Title: Manalive
Author: Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Language: English
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MANALIVE

By G. K. Chesterton  



THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
1912


CONTENTS

 Part I — THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT SMITH
 Chapter I — How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House
 Chapter II — The Luggage of an Optimist
 Chapter III — The Banner of Beacon
 Chapter IV — The Garden of the God
 Chapter V — The Allegorical Practical Joker

 Part II — THE EXPLANATIONS OF INNOCENT SMITH
 Chapter I — The Eye of Death; or, the Murder Charge
 Chapter II — The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge
 Chapter III — The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge
 Chapter IV — The Wild Weddings; or, the Polygamy Charge
 Chapter V — How the Great Wind Went from Beacon House



PART I
THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT SMITH



Chapter I
How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House


A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness,
and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of
forests and the cold intoxication of the sea. In a million holes and
corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him like a
blow. In the inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke
like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with some professor’s
papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive, or blowing out the
candle by which a boy read “Treasure Island” and wrapping him in
roaring dark. But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives, and
carried the trump of crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in
a mean backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line
as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her five
children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat
imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious
she half-remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves
still dwelt in the homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank
walled garden had tossed herself into the hammock with the same
intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed herself into the
Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the
hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint clouds far
beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode
heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a
telescopic road of poplars, thought for the hundredth time that they
were like the plumes of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and
swung and clashed them round his head like a wreath or salutation of
seraphic wings. There was in it something more inspired and
authoritative even than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the
good wind that blows nobody harm.

The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern
heights, terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh. It was
round about this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up
astonished at all those streets gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of
glaciers and roped mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage,
which it has never been able to shake off. At some stage of those
heights a terrace of tall gray houses, mostly empty and almost as
desolate as the Grampians, curved round at the western end, so that the
last building, a boarding establishment called “Beacon House,” offered
abruptly to the sunset its high, narrow and towering termination, like
the prow of some deserted ship.

The ship, however, was not wholly deserted. The proprietor of the
boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of those helpless persons against
whom fate wars in vain; she smiled vaguely both before and after all
her calamities; she was too soft to be hurt. But by the aid (or rather
under the orders) of a strenuous niece she always kept the remains of a
clientele, mostly of young but listless folks. And there were actually
five inmates standing disconsolately about the garden when the great
gale broke at the base of the terminal tower behind them, as the sea
bursts against the base of an outstanding cliff.

All day that hill of houses over London had been domed and sealed up
with cold cloud. Yet three men and two girls had at last found even the
gray and chilly garden more tolerable than the black and cheerless
interior. When the wind came it split the sky and shouldered the
cloudland left and right, unbarring great clear furnaces of evening
gold. The burst of light released and the burst of air blowing seemed
to come almost simultaneously; and the wind especially caught
everything in a throttling violence. The bright short grass lay all one
way like brushed hair. Every shrub in the garden tugged at its roots
like a dog at the collar, and strained every leaping leaf after the
hunting and exterminating element. Now and again a twig would snap and
fly like a bolt from an arbalist. The three men stood stiffly and
aslant against the wind, as if leaning against a wall. The two ladies
disappeared into the house; rather, to speak truly, they were blown
into the house. Their two frocks, blue and white, looked like two big
broken flowers, driving and drifting upon the gale. Nor is such a
poetic fancy inappropriate, for there was something oddly romantic
about this inrush of air and light after a long, leaden and unlifting
day. Grass and garden trees seemed glittering with something at once
good and unnatural, like a fire from fairyland. It seemed like a
strange sunrise at the wrong end of the day.

The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore a white hat of
the proportions of a parachute, which might have wafted her away into
the coloured clouds of evening. She was their one splash of splendour,
and irradiated wealth in that impecunious place (staying there
temporarily with a friend), an heiress in a small way, by name Rosamund
Hunt, brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and rather boisterous. On
top of her wealth she was good-humoured and rather good-looking; but
she had not married, perhaps because there was always a crowd of men
around her. She was not fast (though some might have called her
vulgar), but she gave irresolute youths an impression of being at once
popular and inaccessible. A man felt as if he had fallen in love with
Cleopatra, or as if he were asking for a great actress at the stage
door. Indeed, some theatrical spangles seemed to cling about Miss Hunt;
she played the guitar and the mandoline; she always wanted charades;
and with that great rending of the sky by sun and storm, she felt a
girlish melodrama swell again within her. To the crashing orchestration
of the air the clouds rose like the curtain of some long-expected
pantomime.

Nor, oddly, was the girl in blue entirely unimpressed by this
apocalypse in a private garden; though she was one of most prosaic and
practical creatures alive. She was, indeed, no other than the strenuous
niece whose strength alone upheld that mansion of decay. But as the
gale swung and swelled the blue and white skirts till they took on the
monstrous contours of Victorian crinolines, a sunken memory stirred in
her that was almost romance—a memory of a dusty volume of _Punch_ in an
aunt’s house in infancy: pictures of crinoline hoops and croquet hoops
and some pretty story, of which perhaps they were a part. This
half-perceptible fragrance in her thoughts faded almost instantly, and
Diana Duke entered the house even more promptly than her companion.
Tall, slim, aquiline, and dark, she seemed made for such swiftness. In
body she was of the breed of those birds and beasts that are at once
long and alert, like greyhounds or herons or even like an innocent
snake. The whole house revolved on her as on a rod of steel. It would
be wrong to say that she commanded; for her own efficiency was so
impatient that she obeyed herself before any one else obeyed her.
Before electricians could mend a bell or locksmiths open a door, before
dentists could pluck a tooth or butlers draw a tight cork, it was done
already with the silent violence of her slim hands. She was light; but
there was nothing leaping about her lightness. She spurned the ground,
and she meant to spurn it. People talk of the pathos and failure of
plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may
succeed in everything but womanhood.

“It’s enough to blow your head off,” said the young woman in white,
going to the looking-glass.

The young woman in blue made no reply, but put away her gardening
gloves, and then went to the sideboard and began to spread out an
afternoon cloth for tea.

“Enough to blow your head off, I say,” said Miss Rosamund Hunt, with
the unruffled cheeriness of one whose songs and speeches had always
been safe for an encore.

“Only your hat, I think,” said Diana Duke, “but I dare say that is
sometimes more important.”

Rosamund’s face showed for an instant the offence of a spoilt child,
and then the humour of a very healthy person. She broke into a laugh
and said, “Well, it would have to be a big wind to blow your head off.”

There was another silence; and the sunset breaking more and more from
the sundering clouds, filled the room with soft fire and painted the
dull walls with ruby and gold.

“Somebody once told me,” said Rosamund Hunt, “that it’s easier to keep
one’s head when one has lost one’s heart.”

“Oh, don’t talk such rubbish,” said Diana with savage sharpness.

Outside, the garden was clad in a golden splendour; but the wind was
still stiffly blowing, and the three men who stood their ground might
also have considered the problem of hats and heads. And, indeed, their
position, touching hats, was somewhat typical of them. The tallest of
the three abode the blast in a high silk hat, which the wind seemed to
charge as vainly as that other sullen tower, the house behind him. The
second man tried to hold on a stiff straw hat at all angles, and
ultimately held it in his hand. The third had no hat, and, by his
attitude, seemed never to have had one in his life. Perhaps this wind
was a kind of fairy wand to test men and women, for there was much of
the three men in this difference.

The man in the solid silk hat was the embodiment of silkiness and
solidity. He was a big, bland, bored and (as some said) boring man,
with flat fair hair and handsome heavy features; a prosperous young
doctor by the name of Warner. But if his blondness and blandness seemed
at first a little fatuous, it is certain that he was no fool. If
Rosamund Hunt was the only person there with much money, he was the
only person who had as yet found any kind of fame. His treatise on “The
Probable Existence of Pain in the Lowest Organisms” had been
universally hailed by the scientific world as at once solid and daring.
In short, he undoubtedly had brains; and perhaps it was not his fault
if they were the kind of brains that most men desire to analyze with a
poker.

The young man who put his hat off and on was a scientific amateur in a
small way, and worshipped the great Warner with a solemn freshness. It
was, in fact, at his invitation that the distinguished doctor was
present; for Warner lived in no such ramshackle lodging-house, but in a
professional palace in Harley Street. This young man was really the
youngest and best-looking of the three. But he was one of those
persons, both male and female, who seem doomed to be good-looking and
insignificant. Brown-haired, high-coloured, and shy, he seemed to lose
the delicacy of his features in a sort of blur of brown and red as he
stood blushing and blinking against the wind. He was one of those
obvious unnoticeable people: every one knew that he was Arthur
Inglewood, unmarried, moral, decidedly intelligent, living on a little
money of his own, and hiding himself in the two hobbies of photography
and cycling. Everybody knew him and forgot him; even as he stood there
in the glare of golden sunset there was something about him indistinct,
like one of his own red-brown amateur photographs.

The third man had no hat; he was lean, in light, vaguely sporting
clothes, and the large pipe in his mouth made him look all the leaner.
He had a long ironical face, blue-black hair, the blue eyes of an
Irishman, and the blue chin of an actor. An Irishman he was, an actor
he was not, except in the old days of Miss Hunt’s charades, being, as a
matter of fact, an obscure and flippant journalist named Michael Moon.
He had once been hazily supposed to be reading for the Bar; but (as
Warner would say with his rather elephantine wit) it was mostly at
another kind of bar that his friends found him. Moon, however, did not
drink, nor even frequently get drunk; he simply was a gentleman who
liked low company. This was partly because company is quieter than
society: and if he enjoyed talking to a barmaid (as apparently he did),
it was chiefly because the barmaid did the talking. Moreover he would
often bring other talent to assist her. He shared that strange trick of
all men of his type, intellectual and without ambition—the trick of
going about with his mental inferiors. There was a small resilient Jew
named Moses Gould in the same boarding-house, a man whose negro
vitality and vulgarity amused Michael so much that he went round with
him from bar to bar, like the owner of a performing monkey.

The colossal clearance which the wind had made of that cloudy sky grew
clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber seemed to open in heaven.
One felt one might at last find something lighter than light. In the
fullness of this silent effulgence all things collected their colours
again: the gray trunks turned silver, and the drab gravel gold. One
bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from one tree to another, and his
brown feathers were brushed with fire.

“Inglewood,” said Michael Moon, with his blue eye on the bird, “have
you any friends?”

Dr. Warner mistook the person addressed, and turning a broad beaming
face, said,—

“Oh yes, I go out a great deal.”

Michael Moon gave a tragic grin, and waited for his real informant, who
spoke a moment after in a voice curiously cool, fresh and young, as
coming out of that brown and even dusty interior.

“Really,” answered Inglewood, “I’m afraid I’ve lost touch with my old
friends. The greatest friend I ever had was at school, a fellow named
Smith. It’s odd you should mention it, because I was thinking of him
to-day, though I haven’t seen him for seven or eight years. He was on
the science side with me at school— a clever fellow though queer; and
he went up to Oxford when I went to Germany. The fact is, it’s rather a
sad story. I often asked him to come and see me, and when I heard
nothing I made inquiries, you know. I was shocked to learn that poor
Smith had gone off his head. The accounts were a bit cloudy, of course,
some saying that he had recovered again; but they always say that.
About a year ago I got a telegram from him myself. The telegram, I’m
sorry to say, put the matter beyond a doubt.”

“Quite so,” assented Dr. Warner stolidly; “insanity is generally
incurable.”

“So is sanity,” said the Irishman, and studied him with a dreary eye.

“Symptoms?” asked the doctor. “What was this telegram?”

“It’s a shame to joke about such things,” said Inglewood, in his
honest, embarrassed way; “the telegram was Smith’s illness, not Smith.
The actual words were, ‘Man found alive with two legs.’”

“Alive with two legs,” repeated Michael, frowning. “Perhaps a version
of alive and kicking? I don’t know much about people out of their
senses; but I suppose they ought to be kicking.”

“And people in their senses?” asked Warner, smiling.

“Oh, they ought to be kicked,” said Michael with sudden heartiness.

“The message is clearly insane,” continued the impenetrable Warner.
“The best test is a reference to the undeveloped normal type. Even a
baby does not expect to find a man with three legs.”

“Three legs,” said Michael Moon, “would be very convenient in this
wind.”

A fresh eruption of the atmosphere had indeed almost thrown them off
their balance and broken the blackened trees in the garden. Beyond, all
sorts of accidental objects could be seen scouring the wind-scoured
sky—straws, sticks, rags, papers, and, in the distance, a disappearing
hat. Its disappearance, however, was not final; after an interval of
minutes they saw it again, much larger and closer, like a white panama,
towering up into the heavens like a balloon, staggering to and fro for
an instant like a stricken kite, and then settling in the centre of
their own lawn as falteringly as a fallen leaf.

“Somebody’s lost a good hat,” said Dr. Warner shortly.

Almost as he spoke, another object came over the garden wall, flying
after the fluttering panama. It was a big green umbrella. After that
came hurtling a huge yellow Gladstone bag, and after that came a figure
like a flying wheel of legs, as in the shield of the Isle of Man.

But though for a flash it seemed to have five or six legs, it alighted
upon two, like the man in the queer telegram. It took the form of a
large light-haired man in gay green holiday clothes. He had bright
blonde hair that the wind brushed back like a German’s, a flushed eager
face like a cherub’s, and a prominent pointing nose, a little like a
dog’s. His head, however, was by no means cherubic in the sense of
being without a body. On the contrary, on his vast shoulders and shape
generally gigantesque, his head looked oddly and unnaturally small.
This gave rise to a scientific theory (which his conduct fully
supported) that he was an idiot.

Inglewood had a politeness instinctive and yet awkward. His life was
full of arrested half gestures of assistance. And even this prodigy of
a big man in green, leaping the wall like a bright green grasshopper,
did not paralyze that small altruism of his habits in such a matter as
a lost hat. He was stepping forward to recover the green gentleman’s
head-gear, when he was struck rigid with a roar like a bull’s.

“Unsportsmanlike!” bellowed the big man. “Give it fair play, give it
fair play!” And he came after his own hat quickly but cautiously, with
burning eyes. The hat had seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in
ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again freshening
and rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of a _pas
de quatre_. The eccentric went bounding after it with kangaroo leaps
and bursts of breathless speech, of which it was not always easy to
pick up the thread: “Fair play, fair play... sport of kings... chase
their crowns... quite humane... tramontana... cardinals chase red
hats... old English hunting... started a hat in Bramber Combe... hat at
bay... mangled hounds... Got him!”

As the wind rose out of a roar into a shriek, he leapt into the sky on
his strong, fantastic legs, snatched at the vanishing hat, missed it,
and pitched sprawling face foremost on the grass. The hat rose over him
like a bird in triumph. But its triumph was premature; for the lunatic,
flung forward on his hands, threw up his boots behind, waved his two
legs in the air like symbolic ensigns (so that they actually thought
again of the telegram), and actually caught the hat with his feet. A
prolonged and piercing yell of wind split the welkin from end to end.
The eyes of all the men were blinded by the invisible blast, as by a
strange, clear cataract of transparency rushing between them and all
objects about them. But as the large man fell back in a sitting posture
and solemnly crowned himself with the hat, Michael found, to his
incredulous surprise, that he had been holding his breath, like a man
watching a duel.

While that tall wind was at the top of its sky-scraping energy, another
short cry was heard, beginning very querulous, but ending very quick,
swallowed in abrupt silence. The shiny black cylinder of Dr. Warner’s
official hat sailed off his head in the long, smooth parabola of an
airship, and in almost cresting a garden tree was caught in the topmost
branches. Another hat was gone. Those in that garden felt themselves
caught in an unaccustomed eddy of things happening; no one seemed to
know what would blow away next. Before they could speculate, the
cheering and hallooing hat-hunter was already halfway up the tree,
swinging himself from fork to fork with his strong, bent, grasshopper
legs, and still giving forth his gasping, mysterious comments.

“Tree of life... Ygdrasil... climb for centuries perhaps... owls
nesting in the hat... remotest generations of owls... still usurpers...
gone to heaven... man in the moon wears it... brigand... not yours...
belongs to depressed medical man... in garden... give it up... give it
up!”

The tree swung and swept and thrashed to and fro in the thundering wind
like a thistle, and flamed in the full sunshine like a bonfire. The
green, fantastic human figure, vivid against its autumn red and gold,
was already among its highest and craziest branches, which by bare luck
did not break with the weight of his big body. He was up there among
the last tossing leaves and the first twinkling stars of evening, still
talking to himself cheerfully, reasoningly, half apologetically, in
little gasps. He might well be out of breath, for his whole
preposterous raid had gone with one rush; he had bounded the wall once
like a football, swept down the garden like a slide, and shot up the
tree like a rocket. The other three men seemed buried under incident
piled on incident— a wild world where one thing began before another
thing left off. All three had the first thought. The tree had been
there for the five years they had known the boarding-house. Each one of
them was active and strong. No one of them had even thought of climbing
it. Beyond that, Inglewood felt first the mere fact of colour. The
bright brisk leaves, the bleak blue sky, the wild green arms and legs,
reminded him irrationally of something glowing in his infancy,
something akin to a gaudy man on a golden tree; perhaps it was only a
painted monkey on a stick. Oddly enough, Michael Moon, though more of a
humourist, was touched on a tenderer nerve, half remembered the old,
young theatricals with Rosamund, and was amused to find himself almost
quoting Shakespeare—

“For valour. Is not love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?”


Even the immovable man of science had a bright, bewildered sensation
that the Time Machine had given a great jerk, and gone forward with
rather rattling rapidity.

He was not, however, wholly prepared for what happened next. The man in
green, riding the frail topmost bough like a witch on a very risky
broomstick, reached up and rent the black hat from its airy nest of
twigs. It had been broken across a heavy bough in the first burst of
its passage, a tangle of branches in torn and scored and scratched it
in every direction, a clap of wind and foliage had flattened it like a
concertina; nor can it be said that the obliging gentleman with the
sharp nose showed any adequate tenderness for its structure when he
finally unhooked it from its place. When he had found it, however, his
proceedings were by some counted singular. He waved it with a loud
whoop of triumph, and then immediately appeared to fall backwards off
the tree, to which, however, he remained attached by his long strong
legs, like a monkey swung by his tail. Hanging thus head downwards
above the unhelmed Warner, he gravely proceeded to drop the battered
silk cylinder upon his brows. “Every man a king,” explained the
inverted philosopher, “every hat (consequently) a crown. But this is a
crown out of heaven.”

And he again attempted the coronation of Warner, who, however, moved
away with great abruptness from the hovering diadem; not seeming,
strangely enough, to wish for his former decoration in its present
state.

“Wrong, wrong!” cried the obliging person hilariously. “Always wear
uniform, even if it’s shabby uniform! Ritualists may always be untidy.
Go to a dance with soot on your shirt-front; but go with a shirt-front.
Huntsman wears old coat, but old pink coat. Wear a topper, even if it’s
got no top. It’s the symbol that counts, old cock. Take your hat,
because it is your hat after all; its nap rubbed all off by the bark,
dears, and its brim not the least bit curled; but for old sakes’ sake
it is still, dears, the nobbiest tile in the world.”

Speaking thus, with a wild comfortableness, he settled or smashed the
shapeless silk hat over the face of the disturbed physician, and fell
on his feet among the other men, still talking, beaming and breathless.

“Why don’t they make more games out of wind?” he asked in some
excitement. “Kites are all right, but why should it only be kites? Why,
I thought of three other games for a windy day while I was climbing
that tree. Here’s one of them: you take a lot of pepper—”

“I think,” interposed Moon, with a sardonic mildness, “that your games
are already sufficiently interesting. Are you, may I ask, a
professional acrobat on a tour, or a travelling advertisement of Sunny
Jim? How and why do you display all this energy for clearing walls and
climbing trees in our melancholy, but at least rational, suburbs?”

The stranger, so far as so loud a person was capable of it, appeared to
grow confidential.

“Well, it’s a trick of my own,” he confessed candidly. “I do it by
having two legs.”

Arthur Inglewood, who had sunk into the background of this scene of
folly, started and stared at the newcomer with his short-sighted eyes
screwed up and his high colour slightly heightened.

“Why, I believe you’re Smith,” he cried with his fresh, almost boyish
voice; and then after an instant’s stare, “and yet I’m not sure.”

“I have a card, I think,” said the unknown, with baffling solemnity—“a
card with my real name, my titles, offices, and true purpose on this
earth.”

He drew out slowly from an upper waistcoat pocket a scarlet card-case,
and as slowly produced a very large card. Even in the instant of its
production, they fancied it was of a queer shape, unlike the cards of
ordinary gentlemen. But it was there only for an instant; for as it
passed from his fingers to Arthur’s, one or another slipped his hold.
The strident, tearing gale in that garden carried away the stranger’s
card to join the wild waste paper of the universe; and that great
western wind shook the whole house and passed.



Chapter II
The Luggage of an Optimist


We all remember the fairy tales of science in our infancy, which played
with the supposition that large animals could jump in the proportion of
small ones. If an elephant were as strong as a grasshopper, he could (I
suppose) spring clean out of the Zoological Gardens and alight
trumpeting upon Primrose Hill. If a whale could leap from the sea like
a trout, perhaps men might look up and see one soaring above Yarmouth
like the winged island of Laputa. Such natural energy, though sublime,
might certainly be inconvenient, and much of this inconvenience
attended the gaiety and good intentions of the man in green. He was too
large for everything, because he was lively as well as large. By a
fortunate physical provision, most very substantial creatures are also
reposeful; and middle-class boarding-houses in the lesser parts of
London are not built for a man as big as a bull and excitable as a
kitten.

When Inglewood followed the stranger into the boarding-house, he found
him talking earnestly (and in his own opinion privately) to the
helpless Mrs. Duke. That fat, faint lady could only goggle up like a
dying fish at the enormous new gentleman, who politely offered himself
as a lodger, with vast gestures of the wide white hat in one hand, and
the yellow Gladstone bag in the other. Fortunately, Mrs. Duke’s more
efficient niece and partner was there to complete the contract; for,
indeed, all the people of the house had somehow collected in the room.
This fact, in truth, was typical of the whole episode. The visitor
created an atmosphere of comic crisis; and from the time he came into
the house to the time he left it, he somehow got the company to gather
and even follow (though in derision) as children gather and follow a
Punch and Judy. An hour ago, and for four years previously, these
people had avoided each other, even when they had really liked each
other. They had slid in and out of dismal and deserted rooms in search
of particular newspapers or private needlework. Even now they all came
casually, as with varying interests; but they all came. There was the
embarrassed Inglewood, still a sort of red shadow; there was the
unembarrassed Warner, a pallid but solid substance. There was Michael
Moon offering like a riddle the contrast of the horsy crudeness of his
clothes and the sombre sagacity of his visage. He was now joined by his
yet more comic crony, Moses Gould. Swaggering on short legs with a
prosperous purple tie, he was the gayest of godless little dogs; but
like a dog also in this, that however he danced and wagged with
delight, the two dark eyes on each side of his protuberant nose
glistened gloomily like black buttons. There was Miss Rosamund Hunt,
still with the fine white hat framing her square, good-looking face,
and still with her native air of being dressed for some party that
never came off. She also, like Mr. Moon, had a new companion, new so
far as this narrative goes, but in reality an old friend and a
protegee. This was a slight young woman in dark gray, and in no way
notable but for a load of dull red hair, of which the shape somehow
gave her pale face that triangular, almost peaked, appearance which was
given by the lowering headdress and deep rich ruff of the Elizabethan
beauties. Her surname seemed to be Gray, and Miss Hunt called her Mary,
in that indescribable tone applied to a dependent who has practically
become a friend. She wore a small silver cross on her very
business-like gray clothes, and was the only member of the party who
went to church. Last, but the reverse of least, there was Diana Duke,
studying the newcomer with eyes of steel, and listening carefully to
every idiotic word he said. As for Mrs. Duke, she smiled up at him, but
never dreamed of listening to him. She had never really listened to any
one in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with her new guest’s concentration
of courtesy upon herself; for no one ever spoke seriously to her any
more than she listened seriously to any one. And she almost beamed as
the stranger, with yet wider and almost whirling gestures of
explanation with his huge hat and bag, apologized for having entered by
the wall instead of the front door. He was understood to put it down to
an unfortunate family tradition of neatness and care of his clothes.

“My mother was rather strict about it, to tell the truth,” he said,
lowering his voice, to Mrs. Duke. “She never liked me to lose my cap at
school. And when a man’s been taught to be tidy and neat it sticks to
him.”

Mrs. Duke weakly gasped that she was sure he must have had a good
mother; but her niece seemed inclined to probe the matter further.

“You’ve got a funny idea of neatness,” she said, “if it’s jumping
garden walls and clambering up garden trees. A man can’t very well
climb a tree tidily.”

“He can clear a wall neatly,” said Michael Moon; “I saw him do it.”

Smith seemed to be regarding the girl with genuine astonishment. “My
dear young lady,” he said, “I was tidying the tree. You don’t want last
year’s hats there, do you, any more than last year’s leaves? The wind
takes off the leaves, but it couldn’t manage the hat; that wind, I
suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day. Rum idea this is, that
tidiness is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness is a toil for
giants. You can’t tidy anything without untidying yourself; just look
at my trousers. Don’t you know that? Haven’t you ever had a spring
cleaning?”

“Oh yes, sir,” said Mrs. Duke, almost eagerly. “You will find
everything of that sort quite nice.” For the first time she had heard
two words that she could understand.

Miss Diana Duke seemed to be studying the stranger with a sort of spasm
of calculation; then her black eyes snapped with decision, and she said
that he could have a particular bedroom on the top floor if he liked:
and the silent and sensitive Inglewood, who had been on the rack
through these cross-purposes, eagerly offered to show him up to the
room. Smith went up the stairs four at a time, and when he bumped his
head against the ultimate ceiling, Inglewood had an odd sensation that
the tall house was much shorter than it used to be.

Arthur Inglewood followed his old friend—or his new friend, for he did
not very clearly know which he was. The face looked very like his old
schoolfellow’s at one second and very unlike at another. And when
Inglewood broke through his native politeness so far as to say
suddenly, “Is your name Smith?” he received only the unenlightening
reply, “Quite right; quite right. Very good. Excellent!” Which appeared
to Inglewood, on reflection, rather the speech of a new-born babe
accepting a name than of a grown-up man admitting one.

Despite these doubts about identity, the hapless Inglewood watched the
other unpack, and stood about his bedroom in all the impotent attitudes
of the male friend. Mr. Smith unpacked with the same kind of whirling
accuracy with which he climbed a tree—throwing things out of his bag as
if they were rubbish, yet managing to distribute quite a regular
pattern all round him on the floor.

As he did so he continued to talk in the same somewhat gasping manner
(he had come upstairs four steps at a time, but even without this his
style of speech was breathless and fragmentary), and his remarks were
still a string of more or less significant but often separate pictures.

“Like the day of judgement,” he said, throwing a bottle so that it
somehow settled, rocking on its right end. “People say vast universe...
infinity and astronomy; not sure... I think things are too close
together... packed up; for travelling... stars too close, really...
why, the sun’s a star, too close to be seen properly; the earth’s a
star, too close to be seen at all... too many pebbles on the beach;
ought all to be put in rings; too many blades of grass to study...
feathers on a bird make the brain reel; wait till the big bag is
unpacked... may all be put in our right places then.”

Here he stopped, literally for breath—throwing a shirt to the other end
of the room, and then a bottle of ink so that it fell quite neatly
beyond it. Inglewood looked round on this strange, half-symmetrical
disorder with an increasing doubt.

In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith’s holiday luggage, the less
one could make anything of it. One peculiarity of it was that almost
everything seemed to be there for the wrong reason; what is secondary
with every one else was primary with him. He would wrap up a pot or pan
in brown paper; and the unthinking assistant would discover that the
pot was valueless or even unnecessary, and that it was the brown paper
that was truly precious. He produced two or three boxes of cigars, and
explained with plain and perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker,
but that cigar-box wood was by far the best for fretwork. He also
exhibited about six small bottles of wine, white and red, and
Inglewood, happening to note a Volnay which he knew to be excellent,
supposed at first that the stranger was an epicure in vintages. He was
therefore surprised to find that the next bottle was a vile sham claret
from the colonies, which even colonials (to do them justice) do not
drink. It was only then that he observed that all six bottles had those
bright metallic seals of various tints, and seemed to have been chosen
solely because they have the three primary and three secondary colours:
red, blue, and yellow; green, violet and orange. There grew upon
Inglewood an almost creepy sense of the real childishness of this
creature. For Smith was really, so far as human psychology can be,
innocent. He had the sensualities of innocence: he loved the stickiness
of gum, and he cut white wood greedily as if he were cutting a cake. To
this man wine was not a doubtful thing to be defended or denounced; it
was a quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a shop window.
He talked dominantly and rushed the social situation; but he was not
asserting himself, like a superman in a modern play. He was simply
forgetting himself, like a little boy at a party. He had somehow made
the giant stride from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in
youth when most of us grow old.

As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed the initials I. S. printed
on one side of it, and remembered that Smith had been called Innocent
Smith at school, though whether as a formal Christian name or a moral
description he could not remember. He was just about to venture another
question, when there was a knock at the door, and the short figure of
Mr. Gould offered itself, with the melancholy Moon, standing like his
tall crooked shadow, behind him. They had drifted up the stairs after
the other two men with the wandering gregariousness of the male.

“Hope there’s no intrusion,” said the beaming Moses with a glow of good
nature, but not the airiest tinge of apology.

“The truth is,” said Michael Moon with comparative courtesy, “we
thought we might see if they had made you comfortable. Miss Duke is
rather—”

“I know,” cried the stranger, looking up radiantly from his bag;
“magnificent, isn’t she? Go close to her—hear military music going by,
like Joan of Arc.”

Inglewood stared and stared at the speaker like one who has just heard
a wild fairy tale, which nevertheless contains one small and forgotten
fact. For he remembered how he had himself thought of Jeanne d’Arc
years ago, when, hardly more than a schoolboy, he had first come to the
boarding-house. Long since the pulverizing rationalism of his friend
Dr. Warner had crushed such youthful ignorances and disproportionate
dreams. Under the Warnerian scepticism and science of hopeless human
types, Inglewood had long come to regard himself as a timid,
insufficient, and “weak” type, who would never marry; to regard Diana
Duke as a materialistic maidservant; and to regard his first fancy for
her as the small, dull farce of a collegian kissing his landlady’s
daughter. And yet the phrase about military music moved him queerly, as
if he had heard those distant drums.

“She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only natural,” said Moon,
glancing round the rather dwarfish room, with its wedge of slanted
ceiling, like the conical hood of a dwarf.

“Rather a small box for you, sir,” said the waggish Mr. Gould.

“Splendid room, though,” answered Mr. Smith enthusiastically, with his
head inside his Gladstone bag. “I love these pointed sorts of rooms,
like Gothic. By the way,” he cried out, pointing in quite a startling
way, “where does that door lead to?”

“To certain death, I should say,” answered Michael Moon, staring up at
a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of the attic.
“I don’t think there’s a loft there; and I don’t know what else it
could lead to.” Long before he had finished his sentence the man with
the strong green legs had leapt at the door in the ceiling, swung
himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it, wrenched it open after a
struggle, and clambered through it. For a moment they saw the two
symbolic legs standing like a truncated statue; then they vanished.
Through the hole thus burst in the roof appeared the empty and lucid
sky of evening, with one great many-coloured cloud sailing across it
like a whole county upside down.

“Hullo, you fellows!” came the far cry of Innocent Smith, apparently
from some remote pinnacle. “Come up here; and bring some of my things
to eat and drink. It’s just the spot for a picnic.”

With a sudden impulse Michael snatched two of the small bottles of
wine, one in each solid fist; and Arthur Inglewood, as if mesmerized,
groped for a biscuit tin and a big jar of ginger. The enormous hand of
Innocent Smith appearing through the aperture, like a giant’s in a
fairy tale, received these tributes and bore them off to the eyrie;
then they both hoisted themselves out of the window. They were both
athletic, and even gymnastic; Inglewood through his concern for
hygiene, and Moon through his concern for sport, which was not quite so
idle and inactive as that of the average sportsman. Also they both had
a light-headed burst of celestial sensation when the door was burst in
the roof, as if a door had been burst in the sky, and they could climb
out on to the very roof of the universe. They were both men who had
long been unconsciously imprisoned in the commonplace, though one took
it comically, and the other seriously. They were both men,
nevertheless, in whom sentiment had never died. But Mr. Moses Gould had
an equal contempt for their suicidal athletics and their subconscious
transcendentalism, and he stood and laughed at the thing with the
shameless rationality of another race.

When the singular Smith, astride of a chimney-pot, learnt that Gould
was not following, his infantile officiousness and good nature forced
him to dive back into the attic to comfort or persuade; and Inglewood
and Moon were left alone on the long gray-green ridge of the slate
roof, with their feet against gutters and their backs against
chimney-pots, looking agnostically at each other. Their first feeling
was that they had come out into eternity, and that eternity was very
like topsy-turvydom. One definition occurred to both of them—that he
had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in
which all beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology.
Heaven seemed deep enough to hold all the gods. The round of the ether
turned from green to yellow gradually like a great unripe fruit. All
around the sunken sun it was like a lemon; round all the east it was a
sort of golden green, more suggestive of a greengage; but the whole had
still the emptiness of daylight and none of the secrecy of dusk.
Tumbled here and there across this gold and pale green were shards and
shattered masses of inky purple cloud, which seemed falling towards the
earth in every kind of colossal perspective. One of them really had the
character of some many-mitred, many-bearded, many-winged Assyrian
image, huge head downwards, hurled out of heaven—a sort of false
Jehovah, who was perhaps Satan. All the other clouds had preposterous
pinnacled shapes, as if the god’s palaces had been flung after him.

