is
Wimpole? Who was Shakespeare?”

“As to who Shakespeare was,” answered my friend placidly, “my views go
no further than thinking that he was not Bacon. More probably he was
Mary Queen of Scots. But as to who Wimpole is--” and his speech also was
cloven with a roar of laughter from within.

“Wimpole!” cried Lord Beaumont, in a sort of ecstasy. “Haven’t you heard
of the great modern wit? My dear fellow, he has turned conversation,
I do not say into an art--for that, perhaps, it always was but into a
great art, like the statuary of Michael Angelo--an art of masterpieces.
His repartees, my good friend, startle one like a man shot dead. They
are final; they are--”

Again there came the hilarious roar from the room, and almost with the
very noise of it, a big, panting apoplectic old gentleman came out of
the inner house into the hall where we were standing.

“Now, my dear chap,” began Lord Beaumont hastily.

“I tell you, Beaumont, I won’t stand it,” exploded the large old
gentleman. “I won’t be made game of by a twopenny literary adventurer
like that. I won’t be made a guy. I won’t--”

“Come, come,” said Beaumont feverishly. “Let me introduce you. This is
Mr Justice Grant--that is, Mr Grant. Basil, I am sure you have heard of
Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh.”

“Who has not?” asked Grant, and bowed to the worthy old baronet, eyeing
him with some curiosity. He was hot and heavy in his momentary anger,
but even that could not conceal the noble though opulent outline of his
face and body, the florid white hair, the Roman nose, the body stalwart
though corpulent, the chin aristocratic though double. He was a
magnificent courtly gentleman; so much of a gentleman that he could show
an unquestionable weakness of anger without altogether losing dignity;
so much of a gentleman that even his faux pas were well-bred.

“I am distressed beyond expression, Beaumont,” he said gruffly, “to fail
in respect to these gentlemen, and even more especially to fail in it in
your house. But it is not you or they that are in any way concerned, but
that flashy half-caste jackanapes--”

At this moment a young man with a twist of red moustache and a sombre
air came out of the inner room. He also did not seem to be greatly
enjoying the intellectual banquet within.

“I think you remember my friend and secretary, Mr Drummond,” said
Lord Beaumont, turning to Grant, “even if you only remember him as a
schoolboy.”

“Perfectly,” said the other. Mr Drummond shook hands pleasantly and
respectfully, but the cloud was still on his brow. Turning to Sir Walter
Cholmondeliegh, he said:

“I was sent by Lady Beaumont to express her hope that you were not going
yet, Sir Walter. She says she has scarcely seen anything of you.”

The old gentleman, still red in the face, had a temporary internal
struggle; then his good manners triumphed, and with a gesture of
obeisance and a vague utterance of, “If Lady Beaumont... a lady, of
course,” he followed the young man back into the salon. He had scarcely
been deposited there half a minute before another peal of laughter told
that he had (in all probability) been scored off again.

“Of course, I can excuse dear old Cholmondeliegh,” said Beaumont, as he
helped us off with our coats. “He has not the modern mind.”

“What is the modern mind?” asked Grant.

“Oh, it’s enlightened, you know, and progressive--and faces the facts
of life seriously.” At this moment another roar of laughter came from
within.

“I only ask,” said Basil, “because of the last two friends of yours who
had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other
thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardon--this way, if I remember
right.”

“Do you know,” said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish
entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the interior, “I can never
quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and
sometimes so reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?”

“No,” said Basil, loudly and cheerfully, as he entered the crowded
drawing-room.

This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned away from our
slim friend with the Oriental face for the first time that afternoon.
Two people, however, still looked at him. One was the daughter of the
house, Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him with great violet eyes and
with the intense and awful thirst of the female upper class for verbal
amusement and stimulus. The other was Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, who
looked at him with a still and sullen but unmistakable desire to throw
him out of the window.

He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything
from the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of his silvered hair
suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a
man--the unmistakable, splendid serpentine gentleman we had seen walking
in North London, his eyes shining with repeated victory.

“What I can’t understand, Mr Wimpole,” said Muriel Beaumont eagerly,
“is how you contrive to treat all this so easily. You say things quite
philosophical and yet so wildly funny. If I thought of such things, I’m
sure I should laugh outright when the thought first came.”

“I agree with Miss Beaumont,” said Sir Walter, suddenly exploding with
indignation. “If I had thought of anything so futile, I should find it
difficult to keep my countenance.”

“Difficult to keep your countenance,” cried Mr Wimpole, with an air of
alarm; “oh, do keep your countenance! Keep it in the British Museum.”

Every one laughed uproariously, as they always do at an already admitted
readiness, and Sir Walter, turning suddenly purple, shouted out:

“Do you know who you are talking to, with your confounded tomfooleries?”

“I never talk tomfooleries,” said the other, “without first knowing my
audience.”

Grant walked across the room and tapped the red-moustached secretary on
the shoulder. That gentleman was leaning against the wall regarding
the whole scene with a great deal of gloom; but, I fancied, with very
particular gloom when his eyes fell on the young lady of the house
rapturously listening to Wimpole.

“May I have a word with you outside, Drummond?” asked Grant. “It is
about business. Lady Beaumont will excuse us.”

I followed my friend, at his own request, greatly wondering, to this
strange external interview. We passed abruptly into a kind of side room
out of the hall.

“Drummond,” said Basil sharply, “there are a great many good people, and
a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind
of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people
are wicked. You are the only person I know of here who is honest and has
also some common sense. What do you make of Wimpole?”

Mr Secretary Drummond had a pale face and red hair; but at this his face
became suddenly as red as his moustache.

“I am not a fair judge of him,” he said.

“Why not?” asked Grant.

“Because I hate him like hell,” said the other, after a long pause and
violently.

Neither Grant nor I needed to ask the reason; his glances towards Miss
Beaumont and the stranger were sufficiently illuminating. Grant said
quietly:

“But before--before you came to hate him, what did you really think of
him?”

“I am in a terrible difficulty,” said the young man, and his voice told
us, like a clear bell, that he was an honest man. “If I spoke about him
as I feel about him now, I could not trust myself. And I should like to
be able to say that when I first saw him I thought he was charming. But
again, the fact is I didn’t. I hate him, that is my private affair. But
I also disapprove of him--really I do believe I disapprove of him quite
apart from my private feelings. When first he came, I admit he was much
quieter, but I did not like, so to speak, the moral swell of him. Then
that jolly old Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh got introduced to us, and this
fellow, with his cheap-jack wit, began to score off the old man in the
way he does now. Then I felt that he must be a bad lot; it must be
bad to fight the old and the kindly. And he fights the poor old chap
savagely, unceasingly, as if he hated old age and kindliness. Take, if
you want it, the evidence of a prejudiced witness. I admit that I hate
the man because a certain person admires him. But I believe that apart
from that I should hate the man because old Sir Walter hates him.”

This speech affected me with a genuine sense of esteem and pity for the
young man; that is, of pity for him because of his obviously hopeless
worship of Miss Beaumont, and of esteem for him because of the direct
realistic account of the history of Wimpole which he had given. Still, I
was sorry that he seemed so steadily set against the man, and could
not help referring it to an instinct of his personal relations, however
nobly disguised from himself.

In the middle of these meditations, Grant whispered in my ear what was
perhaps the most startling of all interruptions.

“In the name of God, let’s get away.”

I have never known exactly in how odd a way this odd old man affected
me. I only know that for some reason or other he so affected me that I
was, within a few minutes, in the street outside.

“This,” he said, “is a beastly but amusing affair.”

“What is?” I asked, baldly enough.

“This affair. Listen to me, my old friend. Lord and Lady Beaumont have
just invited you and me to a grand dinner-party this very night, at
which Mr Wimpole will be in all his glory. Well, there is nothing very
extraordinary about that. The extraordinary thing is that we are not
going.”

“Well, really,” I said, “it is already six o’clock and I doubt if we
could get home and dress. I see nothing extraordinary in the fact that
we are not going.”

“Don’t you?” said Grant. “I’ll bet you’ll see something extraordinary in
what we’re doing instead.”

I looked at him blankly.

“Doing instead?” I asked. “What are we doing instead?”

“Why,” said he, “we are waiting for one or two hours outside this house
on a winter evening. You must forgive me; it is all my vanity. It is
only to show you that I am right. Can you, with the assistance of this
cigar, wait until both Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh and the mystic Wimpole
have left this house?”

“Certainly,” I said. “But I do not know which is likely to leave first.
Have you any notion?”

“No,” he said. “Sir Walter may leave first in a glow of rage. Or again,
Mr Wimpole may leave first, feeling that his last epigram is a thing to
be flung behind him like a firework. And Sir Walter may remain some
time to analyse Mr Wimpole’s character. But they will both have to leave
within reasonable time, for they will both have to get dressed and come
back to dinner here tonight.”

As he spoke the shrill double whistle from the porch of the great house
drew a dark cab to the dark portal. And then a thing happened that we
really had not expected. Mr Wimpole and Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh came
out at the same moment.

They paused for a second or two opposite each other in a natural doubt;
then a certain geniality, fundamental perhaps in both of them, made Sir
Walter smile and say: “The night is foggy. Pray take my cab.”

Before I could count twenty the cab had gone rattling up the street with
both of them. And before I could count twenty-three Grant had hissed in
my ear:

“Run after the cab; run as if you were running from a mad dog--run.”

We pelted on steadily, keeping the cab in sight, through dark mazy
streets. God only, I thought, knows why we are running at all, but we
are running hard. Fortunately we did not run far. The cab pulled up at
the fork of two streets and Sir Walter paid the cabman, who drove away
rejoicing, having just come in contact with the more generous among the
rich. Then the two men talked together as men do talk together after
giving and receiving great insults, the talk which leads either to
forgiveness or a duel--at least so it seemed as we watched it from ten
yards off. Then the two men shook hands heartily, and one went down one
fork of the road and one down another.

Basil, with one of his rare gestures, flung his arms forward.

“Run after that scoundrel,” he cried; “let us catch him now.”

We dashed across the open space and reached the juncture of two paths.

“Stop!” I shouted wildly to Grant. “That’s the wrong turning.”

He ran on.

“Idiot!” I howled. “Sir Walter’s gone down there. Wimpole has slipped
us. He’s half a mile down the other road. You’re wrong... Are you deaf?
You’re wrong!”

“I don’t think I am,” he panted, and ran on.

“But I saw him!” I cried. “Look in front of you. Is that Wimpole? It’s
the old man... What are you doing? What are we to do?”

“Keep running,” said Grant.

Running soon brought us up to the broad back of the pompous old baronet,
whose white whiskers shone silver in the fitful lamplight. My brain was
utterly bewildered. I grasped nothing.

“Charlie,” said Basil hoarsely, “can you believe in my common sense for
four minutes?”

“Of course,” I said, panting.

“Then help me to catch that man in front and hold him down. Do it at
once when I say ‘Now’. Now!”

We sprang on Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, and rolled that portly old
gentleman on his back. He fought with a commendable valour, but we got
him tight. I had not the remotest notion why. He had a splendid and
full-blooded vigour; when he could not box he kicked, and we bound him;
when he could not kick he shouted, and we gagged him. Then, by Basil’s
arrangement, we dragged him into a small court by the street side and
waited. As I say, I had no notion why.

“I am sorry to incommode you,” said Basil calmly out of the darkness;
“but I have made an appointment here.”

“An appointment!” I said blankly.

“Yes,” he said, glancing calmly at the apoplectic old aristocrat gagged
on the ground, whose eyes were starting impotently from his head. “I
have made an appointment here with a thoroughly nice young fellow.
An old friend. Jasper Drummond his name is--you may have met him
this afternoon at the Beaumonts. He can scarcely come though till the
Beaumonts’ dinner is over.”

For I do not know how many hours we stood there calmly in the darkness.
By the time those hours were over I had thoroughly made up my mind that
the same thing had happened which had happened long ago on the bench of
a British Court of Justice. Basil Grant had gone mad. I could imagine
no other explanation of the facts, with the portly, purple-faced old
country gentleman flung there strangled on the floor like a bundle of
wood.

After about four hours a lean figure in evening dress rushed into the
court. A glimpse of gaslight showed the red moustache and white face of
Jasper Drummond.

“Mr Grant,” he said blankly, “the thing is incredible. You were right;
but what did you mean? All through this dinner-party, where dukes and
duchesses and editors of Quarterlies had come especially to hear him,
that extraordinary Wimpole kept perfectly silent. He didn’t say a funny
thing. He didn’t say anything at all. What does it mean?”

Grant pointed to the portly old gentleman on the ground.

“That is what it means,” he said.

Drummond, on observing a fat gentleman lying so calmly about the place,
jumped back, as from a mouse.

“What?” he said weakly, “... what?”

Basil bent suddenly down and tore a paper out of Sir Walter’s
breastpocket, a paper which the baronet, even in his hampered state,
seemed to make some effort to retain.

It was a large loose piece of white wrapping paper, which Mr Jasper
Drummond read with a vacant eye and undisguised astonishment. As far as
he could make out, it consisted of a series of questions and answers, or
at least of remarks and replies, arranged in the manner of a catechism.
The greater part of the document had been torn and obliterated in the
struggle, but the termination remained. It ran as follows:

C. Says... Keep countenance.

W. Keep... British Museum.

C. Know whom talk... absurdities.

W. Never talk absurdities without

“What is it?” cried Drummond, flinging the paper down in a sort of final
fury.

“What is it?” replied Grant, his voice rising into a kind of splendid
chant. “What is it? It is a great new profession. A great new trade. A
trifle immoral, I admit, but still great, like piracy.”

“A new profession!” said the young man with the red moustache vaguely;
“a new trade!”

“A new trade,” repeated Grant, with a strange exultation, “a new
profession! What a pity it is immoral.”

“But what the deuce is it?” cried Drummond and I in a breath of
blasphemy.

“It is,” said Grant calmly, “the great new trade of the Organizer of
Repartee. This fat old gentleman lying on the ground strikes you, as I
have no doubt, as very stupid and very rich. Let me clear his character.
He is, like ourselves, very clever and very poor. He is also not really
at all fat; all that is stuffing. He is not particularly old, and
his name is not Cholmondeliegh. He is a swindler, and a swindler of
a perfectly delightful and novel kind. He hires himself out at
dinner-parties to lead up to other people’s repartees. According to a
preconcerted scheme (which you may find on that piece of paper), he says
the stupid things he has arranged for himself, and his client says the
clever things arranged for him. In short, he allows himself to be scored
off for a guinea a night.”

“And this fellow Wimpole--” began Drummond with indignation.

“This fellow Wimpole,” said Basil Grant, smiling, “will not be an
intellectual rival in the future. He had some fine things, elegance and
silvered hair, and so on. But the intellect is with our friend on the
floor.”

“That fellow,” cried Drummond furiously, “that fellow ought to be in
gaol.”

“Not at all,” said Basil indulgently; “he ought to be in the Club of
Queer Trades.”



Chapter 3. The Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit

The revolt of Matter against Man (which I believe to exist) has now been
reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather than
the large things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The
bones of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the
tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts
of fire heap hell over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and
eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar
studs. The stud with which I was engaged (on fierce and equal terms) as
I made the above reflections, was one which I was trying to introduce
into my shirt collar when a loud knock came at the door.

My first thought was as to whether Basil Grant had called to fetch me.
He and I were to turn up at the same dinner-party (for which I was in
the act of dressing), and it might be that he had taken it into his head
to come my way, though we had arranged to go separately. It was a
small and confidential affair at the table of a good but unconventional
political lady, an old friend of his. She had asked us both to meet a
third guest, a Captain Fraser, who had made something of a name and was
an authority on chimpanzees. As Basil was an old friend of the hostess
and I had never seen her, I felt that it was quite possible that he
(with his usual social sagacity) might have decided to take me along in
order to break the ice. The theory, like all my theories, was complete;
but as a fact it was not Basil.

I was handed a visiting card inscribed: “Rev. Ellis Shorter”, and
underneath was written in pencil, but in a hand in which even hurry
could not conceal a depressing and gentlemanly excellence, “Asking the
favour of a few moments’ conversation on a most urgent matter.”!

I had already subdued the stud, thereby proclaiming that the image of
God has supremacy over all matters (a valuable truth), and throwing on
my dress-coat and waistcoat, hurried into the drawing-room. He rose at
my entrance, flapping like a seal; I can use no other description. He
flapped a plaid shawl over his right arm; he flapped a pair of pathetic
black gloves; he flapped his clothes; I may say, without exaggeration,
that he flapped his eyelids, as he rose. He was a bald-browed,
white-haired, white-whiskered old clergyman, of a flappy and floppy
type. He said:

“I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I am so extremely sorry. I come--I
can only say--I can only say in my defence, that I come--upon an
important matter. Pray forgive me.”

I told him I forgave perfectly and waited.

“What I have to say,” he said brokenly, “is so dreadful--it is so
dreadful--I have lived a quiet life.”

I was burning to get away, for it was already doubtful if I should be in
time for dinner. But there was something about the old man’s honest air
of bitterness that seemed to open to me the possibilities of life larger
and more tragic than my own.

I said gently: “Pray go on.”

Nevertheless the old gentleman, being a gentleman as well as old,
noticed my secret impatience and seemed still more unmanned.

“I’m so sorry,” he said meekly; “I wouldn’t have come--but for--your
friend Major Brown recommended me to come here.”

“Major Brown!” I said, with some interest.

“Yes,” said the Reverend Mr Shorter, feverishly flapping his plaid
shawl about. “He told me you helped him in a great difficulty--and my
difficulty! Oh, my dear sir, it’s a matter of life and death.”

I rose abruptly, in an acute perplexity. “Will it take long, Mr
Shorter?” I asked. “I have to go out to dinner almost at once.”

He rose also, trembling from head to foot, and yet somehow, with all his
moral palsy, he rose to the dignity of his age and his office.

“I have no right, Mr Swinburne--I have no right at all,” he said. “If
you have to go out to dinner, you have of course--a perfect right--of
course a perfect right. But when you come back--a man will be dead.”

And he sat down, quaking like a jelly.

The triviality of the dinner had been in those two minutes dwarfed and
drowned in my mind. I did not want to go and see a political widow, and
a captain who collected apes; I wanted to hear what had brought this
dear, doddering old vicar into relation with immediate perils.

“Will you have a cigar?” I said.

“No, thank you,” he said, with indescribable embarrassment, as if not
smoking cigars was a social disgrace.

“A glass of wine?” I said.

“No, thank you, no, thank you; not just now,” he repeated with that
hysterical eagerness with which people who do not drink at all often
try to convey that on any other night of the week they would sit up all
night drinking rum-punch. “Not just now, thank you.”

“Nothing else I can get for you?” I said, feeling genuinely sorry for
the well-mannered old donkey. “A cup of tea?”

I saw a struggle in his eye and I conquered. When the cup of tea came he
drank it like a dipsomaniac gulping brandy. Then he fell back and said:

“I have had such a time, Mr Swinburne. I am not used to these
excitements. As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex’--he threw this in with
an indescribable airiness of vanity--‘I have never known such things
happen.”

“What things happen?” I asked.

He straightened himself with sudden dignity.

