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.”