And yet, while the empty heaven was full of silent catastrophe, the
height of human buildings above which they sat held here and there a
tiny trivial noise that was the exact antithesis; and they heard some
six streets below a newsboy calling, and a bell bidding to chapel. They
could also hear talk out of the garden below; and realized that the
irrepressible Smith must have followed Gould downstairs, for his eager
and pleading accents could be heard, followed by the half-humourous
protests of Miss Duke and the full and very youthful laughter of
Rosamund Hunt. The air had that cold kindness that comes after a storm.
Michael Moon drank it in with as serious a relish as he had drunk the
little bottle of cheap claret, which he had emptied almost at a
draught. Inglewood went on eating ginger very slowly and with a
solemnity unfathomable as the sky above him. There was still enough
stir in the freshness of the atmosphere to make them almost fancy they
could smell the garden soil and the last roses of autumn. Suddenly
there came from the darkening room a silvery ping and pong which told
them that Rosamund had brought out the long-neglected mandoline. After
the first few notes there was more of the distant bell-like laughter.

“Inglewood,” said Michael Moon, “have you ever heard that I am a
blackguard?”

“I haven’t heard it, and I don’t believe it,” answered Inglewood, after
an odd pause. “But I have heard you were—what they call rather wild.”

“If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the rumour,” said
Moon, with an extraordinary calm; “I am tame. I am quite tame; I am
about the tamest beast that crawls. I drink too much of the same kind
of whisky at the same time every night. I even drink about the same
amount too much. I go to the same number of public-houses. I meet the
same damned women with mauve faces. I hear the same number of dirty
stories— generally the same dirty stories. You may assure my friends,
Inglewood, that you see before you a person whom civilization has
thoroughly tamed.”

Arthur Inglewood was staring with feelings that made him nearly fall
off the roof, for indeed the Irishman’s face, always sinister, was now
almost demoniacal.

“Christ confound it!” cried out Moon, suddenly clutching the empty
claret bottle, “this is about the thinnest and filthiest wine I ever
uncorked, and it’s the only drink I have really enjoyed for nine years.
I was never wild until just ten minutes ago.” And he sent the bottle
whizzing, a wheel of glass, far away beyond the garden into the road,
where, in the profound evening silence, they could even hear it break
and part upon the stones.

“Moon,” said Arthur Inglewood, rather huskily, “you mustn’t be so
bitter about it. Everyone has to take the world as he finds it; of
course one often finds it a bit dull—”

“That fellow doesn’t,” said Michael decisively; “I mean that fellow
Smith. I have a fancy there’s some method in his madness. It looks as
if he could turn into a sort of wonderland any minute by taking one
step out of the plain road. Who would have thought of that trapdoor?
Who would have thought that this cursed colonial claret could taste
quite nice among the chimney-pots? Perhaps that is the real key of
fairyland. Perhaps Nosey Gould’s beastly little Empire Cigarettes ought
only to be smoked on stilts, or something of that sort. Perhaps Mrs.
Duke’s cold leg of mutton would seem quite appetizing at the top of a
tree. Perhaps even my damned, dirty, monotonous drizzle of Old Bill
Whisky—”

“Don’t be so rough on yourself,” said Inglewood, in serious distress.
“The dullness isn’t your fault or the whisky’s. Fellows who don’t—
fellows like me I mean—have just the same feeling that it’s all rather
flat and a failure. But the world’s made like that; it’s all survival.
Some people are made to get on, like Warner; and some people are made
to stick quiet, like me. You can’t help your temperament. I know you’re
much cleverer than I am; but you can’t help having all the loose ways
of a poor literary chap, and I can’t help having all the doubts and
helplessness of a small scientific chap, any more than a fish can help
floating or a fern can help curling up. Humanity, as Warner said so
well in that lecture, really consists of quite different tribes of
animals all disguised as men.”

In the dim garden below the buzz of talk was suddenly broken by Miss
Hunt’s musical instrument banging with the abruptness of artillery into
a vulgar but spirited tune.

Rosamund’s voice came up rich and strong in the words of some fatuous,
fashionable coon song:—

“Darkies sing a song on the old plantation,
Sing it as we sang it in days long since gone by.”


Inglewood’s brown eyes softened and saddened still more as he continued
his monologue of resignation to such a rollicking and romantic tune.
But the blue eyes of Michael Moon brightened and hardened with a light
that Inglewood did not understand. Many centuries, and many villages
and valleys, would have been happier if Inglewood or Inglewood’s
countrymen had ever understood that light, or guessed at the first
blink that it was the battle star of Ireland.

“Nothing can ever alter it; it’s in the wheels of the universe,” went
on Inglewood, in a low voice: “some men are weak and some strong, and
the only thing we can do is to know that we are weak. I have been in
love lots of times, but I could not do anything, for I remembered my
own fickleness. I have formed opinions, but I haven’t the cheek to push
them, because I’ve so often changed them. That’s the upshot, old
fellow. We can’t trust ourselves— and we can’t help it.”

Michael had risen to his feet, and stood poised in a perilous position
at the end of the roof, like some dark statue hung above its gable.
Behind him, huge clouds of an almost impossible purple turned slowly
topsy-turvy in the silent anarchy of heaven. Their gyration made the
dark figure seem yet dizzier.

“Let us...” he said, and was suddenly silent.

“Let us what?” asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally quick though
somewhat more cautiously, for his friend seemed to find some difficulty
in speech.

“Let us go and do some of these things we can’t do,” said Michael.

At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below them the
cockatoo hair and flushed face of Innocent Smith, calling to them that
they must come down as the “concert” was in full swing, and Mr. Moses
Gould was about to recite “Young Lochinvar.”

As they dropped into Innocent’s attic they nearly tumbled over its
entertaining impedimenta again. Inglewood, staring at the littered
floor, thought instinctively of the littered floor of a nursery. He was
therefore the more moved, and even shocked, when his eye fell on a
large well-polished American revolver.

“Hullo!” he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter as men step
back from a serpent; “are you afraid of burglars? or when and why do
you deal death out of that machine gun?”

“Oh, that!” said Smith, throwing it a single glance; “I deal life out
of that,” and he went bounding down the stairs.



Chapter III
The Banner of Beacon


All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it was
everybody’s birthday. It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold
and cramping things. The truth is that when people are in exceptionally
high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must,
and they always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall
into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make
rules. This, which is true of all the churches and republics of
history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most
unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution
frees us; and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority.
Even the wild authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority,
because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and
conditions. He filled every one with his own half-lunatic life; but it
was not expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling
construction. Each person with a hobby found it turning into an
institution. Rosamund’s songs seemed to coalesce into a kind of opera;
Michael’s jests and paragraphs into a magazine. His pipe and her
mandoline seemed between them to make a sort of smoking concert. The
bashful and bewildered Arthur Inglewood almost struggled against his
own growing importance. He felt as if, in spite of him, his photographs
were turning into a picture gallery, and his bicycle into a gymkhana.
But no one had any time to criticize these impromptu estates and
offices, for they followed each other in wild succession like the
topics of a rambling talker.

Existence with such a man was an obstacle race made out of pleasant
obstacles. Out of any homely and trivial object he could drag reels of
exaggeration, like a conjurer. Nothing could be more shy and impersonal
than poor Arthur’s photography. Yet the preposterous Smith was seen
assisting him eagerly through sunny morning hours, and an indefensible
sequence described as “Moral Photography” began to unroll about the
boarding-house. It was only a version of the old photographer’s joke
which produces the same figure twice on one plate, making a man play
chess with himself, dine with himself, and so on. But these plates were
more hysterical and ambitious—as, “Miss Hunt forgets Herself,” showing
that lady answering her own too rapturous recognition with a most
appalling stare of ignorance; or “Mr. Moon questions Himself,” in which
Mr. Moon appeared as one driven to madness under his own legal
cross-examination, which was conducted with a long forefinger and an
air of ferocious waggery. One highly successful trilogy—representing
Inglewood recognizing Inglewood, Inglewood prostrating himself before
Inglewood, and Inglewood severely beating Inglewood with an umbrella—
Innocent Smith wanted to have enlarged and put up in the hall, like a
sort of fresco, with the inscription,—

“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control—
These three alone will make a man a prig.”
                    TENNYSON.


Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than the
domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent had somehow
blundered on the discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went with a
considerable feminine care for dress—the one feminine thing that had
never failed her solitary self-respect. In consequence Smith pestered
her with a theory (which he really seemed to take seriously) that
ladies might combine economy with magnificence if they would draw light
chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust them off again. He set up
“Smith’s Lightning Dressmaking Company,” with two screens, a cardboard
placard, and box of bright soft crayons; and Miss Diana actually threw
him an abandoned black overall or working dress on which to exercise
the talents of a modiste. He promptly produced for her a garment aflame
with red and gold sunflowers; she held it up an instant to her
shoulders, and looked like an empress. And Arthur Inglewood, some hours
afterwards cleaning his bicycle (with his usual air of being
inextricably hidden in it), glanced up; and his hot face grew hotter,
for Diana stood laughing for one flash in the doorway, and her dark
robe was rich with the green and purple of great decorative peacocks,
like a secret garden in the “Arabian Nights.” A pang too swift to be
named pain or pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier.
He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was ready to
fall in love with anybody; but it was like remembering a worship of
some Babylonian princess in some previous existence. At his next
glimpse of her (and he caught himself awaiting it) the purple and green
chalk was dusted off, and she went by quickly in her working clothes.

As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could conceive her as
actively resisting this invasion that had turned her house upside down.
But among the most exact observers it was seriously believed that she
liked it. For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all men
as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species. And it
is doubtful if she really saw anything more eccentric or inexplicable
in Smith’s chimney-pot picnics or crimson sunflowers than she had in
the chemicals of Inglewood or the sardonic speeches of Moon. Courtesy,
on the other hand, is a thing that anybody can understand, and Smith’s
manners were as courteous as they were unconventional. She said he was
“a real gentleman,” by which she simply meant a kind-hearted man, which
is a very different thing. She would sit at the head of the table with
fat, folded hands and a fat, folded smile for hours and hours, while
every one else was talking at once. At least, the only other exception
was Rosamund’s companion, Mary Gray, whose silence was of a much more
eager sort. Though she never spoke she always looked as if she might
speak any minute. Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion.
Innocent Smith seemed to throw himself, as into other adventures, into
the adventure of making her talk. He never succeeded, yet he was never
snubbed; if he achieved anything, it was only to draw attention to this
quiet figure, and to turn her, by ever so little, from a modesty to a
mystery. But if she was a riddle, every one recognized that she was a
fresh and unspoilt riddle, like the riddle of the sky and the woods in
spring. Indeed, though she was rather older than the other two girls,
she had an early morning ardour, a fresh earnestness of youth, which
Rosamund seemed to have lost in the mere spending of money, and Diana
in the mere guarding of it. Smith looked at her again and again. Her
eyes and mouth were set in her face the wrong way—which was really the
right way. She had the knack of saying everything with her face: her
silence was a sort of steady applause.

But among the hilarious experiments of that holiday (which seemed more
like a week’s holiday than a day’s) one experiment towers supreme, not
because it was any sillier or more successful than the others, but
because out of this particular folly flowed all of the odd events that
were to follow. All the other practical jokes exploded of themselves,
and left vacancy; all the other fictions returned upon themselves, and
were finished like a song. But the string of solid and startling
events— which were to include a hansom cab, a detective, a pistol, and
a marriage licence—were all made primarily possible by the joke about
the High Court of Beacon.

It had originated, not with Innocent Smith, but with Michael Moon. He
was in a strange glow and pressure of spirits, and talked incessantly;
yet he had never been more sarcastic, and even inhuman. He used his old
useless knowledge as a barrister to talk entertainingly of a tribunal
that was a parody on the pompous anomalies of English law. The High
Court of Beacon, he declared, was a splendid example of our free and
sensible constitution. It had been founded by King John in defiance of
the Magna Carta, and now held absolute power over windmills, wine and
spirit licences, ladies traveling in Turkey, revision of sentences for
dog-stealing and parricide, as well as anything whatever that happened
in the town of Market Bosworth. The whole hundred and nine seneschals
of the High Court of Beacon met once in every four centuries; but in
the intervals (as Mr. Moon explained) the whole powers of the
institution were vested in Mrs. Duke. Tossed about among the rest of
the company, however, the High Court did not retain its historical and
legal seriousness, but was used somewhat unscrupulously in a riot of
domestic detail. If somebody spilt the Worcester Sauce on the
tablecloth, he was quite sure it was a rite without which the sittings
and findings of the Court would be invalid; or if somebody wanted a
window to remain shut, he would suddenly remember that none but the
third son of the lord of the manor of Penge had the right to open it.
They even went to the length of making arrests and conducting criminal
inquiries. The proposed trial of Moses Gould for patriotism was rather
above the heads of the company, especially of the criminal; but the
trial of Inglewood on a charge of photographic libel, and his
triumphant acquittal upon a plea of insanity, were admitted to be in
the best tradition of the Court.

But when Smith was in wild spirits he grew more and more serious, not
more and more flippant like Michael Moon. This proposal of a private
court of justice, which Moon had thrown off with the detachment of a
political humourist, Smith really caught hold of with the eagerness of
an abstract philosopher. It was by far the best thing they could do, he
declared, to claim sovereign powers even for the individual household.

“You believe in Home Rule for Ireland; I believe in Home Rule for
homes,” he cried eagerly to Michael. “It would be better if every
father COULD kill his son, as with the old Romans; it would be better,
because nobody would be killed. Let’s issue a Declaration of
Independence from Beacon House. We could grow enough greens in that
garden to support us, and when the tax-collector comes let’s tell him
we’re self-supporting, and play on him with the hose.... Well, perhaps,
as you say, we couldn’t very well have a hose, as that comes from the
main; but we could sink a well in this chalk, and a lot could be done
with water-jugs.... Let this really be Beacon House. Let’s light a
bonfire of independence on the roof, and see house after house
answering it across the valley of the Thames! Let us begin the League
of the Free Families! Away with Local Government! A fig for Local
Patriotism! Let every house be a sovereign state as this is, and judge
its own children by its own law, as we do by the Court of Beacon. Let
us cut the painter, and begin to be happy together, as if we were on a
desert island.”

“I know that desert island,” said Michael Moon; “it only exists in the
‘Swiss Family Robinson.’ A man feels a strange desire for some sort of
vegetable milk, and crash comes down some unexpected cocoa-nut from
some undiscovered monkey. A literary man feels inclined to pen a
sonnet, and at once an officious porcupine rushes out of a thicket and
shoots out one of his quills.”

“Don’t you say a word against the ‘Swiss Family Robinson,’” cried
Innocent with great warmth. “It mayn’t be exact science, but it’s dead
accurate philosophy. When you’re really shipwrecked, you do really find
what you want. When you’re really on a desert island, you never find it
a desert. If we were really besieged in this garden, we’d find a
hundred English birds and English berries that we never knew were here.
If we were snowed up in this room, we’d be the better for reading
scores of books in that bookcase that we don’t even know are there;
we’d have talks with each other, good, terrible talks, that we shall go
to the grave without guessing; we’d find materials for everything—
christening, marriage, or funeral; yes, even for a coronation— if we
didn’t decide to be a republic.”

“A coronation on ‘Swiss Family’ lines, I suppose,” said Michael,
laughing. “Oh, I know you would find everything in that atmosphere. If
we wanted such a simple thing, for instance, as a Coronation Canopy, we
should walk down beyond the geraniums and find the Canopy Tree in full
bloom. If we wanted such a trifle as a crown of gold, why, we should be
digging up dandelions, and we should find a gold mine under the lawn.
And when we wanted oil for the ceremony, why I suppose a great storm
would wash everything on shore, and we should find there was a Whale on
the premises.”

“And so there IS a whale on the premises for all you know,” asseverated
Smith, striking the table with passion. “I bet you’ve never examined
the premises! I bet you’ve never been round at the back as I was this
morning— for I found the very thing you say could only grow on a tree.
There’s an old sort of square tent up against the dustbin; it’s got
three holes in the canvas, and a pole’s broken, so it’s not much good
as a tent, but as a Canopy—” And his voice quite failed him to express
its shining adequacy; then he went on with controversial eagerness:
“You see I take every challenge as you make it. I believe every blessed
thing you say couldn’t be here has been here all the time. You say you
want a whale washed up for oil. Why, there’s oil in that cruet-stand at
your elbow; and I don’t believe anybody has touched it or thought of it
for years. And as for your gold crown, we’re none of us wealthy here,
but we could collect enough ten-shilling bits from our own pockets to
string round a man’s head for half an hour; or one of Miss Hunt’s gold
bangles is nearly big enough to—”

The good-humoured Rosamund was almost choking with laughter. “All is
not gold that glitters,” she said, “and besides—”

“What a mistake that is!” cried Innocent Smith, leaping up in great
excitement. “All is gold that glitters— especially now we are a
Sovereign State. What’s the good of a Sovereign State if you can’t
define a sovereign? We can make anything a precious metal, as men could
in the morning of the world. They didn’t choose gold because it was
rare; your scientists can tell you twenty sorts of slime much rarer.
They chose gold because it was bright—because it was a hard thing to
find, but pretty when you’ve found it. You can’t fight with golden
swords or eat golden biscuits; you can only look at it—and you can look
at it out here.”

With one of his incalculable motions he sprang back and burst open the
doors into the garden. At the same time also, with one of his gestures
that never seemed at the instant so unconventional as they were, he
stretched out his hand to Mary Gray, and led her out on to the lawn as
if for a dance.

The French windows, thus flung open, let in an evening even lovelier
than that of the day before. The west was swimming with sanguine
colours, and a sort of sleepy flame lay along the lawn. The twisted
shadows of the one or two garden trees showed upon this sheen, not gray
or black, as in common daylight, but like arabesques written in vivid
violet ink on some page of Eastern gold. The sunset was one of those
festive and yet mysterious conflagrations in which common things by
their colours remind us of costly or curious things. The slates upon
the sloping roof burned like the plumes of a vast peacock, in every
mysterious blend of blue and green. The red-brown bricks of the wall
glowed with all the October tints of strong ruby and tawny wines. The
sun seemed to set each object alight with a different coloured flame,
like a man lighting fireworks; and even Innocent’s hair, which was of a
rather colourless fairness, seemed to have a flame of pagan gold on it
as he strode across the lawn towards the one tall ridge of rockery.

“What would be the good of gold,” he was saying, “if it did not
glitter? Why should we care for a black sovereign any more than for a
black sun at noon? A black button would do just as well. Don’t you see
that everything in this garden looks like a jewel? And will you kindly
tell me what the deuce is the good of a jewel except that it looks like
a jewel? Leave off buying and selling, and start looking! Open your
eyes, and you’ll wake up in the New Jerusalem.

“All is gold that glitters—
    Tree and tower of brass;
Rolls the golden evening air
    Down the golden grass.
Kick the cry to Jericho,
    How yellow mud is sold;
All is gold that glitters,
    For the glitter is the gold.”


“And who wrote that?” asked Rosamund, amused.

“No one will ever write it,” answered Smith, and cleared the rockery
with a flying leap.

“Really,” said Rosamund to Michael Moon, “he ought to be sent to an
asylum. Don’t you think so?”

“I beg your pardon,” inquired Michael, rather sombrely; his long,
swarthy head was dark against the sunset, and, either by accident or
mood, he had the look of something isolated and even hostile amid the
social extravagance of the garden.

“I only said Mr. Smith ought to go to an asylum,” repeated the lady.

The lean face seemed to grow longer and longer, for Moon was
unmistakably sneering. “No,” he said; “I don’t think it’s at all
necessary.”

“What do you mean?” asked Rosamund quickly. “Why not?”

“Because he is in one now,” answered Michael Moon, in a quiet but ugly
voice. “Why, didn’t you know?”

“What?” cried the girl, and there was a break in her voice; for the
Irishman’s face and voice were really almost creepy. With his dark
figure and dark sayings in all that sunshine he looked like the devil
in paradise.

“I’m sorry,” he continued, with a sort of harsh humility. “Of course we
don’t talk about it much... but I thought we all really knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Well,” answered Moon, “that Beacon House is a certain rather singular
sort of house—a house with the tiles loose, shall we say? Innocent
Smith is only the doctor that visits us; hadn’t you come when he called
before? As most of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be
extra cheery. Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious eccentric thing
to us. Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree—that’s his bedside manner.”

“You daren’t say such a thing!” cried Rosamund in a rage. “You daren’t
suggest that I—”

“Not more than I am,” said Michael soothingly; “not more than the rest
of us. Haven’t you ever noticed that Miss Duke never sits still—a
notorious sign? Haven’t you ever observed that Inglewood is always
washing his hands— a known mark of mental disease? I, of course, am a
dipsomaniac.”

“I don’t believe you,” broke out his companion, not without agitation.
“I’ve heard you had some bad habits—”

“All habits are bad habits,” said Michael, with deadly calm. “Madness
does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in
some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed. YOU
went mad about money, because you’re an heiress.”

“It’s a lie,” cried Rosamund furiously. “I never was mean about money.”

“You were worse,” said Michael, in a low voice and yet violently. “You
thought that other people were. You thought every man who came near you
must be a fortune-hunter; you would not let yourself go and be sane;
and now you’re mad and I’m mad, and serve us right.”

“You brute!” said Rosamund, quite white. “And is this true?”

With the intellectual cruelty of which the Celt is capable when his
abysses are in revolt, Michael was silent for some seconds, and then
stepped back with an ironical bow. “Not literally true, of course,” he
said; “only really true. An allegory, shall we say? a social satire.”

“And I hate and despise your satires,” cried Rosamund Hunt, letting
loose her whole forcible female personality like a cyclone, and
speaking every word to wound. “I despise it as I despise your rank
tobacco, and your nasty, loungy ways, and your snarling, and your
Radicalism, and your old clothes, and your potty little newspaper, and
your rotten failure at everything. I don’t care whether you call it
snobbishness or not, I like life and success, and jolly things to look
at, and action. You won’t frighten me with Diogenes; I prefer
Alexander.”

“Victrix causa deæ—” said Michael gloomily; and this angered her more,
as, not knowing what it meant, she imagined it to be witty.

“Oh, I dare say you know Greek,” she said, with cheerful inaccuracy;
“you haven’t done much with that either.” And she crossed the garden,
pursuing the vanished Innocent and Mary.

In doing so she passed Inglewood, who was returning to the house
slowly, and with a thought-clouded brow. He was one of those men who
are quite clever, but quite the reverse of quick. As he came back out
of the sunset garden into the twilight parlour, Diana Duke slipped
swiftly to her feet and began putting away the tea things. But it was
not before Inglewood had seen an instantaneous picture so unique that
he might well have snapshotted it with his everlasting camera. For
Diana had been sitting in front of her unfinished work with her chin on
her hand, looking straight out of the window in pure thoughtless
thought.

“You are busy,” said Arthur, oddly embarrassed with what he had seen,
and wishing to ignore it.

“There’s no time for dreaming in this world,” answered the young lady
with her back to him.

“I have been thinking lately,” said Inglewood in a low voice, “that
there’s no time for waking up.”

She did not reply, and he walked to the window and looked out on the
garden.

“I don’t smoke or drink, you know,” he said irrelevantly, “because I
think they’re drugs. And yet I fancy all hobbies, like my camera and
bicycle, are drugs too. Getting under a black hood, getting into a dark
room—getting into a hole anyhow. Drugging myself with speed, and
sunshine, and fatigue, and fresh air. Pedalling the machine so fast
that I turn into a machine myself. That’s the matter with all of us.
We’re too busy to wake up.”

“Well,” said the girl solidly, “what is there to wake up to?”

“There must be!” cried Inglewood, turning round in a singular
excitement—“there must be something to wake up to! All we do is
preparations—your cleanliness, and my healthiness, and Warner’s
scientific appliances. We’re always preparing for something—something
that never comes off. I ventilate the house, and you sweep the house;
but what is going to HAPPEN in the house?”

She was looking at him quietly, but with very bright eyes, and seemed
to be searching for some form of words which she could not find.

Before she could speak the door burst open, and the boisterous Rosamund
Hunt, in her flamboyant white hat, boa, and parasol, stood framed in
the doorway. She was in a breathing heat, and on her open face was an
expression of the most infantile astonishment.

“Well, here’s a fine game!” she said, panting. “What am I to do now, I
wonder? I’ve wired for Dr. Warner; that’s all I can think of doing.”

“What is the matter?” asked Diana, rather sharply, but moving forward
like one used to be called upon for assistance.

“It’s Mary,” said the heiress, “my companion Mary Gray: that cracked
friend of yours called Smith has proposed to her in the garden, after
ten hours’ acquaintance, and he wants to go off with her now for a
special licence.”

Arthur Inglewood walked to the open French windows and looked out on
the garden, still golden with evening light. Nothing moved there but a
bird or two hopping and twittering; but beyond the hedge and railings,
in the road outside the garden gate, a hansom cab was waiting, with the
yellow Gladstone bag on top of it.



Chapter IV
The Garden of the God


Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt entrance and
utterance of the other girl.

“Well,” she said shortly, “I suppose Miss Gray can decline him if she
doesn’t want to marry him.”

“But she DOES want to marry him!” cried Rosamund in exasperation.
“She’s a wild, wicked fool, and I won’t be parted from her.”

“Perhaps,” said Diana icily, “but I really don’t see what we can do.”

“But the man’s balmy, Diana,” reasoned her friend angrily. “I can’t let
my nice governess marry a man that’s balmy! You or somebody MUST stop
it!—Mr. Inglewood, you’re a man; go and tell them they simply can’t.”

“Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can,” said Inglewood, with a
depressed air. “I have far less right of intervention than Miss Duke,
besides having, of course, far less moral force than she.”

“You haven’t either of you got much,” cried Rosamund, the last stays of
her formidable temper giving way; “I think I’ll go somewhere else for a
little sense and pluck. I think I know some one who will help me more
than you do, at any rate... he’s a cantankerous beast, but he’s a man,
and has a mind, and knows it...” And she flung out into the garden,
with cheeks aflame, and the parasol whirling like a Catherine wheel.

She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree, looking over the
hedge; hunched like a bird of prey, with his large pipe hanging down
his long blue chin. The very hardness of his expression pleased her,
after the nonsense of the new engagement and the shilly-shallying of
her other friends.

“I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon,” she said frankly. “I hated you for
being a cynic; but I’ve been well punished, for I want a cynic just
now. I’ve had my fill of sentiment—I’m fed up with it. The world’s gone
mad, Mr. Moon—all except the cynics, I think. That maniac Smith wants
to marry my old friend Mary, and she— and she—doesn’t seem to mind.”

Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking, she added
smartly, “I’m not joking; that’s Mr. Smith’s cab outside. He swears
he’ll take her off now to his aunt’s, and go for a special licence. Do
give me some practical advice, Mr. Moon.”

Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his hand for an
instant reflectively, and then tossed it to the other side of the
garden. “My practical advice to you is this,” he said: “Let him go for
his special licence, and ask him to get another one for you and me.”

“Is that one of your jokes?” asked the young lady. “Do say what you
really mean.”

“I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business,” said Moon with
ponderous precision—“a plain, practical man: a man of affairs; a man of
facts and the daylight. He has let down twenty ton of good building
bricks suddenly on my head, and I am glad to say they have woken me up.
We went to sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in this very
sunlight. We have had a little nap for five years or so, but now we’re
going to be married, Rosamund, and I can’t see why that cab...”

“Really,” said Rosamund stoutly, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“What a lie!” cried Michael, advancing on her with brightening eyes.
“I’m all for lies in an ordinary way; but don’t you see that to-night
they won’t do? We’ve wandered into a world of facts, old girl. That
grass growing, and that sun going down, and that cab at the door, are
facts. You used to torment and excuse yourself by saying I was after
your money, and didn’t really love you. But if I stood here now and
told you I didn’t love you—you wouldn’t believe me: for truth is in
this garden to-night.”

“Really, Mr. Moon...” said Rosamund, rather more faintly.

He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face. “Is my name
Moon?” he asked. “Is your name Hunt? On my honour, they sound to me as
quaint and as distant as Red Indian names. It’s as if your name was
‘Swim’ and my name was ‘Sunrise.’ But our real names are Husband and
Wife, as they were when we fell asleep.”

“It is no good,” said Rosamund, with real tears in her eyes; “one can
never go back.”

“I can go where I damn please,” said Michael, “and I can carry you on
my shoulder.”

“But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!” cried the girl
earnestly. “You could carry me off my feet, I dare say, soul and body,
but it may be bitter bad business for all that. These things done in
that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith’s, they— they do attract women, I
don’t deny it. As you say, we’re all telling the truth to-night.
They’ve attracted poor Mary, for one. They attract me, Michael. But the
cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and
disappointment— you’ve got used to your drinks and things—I shan’t be
pretty much longer—”

“Imprudent marriages!” roared Michael. “And pray where in earth or
heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about
prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long enough,
and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You
never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you’ll be
unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn’t be unhappy, like the
mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we’ll be disappointed. I,
for one, don’t expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this
minute— a tower with all the trumpets shouting.”

“You see all this,” said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid
face, “and do you really want to marry me?”

“My darling, what else is there to do?” reasoned the Irishman. “What
other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to
marry you? What’s the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It’s not
liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you
must marry Man—that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself—
yourself, yourself, yourself—the only companion that is never
satisfied— and never satisfactory.”

“Michael,” said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, “if you won’t talk so
much, I’ll marry you.”

“It’s no time for talking,” cried Michael Moon; “singing is the only
thing. Can’t you find that mandoline of yours, Rosamund?”

“Go and fetch it for me,” said Rosamund, with crisp and sharp
authority.

The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second astonished; then he
shot away across the lawn, as if shod with the feathered shoes out of
the Greek fairy tale. He cleared three yards and fifteen daisies at a
leap, out of mere bodily levity; but when he came within a yard or two
of the open parlour windows, his flying feet fell in their old manner
like lead; he twisted round and came back slowly, whistling. The events
of that enchanted evening were not at an end.

Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a glimpse a
curious thing had happened, almost an instant after the intemperate
exit of Rosamund. It was something which, occurring in that obscure
parlour, seemed to Arthur Inglewood like heaven and earth turning head
over heels, the sea being the ceiling and the stars the floor. No words
can express how it astonished him, as it astonishes all simple men when
it happens. Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems separated from it
only by a sheet of paper or a sheet of steel. It indicates no
surrender, far less any sympathy. The most rigid and ruthless woman can
begin to cry, just as the most effeminate man can grow a beard. It is a
separate sexual power, and proves nothing one way or the other about
force of character. But to young men ignorant of women, like Arthur
Inglewood, to see Diana Duke crying was like seeing a motor-car
shedding tears of petrol.

He could never have given (even if his really manly modesty had
permitted it) any vaguest vision of what he did when he saw that
portent. He acted as men do when a theatre catches fire—very
differently from how they would have conceived themselves as acting,
whether for better or worse. He had a faint memory of certain
half-stifled explanations, that the heiress was the one really paying
guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs (in consequence) would come;
but after that he knew nothing of his own conduct except by the
protests it evoked.

“Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood—leave me alone; that’s not the way to
help.”

“But I can help you,” said Arthur, with grinding certainty; “I can, I
can, I can...”

“Why, you said,” cried the girl, “that you were much weaker than me.”

“So I am weaker than you,” said Arthur, in a voice that went vibrating
through everything, “but not just now.”

“Let go my hands!” cried Diana. “I won’t be bullied.”

In one element he was much stronger than she—the matter of humour. This
leapt up in him suddenly, and he laughed, saying: “Well, you are mean.
You know quite well you’ll bully me all the rest of my life. You might
allow a man the one minute of his life when he’s allowed to bully.”

It was as extraordinary for him to laugh as for her to cry, and for the
first time since her childhood Diana was entirely off her guard.

“Do you mean you want to marry me?” she said.

“Why, there’s a cab at the door!” cried Inglewood, springing up with an
unconscious energy and bursting open the glass doors that led into the
garden.

As he led her out by the hand they realized somehow for the first time
that the house and garden were on a steep height over London. And yet,
though they felt the place to be uplifted, they felt it also to be
secret: it was like some round walled garden on the top of one of the
turrets of heaven.

Inglewood looked around dreamily, his brown eyes devouring all sorts of
details with a senseless delight. He noticed for the first time that
the railings of the gate beyond the garden bushes were moulded like
little spearheads and painted blue. He noticed that one of the blue
spears was loosened in its place, and hung sideways; and this almost
made him laugh. He thought it somehow exquisitely harmless and funny
that the railing should be crooked; he thought he should like to know
how it happened, who did it, and how the man was getting on.

When they were gone a few feet across that fiery grass they realized
that they were not alone. Rosamund Hunt and the eccentric Mr. Moon,
both of whom they had last seen in the blackest temper of detachment,
were standing together on the lawn. They were standing in quite an
ordinary manner, and yet they looked somehow like people in a book.