“As Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex,” he said, “I have never been forcibly
dressed up as an old woman and made to take part in a crime in the
character of an old woman. Never once. My experience may be small. It
may be insufficient. But it has never occurred to me before.”

“I have never heard of it,” I said, “as among the duties of a clergyman.
But I am not well up in church matters. Excuse me if perhaps I failed to
follow you correctly. Dressed up--as what?”

“As an old woman,” said the vicar solemnly, “as an old woman.”

I thought in my heart that it required no great transformation to make
an old woman of him, but the thing was evidently more tragic than comic,
and I said respectfully:

“May I ask how it occurred?”

“I will begin at the beginning,” said Mr Shorter, “and I will tell my
story with the utmost possible precision. At seventeen minutes past
eleven this morning I left the vicarage to keep certain appointments and
pay certain visits in the village. My first visit was to Mr Jervis, the
treasurer of our League of Christian Amusements, with whom I concluded
some business touching the claim made by Parkes the gardener in the
matter of the rolling of our tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a
very earnest churchwoman, but permanently bedridden. She is the author
of several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled
(unless my memory misleads me) Eglantine.”

He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something that
can only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager deliberation.
He had, I think, a vague memory in his head of the detectives in the
detective stories, who always sternly require that nothing should be
kept back.

“I then proceeded,” he went on, with the same maddening
conscientiousness of manner, “to Mr Carr (not Mr James Carr, of course;
Mr Robert Carr) who is temporarily assisting our organist, and having
consulted with him (on the subject of a choir boy who is accused, I
cannot as yet say whether justly or not, of cutting holes in the organ
pipes), I finally dropped in upon a Dorcas meeting at the house of Miss
Brett. The Dorcas meetings are usually held at the vicarage, but my wife
being unwell, Miss Brett, a newcomer in our village, but very active in
church work, had very kindly consented to hold them. The Dorcas society
is entirely under my wife’s management as a rule, and except for Miss
Brett, who, as I say, is very active, I scarcely know any members of it.
I had, however, promised to drop in on them, and I did so.

“When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with Miss
Brett, but they were sewing very busily. It is very difficult, of
course, for any person, however strongly impressed with the necessity in
these matters of full and exact exposition of the facts, to remember and
repeat the actual details of a conversation, particularly a conversation
which (though inspired with a most worthy and admirable zeal for good
work) was one which did not greatly impress the hearer’s mind at the
time and was in fact--er--mostly about socks. I can, however, remember
distinctly that one of the spinster ladies (she was a thin person with
a woollen shawl, who appeared to feel the cold, and I am almost sure she
was introduced to me as Miss James) remarked that the weather was very
changeable. Miss Brett then offered me a cup of tea, which I accepted,
I cannot recall in what words. Miss Brett is a short and stout lady with
white hair. The only other figure in the group that caught my attention
was a Miss Mowbray, a small and neat lady of aristocratic manners,
silver hair, and a high voice and colour. She was the most emphatic
member of the party; and her views on the subject of pinafores, though
expressed with a natural deference to myself, were in themselves strong
and advanced. Beside her (although all five ladies were dressed simply
in black) it could not be denied that the others looked in some way what
you men of the world would call dowdy.

“After about ten minutes’ conversation I rose to go, and as I did so
I heard something which--I cannot describe it--something which seemed
to--but I really cannot describe it.”

“What did you hear?” I asked, with some impatience.

“I heard,” said the vicar solemnly, “I heard Miss Mowbray (the lady with
the silver hair) say to Miss James (the lady with the woollen shawl),
the following extraordinary words. I committed them to memory on the
spot, and as soon as circumstances set me free to do so, I noted them
down on a piece of paper. I believe I have it here.” He fumbled in
his breast-pocket, bringing out mild things, note-books, circulars and
programmes of village concerts. “I heard Miss Mowbray say to Miss James,
the following words: ‘Now’s your time, Bill.’”

He gazed at me for a few moments after making this announcement, gravely
and unflinchingly, as if conscious that here he was unshaken about his
facts. Then he resumed, turning his bald head more towards the fire.

“This appeared to me remarkable. I could not by any means understand
it. It seemed to me first of all peculiar that one maiden lady should
address another maiden lady as ‘Bill’. My experience, as I have said,
may be incomplete; maiden ladies may have among themselves and in
exclusively spinster circles wilder customs than I am aware of. But
it seemed to me odd, and I could almost have sworn (if you will not
misunderstand the phrase), I should have been strongly impelled to
maintain at the time that the words, ‘Now’s your time, Bill’, were by
no means pronounced with that upper-class intonation which, as I have
already said, had up to now characterized Miss Mowbray’s conversation.
In fact, the words, ‘Now’s your time, Bill’, would have been, I fancy,
unsuitable if pronounced with that upper-class intonation.

“I was surprised, I repeat, then, at the remark. But I was still more
surprised when, looking round me in bewilderment, my hat and umbrella in
hand, I saw the lean lady with the woollen shawl leaning upright against
the door out of which I was just about to make my exit. She was still
knitting, and I supposed that this erect posture against the door was
only an eccentricity of spinsterhood and an oblivion of my intended
departure.

“I said genially, ‘I am so sorry to disturb you, Miss James, but I must
really be going. I have--er--’ I stopped here, for the words she
had uttered in reply, though singularly brief and in tone extremely
business-like, were such as to render that arrest of my remarks, I
think, natural and excusable. I have these words also noted down. I have
not the least idea of their meaning; so I have only been able to render
them phonetically. But she said,” and Mr Shorter peered short-sightedly
at his papers, “she said: ‘Chuck it, fat ‘ead,’ and she added something
that sounded like ‘It’s a kop’, or (possibly) ‘a kopt’. And then the
last cord, either of my sanity or the sanity of the universe, snapped
suddenly. My esteemed friend and helper, Miss Brett, standing by the
mantelpiece, said: ‘Put ‘is old ‘ead in a bag, Sam, and tie ‘im up
before you start jawin’. You’ll be kopt yourselves some o’ these days
with this way of coin’ things, har lar theater.’

“My head went round and round. Was it really true, as I had suddenly
fancied a moment before, that unmarried ladies had some dreadful riotous
society of their own from which all others were excluded? I remembered
dimly in my classical days (I was a scholar in a small way once, but
now, alas! rusty), I remembered the mysteries of the Bona Dea and their
strange female freemasonry. I remembered the witches’ Sabbaths. I was
just, in my absurd lightheadedness, trying to remember a line of verse
about Diana’s nymphs, when Miss Mowbray threw her arm round me from
behind. The moment it held me I knew it was not a woman’s arm.

“Miss Brett--or what I had called Miss Brett--was standing in front of
me with a big revolver in her hand and a broad grin on her face.
Miss James was still leaning against the door, but had fallen into an
attitude so totally new, and so totally unfeminine, that it gave one a
shock. She was kicking her heels, with her hands in her pockets and her
cap on one side. She was a man. I mean he was a wo--no, that is I saw
that instead of being a woman she--he, I mean--that is, it was a man.”

Mr Shorter became indescribably flurried and flapping in endeavouring to
arrange these genders and his plaid shawl at the same time. He resumed
with a higher fever of nervousness:

“As for Miss Mowbray, she--he, held me in a ring of iron. He had her
arm--that is she had his arm--round her neck--my neck I mean--and I
could not cry out. Miss Brett--that is, Mr Brett, at least Mr something
who was not Miss Brett--had the revolver pointed at me. The other two
ladies--or er--gentlemen, were rummaging in some bag in the background.
It was all clear at last: they were criminals dressed up as women, to
kidnap me! To kidnap the Vicar of Chuntsey, in Essex. But why? Was it to
be Nonconformists?

“The brute leaning against the door called out carelessly, ‘’Urry up,
‘Arry. Show the old bloke what the game is, and let’s get off.’

“‘Curse ‘is eyes,’ said Miss Brett--I mean the man with the
revolver--‘why should we show ‘im the game?’

“‘If you take my advice you bloomin’ well will,’ said the man at the
door, whom they called Bill. ‘A man wot knows wet ‘e’s doin’ is worth
ten wot don’t, even if ‘e’s a potty old parson.’

“‘Bill’s right enough,’ said the coarse voice of the man who held me (it
had been Miss Mowbray’s). ‘Bring out the picture, ‘Arry.’

“The man with the revolver walked across the room to where the other
two women--I mean men--were turning over baggage, and asked them for
something which they gave him. He came back with it across the room
and held it out in front of me. And compared to the surprise of that
display, all the previous surprises of this awful day shrank suddenly.

“It was a portrait of myself. That such a picture should be in the hands
of these scoundrels might in any case have caused a mild surprise;
but no more. It was no mild surprise that I felt. The likeness was
an extremely good one, worked up with all the accessories of the
conventional photographic studio. I was leaning my head on my hand and
was relieved against a painted landscape of woodland. It was obvious
that it was no snapshot; it was clear that I had sat for this
photograph. And the truth was that I had never sat for such a
photograph. It was a photograph that I had never had taken.

“I stared at it again and again. It seemed to me to be touched up a good
deal; it was glazed as well as framed, and the glass blurred some of the
details. But there unmistakably was my face, my eyes, my nose and mouth,
my head and hand, posed for a professional photographer. And I had never
posed so for any photographer.

“‘Be’old the bloomin’ miracle,’ said the man with the revolver, with
ill-timed facetiousness. ‘Parson, prepare to meet your God.’ And with
this he slid the glass out of the frame. As the glass moved, I saw that
part of the picture was painted on it in Chinese white, notably a pair
of white whiskers and a clerical collar. And underneath was a portrait
of an old lady in a quiet black dress, leaning her head on her hand
against the woodland landscape. The old lady was as like me as one pin
is like another. It had required only the whiskers and the collar to
make it me in every hair.

“‘Entertainin’, ain’t it?’ said the man described as ‘Arry, as he shot
the glass back again. ‘Remarkable resemblance, parson. Gratifyin’ to the
lady. Gratifyin’ to you. And hi may hadd, particlery gratifyin’ to us,
as bein’ the probable source of a very tolerable haul. You know Colonel
Hawker, the man who’s come to live in these parts, don’t you?’

“I nodded.

“‘Well,’ said the man ‘Arry, pointing to the picture, ‘that’s ‘is
mother. ‘Oo ran to catch ‘im when ‘e fell? She did,’ and he flung his
fingers in a general gesture towards the photograph of the old lady who
was exactly like me.

“‘Tell the old gent wot ‘e’s got to do and be done with it,’ broke out
Bill from the door. ‘Look ‘ere, Reverend Shorter, we ain’t goin’ to do
you no ‘arm. We’ll give you a sov. for your trouble if you like. And as
for the old woman’s clothes--why, you’ll look lovely in ‘em.’

“‘You ain’t much of a ‘and at a description, Bill,’ said the man behind
me. ‘Mr Shorter, it’s like this. We’ve got to see this man Hawker
tonight. Maybe ‘e’ll kiss us all and ‘ave up the champagne when ‘e sees
us. Maybe on the other ‘and--‘e won’t. Maybe ‘e’ll be dead when we goes
away. Maybe not. But we’ve got to see ‘im. Now as you know, ‘e shuts
‘isself up and never opens the door to a soul; only you don’t know why
and we does. The only one as can ever get at ‘im is ‘is mother.
Well, it’s a confounded funny coincidence,’ he said, accenting the
penultimate, ‘it’s a very unusual piece of good luck, but you’re ‘is
mother.’

“‘When first I saw ‘er picture,’ said the man Bill, shaking his head in
a ruminant manner, ‘when I first saw it I said--old Shorter. Those were
my exact words--old Shorter.’

“‘What do you mean, you wild creatures?’ I gasped. ‘What am I to do?’

“‘That’s easy said, your ‘oldness,’ said the man with the revolver,
good-humouredly; ‘you’ve got to put on those clothes,’ and he pointed to
a poke-bonnet and a heap of female clothes in the corner of the room.

“I will not dwell, Mr Swinburne, upon the details of what followed. I
had no choice. I could not fight five men, to say nothing of a loaded
pistol. In five minutes, sir, the Vicar of Chuntsey was dressed as an
old woman--as somebody else’s mother, if you please--and was dragged out
of the house to take part in a crime.

“It was already late in the afternoon, and the nights of winter were
closing in fast. On a dark road, in a blowing wind, we set out towards
the lonely house of Colonel Hawker, perhaps the queerest cortege that
ever straggled up that or any other road. To every human eye, in every
external, we were six very respectable old ladies of small means, in
black dresses and refined but antiquated bonnets; and we were really
five criminals and a clergyman.

“I will cut a long story short. My brain was whirling like a windmill as
I walked, trying to think of some manner of escape. To cry out, so long
as we were far from houses, would be suicidal, for it would be easy for
the ruffians to knife me or to gag me and fling me into a ditch. On the
other hand, to attempt to stop strangers and explain the situation was
impossible, because of the frantic folly of the situation itself. Long
before I had persuaded the chance postman or carrier of so absurd a
story, my companions would certainly have got off themselves, and in all
probability would have carried me off, as a friend of theirs who had
the misfortune to be mad or drunk. The last thought, however, was an
inspiration; though a very terrible one. Had it come to this, that the
Vicar of Chuntsey must pretend to be mad or drunk? It had come to this.

“I walked along with the rest up the deserted road, imitating and
keeping pace, as far as I could, with their rapid and yet lady-like
step, until at length I saw a lamp-post and a policeman standing under
it. I had made up my mind. Until we reached them we were all equally
demure and silent and swift. When we reached them I suddenly flung
myself against the railings and roared out: ‘Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!
Rule Britannia! Get your ‘air cut. Hoop-la! Boo!’ It was a condition of
no little novelty for a man in my position.

“The constable instantly flashed his lantern on me, or the draggled,
drunken old woman that was my travesty. ‘Now then, mum,’ he began
gruffly.

“‘Come along quiet, or I’ll eat your heart,’ cried Sam in my ear
hoarsely. ‘Stop, or I’ll flay you.’ It was frightful to hear the words
and see the neatly shawled old spinster who whispered them.

“I yelled, and yelled--I was in for it now. I screamed comic refrains
that vulgar young men had sung, to my regret, at our village concerts; I
rolled to and fro like a ninepin about to fall.

“‘If you can’t get your friend on quiet, ladies,’ said the policeman, ‘I
shall have to take ‘er up. Drunk and disorderly she is right enough.’

“I redoubled my efforts. I had not been brought up to this sort of
thing; but I believe I eclipsed myself. Words that I did not know I had
ever heard of seemed to come pouring out of my open mouth.

“‘When we get you past,’ whispered Bill, ‘you’ll howl louder; you’ll
howl louder when we’re burning your feet off.’

“I screamed in my terror those awful songs of joy. In all the nightmares
that men have ever dreamed, there has never been anything so blighting
and horrible as the faces of those five men, looking out of their
poke-bonnets; the figures of district visitors with the faces of devils.
I cannot think there is anything so heart-breaking in hell.

“For a sickening instant I thought that the bustle of my companions
and the perfect respectability of all our dresses would overcome the
policeman and induce him to let us pass. He wavered, so far as one
can describe anything so solid as a policeman as wavering. I lurched
suddenly forward and ran my head into his chest, calling out (if I
remember correctly), ‘Oh, crikey, blimey, Bill.’ It was at that moment
that I remembered most dearly that I was the Vicar of Chuntsey, in
Essex.

“My desperate coup saved me. The policeman had me hard by the back of
the neck.

“‘You come along with me,’ he began, but Bill cut in with his perfect
imitation of a lady’s finnicking voice.

“‘Oh, pray, constable, don’t make a disturbance with our poor friend. We
will get her quietly home. She does drink too much, but she is quite a
lady--only eccentric.’

“‘She butted me in the stomach,’ said the policeman briefly.

“‘Eccentricities of genius,’ said Sam earnestly.

“‘Pray let me take her home,’ reiterated Bill, in the resumed character
of Miss James, ‘she wants looking after.’ ‘She does,’ said the
policeman, ‘but I’ll look after her.’

“‘That’s no good,’ cried Bill feverishly. ‘She wants her friends. She
wants a particular medicine we’ve got.’

“‘Yes,’ assented Miss Mowbray, with excitement, ‘no other medicine any
good, constable. Complaint quite unique.’

“‘I’m all righ’. Cutchy, cutchy, coo!’ remarked, to his eternal shame,
the Vicar of Chuntsey.

“‘Look here, ladies,’ said the constable sternly, ‘I don’t like the
eccentricity of your friend, and I don’t like ‘er songs, or ‘er ‘ead in
my stomach. And now I come to think of it, I don’t like the looks of you
I’ve seen many as quiet dressed as you as was wrong ‘uns. Who are you?’

“‘We’ve not our cards with us,’ said Miss Mowbray, with indescribable
dignity. ‘Nor do we see why we should be insulted by any Jack-in-office
who chooses to be rude to ladies, when he is paid to protect them. If
you choose to take advantage of the weakness of our unfortunate friend,
no doubt you are legally entitled to take her. But if you fancy you have
any legal right to bully us, you will find yourself in the wrong box.’

“The truth and dignity of this staggered the policeman for a moment.
Under cover of their advantage my five persecutors turned for an instant
on me faces like faces of the damned and then swished off into the
darkness. When the constable first turned his lantern and his suspicions
on to them, I had seen the telegraphic look flash from face to face
saying that only retreat was possible now.

“By this time I was sinking slowly to the pavement, in a state of acute
reflection. So long as the ruffians were with me, I dared not quit the
role of drunkard. For if I had begun to talk reasonably and explain the
real case, the officer would merely have thought that I was slightly
recovered and would have put me in charge of my friends. Now, however,
if I liked I might safely undeceive him.

“But I confess I did not like. The chances of life are many, and it may
doubtless sometimes lie in the narrow path of duty for a clergyman of
the Church of England to pretend to be a drunken old woman; but
such necessities are, I imagine, sufficiently rare to appear to many
improbable. Suppose the story got about that I had pretended to be
drunk. Suppose people did not all think it was pretence!

“I lurched up, the policeman half-lifting me. I went along weakly and
quietly for about a hundred yards. The officer evidently thought that
I was too sleepy and feeble to effect an escape, and so held me lightly
and easily enough. Past one turning, two turnings, three turnings, four
turnings, he trailed me with him, a limp and slow and reluctant figure.
At the fourth turning, I suddenly broke from his hand and tore down the
street like a maddened stag. He was unprepared, he was heavy, and it was
dark. I ran and ran and ran, and in five minutes’ running, found I was
gaining. In half an hour I was out in the fields under the holy and
blessed stars, where I tore off my accursed shawl and bonnet and buried
them in clean earth.”

The old gentleman had finished his story and leant back in his chair.
Both the matter and the manner of his narration had, as time went on,
impressed me favourably. He was an old duffer and pedant, but behind
these things he was a country-bred man and gentleman, and had showed
courage and a sporting instinct in the hour of desperation. He had told
his story with many quaint formalities of diction, but also with a very
convincing realism.

“And now--” I began.

“And now,” said Shorter, leaning forward again with something like
servile energy, “and now, Mr Swinburne, what about that unhappy man
Hawker. I cannot tell what those men meant, or how far what they said
was real. But surely there is danger. I cannot go to the police, for
reasons that you perceive. Among other things, they wouldn’t believe me.
What is to be done?”

I took out my watch. It was already half past twelve.

“My friend Basil Grant,” I said, “is the best man we can go to. He and I
were to have gone to the same dinner tonight; but he will just have come
back by now. Have you any objection to taking a cab?”

“Not at all,” he replied, rising politely, and gathering up his absurd
plaid shawl.

A rattle in a hansom brought us underneath the sombre pile of workmen’s
flats in Lambeth which Grant inhabited; a climb up a wearisome wooden
staircase brought us to his garret. When I entered that wooden and
scrappy interior, the white gleam of Basil’s shirt-front and the lustre
of his fur coat flung on the wooden settle, struck me as a contrast. He
was drinking a glass of wine before retiring. I was right; he had come
back from the dinner-party.

He listened to the repetition of the story of the Rev. Ellis Shorter
with the genuine simplicity and respect which he never failed to exhibit
in dealing with any human being. When it was over he said simply:

“Do you know a man named Captain Fraser?”

I was so startled at this totally irrelevant reference to the worthy
collector of chimpanzees with whom I ought to have dined that evening,
that I glanced sharply at Grant. The result was that I did not look at
Mr Shorter. I only heard him answer, in his most nervous tone, “No.”

Basil, however, seemed to find something very curious about his answer
or his demeanour generally, for he kept his big blue eyes fixed on the
old clergyman, and though the eyes were quite quiet they stood out more
and more from his head.

“You are quite sure, Mr Shorter,” he repeated, “that you don’t know
Captain Fraser?”

“Quite,” answered the vicar, and I was certainly puzzled to find him
returning so much to the timidity, not to say the demoralization, of his
tone when he first entered my presence.

Basil sprang smartly to his feet.

“Then our course is clear,” he said. “You have not even begun your
investigation, my dear Mr Shorter; the first thing for us to do is to go
together to see Captain Fraser.”

“When?” asked the clergyman, stammering.

“Now,” said Basil, putting one arm in his fur coat.

The old clergyman rose to his feet, quaking all over.

“I really do not think that it is necessary,” he said.

Basil took his arm out of the fur coat, threw it over the chair again,
and put his hands in his pockets.

“Oh,” he said, with emphasis. “Oh--you don’t think it necessary; then,”
 and he added the words with great clearness and deliberation, “then, Mr
Ellis Shorter, I can only say that I would like to see you without your
whiskers.”

And at these words I also rose to my feet, for the great tragedy of my
life had come. Splendid and exciting as life was in continual contact
with an intellect like Basil’s, I had always the feeling that that
splendour and excitement were on the borderland of sanity. He lived
perpetually near the vision of the reason of things which makes men lose
their reason. And I felt of his insanity as men feel of the death of
friends with heart disease. It might come anywhere, in a field, in a
hansom cab, looking at a sunset, smoking a cigarette. It had come now.
At the very moment of delivering a judgement for the salvation of a
fellow creature, Basil Grant had gone mad.

“Your whiskers,” he cried, advancing with blazing eyes. “Give me your
whiskers. And your bald head.”

The old vicar naturally retreated a step or two. I stepped between.

“Sit down, Basil,” I implored, “you’re a little excited. Finish your
wine.”

“Whiskers,” he answered sternly, “whiskers.”

And with that he made a dash at the old gentleman, who made a dash for
the door, but was intercepted. And then, before I knew where I was
the quiet room was turned into something between a pantomime and a
pandemonium by those two. Chairs were flung over with a crash, tables
were vaulted with a noise like thunder, screens were smashed, crockery
scattered in smithereens, and still Basil Grant bounded and bellowed
after the Rev. Ellis Shorter.

And now I began to perceive something else, which added the last
half-witted touch to my mystification. The Rev. Ellis Shorter, of
Chuntsey, in Essex, was by no means behaving as I had previously noticed
him to behave, or as, considering his age and station, I should have
expected him to behave. His power of dodging, leaping, and fighting
would have been amazing in a lad of seventeen, and in this doddering old
vicar looked like a sort of farcical fairy-tale. Moreover, he did not
seem to be so much astonished as I had thought. There was even a look of
something like enjoyment in his eyes; so there was in the eye of Basil.
In fact, the unintelligible truth must be told. They were both laughing.

At length Shorter was cornered.

“Come, come, Mr Grant,” he panted, “you can’t do anything to me. It’s
quite legal. And it doesn’t do any one the least harm. It’s only a
social fiction. A result of our complex society, Mr Grant.”

“I don’t blame you, my man,” said Basil coolly. “But I want your
whiskers. And your bald head. Do they belong to Captain Fraser?”

“No, no,” said Mr Shorter, laughing, “we provide them ourselves. They
don’t belong to Captain Fraser.”

“What the deuce does all this mean?” I almost screamed. “Are you all
in an infernal nightmare? Why should Mr Shorter’s bald head belong to
Captain Fraser? How could it? What the deuce has Captain Fraser to
do with the affair? What is the matter with him? You dined with him,
Basil.”

“No,” said Grant, “I didn’t.”

“Didn’t you go to Mrs Thornton’s dinner-party?” I asked, staring. “Why
not?”

“Well,” said Basil, with a slow and singular smile, “the fact is I was
detained by a visitor. I have him, as a point of fact, in my bedroom.”

“In your bedroom?” I repeated; but my imagination had reached that point
when he might have said in his coal scuttle or his waistcoat pocket.

Grant stepped to the door of an inner room, flung it open and walked in.
Then he came out again with the last of the bodily wonders of that wild
night. He introduced into the sitting-room, in an apologetic manner,
and by the nape of the neck, a limp clergyman with a bald head, white
whiskers and a plaid shawl.

“Sit down, gentlemen,” cried Grant, striking his hands heartily. “Sit
down all of you and have a glass of wine. As you say, there is no harm
in it, and if Captain Fraser had simply dropped me a hint I could have
saved him from dropping a good sum of money. Not that you would have
liked that, eh?”

The two duplicate clergymen, who were sipping their Burgundy with two
duplicate grins, laughed heartily at this, and one of them carelessly
pulled off his whiskers and laid them on the table.

“Basil,” I said, “if you are my friend, save me. What is all this?”

He laughed again.

“Only another addition, Cherub, to your collection of Queer Trades.
These two gentlemen (whose health I have now the pleasure of drinking)
are Professional Detainers.”

“And what on earth’s that?” I asked.

“It’s really very simple, Mr Swinburne,” began he who had once been
the Rev. Ellis Shorter, of Chuntsey, in Essex; and it gave me a shock
indescribable to hear out of that pompous and familiar form come no
longer its own pompous and familiar voice, but the brisk sharp tones of
a young city man. “It is really nothing very important. We are paid by
our clients to detain in conversation, on some harmless pretext, people
whom they want out of the way for a few hours. And Captain Fraser--” and
with that he hesitated and smiled.

Basil smiled also. He intervened.

“The fact is that Captain Fraser, who is one of my best friends, wanted
us both out of the way very much. He is sailing tonight for East Africa,
and the lady with whom we were all to have dined is--er--what is I
believe described as ‘the romance of his life’. He wanted that two hours
with her, and employed these two reverend gentlemen to detain us at our
houses so as to let him have the field to himself.”

“And of course,” said the late Mr Shorter apologetically to me, “as I
had to keep a gentleman at home from keeping an appointment with a lady,
I had to come with something rather hot and strong--rather urgent. It
wouldn’t have done to be tame.”

“Oh,” I said, “I acquit you of tameness.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the man respectfully, “always very grateful for
any recommendation, sir.”

The other man idly pushed back his artificial bald head, revealing close
red hair, and spoke dreamily, perhaps under the influence of Basil’s
admirable Burgundy.

“It’s wonderful how common it’s getting, gentlemen. Our office is busy
from morning till night. I’ve no doubt you’ve often knocked up against
us before. You just take notice. When an old bachelor goes on boring you
with hunting stories, when you’re burning to be introduced to somebody,
he’s from our bureau. When a lady calls on parish work and stops hours,
just when you wanted to go to the Robinsons’, she’s from our bureau. The
Robinson hand, sir, may be darkly seen.”

“There is one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why you are both
vicars.”

A shade crossed the brow of the temporary incumbent of Chuntsey, in
Essex.

“That may have been a mistake, sir,” he said. “But it was not our fault.
It was all the munificence of Captain Fraser. He requested that the
highest price and talent on our tariff should be employed to detain
you gentlemen. Now the highest payment in our office goes to those who
impersonate vicars, as being the most respectable and more of a strain.
We are paid five guineas a visit. We have had the good fortune to
satisfy the firm with our work; and we are now permanently vicars.
Before that we had two years as colonels, the next in our scale.
Colonels are four guineas.”



Chapter 4. The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent

Lieutenant Drummond Keith was a man about whom conversation always burst
like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room. This arose from many
separate touches about him. He was a light, loose person, who wore
light, loose clothes, generally white, as if he were in the tropics; he
was lean and graceful, like a panther, and he had restless black eyes.

He was very impecunious. He had one of the habits of the poor, in a
degree so exaggerated as immeasurably to eclipse the most miserable of
the unemployed; I mean the habit of continual change of lodgings. There
are inland tracts of London where, in the very heart of artificial
civilization, humanity has almost become nomadic once more. But in that
restless interior there was no ragged tramp so restless as the elegant
officer in the loose white clothes. He had shot a great many things in
his time, to judge from his conversation, from partridges to elephants,
but his slangier acquaintances were of opinion that “the moon” had been
not unfrequently amid the victims of his victorious rifle. The phrase is
a fine one, and suggests a mystic, elvish, nocturnal hunting.

He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit which
consisted practically of five articles. Two odd-looking, large-bladed
spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of some savage tribe, a
green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of the Pickwick Papers, a big
game rifle, and a large sealed jar of some unholy Oriental wine. These
always went into every new lodging, even for one night; and they went in
quite undisguised, tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight
of the poetic gutter boys in the little grey streets.

I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old
regimental sword. But this raised another odd question about him. Slim
and active as he was, he was no longer very young. His hair, indeed, was
quite grey, though his rather wild almost Italian moustache retained its
blackness, and his face was careworn under its almost Italian gaiety.
To find a middle-aged man who has left the Army at the primitive rank
of lieutenant is unusual and not necessarily encouraging. With the
more cautious and solid this fact, like his endless flitting, did the
mysterious gentleman no good.

Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win a man
admiration, but not respect. They came out of queer places, where a good
man would scarcely find himself, out of opium dens and gambling hells;
they had the heat of the thieves’ kitchens or smelled of a strange
smoke from cannibal incantations. These are the kind of stories which
discredit a person almost equally whether they are believed or no. If
Keith’s tales were false he was a liar; if they were true he had had, at
any rate, every opportunity of being a scamp.

He had just left the room in which I sat with Basil Grant and his
brother Rupert, the voluble amateur detective. And as I say was
invariably the case, we were all talking about him. Rupert Grant was
a clever young fellow, but he had that tendency which youth and
cleverness, when sharply combined, so often produce, a somewhat
extravagant scepticism. He saw doubt and guilt everywhere, and it
was meat and drink to him. I had often got irritated with this boyish
incredulity of his, but on this particular occasion I am bound to say
that I thought him so obviously right that I was astounded at Basil’s
opposing him, however banteringly.

I could swallow a good deal, being naturally of a simple turn, but I
could not swallow Lieutenant Keith’s autobiography.

“You don’t seriously mean, Basil,” I said, “that you think that that
fellow really did go as a stowaway with Nansen and pretend to be the Mad
Mullah and--”

“He has one fault,” said Basil thoughtfully, “or virtue, as you may
happen to regard it. He tells the truth in too exact and bald a style;
he is too veracious.”

“Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical,” said Rupert contemptuously,
“be a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance, that he has lived all
his life in one ancestral manor.”

“No, he’s extremely fond of change of scene,” replied Basil
dispassionately, “and of living in odd places. That doesn’t prevent his
chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people don’t understand is
that telling a thing crudely and coarsely as it happened makes it sound
frightfully strange. The sort of things Keith recounts are not the sort
of things that a man would make up to cover himself with honour; they
are too absurd. But they are the sort of things that a man would do if
he were sufficiently filled with the soul of skylarking.”

“So far from paradox,” said his brother, with something rather like a
sneer, “you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do you believe
that truth is stranger than fiction?”

“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction,” said Basil placidly.
“For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is
congenial to it.”

“Well, your lieutenant’s truth is stranger, if it is truth, than
anything I ever heard of,” said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy. “Do
you, on your soul, believe in all that about the shark and the camera?”

“I believe Keith’s words,” answered the other. “He is an honest man.”

“I should like to question a regiment of his landladies,” said Rupert
cynically.

“I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as unimpeachable merely
in himself,” I said mildly; “his mode of life--”

Before I could complete the sentence the door was flung open and
Drummond Keith appeared again on the threshold, his white Panama on his
head.

“I say, Grant,” he said, knocking off his cigarette ash against the
door, “I’ve got no money in the world till next April. Could you lend me
a hundred pounds? There’s a good chap.”

Rupert and I looked at each other in an ironical silence. Basil, who was
sitting by his desk, swung the chair round idly on its screw and picked
up a quill-pen.

“Shall I cross it?” he asked, opening a cheque-book.

“Really,” began Rupert, with a rather nervous loudness, “since
Lieutenant Keith has seen fit to make this suggestion to Basil before
his family, I--”

“Here you are, Ugly,” said Basil, fluttering a cheque in the direction
of the quite nonchalant officer. “Are you in a hurry?”

“Yes,” replied Keith, in a rather abrupt way. “As a matter of fact I
want it now. I want to see my--er--business man.”

Rupert was eyeing him sarcastically, and I could see that it was on
the tip of his tongue to say, inquiringly, “Receiver of stolen goods,
perhaps.” What he did say was:

“A business man? That’s rather a general description, Lieutenant Keith.”

Keith looked at him sharply, and then said, with something rather like
ill-temper:

“He’s a thingum-my-bob, a house-agent, say. I’m going to see him.”

“Oh, you’re going to see a house-agent, are you?” said Rupert Grant
grimly. “Do you know, Mr Keith, I think I should very much like to go
with you?”

Basil shook with his soundless laughter. Lieutenant Keith started a
little; his brow blackened sharply.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “What did you say?”

Rupert’s face had been growing from stage to stage of ferocious irony,
and he answered:

“I was saying that I wondered whether you would mind our strolling along
with you to this house-agent’s.”

The visitor swung his stick with a sudden whirling violence.

“Oh, in God’s name, come to my house-agent’s! Come to my bedroom. Look
under my bed. Examine my dust-bin. Come along!” And with a furious
energy which took away our breath he banged his way out of the room.

Rupert Grant, his restless blue eyes dancing with his detective
excitement, soon shouldered alongside him, talking to him with that
transparent camaraderie which he imagined to be appropriate from the
disguised policeman to the disguised criminal. His interpretation
was certainly corroborated by one particular detail, the unmistakable
unrest, annoyance, and nervousness of the man with whom he walked. Basil
and I tramped behind, and it was not necessary for us to tell each other
that we had both noticed this.

Lieutenant Drummond Keith led us through very extraordinary and
unpromising neighbourhoods in the search for his remarkable house-agent.
Neither of the brothers Grant failed to notice this fact. As the streets
grew closer and more crooked and the roofs lower and the gutters grosser
with mud, a darker curiosity deepened on the brows of Basil, and the
figure of Rupert seen from behind seemed to fill the street with a
gigantic swagger of success. At length, at the end of the fourth or
fifth lean grey street in that sterile district, we came suddenly to a
halt, the mysterious lieutenant looking once more about him with a
sort of sulky desperation. Above a row of shutters and a door, all
indescribably dingy in appearance and in size scarce sufficient even for
a penny toyshop, ran the inscription: “P. Montmorency, House-Agent.”

“This is the office of which I spoke,” said Keith, in a cutting voice.
“Will you wait here a moment, or does your astonishing tenderness about
my welfare lead you to wish to overhear everything I have to say to my
business adviser?”

Rupert’s face was white and shaking with excitement; nothing on earth
would have induced him now to have abandoned his prey.

“If you will excuse me,” he said, clenching his hands behind his back,
“I think I should feel myself justified in--”

“Oh! Come along in,” exploded the lieutenant. He made the same gesture
of savage surrender. And he slammed into the office, the rest of us at
his heels.

P. Montmorency, House-Agent, was a solitary old gentleman sitting behind
a bare brown counter. He had an egglike head, froglike jaws, and a grey
hairy fringe of aureole round the lower part of his face; the whole
combined with a reddish, aquiline nose. He wore a shabby black
frock-coat, a sort of semi-clerical tie worn at a very unclerical
angle, and looked, generally speaking, about as unlike a house-agent as
anything could look, short of something like a sandwich man or a Scotch
Highlander.

We stood inside the room for fully forty seconds, and the odd old
gentleman did not look at us. Neither, to tell the truth, odd as he
was, did we look at him. Our eyes were fixed, where his were fixed, upon
something that was crawling about on the counter in front of him. It was
a ferret.

The silence was broken by Rupert Grant. He spoke in that sweet and
steely voice which he reserved for great occasions and practised for
hours together in his bedroom. He said:

“Mr Montmorency, I think?”

The old gentleman started, lifted his eyes with a bland bewilderment,
picked up the ferret by the neck, stuffed it alive into his trousers
pocket, smiled apologetically, and said:

“Sir.”

“You are a house-agent, are you not?” asked Rupert.

To the delight of that criminal investigator, Mr Montmorency’s eyes
wandered unquietly towards Lieutenant Keith, the only man present that
he knew.

“A house-agent,” cried Rupert again, bringing out the word as if it were
“burglar’.

“Yes... oh, yes,” said the man, with a quavering and almost coquettish
smile. “I am a house-agent... oh, yes.”

“Well, I think,” said Rupert, with a sardonic sleekness, “that
Lieutenant Keith wants to speak to you. We have come in by his request.”

Lieutenant Keith was lowering gloomily, and now he spoke.

“I have come, Mr Montmorency, about that house of mine.”

“Yes, sir,” said Montmorency, spreading his fingers on the flat counter.
“It’s all ready, sir. I’ve attended to all your suggestions er--about
the br--”

“Right,” cried Keith, cutting the word short with the startling neatness
of a gunshot. “We needn’t bother about all that. If you’ve done what I
told you, all right.”

And he turned sharply towards the door.

Mr Montmorency, House-Agent, presented a picture of pathos. After
stammering a moment he said: “Excuse me... Mr Keith... there was another
matter... about which I wasn’t quite sure. I tried to get all the
heating apparatus possible under the circumstances ... but in winter...
at that elevation...”

“Can’t expect much, eh?” said the lieutenant, cutting in with the same
sudden skill. “No, of course not. That’s all right, Montmorency. There
can’t be any more difficulties,” and he put his hand on the handle of
the door.

“I think,” said Rupert Grant, with a satanic suavity, “that Mr
Montmorency has something further to say to you, lieutenant.”

“Only,” said the house-agent, in desperation, “what about the birds?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Rupert, in a general blank.

“What about the birds?” said the house-agent doggedly.