“Oh,” said Diana, “what lovely air!”

“I know,” called out Rosamund, with a pleasure so positive that it rang
out like a complaint. “It’s just like that horrid, beastly fizzy stuff
they gave me that made me feel happy.”

“Oh, it isn’t like anything but itself!” answered Diana, breathing
deeply. “Why, it’s all cold, and yet it feels like fire.”

“Balmy is the word we use in Fleet Street,” said Mr. Moon.
“Balmy—especially on the crumpet.” And he fanned himself quite
unnecessarily with his straw hat. They were all full of little leaps
and pulsations of objectless and airy energy. Diana stirred and
stretched her long arms rigidly, as if crucified, in a sort of
excruciating restfulness; Michael stood still for long intervals, with
gathered muscles, then spun round like a teetotum, and stood still
again; Rosamund did not trip, for women never trip, except when they
fall on their noses, but she struck the ground with her foot as she
moved, as if to some inaudible dance tune; and Inglewood, leaning quite
quietly against a tree, had unconsciously clutched a branch and shaken
it with a creative violence. Those giant gestures of Man, that made the
high statues and the strokes of war, tossed and tormented all their
limbs. Silently as they strolled and stood they were bursting like
batteries with an animal magnetism.

“And now,” cried Moon quite suddenly, stretching out a hand on each
side, “let’s dance round that bush!”

“Why, what bush do you mean?” asked Rosamund, looking round with a sort
of radiant rudeness.

“The bush that isn’t there,” said Michael—“the Mulberry Bush.”

They had taken each other’s hands, half laughing and quite ritually;
and before they could disconnect again Michael spun them all round,
like a demon spinning the world for a top. Diana felt, as the circle of
the horizon flew instantaneously around her, a far aerial sense of the
ring of heights beyond London and corners where she had climbed as a
child; she seemed almost to hear the rooks cawing about the old pines
on Highgate, or to see the glowworms gathering and kindling in the
woods of Box Hill.

The circle broke—as all such perfect circles of levity must break— and
sent its author, Michael, flying, as by centrifugal force, far away
against the blue rails of the gate. When reeling there he suddenly
raised shout after shout of a new and quite dramatic character.

“Why, it’s Warner!” he shouted, waving his arms. “It’s jolly old
Warner— with a new silk hat and the old silk moustache!”

“Is that Dr. Warner?” cried Rosamund, bounding forward in a burst of
memory, amusement, and distress. “Oh, I’m so sorry! Oh, do tell him
it’s all right!”

“Let’s take hands and tell him,” said Michael Moon. For indeed, while
they were talking, another hansom cab had dashed up behind the one
already waiting, and Dr. Herbert Warner, leaving a companion in the
cab, had carefully deposited himself on the pavement.

Now, when you are an eminent physician and are wired for by an heiress
to come to a case of dangerous mania, and when, as you come in through
the garden to the house, the heiress and her landlady and two of the
gentlemen boarders join hands and dance round you in a ring, calling
out, “It’s all right! it’s all right!” you are apt to be flustered and
even displeased. Dr. Warner was a placid but hardly a placable person.
The two things are by no means the same; and even when Moon explained
to him that he, Warner, with his high hat and tall, solid figure, was
just such a classic figure as OUGHT to be danced round by a ring of
laughing maidens on some old golden Greek seashore— even then he seemed
to miss the point of the general rejoicing.

“Inglewood!” cried Dr. Warner, fixing his former disciple with a stare,
“are you mad?”

Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown hair, but he answered, easily
and quietly enough, “Not now. The truth is, Warner, I’ve just made a
rather important medical discovery—quite in your line.”

“What do you mean?” asked the great doctor stiffly—“what discovery?”

“I’ve discovered that health really is catching, like disease,”
answered Arthur.

“Yes; sanity has broken out, and is spreading,” said Michael,
performing a _pas seul_ with a thoughtful expression. “Twenty thousand
more cases taken to the hospitals; nurses employed night and day.”

Dr. Warner studied Michael’s grave face and lightly moving legs with an
unfathomed wonder. “And is THIS, may I ask,” he said, “the sanity that
is spreading?”

“You must forgive me, Dr. Warner,” cried Rosamund Hunt heartily. “I
know I’ve treated you badly; but indeed it was all a mistake. I was in
a frightfully bad temper when I sent for you, but now it all seems like
a dream—and—and Mr. Smith is the sweetest, most sensible, most
delightful old thing that ever existed, and he may marry any one he
likes—except me.”

“I should suggest Mrs. Duke,” said Michael.

The gravity of Dr. Warner’s face increased. He took a slip of pink
paper from his waistcoat pocket, with his pale blue eyes quietly fixed
on Rosamund’s face all the time. He spoke with a not inexcusable
frigidity.

“Really, Miss Hunt,” he said, “you are not yet very reassuring. You
sent me this wire only half an hour ago: ‘Come at once, if possible,
with another doctor. Man—Innocent Smith—gone mad on premises, and doing
dreadful things. Do you know anything of him?’ I went round at once to
a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor who is also a private
detective and an authority on criminal lunacy; he has come round with
me, and is waiting in the cab. Now you calmly tell me that this
criminal madman is a highly sweet and sane old thing, with
accompaniments that set me speculating on your own definition of
sanity. I hardly comprehend the change.”

“Oh, how can one explain a change in sun and moon and everybody’s
soul?” cried Rosamund, in despair. “Must I confess we had got so morbid
as to think him mad merely because he wanted to get married; and that
we didn’t even know it was only because we wanted to get married
ourselves? We’ll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor; we’re happy
enough.”

“Where is Mr. Smith?” asked Warner of Inglewood very sharply.

Arthur started; he had forgotten all about the central figure of their
farce, who had not been visible for an hour or more.

“I—I think he’s on the other side of the house, by the dustbin,” he
said.

“He may be on the road to Russia,” said Warner, “but he must be found.”
And he strode away and disappeared round a corner of the house by the
sunflowers.

“I hope,” said Rosamund, “he won’t really interfere with Mr. Smith.”

“Interfere with the daisies!” said Michael with a snort. “A man can’t
be locked up for falling in love—at least I hope not.”

“No; I think even a doctor couldn’t make a disease out of him. He’d
throw off the doctor like the disease, don’t you know? I believe it’s a
case of a sort of holy well. I believe Innocent Smith is simply
innocent, and that is why he is so extraordinary.”

It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly tracing circles in the grass with
the point of her white shoe.

“I think,” said Inglewood, “that Smith is not extraordinary at all.
He’s comic just because he’s so startlingly commonplace. Don’t you know
what it is to be all one family circle, with aunts and uncles, when a
schoolboy comes home for the holidays? That bag there on the cab is
only a schoolboy’s hamper. This tree here in the garden is only the
sort of tree that any schoolboy would have climbed. Yes, that’s the
thing that has haunted us all about him, the thing we could never fit a
word to. Whether he is my old schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my
old schoolfellows. He is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwing animal
that we have all been.”

“That is only you absurd boys,” said Diana. “I don’t believe any girl
was ever so silly, and I’m sure no girl was ever so happy, except—” and
she stopped.

“I will tell you the truth about Innocent Smith,” said Michael Moon in
a low voice. “Dr. Warner has gone to look for him in vain. He is not
there. Haven’t you noticed that we never saw him since we found
ourselves? He was an astral baby born on all four of us; he was only
our own youth returned. Long before poor old Warner had clambered out
of his cab, the thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew and light
on this lawn. Once or twice more, by the mercy of God, we may feel the
thing, but the man we shall never see. In a spring garden before
breakfast we shall smell the smell called Smith. In the snapping of
brisk twigs in tiny fires we shall hear a noise named Smith. Everything
insatiable and innocent in the grasses that gobble up the earth like
babies at a bun feast, in the white mornings that split the sky as a
boy splits up white firwood, we may feel for one instant the presence
of an impetuous purity; but his innocence was too close to the
unconsciousness of inanimate things not to melt back at a mere touch
into the mild hedges and heavens; he—”

He was interrupted from behind the house by a bang like that of a bomb.
Almost at the same instant the stranger in the cab sprang out of it,
leaving it rocking upon the stones of the road. He clutched the blue
railings of the garden, and peered eagerly over them in the direction
of the noise. He was a small, loose, yet alert man, very thin, with a
face that seemed made out of fish bones, and a silk hat quite as rigid
and resplendent as Warner’s, but thrust back recklessly on the hinder
part of his head.

“Murder!” he shrieked, in a high and feminine but very penetrating
voice. “Stop that murderer there!”

Even as he shrieked a second shot shook the lower windows of the house,
and with the noise of it Dr. Herbert Warner came flying round the
corner like a leaping rabbit. Yet before he had reached the group a
third discharge had deafened them, and they saw with their own eyes two
spots of white sky drilled through the second of the unhappy Herbert’s
high hats. The next moment the fugitive physician fell over a
flowerpot, and came down on all fours, staring like a cow. The hat with
the two shot-holes in it rolled upon the gravel path before him, and
Innocent Smith came round the corner like a railway train. He was
looking twice his proper size—a giant clad in green, the big revolver
still smoking in his hand, his face sanguine and in shadow, his eyes
blazing like all stars, and his yellow hair standing out all ways like
Struwelpeter’s.

Though this startling scene hung but an instant in stillness, Inglewood
had time to feel once more what he had felt when he saw the other
lovers standing on the lawn—the sensation of a certain cut and coloured
clearness that belongs rather to the things of art than to the things
of experience. The broken flowerpot with its red-hot geraniums, the
green bulk of Smith and the black bulk of Warner, the blue-spiked
railings behind, clutched by the stranger’s yellow vulture claws and
peered over by his long vulture neck, the silk hat on the gravel, and
the little cloudlet of smoke floating across the garden as innocently
as the puff of a cigarette— all these seemed unnaturally distinct and
definite. They existed, like symbols, in an ecstasy of separation.
Indeed, every object grew more and more particular and precious because
the whole picture was breaking up. Things look so bright just before
they burst.

Long before his fancies had begun, let alone ceased, Arthur had stepped
across and taken one of Smith’s arms. Simultaneously the little
stranger had run up the steps and taken the other. Smith went into
peals of laughter, and surrendered his pistol with perfect willingness.
Moon raised the doctor to his feet, and then went and leaned sullenly
on the garden gate. The girls were quiet and vigilant, as good women
mostly are in instants of catastrophe, but their faces showed that,
somehow or other, a light had been dashed out of the sky. The doctor
himself, when he had risen, collected his hat and wits, and dusting
himself down with an air of great disgust, turned to them in brief
apology. He was very white with his recent panic, but he spoke with
perfect self-control.

“You will excuse us, ladies,” he said; “my friend and Mr. Inglewood are
both scientists in their several ways. I think we had better all take
Mr. Smith indoors, and communicate with you later.”

And under the guard of the three natural philosophers the disarmed
Smith was led tactfully into the house, still roaring with laughter.

From time to time during the next twenty minutes his distant boom of
mirth could again be heard through the half-open window; but there came
no echo of the quiet voices of the physicians. The girls walked about
the garden together, rubbing up each other’s spirits as best they
might; Michael Moon still hung heavily against the gate. Somewhere
about the expiration of that time Dr. Warner came out of the house with
a face less pale but even more stern, and the little man with the
fish-bone face advanced gravely in his rear. And if the face of Warner
in the sunlight was that of a hanging judge, the face of the little man
behind was more like a death’s head.

“Miss Hunt,” said Dr. Herbert Warner, “I only wish to offer you my warm
thanks and admiration. By your prompt courage and wisdom in sending for
us by wire this evening, you have enabled us to capture and put out of
mischief one of the most cruel and terrible of the enemies of humanity—
a criminal whose plausibility and pitilessness have never been before
combined in flesh.”

Rosamund looked across at him with a white, blank face and blinking
eyes. “What do you mean?” she asked. “You can’t mean Mr. Smith?”

“He has gone by many other names,” said the doctor gravely, “and not
one he did not leave to be cursed behind him. That man, Miss Hunt, has
left a track of blood and tears across the world. Whether he is mad as
well as wicked, we are trying, in the interests of science, to
discover. In any case, we shall have to take him to a magistrate first,
even if only on the road to a lunatic asylum. But the lunatic asylum in
which he is confined will have to be sealed with wall within wall, and
ringed with guns like a fortress, or he will break out again to bring
forth carnage and darkness on the earth.”

Rosamund looked at the two doctors, her face growing paler and paler.
Then her eyes strayed to Michael, who was leaning on the gate; but he
continued to lean on it without moving, with his face turned away
towards the darkening road.



Chapter V
The Allegorical Practical Joker


The criminal specialist who had come with Dr. Warner was a somewhat
more urbane and even dapper figure than he had appeared when clutching
the railings and craning his neck into the garden. He even looked
comparatively young when he took his hat off, having fair hair parted
in the middle and carefully curled on each side, and lively movements,
especially of the hands. He had a dandified monocle slung round his
neck by a broad black ribbon, and a big bow tie, as if a big American
moth had alighted on him. His dress and gestures were bright enough for
a boy’s; it was only when you looked at the fish-bone face that you
beheld something acrid and old. His manners were excellent, though
hardly English, and he had two half-conscious tricks by which people
who only met him once remembered him. One was a trick of closing his
eyes when he wished to be particularly polite; the other was one of
lifting his joined thumb and forefinger in the air as if holding a
pinch of snuff, when he was hesitating or hovering over a word. But
those who were longer in his company tended to forget these oddities in
the stream of his quaint and solemn conversation and really singular
views.

“Miss Hunt,” said Dr. Warner, “this is Dr. Cyrus Pym.”

Dr. Cyrus Pym shut his eyes during the introduction, rather as if he
were “playing fair” in some child’s game, and gave a prompt little bow,
which somehow suddenly revealed him as a citizen of the United States.

“Dr. Cyrus Pym,” continued Warner (Dr. Pym shut his eyes again), “is
perhaps the first criminological expert of America. We are very
fortunate to be able to consult with him in this extraordinary case—”

“I can’t make head or tail of anything,” said Rosamund. “How can poor
Mr. Smith be so dreadful as he is by your account?”

“Or by your telegram,” said Herbert Warner, smiling.

“Oh, you don’t understand,” cried the girl impatiently. “Why, he’s done
us all more good than going to church.”

“I think I can explain to the young lady,” said Dr. Cyrus Pym. “This
criminal or maniac Smith is a very genius of evil, and has a method of
his own, a method of the most daring ingenuity. He is popular wherever
he goes, for he invades every house as an uproarious child. People are
getting suspicious of all the respectable disguises for a scoundrel; so
he always uses the disguise of—what shall I say—the Bohemian, the
blameless Bohemian. He always carries people off their feet. People are
used to the mask of conventional good conduct. He goes in for eccentric
good-nature. You expect a Don Juan to dress up as a solemn and solid
Spanish merchant; but you’re not prepared when he dresses up as Don
Quixote. You expect a humbug to behave like Sir Charles Grandison;
because (with all respect, Miss Hunt, for the deep, tear-moving
tenderness of Samuel Richardson) Sir Charles Grandison so often behaved
like a humbug. But no real red-blooded citizen is quite ready for a
humbug that models himself not on Sir Charles Grandison but on Sir
Roger de Coverly. Setting up to be a good man a little cracked is a new
criminal incognito, Miss Hunt. It’s been a great notion, and uncommonly
successful; but its success just makes it mighty cruel. I can forgive
Dick Turpin if he impersonates Dr. Busby; I can’t forgive him when he
impersonates Dr. Johnson. The saint with a tile loose is a bit too
sacred, I guess, to be parodied.”

“But how do you know,” cried Rosamund desperately, “that Mr. Smith is a
known criminal?”

“I collated all the documents,” said the American, “when my friend
Warner knocked me up on receipt of your cable. It is my professional
affair to know these facts, Miss Hunt; and there’s no more doubt about
them than about the Bradshaw down at the depot. This man has hitherto
escaped the law, through his admirable affectations of infancy or
insanity. But I myself, as a specialist, have privately authenticated
notes of some eighteen or twenty crimes attempted or achieved in this
manner. He comes to houses as he has to this, and gets a grand
popularity. He makes things go. They do go; when he’s gone the things
are gone. Gone, Miss Hunt, gone, a man’s life or a man’s spoons, or
more often a woman. I assure you I have all the memoranda.”

“I have seen them,” said Warner solidly, “I can assure you that all
this is correct.”

“The most unmanly aspect, according to my feelings,” went on the
American doctor, “is this perpetual deception of innocent women by a
wild simulation of innocence. From almost every house where this great
imaginative devil has been, he has taken some poor girl away with him;
some say he’s got a hypnotic eye with his other queer features, and
that they go like automata. What’s become of all those poor girls
nobody knows. Murdered, I dare say; for we’ve lots of instances,
besides this one, of his turning his hand to murder, though none ever
brought him under the law. Anyhow, our most modern methods of research
can’t find any trace of the wretched women. It’s when I think of them
that I am really moved, Miss Hunt. And I’ve really nothing else to say
just now except what Dr. Warner has said.”

“Quite so,” said Warner, with a smile that seemed moulded in
marble—“that we all have to thank you very much for that telegram.”

The little Yankee scientist had been speaking with such evident
sincerity that one forgot the tricks of his voice and manner— the
falling eyelids, the rising intonation, and the poised finger and
thumb—which were at other times a little comic. It was not so much that
he was cleverer than Warner; perhaps he was not so clever, though he
was more celebrated. But he had what Warner never had, a fresh and
unaffected seriousness— the great American virtue of simplicity.
Rosamund knitted her brows and looked gloomily toward the darkening
house that contained the dark prodigy.

Broad daylight still endured; but it had already changed from gold to
silver, and was changing from silver to gray. The long plumy shadows of
the one or two trees in the garden faded more and more upon a dead
background of dusk. In the sharpest and deepest shadow, which was the
entrance to the house by the big French windows, Rosamund could watch a
hurried consultation between Inglewood (who was still left in charge of
the mysterious captive) and Diana, who had moved to his assistance from
without. After a few minutes and gestures they went inside, shutting
the glass doors upon the garden; and the garden seemed to grow grayer
still.

The American gentleman named Pym seemed to be turning and on the move
in the same direction; but before he started he spoke to Rosamund with
a flash of that guileless tact which redeemed much of his childish
vanity, and with something of that spontaneous poetry which made it
difficult, pedantic as he was, to call him a pedant.

“I’m vurry sorry, Miss Hunt,” he said; “but Dr. Warner and I, as two
quali-FIED practitioners, had better take Mr. Smith away in that cab,
and the less said about it the better. Don’t you agitate yourself, Miss
Hunt. You’ve just got to think that we’re taking away a monstrosity,
something that oughtn’t to be at all—something like one of those gods
in your Britannic Museum, all wings, and beards, and legs, and eyes,
and no shape. That’s what Smith is, and you shall soon be quit of him.”

He had already taken a step towards the house, and Warner was about to
follow him, when the glass doors were opened again and Diana Duke came
out with more than her usual quickness across the lawn. Her face was
aquiver with worry and excitement, and her dark earnest eyes fixed only
on the other girl.

“Rosamund,” she cried in despair, “what shall I do with her?”

“With her?” cried Miss Hunt, with a violent jump. “O lord, he isn’t a
woman too, is he?”

“No, no, no,” said Dr. Pym soothingly, as if in common fairness. “A
woman? no, really, he is not so bad as that.”

“I mean your friend Mary Gray,” retorted Diana with equal tartness.
“What on earth am I to do with her?”

“How can we tell her about Smith, you mean,” answered Rosamund, her
face at once clouded and softening. “Yes, it will be pretty painful.”

“But I HAVE told her,” exploded Diana, with more than her congenital
exasperation. “I have told her, and she doesn’t seem to mind. She still
says she’s going away with Smith in that cab.”

“But it’s impossible!” ejaculated Rosamund. “Why, Mary is really
religious. She—”

She stopped in time to realize that Mary Gray was comparatively close
to her on the lawn. Her quiet companion had come down very quietly into
the garden, but dressed very decisively for travel. She had a neat but
very ancient blue tam-o’-shanter on her head, and was pulling some
rather threadbare gray gloves on to her hands. Yet the two tints fitted
excellently with her heavy copper-coloured hair; the more excellently
for the touch of shabbiness: for a woman’s clothes never suit her so
well as when they seem to suit her by accident.

But in this case the woman had a quality yet more unique and
attractive. In such gray hours, when the sun is sunk and the skies are
already sad, it will often happen that one reflection at some
occasional angle will cause to linger the last of the light. A scrap of
window, a scrap of water, a scrap of looking-glass, will be full of the
fire that is lost to all the rest of the earth. The quaint, almost
triangular face of Mary Gray was like some triangular piece of mirror
that could still repeat the splendour of hours before. Mary, though she
was always graceful, could never before have properly been called
beautiful; and yet her happiness amid all that misery was so beautiful
as to make a man catch his breath.

“O Diana,” cried Rosamund in a lower voice and altering her phrase;
“but how did you tell her?”

“It is quite easy to tell her,” answered Diana sombrely; “it makes no
impression at all.”

“I’m afraid I’ve kept everything waiting,” said Mary Gray
apologetically, “and now we must really say good-bye. Innocent is
taking me to his aunt’s over at Hampstead, and I’m afraid she goes to
bed early.”

Her words were quite casual and practical, but there was a sort of
sleepy light in her eyes that was more baffling than darkness; she was
like one speaking absently with her eye on some very distant object.

“Mary, Mary,” cried Rosamund, almost breaking down, “I’m so sorry about
it, but the thing can’t be at all. We—we have found out all about Mr.
Smith.”

“All?” repeated Mary, with a low and curious intonation; “why, that
must be awfully exciting.”

There was no noise for an instant and no motion except that the silent
Michael Moon, leaning on the gate, lifted his head, as it might be to
listen. Then Rosamund remaining speechless, Dr. Pym came to her rescue
in a definite way.

“To begin with,” he said, “this man Smith is constantly attempting
murder. The Warden of Brakespeare College—”

“I know,” said Mary, with a vague but radiant smile. “Innocent told
me.”

“I can’t say what he told you,” replied Pym quickly, “but I’m very much
afraid it wasn’t true. The plain truth is that the man’s stained with
every known human crime. I assure you I have all the documents. I have
evidence of his committing burglary, signed by a most eminent English
curate. I have—”

“Oh, but there were two curates,” cried Mary, with a certain gentle
eagerness; “that was what made it so much funnier.”

The darkened glass doors of the house opened once more, and Inglewood
appeared for an instant, making a sort of signal. The American doctor
bowed, the English doctor did not, but they both set out stolidly
towards the house. No one else moved, not even Michael hanging on the
gate; but the back of his head and shoulders had still an indescribable
indication that he was listening to every word.

“But don’t you understand, Mary,” cried Rosamund in despair; “don’t you
know that awful things have happened even before our very eyes. I
should have thought you would have heard the revolver shots upstairs.”

“Yes, I heard the shots,” said Mary almost brightly; “but I was busy
packing just then. And Innocent had told me he was going to shoot at
Dr. Warner; so it wasn’t worth while to come down.”

“Oh, I don’t understand what you mean,” cried Rosamund Hunt, stamping,
“but you must and shall understand what I mean. I don’t care how
cruelly I put it, if only I can save you. I mean that your Innocent
Smith is the most awfully wicked man in the world. He has sent bullets
at lots of other men and gone off in cabs with lots of other women. And
he seems to have killed the women too, for nobody can find them.”

“He is really rather naughty sometimes,” said Mary Gray, laughing
softly as she buttoned her old gray gloves.

“Oh, this is really mesmerism, or something,” said Rosamund, and burst
into tears.

At the same moment the two black-clad doctors appeared out of the house
with their great green-clad captive between them. He made no
resistance, but was still laughing in a groggy and half-witted style.
Arthur Inglewood followed in the rear, a dark and red study in the last
shades of distress and shame. In this black, funereal, and painfully
realistic style the exit from Beacon House was made by a man whose
entrance a day before had been effected by the happy leaping of a wall
and the hilarious climbing of a tree. No one moved of the groups in the
garden except Mary Gray, who stepped forward quite naturally, calling
out, “Are you ready, Innocent? Our cab’s been waiting such a long
time.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Dr. Warner firmly, “I must insist on
asking this lady to stand aside. We shall have trouble enough as it is,
with the three of us in a cab.”

“But it IS our cab,” persisted Mary. “Why, there’s Innocent’s yellow
bag on the top of it.”

“Stand aside,” repeated Warner roughly. “And you, Mr. Moon, please be
so obliging as to move a moment. Come, come! the sooner this ugly
business is over the better—and how can we open the gate if you will
keep leaning on it?”

Michael Moon looked at his long lean forefinger, and seemed to consider
and reconsider this argument. “Yes,” he said at last; “but how can I
lean on this gate if you keep on opening it?”

“Oh, get out of the way!” cried Warner, almost good-humouredly. “You
can lean on the gate any time.”

“No,” said Moon reflectively. “Seldom the time and the place and the
blue gate altogether; and it all depends whether you come of an old
country family. My ancestors leaned on gates before any one had
discovered how to open them.”

“Michael!” cried Arthur Inglewood in a kind of agony, “are you going to
get out of the way?”

“Why, no; I think not,” said Michael, after some meditation, and swung
himself slowly round, so that he confronted the company, while still,
in a lounging attitude, occupying the path.

“Hullo!” he called out suddenly; “what are you doing to Mr. Smith?”

“Taking him away,” answered Warner shortly, “to be examined.”

“Matriculation?” asked Moon brightly.

“By a magistrate,” said the other curtly.

“And what other magistrate,” cried Michael, raising his voice, “dares
to try what befell on this free soil, save only the ancient and
independent Dukes of Beacon? What other court dares to try one of our
company, save only the High Court of Beacon? Have you forgotten that
only this afternoon we flew the flag of independence and severed
ourselves from all the nations of the earth?”

“Michael,” cried Rosamund, wringing her hands, “how can you stand there
talking nonsense? Why, you saw the dreadful thing yourself. You were
there when he went mad. It was you that helped the doctor up when he
fell over the flower-pot.”

“And the High Court of Beacon,” replied Moon with hauteur, “has special
powers in all cases concerning lunatics, flower-pots, and doctors who
fall down in gardens. It’s in our very first charter from Edward I: ‘Si
medicus quisquam in horto prostratus—‘”

“Out of the way!” cried Warner with sudden fury, “or we will force you
out of it.”

“What!” cried Michael Moon, with a cry of hilarious fierceness. “Shall
I die in defence of this sacred pale? Will you paint these blue
railings red with my gore?” and he laid hold of one of the blue spikes
behind him. As Inglewood had noticed earlier in the evening, the
railing was loose and crooked at this place, and the painted iron staff
and spearhead came away in Michael’s hand as he shook it.

“See!” he cried, brandishing this broken javelin in the air, “the very
lances round Beacon Tower leap from their places to defend it. Ah, in
such a place and hour it is a fine thing to die alone!” And in a voice
like a drum he rolled the noble lines of Ronsard—

“Ou pour l’honneur de Dieu, ou pour le droit de mon prince,
Navré, poitrine ouverte, au bord de mon province.”


“Sakes alive!” said the American gentleman, almost in an awed tone.
Then he added, “Are there two maniacs here?”

“No; there are five,” thundered Moon. “Smith and I are the only sane
people left.”

“Michael!” cried Rosamund; “Michael, what does it mean?”

“It means bosh!” roared Michael, and slung his painted spear hurtling
to the other end of the garden. “It means that doctors are bosh, and
criminology is bosh, and Americans are bosh— much more bosh than our
Court of Beacon. It means, you fatheads, that Innocent Smith is no more
mad or bad than the bird on that tree.”

“But, my dear Moon,” began Inglewood in his modest manner, “these
gentlemen—”

“On the word of two doctors,” exploded Moon again, without listening to
anybody else, “shut up in a private hell on the word of two doctors!
And such doctors! Oh, my hat! Look at ’em!—do just look at ’em! Would
you read a book, or buy a dog, or go to a hotel on the advice of twenty
such? My people came from Ireland, and were Catholics. What would you
say if I called a man wicked on the word of two priests?”

“But it isn’t only their word, Michael,” reasoned Rosamund; “they’ve
got evidence too.”

“Have you looked at it?” asked Moon.

“No,” said Rosamund, with a sort of faint surprise; “these gentlemen
are in charge of it.”

“And of everything else, it seems to me,” said Michael. “Why, you
haven’t even had the decency to consult Mrs. Duke.”

“Oh, that’s no use,” said Diana in an undertone to Rosamund; “Auntie
can’t say ‘Bo!’ to a goose.”

“I am glad to hear it,” answered Michael, “for with such a flock of
geese to say it to, the horrid expletive might be constantly on her
lips. For my part, I simply refuse to let things be done in this light
and airy style. I appeal to Mrs. Duke—it’s her house.”

“Mrs. Duke?” repeated Inglewood doubtfully.

“Yes, Mrs. Duke,” said Michael firmly, “commonly called the Iron Duke.”

“If you ask Auntie,” said Diana quietly, “she’ll only be for doing
nothing at all. Her only idea is to hush things up or to let things
slide. That just suits her.”

“Yes,” replied Michael Moon; “and, as it happens, it just suits all of
us. You are impatient with your elders, Miss Duke; but when you are as
old yourself you will know what Napoleon knew— that half one’s letters
answer themselves if you can only refrain from the fleshly appetite of
answering them.”

He was still lounging in the same absurd attitude, with his elbow on
the grate, but his voice had altered abruptly for the third time; just
as it had changed from the mock heroic to the humanly indignant, it now
changed to the airy incisiveness of a lawyer giving good legal advice.

“It isn’t only your aunt who wants to keep this quiet if she can,” he
said; “we all want to keep it quiet if we can. Look at the large
facts—the big bones of the case. I believe those scientific gentlemen
have made a highly scientific mistake. I believe Smith is as blameless
as a buttercup. I admit buttercups don’t often let off loaded pistols
in private houses; I admit there is something demanding explanation.
But I am morally certain there’s some blunder, or some joke, or some
allegory, or some accident behind all this. Well, suppose I’m wrong.
We’ve disarmed him; we’re five men to hold him; he may as well go to a
lock-up later on as now. But suppose there’s even a chance of my being
right. Is it anybody’s interest here to wash this linen in public?

“Come, I’ll take each of you in order. Once take Smith outside that
gate, and you take him into the front page of the evening papers. I
know; I’ve written the front page myself. Miss Duke, do you or your
aunt want a sort of notice stuck up over your boarding-house—‘Doctors
shot here.’? No, no—doctors are rubbish, as I said; but you don’t want
the rubbish shot here. Arthur, suppose I am right, or suppose I am
wrong. Smith has appeared as an old schoolfellow of yours. Mark my
words, if he’s proved guilty, the Organs of Public Opinion will say you
introduced him. If he’s proved innocent, they will say you helped to
collar him. Rosamund, my dear, suppose I am right or wrong. If he’s
proved guilty, they’ll say you engaged your companion to him. If he’s
proved innocent, they’ll print that telegram. I know the Organs, damn
them.”

He stopped an instant; for this rapid rationalism left him more
breathless than had either his theatrical or his real denunciation. But
he was plainly in earnest, as well as positive and lucid; as was proved
by his proceeding quickly the moment he had found his breath.

“It is just the same,” he cried, “with our medical friends. You will
say that Dr. Warner has a grievance. I agree. But does he want
specially to be snapshotted by all the journalists _prostratus in
horto?_ It was no fault of his, but the scene was not very dignified
even for him. He must have justice; but does he want to ask for
justice, not only on his knees, but on his hands and knees? Does he
want to enter the court of justice on all fours? Doctors are not
allowed to advertise; and I’m sure no doctor wants to advertise himself
as looking like that. And even for our American guest the interest is
the same. Let us suppose that he has conclusive documents. Let us
assume that he has revelations really worth reading. Well, in a legal
inquiry (or a medical inquiry, for that matter) ten to one he won’t be
allowed to read them. He’ll be tripped up every two or three minutes
with some tangle of old rules. A man can’t tell the truth in public
nowadays. But he can still tell it in private; he can tell it inside
that house.”

“It is quite true,” said Dr. Cyrus Pym, who had listened throughout the
speech with a seriousness which only an American could have retained
through such a scene. “It is true that I have been per-ceptibly less
hampered in private inquiries.”

“Dr. Pym!” cried Warner in a sort of sudden anger. “Dr. Pym! you aren’t
really going to admit—”

“Smith may be mad,” went on the melancholy Moon in a monologue that
seemed as heavy as a hatchet, “but there was something after all in
what he said about Home Rule for every home. Yes, there is something,
when all’s said and done, in the High Court of Beacon. It is really
true that human beings might often get some sort of domestic justice
where just now they can only get legal injustice—oh, I am a lawyer too,
and I know that as well. It is true that there’s too much official and
indirect power. Often and often the thing a whole nation can’t settle
is just the thing a family could settle. Scores of young criminals have
been fined and sent to jail when they ought to have been thrashed and
sent to bed. Scores of men, I am sure, have had a lifetime at Hanwell
when they only wanted a week at Brighton. There IS something in Smith’s
notion of domestic self-government; and I propose that we put it into
practice. You have the prisoner; you have the documents. Come, we are a
company of free, white, Christian people, such as might be besieged in
a town or cast up on a desert island. Let us do this thing ourselves.
Let us go into that house there and sit down and find out with our own
eyes and ears whether this thing is true or not; whether this Smith is
a man or a monster. If we can’t do a little thing like that, what right
have we to put crosses on ballot papers?”

Inglewood and Pym exchanged a glance; and Warner, who was no fool, saw
in that glance that Moon was gaining ground. The motives that led
Arthur to think of surrender were indeed very different from those
which affected Dr. Cyrus Pym. All Arthur’s instincts were on the side
of privacy and polite settlement; he was very English and would often
endure wrongs rather than right them by scenes and serious rhetoric. To
play at once the buffoon and the knight-errant, like his Irish friend,
would have been absolute torture to him; but even the semi-official
part he had played that afternoon was very painful. He was not likely
to be reluctant if any one could convince him that his duty was to let
sleeping dogs lie.

On the other hand, Cyrus Pym belonged to a country in which things are
possible that seem crazy to the English. Regulations and authorities
exactly like one of Innocent’s pranks or one of Michael’s satires
really exist, propped by placid policemen and imposed on bustling
business men. Pym knew whole States which are vast and yet secret and
fanciful; each is as big as a nation yet as private as a lost village,
and as unexpected as an apple-pie bed. States where no man may have a
cigarette, States where any man may have ten wives, very strict
prohibition States, very lax divorce States—all these large local
vagaries had prepared Cyrus Pym’s mind for small local vagaries in a
smaller country. Infinitely more remote from England than any Russian
or Italian, utterly incapable of even conceiving what English
conventions are, he could not see the social impossibility of the Court
of Beacon. It is firmly believed by those who shared the experiment,
that to the very end Pym believed in that phantasmal court and supposed
it to be some Britannic institution.

Towards the synod thus somewhat at a standstill there approached
through the growing haze and gloaming a short dark figure with a walk
apparently founded on the imperfect repression of a negro breakdown.
Something at once in the familiarity and the incongruity of this being
moved Michael to even heartier outbursts of a healthy and humane
flippancy.

“Why, here’s little Nosey Gould,” he exclaimed. “Isn’t the mere sight
of him enough to banish all your morbid reflections?”

“Really,” replied Dr. Warner, “I really fail to see how Mr. Gould
affects the question; and I once more demand—”

“Hello! what’s the funeral, gents?” inquired the newcomer with the air
of an uproarious umpire. “Doctor demandin’ something? Always the way at
a boarding-house, you know. Always lots of demand. No supply.”

As delicately and impartially as he could, Michael restated his
position, and indicated generally that Smith had been guilty of certain
dangerous and dubious acts, and that there had even arisen an
allegation that he was insane.

“Well, of course he is,” said Moses Gould equably; “it don’t need old
’Olmes to see that. The ’awk-like face of ’Olmes,” he added with
abstract relish, “showed a shide of disappointment, the sleuth-like
Gould ’avin’ got there before ’im.”

“If he is mad,” began Inglewood.

“Well,” said Moses, “when a cove gets out on the tile the first night
there’s generally a tile loose.”

“You never objected before,” said Diana Duke rather stiffly, “and
you’re generally pretty free with your complaints.”

“I don’t compline of him,” said Moses magnanimously, “the poor chap’s
’armless enough; you might tie ’im up in the garden here and ‘e’d make
noises at the burglars.”

“Moses,” said Moon with solemn fervour, “you are the incarnation of
Common Sense. You think Mr. Innocent is mad. Let me introduce you to
the incarnation of Scientific Theory. He also thinks Mr. Innocent is
mad.—Doctor, this is my friend Mr. Gould.—Moses, this is the celebrated
Dr. Pym.” The celebrated Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes and bowed. He
also murmured his national war-cry in a low voice, which sounded like
“Pleased to meet you.”

“Now you two people,” said Michael cheerfully, “who both think our poor
friend mad, shall jolly well go into that house over there and prove
him mad. What could be more powerful than the combination of Scientific
Theory with Common Sense? United you stand; divided you fall. I will
not be so uncivil as to suggest that Dr. Pym has no common sense; I
confine myself to recording the chronological accident that he has not
shown us any so far. I take the freedom of an old friend in staking my
shirt that Moses has no scientific theory. Yet against this strong
coalition I am ready to appear, armed with nothing but an
intuition—which is American for a guess.”

“Distinguished by Mr. Gould’s assistance,” said Pym, opening his eyes
suddenly. “I gather that though he and I are identical in primary
di-agnosis there is yet between us something that cannot be called a
disagreement, something which we may perhaps call a—” He put the points
of thumb and forefinger together, spreading the other fingers
exquisitely in the air, and seemed to be waiting for somebody else to
tell him what to say.

“Catchin’ flies?” inquired the affable Moses.

“A divergence,” said Dr. Pym, with a refined sigh of relief; “a
divergence. Granted that the man in question is deranged, he would not
necessarily be all that science requires in a homicidal maniac—”

“Has it occurred to you,” observed Moon, who was leaning on the gate
again, and did not turn round, “that if he were a homicidal maniac he
might have killed us all here while we were talking.”

Something exploded silently underneath all their minds, like sealed
dynamite in some forgotten cellars. They all remembered for the first
time for some hour or two that the monster of whom they were talking
was standing quietly among them. They had left him in the garden like a
garden statue; there might have been a dolphin coiling round his legs,
or a fountain pouring out of his mouth, for all the notice they had
taken of Innocent Smith. He stood with his crest of blonde, blown hair
thrust somewhat forward, his fresh-coloured, rather short-sighted face
looking patiently downwards at nothing in particular, his huge
shoulders humped, and his hands in his trousers pockets. So far as they
could guess he had not moved at all. His green coat might have been cut
out of the green turf on which he stood. In his shadow Pym had
expounded and Rosamund expostulated, Michael had ranted and Moses had
ragged. He had remained like a thing graven; the god of the garden. A
sparrow had perched on one of his heavy shoulders; and then, after
correcting its costume of feathers, had flown away.

“Why,” cried Michael, with a shout of laughter, “the Court of Beacon
has opened—and shut up again too. You all know now I am right. Your
buried common sense has told you what my buried common sense has told
me. Smith might have fired off a hundred cannons instead of a pistol,
and you would still know he was harmless as I know he is harmless. Back
we all go to the house and clear a room for discussion. For the High
Court of Beacon, which has already arrived at its decision, is just
about to begin its inquiry.”

“Just a goin’ to begin!” cried little Mr. Moses in an extraordinary
sort of disinterested excitement, like that of an animal during music
or a thunderstorm. “Follow on to the ‘Igh Court of Eggs and Bacon; ’ave
a kipper from the old firm! ’Is Lordship complimented Mr. Gould on the
’igh professional delicacy ’e had shown, and which was worthy of the
best traditions of the Saloon Bar— and three of Scotch hot, miss! Oh,
chase me, girls!”

The girls betraying no temptation to chase him, he went away in a sort
of waddling dance of pure excitement; and had made a circuit of the
garden before he reappeared, breathless but still beaming. Moon had
known his man when he realized that no people presented to Moses Gould
could be quite serious, even if they were quite furious. The glass
doors stood open on the side nearest to Mr. Moses Gould; and as the
feet of that festive idiot were evidently turned in the same direction,
everybody else went that way with the unanimity of some uproarious
procession. Only Diana Duke retained enough rigidity to say the thing
that had been boiling at her fierce feminine lips for the last few
hours. Under the shadow of tragedy she had kept it back as
unsympathetic. “In that case,” she said sharply, “these cabs can be
sent away.”

“Well, Innocent must have his bag, you know,” said Mary with a smile.
“I dare say the cabman would get it down for us.”

“I’ll get the bag,” said Smith, speaking for the first time in hours;
his voice sounded remote and rude, like the voice of a statue.

Those who had so long danced and disputed round his immobility were
left breathless by his precipitance. With a run and spring he was out
of the garden into the street; with a spring and one quivering kick he
was actually on the roof of the cab. The cabman happened to be standing
by the horse’s head, having just removed its emptied nose-bag. Smith
seemed for an instant to be rolling about on the cab’s back in the
embraces of his Gladstone bag. The next instant, however, he had
rolled, as if by a royal luck, into the high seat behind, and with a
shriek of piercing and appalling suddenness had sent the horse flying
and scampering down the street.

His evanescence was so violent and swift, that this time it was all the
other people who were turned into garden statues. Mr. Moses Gould,
however, being ill-adapted both physically and morally for the purposes
of permanent sculpture, came to life some time before the rest, and,
turning to Moon, remarked, like a man starting chattily with a stranger
on an omnibus, “Tile loose, eh? Cab loose anyhow.” There followed a
fatal silence; and then Dr. Warner said, with a sneer like a club of
stone,—

“This is what comes of the Court of Beacon, Mr. Moon. You have let
loose a maniac on the whole metropolis.”

Beacon House stood, as has been said, at the end of a long crescent of
continuous houses. The little garden that shut it in ran out into a
sharp point like a green cape pushed out into the sea of two streets.
Smith and his cab shot up one side of the triangle, and certainly most
of those standing inside of it never expected to see him again. At the
apex, however, he turned the horse sharply round and drove with equal
violence up the other side of the garden, visible to all those in the
group. With a common impulse the little crowd ran across the lawn as if
to stop him, but they soon had reason to duck and recoil. Even as he
vanished up street for the second time, he let the big yellow bag fly
from his hand, so that it fell in the centre of the garden, scattering
the company like a bomb, and nearly damaging Dr. Warner’s hat for the
third time. Long before they had collected themselves, the cab had shot
away with a shriek that went into a whisper.

“Well,” said Michael Moon, with a queer note in his voice; “you may as
well all go inside anyhow. We’ve got two relics of Mr. Smith at least;
his fiancee and his trunk.”

“Why do you want us to go inside?” asked Arthur Inglewood, in whose red
brow and rough brown hair botheration seemed to have reached its limit.

“I want the rest to go in,” said Michael in a clear voice, “because I
want the whole of this garden in which to talk to you.”

There was an atmosphere of irrational doubt; it was really getting
colder, and a night wind had begun to wave the one or two trees in the
twilight. Dr. Warner, however, spoke in a voice devoid of indecision.

“I refuse to listen to any such proposal,” he said; “you have lost this
ruffian, and I must find him.”

“I don’t ask you to listen to any proposal,” answered Moon quietly; “I
only ask you to listen.”

He made a silencing movement with his hand, and immediately the
whistling noise that had been lost in the dark streets on one side of
the house could be heard from quite a new quarter on the other side.
Through the night-maze of streets the noise increased with incredible
rapidity, and the next moment the flying hoofs and flashing wheels had
swept up to the blue-railed gate at which they had originally stood.
Mr. Smith got down from his perch with an air of absent-mindedness, and
coming back into the garden stood in the same elephantine attitude as
before.

“Get inside! get inside!” cried Moon hilariously, with the air of one
shooing a company of cats. “Come, come, be quick about it! Didn’t I
tell you I wanted to talk to Inglewood?”

How they were all really driven into the house again it would have been
difficult afterwards to say. They had reached the point of being
exhausted with incongruities, as people at a farce are ill with
laughing, and the brisk growth of the storm among the trees seemed like
a final gesture of things in general. Inglewood lingered behind them,
saying with a certain amicable exasperation, “I say, do you really want
to speak to me?”

“I do,” said Michael, “very much.”

Night had come as it generally does, quicker than the twilight had
seemed to promise. While the human eye still felt the sky as light
gray, a very large and lustrous moon appearing abruptly above a bulk of
roofs and trees, proved by contrast that the sky was already a very
dark gray indeed. A drift of barren leaves across the lawn, a drift of
riven clouds across the sky, seemed to be lifted on the same strong and
yet laborious wind.

“Arthur,” said Michael, “I began with an intuition; but now I am sure.
You and I are going to defend this friend of yours before the blessed
Court of Beacon, and to clear him too—clear him of both crime and
lunacy. Just listen to me while I preach to you for a bit.” They walked
up and down the darkening garden together as Michael Moon went on.

“Can you,” asked Michael, “shut your eyes and see some of those queer
old hieroglyphics they stuck up on white walls in the old hot
countries. How stiff they were in shape and yet how gaudy in colour.
Think of some alphabet of arbitrary figures picked out in black and
red, or white and green, with some old Semitic crowd of Nosey Gould’s
ancestors staring at it, and try to think why the people put it up at
all.”

Inglewood’s first instinct was to think that his perplexing friend had
really gone off his head at last; there seemed so reckless a flight of
irrelevancy from the tropic-pictured walls he was asked to imagine to
the gray, wind-swept, and somewhat chilly suburban garden in which he
was actually kicking his heels. How he could be more happy in one by
imagining the other he could not conceive. Both (in themselves) were
unpleasant.

“Why does everybody repeat riddles,” went on Moon abruptly, “even if
they’ve forgotten the answers? Riddles are easy to remember because
they are hard to guess. So were those stiff old symbols in black, red,
or green easy to remember because they had been hard to guess. Their
colours were plain. Their shapes were plain. Everything was plain
except the meaning.”

Inglewood was about to open his mouth in an amiable protest, but Moon
went on, plunging quicker and quicker up and down the garden and
smoking faster and faster. “Dances, too,” he said; “dances were not
frivolous. Dances were harder to understand than inscriptions and
texts. The old dances were stiff, ceremonial, highly coloured but
silent. Have you noticed anything odd about Smith?”

“Well, really,” cried Inglewood, left behind in a collapse of humour,
“have I noticed anything else?”

“Have you noticed this about him,” asked Moon, with unshaken
persistency, “that he has done so much and said so little? When first
he came he talked, but in a gasping, irregular sort of way, as if he
wasn’t used to it. All he really did was actions—painting red flowers
on black gowns or throwing yellow bags on to the grass. I tell you that
big green figure is figurative— like any green figure capering on some
white Eastern wall.”

“My dear Michael,” cried Inglewood, in a rising irritation which
increased with the rising wind, “you are getting absurdly fanciful.”

“I think of what has just happened,” said Michael steadily. “The man
has not spoken for hours; and yet he has been speaking all the time. He
fired three shots from a six-shooter and then gave it up to us, when he
might have shot us dead in our boots. How could he express his trust in
us better than that? He wanted to be tried by us. How could he have
shown it better than by standing quite still and letting us discuss it?
He wanted to show that he stood there willingly, and could escape if he
liked. How could he have shown it better than by escaping in the cab
and coming back again? Innocent Smith is not a madman—he is a
ritualist. He wants to express himself, not with his tongue, but with
his arms and legs— with my body I thee worship, as it says in the
marriage service. I begin to understand the old plays and pageants. I
see why the mutes at a funeral were mute. I see why the mummers were
mum. They MEANT something; and Smith means something too. All other
jokes have to be noisy—like little Nosey Gould’s jokes, for instance.
The only silent jokes are the practical jokes. Poor Smith, properly
considered, is an allegorical practical joker. What he has really done
in this house has been as frantic as a war-dance, but as silent as a
picture.”

“I suppose you mean,” said the other dubiously, “that we have got to
find out what all these crimes meant, as if they were so many coloured
picture-puzzles. But even supposing that they do mean something—why,
Lord bless my soul!—”

Taking the turn of the garden quite naturally, he had lifted his eyes
to the moon, by this time risen big and luminous, and had seen a huge,
half-human figure sitting on the garden wall. It was outlined so
sharply against the moon that for the first flash it was hard to be
certain even that it was human: the hunched shoulders and outstanding
hair had rather the air of a colossal cat. It resembled a cat also in
the fact that when first startled it sprang up and ran with easy
activity along the top of the wall. As it ran, however, its heavy
shoulders and small stooping head rather suggested a baboon. The
instant it came within reach of a tree it made an ape-like leap and was
lost in the branches. The gale, which by this time was shaking every
shrub in the garden, made the identification yet more difficult, since
it melted the moving limbs of the fugitive in the multitudinous moving
limbs of the tree.

“Who is there?” shouted Arthur. “Who are you? Are you Innocent?”

“Not quite,” answered an obscure voice among the leaves. “I cheated you
once about a penknife.”

The wind in the garden had gathered strength, and was throwing the tree
backwards and forwards with the man in the thick of it, just as it had
on the gay and golden afternoon when he had first arrived.

“But are you Smith?” asked Inglewood as in an agony.

“Very nearly,” said the voice out of the tossing tree.

“But you must have some real names,” shrieked Inglewood in despair.
“You must call yourself something.”

“Call myself something,” thundered the obscure voice, shaking the tree
so that all its ten thousand leaves seemed to be talking at once. “I
call myself Roland Oliver Isaiah Charlemagne Arthur Hildebrand Homer
Danton Michaelangelo Shakespeare Brakespeare—”

“But, manalive!” began Inglewood in exasperation.

“That’s right! that’s right!” came with a roar out of the rocking tree;
“that’s my real name.” And he broke a branch, and one or two autumn
leaves fluttered away across the moon.



PART II
THE EXPLANATIONS OF INNOCENT SMITH



Chapter I
The Eye of Death; or, the Murder Charge


The dining-room of the Dukes had been set out for the Court of Beacon
with a certain impromptu pomposity that seemed somehow to increase its
cosiness. The big room was, as it were, cut up into small rooms, with
walls only waist high—the sort of separation that children make when
they are playing at shops. This had been done by Moses Gould and
Michael Moon (the two most active members of this remarkable inquiry)
with the ordinary furniture of the place. At one end of the long
mahogany table was set the one enormous garden chair, which was
surmounted by the old torn tent or umbrella which Smith himself had
suggested as a coronation canopy. Inside this erection could be
perceived the dumpy form of Mrs. Duke, with cushions and a form of
countenance that already threatened slumber. At the other end sat the
accused Smith, in a kind of dock; for he was carefully fenced in with a
quadrilateral of light bedroom chairs, any of which he could have
tossed out the window with his big toe. He had been provided with pens
and paper, out of the latter of which he made paper boats, paper darts,
and paper dolls contentedly throughout the whole proceedings. He never
spoke or even looked up, but seemed as unconscious as a child on the
floor of an empty nursery.

On a row of chairs raised high on the top of a long settee sat the
three young ladies with their backs up against the window, and Mary
Gray in the middle; it was something between a jury box and the stall
of the Queen of Beauty at a tournament. Down the centre of the long
table Moon had built a low barrier out of eight bound volumes of “Good
Words” to express the moral wall that divided the conflicting parties.
On the right side sat the two advocates of the prosecution, Dr. Pym and
Mr. Gould; behind a barricade of books and documents, chiefly (in the
case of Dr. Pym) solid volumes of criminology. On the other side, Moon
and Inglewood, for the defence, were also fortified with books and
papers; but as these included several old yellow volumes by Ouida and
Wilkie Collins, the hand of Mr. Moon seemed to have been somewhat
careless and comprehensive. As for the victim and prosecutor, Dr.
Warner, Moon wanted at first to have him kept entirely behind a high
screen in the corner, urging the indelicacy of his appearance in court,
but privately assuring him of an unofficial permission to peep over the
top now and then. Dr. Warner, however, failed to rise to the chivalry
of such a course, and after some little disturbance and discussion he
was accommodated with a seat on the right side of the table in a line
with his legal advisers.

It was before this solidly-established tribunal that Dr. Cyrus Pym,
after passing a hand through the honey-coloured hair over each ear,
rose to open the case. His statement was clear and even restrained, and
such flights of imagery as occurred in it only attracted attention by a
certain indescribable abruptness, not uncommon in the flowers of
American speech.

He planted the points of his ten frail fingers on the mahogany, closed
his eyes, and opened his mouth. “The time has gone by,” he said, “when
murder could be regarded as a moral and individual act, important
perhaps to the murderer, perhaps to the murdered. Science has
profoundly...” here he paused, poising his compressed finger and thumb
in the air as if he were holding an elusive idea very tight by its
tail, then he screwed up his eyes and said “modified,” and let it
go—“has profoundly Modified our view of death. In superstitious ages it
was regarded as the termination of life, catastrophic, and even tragic,
and was often surrounded by solemnity. Brighter days, however, have
dawned, and we now see death as universal and inevitable, as part of
that great soul-stirring and heart-upholding average which we call for
convenience the order of nature. In the same way we have come to
consider murder SOCIALLY. Rising above the mere private feelings of a
man while being forcibly deprived of life, we are privileged to behold
murder as a mighty whole, to see the rich rotation of the cosmos,
bringing, as it brings the golden harvests and the golden-bearded
harvesters, the return for ever of the slayers and the slain.”

He looked down, somewhat affected with his own eloquence, coughed
slightly, putting up four of his pointed fingers with the excellent
manners of Boston, and continued: “There is but one result of this
happier and humaner outlook which concerns the wretched man before us.
It is that thoroughly elucidated by a Milwaukee doctor, our great
secret-guessing Sonnenschein, in his great work, ‘The Destructive
Type.’ We do not denounce Smith as a murderer, but rather as a
murderous man. The type is such that its very life— I might say its
very health—is in killing. Some hold that it is not properly an
aberration, but a newer and even a higher creature. My dear old friend
Dr. Bulger, who kept ferrets—” (here Moon suddenly ejaculated a loud
“hurrah!” but so instantaneously resumed his tragic expression that
Mrs. Duke looked everywhere else for the sound); Dr. Pym continued
somewhat sternly—“who, in the interests of knowledge, kept ferrets,
felt that the creature’s ferocity is not utilitarian, but absolutely an
end in itself. However this may be with ferrets, it is certainly so
with the prisoner. In his other iniquities you may find the cunning of
the maniac; but his acts of blood have almost the simplicity of sanity.
But it is the awful sanity of the sun and the elements—a cruel, an evil
sanity. As soon stay the iris-leapt cataracts of our virgin West as
stay the natural force that sends him forth to slay. No environment,
however scientific, could have softened him. Place that man in the
silver-silent purity of the palest cloister, and there will be some
deed of violence done with the crozier or the alb. Rear him in a happy
nursery, amid our brave-browed Anglo-Saxon infancy, and he will find
some way to strangle with the skipping-rope or brain with the brick.
Circumstances may be favourable, training may be admirable, hopes may
be high, but the huge elemental hunger of Innocent Smith for blood will
in its appointed season burst like a well-timed bomb.”

Arthur Inglewood glanced curiously for an instant at the huge creature
at the foot of the table, who was fitting a paper figure with a cocked
hat, and then looked back at Dr. Pym, who was concluding in a quieter
tone.

“It only remains for us,” he said, “to bring forward actual evidence of
his previous attempts. By an agreement already made with the Court and
the leaders of the defence, we are permitted to put in evidence
authentic letters from witnesses to these scenes, which the defence is
free to examine. Out of several cases of such outrages we have decided
to select one— the clearest and most scandalous. I will therefore,
without further delay, call on my junior, Mr. Gould, to read two
letters—one from the Sub-Warden and the other from the porter of
Brakespeare College, in Cambridge University.”

Gould jumped up with a jerk like a jack-in-the-box, an academic-looking
paper in his hand and a fever of importance on his face. He began in a
loud, high, cockney voice that was as abrupt as a cock-crow:—

“Sir,—Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge—”

“Lord have mercy on us,” muttered Moon, making a backward movement as
men do when a gun goes off.

“Hi am the Sub-Warden of Brikespeare College, Cambridge,” proclaimed
the uncompromising Moses, “and I can endorse the description you gave
of the un’appy Smith. It was not alone my unfortunate duty to rebuke
many of the lesser violences of his undergraduate period, but I was
actually a witness to the last iniquity which terminated that period.
Hi happened to passing under the house of my friend the Warden of
Brikespeare, which is semi-detached from the College and connected with
it by two or three very ancient arches or props, like bridges, across a
small strip of water connected with the river. To my grive astonishment
I be’eld my eminent friend suspended in mid-air and clinging to one of
these pieces of masonry, his appearance and attitude indicatin’ that he
suffered from the grivest apprehensions. After a short time I heard two
very loud shots, and distinctly perceived the unfortunate undergraduate
Smith leaning far out of the Warden’s window and aiming at the Warden
repeatedly with a revolver. Upon seeing me, Smith burst into a loud
laugh (in which impertinence was mingled with insanity), and appeared
to desist. I sent the college porter for a ladder, and he succeeded in
detaching the Warden from his painful position. Smith was sent down.
The photograph I enclose is from the group of the University Rifle Club
prizemen, and represents him as he was when at the College.— Hi am,
your obedient servant, Amos Boulter.

“The other letter,” continued Gould in a glow of triumph, “is from the
porter, and won’t take long to read.

“Dear Sir,—It is quite true that I am the porter of Brikespeare
College, and that I ‘elped the Warden down when the young man was
shooting at him, as Mr. Boulter has said in his letter. The young man
who was shooting at him was Mr. Smith, the same that is in the
photograph Mr. Boulter sends.— Yours respectfully, Samuel Barker.”

Gould handed the two letters across to Moon, who examined them. But for
the vocal divergences in the matter of h’s and a’s, the Sub-Warden’s
letter was exactly as Gould had rendered it; and both that and the
porter’s letter were plainly genuine. Moon handed them to Inglewood,
who handed them back in silence to Moses Gould.

“So far as this first charge of continual attempted murder is
concerned,” said Dr. Pym, standing up for the last time, “that is my
case.”

Michael Moon rose for the defence with an air of depression which gave
little hope at the outset to the sympathizers with the prisoner. He did
not, he said, propose to follow the doctor into the abstract questions.
“I do not know enough to be an agnostic,” he said, rather wearily, “and
I can only master the known and admitted elements in such
controversies. As for science and religion, the known and admitted
facts are plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that
the doctors say is disproved. That’s the only difference between
science and religion there’s ever been, or will be. Yet these new
discoveries touch me, somehow,” he said, looking down sorrowfully at
his boots. “They remind me of a dear old great-aunt of mine who used to
enjoy them in her youth. It brings tears to my eyes. I can see the old
bucket by the garden fence and the line of shimmering poplars behind—”

“Hi! here, stop the ’bus a bit,” cried Mr. Moses Gould, rising in a
sort of perspiration. “We want to give the defence a fair run—like
gents, you know; but any gent would draw the line at shimmering
poplars.”

“Well, hang it all,” said Moon, in an injured manner, “if Dr. Pym may
have an old friend with ferrets, why mayn’t I have an old aunt with
poplars?”

“I am sure,” said Mrs. Duke, bridling, with something almost like a
shaky authority, “Mr. Moon may have what aunts he likes.”

“Why, as to liking her,” began Moon, “I—but perhaps, as you say, she is
scarcely the core of the question. I repeat that I do not mean to
follow the abstract speculations. For, indeed, my answer to Dr. Pym is
simple and severely concrete. Dr. Pym has only treated one side of the
psychology of murder. If it is true that there is a kind of man who has
a natural tendency to murder, is it not equally true”—here he lowered
his voice and spoke with a crushing quietude and earnestness—“is it not
equally true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency to
get murdered? Is it not at least a hypothesis holding the field that
Dr. Warner is such a man? I do not speak without the book, any more
than my learned friend. The whole matter is expounded in Dr.
Moonenschein’s monumental work, ‘The Destructible Doctor,’ with
diagrams, showing the various ways in which such a person as Dr. Warner
may be resolved into his elements. In the light of these facts—”

“Hi, stop the ’bus! stop the ’bus!” cried Moses, jumping up and down
and gesticulating in great excitement. “My principal’s got something to
say! My principal wants to do a bit of talkin’.”

Dr. Pym was indeed on his feet, looking pallid and rather vicious. “I
have strictly CON-fined myself,” he said nasally, “to books to which
immediate reference can be made. I have Sonnenschein’s ‘Destructive
Type’ here on the table, if the defence wish to see it. Where is this
wonderful work on Destructability Mr. Moon is talking about? Does it
exist? Can he produce it?”

“Produce it!” cried the Irishman with a rich scorn. “I’ll produce it in
a week if you’ll pay for the ink and paper.”

“Would it have much authority?” asked Pym, sitting down.

“Oh, authority!” said Moon lightly; “that depends on a fellow’s
religion.”

Dr. Pym jumped up again. “Our authority is based on masses of accurate
detail,” he said. “It deals with a region in which things can be
handled and tested. My opponent will at least admit that death is a
fact of experience.”

“Not of mine,” said Moon mournfully, shaking his head. “I’ve never
experienced such a thing in all my life.”

“Well, really,” said Dr. Pym, and sat down sharply amid a crackle of
papers.

“So we see,” resumed Moon, in the same melancholy voice, “that a man
like Dr. Warner is, in the mysterious workings of evolution, doomed to
such attacks. My client’s onslaught, even if it occurred, was not
unique. I have in my hand letters from more than one acquaintance of
Dr. Warner whom that remarkable man has affected in the same way.
Following the example of my learned friends I will read only two of
them. The first is from an honest and laborious matron living off the
Harrow Road.

“Mr. Moon, Sir,—Yes, I did throw a sorsepan at him. Wot then? It was
all I had to throw, all the soft things being porned, and if your
Docter Warner doesn’t like having sorsepans thrown at him, don’t let
him wear his hat in a respectable woman’s parler, and tell him to leave
orf smiling or tell us the joke.—Yours respectfully, Hannah Miles.

“The other letter is from a physician of some note in Dublin, with whom
Dr. Warner was once engaged in consultation. He writes as follows:—

“Dear Sir,—The incident to which you refer is one which I regret, and
which, moreover, I have never been able to explain. My own branch of
medicine is not mental; and I should be glad to have the view of a
mental specialist on my singular momentary and indeed almost automatic
action. To say that I ‘pulled Dr. Warner’s nose,’ is, however,
inaccurate in a respect that strikes me as important. That I punched
his nose I must cheerfully admit (I need not say with what regret); but
pulling seems to me to imply a precision of objective with which I
cannot reproach myself. In comparison with this, the act of punching
was an outward, instantaneous, and even natural gesture.— Believe me,
yours faithfully, Burton Lestrange.

“I have numberless other letters,” continued Moon, “all bearing witness
to this widespread feeling about my eminent friend; and I therefore
think that Dr. Pym should have admitted this side of the question in
his survey. We are in the presence, as Dr. Pym so truly says, of a
natural force. As soon stay the cataract of the London water-works as
stay the great tendency of Dr. Warner to be assassinated by somebody.
Place that man in a Quakers’ meeting, among the most peaceful of
Christians, and he will immediately be beaten to death with sticks of
chocolate. Place him among the angels of the New Jerusalem, and he will
be stoned to death with precious stones. Circumstances may be beautiful
and wonderful, the average may be heart-upholding, the harvester may be
golden-bearded, the doctor may be secret-guessing, the cataract may be
iris-leapt, the Anglo-Saxon infant may be brave-browed, but against and
above all these prodigies the grand simple tendency of Dr. Warner to
get murdered will still pursue its way until it happily and
triumphantly succeeds at last.”

He pronounced this peroration with an appearance of strong emotion. But
even stronger emotions were manifesting themselves on the other side of
the table. Dr. Warner had leaned his large body quite across the little
figure of Moses Gould and was talking in excited whispers to Dr. Pym.
That expert nodded a great many times and finally started to his feet
with a sincere expression of sternness.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried indignantly, “as my colleague has
said, we should be delighted to give any latitude to the defence—if
there were a defence. But Mr. Moon seems to think he is there to make
jokes— very good jokes I dare say, but not at all adapted to assist his
client. He picks holes in science. He picks holes in my client’s social
popularity. He picks holes in my literary style, which doesn’t seem to
suit his high-toned European taste. But how does this picking of holes
affect the issue? This Smith has picked two holes in my client’s hat,
and with an inch better aim would have picked two holes in his head.
All the jokes in the world won’t unpick those holes or be any use for
the defence.”

Inglewood looked down in some embarrassment, as if shaken by the
evident fairness of this, but Moon still gazed at his opponent in a
dreamy way. “The defence?” he said vaguely—“oh, I haven’t begun that
yet.”

“You certainly have not,” said Pym warmly, amid a murmur of applause
from his side, which the other side found it impossible to answer.
“Perhaps, if you have any defence, which has been doubtful from the
very beginning—”

“While you’re standing up,” said Moon, in the same almost sleepy style,
“perhaps I might ask you a question.”

“A question? Certainly,” said Pym stiffly. “It was distinctly arranged
between us that as we could not cross-examine the witnesses, we might
vicariously cross-examine each other. We are in a position to invite
all such inquiry.”

“I think you said,” observed Moon absently, “that none of the
prisoner’s shots really hit the doctor.”

“For the cause of science,” cried the complacent Pym, “fortunately
not.”

“Yet they were fired from a few feet away.”

“Yes; about four feet.”

“And no shots hit the Warden, though they were fired quite close to him
too?” asked Moon.

“That is so,” said the witness gravely.

“I think,” said Moon, suppressing a slight yawn, “that your Sub-Warden
mentioned that Smith was one of the University’s record men for
shooting.”

“Why, as to that—” began Pym, after an instant of stillness.

“A second question,” continued Moon, comparatively curtly. “You said
there were other cases of the accused trying to kill people. Why have
you not got evidence of them?”

The American planted the points of his fingers on the table again. “In
those cases,” he said precisely, “there was no evidence from outsiders,
as in the Cambridge case, but only the evidence of the actual victims.”

“Why didn’t you get their evidence?”

“In the case of the actual victims,” said Pym, “there was some
difficulty and reluctance, and—”

“Do you mean,” asked Moon, “that none of the actual victims would
appear against the prisoner?”