Basil, who had remained throughout the proceedings in a state of
Napoleonic calm, which might be more accurately described as a state of
Napoleonic stupidity, suddenly lifted his leonine head.

“Before you go, Lieutenant Keith,” he said. “Come now. Really, what
about the birds?”

“I’ll take care of them,” said Lieutenant Keith, still with his long
back turned to us; “they shan’t suffer.”

“Thank you, sir, thank you,” cried the incomprehensible house-agent,
with an air of ecstasy. “You’ll excuse my concern, sir. You know I’m
wild on wild animals. I’m as wild as any of them on that. Thank you,
sir. But there’s another thing...”

The lieutenant, with his back turned to us, exploded with an
indescribable laugh and swung round to face us. It was a laugh, the
purport of which was direct and essential, and yet which one cannot
exactly express. As near as it said anything, verbally speaking, it
said: “Well, if you must spoil it, you must. But you don’t know what
you’re spoiling.”

“There is another thing,” continued Mr Montmorency weakly. “Of course,
if you don’t want to be visited you’ll paint the house green, but--”

“Green!” shouted Keith. “Green! Let it be green or nothing. I won’t have
a house of another colour. Green!” and before we could realize anything
the door had banged between us and the street.

Rupert Grant seemed to take a little time to collect himself; but he
spoke before the echoes of the door died away.

“Your client, Lieutenant Keith, appears somewhat excited,” he said.
“What is the matter with him? Is he unwell?”

“Oh, I should think not,” said Mr Montmorency, in some confusion. “The
negotiations have been somewhat difficult--the house is rather--”

“Green,” said Rupert calmly. “That appears to be a very important point.
It must be rather green. May I ask you, Mr Montmorency, before I rejoin
my companion outside, whether, in your business, it is usual to ask for
houses by their colour? Do clients write to a house-agent asking for a
pink house or a blue house? Or, to take another instance, for a green
house?”

“Only,” said Montmorency, trembling, “only to be inconspicuous.”

Rupert had his ruthless smile. “Can you tell me any place on earth in
which a green house would be inconspicuous?”

The house-agent was fidgeting nervously in his pocket. Slowly drawing
out a couple of lizards and leaving them to run on the counter, he said:

“No; I can’t.”

“You can’t suggest an explanation?”

“No,” said Mr Montmorency, rising slowly and yet in such a way as to
suggest a sudden situation, “I can’t. And may I, as a busy man, be
excused if I ask you, gentlemen, if you have any demand to make of me in
connection with my business. What kind of house would you desire me to
get for you, sir?”

He opened his blank blue eyes on Rupert, who seemed for the second
staggered. Then he recovered himself with perfect common sense and
answered:

“I am sorry, Mr Montmorency. The fascination of your remarks has unduly
delayed us from joining our friend outside. Pray excuse my apparent
impertinence.”

“Not at all, sir,” said the house-agent, taking a South American spider
idly from his waistcoat pocket and letting it climb up the slope of his
desk. “Not at all, sir. I hope you will favour me again.”

Rupert Grant dashed out of the office in a gust of anger, anxious
to face Lieutenant Keith. He was gone. The dull, starlit street was
deserted.

“What do you say now?” cried Rupert to his brother. His brother said
nothing now.

We all three strode down the street in silence, Rupert feverish, myself
dazed, Basil, to all appearance, merely dull. We walked through grey
street after grey street, turning corners, traversing squares, scarcely
meeting anyone, except occasional drunken knots of two or three.

In one small street, however, the knots of two or three began abruptly
to thicken into knots of five or six and then into great groups and then
into a crowd. The crowd was stirring very slightly. But anyone with a
knowledge of the eternal populace knows that if the outside rim of a
crowd stirs ever so slightly it means that there is madness in the
heart and core of the mob. It soon became evident that something really
important had happened in the centre of this excitement. We wormed our
way to the front, with the cunning which is known only to cockneys, and
once there we soon learned the nature of the difficulty. There had been
a brawl concerned with some six men, and one of them lay almost dead
on the stones of the street. Of the other four, all interesting matters
were, as far as we were concerned, swallowed up in one stupendous fact.
One of the four survivors of the brutal and perhaps fatal scuffle was
the immaculate Lieutenant Keith, his clothes torn to ribbons, his eyes
blazing, blood on his knuckles. One other thing, however, pointed at him
in a worse manner. A short sword, or very long knife, had been drawn out
of his elegant walking-stick, and lay in front of him upon the stones.
It did not, however, appear to be bloody.

The police had already pushed into the centre with their ponderous
omnipotence, and even as they did so, Rupert Grant sprang forward with
his incontrollable and intolerable secret.

“That is the man, constable,” he shouted, pointing at the battered
lieutenant. “He is a suspicious character. He did the murder.”

“There’s been no murder done, sir,” said the policeman, with his
automatic civility. “The poor man’s only hurt. I shall only be able to
take the names and addresses of the men in the scuffle and have a good
eye kept on them.”

“Have a good eye kept on that one,” said Rupert, pale to the lips, and
pointing to the ragged Keith.

“All right, sir,” said the policeman unemotionally, and went the round
of the people present, collecting the addresses. When he had completed
his task the dusk had fallen and most of the people not immediately
connected with the examination had gone away. He still found, however,
one eager-faced stranger lingering on the outskirts of the affair. It
was Rupert Grant.

“Constable,” he said, “I have a very particular reason for asking you
a question. Would you mind telling me whether that military fellow who
dropped his sword-stick in the row gave you an address or not?”

“Yes, sir,” said the policeman, after a reflective pause; “yes, he gave
me his address.”

“My name is Rupert Grant,” said that individual, with some pomp. “I
have assisted the police on more than one occasion. I wonder whether you
would tell me, as a special favour, what address?”

The constable looked at him.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “if you like. His address is: The Elms, Buxton
Common, near Purley, Surrey.”

“Thank you,” said Rupert, and ran home through the gathering night as
fast as his legs could carry him, repeating the address to himself.

Rupert Grant generally came down late in a rather lordly way to
breakfast; he contrived, I don’t know how, to achieve always the
attitude of the indulged younger brother. Next morning, however, when
Basil and I came down we found him ready and restless.

“Well,” he said sharply to his brother almost before we sat down to the
meal. “What do you think of your Drummond Keith now?”

“What do I think of him?” inquired Basil slowly. “I don’t think anything
of him.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Rupert, buttering his toast with an energy
that was somewhat exultant. “I thought you’d come round to my view, but
I own I was startled at your not seeing it from the beginning. The man
is a translucent liar and knave.”

“I think,” said Basil, in the same heavy monotone as before, “that I did
not make myself clear. When I said that I thought nothing of him I meant
grammatically what I said. I meant that I did not think about him; that
he did not occupy my mind. You, however, seem to me to think a lot of
him, since you think him a knave. I should say he was glaringly good
myself.”

“I sometimes think you talk paradox for its own sake,” said Rupert,
breaking an egg with unnecessary sharpness. “What the deuce is the
sense of it? Here’s a man whose original position was, by our common
agreement, dubious. He’s a wanderer, a teller of tall tales, a man who
doesn’t conceal his acquaintance with all the blackest and bloodiest
scenes on earth. We take the trouble to follow him to one of his
appointments, and if ever two human beings were plotting together and
lying to every one else, he and that impossible house-agent were doing
it. We followed him home, and the very same night he is in the thick
of a fatal, or nearly fatal, brawl, in which he is the only man armed.
Really, if this is being glaringly good, I must confess that the glare
does not dazzle me.”

Basil was quite unmoved. “I admit his moral goodness is of a certain
kind, a quaint, perhaps a casual kind. He is very fond of change and
experiment. But all the points you so ingeniously make against him are
mere coincidence or special pleading. It’s true he didn’t want to talk
about his house business in front of us. No man would. It’s true that he
carries a sword-stick. Any man might. It’s true he drew it in the shock
of a street fight. Any man would. But there’s nothing really dubious in
all this. There’s nothing to confirm--”

As he spoke a knock came at the door.

“If you please, sir,” said the landlady, with an alarmed air, “there’s a
policeman wants to see you.”

“Show him in,” said Basil, amid the blank silence.

The heavy, handsome constable who appeared at the door spoke almost as
soon as he appeared there.

“I think one of you gentlemen,” he said, curtly but respectfully, “was
present at the affair in Copper Street last night, and drew my attention
very strongly to a particular man.”

Rupert half rose from his chair, with eyes like diamonds, but the
constable went on calmly, referring to a paper.

“A young man with grey hair. Had light grey clothes, very good, but torn
in the struggle. Gave his name as Drummond Keith.”

“This is amusing,” said Basil, laughing. “I was in the very act of
clearing that poor officer’s character of rather fanciful aspersions.
What about him?”

“Well, sir,” said the constable, “I took all the men’s addresses and had
them all watched. It wasn’t serious enough to do more than that. All the
other addresses are all right. But this man Keith gave a false address.
The place doesn’t exist.”

The breakfast table was nearly flung over as Rupert sprang up, slapping
both his thighs.

“Well, by all that’s good,” he cried. “This is a sign from heaven.”

“It’s certainly very extraordinary,” said Basil quietly, with knitted
brows. “It’s odd the fellow should have given a false address,
considering he was perfectly innocent in the--”

“Oh, you jolly old early Christian duffer,” cried Rupert, in a sort of
rapture, “I don’t wonder you couldn’t be a judge. You think every one
as good as yourself. Isn’t the thing plain enough now? A doubtful
acquaintance; rowdy stories, a most suspicious conversation, mean
streets, a concealed knife, a man nearly killed, and, finally, a false
address. That’s what we call glaring goodness.”

“It’s certainly very extraordinary,” repeated Basil. And he strolled
moodily about the room. Then he said: “You are quite sure, constable,
that there’s no mistake? You got the address right, and the police have
really gone to it and found it was a fraud?”

“It was very simple, sir,” said the policeman, chuckling. “The place
he named was a well-known common quite near London, and our people were
down there this morning before any of you were awake. And there’s no
such house. In fact, there are hardly any houses at all. Though it is
so near London, it’s a blank moor with hardly five trees on it, to
say nothing of Christians. Oh, no, sir, the address was a fraud right
enough. He was a clever rascal, and chose one of those scraps of lost
England that people know nothing about. Nobody could say off-hand that
there was not a particular house dropped somewhere about the heath. But
as a fact, there isn’t.”

Basil’s face during this sensible speech had been growing darker and
darker with a sort of desperate sagacity. He was cornered almost for
the first time since I had known him; and to tell the truth I rather
wondered at the almost childish obstinacy which kept him so close to his
original prejudice in favour of the wildly questionable lieutenant. At
length he said:

“You really searched the common? And the address was really not known in
the district--by the way, what was the address?”

The constable selected one of his slips of paper and consulted it, but
before he could speak Rupert Grant, who was leaning in the window in a
perfect posture of the quiet and triumphant detective, struck in with
the sharp and suave voice he loved so much to use.

“Why, I can tell you that, Basil,” he said graciously as he idly plucked
leaves from a plant in the window. “I took the precaution to get this
man’s address from the constable last night.”

“And what was it?” asked his brother gruffly.

“The constable will correct me if I am wrong,” said Rupert, looking
sweetly at the ceiling. “It was: The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley,
Surrey.”

“Right, sir,” said the policeman, laughing and folding up his papers.

There was a silence, and the blue eyes of Basil looked blindly for a few
seconds into the void. Then his head fell back in his chair so suddenly
that I started up, thinking him ill. But before I could move further his
lips had flown apart (I can use no other phrase) and a peal of gigantic
laughter struck and shook the ceiling--laughter that shook the laughter,
laughter redoubled, laughter incurable, laughter that could not stop.

Two whole minutes afterwards it was still unended; Basil was ill with
laughter; but still he laughed. The rest of us were by this time ill
almost with terror.

“Excuse me,” said the insane creature, getting at last to his feet.
“I am awfully sorry. It is horribly rude. And stupid, too. And also
unpractical, because we have not much time to lose if we’re to get down
to that place. The train service is confoundedly bad, as I happen to
know. It’s quite out of proportion to the comparatively small distance.”

“Get down to that place?” I repeated blankly. “Get down to what place?”

“I have forgotten its name,” said Basil vaguely, putting his hands in
his pockets as he rose. “Something Common near Purley. Has any one got a
timetable?”

“You don’t seriously mean,” cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort
of confusion of emotions. “You don’t mean that you want to go to Buxton
Common, do you? You can’t mean that!”

“Why shouldn’t I go to Buxton Common?” asked Basil, smiling.

“Why should you?” said his brother, catching hold again restlessly of
the plant in the window and staring at the speaker.

“To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course,” said Basil Grant. “I
thought you wanted to find him?”

Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it impatiently
on the floor. “And in order to find him,” he said, “you suggest the
admirable expedient of going to the only place on the habitable earth
where we know he can’t be.”

The constable and I could not avoid breaking into a kind of assenting
laugh, and Rupert, who had family eloquence, was encouraged to go on
with a reiterated gesture:

“He may be in Buckingham Palace; he may be sitting astride the cross of
St Paul’s; he may be in jail (which I think most likely); he may be
in the Great Wheel; he may be in my pantry; he may be in your store
cupboard; but out of all the innumerable points of space, there is only
one where he has just been systematically looked for and where we know
that he is not to be found--and that, if I understand you rightly, is
where you want us to go.”

“Exactly,” said Basil calmly, getting into his great-coat; “I thought
you might care to accompany me. If not, of course, make yourselves jolly
here till I come back.”

It is our nature always to follow vanishing things and value them if
they really show a resolution to depart. We all followed Basil, and I
cannot say why, except that he was a vanishing thing, that he vanished
decisively with his great-coat and his stick. Rupert ran after him with
a considerable flurry of rationality.

“My dear chap,” he cried, “do you really mean that you see any good in
going down to this ridiculous scrub, where there is nothing but beaten
tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was the first place
that came into a rowdy lieutenant’s head when he wanted to give a lying
reference in a scrape?”

“Yes,” said Basil, taking out his watch, “and, what’s worse, we’ve lost
the train.”

He paused a moment and then added: “As a matter of fact, I think we may
just as well go down later in the day. I have some writing to do, and
I think you told me, Rupert, that you thought of going to the Dulwich
Gallery. I was rather too impetuous. Very likely he wouldn’t be in. But
if we get down by the 5.15, which gets to Purley about 6, I expect we
shall just catch him.”

“Catch him!” cried his brother, in a kind of final anger. “I wish we
could. Where the deuce shall we catch him now?”

“I keep forgetting the name of the common,” said Basil, as he buttoned
up his coat. “The Elms--what is it? Buxton Common, near Purley. That’s
where we shall find him.”

“But there is no such place,” groaned Rupert; but he followed his
brother downstairs.

We all followed him. We snatched our hats from the hat-stand and our
sticks from the umbrella-stand; and why we followed him we did not and
do not know. But we always followed him, whatever was the meaning of the
fact, whatever was the nature of his mastery. And the strange thing was
that we followed him the more completely the more nonsensical appeared
the thing which he said. At bottom, I believe, if he had risen from
our breakfast table and said: “I am going to find the Holy Pig with Ten
Tails,” we should have followed him to the end of the world.

I don’t know whether this mystical feeling of mine about Basil on this
occasion has got any of the dark and cloudy colour, so to speak, of the
strange journey that we made the same evening. It was already very dense
twilight when we struck southward from Purley. Suburbs and things on the
London border may be, in most cases, commonplace and comfortable. But if
ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to the
human spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or
Highland hills, because the suddenness with which the traveller drops
into that silence has something about it as of evil elf-land. It
seems to be one of the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by
God--such a place was Buxton Common, near Purley.

There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself.
But it was enormously increased by the sense of grey futility in our
expedition. The tracts of grey turf looked useless, the occasional
wind-stricken trees looked useless, but we, the human beings, more
useless than the hopeless turf or the idle trees. We were maniacs akin
to the foolish landscape, for we were come to chase the wild goose which
has led men and left men in bogs from the beginning. We were three dazed
men under the captaincy of a madman going to look for a man whom we knew
was not there in a house that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed to
look at us with a sort of sickly smile before it died.

Basil went on in front with his coat collar turned up, looking in the
gloom rather like a grotesque Napoleon. We crossed swell after swell
of the windy common in increasing darkness and entire silence. Suddenly
Basil stopped and turned to us, his hands in his pockets. Through the
dusk I could just detect that he wore a broad grin as of comfortable
success.

“Well,” he cried, taking his heavily gloved hands out of his pockets and
slapping them together, “here we are at last.”

The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath; two desolate elms rocked
above us in the sky like shapeless clouds of grey. There was not a sign
of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of
that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an
innkeeper standing at an open door.

“How jolly it is,” he cried, “to get back to civilization. That notion
that civilization isn’t poetical is a civilised delusion. Wait till
you’ve really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and
the cruel flowers. Then you’ll know that there’s no star like the red
star of man that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the red
river of man, the good red wine, which you, Mr Rupert Grant, if I
have any knowledge of you, will be drinking in two or three minutes in
enormous quantities.”

Rupert and I exchanged glances of fear. Basil went on heartily, as the
wind died in the dreary trees.

“You’ll find our host a much more simple kind of fellow in his own
house. I did when I visited him when he lived in the cabin at Yarmouth,
and again in the loft at the city warehouse. He’s really a very good
fellow. But his greatest virtue remains what I said originally.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, finding his speech straying towards a sort
of sanity. “What is his greatest virtue?”

“His greatest virtue,” replied Basil, “is that he always tells the
literal truth.”

“Well, really,” cried Rupert, stamping about between cold and anger,
and slapping himself like a cabman, “he doesn’t seem to have been very
literal or truthful in this case, nor you either. Why the deuce, may I
ask, have you brought us out to this infernal place?”

“He was too truthful, I confess,” said Basil, leaning against the tree;
“too hardly veracious, too severely accurate. He should have indulged in
a little more suggestiveness and legitimate romance. But come, it’s time
we went in. We shall be late for dinner.”

Rupert whispered to me with a white face:

“Is it a hallucination, do you think? Does he really fancy he sees a
house?”

“I suppose so,” I said. Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be
a cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost as
strange as the wind:

“Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow. Where do you want us to go?”

“Why, up here,” cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was above
our heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal tree.

“Come up, all of you,” he shouted out of the darkness, with the voice of
a schoolboy. “Come up. You’ll be late for dinner.”

The two great elms stood so close together that there was scarcely a
yard anywhere, and in some places not more than a foot, between them.
Thus occasional branches and even bosses and boles formed a series of
footholds that almost amounted to a rude natural ladder. They must, I
supposed, have been some sport of growth, Siamese twins of vegetation.

Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the mystery of
the waste and dark had brought out and made primary something wholly
mystical in Basil’s supremacy. But we only felt that there was a giant’s
staircase going somewhere, perhaps to the stars; and the victorious
voice above called to us out of heaven. We hoisted ourselves up after
him.

Half-way up some cold tongue of the night air struck and sobered me
suddenly. The hypnotism of the madman above fell from me, and I saw the
whole map of our silly actions as clearly as if it were printed. I saw
three modern men in black coats who had begun with a perfectly sensible
suspicion of a doubtful adventurer and who had ended, God knows how,
half-way up a naked tree on a naked moorland, far from that adventurer
and all his works, that adventurer who was at that moment, in all
probability, laughing at us in some dirty Soho restaurant. He had plenty
to laugh at us about, and no doubt he was laughing his loudest; but when
I thought what his laughter would be if he knew where we were at that
moment, I nearly let go of the tree and fell.