“That would be exaggerative,” began the other.

“A third question,” said Moon, so sharply that every one jumped.
“You’ve got the evidence of the Sub-Warden who heard some shots;
where’s the evidence of the Warden himself who was shot at? The Warden
of Brakespeare lives, a prosperous gentleman.”

“We did ask for a statement from him,” said Pym a little nervously;
“but it was so eccentrically expressed that we suppressed it out of
deference to an old gentleman whose past services to science have been
great.”

Moon leaned forward. “You mean, I suppose,” he said, “that his
statement was favourable to the prisoner.”

“It might be understood so,” replied the American doctor; “but, really,
it was difficult to understand at all. In fact, we sent it back to
him.”

“You have no longer, then, any statement signed by the Warden of
Brakespeare.”

“No.”

“I only ask,” said Michael quietly, “because we have. To conclude my
case I will ask my junior, Mr. Inglewood, to read a statement of the
true story—a statement attested as true by the signature of the Warden
himself.”

Arthur Inglewood rose with several papers in his hand, and though he
looked somewhat refined and self-effacing, as he always did, the
spectators were surprised to feel that his presence was, upon the
whole, more efficient and sufficing than his leader’s. He was, in
truth, one of those modest men who cannot speak until they are told to
speak; and then can speak well. Moon was entirely the opposite. His own
impudences amused him in private, but they slightly embarrassed him in
public; he felt a fool while he was speaking, whereas Inglewood felt a
fool only because he could not speak. The moment he had anything to say
he could speak; and the moment he could speak, speaking seemed quite
natural. Nothing in this universe seemed quite natural to Michael Moon.

“As my colleague has just explained,” said Inglewood, “there are two
enigmas or inconsistencies on which we base the defence. The first is a
plain physical fact. By the admission of everybody, by the very
evidence adduced by the prosecution, it is clear that the accused was
celebrated as a specially good shot. Yet on both the occasions
complained of he shot from a distance of four or five feet, and shot at
him four or five times, and never hit him once. That is the first
startling circumstance on which we base our argument. The second, as my
colleague has urged, is the curious fact that we cannot find a single
victim of these alleged outrages to speak for himself. Subordinates
speak for him. Porters climb up ladders to him. But he himself is
silent. Ladies and gentlemen, I propose to explain on the spot both the
riddle of the shots and the riddle of the silence. I will first of all
read the covering letter in which the true account of the Cambridge
incident is contained, and then that document itself. When you have
heard both, there will be no doubt about your decision. The covering
letter runs as follows:—

“Dear Sir,—The following is a very exact and even vivid account of the
incident as it really happened at Brakespeare College. We, the
undersigned, do not see any particular reason why we should refer it to
any isolated authorship. The truth is, it has been a composite
production; and we have even had some difference of opinion about the
adjectives. But every word of it is true.—We are, yours faithfully,

“Wilfred Emerson Eames,
“Warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.
“Innocent Smith.


“The enclosed statement,” continued Inglewood, “runs as follows:—

“A celebrated English university backs so abruptly on the river, that
it has, so to speak, to be propped up and patched with all sorts of
bridges and semi-detached buildings. The river splits itself into
several small streams and canals, so that in one or two corners the
place has almost the look of Venice. It was so especially in the case
with which we are concerned, in which a few flying buttresses or airy
ribs of stone sprang across a strip of water to connect Brakespeare
College with the house of the Warden of Brakespeare.

“The country around these colleges is flat; but it does not seem flat
when one is thus in the midst of the colleges. For in these flat fens
there are always wandering lakes and lingering rivers of water. And
these always change what might have been a scheme of horizontal lines
into a scheme of vertical lines. Wherever there is water the height of
high buildings is doubled, and a British brick house becomes a
Babylonian tower. In that shining unshaken surface the houses hang head
downwards exactly to their highest or lowest chimney. The
coral-coloured cloud seen in that abyss is as far below the world as
its original appears above it. Every scrap of water is not only a
window but a skylight. Earth splits under men’s feet into precipitous
aerial perspectives, into which a bird could as easily wing its way
as—”

Dr. Cyrus Pym rose in protest. The documents he had put in evidence had
been confined to cold affirmation of fact. The defence, in a general
way, had an indubitable right to put their case in their own way, but
all this landscape gardening seemed to him (Dr. Cyrus Pym) to be not up
to the business. “Will the leader of the defence tell me,” he asked,
“how it can possibly affect this case, that a cloud was cor’l-coloured,
or that a bird could have winged itself anywhere?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Michael, lifting himself lazily; “you see, you
don’t know yet what our defence is. Till you know that, don’t you see,
anything may be relevant. Why, suppose,” he said suddenly, as if an
idea had struck him, “suppose we wanted to prove the old Warden
colour-blind. Suppose he was shot by a black man with white hair, when
he thought he was being shot by a white man with yellow hair! To
ascertain if that cloud was really and truly coral-coloured might be of
the most massive importance.”

He paused with a seriousness which was hardly generally shared, and
continued with the same fluency: “Or suppose we wanted to maintain that
the Warden committed suicide—that he just got Smith to hold the pistol
as Brutus’s slave held the sword. Why, it would make all the difference
whether the Warden could see himself plain in still water. Still water
has made hundreds of suicides: one sees oneself so very—well, so very
plain.”

“Do you, perhaps,” inquired Pym with austere irony, “maintain that your
client was a bird of some sort—say, a flamingo?”

“In the matter of his being a flamingo,” said Moon with sudden
severity, “my client reserves his defence.”

No one quite knowing what to make of this, Mr. Moon resumed his seat
and Inglewood resumed the reading of his document:—

“There is something pleasing to a mystic in such a land of mirrors. For
a mystic is one who holds that two worlds are better than one. In the
highest sense, indeed, all thought is reflection.

“This is the real truth, in the saying that second thoughts are best.
Animals have no second thoughts; man alone is able to see his own
thought double, as a drunkard sees a lamp-post; man alone is able to
see his own thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle. This
duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is (we repeat) the inmost
thing of human philosophy. There is a mystical, even a monstrous truth,
in the statement that two heads are better than one. But they ought
both to grow on the same body.”

“I know it’s a little transcendental at first,” interposed Inglewood,
beaming round with a broad apology, “but you see this document was
written in collaboration by a don and a—”

“Drunkard, eh?” suggested Moses Gould, beginning to enjoy himself.

“I rather think,” proceeded Inglewood with an unruffled and critical
air, “that this part was written by the don. I merely warn the Court
that the statement, though indubitably accurate, bears here and there
the trace of coming from two authors.”

“In that case,” said Dr. Pym, leaning back and sniffing, “I cannot
agree with them that two heads are better than one.”

“The undersigned persons think it needless to touch on a kindred
problem so often discussed at committees for University Reform: the
question of whether dons see double because they are drunk, or get
drunk because they see double. It is enough for them (the undersigned
persons) if they are able to pursue their own peculiar and profitable
theme—which is puddles. What (the undersigned persons ask themselves)
is a puddle? A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light;
nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty
water spread very thin on mud. The two great historic universities of
England have all this large and level and reflective brilliance.
Nevertheless, or, rather, on the other hand, they are puddles—puddles,
puddles, puddles, puddles. The undersigned persons ask you to excuse an
emphasis inseparable from strong conviction.”

Inglewood ignored a somewhat wild expression on the faces of some
present, and continued with eminent cheerfulness:—

“Such were the thoughts that failed to cross the mind of the
undergraduate Smith as he picked his way among the stripes of canal and
the glittering rainy gutters into which the water broke up round the
back of Brakespeare College. Had these thoughts crossed his mind he
would have been much happier than he was. Unfortunately he did not know
that his puzzles were puddles. He did not know that the academic mind
reflects infinity and is full of light by the simple process of being
shallow and standing still. In his case, therefore, there was something
solemn, and even evil about the infinity implied. It was half-way
through a starry night of bewildering brilliancy; stars were both above
and below. To young Smith’s sullen fancy the skies below seemed even
hollower than the skies above; he had a horrible idea that if he
counted the stars he would find one too many in the pool.

“In crossing the little paths and bridges he felt like one stepping on
the black and slender ribs of some cosmic Eiffel Tower. For to him, and
nearly all the educated youth of that epoch, the stars were cruel
things. Though they glowed in the great dome every night, they were an
enormous and ugly secret; they uncovered the nakedness of nature; they
were a glimpse of the iron wheels and pulleys behind the scenes. For
the young men of that sad time thought that the god always comes from
the machine. They did not know that in reality the machine only comes
from the god. In short, they were all pessimists, and starlight was
atrocious to them— atrocious because it was true. All their universe
was black with white spots.

“Smith looked up with relief from the glittering pools below to the
glittering skies and the great black bulk of the college. The only
light other than stars glowed through one peacock-green curtain in the
upper part of the building, marking where Dr. Emerson Eames always
worked till morning and received his friends and favourite pupils at
any hour of the night. Indeed, it was to his rooms that the melancholy
Smith was bound. Smith had been at Dr. Eames’s lecture for the first
half of the morning, and at pistol practice and fencing in a saloon for
the second half. He had been sculling madly for the first half of the
afternoon and thinking idly (and still more madly) for the second half.
He had gone to a supper where he was uproarious, and on to a debating
club where he was perfectly insufferable, and the melancholy Smith was
melancholy still. Then, as he was going home to his diggings he
remembered the eccentricity of his friend and master, the Warden of
Brakespeare, and resolved desperately to turn in to that gentleman’s
private house.

“Emerson Eames was an eccentric in many ways, but his throne in
philosophy and metaphysics was of international eminence; the
university could hardly have afforded to lose him, and, moreover, a don
has only to continue any of his bad habits long enough to make them a
part of the British Constitution. The bad habits of Emerson Eames were
to sit up all night and to be a student of Schopenhauer. Personally, he
was a lean, lounging sort of man, with a blond pointed beard, not so
very much older than his pupil Smith in the matter of mere years, but
older by centuries in the two essential respects of having a European
reputation and a bald head.

“‘I came, against the rules, at this unearthly hour,’ said Smith, who
was nothing to the eye except a very big man trying to make himself
small, ‘because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really
too rotten. I know all the arguments of the thinkers that think
otherwise—bishops, and agnostics, and those sort of people. And knowing
you were the greatest living authority on the pessimist thinkers—’

“‘All thinkers,’ said Eames, ‘are pessimist thinkers.’

“After a patch of pause, not the first—for this depressing conversation
had gone on for some hours with alternations of cynicism and silence—
the Warden continued with his air of weary brilliancy: ‘It’s all a
question of wrong calculation. The moth flies into the candle because
he doesn’t happen to know that the game is not worth the candle. The
wasp gets into the jam in hearty and hopeful efforts to get the jam
into him. IN the same way the vulgar people want to enjoy life just as
they want to enjoy gin—because they are too stupid to see that they are
paying too big a price for it. That they never find happiness—that they
don’t even know how to look for it—is proved by the paralyzing
clumsiness and ugliness of everything they do. Their discordant colours
are cries of pain. Look at the brick villas beyond the college on this
side of the river. There’s one with spotted blinds; look at it! just go
and look at it!’

“‘Of course,’ he went on dreamily, ‘one or two men see the sober fact a
long way off—they go mad. Do you notice that maniacs mostly try either
to destroy other things, or (if they are thoughtful) to destroy
themselves? The madman is the man behind the scenes, like the man that
wanders about the coulisse of a theater. He has only opened the wrong
door and come into the right place. He sees things at the right angle.
But the common world—’

“‘Oh, hang the common world!’ said the sullen Smith, letting his fist
fall on the table in an idle despair.

“‘Let’s give it a bad name first,’ said the Professor calmly, ‘and then
hang it. A puppy with hydrophobia would probably struggle for life
while we killed it; but if we were kind we should kill it. So an
omniscient god would put us out of our pain. He would strike us dead.’

“‘Why doesn’t he strike us dead?’ asked the undergraduate abstractedly,
plunging his hands into his pockets.

“‘He is dead himself,’ said the philosopher; ‘that is where he is
really enviable.’

“‘To any one who thinks,’ proceeded Eames, ‘the pleasures of life,
trivial and soon tasteless, are bribes to bring us into a torture
chamber. We all see that for any thinking man mere extinction is the...
What are you doing?... Are you mad?... Put that thing down.’

“Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head over his
shoulder, and had found himself looking into a small round black hole,
rimmed by a six-sided circlet of steel, with a sort of spike standing
up on the top. It fixed him like an iron eye. Through those eternal
instants during which the reason is stunned he did not even know what
it was. Then he saw behind it the chambered barrel and cocked hammer of
a revolver, and behind that the flushed and rather heavy face of Smith,
apparently quite unchanged, or even more mild than before.

“‘I’ll help you out of your hole, old man,’ said Smith, with rough
tenderness. ‘I’ll put the puppy out of his pain.’

“Emerson Eames retreated towards the window. ‘Do you mean to kill me?’
he cried.

“‘It’s not a thing I’d do for every one,’ said Smith with emotion; ‘but
you and I seem to have got so intimate to-night, somehow. I know all
your troubles now, and the only cure, old chap.’

“‘Put that thing down,’ shouted the Warden.

“‘It’ll soon be over, you know,’ said Smith with the air of a
sympathetic dentist. And as the Warden made a run for the window and
balcony, his benefactor followed him with a firm step and a
compassionate expression.

“Both men were perhaps surprised to see that the gray and white of
early daybreak had already come. One of them, however, had emotions
calculated to swallow up surprise. Brakespeare College was one of the
few that retained real traces of Gothic ornament, and just beneath Dr.
Eames’s balcony there ran out what had perhaps been a flying buttress,
still shapelessly shaped into gray beasts and devils, but blinded with
mosses and washed out with rains. With an ungainly and most courageous
leap, Eames sprang out on this antique bridge, as the only possible
mode of escape from the maniac. He sat astride of it, still in his
academic gown, dangling his long thin legs, and considering further
chances of flight. The whitening daylight opened under as well as over
him that impression of vertical infinity already remarked about the
little lakes round Brakespeare. Looking down and seeing the spires and
chimneys pendent in the pools, they felt alone in space. They felt as
if they were looking over the edge from the North Pole and seeing the
South Pole below.

“‘Hang the world, we said,’ observed Smith, ‘and the world is hanged.
“He has hanged the world upon nothing,” says the Bible. Do you like
being hanged upon nothing? I’m going to be hanged upon something
myself. I’m going to swing for you... Dear, tender old phrase,’ he
murmured; ‘never true till this moment. I am going to swing for you.
For you, dear friend. For your sake. At your express desire.’

“‘Help!’ cried the Warden of Brakespeare College; ‘help!’

“‘The puppy struggles,’ said the undergraduate, with an eye of pity,
‘the poor puppy struggles. How fortunate it is that I am wiser and
kinder than he,’ and he sighted his weapon so as exactly to cover the
upper part of Eames’s bald head.

“‘Smith,’ said the philosopher with a sudden change to a sort of
ghastly lucidity, ‘I shall go mad.’

“‘And so look at things from the right angle,’ observed Smith, sighing
gently. ‘Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best, a drug. The only
cure is an operation—an operation that is always successful: death.’

“As he spoke the sun rose. It seemed to put colour into everything,
with the rapidity of a lightning artist. A fleet of little clouds
sailing across the sky changed from pigeon-gray to pink. All over the
little academic town the tops of different buildings took on different
tints: here the sun would pick out the green enameled on a pinnacle,
there the scarlet tiles of a villa; here the copper ornament on some
artistic shop, and there the sea-blue slates of some old and steep
church roof. All these coloured crests seemed to have something oddly
individual and significant about them, like crests of famous knights
pointed out in a pageant or a battlefield: they each arrested the eye,
especially the rolling eye of Emerson Eames as he looked round on the
morning and accepted it as his last. Through a narrow chink between a
black timber tavern and a big gray college he could see a clock with
gilt hands which the sunshine set on fire. He stared at it as though
hypnotized; and suddenly the clock began to strike, as if in personal
reply. As if at a signal, clock after clock took up the cry: all the
churches awoke like chickens at cockcrow. The birds were already noisy
in the trees behind the college. The sun rose, gathering glory that
seemed too full for the deep skies to hold, and the shallow waters
beneath them seemed golden and brimming and deep enough for the thirst
of the gods. Just round the corner of the College, and visible from his
crazy perch, were the brightest specks on that bright landscape, the
villa with the spotted blinds which he had made his text that night. He
wondered for the first time what people lived in them.

“Suddenly he called out with mere querulous authority, as he might have
called to a student to shut a door.

“‘Let me come off this place,’ he cried; ‘I can’t bear it.’

“‘I rather doubt if it will bear you,’ said Smith critically; ‘but
before you break your neck, or I blow out your brains, or let you back
into this room (on which complex points I am undecided) I want the
metaphysical point cleared up. Do I understand that you want to get
back to life?’

“‘I’d give anything to get back,’ replied the unhappy professor.

“‘Give anything!’ cried Smith; ‘then, blast your impudence, give us a
song!’

“‘What song do you mean?’ demanded the exasperated Eames; ‘what song?’

“‘A hymn, I think, would be most appropriate,’ answered the other
gravely. ‘I’ll let you off if you’ll repeat after me the words—

“‘I thank the goodness and the grace
    That on my birth have smiled.
And perched me on this curious place,
    A happy English child.’


“Dr. Emerson Eames having briefly complied, his persecutor abruptly
told him to hold his hands up in the air. Vaguely connecting this
proceeding with the usual conduct of brigands and bushrangers, Mr.
Eames held them up, very stiffly, but without marked surprise. A bird
alighting on his stone seat took no more notice of him than of a comic
statue.

“‘You are now engaged in public worship,’ remarked Smith severely, ‘and
before I have done with you, you shall thank God for the very ducks on
the pond.’

“The celebrated pessimist half articulately expressed his perfect
readiness to thank God for the ducks on the pond.

“‘Not forgetting the drakes,’ said Smith sternly. (Eames weakly
conceded the drakes.) ‘Not forgetting anything, please. You shall thank
heaven for churches and chapels and villas and vulgar people and
puddles and pots and pans and sticks and rags and bones and spotted
blinds.’

“‘All right, all right,’ repeated the victim in despair; ‘sticks and
rags and bones and blinds.’

“‘Spotted blinds, I think we said,’ remarked Smith with a rogueish
ruthlessness, and wagging the pistol-barrel at him like a long metallic
finger.

“‘Spotted blinds,’ said Emerson Eames faintly.

“‘You can’t say fairer than that,’ admitted the younger man, ‘and now
I’ll just tell you this to wind up with. If you really were what you
profess to be, I don’t see that it would matter to snail or seraph if
you broke your impious stiff neck and dashed out all your drivelling
devil-worshipping brains. But in strict biographical fact you are a
very nice fellow, addicted to talking putrid nonsense, and I love you
like a brother. I shall therefore fire off all my cartridges round your
head so as not to hit you (I am a good shot, you may be glad to hear),
and then we will go in and have some breakfast.’

“He then let off two barrels in the air, which the Professor endured
with singular firmness, and then said, ‘But don’t fire them all off.’

“‘Why not’ asked the other buoyantly.

“‘Keep them,’ asked his companion, ‘for the next man you meet who talks
as we were talking.’

“It was at this moment that Smith, looking down, perceived apoplectic
terror upon the face of the Sub-Warden, and heard the refined shriek
with which he summoned the porter and the ladder.

“It took Dr. Eames some little time to disentangle himself from the
ladder, and some little time longer to disentangle himself from the
Sub-Warden. But as soon as he could do so unobtrusively, he rejoined
his companion in the late extraordinary scene. He was astonished to
find the gigantic Smith heavily shaken, and sitting with his shaggy
head on his hands. When addressed, he lifted a very pale face.

“‘Why, what is the matter?’ asked Eames, whose own nerves had by this
time twittered themselves quiet, like the morning birds.

“‘I must ask your indulgence,’ said Smith, rather brokenly. ‘I must ask
you to realize that I have just had an escape from death.’

“‘YOU have had an escape from death?’ repeated the Professor in not
unpardonable irritation. ‘Well, of all the cheek—’

“‘Oh, don’t you understand, don’t you understand?’ cried the pale young
man impatiently. ‘I had to do it, Eames; I had to prove you wrong or
die. When a man’s young, he nearly always has some one whom he thinks
the top-water mark of the mind of man— some one who knows all about it,
if anybody knows.

“‘Well, you were that to me; you spoke with authority, and not as the
scribes. Nobody could comfort me if YOU said there was no comfort. If
you really thought there was nothing anywhere, it was because you had
been there to see. Don’t you see that I HAD to prove you didn’t really
mean it?— or else drown myself in the canal.’

“‘Well,’ said Eames hesitatingly, ‘I think perhaps you confuse—’

“‘Oh, don’t tell me that!’ cried Smith with the sudden clairvoyance of
mental pain; ‘don’t tell me I confuse enjoyment of existence with the
Will to Live! That’s German, and German is High Dutch, and High Dutch
is Double Dutch. The thing I saw shining in your eyes when you dangled
on that bridge was enjoyment of life and not “the Will to Live.” What
you knew when you sat on that damned gargoyle was that the world, when
all is said and done, is a wonderful and beautiful place; I know it,
because I knew it at the same minute. I saw the gray clouds turn pink,
and the little gilt clock in the crack between the houses. It was THOSE
things you hated leaving, not Life, whatever that is. Eames, we’ve been
to the brink of death together; won’t you admit I’m right?’

“‘Yes,’ said Eames very slowly, ‘I think you are right. You shall have
a First!’

“‘Right!’ cried Smith, springing up reanimated. ‘I’ve passed with
honours, and now let me go and see about being sent down.’

“‘You needn’t be sent down,’ said Eames with the quiet confidence of
twelve years of intrigue. ‘Everything with us comes from the man on top
to the people just round him: I am the man on top, and I shall tell the
people round me the truth.’

“The massive Mr. Smith rose and went firmly to the window, but he spoke
with equal firmness. ‘I must be sent down,’ he said, ‘and the people
must not be told the truth.’

“‘And why not’ asked the other.

“‘Because I mean to follow your advice,’ answered the massive youth, ‘I
mean to keep the remaining shots for people in the shameful state you
and I were in last night—I wish we could even plead drunkenness. I mean
to keep those bullets for pessimists—pills for pale people. And in this
way I want to walk the world like a wonderful surprise— to float as
idly as the thistledown, and come as silently as the sunrise; not to be
expected any more than the thunderbolt, not to be recalled any more
than the dying breeze. I don’t want people to anticipate me as a
well-known practical joke. I want both my gifts to come virgin and
violent, the death and the life after death. I am going to hold a
pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill
him—only to bring him to life. I begin to see a new meaning in being
the skeleton at the feast.’

“‘You can scarcely be called a skeleton,’ said Dr. Eames, smiling.

“‘That comes of being so much at the feast,’ answered the massive
youth. ‘No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining out. But
that is not quite what I meant: what I mean is that I caught a kind of
glimpse of the meaning of death and all that—the skull and cross-bones,
the _memento mori_. It isn’t only meant to remind us of a future life,
but to remind us of a present life too. With our weak spirits we should
grow old in eternity if we were not kept young by death. Providence has
to cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and
butter into fingers.’

“Then he added suddenly in a voice of unnatural actuality, ‘But I know
something now, Eames. I knew it when I saw the clouds turn pink.’

“‘What do you mean?’ asked Eames. ‘What did you know?’

“‘I knew for the first time that murder is really wrong.’

“He gripped Dr. Eames’s hand and groped his way somewhat unsteadily to
the door. Before he had vanished through it he had added, ‘It’s very
dangerous, though, when a man thinks for a split second that he
understands death.’

“Dr. Eames remained in repose and rumination some hours after his late
assailant had left. Then he rose, took his hat and umbrella, and went
for a brisk if rotatory walk. Several times, however, he stood outside
the villa with the spotted blinds, studying them intently with his head
slightly on one side. Some took him for a lunatic and some for an
intending purchaser. He is not yet sure that the two characters would
be widely different.

“The above narrative has been constructed on a principle which is, in
the opinion of the undersigned persons, new in the art of letters. Each
of the two actors is described as he appeared to the other. But the
undersigned persons absolutely guarantee the exactitude of the story;
and if their version of the thing be questioned, they, the undersigned
persons, would deucedly well like to know who does know about it if
they don’t.

“The undersigned persons will now adjourn to ‘The Spotted Dog’ for
beer. Farewell.

“(Signed) James Emerson Eames, “Warden of Brakespeare College,
Cambridge.

“Innocent Smith.”



Chapter II
The Two Curates; or, the Burglary Charge


Arthur Inglewood handed the document he had just read to the leaders of
the prosecution, who examined it with their heads together. Both the
Jew and the American were of sensitive and excitable stocks, and they
revealed by the jumpings and bumpings of the black head and the yellow
that nothing could be done in the way of denial of the document. The
letter from the Warden was as authentic as the letter from the
Sub-Warden, however regrettably different in dignity and social tone.

“Very few words,” said Inglewood, “are required to conclude our case in
this matter. Surely it is now plain that our client carried his pistol
about with the eccentric but innocent purpose of giving a wholesome
scare to those whom he regarded as blasphemers. In each case the scare
was so wholesome that the victim himself has dated from it as from a
new birth. Smith, so far from being a madman, is rather a mad doctor—
he walks the world curing frenzies and not distributing them. That is
the answer to the two unanswerable questions which I put to the
prosecutors. That is why they dared not produce a line by any one who
had actually confronted the pistol. All who had actually confronted the
pistol confessed that they had profited by it. That was why Smith,
though a good shot, never hit anybody. He never hit anybody because he
was a good shot. His mind was as clear of murder as his hands are of
blood. This, I say, is the only possible explanation of these facts and
of all the other facts. No one can possibly explain the Warden’s
conduct except by believing the Warden’s story. Even Dr. Pym, who is a
very factory of ingenious theories, could find no other theory to cover
the case.”

“There are promising per-spectives in hypnotism and dual personality,”
said Dr. Cyrus Pym dreamily; “the science of criminology is in its
infancy, and—”

“Infancy!” cried Moon, jerking his red pencil in the air with a gesture
of enlightenment; “why, that explains it!”

“I repeat,” proceeded Inglewood, “that neither Dr. Pym nor any one else
can account on any other theory but ours for the Warden’s signature,
for the shots missed and the witnesses missing.”

The little Yankee had slipped to his feet with some return of a
cock-fighting coolness. “The defence,” he said, “omits a coldly
colossal fact. They say we produce none of the actual victims. Wal,
here is one victim—England’s celebrated and stricken Warner. I reckon
he is pretty well produced. And they suggest that all the outrages were
followed by reconciliation. Wal, there’s no flies on England’s Warner;
and he isn’t reconciliated much.”

“My learned friend,” said Moon, getting elaborately to his feet, “must
remember that the science of shooting Dr. Warner is in its infancy. Dr.
Warner would strike the idlest eye as one specially difficult to
startle into any recognition of the glory of God. We admit that our
client, in this one instance, failed, and that the operation was not
successful. But I am empowered to offer, on behalf of my client, a
proposal for operating on Dr. Warner again, at his earliest
convenience, and without further fees.”

“’Ang it all, Michael,” cried Gould, quite serious for the first time
in his life, “you might give us a bit of bally sense for a chinge.”

“What was Dr. Warner talking about just before the first shot?” asked
Moon sharply.

“The creature,” said Dr. Warner superciliously, “asked me, with
characteristic rationality, whether it was my birthday.”

“And you answered, with characteristic swank,” cried Moon, shooting out
a long lean finger, as rigid and arresting as the pistol of Smith,
“that you didn’t keep your birthday.”

“Something like that,” assented the doctor.

“Then,” continued Moon, “he asked you why not, and you said it was
because you didn’t see that birth was anything to rejoice over. Agreed?
Now is there any one who doubts that our tale is true?”

There was a cold crash of stillness in the room; and Moon said, “Pax
populi vox Dei; it is the silence of the people that is the voice of
God. Or in Dr. Pym’s more civilized language, it is up to him to open
the next charge. On this we claim an acquittal.”

It was about an hour later. Dr. Cyrus Pym had remained for an
unprecedented time with his eyes closed and his thumb and finger in the
air. It almost seemed as if he had been “struck so,” as the nurses say;
and in the deathly silence Michael Moon felt forced to relieve the
strain with some remark. For the last half-hour or so the eminent
criminologist had been explaining that science took the same view of
offences against property as it did of offences against life. “Most
murder,” he had said, “is a variation of homicidal mania, and in the
same way most theft is a version of kleptomania. I cannot entertain any
doubt that my learned friends opposite adequately con-ceive how this
must involve a scheme of punishment more tol’rant and humane than the
cruel methods of ancient codes. They will doubtless exhibit
consciousness of a chasm so eminently yawning, so thought-arresting,
so—” It was here that he paused and indulged in the delicate gesture to
which allusion has been made; and Michael could bear it no longer.

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, “we admit the chasm. The old cruel
codes accuse a man of theft and send him to prison for ten years. The
tolerant and humane ticket accuses him of nothing and sends him to
prison for ever. We pass the chasm.”

It was characteristic of the eminent Pym, in one of his trances of
verbal fastidiousness, that he went on, unconscious not only of his
opponent’s interruption, but even of his own pause.

“So stock-improving,” continued Dr. Cyrus Pym, “so fraught with real
high hopes of the future. Science therefore regards thieves, in the
abstract, just as it regards murderers. It regards them not as sinners
to be punished for an arbitrary period, but as patients to be detained
and cared for,” (his first two digits closed again as he hesitated)—“in
short, for the required period. But there is something special in the
case we investigate here. Kleptomania commonly con-joins itself—”

“I beg pardon,” said Michael; “I did not ask just now because, to tell
the truth, I really thought Dr. Pym, though seemingly vertical, was
enjoying well-earned slumber, with a pinch in his fingers of scentless
and delicate dust. But now that things are moving a little more, there
is something I should really like to know. I have hung on Dr. Pym’s
lips, of course, with an interest that it were weak to call rapture,
but I have so far been unable to form any conjecture about what the
accused, in the present instance, is supposed to have been and gone and
done.”

“If Mr. Moon will have patience,” said Pym with dignity, “he will find
that this was the very point to which my exposition was di-rected.
Kleptomania, I say, exhibits itself as a kind of physical attraction to
certain defined materials; and it has been held (by no less a man than
Harris) that this is the ultimate explanation of the strict specialism
and vurry narrow professional outlook of most criminals. One will have
an irresistible physical impulsion towards pearl sleeve-links, while he
passes over the most elegant and celebrated diamond sleeve-links,
placed about in the most conspicuous locations. Another will impede his
flight with no less than forty-seven buttoned boots, while
elastic-sided boots leave him cold, and even sarcastic. The specialism
of the criminal, I repeat, is a mark rather of insanity than of any
brightness of business habits; but there is one kind of depredator to
whom this principle is at first sight hard to apply. I allude to our
fellow-citizen the housebreaker.

“It has been maintained by some of our boldest young truth-seekers,
that the eye of a burglar beyond the back-garden wall could hardly be
caught and hypnotized by a fork that is insulated in a locked box under
the butler’s bed. They have thrown down the gauntlet to American
science on this point. They declare that diamond links are not left
about in conspicuous locations in the haunts of the lower classes, as
they were in the great test experiment of Calypso College. We hope this
experiment here will be an answer to that young ringing challenge, and
will bring the burglar once more into line and union with his fellow
criminals.”

Moon, whose face had gone through every phase of black bewilderment for
five minutes past, suddenly lifted his hand and struck the table in
explosive enlightenment.

“Oh, I see!” he cried; “you mean that Smith is a burglar.”

“I thought I made it quite ad’quately lucid,” said Mr. Pym, folding up
his eyelids. It was typical of this topsy-turvy private trial that all
the eloquent extras, all the rhetoric or digression on either side, was
exasperating and unintelligible to the other. Moon could not make head
or tail of the solemnity of a new civilization. Pym could not make head
or tail of the gaiety of an old one.

“All the cases in which Smith has figured as an expropriator,”
continued the American doctor, “are cases of burglary. Pursuing the
same course as in the previous case, we select the indubitable instance
from the rest, and we take the most correct cast-iron evidence. I will
now call on my colleague, Mr. Gould, to read a letter we have received
from the earnest, unspotted Canon of Durham, Canon Hawkins.”

Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual alacrity to read the letter
from the earnest and unspotted Hawkins. Moses Gould could imitate a
farmyard well, Sir Henry Irving not so well, Marie Lloyd to a point of
excellence, and the new motor horns in a manner that put him upon the
platform of great artists. But his imitation of a Canon of Durham was
not convincing; indeed, the sense of the letter was so much obscured by
the extraordinary leaps and gasps of his pronunciation that it is
perhaps better to print it here as Moon read it when, a little later,
it was handed across the table.

“Dear Sir,—I can scarcely feel surprise that the incident you mention,
private as it was, should have filtered through our omnivorous journals
to the mere populace; for the position I have since attained makes me,
I conceive, a public character, and this was certainly the most
extraordinary incident in a not uneventful and perhaps not an
unimportant career. I am by no means without experience in scenes of
civil tumult. I have faced many a political crisis in the old Primrose
League days at Herne Bay, and, before I broke with the wilder set, have
spent many a night at the Christian Social Union. But this other
experience was quite inconceivable. I can only describe it as the
letting loose of a place which it is not for me, as a clergyman, to
mention.

“It occurred in the days when I was, for a short period, a curate at
Hoxton; and the other curate, then my colleague, induced me to attend a
meeting which he described, I must say profanely described, as
calculated to promote the kingdom of God. I found, on the contrary,
that it consisted entirely of men in corduroys and greasy clothes whose
manners were coarse and their opinions extreme.

“Of my colleague in question I wish to speak with the fullest respect
and friendliness, and I will therefore say little. No one can be more
convinced than I of the evil of politics in the pulpit; and I never
offer my congregation any advice about voting except in cases in which
I feel strongly that they are likely to make an erroneous selection.
But, while I do not mean to touch at all upon political or social
problems, I must say that for a clergyman to countenance, even in jest,
such discredited nostrums of dissipated demagogues as Socialism or
Radicalism partakes of the character of the betrayal of a sacred trust.
Far be it from me to say a word against the Reverend Raymond Percy, the
colleague in question. He was brilliant, I suppose, and to some
apparently fascinating; but a clergyman who talks like a Socialist,
wears his hair like a pianist, and behaves like an intoxicated person,
will never rise in his profession, or even obtain the admiration of the
good and wise. Nor is it for me to utter my personal judgements of the
appearance of the people in the hall. Yet a glance round the room,
revealing ranks of debased and envious faces—”

“Adopting,” said Moon explosively, for he was getting restive—“adopting
the reverend gentleman’s favourite figure of logic, may I say that
while tortures would not tear from me a whisper about his intellect, he
is a blasted old jackass.”

“Really!” said Dr. Pym; “I protest.”

“You must keep quiet, Michael,” said Inglewood; “they have a right to
read their story.”

“Chair! Chair! Chair!” cried Gould, rolling about exuberantly in his
own; and Pym glanced for a moment towards the canopy which covered all
the authority of the Court of Beacon.

“Oh, don’t wake the old lady,” said Moon, lowering his voice in a moody
good-humour. “I apologize. I won’t interrupt again.”

Before the little eddy of interruption was ended the reading of the
clergyman’s letter was already continuing.

“The proceedings opened with a speech from my colleague, of which I
will say nothing. It was deplorable. Many of the audience were Irish,
and showed the weakness of that impetuous people. When gathered
together into gangs and conspiracies they seem to lose altogether that
lovable good-nature and readiness to accept anything one tells them
which distinguishes them as individuals.”

With a slight start, Michael rose to his feet, bowed solemnly, and sat
down again.

“These persons, if not silent, were at least applausive during the
speech of Mr. Percy. He descended to their level with witticisms about
rent and a reserve of labour. Confiscation, expropriation, arbitration,
and such words with which I cannot soil my lips, recurred constantly.
Some hours afterward the storm broke. I had been addressing the meeting
for some time, pointing out the lack of thrift in the working classes,
their insufficient attendance at evening service, their neglect of the
Harvest Festival, and of many other things that might materially help
them to improve their lot. It was, I think, about this time that an
extraordinary interruption occurred. An enormous, powerful man, partly
concealed with white plaster, arose in the middle of the hall, and
offered (in a loud, roaring voice, like a bull’s) some observations
which seemed to be in a foreign language. Mr. Raymond Percy, my
colleague, descended to his level by entering into a duel of repartee,
in which he appeared to be the victor. The meeting began to behave more
respectfully for a little; yet before I had said twelve sentences more
the rush was made for the platform. The enormous plasterer, in
particular, plunged towards us, shaking the earth like an elephant; and
I really do not know what would have happened if a man equally large,
but not quite so ill-dressed, had not jumped up also and held him away.
This other big man shouted a sort of speech to the mob as he was
shoving them back. I don’t know what he said, but, what with shouting
and shoving and such horseplay, he got us out at a back door, while the
wretched people went roaring down another passage.

“Then follows the truly extraordinary part of my story. When he had got
us outside, in a mean backyard of blistered grass leading into a lane
with a very lonely-looking lamp-post, this giant addressed me as
follows: ‘You’re well out of that, sir; now you’d better come along
with me. I want you to help me in an act of social justice, such as
we’ve all been talking about. Come along!’ And turning his big back
abruptly, he led us down the lean old lane with the one lean old
lamp-post, we scarcely knowing what to do but to follow him. He had
certainly helped us in a most difficult situation, and, as a gentleman,
I could not treat such a benefactor with suspicion without grave
grounds. Such also was the view of my Socialistic colleague, who (with
all his dreadful talk of arbitration) is a gentleman also. In fact, he
comes of the Staffordshire Percys, a branch of the old house and has
the black hair and pale, clear-cut face of the whole family. I cannot
but refer it to vanity that he should heighten his personal advantages
with black velvet or a red cross of considerable ostentation, and
certainly—but I digress.

“A fog was coming up the street, and that last lost lamp-post faded
behind us in a way that certainly depressed the mind. The large man in
front of us looked larger and larger in the haze. He did not turn
round, but he said with his huge back to us, ‘All that talking’s no
good; we want a little practical Socialism.’

“‘I quite agree,’ said Percy; ‘but I always like to understand things
in theory before I put them into practice.’

“‘Oh, you just leave that to me,’ said the practical Socialist, or
whatever he was, with the most terrifying vagueness. ‘I have a way with
me. I’m a Permeator.’

“I could not imagine what he meant, but my companion laughed, so I was
sufficiently reassured to continue the unaccountable journey for the
present. It led us through most singular ways; out of the lane, where
we were already rather cramped, into a paved passage, at the end of
which we passed through a wooden gate left open. We then found
ourselves, in the increasing darkness and vapour, crossing what
appeared to be a beaten path across a kitchen garden. I called out to
the enormous person going on in front, but he answered obscurely that
it was a short cut.

“I was just repeating my very natural doubt to my clerical companion
when I was brought up against a short ladder, apparently leading to a
higher level of road. My thoughtless colleague ran up it so quickly
that I could not do otherwise than follow as best I could. The path on
which I then planted my feet was quite unprecedentedly narrow. I had
never had to walk along a thoroughfare so exiguous. Along one side of
it grew what, in the dark and density of air, I first took to be some
short, strong thicket of shrubs. Then I saw that they were not short
shrubs; they were the tops of tall trees. I, an English gentleman and
clergyman of the Church of England—I was walking along the top of a
garden wall like a tom cat.

“I am glad to say that I stopped within my first five steps, and let
loose my just reprobation, balancing myself as best I could all the
time.

“‘It’s a right-of-way,’ declared my indefensible informant. ‘It’s
closed to traffic once in a hundred years.’

“‘Mr. Percy, Mr. Percy!’ I called out; ‘you are not going on with this
blackguard?’

“‘Why, I think so,’ answered my unhappy colleague flippantly. ‘I think
you and I are bigger blackguards than he is, whatever he is.’

“‘I am a burglar,’ explained the big creature quite calmly. ‘I am a
member of the Fabian Society. I take back the wealth stolen by the
capitalist, not by sweeping civil war and revolution, but by reform
fitted to the special occasion—here a little and there a little. Do you
see that fifth house along the terrace with the flat roof? I’m
permeating that one to-night.’

“‘Whether this is a crime or a joke,’ I cried, ‘I desire to be quit of
it.’

“‘The ladder is just behind you,’ answered the creature with horrible
courtesy; ‘and, before you go, do let me give you my card.’

“If I had had the presence of mind to show any proper spirit I should
have flung it away, though any adequate gesture of the kind would have
gravely affected my equilibrium upon the wall. As it was, in the
wildness of the moment, I put it in my waistcoat pocket, and, picking
my way back by wall and ladder, landed in the respectable streets once
more. Not before, however, I had seen with my own eyes the two awful
and lamentable facts— that the burglar was climbing up a slanting roof
towards the chimneys, and that Raymond Percy (a priest of God and, what
was worse, a gentleman) was crawling up after him. I have never seen
either of them since that day.

“In consequence of this soul-searching experience I severed my
connection with the wild set. I am far from saying that every member of
the Christian Social Union must necessarily be a burglar. I have no
right to bring any such charge. But it gave me a hint of what such
courses may lead to in many cases; and I saw them no more.

“I have only to add that the photograph you enclose, taken by a Mr.
Inglewood, is undoubtedly that of the burglar in question. When I got
home that night I looked at his card, and he was inscribed there under
the name of Innocent Smith.—Yours faithfully,

“John Clement Hawkins.”


Moon merely went through the form of glancing at the paper. He knew
that the prosecutors could not have invented so heavy a document; that
Moses Gould (for one) could no more write like a canon than he could
read like one. After handing it back he rose to open the defence on the
burglary charge.

“We wish,” said Michael, “to give all reasonable facilities to the
prosecution; especially as it will save the time of the whole court.
The latter object I shall once again pursue by passing over all those
points of theory which are so dear to Dr. Pym. I know how they are
made. Perjury is a variety of aphasia, leading a man to say one thing
instead of another. Forgery is a kind of writer’s cramp, forcing a man
to write his uncle’s name instead of his own. Piracy on the high seas
is probably a form of sea-sickness. But it is unnecessary for us to
inquire into the causes of a fact which we deny. Innocent Smith never
did commit burglary at all.

“I should like to claim the power permitted by our previous
arrangement, and ask the prosecution two or three questions.”

Dr. Cyrus Pym closed his eyes to indicate a courteous assent.

“In the first place,” continued Moon, “have you the date of Canon
Hawkins’s last glimpse of Smith and Percy climbing up the walls and
roofs?”

“Ho, yus!” called out Gould smartly. “November thirteen, eighteen
ninety-one.”

“Have you,” continued Moon, “identified the houses in Hoxton up which
they climbed?”

“Must have been Ladysmith Terrace out of the highroad,” answered Gould
with the same clockwork readiness.

“Well,” said Michael, cocking an eyebrow at him, “was there any
burglary in that terrace that night? Surely you could find that out.”

“There may well have been,” said the doctor primly, after a pause, “an
unsuccessful one that led to no legalities.”

“Another question,” proceeded Michael. “Canon Hawkins, in his
blood-and-thunder boyish way, left off at the exciting moment. Why
don’t you produce the evidence of the other clergyman, who actually
followed the burglar and presumably was present at the crime?”

Dr. Pym rose and planted the points of his fingers on the table, as he
did when he was specially confident of the clearness of his reply.

“We have entirely failed,” he said, “to track the other clergyman, who
seems to have melted into the ether after Canon Hawkins had seen him
as-cending the gutters and the leads. I am fully aware that this may
strike many as sing’lar; yet, upon reflection, I think it will appear
pretty natural to a bright thinker. This Mr. Raymond Percy is
admittedly, by the canon’s evidence, a minister of eccentric ways. His
con-nection with England’s proudest and fairest does not seemingly
prevent a taste for the society of the real low-down. On the other
hand, the prisoner Smith is, by general agreement, a man of
irr’sistible fascination. I entertain no doubt that Smith led the
Revered Percy into the crime and forced him to hide his head in the
real crim’nal class. That would fully account for his non-appearance,
and the failure of all attempts to trace him.”

“It is impossible, then, to trace him?” asked Moon.

“Impossible,” repeated the specialist, shutting his eyes.

“You are sure it’s impossible?”

“Oh dry up, Michael,” cried Gould, irritably. “We’d ’ave found ’im if
we could, for you bet ’e saw the burglary. Don’t YOU start looking for
’im. Look for your own ’ead in the dustbin. You’ll find that—after a
bit,” and his voice died away in grumbling.

“Arthur,” directed Michael Moon, sitting down, “kindly read Mr. Raymond
Percy’s letter to the court.”

“Wishing, as Mr. Moon has said, to shorten the proceedings as much as
possible,” began Inglewood, “I will not read the first part of the
letter sent to us. It is only fair to the prosecution to admit the
account given by the second clergyman fully ratifies, as far as facts
are concerned, that given by the first clergyman. We concede, then, the
canon’s story so far as it goes. This must necessarily be valuable to
the prosecutor and also convenient to the court. I begin Mr. Percy’s
letter, then, at the point when all three men were standing on the
garden wall:—

“As I watched Hawkins wavering on the wall, I made up my own mind not
to waver. A cloud of wrath was on my brain, like the cloud of copper
fog on the houses and gardens round. My decision was violent and
simple; yet the thoughts that led up to it were so complicated and
contradictory that I could not retrace them now. I knew Hawkins was a
kind, innocent gentleman; and I would have given ten pounds for the
pleasure of kicking him down the road. That God should allow good
people to be as bestially stupid as that— rose against me like a
towering blasphemy.

“At Oxford, I fear, I had the artistic temperament rather badly; and
artists love to be limited. I liked the church as a pretty pattern;
discipline was mere decoration. I delighted in mere divisions of time;
I liked eating fish on Friday. But then I like fish; and the fast was
made for men who like meat. Then I came to Hoxton and found men who had
fasted for five hundred years; men who had to gnaw fish because they
could not get meat—and fish-bones when they could not get fish. As too
many British officers treat the army as a review, so I had treated the
Church Militant as if it were the Church Pageant. Hoxton cures that.
Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant had
not been a pageant, but a riot—and a suppressed riot. There, still
living patiently in Hoxton, were the people to whom the tremendous
promises had been made. In the face of that I had to become a
revolutionary if I was to continue to be religious. In Hoxton one
cannot be a conservative without being also an atheist— and a
pessimist. Nobody but the devil could want to conserve Hoxton.

“On the top of all this comes Hawkins. If he had cursed all the Hoxton
men, excommunicated them, and told them they were going to hell, I
should have rather admired him. If he had ordered them all to be burned
in the market-place, I should still have had that patience that all
good Christians have with the wrongs inflicted on other people. But
there is no priestcraft about Hawkins—nor any other kind of craft. He
is as perfectly incapable of being a priest as he is of being a
carpenter or a cabman or a gardener or a plasterer. He is a perfect
gentleman; that is his complaint. He does not impose his creed, but
simply his class. He never said a word of religion in the whole of his
damnable address. He simply said all the things his brother, the major,
would have said. A voice from heaven assures me that he has a brother,
and that this brother is a major.

“When this helpless aristocrat had praised cleanliness in the body and
convention in the soul to people who could hardly keep body and soul
together, the stampede against our platform began. I took part in his
undeserved rescue, I followed his obscure deliverer, until (as I have
said) we stood together on the wall above the dim gardens, already
clouding with fog. Then I looked at the curate and at the burglar, and
decided, in a spasm of inspiration, that the burglar was the better man
of the two. The burglar seemed quite as kind and human as the curate
was— and he was also brave and self-reliant, which the curate was not.
I knew there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belong to it
myself; I knew there was not so very much in the lower class, for I had
lived with it a long time. Many old texts about the despised and
persecuted came back to my mind, and I thought that the saints might
well be hidden in the criminal class. About the time Hawkins let
himself down the ladder I was crawling up a low, sloping, blue-slate
roof after the large man, who went leaping in front of me like a
gorilla.

“This upward scramble was short, and we soon found ourselves tramping
along a broad road of flat roofs, broader than many big thoroughfares,
with chimney-pots here and there that seemed in the haze as bulky as
small forts. The asphyxiation of the fog seemed to increase the
somewhat swollen and morbid anger under which my brain and body
laboured. The sky and all those things that are commonly clear seemed
overpowered by sinister spirits. Tall spectres with turbans of vapour
seemed to stand higher than the sun or moon, eclipsing both. I thought
dimly of illustrations to the ‘Arabian Nights’ on brown paper with rich
but sombre tints, showing genii gathering round the Seal of Solomon. By
the way, what was the Seal of Solomon? Nothing to do with sealing-wax
really, I suppose; but my muddled fancy felt the thick clouds as being
of that heavy and clinging substance, of strong opaque colour, poured
out of boiling pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.

“The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that discoloured
look of pea-soup or coffee brown of which Londoners commonly speak. But
the scene grew subtler with familiarity. We stood above the average of
the housetops and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in
great cities creates the strange thing called fog. Beneath us rose a
forest of chimney-pots. And there stood in every chimney-pot, as if it
were a flower-pot, a brief shrub or a tall tree of coloured vapour. The
colours of the smoke were various; for some chimneys were from
firesides and some from factories, and some again from mere rubbish
heaps. And yet, though the tints were all varied, they all seemed
unnatural, like fumes from a witch’s pot. It was as if the shameful and
ugly shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate
spurt of steam, coloured according to the fish or flesh consumed. Here,
aglow from underneath, were dark red clouds, such as might drift from
dark jars of sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray,
like the long hair of witches steeped in the hell-broth. In another
place the smoke was of an awful opaque ivory yellow, such as might be
the disembodiment of one of their old, leprous waxen images. But right
across it ran a line of bright, sinister, sulphurous green, as clear
and crooked as Arabic—”

Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the ’bus. He was
understood to suggest that the reader should shorten the proceedings by
leaving out all the adjectives. Mrs. Duke, who had woken up, observed
that she was sure it was all very nice, and the decision was duly noted
down by Moses with a blue, and by Michael with a red pencil. Inglewood
then resumed the reading of the document.

“Then I read the writing of the smoke. Smoke was like the modern city
that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always wicked
and vain.

“Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry all colours,
but it could leave nothing but a stain. It was our weakness and not our
strength that put a rich refuse in the sky. These were the rivers of
our vanity pouring into the void. We had taken the sacred circle of the
whirlwind, and looked down on it, and seen it as a whirlpool. And then
we had used it as a sink. It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own
mind. Only our worst things were going to heaven. Only our criminals
could still ascend like angels.

“As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped by one of
the big chimney-pots that stood at the regular intervals like
lamp-posts along that uplifted and aerial highway. He put his heavy
hand upon it, and for the moment I thought he was merely leaning on it,
tired with his steep scramble along the terrace. So far as I could
guess from the abysses, full of fog on either side, and the veiled
lights of red brown and old gold glowing through them now and again, we
were on the top of one of those long, consecutive, and genteel rows of
houses which are still to be found lifting their heads above poorer
districts, the remains of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative
builders. Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted, or tenanted
only by such small clans of the poor as gather also in the old emptied
palaces of Italy. Indeed, some little time later, when the fog had
lifted a little, I discovered that we were walking round a semi-circle
of crescent which fell away below us into one flat square or wide
street below another, like a giant stairway, in a manner not unknown in
the eccentric building of London, and looking like the last ledges of
the land. But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet.

“My speculations about the sullen skyscape, however, were interrupted
by something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky. Instead of
my burglar lifting his hand from the chimney he leaned on, he leaned on
it a little more heavily, and the whole chimney-pot turned over like
the opening top of an inkstand. I remembered the short ladder leaning
against the low wall and felt sure he had arranged his criminal
approach long before.

“The collapse of the big chimney-pot ought to have been the culmination
of my chaotic feelings; but, to tell the truth, it produced a sudden
sense of comedy and even of comfort. I could not recall what connected
this abrupt bit of housebreaking with some quaint but still kindly
fancies. Then I remembered the delightful and uproarious scenes of
roofs and chimneys in the harlequinades of my childhood, and was darkly
and quite irrationally comforted by a sense of unsubstantiality in the
scene, as if the houses were of lath and paint and pasteboard, and were
only meant to be tumbled in and out of by policemen and pantaloons. The
law-breaking of my companion seemed not only seriously excusable, but
even comically excusable. Who were all these pompous preposterous
people with their footmen and their foot-scrapers, their chimney-pots
and their chimney-pot hats, that they should prevent a poor clown from
getting sausages if he wanted them? One would suppose that property was
a serious thing. I had reached, as it were, a higher level of that
mountainous and vapourous visions, the heaven of a higher levity.

“My guide had jumped down into the dark cavity revealed by the
displaced chimney-pot. He must have landed at a level considerably
lower, for, tall as he was, nothing but his weirdly tousled head
remained visible. Something again far off, and yet familiar, pleased me
about this way of invading the houses of men. I thought of little
chimney-sweeps, and ‘The Water Babies;’ but I decided that it was not
that. Then I remembered what it was that made me connect such
topsy-turvy trespass with ideas quite opposite to the idea of crime.
Christmas Eve, of course, and Santa Claus coming down the chimney.

“Almost at the same instant the hairy head disappeared into the black
hole; but I heard a voice calling to me from below. A second or two
afterwards, the hairy head reappeared; it was dark against the more
fiery part of the fog, and nothing could be spelt of its expression,
but its voice called on me to follow with that enthusiastic impatience
proper only among old friends. I jumped into the gulf, and as blindly
as Curtius, for I was still thinking of Santa Claus and the traditional
virtue of such vertical entrance.

“In every well-appointed gentleman’s house, I reflected, there was the
front door for the gentlemen, and the side door for the tradesmen; but
there was also the top door for the gods. The chimney is, so to speak,
the underground passage between earth and heaven. By this starry tunnel
Santa Claus manages—like the skylark— to be true to the kindred points
of heaven and home. Nay, owing to certain conventions, and a widely
distributed lack of courage for climbing, this door was, perhaps,
little used. But Santa Claus’s door was really the front door: it was
the door fronting the universe.

“I thought this as I groped my way across the black garret, or loft
below the roof, and scrambled down the squat ladder that let us down
into a yet larger loft below. Yet it was not till I was half-way down
the ladder that I suddenly stood still, and thought for an instant of
retracing all my steps, as my companion had retraced them from the
beginning of the garden wall. The name of Santa Claus had suddenly
brought me back to my senses. I remembered why Santa Claus came, and
why he was welcome.

“I was brought up in the propertied classes, and with all their horror
of offences against property. I had heard all the regular denunciations
of robbery, both right and wrong; I had read the Ten Commandments in
church a thousand times. And then and there, at the age of thirty-four,
half-way down a ladder in a dark room in the bodily act of burglar, I
saw suddenly for the first time that theft, after all, is really wrong.

“It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed the strangely
soft footsteps of my huge companion across the lower and larger loft,
till he knelt down on a part of the bare flooring and, after a few
fumbling efforts, lifted a sort of trapdoor. This released a light from
below, and we found ourselves looking down into a lamp-lit sitting
room, of the sort that in large houses often leads out of a bedroom,
and is an adjunct to it. Light thus breaking from beneath our feet like
a soundless explosion, showed that the trapdoor just lifted was clogged
with dust and rust, and had doubtless been long disused until the
advent of my enterprising friend. But I did not look at this long, for
the sight of the shining room underneath us had an almost unnatural
attractiveness. To enter a modern interior at so strange an angle, by
so forgotten a door, was an epoch in one’s psychology. It was like
having found a fourth dimension.

“My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so suddenly and
soundlessly, that I could do nothing but follow him; though, for lack
of practice in crime, I was by no means soundless. Before the echo of
my boots had died away, the big burglar had gone quickly to the door,
half opened it, and stood looking down the staircase and listening.
Then, leaving the door still half open, he came back into the middle of
the room, and ran his roving blue eye round its furniture and ornament.
The room was comfortably lined with books in that rich and human way
that makes the walls seem alive; it was a deep and full, but slovenly,
bookcase, of the sort that is constantly ransacked for the purposes of
reading in bed. One of those stunted German stoves that look like red
goblins stood in a corner, and a sideboard of walnut wood with closed
doors in its lower part. There were three windows, high but narrow.
After another glance round, my housebreaker plucked the walnut doors
open and rummaged inside. He found nothing there, apparently, except an
extremely handsome cut-glass decanter, containing what looked like
port. Somehow the sight of the thief returning with this ridiculous
little luxury in his hand woke within me once more all the revelation
and revulsion I had felt above.

“‘Don’t do it!’ I cried quite incoherently, ‘Santa Claus—’

“‘Ah,’ said the burglar, as he put the decanter on the table and stood
looking at me, ‘you’ve thought about that, too.’

“‘I can’t express a millionth part of what I’ve thought of,’ I cried,
‘but it’s something like this... oh, can’t you see it? Why are children
not afraid of Santa Claus, though he comes like a thief in the night?
He is permitted secrecy, trespass, almost treachery—because there are
more toys where he has been. What should we feel if there were less?
Down what chimney from hell would come the goblin that should take away
the children’s balls and dolls while they slept? Could a Greek tragedy
be more gray and cruel than that daybreak and awakening? Dog-stealer,
horse-stealer, man-stealer—can you think of anything so base as a
toy-stealer?’

“The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from his pocket and
laid it on the table beside the decanter, but still kept his blue
reflective eyes fixed on my face.

“‘Man!’ I said, ‘all stealing is toy-stealing. That’s why it’s really
wrong. The goods of the unhappy children of men should be really
respected because of their worthlessness. I know Naboth’s vineyard is
as painted as Noah’s Ark. I know Nathan’s ewe-lamb is really a woolly
baa-lamb on a wooden stand. That is why I could not take them away. I
did not mind so much, as long as I thought of men’s things as their
valuables; but I dare not put a hand upon their vanities.’

“After a moment I added abruptly, ‘Only saints and sages ought to be
robbed. They may be stripped and pillaged; but not the poor little
worldly people of the things that are their poor little pride.’

“He set out two wineglasses from the cupboard, filled them both, and
lifted one of them with a salutation towards his lips.

“‘Don’t do it!’ I cried. ‘It might be the last bottle of some rotten
vintage or other. The master of this house may be quite proud of it.
Don’t you see there’s something sacred in the silliness of such
things?’

“‘It’s not the last bottle,’ answered my criminal calmly; ‘there’s
plenty more in the cellar.’

“‘You know the house, then?’ I said.

“‘Too well,’ he answered, with a sadness so strange as to have
something eerie about it. ‘I am always trying to forget what I know—
and to find what I don’t know.’ He drained his glass. ‘Besides,’ he
added, ‘it will do him good.’

“‘What will do him good?’

“‘The wine I’m drinking,’ said the strange person.

“‘Does he drink too much, then?’ I inquired.

“‘No,’ he answered, ‘not unless I do.’

“‘Do you mean,’ I demanded, ‘that the owner of this house approves of
all you do?’

“‘God forbid,’ he answered; ‘but he has to do the same.’

“The dead face of the fog looking in at all three windows unreasonably
increased a sense of riddle, and even terror, about this tall, narrow
house we had entered out of the sky. I had once more the notion about
the gigantic genii— I fancied that enormous Egyptian faces, of the dead
reds and yellows of Egypt, were staring in at each window of our little
lamp-lit room as at a lighted stage of marionettes. My companion went
on playing with the pistol in front of him, and talking with the same
rather creepy confidentialness.

“‘I am always trying to find him—to catch him unawares. I come in
through skylights and trapdoors to find him; but whenever I find him—he
is doing what I am doing.’

“I sprang to my feet with a thrill of fear. ‘There is some one coming,’
I cried, and my cry had something of a shriek in it. Not from the
stairs below, but along the passage from the inner bedchamber (which
seemed somehow to make it more alarming), footsteps were coming nearer.
I am quite unable to say what mystery, or monster, or double, I
expected to see when the door was pushed open from within. I am only
quite certain that I did not expect to see what I did see.

“Framed in the open doorway stood, with an air of great serenity, a
rather tall young woman, definitely though indefinably artistic— her
dress the colour of spring and her hair of autumn leaves, with a face
which, though still comparatively young, conveyed experience as well as
intelligence. All she said was, ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

“‘I came in another way,’ said the Permeator, somewhat vaguely. ‘I’d
left my latchkey at home.’

“I got to my feet in a mixture of politeness and mania. ‘I’m really
very sorry,’ I cried. ‘I know my position is irregular. Would you be so
obliging as to tell me whose house this is?’

“‘Mine,’ said the burglar, ‘May I present you to my wife?’

“I doubtfully, and somewhat slowly, resumed my seat; and I did not get
out of it till nearly morning. Mrs. Smith (such was the prosaic name of
this far from prosaic household) lingered a little, talking slightly
and pleasantly. She left on my mind the impression of a certain odd
mixture of shyness and sharpness; as if she knew the world well, but
was still a little harmlessly afraid of it. Perhaps the possession of
so jumpy and incalculable a husband had left her a little nervous.
Anyhow, when she had retired to the inner chamber once more, that
extraordinary man poured forth his apologia and autobiography over the
dwindling wine.

“He had been sent to Cambridge with a view to a mathematical and
scientific, rather than a classical or literary, career. A starless
nihilism was then the philosophy of the schools; and it bred in him a
war between the members and the spirit, but one in which the members
were right. While his brain accepted the black creed, his very body
rebelled against it. As he put it, his right hand taught him terrible
things. As the authorities of Cambridge University put it,
unfortunately, it had taken the form of his right hand flourishing a
loaded firearm in the very face of a distinguished don, and driving him
to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout. He had done it
solely because the poor don had professed in theory a preference for
non-existence. For this very unacademic type of argument he had been
sent down. Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pessimism that
had quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic of the
joy of life. He cut across all the associations of serious-minded men.
He was gay, but by no means careless. His practical jokes were more in
earnest than verbal ones. Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of
maintaining that life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to
maintain that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it. ‘What
is more immortal,’ he would cry, ‘than love and war? Type of all desire
and joy—beer. Type of all battle and conquest—skittles.’

“There was something in him of what the old world called the solemnity
of revels—when they spoke of ‘solemnizing’ a mere masquerade or wedding
banquet. Nevertheless he was not a mere pagan any more than he was a
mere practical joker. His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of
faith, in itself mystical, and even childlike and Christian.

“‘I don’t deny,’ he said, ‘that there should be priests to remind men
that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs
it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually
to remind men that they are not dead yet. The intellectuals among whom
I moved were not even alive enough to fear death. They hadn’t enough
blood in them to be cowards. Until a pistol barrel was poked under
their very noses they never even knew they had been born. For ages
looking up an eternal perspective it might be true that life is a
learning to die. But for these little white rats it was just as true
that death was their only chance of learning to live.’

“His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test; that he felt
it continually slipping from himself as much as from others. He had the
same pistol for himself, as Brutus said of the dagger. He continually
ran preposterous risks of high precipice or headlong speed to keep
alive the mere conviction that he was alive. He treasured up trivial
and yet insane details that had once reminded him of the awful
subconscious reality. When the don had hung on the stone gutter, the
sight of his long dangling legs, vibrating in the void like wings,
somehow awoke the naked satire of the old definition of man as a
two-legged animal without feathers. The wretched professor had been
brought into peril by his head, which he had so elaborately cultivated,
and only saved by his legs, which he had treated with coldness and
neglect. Smith could think of no other way of announcing or recording
this, except to send a telegram to an old friend (by this time a total
stranger) to say that he had just seen a man with two legs; and that
the man was alive.

“The uprush of his released optimism burst into stars like a rocket
when he suddenly fell in love. He happened to be shooting a high and
very headlong weir in a canoe, by way of proving to himself that he was
alive; and he soon found himself involved in some doubt about the
continuance of the fact. What was worse, he found he had equally
jeopardized a harmless lady alone in a rowing-boat, and one who had
provoked death by no professions of philosophic negation. He apologized
in wild gasps through all his wild wet labours to bring her to the
shore, and when he had done so at last, he seems to have proposed to
her on the bank. Anyhow, with the same impetuosity with which he had
nearly murdered her, he completely married her; and she was the lady in
green to whom I had recently said ‘good-night.’

“They had settled down in these high narrow houses near Highbury.
Perhaps, indeed, that is hardly the word. One could strictly say that
Smith was married, that he was very happily married, that he not only
did not care for any woman but his wife, but did not seem to care for
any place but his home; but perhaps one could hardly say that he had
settled down. ‘I am a very domestic fellow,’ he explained with gravity,
‘and have often come in through a broken window rather than be late for
tea.’

“He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep. He lost
his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at the door as a
total stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there and what kind of a
man he was. The London general servant is not used to the master
indulging in such transcendental ironies. And it was found impossible
to explain to her that he did it in order to feel the same interest in
his own affairs that he always felt in other people’s.

“‘I know there’s a fellow called Smith,’ he said in his rather weird
way, ‘living in one of the tall houses in this terrace. I know he is
really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.’

“Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a kind of
paralyzed politeness, like a young stranger struck with love at first
sight. Sometimes he would extend this poetic fear to the very
furniture; would seem to apologize to the chair he sat on, and climb
the staircase as cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the
sense of their skeleton of reality. Every stair is a ladder and every
stool a leg, he said. And at other times he would play the stranger
exactly in the opposite sense, and would enter by another way, so as to
feel like a thief and a robber. He would break and violate his own
home, as he had done with me that night. It was near morning before I
could tear myself from this queer confidence of the Man Who Would Not
Die, and as I shook hands with him on the doorstep the last load of fog
was lifting, and rifts of daylight revealed the stairway of irregular
street levels that looked like the end of the world.

“It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a night with a
maniac. What other term, it will be said, could be applied to such a
being? A man who reminds himself that he is married by pretending not
to be married! A man who tries to covet his own goods instead of his
neighbor’s! On this I have but one word to say, and I feel it of my
honour to say it, though no one understands. I believe the maniac was
one of those who do not merely come, but are sent; sent like a great
gale upon ships by Him who made His angels winds and His messengers a
flaming fire. This, at least, I know for certain. Whether such men have
laughed or wept, we have laughed at their laughter as much as at their
weeping. Whether they cursed or blessed the world, they have never
fitted it. It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great
satirist as if from the sting of an adder. But it is equally true that
men flee from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a
bear. Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction. For the
goodness of good things, like the badness of bad things, is a prodigy
past speech; it is to be pictured rather than spoken. We shall have
gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than the oldest
angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations, the
everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates and
loves the world.—I am, yours faithfully, “Raymond Percy.”