“Swinburne,” said Rupert suddenly, from above, “what are we doing? Let’s
get down again,” and by the mere sound of his voice I knew that he too
felt the shock of wakening to reality.

“We can’t leave poor Basil,” I said. “Can’t you call to him or get hold
of him by the leg?”

“He’s too far ahead,” answered Rupert; “he’s nearly at the top of the
beastly thing. Looking for Lieutenant Keith in the rooks’ nests, I
suppose.”

We were ourselves by this time far on our frantic vertical journey. The
mighty trunks were beginning to sway and shake slightly in the wind.
Then I looked down and saw something which made me feel that we were far
from the world in a sense and to a degree that I cannot easily describe.
I saw that the almost straight lines of the tall elm trees diminished a
little in perspective as they fell. I was used to seeing parallel lines
taper towards the sky. But to see them taper towards the earth made me
feel lost in space, like a falling star.

“Can nothing be done to stop Basil?” I called out.

“No,” answered my fellow climber. “He’s too far up. He must get to the
top, and when he finds nothing but wind and leaves he may go sane again.
Hark at him above there; you can just hear him talking to himself.”

“Perhaps he’s talking to us,” I said.

“No,” said Rupert, “he’d shout if he was. I’ve never known him to talk
to himself before; I’m afraid he really is bad tonight; it’s a known
sign of the brain going.”

“Yes,” I said sadly, and listened. Basil’s voice certainly was sounding
above us, and not by any means in the rich and riotous tones in which
he had hailed us before. He was speaking quietly, and laughing every now
and then, up there among the leaves and stars.

After a silence mingled with this murmur, Rupert Grant suddenly said,
“My God!” with a violent voice.

“What’s the matter--are you hurt?” I cried, alarmed.

“No. Listen to Basil,” said the other in a very strange voice. “He’s not
talking to himself.”

“Then he is talking to us,” I cried.

“No,” said Rupert simply, “he’s talking to somebody else.”

Great branches of the elm loaded with leaves swung about us in a
sudden burst of wind, but when it died down I could still hear the
conversational voice above. I could hear two voices.

Suddenly from aloft came Basil’s boisterous hailing voice as before:
“Come up, you fellows. Here’s Lieutenant Keith.”

And a second afterwards came the half-American voice we had heard in our
chambers more than once. It called out:

“Happy to see you, gentlemen; pray come in.”

Out of a hole in an enormous dark egg-shaped thing, pendent in the
branches like a wasps’ nest, was protruding the pale face and fierce
moustache of the lieutenant, his teeth shining with that slightly
Southern air that belonged to him.

Somehow or other, stunned and speechless, we lifted ourselves heavily
into the opening. We fell into the full glow of a lamp-lit, cushioned,
tiny room, with a circular wall lined with books, a circular table,
and a circular seat around it. At this table sat three people. One was
Basil, who, in the instant after alighting there, had fallen into an
attitude of marmoreal ease as if he had been there from boyhood; he was
smoking a cigar with a slow pleasure. The second was Lieutenant Drummond
Keith, who looked happy also, but feverish and doubtful compared with
his granite guest. The third was the little bald-headed house-agent with
the wild whiskers, who called himself Montmorency. The spears, the
green umbrella, and the cavalry sword hung in parallels on the wall. The
sealed jar of strange wine was on the mantelpiece, the enormous rifle
in the corner. In the middle of the table was a magnum of champagne.
Glasses were already set for us.

The wind of the night roared far below us, like an ocean at the foot
of a light-house. The room stirred slightly, as a cabin might in a mild
sea.

Our glasses were filled, and we still sat there dazed and dumb. Then
Basil spoke.

“You seem still a little doubtful, Rupert. Surely there is no further
question about the cold veracity of our injured host.”

“I don’t quite grasp it all,” said Rupert, blinking still in the sudden
glare. “Lieutenant Keith said his address was--”

“It’s really quite right, sir,” said Keith, with an open smile. “The
bobby asked me where I lived. And I said, quite truthfully, that I lived
in the elms on Buxton Common, near Purley. So I do. This gentleman, Mr
Montmorency, whom I think you have met before, is an agent for houses
of this kind. He has a special line in arboreal villas. It’s being kept
rather quiet at present, because the people who want these houses don’t
want them to get too common. But it’s just the sort of thing a fellow
like myself, racketing about in all sorts of queer corners of London,
naturally knocks up against.”

“Are you really an agent for arboreal villas?” asked Rupert eagerly,
recovering his ease with the romance of reality.

Mr Montmorency, in his embarrassment, fingered one of his pockets and
nervously pulled out a snake, which crawled about the table.

“W-well, yes, sir,” he said. “The fact was--er--my people wanted me very
much to go into the house-agency business. But I never cared myself for
anything but natural history and botany and things like that. My poor
parents have been dead some years now, but--naturally I like to respect
their wishes. And I thought somehow that an arboreal villa agency was
a sort of--of compromise between being a botanist and being a
house-agent.”

Rupert could not help laughing. “Do you have much custom?” he asked.

“N-not much,” replied Mr Montmorency, and then he glanced at Keith, who
was (I am convinced) his only client. “But what there is--very select.”

“My dear friends,” said Basil, puffing his cigar, “always remember two
facts. The first is that though when you are guessing about any one
who is sane, the sanest thing is the most likely; when you are guessing
about any one who is, like our host, insane, the maddest thing is the
most likely. The second is to remember that very plain literal fact
always seems fantastic. If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house
in Clapham with nothing but railings in front of it and had written ‘The
Elms’ over it, you wouldn’t have thought there was anything fantastic
about that. Simply because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you
would have believed it.”

“Drink your wine, gentlemen,” said Keith, laughing, “for this confounded
wind will upset it.”

We drank, and as we did so, although the hanging house, by a cunning
mechanism, swung only slightly, we knew that the great head of the elm
tree swayed in the sky like a stricken thistle.



Chapter 5. The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd

Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he was
the reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any one anywhere, and
talk not only well but with perfectly genuine concern and enthusiasm for
that person’s affairs. He went through the world, as it were, as if he
were always on the top of an omnibus or waiting for a train. Most of
these chance acquaintances, of course, vanished into darkness out of his
life. A few here and there got hooked on to him, so to speak, and became
his lifelong intimates, but there was an accidental look about all of
them as if they were windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen
from a goods train or presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would
be, let us say, a veterinary surgeon with the appearance of a jockey;
another, a mild prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another,
a young captain in the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains
in the Lancers; another, a small dentist from Fulham, in all reasonable
certainty precisely like every other dentist from Fulham. Major
Brown, small, dry, and dapper, was one of these; Basil had made his
acquaintance over a discussion in a hotel cloak-room about the right
hat, a discussion which reduced the little major almost to a kind of
masculine hysterics, the compound of the selfishness of an old bachelor
and the scrupulosity of an old maid. They had gone home in a cab
together and then dined with each other twice a week until they died. I
myself was another. I had met Grant while he was still a judge, on the
balcony of the National Liberal Club, and exchanged a few words about
the weather. Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and
God; for men always talk about the most important things to total
strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself;
the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts
of the wisdom of a moustache.

One of the most interesting of Basil’s motley group of acquaintances was
Professor Chadd. He was known to the ethnological world (which is a very
interesting world, but a long way off this one) as the second greatest,
if not the greatest, authority on the relations of savages to language.
He was known to the neighbourhood of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a
bearded man with a bald head, spectacles, and a patient face, the face
of an unaccountable Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He
went to and fro between the British Museum and a selection of blameless
tea-shops, with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He
was never seen without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed (by
the lighter wits of the Persian MS. room) to go to bed with them in his
little brick villa in the neighbourhood of Shepherd’s Bush. There
he lived with three sisters, ladies of solid goodness, but sinister
demeanour. His life was happy, as are almost all the lives of methodical
students, but one would not have called it exhilarating. His only hours
of exhilaration occurred when his friend, Basil Grant, came into the
house, late at night, a tornado of conversation.

Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous babyishness, and
these seemed for some reason or other to descend upon him particularly
in the house of his studious and almost dingy friend. I can remember
vividly (for I was acquainted with both parties and often dined with
them) the gaiety of Grant on that particular evening when the strange
calamity fell upon the professor. Professor Chadd was, like most of
his particular class and type (the class that is at once academic and
middle-class), a Radical of a solemn and old-fashioned type. Grant was
a Radical himself, but he was that more discriminating and not uncommon
type of Radical who passes most of his time in abusing the Radical
party. Chadd had just contributed to a magazine an article called “Zulu
Interests and the New Makango Frontier’, in which a precise scientific
report of his study of the customs of the people of T’Chaka was
reinforced by a severe protest against certain interferences with these
customs both by the British and the Germans. He-was sitting with the
magazine in front of him, the lamplight shining on his spectacles, a
wrinkle in his forehead, not of anger, but of perplexity, as Basil Grant
strode up and down the room, shaking it with his voice, with his high
spirits and his heavy tread.

“It’s not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd,” he was
saying, “it’s you. You are quite right to champion the Zulus, but for
all that you do not sympathize with them. No doubt you know the Zulu way
of cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer before blowing one’s nose; but
for all that you don’t understand them as well as I do, who don’t know
an assegai from an alligator. You are more learned, Chadd, but I am more
Zulu. Why is it that the jolly old barbarians of this earth are always
championed by people who are their antithesis? Why is it? You are
sagacious, you are benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you
are not savage. Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the
glass. Ask your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British Museum.
Look at this umbrella.” And he held up that sad but still respectable
article. “Look at it. For ten mortal years to my certain knowledge you
have carried that object under your arm, and I have no sort of doubt
that you carried it at the age of eight months, and it never occurred to
you to give one wild yell and hurl it like a javelin--thus--”

And he sent the umbrella whizzing past the professor’s bald head,
so that it knocked over a pile of books with a crash and left a vase
rocking.

Professor Chadd appeared totally unmoved, with his face still lifted to
the lamp and the wrinkle cut in his forehead.

“Your mental processes,” he said, “always go a little too fast. And they
are stated without method. There is no kind of inconsistency”--and
no words can convey the time he took to get to the end of the
word--“between valuing the right of the aborigines to adhere to their
stage in the evolutionary process, so long as they find it congenial
and requisite to do so. There is, I say, no inconsistency between this
concession which I have just described to you and the view that the
evolutionary stage in question is, nevertheless, so far as we can form
any estimate of values in the variety of cosmic processes, definable in
some degree as an inferior evolutionary stage.”

Nothing but his lips had moved as he spoke, and his glasses still shone
like two pallid moons.

Grant was shaking with laughter as he watched him.

“True,” he said, “there is no inconsistency, my son of the red spear.
But there is a great deal of incompatibility of temper. I am very far
from being certain that the Zulu is on an inferior evolutionary stage,
whatever the blazes that may mean. I do not think there is anything
stupid or ignorant about howling at the moon or being afraid of devils
in the dark. It seems to me perfectly philosophical. Why should a man
be thought a sort of idiot because he feels the mystery and peril of
existence itself? Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the
idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?”

Professor Chadd slit open a page of the magazine with a bone paper-knife
and the intent reverence of the bibliophile.

“Beyond all question,” he said, “it is a tenable hypothesis. I allude
to the hypothesis which I understand you to entertain, that our
civilization is not or may not be an advance upon, and indeed (if I
apprehend you), is or may be a retrogression from states identical with
or analogous to the state of the Zulus. Moreover, I shall be inclined
to concede that such a proposition is of the nature, in some degree at
least, of a primary proposition, and cannot adequately be argued, in the
same sense, I mean, that the primary proposition of pessimism, or the
primary proposition of the non-existence of matter, cannot adequately
be argued. But I do not conceive you to be under the impression that you
have demonstrated anything more concerning this proposition than that it
is tenable, which, after all, amounts to little more than the statement
that it is not a contradiction in terms.”

Basil threw a book at his head and took out a cigar.

“You don’t understand,” he said, “but, on the other hand, as a
compensation, you don’t mind smoking. Why you don’t object to that
disgustingly barbaric rite I can’t think. I can only say that I began it
when I began to be a Zulu, about the age of ten. What I maintained was
that although you knew more about Zulus in the sense that you are a
scientist, I know more about them in the sense that I am a savage. For
instance, your theory of the origin of language, something about its
having come from the formulated secret language of some individual
creature, though you knocked me silly with facts and scholarship in its
favour, still does not convince me, because I have a feeling that that
is not the way that things happen. If you ask me why I think so I can
only answer that I am a Zulu; and if you ask me (as you most certainly
will) what is my definition of a Zulu, I can answer that also. He is one
who has climbed a Sussex apple-tree at seven and been afraid of a ghost
in an English lane.”

“Your process of thought--” began the immovable Chadd, but his speech
was interrupted. His sister, with that masculinity which always in such
families concentrates in sisters, flung open the door with a rigid arm
and said:

“James, Mr Bingham of the British Museum wants to see you again.”

The philosopher rose with a dazed look, which always indicates in
such men the fact that they regard philosophy as a familiar thing, but
practical life as a weird and unnerving vision, and walked dubiously out
of the room.

“I hope you do not mind my being aware of it, Miss Chadd,” said Basil
Grant, “but I hear that the British Museum has recognized one of the
men who have deserved well of their commonwealth. It is true, is it
not, that Professor Chadd is likely to be made keeper of Asiatic
manuscripts?”

The grim face of the spinster betrayed a great deal of pleasure and a
great deal of pathos also. “I believe it’s true,” she said. “If it is,
it will not only be great glory which women, I assure you, feel a great
deal, but great relief, which they feel more; relief from worry from a
lot of things. James’ health has never been good, and while we are as
poor as we are he had to do journalism and coaching, in addition to his
own dreadful grinding notions and discoveries, which he loves more than
man, woman, or child. I have often been afraid that unless something of
this kind occurred we should really have to be careful of his brain. But
I believe it is practically settled.”

“I am delighted,” began Basil, but with a worried face, “but these
red-tape negotiations are so terribly chancy that I really can’t advise
you to build on hope, only to be hurled down into bitterness. I’ve
known men, and good men like your brother, come nearer than this and be
disappointed. Of course, if it is true--”

“If it is true,” said the woman fiercely, “it means that people who have
never lived may make an attempt at living.”

Even as she spoke the professor came into the room still with the dazed
look in his eyes.

“Is it true?” asked Basil, with burning eyes.

“Not a bit true,” answered Chadd after a moment’s bewilderment. “Your
argument was in three points fallacious.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Grant.

“Well,” said the professor slowly, “in saying that you could possess a
knowledge of the essence of Zulu life distinct from--”

“Oh! confound Zulu life,” cried Grant, with a burst of laughter. “I
mean, have you got the post?”

“You mean the post of keeper of the Asiatic manuscripts,” he said,
opening his eye with childlike wonder. “Oh, yes, I got that. But the
real objection to your argument, which has only, I admit, occurred to me
since I have been out of the room, is that it does not merely presuppose
a Zulu truth apart from the facts, but infers that the discovery of it
is absolutely impeded by the facts.”

“I am crushed,” said Basil, and sat down to laugh, while the professor’s
sister retired to her room, possibly, possibly not.

It was extremely late when we left the Chadds, and it is an extremely
long and tiresome journey from Shepherd’s Bush to Lambeth. This may
be our excuse for the fact that we (for I was stopping the night with
Grant) got down to breakfast next day at a time inexpressibly criminal,
a time, in point of fact, close upon noon. Even to that belated meal
we came in a very lounging and leisurely fashion. Grant, in particular,
seemed so dreamy at table that he scarcely saw the pile of letters by
his plate, and I doubt if he would have opened any of them if there
had not lain on the top that one thing which has succeeded amid modern
carelessness in being really urgent and coercive--a telegram. This he
opened with the same heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and
drank his tea. When he read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but
something, I know not what, made me feel that the motionless figure
had been pulled together suddenly as strings are tightened on a slack
guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I knew that he had been
for an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock of cold water. It was
scarcely any surprise to me when a man who had drifted sullenly to his
seat and fallen into it, kicked it away like a cur from under him and
came round to me in two strides.

“What do you make of that?” he said, and flattened out the wire in front
of me.

It ran: “Please come at once. James’ mental state dangerous. Chadd.”

“What does the woman mean?” I said after a pause, irritably. “Those
women have been saying that the poor old professor was mad ever since he
was born.”

“You are mistaken,” said Grant composedly. “It is true that all sensible
women think all studious men mad. It is true, for the matter of that,
all women of any kind think all men of any kind mad. But they don’t put
it in telegrams, any more than they wire to you that grass is green or
God all-merciful. These things are truisms, and often private ones at
that. If Miss Chadd has written down under the eye of a strange woman
in a post-office that her brother is off his head you may be perfectly
certain that she did it because it was a matter of life and death, and
she can think of no other way of forcing us to come promptly.”

“It will force us of course,” I said, smiling.

“Oh, yes,” he replied; “there is a cab-rank near.”

Basil scarcely said a word as we drove across Westminster Bridge,
through Trafalgar Square, along Piccadilly, and up the Uxbridge Road.
Only as he was opening the gate he spoke.

“I think you will take my word for it, my friend,” he said; “this is
one of the most queer and complicated and astounding incidents that ever
happened in London or, for that matter, in any high civilization.”

“I confess with the greatest sympathy and reverence that I don’t quite
see it,” I said. “Is it so very extraordinary or complicated that a
dreamy somnambulant old invalid who has always walked on the borders of
the inconceivable should go mad under the shock of great joy? Is it so
very extraordinary that a man with a head like a turnip and a soul
like a spider’s web should not find his strength equal to a confounding
change of fortunes? Is it, in short, so very extraordinary that James
Chadd should lose his wits from excitement?”

“It would not be extraordinary in the least,” answered Basil, with
placidity. “It would not be extraordinary in the least,” he repeated,
“if the professor had gone mad. That was not the extraordinary
circumstance to which I referred.”

“What,” I asked, stamping my foot, “was the extraordinary thing?”

“The extraordinary thing,” said Basil, ringing the bell, “is that he has
not gone mad from excitement.”

The tall and angular figure of the eldest Miss Chadd blocked the doorway
as the door opened. Two other Miss Chadds seemed in the same way to be
blocking the narrow passage and the little parlour. There was a general
sense of their keeping something from view. They seemed like three
black-clad ladies in some strange play of Maeterlinck, veiling the
catastrophe from the audience in the manner of the Greek chorus.

“Sit down, won’t you?” said one of them, in a voice that was somewhat
rigid with pain. “I think you had better be told first what has
happened.”