“Oh, ’oly, ’oly, ’oly!” said Mr. Moses Gould.

The instant he had spoken all the rest knew they had been in an almost
religious state of submission and assent. Something had bound them
together; something in the sacred tradition of the last two words of
the letter; something also in the touching and boyish embarrassment
with which Inglewood had read them— for he had all the thin-skinned
reverence of the agnostic. Moses Gould was as good a fellow in his way
as ever lived; far kinder to his family than more refined men of
pleasure, simple and steadfast in his admiration, a thoroughly
wholesome animal and a thoroughly genuine character. But wherever there
is conflict, crises come in which any soul, personal or racial,
unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its hundred faces.
English reverence, Irish mysticism, American idealism, looked up and
saw on the face of Moses a certain smile. It was that smile of the
Cynic Triumphant, which has been the tocsin for many a cruel riot in
Russian villages or mediaeval towns.

“Oh, ’oly, ’oly, ’oly!” said Moses Gould.

Finding that this was not well received, he explained further,
exuberance deepening on his dark exuberant features.

“Always fun to see a bloke swallow a wasp when ‘e’s corfin’ up a fly,”
he said pleasantly. “Don’t you see you’ve bunged up old Smith anyhow.
If this parson’s tale’s O.K.—why, Smith is ‘ot. ‘E’s pretty ‘ot. We
find him elopin’ with Miss Gray (best respects!) in a cab. Well, what
abart this Mrs. Smith the curate talks of, with her blarsted
shyness—transmigogrified into a blighted sharpness? Miss Gray ain’t
been very sharp, but I reckon she’ll be pretty shy.”

“Don’t be a brute,” growled Michael Moon.

None could lift their eyes to look at Mary; but Inglewood sent a glance
along the table at Innocent Smith. He was still bowed above his paper
toys, and a wrinkle was on his forehead that might have been worry or
shame. He carefully plucked out one corner of a complicated paper and
tucked it in elsewhere; then the wrinkle vanished and he looked
relieved.



Chapter III
The Round Road; or, the Desertion Charge


Pym rose with sincere embarrassment; for he was an American, and his
respect for ladies was real, and not at all scientific.

“Ignoring,” he said, “the delicate and considerable knightly protests
that have been called forth by my colleague’s native sense of oration,
and apologizing to all for whom our wild search for truth seems
unsuitable to the grand ruins of a feudal land, I still think my
colleague’s question by no means devoid of rel’vancy. The last charge
against the accused was one of burglary; the next charge on the paper
is of bigamy and desertion. It does without question appear that the
defence, in aspiring to rebut this last charge, have really admitted
the next. Either Innocent Smith is still under a charge of attempted
burglary, or else that is exploded; but he is pretty well fixed for
attempted bigamy. It all depends on what view we take of the alleged
letter from Curate Percy. Under these conditions I feel justified in
claiming my right to questions. May I ask how the defence got hold of
the letter from Curate Percy? Did it come direct from the prisoner?”

“We have had nothing direct from the prisoner,” said Moon quietly. “The
few documents which the defence guarantees came to us from another
quarter.”

“From what quarter?” asked Dr. Pym.

“If you insist,” answered Moon, “we had them from Miss Gray.”

“Dr. Cyrus Pym quite forgot to close his eyes, and, instead, opened
them very wide.

“Do you really mean to say,” he said, “that Miss Gray was in possession
of this document testifying to a previous Mrs. Smith?”

“Quite so,” said Inglewood, and sat down.

The doctor said something about infatuation in a low and painful voice,
and then with visible difficulty continued his opening remarks.

“Unfortunately the tragic truth revealed by Curate Percy’s narrative is
only too crushingly confirmed by other and shocking documents in our
own possession. Of these the principal and most certain is the
testimony of Innocent Smith’s gardener, who was present at the most
dramatic and eye-opening of his many acts of marital infidelity. Mr.
Gould, the gardener, please.”

Mr. Gould, with his tireless cheerfulness, arose to present the
gardener. That functionary explained that he had served Mr. and Mrs.
Innocent Smith when they had a little house on the edge of Croydon.
From the gardener’s tale, with its many small allusions, Inglewood grew
certain he had seen the place. It was one of those corners of town or
country that one does not forget, for it looked like a frontier. The
garden hung very high above the lane, and its end was steep and sharp,
like a fortress. Beyond was a roll of real country, with a white path
sprawling across it, and the roots, boles, and branches of great gray
trees writhing and twisting against the sky. But as if to assert that
the lane itself was suburban, were sharply relieved against that gray
and tossing upland a lamp-post painted a peculiar yellow-green and a
red pillar-box that stood exactly at the corner. Inglewood was sure of
the place; he had passed it twenty times in his constitutionals on the
bicycle; he had always dimly felt it was a place where something might
occur. But it gave him quite a shiver to feel that the face of his
frightful friend or enemy Smith might at any time have appeared over
the garden bushes above. The gardener’s account, unlike the curate’s,
was quite free from decorative adjectives, however many he may have
uttered privately when writing it. He simply said that on a particular
morning Mr. Smith came out and began to play about with a rake, as he
often did. Sometimes he would tickle the nose of his eldest child (he
had two children); sometimes he would hook the rake on to the branch of
a tree, and hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like those
of a giant frog in its final agony. Never, apparently, did he think of
putting the rake to any of its proper uses, and the gardener, in
consequence, treated his actions with coldness and brevity. But the
gardener was certain that on one particular morning in October he (the
gardener) had come round the corner of the house carrying the hose, had
seen Mr. Smith standing on the lawn in a striped red and white jacket
(which might have been his smoking-jacket, but was quite as like a part
of his pyjamas), and had heard him then and there call out to his wife,
who was looking out of the bedroom window on to the garden, these
decisive and very loud expressions—

“I won’t stay here any longer. I’ve got another wife and much better
children a long way from here. My other wife’s got redder hair than
yours, and my other garden’s got a much finer situation; and I’m going
off to them.”

With these words, apparently, he sent the rake flying far up into the
sky, higher than many could have shot an arrow, and caught it again.
Then he cleared the hedge at a leap and alighted on his feet down in
the lane below, and set off up the road without even a hat. Much of the
picture was doubtless supplied by Inglewood’s accidental memory of the
place. He could see with his mind’s eye that big bare-headed figure
with the ragged rake swaggering up the crooked woodland road, and
leaving lamp-post and pillar-box behind. But the gardener, on his own
account, was quite prepared to swear to the public confession of
bigamy, to the temporary disappearance of the rake in the sky, and the
final disappearance of the man up the road. Moreover, being a local
man, he could swear that, beyond some local rumours that Smith had
embarked on the south-eastern coast, nothing was known of him again.

This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by Michael Moon in the
few but clear phrases in which he opened the defence upon the third
charge. So far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and
disappeared on the Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on
his own account. “I hope you are not so insular,” he said, “that you
will not respect the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an
English gardener. By Mr. Inglewood’s favour we will hear the French
innkeeper.”

Before the company had decided the delicate point Inglewood was already
reading the account in question. It was in French. It seemed to them to
run something like this:—

“Sir,—Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin’s Cafe on the sea-front at Gras,
rather north of Dunquerque. I am willing to write all I know of the
stranger out of the sea.

“I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets. A man of sense looks for
beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful, such as a trim
flower-bed or an ivory statuette. One does not permit beauty to pervade
one’s whole life, just as one does not pave all the roads with ivory or
cover all the fields with geraniums. My faith, but we should miss the
onions!

“But whether I read things backwards through my memory, or whether
there are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science
cannot as yet pierce, it is the humiliating fact that on that
particular evening I felt like a poet—like any little rascal of a poet
who drinks absinthe in the mad Montmartre.

“Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green and bitter and
poisonous. I had never known it look so unfamiliar before. In the sky
was that early and stormy darkness that is so depressing to the mind,
and the wind blew shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk where
they sell the newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the shore. There
I saw a fishing-boat with a brown sail standing in silently from the
sea. It was already quite close, and out of it clambered a man of
monstrous stature, who came wading to shore with the water not up to
his knees, though it would have reached the hips of many men. He leaned
on a long rake or pole, which looked like a trident, and made him look
like a Triton. Wet as he was, and with strips of seaweed clinging to
him, he walked across to my cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside,
asked for cherry brandy, a liqueur which I keep, but is seldom
demanded. Then the monster, with great politeness, invited me to
partake of a vermouth before my dinner, and we fell into conversation.
He had apparently crossed from Kent by a small boat got at a private
bargain because of some odd fancy he had for passing promptly in an
easterly direction, and not waiting for any of the official boats. He
was, he somewhat vaguely explained, looking for a house. When I
naturally asked him where the house was, he answered that he did not
know; it was on an island; it was somewhere to the east; or, as he
expressed it with a hazy and yet impatient gesture, ‘over there.’

“I asked him how, if he did not know the place, he would know it when
he saw it. Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy, and became alarmingly
minute. He gave a description of the house detailed enough for an
auctioneer. I have forgotten nearly all the details except the last
two, which were that the lamp-post was painted green, and that there
was a red pillar-box at the corner.

“‘A red pillar-box!’ I cried in astonishment. ‘Why, the place must be
in England!’

“‘I had forgotten,’ he said, nodding heavily. ‘That is the island’s
name.’

“‘But, _nom du nom_,’ I cried testily, ‘you’ve just come from England,
my boy.’

“‘They SAID it was England,’ said my imbecile, conspiratorially. ‘They
said it was Kent. But Kentish men are such liars one can’t believe
anything they say.’

“‘Monsieur,’ I said, ‘you must pardon me. I am elderly, and the
_fumisteries_ of the young men are beyond me. I go by common sense, or,
at the largest, by that extension of applied common sense called
science.’

“‘Science!’ cried the stranger. ‘There is only one good thing science
ever discovered—a good thing, good tidings of great joy— that the world
is round.’

“I told him with civility that his words conveyed no impression to my
intelligence. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that going right round the world is
the shortest way to where you are already.’

“‘Is it not even shorter,’ I asked, ‘to stop where you are?’

“‘No, no, no!’ he cried emphatically. ‘That way is long and very weary.
At the end of the world, at the back of the dawn, I shall find the wife
I really married and the house that is really mine. And that house will
have a greener lamp-post and a redder pillar-box. Do you,’ he asked
with a sudden intensity, ‘do you never want to rush out of your house
in order to find it?’

“‘No, I think not,’ I replied; ‘reason tells a man from the first to
adapt his desires to the probable supply of life. I remain here,
content to fulfil the life of man. All my interests are here, and most
of my friends, and—’

“‘And yet,’ he cried, starting to his almost terrific height, ‘you made
the French Revolution!’

“‘Pardon me,’ I said, ‘I am not quite so elderly. A relative perhaps.’

“‘I mean your sort did!’ exclaimed this personage. ‘Yes, your damned
smug, settled, sensible sort made the French Revolution. Oh! I know
some say it was no good, and you’re just back where you were before.
Why, blast it all, that’s just where we all want to be—back where we
were before! That is revolution—going right round! Every revolution,
like a repentance, is a return.’

“He was so excited that I waited till he had taken his seat again, and
then said something indifferent and soothing; but he struck the tiny
table with his colossal fist and went on.

“‘I am going to have a revolution, not a French Revolution, but an
English Revolution. God has given to each tribe its own type of mutiny.
The Frenchmen march against the citadel of the city together; the
Englishman marches to the outskirts of the city, and alone. But I am
going to turn the world upside down, too. I’m going to turn myself
upside down. I’m going to walk upside down in the cursed upsidedownland
of the Antipodes, where trees and men hang head downward in the sky.
But my revolution, like yours, like the earth’s, will end up in the
holy, happy place— the celestial, incredible place—the place where we
were before.’

“With these remarks, which can scarcely be reconciled with reason, he
leapt from the seat and strode away into the twilight, swinging his
pole and leaving behind him an excessive payment, which also pointed to
some loss of mental balance. This is all I know of the episode of the
man landed from the fishing-boat, and I hope it may serve the interests
of justice.— Accept, Sir, the assurances of the very high
consideration, with which I have the honour to be your obedient
servant, “Jules Durobin.”

“The next document in our dossier,” continued Inglewood, “comes from
the town of Crazok, in the central plains of Russia, and runs as
follows:—

“Sir,—My name is Paul Nickolaiovitch: I am the stationmaster at the
station near Crazok. The great trains go by across the plains taking
people to China, but very few people get down at the platform where I
have to watch. This makes my life rather lonely, and I am thrown back
much upon the books I have. But I cannot discuss these very much with
my neighbours, for enlightened ideas have not spread in this part of
Russia so much as in other parts. Many of the peasants round here have
never heard of Bernard Shaw.

“I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread Liberal ideas; but since the
failure of the revolution this has been even more difficult. The
revolutionists committed many acts contrary to the pure principles of
humanitarianism, with which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books,
they were ill acquainted. I did not approve of these cruel acts, though
provoked by the tyranny of the government; but now there is a tendency
to reproach all Intelligents with the memory of them. This is very
unfortunate for Intelligents.

“It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a few trains came
through at long intervals, that I stood one day watching a train that
had come in. Only one person got out of the train, far away up at the
other end of it, for it was a very long train. It was evening, with a
cold, greenish sky. A little snow had fallen, but not enough to whiten
the plain, which stretched away a sort of sad purple in all directions,
save where the flat tops of some distant tablelands caught the evening
light like lakes. As the solitary man came stamping along on the thin
snow by the train he grew larger and larger; I thought I had never seen
so large a man. But he looked even taller than he was, I think, because
his shoulders were very big and his head comparatively little. From the
big shoulders hung a tattered old jacket, striped dull red and dirty
white, very thin for the winter, and one hand rested on a huge pole
such as peasants rake in weeds with to burn them.

“Before he had traversed the full length of the train he was entangled
in one of those knots of rowdies that were the embers of the extinct
revolution, though they mostly disgraced themselves upon the government
side. I was just moving to his assistance, when he whirled up his rake
and laid out right and left with such energy that he came through them
without scathe and strode right up to me, leaving them staggered and
really astonished.

“Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt an assertion of his aim, he
could only say rather dubiously in French that he wanted a house.

“‘There are not many houses to be had round here,’ I answered in the
same language, ‘the district has been very disturbed. A revolution, as
you know, has recently been suppressed. Any further building—’

“‘Oh! I don’t mean that,’ he cried; ‘I mean a real house—a live house.
It really is a live house, for it runs away from me.’

“‘I am ashamed to say that something in his phrase or gesture moved me
profoundly. We Russians are brought up in an atmosphere of folk-lore,
and its unfortunate effects can still be seen in the bright colours of
the children’s dolls and of the ikons. For an instant the idea of a
house running away from a man gave me pleasure, for the enlightenment
of man moves slowly.

“‘Have you no other house of your own?’ I asked.

“‘I have left it,’ he said very sadly. ‘It was not the house that grew
dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women,
and yet I could not feel it.’

“‘And so,’ I said with sympathy, ‘you walked straight out of the front
door, like a masculine Nora.’

“‘Nora?’ he inquired politely, apparently supposing it to be a Russian
word.

“‘I mean Nora in “The Doll’s House,”’ I replied.

“At this he looked very much astonished, and I knew he was an
Englishman; for Englishmen always think that Russians study nothing but
‘ukases.’

“‘"The Doll’s House”?’ he cried vehemently; ‘why, that is just where
Ibsen was so wrong! Why, the whole aim of a house is to be a doll’s
house. Don’t you remember, when you were a child, how those little
windows WERE windows, while the big windows weren’t. A child has a
doll’s house, and shrieks when a front door opens inwards. A banker has
a real house, yet how numerous are the bankers who fail to emit the
faintest shriek when their real front doors open inwards.’

“Something from the folk-lore of my infancy still kept me foolishly
silent; and before I could speak, the Englishman had leaned over and
was saying in a sort of loud whisper, ‘I have found out how to make a
big thing small. I have found out how to turn a house into a doll’s
house. Get a long way off it: God lets us turn all things into toys by
his great gift of distance. Once let me see my old brick house standing
up quite little against the horizon, and I shall want to go back to it
again. I shall see the funny little toy lamp-post painted green against
the gate, and all the dear little people like dolls looking out of the
window. For the windows really open in my doll’s house.’

“‘But why?’ I asked, ‘should you wish to return to that particular
doll’s house? Having taken, like Nora, the bold step against
convention, having made yourself in the conventional sense
disreputable, having dared to be free, why should you not take
advantage of your freedom? As the greatest modern writers have pointed
out, what you called your marriage was only your mood. You have a right
to leave it all behind, like the clippings of your hair or the parings
of your nails. Having once escaped, you have the world before you.
Though the words may seem strange to you, you are free in Russia.’

“He sat with his dreamy eyes on the dark circles of the plains, where
the only moving thing was the long and labouring trail of smoke out of
the railway engine, violet in tint, volcanic in outline, the one hot
and heavy cloud of that cold clear evening of pale green.

“‘Yes,’ he said with a huge sigh, ‘I am free in Russia. You are right.
I could really walk into that town over there and have love all over
again, and perhaps marry some beautiful woman and begin again, and
nobody could ever find me. Yes, you have certainly convinced me of
something.’

“His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled to ask him
what he meant, and of what exactly I had convinced him.

“‘You have convinced me,’ he said with the same dreamy eye, ‘why it is
really wicked and dangerous for a man to run away from his wife.’

“‘And why is it dangerous?’ I inquired.

“‘Why, because nobody can find him,’ answered this odd person, ‘and we
all want to be found.’

“‘The most original modern thinkers,’ I remarked, ‘Ibsen, Gorki,
Nietzsche, Shaw, would all rather say that what we want most is to be
lost: to find ourselves in untrodden paths, and to do unprecedented
things: to break with the past and belong to the future.’

“He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and looked round on
what was, I confess, a somewhat desolate scene—the dark purple plains,
the neglected railroad, the few ragged knots of malcontents. ‘I shall
not find the house here,’ he said. ‘It is still eastward— further and
further eastward.’

“Then he turned upon me with something like fury, and struck the foot
of his pole upon the frozen earth.

“‘And if I do go back to my country,’ he cried, ‘I may be locked up in
a madhouse before I reach my own house. I have been a bit
unconventional in my time! Why, Nietzsche stood in a row of ramrods in
the silly old Prussian army, and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the
suburbs; but the things I do are unprecedented things. This round road
I am treading is an untrodden path. I do believe in breaking out; I am
a revolutionist. But don’t you see that all these real leaps and
destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden— to
something we have had, to something we at least have heard of? Don’t
you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order to get
HOME?’

“‘No,’ I answered after due reflection, ‘I don’t think I should accept
that.’

“‘Ah,’ he said with a sort of a sigh, ‘then you have explained a second
thing to me.’

“‘What do you mean?’ I asked; ‘what thing?’

“‘Why your revolution has failed,’ he said; and walking across quite
suddenly to the train he got into it just as it was steaming away at
last. And as I saw the long snaky tail of it disappear along the
darkening flats.

“I saw no more of him. But though his views were adverse to the best
advanced thought, he struck me as an interesting person: I should like
to find out if he has produced any literary works.—Yours, etc., “Paul
Nickolaiovitch.”

There was something in this odd set of glimpses into foreign lives
which kept the absurd tribunal quieter than it had hitherto been, and
it was again without interruption that Inglewood opened another paper
upon his pile. “The Court will be indulgent,” he said, “if the next
note lacks the special ceremonies of our letter-writing. It is
ceremonious enough in its own way:—

“The Celestial Principles are permanent: Greeting.—I am Wong-Hi, and I
tend the temple of all the ancestors of my family in the forest of Fu.
The man that broke through the sky and came to me said that it must be
very dull, but I showed him the wrongness of his thought. I am indeed
in one place, for my uncle took me to this temple when I was a boy, and
in this I shall doubtless die. But if a man remain in one place he
shall see that the place changes. The pagoda of my temple stands up
silently out of all the trees, like a yellow pagoda above many green
pagodas. But the skies are sometimes blue like porcelain, and sometimes
green like jade, and sometimes red like garnet. But the night is always
ebony and always returns, said the Emperor Ho.

“The sky-breaker came at evening very suddenly, for I had hardly seen
any stirring in the tops of the green trees over which I look as over a
sea, when I go to the top of the temple at morning. And yet when he
came, it was as if an elephant had strayed from the armies of the great
kings of India. For palms snapped, and bamboos broke, and there came
forth in the sunshine before the temple one taller than the sons of
men.

“Strips of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a carnival, and
he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it like the teeth of a dragon.
His face was white and discomposed, after the fashion of the
foreigners, so that they look like dead men filled with devils; and he
spoke our speech brokenly.

“He said to me, ‘This is only a temple; I am trying to find a house.’
And then he told me with indelicate haste that the lamp outside his
house was green, and that there was a red post at the corner of it.

“‘I have not seen your house nor any houses,’ I answered. ‘I dwell in
this temple and serve the gods.’

“‘Do you believe in the gods?’ he asked with hunger in his eyes, like
the hunger of dogs. And this seemed to me a strange question to ask,
for what should a man do except what men have done?

“‘My Lord,’ I said, ‘it must be good for men to hold up their hands
even if the skies are empty. For if there are gods, they will be
pleased, and if there are none, then there are none to be displeased.
Sometimes the skies are gold and sometimes porphyry and sometimes
ebony, but the trees and the temple stand still under it all. So the
great Confucius taught us that if we do always the same things with our
hands and our feet as do the wise beasts and birds, with our heads we
may think many things: yes, my Lord, and doubt many things. So long as
men offer rice at the right season, and kindle lanterns at the right
hour, it matters little whether there be gods or no. For these things
are not to appease gods, but to appease men.’

“He came yet closer to me, so that he seemed enormous; yet his look was
very gentle.

“‘Break your temple,’ he said, ‘and your gods will be freed.’

“And I, smiling at his simplicity, answered: ‘And so, if there be no
gods, I shall have nothing but a broken temple.’

“And at this, that giant from whom the light of reason was withheld
threw out his mighty arms and asked me to forgive him. And when I asked
him for what he should be forgiven he answered: ‘For being right.’

“‘Your idols and emperors are so old and wise and satisfying,’ he
cried, ‘it is a shame that they should be wrong. We are so vulgar and
violent, we have done you so many iniquities— it is a shame we should
be right after all.’

“And I, still enduring his harmlessness, asked him why he thought that
he and his people were right.

“And he answered: ‘We are right because we are bound where men should
be bound, and free where men should be free. We are right because we
doubt and destroy laws and customs— but we do not doubt our own right
to destroy them. For you live by customs, but we live by creeds. Behold
me! In my country I am called Smip. My country is abandoned, my name is
defiled, because I pursue around the world what really belongs to me.
You are steadfast as the trees because you do not believe. I am as
fickle as the tempest because I do believe. I do believe in my own
house, which I shall find again. And at the last remaineth the green
lantern and the red post.’

“I said to him: ‘At the last remaineth only wisdom.’

“But even as I said the word he uttered a horrible shout, and rushing
forward disappeared among the trees. I have not seen this man again nor
any other man. The virtues of the wise are of fine brass. “Wong-Hi.”

“The next letter I have to read,” proceeded Arthur Inglewood, “will
probably make clear the nature of our client’s curious but innocent
experiment. It is dated from a mountain village in California, and runs
as follows:—

“Sir,—A person answering to the rather extraordinary description
required certainly went, some time ago, over the high pass of the
Sierras on which I live and of which I am probably the sole stationary
inhabitant. I keep a rudimentary tavern, rather ruder than a hut, on
the very top of this specially steep and threatening pass. My name is
Louis Hara, and the very name may puzzle you about my nationality.
Well, it puzzles me a great deal. When one has been for fifteen years
without society it is hard to have patriotism; and where there is not
even a hamlet it is difficult to invent a nation. My father was an
Irishman of the fiercest and most free-shooting of the old Californian
kind. My mother was a Spaniard, proud of descent from the old Spanish
families round San Francisco, yet accused for all that of some
admixture of Red Indian blood. I was well educated and fond of music
and books. But, like many other hybrids, I was too good or too bad for
the world; and after attempting many things I was glad enough to get a
sufficient though a lonely living in this little cabaret in the
mountains. In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of a savage.
Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a Red Indian, I wore in
hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers, with a great straw
hat as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun. I had a bowie knife
at my belt and a long gun under my arm; and I dare say I produced a
pretty wild impression on the few peaceable travellers that could climb
up to my place. But I promise you I never looked as mad as that man
did. Compared with him I was Fifth Avenue.

“I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd
effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as
peaks coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven
itself. Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles;
cliffs so tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as
sea-crags collect a mere glitter of phosphorous. These terraces and
towers of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the end of the
world. Rather they seem to be its awful beginning: its huge
foundations. We could almost fancy the mountain branching out above us
like a tree of stone, and carrying all those cosmic lights like a
candelabrum. For just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far,
so the stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near. The
spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at the earth than
planets circling placidly about it.

“All this may have driven me mad; I am not sure. I know there is one
angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little, and
on windy nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks—
yes, city against city and citadel against citadel, far up into the
night. It was on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the
pass. Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up the pass. But
I had never seen one like this one before.

“He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated garden rake,
all bearded and bedraggled with grasses, so that it looked like the
ensign of some old barbarian tribe. His hair, which was as long and
rank as the grass, hung down below his huge shoulders; and such clothes
as clung about him were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he
had the air of being dressed like an Indian in feathers or autumn
leaves. The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it was, he used sometimes as
an alpenstock, sometimes (I was told) as a weapon. I do not know why he
should have used it as a weapon, for he had, and afterwards showed me,
an excellent six-shooter in his pocket. ‘But THAT,’ he said, ‘I use
only for peaceful purposes.’ I have no notion what he meant.

“He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank some wine from
the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy over it like one who had
travelled long among alien, cruel things and found at last something
that he knew. Then he sat staring rather foolishly at the rude lantern
of lead and coloured glass that hangs over my door. It is old, but of
no value; my grandmother gave it to me long ago: she was devout, and it
happens that the glass is painted with a crude picture of Bethlehem and
the Wise Men and the Star. He seemed so mesmerized with the transparent
glow of Our Lady’s blue gown and the big gold star behind, that he led
me also to look at the thing, which I had not done for fourteen years.

“Then he slowly withdrew his eyes from this and looked out eastward
where the road fell away below us. The sunset sky was a vault of rich
velvet, fading away into mauve and silver round the edges of the dark
mountain amphitheatre; and between us and the ravine below rose up out
of the deeps and went up into the heights the straight solitary rock we
call Green Finger. Of a queer volcanic colour, and wrinkled all over
with what looks undecipherable writing, it hung there like a Babylonian
pillar or needle.

“The man silently stretched out his rake in that direction, and before
he spoke I knew what he meant. Beyond the great green rock in the
purple sky hung a single star.

“‘A star in the east,’ he said in a strange hoarse voice like one of
our ancient eagles’. ‘The wise men followed the star and found the
house. But if I followed the star, should I find the house?’

“‘It depends perhaps,’ I said, smiling, ‘on whether you are a wise
man.’ I refrained from adding that he certainly didn’t look it.

“‘You may judge for yourself,’ he answered. ‘I am a man who left his
own house because he could no longer bear to be away from it.’

“‘It certainly sounds paradoxical,’ I said.

“‘I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving about the
room,’ he continued, ‘and all the time I knew they were walking and
talking in another house thousands of miles away, under the light of
different skies, and beyond the series of the seas. I loved them with a
devouring love, because they seemed not only distant but unattainable.
Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable: but I seemed
like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet for a
testimony. Nay, I did more. I spurned the world under my feet so that
it swung full circle like a treadmill.’

“‘Do you really mean,’ I cried, ‘that you have come right round the
world? Your speech is English, yet you are coming from the west.’

“‘My pilgrimage is not yet accomplished,’ he replied sadly. ‘I have
become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.’

“Something in the word ‘pilgrim’ awoke down in the roots of my ruinous
experience memories of what my fathers had felt about the world, and of
something from whence I came. I looked again at the little pictured
lantern at which I had not looked for fourteen years.

“‘My grandmother,’ I said in a low tone, ‘would have said that we were
all in exile, and that no earthly house could cure the holy
home-sickness that forbids us rest.’

“He was silent a long while, and watched a single eagle drift out
beyond the Green Finger into the darkening void.

“Then he said, ‘I think your grandmother was right,’ and stood up
leaning on his grassy pole. ‘I think that must be the reason,’ he
said—‘the secret of this life of man, so ecstatic and so unappeased.
But I think there is more to be said. I think God has given us the love
of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good
reason.’

“‘I dare say,’ I said. ‘What reason?’

“‘Because otherwise,’ he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the
abyss, ‘we might worship that.’

“‘What do you mean?’ I demanded.

“‘Eternity,’ he said in his harsh voice, ‘the largest of the idols— the
mightiest of the rivals of God.’

“‘You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,’ I suggested.

“‘I mean,’ he said with increasing vehemence, ‘that if there be a house
for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge, or
something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post and a
hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all
things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a
witness against all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise
is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I
would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real
green lamp-post after all.’

“With which he shouldered his pole and went striding down the perilous
paths below, and left me alone with the eagles. But since he went a
fever of homelessness will often shake me. I am troubled by rainy
meadows and mud cabins that I have never seen; and I wonder whether
America will endure.— Yours faithfully, Louis Hara.”

After a short silence Inglewood said: “And, finally, we desire to put
in as evidence the following document:—

“This is to say that I am Ruth Davis, and have been housemaid to Mrs.
I. Smith at ‘The Laurels’ in Croydon for the last six months. When I
came the lady was alone, with two children; she was not a widow, but
her husband was away. She was left with plenty of money and did not
seem disturbed about him, though she often hoped he would be back soon.
She said he was rather eccentric and a little change did him good. One
evening last week I was bringing the tea-things out on to the lawn when
I nearly dropped them. The end of a long rake was suddenly stuck over
the hedge, and planted like a jumping-pole; and over the hedge, just
like a monkey on a stick, came a huge, horrible man, all hairy and
ragged like Robinson Crusoe. I screamed out, but my mistress didn’t
even get out of her chair, but smiled and said he wanted shaving. Then
he sat down quite calmly at the garden table and took a cup of tea, and
then I realized that this must be Mr. Smith himself. He has stopped
here ever since and does not really give much trouble, though I
sometimes fancy he is a little weak in his head. “Ruth Davis.

“P.S.—I forgot to say that he looked round at the garden and said, very
loud and strong: ‘Oh, what a lovely place you’ve got;’ just as if he’d
never seen it before.”

The room had been growing dark and drowsy; the afternoon sun sent one
heavy shaft of powdered gold across it, which fell with an intangible
solemnity upon the empty seat of Mary Gray, for the younger women had
left the court before the more recent of the investigations. Mrs. Duke
was still asleep, and Innocent Smith, looking like a large hunchback in
the twilight, was bending closer and closer to his paper toys. But the
five men really engaged in the controversy, and concerned not to
convince the tribunal but to convince each other, still sat round the
table like the Committee of Public Safety.

Suddenly Moses Gould banged one big scientific book on top of another,
cocked his little legs up against the table, tipped his chair backwards
so far as to be in direct danger of falling over, emitted a startling
and prolonged whistle like a steam engine, and asserted that it was all
his eye.

When asked by Moon what was all his eye, he banged down behind the
books again and answered with considerable excitement, throwing his
papers about. “All those fairy-tales you’ve been reading out,” he said.
“Oh! don’t talk to me! I ain’t littery and that, but I know fairy-tales
when I hear ’em. I got a bit stumped in some of the philosophical bits
and felt inclined to go out for a B. and S. But we’re living in West
‘Ampstead and not in ‘Ell; and the long and the short of it is that
some things ‘appen and some things don’t ‘appen. Those are the things
that don’t ‘appen.”

“I thought,” said Moon gravely, “that we quite clearly explained—”

“Oh yes, old chap, you quite clearly explained,” assented Mr. Gould
with extraordinary volubility. “You’d explain an elephant off the
doorstep, you would. I ain’t a clever chap like you; but I ain’t a born
natural, Michael Moon, and when there’s an elephant on my doorstep I
don’t listen to no explanations. ‘It’s got a trunk,’ I says.—‘My
trunk,’ you says: ‘I’m fond of travellin’, and a change does me
good.’—‘But the blasted thing’s got tusks,’ I says.—‘Don’t look a gift
‘orse in the mouth,’ you says, ‘but thank the goodness and the graice
that on your birth ‘as smiled.’—‘But it’s nearly as big as the ‘ouse,’
I says.—‘That’s the bloomin’ perspective,’ you says, ‘and the sacred
magic of distance.’—‘Why, the elephant’s trumpetin’ like the Day of
Judgement,’ I says.—‘That’s your own conscience a-talking to you, Moses
Gould,’ you says in a grive and tender voice. Well, I ’ave got a
conscience as much as you. I don’t believe most of the things they tell
you in church on Sundays; and I don’t believe these ‘ere things any
more because you goes on about ’em as if you was in church. I believe
an elephant’s a great big ugly dingerous beast— and I believe Smith’s
another.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked Inglewood, “that you still doubt the
evidence of exculpation we have brought forward?”

“Yes, I do still doubt it,” said Gould warmly. “It’s all a bit too
far-fetched, and some of it a bit too far off. ’Ow can we test all
those tales? ’Ow can we drop in and buy the ‘Pink ’Un’ at the railway
station at Kosky Wosky or whatever it was? ‘Ow can we go and do a
gargle at the saloon-bar on top of the Sierra Mountains? But anybody
can go and see Bunting’s boarding-house at Worthing.”

Moon regarded him with an expression of real or assumed surprise.

“Any one,” continued Gould, “can call on Mr. Trip.”

“It is a comforting thought,” replied Michael with restraint; “but why
should any one call on Mr. Trip?”

“For just exactly the sime reason,” cried the excited Moses, hammering
on the table with both hands, “for just exactly the sime reason that he
should communicate with Messrs. ‘Anbury and Bootle of Paternoster Row
and with Miss Gridley’s ‘igh class Academy at ‘Endon, and with old Lady
Bullingdon who lives at Penge.”

“Again, to go at once to the moral roots of life,” said Michael, “why
is it among the duties of man to communicate with old Lady Bullingdon
who lives at Penge?”

“It ain’t one of the duties of man,” said Gould, “nor one of his
pleasures, either, I can tell you. She takes the crumpet, does Lady
Bullingdon at Penge. But it’s one of the duties of a prosecutor
pursuin’ the innocent, blameless butterfly career of your friend Smith,
and it’s the sime with all the others I mentioned.”

“But why do you bring in these people here?” asked Inglewood.

“Why! Because we’ve got proof enough to sink a steamboat,” roared
Moses; “because I’ve got the papers in my very ‘and; because your
precious Innocent is a blackguard and ‘ome smasher, and these are the
‘omes he’s smashed. I don’t set up for a ’oly man; but I wouldn’t ’ave
all those poor girls on my conscience for something. And I think a chap
that’s capable of deserting and perhaps killing ’em all is about
capable of cracking a crib or shootin’ an old schoolmaster—so I don’t
care much about the other yarns one way or another.”

“I think,” said Dr. Cyrus Pym with a refined cough, “that we are
approaching this matter rather irregularly. This is really the fourth
charge on the charge sheet, and perhaps I had better put it before you
in an ordered and scientific manner.”

Nothing but a faint groan from Michael broke the silence of the
darkening room.



Chapter IV
The Wild Weddings; or, the Polygamy Charge


“A modern man,” said Dr. Cyrus Pym, “must, if he be thoughtful,
approach the problem of marriage with some caution. Marriage is a
stage—doubtless a suitable stage—in the long advance of mankind towards
a goal which we cannot as yet conceive; which we are not, perhaps, as
yet fitted even to desire. What, gentlemen, is the ethical position of
marriage? Have we outlived it?”

“Outlived it?” broke out Moon; “why, nobody’s ever survived it! Look at
all the people married since Adam and Eve—and all as dead as mutton.”

“This is no doubt an inter-pellation joc’lar in its character,” said
Dr. Pym frigidly. “I cannot tell what may be Mr. Moon’s matured and
ethical view of marriage—”

“I can tell,” said Michael savagely, out of the gloom. “Marriage is a
duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.”

“Michael,” said Arthur Inglewood in a low voice, “you MUST keep quiet.”

“Mr. Moon,” said Pym with exquisite good temper, “probably regards the
institution in a more antiquated manner. Probably he would make it
stringent and uniform. He would treat divorce in some great soul of
steel—the divorce of a Julius Caesar or of a Salt Ring Robinson—
exactly as he would treat some no-account tramp or labourer who scoots
from his wife. Science has views broader and more humane. Just as
murder for the scientist is a thirst for absolute destruction, just as
theft for the scientist is a hunger for monotonous acquisition, so
polygamy for the scientist is an extreme development of the instinct
for variety. A man thus afflicted is incapable of constancy. Doubtless
there is a physical cause for this flitting from flower to flower— as
there is, doubtless, for the intermittent groaning which appears to
afflict Mr. Moon at the present moment. Our own world-scorning
Winterbottom has even dared to say, ‘For a certain rare and fine
physical type polygamy is but the realization of the variety of
females, as comradeship is the realization of the variety of males.’ In
any case, the type that tends to variety is recognized by all
authoritative inquirers. Such a type, if the widower of a negress, does
in many ascertained cases espouse _en seconde noces_ an albino; such a
type, when freed from the gigantic embraces of a female Patagonian,
will often evolve from its own imaginative instinct the consoling
figure of an Eskimo. To such a type there can be no doubt that the
prisoner belongs. If blind doom and unbearable temptation constitute
any slight excuse for a man, there is no doubt that he has these
excuses.

“Earlier in the inquiry the defence showed real chivalric ideality in
admitting half of our story without further dispute. We should like to
acknowledge and imitate so eminently large-hearted a style by conceding
also that the story told by Curate Percy about the canoe, the weir, and
the young wife seems to be substantially true. Apparently Smith did
marry a young woman he had nearly run down in a boat; it only remains
to be considered whether it would not have been kinder of him to have
murdered her instead of marrying her. In confirmation of this fact I
can now con-cede to the defence an unquestionable record of such a
marriage.”

So saying, he handed across to Michael a cutting from the “Maidenhead
Gazette” which distinctly recorded the marriage of the daughter of a
“coach,” a tutor well known in the place, to Mr. Innocent Smith, late
of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.

When Dr. Pym resumed it was realized that his face had grown at once
both tragic and triumphant.

“I pause upon this pre-liminary fact,” he said seriously, “because this
fact alone would give us the victory, were we aspiring after victory
and not after truth. As far as the personal and domestic problem holds
us, that problem is solved. Dr. Warner and I entered this house at an
instant of highly emotional diff’culty. England’s Warner has entered
many houses to save human kind from sickness; this time he entered to
save an innocent lady from a walking pestilence. Smith was just about
to carry away a young girl from this house; his cab and bag were at the
very door. He had told her she was going to await the marriage license
at the house of his aunt. That aunt,” continued Cyrus Pym, his face
darkening grandly—“that visionary aunt had been the dancing
will-o’-the-wisp who had led many a high-souled maiden to her doom.
Into how many virginal ears has he whispered that holy word? When he
said ‘aunt’ there glowed about her all the merriment and high morality
of the Anglo-Saxon home. Kettles began to hum, pussy cats to purr, in
that very wild cab that was being driven to destruction.”

Inglewood looked up, to find, to his astonishment (as many another
denizen of the eastern hemisphere has found), that the American was not
only perfectly serious, but was really eloquent and affecting— when the
difference of the hemispheres was adjusted.

“It is therefore atrociously evident that the man Smith has at least
represented himself to one innocent female of this house as an eligible
bachelor, being, in fact, a married man. I agree with my colleague, Mr.
Gould, that no other crime could approximate to this. As to whether
what our ancestors called purity has any ultimate ethical value indeed,
science hesitates with a high, proud hesitation. But what hesitation
can there be about the baseness of a citizen who ventures, by brutal
experiments upon living females, to anticipate the verdict of science
on such a point?

“The woman mentioned by Curate Percy as living with Smith in Highbury
may or may not be the same as the lady he married in Maidenhead. If one
short sweet spell of constancy and heart repose interrupted the
plunging torrent of his profligate life, we will not deprive him of
that long past possibility. After that conjectural date, alas, he seems
to have plunged deeper and deeper into the shaking quagmires of
infidelity and shame.”

Dr. Pym closed his eyes, but the unfortunate fact that there was no
more light left this familiar signal without its full and proper moral
effect. After a pause, which almost partook of the character of prayer,
he continued.

“The first instance of the accused’s repeated and irregular nuptials,”
he exclaimed, “comes from Lady Bullingdon, who expresses herself with
the high haughtiness which must be excused in those who look out upon
all mankind from the turrets of a Norman and ancestral keep. The
communication she has sent to us runs as follows:—

“Lady Bullingdon recalls the painful incident to which reference is
made, and has no desire to deal with it in detail. The girl Polly Green
was a perfectly adequate dressmaker, and lived in the village for about
two years. Her unattached condition was bad for her as well as for the
general morality of the village. Lady Bullingdon, therefore, allowed it
to be understood that she favoured the marriage of the young woman. The
villagers, naturally wishing to oblige Lady Bullingdon, came forward in
several cases; and all would have been well had it not been for the
deplorable eccentricity or depravity of the girl Green herself. Lady
Bullingdon supposes that where there is a village there must be a
village idiot, and in her village, it seems, there was one of these
wretched creatures. Lady Bullingdon only saw him once, and she is quite
aware that it is really difficult to distinguish between actual idiots
and the ordinary heavy type of the rural lower classes. She noticed,
however, the startling smallness of his head in comparison to the rest
of his body; and, indeed, the fact of his having appeared upon election
day wearing the rosette of both the two opposing parties appears to
Lady Bullingdon to put the matter quite beyond doubt. Lady Bullingdon
was astounded to learn that this afflicted being had put himself
forward as one of the suitors of the girl in question. Lady
Bullingdon’s nephew interviewed the wretch upon the point, telling him
that he was a ‘donkey’ to dream of such a thing, and actually received,
along with an imbecile grin, the answer that donkeys generally go after
carrots. But Lady Bullingdon was yet further amazed to find the unhappy
girl inclined to accept this monstrous proposal, though she was
actually asked in marriage by Garth, the undertaker, a man in a far
superior position to her own. Lady Bullingdon could not, of course,
countenance such an arrangement for a moment, and the two unhappy
persons escaped for a clandestine marriage. Lady Bullingdon cannot
exactly recall the man’s name, but thinks it was Smith. He was always
called in the village the Innocent. Later, Lady Bullingdon believes he
murdered Green in a mental outbreak.”

“The next communication,” proceeded Pym, “is more conspicuous for
brevity, but I am of the opinion that it will adequately convey the
upshot. It is dated from the offices of Messrs. Hanbury and Bootle,
publishers, and is as follows:—

“Sir,—Yrs. rcd. and conts. noted. Rumour re typewriter possibly refers
to a Miss Blake or similar name, left here nine years ago to marry an
organ-grinder. Case was undoubtedly curious, and attracted police
attention. Girl worked excellently till about Oct. 1907, when
apparently went mad. Record was written at the time, part of which I
enclose.— Yrs., etc., W. Trip.

“The fuller statement runs as follows:—

“On October 12 a letter was sent from this office to Messrs. Bernard
and Juke, bookbinders. Opened by Mr. Juke, it was found to contain the
following: ‘Sir, our Mr. Trip will call at 3, as we wish to know
whether it is really decided 00000073bb!!!!!xy.’ To this Mr. Juke, a
person of a playful mind, returned the answer: ‘Sir, I am in a position
to give it as my most decided opinion that it is not really decided
that 00000073bb!!!!!xy. Yrs., etc., ‘J. Juke.’

“On receiving this extraordinary reply, our Mr. Trip asked for the
original letter sent from him, and found that the typewriter had indeed
substituted these demented hieroglyphics for the sentences really
dictated to her. Our Mr. Trip interviewed the girl, fearing that she
was in an unbalanced state, and was not much reassured when she merely
remarked that she always went like that when she heard the barrel
organ. Becoming yet more hysterical and extravagant, she made a series
of most improbable statements—as, that she was engaged to the
barrel-organ man, that he was in the habit of serenading her on that
instrument, that she was in the habit of playing back to him upon the
typewriter (in the style of King Richard and Blondel), and that the
organ man’s musical ear was so exquisite and his adoration of herself
so ardent that he could detect the note of the different letters on the
machine, and was enraptured by them as by a melody. To all these
statements of course our Mr. Trip and the rest of us only paid that
sort of assent that is paid to persons who must as quickly as possible
be put in the charge of their relations. But on our conducting the lady
downstairs, her story received the most startling and even exasperating
confirmation; for the organ-grinder, an enormous man with a small head
and manifestly a fellow-lunatic, had pushed his barrel organ in at the
office doors like a battering-ram, and was boisterously demanding his
alleged _fiancée_. When I myself came on the scene he was flinging his
great, ape-like arms about and reciting a poem to her. But we were used
to lunatics coming and reciting poems in our office, and we were not
quite prepared for what followed. The actual verse he uttered began, I
think,

‘O vivid, inviolate head,
Ringed—’


but he never got any further. Mr. Trip made a sharp movement towards
him, and the next moment the giant picked up the poor lady typewriter
like a doll, sat her on top of the organ, ran it with a crash out of
the office doors, and raced away down the street like a flying
wheelbarrow. I put the police upon the matter; but no trace of the
amazing pair could be found. I was sorry myself; for the lady was not
only pleasant but unusually cultivated for her position. As I am
leaving the service of Messrs. Hanbury and Bootle, I put these things
in a record and leave it with them. (Signed) Aubrey Clarke, Publishers’
Reader.

“And the last document,” said Dr. Pym complacently, “is from one of
those high-souled women who have in this age introduced your English
girlhood to hockey, the higher mathematics, and every form of ideality.

“Dear Sir (she writes),—I have no objection to telling you the facts
about the absurd incident you mention; though I would ask you to
communicate them with some caution, for such things, however
entertaining in the abstract, are not always auxiliary to the success
of a girls’ school. The truth is this: I wanted some one to deliver a
lecture on a philological or historical question—a lecture which, while
containing solid educational matter, should be a little more popular
and entertaining than usual, as it was the last lecture of the term. I
remembered that a Mr. Smith of Cambridge had written somewhere or other
an amusing essay about his own somewhat ubiquitous name— an essay which
showed considerable knowledge of genealogy and topography. I wrote to
him, asking if he would come and give us a bright address upon English
surnames; and he did. It was very bright, almost too bright. To put the
matter otherwise, by the time that he was halfway through it became
apparent to the other mistresses and myself that the man was totally
and entirely off his head. He began rationally enough by dealing with
the two departments of place names and trade names, and he said (quite
rightly, I dare say) that the loss of all significance in names was an
instance of the deadening of civilization. But then he went on calmly
to maintain that every man who had a place name ought to go to live in
that place, and that every man who had a trade name ought instantly to
adopt that trade; that people named after colours should always dress
in those colours, and that people named after trees or plants (such as
Beech or Rose) ought to surround and decorate themselves with these
vegetables. In a slight discussion that arose afterwards among the
elder girls the difficulties of the proposal were clearly, and even
eagerly, pointed out. It was urged, for instance, by Miss Younghusband
that it was substantially impossible for her to play the part assigned
to her; Miss Mann was in a similar dilemma, from which no modern views
on the sexes could apparently extricate her; and some young ladies,
whose surnames happened to be Low, Coward, and Craven, were quite
enthusiastic against the idea. But all this happened afterwards. What
happened at the crucial moment was that the lecturer produced several
horseshoes and a large iron hammer from his bag, announced his
immediate intention of setting up a smithy in the neighbourhood, and
called on every one to rise in the same cause as for a heroic
revolution. The other mistresses and I attempted to stop the wretched
man, but I must confess that by an accident this very intercession
produced the worst explosion of his insanity. He was waving the hammer,
and wildly demanding the names of everybody; and it so happened that
Miss Brown, one of the younger teachers, was wearing a brown dress—a
reddish-brown dress that went quietly enough with the warmer colour of
her hair, as well she knew. She was a nice girl, and nice girls do know
about those things. But when our maniac discovered that we really had a
Miss Brown who WAS brown, his _idée fixe_ blew up like a powder
magazine, and there, in the presence of all the mistresses and girls,
he publicly proposed to the lady in the red-brown dress. You can
imagine the effect of such a scene at a girls’ school. At least, if you
fail to imagine it, I certainly fail to describe it.

“Of course, the anarchy died down in a week or two, and I can think of
it now as a joke. There was only one curious detail, which I will tell
you, as you say your inquiry is vital; but I should desire you to
consider it a little more confidential than the rest. Miss Brown, who
was an excellent girl in every way, did quite suddenly and
surreptitiously leave us only a day or two afterwards. I should never
have thought that her head would be the one to be really turned by so
absurd an excitement.—Believe me, yours faithfully, Ada Gridley.

“I think,” said Pym, with a really convincing simplicity and
seriousness, “that these letters speak for themselves.”

Mr. Moon rose for the last time in a darkness that gave no hint of
whether his native gravity was mixed with his native irony.

“Throughout this inquiry,” he said, “but especially in this its closing
phase, the prosecution has perpetually relied upon one argument; I mean
the fact that no one knows what has become of all the unhappy women
apparently seduced by Smith. There is no sort of proof that they were
murdered, but that implication is perpetually made when the question is
asked as to how they died. Now I am not interested in how they died, or
when they died, or whether they died. But I am interested in another
analogous question—that of how they were born, and when they were born,
and whether they were born. Do not misunderstand me. I do not dispute
the existence of these women, or the veracity of those who have
witnessed to them. I merely remark on the notable fact that only one of
these victims, the Maidenhead girl, is described as having any home or
parents. All the rest are boarders or birds of passage—a guest, a
solitary dressmaker, a bachelor-girl doing typewriting. Lady
Bullingdon, looking from her turrets, which she bought from the
Whartons with the old soap-boiler’s money when she jumped at marrying
an unsuccessful gentleman from Ulster—Lady Bullingdon, looking out from
those turrets, did really see an object which she describes as Green.
Mr. Trip, of Hanbury and Bootle, really did have a typewriter betrothed
to Smith. Miss Gridley, though idealistic, is absolutely honest. She
did house, feed, and teach a young woman whom Smith succeeded in
decoying away. We admit that all these women really lived. But we still
ask whether they were ever born?”

“Oh, crikey!” said Moses Gould, stifled with amusement.

“There could hardly,” interposed Pym with a quiet smile, “be a better
instance of the neglect of true scientific process. The scientist, when
once convinced of the fact of vitality and consciousness, would infer
from these the previous process of generation.”

“If these gals,” said Gould impatiently—“if these gals were all alive
(all alive O!) I’d chance a fiver they were all born.”

“You’d lose your fiver,” said Michael, speaking gravely out of the
gloom. “All those admirable ladies were alive. They were more alive for
having come into contact with Smith. They were all quite definitely
alive, but only one of them was ever born.”

“Are you asking us to believe—” began Dr. Pym.

“I am asking you a second question,” said Moon sternly. “Can the court
now sitting throw any light on a truly singular circumstance? Dr. Pym,
in his interesting lecture on what are called, I believe, the relations
of the sexes, said that Smith was the slave of a lust for variety which
would lead a man first to a negress and then to an albino, first to a
Patagonian giantess and then to a tiny Eskimo. But is there any
evidence of such variety here? Is there any trace of a gigantic
Patagonian in the story? Was the typewriter an Eskimo? So picturesque a
circumstance would not surely have escaped remark. Was Lady
Bullingdon’s dressmaker a negress? A voice in my bosom answers, ‘No!’
Lady Bullingdon, I am sure, would think a negress so conspicuous as to
be almost Socialistic, and would feel something a little rakish even
about an albino.

“But was there in Smith’s taste any such variety as the learned doctor
describes? So far as our slight materials go, the very opposite seems
to be the case. We have only one actual description of any of the
prisoner’s wives— the short but highly poetic account by the aesthetic
curate. ‘Her dress was the colour of spring, and her hair of autumn
leaves.’ Autumn leaves, of course, are of various colours, some of
which would be rather startling in hair (green, for instance); but I
think such an expression would be most naturally used of the shades
from red-brown to red, especially as ladies with their coppery-coloured
hair do frequently wear light artistic greens. Now when we come to the
next wife, we find the eccentric lover, when told he is a donkey,
answering that donkeys always go after carrots; a remark which Lady
Bullingdon evidently regarded as pointless and part of the natural
table-talk of a village idiot, but which has an obvious meaning if we
suppose that Polly’s hair was red. Passing to the next wife, the one he
took from the girls’ school, we find Miss Gridley noticing that the
schoolgirl in question wore ‘a reddish-brown dress, that went quietly
enough with the warmer colour of her hair.’ In other words, the colour
of the girl’s hair was something redder than red-brown. Lastly, the
romantic organ-grinder declaimed in the office some poetry that only
got as far as the words,—

‘O vivid, inviolate head,
Ringed—’


But I think that a wide study of the worst modern poets will enable us
to guess that ‘ringed with a glory of red,’ or ‘ringed with its
passionate red,’ was the line that rhymed to ‘head.’ In this case once
more, therefore, there is good reason to suppose that Smith fell in
love with a girl with some sort of auburn or darkish-red hair—rather,”
he said, looking down at the table, “rather like Miss Gray’s hair.”

Cyrus Pym was leaning forward with lowered eyelids, ready with one of
his more pedantic interpellations; but Moses Gould suddenly struck his
forefinger on his nose, with an expression of extreme astonishment and
intelligence in his brilliant eyes.

“Mr. Moon’s contention at present,” interposed Pym, “is not, even if
veracious, inconsistent with the lunatico-criminal view of I. Smith,
which we have nailed to the mast. Science has long anticipated such a
complication. An incurable attraction to a particular type of physical
woman is one of the commonest of criminal per-versities, and when not
considered narrowly, but in the light of induction and evolution—”

“At this late stage,” said Michael Moon very quietly, “I may perhaps
relieve myself of a simple emotion that has been pressing me throughout
the proceedings, by saying that induction and evolution may go and boil
themselves. The Missing Link and all that is well enough for kids, but
I’m talking about things we know here. All we know of the Missing Link
is that he is missing—and he won’t be missed either. I know all about
his human head and his horrid tail; they belong to a very old game
called ‘Heads I win, tails you lose.’ If you do find a fellow’s bones,
it proves he lived a long while ago; if you don’t find his bones, it
proves how long ago he lived. That is the game you’ve been playing with
this Smith affair. Because Smith’s head is small for his shoulders you
call him microcephalous; if it had been large, you’d have called it
water-on-the-brain. As long as poor old Smith’s seraglio seemed pretty
various, variety was the sign of madness: now, because it’s turning out
to be a bit monochrome—now monotony is the sign of madness. I suffer
from all the disadvantages of being a grown-up person, and I’m jolly
well going to get some of the advantages too; and with all politeness I
propose not to be bullied with long words instead of short reasons, or
consider your business a triumphant progress merely because you’re
always finding out that you were wrong. Having relieved myself of these
feelings, I have merely to add that I regard Dr. Pym as an ornament to
the world far more beautiful than the Parthenon, or the monument on
Bunker’s Hill, and that I propose to resume and conclude my remarks on
the many marriages of Mr. Innocent Smith.

“Besides this red hair, there is another unifying thread that runs
through these scattered incidents. There is something very peculiar and
suggestive about the names of these women. Mr. Trip, you will remember,
said he thought the typewriter’s name was Blake, but could not remember
exactly. I suggest that it might have been Black, and in that case we
have a curious series: Miss Green in Lady Bullingdon’s village; Miss
Brown at the Hendon School; Miss Black at the publishers. A chord of
colours, as it were, which ends up with Miss Gray at Beacon House, West
Hampstead.”

Amid a dead silence Moon continued his exposition. “What is the meaning
of this queer coincidence about colours? Personally I cannot doubt for
a moment that these names are purely arbitrary names, assumed as part
of some general scheme or joke. I think it very probable that they were
taken from a series of costumes— that Polly Green only meant Polly (or
Mary) when in green, and that Mary Gray only means Mary (or Polly) when
in gray. This would explain—”

Cyrus Pym was standing up rigid and almost pallid. “Do you actually
mean to suggest—” he cried.

“Yes,” said Michael; “I do mean to suggest that. Innocent Smith has had
many wooings, and many weddings for all I know; but he has had only one
wife. She was sitting on that chair an hour ago, and is now talking to
Miss Duke in the garden.

“Yes, Innocent Smith has behaved here, as he has on hundreds of other
occasions, upon a plain and perfectly blameless principle. It is odd
and extravagant in the modern world, but not more than any other
principle plainly applied in the modern world would be. His principle
can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive.
He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect,
that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world. For
this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason he
arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property;
for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to
his own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking
the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about
(so to speak) at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so
that he might recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic
elopement. He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to
keep alive the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should
be run for her sake.

“So far his motives are clear enough; but perhaps his convictions are
not quite so clear. I think Innocent Smith has an idea at the bottom of
all this. I am by no means sure that I believe it myself, but I am
quite sure that it is worth a man’s uttering and defending.

“The idea that Smith is attacking is this. Living in an entangled
civilization, we have come to think certain things wrong which are not
wrong at all. We have come to think outbreak and exuberance, banging
and barging, rotting and wrecking, wrong. In themselves they are not
merely pardonable; they are unimpeachable. There is nothing wicked
about firing a pistol off even at a friend, so long as you do not mean
to hit him and know you won’t. It is no more wrong than throwing a
pebble at the sea—less, for you do occasionally hit the sea. There is
nothing wrong in bashing down a chimney-pot and breaking through a
roof, so long as you are not injuring the life or property of other
men. It is no more wrong to choose to enter a house from the top than
to choose to open a packing-case from the bottom. There is nothing
wicked about walking round the world and coming back to your own house;
it is no more wicked than walking round the garden and coming back to
your own house. And there is nothing wicked about picking up your wife
here, there, and everywhere, if, forsaking all others, you keep only to
her so long as you both shall live. It is as innocent as playing a game
of hide-and-seek in the garden. You associate such acts with
blackguardism by a mere snobbish association, as you think there is
something vaguely vile about going (or being seen going) into a
pawnbroker’s or a public-house. You think there is something squalid
and commonplace about such a connection. You are mistaken.

“This man’s spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has
distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions,
but he has kept the commandments. It is as if a man were found gambling
wildly in a gambling hell, and you found that he only played for
trouser buttons. It is as if you found a man making a clandestine
appointment with a lady at a Covent Garden ball, and then you found it
was his grandmother. Everything is ugly and discreditable, except the
facts; everything is wrong about him, except that he has done no wrong.

“It will then be asked, ‘Why does Innocent Smith continue far into his
middle age a farcical existence, that exposes him to so many false
charges?’ To this I merely answer that he does it because he really is
happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and
alive. He is so young that climbing garden trees and playing silly
practical jokes are still to him what they once were to us all. And if
you ask me yet again why he alone among men should be fed with such
inexhaustible follies, I have a very simple answer to that, though it
is one that will not be approved.

“There is but one answer, and I am sorry if you don’t like it. If
Innocent is happy, it is because he IS innocent. If he can defy the
conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is
just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a
pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just
because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his
neighbour’s goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long
for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he
does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex;
it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.
If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman, he
would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love-letter was like a
song— at least, not a comic song.”

“Do not imagine, please, that any such attitude is easy to me or
appeals in any particular way to my sympathies. I am an Irishman, and a
certain sorrow is in my bones, bred either of the persecutions of my
creed, or of my creed itself. Speaking singly, I feel as if man was
tied to tragedy, and there was no way out of the trap of old age and
doubt. But if there is a way out, then, by Christ and St. Patrick, this
is the way out. If one could keep as happy as a child or a dog, it
would be by being as innocent as a child, or as sinless as a dog.
Barely and brutally to be good—that may be the road, and he may have
found it. Well, well, well, I see a look of skepticism on the face of
my old friend Moses. Mr. Gould does not believe that being perfectly
good in all respects would make a man merry.”

“No,” said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity; “I do not
believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man
merry.”

“Well,” said Michael quietly, “will you tell me one thing? Which of us
has ever tried it?”

A silence ensued, rather like the silence of some long geological epoch
which awaits the emergence of some unexpected type; for there rose at
last in the stillness a massive figure that the other men had almost
completely forgotten.

“Well, gentlemen,” said Dr. Warner cheerfully, “I’ve been pretty well
entertained with all this pointless and incompetent tomfoolery for a
couple of days; but it seems to be wearing rather thin, and I’m engaged
for a city dinner. Among the hundred flowers of futility on both sides
I was unable to detect any sort of reason why a lunatic should be
allowed to shoot me in the back garden.”

He had settled his silk hat on his head and gone out sailing placidly
to the garden gate, while the almost wailing voice of Pym still
followed him: “But really the bullet missed you by several feet.” And
another voice added: “The bullet missed him by several years.”

There was a long and mainly unmeaning silence, and then Moon said
suddenly, “We have been sitting with a ghost. Dr. Herbert Warner died
years ago.”



Chapter V
How the Great Wind Went from Beacon House


Mary was walking between Diana and Rosamund slowly up and down the
garden; they were silent, and the sun had set. Such spaces of daylight
as remained open in the west were of a warm-tinted white, which can be
compared to nothing but a cream cheese; and the lines of plumy cloud
that ran across them had a soft but vivid violet bloom, like a violet
smoke. All the rest of the scene swept and faded away into a dove-like
gray, and seemed to melt and mount into Mary’s dark-gray figure until
she seemed clothed with the garden and the skies. There was something
in these last quiet colours that gave her a setting and a supremacy;
and the twilight, which concealed Diana’s statelier figure and
Rosamund’s braver array, exhibited and emphasized her, leaving her the
lady of the garden, and alone.

When they spoke at last it was evident that a conversation long fallen
silent was being revived.

“But where is your husband taking you?” asked Diana in her practical
voice.

“To an aunt,” said Mary; “that’s just the joke. There really is an
aunt, and we left the children with her when I arranged to be turned
out of the other boarding-house down the road. We never take more than
a week of this kind of holiday, but sometimes we take two of them
together.”

“Does the aunt mind much?” asked Rosamund innocently. “Of course, I
dare say it’s very narrow-minded and—what’s that other word?— you know,
what Goliath was—but I’ve known many aunts who would think it—well,
silly.”

“Silly?” cried Mary with great heartiness. “Oh, my Sunday hat! I should
think it was silly! But what do you expect? He really is a good man,
and it might have been snakes or something.”

“Snakes?” inquired Rosamund, with a slightly puzzled interest.

“Uncle Harry kept snakes, and said they loved him,” replied Mary with
perfect simplicity. “Auntie let him have them in his pockets, but not
in the bedroom.”

“And you—” began Diana, knitting her dark brows a little.

“Oh, I do as auntie did,” said Mary; “as long as we’re not away from
the children more than a fortnight together I play the game. He calls
me ‘Manalive;’ and you must write it all one word, or he’s quite
flustered.”

“But if men want things like that,” began Diana.

“Oh, what’s the good of talking about men?” cried Mary impatiently;
“why, one might as well be a lady novelist or some horrid thing. There
aren’t any men. There are no such people. There’s a man; and whoever he
is he’s quite different.”

“So there is no safety,” said Diana in a low voice.

“Oh, I don’t know,” answered Mary, lightly enough; “there’s only two
things generally true of them. At certain curious times they’re just
fit to take care of us, and they’re never fit to take care of
themselves.”

“There is a gale getting up,” said Rosamund suddenly. “Look at those
trees over there, a long way off, and the clouds going quicker.”

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Mary; “and don’t you be silly
fools. Don’t you listen to the lady novelists. You go down the king’s
highway; for God’s truth, it is God’s. Yes, my dear Michael will often
be extremely untidy. Arthur Inglewood will be worse—he’ll be untidy.
But what else are all the trees and clouds for, you silly kittens?”

“The clouds and trees are all waving about,” said Rosamund. “There is a
storm coming, and it makes me feel quite excited, somehow. Michael is
really rather like a storm: he frightens me and makes me happy.”

“Don’t you be frightened,” said Mary. “All over, these men have one
advantage; they are the sort that go out.”

A sudden thrust of wind through the trees drifted the dying leaves
along the path, and they could hear the far-off trees roaring faintly.

“I mean,” said Mary, “they are the kind that look outwards and get
interested in the world. It doesn’t matter a bit whether it’s arguing,
or bicycling, or breaking down the ends of the earth as poor old
Innocent does. Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries
to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the
window and tries to understand you. When poor old Adam had gone out
gardening (Arthur will go out gardening), the other sort came along and
wormed himself in, nasty old snake.”

“You agree with your aunt,” said Rosamund, smiling: “no snakes in the
bedroom.”

“I didn’t agree with my aunt very much,” replied Mary simply, “but I
think she was right to let Uncle Harry collect dragons and griffins, so
long as it got him out of the house.”

Almost at the same moment lights sprang up inside the darkened house,
turning the two glass doors into the garden into gates of beaten gold.
The golden gates were burst open, and the enormous Smith, who had sat
like a clumsy statue for so many hours, came flying and turning
cart-wheels down the lawn and shouting, “Acquitted! acquitted!” Echoing
the cry, Michael scampered across the lawn to Rosamund and wildly swung
her into a few steps of what was supposed to be a waltz. But the
company knew Innocent and Michael by this time, and their extravagances
were gaily taken for granted; it was far more extraordinary that Arthur
Inglewood walked straight up to Diana and kissed her as if it had been
his sister’s birthday. Even Dr. Pym, though he refrained from dancing,
looked on with real benevolence; for indeed the whole of the absurd
revelation had disturbed him less than the others; he half supposed
that such irresponsible tribunals and insane discussions were part of
the mediaeval mummeries of the Old Land.

While the tempest tore the sky as with trumpets, window after window
was lighted up in the house within; and before the company, broken with
laughter and the buffeting of the wind, had groped their way to the
house again, they saw that the great apish figure of Innocent Smith had
clambered out of his own attic window, and roaring again and again,
“Beacon House!” whirled round his head a huge log or trunk from the
wood fire below, of which the river of crimson flame and purple smoke
drove out on the deafening air.

He was evident enough to have been seen from three counties; but when
the wind died down, and the party, at the top of their evening’s
merriment, looked again for Mary and for him, they were not to be
found.

The End





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