Then, with her bleak face looking unmeaningly out of the window, she
continued, in an even and mechanical voice:

“I had better state everything that occurred just as it occurred. This
morning I was clearing away the breakfast things, my sisters were both
somewhat unwell, and had not come down. My brother had just gone out
of the room, I believe, to fetch a book. He came back again, however,
without it, and stood for some time staring at the empty grate. I said,
‘Were you looking for anything I could get?’ He did not answer, but
this constantly happens, as he is often very abstracted. I repeated my
question, and still he did not answer. Sometimes he is so wrapped up
in his studies that nothing but a touch on the shoulder would make him
aware of one’s presence, so I came round the table towards him. I really
do not know how to describe the sensation which I then had. It seems
simply silly, but at the moment it seemed something enormous, upsetting
one’s brain. The fact is, James was standing on one leg.”

Grant smiled slowly and rubbed his hands with a kind of care.

“Standing on one leg?” I repeated.

“Yes,” replied the dead voice of the woman without an inflection to
suggest that she felt the fantasticality of her statement. “He was
standing on the left leg and the right drawn up at a sharp angle, the
toe pointing downwards. I asked him if his leg hurt him. His only
answer was to shoot the leg straight at right angles to the other, as
if pointing to the other with his toe to the wall. He was still looking
quite gravely at the fireplace.

“‘James, what is the matter?’ I cried, for I was thoroughly frightened.
James gave three kicks in the air with the right leg, flung up the
other, gave three kicks in the air with it also and spun round like a
teetotum the other way. ‘Are you mad?’ I cried. ‘Why don’t you answer
me?’ He had come to a standstill facing me, and was looking at me as he
always does, with his lifted eyebrows and great spectacled eyes. When
I had spoken he remained a second or two motionless, and then his only
reply was to lift his left foot slowly from the floor and describe
circles with it in the air. I rushed to the door and shouted for
Christina. I will not dwell on the dreadful hours that followed. All
three of us talked to him, implored him to speak to us with appeals that
might have brought back the dead, but he has done nothing but hop
and dance and kick with a solemn silent face. It looks as if his legs
belonged to some one else or were possessed by devils. He has never
spoken to us from that time to this.”

“Where is he now?” I said, getting up in some agitation. “We ought not
to leave him alone.”

“Doctor Colman is with him,” said Miss Chadd calmly. “They are in the
garden. Doctor Colman thought the air would do him good. And he can
scarcely go into the street.”

Basil and I walked rapidly to the window which looked out on the garden.
It was a small and somewhat smug suburban garden; the flower beds a
little too neat and like the pattern of a coloured carpet; but on this
shining and opulent summer day even they had the exuberance of something
natural, I had almost said tropical. In the middle of a bright and
verdant but painfully circular lawn stood two figures. One of them was a
small, sharp-looking man with black whiskers and a very polished hat (I
presume Dr Colman), who was talking very quietly and clearly, yet with
a nervous twitch, as it were, in his face. The other was our old friend,
listening with his old forbearing expression and owlish eyes, the strong
sunlight gleaming on his glasses as the lamplight had gleamed the
night before, when the boisterous Basil had rallied him on his studious
decorum. But for one thing the figure of this morning might have been
the identical figure of last night. That one thing was that while the
face listened reposefully the legs were industriously dancing like the
legs of a marionette. The neat flowers and the sunny glitter of
the garden lent an indescribable sharpness and incredibility to
the prodigy--the prodigy of the head of a hermit and the legs of a
harlequin. For miracles should always happen in broad daylight. The
night makes them credible and therefore commonplace.

The second sister had by this time entered the room and came somewhat
drearily to the window.

“You know, Adelaide,” she said, “that Mr Bingham from the Museum is
coming again at three.”

“I know,” said Adelaide Chadd bitterly. “I suppose we shall have to tell
him about this. I thought that no good fortune would ever come easily to
us.”

Grant suddenly turned round. “What do you mean?” he said. “What will you
have to tell Mr Bingham?”

“You know what I shall have to tell him,” said the professor’s sister,
almost fiercely. “I don’t know that we need give it its wretched name.
Do you think that the keeper of Asiatic manuscripts will be allowed to
go on like that?” And she pointed for an instant at the figure in the
garden, the shining, listening face and the unresting feet.

Basil Grant took out his watch with an abrupt movement. “When did you
say the British Museum man was coming?” he said.

“Three o’clock,” said Miss Chadd briefly.

“Then I have an hour before me,” said Grant, and without another word
threw up the window and jumped out into the garden. He did not walk
straight up to the doctor and lunatic, but strolling round the garden
path drew near them cautiously and yet apparently carelessly. He stood
a couple of feet off them, seemingly counting halfpence out of his
trousers pocket, but, as I could see, looking up steadily under the
broad brim of his hat.

Suddenly he stepped up to Professor Chadd’s elbow, and said, in a
loud familiar voice, “Well, my boy, do you still think the Zulus our
inferiors?”

The doctor knitted his brows and looked anxious, seeming to be about to
speak. The professor turned his bald and placid head towards Grant in a
friendly manner, but made no answer, idly flinging his left leg about.

“Have you converted Dr Colman to your views?” Basil continued, still in
the same loud and lucid tone.

Chadd only shuffled his feet and kicked a little with the other leg,
his expression still benevolent and inquiring. The doctor cut in rather
sharply. “Shall we go inside, professor?” he said. “Now you have shown
me the garden. A beautiful garden. A most beautiful garden. Let us go
in,” and he tried to draw the kicking ethnologist by the elbow, at the
same time whispering to Grant: “I must ask you not to trouble him with
questions. Most risky. He must be soothed.”

Basil answered in the same tone, with great coolness:

“Of course your directions must be followed out, doctor. I will
endeavour to do so, but I hope it will not be inconsistent with them if
you will leave me alone with my poor friend in this garden for an hour.
I want to watch him. I assure you, Dr Colman, that I shall say very
little to him, and that little shall be as soothing as--as syrup.”

The doctor wiped his eyeglass thoughtfully.

“It is rather dangerous for him,” he said, “to be long in the strong sun
without his hat. With his bald head, too.”

“That is soon settled,” said Basil composedly, and took off his own big
hat and clapped it on the egglike skull of the professor. The latter did
not turn round but danced away with his eyes on the horizon.

The doctor put on his glasses again, looked severely at the two for
some seconds, with his head on one side like a bird’s, and then saying,
shortly, “All right,” strutted away into the house, where the three
Misses Chadd were all looking out from the parlour window on to the
garden. They looked out on it with hungry eyes for a full hour without
moving, and they saw a sight which was more extraordinary than madness
itself.

Basil Grant addressed a few questions to the madman, without succeeding
in making him do anything but continue to caper, and when he had done
this slowly took a red note-book out of one pocket and a large pencil
out of another.

He began hurriedly to scribble notes. When the lunatic skipped away from
him he would walk a few yards in pursuit, stop, and make notes again.
Thus they followed each other round and round the foolish circle of
turf, the one writing in pencil with the face of a man working out a
problem, the other leaping and playing like a child.

After about three-quarters of an hour of this imbecile scene, Grant put
the pencil in his pocket, but kept the note-book open in his hand, and
walking round the mad professor, planted himself directly in front of
him.

Then occurred something that even those already used to that wild
morning had not anticipated or dreamed. The professor, on finding Basil
in front of him, stared with a blank benignity for a few seconds, and
then drew up his left leg and hung it bent in the attitude that his
sister had described as being the first of all his antics. And the
moment he had done it Basil Grant lifted his own leg and held it out
rigid before him, confronting Chadd with the flat sole of his boot. The
professor dropped his bent leg, and swinging his weight on to it kicked
out the other behind, like a man swimming. Basil crossed his feet like
a saltire cross, and then flung them apart again, giving a leap into
the air. Then before any of the spectators could say a word or even
entertain a thought about the matter, both of them were dancing a sort
of jig or hornpipe opposite each other; and the sun shone down on two
madmen instead of one.

They were so stricken with the deafness and blindness of monomania that
they did not see the eldest Miss Chadd come out feverishly into the
garden with gestures of entreaty, a gentleman following her. Professor
Chadd was in the wildest posture of a pas-de-quatre, Basil Grant seemed
about to turn a cart-wheel, when they were frozen in their follies by
the steely voice of Adelaide Chadd saying, “Mr Bingham of the British
Museum.”

Mr Bingham was a slim, well-clad gentleman with a pointed and slightly
effeminate grey beard, unimpeachable gloves, and formal but agreeable
manners. He was the type of the over-civilized, as Professor Chadd was
of the uncivilized pedant. His formality and agreeableness did him some
credit under the circumstances. He had a vast experience of books and a
considerable experience of the more dilettante fashionable salons. But
neither branch of knowledge had accustomed him to the spectacle of two
grey-haired middle-class gentlemen in modern costume throwing themselves
about like acrobats as a substitute for an after-dinner nap.

The professor continued his antics with perfect placidity, but Grant
stopped abruptly. The doctor had reappeared on the scene, and his shiny
black eyes, under his shiny black hat, moved restlessly from one of them
to the other.

“Dr Colman,” said Basil, turning to him, “will you entertain Professor
Chadd again for a little while? I am sure that he needs you. Mr Bingham,
might I have the pleasure of a few moments’ private conversation? My
name is Grant.”

Mr Bingham, of the British Museum, bowed in a manner that was respectful
but a trifle bewildered.

“Miss Chadd will excuse me,” continued Basil easily, “if I know my way
about the house.” And he led the dazed librarian rapidly through the
back door into the parlour.

“Mr Bingham,” said Basil, setting a chair for him, “I imagine that Miss
Chadd has told you of this distressing occurrence.”

“She has, Mr Grant,” said Bingham, looking at the table with a sort
of compassionate nervousness. “I am more pained than I can say by this
dreadful calamity. It seems quite heart-rending that the thing should
have happened just as we have decided to give your eminent friend
a position which falls far short of his merits. As it is, of
course--really, I don’t know what to say. Professor Chadd may, of
course, retain--I sincerely trust he will--his extraordinarily valuable
intellect. But I am afraid--I am really afraid--that it would not do to
have the curator of the Asiatic manuscripts--er--dancing about.”

“I have a suggestion to make,” said Basil, and sat down abruptly in his
chair, drawing it up to the table.

“I am delighted, of course,” said the gentleman from the British Museum,
coughing and drawing up his chair also.

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked for just the moments required for
Basil to clear his throat and collect his words, and then he said:

“My proposal is this. I do not know that in the strict use of words you
could altogether call it a compromise, still it has something of that
character. My proposal is that the Government (acting, as I presume,
through your Museum) should pay Professor Chadd L800 a year until he
stops dancing.”

“Eight hundred a year!” said Mr Bingham, and for the first time lifted
his mild blue eyes to those of his interlocutor--and he raised them
with a mild blue stare. “I think I have not quite understood you. Did I
understand you to say that Professor Chadd ought to be employed, in his
present state, in the Asiatic manuscript department at eight hundred a
year?”

Grant shook his head resolutely.

“No,” he said firmly. “No. Chadd is a friend of mine, and I would say
anything for him I could. But I do not say, I cannot say, that he ought
to take on the Asiatic manuscripts. I do not go so far as that. I merely
say that until he stops dancing you ought to pay him L800 Surely you
have some general fund for the endowment of research.”

Mr Bingham looked bewildered.

“I really don’t know,” he said, blinking his eyes, “what you are talking
about. Do you ask us to give this obvious lunatic nearly a thousand a
year for life?”

“Not at all,” cried Basil, keenly and triumphantly. “I never said for
life. Not at all.”

“What for, then?” asked the meek Bingham, suppressing an instinct meekly
to tear his hair. “How long is this endowment to run? Not till his
death? Till the Judgement day?”

“No,” said Basil, beaming, “but just what I said. Till he has stopped
dancing.” And he lay back with satisfaction and his hands in his
pockets.

Bingham had by this time fastened his eyes keenly on Basil Grant and
kept them there.

“Come, Mr Grant,” he said. “Do I seriously understand you to suggest
that the Government pay Professor Chadd an extraordinarily high salary
simply on the ground that he has (pardon the phrase) gone mad? That he
should be paid more than four good clerks solely on the ground that he
is flinging his boots about in the back yard?”

“Precisely,” said Grant composedly.

“That this absurd payment is not only to run on with the absurd dancing,
but actually to stop with the absurd dancing?”

“One must stop somewhere,” said Grant. “Of course.”

Bingham rose and took up his perfect stick and gloves.

“There is really nothing more to be said, Mr Grant,” he said coldly.
“What you are trying to explain to me may be a joke--a slightly
unfeeling joke. It may be your sincere view, in which case I ask your
pardon for the former suggestion. But, in any case, it appears quite
irrelevant to my duties. The mental morbidity, the mental downfall, of
Professor Chadd, is a thing so painful to me that I cannot easily endure
to speak of it. But it is clear there is a limit to everything. And if
the Archangel Gabriel went mad it would sever his connection, I am sorry
to say, with the British Museum Library.”

He was stepping towards the door, but Grant’s hand, flung out in
dramatic warning, arrested him.

“Stop!” said Basil sternly. “Stop while there is yet time. Do you want
to take part in a great work, Mr Bingham? Do you want to help in the
glory of Europe--in the glory of science? Do you want to carry your head
in the air when it is bald or white because of the part that you bore in
a great discovery? Do you want--”

Bingham cut in sharply:

“And if I do want this, Mr Grant--”

“Then,” said Basil lightly, “your task is easy. Get Chadd L800 a year
till he stops dancing.”

With a fierce flap of his swinging gloves Bingham turned impatiently
to the door, but in passing out of it found it blocked. Dr Colman was
coming in.

“Forgive me, gentlemen,” he said, in a nervous, confidential voice, “the
fact is, Mr Grant, I--er--have made a most disturbing discovery about Mr
Chadd.”

Bingham looked at him with grave eyes.

“I was afraid so,” he said. “Drink, I imagine.”

“Drink!” echoed Colman, as if that were a much milder affair. “Oh, no,
it’s not drink.”

Mr Bingham became somewhat agitated, and his voice grew hurried and
vague. “Homicidal mania--” he began.

“No, no,” said the medical man impatiently.

“Thinks he’s made of glass,” said Bingham feverishly, “or says he’s
God--or--”

“No,” said Dr Colman sharply; “the fact is, Mr Grant, my discovery is of
a different character. The awful thing about him is--”

“Oh, go on, sir,” cried Bingham, in agony.

“The awful thing about him is,” repeated Colman, with deliberation,
“that he isn’t mad.”

“Not mad!”

“There are quite well-known physical tests of lunacy,” said the doctor
shortly; “he hasn’t got any of them.”

“But why does he dance?” cried the despairing Bingham. “Why doesn’t he
answer us? Why hasn’t he spoken to his family?”

“The devil knows,” said Dr Colman coolly. “I’m paid to judge of
lunatics, but not of fools. The man’s not mad.”

“What on earth can it mean? Can’t we make him listen?” said Mr Bingham.
“Can none get into any kind of communication with him?”

Grant’s voice struck in sudden and clear, like a steel bell:

“I shall be very happy,” he said, “to give him any message you like to
send.”

Both men stared at him.

“Give him a message?” they cried simultaneously. “How will you give him
a message?”

Basil smiled in his slow way.

“If you really want to know how I shall give him your message,” he
began, but Bingham cried:

“Of course, of course,” with a sort of frenzy.

“Well,” said Basil, “like this.” And he suddenly sprang a foot into the
air, coming down with crashing boots, and then stood on one leg.

His face was stern, though this effect was slightly spoiled by the fact
that one of his feet was making wild circles in the air.

“You drive me to it,” he said. “You drive me to betray my friend. And I
will, for his own sake, betray him.”

The sensitive face of Bingham took on an extra expression of distress as
of one anticipating some disgraceful disclosure. “Anything painful, of
course--” he began.

Basil let his loose foot fall on the carpet with a crash that struck
them all rigid in their feeble attitudes.

“Idiots!” he cried. “Have you seen the man? Have you looked at James
Chadd going dismally to and fro from his dingy house to your miserable
library, with his futile books and his confounded umbrella, and never
seen that he has the eyes of a fanatic? Have you never noticed, stuck
casually behind his spectacles and above his seedy old collar, the face
of a man who might have burned heretics, or died for the philosopher’s
stone? It is all my fault, in a way: I lit the dynamite of his deadly
faith. I argued against him on the score of his famous theory about
language--the theory that language was complete in certain individuals
and was picked up by others simply by watching them. I also chaffed him
about not understanding things in rough and ready practice. What has
this glorious bigot done? He has answered me. He has worked out a system
of language of his own (it would take too long to explain); he has made
up, I say, a language of his own. And he has sworn that till people
understand it, till he can speak to us in this language, he will not
speak in any other. And he shall not. I have understood, by taking
careful notice; and, by heaven, so shall the others. This shall not be
blown upon. He shall finish his experiment. He shall have L800 a year
from somewhere till he has stopped dancing. To stop him now is an
infamous war on a great idea. It is religious persecution.”

Mr Bingham held out his hand cordially.

“I thank you, Mr Grant,” he said. “I hope I shall be able to answer for
the source of the L800 and I fancy that I shall. Will you come in my
cab?”

“No, thank you very much, Mr Bingham,” said Grant heartily. “I think I
will go and have a chat with the professor in the garden.”

The conversation between Chadd and Grant appeared to be personal and
friendly. They were still dancing when I left.



Chapter 6. The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady

The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of
interest--first, the long fantasias of detective deduction in which he
was engaged, and, second, his genuine romantic interest in the life of
London. His brother Basil said of him: “His reasoning is particularly
cold and clear, and invariably leads him wrong. But his poetry comes
in abruptly and leads him right.” Whether this was true of Rupert as a
whole, or no, it was certainly curiously supported by one story about
him which I think worth telling.

We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together. The street
was full of that bright blue twilight which comes about half past eight
in summer, and which seems for the moment to be not so much a coming of
darkness as the turning on of a new azure illuminator, as if the earth
were lit suddenly by a sapphire sun. In the cool blue the lemon tint of
the lamps had already begun to flame, and as Rupert and I passed them,
Rupert talking excitedly, one after another the pale sparks sprang out
of the dusk. Rupert was talking excitedly because he was trying to
prove to me the nine hundred and ninety-ninth of his amateur detective
theories. He would go about London, with this mad logic in his brain,
seeing a conspiracy in a cab accident, and a special providence in a
falling fusee. His suspicions at the moment were fixed upon an unhappy
milkman who walked in front of us. So arresting were the incidents which
afterwards overtook us that I am really afraid that I have forgotten
what were the main outlines of the milkman’s crime. I think it had
something to do with the fact that he had only one small can of milk to
carry, and that of that he had left the lid loose and walked so quickly
that he spilled milk on the pavement. This showed that he was not
thinking of his small burden, and this again showed that he anticipated
some other than lacteal business at the end of his walk, and this (taken
in conjunction with something about muddy boots) showed something else
that I have entirely forgotten. I am afraid that I derided this detailed
revelation unmercifully; and I am afraid that Rupert Grant, who,
though the best of fellows, had a good deal of the sensitiveness of the
artistic temperament, slightly resented my derision. He endeavoured to
take a whiff of his cigar, with the placidity which he associated with
his profession, but the cigar, I think, was nearly bitten through.

“My dear fellow,” he said acidly, “I’ll bet you half a crown that
wherever that milkman comes to a real stop I’ll find out something
curious.”

“My resources are equal to that risk,” I said, laughing. “Done.”

We walked on for about a quarter of an hour in silence in the trail of
the mysterious milkman. He walked quicker and quicker, and we had some
ado to keep up with him; and every now and then he left a splash of
milk, silver in the lamplight. Suddenly, almost before we could note it,
he disappeared down the area steps of a house. I believe Rupert really
believed that the milkman was a fairy; for a second he seemed to accept
him as having vanished. Then calling something to me which somehow took
no hold on my mind, he darted after the mystic milkman, and disappeared
himself into the area.

I waited for at least five minutes, leaning against a lamp-post in the
lonely street. Then the milkman came swinging up the steps without his
can and hurried off clattering down the road. Two or three minutes more
elapsed, and then Rupert came bounding up also, his face pale but yet
laughing; a not uncommon contradiction in him, denoting excitement.

“My friend,” he said, rubbing his hands, “so much for all your
scepticism. So much for your philistine ignorance of the possibilities
of a romantic city. Two and sixpence, my boy, is the form in which your
prosaic good nature will have to express itself.”

“What?” I said incredulously, “do you mean to say that you really did
find anything the matter with the poor milkman?”

His face fell.

“Oh, the milkman,” he said, with a miserable affectation at having
misunderstood me. “No, I--I--didn’t exactly bring anything home to the
milkman himself, I--”

“What did the milkman say and do?” I said, with inexorable sternness.

“Well, to tell the truth,” said Rupert, shifting restlessly from
one foot to another, “the milkman himself, as far as merely physical
appearances went, just said, ‘Milk, Miss,’ and handed in the can. That
is not to say, of course, that he did not make some secret sign or
some--”

I broke into a violent laugh. “You idiot,” I said, “why don’t you own
yourself wrong and have done with it? Why should he have made a secret
sign any more than any one else? You own he said nothing and did nothing
worth mentioning. You own that, don’t you?”

His face grew grave.

“Well, since you ask me, I must admit that I do. It is possible that
the milkman did not betray himself. It is even possible that I was wrong
about him.”

“Then come along with you,” I said, with a certain amicable anger, “and
remember that you owe me half a crown.”

“As to that, I differ from you,” said Rupert coolly. “The milkman’s
remarks may have been quite innocent. Even the milkman may have been.
But I do not owe you half a crown. For the terms of the bet were, I
think, as follows, as I propounded them, that wherever that milkman came
to a real stop I should find out something curious.”

“Well?” I said.

“Well,” he answered, “I jolly well have. You just come with me,” and
before I could speak he had turned tail once more and whisked through
the blue dark into the moat or basement of the house. I followed almost
before I made any decision.

When we got down into the area I felt indescribably foolish literally,
as the saying is, in a hole. There was nothing but a closed door,
shuttered windows, the steps down which we had come, the ridiculous
well in which I found myself, and the ridiculous man who had brought me
there, and who stood there with dancing eyes. I was just about to turn
back when Rupert caught me by the elbow.

“Just listen to that,” he said, and keeping my coat gripped in his right
hand, he rapped with the knuckles of his left on the shutters of the
basement window. His air was so definite that I paused and even inclined
my head for a moment towards it. From inside was coming the murmur of an
unmistakable human voice.

“Have you been talking to somebody inside?” I asked suddenly, turning to
Rupert.

“No, I haven’t,” he replied, with a grim smile, “but I should very much
like to. Do you know what somebody is saying in there?”

“No, of course not,” I replied.

“Then I recommend you to listen,” said Rupert sharply.

In the dead silence of the aristocratic street at evening, I stood a
moment and listened. From behind the wooden partition, in which there
was a long lean crack, was coming a continuous and moaning sound which
took the form of the words: “When shall I get out? When shall I get out?
Will they ever let me out?” or words to that effect.

“Do you know anything about this?” I said, turning upon Rupert very
abruptly.

“Perhaps you think I am the criminal,” he said sardonically, “instead
of being in some small sense the detective. I came into this area two or
three minutes ago, having told you that I knew there was something funny
going on, and this woman behind the shutters (for it evidently is a
woman) was moaning like mad. No, my dear friend, beyond that I do
not know anything about her. She is not, startling as it may seem, my
disinherited daughter, or a member of my secret seraglio. But when
I hear a human being wailing that she can’t get out, and talking to
herself like a mad woman and beating on the shutters with her fists,
as she was doing two or three minutes ago, I think it worth mentioning,
that is all.”

“My dear fellow,” I said, “I apologize; this is no time for arguing.
What is to be done?”

Rupert Grant had a long clasp-knife naked and brilliant in his hand.

“First of all,” he said, “house-breaking.” And he forced the blade into
the crevice of the wood and broke away a huge splinter, leaving a gap
and glimpse of the dark window-pane inside. The room within was entirely
unlighted, so that for the first few seconds the window seemed a dead
and opaque surface, as dark as a strip of slate. Then came a realization
which, though in a sense gradual, made us step back and catch our
breath. Two large dim human eyes were so close to us that the window
itself seemed suddenly to be a mask. A pale human face was pressed
against the glass within, and with increased distinctness, with the
increase of the opening came the words:

“When shall I get out?”

“What can all this be?” I said.

Rupert made no answer, but lifting his walking-stick and pointing the
ferrule like a fencing sword at the glass, punched a hole in it, smaller
and more accurate than I should have supposed possible. The moment he
had done so the voice spouted out of the hole, so to speak, piercing and
querulous and clear, making the same demand for liberty.

“Can’t you get out, madam?” I said, drawing near the hole in some
perturbation.

“Get out? Of course I can’t,” moaned the unknown female bitterly. “They
won’t let me. I told them I would be let out. I told them I’d call the
police. But it’s no good. Nobody knows, nobody comes. They could keep me
as long as they liked only--”

I was in the very act of breaking the window finally with my stick,
incensed with this very sinister mystery, when Rupert held my arm hard,
held it with a curious, still, and secret rigidity as if he desired to
stop me, but did not desire to be observed to do so. I paused a moment,
and in the act swung slightly round, so that I was facing the supporting
wall of the front door steps. The act froze me into a sudden stillness
like that of Rupert, for a figure almost as motionless as the pillars of
the portico, but unmistakably human, had put his head out from between
the doorposts and was gazing down into the area. One of the lighted
lamps of the street was just behind his head, throwing it into abrupt
darkness. Consequently, nothing whatever could be seen of his face
beyond one fact, that he was unquestionably staring at us. I must say I
thought Rupert’s calmness magnificent. He rang the area bell quite idly,
and went on talking to me with the easy end of a conversation which had
never had any beginning. The black glaring figure in the portico did
not stir. I almost thought it was really a statue. In another moment
the grey area was golden with gaslight as the basement door was opened
suddenly and a small and decorous housemaid stood in it.

“Pray excuse me,” said Rupert, in a voice which he contrived to make
somehow or other at once affable and underbred, “but we thought perhaps
that you might do something for the Waifs and Strays. We don’t expect--”

“Not here,” said the small servant, with the incomparable severity of
the menial of the non-philanthropic, and slammed the door in our faces.

“Very sad, very sad--the indifference of these people,” said the
philanthropist with gravity, as we went together up the steps. As we did
so the motionless figure in the portico suddenly disappeared.

“Well, what do you make of that?” asked Rupert, slapping his gloves
together when we got into the street.

I do not mind admitting that I was seriously upset. Under such
conditions I had but one thought.

“Don’t you think,” I said a trifle timidly, “that we had better tell
your brother?”

“Oh, if you like,” said Rupert, in a lordly way. “He is quite near, as
I promised to meet him at Gloucester Road Station. Shall we take a cab?
Perhaps, as you say, it might amuse him.”

Gloucester Road Station had, as if by accident, a somewhat deserted
look. After a little looking about we discovered Basil Grant with his
great head and his great white hat blocking the ticket-office window. I
thought at first that he was taking a ticket for somewhere and being an
astonishingly long time about it. As a matter of fact, he was discussing
religion with the booking-office clerk, and had almost got his head
through the hole in his excitement. When we dragged him away it was
some time before he would talk of anything but the growth of an Oriental
fatalism in modern thought, which had been well typified by some of the
official’s ingenious but perverse fallacies. At last we managed to get
him to understand that we had made an astounding discovery. When he
did listen, he listened attentively, walking between us up and down
the lamp-lit street, while we told him in a rather feverish duet of the
great house in South Kensington, of the equivocal milkman, of the lady
imprisoned in the basement, and the man staring from the porch. At
length he said:

“If you’re thinking of going back to look the thing up, you must be
careful what you do. It’s no good you two going there. To go twice on
the same pretext would look dubious. To go on a different pretext would
look worse. You may be quite certain that the inquisitive gentleman
who looked at you looked thoroughly, and will wear, so to speak,
your portraits next to his heart. If you want to find out if there
is anything in this without a police raid I fancy you had better wait
outside. I’ll go in and see them.”

His slow and reflective walk brought us at length within sight of the
house. It stood up ponderous and purple against the last pallor of
twilight. It looked like an ogre’s castle. And so apparently it was.

“Do you think it’s safe, Basil,” said his brother, pausing, a little
pale, under the lamp, “to go into that place alone? Of course we
shall be near enough to hear if you yell, but these devils might do
something--something sudden--or odd. I can’t feel it’s safe.”

“I know of nothing that is safe,” said Basil composedly, “except,
possibly--death,” and he went up the steps and rang at the bell. When
the massive respectable door opened for an instant, cutting a square of
gaslight in the gathering dark, and then closed with a bang, burying
our friend inside, we could not repress a shudder. It had been like
the heavy gaping and closing of the dim lips of some evil leviathan. A
freshening night breeze began to blow up the street, and we turned up
the collars of our coats. At the end of twenty minutes, in which we
had scarcely moved or spoken, we were as cold as icebergs, but more, I
think, from apprehension than the atmosphere. Suddenly Rupert made an
abrupt movement towards the house.

“I can’t stand this,” he began, but almost as he spoke sprang back into
the shadow, for the panel of gold was again cut out of the black house
front, and the burly figure of Basil was silhouetted against it coming
out. He was roaring with laughter and talking so loudly that you
could have heard every syllable across the street. Another voice, or,
possibly, two voices, were laughing and talking back at him from within.

“No, no, no,” Basil was calling out, with a sort of hilarious hostility.
“That’s quite wrong. That’s the most ghastly heresy of all. It’s the
soul, my dear chap, the soul that’s the arbiter of cosmic forces. When
you see a cosmic force you don’t like, trick it, my boy. But I must
really be off.”

“Come and pitch into us again,” came the laughing voice from out of the
house. “We still have some bones unbroken.”

“Thanks very much, I will--good night,” shouted Grant, who had by this
time reached the street.

“Good night,” came the friendly call in reply, before the door closed.

“Basil,” said Rupert Grant, in a hoarse whisper, “what are we to do?”

The elder brother looked thoughtfully from one of us to the other.

“What is to be done, Basil?” I repeated in uncontrollable excitement.

“I’m not sure,” said Basil doubtfully. “What do you say to getting some
dinner somewhere and going to the Court Theatre tonight? I tried to get
those fellows to come, but they couldn’t.”

We stared blankly.

“Go to the Court Theatre?” repeated Rupert. “What would be the good of
that?”

“Good? What do you mean?” answered Basil, staring also. “Have you turned
Puritan or Passive Resister, or something? For fun, of course.”

“But, great God in Heaven! What are we going to do, I mean!” cried
Rupert. “What about the poor woman locked up in that house? Shall I go
for the police?”

Basil’s face cleared with immediate comprehension, and he laughed.

“Oh, that,” he said. “I’d forgotten that. That’s all right. Some
mistake, possibly. Or some quite trifling private affair. But I’m sorry
those fellows couldn’t come with us. Shall we take one of these green
omnibuses? There is a restaurant in Sloane Square.”

“I sometimes think you play the fool to frighten us,” I said irritably.
“How can we leave that woman locked up? How can it be a mere private
affair? How can crime and kidnapping and murder, for all I know, be
private affairs? If you found a corpse in a man’s drawing-room, would
you think it bad taste to talk about it just as if it was a confounded
dado or an infernal etching?”

Basil laughed heartily.

“That’s very forcible,” he said. “As a matter of fact, though, I know
it’s all right in this case. And there comes the green omnibus.”

“How do you know it’s all right in this ease?” persisted his brother
angrily.

“My dear chap, the thing’s obvious,” answered Basil, holding a return
ticket between his teeth while he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket.
“Those two fellows never committed a crime in their lives. They’re not
the kind. Have either of you chaps got a halfpenny? I want to get a
paper before the omnibus comes.”

“Oh, curse the paper!” cried Rupert, in a fury. “Do you mean to tell
me, Basil Grant, that you are going to leave a fellow creature in pitch
darkness in a private dungeon, because you’ve had ten minutes’ talk with
the keepers of it and thought them rather good men?”

“Good men do commit crimes sometimes,” said Basil, taking the ticket
out of his mouth. “But this kind of good man doesn’t commit that kind of
crime. Well, shall we get on this omnibus?”

The great green vehicle was indeed plunging and lumbering along the
dim wide street towards us. Basil had stepped from the curb, and for an
instant it was touch and go whether we should all have leaped on to it
and been borne away to the restaurant and the theatre.

“Basil,” I said, taking him firmly by the shoulder, “I simply won’t
leave this street and this house.”

“Nor will I,” said Rupert, glaring at it and biting his fingers.
“There’s some black work going on there. If I left it I should never
sleep again.”

Basil Grant looked at us both seriously.

“Of course if you feel like that,” he said, “we’ll investigate further.
You’ll find it’s all right, though. They’re only two young Oxford
fellows. Extremely nice, too, though rather infected with this
pseudo-Darwinian business. Ethics of evolution and all that.”

“I think,” said Rupert darkly, ringing the bell, “that we shall
enlighten you further about their ethics.”

“And may I ask,” said Basil gloomily, “what it is that you propose to
do?”

“I propose, first of all,” said Rupert, “to get into this house;
secondly, to have a look at these nice young Oxford men; thirdly, to
knock them down, bind them, gag them, and search the house.”

Basil stared indignantly for a few minutes. Then he was shaken for an
instant with one of his sudden laughs.

“Poor little boys,” he said. “But it almost serves them right for
holding such silly views, after all,” and he quaked again with amusement
“there’s something confoundedly Darwinian about it.”

“I suppose you mean to help us?” said Rupert.

“Oh, yes, I’ll be in it,” answered Basil, “if it’s only to prevent your
doing the poor chaps any harm.”

He was standing in the rear of our little procession, looking
indifferent and sometimes even sulky, but somehow the instant the door
opened he stepped first into the hall, glowing with urbanity.

“So sorry to haunt you like this,” he said. “I met two friends outside
who very much want to know you. May I bring them in?”

“Delighted, of course,” said a young voice, the unmistakable voice
of the Isis, and I realized that the door had been opened, not by the
decorous little servant girl, but by one of our hosts in person. He was
a short, but shapely young gentleman, with curly dark hair and a
square, snub-nosed face. He wore slippers and a sort of blazer of some
incredible college purple.

“This way,” he said; “mind the steps by the staircase. This house is
more crooked and old-fashioned than you would think from its snobbish
exterior. There are quite a lot of odd corners in the place really.”

“That,” said Rupert, with a savage smile, “I can quite believe.”

We were by this time in the study or back parlour, used by the young
inhabitants as a sitting-room, an apartment littered with magazines
and books ranging from Dante to detective stories. The other youth, who
stood with his back to the fire smoking a corncob, was big and burly,
with dead brown hair brushed forward and a Norfolk jacket. He was that
particular type of man whose every feature and action is heavy and
clumsy, and yet who is, you would say, rather exceptionally a gentleman.

“Any more arguments?” he said, when introductions had been effected. “I
must say, Mr Grant, you were rather severe upon eminent men of science
such as we. I’ve half a mind to chuck my D.Sc. and turn minor poet.”

“Bosh,” answered Grant. “I never said a word against eminent men of
science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes
itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new
religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall
of man they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn’t
understand. Now that they talk about the survival of the fittest they
think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion,
they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean. The
Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that,
instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk
unscientifically about science.”

“That is all very well,” said the big young man, whose name appeared
to be Burrows. “Of course, in a sense, science, like mathematics or
the violin, can only be perfectly understood by specialists. Still, the
rudiments may be of public use. Greenwood here,” indicating the little
man in the blazer, “doesn’t know one note of music from another. Still,
he knows something. He knows enough to take off his hat when they play
‘God save the King’. He doesn’t take it off by mistake when they play
‘Oh, dem Golden Slippers’. Just in the same way science--”

Here Mr Burrows stopped abruptly. He was interrupted by an argument
uncommon in philosophical controversy and perhaps not wholly legitimate.
Rupert Grant had bounded on him from behind, flung an arm round his
throat, and bent the giant backwards.

“Knock the other fellow down, Swinburne,” he called out, and before I
knew where I was I was locked in a grapple with the man in the purple
blazer. He was a wiry fighter, who bent and sprang like a whalebone, but
I was heavier and had taken him utterly by surprise. I twitched one of
his feet from under him; he swung for a moment on the single foot, and
then we fell with a crash amid the litter of newspapers, myself on top.

My attention for a moment released by victory, I could hear Basil’s
voice finishing some long sentence of which I had not heard the
beginning.

“... wholly, I must confess, unintelligible to me, my dear sir, and
I need not say unpleasant. Still one must side with one’s old friends
against the most fascinating new ones. Permit me, therefore, in tying
you up in this antimacassar, to make it as commodious as handcuffs can
reasonably be while...”

I had staggered to my feet. The gigantic Burrows was toiling in the
garotte of Rupert, while Basil was striving to master his mighty hands.
Rupert and Basil were both particularly strong, but so was Mr Burrows;
how strong, we knew a second afterwards. His head was held back by
Rupert’s arm, but a convulsive heave went over his whole frame. An
instant after his head plunged forward like a bull’s, and Rupert Grant
was slung head over heels, a catherine wheel of legs, on the floor in
front of him. Simultaneously the bull’s head butted Basil in the chest,
bringing him also to the ground with a crash, and the monster, with a
Berserker roar, leaped at me and knocked me into the corner of the
room, smashing the waste-paper basket. The bewildered Greenwood sprang
furiously to his feet. Basil did the same. But they had the best of it
now.

Greenwood dashed to the bell and pulled it violently, sending peals
through the great house. Before I could get panting to my feet, and
before Rupert, who had been literally stunned for a few moments,
could even lift his head from the floor, two footmen were in the room.
Defeated even when we were in a majority, we were now outnumbered.
Greenwood and one of the footmen flung themselves upon me, crushing me
back into the corner upon the wreck of the paper basket. The other two
flew at Basil, and pinned him against the wall. Rupert lifted himself on
his elbow, but he was still dazed.

In the strained silence of our helplessness I heard the voice of Basil
come with a loud incongruous cheerfulness.

“Now this,” he said, “is what I call enjoying oneself.”

I caught a glimpse of his face, flushed and forced against the bookcase,
from between the swaying limbs of my captors and his. To my astonishment
his eyes were really brilliant with pleasure, like those of a child
heated by a favourite game.

I made several apoplectic efforts to rise, but the servant was on top of
me so heavily that Greenwood could afford to leave me to him. He turned
quickly to come to reinforce the two who were mastering Basil. The
latter’s head was already sinking lower and lower, like a leaking ship,
as his enemies pressed him down. He flung up one hand just as I thought
him falling and hung on to a huge tome in the bookcase, a volume, I
afterwards discovered, of St Chrysostom’s theology. Just as Greenwood
bounded across the room towards the group, Basil plucked the ponderous
tome bodily out of the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the
air, so that it struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him over
like a rolling ninepin. At the same instant Basil’s stiffness broke, and
he sank, his enemies closing over him.

Rupert’s head was clear, but his body shaken; he was hanging as best he
could on to the half-prostrate Greenwood. They were rolling over each
other on the floor, both somewhat enfeebled by their falls, but Rupert
certainly the more so. I was still successfully held down. The floor
was a sea of torn and trampled papers and magazines, like an immense
waste-paper basket. Burrows and his companion were almost up to the
knees in them, as in a drift of dead leaves. And Greenwood had his leg
stuck right through a sheet of the Pall Mall Gazette, which clung to it
ludicrously, like some fantastic trouser frill.

Basil, shut from me in a human prison, a prison of powerful bodies,
might be dead for all I knew. I fancied, however, that the broad back of
Mr Burrows, which was turned towards me, had a certain bend of effort in
it as if my friend still needed some holding down. Suddenly that broad
back swayed hither and thither. It was swaying on one leg; Basil,
somehow, had hold of the other. Burrows’ huge fists and those of the
footman were battering Basil’s sunken head like an anvil, but nothing
could get the giant’s ankle out of his sudden and savage grip. While his
own head was forced slowly down in darkness and great pain, the right
leg of his captor was being forced in the air. Burrows swung to and
fro with a purple face. Then suddenly the floor and the walls and the
ceiling shook together, as the colossus fell, all his length seeming to
fill the floor. Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three blows
like battering-rams knocked the footman into a cocked hat. Then he
sprang on top of Burrows, with one antimacassar in his hand and another
in his teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost before he knew clearly
that his head had struck the floor. Then Basil sprang at Greenwood, whom
Rupert was struggling to hold down, and between them they secured him
easily. The man who had hold of me let go and turned to his rescue, but
I leaped up like a spring released, and, to my infinite satisfaction,
knocked the fellow down. The other footman, bleeding at the mouth
and quite demoralized, was stumbling out of the room. My late captor,
without a word, slunk after him, seeing that the battle was won.
Rupert was sitting astride the pinioned Mr Greenwood, Basil astride the
pinioned Mr Burrows.

To my surprise the latter gentleman, lying bound on his back, spoke in a
perfectly calm voice to the man who sat on top of him.

“And now, gentlemen,” he said, “since you have got your own way, perhaps
you wouldn’t mind telling us what the deuce all this is?”

“This,” said Basil, with a radiant face, looking down at his captive,
“this is what we call the survival of the fittest.”

Rupert, who had been steadily collecting himself throughout the latter
phases of the fight, was intellectually altogether himself again at the
end of it. Springing up from the prostrate Greenwood, and knotting a
handkerchief round his left hand, which was bleeding from a blow, he
sang out quite coolly:

“Basil, will you mount guard over the captive of your bow and spear and
antimacassar? Swinburne and I will clear out the prison downstairs.”

“All right,” said Basil, rising also and seating himself in a leisured
way in an armchair. “Don’t hurry for us,” he said, glancing round at the
litter of the room, “we have all the illustrated papers.”

Rupert lurched thoughtfully out of the room, and I followed him even
more slowly; in fact, I lingered long enough to hear, as I passed
through the room, the passages and the kitchen stairs, Basil’s voice
continuing conversationally:

“And now, Mr Burrows,” he said, settling himself sociably in the chair,
“there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go on with that amusing argument.
I’m sorry that you have to express yourself lying on your back on the
floor, and, as I told you before, I’ve no more notion why you are there
than the man in the moon. A conversationalist like yourself, however,
can scarcely be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture. You were
saying, if I remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that
the rudiments of science might with advantage be made public.”

“Precisely,” said the large man on the floor in an easy tone. “I hold
that nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen by science
can be...”

And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I
noticed that Mr Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy.
Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings
with a slight degree of resentment. Mr Burrows, however, was all
philosophy and chattiness. We left them, as I say, together, and sank
deeper and deeper into the under-world of that mysterious house, which,
perhaps, appeared to us somewhat more Tartarean than it really was,
owing to our knowledge of its semi-criminal mystery and of the human
secret locked below.

The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house; doors
that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery, the pantry,
the servants’ hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all the doors with
indescribable rapidity. Four out of the five opened on entirely empty
apartments. The fifth was locked. Rupert broke the door in like a
bandbox, and we fell into the sudden blackness of the sealed, unlighted
room.

Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man calling into an
abyss:

“Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held you
captive are captives themselves. We heard you crying and we came to
deliver you. We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot. You are
free.”

For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead
silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering and moaning. We might
easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have
heard it before. It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman,
drearily demanding liberty, just as we had heard her demand it.

“Has anybody got a match?” said Rupert grimly. “I fancy we have come
pretty near the end of this business.”

I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare,
yellow-papered apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end of
it near the window. An instant after it burned my fingers and dropped,
leaving darkness. It had, however, revealed something more practical--an
iron gas bracket just above my head. I struck another match and lit the
gas. And we found ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of
the captive.

At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfast-room
sat an elderly lady with a singularly high colour and almost startling
silver hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair
of Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare
of the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown
background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one
place; at the place where Rupert’s knife had torn a great opening in the
wood about an hour before.

“Madam,” said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, “permit me
to have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free. Your
complaints happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street, and
we have therefore ventured to come to your rescue.”

The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for
a moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot. Then she
said, with a sudden gust or breathing of relief:

“Rescue? Where is Mr Greenwood? Where is Mr Burrows? Did you say you had
rescued me?”

“Yes, madam,” said Rupert, with a beaming condescension. “We have very
satisfactorily dealt with Mr Greenwood and Mr Burrows. We have settled
affairs with them very satisfactorily.”

The old lady rose from her chair and came very quickly towards us.

“What did you say to them? How did you persuade them?” she cried.

“We persuaded them, my dear madam,” said Rupert, laughing, “by knocking
them down and tying them up. But what is the matter?”

To the surprise of every one the old lady walked slowly back to her seat
by the window.

“Do I understand,” she said, with the air of a person about to begin
knitting, “that you have knocked down Mr Burrows and tied him up?”

“We have,” said Rupert proudly; “we have resisted their oppression and
conquered it.”

“Oh, thanks,” answered the old lady, and sat down by the window.

A considerable pause followed.

“The road is quite clear for you, madam,” said Rupert pleasantly.

The old lady rose, cocking her black eyebrows and her silver crest at us
for an instant.

“But what about Greenwood and Burrows?” she said. “What did I understand
you to say had become of them?”

“They are lying on the floor upstairs,” said Rupert, chuckling. “Tied
hand and foot.”

“Well, that settles it,” said the old lady, coming with a kind of bang
into her seat again, “I must stop where I am.”

Rupert looked bewildered.

“Stop where you are?” he said. “Why should you stop any longer where you
are? What power can force you now to stop in this miserable cell?”

“The question rather is,” said the old lady, with composure, “what power
can force me to go anywhere else?”

We both stared wildly at her and she stared tranquilly at us both.

At last I said, “Do you really mean to say that we are to leave you
here?”

“I suppose you don’t intend to tie me up,” she said, “and carry me off?
I certainly shall not go otherwise.”

“But, my dear madam,” cried out Rupert, in a radiant exasperation, “we
heard you with our own ears crying because you could not get out.”

“Eavesdroppers often hear rather misleading things,” replied the captive
grimly. “I suppose I did break down a bit and lose my temper and talk to
myself. But I have some sense of honour for all that.”

“Some sense of honour?” repeated Rupert, and the last light of
intelligence died out of his face, leaving it the face of an idiot with
rolling eyes.

He moved vaguely towards the door and I followed. But I turned yet once
more in the toils of my conscience and curiosity. “Can we do nothing for
you, madam?” I said forlornly.

“Why,” said the lady, “if you are particularly anxious to do me a little
favour you might untie the gentlemen upstairs.”

Rupert plunged heavily up the kitchen staircase, shaking it with his
vague violence. With mouth open to speak he stumbled to the door of the
sitting-room and scene of battle.

“Theoretically speaking, that is no doubt true,” Mr Burrows was saying,
lying on his back and arguing easily with Basil; “but we must consider
the matter as it appears to our sense. The origin of morality...”

“Basil,” cried Rupert, gasping, “she won’t come out.”

“Who won’t come out?” asked Basil, a little cross at being interrupted
in an argument.

“The lady downstairs,” replied Rupert. “The lady who was locked up. She
won’t come out. And she says that all she wants is for us to let these
fellows loose.”

“And a jolly sensible suggestion,” cried Basil, and with a bound he was
on top of the prostrate Burrows once more and was unknotting his bonds
with hands and teeth.

“A brilliant idea. Swinburne, just undo Mr Greenwood.”

In a dazed and automatic way I released the little gentleman in the
purple jacket, who did not seem to regard any of the proceedings as
particularly sensible or brilliant. The gigantic Burrows, on the other
hand, was heaving with herculean laughter.

“Well,” said Basil, in his cheeriest way, “I think we must be getting
away. We’ve so much enjoyed our evening. Far too much regard for you to
stand on ceremony. If I may so express myself, we’ve made ourselves at
home. Good night. Thanks so much. Come along, Rupert.”

“Basil,” said Rupert desperately, “for God’s sake come and see what you
can make of the woman downstairs. I can’t get the discomfort out of my
mind. I admit that things look as if we had made a mistake. But these
gentlemen won’t mind perhaps...”

“No, no,” cried Burrows, with a sort of Rabelaisian uproariousness. “No,
no, look in the pantry, gentlemen. Examine the coal-hole. Make a tour of
the chimneys. There are corpses all over the house, I assure you.”

This adventure of ours was destined to differ in one respect from others
which I have narrated. I had been through many wild days with Basil
Grant, days for the first half of which the sun and the moon seemed to
have gone mad. But it had almost invariably happened that towards the
end of the day and its adventure things had cleared themselves like the
sky after rain, and a luminous and quiet meaning had gradually dawned
upon me. But this day’s work was destined to end in confusion worse
confounded. Before we left that house, ten minutes afterwards, one
half-witted touch was added which rolled all our minds in cloud. If
Rupert’s head had suddenly fallen off on the floor, if wings had begun
to sprout out of Greenwood’s shoulders, we could scarcely have been more
suddenly stricken. And yet of this we had no explanation. We had to go
to bed that night with the prodigy and get up next morning with it and
let it stand in our memories for weeks and months. As will be seen, it
was not until months afterwards that by another accident and in another
way it was explained. For the present I only state what happened.

When all five of us went down the kitchen stairs again, Rupert leading,
the two hosts bringing up the rear, we found the door of the prison
again closed. Throwing it open we found the place again as black as
pitch. The old lady, if she was still there, had turned out the gas: she
seemed to have a weird preference for sitting in the dark.

Without another word Rupert lit the gas again. The little old lady
turned her bird-like head as we all stumbled forward in the strong
gaslight. Then, with a quickness that almost made me jump, she sprang up
and swept a sort of old-fashioned curtsey or reverence. I looked
quickly at Greenwood and Burrows, to whom it was natural to suppose this
subservience had been offered. I felt irritated at what was implied in
this subservience, and desired to see the faces of the tyrants as they
received it. To my surprise they did not seem to have seen it at all:
Burrows was paring his nails with a small penknife. Greenwood was at the
back of the group and had hardly entered the room. And then an amazing
fact became apparent. It was Basil Grant who stood foremost of the
group, the golden gaslight lighting up his strong face and figure. His
face wore an expression indescribably conscious, with the suspicion of
a very grave smile. His head was slightly bent with a restrained bow. It
was he who had acknowledged the lady’s obeisance. And it was he, beyond
any shadow of reasonable doubt, to whom it had really been directed.

“So I hear,” he said, in a kindly yet somehow formal voice, “I hear,
madam, that my friends have been trying to rescue you. But without
success.”

“No one, naturally, knows my faults better than you,” answered the lady
with a high colour. “But you have not found me guilty of treachery.”

“I willingly attest it, madam,” replied Basil, in the same level tones,
“and the fact is that I am so much gratified with your exhibition of
loyalty that I permit myself the pleasure of exercising some very large
discretionary powers. You would not leave this room at the request of
these gentlemen. But you know that you can safely leave it at mine.”

The captive made another reverence. “I have never complained of
your injustice,” she said. “I need scarcely say what I think of your
generosity.”

And before our staring eyes could blink she had passed out of the room,
Basil holding the door open for her.

He turned to Greenwood with a relapse into joviality. “This will be a
relief to you,” he said.

“Yes, it will,” replied that immovable young gentleman with a face like
a sphinx.

We found ourselves outside in the dark blue night, shaken and dazed as
if we had fallen into it from some high tower.

“Basil,” said Rupert at last, in a weak voice, “I always thought you
were my brother. But are you a man? I mean--are you only a man?”

“At present,” replied Basil, “my mere humanity is proved by one of the
most unmistakable symbols--hunger. We are too late for the theatre in
Sloane Square. But we are not too late for the restaurant. Here comes
the green omnibus!” and he had leaped on it before we could speak.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

As I said, it was months after that Rupert Grant suddenly entered my
room, swinging a satchel in his hand and with a general air of having
jumped over the garden wall, and implored me to go with him upon the
latest and wildest of his expeditions. He proposed to himself no less
a thing than the discovery of the actual origin, whereabouts, and
headquarters of the source of all our joys and sorrows--the Club of
Queer Trades. I should expand this story for ever if I explained how
ultimately we ran this strange entity to its lair. The process meant a
hundred interesting things. The tracking of a member, the bribing of
a cabman, the fighting of roughs, the lifting of a paving stone, the
finding of a cellar, the finding of a cellar below the cellar, the
finding of the subterranean passage, the finding of the Club of Queer
Trades.

I have had many strange experiences in my life, but never a stranger
one than that I felt when I came out of those rambling, sightless, and
seemingly hopeless passages into the sudden splendour of a sumptuous and
hospitable dining-room, surrounded upon almost every side by faces
that I knew. There was Mr Montmorency, the Arboreal House-Agent, seated
between the two brisk young men who were occasionally vicars, and always
Professional Detainers. There was Mr P. G. Northover, founder of the
Adventure and Romance Agency. There was Professor Chadd, who invented
the dancing Language.

As we entered, all the members seemed to sink suddenly into their
chairs, and with the very action the vacancy of the presidential seat
gaped at us like a missing tooth.

“The president’s not here,” said Mr P. G. Northover, turning suddenly to
Professor Chadd.

“N--no,” said the philosopher, with more than his ordinary vagueness. “I
can’t imagine where he is.”

“Good heavens,” said Mr Montmorency, jumping up, “I really feel a little
nervous. I’ll go and see.” And he ran out of the room.

An instant after he ran back again, twittering with a timid ecstasy.

“He’s there, gentlemen--he’s there all right--he’s coming in now,”
 he cried, and sat down. Rupert and I could hardly help feeling the
beginnings of a sort of wonder as to who this person might be who
was the first member of this insane brotherhood. Who, we thought
indistinctly, could be maddest in this world of madmen: what fantastic
was it whose shadow filled all these fantastics with so loyal an
expectation?

Suddenly we were answered. The door flew open and the room was filled
and shaken with a shout, in the midst of which Basil Grant, smiling and
in evening dress, took his seat at the head of the table.

How we ate that dinner I have no idea. In the common way I am a person
particularly prone to enjoy the long luxuriance of the club dinner. But
on this occasion it seemed a hopeless and endless string of courses.
Hors-d’oeuvre sardines seemed as big as herrings, soup seemed a sort
of ocean, larks were ducks, ducks were ostriches until that dinner was
over. The cheese course was maddening. I had often heard of the moon
being made of green cheese. That night I thought the green cheese was
made of the moon. And all the time Basil Grant went on laughing and
eating and drinking, and never threw one glance at us to tell us why he
was there, the king of these capering idiots.

At last came the moment which I knew must in some way enlighten us, the
time of the club speeches and the club toasts. Basil Grant rose to his
feet amid a surge of songs and cheers.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “it is a custom in this society that the
president for the year opens the proceedings not by any general toast
of sentiment, but by calling upon each member to give a brief account of
his trade. We then drink to that calling and to all who follow it. It
is my business, as the senior member, to open by stating my claim to
membership of this club. Years ago, gentlemen, I was a judge; I did my
best in that capacity to do justice and to administer the law. But it
gradually dawned on me that in my work, as it was, I was not touching
even the fringe of justice. I was seated in the seat of the mighty, I
was robed in scarlet and ermine; nevertheless, I held a small and lowly
and futile post. I had to go by a mean rule as much as a postman, and
my red and gold was worth no more than his. Daily there passed before me
taut and passionate problems, the stringency of which I had to pretend
to relieve by silly imprisonments or silly damages, while I knew all the
time, by the light of my living common sense, that they would have
been far better relieved by a kiss or a thrashing, or a few words of
explanation, or a duel, or a tour in the West Highlands. Then, as this
grew on me, there grew on me continuously the sense of a mountainous
frivolity. Every word said in the court, a whisper or an oath, seemed
more connected with life than the words I had to say. Then came the time
when I publicly blasphemed the whole bosh, was classed as a madman and
melted from public life.”

Something in the atmosphere told me that it was not only Rupert and I
who were listening with intensity to this statement.

“Well, I discovered that I could be of no real use. I offered myself
privately as a purely moral judge to settle purely moral differences.
Before very long these unofficial courts of honour (kept strictly
secret) had spread over the whole of society. People were tried before
me not for the practical trifles for which nobody cares, such as
committing a murder, or keeping a dog without a licence. My criminals
were tried for the faults which really make social life impossible. They
were tried before me for selfishness, or for an impossible vanity, or
for scandalmongering, or for stinginess to guests or dependents. Of
course these courts had no sort of real coercive powers. The fulfilment
of their punishments rested entirely on the honour of the ladies and
gentlemen involved, including the honour of the culprits. But you would
be amazed to know how completely our orders were always obeyed. Only
lately I had a most pleasing example. A maiden lady in South Kensington
whom I had condemned to solitary confinement for being the means of
breaking off an engagement through backbiting, absolutely refused
to leave her prison, although some well-meaning persons had been
inopportune enough to rescue her.”

Rupert Grant was staring at his brother, his mouth fallen agape. So, for
the matter of that, I expect, was I. This, then, was the explanation of
the old lady’s strange discontent and her still stranger content with
her lot. She was one of the culprits of his Voluntary Criminal Court.
She was one of the clients of his Queer Trade.

We were still dazed when we drank, amid a crash of glasses, the health
of Basil’s new judiciary. We had only a confused sense of everything
having been put right, the sense men will have when they come into the
presence of God. We dimly heard Basil say:

“Mr P. G. Northover will now explain the Adventure and Romance Agency.”

And we heard equally dimly Northover beginning the statement he had made
long ago to Major Brown. Thus our epic ended where it had begun, like a
true cycle.





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